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McCONNELL THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI Copyright, 1924, by RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian Printed in the United States of America TO MY STUDENTS WHOSE YOUTHFUL EYES HAVE DISCERNED THE INVISIBLE CONTENTS PAGE PRINT TICRTON sa 57 vis RE bias Fist Rae oe ele afelalnne.p a Niele ei, s'9 11 EW ARDS REE erecta ee Loi en AN aN ote a Lat dial am ie'e, = SENT, LS CHAPTER I Tar NATURE or Proor In SCIENCE AND IN LIFE...... 17 The unjustified trust in the all-embracing character of scientific explanation—The divergence of proof in the two fields—Scientific demonstration inapplicable where there is freedom—Scientific demonstration con- fined to succession in phenomena—Demonstration in the field of self-conscious life a matter of values—lIllustra- tion of the inapplicability of scientific proof to self- conscious life in the fields of psychology, sociology, and religion—Demonstration in the realm of life must be individual and particular—The profoundest truths are realized not by demonstration but by faith—in the individual. CHAPTER II Tur SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF THE TRUTH..........-+05 The qualities of truth—not needing defense—human truth at best but fragmentary—always subject to test— The growing understanding of truth in _history—Reli- gious truth subject to development—The validity of truth internal—The meaning of revelation—The mean- ing of inspiration—The relation of inspiration to infalli- bility—The principles by which inspiration is to be tested —canonicity general, not specific—the measure of in- spiration—importance assigned by the past—The test of the author’s claim—The fundamental principles stated in the Bible itself—the principles of judgment laid down by Jesus—Relation of these reflections to modern problems—the problem of present understanding—of present prophetic claims—the purpose of inspiration, life—The place of historic authority—the ultimate authority the light which lighteth every man that com- eth into the world. 32 8 CONTENTS CHAPTER III Tue Nature OF EXISTENCE...........-- ROE tel Vicehaihe The meaning of existence soluble in practice only— Two classes of explanation, impersonal and personal— The impersonal ones—materialistic mechanism—resort to “function” as explanation—primal accident of. matter and motion—the pantheistic conclusions of absolutism—All impersonalistic forms of explanation commit to the infinite regress—-The personalistie expla- nation—an intelligible world springing from intelligence —Is existence static or creative?—if static impossible to posit change as more than a redistribution of unchanging units—quality is made an illusion—If existence is cre- ative—it must be considered as intelligence residing in the cell or atom—or as supreme intelligence transcending the process—Is existence a relation to the temporal and spatial under the form of life?—Are there reasons for assigning intelligence to existence? CHAPTER IV Tur REASONABLENESS OF THE INCARNATION. .....ee08 A new approach to the problem needed and one that will disclose its vital importance—Jesus’ thought of the incarnation grew out of His consciousness of the Father- hood of God—The Jewish thought of Fatherhood one of limitation—that of Jesus all-embracing—Direct words of Jesus on the Divine Fatherhood—a fatherhood of love—realized through sonship—On an eternal foun- dation—and forming an eternal appeal—definitely set forth in the parable of the prodigal—The divine father- hood taught by Jesus’ conception of Messiahship—com- pleted in his thought of the office and work of the Holy Spirit—An incarnation does not lower God but exalts man—Admission of Christ’s moral perfection implies Deity—lIncarnation demanded by the problem of evil— Life the supreme authority. CHAPTER V Tue MEANING AND FUNCTION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.... The need to personalize Deity—to establish the com- mon identity of goodness—Separation from the Spirit a tragedy—The need to provide a ground of authority— the source of living guidance. 64 82 115 CONTENTS CHAPTER VI PRAYER AND THE WORLD-ORDER ........2--200seeeeee The modern apathy toward prayer—is it reasonable? —The conception of prayer as a changing of the supreme order—The threefold purpose of prayer—to bring the true adjustment of man to the divine order, not to ad- just God to our order—to put the individual in cooper- ation with God—to accomplish the end sought—Prayer as a source of power—Prayer and the divine character. CHAPTER VII Sn, PUNISHMENT, AND PERSONALITY. .......--00-005: Need to find the underlying principle—Sin a failure to cooperate with God—a dwarfing of personality—an offense against the personality of others—the meaning of unpardonable sin—Punishment inherent in personality— The three laws of character—Intensification of punish- ment through vanishing of spatial and temporal order. CHAPTER VIII Tus CHARACTER OF WoRLD REDEMPTION..........-+- The conflict between immanence and transcendence as world-views—The transcendental view in conflict with the order of nature and of life—with the fact of personality—unethical in character—conflictingly dualis- tic—reverses the divine character—The developmental view too easily indifferent—but capable of setting forth the ethical side of individual redemption—to show world-redemption as a cooperative process—to empha- size its universal character—as including fullness of life in the present world—and nature as well—and not an end in itself—The source of cataclysmic speculation— The cataclysmic teachings of Jesus—The noncataclysmic character of the latest gospel—Immanence and tran- scendence reconcilable. CHAPTER Ix PosstsLtE Error, Pain, anp Evi, tHE SCHOOLMASTERS Pe MPM ee ra, Loci blic cs Die ot br orSage/ es he lbottel ah ese te ac 6, abel ek Necessity for a distinction between evil and its pos- sibility—Error and the growth of knowledge—Pain and 149 171 2038 10 CONTENTS the advance of civilization—pain self-preservative— its social uses—Evil and moral self-hood—the solution of these problems personal. CHAPTER X Tur CONSCIOUSNESS OF IMMORTALITY.........-0+.005- Continuance of the belief in immortality due to the nature of the human spirit—Arises from the time-tran- scending nature of experience—not from dreams or apparitions—but from the temporal consciousness— and is functional—It attends a timeless order of living— is in accord with the logic of life and growth—by a false emphasis is relegated entirely to the future—Immor- tality is individual or nothing—non-personal immortality meaningless—It is outside the field of scientific demon- stration. CHAPTER XI CREATIVE PERSONALITY ¢\dicisias. .aNbios Rich eiole Mee em eonae The new interest in personality—The meaning of personality—in its simplest terms _ self-consciousness. and self-direction—the distinguishing features of human personality freedom and creativity—Divine personality necessary but mysterious—The meaning of creativity— creation ex nthilo—necessity for first cause in all causal explanation—Personality a first cause—cultural and social consequences from denial of this—Relation of creativity to personality—The release of the higher powers from harmony—with physical environment— with society—with one’s moral and spiritual ideals— oneness with God and the universe—Harmony of spirit and the constructive imagination. 214 228 INTRODUCTION Proressor FLEWELLING is known in philo- sophical circles throughout this country as an earnest and forceful expositor of personalism. It is from the point of view of personalism that Tur Reason IN Fairtu is written. For Doctor Flewelling the only real values in the world are those that relate themselves to persons. We may well be thankful that at the close of a period of thought which overexalted scientific processes in themselves on the one hand, and which bowed down before abstract conceptions on the other, we have put before us a book which bids us dare to think again of personality, human and divine, as the end for which all physical and intellectual systems are merely instrumental. If it seems to any readers that at points here and there in his discussion Professor Flewelling speaks a little overconfidently of the spiritual serviceableness of some factors in the universe— as, for example, in his discussion of such themes as the problem of pain—let them temper their criticism with thankfulness that a keenly thoughtful mind thus regally claims all forces ll 12 INTRODUCTION of the universe as servants of the soul. We have been so long browbeaten both by material- istic and by abstractly idealistic philosophy that . we have literally come to be afraid to call our souls our own. This book helps us to feel not merely that our souls are our own, but that souls are the only possessions worth having. There is in this book a notable departure from the customary language of theology. Those who have thought only in the customary terms will at first feel somewhat lost in Professor Flewelling’s pages. I am confident, however, that before the open-minded reader finishes the book he will find his faith in the essential things grounded anew in reason, or in reasons, rather, for with Doctor Flewelling persons are reasons, the only reasons worth taking into account. Francis J. McConneE.t. PREFACE Tus book is not written primarily for those whose faith is unquestioning. It is, rather, for those who have been shaken by the fre- quent claims of scientism to the sole knowl- edge of reality or by the abrogation (on the part of a certain type of religionism) of reason as necessary to faith. Our age is nothing if not scientific. Whether we travel, fight, eat, sleep, or dream (since Freud) we do it by science. So far have we gone in this process that not infrequently we hear some voice proclaiming the unreality of all which cannot be reduced to the pint cup of scientific meas- urement. One should scarcely know whether his mother’s love is worth consideration since there are some to tell him it is naught but an example of chemism. Out of this absurd overemphasis of scientism has grown a demand for demonstration in religion which religion, in the nature of the case, cannot meet because it is of another field and order. But some one says, “Is there not a science of religion?” Yes, truly, but not in the same sense that there is a science of botany or of physical 13 14 - PREFACE phenomena. When we speak of the science of religion we are using science in a different sense without knowing it. Religion, like all human values, is not commensurable in scien- tific terms. It is not, therefore, unreal; it is one of the sureties of human experience reached only by faith. We would have exactly the same difficulty proving by science the existence of freedom that we would meet in a scientific demonstration of God. So far as science goes there is and can be no freedom. Freedom is, however, so basic a reality in human expe- rience that upon the assumption of its reality all the institutions of society are built. Just as the time will never come when free- dom can be safely discarded from the realm of reality and reason, even so the great funda- mentals of faith are built into the very nature and functioning of man and cannot be dis- allowed without the loss of that which is most significant to life. He who deems it necessary to hide the light of religious truth under a bushel, lest the winds of investigation blow it out, has mistaken both the value and the compulsion of truth. He who marks the retreat of the tides of human interest from the spiritual allegiances of life and thinks them gone out forever, is like the ignorant watcher by the sea who vainly imagines that PREFACE 15 the heart of the sea is not faithful to the shore. So it is the task of philosophy to show that truth of any nature is divine, to show there is no conflict between a real science and a true faith, and to indicate the reason and the logic which underlie man’s highest endeavor. It is believable that as thinking men realize the eternal character of spiritual truth and its consonance with the known facts of science, they may come into that surety of faith which will help in the highest and completest realiza- tion of themselves. If any faintest part of such a hope shall be realized by the reflections of this book, the desire of its author will have been achieved. Acknowledgments are due to the Methodist Review and The Personalist for material first published in those journals. Tue AUTHOR. Los Angeles. } 4 a fakes ot ats 4 7 avi Min id a mr’ CHAPTER I THE NATURE OF PROOF IN SCIENCE AND IN LIFE THE world of thought, like the world of curative medicine, has been hampered by the obsession of the human mind for panaceas. One needs not to have lived very long to remember the extravagant claims made for every discovery possessing any curative value or promising such value even remotely. This human tendency is due, on the one hand, to the labor of thought, a natural inertia for resting in easiest conclusions, and, on the other, to enthusiasm of the mind for the novel idea, the pride in its own discoveries. Before it can be healed of false conclusions there must needs be many painful disillusionments. Even such has been the record in the realm of thought: enthusiasm for a one-sided but novel view, pride in intellectual achievement already won, determination to make the theory fit every case, solve every question, meet every demand—this is the old man of the sea which humanity is forever dragging about. One practical result of this tendency has been a compartment view of knowledge of the 17 18 THE REASON IN FAITH world and of life which we frequently dignify with the term “specialization.” Against spe- cialization there can be no complaint; its result is for good if it is specialization which bears the enlightenment of some knowledge of other fields; but without this, however pro- found it may dream itself, it is warped and provincial. Its tendency is to forget that its field is not the whole of life; to insist on furnishing the standards of measurement in all other realms, and, if its own norms fail, to spend its breath in a withering scorn of unbe- lief in the reality of that which it does not understand and measure. There is no use charging our own age with greater dereliction in this than all others. It is only that an extreme passion for individualism and a scorn for generalization has given us a childish faith in our own panaceas. We give small shrift to the wisdom of other days. We lack the historic sense and are proud of it. We dote upon the scientific achievement of our time, which is wonderful, and in our unthinking enthusiasm follow whatever is offered in its sacred name, this being the only divinity that we worship. DIVERGENCE OF PROOF IN THE Two FIELDS The result has been a sullen and at times ignorant distrust on the part of those who THE NATURE OF PROOF 19 felt the demands for faith and idealism in life, and too often on the part of the trium- phant scientist a tendency to slap faces and proclaim the ignorance and bigotry of all opposing or doubtful opinions. That which neither extremist has perhaps fully realized, and perhaps not at all, is that the field of demonstration or proof in physical phenomena is not identical with the field of demonstration in the realm of freedom, that is, where the power of human choices enters into the results. At this point one hears the clamor of strident voices proclaiming that human choice has no part in science, but the outcry may be borne with calmness because it is belied by every scientist every minute that he breathes. Theo- retical denial of freedom there is, but tacit acceptance of the reality of freedom exists with every human relationship that is his. To deny freedom is to preach a theory and to practice its opposite. Since the days of the Comtian positivism one would imagine the demarcation between that which is the business of science and that which is the business of philosophy would be very clear, namely, that science can deal only with phenomena, their observation, measure- ment, and order, being unable scientifically to dip into the realm of first causes which is 20 THE REASON IN FAITH philosophical. The positivistic result, however, has led far a-field from this to the assumption that whatever cannot be measured in terms of weight, resistance, or force has no existence at all. Thus at a stroke the field of chief importance to the living man is obliterated. This lack 1s presumed to be supplied by the panacea, answer-all, account-for-all of material- istic science. : Inasmuch as progress, to say nothing of comity and good will, can follow only the friendly recognition of the rights of both parties, let us inquire into the nature of demon- stration in the two fields. ScIENTIFIC DEMONSTRATION CONFINED TO SUCCESSION IN PHENOMENA In the physical world we are witnesses of succession in phenomena. We can _ unravel many of the intricacies of relation which exist between objects in the material world. The discovery of these relations gives us mastery over forces and energies which afford ever- widening knowledge and ever-increasing con- trol. However intricately we may analyze these relations, we cannot find the clue to their being. Conjectures there are a plenty, some reasonable, some openly at war with THE NATURE OF PROOF 21 the most valuable issues of human life, many claiming attention as scientifically proved when they are but the most reasonable of present hypotheses. We can learn how to handle electricity, we can make it carry our burdens and perform us service, but why it acts as it does, and what the basal reality may be behind it, is the problem of metaphysics. Nor is it any relief to say there is nothing behind, that the act or relation is in itself all; we still have to account for the uniformity and the marvel- ous coordinations and ends of our world. To order an end to questioning at this point is to stop when the mind grows most curious and most insistent. Obviously, then, we can learn nothing more from science than the order of and control of phenomena. In this realm there are certain assurances which we call proofs. They relate to the sequence of phe- nomena. Certain combinations bring certain results. The only necessary proof is to be found in the unvarying outcome. Thus we build up a world of normal expectations, and so long as phenomena keep within the range of normal experience we do not question their reality. When phenomena present features abnormal to experience our first inquiry is whether they appear to others. These, then, are the foundations of our judgment of reality 22 THE REASON IN FAITH —-normality in experience and the validity of the common-to-all. DEMONSTRATION IN THE Fietp oF SELF- conscious Lire A Marrer or VALUES In the realm of personal values proof of this order is out of the question. In ethics the question is not what is normal, but, in the light of human freedom, what ought to be normal. Just as the factors which make up the equation in moral action are invisible, mental, spiritual, so the necessary sequences in moral phenomena are invisible, mental, — spiritual. There is no doubt that consistent moral action builds up certain intellectual and spiritual powers and immoral action weakens and tears down, but these powers and values can never be gotten truly into terms of foot- pounds of energy or the usual measures of force. This fact leads the naturalist to discard them altogether; but this is to deny the facts most important to man’s life and happiness. Instead of being practical it is being imprac- tical. I am not concerned with the measure- ment of released energy represented in the smile of my mother or the love of my wife or in the abandon of devotion on the part of my child. These are not made real to me by adopting terms of blood pressure. They THE NATURE OF PROOF 23 are themselves the important values of life, and their values vanish the moment I assume them to be anything but free. The material- istic psychologist may work his head off to prove an exact ratio between incoming im- pulse and outgoing energy, and assert in all self-confidence that what I call soul or spirit is only necessary chemical reaction, but to do so will yield me no whit of knowledge, joy, or better practice. The all-important value to me is the voluntariness of these responses on the part of mother, wife, and child. To deny the phenomena of love altogether might be scientific, but it is not practical, nor is it in accordance with the needs of life. Great value comes from the scientific study of the chemistry of food, but for the individual the possession of a stomach is practically more important. Denial of the stomach because by the usual laws the digestive juices should attack and break down its walls would be just about on a plane of intelligence with that scientist who would deny the moral, ethical, and spiritual realities of life because he can- not account for them by material measure- ments. Since when has it been considered scientific to deny that which we are unable to understand? In life the nearest approach toward scientific 24 THE REASON IN FAITH proof is this: Does such or such a system of moral choices build up in me a normal atti- tude toward life, toward my fellow men, toward the moral values, so that thereby I am con- — scious of my best self-realization? Are these moral choices such as to commend themselves to right-thinking men everywhere? Should they prove themselves in keeping with life, with the functioning of the highest faculties of the human spirit, and are they of such nature as to win the allegiance of lovers of good generally? Here I should have in the order of practical living, in the realm of the moral and spiritual, that which corresponds to proof in the field of the material. | ILLUSTRATION OF THE INAPPLICABILITY OF ScrentiFic Proor to Seur-conscious Lirr The impossibility of making intelligible appli- cation of material standards in the realm of human freedom is well illustrated by the frequent misuse of statistics. In the field of psychology it is possible to go scientifically so far as to note physical and mental corre- spondences, times, strength, and sequences of reaction, etc. Statistics may be gathered which show the average and indicate what might be called the norm of action. Such statistics carefully taken could not fail to be THE NATURE OF PROOF 25 of very great value, but as applied to any individual case they might be without value. Just as the actuary may tell you by reference to his tables your exact life expectancy with- out thereby predicting the age at which you will die, so in all cases involving human choice or freedom there is no assurance that the individual will approach the norm. The teacher who confidently expects each pupil to live up to the teachings of her psychology is in for disillusionment and failure. There are always the exceptional cases in which she will have to fall back on her own wit and judgment. Social statistics, if they are to possess any value at all, must be gathered with unusual care and used with rare judgment. Otherwise they may be very misleading. One must know who the canvassers of social statistics were and their method of approach. Furthermore, one needs to know something of the honesty, intelligence, and interest of the people who answered the questions. Even such simple statistics as the number living in a_ house, the variety of religious beliefs, literacy, and sanitary accommodations are dependent on the intelligence, willingness, interest, and honesty of the person interviewed. Neither does the external circumstance, number of bathtubs, 26 THE REASON IN FAITH presence or absence of windows, give so much of a line upon the character or cleanliness of the inhabitants as is sometimes dreamed and frequently played up with convincing flourish and great show of numerical precision. The possession of a bath does not insure its right- ful use, nor the absence of one prevent bathing. Darkness and narrow quarters may house people of exceeding cleanliness, while light and room may be the portion of the unsanitary and uncleanly. All should have an equal chance to live under sanitary conditions. Some would immediately convert a palace into a pig-sty. The slums exist partly through the inhuman greed of the landlords and the wicked tyranny of sweaters, but also in part because there are people who would feel at home nowhere else. In every case out of the thousands of items gathered there are differences and peculiarities springing out of human choices, and these manifestations of freedom which cannot be gotten into statis- tics of any kind are exactly the ones of the most importance. Religious statistics must be approached with an even greater measure of caution just to the degree that results in this realm are even more idealistic, more intangible than in any other. While every normally functioning reli- THE NATURE OF PROOF 27 gious institution should show consistent numer- ical gains, there might be specific instances in which the largest real gain would be indi- cated by a loss of numbers. Counting the hands raised is not necessarily to discover the number of souls saved. Reporting the number of calls made is well-nigh useless unless one can indicate something of a religious nature that has been accomplished. No reckoning can be made of the worth, value, and results of a life of humble integrity and true devo- tion and sacrifice before God. The tragedy of our day, as of all days, is our failure to appre- ciate this and our childish faith in the spec- tacular and self-assertive. It may be a source of sincere grief to the psychologist or the social or religious worker that he must forever lack the mechanical exactness of demonstration possible to science, but it is only because his problem is vaster, more important, and depending upon values that bulk on human freedom. The standards of science are applicable here only by a sort of perversion which gives a false security, an empty appearance of knowledge in a field where those standards really do not apply. This whole field can be cleared only by the passing of the false estimate upon so-called scientific demonstration. 28 THE REASON IN FAITH It remains to consider in more detail some of the essentials of demonstration in the higher ranges of life. Here the problem is compli-. cated and gives no promise whatever of satis- fying the “scientific” mind. DEMONSTRATION IN THE Ream or LiFe Must Be InpivipvaL AND PaRTICULAR To begin with, demonstration in this field must be individual and particular. In any event it is a demonstration of value. The seeming paradox of this position is well illus- trated by the problem of pain. Why there should be pain can never be settled upon general assumptions. It is one of life’s insol- uble questions. Yet the individual can solve it in his own experience by making it work for him a spiritual triumph over all adversities, a growing moral self-control, a broader social spirit and depth of character. There is no misfortune of life which cannot be met and its problem solved in this way. As Dunsany puts it, “Fate cannot hurt one if he smiles at her.” In addition the problem must be soluble by each individual, and here is the real paradox; it is not perhaps soluble by society as a whole. As a matter of fact, one reason we cannot solve it for all life is because THE NATURE OF PROOF 29 we look over such a limited landscape, the limits of space and time narrow our vision to the here and now. We read but a chapter in the book of life, and it is not surprising if we miss some of the plot. And perhaps it is, after all, an Eternal Wisdom which permits us to spell out the lesson painfully and day by day, that our curiosity may not go stale until we have been built up in our own minds and souls as independent and self-respecting selves. Tue PrRorounpEsT TRUTHS ARE REALIZED Not sy Demonstration Bout spy Faitu In the second place, we must remember that the proof of ethical or spiritual values lies not only in actual results but also in ideals pursued. Just as the value of the school is not to be concluded from the number of fault- less copy books and perfect examination papers, but, rather, in the expanding ideals of culture imbibed, the forward look and the inspiration of the pupil toward independent culture, so likewise it is unfair to judge of religion by the immediate flawlessness attained, but, rather, by the general trend toward ideals that mean not only the betterment of the individual but the general moral advance of society. One is to judge of ethical and spiritual reality, 30 THE REASON IN FAITH then, not only by the experience of the indi- vidual but also by the ideal involved and the relation of this ideal to future society and its general adaptability to the human mind. Last of all, regard must be had to the fact that the profoundest ethical and _ spiritual interests are capable of demonstration to the individual alone. An element of faith is essen- tial. Nor is this condition peculiar to spiritual values. What boots it that the clown who watches the working out of an equation in differential calculus declares he ‘‘cannot see it’? One would be quite justified in saying, “What of it?” His failure to see makes the process of no less practical value to the mathe- matician. And, whoever the man, he may see if he has a mind and will commit himself to study. Loudly proclaiming “We cannot see it,’ while it is a popular form of denial, is very often a proclamation of intellectual and spiritual impotence which should cause shame rather than pride. One takes the deeper facts of life as one does the sun, conscious of the normality of his shining and having faith in the ultimate results of to-day’s sowing. So some loyalties, some loves, some ideals, some aspirations, some moralities, some visions of time, eternity, freedom, God are necessary to the normal and highest functioning of life; THE NATURE OF PROOF 31 we take them on faith, and the only justifi- cation they need is the justification of results. And in its final analysis the best demonstration of life cannot be had by mathematical pre- cision nor by observation of scientific phe- nomena, but in living itself. That which runs into the realm of moral values can be truly judged only by him who is himself loyal to these values, just as the untrained man cannot properly be the judge of astronomical phenomena or of chemical reaction. Always the secrets of life are for those who train them- selves to understand and appreciate, as even “the secrets of the Lord” are for “those that fear him.” CHAPTER il THE SELF-J USTIFICATION OF THE TRUTH In the field of thought and knowledge we still linger between the skeptics who make a scoff of knowledge and those who feel called upon to defend truth in the fear that other- wise it may perish from the earth. Neither mood is good. The skeptic mood ends in futility and failure. Mere denial is a weak- ness. Without positive beliefs and convic- tions the practical issues of life fail and man becomes useless both to himself and society. One should include in his litany the prayer to be delivered from the know-nothing aitti- tude. The defense mood is likewise prone to confine itself to theory and so to lose the practical side of its vaunted possessions alto- gether. If one is quite sure he has the truth, he does not fear its overthrow. For truth can never be proved untrue. Falsehood may flourish for a time but cannot permanently hold the confidence of mankind. Truth needs not the bolstering of authority. It is never true on authority or by reason of authority. It is true because it meets human needs or the 32 SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 33 eventual demand of the human spirit, because it fits in with life, because it is in keeping with the highest human ideals, ““because it works,” to use a phrase of pragmatism. In the last analysis it is true because it is the truth. It will in the long run prove its own justification. “Wisdom is still justified of her children,” or, as the Revised Version puts it, “of her works.” Let us put aside, then, every fear and set our hearts to the fullest use of such truth as we have, glad if perchance we may be able to approximate more closely than those who have gone before us. For only that truth is valuable which we can in some measure live by. If we really believe it and it gets into our lives, it will shine out upon the world around us with convincing power. We shall not need to give it verbal justification. It will already have been put in the most con- vineing way. Human Trutu at Best But FRAGMENTARY The ghost of an ancient misunderstanding has arisen out of the modern doctrine of rel- ativity. Just as the Sophists misused the truth involved in relativity to break down the reality of both intellectual integrity and the moral sanctions, so some of our modern 34 THE REASON IN FAITH thinkers are drawing a like shallow conclusion. The heart of relativity lies not in the assump- tions of skepticism, that we are really incapable of approaching reality, but, rather, in the assertion that the universe is a system of rela- tions. This truth may be asserted without any fear of abrogating or weakening either the intellectual or moral sanctions. [If it is to be maintained that the universe is a sys- tem of relations, we gather at once the frag- mentary nature of any truth of which we may consider ourselves possessors. Such a view is sure to meet with disfavor from the dogmatic scientist and also from the dog- matist in philosophy and religion. A petty and provincial pride drives us to assert com- pleteness of knowledge. It is distasteful to the small mind to confess ignorance or partial knowledge. Moreover, there are more power- ful motives to drive us on. To admit the fragmentary and partial nature of our truth gives promise of no sure anchorage, and anchor- age is what the average man most desires. If he can get his truth into some form that seems to him final, unchangeable, or grounded upon everlasting, infallible and known author- ity, the purpose of learning and faith seems to be achieved. Particularly does pride respond to the notion of putting all future generations SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 35 to the test of one’s own appreciations and discoveries. The chief result achieved by this is deadening to knowledge and to religion. ALWays SuBsEcT to TEst There is no truth which does not have to meet momentarily the judgment of life. It has to rewrite itself into the history of every generation as it comes along and again and again rejustify itself. How could it be other- wise, since truth gets no real hold upon us, possesses no real meaning for us, except as we work it out in life? The multiplication table as some of us learned it was a mere sing- song which at the time had no real issue in life. We later discovered that thirteen times thirteen had a very practical relation to our welfare in business and if we had not possessed the knowledge as taught we would by the very needs of life have been compelled to make a multiplication table of our own. At any rate the multiplication table possessed meaning for us only when we discovered its relation to our own experience. Why does not some defender of truth rise up to defend the multiplication table? The reason is that its practical need is too obvious and too ma- terial for question. If the need were in the 36 THE REASON IN FAITH higher reaches touching the deeper matters of the Spirit, we should have regarding it both defenders of the faith and agnostics. | Tur GRowinc UNDERSTANDING oF TRUTH IN History Unrest, change, development, growth, these have seemed to many the antithesis of per- fection. We have conservatives in every realm willing to live only by the past and unwilling to venture any experiment. But it is fair to say that throughout history the one characteristic of living beings and of living thoughts has been unrest and change. It is the way life has of manifesting itself. With- out it there is only death. He who fears the growing pains of increasing knowledge, faith, or institutions would substitute death for life and has no deep understanding of the nature of the universe. If the universe is a system of relations, we cannot know all about a specific thing until we know all its possible relations. Such ad- mission may be a blow to our mental or spir- itual pride, but it should lead to that humility which favors learning. To say that the uni- verse is a system of relations which we cannot altogether know until we know all is not to say that we can know nothing. It is not to SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 37 deny the reality of the relations already puz- zled out. This view has been the fertile source of agnosticism, a sort of “all-or-nothing”’ theory that has beset us. It was a feeling that if we discover any knowledge to have been partial, it must be forever entirely abro- gated. We pride ourselves over the past, as if we at last, the climax of the ages, were the sole discoverers and possessors of truth. With unperceiving eye toward the future we do not see that to-morrow will discard many of our cherished opinions to its own benefit. With the coming of the Copernican we dis- card the Ptolemaic. Is it because the Ptolemaic was false? We have so assumed. But did not the astronomers of Ptolemaic times lay the foundation of the Copernican advance? Did they not from the geocentric standpoint faithfully plot the various relations of stars, planets, and earth? Their work was well and painstakingly done, and ‘of inestimable value in the advance of science. One day it was seen that the earth must be viewed not as by one standing upon the earth but as from the sun. It was shown that the relationship was one step more complex than men had supposed. Not one jot nor tittle had been removed from the established truth of former years. All had now to be seen in the light 38 THE REASON IN FAITH of more extended relationships than had been previously dreamed. Such seems to be the ever-recurring history of the growth of knowl- edge. We may be on the verge of discarding the laborious and costly method of stringing wires across interminable miles for the better way of a perfectly wireless communication. It will not be because the old way was false but because it was based on partial knowledge, which finds itself fulfilled by advancing discovery. Reuicious Truta Supsect To DEVELOPMENT When we come into the region of religious truth, this was exactly the principle to which Jesus appealed to describe his relation to the Jewish law and the ancient order. He had not, he said, come to destroy the law, or the prophets, but only to fulfill them. On the strength of his consciousness of God and truth he set forth principles that rendered the old obsolete. A striking example was his interpretation of a phrase of the lex talionis, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” which did represent in one stage of civilization the principle of exact and impartial justice. Jesus fulfilled the law by showing that justice without sympathy is not wholly just, and so the men of the new order were to forgive. A new system of ethics must be written for SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 39 every age. The principles remain the same, but the applications are either new or newly seen. The complexity of our modern civil- ization, with its means of communication, its wireless, its moving pictures, and its auto- mobiles, has added further temptations and compelled the new applications of old prin- ciples. It was significant in the teaching of Jesus that he was content to lay down the ethical principles which the growing mind and heart of man would apply in new ways. Cen- tury by century we make the developing application, doing away with slavery, the fraud of big business, the debaucheries of strong drink, and a hundred evils which did not appear as evils to another age. Vauipity oF TRUTH INTERNAL The necessity that truth shall be judged continuously by its reference to the needs of men, being re-proved or rediscovered by each generation, shows that the validity of truth rests upon internal rather than upon objective foundations. Perhaps the first ques- tion that would naturally arise at this point is the question of historic authority. How far does it extend? Is it valueless? Is it to be set lightly aside, or abrogated altogether? Let us inquire first how far historic authority 40 THE REASON IN FAITH can go. It is evident that, in the first place, the historicity and the validity of authority is subject to the judgment of every individual who does not accept it unthinkingly. In any case it is not something which can be imposed against the individual judgment and will. As the chances for individual investigation are limited, there is danger that the authority will be accepted unquestioningly and so fail to enter into the life of the individual who accepts it. One, then, merely accepts the point of view in which he has been brought up, or which passes as conventional in the society which surrounds him. This is the case with the average man both regarding his knowledge and his religion. What are we to mean by historic revelation or inspiration? We sometimes speak of men as inspired by great ideas. We say that the missionary, in his wonderful grasp of the forces that are active in the Oriental world, and in his dream of its conquest for our Lord, is inspired by prophetic vision. Do we really mean it as true, or do we play with speech? We say of Charles Wesley that, in a moment of inspiration, he wrote “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” that im- mortal song of the heart worthy to take its place in the religious experience of thousands of Christians along with the Shepherd Psalm. SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 41 But when we say that Charles Wesley was inspired to write that hymn, do we mean it? We say that the biblical writers were in- spired. Do we mean that they were so over- come by the Divine Spirit that they were able to speak or write only certain words that were dictated to them by the Almighty, losing for a time their own will power? Was their mental consciousness hypnotized? Were they for the moment so depersonalized that they could utter no word of themselves? Is this God’s usual way of revealing his will to men? To what extent did their inspiration go? Did it give unlettered men a knowledge of history they had never studied, or of astronomy which they had never investigated? Were they at the moment of inspiration lifted into omniscience? We must follow questions with further questionings. Is the day of inspiration past? It seems to have been active in a day of unde- veloped moral ideals. Is it operative to-day, and if not, why? Is it no longer needed? Has God lost the power or the will to inspire men or have they outgrown the need? Can the minds of uninspired men catch the deeper spiritual meanings of the inspired word? Is the sudden revelation of duty, or conviction for sin which comes to men out of words often read or heard before, which changes for right- 42 THE REASON IN FAITH eousness the whole course of a life in any way connected with what we might call divine inspiration? Does inspiration as it came to King David of Judea differ in religious sig- nificance and worth from that which might come to a man of our own age? If so, what would the difference be? What is the modern significance of the Holy Spirit? What are the acid tests of inspiration which new ideas must undergo before they can be recognized? These questions indicate the necessity for explicit definition. MEANING oF REVELATION Revelation is the living God made known in history and experience. This was the con- ception that filled the minds of Israel’s poets, seers, and prophets: “My soul cries out for the living God.” It is exactly this conscious- ness that, breathing through their words, stirs across the long centuries the heart of the modern age. The living God is the demand of the human soul that outlasts all human prejudices, all tyrannies of human thought, growth in civilization, all time and change. The hunger for the living God is the basis of all revelation to the souls of men. The Bible is the story of how this revelation came to the pioneer minds of the world’s most SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 43 religious race. The Bible is not that revela- tion, for that revelation could only partially and poorly be put into human speech and expression. But as the story of revelation to a great race it stands forever. No greater mistake can be made than to identify the book with revelation, and so to limit the meaning of the term, and so to confine God to a time, a season, and a people. If men are to be led aright, there must be a living God and a liv- ing guidance for this as for every other age. One other point needs always to be remem- bered, that revelation has always to be made to men as they are. It is the characteristic of God that he is willing to meet man on the plane of his present moral and _ intellectual crudeness, and to reveal so much of himself as he can get the undeveloped man to under- stand. God is willing to wait and still to wait for man to grow. We cannot compre- hend this attitude of God, because living under the forms of time and space we have to get our work done right soon and cannot wait. With him one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years are as one day. He seems content out of the rolling centuries to bring man up to moral freedom and to make him a lover of the good and true and righteous. We should not, then, be surprised to find Ad THE REASON IN FAITH moral crudities, and half-understandings, and even misunderstandings, existing alongside of the highest and holiest conceptions of the divine will and nature, both in thé character of the men who caught the light of revelation and in the book that tells the story of their growth in the knowledge of God. We should not be, and in practice we are not, less sure of the spiritual truth of the:twenty-third psalm because we read elsewhere of the terrible transgression of its probable author. We do not reject the spiritual vision of Isaiah because his words are bound in the same volume with the im- precatory psalms. We must and do take into account the growing moral sense of man. God is leading men along to better things. He does not grow impatient with moral in- fancy so long as the heart of the infant is willing and obedient. He is revealing himself as rapidly as growing moral and _ spiritual sense can take in his truth. He works through human history, but all life is a revelation of himself. Most of all does the’ revelation come in Jesus Christ, who was also the living God, “The express image of the Father.”’ MEANING OF INSPIRATION Inspiration is the gift of understanding the revelation of God to the world or to the indi- SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 45 vidual. The revelation has been ready since the world began, waiting for the inspired mind. Inspiration enables man to interpret the march of events, to understand the divine message, the significance of experience, and the relation of God to his world. Inspiration does not give to a man knowl- edge of history which he has not himself wit- nessed or learned. It does not endow him with a knowledge of geology, nor of astronomy, nor of chemistry. It does not aim to convey to his mind knowledge that can be gained in a natural way. For these things God has provided other means of which he is equally the author. He provides the ground of all our thought, and we are under obligation to think sincerely. The aim of inspiration is spiritual, the comprehension of spiritual truth or of the divine will. God ordains that other kinds of knowledge should come by the stern way of mental discipline. On this side the seer is therefore subject to the mental limita- tions of his times. Inspiration is that spiritual vision which enables him to lay hold upon events and to say “God is here’; “This is the moral imperative”; ““That is the way of duty.” The greatest demand that is made upon him is the open mind to understand and to do God’s will. The pure in heart see God. 46 THE REASON IN FAITH A great deal of time and of nervous energy have been wasted to bring the creation stories of Genesis into unity with the latest geological discoveries. This time and strength might have been saved to the greater glory and progress of the Kingdom. Speaking geolog- ically and astronomically, the creation stories represent the geological and astronomical con- viction of the times in which they were written. The point of inspiration in the Genesis accounts of the creation has to do not with correct geology but with recognition of the spiritual truth that, however men might explain the beginning of things, the basal fact behind everything was and is “In the beginning God.” This discovery of the relation of God to his world and the call through the struggle out of chaos and night to the freedom of the new heaven and the new earth rather than any scientific knowledge was the great gift of the biblical writers to the human race. Their vision remains across the ages the high- est dream of the world. This is knowledge that could reach men only through inspiration. Furthermore, it is knowledge that cannot be effectively comprehended, that is, it cannot have vital meaning to a human life except the mind be inspired to receive it. “‘No man,” says Paul, “can say that Jesus is the Lord, SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 47 but by the Holy Ghost.’! It is still the Holy Spirit which convicts of sin, of righteousness and of judgment to come. To the uninspired mind such language is without meaning. RELATION OF INSPIRATION TO INFALLIBILITY We must clear the situation further by taking up the question of infallibility in its relation to inspiration. This is a theological word which so far as I know is quite foreign to any part of the Bible. The Bible writers seem never to have dreamed of claiming it for their work. I feel very certain Paul would never have claimed it for the letters that he was writing to his Christian friends around the Mediterranean. The nearest exception is perhaps the book of Revelation which was not received by the church at large as a part of the Bible until very late. Infallibility is, however, a term to be reckoned with and much on the common tongue. Here, again, before employing or allowing the term we ought to ask ourselves just what we mean by it. We ought to recognize first perhaps that there is no living thing that can be said to be infallible excepting God himself. So long as a thing partakes of the human, is sub- 11 Cor. 12. 3. 48 THE REASON IN FAITH ject to human thought, or is the creation of the human mind, it has no final claim to infallibility. Even ancient good and truth are made uncouth by time. Though the very words of the Bible were one by one infallible, we should need then an infallible interpreta- tion of those words. No one, not even God himself can, under free will, insure that any given word of human language shall convey to every mind the same idea. Under infalli- bility there would be no chance for difference of opinion. An infallible interpretation is impossible without an infallible interpreter. The Roman Catholic alone has of us all car- ried this matter to its true and unavoidable conclusion. The Pope is to him that infallible interpreting mind. But such words have no place in a true Protestantism, nor, indeed, in any vital religious system. | - Upon strict examination any theory of infalli- bility will be found untenable. Inspiration does not render men infallible, nor does it remove the subject of inspiration from the court of reason. We are to try even the spirits to see if they be of God. There is in the Bible itself illustration of the misuse of this theory. In Jeremiah’s time the false prophets were bolstering up their pleasant prophecies of the safety of Jerusalem from the foreign oppressor SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 49 by quoting literally the words of Isaiah which in other times and other conditions had de- clared that God would not allow her to become the inheritance of the heathen. It was a slavish repetition of Scripture, but as applied to Jeremiah’s day it was false. But some one says, “If the Bible is not infallible, how can we trust it at all?” This question is one of those specters of the mind by which a religious panic is produced. The question is theoretical rather than practical. IT can ask an exactly similar question concern- ing the sense of smell, sight, or hearing. I am often deceived in each one of these realms. I hear many things that are not so. My sight often deceives me. Nevertheless, I continue to get along fairly well. Life can go on, because, for all practical purposes, my senses give me correct reports of the world around. It is not necessary to my life that my senses should be infallible, that is, incapable of being de- ceived. And the same thing is true of my spiritual life. Infallibility is not necessary to the trustworthiness of my senses, neither is infallibility necessary to the trustworthiness of the Bible. I use my human judgment still as God wants me to do, and the light that falls from the face of Christ, and what it tells me holds me fast when the tides lift and the cables 50 THE REASON IN FAITH strain. Amid the sweeping waves I know I am fast to the eternal Rock. I do not need either Pope or priest to tell me so, for in the midst of the storm there is a song in my heart, and my vision is able to discern a Form walk- ing on the water, whom mine eyes behold and not another. We believe that the Holy Scrip- tures are a sufficient guide to the kingdom of grace and glory. And with all our half-under- standings and faltering interpretations still they are. A wayfaring man though a fool need not err therein. Tue PRINCIPLES BY WHICH INSPIRATION Is TO BE TESTED If, then, we cannot find anything so ready- made that we can take it without thought or judgment, let us see if there may not be some principles by which we may judge of the inspiration of our own and of other men’s © thoughts and of messages purporting to be religious. There are two outstanding theories by which we are most often asked to judge of the Bible. The first of these is inclusion in the canon of Scripture, the second is the statement of a prophet, ‘““Thus saith the Lord.” Perhaps the best general test of inspiration is the common one of acceptance by the uni- versal church as canonical Scripture. But SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 51 while this is good enough in a general way, it is not to be slavishly followed. Such a general conception rigidly adhered to leaves out too many significant factors. Tue Measure oF INSPIRATION One of these factors that needs considera- tion is the relative measure of inspiration. I presume no one would hold that if it came to a case of losing the Song of Songs or the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, the one would be as much of a loss as the other. Nor that Ecclesiastes is as valuable for spiritual helpfulness as the Sermon on the Mount. We might even go farther and say that if the Beatitudes are inspired, the hundred and forty-seventh psalm cannot be, because they are diametrically opposed in their teaching of the treatment of enemies. John Wesley in arranging a Psalter for the use of the Amer- ican or Methodist Episcopal Church, left out many of the psalms because, as he explained in the introduction, they are “unfit for the mouths of a Christian congregation.” IMPORTANCE ASSIGNED BY THE Past The second factor that needs to be con- sidered in this general or canonical test for inspired writings is the relative religious im- 52 THE REASON IN FAITH portance assigned to different books by earlier generations of men. All these books existed first as a body of literature. A few, the first five books, were accepted by the Jews at a comparatively late date in their history as the most sacred books. Later the greater and lesser prophets were added, as sacred books, not including Daniel. Still later the other books were added to the list as_ religious writings. Of these last the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Daniel were longest denied a place. To this day certain books are not allowed read in any Jewish synagogue at public worship. These are Chronicles, Job, Proverbs, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah. The canon of the New Testament was not settled until the end of the fourth century alter Christ. That is, the church for nearly four hundred years after Christ had not deemed it necessary to pronounce on the matter of canonicity. Up to this time there had been but partial unity. The book of Revelation was very late in being received, and so also Jude and Epistle of James. These were chosen from a great mass of other books, some of the rejected books being held in high esteem as sacred by some of the churches who were outvoted in the Council. At the end of the third century the generally recognized books SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 53 were four Gospels, thirteen Epistles of Paul (but not Hebrews), First Peter, and First John. To-day our Bible does not agree with the accepted Roman Catholic Bible because we hold as sacred the books generally received by the Palestinian Jews, while they accept those in favor with the Alexandrian Jews who translated the Septuagint. We see, then, that human judgment was compelled to choose what books or portions of books should be accepted as inspired, and any question settled by human judgment can honorably be opened to human judgment again. There is nothing that goes to prove that the judgment of the Council of Nice which voted on the matter in 397 A. D. and was then divided in its opinion, or the Jewish Council of Jamnia held in 1 A. D., possessed a mental infallibility which forever after is not subject to review by devout and intelligent men. It would be as just to claim that a session of a modern General Conference or General Assembly was infallible and its acts forever beyond criticism or change. We cannot, then, as we have so often thought, dismiss the need for individual and critical judgment. The principle of canonicity 1s valid only in a general way, as a valuable consensus of opinion in the Christian Church. 54 THE REASON IN FAITH Tue Test oF tHE AUTHOR’S CLAIM There is still another principle of judgment by which it is possible to go concerning a por- tion of the sacred books. Many of the prophets use the phrase “Thus saith the Lord,” and other writers seem certain that what they write is the oracle of God. At first glance this would seem a secure resting place on the waters over which we have sent forth our dove of faith. It is necessary, however, to cite only an instance or two to show that even in this field we need to use individual powers of discretion. If you will turn to Jeremiah 38. 14-28, you will find him telling Zedekiah with a “Thus saith the Lord” that if he will go out and fight the approaching Babylonians, the city — and its people will be saved. This resistance which Jeremiah recommended, Zedekiah did make. As the result he was defeated, his two sons were killed before his eyes, and, that the horrible vision might be the last he should ever look upon, his own eyes were then put out. ‘There is but one inference open to a mind not inalienably bent on apology. That inference is that in this case Jeremiah was sure of the Divine Will regarding Zedekiah, but was mistaken. But perhaps this is not SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 55 sufficiently convincing to some. Here is an- other example: Ezekiel with a “Thus saith the Lord” promised the fall of Tyre under the blows of Nebuchadrezzar. But, contrary to his expectation, Tyre withstood the “siege.” Here again either Ezekiel was mistaken in the word of the Lord, or God did not keep his word. The only thing that this proves is the fact that even with the most inspired of prophets it was possible for them to be mistaken regard- ing the events around them, and especially when they left the field of spiritual interests and began to deal with political matters. At any rate, we see that we cannot, without the exercise of individual knowledge and judg- ment, unquestioningly receive the conviction of the writer himself. In fact, we should find by examination of the Apocryphal books that the least trustworthy authors attempted to get their writings received by themselves, ad- vancing the boldest claims to divine authority. Tue FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES STATED IN THE BrisiE ITsELF One should not attempt from himself to ‘name the principles of choice upon which the individual must act in judging of inspiration. 2 Compare Ezek. 26. 7ff. with 29. 17. 56 THE REASON IN FAITH Very happily these principles are named within the Bible itself, and one does not need to go outside of the Book to prove the position taken. Both the prophets and Jesus have laid down the principles for us, and_ their having done so confirms inalienably our own right of judgment. Neither Jesus nor the prophets had a canon as we at present think of it. They were com- pelled to judge by certain moral and spiritual considerations, and these they have named for our guidance. As true prophets they wished their own work to be judged by these rather than by any artificial standards. Isaiah judged himself inspired by reason of an inner illumination that came to him while at worship in the Temple. The consciousness of inspiration came to Ezekiel from the reading of a book. Upon Jeremiah fell the consciousness of a call to a great work. Amos was led to the eternal sureties by the passage of national events, the existence of great national sins, and the indwelling in his own heart of the moral imperative. In the face of national demoralization and moral decay, with wickedness coming in as a flood, and the consciousness that God was still in heaven “who could but prophesy?” he asks. SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 57 It was as if, holding his peace, the very stones would cry out for judgment. Deuteronomy? declares the norm of judgment is this: no matter what the accompanying signs and wonders may be, any prophecy is false if it leads away from righteousness of conduct, the following of the true God. Jeremiah! says that the best proof of the truth of a prophet’s word is the test of events. Is he inspired in that which he utters? See if his prophecy comes to pass. ‘Tue Princrptes Lain Down By JESUS Jesus laid down three principles of judg- ment to which all words claiming inspiration were to be put to the acid test. The first was the test of results. Does your prophet and his prophecy help the world to God? “By their fruits ye shall know them.” They are to be subjected to the same unbiased judgment by which you decide that a thistle is not a fig. The second principle of judgment was the character of the prophet himself. This was the test he asked the multitude to apply to his own words. Am I a good man or am I pid ly Eas 428. 9. 58 THE REASON IN FAITH a deceiver? If he were a really good man, his words must agree with his character. The third principle was the internal. con- sciousness of the prophet himself. If the man at great sacrifice spoke the word that he felt was from God, and the character of the man was such as to give credence to his word as a divine message, and the result of the prophet and his message was to lead men away from sin to righteousness, then there was evidence of inspiration. In the final inter- views with his disciples Jesus brought these principles down to modern times, making them practical in all ages by sending the Holy Spirit, whose function was “to guide men into all truth.” | | To my mind, at least, Jesus left nothing to be added. He would not have laid down these principles had he not expected his disciples to use them. RELATION OF THESE REFLECTIONS TO Mopiern PROBLEMS Let us in conclusion go back to the state- ments with which we began. Revelation is the living God at work in history and expe- rience. The apprehension of his presence and his will comes to man through inspiration. In the presence of the Eternal God, in whom SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 59 he lives and moves and has his being, the dull mind of man now and again catches step with that eternal purpose and eternal will. PRESENT UNDERSTANDING We cannot rule all revelation and all inspira- tion into the past without ruling God out of his present world and the understanding of his will out of the present generation. We may—indeed, we must—hold to the sufficient revelation in Jesus Christ, but we must also hold that the passing years are adding clear- ness to the human conception of his teaching. The passage of time only enhances the beauty and truth of his word. Revelation and inspiration in order to be effective must be living fires, burning from generation to generation. We shall find that this view agrees with that of Jesus, who talked to his disciples of enlarging conceptions of truth under the safe leadership of the Holy Spirit. PRESENT CLAIMS How does such a theory prevent the sub- stitution of Mormonism, Dowieism, Mary- Baker-Eddyism, and all the foul brood of error that would divert men from the heart of the gospel, which is righteous and Christ- 60 THE REASON IN FAITH like living? Let us apply the test that Jesus set for his disciples, ancient and modern. As to the fruits of the teaching: Does it go unselfishly into all the world, bearing a cross, not to propagate a system but to minister to the sinful, broken-hearted, and poor, or does it have the taint of the dollar or of self- interest over all its pious palaver? “By their fruits ye shall know them.” What is the character of the purveyor of the alleged spir- itual discovery? Is it sordidness, greed, and sinP What one of the spiritual impostors of our generation or before could stand this acid test? Not one. Last of all, do these truths ring in men’s hearts with a commanding moral imperative so that one against his will is forced to feel that if he follow not, his soul is lost? We can safely admit, I think, the things that can pass this test. THe Purpose oF INSPIRATION IS LIFE The judgment of the true is an inalienable moral right of the individual, and it cannot be taken away by any man or group of men without entailing spiritual loss. The object of inspiration is not to lend an infallible hearing of the ear, but to bring individual men into close and enduring experience of God. It is not enough that I should be able to read about SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 61 him, though the story be ever so skillfully or infallibly told. The heart of inspiration is that I should know God in my own heart. The scaffold by which I build that house of eternal life—how precious is it beyond all words and expression! But the scaffolding is to be taken down some day and I shall know him no longer by hearsay, but as he is. To know him is eternal life. To come to this goal it may be necessary to venture forth on stormy and troubled seas, but God is the pilot and I shall be brought into the desired haven. Tue Puace oF Historic AUTHORITY Are we to consider historic authority value- _ less because it does not remove the necessity for private judgment? Not at all. Historic authority bears all the validity of its. true- ness and no more. If it is false, no authority ean make it true and no legislation can erect it into verity. If its authors show evidence of a supreme ethical knowledge, and the value and validity of that knowledge are proved in passing generations of men; if it meets the pragmatic needs of man’s individual and social life, it must be assumed as truth. No one person is justified in breaking with the past. He is surely foolish who vainly imagines that he is in touch with such sources of wisdom, 62 THE REASON IN FAITH or is so independent of the past, that he can jump forth full-fledged to utter his own inde- pendent and conflicting discoveries. We have such men now and then who strut across our range of vision, but both God and _ history laugh at their futility. We are the children of time and we cannot discard the past with- out doing violence to our own intelligence. Unfolding truths, discovery of new relations, we have a right to expect as the rich reward of life, but one of the surest touchstones to present truth is, that it is but the fulfillment of the best wisdom of yesterday and of the ages which lie behind. ULTIMATE AUTHORITY THE LIGHT THAT LicutetaH Every Man Is there no seat of ultimate judgment or authority beyond man himself? This is the perilous question to which we will eventually be driven. It seems to many honest souls a dangerous affair to leave truth to individual judgment; but this is exactly what God did, and he was apparently willing to take the risk. It may be all wrong, and we may not be able to have so much faith in humanity as God does. Nevertheless, it is quite probable there may be method in what seems to some a divine madness. There is a certain moral SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF TRUTH 63 and spiritual development to be found in making our own ethical decisions and in dis- covering the truth for ourselves. Such is the greatness of the divine mercy that we are granted the privileges of moral choices in which we may go wrong. The margin of ethical uncertainty is not so broad as one might suppose. There are certain fundamental moralities which every man recognizes whether or not he accepts them. When he has the touchstone of an actual life like that of the Man of Nazareth, he recognizes at once that such is the kind of a man he ought to be. We can be of many minds concerning the casuistic morals of the Pharisees, but on the funda- mentals we agree. Face to face with moral goodness the heart speaks louder than cus- tom, habit, savagery, or civilization. There can be no doubt by anyone that the highest command upon us is to love God with all our hearts and our neighbor as ourself. The only reason that command does not capture the world is because it is so difficult to achieve and we do but half-heartedly obey it. CHAPTER III THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE THe MEANING OF EXISTENCE SOLUBLE IN Practice ONLY Tur meaning of existence is the unsolved problem of humanity. At the same time it is the problem which the mind of man cannot leave alone. Like the riddle of the Sphinx we must measurably find the answer for our- selves or be devoured. While it would be presumptuous for any man to declare the solution, yet some of the proposed solutions quarrel less violently with the whole circle of facts than others. Some are illogical and some negate the deeper values, some break down in absolute denial of the possibility of knowledge. Obviously, we cannot expect much from an explanation which merely assumes that explanation is impossible. We seem bound in mental integrity to follow that way which holds to an open mind and which does not close the avenues of investigation. 64 THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE 65 Two CiassEes oF EXPLANATION—PERSONAL AND IMPERSONAL There are two general classes of explanation —personal and impersonal. Of the impersonal type there are a number of modern varieties. IMPERSONAL . Materialistic mechanism is the type of impersonalistic explanation which makes the greatest claims for being scientific. It assumes that the basis of all activity is in material energy. To.it even the activity of thought can be traced to external impulses. It has never been able to prove the exact measure- tment of these impulses, but because there is a correspondence it assumes that “it will some day be able” to show that a mental activity exists by reason of and in exact physical measure of external impulse, and as the result of that impulse. Thus it is led to the denial of human freedom. But this is not the most disastrous outcome of such thinking. Thought is recognized as something less real than ob- jects. Qualities are tainted with the inter- pretations that arise from mental action. Qualities are themselves immaterial or only the effects upon mind of activity in an atomic substance. Reality, then, is the material base that sends out qualities. If this, then, be 66 THE REASON IN FAITH true, we get only qualities, but can never know reality at all. Thus by the short route of so-called scientific thinking we land in logical denial of the possibility of knowledge. Some day it will be discovered that this skepticism, far from being scientific, is the enemy of scientific discovery and investigation. Another type of impersonal explanation is represented in the modern reversion to Aris- totelianism, in the use of the term “entelechy,” or function. Here we have an active universe because it is the function of the universe to act. The assumption is that a certain ma- terial combination by reason of its relation produces the various marvelous adaptations of nature. So the lily is three-parted because such is the function of lilies, or flowers cross- fertilize because it is their function. It is at once obvious to any careful thinker that this type of explanation is purely verbal. If we must take it and despair of anything better, we are driven to sorry lengths. It is but a> house of cards which any precocious infant can upset by asking “Why?” Surely, we cannot produce satisfactory explanation by begging the question. The tautology of func- tionalism does not satisfy the mind. Still another form of explanation quite com- mon is that of primal accident as the cause of THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE = 67 present life and order. It is assumed that matter and motion are all that are required to produce anything. Prat AccipeENntT oF Mattrer anp Motion “Given time, energy, and matter, and all is possible. At first these compounds are simple, but simple joins to simple and makes eomplex. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen unite to make amino solids, which condense in the seas. They accumulate there, for there is nothing to remove or destroy them—no bacteria, no molds. They interact also. Slowly they condense to form every kind of complex compound: proteins appear, phosphoric acid compounds, fats, sugars; and at last, as a result of these complex molecules, emulsions are formed. A slime appears in the pools. It passes, reappears, dissolves, reappears, liv- ing always a longer time. A countless num- ber of times this happens until a moving equilibrium is finally established. The slime persists and increases. It attracts to itself pieces like it in composition. What has hap- pened? It is the process of individuation which has taken a long step forward. The universe is dividing into two parts—an indi- vidual, a slime, and all else. This is a living slime. “At what moment did life appear? At no 68 THE REASON IN FAITH moment. One cannot say, because it was there from the beginning. From the elemental carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, the progress upward of heterogeneity has been so gradual that one cannot say that at this moment life appeared; it has been a becoming for so long. But this slime is alive by all our criteria. It moves, feebly, but it moves; it grows, slowly, to be sure, but still it grows. It holds its life by a thread; it can equilibrate itself only with a very small change and to a very slowly chang- ing environment. The slightest rise in tem- perature dissolves it. Look at it carefully. What is there in that colloidal foam, colorless and microscopic in size, and almost homoge- neous, without visible differentiation of struc- ture? Everything is in it: every plant, every animal, you and I.” . This constitutes one of the best illustrations of the fallacy of explanation by attempted description. It seems preposterous that any — thinking being should take seriously this out- burst of words, but imagination is a truly wonderful gift for deception The back-lying assumption here is that by the law of permutations and combinations any possible effect must be hit upon “if it has time enough.” The logical fallacy is so obvious and so ancient that one feels reluctant to THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE — 69 waste time upon it. Only failure to bring it into touch with actual conditions prolongs its life. Would it be safe to say that if you had all the characters which appear in your morn- ing paper in constant movement eventually they would of necessity take that position of mutual relations which comprises the intel- ligible sheet I have before me? One sees with the actual problem before him that there would never be years enough to imsure that combination and if it should happen, it would be more of a miracle than the hardiest theist would think of claiming. It is safe to say that if such explanation were offered in any other realm than that of science, it would be - immediately rejected by science as gross super- stition. The legend of the Septuagint Scrip- tures in which the seventy isolated scholars were directly inspired of God to write the Scriptures in a month, and in which without consultation each wrote identical words, would be reasonable and scientific as compared with the accident explanation of the universe. Tue PANTHEISTIC CONCLUSIONS OF ABSOLUTISM One other type of impersonal explanation should perhaps have a word, that is, idealistic absolutism. This type is clearly forced to a 70 THE REASON IN FAITH pantheistic conception of the world of which matter and personal mentalities as well are but the emanation. Much poetic effusion is wasted in declaring that God is all. A little clear thinking would show that God, then, becomes responsible for all the blindness, wickedness, prejudice, and error, including even the resistance to the “God is all’ doctrine. In this case God is his own worst enemy and needs himself to take the cure his votaries — would give to others. | AuL ImpeRsonAListic Forms Commit To THE INFINITE REGRESS It becomes increasingly clear that all imper- sonalistic forms of cosmic explanation commit to the infinite regress and eventually denial of all knowledge of reality, or as functionalism provide only a tautology of verbal solution, or as accidentalism make war on reason itself, requiring unreasonable miracle or, as in the case of absolutism, disclose a world-ground at war with itself, one part of it negating the other part. This survey of impersonalistic ex- planation is fairly inclusive of the various types. PERSONALISTIC EXPLANATION Now, of cosmic explanation there seem to be but two general types—impersonalistic and THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE 71 personalistic. The personalistic type assumes that it is reasonable to hold the origin of an intelligible world is in a basic intelligence, on the scientific principle that a cause must be adequate for its effects. It assumes also that this basal cause is active and that it has power to direct its action. In other words, personal- ism assumes that the ground of existence is self-conscious and self-directive. The posses- sion of these two elements is what it means by personality. They do not necessitate bodily form. In connection with the further dis- cussion three leading questions arise: Is existence creative or static? Is existence related to the temporal and spatial order under the form of life? Are there reasons for assigning intelligence to cosmic existence? The discussion of these questions should clarify our position and show the tenability of the personalistic explanation. Is Existence CREATIVE OR STATIC? It may be doubted at first whether one or the other horn of this dilemma is made neces- sary. But it has been thus put by generations of human thinkers and so may serve the pur- poses of this discussion. The Eleatic contention that there is no movement would at the present 72 THE REASON IN FAITH find few defenders. But there are those who contend that what we call change is but the movement of certain units which are con- ceived as every whit alike, bearing exactly the same properties and grounding what we call quality by increasing the quantity. It is assumed as a corollary of this that quality is always reducible to terms of quantity. It will be seen that this view is really a refine- ment of the earlier notion. In the former view we had a static cosmos; in the latter we have a static unit of reality called by various names, such as atom, zon, electron, or vortex. Inasmuch as there would at present be no point in discussing ancient Eleaticism, let us turn our attention to the notion of a static atom which makes up the universe: Quauity 1s Mave an Intusion There is no doubt that the world has grown ages away from the Eleatics, who contended that being is static, that motion is impossible, and that change is illusion. Even the most confirmed of mechanists insists that motion is necessary. He may hold to the Eleatic idea in maintaining a monistic unit of reality; he may contend that qualities are but the expres- sion of atomic quantities; but life means to THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE = 73 him at least motion of the fundamental unit. In this he is not so consistent as the Eleatics. They denied change altogether, he affirms it without producing intelligible reason. Suppose we proceed on the basis of a uni- versal vibratory theory to affirm one ultimate basic unit called by whatever name pleases _us, and assume that all sense qualities come to us through the speed, wave length, or what- not in the motion of this basal unit. Is motion adequate to account for our various qualitative interpretations? Suppose all we know is held reducible to vibrations of cosmic unchangeable units, so that sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell are but these measurable vibrations. The fact remains that we are not conscious of vibrations at all, but of quality. The quantitative asser- tion can do no more than establish a relation between quantity and that which we discern as quality. Measurement cannot answer our question of what is quality, or why vibrations produce in us the effect they do instead of producing consciousness of vibrations which they really are. A similar question might be put to him who asserts that motion is the reality of cosmic change. Why are we not conscious of this change for what it is, namely, a movement 74 THE REASON IN FAITH of atoms from one place to another? On the contrary, the cosmic changes seem to produce in some both a sweetness and light which are other than motion. So has it come about that mechanism is being forced to a view that the world is less lumpish matter and more and more activity. Can our notion of the atom remain that of a static unit in rapid motion? If so, change is nothing more than a redistribution of energy. If this is the case, our atom is like the brick that makes up a heap or a portion of wall, and we are forced to assume that by adding to the number or position we can change the quality of the whole heap. Quality becomes, then, only a mental illusion and there can be nothing really new or unique. In the end we are forced by our static unit of matter to as rigid a state of changelessness as that which held the Eleatics.. Ir EXISTENCE IS CREATIVE The alternative of a static universe is a creative or contingent world which is quite commonly assumed by all classes of thinkers to-day. Here, again, we are faced with a choice of positions. If life is a contingent and creative process, adapting itself to new cir- THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE 75 cumstances in such ways as to meet changes demanded for self-preservation and progress, where does this intelligent adaptability home itself? Is it in the cell or in something behind the cell? Activity is meaningless unless it is directed. If there is to be evolution in ever- ascending order, there must be forethought somewhere. We can scarcely lay to natural ‘selection adaptations which are made before selection is possible. Whence came the first adaptation or the beginning of adaptation? There is no reason why rapid motion should eventuate in universal cosmos rather than in universal chaos. If we should actually witness chaos marshaling itself bit by bit into a formu- lated order, we should demand to know the intelligent source. If a mob suddenly breaks up into platoons, wheeling right and left im perfect step in such a way as to escape a burn- ing building, even the craziest of us would not dream of ascribing that adaptation either to accident or the law of survival. We would ask after the intelligence that must have directed the whole maneuver. Moreover, we should not be considered less scientific in assuming the existence of a drillmaster, or more scientific in claiming that the strange result was most reasonably explained on the basis of accident. 76 THE REASON IN FAITH It Must Br ConsIDERED AS INTELLIGENCE RESIDING IN THE CELL What the scientist, the man of the street, and the philosopher alike are demanding at this point is not merely activity; it is creativ- ity, and creativity demands both intelligence and freedom. Here we can choose to say that intelligence and freedom are in each individual cell or that they very likely reside in an energy or force or personality which maintains and upholds the whole system of cosmic relations. If we maintain this creative direction is in the cell itself, we must assume each cell to possess a knowledge of all other cells and of its rela- tions to them both individually and as a whole. Its knowledge must possess a cosmic sweep which would be the despair of any human mind, for it would have to know, not only everything that has been or does now exist, but everything that could be. The material- istic scientist is logically compelled to an assumption of knowledge in every living cell which he denies to a Supreme Being. The question immediately forces itself upon us, why, with a body composed of all-knowing cells, the human mind should know so little about its relations with the world around it and why its knowledge should be gained at so ae —— THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE 177 tremendous an effort. We should really be teeming with knowledge. Mund would seem to be the only thing to stand in the way of knowl- edge, and one might well be conceived as praying for a return to cellular simplicity and a Bergsonian intuition. Such a course not only succeeds in vacating the reality of a Supreme Mind, at which some of our friends rejoice, not comprehending that by the same stroke they make it logically impossible to maintain the existence and reality of their own minds. Like the work of the fabled scimiter, they have cut off their own heads with a blade so sharp they do not realize what has happened until they attempt to nod. The overthrow of theism is attended with all the danger of a Parthian retreat. It is fatal to the pursuers. Or as SUPREME INTELLIGENCE TRANSCENDING : THE PROCESS There is remaining, then, one other assump- tion concerning this active and creative world, which is that it is responding to a supreme intelligence which is able to weave all into an orderly whole and which has been able to endow its own creatures with a contingency which makes possible freedom in action in constantly ascending scale. Some assumption 78 THE REASON IN FAITH of this kind is clearly necessary if we are to hold that existence is creative and biological evolution is possible. The two remaining questions have in effect been already answered, so that it is only necessary to draw out a particular phase of the one and to do little more than answer the other. | Is existence a relation to the temporal and spatial under the form of life? The Eleatics removed the ground of change by removing the relations to the temporal and spatial order. Zeno refused to consider the relation of the arrow to more than one point in space at a given time. The attempt to analyze the spatial and temporal relations into different com- partments of experience has always even- tuated in some such deadlock. The element that puts grotesqueness into our dreaming is the fact that temporal and spatial are thrown out of alignment by absence of the usual norms of relation. It may be that much of our scientific hypothesis regarding the nature of life, as when we speak of light as vibrations in cosmic ether, thus putting it under a spatial and temporal form, suffers from the assump- tion of a relation which we do not really know. We are sure to suffer from such faulty assump- tions so long as we consider space and time THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE 79 independent realities rather than the form of relation between objects and events. There is no doubt that the impetus which Einstein and many others have given to this phase of physics will lead to new and valuable discoveries. In order to have change at all there must be something which survives change and is in a sense changeless. The separate drops of a ‘flowing river, bearing ever the same relative position and conscious only of the surrounding drops, would in no wise be conscious of flow. It is the spectator on the bank, who is able to take in the changing relations, to whom the change becomes a reality. It is just the time- less and spaceless element in the human mind which makes possible the conception of time and space. It is probable that that which we eall living being is differentiated from the non- livmg by just this power to conquer the tem- poral and spatial elements and make them a part of experience. This in the end will amount to a power to realize relations. Ultimately it may be found that the energy, force, or intel- ligence which is able to ground and to realize all relations would be both spaceless and time- less, and what the theist names as God. Are there reasons for assigning intelligence to existence? Only that can be conscious of space and time which is conscious of itself as 80 THE REASON IN FAITH over against passing events, differentiated from surrounding objects. If the supreme being, then, is to be a world-ground, developing living things in orderly evolution, it must possess the quality of space and time experience. The power of self-consciousness with the power of self-direction is, however, the very essence of personality. If the world-ground is to act through time, it must be personal, and this is what one might reasonably expect in an intel- ligible universe. Not only is the assumption of theism logically necessary to any consistent doctrine of evolution, there are certain other personal qualities essential in the world-ground if proper standing is to be accorded the moral values. The world-ground must be living. That is, it must be the subject of experience. If God is undertaking a creation under the spatial and temporal form, it will appear that he moves toward a goal of development. He becomes vitally interested in this consummation, and inasmuch as the coming of other free wills has introduced the element of contingency, man can be a coworker with God in securing the moral evolution sought. Inasmuch as the moral victories of man become a part of the divine experience, man’s moral well-being be- comes of the utmost moment to God. More- over, such an assumption puts the universe in OE —s THE NATURE OF EXISTENCE 81 league with right-thinking and _ right-acting men, giving the hope that when men every- where have brought themselves into harmony with God they will find themselves likewise in harmony with the universe. Nature will at last be found the ally of righteousness. CHAPTER IV THE REASONABLENESS OF THE INCARNATION TueE earlier method of textual proofs of the Incarnation was bound to lose ground with the passing of the hold upon men’s minds of the doctrine of strict verbal infallibility. What- ever one may believe with regard to verbal infallibility, there is obviously little use of attempting to increase belief in the incarnation by methods which themselves for either good or bad reasons are no longer convincing to many. It is important that the question of the incarnation should be approached from the angle of admitted facts. It surely does not show a wholesome belief to refuse this approach, for, if one really believes in the incarnation, he must equally believe it is not in contradiction of any scientific truths of which we are pos- sessed. To submit a fundamental truth like the incarnation to the extreme tests of logic, science, and life is, if it be true, likely to make it appear even more reasonable, than if held with unquestioning faith. It is important, then, for modern belief 82 é : THE INCARNATION 83 that we should discover what facts are known by experience and correlated by philosophy having a bearing upon the question. In the last analysis we will not, of course, make claim to scientific demonstration. Few people in these days realize how exceedingly limited is the field of scientific proof. Beyond the facts relating to our physical wants there is no place for scientific demonstration. The practical and living values are taken upon faith and general reasonableness, rather than upon demonstration, from the transac- tions of business life, resting on belief in general integrity, to accepting the love of one’s mother as an undemonstrable but working fact of life. While one does not wish in any way to dis- parage scientific proof, it is clearly seen to operate less and less the higher the range of human values considered. Is the incarnation a reasonable supposition? Is it in keeping with what we know of the higher human values? Is it of any importance to the welfare of the race whether or not it be assumed as true? Would anything be lost by failure to accept it? We believe the assump- tion of the incarnation of God in Christ is of the most stupendous moment to human progress and attainment and that it is in the com- pletest sense reasonable and necessary. 84 THE REASON IN FAITH We shall consider it first in the light of Jesus’ own assumptions and shall then attempt to show its reasonableness from several im- portant standpoints. | Jesus’ THouGut OF THE INCARNATION GREW Out or His CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE DivinE FATHERHOOD Jesus’ thought of incarnation grew out of his interpretation of divine Fatherhood and was evidenced by the Holy Spirit. The divine Fatherhood was the unique representation of Jesus. Between the prophetic conception of the divine Fatherhood and that of Jesus there was a continental difference. It was Jesus who brought to the vague and narrow dream of the ancient prophets a real content and made it a fact for humanity. The Jews were not unfamiliar with the thought of divine Fatherhood, but it was a fatherhood with many limitations. It was of God as the Father of Israel, the nation. All other nations and peoples were, in the common thought at least, shut out of that relationship. Moreover, they thought of God as the Father of the nation rather than as the Father of the individual. The nation was the supreme care, while individuals went down in the stream of events uncared for and forgotten. Conse- THE INCARNATION 85 quently, when Jesus said ““My Father,” “Our Father,” it appealed to the theological minds among his hearers as a blasphemy. Not only was Jesus’ doctrine of the divine Fatherhood unique; it was the consummation of all his teachings concerning God. Modern theology describes God under a long category of. attributes. Calling attention to his omnis- cience, his omnipotence, his omnipresence, his immutability, his incomprehensibility, it names him as Judge, Creator, Avenger. Jesus had but one term which he used almost exclusively to describe God; that was ‘“‘Father.” And yet through the long Christian centuries we have been afraid to accept the implication of Fatherhood as being religiously safe and sound. We are yet afraid to trust the love of God to do what his vengeance could never accom- plish, just as we are afraid to trust ourselves without reserve to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. Let us, then, attempt briefly to look into Jesus’ teaching of the divine Fatherhood. This teaching can best be determined in three ways: first, by the words of Jesus bearing directly on the subject; second, by his conception of the meaning of Messiahship; third, by his teaching respecting the office and work of the Holy Spirit. 86 THE REASON IN FAITH Direct Worps or Jesus ON THE DIVINE FATHERHOOD Much stress has been laid on the significant choice of a lesson which Jesus read at the Synagogue in Nazareth, in the beginning of his ministry. But no less significant in that lesson is what he failed to read. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” Then, as the minds of his hearers went on to the following clause, “The day of vengeance of our God,” he abruptly closed the book and returned it. This was in strict keeping with the word already spoken to Nicodemus, “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.””? But what Jesus thought of the Fatherhood of love was not that men might safely pre- sume upon it, as is so often the idea of men who have said most about it. It is, rather, the foundation of ethics and of religious action for 1 John 3. 17. THE INCARNATION 87 all who desire to be the children of the highest. Turn, now, to the Sermon on the Mount, which has been rightly designated as the constitution of the Christian Church, and you will find the keynote of all the duties demanded for the divine Fatherhood.? REAuIzED THROUGH SONSHIP The reason given for doing these things is “That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.” Fatherhood does not mean personal escape from penalty. It means brotherhood. We have taken it the other way around. That is the reason we have been afraid of the implication of Fatherhood. Un- fortunately, the latter thought of brotherhood is not much more agreeable. Read again this wonderful sermon, and you will see how the relation of Fatherhood runs all through it. The poor in spirit are blessed because of the conscious relationship to the Father; already they are of the Kingdom. The meek inherit the earth because it is their Father’s world, and its best treasures are already theirs. The peacemakers are blessed because they obtain open recognition of their divine sonship. The children of the Kingdom are blessed in the 2 Matt. 5. 45. 88 THE REASON IN FAITH midst of revilings, of nonresistance of evil, of love for their enemies, because that is the way their Father does who loves both the just and the unjust, and makes them all, good and bad, the recipients of his loving care. The same reason runs like a cord through all the duties there expressed. The old thought of purity considered only the letter of the act, while imagination ran riot unrestrained, cutting hate just short of the open act of murder, and lust just short of the act of adultery. These prepossessions could not live in peace in the heart of the true children of the Father. In the same way alms was the free and simple expression of love, not a means of advertise- ment. Prayer was to be not a duty valued by its length, posture, or repetition, but the simple communion of the child with its Parent. Fasting also, as an institution, was of no con- sequence except as it had a bearing upon one’s effectiveness in doing the Father’s will. The ground of forgiveness lay in our forgive- ness of our brothers, and on no other ground could we ask or expect it. Anxious care was to be laid aside in sweet trust that this was our Father’s world, and that he cares for us. Harsh judgment of our fellows was followed by hardness of heart and spirit, which will make our own condemnation deeper when, freed from THE INCARNATION 89 the self-prejudice of time and sense, we see ourselves, as at last we must, as we are. On AN ErerRNAL FouNDATION Last of all, he who builds his life on this immutable foundation of the divine Father- hood is the only man whose house can stand when the floods of life sweep, the winds of ad- versity blow, and all things are brought to test. If there is anything more wonderful than this in all the religious history of the ages, it has yet to be discovered. It is equally true that it is impossible to be surpassed or made ancient or uncouth by any discovery of time. Man is asked to meet these requirements because that is the way his Father does. Is there any appeal more commanding to a boy’s heart than that? Even to think upon it braces the back, clears the vision, and sends new impulses coursing through the heart. I can forgive those who sin against me, not because _they deserve it, but because that is what my Father does. I can love and cherish my enemies, for that is what my Father does. I can be true to the unloving, the ungrateful, and the evil because that is my Father’s way, and these are my brethren. We have scarcely begun, as yet, to comprehend the implications of Jesus’ teaching of the divine Fatherhood. 90 THE REASON IN FAITH DEFINITELY SET FortTH IN THE PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL . But the consummate teaching of Jesus on the divine Fatherhood is to be found in the parable of the prodigal son. That parable introduced an element into the thought of God that men have been afraid to believe, even to this hour. To let that worthless son, who had imposed in reckless selfishness upon his father’s love, broken the father’s heart, impoverished the father both in purse and in spirit, come home after giving his father long days of waiting and agony, is too much for poor human nature. That he should be met down the dusty road and wept over, and dressed in his father’s robes and decked in the chain and ring of authority, and given a feast, was not only a shock to the religious feeling of scribes and Pharisees, but it is also a shock to us. We can read the parable and give a mental assent, but whenever we see this thing in real life, we long to get even with the prodigal son. Moreover, the only amend that he made was to be sorry he had made such a fool of himself and to cease to be a fool. Many Christians of to-day would refuse to stand for the principles of the parable if they were applied in the bald way which Jesus represented. THE INCARNATION 91 Yet how true it is to father love and mother love! It is the world’s inexplicable mystery. What worthless boy who ever wandered farthest is not also the apple of his mother’s eye? The harsher grew the judgment and condemnation of the world, the profounder grew the longing of those lonely hearts wait- ing at home for the delayed return. That was Jesus’ picture of the character of God, and if it seems, on the one hand, as it did also to the brother who stayed at home, that it lets in a lot of unworthy people, and glosses over a lot of reprehensible sins, we can take refuge in the thought that if we knew our- selves better, we should realize that we also have been prodigal of the Father’s love, and that unless our sins also are remembered against us no more forever, we too are irre- trievably lost. Tue Divine FatHERHOOD TAUGHT BY JESUS CONCEPTION OF MESSIAHSHIP All these words of Jesus about the divine Fatherhood found constant verification in his life. ‘That was where he always sought veri- fication of his Messiahship. Whenever chal- lenged, he answered by this reference: “If I do not the works of my Father.” If they could condemn him there, he was an impos- 92 THE REASON IN FAITH tor. Once they challenged his Messiahship on the ground that he was not descended from the Davidic line. He showed the need- lessness of any such proof,’ amounting -to the specific declaration that he did not care to be known as the son of David in the physical sense. “If ye believe not my word, believe me for the works’ sake.” His conception of the Father, then, is to be measured by his conception of his own life and Messiahship. There was already current among the Jews a very decided notion of the Messiahship. The reason we fail to recognize this is because our Old Testament does not include the latest books then common among the people and accorded value only second, if not equal, to _ our canonical books. Notably was this true of the book of Enoch. In it we find not only the common Jewish conception of Messiahship, but also the phrases in which Jesus clothes his own ideas, and also the ideas which largely controlled the disciples in their interpretation of what Jesus did say, and which may have led them into error as to his meaning, as in the case of his immediate return in that generation. Jesus took this prevailing conception of Messiahship and modeled it after his own 3 Mark 12. 35. THE INCARNATION 93 uses, accepting certain portions and rejecting others. This has been admirably shown by Professor Bruce in his work on the Kingdom of God, in which he says: “‘No other type of Messiahship could have any attraction for him; not the political Messiah of the zealots, whose one desire was national independence; not the Messiah of common expectation, who should restore popular prejudices and make himself an idol by becoming a slave; not the Messiah of the Pharisees; himself a Pharisee, regarding it as his vocation to deliver Israel from pagan impurity; not even the austere Messiah of the Baptist, who was to separate the good from evil by a process of judicial severity, and so usher in a kingdom of righteousness. The Messiah devoutly to be longed for, and cor- dially to be welcomed when he came, in his view, was one who should conquer by the might of love and truth; who should meet the deepest wants of man, not merely gratifying the wishes of the Jews, and prove a light and Saviour to the whole world; who should be conspicuous by patience and helpfulness, rather than by inexorable sternness; a humane, uni- versal, spiritual Messiah answering to a divine kingdom of kindred character; the desire of all nations, the fulfillment of humanity’s deep- est longings, therefore not destined to be 94 THE REASON IN FAITH superseded, but to stand an eternal Christ, the same yesterday, to-day and forever.” This conception of Messiahship becomes of special significance when we recall the word of Jesus to his disciples, ““He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”* The love and sympathy, identification with the wretched and lost, with which his life was vocal, was the real revelation of the Father. What Jesus would do for man, that his Father would do. John had conceived of God as the God of judgment and wrath upon all evildoers. ‘To him the Messiah was as the winnowing fan, to purge the chaff from the wheat, and usher in a final Judgment. To his wondering ques- tion Jesus sent back only the report of what John’s disciples saw: the sick healed, lepers cleansed, and the gospel preached to the poor. This reply must have been unsatisfactory enough to John, but it was the only reply he received. Jesus’ idea of the divine Fatherhood was to be measured directly by his own exam- ple of brotherliness, which extended not only to the rich or powerful, or to the agreeable, but to the outcast, the sinful and despised. This was always his distinctive attitude, from that meeting with the outcast woman of Samaria, to that final fellowship with the ~~ 4John 14. 7-11. THE INCARNATION 95 thief on the cross. Anything that cut him off from being brotherly he avoided with all the strength of his being, and the reason for this conception of the Messiahship lay deep in his assertion of the divine Fatherhood. His TuHoucut or tHe Orrick AND WorK OF THE Ho.uy SPIRIT This teaching is supreme evidence of the sanity of Jesus. If you and I were to invent a religion, I have no doubt we should want to state the foundations of belief carefully, so that there could be no misunderstanding, nothing left to the future. We should feel it necessary to the maintenance of our views, and it would be necessary. We have not the cosmic vision of Deity, and he had. Jesus did nothing of the kind. He trusted his words to oral tradition, liable to misinterpretation by men who again and again had misconstrued his plainest meanings. Yet Jesus felt no hesitancy whatever. Even to-day, with his reported words in every hand, we too often possess the fear of our Roman Catholic brethren, and are not willing to leave men with these words of Jesus, without imposing our added interpretation. Jesus felt no such necessity. He even told the disciples that the gospel 96 THE REASON IN FAITH would grow; that greater things than they had yet seen were to come to the Christian Church; that new situations would confront men, in the face of which all their present knowledge would be inadequate. How dared he leave them without more explicit direc- tions? Simply because, as he was immeas- urably greater than you or I, he was willing to trust “the voice that speaketh low in every heart.” | Jesus knew that when the last error had been vaunted, and the last pride of the proud- est mind had been exploited, the unsatisfied soul of man would return to him as the only satisfier of the heart. How did he know this? Because he believed in the reality of the divine Fatherhood, and in the end, having brought to man in an indisputable way the conscious- ness of Sonship, he knew that the voice of the Spirit was their sufficient guide. Who else that ever lived had this supreme con- fidence concerning the eternity of his work? Who else ever trusted the hearts of men to speak his word? He assumed his truth was the deepest truth which was in them. He believed what he said, that he was the Eternal Son of the Eternal Father, and that he gave unto men the words of eternal Life. This breadth of outlook is a long road from THE INCARNATION 97 the spirit that has controlled many of Jesus’ followers. If it had been the predominant note in the Christian Church, there never would have been any terrors for believers, and the darkest pages of church history would never have been written. We imagine, when we get a theological dogma where we can handle it, fondle it, see it in print, throw it at people, that we have made a great religious advance. Henceforth our “I believe’ must become the world’s ‘I believe’ or the world lacks not only in apprehension but in saving truth. All minds that fail to fit into the particular groove of our minds we consign to an everlasting per- dition with the utmost flippancy. Whenever this mood of the devil comes upon us we ought to immerse ourselves in those last words of Jesus in the upper room, “The Paraclete, which is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remem- brance whatsoever I have said unto you.’” “When the Paraclete has come...he shall testify of me.”® “It is expedient that I go away; for if I go not away, the Paraclete will not come unto you.” ‘When he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, of righteousness, § John 14. 26. § John 15. 26. 98 THE REASON IN FAITH and of judgment: Of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me‘no more; of judg- ment, because the prince of this world is judged. I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.”’ What is this larger truth left to the Spirit to communicate to his disciples? Has any mind yet grasped it all? I think not. So long as the Spirit is in the world the revelation of Jesus is bound to grow. In our own generation he has taken of the things of Christ and has shown them unto us in ways which our fathers never dreamed; and though we follow reluctantly toward new truth, or new appre- hension of old truth, we must eventually follow, finding Christ himself evermore to be the way, the truth, and the life. The same Holy Spirit is in the world to-day. I am sure we do not trust him as we ought. We do not admit his power and authority over men as we ought. If we did, there would be new and undreamed of accessions of power to the Christian Church. As yet the letters of our lesson are not all spelled out, and it seems to be our Father’s way to let us spell them ~ 1 John 16. 7ff. THE INCARNATION 99 for ourselves, lest we should miss the new and ever-living interest, and escape the needed discipline. IncaRNATION Dors not Lower Gop, But Exautts MAn Objection to a doctrine of the incarnation has sometimes come from the most reverent and sensitive religious spirits because it seemed to them a degradation of God to think of him as manifesting himself in a human personality in historic time. Especially has this doctrine been the bugbear of philosophers who have entertained the grandest conceptions of God. How can the Infinite manifest himself in finite time and space? and categorically there seems to be no answer. How can pure spirit act upon and through matter? is a question only less astounding. We cannot answer it, but we can experience it every time we move our bodies or drive our minds to creative activity. We have, in the final analysis of all such expe- riences, spirit acting on matter. How it does is the world’s profoundest mystery. That it does so act we have no doubt, for on that freedom we build our laws against crime and establish all the institutions of civilization. The denial of incarnation is far more destruc- tive than is commonly assumed. If God could 100 THE REASON IN FAITH not manifest himself with moral completeness in one human life, there is certainly no assur- ance that he could manifést himself meas- urably in any life. If we persist in denying the possible deity of Jesus and are to remain logical, we must deny that the goodness which comes to birth in human hearts is of God. Moreover, it will be logically impossible then to affirm that God is the world-ground, Creator and upholder of the world. If we make the common assumptions of God’s relation to the world, we are forced either to look upon the world as his handiwork, a manifestation of himself, in historic time and space, or else we must deny God altogether. The assumption of Deity in Jesus does not imply limitation in God, because the significant qualities of God are, so far as they affect us, neither omnipo- tence, omniscience, nor omnipresence, which are the halting terms we use to express the unknown relationship of God to a world which we can know only as a temporal and spatial order. The significant attributes of God are the moral attributes of justice, righteousness, and love. These we find perfectly and satisfactorily pic- tured in Jesus Christ. Obviously, it is these moral qualities which could be manifested in time and space, and only these. So long as in our temporal and spatial relations these are THE INCARNATION 101 the only demonstrable qualities of God, the only ones we can understand, why seek those that pass our temporal and spatial compre- hension? The moral effect of assuming the truth of the incarnation is to set forth that moral good- ness in human lives is by the Divine Spirit. This is the manifestation of our sonship to God and of our brotherhood to Christ. The incarnation, then, does not degrade God, but it does lift man to his feet and sets him forth as the crown of evolution, the one creature capable of voluntary oneness with God. The Fatherhood of God is witnessed by the deity of Jesus, of whom man is but the younger brother. Apmission oF Curist’s Morat PERFECTION Impuies DEITY Reference has already been made to those divine attributes under which we attempt to express the relation of God to the temporal and spatial order. All we can thus do is to express the truth that God’s relation to this order is not limited as is ours. What is the relation of God to time? We immediately lose ourselves in the mazes of contradictory assump- tions. Either he appears to us static, every- thing being for him finished because of fore- 102 THE REASON IN FAITH knowledge, or he is shown to be the victim of change. There is little hope that the con- troversy will be settled because it can be argued only from our temporally and spatially limited standpoint. We have not, in other words, minds capable of comprehending the relations of the nontemporal and nonspatial to the temporal and spatial. The existence and location of our own souls within our bodies presents us with a question equally insoluble because it is a shred of the same garment of mystery. | The supreme revelation of God to man must be the moral one, for the spatial and temporal limitations seem to be maintained exactly so that we can arrive at the moral solution of the meaning of life. If, now, in casting about we find one life that meets the inexorable moral ideal of all men when faithfully presented, we have the witness of nothing less than the moral nature of man to the fact of the com- plete moral manifestation of God. The greater proof of the deity of Jesus is not the evidence of proof texts, as good as they are, but, rather, the living proof of universal life. The story of Jesus’ love, sacrifice, and devotion wins instant recognition from the moral nature of man wherever told. It reaches through all social and religious prejudice, through ignor- THE INCARNATION 103 ance and through culture, and is embraced even by men who hate the name under which it comes. Jesus presents the one blameless character that fulfills the highest moral and spiritual ideals of man, and the recognition of his supreme moral leadership, if we admit that all goodness is of God, is essentially a recognition that God was perfectly in Christ revealing himself unto the world. Unless the goodness in Christ was of God, was God, then we cannot trust him as our moral leader, and doubt is thrown on the worth of moral char- acter and the basic goodness in the universe. As Browning says, ‘‘Call Christ the illimitable God, or lost.” If we see God at all, it must be in the face of Jesus Christ. And the world is more and more picturing the character of God by refer- ence to the character of Christ. There never was a day when Jesus Christ and his gospel found such avenues to the heart of man. As one has aptly stated it, “The greatness of Christ is the surprise of the centuries.” Hu- manity toils breathless, laboring heavily at the oar, through the long night, only to find, as it reaches land again and sees the shore through the mist, that the Master is there first, with the fire kindled and a home welcome to every new land. 104 THE REASON IN FAITH The advent of a vaster and nobler faith means every time the advent of a vaster and nobler Christ. Everything else is coming more and more to be measured by him. Every- thing that cannot stand measurement by his principles is seen to be unworthy. It does not disturb us because the one hundred and thirty- seventh Psalm declares, in pagan glee, the beatitude of him who dashes out the brains of little ones against the stones, nor that the men of an earlier age interpreted the com- mand of God to mean the slaughter of inno- cent victims in an exterminating war. We know that this is not in keeping with the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. We feel that such a spirit is forever forbidden us. We see the deity of Christ as a necessary assumption, not after the ancient theological order, but that it is necessary if we are to think of any kinship between man and God. The Unitarian position fixes a great gulf be- tween God and humanity which makes it impossible for the one to go to the other, or to find any basis of communication or fellow- ship. If God could not reveal himself in the man Jesus, he cannot reveal himself in any man. Christ brings God nearer, establishes the divine Fatherhood, and makes clear the divine sonship; not only so, but the philosoph- a ae ~ = oe. THE INCARNATION 105 ical trend of intelligent thinking is toward this position. We see that a religion of fear has no effective power over the hearts of men. We also see that, while old figures of speech no longer move men, there is rising over the horizon of the mind a new sense of the awfulness of sin, the age-long retribution which it carries in itself, that no man is able to escape. We are coming to see that this penalty cannot be altogether avoided by any sinner, nor can it be in any degree avoided by the absolution of any priest, nor by the muttering of any magic name, nor by the thoughtless taking of any creed upon our lips, nor by mental assent to any beliefs, but only by repentance that makes a man a new creature with a new character wherein old things have passed away, and all things have become new. We see with a new force that no man can hate his neighbor and with any measure of truth say that he loves God. We see that the self-denial and sacrifice, the service per- formed to the last and feeblest and most decrepit creature, in humility of heart and in the name of Christ, has been a service to Christ himself. We see that it is safe to trust the infinite love of the Father, that too long our thought 106 THE REASON IN FAITH of the Father’s love has been placed at a dis- advantage with the love of Christ. Do we love any human being, then God loves them infinitely more. Would we do all we could to rescue him from himself, all that and infin- itely more God would do for him. Because our highest human love, and the love brought to us in the earthly example of Jesus, are only the reflection of what, in God, is a limitless sea, having no shore or bound. | It is hard to realize what Christ will mean to the days that are coming. He is sure to speak with an ever-increasing authority. Jesus of Nazareth is the one ultimate goal of hu- manity. The race is like one who has seen a vision, and henceforth there can be no rest, no satisfaction, no peace of mind until the vision be attained. Christ will mean vastly more to the coming age than to our own. Into the everwidening interpretation of Christ must go the interpretation of peoples now pagan. ‘The great missionary movement is bound to give a new appreciation of Christ. Charles Cuthbert Hall has shown how the highest and fullest appreciation of Christ is delayed until to the Western content of Chris- tianity has been added the richness of the Oriental mysticism. The kingdom of Jesus Christ is coming, that THE INCARNATION 107 will bring the nations of the whole earth into the tender and yet compelling bonds of uni- versal brotherhood. AII that is unbrotherly in custom or in practice will have to go. Old superstitions that have bound men in thral- dom for ages, slavery, injustice, the greed of “thine and mine,” long-standing social tyran- nies, the horrors of the war, will no more possess the earth. We are beginning to see the first gleams of such a movement. Christ will never have conquered the earth until he has awakened devotion in the hearts of individual men. The culmination may be delayed. “No one knoweth but the Father”’ when that day shall break in its full splendor, but the waiting earth is the witness, and the need of man is the prophecy that it will come. “We may be lying in the ground When it awakes the world to wonder, But we have seen it gathering round, And heard its voice of living thunder, ’Tis coming, yes, tis coming!” Yes, and much better than that, there will be unnumbered voices in that day, like the sound of many waters, singing the song of Moses and the Lamb. There will be the voices of men from all lands and tribes and kindred, and from all ages. 108 THE REASON IN FAITH “‘As shadows, cast by cloud and sun, Flit o’er the summer grass, So, in thy sight, Almighty One, Earth’s generations pass. “And as the years, an endless host, Come swiftly pressing on, The brightest names that earth can boast Just glisten and are gone. “Yet doth the star of Bethlehem shed A luster pure and sweet, And still it leads, as once it led, To the Messiah’s feet.” INCARNATION DEMANDED BY THE PROBLEM | oF Evin An incarnation was necessary to justify the existence of pain and evil in the world and to show that, in spite of appearances, the heart of the Eternal is love. If God being able to order a universe in which there should be neither sin nor pain, orders one where the contrary is true, he must show, first, that the suffering is disciplinary, and, second, that he is willing to share it in the task of working out man’s redemption. There is deadlock, and deadlock only, in philosophy and in theology unless the appearance of God in the person of Christ be allowed. There is logically and practically no solution for the deeper problems THE INCARNATION 109 of human existence apart from the deity and suffering of Jesus. The whole problem of reconciliation centers here. How this can be is a great mystery. The important fact is that it is. How it should be explained is another matter. This desire to explain the participation of God in the world through Christ has been the source of much unprofitable theorizing which has often confused the practical issues. We have had our governmental and other theories of the atonement. God was an abstract justice. Justice required punishment for every sinner. Man has sold himself to the devil by sin and must needs be ransomed. Because of sin the whole world lay under the divine wrath. Jesus offered himself to appease this wrath and pay a ransom for man. For his sake wrath was turned aside and satisfied with the punishment of the innocent for the guilty. God was eternal wrath and Jesus was eternal love. No wonder there were charges of polytheism against the then current trinitarianism. In the view of some the office of Jesus was that of a substitute. Some victim was required to meet the demands of justice. So Jesus became the innocent victim that paid the price for our sins. These ideas were written into Christian hymns and are still the choice 110 THE REASON IN FAITH theological possession of many. They were calculated to meet the unspiritual desires of some who rejoice in having a cross borne for them that will obviate the necessity for their bearing any cross or paying any price. The greatest trouble with these mechanical theories of the atonement is their faculty of raising more serious questions than they are able to settle. The demand for a blind vengeance that takes it out on the first victim offered, and apart from a larger and purposive love, is an unethical demand. Furthermore, no justice can ever be satisfied with an injustice. To kill an innocent man for the wrong of the sinner would never satisfy justice in any but an immoral world. It will further be discovered that while theoretically the sins of the indi- vidual and the world are taken away by the act of One, in fact they remain until the indi- vidual removes them from his life, through the confidence in victory that comes through the living presence of the Christ. It becomes evident also on reflection that though the world is said to be redeemed from the wrath of sin, it is not, and that the wrath abides as long as sin in the world and in the individual abides. That even while men are forgiven they are called upon to endure the penalty of old sins. The fact is that these theories could THE INCARNATION 111 have been accepted only by minds of a cer- tain legal cast which were long accustomed to irresponsible and despotic governmental tyrannies. “But if we let go these,’ some one says, “what will we believe? What have we to take its place?”? Well—pardon the suggestion —why not accept the New Testament as con- taining a sufficient statement of the matter, realizing that any statement of truth is vain without the experience of the individual of sins forgiven and overcome, and a new life of obedience replacing the old life of sin and rebellion? Apart from experience of them in life, all religious statements are as powerless for religion as the prayermills of the Orient. The unexplained fact that lies behind many of these statements is the unreckoned law of compensation which no man can altogether avoid in life. The sinner is forgiven, but may not be altogether freed from the natural con- sequences of his sin. The powers of life wasted in sins of profligacy cannot be replaced. The mind burdened with the repulsive memories of the past has no present Lethe in which it may wash. There is still present the con- sciousness of evil influences which continue their career of evil long after the man has repented. No mechanical theory, however 112 THE REASON IN FAITH good, can take the place of redemption in fact and in life. What God wants in us is not so much remorse for past sins as the attain- ment of moral character. Repentance in the face of approaching punishment is not char- acter. God freely forgives the sinner, but the one requirement or requisite of forgiveness is a repentance which includes the forsaking of sin, and the setting in motion of new forces of life which shall measurably redeem his past. God is content even far beyond the patience of men if he can discover in any person an effort or struggle toward righteousness. ‘The fact of forgiveness, the sympathy of the Eter- nal with man’s lowly struggle away from base- ness, the possibility of overcoming every sin, the part which the Christ takes in every moral victory, the willingness of God to tent with us along the common plains of life and to abide with us through storm and sunshine until the conquest over self and the world is won, and then to receive us to himselfi—these are the things that have been brought to us by the incarnation. It is sufficient if we experience these great truths in life. And if they fail to make us new creatures in Christ Jesus, there is nothing about all the beliefs in the world that can do aught for us. THE INCARNATION 113 Lire THE SupREME AUTHORITY Christian people have too often forgotten that the supreme revelation is the living Christ himself. The New Testament is revelation just to the extent that the living Christ by impact upon his disciples was able to get his message over to the world of men. If in this modern age this living Christ shall nowhere live again in the thoughts, deeds, dreams, and activities of men, then dead indeed he is. The greatest and most unanswerable of all authorities is the living authority. It cannot possibly be gainsaid because it bears the wit- ness of life. The witness of life is the most convincing to the modern mind as it has been to all ages. The only commanding authority anywhere in the world is not verbal authority but living authority. I can gainsay all your theories and with Sophist diligence can put them all to shame. Theological controversy has never been profitable because its only end was the exhaustion or death of one of the participants; but the loving faithfulness of my enemy, though scorned and misinterpreted by me, becomes either the rock of my salvation or my damnation. I cannot live in its presence and not be changed by it for better or for worse. It becomes the test of judgment upon 114 THE REASON IN FAITH my own life. In life, then, we find the su- preme authority, and in the life of the Son of God we have a rock of salvation if we bring our lives into accord, or a millstone of destruc- tion if we reject. To reject the moral goodness of the Man of Nazareth is to make the supreme decision for evil; to accept and to follow is to live. CHAPTER V THE MEANING AND FUNCTION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT Tuat the modern mind with its interest in the psychical history of man is so indifferent to the theological doctrine of the Holy Spirit cannot be attributed altogether to the mate- rialism of our age. In most discussions of a theological order there has been a vagueness and mysticism here that has not been evident in the discussion of God and the incarnation. One can scarcely get the history of trinitarian doctrine clearly without recalling something of the possible influence upon it of the Platon- istic Philo the Jew. The idea suggests itself to the mind whether or not the mysticism that gathers about the Christian conception of the Holy Spirit may not have had some of its sources in this pre-Christian mysticism. There is, of course, the more obvious reason that the Holy Spirit is a matter of personal expe- rience the basis of which is pure mysticism. Is there, then, a reasonableness to this doc- trine? Can it be shown to be in keeping with the best human experience? What is the 115 116 THE REASON IN FAITH meaning and application and what the par- ticular place of the Holy Spirit in Christian self-realization and activity? The mystical character of the doctrine has undoubtedly driven from its consideration many earnest spirits who were of an exceedingly practical order, and who have never dreamed it was possible to apply here the test of reasonable- ness. This feeling has been intensified by the mystics, who have set it up against reason as a sort of propaganda against the “carnal mind.” In this case “mind” has been com- pelled to bear the stigma that rightly belonged to “carnal.” The result has wrought m some devotees of the doctrine a hostility toward reason and a plain neglect of the most obvious sources of ethical knowledge in the interests of a blind unreasoning “feeling” which had no issue in ethical living, but ended m an innocuous ecstasy which often left the saint less in moral self-control than in the begin- ning. It is necessary to distinguish sharply true religion, which is fundamentally ethical self-control, from a sometimes erotic, some- times hypnotic and merely suggestive “expe- rience” of religion. This tendency has always been considered abnormal in the history of Christianity and has always been frowned upon and discredited when it appeared. THE HOLY SPIRIT 117 In view of these facts it is well, then, to seek the reasonableness of a doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Tue NeEEp To PersonauizeE Deity The foremost reason for assuming the reality of the Holy Spirit as a necessary part of the Godhead would seem to lie in the personal- izing of the Divinity. By this is meant that wider personalization which was made necessary for the communication of the divine will to the disciples after the Master was no longer with them. They naturally felt themselves all at sea for counsel and guidance, and there needed to come into their consciousness the assurance that the companionship and guidance of Jesus had not ceased at his death. Out of the fact and the doctrine of incarnation of God in Christ arose this new demand, a de- mand which had never before been so keenly felt. The taking away from them of that Presence which they “had trusted should redeem Israel’? threw them back on the deeper sources of their own experience and left them to discover there that of which they could not be conscious either before his coming or during the period of his living presence. That this new consciousness was vital and essential to the progress of Christianity is evidenced 118 THE REASON IN FAITH by the use they made of it. To those early disciples it must: have meant the same as to that later one we know so well, who wrote: “I worship thee, O Holy Ghost, I love to worship thee; My risen Lord for aye were lost But for thy company.” In the strength of it they moved forth to the audacious conquest of the world without an apparent doubt in the final outcome in spite of all present difficulties and hostilities that would have been overwhelming but for this consciousness. There can be no doubt in the light of early Christian writings that this assurance, witness, or whatever one may call it, was looked upon by them as taking the place of companionship vacated by their cru- cified Lord, and to it they looked for guidance in truth and for escape from physical foes. In other words, the doctrine grew out of their demand for such a personalization of God as the living presence of Jesus had made man- ifest, and the belief stood the test of actual experience in the accomplishment of their tasks. , Whatever one may think of their wisdom and adherence to truth, or even of their self- deception, an impartial historian must admit that, so far as we know, the experience was THE HOLY SPIRIT 119 unique in the history of humanity, and it led likewise to unique and lasting results. These results have been so constant in the history of the Christian Church and of individual experience as to have become one of the dependables of Christian practice and faith. To EstABLisH THE ComMoN IDENTITY OF GOODNESS The second result flowing from the assump- tion of reality in the Holy Spirit is the identi- fication which it makes of all goodness with the divine nature. This is an important truth which has been too often overlooked in the progress of Christianity. Goodness, spiritual- ity, moral self-discipline, humility, love were all considered as fruits of the Spirit which did not appear save as they were brought into actual being by the presence and directing energy of God. The incarnation of Jesus would have been incomplete without this other factor. Men came to know the possibility of moving to the same motives to which his life had moved. As this profound force had been recognized by himself as the “Father” in him, so some measure of the same assurance was granted them. That spirit which became the master note to their song of life was the spirit 120 THE REASON IN FAITH which they had seen manifested in Christ, and it was the Spirit of God acting in them. In fact, they conceived that a man could not act in such a way as to please God and to fulfill his true destiny without acting in the Spirit. This was made necessary because the proper performance of any task depends upon the spirit in which it is done. Just as one needs the genius which springs from love, from appreciation, from insight in order to paint a worthy picture or write a real poem, so spiritual genius was necessary for living a truly Christian life. Just as the life of Jesus had not been one primarily of ritualistic observance nor priestly formality and dog- gedly pursued duty, but of an inspiring and joyous fulfillment of deep-seated desire, so these men conceived through the illumination that had come to them that they must catch within them the stirrings of the same spiritual genius. The distinction that they discovered is just the distinction between Christianity and Phariseeism. This new experience became to them not only a common tie of fellowship, but established a meaning to communion or fellowship with God and each other. They rightly felt that it was God working in and through them to will and to do of his own good pleasure. Furthermore, they did not THE HOLY SPIRIT 121 make the mistake which is sometimes made of identifying their emotional feelmgs with religion. With a sane reasonableness they insisted upon applying the ethical test of prac- tical character and works, and where this appeared they decided the Spirit of God must have been present. It was a daring thing for the early church thus to recognize the divine character of all true goodness of the heart as opposed to a goodness of mere formality. To a great many even to-day it seems altogether too daring. To such it no doubt seems like making good- ness too common, too easy. But if the good- ness of God is to be something so far apart from us that we can never realize it, the claim to be the children of God becomes. only a solemn and hollow mockery. And even yet so few there are who follow consistently and altogether the guidance of this supreme inspira- tion that their lives shine out over the age with an uncommon splendor which reminds us at once of the Great Forerunner and Elder Brother. SEPARATION FRoM THE SPIRIT A TRAGEDY The first condition for the realization of the Holy Spirit is mental and moral honesty. ~ 122 THE REASON IN FAITH This is the foundation of the teaching of Jesus with regard to the single eye. In any case of self-guidance or self-direction it will be seen that unless there is a straightforwardness with oneself there is no chance for the springs of action to be clear, because out of the heart are the issues of life. In cases where mental dishonesty has been practiced there comes eventually an inability through prejudice to recognize the truth. By adherence to willful courses of action dressed to one’s own thinking with a garb of respectability, religious for- mality, or external righteousness, there grows an inability to exercise a clear and honest judgment. In time it may come to pass that the mind is so warped by the prejudice of what it wants to see and do that the evil im- presses one as the good and the good evil. Such a condition can be brought about only by acts of mental dishonesty and insincerity with oneself and with one’s world. This state is described as the sin against the Holy Spirit, and the tragedy lies in the skilled indifference of the sinner. It is not that he desires to be forgiven, and cannot be, but, rather, that such a love for evil has grown within him that there is no desire for repentance. The con- dition is one of moral atrophy through con- sistent and continued refusal to recognize the THE HOLY SPIRIT 123 norms of righteousness for one’s own conduct. The impulses toward righteousness may be inhibited by acts of will until they are no longer active. The man actually succeeds in strangling his own better nature, and his pun- ishment can be nothing less than the character he has himself produced. If this condition has been attended by religious hypocrisy, the situation is aggravated because the sinner retains the external forms of religion which make the self-deception more complete. Thus there grows up within the soul a separation from its better self,! or its ideal self, which is nothing less than a separation from God. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit emphasizes the internal fact of religion and hence is psycho- logically correct. Where this process has been run out to its easy limit, the spiritual blind- ness is complete and irremediable. It is this phase of experience which is so powerfully pictured by Ibsen in Peer Gynt, whose sins have been deepened by religious cant and adherence to religious forms covering an intol- erable selfishness which has brought him to such a state that the button-molder discovers no hope for him and threatens to put him into the melting ladle to extract what little of real metal God endowed him with originally. 1 Charles S. Royce, World and Individual—On the Ideal Self. 124 THE REASON IN FAITH Tue NgeEpD To ProvipE A GROUND or AUTHORITY In the final analysis the doctrine of the Holy Spirit provides the ultimate ground of authority. This may not at once seem evident in the face of the claim for infallibility in institution, Pope, creed, or Scripture, but such is the case. Only such truth as recommends itself to an enlightened conscience can be conscientiously received. The exercise of this discriminatory power cannot be deputed to any institution, council, or age. The testi- mony of man’s own spiritual judgment was always the basis of Jesus’ appeal for belief in himself. He never based that appeal on authority. Eventually each man must choose for himself and decide within his own conscious- ness the right and the wrong. Such is the nature of the human soul that individual decision is necessary for individual salvation. No profounder mistake can be made than to attempt to impress upon the rising generation any form of words. Living theologies spring from the heart of living experiences of God. Unless the new generation can discover for it- self this fountain of living inspiration, all creed- al subscriptions become worse than nothing. They serve only to keep from that age which THE HOLY SPIRIT 125 thus unquestioningly accepts them a recog- nition of its own spiritual and mental poverty. The only corrective is a profound belief in the power of the Holy Spirit to guide men into all truth. It is just the absence of belief in the reality of the Holy Spirit in all ages which has led to the attempt by one age to fasten upon the following age the shackles of its own expressions of living truth. In our smug self-conceit of perfect spiritual expres- sion we would quarrel with God over his care- lessness in leaving to the new generation the privilege and the task of finding God for itself. So in every age truth must be put con- tinually anew in the crucible in order that every rising generation may struggle to its own expression of God. One need not in the recognition of this truth disparage the help which the past has to give. It may erect guideposts for those who come after. These are of unspeakable value as indicating what others have found out about God. ‘They are of no avail unless those of the future find out God for themselves and largely in their own way. That is the God-given privilege of a living soul, and ultimate authority is grounded at the center in the witness of the Spirit, or the internal consciousness of God and right- eousness. 126 THE REASON IN FAITH Tue Source or Livinec GuiIpANcE Perhaps the greatest function of the Holy Spirit is to furnish a living guidance for the spirit of man. All norms of truth except living norms pass away with the fashions and moods of the age that gave them birth. All except living norms of truth pertain to a race, a nation, an age, or a civilization and are soon outworn. The exaltation of external authority of any kind indicates a distrust of that God who speaketh low in every heart, to whom the children of every age are unutter- ably dear, and who will not permanently leave any man or generation without the witness of himself. For we do not have to make men religious. The demands of our spiritual nature are insistent and once there has: shone upon the world the clear light of the God in Christ, man must come in the end to embrace it. Augustine uttered a supreme truth in the word, “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.” Nothing but the Christ-realization is fitted to satisfy the spiritual longing of man. And because this is so, no true and efficient doc- trine of God can leave out the office and func- tion of the Holy Spirit. If it were not so, God could not have been THE HOLY SPIRIT 127 in Christ, nor could God be in us, nor could there be any assurance of goodness in men. It is because in Christ we have the manifesta- tion of God in the flesh, and because we have in the spirit of man a candle of the Lord, that the three can meet in religious experience. To leave out one Person of the Trinity would be to make an impassable gulf between man and God. CHAPTER VI PRAYER AND THE WORLD-ORDER A DOMINANTLY scientific spirit has served to shake to its very foundation the conception of prayer which to many devout minds seems necessary if it is to possess any force. It 1s, therefore, important to study the nature of prayer and its use and likewise to reflect upon its examples in the highest type of prayer of which we have record. We need also to con- sider prayer from the standpoint of the world- order and determine whether there is that about it which is in conflict with the reverent scientific mind. The skepticism concerning prayer has gone deep into the common thought of the present generation so that it is unfor- tunately about the least used of religious functions where there are many evidences that it is the one most needing exercise. How are we to account for the so general apathy? May it not spring from a wrong interpretation or from a false emphasis of some lesser phase of prayer? It is quite worthy the attention of 128 PRAYER AND WORLD-ORDER 129 the serious student of religious problems to solve the present deadlock and to assist in bringing a new confidence where such con- fidence may rightly appeal to the reason of thinking men. There is reason to believe that the new conception of a universe of inevitable and uni- form law, wherein there is no place for chance and only a limited place for contingency of any kind, has helped bring the present indiffer- ence to prayer. The earlier conception was based upon an idea of the world as essentially capricious, in which anything might happen because there were no inexorable laws. That older world was one in which magic had a large place because of the slight understanding of forces whose uniformity had not yet been determined. The universe was geocentric and man was the most important creature in it. The result was to make systems of thought homocentric. To such an age it was not a daring thought to imagine the whole cycle of laws and uniformities interrupted and nulli- fied for the special salvation of a highland clan at war with its enemies, or even of individuals. With the coming of the Copernican theory all was changed. There was indeed much reason why the church of that time should oppose the Copernican hypothesis, on the ground that 130 THE REASON IN FAITH it was hostile to religion and destructive of biblical authority. It was destructive of the prevailing theology of the time. Its introduc- tion was one of the leading inducements to the Reformation. A provincial God was lost in the thought of a universe whose vastness was an intoxication to the hitherto parochial mind. Thereupon sprang a skepticism which has held the minds of many until our own time. Too few have been the real attempts at reconciliation between prayer and rationality. Even yet there are many who feel that recon- ciliation is not in keeping with piety. The result has been that an age given more and more to the scientific aspect of thought has concluded that it could safely neglect, the consideration altogether. There are likewise many truly earnest and devout souls who feel the force, the beauty, and the power ot scientific conceptions, who strongly desire but do not see their way clear to an unqualified faith. And yet there are few who do not in some way practice prayer and find it helpful in the darker passages of life. What, then, is prayer and what may be the relation which it sustains to a world-order? Has it a place in the world as we now know it, or is it, as some of our unbelieving friends love to assume, the failing remnant of an ancient superstition? PRAYER AND WORLD-ORDER 131 Tur CoNCEPTION OF PRAYER AS A CHANGING OF THE SUPREME ORDER Prayer is frequently conceived as a changing of the supreme order. It may be well to begin with this conception, as it is perhaps the most common one. It is seldom stated in this form because thus to state it would be to reveal its inconsistency. Prayer in this sense is usually put in the light of a change of the divine mind which is naturally more or less indifferent to consequences except when it feels the particular pull of intercession. The logical conclusion to draw is that God could not save himself nor his world without the prayer of men, which is quite true indeed, but in a sense just opposite to that generally taken, for it is necessarily impious to consider God indifferent to his world and only tardily moved to care for it under the persistent solicitations of religious busybodies. If we are ever to make anything of prayer, we must look upon it not as man changing either the supreme mind or order to his own capricious taste, but man as putting himself in tune with the divine order that the will of God may begin to operate in him. The immediate objection that will be raised against this point will be the exhortation to 132 THE REASON IN FAITH importunity taught in the parable of the un- just judge who heard the woman’s prayer for justice not from a love of justice but from a love of ease. No right-thinking man can take seriously the suggestion that Jesus meant thus to portray the character of God. The emphasis is not necessarily on the unwilling- ness of God to hear, but is, rather, on the value of importunity. We surely cannot accomplish the difficult tasks of life in a des- ultory way. It is only the man who makes every moment and every act a prayer for success that is really able to accomplish the important things of life. The value of prayer is to clear his purpose from the unessential and the unreal, to give him insight into God’s will and put him in working harmony with that will. Thus out of his importunate plead- ing and working come results that can be had in no other way. A study of the leading prayers of the world helps to bear out this conception. We might expect it in the highest type of prayer of all, that is, in the prayers of Jesus. The great exordium of the Lord’s Prayer is calculated first of all to emphasize the necessity of accord with the divine mind, for it begins: ‘Hallowed be thy name in earth as it is in heaven: thy kingdom come in earth as it is in heaven: PRAYER AND WORLD-ORDER 133 thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.” One could not think recognition more com- plete that the primal object of prayer is to put man en rapport with God, preceding as it does the prayer for individual needs. This truth gains emphasis from a consideration of the final prayer in Gethsemane, where the heart of the divine response is put in the closing words like the close of a heavenly benediction upon the mental and spiritual struggle of which it was a part—“not my will but thine be done.” The significance of this was clearly understood by the author of. Hebrews, who looked on that final clause of accommodation to the Supreme Will as the answer to Jesus’ prayer, ““Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared.” That is, the coor- dination of his will to his Father’s was the great outcome of his prayer, and if we choose not to take this as the answer to his prayer, we have only the choice of the conclusion there was none.1 A study of the great Old-Testament prayers shows a striking lack of the element which would look on God as a handy assistant from 1See also John 12. 27; 17. 1-26. 134 THE REASON IN FAITH the results of one’s own misdoings or the magic purveyor of unaccountable and unearned for- tune for the faithful. Jacob’s essentially selfish prayer at Bethel is almost an exception. Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, and Heze- kiah,? great national leaders, pray for the perpetuity of Israel not for its own sake but because the perpetuity of the worship of Jehovah is dependent upon Israel’s preservation. Similar is the prayer of Isaiah? for the preservation of a distinctive Israel, distinctive in the holiness of their relations to Jehovah. The prayers of Nehemiah’ and of Jeremiah® are the expressions of a mighty longing, a plea for the remembrance of the half-forgotten entente with his chosen people. | That which we find true of prayer in its leading Old-Testament documents as well as in the prayers of Jesus is also markedly true of the noblest prayer of the pagan world, the Stoic prayer of Cleanthes. “We are Thy offspring, and alone of living creatures possess a voice which is the image of reason. Therefore I will forever sing Thee 2 Exod. 32. 11; Num. 14. 13; Deut. 3. 24; Josh. 7. 8; 2 Sam. 7. 25; 1 Kings 8. 25; 2 Kings 19. 15. 8 Tsa. 63. 17. «Neh. 1. 8; 9. 32. 5 Jer. 14. 2. PRAYER AND WORLD-ORDER 135 and celebrate Thy power. All this universe rolling round the earth obeys Thee, and fol- lows willingly at Thy command. Such a minister hast Thou in Thy invincible hands, the two-edged, flaming, vivid thunderbolt. O King, Most High, nothing is done without Thee, neither in heaven or on earth, nor in the sea, except what the wicked do in their foolishness. Thou makest order out of dis- order, and what is worthless becomes precious in Thy sight; for Thou hast fitted together good and evil into one, and hast established one law that exists forever. But the wicked fly from Thy law, unhappy ones, and though they desire to possess what is good, yet they see not, neither do they hear the universal law of God. If they would follow it with understanding, they might have a good life. But they go astray, each after his own devices, some vainly striving after reputation, others turning aside after gain excessively, others after riotous living and wantonness. Nay, but, O Zeus, Giver of all things, who dwellest in dark clouds and rulest over the thunder, de- liver men from their foolishness. Scatter it from their souls, and grant them to obtain wisdom, for by wisdom Thou dost rightly govern all things; that being honored we may repay Thee with honor, singing Thy works 136 THE REASON IN FAITH without ceasing, as it is right for us to do. For there is no greater thing than this, either for mortal men or for the Gods, to au rightly the universal law.” The predominating characteristic of all these prayers is their recognition of the necessity of unity of the individual with the will of God, adaptation to the divine order which is the essential element of all true worship. A very much overlooked fact among reli- gious people is the sanctity of the supreme order of uniformity which we call natural law. In the ultimate the scientist cannot tell us what is the mysterious force presiding over matter and producing both activity and life. He can tell us what electricity will do under certain conditions; he cannot tell us what it is. He can tell us about the activity of the living cell; he cannot tell us what it is except to describe the phenomena of its activity. He may, to aid the imagination, picture the atom as made up of protons and electrons, but these he knows only through the measur- able forms of energy given off. His meta- physics of the atom is simply his attempt to aid the imagination in conceiving the ground of the activity. The proton and electron are the scientific guess, and as to the force which grounds their mutual attraction he has nothing. PRAYER AND WORLD-ORDER 137 It might quite as well be the mind of a su- preme Intelligence. This guess is worth as a guess quite as much as his “electrical attrac- tion,’ and it does actually mean much more because it is in reasonable keeping with a host of other facts and values that are sure but inexplicable upon any mechanistic or materialistic hypothesis. If one is to accept both science and theism, he must assume then that this back-lying force or activity is nothing less than the divine will and all natural laws are the uniformities of that will in action. In such a case there would be a literal truth to the words, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” It would be true likewise that the old distinction between sacred and secular would be done away, for all law would be an expression of the Supreme Mind. All life, then, would be a miracle, not in the sense of a wonder but in the sense of being momen- tarily depending for its existence upon the divine will. The order of nature is, then, the order of God, and its attempted infraction becomes a kind of impiety. The man who would become most efficient must bring him- self to the point of obedience to these laws. It is unreasonable to expect that God will upset the uniformity of his action where merely trivial matters are involved. Apparently, this 138 THE REASON IN FAITH uniformity or dependableness of the laws of nature should form the first article of any faith in God. Because of it life is enabled to go on. If the laws of gravitation could be upset by the prayer of an individual, it would mean destruction for the remainder of the race. As a fact, the rain is sent impartially upon the just and the unjust, the tower of Siloam is no respecter of persons in its fall. Exposure to contagion picks off the innocent and the guilty. Our only hope to escape the general wreckage which flows from broken law is to conform our wills and our activity to the divine will and activity. Then shall we find that there is a special care for the lawkeeper, a care which is in the very nature of the case. We may weep over the fact that fire burns the innocent child, but the law is for the gen- eral good, fire being useful to the race and pain being not an evil but a blessed signal of warning that preserves the race from un- willing self-destruction. Besides, we have been endowed with brains and a sense of moral responsibility which puts us under obligation to keep children and incompetents out of the fire. The failure to think clearly upon this point is costing the world a frightful toll of confusion, and even of life itself. PRAYER AND WORLD-ORDER 139 Tue THREEFOLD NATURE OF PRAYER Whether we think of prayer as appeal or worship, it becomes evident that it is to be considered, first of all, from its effect upon man rather than from any effect it may have in changing the divine mind or purpose. There is a sublime beauty and holiness about an onmoving order of life and nature which is of incalculable benefit to man in his moral and spiritual aspirations. To this end modern science, in spite of all its crude materialisms and over-weening assumptions, has made such contribution that the religious man should every day fall upon his knees and give thanks for the growing light of scientific knowledge. It will not and cannot eventually be found hostile to faith. Any truth wherever we find it is God’s truth, and no man can at heart be religious who does not desire that the truth shall prevail at any cost to any of his pre- conceived theories or beliefs. To BRING THE TRUE ADJUSTMENT OF Man TO THE DIvINE ORDER Obviously, if this is God’s world, then the prime effect of prayer is to bring the proper adjustment of the individual to the divine order. The orderly uniformity and ongoing 140 THE REASON IN FAITH of the world is as divine as any unforeseen results. Upon this uniformity, life and the general well-being are dependent. Prayer can- not, then, be considered an interruption of that order. It is more important that prayer should conform us to God’s will than that it should conform God to our wills. If prayer were a conforming of God to our desires, as a host of people assume, prayer would be a far more dangerous exercise than aviation is at the present time, for it would endanger not only the individual who prayed, but it would set up the caprice of the short-sighted, ignorant but devout religious man as a sort of hierarch over God. In such a case God could only obey. Such is of course a reversion of the true nature of prayer, but the concep- tion of it is very prevalent. i By prayer the individual does, then, seek to know the supreme will concerning him. Through it he clears the fountain springs of his own motives of that selfishness which biases opinion and leads away from true insight into the meaning of life and of social relations. It is a calling in of the Divine Spirit for review upon one’s life, one’s motives and ambitions. Without its clarifying power life never can be lived greatly. Prayer is the sine qua non of true adjustment to the facts and forces about PRAYER AND WORLD-ORDER 141 us, to the divine will and order, and it is essential to all religious living. This thought leads naturally to a second element in prayer, namely, that it is a form of cooperation of the individual with the Divine. To Put tHe INDIVIDUAL IN COOPERATION witH Gop We frequently forget that prayer is a form of cooperation. Too often it becomes a plead- ing for God to do for us what we lack the energy, the courage, or the initiative to do for ourselves. Sometimes men have prayed for a revival of religion in their community who have missed entirely the thought of the cooperative nature of prayer. If they had not, they would have first brought their own lives above reproach by the fulfilling of their own obligations, justice, kindness, love, and truth to their neighbors. In the next place, if the matter had really entered vitally into their wills, they would have responded to the call frankly and courageously to seek those same neighbors for discipleship. The great value of the closet prayer is to bring about such a state of mind that the man who prays is ready to cooperate with God, for God desires infinitely more than any man can to see the salvation of any community and is only await- 142 THE REASON IN FAITH ing the cooperation of his own children. There is little use, then, in merely beseeching God to do what he already wants to do but in the way of which stand our laziness, our cowardice, our indifference, and our sin. Real prayer will soon set us to cooperating by every means In our power. We shall move out to answer our own prayer by fulfilling our part of the bargain, and we have the assurance if that prayer is an expression of what God wants too, all the powers of the universe are at our disposal to bring the desired result, remembering only this, that God never makes infractions upon the wills of men. Inviolability of the human will carries within its precious keeping the reality of moral character. Neither is the cooperation one-sided. For the oneness with the divine will which prayer brings about opens new avenues of possible efficiency and vision. Praying is analogous to making elec- trical connection with power. The dynamo will not turn until the connection is made. The cooperation with God through prayer may truly be looked upon as an opening of the avenues of power. To AccoMPLISH THE Enp Soucurt The third purpose in prayer is the accom- plishment of the end sought. It is clear that PRAYER AND WORLD-ORDER 143 the prayer which is in keeping with the divine will and which does not involve infraction of free wills cannot remain unanswered. It may not be answered as the man wanted when he began to pray. It must be answered to the extent that the man makes God’s will his own will in the matter. We are all of us very limited in our knowledge and insight and know not how to pray or what to ask for as we ought. No man has lived a score of years religiously who has not been more grateful for the lack of definite answer to certain prayers than for those which have been ful- filled. This is the reasonableness of the saving proviso, in all prayer, ““Not my will but thine be done.” Very often the best answer to our prayer lies in the denial of that which for the moment seems to us most necessary. The answer to prayer does not, then, depend upon receiving the thing asked for. Very often the answer comes in achieving a mind which voluntarily foregoes the desired object. Prayer as a selfish getting of some bauble for me by denying it to my neighbor partakes more of pious mendicancy than of religion. It is not religious and therefore is not prayer. It is credulous beggary. But if one’s heart be bent upon the achievement of the divine will, though that end reach out far past the 144 THE REASON IN FAITH limits of his own toil, struggle and life itself it must eventually come to pass, for ali the higher forces of the universe work to bring it to pass. Our real prayers are like ships we put to sea, which wander wide by many havens, which, though they circle the wide earth again and again, must find their way at last to port. Blessed is the man who desires as God desires, for he shall have many ships on God’s wide seas, and none of them shall be lost. mi PRAYER AS A SoURCE OF PowER So many phases of the subject have already been covered that prayer as a source of power has already been indicated and needs in this place but a few additional words. We have seen how prayer is really a putting of man into harmony with the will of God. It places him in a spirit of cooperation with God to bring about that thing which God wants. There are many motives that control our activities in life. There is the desire for praise, or fortune or fame, the desire of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life. Some of these are legitimate if they are incidental to the greater and supreme desire to glorify God and to establish his king- dom on the earth. In these desires which PRAYER AND WORLD-ORDER 145 range from a mild form of individualism to the grossest and most damnable selfishness there runs a streak of discontent and disgust, because in them the man is not realizing his full nature. We cannot leave out the nobler side of man’s effort and have anything in the end but disillusionment, unhappiness, and dis- _ satisfaction. We lie too often upon the sur- face of things with no deep-lying principle to sustain us. Like restless babes we are quieted only with immediate satisfaction. The withdrawal of riches, or the satisfaction of lust, the vanishing of a single dream leaves the man broken with the object of life gone. There is here no means of permanent satis- faction, no noble self-realization. One must somehow anchor himself in the nature of things which is God. He must give himself to causes that are eternal, to satisfactions that cannot die, to expressions that are as true for one age as another, or at the very least to heroisms that stand forth in undying splendor. Often such achievement is possi- ble to the man only after time and sense have robbed him of the trivial and the fading. Such was Dante when his ambitious dreams vanished into the darkness of the political nightmare of his time and he found his peace in the undying truth of his Divine Comedy. 146 THE REASON IN FAITH Only he can find highest expression of himself who works without fear of time or fate or man or devil, laying one by one the stones in the great foundation of truth which by their sincerity are beyond cavil, set for all the world to see, to criticize, to condemn for a time, but eventually to recognize and adore. To work thus in the absence of praise and against the sharp-running tides of unpopu- larity and misunderstanding is impossible un- less the man has come to some deep under- standing with God, or, if you prefer it, with truth or with the nature of things. When we put ourselves in tune within the divine order, there spring new sources of power which over- come every obstacle, even death itself. Such a man has the force of the universe at his back. It is a literal truth that the stars in their courses fight for him. Because his will is the will of God he cannot be defeated. Such an one can ask what he will and it shall be done unto him because he wills what God has already willed through him. PRAYER AND THE Divinr CHARACTER Prayer is the particular need of our own age with its pressing and colossal problems which only they shall have power to solve who keep close to the sources of power. PRAYER AND WORLD-ORDER 147 No thoughtful reader has come thus far without realization of how one’s conception of prayer involves the conception of the divine character. The false conception of prayer, which, under garb of pious phrase, looks upon it as the _ cajoling of a divine Despot, an unwilling Deity, into some form of favoritism to those who live decently and after the forms of reli- gion is really a travesty upon God’s character. Furthermore, it makes for unbelief and forms a stumbling-block in the way of the reverently thoughtful. God must be faithful to the un- just as well as to the just if he is to preserve his character. He cannot be a respecter of persons. He is only a respecter of human needs. I cannot pray down the rain upon my corn that will destroy my neighbor’s barley, nor pray the far job into my possession that will mean distress and want for my neighbor who needs it more than I. Really religious men cannot pray in that way. Unless our prayers are social and include the general good, they cannot in the strict sense be consid- ered prayers at all; they are the expressions of selfish wishes. And though our way to this high truth lie through the blinding tears of self-denial, it is the only trail which leads out to the highways of God—who loves all his 148 THE REASON IN FAITH children with an unchanging and equal love. If through our blindness we could see this, we should know that through this divine impartiality alone is the possibility of our salvation. The highest pathway for man lies along the steep ascent of reconciliation with God. CHAPTER VII SIN, PUNISHMENT, AND PERSONALITY In considering the problem of sin it is first of all necessary to reach definite principles widely applicable, because the notion of sin varies with the outlook, habits, early train- ing, and conscience of the individual. We must look past these variations to the under- lying principle. We can do no better in such a case than to have resort to the teachings of Jesus, who had such principles, though he frequently ran counter to the common notions of sin in his own day. His action on the Sabbath was set forth as sinful; some of his sayings regarding God were considered im- pious. He seemed quite indifferent to the set rules of his time in which religious conduct had become stereotyped. He frequently ex- posed the irreligion which lay underneath a slavish obedience to the religious rules. What his principle was is indicated in his perfect law—love to God, to neighbor, and to self. Sin would be that which would offend in any one of these three respects, and these will 149 150 THE REASON IN FAITH form the basis of our consideration and definition. | | : Sin may be defined as an offense toward God, neighbor, or self. Since such a defini- tion is sure to seem vague, let us study it a little more closely. It is quite certain that it will not please the literalist who wants his sin named and catalogued and is impatient with the application of principles which must be used more or less differently in different cases. Such an one is likely to look upon such application of principles as a sort of moral obliquity. Exactly such was the charge against Jesus, and we should not allow it too great an importance. Sin A FaInuRE To CooPpERATE witH Gop There is no doubt that Jesus had in mind the definition of sin as rebellion against God’s will, though he had little or nothing to say regarding the divine wrath against it. His doctrine of sin sprang out of a sense of the value of human life and the intrinsic worth of the human soul rather than from that sense, which has been at times so prominent with the theologians, of the absolute holiness and abstract justice of God. Jesus did not discuss sin in the abstract, but always as a fact of experience, and he lays no particular stress SIN AND PERSONALITY 151 upon the wrath of an injured God as a factor in the problem. From the aspect of sin against God we have most prominently the parable of the king’s wedding. To this invitations were issued only to be insolently disregarded by men who were too busy with material things to accept. The result for them is that a whole horde of men whom they consider socially unfit receive the honor of sitting down at the marriage of the king’s son. Among those that come is one who is apparently bound to come on his own terms. He refuses to wear the wedding garment. He is, of course, con- spicuous and out of place, the blot upon other- wise perfect arrangements and a perfect feast. His only natural place is the outer darkness. He does not belong. The sin of the foolish virgins was the neglect of preparation for that usefulness which made their presence desirable at the wedding. They were come in the capacity of light-bearers to welcome the home-bringing of the bride. With no oil in their lamps and no welcome when the bridegroom came, there was simply no reason for their admission to the feast. The chief object of admission was not that they might have the pleasure of witnessing the spectacle, but that they might add to the joy. 152 THE REASON IN FAITH The wicked husbandmen sinned by misusing a heritage with whose safe-keeping and development they are only intrusted. They forget their duties as stewards and begin by converting these means to their own uses. The killmg of the rightful heir naturally follows. The moral is that men who thus misuse their stewardship open the way to the most desperate hatred of God which prevents them from having any part in the Eternal Kingdom. | One particular thread will be seen running through this group of parables. It is the failure of the individual sinner to adapt him- self to the divine will and order. That refusal to adapt himself prevents him from becoming a partaker in that order. This phase of truth is ever in need of emphasis and never more than in our own time, for there is an unchangeable divine order—a universe to which the wise man adapts himself. If he works in unison with natural law, by so much he works in unison with God and has God working with him. He cannot break the laws of that uni- verse without reading himself out of its benefits. If the transgressed laws of health slay him or the transgressed law of gravitation break him in pieces, or the cold freeze him or the fire burn him, there is no special intervention or SIN AND PERSONALITY 153 suspension of laws which he knew were existent and against which he should have provided. This is so because the lives of great multitudes depend upon this uniformity. It may seem sternness to some, but it is unflinching stern- ness for the common welfare which is of vastly more moment than that of any individual. To be kind to the race God must be stern with the individual. Many of our social, political, and judicial institutions are attempting to reverse that law at this time. We are so merci- ful toward the wrongdoer that we often forget we have any obligation to the innocent vic- tims or to the welfare of society in general. God never forgets. Science repeats the same stern tale of atrophied powers where there is refusal to enter upon the use of those powers. It is as if in these talents God were offering us kingdoms contingent upon our taking them. If they are offered and we refuse to enter into them, the responsibility is ours and not God’s. He, then, who sets himself up against the divine order in the natural world or in the spiritual world has all the force of the eternal energy opposed to him. He wages an im- possible conflict which means for him the loss of powers, of opportunity, and in the end of personality itself. The force of the universe would like a falling millstone grind him to 154 THE REASON IN FAITH powder. This irrepressible power was the wrath of God upon the children of disobedi- ence, although Jesus never ‘chose to state it in that way. | A DwaRFING oF PERSONALITY But Jesus was forever viewing sin as a dwarfing of personality. Foremost was its effect upon the personality of the sinner. It was that which hinders or deforms person- ality. One could never be quite the man after he had sinned that he had been before. The nature of sin was dwarfing and warping. It dulls the insight, blinds the vision, poisons the fountains of life at their source, and in the end perverts the personality from the image of God so that the sinner is no longer capable of seeing truly or of communion with God. Of this type of sin Jesus speaks in three typical parables—the parables of the prod- igal, the rich fool, and the house on the sand. In the first the wanderer reduces himself to a state of beggary by his disgusting ingrati- tude and willfulness, but, seeing his wrong, he returns belated to the love of his father’s house. The teaching of the parable is that the greater loss falls to the mean-spirited brother, who shuts himself away from the father’s love and joy, because of a petty, SIN AND PERSONALITY 155 jealous, and unforgiving spirit. The sin of the rich fool lies in his willingness to be satis- fied with the lesser rather than the greater gifts of life. The very night that he decided to be happy with a full barn and a fat pocket- book, all that was noblest and all that was intrinsically valuable about him glimmered ' out, the light that failed. The man who built his house upon the sand was likewise trusting to satisfactions that could not withstand the blasts of life. Having no eternal foundations, all his hopes were swept away. AN OFFENSE AGAINST THE PERSONALITY oF OTHERS Finally Jesus defined sin as an offense against the personality of others. This phase of the subject he touched with a delicacy which has been seldom comprehended. In our unthink- ing. rudeness we blunder into places which Jesus always approached with reverence. Per- sonality was to him a sacred thing upon which even God would not intrude unannounced and uninvited. “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man will open unto me, I will come in and sup with him.” In this shekinah of the human soul was the last citadel of goodness. Broken down, invaded, or destroyed, life could never be the same again. Probably 156 THE REASON IN FAITH the most cruel and terrible words we could utter to any man would be, “I have lost all respect for you.” That must lie at the heart of Jesus’ warning that he who calls his brother a cursed fool is in danger of hell-fire. Once the delicacy of that self-respect is destroyed —soul substance is destroyed—and the way back is difficult and all but impossible. He who respects his fellow men, expecting the meanest and weakest of them to show forth a true manhood, unconsciously passes through society with a lifting and saving power. Even the adulterous woman was not burdened with the further consciousness of the Master’s dis- respect. He met her as upon the same plane of respect with himself. His inherent respect for her personality was her salvation. | The parables which have to do with sin against others are typically represented in Dives and Lazarus and the last judgment. Dives’ sin consisted of indifference to the plain laws of humanity. So set was he upon the pleasures of his own worldly life that he missed the finer treasure of human companion- ship and charity. When, stripped of the first, he sought the second, he found that there was no common language of approach or sympathy. There was an impassable gulf which he had made. In the parable of the sheep and the SIN AND PERSONALITY 157 goats, the literal-minded desire to know when- ever they saw Him hungry or athirst or poor or sick or in prison, and did not minister unto him. These sadly learn the solidarity of life by being told that inasmuch as they did it not to one of the least of these whom he con- sidered brethren, they did it not to him. THe MEANING oF UNPARDONABLE SIN It would not do, perhaps, to close this dis- cussion without reference to Jesus’ teaching regarding unpardonable sin. Not because of the importance which it assumes directly, but because the fact of unpardonable sin has been the bludgeon of the crank and the horror of the sensitive. One might infer from the common idea of unpardonable sin that God is himself crotchety, quick-tempered and unreasonable, glad to catch man at a disadvantage and to visit on him the direct punishment for an unpremeditated and thoughtless offense, from which there is no escape even upon repentance. But we cannot take the character of God in the large, as Jesus represented it, and think for one moment that the human soul can ever reach the place where it is not surrounded by the Eternal Love, nor that to any soul at any time coming with that repentance which means 158 THE REASON IN FAITH a new purpose and new life, the divine for- giveness would be denied. We must think that sin becomes unpardonable only because forgiveness is not sought, because the indi- vidual has grown so blind to moral and spir- itual distinctions that evil has become its good. The unpardonable sin is nearer to us than we think and of different order than many think. Recall the connection in which Jesus used those words. It was when. his works of love and mercy were being ascribed to devilish motives. He was calling attention to the attitude of life into which his accusers had fallen. They had run gladly to convince themselves of a lie. Even the power of God manifested in one whom they hated was lightly accredited to demonic possession. Have you ever pondered on that miserable sin of jeal- ousy which led you to attribute evil motives to every good that your enemy might do? So far as that one man was concerned, your whole outlook on life was changed. It cen- tered in your self-pity and vanity. His light, whatever it might be, was darkness to you, his good would not be admitted, there must at least be an evil motive lurking behind. That is how hate poisons the springs of one’s being. So men, under the excuse of self-pity, af self-conceit, or vanity, come to the point Es _. SIN AND PERSONALITY 159 where they cannot apprehend the truth. Dark- ness appears as light and light as darkness. This is the attitude of life that brings us be- yond the reach of reconciliation either with man or with God. That life can be only black- ness which raises over its head the banner of hate. PUNISHMENT INHERENT IN PERSONALITY In discussing the teachings of Jesus it is always desirable to remember the symbolical nature of all language used to describe spir- itual experiences and spiritual truths. This is due to the poverty of language, and the nature of the deepest experiences of the soul. We cannot describe the simplest spiritual expe- riences except in metaphorical terms, hoping that those who hear may construct a content similar to our own, and get from our expres- sion meanings deeper than words. The blind literalist never understands anything in the spiritual world and never accomplishes any- thing except heresy trials. The heart of religious teaching forever escapes him. This principle is useful in considering Jesus’ doctrine of future punishment, to keep us from a literalism that shall turn aside the deeper facts of the truth he uttered. He used the formulas and the ideas that were com- 160 THE REASON IN FAITH mon to his day. How true this is will become clear to anyone who will take the pains to consult the apocryphal writings current among the Jews of Jesus’ day, and especially the Ethiopie and Slavonic books of Enoch. Jesus was compelled to speak his message in the language and forms of expression and to use the prevailing ideas of his age. Moreover, he confined himself to no single form of expres- sion, and about this fact the literalists have swarmed like bees, each gathering his own particular kind of theological honey. We shall not understand deeply the teach- ings of the Master regarding punishment if we do not remember that it is based upon the inherent capacities of the personality. The damnation about which Jesus was most con- cerned was one of character, and not delayed until the future life. To say that men were to burn in a lake of fire was at best a figure of speech used to indicate to common minds the serious nature of the loss of a soul. But to lose the soul meant much more than any such figure of speech could convey. It meant, as in the parable of the tares,! separation from the good and true. A similar meaning is connoted in the parable of the dragnet.” It 1 Matt. 13. 24. 2 Matt. 13. 47. SIN AND PERSONALITY 161 meant the uprooting of all not planted by the Eternal Father.? It meant the cutting down of the fruitless tree. It meant a recurring consciousness of sonship, and yet of irrec- oncilable separation, as in the case of Dives, to whom in hell are addressed the words of sorrowing tenderness, “Son, remember.” It - meant to be denied by the Lord when he should come in his glory. To lose the soul meant to be shut out from the loving fellow- ship of the King, to lose the estate of incom- parable worth, the secret treasure, the pearl of great price. But the climax of sadness must come in the fact that the damnation is self-wrought by the individual in the face of a love that has done all that it could to save him. These outward recognitions are only external marks ‘of a damnation already proceeding, for example, the loss of one’s character. If hell-fire arbi- trarily administered is the whole of the story, as many have thought, a mechanical doctrine of atonement may enable one to think that a death-bed repentance, the absolution of a priest, or a prayer of last hope, may be suffi- cient to present the soul without loss in eternal bliss. But such a view is trivial and § Matt. 13. 15. $ Matt. 7. 23, 10. 33, 25. 12; Luke 13. 25-27, 162 THE REASON IN FAITH false in the face of the deeper teachings of Jesus regarding the effect of sin upon character. The greatest punishment, ‘after all, that can be meted out to the sinner, is just to be what he has made himself, and the greatest reward of the saint is likewise to be what he has be- come through the power of God, redeemed from sin. Golden streets and eternal rest and song have little to add to the man who has come up out of great tribulation by the pres- ence and conscious help of the eternal God, having washed his robes and made them _ white in the blood of sacrificial living. Tur Turee Laws or CHARACTER The teachings of Jesus on the retribution of character may for convenience be grouped under three heads, which we may designate as laws of character. They are, first, the law of inevitable harvest, with its negative, the law of unused possession; second, the law of spiritual reaction; and, third, the law of spir- itual relapse. We have already touched upon the mean- ing of the parable of the wise and foolish vir- gins. Admittance to the marriage is refused the foolish virgins simply on the ground that they have nothing to bring there of light or joy. We have too often sought heaven for SIN AND PERSONALITY ~ 163 what we expect to get out of it. The teaching of this parable is that unless we have some- thing to add to its light and song, some sheaves to bring, some deathless treasures of the human spirit, some contribution to the eternal glory, there will be no reason for our entering there. What of us that live along for years without adding a single treasure of the human soul, without bringing gladness and joy and salvation to any in our neighborhood, and have brought back to the Father’s house no single prodigal from his far wandering? Some of us cannot decorate even the earth. How can we hope to be of use to heaven? It is true that the doors are open upon east and west and north and south and shall not be shut by day, but even the kings of the earth enter there because they have some glory and honor of the real kind to bring into it. If there is no fruit, there is no future for the tree. The purposes of a tree are all missed if it bears no fruit. There is nothing to do but to cut it down. “Why cumbereth it the ground?” If a human soul find not itself nor its fruitage, who can give it a soul or save it from itself? There are certain storms before whose flood all sands will melt away. Who can save the house of the man who has had no more sense than to build deep into the 164 THE REASON IN FAITH sand? If a man be a servant and faithfully employs his talent, there is a law of increasing success to help him on.’ Nothing succeeds like success—talents multiply to kingdoms. But if a servant is so unmindful of his duty as to bury his talent, again the inevitable harvest, “Cast the unprofitable servant into outer darkness.” The negative side of the law of inevitable harvest is the law of unused possessions. Nature has written this law of atrophy of powers all over creation. She has proclaimed it from every scarped cliff, from every bury- ing ground of uncouth monsters of an age gone by. “Take from him that which he seemeth to have, and deliver it to him that hath ten talents.” Aye, that which he seem- eth to have. Napkin talents are had only in the seeming. Wealth is a reality only in use. Education is valuable only in the imparting. Religion there is none apart from the living. The unused possession is an unreality that only deceives. The miser hoards his gold at the expense of what the gold might give him. The rich fool instead of expanding life with expanding barns would narrow it to the size of the barns, and that night his soul, the only source of deeper joys, died within him. O thou Capernaum, thou Bethsaida, companions SIN AND PERSONALITY 165 of the manifold mystery, because there is in thee no vision to discover thy God when he comes to thee, thou art to go down to the eternal blindness. Dives had built a world of food and drink and gorgeous apparel, as if food and drink and gorgeous apparel would last always. All these things in which his heart had trusted for joy slipped out in a night and were not. One anchor of the soul there might have been. He might at least have had fellowship with the beggar at the gate. That privilege which in life he had despised became his prayer in hell. Mayhap Lazarus would have been glad to minister, but how shall they communicate who speak a different language? What could Lazarus of the doorstep say in sympathy that would not add tortures to Dives of the marble hall? There was a great gulf fixed in death as Dives had made it in life. Then there is the law of spiritual reaction. A truly repentant man will not be unforgiving. Strange, sad truth it is, that as I am lax with myself I am hard with the sins of my fellows, and as J am stern with my own shortcomings I am forgiving toward theirs. The debtor who was forgiven much refused to forgive little and displayed a character so out of keeping with his Lord that there was nothing that 166 THE REASON IN FAITH could touch his hardened soul but bending on the rack until the last farthing was paid, Last of all, there was the law of spiritual relapse, or the law of the unfilled vacuum. A purged soul with no task is simply a vacuum into which anything may enter. It is a type of the Christian with no real work for the Kingdom, a church member with no religious toil, with no church to support, no community to save. It cannot long remain in that state; it must either get at a positive program or become the abode of seven demons worse than the first. The harvest of character—this is the punishment which we carry with us wher- ever we go, the hell that we are making for ourselves. In this the saddest and bitterest touch of remorse must come when self-decep- tion is no longer possible from the conscious- ness that we are enfolded by a pleading and untiring love. What is more distasteful than a love unreciprocated and unsought? When that love is the Eternal himself who can flee from his presence? Though I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the utter- most parts of the earth, though I say the darkness shall hide me, though I make my bed in hell, lo, he is there. In such a case I might well call upon the rocks and the moun- tains to hide me from his presence. His con- SIN AND PERSONALITY 167 sciousness is so bound up with my personality that I may be sure of this whatever else I may doubt, wherever my personality survives, there will his presence be for joy or for pain. INTENSIFICATION OF PUNISHMENT THROUGH VANISHING OF TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL ORDER In human experience there is nothing so delicate, nothing so intimately connected with happiness or sanity as the inner personality of which we have been speaking. Confirm and strengthen it, and the outward life responds with strength as the flower responds to the sun. Weaken or break it down, and there is immediate effect in the outward self. It is as if the soul could never forget. One can fill the hours with ulterior interests and excite- ments and momentarily forget the deeper existence, but in the end wrongs done to the personality stalk like specters through the background and are waiting only their chance to occupy the foreground. In the watches of the night, after the first deep sleep has passed, in moments of mental leisure they come to fill the stage of the mind. There are flashes from forgotten days of childhood, unremem- bered for years, memories which long inhibited we had supposed forgotten, but in some mo- 168 THE REASON IN FAITH ment when least we wish to see them they appear. Some of the psychologists call these manifestations of the subconscious mind, a term more or less misleading and inaccurate. The fact that the memories have to do with injury to the personality has led Freud and the psychoanalysts to jump to the conclusion that all are founded on sex repressions. It is only because sex experience is so intimately bound up with personality. A man may dis- pense with much in this life; he cannot afford to dispense with respect for himself. So long as he keeps the citadel of his own heart he can face the world with power. The con- sciousness of weakness or surrender here is followed with inevitable internal conflict and disaster because the very center is attacked from which are the issues of life. We can bear anything but shame. And shame bites deepest when internal shame witnesses to the external. Stevenson in the Christmas Sermon called attention to the necessity of having friends, yet without capitulation and “above all, on the same grim condition to keep friends with oneself.” The heart of future punishment lies perhaps in this, the failure to be on good terms with oneself. It is the fertile source of split personality, and all manner of psy- choneuroses, and many insanities where the SIN AND PERSONALITY 169 individual through some shock to the per- sonality loses his own self-control. A study of these instances is likely to lead one to the conclusion that they are, many of them, shocks that touch the inner spirit of personality or self-respect. May it not be possible, then. that when the human personality through the ' passing from the spatial and temporal order is no longer able to occupy itself with super- ficial interests, the punishment for sin will be just this incompatibility with oneself and with the divine order by which one is sur- rounded? Dante has represented one song as filling all the spaces of eternity. It is the subject of the heavenly choirs in their wheeling flight about the throne—it forms a chorus of cheer to the wearied pilgrims who in hope struggle up the dark circles of the mount of purgatory. It is also heard in hell. Everywhere the burden of the song is love, “Amore! Amore! Amore!” That which creates the rapture of heaven and sustains the pilgrims of purgatory is the deep- est punishment of the wicked and ungrateful. And the tragedy of their situation lies in this, that so long have they wronged the deeper demands of their own personalities that they have come to hate their better selves. They find themselves with divided personalities, but 170 THE REASON IN FAITH incapable of longer willing the good. So far as they can be said to desire anything, it is only evil. So they live forever in a universe with which they are at hopeless war.. They are surrounded by the presence and conscious- ness of God which they hate and cannot escape. Happy would their lot be if, indeed, they could compel the rocks and the mountains to fall upon them and hide them from the face of the Almighty. But they cannot escape his universe and they will not reconcile nor adapt themselves to it. Their punishment is just to be themselves with what they have made themselves, but at war with all their surroundings. Such a hell begins in the human personality with the first sin, and if there be no repentance, it can only be accentuated by the passage of time and only deepened with the vanishing of the temporal order when our sins stand out before us as an eternal now. Is such a viewpoint of sin and punishment not sufficiently definite?- Are principles like these more adequate than a catalogue of sins? To some it will so seem, and there will be much to bear them out in the speech and attitude of the Great Teacher. To the think- ing mind in our modern age they are likely to drive home the old teachings with a new and compelling force. CHAPTER VIII THE CHARACTER OF WORLD REDEMPTION Brnepetto Crocs, in his Theory and Prac- tice of History, points out the long conflict between contrasting world views which has determined philosophy and historiography from the beginning. It is the conflict between the ideas of immanence and transcendence. Im- manence is developmental, though in being so it never escapes the necessity for transcendence. Its tendencies are naturalistic, not to say fatalistic. It looks on the origin of the world and the progress of civilization as a natural development. It refuses to become excited over things as they are, looking upon the whole process of life and at history from the standpoint of growth. The natural and the supernatural are one. The transcendental view is sharply dualistic. The creative process proceeds from a will which is at direct con- trast with the world it creates. Emphasis is placed on the natural as over against the supernatural. The fact of human freedom is dwelt upon, as over against the fatalism in- 171 172 THE REASON IN FAITH volved in the usual notions of immanence. But the redemptive value and implications of human freedom are lost from sight. Its dualism is, however, too complete. It assumes a Creator who is no part of present life and finds itself driven into a wilderness of explanation which satisfies neither its opponents nor itself. It is not, then, strange that contrasting attitudes which have so profoundly affected the history of secular thought should like- wise have affected theological thought regarding the goal of history, the character of world redemption. We shall discover the two types here—the immanently developmental, natural- istic and positive, and the transcendental dualistic, cataclysmic and negative. The two views form the crux of present theologico- scientific discussion. Both are partly right, partly wrong, and peace can be had only in the discovery of the nexus of compromise. Immanence and transcendence are not mu- tually exclusive terms. Both immanence and transcendence are present in personality and in all creative life. A wider understanding will eventually show the necessity for both ideas. Let us, then, without further preliminary, reverse our order and consider first the tran- scendental view, which is cataclysmic and negative. WORLD REDEMPTION 173 Tur TRANSCENDENTAL, CATACLYSMIC, OR NEGATIVE VIEW Perhaps the most resented adjective in this description will be the last one, but it springs directly from the positing of a dualism so complete that in effect it rules God out of the natural order and gives him participation only ‘in the supernatural. In the beginning this move was made to safeguard the reality of human freedom and remove from the Divine the responsibility for evil. However good the intention, the result has not been satisfactory either for the maintenance of a real human freedom or for clearing the divine character of complicity in an evil world-order. The knot remains untied until we discover the mutual compatibility of immanence and tran- scendence. Ture TRANSCENDENTAL VIEW IN CONFLICT Wits THe Orpier or NATURE AND LIFE The first result, then, of this unsynthesized dualism—for a synthesized dualism must be maintained—has been to raise a conflict with the order of nature and of life. Nature is held to be somewhat base, that from which the soul must struggle to escape. Natural ten- dencies are always wrong tendencies, and the way of salvation is a battle against nature. 174 THE REASON IN FAITH God is not only a Being transcending the natural order which he has created, but so holy withal that he has come to despise it and seeks by what means he can to save from it such as are of his own way of thinking. Such an attitude can but create distrust in all natural methods and in the value of scien- tific research. It resents any thought of development except the development of iniquity and finds itself in immediate conflict with all evolutionary theory. For God to act through natural forces would be to remove all super- natural or transcendent reality. When the facts of science refute its positions, its tendency is one of despising the facts and fleeing for refuge to the realm of mysticism and magic. Its world can be redeemed only by destruction, and salvation can come only by bloodshed. Wirs tHE Fact or PERSONALITY Not only is this view in conflict with the order of nature and of life, but it is likewise in conflict with the fact of personality. The foundation stone of personality is freedom, the power of choice and self-direction, and the resulting value in character. Apparently, the possession of freedom by his creatures is so dear to God that he will not transgress it even to impose his will. He stands at the WORLD REDEMPTION 175 door and knocks, but it is for man to open the door ere he will enter. And this is in line with the best we can know of life, philos- ophy, and psychology. One cannot be frightened, bludgeoned, or scared into moral character. Reformation comes not in circum- stances but in the moral will. If this remain - untouched, or if it move in the direction of an outward and formal decency only under the spur of fear or the anticipation of selfish rewards, its activity springs not from a desire for goodness but a desire for future selfish bliss, and the moral will remains unchanged. Many men who in the human relations have learned to esteem lightly the moral value of decisions made under compulsions of punish- ment or made for selfish gain, apply this method to God’s dealings with free men without dreaming of its horrible inconsistency and its travesty upon religion. Redemption is a redemption of the moral will or it is nothing. We are saved only when we love goodness and not when we hope merely to escape the reward of evil. Love of righteousness rather than love of the joys of heaven indicates whether there has been any moral change at heart. It is clear, then, that any true redemption of the world can come only by cooperation 176 THE REASON IN FAITH of free human personalities and not by any compulsion whatever. In the possession of the moral will and the divine assistance in the order of nature man has all the elements from which in cooperation with God to build a new heaven and a new earth. The coming of this new earth waits only upon his coopera- tion with God, and what gain would come of compulsion and cataclysm does not appear. It lies within man’s own power, acting with God, to redeem his world and the order of society. Against his will even God is power- less, for to remove man’s moral freedom is to remove the possibility of his moral char- acter and to reduce him to the moral status of the beasts of the field. The transcendental and cataclysmic view is, then, in its extreme and unqualified form in conflict with facts and necessities of human personality. It is incon- ceivable that having created human personality as the climax of creating activity, God should proceed to destroy it in order to save it. Such is the dilemma of transcendentalism. UNETHICAL IN CHARACTER The unethical character of such world- redemption has already become apparent dur- ing the discussion of personality. Free will WORLD REDEMPTION 177 cannot be coerced into goodness. Goodness must be its choice in order that there shall be either character or ethical value. It surely is an anomaly to talk of any kind of redemption which does not have the complete cooperation of the will of the individual. It does not appear how any band of saints caught up into a third _ heaven would have any completer field for exercise of the moral will than they would in the average modern city, where the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life are ever calling but are ever being resisted by those whose hearts are right. The assumption of such a position is that it is impossible to resist sin and that the only perfect life is one in which there can be no temptation. The physical removal of tempta- tion does not bear, however, an ethical qual- ity. When the power of temptation has been forever swallowed up and lostin the love for righteousness and truth, then, and only then, is the individual completely redeemed. On no other basis can the temptation of Jesus be explained as a reality without detriment to his moral character. It was not absence of temptation but love for and devotion to goodness that lifted his life into continual moral triumph. Any hope to renew the world by fire, blood, 178 THE REASON IN FAITH judgment, and cataclysm rather than by the mastery by man of the ethical values is as untrue to moral reality as itis vain. - CONFLICTINGLY DUALISTIC Another element in the transcendental view is its unsynthesized dualism. The practical removal of God from the natural order sets up a contrasting kingdom of evil as powerful and as tenacious as the kingdom of good. This arises from a failure to distinguish be- tween the existence of evil as an act and evil as a possibility. This distinction many minds refuse to make, and yet it is fundamental in its consequences for theology. Temptation to evil, though not entered into, is frequently treated as if it were evil. Evil is removed from wrong moral choices and given an inde- pendent existence of its own as if it could exist apart from action. When one has the temerity to remind the theological dualist of this, he is immediately reproached with being false to the faith once delivered to the saints, as if the eternal and independent existence of evil were as necessary to religion as belief in God. If evil as an act rather than as a possi- bility is eternally necessary, there is no hope that righteousness will be eternally triumphant. WORLD REDEMPTION 179 In which case also we must charge God with being its author, thus destroying his moral character, or else admit that God divides his realm with that before which he is powerless. If, on the other hand, evil is wrong moral choice alone, the day may come when all men, having been induced to love and desire the good, may do away with evil, though not with its possibility, forever. This does not, of course, take into account the possibility that there are persons whose wills are so com- pletely given to evil action that they can never be induced to love the good. But even for such the destructive effect of wickedness upon free moral personality needs to be taken into account. REVERSES THE DivInrE CHARACTER The most disturbing feature of the tran- scendental or cataclysmic view of redemption is its reversal of the moral plan and character of God. To it creation as consummated has to be viewed as a colossal divine mistake. Con- sequences apparently unforeseen, but springing out of the blunder of endowing man with freedom and giving the devil a free range, have spoiled the original work beyond power of recall. The only hope thus left is to burn 180 THE REASON IN FAITH up the present creation root and branch, and with such portion of it as has shown hope by subscription to dogmatic belief, to start a better world with the acquired fund of expe- rience arising from the original failure. In this new world it must be assumed there can be no possibility of evil, and thus only a living upon the virtue of the past, that character originally acquired in a “‘sin-cursed world.” There could be no multiplication of spirits be- cause these to exist must have an ethical character which is unobtainable except in a world where moral choice is a possibility. For such a God and such a heaven growth would be forever an impossibility and, what the un- wary cannot see, by the same law, life itself would be forever barred. Abbey in his master- piece, “The Search for the Grail,” has given us the picture of such a heaven in that of King Amfortas, who with his court is destined to remain locked in slumber till the coming of one whose heart and deeds are of such a character as to break the unearthly spell of dead enchantment. Life can never take itself out in self-contemplation of its own goodness, nor redeemed living souls in their own praise. Life must ever be creative. “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,” said Jesus. WORLD REDEMPTION 181 DEVELOPMENTAL ViEW TOO EASILY INDIFFERENT The developmental or positive view is open to criticism in much the same way as the transcendental for its one-sided incomplete- ness. It is too often lazssez faire and morally ' indifferent. Moral redemption being a process of development, it is easy for the individual to depend upon the world-order to do the developing, while he escapes moral respon- sibility. If the negative viewpoint fails by underemphasizing man’s part in the redemp- tion of the world, the positive viewpoint often fails by oversight of man’s responsibility. It does not yield itself to that pessimism of the opposing view which cuts the cords of action, but its very hopefulness easily becomes its temptation to indifference. In keeping with its immanental proclivities it magnifies the process, the order, while it minifies the indi- vidual. It is grand in conception, but has not the spirit to attack evil and force moral issues. It should, however, by very reason of its pos- itive standpoint and its opposition to the cataclysmic view arrive at a saner outlook on the inner meaning of redemption. It has open to it thus a perspective something like the following: 182 THE REASON IN FAITH CAPABLE OF SETTING ForTH THE ETHICAL SIDE It should realize the necessity in any real world redemption of provision for the life of the individual. That is to say, it should have a broader view of the salvation of the indi- vidual than that it is almost wholly mental assent to dogma and salvation for a world to come. Salvation is begun here or nowhere. It is a change in ethical character and achieve- ment or it is nothing. It is salvation to whole- some and Christlike living rather than to future joy. The Christlike order of life does, of course, insure the joy, but happiness is incidental and a by-product rather than the goal of effort. Happiness is always such a by-product. It never comes to him who seeks it as a goal. It is the reward of moral integ- rity and the self-forgetting spirit. Religious joy is no exception. Heaven itself would be stale for the man who had not won it at great cost. Redemption for the individual can include nothing less than a redemption of the present life to social usefulness and service, to the actual pursuit of high ideals, and the spend- ing of life on righteous causes. This important truth the developmental view is specially fitted to emphasize. WORLD REDEMPTION 183 To SHow Wortp REDEMPTION AS A CooPERATIVE PROCESS The other fact of importance in the redemp- tion of the individual which the positive viewpoint should make clear is that world redemption is in the nature of the case a ‘cooperative process. It cannot overlook the moral will of the individual. Having created a world of free individuals, that world cannot be redeemed without the cooperation of the free wills created. It was doubtless a danger- ous and venturesome thing for God to do, as seen from our human standpoint, but the fact of freedom cannot be doubted without negating the whole moral system. It should not be deemed a sign of weakness on God’s part that he chooses to save the world through the cooperation of human wills. The growth of human individuals to his own viewpoint must afford the highest possible satisfaction to the Creator, while it provides the highest possible development and satisfaction to man. It is not a sign of weakness in a teacher to refuse to perform the sums in the pupil’s arithmetic, nor for a father to decline to make decisions for his child. To cast upon the pupil the necessity of struggling out his problem means that he shall be strong as his teacher, and to 184 THE REASON IN FAITH throw upon the child the necessity for his own decisions means he may be as his father. As individuals come to learn the deeper mean- ings of life, as they come to see as God sees, and to desire those things which he desires, they will make their world what he wills. When all men have thus come to the spirit of cooperation the world will be redeemed. This much a real redemption must mean in any case, and it can mean nothing less. It is a process discouragingly slow for our hasty hearts and years that are spent as a watch in the night, but it may not seem slow to that Mind that has spent uncounted millenniums in bringing the process to its present condition of achievement. It may seem precarious to the cynical disbeliever in human character, the man whose faith dwells chiefly on human depravity, but not to a loving Mind which dwells with infinite joy upon every manifesta- tion of moral achievement in those whom he is bringing to the true status of sonship to himself. To Empuasize Its Untversat CHARACTER Not only must a world redemption be true to the freedom and the nature of the individual, but it must likewise be universal and com- EE ———— WORLD REDEMPTION 185 plete. That surely would be a sorry outcome of cosmic effort which resulted only in the redemption of some broken fragments of its creation. The demands of an all-wise and perfect Creator can be nothing less than the redemption of the whole social order, and that through the cooperating will of his creatures. ‘To create the power of freedom bespeaks a genuine confidence in what shall eventually be accomplished through that freedom. If the results are to be something very much less than universal, the endowment of human life is but the meddlesome opening of a Pandora’s box whose results are irrevocable. Nothing Jess than the recovery of the whole social order, a world which out of tragedy and vicissi- tude has learned to love the will of God— such a world alone could be adequate justi- fication for pain and evil that have been world- wide and age-long. Furthermore, so large a result demands more than the redemption of any human institution with its short-sighted requirements, its half-insights and accomplishments, even though it be so great an institution as the Christian Church. It would be adequate only as it includes within its numbers from all ages and races all men of good will who follow after the Christ spirit. 186 THE REASON IN FAITH As Inctupinc FULuLNEss oF LIFE 1N THIS PRESENT WoRLD World redemption can furthermore be con- sidered adequate only as it includes the dis- covery of fullness of life in the present world. All life—the life of individuals and through them of society at large—must be set to a new key. So long as justice in the social order remains unachieved, so long as we have not learned even the alphabet of true economic adjustment, so long as government itself is accomplished so blunderingly, we cannot pro- vide the basis of fullness of life for individual achievement. Our faulty educational methods waste the years and too often dissipate the moral fineness of the young. As a civilization we have not yet learned to appreciate and provide for the moral and spiritual training of the rising generation. ‘There is still too much of reward for the selfish and the evil- minded. Until man has learned to set up the kingdom of God on earth, how shall he learn to set it up in heaven? That is a childish conception which would turn from the pres- ence of a great moral task to dream that the mere transference of the field of activity would solve all perplexing problems. ‘There is one task more important for the Christian min- WORLD REDEMPTION 187 ister than saving people for the world to come, and it is to save them for the world that now is. When this is done, we may safely leave the conditions and delights of that world to come in the hands of the Father of Spirits. If we have not learned to love and serve him here in the brethren he has given us, how shall we expect to love him or serve him better under other conditions? Redemption to be complete involves a new world-order in which every son of man shall have at least oppor- tunity for knowing choice and a chance to realize his fullest powers. In the face of so great a duty, to seek the transference of the problem to an after-life is to despise the spir- itual significance and reality of the life that now is. Anp Nature Aas WELL A world redemption to be complete must go even further than this and include nature herself. Only thus can be resolved the dark antinomies of pain and evil. If it be true that the natural world has been groaning and travailing in pain waiting for the appear- ance of the sons of God, a redeemed order must show a result worth all the suffering and a disciplinary purpose worth all the cost. 188 THE REASON IN FAITH And this discipline when attained by “the sons of God” must be adequate for Riguant the age-long agony of nature. Anp Not an Enp in ITSELF World redemption to be adequate not only for the present world but also for the expand- ing life of a world to come must not end in itself. The one characteristic of life is growth, the expanding of latent powers. If the other life is to be life, and not death, it demands the growth of living experience in all who enter it. He, then, who here and now catches the keynote of the universe and learns in humble ways to think and love and work with God is but putting his hands to those appren- tice tasks which are the mere beginnings of vaster accomplishments. THE Source oF CATACLYSMIC SPECULATION One should not be surprised that views so radical, so contrasting, and so fundamental should find expression in the message of the New Testament. When one discovers the predominance of the cataclysmic note in the Old Testament, one is struck with the fact that the developmental teaching of Jesus was new to his age and in contrast with prevail- WORLD REDEMPTION 189 ing ideas. The people were familiar with the hagiographical writings which were loaded with the expressions and similes of cataclysm. If Jesus was to speak to his own age, it was necessary for him to employ the language and the figures of speech which were familiar to the people. We must further take note that his message has come to us not directly but through the interpreting minds of men steeped in the eschatological view from their youth, who had no thought of the long centuries to pass before the consummation of the king- dom. Not only was it impossible for them to conceive, but to the infant church such knowledge would have brought discouragement profound and disconcerting. The vision was. wisely withheld from them. Even Jesus dis- claimed ability to look into that future to understand “‘the times and the seasons” which were known only to the Father. We find, then, a certain cataclysmic element in the synoptic Gospels, and with the growth of the church and the passage of time a leaving of the eschatological elements of the synoptics for the developmental emphasis of John. It is a strange fact that if we would find the basis of the Jewish and Christian con- ceptions of hell, heaven, the Judgment, angels and demons, we must go not to the canonical 190 THE REASON IN FAITH portion of the Bible, but to those portions which have been rejected by the consensus of Jewish and Christian opinion. Some oné may cite the books of Daniel and Revelation as exceptions. These exceptions prove the rule. The book of Daniel was received very late, and a large portion of the Christian Church refused. to accept the Revelation until after the fourth century. So it would be almost impossible, aside from these, to construct from the canonical Scriptures the detailed theory which obtains through a large portion of Christendom. The Jewish conception of the Messianic kingdom and the last things which was prevalent in Jesus’ time sprang from that large number of apocryphal writings which grew up like mushrooms in the night of Jewish national history, extending from the time of the last of the Jewish prophets to the dawn of the Christian era. Chief among these apocryphal books was the Ethiopic Book of Enoch. Here you must go if you would find the common conception which filled the minds of the people of Jesus’ time. Here, indeed, you will find many of the phrases which Jesus used to express the Messianic consciousness. When he speaks of ‘“‘Gehenna,” ‘‘Hades,”’ “Satan,” etc., it is in the terms there expressed because those were the common terms of his WORLD REDEMPTION 191 time and he had to deal with conceptions already present to the minds of his hearers. It is a matter of the utmost moment to us that Jesus recovered these prevalent concep- tions from the region of extravagance, and gave them a more simple and practical content. What was Jesus’ thought regarding the last things? Tue Catacrysmic TEACHINGS OF JESUS There are certain passages which indicate that he was thinking of a cataclysmic king- dom, the kingdom of God coming by the sudden and immediate return of the Son of man to judge the world. There are certain others which indicate that he thought of the kingdom as one which should slowly grow through the years. Still other sayings bring the thought of the kingdom of heaven as a kingdom of the spirit, even now present and conquering in the hearts of men. 1. Among the first class of passages, those indicating an immediate return in judgment, are these: “The Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. There be some standing here which shall not 192 THE REASON IN FAITH taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.”! “And as he sat upon the Mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world? As the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven; and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. ) “And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”? “As the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. As in the days that were before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in mar- riage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.’ 1 Matt. 16. 27, 28. See also Mark 9. 1; Luke 9. 27. 2 Matt. 24. 3, 27, 30, 31. 3 Matt. 24. 37-39. WORLD REDEMPTION 193 “Watch, therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. If the good- man of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. Therefore, be ye also ready; for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.’ “At midnight there was a cry made, Behold the bridegroom cometh. Go ye out to meet him. While they went to buy, the bridegroom came. And they that were ready went in with him to the marriage; and the door was shut. Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh. After a long time the Lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory.’”” “Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven.’’® “Then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect to the uttermost part of heaven. Of that day and that hour know- 4Matt. 24. 42, 43, 44. 5 Matt. 25. 6. 6 Matt. 26. 64. 194 THE REASON IN FAITH eth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Watch ye, therefore: for ye know not when the Master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock crowing, or in the morning: lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.’’” “Ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.’’® | “Then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and glory. And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads. For your redemp- tion draweth nigh.” | “And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree and all the trees. When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand. So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be ful- filled. Watch ye, therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.” 7 Mark 18. 27-36. See Matt. 24. 36. 8 Mark 14. 62. WORLD REDEMPTION 195 With these should be taken the parable of the ten virgins, in which the Kingdom 1s repre- sented as coming suddenly, also the parables of the talents, the pounds, the vineyard, the wicked husbandman, the householder, and the thief. 2. In the second place, Jesus was fond of ' representing the Kingdom as a matter of growth: first the blade, then the stalk, then the full corn in the ear. The Kingdom was to be like a householder who rose night and day, and while he slept the corn grew in the field. Or the Kingdom was to be like the mustard seed, small in its beginnings, but growing to great proportions. It was to be like the leaven, changing the whole mass by gradual process. “Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.’ 3. Again, when he was pressed for a sign of the Kingdom, he declared that the kingdom of God cometh not with observation. “Neither shall ye say, Lo here, or lo there, for the king- dom of God is in the midst of you.” He declared to John’s messengers that the king- dom of heaven which John had preached as near at hand was already present in the healing ® John 12. 31-32. 196 THE REASON IN FAITH of the sick and in the preaching of the gospel to the poor. The kingdom of heaven is like the seed of the sower, received by those hearts that were open to it. The apocalyptic sayings fall for the most part into the closing portion of his ministry, after his practical rejection by his people. Was he disappointed in their response to his gospel? Had he hoped at least for a new day for Israel, and did their rejection of his words show him that the hope of a peaceful coming of the Kingdom was small? Did he see that only destruction and terror could affect a people so willfully obdurate? Did the dis- ciples gather from these prophecies respect- ing the immediate destruction of Jerusalem in that generation a wider import than they were intended to convey? Did ‘the disciples report the exact words, or were they influ- enced in their conception of what he meant by their own Jewish expectations? Were they in writing out the record unconsciously influ- enced in their interpretations by the death of Jesus, the precarious condition of the infant church, and the swift panorama of events which were leading to the destruction of Jerusalem? ‘These and a thousand other ques- tions, over which scholars have been long divided, arise to the mind. WORLD REDEMPTION 197 Again and again men have computed from the symbolic figures of the Apocalypse the time of his coming, knowledge which was denied to Jesus in the flesh, and even to the angels in heaven. The men of the first gen- eration looked for the second coming before their death. It was the early dream of Paul, _which faded into a larger vision as the years rolled by. Its expectation unsettled the whole life of Europe at the end of the tenth century. Some very good people of to-day make it the backbone of doctrine. The question will arise: Can that which was so unimportant to the mind of Christ be of such supreme importance to his disciples? The only question for you and me is: Are we at present in the Kingdom? If so, when he comes is a matter of indifference. Tur NoNcATACLYSMIC CHARACTER OF THE FourtH GOSPEL Nearly if not quite all the citations given for the cataclysmic thought of the Kingdom are to be found in the synoptic Gospels. If, now, we turn to the Gospel of John, we shall find what seems to be a changed tenor of interpretation upon the words of Jesus. This was the last Gospel to be written. Its writer was beginning to get the perspective of history. Throughout the Gospel there was a different 198 THE REASON IN FAITH emphasis from that of the synoptics. The judgment of religious minds on this Gospel has been better than that of the adverse critics. We see in it the influence that Jesus prophesied. The Spirit has taken of the things of Christ and has shown them to the writer of this Gospel. The Gospel of John records a new appreciation of Jesus. Stress is laid no longer on a cataclysmic return of Jesus, but on his living presence in the hearts of his disciples. He is the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. In him is life, and the life is the light of men. The Son is sent into the world not for purposes of con- demnation, but that the world through him might be saved.” | Judgment is internal rather than external. “If any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him at the last day.” The discourse on the destruction of Jeru- salem and the end of the world, given by Matthew, Mark and Luke, is entirely absent. 10 John 3. 17-18. 1 John 12. 47-48. WORLD REDEMPTION 199 The “coming of the kingdom” is a new birth of the Spirit. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” “Tf I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself.”’” Finally, the closing verses of the Gospel give frank denial to the report that John must be expected to live until the second coming of Christ. To this general tenor there is but a single exception.” IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE ~RECONCILABLE The persistence of the cataclysmic and developmental views side by side through history should lead us to humility toward the discarding of either. What is so persistent is sure to contain elements of truth. The great conflict has arisen out of a natural temperamental proclivity toward one or the other which influences nearly every one. Are the two ideas inconsistent and irrecon- cilable? Must we reject either the synoptics or John? Must we adopt the cataclysmic theory and reject the wisdom of modern sci- ence or adopt the developmental view to the discarding of the other? No, we must adopt 12 John 14. 3. 18 John 5. 28-29. 200 THE REASON IN FAITH both by finding the common ground of truth which they contain. What will help us in the face of the seeming paradox? Let us turn to life and experience. My student days brought me into almost daily association with the mural paintings of Puvis de Chavannes in the Boston Public Library. Years later, on stepping into the Pantheon at Paris, without in any way know- ing what to expect, I had no more than entered the door before I exclaimed “Puvis de Chavannes!” There was no need of signa- ture, for those pictures were themselves vocal of the artist and beyond mistake. The sub- jects of the two series are very different, but the manner of treatment, the use of color, the personal attitude and philosophy of life of the painter have indubitably entered into the expression of the painter. As expressive of the painter’s very life and soul he may be spoken of as immanent in his picture. This is specially true of creative effort of every kind. But while the artist is immanent in his picture, he also transcends it. So must we think of God as both immanent and transcendent. The order of nature and of life are expressions of his immanence. But we could not by summing up all his works get him, his willing free personality. In that WORLD REDEMPTION 201 he possesses self-consciousness and self-direc- tion, he is never lost in his works; he tran- scends them. This unique power of immanence and transcendence occurs in but one situation —in creative will, in what, for want of a better term, we describe as personality. The newer theories of physics maintain that ‘in the ultimate what we describe as matter is simply the radio-active forces which com- prise it. These forces we can only measure; what they are we cannot say. Matter is, then, an activity so far as we can know it. What science cannot say is whence comes this force. Sometimes it assumes the question closed there. Is there any sound reason for not assuming that this activity is the activity of a supreme directing Intelligence? It might well be that what we call nature is but the active manifestation of himself. What we call natural law would then be but the expres- sion of his will. There would be literal truth in Paul’s expression, “In him we live and move and have our being.” But this kind of immanence is not the kind that binds every- thing in one bundle. He that is immanent in the world of nature also transcends it. Nature is not the body from which he cannot escape. It is one of the modes through which he ex- presses himself; it need not be the only mode. 202 THE REASON IN FAITH To make that assumption would be to assume the painter confined to a single picture. God’s willing purpose transcends all his works. While he works uniformly, and that uniformity is called natural law, contingency is not precluded. Obviously, the race of men ought to venerate his uniformity of action as much as any miracle because upon uniformity depends the life and well-being of all. Whatever, then, is done by natural law is as divine as what is willed in any other way; and we are rid at a stroke of a God of caprice and unreason. There are many reasons to believe that the evolution of life as well as of civilization has been both by uniformity and by the cata- clysms in nature which might be called jumps or unaccountable appearances of the unique. At heart there can be no conflict, for all true laws of the universe are God’s laws. Any reverent effort after any kind of truth is an effort after God’s truth and in the end the truths of nature and the soul must be found in harmony because they proceed from the same source. Here, then, is that synthesized dualism of which we spoke in the beginning of this chap- ter. The order of nature and the order of spirit find their synthesis in the Personality which maintains both as the manifestation of his own creative will. CHAPTER IX POSSIBLE ERROR, PAIN, AND EVIL THE SCHOOLMASTERS OF LIFE Tue man of the street seldom makes the proper distinctions between error, pain, and evil or thinks those distinctions through to their philosophical bases. They are the school- master triad of life, but this not in their actuality so much as in their possibility. Error is an affair of mind or the intellect, and the care necessary to avoid it is the source of the mental discipline through which man masters that portion of his world amenable to thought. Pain is least easily understood, but it appears to be the schoolmaster to physical well-being and the care of the body. Evil touches the soul and is the dark shadow which haunts spiritual and moral freedom. It should be understood at once that neither pain, error, nor evil is in itself ever desirable or necessary. The important thing is that man should learn the power of banishing them from the earth, and in the learning come into the fullest and highest possession of his own powers. The greatest confusion arises from the failure to 203 204 THE REASON IN FAITH distinguish between their possibility and their actuality. Too often we think of them as existing abstractly as something apart from concrete instances, and thus apotheosized, it seems necessary to retain them in a universal relation. So much emphasis is put by some upon the existence of a devil, apart from devilish activities, that if he and all his works were eventually to be cast out, it would ruin their main theological conceptions. Such an attitude of divided power in the moral realm amounts in some cases to little less than demon worship. The triad represents the profoundest problems that are raised for man’s under- standing. Error is the bugbear of every theory of thought or knowledge and ean be even partially met only as it is carried up into metaphysics. It is distinctly the rock on which all materialisms break. Pain and evil are the perplexity of theistic types of think- ing. There is no hope that in this brief chapter we shall solve problems which have been the despair of the world’s sages, but there are some considerations which, taken into account, make the problems less intolerable. These sugges- tions are not new, and they lie along the beaten track, namely, the disciplinary character of error, pain, and evil. The problem of error is insoluble from any SCHOOLMASTERS OF LIFE 205 theory of knowledge that is fundamentally materialistic. Whether knowledge be taken as the product of the writing upon the mental organism of external impressions over which the will has no control or the result of finer psy- chological reactions implied by the functioning organism, the result is the same. No dis- tinction is possible between truth and error. All mental products must be equally true. Mechanism has been able to settle this prob- lem in only one consistent way, and that has been the way of philosophical skepticism, the denial of the possibility of knowledge. If we are going to reach such a conclusion, there certainly are less painful and less complicated ways of reaching it. There are minds that profess to find intellectual peace in the denial of knowledge, but that attitude calls for a peculiar intellectual disposition. Most pen- etrative minds can tolerate anything but an intellectual deadlock. If we discard mechanical theories of knowl- edge, while the result may not be altogether satisfactory, it is at least less difficult and less conflicting with the practical issues of life. In the possibility of error seems to be the whetting of intellectual curiosity from which may have come the prime intellectual develop- ment of man. It is impossible to say who 206 THE REASON IN FAITH would give himself to painful effort to pur- sue knowledge if the realists were correct and everything is immediately seen, as it is. The likelihood of mistake, the conflict of opinion, lies at the very basis of scientific effort. It is to remove the individual chances of error and to conform observations to uniform and reasonable laws that the scientist works. Scien- tific knowledge is distinguished from common knowledge in just this way, that insistence is made on facts not just as they appear to the individual, but as they appear to many or all who have been trained to observe the facts. The possibility of being mistaken in spite of the most exceeding pains is what has added exactness to man’s mental operations and has thereby prepared him for a moral and spiritual exactness which were otherwise impossible. Let no one say that error is necessary to knowledge. The possibility of error only is needed, and in that careful distinction lies the hope of man that some day he shall know even as also he is known. Some exalt the intuitional faculties as if it were a step back- ward in evolution when man struck out to rationalize his world instead of depending upon instinctive knowledge of it. But if there was such a time in racial history it should be looked i a SCHOOLMASTERS OF LIFE = 207 upon as the magna charta of man’s mental kingdom. Better far many blind mistakes, if only in the long run he shall learn to use his brain, than a dull following of instincts. In rationalization lay the coming creative power of man which will eventually make him a new world. Mankind would seem to owe its mental equipment very largely to the possi- bility of error. PAIN AND THE ADVANCE oF CIVILIZATION As in the case of error and evil, perplexity arises from the failure to distinguish between pain and its possibility. As the possibility of error is the source of man’s mental activity, the possibility of pain is fundamental to his physical and social well-being. The existence of nerves which cause intense suffering under abnormal physical conditions is not an evil but a good. Thus it is that the body is able to hang out the distress signal for its own preservation. If physical violence were unattended by pain, we should most of us go through life maimed and deformed by acts done in ignorance and before our minds had arrived at the possibility of knowledge. Nerves are as necessary an equipment of a sound body as any other part of the organ- ism and are absolutely necessary to save us 208 THE REASON IN FAITH from self-destruction. The possibility of pain is thus seen to be necessary to physical existence. Has it any effect of a social nature? Its Socrat Usss Here we hit upon a use of pain which goes outside of individual well-being into the wider reaches of social welfare. The recognition of - the possibility of pain is one of the strongest impulses making for social welfare. If our neighbor, friend, or enemy is incapable of pain, there is no call for us to spend energy upon any welfare than our own. If he is capable of pain arising from our action, we have social responsibility. Any teaching that pain is an unreality is fundamentally anti-social. Out of the possibility of pain have grown the amelio- rative agencies of society and the successive stages of civilization may be marked exactly by growth in these agencies. It is moral sensitiveness to pain in others that has abol- ished slavery and ended peonage and led the path of every social reform. It is leading the way out of brutality and animality to man’s higher self-realization. Its increase is the sign of civilization. It will end some day and the Injustices and miseries of time, when pain shall have at last been put under leash and conquered. SCHOOLMASTERS OF LIFE — 209 Evit anp Morau SrELFHoop In none of these dark problems is there likely to be so much of unclearness and of confused thinking as in the problem of evil. The average person fails after many explana- tions to see any distinction between the possi- bility of evil and its existence. Show him that moral character is dependent on moral choice and that moral choice is impossible without contrasting alternatives and he will assent. In the very next breath he will be assuming that evil as an act is identical with evil as a possibility. However difficult it may be, never- _ theless there is a distinction, and a distinction which is the turning of the ways for theism. Distinguish evil as a moral act and one can reasonably save the moral character of God. Fail to make that distinction and one can keep moral character in God only by a resort to an eternal dualism which denies his power. If evil is to be defined as a moral act of the will, it can be distinguished from temptation, it exists only where there are evil-willing per- sonalities. Each individual can conquer it for himself, and there is hope for a world in which all men shall be of good will and the kingdom of God shall have come in power. The animal world knows no evil because it 210 THE REASON IN FAITH cannot reflect upon the moods of its own consciousness. There is no moral “‘oughtness”’ except as it learns to connect certain of its acts with punishment. Human reflection rises above this instinctive plane of action. Be- cause of the sense of “oughtness” man reflects on his choices, can restrain his impulses, and direct his energies into what appeal to him to be the higher channels. Out of this moral experience of freedom grows moral character. We cannot now see how, as things are con- stituted, moral character or moral freedom could issue from any other state. Surely, no man could be called actively good who was good simply because he could not be bad. The possibility of evil for each one of us gives the value to our right moral choices which come by struggle and self-mastery. Just as the possibility of error has helped to produce man’s mental development, and as the possi- bility of pain has taught the care of the body and social amelioration, so the possibility of evil has led the way to the development of moral character, the building of the human soul. Let no one say that we have thus declared evil a necessity for goodness. We need not “sin that grace may abound.” It is quite sufficient evidence of grace and of character SCHOOLMASTERS OF LIFE 211 that the sin is not entered into. One is quite as much saved from sins never committed as from those actually entered into. The best evidence of moral character is not reformation but steadfast and life-long refusal to enter into sin. THE SoLuTIoN or Turse PRoBLEMS 1s PERSONAL We can make no headway with the prob- lems of error, pain, and evil so long as we remain on the impersonal plane. We can never account in a general and wholesale way for the wandering of entire races of men through _ the dark mazes of superstition and error. We cannot justify the destruction which follows in the wake of wholesale disaster. We cannot even account for the suffering and death of one other human being. Hardest of all is it to gather from the field sown with evil deeds any harvest of hope. Why the world has so long been allowed to exist as the field of exploitation for evil is beyond the power of any man to explain. We are able to read but a single chapter from the book of life, and we catch but occasional glimpses of that Creative Mind behind all. There is one sort of solution, however, of which each is capable. It is possible for each 212 THE REASON IN FAITH of us to see that pain, error, and possibility of moral evil work in us a growing mastery of nature, of our physical powers, and the self-discipline of our souls. Out of the struggle with the chance of error we can build a mental life that can see straight and solve problems which reach into the field of the hitherto. unknown. It is not so much necessity that is the mother of invention as it is the mental power which grasps the idea of what is necessary. Out of our struggle with pain and disease can come for us individually both sweetness and light. We can bear patiently and not be embittered, and we can learn lovingly to care for the less fortunate and so build the struc- ture of the family, society, and civilization. Out of temptation we can gather to ourselves the moral power of continuously right decisions, and when all men have truly learned that lesson, we shall have a heavenly society not because from us has been taken away the possibility but because we have conquered the will to sin. The general problem is in a wiser and an all- understanding Mind. The particular problem is specifically our own. Just why error, pain, and evil should have been permitted, we do not know and cannot say. But it may be that SCHOOLMASTERS OF LIFE — 213 to God, the final mental, social and moral outcome was worth the venture, and to his eye there may be a goal far off of such supreme worth for every son of man as to far outweigh every distress. It is the part of religion to live as if this were true. CHAPTER X THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF IMMORTALITY | THE source and the warrant of the human _ dream of immortality has furnished unending controversy. Neither the appeal to history, to science, nor to individual experience has been at all satisfactory. It has assumed different forms with different civilizations and in none has received such definite form as in the Christian faith. Even here there is much teaching about it which seems unwarranted in any words coming from thé Founder of Christianity himself. Undoubtedly, Christian- ity in its formative period was profoundly influenced at this point by the eschatological theories current at the time. It has been denied and doubted and assailed again and again, but the theory of immortality holds such comfort for man that it has never been successfully assailed. For this fact there must be some adequate reason, and we believe it lies within the functioning of the human spirit itself. 214 CONSCIOUSNESS OF IMMORTALITY 215 ARISES FROM THE TIME-TRANSCENDING NaturRE or EXPERIENCE It is doubtful if there is any other animal than man who is ever troubled with the notion of immortality. The animal is conscious of his surroundings and his relation to them, but to man is granted the unique gift of con- sciousness of conscious states. In other words, he possesses the power of reflection upon his own moods. While the animal obeys im- pulses, man questions them, and out of this power of reflection rises man’s moral world, the sense of moral responsibility, and with it civilization and culture. He masters his world as the animal does not master it because he possesses the unique gift of mastering himself and his own thoughts. There is reason, therefore, to take issue with a great body of present-day anthropolog- ical teaching which attempts to ground the consciousness of immortality upon visions of the dream state and the division of person- ality arising out of the distinction between dreams and waking consciousness. The ground of the feeling of immortality lies, rather, be- hind these in that functioning of the human mind which enables it to reflect upon the nature of its dreaming as distinguished from its waking experience. There is little doubt 216 THE REASON IN FAITH that animals dream; there is no evidence to show that they reflect upon a dream state or distinguish between dream and waking experience. For a similar reason it seems far-fetched to attribute the rise of a belief in immortality to a belief in ghosts resulting from dreams of the dead. Here, again, we must go back to that fundamental functioning of the human mind which distinguishes the dream state from the waking state and identi- fies, perhaps, the dream state with continued existence in another world or spirit-plane of life. Neither is it quite reasonable to affirm that the theory of immortality (and with some all religion) arises out of fear of the dead. This fear is common in animals, without in any way giving rise to religious or moral reflections. We have here, as in the case of the horse which fears to approach a dead body, all the elements of psychological in- hibitions except that part which in man arises from his power of reflection. The difference in the experience of the horse and the man is worlds apart for this very distinct reason which the behavioristic psychologists are prone to ignore. But From THE TEMPORAL CONSCIOUSNESS The human mind has not been long at its work of interpreting experience until it be- CONSCIOUSNESS OF IMMORTALITY 217 comes conscious of an order of time. In fact, the second conscious experience is set up under a time relation to the first and to the perceiving self. Henceforth we have a grow- ing consciousness of a double order—an order of experiences bearing relation to each other and an order of self-consciousness which ob- serves and transcends the order of experience. Man is conscious of the past with relation to the present and very soon learns to project the present experience into the future, to reflect upon it and to act with it in mind. He thus becomes the master of time, and, being lim- ited by it, yet transcends it. It will at once be objected that the animals likewise are “time-binders,” to use the phrase of Count Korzybski, for we find them making pro- vision for the future. The dog buries the bone against the morrow, the bee provides against the coming winter; there are number- less instances. But it does not appear, there- fore, that there is any reflective consciousness of time. The action may be as instinctive or “functional,” to use a popular scientific expres- sion, as the provision of the tree for the dis- semination of its seed, or its preparation for approaching seasons. The absence of reflection is clearly shown in the case of animals by their utter lack of adjustment to a changed environ- 218 THE REASON IN FAITH ment. The trapdoor spider, according to Fabre, if her work of building the nest which is to protect her eggs be interrupted, will simply complete the operation from the point at which she was arrested. She has no power of reflection and cannot therefore go back and start again. She finishes off as if the previous work had not been destroyed, even though to do so means sure destruction for the eggs she is about to deposit. While, therefore, the animals may be declared “‘time- binders,” the distinction relative to time between themselves and man is that man possesses the capability of reflection upon the order of consciousness. He is a time being if you please, but also a time-transcending being as well. Being time-transcending, having had countless experiences of the survival of time, he naturally expects to continue the survival of time. He cannot think of himself as nonsurviving or nonexisting; to do so would be paradoxical. The chief item of personal experience is continuity. Hence all theories of nonsurvival have had hard sledding because they fight the most fundamental consciousness of experience. On the other hand, a con- sciousness of immortality is functional and for its definite development only awaits the fur- ther progress of reflection. For this reason CONSCIOUSNESS OF IMMORTALITY 219 the growing reflection of man and the higher development of his powers of self-conscious- ness are sure to deepen his consciousness of the need for immortality. The conviction of immortality does not grow insistent except in the presence of an eternal order of living. This point is fre- quently overlooked by disbelievers in immor- tality. It is true that it may be repulsive when not raised to the higher plane and seen sub specie aeternitatis. There is no demand for the continuance of a life taken up merely with eating, drinking, and being clothed withal. A future state of unending wassail, while it has found its way into the Christian hymnal, is not Christian teaching. There is no obvious reason for the continuity of a life which lives only in and for things that perish with the using. Such immortality would be useless and meaningless. Such an order of life becomes wearisome to the jaded pleasure-seeker even here and now; its extension to all eternity would be a horror. This is the fertile source of modern skepticism. It is only as life takes hold upon the pro- founder issues that the demand for immor- tality becomes clear. If life is bent upon the interests that transcend time, then there is all the force of life demanding immortality. 220 THE REASON IN FAITH There is possible to man a self-forgetfulness of service which for far-reaching insight cannot be completed in the short span of his earthly career. There is possible love that shines even more clearly through the shadows of death and lives on undimmed by time and change. There is loyalty that passes the expression of the feeble years. To say that man’s aspira- tions are raised to this consciousness only to be denied is not only to go contrary to what- ever else we see in nature and life, but is also to deny the persistence of the most real values. The very reflections that lift him above the brute world and endow his life with greatness and worth must be taken as the illusory phantasm of a dream. We have said this is contrary to the experience of nature. What- ever functional instincts are given to tree and animal in the way of provision for propagation and care for its offspring are in general stead- fastly met by nature. If the thistle wings its seeds, the broadcasting air is not wanting; if the walnut builds a thick, hard coat for its germ of life, the winter is not far away; if the spider is gifted with functional instincts, it is because those provisional instincts corre- spond to an existing reality. If, then, one result of man’s functional reflection is the conscious- ness of continuity, there is reason to presume CONSCIOUSNESS OF IMMORTALITY 221 that there is something in reality corresponding to it. If it be true that an eternal order of living demands immortality, it is further true that such an order of life alone can satisfy the human spirit. Of course there are examples enough of those who seem satisfied with meat and drink and lust, but the common mind of the race repudiates them and follows after those who live by the higher order. And these who momentarily seem so well content are stirred betimes with dark misgivings as of those who throw away their richest oppor- tunities, and waste life. If life be lived after ideals that enlarge as they are realized, death becomes but the introduction into an order unlimited by temporal and spatial conditions in which whatever is willed is done. Is in Accorp with THE Locic oF Lire AND GROWTH The consciousness of immortality is further in strict accord with the logic of life and growth. The struggle of the individual for knowledge, his apprenticeship in the work of adjustment of his life to social relations and moral de- mands, call for an extension of time. Most men have only begun to learn’ how to live 222 THE REASON IN FAITH when death calls them. There are unnum- bered evidences that the present life is only an apprenticeship in self-mastery and _ self- control, the anteroom to some vaster life. And man is the only being in nature whose earthly career takes on the aspect of frag- mentariness. If one replies that such may be only in his own thoughts, the question arises why he alone of all creation has those most troublesome thoughts. To leave him without immortality is to truncate his possible span of usefulness and to make him unhappiest and least useful of all with no rational excuse for existence. | The belief in immortality has been much hindered by the false emphasis which is fre- quent in much religious teaching. This doc- trine urges man to prepare for a future life as if that life were not already begun. Thus an unfortunate dualism dwells in it to defeat its own end. That future life, if it be a con- tinuity, depends upon the order of life that is now participated in. If one is now living after the eternal order, he need not waste energy in useless conjecture as to the nature of that life to come. He is already learning how to live in God’s world after a divine order and will be at home anywhere where God is King. His task is not to get to heaven, but CONSCIOUSNESS OF IMMORTALITY 223 to get heaven in his heart and life. His one concern here is to acclimate himself to God’s high order of living, then death itself shall be but the opening of a door into a less limited life, but into one with which he is already familiar because he has lived according to the spiritual order. ImMMorTAuitTy 1s InprIvipvuAL or NoTtHING Much vogue is being given by writers on psychology and philosophy to the notion that the demand for immortality is satisfied by a sort of deathless or at least extended influence that one leaves behind in the memories of others. It needs only that we remind our- selves in the face of such claims that such is immortality only in name. It could never satisfy a clean-cut, reflective mind. The present life centers about personal experience. Its consciousness is made by its power to relate itself to the common order of experiences. Its experiences are nothing if not individual. Life takes on unfolding meaning only as a person transcends time to gather the passing procession of events into a system of relations. All man’s knowledge is dependent upon this. Upon it hang rationality, mental growth, and everything that makes life meaningful. The 224 THE REASON IN FAITH personal continuity through time and change is the thread upon which all hangs. If. this is severed, there is no immortality. Even to sink into Nirvana would not be immortality unless in that Nirvana one were to keep the distinction of selfhood. Transmigration would not be immortality without a clear remem- brance of its previous state. Panpsychism — would for similar reasons be equally meaning- less. Immortality to be such has the same center as living experience, a continued and relating personality. | Ir 1s OutsipE THE FIELD OF SCIENTIFIC DEMONSTRATION That immortality is outside the field of scientific demonstration may at first glance appear a perilous statement in view of the efforts of present-day scientists to thus estab- lish it. It is possible to enter this denial, however, without denying any material facts which may be unearthed by psychical research. It is a far cry from the proof of thought trans- ference, mental influences, and all to the scientific demonstration that they arise from ghostly sources. Barring the obvious and continuously practiced fraud—and in the line of his desire the scientist is no less susceptible CONSCIOUSNESS OF IMMORTALITY 225 to fraud than other human beings—the research has never been put upon a basis satisfactory to science. It is equally unsatisfactory to religion. Fundamentally, by whatever name called, psychism, spiritualism, or what-not, fundamentally it is materialism. It assumes the notion, popular with some scientists, that materiality is identical with reality, and that there is nothing real which is not also material. It is not necessary here to point out the inev- itable skepticism and uselessness for life of such an assumption. It has been demonstrated times without number in the history of thought. The claim is that the pint measure of mate- rialism is sufficient for the measurement of all values, and that whatever cannot be thus measured simply is not. Even a mother’s love seems more real to this kind of a pseudo- scientist if he can state it in terms of chemical reaction or (dipus complex, to such a swinish estate has much of our thinking fallen. The attempt to photograph spirits, or to construct a telephone through which they may speak, or to set forward a medium by whom they may communicate, is a presumption that, though they are of another order of life, their existence can be proved only in terms of this order. Spiritualism, if it did succeed, could only prove that death has brought no change 226 THE REASON IN FAITH for the better, but, rather, for the worse, in which self-expression is even more difficult than before death. The fact is that affairs of the soul are not materially demonstrable; they belong to an- other order. We cannot speak of the finer experiences of human relationship or of religion except in material figures of speech, which does fairly well to get ourselves understood by like- minded people until the literalist happens to compel our figures of speech to go on all fours. This the spiritualist attempts to do, with the result that he is false to every demand both of religion and of science. We know only of the life-to-be through the glimpses and foregleams of our own souls testifying to the souls around. Should some return from that happy place, they could bear us no understanding of its conditions because there would be no language of common under- standing. They could tell us only in terms we already know, and we should be as blind after their speech as before. It is as with the modern psychological conception of love as a chemical reaction. When we have found that physically chemical change has taken place, we know no more about love than we did before. Love is of another order and cannot be expressed in material terms or CONSCIOUSNESS OF IMMORTALITY 227 reduced to the material. When you think you have it, it is just exactly what you have not. It may be, after all, that the insight of Paul was best, who summed up his description of the after life in these words: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” CHAPTER XI CREATIVE PERSONALITY Our time has been marked by an increase of interest in the meaning and development of personality. The note of individualism fostered by the philosophy and institutions of medizvalism, which burst into full flower with the enlightenment giving us the natural- self philosophy of Rousseau, has changed in temper to a quest for personalism. It is not strange that individualism was the forerunner of this present temper, for to mistake indi- vidualism for personalism is the most natural of errors. In fact, personalism could not come into the foreground until individualism had been tried and found wanting. The philosophy of nature was characteristically a revolt from institutions which had proved inimical to the development of the individual. Everywhere the undertone of the age was a demand for self-fulfillment through political privilege. It was the age of reason and of individual rights, and it secured its charter from the inner consciousness of man himself, who had slowly 228 CREATIVE PERSONALITY 229 been learning his inherent dignity. The move- ment meant a great step forward in society. It accomplished not only the overthrow of remaining feudalism but also a new conception of government and essential democracy. Its weakness lay in its one-sidedness, for while it emphasized individual rights, it relatively neglected individual duties to society as a whole. Thus it was given a tone and a striv- ing wanting in the moral element. Great stress was laid on individual feeling and emo- tion, a straining at individuality which too often had separated the individual from sym- pathetic touch with his fellows, with his past, and with his own widest fulfillment. Abundant illustrations are to be found in realistic art, literature, music, and the present-day formulas in education. Much energy is spent upon the fleeting emotions of the individual, his likes and dislikes, which is resulting in a culture cut off from the past which is so thin as to be lacking in both dignity and power. How shall the lost balance be restored? This is the problem of the hour. The aspiration toward increased personality and the longing for creative power was never more deeply felt than now; yet the field of its study has been scarcely touched in philosophy, and in psy- chology has been dominated by a single 230 THE REASON IN FAITH dogmatic tyranny, that of a blind and com- plete materialism, impatient of logic, com- mitted to mechanism. ‘There is need that in this problem the two disciplines (if, indeed, they can be divided) of philosophy and psy- chology should work together. Personality presents a most interesting field of investiga- tion, for it is that of which we are most con- scious; it is at once that which is most alluring, most baffling, most deceiving, and most important. Our method here shall be to reduce to lowest terms and then to seek what is essential and what bears directly on life. PERSONALITY IN SIMPLEST TERMS SELF- CONSCIOUSNESS AND SELF-DIRECTION Reduced to the lowest possible terms, we should probably be forced to define person- ality as the center of self-consciousness and self-direction, the center because to recognize either self-consciousness or self-direction as acts to be identified with personality will lead us very far astray. The person is that which knows itself and its world and which is able to act, but no summation of conscious states nor of acts can give the person. Tt will be seen that to such simple prin- ciples have we reduced our definition that it CREATIVE PERSONALITY 231 cannot be applied exclusively to humanity. Have the animals personality? Doubtless just to the extent that they possess a self-conscious- ness and can consciously direct their efforts after an experienced desire. The tide of animal self-consciousness seems to rise with all functionings which are in any way social and is particularly manifest in mating, care of offspring, and gregarious activity. But granting the highest possible content to that type of personal consciousness which we find in the animals, it is obviously far removed from that which we discover in man because of this very great and often-neglected distinction—the presence in man of reflective consciousness. This distinguishing feature of human personality has in philosophy been called consciousness of consciousness. The animal self-consciousness reacts to whatever impulses move him. Man, though following impulses with the greatest rapidity, carries on a moral censorship upon his own reaction. He has power to discuss his own moods, to question the rightness of his own mental atti- tude, and to improve it. In other words, his responses to external impulses are consciously free, and this fact endows him with moral responsibility. It is the investiture of the soul and lifts all his activities out of the plane 232 THE REASON IN FAITH of the animal world. Whatever animality he may fall to, he does wee protest from the moral censor. This chief distinction Keres man and animals is, then, the principal value in man and is his prime characteristic. With the power of reflective thought has been born freedom, for freedom is possible only to a being who can relate the past and the future to its present consciousness, and who has also power to reflect upon it. This freedom is man’s unique gift in the world of nature, and it enables him to become, within his limited field, creative. His creativity is in the nature of the case limited to the intelligent com- bination of natural forces about him and such choices within himself as are creative of moral values and character. What personality might mean to a supreme intelligence which is not limited to time, space, and matter for its self-expression it is im- possible for the finite person to declare. Its apparent power of self-realization without the slow and painful method of human learning and discipline is too unspeakably great to realize, but inasmuch as it must be both intelligent and free in order to be creative, it must also be moral, and, being moral, must be the complete realization of those highest CREATIVE PERSONALITY 233 qualities which in man at the best are dim and shadowy. Our own experience with personality leads us too often to assume bodily existence as necessary to personality, but to a being not holden of the temporal and spatial order, personality would not demand bodily form for its expression; it would be simply the power of self-consciousness and of free creative self- direction. CREATION ex nthilo — The older philosophers used a phrase which is at present relatively neglected and indeed positively rejected by the scientism of our time. This phrase is a hard one because it seems to take us outside the realm of fact, yet it is a necessary one if there is to be any causal explanation. This term the medizevalists ascribed to the First Cause as the power to create ex nthilo. Far be it from us to attempt to revive a term musty with memories of a perished latinism and scholasticism, but may we be permitted to point to two facts: first, that there is no causal explanation without it or its equivalent; and, second, we do each of us experience it in every truly creative act. The object of the ancients in asserting the creation out of nothing doctrine was to end 234 THE REASON IN FAITH the infinite regress from cause to cause in order to arrive at explanation. The reason which is as cogent now as it was then, is that we get back to the fundamental reality only when we reach the uncaused cause. We do not deny the reality of a picture by Rembrandt, but there is a deeper reality than the picture, namely, Rembrandt himself. And the real Rembrandt is deeper than the Rembrandt impulses, the Rembrandt environment, the Rembrandt heredity or education. All these external things might be reproduced without producing a Rembrandt. What we have in the last analysis was a soul giving unique expression to itself in reaction to heredity, environment, and impulse. The work pos- sesses a unique character in that it contains elements of expression which had never before been given to the world and will never be again achieved by any other individual. Creativity means this uniqueness which constitutes Rem- brandt’s message to the world and which is inexplicable on any naturalistic basis. We can only say Rembrandt did it. When we have ascribed it to a person, we need and indeed can go no farther. We have arrived at a first or efficient cause. We have an illustration of how to personality alone is given the power of creating ex nihilo. CREATIVE PERSONALITY = 235 NEcEssity FoR First CAUSE IN ALL CAUSAL EXPLANATION The oversight of the necessity of causal explanation is the great weakness of modern philosophy and of the philosophy upon which the greater body of scientists uncritically de- pend. We arrange the series of biological evolution, for instance, in ascending order. We show how close the simple species is to the more complex, and then with the ingenuous- ness of the magician point to the simple organism as the explanation of the complex. In other. words, we point to the nonexistent as the source of the existent. It is the ancient assumption of the ex nthilo doctrine of the scholastics, but without either rhyme or reason. They grounded their ex nihilo in a personal will; we leave it hanging in the air. They were careful to make their assumption logical and intelligible; we do neither, and we are so blind as not to discover the difference between an arrangement of facts and an explanation of them. PERSONALITY A First Cause When we trace an act down to a person we come at last to a will which transcended all environmental and hereditary influences—or might have done so—to choose its reactions. We have happened on a first cause. The 236 THE REASON IN FAITH person, then, must be claimed as the place of creative causality. Many influences were present to lead me to daily exercise in the gymnasium to take off cellular tissue from where I didn’t like to have it and to put it on where I wanted it, but in the last analysis it was neither the weight machine, law of gray- itation, nor gymnasial environment, but my own creative will which was the ultimate cause of my expanding biceps. To deny creativity in the person brings a train of unthinkable consequences. Its imme- diate effect is to raise the problem of error to a Frankensteinian significance. In such a case perception, not being attended by freedom, cannot be attended by error and all that I think I see is real. This means in the end denial of the power of knowledge, a universal skepticism. But there is for society another consequence worse than this. If I am not free, I am not morally responsible. Upon the assumption of moral responsibility all social and political institutions are built, and in accordance with this faith in freedom alone can they survive. RELATION OF CREATIVITY TO PERSONALITY Personality being fundamentally the power of self-consciousness and self-direction, must be — CREATIVE PERSONALITY 237 developed and enlarged by its correspondences and activities. The multiplication of helpful correspondences must depend largely upon creative effort. Knowledge of the world, of life, of history, of one’s fellow men and of one’s Own powers can never come as a gift or as a free revelation. These can spring only as a man creatively grasps them. ‘Truth is not something to be poured into the mind. To be effective it must be grasped. As the personality bends itself upon the pursuit of truth, upon the fullest realization of its environmental relations, putting itself in tune with its world, its fellow men, its God, its own highest ideals, and only so, does it grow in - power. It may thus be said measurably to be self-creative, for what it is springs out of its own repeated choices. The richest per- sonality is, then, the one with the widest range ofsenriching knowledge of sympathetic human . contacts and highest moral and spiritual ideals. Tue RELEASE OF THE HicgHER PowERs There was a Teacher in the long ago who declared that the light of the body is the eye and that if the eye be single, the whole body should be full of light. He was pragmatically and psychologically correct in that statement. Really creative work, work of the highest 238 THE REASON IN FAITH order, at least, can be done only when the whole personality is undividedly working : to- ward self-expression. The finer and more delicate the task, the higher the powers demanded, the more complete must be the harmony within the self. There are in our day, as in every day, a multitude of distrac- tions, which bring “conflicts,” as the psychologist names them, and every “conflict’’ is an impedi- ment to creative effort. These conflicts, by whatever name, spring out of faulty corre- spondence with environment. By this I mean what might in the very widest sense be called environment. It applies to physical and social environment and also to the spiritual environ- ment of moral responses and ideals.. Witra Puysicat ENVIRONMENT For creative effort it is necessary for one to be in accord with his physical environment. The painter cannot have a quarrel with paint and canvas and be successful. The successful orator cannot despise the people whom he hopes to move. Even the stones of the field are in league against the agriculturist who hates the plow, and the result is seen inevitably in the harvest. There was never more futile struggle, one so depriving of power, as the struggle against environment. The man who CREATIVE PERSONALITY 239 would do things if his environment were not against him, advertises a fundamental weak- ness. His environmental conflict means apathy and fruitlessness. It is the old story of the king’s son who grasped the sword thrown away by the coward because it was broken and which, wielded by the prince, carved the way to a kingdom. Environment is always kindly to him who works with a single purpose. Even harsh environment creates an addition to his power. A great many of the conflicts which prevent creative work spring from faulty correspondence with society. The story of our jails is largely a story of men who have not learned to adjust themselves to the social order. Because the fundamental organization of society is the home, many of these conflicts hinge about the sex relations. This has led the Freudians and psychoanalysts falsely to assume that all internal conflicts spring from sex sources. This has led them to strange and nauseating perversions in the interpreting of dreams in their attempt to trace all neuroses to this single source. It is true that much trouble comes this way because of the high nervous complexity of the sex-functions, creating the continuous and fertile field for neurotic man- ifestation. As elsewhere, he who would do 240 THE REASON IN FAITH creative work cannot be of a double mind in his relations with his fellow men. If he is untrue to his friend, his disloyalty becomes a blur on his poem, his picture or his sermon. By so much does he see less clearly in his business. Keeping on correct terms with men, both the good and the bad, is one of the condi- tions of successful work. A proper hostility toward and evaluation of the evil-minded men is as much a part of his success as a correct appreciation for and attention toward the good man. But his contempts can never drop to the meanness of personalities without injury to himself. Many a man has ruined his power for creative work in business because of a dual or divided love or sex response, and does not realize the sources of his failure, or the inevitable failure which must eventually come. The deeper fact which lies behind all faulty correspondences and which the psychoanalysts as a class overlook is, however, the conflict in moral and spiritual ideals. This field em- braces all the others. If there be spiritual health, there will be correct adjustment of the person to physical and social environment. Without this higher element there cannot be complete recovery from neurotic conditions. The failure to understand this is fatal to Freudianism and constitutes it a moral menace CREATIVE PERSONALITY 241 to society. We must not only know the sources of our neuroses in order to cure them. When a moral attitude is involved that moral atti- tude must be corrected. This is the point where religion and spiritual ideals are imperative. The pathos and tragedy of life lie in the countless multitudes who are not at peace with their own spiritual ideals. It is impossible to estimate the human wreckage and failure which spring from this common source. There are too many men writing books to which they cannot give their souls, making speeches which do not express their profoundest con- victions, writing alleged poems which do not express their worthiest aspirations, attempting to build businesses which have but the half- consent of their moral ideals, engaged in the creation of institutions to which they give the hours of life but not their hearts. Out of this moral conflict in his divided mind comes poor achievement and most frequently downright failure. However popular and promising a success such may achieve, it can be only temporary and passing. It cannot be eternal. So much has been said of the impeding nature of these psychic conflicts in creative effort that it remains necessary but briefly to indicate the positive means for the release of the higher powers. Here the terms “sub- 242 THE REASON IN FAITH > conscious,” or “unconscious mind,” which are commonly used, should be avoided as being at least misnomers of fact. Nevertheless, an atmosphere conducive to highest creativity seems to be provided when the individual has solved all conflicts, physical, social, and spir- itual. In no way can singleness of purpose be so completely achieved as by an absolute surrender of one’s life, work, aspirations, and future to his highest spiritual ideals, or, as some would say, to God. All other things then fall in line and take their natural places of relative importance. With such solution of conflicts all fear and the inhibitions of fear are wiped out. There is no fear of man nor the social order. Even the fear of failure is no more because the future is committed in faith to a greater power. Under such a psy- chology, in which religion has become some- thing more than theory or theology and takes hold on life, the individual is prepared to do creative work. Just to the extent that he is able to do this comes the release of mental, physical, and spiritual powers. Not only does he contend with a whole heart and life with undivided interests, but in so far as his God is true to the universe, in just that degree he has the whole course of nature fighting with him. He is grounded in power and he cannot CREATIVE PERSONALITY 243 ultimately fail. This was the artistic and spiritual significance of the art of the Greeks, and of the Gothic of the Middle Ages. Both were the result of great spiritual revival. In order to get more closely at the psychical factors involved one might be permitted per- haps to touch upon the relation of such a solu- tion of conflicts in singleness of purpose to constructive imagination. Whatever future psychology may write concerning subconscious or unconscious mind, it is certain that the imagination is greatly stimulated by this cooperation of faculties. And it seems to be the fact that when the imagination is pro- foundly stimulated, the thoughts and activ- ities of moments when attention is mainly directed toward outward things, or at least the intervals of attention, are all directed at what has become the main drive of life. In other words, what we want with all our souls to be, that we shall eventually become. Under the stimulus of imagination even the moments of sleep and dreams seem to contribute toward the single end. Work is done with less fatigue or without fatigue, and solutions are presented that seem to the subject as revelations and inspirations. Of course such results cannot follow unless there has been a careful mastery of technique. We must laboriously prepare 244 THE REASON IN FAITH the paths for inspiration, or the inspiration will not come. To us this is the significance of what is commonly called’ the subconscious or unconscious mind. Will humanity ever arise to the realization of efficiency here set forth? Individuals ocea- sionally have in history and_ individuals occasionally do. But when they do they stand out like beacon-lights of leadership, power, invention, and discovery. There is no reason, however, why the mass of us should not arise to the rank of creative personalities. However much we may have failed in the past, however much we may have allowed previous failures to limit us—and there is a certain irrevocableness about these limitations—nevertheless as with Tennyson’s Ulysses: “Tho’ much is taken, much abides; That which we are, we are.... Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” INDEX Aspry’s “Search for the Grail,” 180f. AssoLuTsE idealism pantheistic, 698. AssoLuTisM, pantheistic, 69ff. AGNOSTICISM, one source, 37 ApocaLyptic teachings of Jesus, 196f. Arom in modern thought an activity, 74, 136f., 201f. ArrriBuTES of God, the moral ones significant, 100f. Aurnority, bears its own validation not in its origin but in its truth, 61ff.; must be justified in the individual con- science, 62ff.; of life supreme, 113f.; subject to judgment by the individual, 40f.; why sought, 34E. Brsxe, a sufficient guide, 50f.; as revelation, 43 BreuicaL canon, 51ff.; infallibility not necessary to religious life, 49; principles for test of inspiration, 55ff. Brucs, “Kingdom of God,” quoted, 93f. Canon of the New Testament, 52; of the Old Testament, 52 Canonicity as test of inspiration, 51ff. CaTaAcLysMic speculation, its source, 188f.; teachings of Jesus, 191f.; teaching wanting in John’s Gospel, 197f.; element in synoptic Gospels, 189f. CHANGE in relation to space, time and personality, 78ff. CHARACTER, its three laws, 162ff. CLEANTHES’ prayer, 134¢. CoMTIAN positivism, 19 ConsclousNEss OF CoNsciousNESS grounds, freedom and morality, 232f.; man’s unique possession, 2311. CoPERNICAN astronomy, 37, 129 Councit of Jamnia, 53; of Nice, 53 CREATION ex nihilo, 233 Creativity aided by harmony with environment, 238f.; and the imagination, 243f.; grows with exercise, 237f.; in- apy by harmony with God, 242f.; in personality alone, Crocr, “Theory and Practice of History,” 171f. Dante, 169f. Dezizy of Jesus implied in moral perfection, 101f. 245 246 INDEX DEMONSTRATION cannot touch profoundest truths, 29; im- possible in the field of freedom, 19, 24; in field of the self-conscious a matter of values, 22: in the realm of life individual and particular, 28ff.; in'science and in religion, 18f.; scientific, confined to phenomenal succession, 21 Devi, as an apotheosis of evil, 204f. Dunsany, 28 ELEarTicisM in modern thought, 71f. Enocu, Ethiopic and Slavonic books of, 160, 190f. Error, evil and pain defined, 203ff.: insoluble by material- ism, 204ff.; intellectual, 203f.; its possibility, not its neces- sity, important, 205f.; soluble only in personal living, 210f. EscHaTouogicat teachings of Jesus, 191ff. Evit, as wrong moral choice, 179f., 203ff., 209ff.; distin- guished from temptation, 210f.; not independently existent, 178; not necessary, 178f., 210ff.; soluble only in personal living, 211ff. Evouvution by uniformity and by cataclysm, 202; dependent on purpose, 75f. EXISTENCE, as temporal and spatial relation, 78f.; creative, TAf.; creative or static, 71ff.; meaning and nature of, 64 EXPLANATION by accident of matter and motion, 66f.; by the Absolute, 69ff.; completed only in first cause, 235£.; by causal intelligence, 77ff.; by description, 67f.; by func- tion, 66ff.; by. mechanism, 65ff.; by personality, 71ff.; of impersonalistic type commits to the infinite regress, 70f.; two kinds, personal and impersonal, 65ff. Fare and the trap-door spider, 218 FartH, as nature and function of man, 14; necessary to pro- foundest values, 30ff. Fauuacy of explanation by description, 67ff. FATHERHOOD oF Gop, interpreted by Jesus and the prophets, 84ff.; in the conception of Messiahship, 91ff.; in the par- able of the Prodigals, 90ff.; Jesus’ idea unique, 84.; Jewish doctrine of, 84ff.; realized through sonship, 87ff.; related to incarnation, 84ff.; taught by Jesus, 86ff. First cause can be traced only ‘to personality, 235f.; cause demanded in causal explanation, 235f.; cause in human experience, 234f.; cause ungrounded, 233f. FREEDOM and Science, 14: dependent on reflection, 232: its denial only theoretical, 19; necessary to moral character, 175f., 183f. FREUDIANISM, a moral menace, 240f. FuNcTIONISM, a tautology, 66; as a type of impersonal explanation, 66ff. INDEX 24'7 Forure PunisHMeNT based on personality, 160f.; in the teachings of Jesus, 159ff.; the presence of love to the unloving, 169f.; through vanishing of temporal and spatial order, 167f. Gop, both immanent and transcendent, 200f.; His attributes temporal, spatial and moral, 86ff.; living as source of revelation, 42f., 58f.; not demonstrable by science, 14; Sear 232f.; relation to temporal and spatial order, 232k. Ho.y Spirit and the mystics, 116f.; as a personalization of Deity, 117f.; as ground of authority, 124f.; a practical guide, 118f., 126f.; as taught by Jesus, 95f.; attends on moral and spiritual honesty, 121f.; doctrine of, a recog- nition of the common nature of goodness, 120f.; meaning and function, 115ff.; necessary to the genius of Chris- tianity, 120f. Honesty, mental, necessary to religion, 122f. IMMANENCE and transcendence not incompatible, 171f., 199f.; and transcendence in history, 171f. ImMoRTALITY alone satisfying to human soul, 221.; beyond scientific proof, 224f.; consciousness of in presence of highest type of life, 219f.; conviction of, arises from time- transcending character of experience, 215ff.; grounded in demand for persistence of human values, 220f.; grounded in the functioning of the human spirit, 214f.; misrepre- sented as future only, 222; must be personal, 223f.; not the result of dream and apparition, 215f.; in accord with present life and growth, 221ff. | INCARNATION alone can solve the problem of evil, 108f.; destructive nature of denial, 99f., 104.; exalts man, 95f.; necessary to absolute moral perfection, 101ff.; not de- grading to God, 99f.; proved by life, 102f.; reasonable, 82ff.; relation to consciousness of Divine Fatherhood, 84ff. INDIVIDUALISM as an historic movement, 228ff. INFALLIBILITY not necessary to trustworthiness, 49f.; not to be affirmed of anything human, 47ff.; subject to human judgment, 49f. INSPIRATION, a matter of degree, 51; and free-will, 41; and infallibility, 47f.; does not usurp place of knowledge, 45f.; has for its purpose, life, 60f.; not of past alone, 41f., 59; is spiritual vision, 45; its meaning, 40ff., 44ff.; its tests, 42, 50f.; judged by author’s claim, 54f.; by biblical prin- ciples, 55ff.; by canonicity, 51ff.; by the character of the prophet, 57f.; by personal conviction, 56f.; by results, 57 INTELLIGENCE in the cell or behind it, 76f.; in the world- ground, 80f., 136f. 248 INDEX Jesus and Jewish Law, 38f.; Jesus’ teaching of the Father- hood of God, 86ff.; Jesus’ teachings on future punish- ment, 159f.; Jesus’ temptation real, 177; Jesus’ test of inspiration, 57f.; Jesus’ thought of the Holy Spirit, 95f.; Jesus’ thought of Messiahship, 91ff. KNOWLEDGE as specialization, 17; must include the whole of life, 18 Korzysski’s “time-binding,” 217 Marrer and motion as causal, 67f.; as activity, 201 MATERIALISM cannot account for error, 204ff. MECHANISM, an impersonal type of explanation, 65f.; hostile to true science, 66; makes quality an illusion, 72ff.; power- less before problem of error, 204ff. MEsSsIAHSHIP, its meaning to Jesus, 91ff.; 190f.; Jewish con- ception, 92f., 190. Moratity dependent on reflection and freedom, 232f. Naturg, the ally of righteousness, 81; based in cataclysmic thought, 1736. NatuRAL law, sanctity of, 136f., 152f.; selection inadequate, 75 Nevrosss cured by spiritual ideals, 240f. ; Otp TrestTaMENT prayers, 133f. Patn, a disciplinary factor in life, 203ff.; and the advance of civilization, 207f.; as a problem of life, 28; justified only in practical results, 210ff.; possibility of pain fundamental to health, 207f.; related to social advance, 208f. PAaNTHEISM of absolute idealism, 69f. ParaBLE of Dives, 156, 161, 165; of the Dragnet, 160f.;: of the Figtree, 163, 194; of the house on the sand, 89; of husbandmen, 152; of the Prodigals, 90, 154; of the rich fool, 155; of Tares, 160; of Talents, 164; of Virgins, 151, 162; of wedding supper, 151, 193 PERSONALITY, as related to change, 78ff.; creative, necessary to morality, 236f.; in animals, 231; in man distinguished from that of animals, 231; in the Supreme Being, 232f.; in simple terms, self-consciousness and self-direction, 230ff.; split, and sin, 168f.; subject to growth, 236f.; the ony first cause, 235f.; the synthesis of matter and spirit, Si. PHENOMENAL Nature of scientific data, 20f., 136f. Puito Jupaus and trinitarianism, 115 Positivism, 19 Positivistrc denial of reality to the immaterial, 20 PRAGMATISM, 33 INDEX 249 PRAYER and natural law, 129ff., 137ff.; and the world order, 128ff., 139ff.; apathy toward, 128f.; a source of power, 144f.; cannot be selfish, 147f.; importunity in, 131f.; its cooperative nature, 141f.; its three-fold nature, 139; its value, 132; of Cleanthes, 134f.; not a changing of the Supreme order, 131f., 138f.; puts the individual in coopera- tion with God, 141f.; teaches the Supreme will, 140f.; to secure adjustment to nature, 139f.; to secure accord with the Divine mind, 132; to win an end sought, 142f.; of the Old Testament, 133f.; typical of history, 132ff. PrRoor in science and in religion, 18, 83 Proor, ScrIENTIFIC, inapplicable to the conscious, 24; to immortality, 224f. PsycuicaL “conflict” from maladjustment, 238f.; research materialistic in temper, 224 Psycuouoey of the materialistic type, 23 ProLeMaic astronomy, 37 Quauity made illusory by mechanists, 72f. Reaurism and knowledge, 206f. Reauiry, in mechanistic theory, 65f. REDEMPTION, cataclysmic view, 173ff.; averse to freedom, 174f.; dualistic, 178ff.; reverses the Divine character, 179f.; developmental view, 181ff.; emphasizes universal char- acter of, 184f.; sets forth the ethical side of redemption, 182; shows cooperative nature of, 183f.; must include nature, 187f.; must include the present world, 186f.; not an end in itself, 188; redemption only in the moral will, 175f. Rewattvity, as used by the Sophists, 33f.; its strength in positing a universe of relations, 34f. Reuierovs statistics of doubtful value, 27f. REMBRANDT, a creator, 234f. REPENTANCE includes forsaking of sin, 112f. REVELATION, its meaning, 42f.; limited by human under- standing, 43f.; Supreme, moral, 102f. Rousseau as apostle of individualism, 228 Sctence and freedom, 14; in strict sense inapplicable to religion, 13-14, 22; and religion in agreement, 138f., 152ff.; of religion, 13 ScientiFic hypothesis, 21 Screnrism as a form of worship, 18; overemphasis of, 13 Sin, a dwarfing of personality, 154f.; an offense against others, 155f.; of jealousy, 158f.; unpardonable, 157f.; a failure to cooperate with God, 150f.; and divided_per- sonality, 168f.; Jesus’ doctrine of, 150ff.; that which offends God, man or better self, 149f. 250 INDEX Skeptics, who deny knowledge or defend truth, 32 Soctau statistics must be carefully evaluated, 25; uses of pain, 208f. Sonsuip to God, its meaning, 87. Sopuists, 33 SPECIALIZATION tends to short-sightedness, 18 SPACE and time, 78f.; and time not independent realities, 79; time and change, 78ff.; time, change and personality, 78ff. Stevenson, “The Christmas Sermon,” 168 Stoic prayer of Cleanthes, 134f. STaTiIstics to be received with caution, 25ff. TEMPTATION of Jesus real, 177f. Time and space, 78f.; experience leads to belief in immor- tality, 216f.; transcending demand of nature not disap- pointed, 220f.; transcendence peculiar to human con- sciousness, 218 Trut# always subject to test, 35; human and fragmentary, 33f.; justified by its fruits, 33: ‘of any kind divine, 15; of deepest order realized by faith, 29; of Gospel growing, 97f.; persistent, 14; progressively realized, 36; religion a develop- ment, 38; rests on internal foundations, 39f.; spiritual, eternal, 15 Vaturs, human necessary to normal life, 30f.; the data in moral and religious demonstration, 22 VisRATORY theory of matter and sense, 72ff. - Westey, CHARuEs, inspired hymnist, 40; John and the Psalter, 51 Worup-GRowunpD as intelligent, 80f. ZENO and the paradoxes, 78f. ry Tieik D x tS Lae ute tates jah ie aie + mile! 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