So 
 
RELIGION AND THE GROWING MIND 
 
RELIGION AND THE 
 GROWING MIND 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN DOUGLAS ADAM, D.D. 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 191 2, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London : 2 1 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
PREFACE 
 
 NO attempt is here made to even suggest 
 an outline of the full range of Chris- 
 tian belief. The aim is simply to 
 endeavor to interpret a way of approach to 
 Christian reality for the growing mind. If 
 some earnest, and perplexed, minds are helped 
 in finding a point of contact with the primary 
 facts which produce Christian experience the 
 end in view will have been achieved. 
 
 J. D. A. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. What Are We? ' 9 
 
 II. Why Are We Here? 18 
 
 III. Our Sense of Need 28 
 
 IV. God's 'Answer to Our Sense of 
 
 Need 36 
 
 V. How Do We Enter into the 
 
 Knowledge of Christ ? . . . . 48 
 
 VI. What Is the Bond That Binds 
 
 Us to Christ ? 56 
 
 VII. How Does Faith Express 
 
 Itself towards God ? 65 
 
 VIII. What Does Christ Do for Our 
 
 Lives? 73 
 
 IX. Obedience to the Will of 
 
 Christ 83 
 
 X. The Dangerous Whisper in 
 
 THE Soul 91 
 
 XL The Divine Whisper in the 
 
 Soul 99 
 
 7 
 
8 Contents 
 
 XII. What Is Our Attitude 
 
 Towards Life? io8 
 
 XIII. Service from Centre to Cir- 
 
 cumference I 
 
 XIV. Places of Emphasis in Service. 125 
 
 XV. The Growing Mind under 
 
 Cross Examination 135 
 
WHAT ARE WE? 
 
 ARE we bodies incidentally possessing 
 souls, or are we souls having bodies? 
 Which shall be supreme? Shall the 
 physical house imprison the man, or shall the 
 man possess the house ? Shall the mind make 
 soul or body its favorite? Shall the demands, 
 the instincts, of the higher or lower nature 
 have supreme consideration? Shall the soil 
 smother the seed, or shall the seed gather 
 strength from the soil and rise into blossom 
 above it? 
 
 The problem is to place the emphasis where 
 it belongs, and then to give soul and body their 
 legitimate opportunity. For they are bound up 
 together, they act and react upon each other. 
 The body is not the enemy of the soul, and the 
 soul is not the enemy of the body, so long as 
 the rights of each are recognised. But that is 
 the task, to give each its place. If we submit 
 our thoughts to the cravings and sensations of 
 the body, while we ignore the promptings of 
 
 9 
 
10 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 the soul, we go backwards, we become untrue 
 to our destiny as human beings. That means 
 we have, for the time, given up the real battle 
 of life, we have hung out the white flag of 
 surrender. 
 
 But if we steadily insist that the instincts 
 of the higher life shall dominate the problems 
 of the passing hour, if principle and not 
 impulse has the clear right of way, then the 
 soul is coming into its own. If we are content 
 to wait for pleasure till duty is finished, or 
 to find our pleasure in duty, if we are ready 
 to contend with inclination in order to en- 
 throne what is right, if we are prepared to 
 suffer pangs of inner pain in the attempt to 
 vindicate the supremacy of the soul, if we 
 refuse to enjoy a cheap, and cowardly, passing 
 peace at the expense of higher concerns, then 
 we are on the high road of our destiny. 
 
 And when we give the place of emphasis 
 to the supremacy of the higher life we are 
 acting in accord with the best thinking of our 
 time. For it is not only religion which is pro- 
 claiming this message, the tendency of modern 
 philosophy and even of science is towards the 
 spiritual interpretation of life. In the realm 
 of scientific thought we have entered upon a 
 new day in which a spiritual view of the 
 
What Are We? 11 
 
 world in general, and of man in particular, is 
 in the ascendency. 
 
 But when we resolve that the angel in us 
 must have the mastery over the animal part 
 of us, we do not therefore despise the animal. 
 There have been men who when they recog- 
 nised the sovereignty of the soul, gloried in 
 dishonouring the body, and they are not all 
 dead. There are still a few who think they 
 are all soul, and pay no heed to such things 
 as fresh air, rational diet, and exercise. And 
 they have their reward in depression, and irri- 
 tability; and others besides themselves are 
 made to suffer with them. 
 
 The broad tendency of our time, however, 
 is to give a new and exalted importance to the 
 care of the body, because of its intimate and 
 vital relation to the higher nature. It is a false 
 interpretation of the temper of our day to 
 conclude that the keen interest in the physical 
 life is wholly for its own sake. There is an 
 earnest spiritual purpose behind much of the 
 enthusiasm for physical tone. The modern 
 passion for the social and physical wellbeing 
 of the poor is not an attempt to ignore the soul 
 and glorify the body; on the contrary, there 
 is an ever deepening conviction that because 
 men and women are souls, their bodies must 
 
12 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 therefore have the care and reverence which 
 belong to them. 
 
 The humanitarian movement must become 
 more and more a spiritual movement. We are 
 gradually learning to make the care of the 
 body a matter of conscience. And not only so, 
 we are throwing down artificial barriers be- 
 tween one section of life and another, both in 
 individual and social existence. We are fast 
 coming to see that life must be unified, that 
 it can no longer be lived in separate compart- 
 ments which have no real connection with each 
 other. It is out of date to paganise the body 
 while we exalt the soul, and it ought to be out 
 of date to exalt the body while we paganise the 
 soul. And socially it is a worn out fiction to 
 confine spiritual concerns to certain times and 
 places, while whole realms of human concern 
 and endeavor are left outside the pale. The 
 home, the market place, the legislature, the 
 institutions of amusement, must be brought 
 under the sway of spiritual reality. 
 
 The modern spirit insists that the whole 
 of life shall be made a unity, that the arti- 
 ficial divisions shall be swept away by claim- 
 ing every sphere of human interest for the 
 reign of the spirit. And it is just here that 
 the first battle is fought in individual life, in 
 
What Are We? 13 
 
 the attempt to maintain the supremacy of the 
 spirit, and also the efficiency of the body as 
 the outward means of its expression. The 
 difference between a medicine and a poison 
 often consists in the proportion of the ingre- 
 dients, and the difference between the body as 
 a servant of the spirit and as a tyrant over it 
 is in the proportion of obedience given to each. 
 The body, requiring rest and sleep in order to 
 be at its best, may have so much rest and sleep 
 that it is pampered into weak softness. The 
 body requiring food may be so indulged that 
 the animal suffocates the angel. 
 
 The difficulty in giving the body its true 
 place is not so often a matter of lack of knowl- 
 edge, it is rather a question of the conquest 
 of inclination. We all have a fairly clear idea 
 as to when we should get up in the morning, 
 but after all it is sometimes inclination that 
 settles the matter. There are multitudes of 
 people Who know perfectly well that the reason 
 for the heaviness, the inertness, the inefficiency, 
 of their bodies as instruments of their higher 
 being is because they eat too much and too 
 rapidly, but still inclination is permitted to con- 
 trol the situation. There are some young peo- 
 ple who know as distinctly as if it were writ- 
 ten on the sky that their bodies would be more 
 
14 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 agile, and competent, and radiant servants of 
 their higher selves if they fought more heroic- 
 ally, if they got into resolute grips, with un- 
 worthy inclinations. They know that they do 
 not get the smooth working power out of their 
 physical life because they have not kept the 
 animal under the tight rein of subjection to 
 the spirit. 
 
 We all know that the body cannot be at its 
 best except in the attitude of strict obedience 
 to higher instincts. And we owe it to our souls 
 to keep our bodies fit, for the physical con- 
 dition exercises a distinct influence upon our 
 spiritual nature. For example it was said by 
 some saints of a former age, that they had 
 periods in which God left them in spiritual 
 darkness. As we look at it to-day we do not 
 believe that God did any such thing; the ex- 
 planation of the feelings of those good people 
 mav have been bad air, or feeble digestion, or 
 lack of exercise. And to say this is not trifling 
 with a serious subject, for the proper care 
 of the physical life is a matter of definite 
 spiritual significance because of all that is 
 involved in it. 
 
 The condition of the physical side of our 
 being not only affects its own efficiency, it not 
 only influences the spiritual, but it permeates 
 
What Are We? 15 
 
 our relation to everybody with whom we come 
 in contact. We are continually bringing into 
 our social relationships the results of our 
 physical fitness or unfitness. We carry the 
 victory over the animal which we gained at the 
 table to our hour of companionship with a 
 friend. The freshness, the zest, the buoyancy, 
 which we brought to our friend was the fruit 
 of self control. We helped to inspire and 
 cheer him through our sacrifice. And we 
 may depress and discourage him by means of 
 our dulness and depression which are the 
 result of our self indulgence. We owe it 
 as a debt to the world to be physically at 
 our best. For most of us, it ought to be a 
 disgrace to come before the world physically 
 below par. We have no right to charge the 
 social atmosphere in which we move with the 
 pessimism, and friction, and gloom, which are 
 the direct result of our physical mismanage- 
 ment. We have an obligation to bring to our 
 fellows the alertness, the laughter, the poise, 
 which in part spring from physical life tem- 
 pered and controlled by the highest within us. 
 But when everything has been said for the 
 influence of the physical upon the psychical 
 aspect of life, we must not forget that the 
 influence of the psychical upon the physical 
 
16 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 IS still greater. There are some people who 
 can never be physically normal; they are 
 invalids, yet by the heroism of the spirit 
 behind the body they are able to make tri- 
 umphant souls shine through pathetic limita- 
 tions to such a degree as to become at once 
 a rebuke and an inspiration to those who 
 are physically sound. This is why Christian 
 Science, with all its questionable hypotheses, 
 has won so many to its cause, it has insisted 
 that the human spirit is master of the situation. 
 We see plainly every day that mere sound 
 physical health by itself may be a very uninter- 
 esting and useless thing, unless it is vitalised 
 by an alert, strong, intelligent spirit. In fact, 
 physical health in the highest sense is scarcely 
 possible without the invigorating influence of 
 a soAil holding the reins of control. The soul 
 vivifies the body. It pours health into it. It 
 may actually deepen the breathing and give 
 tone to the nerves, and curb the waste of ner- 
 vous energy. Such a statement is not a mere 
 vagary. Physical science teaches us that when 
 matter is examined back to its minutest ele- 
 ment there is spirit, that matter is a form of 
 energetic spirit. And that being so it is easy 
 to see how powerful the influence of the soul 
 may be upon the body. We have hardly 
 
What Are We? 17 
 
 dreamed of the enormous extent to which a 
 forceful spirit may affect the bodily life. 
 
 And when we emphasise the supreme fact 
 that we are souls, when we refuse to live in the 
 mere sensations of the body, when the soul 
 insists upon dominating the physical life with 
 a firm, wise, and kind grasp, then we find our- 
 selves. Moods and cravings of the lower self 
 will be tamed, or wiped out, or harnessed to 
 higher purposes. The dominion of the spirit 
 will mean the unity, the efficiency, and the 
 satisfaction, of the whole man. 
 
II 
 
 WHY ARE WE HERE? 
 
 THERE are various answers which may 
 be given to this question, different and 
 yet not necessarily contradictory. It 
 may be said that we are here to do our work 
 faithfully, to serve our generation. Or the 
 answer may be given that we are here for the 
 purpose of developing character, to turn the 
 potential soul with which we are naturally 
 endow'ed into a growing personality. These 
 statements instead of contradicting each other 
 simply deal with two aspects of the same prob- 
 lem. The end of life is the making of a soul, 
 and the means by which that end is achieved, 
 among other elements, of which we shall speak 
 later, is by doing our duty, by serving our 
 fellowmen. 
 
 By the growth of a soul we here mean the 
 same kind of growth as that of a seed into a 
 flower. There are certain higher possibilities 
 dormant within us which must rise up from 
 
 18 
 
Why Are We Here? 19 
 
 being latent power to become actual person- 
 ality. But what is the stuff out of which per- 
 sonality is realised? It is not easy to answer 
 this question. Why? Because much of our 
 inner life is below consciousness, just as an 
 iceberg is more under water than above it. 
 The subconscious part of us has depths like the 
 depths of the sea which may never be 
 explored. 
 
 We get a hint of the deep currents and 
 strong tides within our elemental selves when 
 we suddenly receive a message which awakens 
 great joy or sorrow. We realise that there are 
 forces within us of which we had never 
 dreamed. In our ordinary life we merely 
 skim the surface of what is within us. It 
 requires some unusual individual or social 
 experience to reveal the awe-inspiring realities 
 which slumber in human nature. 
 
 When we turn from our subconscious to our 
 conscious life we find that there are three main 
 channels along which consciousness runs, viz. : 
 thought, feeling, and will. Conscience is the 
 sense which arises out of the interaction of our 
 thinking, feeling and willing, as these are true 
 or false to the light which they possess. But 
 where does this light come from? Light upon 
 how we should act in life comes partly from 
 
20 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 within ourselves as the expression of the image 
 of God in us, and partly from the social and 
 religious surroundings in which we exist. And 
 our thinking, our feeling or emotions, and our 
 willing must be true to the highest light which 
 we find within ourselves, mixed with the high- 
 est light we can find in the world. In this task 
 the will is the captain of the ship of life, 
 thought and feeling are officers, and conscience 
 is the compass in various stages of accuracy or 
 inaccuracy, according as the mind has been 
 true to the light within ourselves and in the 
 v/orld. We start our moral career with the 
 beginnings of a personality, part of which is 
 below consciousness, and part of which is in 
 the realm of consciousness, which moves along 
 the three lines we have indicated. 
 
 The will is the primary force within us 
 which secures the growth of personality. It 
 is when the will is in an attitude of alert recog- 
 nition of the highest possible light upon life 
 which the mind can obtain, that it en- 
 deavours to relate that light to the actual facts 
 of life. The supremacy of the will in mixing 
 light with life is the process, on the human 
 side, by which the highest in us reaches its true 
 stature. As a painter mixes paint with what 
 he sees in a landscape upon a canvas, so the 
 
Why Are We Here? 21 
 
 will mingles what it sees to be right with the 
 common affairs of existence, and in the proc- 
 ess makes personality a growing fact. 
 
 There may be perplexing problems con- 
 nected with the will if we go into the meta- 
 physics of the subject. But the supreme thing 
 to bear in mind here is that we are conscious 
 that the will has power to choose between what 
 is right and wrong. We are conscious that it 
 is in the exercise of that power of choice that 
 there lies the opportunity to rise to our destiny 
 or to fall from it. And all the world acts upon 
 that assumption. Therefore it is enough for the 
 present to know that we are consciously free 
 to choose good or evil. And it is absolutely 
 necessary that both of these should be open to 
 us as a choice, otherwise it would be impos- 
 sible for us to rise. Explain good and evil 
 as we please, (and we are not concerned to 
 seek explanations (the stubborn fact re- 
 mains that it is through the presence of these 
 alternatives confronting human life that there 
 arises praise or blame as attaching to actions. 
 
 The possibility of good or evil as a choice 
 must be before us, otherwise there could be 
 no such thing as moral distinction between 
 one act and another. And if the will were not 
 free there could be no real growth of per- 
 
22 Religion and the Growing JMind 
 
 sonality. Wipe out good and evil, and the 
 freedom of the will as actual facts, and there 
 would be no difference between the actions 
 of a life and the activity of a locomotive. 
 There would be no moral distinction between 
 the development of a life and the growth of a 
 flower. But we do not believe anything of 
 the kind, nor does the world at large. Why? 
 Because we trust the reliability of our con- 
 sciousness, for we are conscious that there is 
 a choice of two ways, and that we are free 
 to make the choice, and in the exercise of it, 
 according to our highest light, we achieve per- 
 sonality. And in the achieving of personality 
 we rise into inner freedom. By freedom we 
 mean that we cease to be enslaved to anything 
 except to light upon life. We become masters 
 of our situation. As the enlightened will 
 directs our course we rise into freedom from 
 slavery to our animal nature. The will com- 
 pels the mind to think according to choice, 
 and not as suggestions are merely flung into 
 the mind by outside influences. 
 
 We have a sense of freedom in the realm 
 of duty, not from duty but in it. We may 
 have tasks which press hard upon us and yet 
 as the will is resolute we are conscious that 
 nothing can harm the upward movement of 
 
Why Are We Here? 23 
 
 our essential life. Tasks may become more 
 and more numerous and more exacting, but as 
 the will maintains the supremacy we become 
 increasingly conscious of inner freedom. It 
 is in this attitude that we escape from the 
 tyranny of the outward show of things, and 
 enter into communion with all that, is real. 
 As the will retains its tenacity in the problems 
 of translating truth into action nothing can 
 crush our lives. All seeming defeat is only 
 in appearance. For there can be no real defeat 
 where personality is growing stronger and 
 truer. All true success must be born in the 
 inner life. The so-called success which con- 
 tracts and degrades personality is spurious. 
 
 In the making of personality we are here 
 to make connections with the seen and the 
 unseen worlds, through the action of the will. 
 And the fact that this is possible reveals our 
 capacity for eternal life. And it is this possi- 
 bility which is the main fact of our being. 
 There are a great many things true of us, such 
 as our physical frailty, our mental ignorance, 
 our moral imperfections and transgressions. 
 But while we recognise all these things, and 
 give them their place, they do not convey the 
 supreme truth concerning us. The most im- 
 portant fact which puts every other reality in 
 
24 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 its true relative position is that we have the 
 capacity for God. We are potentially the 
 children of God, we can grasp the overtures 
 which God makes to us. As human beings 
 we are naturally endowed with a capacity for 
 becoming partakers of eternal life. And when 
 we say this we are not here emphasising 
 eternal life as endless duration of existence 
 after this life is over, which is true enough. 
 We are here laying the emphasis upon a fact 
 which may be true at this moment. For we 
 have a capacity for God here and now. Eter- 
 nal life is a present quality of life as well as 
 a future extension of life. It may therefore 
 be a possession now as well as a hope here- 
 after. We insist that we possess the funda- 
 mental possibilities of that type of life within 
 us, and when these possibilities have been 
 joined to the provision Which God has made in 
 order to lift us higher, of which we shall speak 
 later, then eternal life becomes an actual 
 present experience. 
 
 Let us simply cling to the idea that our 
 capacity for God is the fundamental reality 
 of our life. There are many other realities, 
 to be sure, but they are not supreme. 
 
 Some have contended that sin is the greatest 
 
Why Are We Here? 25 
 
 fact within us. But that is clearly far re- 
 moved from the teaching of Jesus, as it is 
 untrue to the facts of the case. Sin derives its 
 terrible meaning from the greater reality of 
 the Divine origin of man, otherwise there 
 could be no such thing as sin. Sin can be sin 
 only as it is recognised that human nature is 
 made in the image of God. Jesus recognised 
 the tragedy of sin with a discernment with 
 which no other saw it, but He did not lay the 
 emphasis upon sin as the supreme reality in 
 human nature. When he spoke of sinning 
 men as lost, the emphasis was upon what was 
 lost. It was the essential value of what was 
 lost that gave the fact of its being lost its 
 solemn meaning. 
 
 Therefore we say that we have the possi- 
 bilities of personality which may grow into 
 triumphant relations with the seen and the 
 unseen worlds. And as the will is set towards 
 the choice of the highest the whole universe 
 conspires in the making of personality. It is 
 not the wind that determines the direction in 
 which a ship shall move, it is the set of the 
 sails, and it is so in life. 
 
 But there can be no real winning of per- 
 sonality if we live in detached separation from 
 
26 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 the higher reahties of the spiritual world which 
 urge themselves upon us from the unseen. The 
 growth of a flower is possible as it is left in 
 the soil and receives sunshine, and moisture, 
 and air from above. And such has its counter- 
 part in human experience; we simply hint at 
 this now for we shall deal with it at length 
 later. 
 
 The help which comes out from the eternal 
 world to enable us to realise our destiny, 
 finds its opportunity to work itself into our 
 being as we surrender ourselves to it. But 
 at the same time the help of God is not given 
 in order that we may ignore duty, but that the 
 will may be able to produce personality in the 
 midst of duty. 
 
 As personality grows the horizons of life 
 widen. We see a more interesting world, we 
 comprehend more of the meanings of life. 
 The veil Is lifted from the face of nature, we 
 enter into its deeper messages, we intuitively 
 understand more than reaches us through our 
 senses. We have new glimpses of the elemen- 
 tal realities of human nature, and the invisi- 
 ble world becomes invested with new interest 
 and values. Its remoteness disappears. What 
 seemed hostile is revealed as friendly. And 
 what was dark begins to reveal gleams of light. 
 
Why Are We Here? 27 
 
 So that with the coming of Divine aid our 
 whole being is able to take its place in the life 
 of the world, and by so doing personality 
 grows, and its instincts reach out to commune 
 with the soul of everything. 
 
Ill 
 
 OUR SENSE OF NEED 
 
 THE growing mind becomes conscious of 
 a more or less keen sense of need, 
 which expresses itself in a variety of 
 forms. The acute stage of this sense of inner 
 need is reached in most instances in the early 
 teens. The predominant element in it may be 
 an intellectual thirst, a desire to understand 
 oneself, and one's relation to the rest of the 
 universe. It is a craving to be able to bring 
 rationality into life. And this stage of intel- 
 lectual awakening is sometimes accompanied 
 by remarkable insight, and an attitude of men- 
 tal severity towards current opinions. 
 
 In seeking to help such it is necessary for 
 older people to be in an attitude of intelligent 
 sympathy, requiring the exercise of a mixture 
 of candour, courage, tact, and patience. But 
 the sense of need in the growing life may not 
 be so definitely intellectual, it may be a vague, 
 indefinite desire for something which cannot 
 
 28 
 
Our Sense of Need 29 
 
 be defined. It might be called a sense of ele- 
 mental longing, of unrest, of dissatisfaction. 
 Or it may be a clearly defined sense of moral 
 need arising out of a sense of failure in duty, 
 that one has not been true to the highest light, 
 that one did not half try, that the will had 
 not been really summoned to its work, that it 
 had surrendered to inclination rather than to 
 duty. And therefore one is conscious of hav- 
 ing been imtrue to his own nature, and con- 
 sequently untrue to the Divine character of 
 which one's own nature is the image. There 
 is a more or less vague sense of having com- 
 mitted an offence against the Highest power 
 in the universe. 
 
 As a result of this there arises in some a 
 fear of death, and a fear of punishment after 
 death, and consequently a longing for Divine 
 forgiveness. In the case of others fear is not 
 the stronger element, it is rather a longing for 
 help in order to realise an ideal before which 
 one has failed. Or the sense of need is mani- 
 fested by a desire for a Divine leader in the 
 conduct of the affairs of life, or for com- 
 panionship and encouragement amid loneli- 
 ness and misunderstanding. This variously 
 expressed and variously felt sense of need may 
 be called a sense of sin, so far as it is the out- 
 
30 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 come of a consciousness of not having been 
 true to the highest Hght. 
 
 But let us clearly understand that a sense of 
 sin is a fact apart from any particular view 
 concerning the origin of man, and it is quite 
 independent of any theory as to how sin came 
 into the world. The sense of sin is a fact 
 revealed in human consciousness. And we all 
 trust the reliability of our consciousness; if 
 we did not, life would be turned into chaos. 
 
 The fact of sin is recognised in the best lit- 
 erature of the world. It is recognised by the 
 pilgrim on his way to Mecca, by the Hindu on 
 his journey for cleansing in the waters of the 
 Ganges. Of course, the deepest sense of sin 
 is felt where Christ's revelation of the mean- 
 ing of sin has had its opportunity to enlighten 
 the human mind. For He showed that sin is 
 first of all an inner reality, even although there 
 may not be an outward expression of it in 
 word or act. It consists in the impure thought 
 controlling the mind^ although the outward 
 life may be blameless. Sin is the falsehood 
 planned even before it is spoken. And the 
 natural history of sin is that one sin leads to 
 another. And there is no power of self- 
 recovery. For it is of the nature of sin not 
 only to multiply, but to bring the sense of guilt 
 
Our Sense of Need 31 
 
 with it. And the human mind cannot rid itself 
 of guilt. The consciousness of this forms the 
 agony point of some masterpieces of literature. 
 
 Thus it is from the facts of human need that 
 religion arises. It springs from that instinct 
 within us which refuses to be satisfied with the 
 world, which seeks to rise above every obstacle 
 in the quest for help, for recovery, for forgive- 
 ness, for guidance, for companionship, in the 
 making of a personality. Religion is not an 
 artificial interest introduced from the outside 
 into human life; it springs from the heart of 
 human nature and its urgent necessities. We 
 have only to refer to the story of the religious 
 aspirations of the world to see how profound 
 the needs of the soul are, and how keen the 
 longing for God. The long, tragic story of 
 the world's search for God has not discour- 
 aged the world in its quest. Notwithstand- 
 ing the false conclusions, the gropings In the 
 black tempestuous night, the disappointing 
 results in nation after nation, and age after age, 
 the instinct for God has persisted, and is the 
 freshest, and most elemental, reality in the life 
 of man today. 
 
 It is not necessary for us, however, to go 
 through the literature of the religions of the 
 world before we enter upon a sound religious 
 
32 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 experience, any more than we must enquire 
 into the styles of architecture prevalent in 
 Africa, or China before we start to build a 
 house. The study of comparative religions is 
 a legitimate, and scientific, pursuit, and it has 
 the reverent attention of expert thinkers, but it 
 is not on the main line of concern for the person 
 of ordinary training, and with limited time at 
 his disposal, who is seeking spiritual satisfac- 
 tion for the urgent demands of his inner life. 
 
 There are certain great conclusions in the 
 realm of religion which have been reached in 
 the progress of the world, which belong to us 
 just as the masterpieces in art and literature 
 belong to us. It is interesting to learn some- 
 thing about the beginnings of art and litera- 
 ture, but when men seek to produce art, or lit- 
 erature, they seek to be under the spell of the 
 highest that has been achieved in their sphere. 
 
 And in the same way our point of contact 
 with the religious knowledge of the world is at 
 its highest point rather than at its lowest, or 
 lower, points. We enter into the achievements 
 of the ages in religion as well as in other things. 
 Of course, the highest religion must be that 
 which most profoundly answers the elemental 
 needs of human nature. But there is one aspect 
 of modern thinking to which we must refer be- 
 
Our Sense of Need 33 
 
 fore passing on to consider the satisfying 
 answer which has been made to human need. 
 
 There is a school of thinkers in our day, 
 divided into varying shades of opinion blending 
 into each other, which contends that there can 
 be no intelligent experience of God on the part 
 of human beings. We are not here referring to 
 Atheists who dogmatically deny that there is a 
 God. We may dismiss them as being prac- 
 tically a negligible quantity in modern thinking. 
 We refer to Agnostics, who do not deny the 
 existence of God. They say that there may be 
 a God, but the limitations of the human mind 
 make it impossible to find out anything con- 
 cerning Him that would be really helpful. 
 Agnosticism, therefore, is a dogmatic philo- 
 sophical generalisation of a negative character. 
 
 And it is only fair to say that this agnostic 
 attitude of some modern minds may have been 
 in part the expression of a protest against a 
 former interpretation of God which was some- 
 ' times a grotesque caricature, and beneath the 
 moral sense of the highest types of men. Or 
 agnosticism may have been in part inspired by 
 a former unreasoning attitude of hostility, on 
 the part of many religious teachers of a by- 
 gone generation against science, the scientific 
 spirit, and scientific conclusions. And if either 
 
34 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 of these influences had a real part in driving 
 scientific minds into the agnostic position, it is 
 safe to say that both low, anthropomorphic con- 
 ceptions of God, and hostility to the scientific 
 temper, have to a very large degree disappeared 
 from modern religious thinking. But the 
 agnostic will contend that there is more in his 
 position than that. He holds that the human 
 mind cannot interpret the First Cause of the 
 universe. He will admit the fact of a First 
 Cause, a mysterious, persistent reality behind 
 all created things, but he affirms it to be inscru- 
 table, unknowable. But we must answer the 
 agnostic that the human spirit cannot cease in 
 its search for God because of a philosophical 
 statement. 
 
 The tides of the ocean will not cease to rise 
 and fall because barriers have been raised along 
 the ocean front. Instinct is stronger than argu- 
 ment. And the instincts of a world of men 
 and women are a more formidable reality than 
 a generalisation from a small group of honest 
 thinkers. Besides, we have a right to say that 
 the First Cause of the universe may be inter- 
 preted as being all that we ourselves are at our 
 best, and infinitely more. And even although 
 God is infinite, it is not unreasonable for us to 
 think of him as having moral qualities which 
 
Our Sense of Need 35 
 
 we recognise in ourselves as finite beings, and 
 especially when we feel the instincts in our 
 nature urging us towards God as a necessary- 
 counterpart for our rational and elemental life. 
 And beyond all that, and with even greater 
 emphasis, let us say that when men declare God 
 to be unknowable they put limits upon God's 
 power and willingness to reveal Himself to the 
 capacity and necessity of human nature. They 
 deny to God those acts of self-expression of 
 which a man is, in his measure, capable. A man 
 may make a house, and write a book and love 
 his child. He can express himself according 
 to the variety of his natural endowments. And 
 surely God can, and has expressed Himself 
 according to the variety of His nature. If we 
 find in nature an expression of God it is not a 
 full expression. If we find an expression of 
 God in the laws which govern the universe, 
 there must be a still deeper revelation. There is 
 no full and satisfying revelation of the highest 
 that is in God until we have seen, in time, a 
 manifestation of Him which answers to the 
 highest in human nature and which is the re- 
 sponse to its deepest, its most urgent needs. 
 
IV 
 
 GOD'S ANSWER TO OUR SENSE OF NEED 
 
 WHILE God is above all that He has 
 created, He is at the same time in 
 the midst of everything which He 
 has made. Science is preaching this truth with 
 great impressiveness in our day. It is not only 
 the poet who speaks of the presence of God in 
 the " flower of the crannied wall," the scientist 
 is also telling us of the Divine immanence in 
 the small things of creation as well as in the 
 large. The modern physicist interprets the 
 physical world as an expression of the life of 
 God rather than as a mere blind process of 
 material evolution. Instead of explaining 
 spirit as arising out of material elements, 
 science is making it clear that material things 
 have their origin in the spiritual reality behind 
 them. And it traces that spiritual reality to 
 be behind the electron which is the merest 
 fragment of an atom, as well as in the midst 
 of the vastness of the universe. 
 
 36 
 
God's Answer 37 
 
 And if Gcxi is in what we call the material 
 world He is much more in the inner life of man. 
 
 And the sense of God's presence has more or 
 less persisted in the thoughts of men. They 
 have felt that God was seeking to reveal Him- 
 self to them and through them, as they were 
 able to fulfill the conditions in which He mani- 
 fests His purposes. And some men in the 
 course of history have heroically responded to 
 the promptings of the spirit of God within 
 them, and they have become leaders and 
 inspirers of their fellows. But at their best 
 those great souls of past ages were capable 
 of being channels of the Divine mind and pur- 
 pose to only a limited extent, and in many 
 instances they mixed that partial revelation of 
 the purposes of God with much that was false 
 or crude. What those lofty characters re- 
 vealed of the ways of God was not enough to 
 satisfy the elemental needs and longings of the 
 rank and file of humanity. And sometimes the 
 revelation which they made was so adulterated 
 with gross error as to mislead large sections of 
 humanity. 
 
 While there were true and various glimpses 
 of God's nature and will made through out- 
 standing men and women, and while great 
 progress was made, at the same time the partial 
 
38 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 manifestations of God, however impressive, 
 were not enough. Human nature could not 
 be satisfied until the deepest needs and longings 
 of the soul saw a fuller, a richer, a larger rev- 
 elation of the character and purposes of God. 
 Has God answered those deep instincts of 
 human nature? Has God made a fuller 
 manifestation, in time, of His character, of 
 His attitude towards men, and of His 
 purposes in and through them? In try- 
 ing to answer this question we must bear 
 in mind that if God has made such a revelation 
 it must be to man as man, plain men must be 
 able to grasp the essential reality of it. If 
 God has given a vision to the human mind of 
 the essence of His nature, that vision must be 
 open to a larger circle than is represented by 
 scholars. Vision must not require to wait upon 
 the findings of even patient and reverent Bibli- 
 cal criticism. 
 
 Success in seeing the answer God has given 
 to the elemental needs of life must not depend 
 upon the rise and fall of philosophical systems. 
 There is a great place for scholarship in the 
 realm of religion, but our contention is that 
 God's message must come to human nature as 
 such, for there are comparatively few scholars 
 in the world, and they make mental demands 
 
God's Answer 39 
 
 upon those who follow them for equipment 
 which few possess, and their conclusions 
 require time to study which few can afford to 
 give. Besides, scholarship breaks up into 
 separate camps, and the plain man has not the 
 equipment, or training, to know which band of 
 scholars he should follow. 
 
 And further, the revelation of God to man 
 as man will require the whole man to under- 
 stand it. If God has revealed His heart, 
 it will be necessary for us to exercise heart, 
 as well as head, in order to comprehend 
 it. If God has spoken to human nature 
 in the form of an historical manifestation of 
 Himself, as well as urging us from within 
 our own souls to seek Him, then our 
 whole being must be summoned if the message 
 of God is to be intelligible to us. It is in this 
 temper we must look for the vision. We seek 
 for a revelation which rises majestically above 
 all interpretations of the ages, wise and unwise. 
 And in seeking to enter into relationship with 
 that revelation, we refuse to be captured by 
 any, or every, council of definition. We insist 
 that we shall not be caught amid the smoke, 
 and noise, and distraction, on the theological 
 battlefield upon which partisans contend. We 
 dare not, the revelation of God is too urgent 
 
40 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 a necessity for our practical life for us to allow 
 problems which are too much for us to stand 
 between us and our heart's desire. Where 
 then is the Divine revelation? Let us ask men 
 who knew no theories regarding that revela- 
 tion. Let us ask those who simply saw, and 
 having seen, were satisfied. But does that not 
 involve us in the whole question of Biblical 
 criticism? When we turn to the testimony of 
 the men of the first century as recorded in the 
 New Testament are we not in the thick of 
 controversy ? 
 
 No, if we cling to the places of emphasis, 
 if we seek in the first instance the broad fact 
 rather than the minutiae of the records. For 
 we are seeking a person; God revealed Him- 
 self in a life. And there is enough in the 
 broad outline of the history of that life to lead 
 us to Him, especially when we bear in mind 
 that the testimony concerning that life is not 
 confined to the experience of men of the first 
 century. That testimony has an unbroken 
 succession through the centuries until this hour. 
 
 H we insist upon wading through literature 
 which gathers around the details of the record 
 of the life of Jesus we may be confused, and 
 mentally suffocated in the process. And many 
 earnest growing minds have been side-tracked 
 
God's Answer 41 
 
 into hopeless confusion in this attempt. There 
 is enough beyond controversy to start with. 
 The great fact of Christ is undisputed. And 
 the experience Which has grown out of the 
 fact makes it possible for us to put it to the test. 
 We do not need a great deal of testimony to 
 lead us to Christ. We do not insist upon a 
 great deal of it when we put anything else to 
 the proof. If we seek a medical specialist the 
 testimony which we get beforehand concerning 
 him is not enormous, it may be very slender, 
 indeed. And the more desperate our case is, 
 the less insistent we are upon getting a great 
 volume of testimony. We are ready to start 
 for the specialist with very small hope, with a 
 minimum of encouragement. Our friends may 
 pathetically shake their heads as we go. But 
 we know the great thing is not so much the 
 testimony as the personal experience which we 
 have at the hands of the physician. And an 
 unpromising outlook may turn out to have a 
 most wonderful result in actual experience. 
 
 And that is the principle upon which we 
 approach Jesus as the revelation of God to 
 human need. 
 
 The testimony of the men of the first cen- 
 tury was that they had a completely satisfying 
 revelation of God in Jesus. That was the ex- 
 
42 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 perlence of one of the greatest minds of that 
 early age. Saul of Tarsus may never have seen 
 Jesus in the flesh, and his vi^hole training and 
 surroundings were against his ever seeing 
 anything in Jesus that would interest him. 
 The strong likelihood is that the first glimpse 
 which Saul ever obtained was through the 
 transfigured life and testimony of Stephen. 
 And after that he saw his Lord as a person 
 who had risen out of local history and had 
 become a spiritual presence. No literature 
 could ever have reached Saul of Tarsus, it was 
 a testimony, it was the living Christ Himself. 
 And he came to know Christ far better than 
 most of the people who had seen and heard 
 the Master during His life-time on earth. And 
 from that spiritual knowledge of Christ Saul 
 when he became St. Paul went back to assim- 
 ilate all the historical knowledge of Jesus that 
 he could obtain from those who had known 
 Him in the days of His flesh. The point we 
 emphasise here is that St. Paul did not rise 
 from large historical knowledge to a spiritual 
 knowledge of Christ. The process was rather 
 that he first of all heard a testimony regarding 
 Christ, then he had an experience of Him and 
 after that he gradually entered into the his- 
 torical facts of the earthly life of his master. 
 
God's Answer 43 
 
 And that way of approach is just as open to us 
 as it was to St. Paul. It is even more open to 
 us, because Saul of Tarsus naturally repudiated 
 the whole earthly career of Jesus, until the 
 time that he had a spiritual experience of Him. 
 We have no such bitter repugnance to the 
 story of the life of Jesus as Saul had. 
 Besides, we have the witness of the ages to 
 help us. Let us cling with the utmost tenacity 
 to the fact that St. Paul had an experience of 
 the living presence of Jesus before he made any 
 explanations, or theories, regarding that pres- 
 ence. It was Christ himself who constituted 
 the supreme revelation of God to the soul of 
 the Apostle. It was that presence who gave ' 
 him all that changed his life, and thought, and 
 career. He had an experience before he made 
 a theological interpretation. That is the 
 supreme fact. Let that fact hold us before we 
 get confused with other issues. Let us not 
 lose the place of emphasis. Let us keep first 
 things first. St. Paul testified that Jesus sat- 
 isfied his soul, and his reason, as a revelation of 
 the heart of God. And the testimony of the 
 Apostle has been carried down to us by the 
 accumulating evidence of centuries of experi- 
 ence. And the experience has expressed itself 
 in a devotional and experimental literature 
 
44 Religion and the Growing JMind 
 
 which satisfies us, which confirms the essential 
 harmony of the Christian witnesses. 
 
 Therefore we say that Christ as the revela- 
 tion of God satisfies the inner needs of man. 
 That is a fact to which countless thousands 
 could swear in a court of law. And men and 
 women have been so possessed of the passion- 
 ate conviction that Christ answered the ulti- 
 mate needs of life that they have hurled them- 
 selves against the difficulties, the cruelty, and 
 the ignorance of the whole world in order to 
 tell their fellows of Him. And they have met 
 with a response, but the numbers who have 
 responded are not the supreme sign of the 
 revelation of God in Christ. It is the depths 
 of hunger and of despair which He has an- 
 swered, it is the transformation of soul which 
 He has effected, that is the criterion. 
 
 We do not here attempt to interpret the con- 
 sciousness of Jesus, as recorded in the Scrip- 
 tures. We do not seek to put the teaching of 
 Jesus into categories. We do not here en- 
 deavour to place emphasis upon any one or 
 more aspects of His life or message. All that 
 has its own important place. We simply seek 
 to see the personality of Christ, with enough 
 of an historical background to give clearness 
 to the outlines of His abiding presence. We 
 
God's Answer 45 
 
 appeal to the spiritual sense of the ages, and 
 of our own times for witness that the presence 
 of Christ is a reality, a reality as great as any 
 other reality. Christ satisfies those cravings 
 of the inner life, which are as real as any other 
 cravings. We insist that He can be put to the 
 proof to-day. The case for His presence and 
 power stands or falls by what He can do for 
 the enlightenment, inspiration, and recovery of 
 lives. 
 
 We do not for a moment say that the fact 
 of the living Christ is all that men will seek to 
 know. They naturally seek to go back to read 
 and appropriate all that He said and did. But 
 they go back with an experience of Christ Him- 
 self. While on the other hand without an ex- 
 perience of Him there is great danger of being 
 lost in the details of Biblical criticism, in con- 
 troversies regarding places of emphasis. Let 
 us steadily remember that the theological 
 approach to Christ is one thing, the religious 
 approach another. 
 
 There are comparatively few able to enter 
 upon the theological approach, as we have 
 already hinted. But multitudes have ap- 
 proached the living presence of Christ, both 
 wise and ignorant men, those who were expert 
 in theology and those who could not even read 
 
46 Religion and the Growing ]\Iind 
 
 the Bible. We dare not turn God's revelation 
 to human need into an academic question. And 
 therefore anything that would tend to im- 
 prison, or bewilder, us, anything that would 
 lead us along lines for which we have neither 
 time nor aptitude, and regarding which even 
 our teachers have not arrived at definite con- 
 clusions, we must put upon one side until we 
 have seen the abiding Master Himself. After 
 that let us go back to the details, to the discus- 
 sions, it may be, if we have time and ability. 
 But our spiritual sense will guide us, and then 
 we shall assimilate such parts of the Scriptures 
 as suit our stage of development, and thus 
 enter upon a progressive appropriation of 
 truth. 
 
 But the main thing is that we shall so assim- 
 ilate the spiritual realities of the Bible, that we 
 shall turn its literature into life, and what we 
 thus make our own is beyond all criticism. The 
 believer thus becomes independent of the critic. 
 Let it be clearly understood that we are not 
 here pleading for intellectual indolence, or 
 timidity, when we insist upon steering clear of 
 controversial matters upon which great and 
 good men differ. We are simply pursuing a 
 common-sense policy that our whole nature and 
 not merely a section of cfur nature shall seek 
 
God's Answer 47 
 
 Christ as the revelation of God. The needs of 
 our soul are so urgent as to make it impossible 
 for us to submit to being sidetracked by ques- 
 tions in scholarship which may not be settled in 
 this generation, and which when settled by the 
 few may never be accepted by many. Christ 
 is not imprisoned in a segment of history. He 
 is in the Scriptures and He is also here. He 
 lives and satisfies the actual needs of men and 
 women with whom we come in contact every 
 day. 
 
V 
 
 HOW DO WE ENTER INTO THE KNOWLEDGE 
 
 OF CHRIST? 
 
 THAT there are various ways into the 
 friendship of Christ we are convinced 
 by the experience of individual Chris- 
 tians. We may have an ideal way in our 
 minds, but as a matter of fact there is no one 
 method. St. Peter came to know Jesus along 
 one path, and St. Paul by quite another. St. 
 Peter approached his Master through the sim- 
 ple facts of the human life of Jesus, He fol- 
 lowed on till the great personality mastered 
 him. St. Paul came to know Christ from the 
 opposite direction. He first entered into fel- 
 lowship with the spiritual Christ, and thus was 
 led to the human, the historical, facts in the 
 earthly life of Jesus. St. Peter entered into the 
 friendship of his Lord by what we would call 
 the historical method, and St. Paul by the 
 spiritual. And these two paths of approach 
 are still travelled by true disciples, and they 
 
 48 
 
The Knowledge of Christ 49 
 
 are not contradictory, they are the counterparts 
 of each other. Some in our own day have 
 come into the knowledge of Christ through the 
 study of the Scriptures. That is to say, 
 through the story of the events by v^hich St. 
 Peter was led up to recognise Jesus as Lord. 
 Some others have been introduced to Christ 
 through a direct sense of His presence. A 
 negro woman, a servant in the home of a the- 
 ological professor, was a devoted disciple of 
 Christ, but she could not read. When her mas- 
 ter taught her to read the New Testament she 
 said she had experienced, and already knew, 
 the truths which she found there. 
 
 We must bear in mind that there are many 
 true Christians throughout the world who can- 
 not read, and there always have been. While 
 we doubtless have in our minds a method of 
 entering into the knowledge of our Lord which 
 we consider to be the highest, and the most 
 honouring to the Scriptures, we dare not dog- 
 matically lay down our way as the only way, 
 in the face of the experience of so many who 
 have not come by our path into a discipleship 
 which is quite as real as our own. 
 
 If we come to a knowledge of Christ through 
 the testimony or saintly life of a believer we do 
 not therefore dishonour the Scriptures. On 
 
50 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 the contrary, we go back to the Scriptures with 
 a freedom of soul, with a spiritual insight 
 which enables us to nmke the Bible increasingly 
 our own, by a process of spiritual assimilation. 
 And at the same time we are kept from being 
 confused by perplexities which are not of pri- 
 mary importance and from bewildering dis- 
 cussions which gather around controversial 
 points. Spiritual experience is thus the per- 
 manent basis of a vital relation to the Bible. 
 And it is the establishment of experience be- 
 tween the needs of our soul and the living 
 Master which becomes the guarantee of our 
 abiding interest in the Bible in a spiritually 
 free, and spiritually profitable way. 
 
 But having accepted testimony as it urges us 
 to put the living Christ to the test for our- 
 selves, how shall we proceed? How shall we 
 make Christ real to our elemental life? How 
 shall His presence be made real to us? We 
 must believe that He is actually here with us 
 at this moment, as really here now as He ever 
 was with His disciples in the days of His 
 flesh. When we say this the mind will at once 
 seek for signs of His presence. For the mind 
 may have preconceived notions as to certain 
 sensations, certain experiences, which should 
 take place when Christ is really present. 
 
The Knowledge of Christ 51 
 
 St. John the Baptist had certain notions as 
 to what Jesus would do when He came, and 
 when Jesus did not manifest Himself as St. 
 John had expected, he began to doubt whether 
 Jesus was after all the personality he had taken 
 Him to be. This is a danger which besets us 
 all. n we are to put Christ to the test we must 
 believe that Christ is actually here, apart from 
 all our preconceived notions as to how He will 
 manifest Himself. We must believe He is 
 here with us, even when we have no feelings 
 whatever or in the possession of feelings 
 within us which seem to absolutely contradict 
 the reality of His presence. 
 
 We must not interpret His presence accord- 
 ing to our moral deservings, for if we were to 
 do that, most of us would put Him very far 
 from us. His presence with us is not the result 
 of anything which we have done to secure it. 
 If we desire him, and if we are willing by His 
 aid to make His will the rule of our lives, it is 
 in no sense presumption to take it completely 
 for granted that He is now present with us. 
 
 Of course, there is a strong natural tendency 
 to look for signs of His presence. There is an 
 almost irresistible temptation to doubt the 
 actual presence of Christ unless there are some 
 indications, some manifestations of feeling to 
 
52 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 verify it. Some seekers after Christ are mis- 
 led by the unusual experiences of which they 
 have read in the biographies of distinguished 
 Christians, and unless some similar emotions 
 spring up in their own lives they are inclined 
 to think that their time of spiritual change has 
 not yet come. But this is a grave mistake. 
 We must believe that Christ is in our lives 
 without anything to verify it except the testi- 
 mony which we have read in the Scriptures, or 
 the testimony of those who profess to have His 
 presence in their lives. 
 
 And this venture of faith will justify itself 
 very quickly. For we shall hear the voice of 
 Christ speaking to us. We shall become con- 
 scious of His actual nearness. But we must 
 not forget that the presence of Christ is one 
 thing, and the outward sign of that presence 
 is another thing. While Christ will give 
 unmistakable signs of His presence, at the 
 same time there will be periods when every 
 mirror of feeling in which we have seen Him 
 will be obscured, or it may be that every mirror 
 through which we have beheld Him shall seem 
 broken, and we shall be flung back upon trust 
 that He is with us, without a single reflection 
 of the fact in our feeling. If we interpret the 
 presence of the living Master by certain sen- 
 
The Knowledge of Christ 53 
 
 sations, we are thus resting upon effects rather 
 than upon the cause of the effects, consequently 
 when the effects vanish we are in confusion. 
 But if we gratefully accept all verifications of 
 the nearness of our Lord without resting upon 
 them, without thinking them to be absolutely 
 necessary, then when they happen to disappear 
 we are not in confusion for we have been walk- 
 ing by faith, and not by sight. 
 
 It is the will that is the point of contact with 
 Christ, and not emotion. The feelings may be 
 a very great aid to the will, but they must never 
 have the mastery over the will. And will must 
 learn to act very often without their help. 
 Feelings may desert the will, they may be in 
 rebellion against the will, but the will must 
 determine to believe in the companionship of 
 Christ. For as Professor William James con- 
 tended we can will to believe. It is possible 
 to put the will on the side of our beliefs, or of 
 our doubts. And we do it consciously or 
 unconsciously all the time in our human rela- 
 tionships. We will to disbelieve slanders 
 against those for whom we have an affection 
 and in whom we trust. And if we have a prej- 
 udice against anyone, it is not difficult, unfor- 
 tunately, to believe an unkind rumour regard- 
 ing him. The human will must always play an 
 
54 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 important part in our beliefs. And it is 
 because the will is involved that ethical value 
 attaches to the fact of believing. It is through 
 the action of the will in relation to all the light 
 that is shed upon us from the Scriptures, from 
 Christ and from our surroundings, that we 
 make personality. 
 
 And as we will to believe in Christ, He will 
 reveal Himself to our need. For the living 
 Christ is a Divine intelligence with a distinct 
 message to the mind, the imagination, the will, 
 the conscience, to the elemental life. Christ 
 carries in His living personality now the fruits 
 of every phase, and stage, of His earthly work 
 of redemption. He brings into the present 
 hour of our need the fruits from the harvest 
 of His human experiences. He has left noth- 
 ing of His achievements in the past. He has 
 been bearing the spiritual results of His glori- 
 ous work through the centuries unto this day. 
 All that He did for man in the far away past. 
 He offers to men now. 
 
 Whatever was necessary in order to make 
 the free offer of forgiveness Christ fulfilled, 
 and He brings the results with His own hand 
 straight to the points of need in human life. 
 And what Christ does for us and in us must be 
 accepted as His presence is accepted, not in the 
 
The Knowledge of Christ 55 
 
 first instance through feehng, but by simple 
 trust. We may have absolutely nothing upon 
 which to rest but His promise, and the testi- 
 mony of believers throughout the ages, who 
 have lived and died in peace through believing. 
 That attitude of faith will bear its own fruit 
 of abiding peace, as it has in the lives of the 
 redeemed who have gone before us, if we per- 
 sist, if our faith fights its battle against all 
 that seeks to overthrow it. 
 
 Christ seeks to cleanse the past, to enlighten, 
 inspire, and empower, the present life, and to 
 create hope for the future. He seeks to shew 
 the meaning of life, the use of discipline, the 
 wisdom of trust in a Divine providence in life. 
 Beyond the intellectual satisfaction which 
 Christ seeks to inspire, there is also the enlight- 
 enment of the mind upon the practical affairs 
 of life. Christ would so lead those who trust 
 Him, that they may become not the mere echo 
 of their surroundings, but original contributors 
 to the life and progress of society. For the 
 mind inspired by Christ is part of the truly 
 progressive element in human history. It has 
 a freshness, a uniqueness, an originality, which 
 makes it distinct and individual, rather than 
 living in an attitude of mere servitude to social 
 precedent. 
 
VI 
 
 WHAT IS THE BOND THAT BINDS US TO 
 
 CHRIST? 
 
 HOW shall the vital bond between per- 
 sonality and the living Christ be 
 maintained? The answer of the 
 New Testament and of the centuries of spirit- 
 ual experience is that the means of abiding fel- 
 lowship with Christ is through faith and obedi- 
 ence. We shall here consider only the first of 
 these two conditions. Many people say they 
 have not faith. They contend that this is their 
 great lack. If they could in some way obtain 
 more faith the spiritual life would become for 
 them a working reality. But as a matter of fact 
 > faith is an instinct inherent in our human 
 nature. It is the instinct which relates us to the 
 world in which we live. Without the exercise 
 of faith it would be quite impossible to get 
 through a single day of life. It is necessary 
 when we sit down to breakfast, when we take 
 a train, when we conclude a bargain. Without 
 it life would be reduced to chaos. So that it 
 
 56 
 
What Binds Us to Christ? 57 
 
 is a mistake for any of us to say we have not 
 faith. Of course the Bible says, "All men have 
 not faith," but it is speaking of faith in God, 
 and we all recognise the absolute truth of that 
 statement. However, we all have the capacity 
 for faith in God and in order to have faith in 
 Him we do not require any new faculty added 
 to our being. 
 
 While we all possess the faith instinct, it is 
 capable of being developed or degraded. Just 
 as ivy may be trained to climb up the wall, or 
 to creep along the ground, so faith may be 
 trained to rise from being exercised between 
 man and man to express itself towards God, 
 or it may manifest itself in purely earthly re- 
 lationships and in few of those. Faith is not 
 merely an expression of the intellect. It has 
 a distinctly intellectual element. But it also 
 proceeds from the imagination, from the will, 
 from the elemental self. It is an outgoing of 
 the whole personality, it is expressed at the 
 focus point of the entire life. And the spirit 
 of God is within us not to create faith, but to 
 train it upwards. The Holy Spirit seeks to 
 lead faith to its supreme object. 
 
 Faith is capable of various definitions ac- 
 cording to the point of view from which we 
 look at it. For our present purpose faith may 
 
58 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 be defined as belief in the unseen presence of 
 Christ. It clothes with reality a presence, 
 regarding whom our senses do not inform us, 
 and our powers of ratiocination cannot wholly 
 reduce the reality of His presence to a demon- 
 stration. Every venture of faith involves the 
 element of risk. Risk is everywhere where 
 faith is concerned. And faith has to be exer- 
 cised in our relation to everything. The man 
 who will not exercise faith because there is a 
 risk, will not venture anywhere, for there is 
 no such thing in this world as absolute knowl- 
 edge concerning anything. Faith is the pioneer 
 section of reason. It is reason without reason- 
 ing. But it does not fear reasoning. It invites 
 it to follow, if reason recognises that faith 
 has its own legitimate place, and if the rea- 
 soning powers recognise that they must pos- 
 sess the ability to handle the problems with 
 which they undertake to deal. For it is not 
 brave to go into a current which is too much 
 for one's strength; it may be a form of 
 suicide. 
 
 And some who have neither the mental 
 training, nor the time necessary, become sub- 
 merged in an intellectual current because they 
 have tried prematurely to reason out that which 
 in the meantime should be humbly accepted, 
 
What Binds ITs to Christ? 59 
 
 because of the lack of mental apparatus to do 
 otherwise. The wisest men have mental limit- 
 ations, and it is not cowardice but bravery to 
 recognise the fact. It was one of the first 
 things confessed by Descartes as he sought to 
 build up his philosophical method. Faith has 
 rights. And it is on safe ground when it 
 asserts its right to believe, when it refuses to 
 be swept off its ground, so long as it cannot 
 be proved that its claims are irrational. And 
 there is nothing whatever irrational in the faith 
 of any man venturing to trust the unseen living 
 Christ. 
 
 Faith is not an end in itself. It must not be 
 taken up with itself. That is a form of self- 
 consciousness, which results in confusion, if 
 not in paralysis. Faith is healthy when it is 
 taken up with its object, forgetting all about its 
 own strength or weakness, its quality or quan- 
 tity. Christian people are sometimes ridiculed 
 or censured, from making much of the import- 
 ance of faith. But if we say that we cannot 
 get water from a well without turning the 
 handle of the well, we are not giving undue 
 prominence to the handle, we are simply stat- 
 ing the way by which we reach the water. We 
 do not exaggerate the importance of a key if 
 we say that we cannot get into a safe without 
 
60 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 it. And in the same way faith is the means by 
 which we enter into that contact with Christ 
 which secures for us what He has to bestow 
 upon our need. But faith will not establish 
 relations with Christ unless the life is pos- 
 sessed by genuine desire for what Christ has to 
 give. To try to exercise faith towards our 
 Lord while we still desire what we know to be 
 Wrong, is to have one part of our being cancel 
 the efforts of another part of our being. The 
 thing cannot be done. Our moral nature is gov- 
 erned by law just as much as physical nature, 
 and if steam will not rise from water until 
 the water has reached a certain temperature, 
 neither will faith be able to make connection 
 with Christ until there is a willingness to be 
 made Christlike. 
 
 Let it be clearly understood that we are not 
 insisting upon moral attainment, but upon 
 willingness to be helped towards attainment. 
 We may be too weak even to try to attain, we 
 may be too discouraged. But that need not, 
 should not, hinder faith. The only thing that 
 will surely paralyse faith towards Christ is the 
 desire to persist in what He disapproves. And 
 that is surely as it should be. Christ cannot lend 
 Himself to anything that is in open revolt 
 against the spirit of moral progress. But He 
 
What Binds Us to Christ? 61 
 
 will stoop to the lowest depths to rescue the 
 weakest, the most sinful, who honestly desires 
 to be made Christlike. This attitude may be 
 nothing more than desire, it may be too abso- 
 lutely feeble to be anything more. It may not 
 express itself in tears, or even in deep sorrow. 
 That will doubtless come later on. And it is a 
 great mistake to withhold the exercise of faith 
 until a certain amount of sorrow has been felt. 
 Who is to say when a sufficient quantity of 
 sorrow has been forthcoming? Repentance 
 not necessarily in the first instance an expres- 
 sion of sorrow, it is the expression of the res- 
 olution to be wholly a genuine man, trusting 
 that Divine power shall be available to turn that 
 resolution into a growing fact. It is then that 
 faith has the right, and the power, to claim 
 what Christ has to bestow for the forgiveness, 
 the recovery, and the expansion of a soul. 
 
 Faith then is not a mere intellectual assent, 
 w'hile the rest of the inner life clings to what 
 is consciously wrong. That would not only 
 establish a dualism divorcing religion from 
 practical life, but it would be an im- 
 moral use of religion. And such a religion 
 wherever it may exist is a travesty of 
 the religion of Christ. It completely fails to 
 recognise that our Lord lends His presence and 
 
62 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 His power only to the redemption, and the 
 development of character. Faith is the out- 
 going of the whole man in a unified desire ex- 
 pressed through the will claiming and rejoic- 
 ing in the help of Christ. The will must ever 
 be the supreme element in the action of true 
 faith. And Christ in His appeal for faith chal- 
 lenges the will. And when the will urges faith 
 to cling to the unseen presence of Christ faith 
 will be assailed. It will be harassed by various 
 influences within our own life, and in the 
 w^orld. 
 
 If faith is to become a growing reality in our 
 experiences it must fight in order to maintain 
 its ground. It must maintain its position even 
 when the whispers of unbelief tell us that our 
 failures, our depressed feelings, and our fitful 
 moods, are greater facts than the presence of 
 Christ in our lives. Faith must simply persist 
 until it conquers the suggestions which 
 threaten to overthrow it. It dare not surrender 
 to mere inclination. 
 
 We sometimes hear a man say : " I have no 
 desire to exercise faith in Christ." But we 
 answer that faith should be urged on by the 
 will even when desire fails to inspire it. There 
 is no need for us to wait for desire before faith 
 becomes energetic. We do not wait for desire 
 
What Binds Us to Christ? 63 
 
 in other directions of life. If we waited for 
 desire before we took up our studies, our edu- 
 cation would be in jeopardy. If we postponed 
 physical exercise till we were in the mood for 
 it we would experience serious consequences. 
 And faith in Christ must be exercised on the 
 same principle, it must wrestle with the inclina- 
 tions which draw us in the opposite directions, 
 until it has vanquished them. Many people are 
 waiting until the longing comes upon them 
 before they enter into relations with Christ by 
 faith. But such an attitude is an utterly false 
 view of the position of faith. It has a right, 
 and a clear duty, to assert itself in the face of 
 inclination, and to tame inclination into sub- 
 jection. 
 
 And the same is true in the relation of faith 
 to knowledge. There are a great many who 
 are holding back the exercise of faith in Christ 
 until they have a more or less complete knowl- 
 edge of Him, and of the problems which gather 
 around Him. But those people forget that the 
 venture of faith is the inspiration of knowl- 
 edge. Knowledge grows through action. 
 While it is possible on the other hand to be ever 
 learning, and never come to a knowledge of 
 the truth. Christopher Columbus knew noth- 
 ing about the New World before he crossed 
 
64 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 the Atlantic. His faith had to fight on through 
 mutiny, storm, distance, and the lack of definite 
 knowledge as to where he was going. But the 
 heroic energy of a great faith brought floods 
 of knowledge to his own mind and to all the 
 world. And in the same manner the bold ven- 
 ture of faith impelled on its way by a coura- 
 geous will is the true attitude towards Christ. 
 And a knowledge of Christ will come to us as 
 we maintain that attitude, which can never 
 come to us in any other way. 
 
yii 
 
 HOW DOES OUR FAITH EXPRESS ITSELF 
 
 TOWARDS GOD? 
 
 PRAYER is the means by which the in- 
 stinct of faith expresses itself towards 
 God through Christ. Prayer is the 
 activity of faith, it is faith articulated. It is 
 faith making connections. So that prayer is 
 simply the continuation of the faith instinct 
 of relationship. It is like the ivy clinging by 
 its tendrils to the wall. It is like the bee gath- 
 ering honey. It is the manifestation of an 
 instinct which may be aided and guided from 
 within the life by the Spirit of God, in seeking 
 its true spiritual environment, as we are willing 
 to let the Divine spirit help us. Of course, this 
 instinct, like every other, may be developed, or 
 it may be perverted as we encourage, or defeat 
 it, as we satisfy, or starve it. Every instinct 
 has natural difficulties to overcome in seeking 
 to reach its goal. The swallow seeking the 
 summer climate must press through storms 
 
 65 
 
66 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 on its way. The child encounters difficulties 
 in learning to speak. 
 
 And prayer must conquer physical, mental 
 and moral difficulties in its effort to express 
 itself in the presence of our Lord. Prayer is 
 therefore not an attempt to bring the power 
 and presence of God in Christ down out of the 
 natural order of the spiritual world into our 
 mere arbitrary desires. It is quite the oppo- 
 site, it is the effort of our lives to rise into the 
 natural order of the spiritual world. Prayer 
 is the lifting of our lives into normal relations 
 with God. And in the process of rising into 
 the mind of Christ through prayer some desires 
 will perish, while others will be intensified. So 
 that in the true order of prayer the first ele- 
 ment in it is personal adjustment through con- 
 fession. It is the acceptance of Divine for- 
 giveness, by which we are thus brought up into 
 the normal order of the spiritual world. But 
 having been forgiven, having entered into nor- 
 mal relations with God, the supreme attitude 
 of the soul in prayer is not asking things. It 
 is the attempt to escape from self. 
 
 The highest element in prayer consists in 
 freedom from all self-consciousness, as we 
 adore, worship, contemplate, the character of 
 God as revealed in Christ. The great changes 
 
How Does Faith Express Itself? 67 
 
 come in our character while we are in the atti- 
 tude of worship. For Christian character is 
 largely a by-product of worship and obedience, 
 rather than through direct requests. Of course, 
 requests for personal blessings have their place. 
 But they have by no means the supreme place 
 in the normal order of the spiritual life. Ex- 
 perience teaches us that it is quite possible to 
 be self-centred in our praying, as in other 
 things. And some earnest people continually 
 thinking of their own souls, and their own 
 needs, only succeed in becoming more and more 
 self-conscious. And simply because they have 
 followed a false order in their prayer life. 
 
 Many would enter upon a new day of spirit- 
 ual experience, a new sense of freedom, of 
 expansion, of joy, if they began the day by 
 quietly contemplating God in Christ. For the 
 time being, at least, forgetting all about their 
 good, bad, or indifferent selves. Worship is 
 the highest attitude of the soul in its relation 
 to God. And as a consequence of worship 
 thanksgiving would follow naturally as the 
 next instinctive utterance of the soul in its 
 prayer life. For it is impossible for us to wor- 
 ship without being possessed by a sense of the 
 Divine goodness. And in the recollection of 
 the goodness of God there inevitably takes 
 
68 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 possession of us the spirit of contentment and 
 joy. One can easily see this to be the psycho- 
 logical sequel. And that being so, an expan- 
 sion, and enriching, of the inner life thereby 
 takes place. 
 
 And no one can healthily experience a sense 
 of the goodness of God, and of the content- 
 ment and joy which spring from it, without 
 longing to have others share it. So that inter- 
 cession follows with perfect naturalness. We 
 become conscious that we belong to a large 
 human family and we begin to realise that it 
 is the Divine way to give the individual his 
 spiritual growth as he seeks to carry the world 
 Christward with him. When we are able to 
 forget ourselves and identify ourselves with 
 the longing, the groping, the ignorance, and 
 the failure of others by intercession in the 
 presence of God, and offer our personality as 
 a channel through which God may minister to 
 others, it is in such attitude that we receive the 
 largest expansion of our souls. 
 
 Just as the attuned wireless instrument 
 becomes the ipeans of communicating a mes- 
 sage, so may the attuned soul become a channel 
 by which God conveys blessings to other lives. 
 It may still be a mystery how this is done, 
 how intercession for human souls achieves 
 
How Does Faith Express Itself? 69 
 
 results in the spiritual world, but the important 
 thing to remember is that it is those who most 
 deeply engage in intercession, who are most 
 conscious of the effectiveness of it. In fact 
 this is true in the whole range of prayer. 
 Arguments for the reasonableness of prayer 
 are not nearly so convincing as the conscious- 
 ness of the reasonableness of prayer which 
 springs from the practice of prayer. Indeed, 
 it may be said that it is the persistent habit of 
 prayer, and what flows from the habit, which 
 are the supreme arguments for prayer. When 
 we give the first place in our prayer life to 
 worship, thanksgiving and intercession, it will 
 then be evident that many of the things to 
 which we had formerly given the first place 
 will be received by us without asking. For our 
 richest spiritual blessings come to us by in- 
 direction. 
 
 It is a law in the spiritual world that we 
 receive most bountifully when we are most 
 completely captured by thoughts of the charac- 
 ter of God, and by the needs of our fel- 
 low men. Prayer is the outgoing of the whole 
 life towards God, just as faith is the expres- 
 sion of the whole man. 
 
 And consequently prayer involves the 
 human body. True prayer implies the con- 
 
70 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 quering of all physical moods. Jesus tamed 
 the moods of His body, its depression, its 
 weariness, so that it became perfectly obedi- 
 ent to the demands of the inner life in the exer- 
 cise of prayer. It is weak surrender to bodily 
 inclination which is sometimes the cause of 
 the neglect of the prayer habit. And if that 
 habit is to have its true place, there are many 
 who must battle with their physical moods. 
 And this might afford some an opportunity to 
 practice very real heroism. For there is an 
 appeal to the heroic even in the physical aspect 
 of prayer, if the exercise is to be charged with 
 reality rising above a mere perfunctory form. 
 There is far too much pandering to the 
 whims of the body in connection with prayer. 
 If some of the physical endurance necessary 
 for a football match, or a boat race, were 
 translated into the exercise of intercessory 
 prayer great things might come to pass. It 
 is the triumph of sheer will power that some- 
 times keeps a man at his oar. Is the same 
 effort as often translated into prayer? 
 
 True prayer demands mental concentration. 
 It requires that the mind shall steadily see 
 what it is praying for, that it is not merely 
 using a confused heap of ideas and translating 
 them into words. It might be a mental aid for 
 
How Does Faith Express Itself? 71 
 
 some of us to write down what is to engage 
 the mind while at prayer. But that is not 
 enough. There must be a persistent exercise 
 of the will to keep merely curious, irrelevant 
 thoughts out of the mind while engaged in 
 prayer. For there is continually a troop of 
 unimportant, unnecessary, or foolish, thoughts 
 seeking to claim the place occupied by the 
 supreme ideas which should be in possession 
 of our attention. 
 
 To surrender to the suggestions of unim- 
 portant, invading, thoughts is weakness. Be- 
 cause such surrender means the bisecting of 
 thought, and that is the psychological basis of 
 all inner weakness. And no amount of Bible 
 reading or prolonged periods of the form of 
 prayer can make up for a mind divided in its 
 attention through a slack will. Mental con- 
 centration means the exercise of the will. And 
 when it is secured it provides the psychological 
 basis of inner strength. All real inner power 
 must spring from a concentrated mind secured 
 by the energy of the will. 
 
 Of course, the will may be greatly aided in 
 the securing of mental concentration in prayer 
 by faith working through imagination to make 
 the presence of God a reality. For true prayer 
 demands the exercise of faith, faith being the 
 
72 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 soul of prayer. Prayer is prayer only as faith 
 is in it. And the prayer of faith makes 
 Christ a near and present reahty. It fights 
 against every whisper in the soul that 
 would deny it, it wrestles with every- 
 thing that would suggest its impotence. Faith 
 conquers in prayer by keeping the imagination 
 fixed upon the transcendent, spiritual power 
 working in co-operation with it. The prayer 
 of faith shuts out all invasions that threaten to 
 weaken its bold venture. That is the fight of 
 faith. !Aiid it does its work through imagina- 
 tion. And thus imagination is able to aid 
 the will, and the acquired strength of the will 
 reacts on the imagination, in the achievement 
 of victory. For every real triumph must first 
 take place in the soul before it is actualised in 
 the world. Faith must visualise success before 
 it is achieved in the actual battlefield of life. 
 The prayer of faith overcomes the world in 
 inner spiritual conflict, and then summons all 
 the powers of the being to go out to claim the 
 victory among the cold, hard, facts of the 
 world. 
 
VIII 
 WHAT DOES CHRIST DO FOR OUR LIVES? 
 
 CHRIST is not an arbitrary imposition 
 upon human nature. He is not a 
 mortgage upon our already burdened 
 lives. He has come to lift the mortgage from 
 life, to endow it with power. Christ is the 
 response which Divine, love has made to the 
 problems which we actually encounter in our 
 attempt to realise the chief end of our exist- 
 ence. We greatly need to keep this steadily 
 before our minds, because some have turned 
 from Christianity thinking it to be another 
 heavy load flung upon lives already staggering 
 under burdens. 
 
 But such a view is a false understanding of 
 the mission of Christ. Our Lord has come 
 in order to make life liveable, to make it rea- 
 sonable, to make it possible for us to attain 
 to our own true moral and spiritual stature. 
 
 If there had been no deep need in our lives 
 there would have been no revelation of Christ. 
 
 73 
 
74 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 " God so loved the world that He gave His 
 only begotten Son." In all our interpretations 
 of Christ Divine love must be the essence of 
 them. Christ is in our midst to give us a 
 knowledge of the character and attitude of 
 God towards us, which shall be sufficient for 
 the deepest needs of the best and the worst 
 people in the world. The first thing which 
 very many lives consciously require to know is 
 whether there is forgiveness with God. 
 Before they can face the question of a fresh 
 start, of moral progress, they are desperately 
 anxious to know whether there is pardon for 
 past transgression. For it is only in the sense 
 of forgiveness that they can ever hope to rise 
 into glad and hopeful moral enterprise. If 
 they must drag with them all the sense of fail- 
 ure and of guilt which pursues them from the 
 past, into the problems which await them in the 
 present and future, then they are convinced 
 that real progress is impossible. And they are 
 surely right. The past must be dealt with, if 
 there is to be hope for the future. 
 
 The problem of forgiveness for past sins is 
 part of the problem of moral progress. And 
 it is the first part of moral progress, the most 
 urgent part, in multitudes of lives. And Christ 
 has come to reveal, in time, the attitude of the 
 
What Does Christ Do for Us? 75 
 
 heart of God, to all who seek emancipation 
 from the tyranny of the past, in order to 
 become what God meant them to be in the 
 present and in the future. He has come in 
 God's name to absolve oppressed souls, to 
 make the new beginning gloriously possible. 
 
 In His own personality Christ reveals the 
 holiness and mercy of God. It is not a mere 
 good-natured message of pardon which He 
 gives. The forgiveness which He offers 
 springs from the depths of the holiness of 
 God. 
 
 It is easy enough for a morally shallow 
 parent to good-naturedly forgive the serious 
 wrong done by his child, without in any way 
 feeling the pang of the wrong in his own 
 being. And such shallow forgiveness works a 
 double evil in the life of the child, it gives him 
 a sense of the weak moral nature of his parent, 
 and a feeble sense of the horror of sin. It is 
 only when forgiveness springs from the depths 
 of a parent's moral nature, when forgiveness 
 bears the marks of love that is born of holi- 
 ness, and consequently is distressed because of 
 the fact of sin, it is only then that forgiveness 
 has a redeeming influence upon a child's life. 
 It is then that a child sees there is self- 
 sacrifice in a parent's forgiveness. He sees 
 
76 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 the depths of the moral nature of his parent, 
 and also he sees the exceeding sinfuhiess of sin. 
 
 This is the vision which Christ gives of the 
 heart of God in the attitude of forgiving sinful 
 men. He not only reveals the infinite love of 
 God but the essential holiness of God. And 
 when love and holiness, which are one, forgive 
 sin, by their very nature they suffer. Christ 
 is the revelation, in time, of the self-sacrifice 
 of a holy, loving God in the attitude of forgiv- 
 ing sin. And we are conscious in our souls of 
 the fact of forgiveness, and also of the love and 
 holiness from which the forgiveness springs. 
 The consciousness of this is as real in the 
 experience of people all about us, as their sense 
 of the outer world. They live, and they are 
 ready to die, in the firm assurance of it. 
 
 It is Christ's message of forgiveness which 
 has given us our fresh start, as it gave Saul of 
 Tarsus and the redeemed in all ages, their 
 new moral enthusiasm. And the fact of our 
 forgiveness is as vivid to us as any other fact in 
 our existence. The most tangible realities have 
 their explanation in our sense of forgiveness — 
 our joy, our zest in life, our passion for moral 
 progress. Without our sense of forgiveness, 
 our life would be like a garden of flowers 
 which had been frost bitten. 
 
What Does Christ Do for Us? 77 
 
 There are very many whose immediate 
 sense of need is not so much the need of for- 
 giveness as an inteUigible interpretation of 
 God for which their minds have been instinct- 
 ively searching. And it is a matter of actual 
 experience that Christ has given them the 
 answer. They are prepared to testify that 
 their minds are satisfied with the vision of God 
 which Christ has given. They are content to 
 let Christ be their point of contact with all that 
 is in the unseen world. Christ has gathered 
 up the broken revelations of God made by 
 prophets and sages and poets, and has unified 
 them in His own personality. 
 
 It may be our own experience that we were 
 bewildered by the vast realms of truth 
 which we had neither time nor the ability to 
 explore, and we observed that those who had 
 given up their lives to speculative enquiry in 
 those realms have in many instances reached 
 no satisfying conclusions. There was there- 
 fore no encouragement for us to find intel- 
 lectual peace in that direction. But through 
 contact with Christ we found mental satisfac- 
 tion. We become intellectually reconciled to 
 the situation, in the seen and in the unseen 
 worlds, because of the light which He has shed. 
 Christ gave us a working contact with the 
 
78 Religion and the Growing JVIind 
 
 universe. He brought God within the scope of 
 our intelligence. He simplified ideas of God 
 to the range of our capacity. And the result 
 is that we are not paralysed by mystery, or 
 vastness. We find ourselves at home in the 
 midst of the immensity which astronomy 
 reveals, and of the antiquity of the world pro- 
 claimed by geology. Our minds stayed upon 
 Christ, we are at peace, and it is not a passive 
 peace either, but a peace flowing from a posi- 
 tive, vital, contact with the seen and the unseen 
 worlds. And we know this to be true, our 
 experience in the matter is of the very essence 
 of reality. And it is the revelation of Christ 
 which has made it possible. 
 
 There are many who are not greatly troubled 
 by the intellectual outlook but they are per- 
 plexed as to how they are to become sharers 
 in the power that is necessary in order to live 
 the highest kind of life. They are conscious 
 that there is Divine power available, but the 
 problem is to establish a point of contact with 
 it for the practical purposes of life. Just as 
 engineers long saw that there was power in 
 the current of Niagara which might be trans- 
 formed into electricity to drive machinery, and 
 illumine cities. But the engineering problem 
 was to make the power in Niagara available. 
 
What Does Christ Do for Us? 79 
 
 to obtain it in a workable form, and to trans- 
 mit it to the point of need. That problem has 
 been solved, the power houses on the banks of 
 Niagara transform the energy in the river cur- 
 rent into light, heat and power to minister to 
 human need in distant cities. And Christ has 
 gathered the power of God into Himself for 
 transmission to the point of human need. He 
 has become a power house, as it were, for the 
 bringing of the energy of God into an 
 approachable, practical, relation to the moral 
 needs of men. He has become the point of 
 contact with that energy which God has to 
 bestow for the necessities of human life. 
 
 Without Christ the power of God is a vague, 
 intangible, unapproachable, reality. With a 
 sense of awe, we see Divine power at work 
 in holding the speeding worlds in their courses. 
 We think of it as present In the glowing galaxy 
 of suns, in the renewal of nature upon our own 
 planet. But how shall we come into contact 
 with that power for the renewal of our stag- 
 gering lives? How shall the exhausted ener- 
 gies of our being be replenished for the tasks 
 of our existence? That is our practical ques- 
 tion. And Christ is God's practical answer. 
 Christ is the power of God. And it has be- 
 come a working fact in our lives up to the 
 
80 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 measure of the reality of our vital contact 
 with Christ. And it is the testimony of multi- 
 tudes that the power of Christ has broken the 
 tyranny of evil habit in their lives. It has 
 renewed the exhausted, the weak, the diseased, 
 will. It has endowed character with moral 
 capital so that bankrupt lives have gone back 
 into life with the zest of a fresh start. And 
 this is just as true in spiritual experience as 
 it is true in another sense in the world of busi- 
 ness where men of large financial resources 
 carry on gigantic enterprises. A great nation 
 like the United States can carry out the task 
 of making a Panama canal, because the na- 
 tional treasury is behind all the patience, skill, 
 and courage. 
 
 And so the power of God is in Christ to be 
 drawn upon for the small and the large moral 
 enterprises before us all. Christ has thus be- 
 come to us our point of contact with Divine 
 forgiveness, enlightenment, and power. And 
 these have become practical realities in the 
 living of life. The feelings may be all the 
 other way. One^s mood may be so depressed 
 and antagonistic to the will as to almost indi- 
 cate the paralysis of the will. But Christ 
 informs the will that it is not only pos- 
 sible for it to act in the most adverse circum- 
 
What Does Christ Do for Us? 81 
 
 stances, but that it is absolutely imperative to 
 do so. The will dare not surrender to anything 
 except to light upon the road of life. Any 
 lower surrender defeats the end Christ has in 
 view as He co-operates with us in the making 
 of personality. And personality can never be 
 developed except as the will recognises both 
 its power and its duty to maintain the su- 
 premacy. Imagination may be a powerful 
 inspiration, or hindrance to the will. It may 
 be its very greatest ally. 
 
 And that has always been the intention of 
 Christ. He always has insisted, that the imag- 
 ination shall not be permitted to handicap the 
 will. The will shall not move in one direction 
 and the imagination in another. Christ in- 
 spires the imagination to paint hopefully the 
 picture of the future, He insists that the imag- 
 ination shall look out with concentration upon 
 every situation, with that hopefulness which 
 takes into account the Divine power, presence, 
 and providence. 
 
 When Christ urged men not to be anxious 
 about the morrow, it was not in order to 
 weaken devotion to the practical tasks of life, 
 but in order to have imagination undivided 
 and consecrated to the problems which the will 
 has actually to undertake. Christ was con- 
 
82 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 tiniially busy upon the human imagination, 
 inspiring it, so that it should become a strong 
 ally of the will in the doing of the Divine will. 
 It is when imagination becomes a co-worker 
 with thought under the direction of the will 
 and all of them inspired by Christ, that the 
 elemental life within is stirred. It is in the 
 elemental depths of being that we reach the 
 heroic zone, it is there that heroisms are 
 born. It is there that life is unified, so that 
 its various parts like the various parts of a 
 locomotive unified by the driving power of 
 steam, become possessed by the dominating 
 passion of doing the will of Christ. And in 
 that attitude a Christian personality becomes a 
 growing reality which is the greatest thing on 
 this planet, finding itself in what we call time 
 and eternity at the same moment, the facts 
 of time and eternity acting upon it while per- 
 sonality assimilates both in the expansion of its 
 ageless life. 
 
IX 
 
 OBEDIENCE TO THE WILL OF CHRIST 
 
 OBEDIENCE to Christ is the outward 
 expression of the reaHty of faith and 
 prayer. It is the counterpart of the 
 inner life. 
 
 Our Master has a universal programme to 
 unfold, to incarnate, in human society. And 
 He has His programme in His own hands. 
 He alone can direct His vast campaign. For 
 His purposes stretch from individual lives to 
 the universal, and through all time. Such a 
 programme is too immense for any other than 
 Himself to administer. And in the adminis- 
 tration of His world purpose He is seeking for 
 those who will surrender themselves to Him, 
 so that they shall become the instruments in 
 the achievement of His plans. 
 
 Thus it becomes clear that the first step 
 towards our co-operation with Christ in the 
 bringing in of the Kingdom of God upon earth 
 is not merely by our doing some good in the 
 
 83 
 
84 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 world, but in surrendering ourselves to Him, 
 to do the good He would have us do. 
 
 It is only in this way that there can be any 
 approximation to the carrying out of a plan 
 that shall have unity of design in it. It is only 
 through genuine surrender to Christ that His 
 true programme can be unfolded, that a large, 
 universal idea can sway the whole of Christian 
 activity, it is only in this way that mere indi- 
 vidual hobbies, and prejudices, can be con- 
 quered, and subdued, into one dominating pur- 
 pose, plan, and spirit. Therefore we say that 
 surrender to Christ is the point of contact 
 between Christ and our souls, if we are to have 
 some intelligent share in the coming of the 
 Kingdom of God in this world, if we are to be 
 something, and do something, that shall be in 
 harmony with the spirit and the activity of all 
 those who are true disciples of Christ. 
 
 For, after all, what this world needs is not 
 only people who will do things, but who will 
 do things without overlapping, and confusion, 
 things that are of primary importance, which, 
 when done, will make it unnecessary that other 
 secondary things should be done, and that what 
 is done shall be done in the right spirit. And 
 surrender to Christ, to the spirit and purpose 
 of the living Christ, means to move in this 
 
Obedience to the Will of Christ 85 
 
 direction. But this word surrender has been 
 worn thin. It has been given a very narrow 
 meaning by some, it has been interpreted to 
 mean giving up a few things which have been 
 disapproved by the Christian social conscience. 
 But it has a much more profound meaning than 
 that. Surrender to Christ implies giving up the 
 life to His purpose, rather than to try to use 
 His power for our small, and local ambitions. 
 
 When Abraham Lincoln said he was not 
 anxious to have God on his side, but he was 
 greatly concerned to be on God's side, he 
 declared the principle for which we are here 
 contending. Surrender to Christ means to let 
 His Spirit control us, to be willing to be led by 
 Him, rather than by our ambitions. And in 
 order to make surrender a really strong and 
 vital fact in experience, the summoning of the 
 whole being will be necessary. Mere earnest- 
 ness is not enough, it is an appeal for the exer- 
 cise of hard thinking, and of a will that wills 
 to translate the mind of Christ into conduct. 
 
 While we are in the attitude of surrender, 
 Christ becomes responsible for the development 
 of our spiritual life. There are some people 
 who, in their earnestness, worry a great deal 
 concerning their spiritual growth. They are 
 continually consulting their feelings to see 
 
86 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 whether they are just as spiritual, and just as 
 happy, as they were on some previous conspic- 
 uous occasion, and if they are not quite up to 
 the mark they are more or less distressed. 
 Now we do not here criticise the motive in this 
 performance, but we certainly condemn the 
 method. For instead of helping the soul it 
 discourages it, and it makes for morbid self- 
 consciousness, and it identifies religion with 
 emotionalism. 
 
 Our spiritual development is far too impor- 
 tant a matter to be made to rest upon the state 
 of our feelings, or even to be left in our hands. 
 Our business is to fulfill conditions, it is the 
 concern of our Lord to see that our spiritual 
 development is realised. It is not a mark of 
 faith to worry over it, it is rather a mark of 
 sheer unbelief. And if we maintain the atti- 
 tude of surrender our Master will take care of 
 our influence. Influence is a by-product of 
 fidelity. Genuine influence must always come 
 by indirection. And it is because some good 
 people fail to see tfiis, that they keep awake at 
 night thinking how they can make their influ- 
 ence more secure. And they consequently try 
 too hard to make an impression upon others, 
 and others detect the artificial element. For it 
 becomes oppressive, self-conscious, strained 
 
Obedience to the Will of Christ 87 
 
 piety. And instead of exerting an influence, 
 they have no influence simply because they 
 took the matter into their own hands, instead 
 of leaving it absolutely with their Master. 
 And the pity of it all is that the motive may 
 have been high, but the method hopelessly 
 wrong. 
 
 If we are surrendered to the spirit and will 
 of Christ, He will certainly preserve our influ- 
 ence against any ungenerous attitude of the 
 world. But we must trust Him in the matter, 
 for we may see no signs of such preservation. 
 For the time being it may seem to be all the 
 other way, and simple faith will be the only 
 thing to keep us from panic. It is in this way 
 we enter into freedom from bondage to self- 
 consciousness, from the paralysing grasp of 
 fears which contract personality into withered 
 smallness. 
 
 We find our true life, our natural spiritual 
 expansion, as we maintain a healthy self- 
 forget fulness in the attitude of companionship 
 with Christ. And this attitude is maintained 
 through the habitual exercise of the prayer of 
 faith on the one hand,, and instant obedience 
 on the other. For obedience is the energetic 
 sequel to the prayer of faith. They are two 
 parts of one vital whole. And they act and 
 
88 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 react upon each other. And it is as we thus 
 live in the companionship of the actual pres- 
 ence of our Lord that we become partakers of 
 the forgiveness of God. And the depths of 
 our nature are satisfied. ^ What the world had 
 absolutely failed to do for us in the direction 
 of giving inner satisfaction and rest takes place 
 as a result of fellowship with Christ. And in 
 so far as we are able to maintain implicit trust 
 in the actual presence of Christ, we are able to 
 live above discouragement. For discourage- 
 ment arises when we come to an end of our 
 inner resources. 
 
 Discouragement is inner bankruptcy. But 
 there is no such thing if we continually believe 
 that there is with us a presence and power 
 equal to all occasions. When we believe that 
 there is actually behind us, and in us, a pres- 
 ence infinitely greater than our moods of 
 depression, or our sense of personal weakness, 
 a power which is sufificient for all our tasks and 
 emergencies, we have found the antidote 
 against discouragement. And not only so, but 
 in the life of companionship with Christ there 
 arises a sense of Divine providence over- 
 shadowing every step of our way. Whatever 
 happens to us, as we live in union with our 
 Master, and His will, is all right so far as our 
 
Obedience to the Will of Christ 89 
 
 highest interests are concerned. What comes 
 to us may be the result of unreasonableness, 
 stupidity, or cruelty, on the part of others. 
 Yet they only succeed in making our own lives 
 deeper, more patient, more charitable. 
 
 If we were not living in fellowship with 
 Christ, with a sense of an overruling provi- 
 dence protecting our highest concerns, the 
 same set of circumstances would probably drive 
 us into bitterness, impatience, and hatred. We 
 see every day the same experience producing 
 totally different results, some are strengthened 
 and purified, while others are weakened and 
 made gross. The same fire which melts wax 
 hardens clay. The same sun which ripens into 
 fruit the blossoming branches of an apple tree, 
 causes a branch which has been severed from 
 the tree to wither. 
 
 We see therefore that Christ cares for our 
 spiritual life in the largest way possible, as we 
 abide in His presence by faith, and in the atti- 
 tude of surrender to His will. He cannot do 
 the best for us except as we forget ourselves 
 in our willingness to obey Him in the bringing 
 in of the Kingdom of God in the world. We 
 cannot be spiritually developed by remaining 
 in aloofness from the needs of the world. We 
 cannot grow by losing sight of the larger pur- 
 
90 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 poses of Christ, and by being concerned only 
 for the peace and happiness of our own souls. 
 
 Such a method of spiritual progress is not 
 the method of Christ, and it is not the method 
 by which the strongest and most virile types 
 of Christian character have been produced. 
 The highest knowledge comes to us in doing 
 the will of Christ, and it is not a mere intel- 
 lectual knowledge which we lay upon the 
 shelves of our memory and rarely use, it is a 
 knowledge which becomes part of the working 
 capital of daily life. 
 
 A deepening sense of the presence of Christ 
 comes to us in the way of obedience. And 
 the keenest sympathy with our fellowmen 
 comes to us in our attempt to serve them 
 according to the Divine will. 
 
X 
 
 THE DANGEROUS WHISPER IN THE SOUL 
 
 WHEN the will resolves to co-operate 
 with the mind of Christ in carry- 
 ing out His purposes in and 
 through us we become vividly conscious of 
 antagonistic influences, subtle whisperings 
 within us call us in other directions. We be- 
 come aware that the spiritual life is haunted 
 by a false voice, by suggestions which if fol- 
 lowed lead to confusion, sorrow, dishonour. It 
 is enough to know that temptation is a great 
 reality of which we are painfully conscious. 
 We cannot get away from the fact by the dis- 
 cussion of its mystery. The suggestion which 
 the false whisper makes within us is not neces- 
 sarily grotesque, outrageous. It may not be 
 the suggestion of an absolute, black, falsehood, 
 it may simply be a half truth. The tempta- 
 tions which assailed Jesus were half truths. 
 They were twisted quotations from Scripture. 
 We are not all tempted to maliciously slan- 
 
 91 
 
92 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 der people, but we all know what it is to be 
 inclined to utter a few mean spirited remarks. 
 Or it may be an ungenerous silence to which 
 we are tempted to succumb, or to a subtle 
 cynical attitude. An observer would hardly 
 notice it, but it registers itself tipon our own 
 inner life. Of course, there is no sin in being 
 tempted, temptation becomes sin only when 
 there is surrender to it. We are not thieves 
 because a burglar tries to get into our house. 
 And many young people who have sensitive 
 consciences are sometimes greatly distressed, 
 beause they have not made a clear distinction 
 between temptation as an involuntary sugges- 
 tion made to the mind, and as an overture 
 accepted by the will. 
 
 The fact of being tempted is something for 
 which we are not responsible. Indeed, tempta- 
 tion plays an absolutely necessary part in our 
 moral progress. There can be no real develop- 
 ment, no moral refinement, without it. With- 
 out temptation Jesus would have remained 
 unsullied but immature, spotless but not strong. 
 
 There is no such thing as Christian character 
 except as the highest is chosen in the presence 
 of the temptation to choose what is lower. The 
 greatest enemy of the highest is not neces- 
 sarily the lowest, but the lower than the high- 
 
Dangerous Whisper in the Soul 93 
 
 est. The arch enemy of the best is not the 
 worst, but the second best. And a part of the 
 subtlety of the temptation is that nobody seems 
 to keenly observe the difference between our 
 choice of the highest as against what is lower 
 than the highest. But there is that difference 
 which exists between chivalry and mediocrity. 
 
 And the difference is always indicated upon 
 our own souls, however blind the outside world 
 may be to it. While we are always haunted 
 by temptation, there are times when we are 
 especially exposed to it. One of those times 
 is after hard strain at work or play. The hour 
 of reaction is a dangerous period, just as after 
 a shot is fired from a gun, it recoils upon the 
 shoulder and will blacken it, if one is not pre- 
 pared for the recoil, so must we be prepared 
 for inner reaction. Our greatest temptations 
 may come to us after our most exalted, our 
 most spiritual, experiences. It was so with 
 Jesus. And we must not think that our experi- 
 ence at a communion service, or on some other 
 hallowed occasion, was spurious because it was 
 followed by suggestions that were of a differ- 
 ent order. The thing is not surprising and it 
 is wisdom to be prepared for it. 
 
 The days after a prolonged college exam- 
 ination, after a convention, the hours after a 
 
94 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 day's hard work, these experiences call for 
 places of refuge for the inner life in the grip 
 of reaction. There must be the provision of 
 some pure, healthy occupation or amusement 
 in which the relaxed mind may rest, and be 
 refreshed, without being weakened or strained. 
 
 While temptation presents itself in a wide 
 variety of forms, we have a comprehensive 
 classification into three phases in the tempta- 
 tion of our Lord, which indicate the lines along 
 which the false whisper comes to us. The 
 first phase is the suggestion to satisfy physical 
 craving by surrendering the claims and rights 
 of the soul. For example, we may have had a 
 day of exhausting toil and the body needs rest. 
 But the soul also requires spiritual contempla- 
 tion, communion, prayer. Shall the mood of 
 the body conquer the rights of the soul? Shall 
 we permit the interests of our higher life to be 
 defeated by the pleadings of physical desire? 
 Shall we allow the will to surrender to mere 
 physical inclination simply because it is easier? 
 
 The second phase of temptation as illus- 
 trated by the experience of Jesus is to trust to 
 the help of God in an act or career of self-will. 
 To obey the whisper of the sinister voice 
 within and then to say that God will take care 
 of us upon the self-chosen path. To cast our- 
 
Dangerous Whisper in the Soul 95 
 
 selves down from the place of duty to the 
 abyss of self-will and to be deceived into think- 
 ing that in so doing God will give His angels 
 charge concerning us. That is the temptation 
 which has a firm grasp upon a man when he 
 says that even although he lives a careless life, 
 the love of the Divine Father will protect and 
 save him. 
 
 It is a plausible half truth, and consequently 
 a most dangerous error. The love of the 
 Divine Father is a great fact, but it can do 
 nothing for us except as the human will co- 
 operates with the Divine love. The redeeming 
 love of God makes it possible for us all to make 
 a fresh start in a life of obedience to the Divine 
 will, but it does not, and cannot, save us except 
 as we rise to it by definite choice. The love of 
 God is not a substitute for human character, it 
 is the opportunity which we embrace in order 
 to achieve character. The love of God cannot 
 redeem a life until that life through the energy 
 of the will co-operates in the redeeming pro- 
 gramme. 
 
 'And the third phase of temptation which 
 is emphasised by the experience of Jesus 
 is to seek success by a short path across for- 
 bidden ground. Success is a perfectly legiti- 
 mate ambition if it comes honestly and 
 
96 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 naturally. But if we obtain it by surrender to 
 what we know to be wrong, even although the 
 surrender may be ever so brief, we have paid 
 a terrible price for what must turn out to be a 
 bad bargain. 
 
 If one should succeed in an examination by 
 surreptitiously getting help from a neighbour 
 at the examination what a miserable thing the 
 success must turn out to be. If one should 
 make a fortune by misrepresenting a competi- 
 tor the situation would not be saved even if 
 the whole fortune were given away to philan- 
 thropic causes. The generous act could not 
 wipe out the stain upon the inner life, nor could 
 it atone for the injustice done to the neighbour. 
 The modern mind is terribly tempted by this 
 sinister suggestion to win success at the price 
 of a surrender of moral principle, and then 
 to make up for the surrender by giving away 
 the fruits of success to good causes. But we 
 greatly need to revise our ideals of success. 
 There are few things the rising generation re- 
 quire to keep more steadily before the mind 
 than the fact that genuine success must spring 
 from the inner life in remaining true to the 
 spirit and mind of Christ. 
 
 The elements out of which a satisfying suc- 
 cess is made must include a clean conscience, 
 
Dangerous Whisper in the Soul 97 
 
 a kind spirit, a clear head, and an iron will. 
 And if we should find that we cannot make a 
 great worldly success by insisting that all of 
 these shall go into our scheme of life, then we 
 must simply follow our Master in being content 
 with what comes. After all, the man who gets 
 all he desires, by the surrender of his higher 
 self, does not really possess the things he has 
 obtained. He must often feel that the dead- 
 ening of his inner sensibilities by being untrue 
 to them, has taken the keen edge off his power 
 to enjoy what he has gathered about him. 
 While the man who retains the keen sensi- 
 bility and the power of enthusiastic apprecia- 
 tion, which spring from keeping the native 
 pieties of the soul unsullied, may get far more 
 real satisfaction out of his humbler lot. Be- 
 sides, those who are true to their deepest selves 
 in their life, and work, in this world are doing 
 far more for the solving of the intricate and 
 urgent social problems of our time. 
 
 No amount of mere philanthropy, or mere 
 mental brilliance, which winks at wrong, can 
 make up for simple, transparent, conduct, in 
 the solving of the modern social situation. 
 Christ is seeking to bring in the Kingdom of 
 God upon earth, and He will do it through 
 those who are willing to carry out His spirit 
 
98 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 and will in life at any cost, and in so doing, are 
 ready to resist plausible temptations to seek 
 success apart from the Christian temper. For 
 the Kingdom of God on earth is simply the 
 spirit of Christ, the plan, the purpose of Christ, 
 reigning in human society. And if we are will- 
 ing to take our ideals from Christ, our spirit, 
 and programme, from Him, and all the conse- 
 quences which may fall upon us personally for 
 weal or woe as a result of such an attitude, 
 then we march with those who shall yet bring 
 in a new day of brotherhood and peace upon 
 the earth. 
 
XI 
 
 THE DIVINE WHISPER IN THE SOUL 
 
 IN our attempt to translate the mind of 
 Christ into conduct, we have the aid of 
 the spirit of God within us. It is not 
 necessary for us to ask Him to come to us. He 
 has come already. The human soul is the cen- 
 tral sphere of the overtures of the Divine 
 Spirit. Since He is everywhere present, He 
 is supremely present within ourselves. The 
 difference between lives is that some possess 
 the spirit, while others are possessed by the 
 spirit, as it may be said of some that they pos- 
 sess ideas, while others are possessed by them. 
 And the way by which the spirit gains the 
 ascendency within us is through permitting 
 Him to get possession of our next thought. It 
 is the next thought that is the highway along 
 which the spirit enters into possession of our 
 growing personality. He waits for the human 
 will to admit Him through the concentration 
 of the mind upon what He would have us 
 
 99 
 
100 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 think, and do. For it is possible for us to 
 attempt our part in the programme of Christ, 
 either in our own way or by the help of the 
 Divine Spirit. The Holy Spirit seeks to aid 
 us in carrying out the mind of Christ. 
 
 The Holy Spirit within us moves along cer- 
 tain psychological lines as He seeks to co-oper- 
 ate with us in the doing of the will of Christ, 
 just as electricity must have wires along which 
 it moves. And as wires of certain metals are 
 better conductors of electricity than others, so 
 there are certain attitudes of our inner life 
 which lend themselves most advantageously to 
 obtaining the aid of the power of the Spirit in 
 doing the will of Christ. Or there are certain 
 attitudes which the Spirit creates when we 
 surrender to Him. 
 
 As we have already remarked mental con- 
 centration is the first psychological condition 
 of the Spirit's co-operation with us. Or we 
 may say that the Holy Spirit helps us to attain 
 to the concentration of the mind and in this 
 He becomes the inspirer and educator of our 
 intellectual life. While at the same time all 
 straining, all over-anxiety, defeats the Spirit in 
 His attempt to help us to live and act. We 
 mean by straining that same temptation to 
 which the golfer is exposed when he tries too 
 
Divine Whisper in the Soul 101 
 
 hard to strike the ball, and drives it only a 
 short distance. " Relax," " Do not press," 
 these are the expressions used by the experi- 
 enced golfer to the novice. And they apply 
 in every phase of life as well as in golf. Strain 
 is a non-conductor of spiritual power. It is so 
 in the matter of anxiety for influence; it 
 applies in speaking; some people even strain 
 too much in listening to others, they try too 
 hard to show their interest. It is a habit which 
 has become chronic in some instances, for even 
 while sitting still there is no mental attitude of 
 repose, there is an unnecessary expenditure of 
 psychic force which causes physical exhaustion. 
 
 It is this habit of straining which is a fre- 
 quent cause of nervous prostration, and it may 
 take place in lives which have not a great deal 
 of work to do. We may strain over anything, 
 we may expend, as it were, the energy neces- 
 sary to cut down a tree in the act of driving 
 a nail. And in trying too hard we shut off 
 the real power which should find expression 
 in our lives. It is like applying the brakes on 
 a train while the steam is full on, which means 
 the expenditure of power in opposite directions 
 and the result is not only friction but enor- 
 mous tear and wear. 
 
 If we are therefore to experience the help 
 
102 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 of the Holy Spirit in our hfe and work we 
 must give Him an opportunity to express His 
 power. We must not apply the brakes of 
 over-anxiety about anything, for however high 
 our motive may be, we simply succeed in de- 
 feating the end we have in view. It is possible 
 for us to counteract all this, to bring ourselves 
 into a state of repose, into a relaxed psychic 
 condition, by the habitual exercise of the will, 
 reinforced by the aid of faith, informing the 
 will of the presence of the power of the Spirit 
 who is our ally in the difficult task. 
 
 Hurry is also a non-conductor of spiritual 
 power; we here speak of hurry as a mental 
 attitude. Hurry is too keen upon the next 
 thing or the thing after that, it has no past or 
 present. It lives in the immediate or remote, 
 future. Hurry does not treat the present 
 moment and its task with adequate seriousness. 
 It is apt to be disrespectful to the thing in 
 hand. 
 
 That is why people are apt to resent our 
 hurry, that is why they look upon hurry as 
 undignified. Because in the attitude of hurry 
 we have surrendered the present to the future. 
 That is to run away from the spirit of God, 
 it is to get out of step with the true rhythm of 
 life. Consequently it not only cheapens the 
 
Divine Whisper in the Soul 103 
 
 work in hand, but it vulgarises our own soul. 
 If there is to be true vision of the things that 
 really count in life, if there is to be a place of 
 honour for the memories and friendships of 
 the past, if there is to be a spirit of contentment 
 within us, if we are to translate the mind of 
 Christ into life, hurry must give place to 
 concentrated leisureliness. 
 
 Deliberate leisureliness is both the fruit of 
 the presence of the Spirit, and the condition of 
 His control over us. It is by this means we 
 approach our work with our whole being, and 
 in our living we carry into the future our mem- 
 ories of the past, our obligations to friendships 
 and our inspirations from them. But in the 
 case of the mentally hurried both the memories 
 of the past, and the obligations of the present 
 are in the way of being sacrificed by a process 
 of elimination. In making for leisureliness in 
 living the Divine Spirit thus seeks to keep us 
 faithful to our friendships of the past, to the 
 memories of the past which should have an 
 influence upon us, and also faithful to the 
 sacred importance of the work of the pres- 
 ent hour. 
 
 A great man said he was too busy to be 
 in a hurry. For it is the present hour 
 which is the most sacred hour in our 
 
V 
 
 104 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 lives, it is the one hour which we can 
 make vital with reahty. 
 
 Fear is another non-conductor of spiritual 
 power, the fear of people, of circumstances, of 
 the consequences of a decision, or of a step 
 which we know to be right. It arises through 
 the imagination being uncontrolled by the will, 
 or misdirected. The imagination instead of 
 being an ally to the rest of the life in its effort 
 to advance has become an enemy, its influ- 
 ence tending to repress and contract person- 
 ality, rather than to encourage and expand it, 
 so that the powers of the inner life are par- 
 alysed. And the result is far reaching in its 
 effects. The spirit is depressed, and joyless, 
 and even the body suffers from the benumb- 
 ing influence. 
 
 We greatly underestimate the influence of 
 fear upon our physical life. It may be that 
 some chronic fear which has no right what- 
 ever to be in our lives is the only cause of our 
 remaining physically below par. And in this 
 condition we spread the contagion of depres- 
 sion. But fear cannot be dispelled merely by 
 willing. The will must be reinforced by an 
 energy capable of dispelling it. And that 
 energy is love, sympathy, the outgoing of our 
 elemental life in unselfish contact with others. 
 
Divine Whisper in the Soul 105 
 
 As light dispels darkness, so "perfect love 
 casteth out fear." 
 
 Of course, we are here speaking of love as a 
 working force, not as a mere gush of feeling 
 which may be neither ethical nor rational. 
 
 It is that power which is the soul of life, 
 and in which all the activities of our mind find 
 their highest possibility. But how are we 
 to get love started as a working force? 
 
 The Spirit of God as we obey His prompt- 
 ings in the common tasks of the day, sheds 
 abroad within us the sense of the Divine love 
 towards us. It is a matter of experience that 
 as obedient souls we become increasingly con- 
 scious of living in the encircling love of God 
 revealed through Christ. 
 
 The Divine Love becomes the sun of our 
 soul. And while we are in the attitude of 
 obedience in the ordinary affairs of daily life, 
 this sense of the Divine love to us works out 
 into our relation to others as the light of the 
 sun is reflected from a window. Only it is 
 not a mere reflection in our case, it is the actual 
 working out of a divine quality. As we allow 
 the spirit of God to guide our thoughts, in that 
 normal attitude of mind, the essence of the 
 Divine being which is love takes possession 
 of us. And the Spirit seeks to arouse our will 
 
106 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 to translate the Divine deposit in our lives 
 into conduct. 
 
 The will is also stimulated in its work by 
 imagination picturing to us what others have 
 a right to receive from us, by imagination put- 
 ting us in other people's places, by our seeing 
 with clear vision the needs of other lives. 
 When we hear of some case of dire poverty 
 or terrible suffering, it is imagination which 
 inspires our will to action. Therefore we say 
 that if our imagination is under the control of 
 the Spirit of God it becomes a powerful aid 
 to the will in the direction of the expression of 
 sympathy. If, on the other hand, imagination 
 is not under the guidance of the Spirit, playing 
 the part of an uncontrolled faculty, then the 
 power of the will may not only be neutralised, 
 but also uninformed as to what to do. 
 • For thoughtlessness towards others often 
 simply arises through lack of imagination. The 
 imagination has been engaged, it may be, in 
 foolish and harmful work, when it might have 
 been busy informing the will of the needs of 
 others. It is clear then that the Divine Spirit 
 may aid us in establishing the psychological 
 conditions of spiritual power, and we also may 
 aid Him in gaining the ascendancy in our lives 
 by exercising the will upon these psychological 
 
Divine Whisper in the Soul 107 
 
 points. For His purpose within us is to com- 
 pletely unify our being so that we shall be able 
 to carry out into life the spirit and programme 
 of Christ. Our Divine helper seeks to make us 
 fit for our task, by making the inner life a unit, 
 and by that unit becoming a channel of the 
 energy of Divine love, and thus throwing off 
 the paralysing influence of fear. This is the 
 way in which we achieve our spiritual freedom. 
 
XII 
 
 WHAT IS OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS LIFE? 
 
 WHEN we have entered into compan- 
 ionship with the Hving Christ, in- 
 spired by the indwelHng presence 
 of His Spirit, we become conscious of having 
 a definite part in the world programme of our 
 Master. Our hfe and our local duties may be 
 very obscure, but that need not alter the fact 
 that we have a distinct part to play in a uni- 
 versal plan. It is our privilege when we live 
 in union with our Lord to be in the rhythm of 
 His world purpose. This does not depend in 
 any sense upon the largeness of our sphere, 
 nor upon the importance of our work, viewed 
 from a worldly point of view. We become 
 cosmopolitan in our outlook upon life because 
 our lives have become keyed to the cosmopoli- 
 tan note which is the genius of the programme 
 of Christ. Through the keyhole of a certain 
 garden gate in Rome it is possible to have a 
 most impressive view of the Church of St. 
 
 108 
 
Our Attitude towards Life 109 
 
 Peter. And from the narrowest lot in life it 
 is possible to have a worldwide outlook and 
 sympathy, to have a distinct part to play in the 
 most stupendous scheme that has ever claimed 
 the attention of the human mind. 
 
 Through our relation to Christ we have 
 become cosmopolitan in the very highest sense 
 of that word. We have a relation to the life 
 nearest to us, and to the last man in the islands 
 of the seas. We are related to the whole 
 world, and to the Eternal, at the same time. 
 But our relation to the world moves from the 
 centre outwards. Our bond with the large 
 affairs of the universal is through fidelity to 
 the small affairs of our particular sphere. The 
 duties of the hour provide our point of contact 
 with the vast concerns which are in the mind 
 of Christ. The work of the present hour may 
 not be congenial to us. The life work to which 
 many find themselves bound may not be the 
 work that they would choose for themselves. 
 
 But we rise above slavery to our work, by 
 doing it for Christ. That motive emancipates 
 our souls from the despotism of circumstances. 
 And that motive secures the development of 
 personality in any sphere of work or suffering, 
 and it is consistent with enterprise, fairness to 
 our neighbour, and the progress of the world. 
 
110 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 Our union with our Master may not free us 
 from the uncongenial task, but when we do 
 our work for Him, in His sight, we find that 
 we are free. The difficuUies of our lot instead 
 of throwing us into chains of servitude, only 
 tend to make the emancipation of our souls 
 more complete. 
 
 The man of largest Christian personahty 
 found his spiritual expansion in a hard place. 
 We maintain this attitude of inner freedom by 
 steadfastly refusing to be ensnared by the in- 
 fluence of past failures, and shortcomings. H 
 St. Paul had permitted his former mistakes to 
 invade the enthusiasms of his apostolic life, he 
 would have been paralysed into fatal depres- 
 sion, and discouragement. But in the forward 
 march of his life he dared not to think of his 
 past mistakes except through the forgiving 
 love of God in Christ. The presence of Christ 
 saved the new enthusiasms of the Apostle from 
 being frost bitten by the wintry blast of past 
 memories. And if we are to persist in our part 
 of the programme of Christ it must be through 
 the resolute exercise of the will as it insists 
 upon our thoughts being taken up with the 
 Divine will for us in the present rather than by 
 being intimidated, and weakened, by memories 
 which would turn enthusiasm into despair. 
 
Our Attitude towards Life 111 
 
 In this attitude of working upon our part of 
 the programme of Christ, and in doing it for 
 Him we find ourselves at peace with God, with 
 ourselves and with our fellowmen. For peace 
 is not something that comes down to us like 
 apples shaken from a tree. Peace is the result 
 of the fulfillment of certain conditions, as heat 
 or cold is. The peace which the presence 
 of Christ creates comes through our being 
 brought into normal relations with our 
 environment, as a dislocated joint brought 
 back into its normal position may result in 
 peace. In so far as we are obedient we find 
 ourselves at home in the presence of God. We 
 are reverent but unafraid, there is no strain or 
 shrinking in the relationship. 
 
 It is so natural that we increasingly find 
 Christ becoming the home of our thoughts, 
 they return to him for inspiration and adjust- 
 ment. The Eternal does not strike terror 
 within us, the solemn realities of the imseen 
 world become the source of our strength rather 
 than of perplexing dread. For we have noth- 
 ing to hide, nothing to fear, we are at one with 
 the Divine will. And we are at peace with 
 ourselves, in the sense that we have found a 
 dominating purpose, a ruling passion. The 
 will of Christ acting upon us both as a vision 
 
112 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 of practical duty, and as a motive in doing it, 
 secures for us the unification of our inner Hfe 
 in doing our share of work. It is just this 
 lack of a ruHng passion which is the cause of 
 inner dissatisfaction in many instances. 
 
 For example, a young woman comes home 
 from school or college with a magnificent 
 mental equipment, and her life is taken up with 
 a few light duties at home, some reading, exer- 
 cise, and amusement, but if there is no supreme 
 aim, if no one thing really dominates the mind, 
 then the working unity of the inner life has not 
 been secured. Several interests of equal 
 strength cancel the effectiveness of each other. 
 Conflicting motives unsettle and harass the 
 soul. The result is that while there may be 
 a very real culture of the faculties, there is no 
 deep peace, no abiding contentment, no fusion 
 of the faculties, in the pursuit of a dominating 
 aim. But the will of Christ, accepted as a pro- 
 gramme to be realised in practical life, as well 
 as a motive power in carrying it out, will bring 
 inner peace, contentment, and spiritual liberty. 
 No one, of course, dare say for another what 
 the programme of Christ shall be. We must 
 individually find that out for ourselves. It 
 may be that the things we are now doing from 
 day to day will remain the same. It may be 
 
Our Attitude towards Life 113 
 
 otherwise. But whether or not we shall be able 
 to bring the spiritual motive into what we do, 
 we shall be able to bring our lives into the mind 
 of Christ, and by so doing we have made pos- 
 sible the inner unity of our being. 
 
 Another element in the peace which the pres- 
 ence of the will of Christ in our lives estab- 
 lishes springs from being in sympathetic rela- 
 tionship with our fellow men. There can be 
 no deep peace for us if we live in cynical, or 
 even pious, aloofness from the problems of 
 humanity. An anti-social attitude of life or 
 mind makes peace a psychological impossi- 
 bility. Shrewd worldly detachment from the 
 cares of humanity, looking out only for per- 
 sonal advantage, is a tragedy in the soul. So 
 long as love does not reign within us in our 
 relation to our fellows, however perverse their 
 actions towards us may be, there can be no 
 genuine abiding peace. 
 
 It is as we fit our lives sympathetically into 
 the jolt and jar, into the plain and rude facts 
 of practical existence that we experience the 
 final element of peace. It was from the very 
 heart of such life that Jesus spoke of His 
 peace. It was while men repudiated Him, and 
 flung His sympathy towards them back into 
 His face that He maintained the attitude of 
 
114 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 unbroken kindness. And it was because He 
 thus patiently persisted in loving that He had 
 perfect peace. 
 
 It is as we face the problems of our lot, set 
 free from self-onsciousness, our life in har- 
 mony with God, ourselves, and the world, 
 finding our work, and our supreme motive in 
 doing it, through obedience to Christ, it is in 
 this attitude we are able to continue our task, 
 to keep steadily on our way. There are voices 
 calling us in every direction, some urging to 
 put the emphasis of our life and work on one 
 point, some on another, until multitudes are 
 confused and shift the emphasis of their life 
 from one point to another, back and forth, 
 according to the most recent or most powerful 
 influence brought to bear upon them. But 
 when we seek to take our direction from the 
 living Christ we are thus steadied in mind 
 against the bewildering distractions of our 
 
 time. 
 
 And this is one of the supreme needs, that 
 we shall persist in that type of life, and service 
 which we believe to be inspired by the mind of 
 Christ. For there is no guarantee whatever 
 of the continuance of that type of life or work 
 which is the mere echo of surroundings. It is 
 in this way all kinds of hobbies are taken up 
 
Our Attitude towards Life 115 
 
 enthusiastically for a time, and then abandoned 
 for something else. And in such activity there 
 can be no real approach towards anything like 
 unity of purpose among workers, nor towards 
 the deepening of the convictions of those work- 
 ers. If our work is to have a sacramental 
 influence upon our personality, the impulse of 
 that work must be born in the deeps of our 
 own rational and spiritual life. And it is as we 
 abide in Christ that what we do for Christ and 
 men becomes the expression of our deepest 
 selves, and not the mere impact of current opin- 
 ions stirring us into activity for a brief season. 
 
XIII 
 
 SERVICE FROM CENTRE TO CIRCUMFERENCE 
 
 IN our relation to the world programme of 
 Christ our immediate sphere of activity 
 will, of course, depend upon our natural 
 gifts, our education, our circumstances, and 
 our willingness to be led by the Divine will. 
 Whatever may be the work that shall engage 
 the largest amount of our time, and thought, 
 the thing of first importance in connection with 
 it is that we shall there be able to be true to 
 the Spirit of Christ. That being understood, 
 we can serve the purpose of Christ in any 
 sphere which, so far as we can see, is the place 
 for us. For the first contribution which we 
 make to the coming of the Kingdom of God 
 on earth is that which springs from the incor- 
 ruptible integrity of our own being. As we 
 live in fellowship with our Lord in any form 
 of enterprise, whether it be commercial, pro- 
 fessional, or whatever it may be, we throw off 
 all unconsciously an influence which is the most 
 
 116 
 
From Centre to Circumference 117 
 
 powerful and uplifting reality in the coming of 
 the Divine Kingdom, 
 
 Nothing can be more important than the 
 Spirit of Christ in a life as a contribution to the 
 solution of the problems of human society. No 
 amount of cleverness, or industry, can make up 
 for the lack of that Spirit which is at once 
 both strong principle, and an atmosphere of 
 kindness. It is the first thing which we owe 
 to this world, to our families, our friends, and 
 to the outer circle of our obligations. Our 
 patriotism is not genuine unless we are genu- 
 ine. A man owes a contribution of personal 
 integrity to the concern of which he may be a 
 member, or an employee. It is an entirely false 
 view of corporate life to say that a man's pri- 
 vate character is a purely personal affair. It is 
 nothing of the kind. If the national expense 
 incurred by the sins of men and women, the 
 evil example of their lives, the false standards, 
 and precedents they have set up, the discour- 
 agement of other lives through their brutal 
 actions, if the whole black mortgage upon soci- 
 ety could be wiped out, if every man lived a 
 straight and Christlike life we should begin to 
 see the outlines of the Heavenly Kingdom 
 on earth. 
 
 The Kingdom of God must first come within 
 
118 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 ourselves. And it has come as we remain in 
 the attitude of surrender to the mind of Christ. 
 This is the first contribution which we bring 
 to our family life when we leave our room 
 in the morning. And if we do not bring that 
 contribution into the heart of our family life, 
 it is not likely that we shall genuinely bring 
 it elsewhere. For the unit of Christian Society 
 is the family. And no civihsation can ever 
 ignore the stability of the family life which 
 is its base. 
 
 In our modern haste for large results, for 
 conspicuous successes, let us solemnly ask, 
 have we paid the obligation we owe at home? 
 have we brought the spirit of Christ to the 
 breakfast table? Have we brought our share 
 of conviction to the establishing, maintaining 
 and vitalising of family religion? Have we 
 brought as much of our intelligent, patient, 
 interested selves to the hour of leisure around 
 the fireside as we have brought to outside 
 causes? Have the members of our families 
 received from us what we have imparted to 
 others? Many clever answers are given by 
 us to such questions when we try to vindicate 
 ourselves in embarrassing moments of con- 
 scious neglect of our own inner circle. But the 
 fact remains that it is because of the impov- 
 
From Centre to Circumference 119 
 
 erishment, the weakening, of family life 
 through absorbing interests elsewhere that our 
 social problems are aggravated and made 
 more intricate all along the line. 
 
 Family life as an institution is a moral 
 achievement of the centuries and to neglect it, 
 to disfigure it, to dishonour it, is to go back- 
 wards. It matters not what kind of act it is that 
 mars the beauty, the peace, the moral prog- 
 ress of the family life, it is a blow struck 
 at an institution which is the bulwark of 
 civilisation. And the attack comes from the 
 most various quarters. It is occasionally made 
 in a modern novel. While from another direc- 
 tion, from those who are earnestly and hon- 
 estly engaged in the uplift of the world, there 
 is sometimes, unconsciously, an attitude of 
 slackness in regard to family obligation arising 
 from excessive engrossment in outside affairs. 
 
 And there is a temptation before the minds 
 of many young people to think that they have 
 no definite obligation to bring a contribution 
 of enrichment to the family life. They only 
 require, however, to give the matter some little 
 thought to realise that the whole responsibility 
 in the matter does not rest upon their parents. 
 Even the lack of cultivating the habit of 
 regular and frequent writing of letters to 
 
120 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 inform the home circle of what is of vital con- 
 cern, while at school or college, is a thing of 
 more serious injury to the family relation than 
 appears on the surface. If we are living in 
 obedience to the mind of Christ it must be that 
 we shall bring more to the family life and not 
 less. For His presence imparts to us exactly 
 those qualities by which the family existence 
 is sweetened and unified. 
 
 But while Christian charity begins at home 
 it does not end there. We have a direct rela- 
 tion to our community, our country, and to 
 the world. And as we are faithful to the 
 Spirit of Christ we shall recognise that how- 
 ever small our contribution of interest and 
 service must inevitably be, yet that can be no 
 reason for ignoring our obligation. The temp- 
 tation in this direction is naturally great. Since 
 public opinion does not always demand our 
 interest and service, in fact it sometimes is most 
 ungrateful and ungracious to those who give 
 themselves unsparingly to the public good. 
 Nevertheless, it is the will of Christ that has 
 become the law of our life, and the gratitude 
 or ingratitude of a society or community can- 
 not determine our actions. 
 
 It is not the amount of service which we are 
 able to render that is the important thing, it is 
 
From Centre to Circumference 121 
 
 the moral influence upon others of our intelli- 
 gent interest. That interest on our part may 
 inspire others to do that for which we have 
 neither time nor capacity. It might be a very 
 great service to a community or to the nation 
 if we would devote some of our leisure to 
 informing ourselves upon the processes by 
 which things for the public good are brought 
 to pass. A course of reading upon parliament- 
 ary law, the function of the primary, the 
 methods of legislative procedure, informing 
 ourselves upon the dark ways of those who 
 seek to defeat the decrees of public sentiment, 
 such pursuit would redeem the mind from the 
 effeminate influence of so much of our reading 
 that leads to no practical result. There can be 
 no real enthusiasm for public service until there 
 is more widespread information upon the ways 
 by which the public mind can be enlightened, 
 and its enlightened will carried into effect. 
 
 Christian people, too often in the past, have 
 looked upon life as divided into two sections, 
 sacred and secular. It is this unspiritual view 
 of life which is in part to blame for the deplor- 
 able condition into which politics, and com- 
 merce, have sometimes fallen. What can we 
 expect the spheres of human enterprise to be- 
 come if they are paganised by Christian people. 
 
122 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 if so-called followers of Christ have no con- 
 science upon the translation of the teaching of 
 Sunday into the business of Monday? Christ 
 seeks the sanctification of the whole of human 
 life and its institutions, that is what Ee meant 
 by the coming of the Kingdom of God upon 
 earth. 
 
 And this will be accomplished not by the 
 secularising of religion, but by the spiritual- 
 ising of the whole realm of life. And that is 
 the glorious and difficult task He has laid upon 
 His disciples in our day. It is to unify and 
 exalt, and baptise into the Kingdom of God 
 every sphere of human activity. It is to Chris- 
 tianise every sphere of human interest so that 
 there shall be no pagan spot in the institutions 
 of our civilisation. 
 
 And this crusade, this holy war, cannot be 
 carried on without its martyrdoms, without 
 men having sometimes to appear to fail in 
 order to all the more succeed. We have a 
 place of honour for those who have given their 
 lives for their country in battle. We do not 
 say that because they did not come home from 
 the war that they failed. Their names are 
 inscribed on brass in our public places. The 
 social conscience has yet to be educated up to 
 honour him who is too courageous and honest 
 
From Centre to Circumference 123 
 
 to grasp a cheap success with the iron grip of 
 greed. The spiritual discernment of the mass 
 of men has yet to be trained to see the martyr 
 in business, in poHtics, in art. We are not here 
 apologising for weak incompetence in the work 
 of the world, we are not seeking a laurel 
 wreath for indolence and stupidity, but rather 
 for those who could easily escape martyrdom 
 if they ran away from absolute principle in the 
 conduct of affairs. 
 
 But the programme of Christ stretches be- 
 yond nationality, it knows no geographical 
 limitations. And He appeals to the heroic 
 instincts of every disciple to have a share in His 
 universal purpose. The day is swiftly coming 
 when the sublime heroism and the profound 
 wisdom of Christian missionaries will be rec- 
 ognised through what they have achieved in 
 the spiritual, intellectual and social life of 
 nations. We would not narrow that work to 
 what has been done by heroic missionaries, for 
 the Christian diplomatist, the merchant, and 
 the mechanic have had their share in the tri- 
 umph of the will of Christ in foreign lands. 
 And they will increasingly have their spiritual 
 opportunity. 
 
 But it is not only the workers on the actual 
 field who are permitted to take a definite part 
 
124 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 in the coming of the Kingdom in the distant 
 parts of the world. There are people hving in 
 the United States and England who either 
 have their own missionary representative, or 
 combine with two or three others in the priv- 
 ilege, through their Church Boards. There 
 are women busy in other directions who gather 
 information regarding the progress of the 
 Divine Kingdom in foreign parts and tell it 
 to their friends. There are circles of Chris- 
 tians who gather to forget their own spiritual 
 needs, in the attitude of passionate and intelli- 
 gent intercession for workers and work in the 
 dark places of the world. 
 
 Such action is helping to make the whole 
 world a neighbourhood, the various parts of 
 which seem to grow less remote every day. 
 And some of those who once sneered at the 
 enterprise of Christ in the largeness of its 
 world grasp, are beginning to be ashamed as 
 they see the marvellous results of quiet, patient 
 toil, looming up into gigantic social facts, suffi- 
 ciently dramatic to inspire the imagination of 
 Christendom with a vision of worldwide 
 triumph. 
 
xrv 
 
 PLACES OF EMPHASIS IN SERVICE 
 
 THE places of emphasis in service, 
 according to the programme of Christ, 
 are both individual and social, both 
 spiritual and material. There is no contradic- 
 tion between them, they are the counterparts 
 of each other. The individual life influences 
 society, and society affects the individual. The 
 spiritual aspect of life powerfully affects the 
 material, and material conditions exercise an 
 influence upon spiritual conditions. 
 
 The unfortunate thing in the past has been 
 that earnest people have tried to separate what 
 Christ has joined together. Some have clung 
 to the individual element in the programme of 
 Christ, while others have chosen the social side. 
 Many have insisted upon the spiritual aspect, 
 ignoring material conditions, and others have 
 emphasised material conditions to the exclu- 
 sion of spiritual concerns. The result has 
 been disastrous, for it has to a large degree 
 
 125 
 
126 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 separated workers who should be working in 
 the unity of one dominating purpose. It has 
 had the effect of setting up false and arbitrary- 
 divisions, which Christ never intended should 
 exist. 
 
 The disrupting of this vital unity has incal- 
 culably weakened the work and the workers 
 in both spheres. It has tended to shut off 
 spiritual work from the practical facts of 
 social reality with the result that spiritual work 
 has sometimes not been preserved because it 
 had no social atmosphere in which to thrive. 
 There have been revivals which have not been 
 survivals. On the other hand, social workers 
 have sometimes lacked spiritual inspiration, 
 and their social work has not been maintained 
 because the individuals who have been socially 
 and materially benefited by their work have 
 not had spirituality enough to keep hold upon 
 the benefits they had received. So that by 
 ignoring each other workers in both spheres 
 have too often sadly to witness the undoing 
 of a great amount of their work. 
 
 When we say that the place of supreme 
 emphasis in the coming of the Kingdom of God 
 is the spiritual life of the individual, we do not 
 thereby minimise or dishonour the importance 
 of material and social service, nor do we 
 
Places of Emphasis in Service 127 
 
 thereby separate the two counterparts of one 
 whole. We simply declare what clearly is the 
 method of Christ in establishing the Kingdom 
 of God in human society. It was through 
 Christian individuals that a Christian Society 
 was first created. It is through individuals that 
 social changes are continually taking place. 
 Those who are working most vigorously for 
 social redemption are making their impression 
 upon society as individuals. 
 
 So that while they may realise it or not, all 
 workers in practice put the supreme emphasis 
 upon the- inner life of the individual. For it is 
 through the individual worker the social mes- 
 sage is proclaimed, the social work achieved. 
 And it is through the soul of the individual 
 worker, for whatever his message may be, it 
 springs from his spiritual vision and sympathy. 
 Therefore we contend that experience proves 
 the spiritual life of the individual to be the 
 supreme place of emphasis in the coming of the 
 Kingdom of God. And when we say the spirit- 
 ual life of the individual, we mean the indi- 
 vidual at the earliest possible period of his life. 
 Scientific investigation has shown that the 
 lives of the vast majority of Christian people 
 were most profoundly influenced spiritually 
 before they reached eighteen years of age. 
 
128 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 And the family Hfe should be the chief centre 
 of spiritual influence. 
 
 No institution whatever can take the place 
 of the home as the sphere where the most last- 
 ing spiritual impressions may be inculcated. 
 And if parents are to exercise their high priv- 
 ilege of having the opportunity to most power- 
 fully determine the spiritual future of their 
 children they must get their work done early. 
 For sooner than they can realise there are com- 
 peting influences in an entirely opposite direc- 
 tion at work from the outside. The most influ- 
 ential element in the making of the Christian 
 character of children is the sincere, natural, 
 joyous, Christian life of their parents. Every 
 form of instruction is second in importance 
 as compared with consistent example. But 
 not example which is self-conscious, trying too 
 hard to make an impression. It is the uncon- 
 sciousness of the example which is the most 
 telling part of it. 
 
 Self-conscious piety which strains after 
 spiritual results must defeat the end it has 
 in view. For professional goodness strikes the 
 youthful life with horror. It is dangerously 
 possible for an earnest parent to try too hard 
 to spiritually help his child. In the attitude of 
 over-anxiety there is little or no faith in the 
 
Places of Emphasis in Service 129 
 
 Spirit of God as co-operating in the holy work. 
 Of course, there is the opposite extreme of 
 doing nothing, of careless, self-centred, uncon- 
 cern which is alarmingly evident everywhere, 
 a chronic, thoughtless, indolence arising from 
 minds soaked through by the atmosphere of 
 worldliness. 
 
 Our hope for the large coming of the King- 
 dom must find its central inspiration from 
 homes where the eternal life is lived in happy, 
 beautiful contact with the common facts of 
 existence ; and where intelligent, prayerful aid 
 is given to young, growing minds, to find the 
 places of emphasis in belief and conduct. If 
 parents fail to seize the opportunity which the 
 family relation affords of affecting society at 
 its foundation, then an elder brother or sister 
 may find that what can be done at home in 
 spiritually helping younger members of the 
 family, without cant or superior airs, may 
 prove to be the greatest possible service 
 that could be rendered. St. Andrew did his 
 greatest work for the world when he brought 
 his brother to Christ. And in doing that he 
 not only saved a youth, who had combustible 
 stuff in his make-up, from an uncertain future, 
 but he had a distinct part in giving St. Peter 
 to the service of the Christian Church. 
 
130 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 After our obligation to the home circle we 
 stand committed to loyalty to all disciples of 
 Christ. 
 
 We owe our fellow Christians our pres- 
 ence and our worship with them of our com- 
 mon Lord. The programme of Christ has 
 a vital place for the recognition of the unity 
 of believing souls. The Christian who says he 
 can worship alone, who has no sense of need 
 for the contemplation of God in Christ in com- 
 pany with the other Christians, has forgotten 
 that he is living under a regime in which his 
 personal inclinations and needs are not the 
 main question. We belong to the whole Chris- 
 tian fellowship. For the sake of that fellow- 
 ship we must forget ourselves. We are mem- 
 bers one of another, and as such we must come 
 together for common worship. When we 
 think supremely of our individual good, we 
 have lost the Christian accent, and emphasis. 
 
 The Church of Christ stands for the recog- 
 nition of the essential unity of all true Chris- 
 tians, it means the subordination of the purely 
 personal element to the universal attitude and 
 function. Our relation to the Church is first 
 and foremost the fulfilhnent of our part in rec- 
 ognising our vital relation to all who are our 
 brothers in Christ. That is a service we owe 
 
Places of Emphasis in Service 131 
 
 to the family spirit in the Christian brother- 
 hood, as well as a high privilege which we 
 possess. It is as we worship together we give 
 concrete reality to the fact of our common 
 union with Christ, and also to our united obli- 
 gation to co-operate in carrying out His 
 programme. 
 
 Not only is this solidarity the genius of 
 Christianity, but the idea is one of the most 
 powerful in our time. Everywhere common 
 interests and pursuits are combining. Groups 
 of people gather around even the most trivial 
 interests, as well as the most momentous. The 
 uniting of forces is a working reality in every 
 sphere of enterprise. And can we ignore this 
 principle in the carrying out of the mind of 
 Christ? We need an enlightenment of con- 
 science upon what we owe our fellow believers 
 in the direction of fellowship in worship as 
 well as work. We dare not let the question of 
 our advantage, or of our inclination, determine 
 the attitude in which we shall stand to those 
 who, like ourselves, are seeking to bring the 
 will of Christ to reign upon the earth. 
 
 The Sunday school, with all its limitations, 
 its imperfect methods, is the immediate sphere 
 of activity which the Church affords to the 
 Christian worker as he seeks to influence the 
 
132 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 spiritual life of the individual. And as the 
 Sunday School is modernised in its outlook, 
 as its teachers are taught the true places of 
 spiritual emphasis, as the Church gives more 
 time and recognition to the enormous impor- 
 tance of the work which the Sunday School is 
 trying to do, it will enter upon a new era of 
 achievement. How much efficiency for 
 extremely difficult tasks can we expect from a 
 body of devoted men and women who have 
 been toiling hard all through the week at other 
 work, as they come, often at great sacrifice, to 
 instruct and inspire classes of young people? 
 They have not had enough assistance from the 
 various quarters which might have rendered 
 help to make our Sunday School teachers effi- 
 cient, and effective in their great opportunity. 
 We need, with a new seriousness to see that 
 the work which the Sunday School is trying 
 to do, next to that in the home and in the 
 ordinary Church service is the most important 
 in the world. Its lack of efficiency may be 
 criticised, but the work to be done, the place 
 which it holds for the spiritual enlightenment 
 of the rising generation, must have a clear right 
 of way, as of surpassing strategic importance. 
 In the meantime, if we enter the Sunday 
 School, having a definite growing spiritual 
 
Places of Emphasis in Service 133 
 
 experience in our own lives, determined to put 
 conscience, faith and prayer into our work 
 there, it will be our privilege to bring some into 
 the conscious fellowship of the living Christ. 
 In so doing we shall make spiritual truth all 
 the more real and vivid to ourselves, and those 
 whom we have helped may look back upon 
 what took place in those early days as the most 
 influential reality in their history. 
 
 Of course, every one cannot serve in the 
 Sunday School, and there is work to be done in 
 society, which if not done will react with harm- 
 ful effect upon the work of the Sunday School. 
 And when we say this we are not now stepping 
 down into a lower sphere of activity. If we 
 are led to devote our spare time by helping to 
 create public sentiment against places in our 
 community which are a menace to public mo- 
 rality we are still working with Christ, we are 
 still bringing in the Kingdom of God. If we 
 are impelled to work patiently for clean meth- 
 ods at a district primary, we are still doing 
 spiritual service, if we retain the high motive. 
 If we go into a city council, or a state legis- 
 lature, with the same guidance and motive we 
 are still workers together with Christ. If we 
 make a study of social conditions, or of eco- 
 nomic theories, in the same spirit of obedience 
 
134 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 to what we beheve to be the mind of Christ, 
 we have not departed from the high purpose 
 of our Master. And there is need for Chris- 
 tian people not merely to beheve this, to assent 
 to it in a lukewarm way, but to hold it as a 
 passionate conviction. 
 
 It is when personal ambition directs our 
 choice, it is when the love of money cankers 
 our motive, it is when envy and jealousy be- 
 come working forces in our activities, then 
 we are out of step with the programme of 
 Christ. And it matters not what we are doing, 
 whether it be preaching, teaching, legislating, 
 or hammering at a new social order, we have 
 fallen out of the ranks of the faithful, if our 
 spirit is not Christlike. But if we are honestly 
 seeking to do the will of our Master as He 
 has revealed it to us, endeavouring to bring in 
 His Kingdom with high motives, we have thus 
 exalted our work to the highest level and we 
 share in the exaltation. 
 
 And at the same time we come closer to 
 every other worker who is toiling in a similar 
 temper and all such work moves towards the 
 triumph of the mind and spirit of Christ in 
 the life of the world. 
 
XV 
 
 THE GROWING MIND UNDER CROSS- 
 EXAMINATION 
 
 AS disciples of the living Christ endeav- 
 ouring to enter into joyous friend- 
 ship with Him, and into obedience 
 to His plan for us, let us try to put our- 
 selves in the attitude of answering some 
 of the questions which are put to us by 
 some representatives of various aspects of 
 opinion in our day. As we pursue our work 
 in the world, in study, in business, in service, 
 in friendly intercourse, we come into contact 
 with those who question us concerning our 
 faith. As perfectly normal members of society 
 who read current books, and are in sympathy 
 with all sound progressive movements, we 
 must be ready always to give an answer to 
 every man that asketh for a reason of the hope 
 that is in us. For we are sometimes put upon 
 the witness-stand. 
 
 135 
 
136 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 We hear the question of the Scientist, who 
 asks us if we beheve in the scientific spirit and 
 method, if we have read the works of modern 
 writers upon scientific thought as it is related 
 to rehgious belief. And the answer we give is 
 that we most heartily believe in the scientific 
 spirit and method, and that there are few books 
 which appeal to us with greater interest than 
 those which deal with the relation of science 
 to Christian truth. The Scientist asks us 
 whether we believe in the reign of law, and if 
 so, whether we think it consistent with the 
 practice of prayer. We find no dii^culty in 
 answering that we believe the reign of law to 
 be a fact throughout the universe, law mean- 
 ing simply the orderly method by which God 
 does His work. And that there are more laws 
 in the universe than those which we see in 
 operation. And one law is frequently able to 
 cancel another law, as the law of death which 
 is at work when one has taken a poison is can- 
 celled by another law working through the 
 antidote administered by the physician. We 
 see no breach of the reign of law in the practice 
 of prayer, for prayer is not the attempt to bring 
 God down to our arbitrary desires, it is rather 
 the process by which we are lifted up into the 
 realm of spiritual reality, and in that realm we 
 
Under Cross-Examination 137 
 
 become spiritual channels of what may be the 
 will of God. 
 
 The philosopher sometimes asks us how we 
 come to translate the First Cause of the uni- 
 verse as expressed by such writers as Herbert 
 Spencer into the idea of a personal God. And 
 we reply that we have a perfect right to inter- 
 pret the First Cause in terms of the highest 
 which we find in ourselves. And when we see 
 God revealed by Christ we instinctively know 
 the revelation to be a true one, in the same way 
 that we know a picture to be beautiful. And 
 more especially when we find our intuitive 
 sense confirmed by the convictions and experi- 
 ence of so many others, who have impressed 
 us by the elevation of their character. 
 
 We cannot prove our contention, but we are 
 able to prove it quite as much as we can prove 
 many other things which we accept implicitly. 
 
 We are occasionally cross-examined by the 
 moralist, by the man who believes in a good, 
 straight life, but not in the Christian message 
 of the forgiving Grace of God which we accept 
 by faith. The moralist asks us if we believe 
 in salvation by character and when we answer 
 in the affirmative, he continues his question to 
 enquire whether we believe in salvation by 
 faith. And when we insist that we emphat- 
 
\ 
 
 138 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 ically do, he enquires whether we do not think 
 that to be an inconsistent position. Is it possi- 
 ble to believe in salvation by character and by 
 faith at the same time ? We certainly are con- 
 vinced that the two statements are the counter- 
 parts of each other. They are no more incon- 
 sistent than rowing a boat with two oars. 
 
 Then we are asked what we mean by salva- 
 tion by faith ? And we reply that salvation by 
 faith is simply trusting in the forgiving love 
 of God manifested to us through Christ. 
 For we find that it is impossible to find salva- 
 tion by character until one obtains a fresh start 
 through forgiveness. And it is not necessarily 
 the worst types of people who are discouraged 
 by their past faihires ; on the contrary, they are 
 quite often the very highest types morally. But 
 they realise that when the past is forgiven, in 
 the companionship of Christ they are able with 
 a lighter heart, with a keener enthusiasm, to 
 try to do the Divine will in thought, word, 
 and deed. So that forgiveness has an inspir- 
 ing influence upon the production of charac- 
 ter. There is the possibility of growth in char- 
 acter as a result of salvation by faith, which 
 could not be realised by any other means. And 
 we are convinced that many have neither the 
 encouragement nor the power to achieve char- 
 
Under Cross-Examination 139 
 
 acter because they have no light upon how past 
 failures may be forgiven. 
 
 We are sometimes interrogated by the theo- 
 logian. He asks us if we believe in the inspira- 
 tion of the Bible. Again we answer that we 
 do. But we have no theory of inspiration. If 
 some one were to point out an error in it, we 
 would not in the least be disturbed. We begin 
 with that part of the Bible which finds us, 
 which speaks to our elemental needs. And it 
 is a matter of experience so far as we are con- 
 cerned that no other book so answers the needs 
 of our soul, besides our experience is verified 
 by the testimony of multitudes of believers. 
 And we expect that more and more of the .Bible 
 will find us as we go on growing in mind and 
 soul. The inspiration of the Bible will become 
 an expanding reality as we live, as we suffer, 
 as we are tempted, as we are guided. And as 
 we make the Bible increasingly our own by the 
 process of spiritual assimilation, that which we 
 so make our own cannot be taken from us, for 
 it has become part of our spiritual existence. 
 
 In the meantime, when we meet difficulties 
 in the Bible we simply lay them on one side. 
 We do exactly with the Bible what we do with 
 the things which we find in the physical world 
 for the nourishment of our bodies. If we eat 
 
140 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 a nut, although the whole of the nut is a 
 product of nature, we do not partake of the 
 shell. It would be folly to break our teeth on 
 the shell when there is enough to satisfy hunger 
 in the kernel. So just as we lay aside part of 
 a nut we lay aside that part of the Bible which 
 we cannot make our own for the present; it 
 may be that what we cannot appropriate now, 
 we shall be able to make our own at a later 
 stage of our experience. In the meantime 
 there is enough spiritual food for our imme- 
 diate necessities. 
 
 Our theological friend is anxious to know 
 why we believe in the Deity of Christ. And 
 we reply that we believe in His deity because 
 He finds us. He satisfies our elemental long- 
 ings. We are further asked how we define 
 Christ, and our answer is that we are not able 
 to define Him. Nor do we consider it neces- 
 sary to define Him, since He is a living person 
 with us in the present. While we contend for 
 the historical reality of His earthly life, we 
 would not at the present stage of our experi- 
 ence lose the actual nearness of Christ to us 
 in the present hour by becoming confused by 
 discussions concerning Him which are beyond 
 us. If He were merely a memory, if Christ 
 had ceased to live in the midst of the realities 
 
Under Cross-Examination 141 
 
 of human life with the close of His human 
 life, then the case would be vastly different. 
 But since we are conscious of His friendship 
 here and now, we go on our way undisturbed 
 by questions with which only expert minds of 
 the highest order have the capacity to deal. 
 
 The practical man asks us why we need 
 Christ in our life, why we cannot get along by 
 ourselves doing the best we can. Our answer 
 is that we need a wiser and stronger power 
 than ourselves to get out of our life what is 
 there. Self-government is a delusion, when 
 we think we are ruling ourselves we are deceiv- 
 ing ourselves, for it may be our baser selves, 
 it may be our surroundings, which are manag- 
 ing our lives. For absolute freedom is impos- 
 sible. And in Christ we find a ruler who 
 knows our nature and who can get the most 
 out of us. Christ satisfies our inner life, and 
 saves us from the paralysis of discouragement. 
 The rationahst questions us as to whether 
 we can reason out all our positions. And when 
 we answer that we cannot he asks us why we 
 hold them. And we simply inform him that 
 our positions are not unreasonable. We accept 
 things in other realms which we cannot reason 
 out. Pure reason is not the only part of our 
 being which has rights. Psychology tells us 
 
142 Religion and the Growing Mind 
 
 of a sub-conscious self, which is not unreason- 
 able, and which acts instinctively without the 
 process of explicit reasoning. There is a dis- 
 tinct place for intuition which outruns 
 knowledge, and creates its own verification. 
 Almost every forward movement in the world 
 might be expressed as an act of faith. Religion 
 is one among many spheres of enterprise where 
 the venture of faith is of the essence of reality. 
 The cynic asks us if we are the disciples of 
 Christ in order to be happy and to obtain at 
 last a heavenly reward. We answer him that 
 we get these. But they are a by-product. 
 Christ fits us for service. Christ encourages us 
 to turn our thoughts from ourselves. It is in 
 the attitude of devotion to His will, in the 
 attempt to realise brotherhood in human rela- 
 tionships, in the effort to bring in the Kingdom 
 of God, that Christ answers the ultimate needs 
 of our being. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America. 
 
THE MINISTER AND HIS WORK 
 
 7HISELT0N MARK, D.Lit. 
 
 The Pedagogics of Preaching 
 
 A Short Essay in Practical H'omiletics. Net 50c. 
 
 Much has been done for the Teacher in showing him 
 the practical application in his work of the findings of the 
 new Psychology, but comparatively little has been done in 
 the field of "Psychology and Preaching." This scholarly and 
 yet popular book applies to the art of preaching methods 
 which have long been followed in the training of teachers. 
 
 FRANK IV. GUMSAULUS, D.D. 
 
 The Minister and The Spiritual Life 
 
 Yale Lectures on Preaching for 191 1. Net $1.25. 
 
 Among the phases of this vital subject treated by the 
 pastor of The Central Church, Chicago, are: The Spiritual 
 Life and Its Expression in and Through Ministering; The 
 Spiritual Life in View of Changes in Philosophical and 
 Ineological View-Points; The Spiritual Life in Its Rela- 
 tion to Truth and Orthodoxy; The Spiritual Life and 
 Present Social Problems, etc. 
 
 PROF. A. T ROBERTSON, D.D. 
 
 The Glory of the Ministry 
 
 Paul's Exultation in Preaching. Cloth, net $1.25 
 
 Rev. F. B. Meyer says: "I think it is the best of al 
 
 your many books and that is saying a good deal. _ Its il 
 luminating references to the Greek text, its graphic por 
 traiture of the great Apostle, its allusions to recent liter 
 ature and current events, its pointed^ and helpful instruc 
 tions to the ministry combine to give it very special value." 
 
 SAMUEL CHARLES BLACK, D.D. 
 
 Building a Working Church 
 
 i2mo, cloth, net $1.25. 
 
 Every pastor or church officer no matter how successful 
 he may be, will find practical, vital suggestions for strength- 
 ening some weak place in his present organization. Ihe au- 
 thor makes every chapter bear directly upon some specific 
 phase of the church building problem. 
 
 WILLIAM E. BARTON, D. D . 
 
 Rules of Order for Religious Assemblies 
 
 iSmo, cloth, net 50c. 
 
 This work is entirely undenominational and will be 
 found adapted to use in any religious assembly whethe* 
 church, council, association or convention. 
 
PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY 
 
 HAROLD BEGBIE 
 
 Twice-Born Men 
 
 A Clinic in Regeneration, 
 
 X2mo, cloth, net .50 
 
 A footnote in narrative to Prof. Wm. Jame§* "The 
 Varieties of Religious Experience." 
 
 Studies in the phenomena of conversion from the stand- 
 point ef the student of human nature. 
 
 Prof. William James, of Harvard: "Mr. Begbie's book is 
 a wonderful set of stories splendidly worked up. It certainly 
 needs no preface from me. I might as well call my book a 
 foot-note to his. I am proud of the dedication and of the 
 references and I wish the book a great success." 
 
 Prof. George A. Coe, of Union Theological Seminary: "I 
 like the book greatly. It gives concrete data and that is 
 what both the psychologist and religionist needs. As I read, 
 I found myself marking the margins and singling out pass- 
 ages for my own scientific use." 
 
 UMES I. VANCE 
 
 Tendency : The Effect of Trend and Drift 
 in the Development of Life. 
 
 Net $1.25. 
 
 A series of discussions of formative influences in char- 
 acter construction, from a practical and sympathetic stand- 
 point. Dr. Vance's work among young men enables him 
 to speak authoritatively. To this he adds insight and sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 SIR JOSEPH COMPTON-RICKETT 
 
 Origins and Faith 
 
 Br6, cloth, net $1.50. 
 
 A series of essays, philosophical and theological, written 
 by this eminent statesman and layman on the fundamentals 
 of belief. It is a frank examination and apologetic for 
 Christianity, by one who is well known now as the author of 
 the erstwhile anonymous books "The Christ That is to Be" 
 and "Pro Christo et Ecclesia." 
 
 EDWIN F. HALLENBECK 
 
 The Passion for Men 
 
 l6mo, cloth, net 40c. 
 A series of straightforward talks on the impcratWe duty 
 of soul winning, by the recent associate pastor of the Piftk 
 Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York.