Cibrarp of Che Cheolocjieal ^eromarp PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY PRESENTED BY The Estate of the ■»-—--T i- 15 T.T • _3 J __^ B 105 .H8 D52 1923 Dickinson, Charles Henry, 1857- The religion of the social passion _ GEO , PULLMAN, 230 HICKORY, ELKHART, {.NO. 0 \ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/religionofsocialOOdick / THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION THE RELIGION OF SOCIAL PASSION MAR 23 F ■ i r * By CHARLES HENRY DICKINSON Author of “The Christian Reconstruction of Modern Life” THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY PRESS CHICAGO Copyright, 1923 By The Christian Century Press To the Memory of My Wife, MARY LORD THORN DICKINSON 7 planted seeds of thought in many soils, Designed large barns and spacious threshing-floor: With failure of each harvest, strove the more To sow swift years with long, incessant toils: Lost sowings! Everywhere the rough weed foils The seed's brave battle; lifeless, stripped, and hoar The scant stalks droop, and all the grain they bore Is crushed beneath the rank vine's snaky coils. At last a plot I found, kept rich and fair By angels' tears, warmed with the smile of God, For perfect harvest: blooms like your life's prayer, Each gracious day, more holy every hour, There where I flung my heart beneath the clod, On your dear grave, love's deathless passion-flower. CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION. 2. THE RELIGIOUS RESERVATIONS OF THE SOCIAL PASSION. 3. THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST. 4. THE HELLENIC SOURCE OF THE SOCIAL PASSION. 5. THE GALILEAN SOURCE. 6. MODERN APPROACHES. 7. THE RECEPTIVE FAITH OF THE SOCIAL PASSION. 8. THE IMPARTIVE LOVE OF THE SOCIAL PASSION. 9. HUMANITY'S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE. 10. THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION. I INTRODUCTION Though we who seek should never find, Yet will tve count the search the best That any God could give: unbind Thyself for the ascent beyond yon highest crest. § 1 OVE to men may weaken faith in God. The doubt may become denial, when increasing de¬ votion to the human finds the customary con¬ ceptions of deity inadequate to human events, human tasks, human demands upon life and their successes and disillusions. The world’s recent and continuing tragedy has made belief in God more difficult to many compassionate hearts, and has tended to separate from conscious faith our service to men. This tendency is essentially different from the agnosticism from which it inherits the rejection of the traditional arguments for the being of God. Agnosticism’s closest relations were with physical science: this aversion to faith is derived from human sympathies and appreciations. That was intellec¬ tual; this is vital. That was too negative to be an outright denial; this asserts great things. That re¬ pressed and confused; this arouses to definite tasks. Men of the humanistic temper, if they can no longer pray, will work the harder. The spiritual powers, which had been directed up to a superhuman being, 11 12 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION now pour themselves out for realizations of human¬ ity. Here the suspicion of a more intimate faith begins to dawn. A holy mystery greets us, not from super¬ human heights, nor from the depths of the lonely soul, but from the faces of our fellows and may there be disclosed as able to subdue all things to itself. § 2 Any general impulse among men produces a movement of fundamental thinking, from which in turn the general movement may gain self-con¬ sciousness, guidance, and inspiration. Congenial to the human devotion of our day, and capable of mutually helpful alliance with it, is the philosophic humanism which occupies an increasing number of thinkers in many lands. The light of their search¬ ing must shine down upon men of their spirit, who, sharing their quest, pursue it by methods less tech¬ nically difficult. This inquiry, in all its varieties, is absorbed in human life. Its purpose is not to achieve an intel¬ lectual construction of the universe, nor to at¬ tain truth in the traditional meaning of truth, nor to find a superhuman God. Whatever it encounters it labors to subordinate to the human, to center in the human. Its task is to serve the vigor, the joy, the accomplishment of human life. Human life is its passion. All thought, all ethical principles, all spiritual aspirations are for this self- achieving human life. They are experimented with INTRODUCTION 13 for their contribution to human life. By this coxv tribution they are judged. Truth is not only to be sought along life’s onward way, but is that ad¬ vance.* In this ministry to human life the humanistic thinker is forced to repudiate another service. This philosophy is not “handmaid of faith,” if the object of faith is a superhuman God. Such a God is not in all its thoughts. The human is its realm, and whatever else it may encounter it must attempt to subordinate to that.f In thought and in work no man can serve two masters. We cannot serve Goa and man. The only deity that the humanist can acknowledge is the human God, if there be such a God. The only way to seek him is the way of deep¬ ening experience of the human, and intensifying devotion to the human. § 3 Reverent and devoted souls who doubt God be¬ cause they love men, and who cannot serve two masters, God and man, feel the desire to join philo¬ sophic humanism in its great adventure. But many of them are unversed in the technicalities and ex¬ tensive references which even humanistic method *The method of pragmatism is becoming familiar in the phrase, “D'oes it work?” This test, simple as it sounds, is vague, almost meaningless, except as clarified in humanism. For what “does it work ?” fWhen some humanists plead that faith in a superhuman God Is recommended by the assistance which this postulate may render to the aims of human life, they fail to reflect—among other considera¬ tions—that human life would then be turned to aims outside itself, even to those of a superhuman God. Thus the task of humanism is repudiated, and its instruments are thrown away. Even though this God be thought to include the human, and though human aims be embraced in him, none the less would Buperhumanity be decisive of thought and ltf». 14 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION employs. In behalf of these fellow-servants of the social passion, a humbler task presents itself, de¬ rived from the eminent humanistic thinkers of our day, and extensive of their influence. This task is: to disclose without the severity of their processes, which however the author may continually keep in mind, clearer meanings of the humanity we serve and of the impulse to serve it. .. My special purpose is to interpret this insight and impulse as religious. In humanity I seek the human God. My unassum¬ ing method limits itself to reflection upon a selec¬ tion, though a representative selection, of the facts of human life. The attempt has its difficulties, as great in their way as those which beset the technically metaphy¬ sical undertaking. For the two advances are in the same direction, one along the heights, the other up the valley. Our undistinguished path also leads into secular affairs, not into lonely realms of meditation and prayer, where we have been bidden to seek God; not into the wilderness where prophets have been wont to meet the Supreme, but into men’s working- places. Or if we climb up for brief intervals into the mountain sanctuaries of nature and our own hearts, it is to gain a vantage-ground from which to survey the struggles where our work is cast. Throngs of men and events seem strange places for seeking God. With recognition of its perplexities I undertake a part in the humbler task, pledging undivided al¬ legiance to that aggressive humanism, in the most broadly human sense of the word, which I have INTRODUCTION 15 accepted because it seems to me the only life pos¬ sible to anyone who would live the life of this time. The conviction that emboldens me in a religious quest apparently so irreligious—a conviction which seems to me to be reinforced by every historic spirit¬ ual advance—is this :, that God is always found in service to men. II THE RELIGIOUS RESERVATIONS OF THE SOCIAL PASSION In presence of our callousness and greed The mangled corpses of the nations bleed: Yet , human hearts that love all men as men, From your warm touch the dead shall live again . - §1 W HEN our hearts are overwhelmed by the universal sorrows of this terrific time, we are initiated into a mighty brother¬ hood of help. The toil of its members, however per¬ plexed, is devoted to the recovery of human life, though their forecasts may be dark concerning the outcome of the world's continuing woe. Their war¬ fare is against the repression of men, however the battle goes. They whose hearts humanity has touched are a great host, as is proved by each one of them finding many companions. There are also potential allies, obscurely swayed by this sympa¬ thetic energy, who are to be drawn into conscious unity. And there is recognizable in the heart of humanity that human impulse which is devotion to humanity. The sharers of this impulse can accept no other, however imposing, as the moving spirit of our time. It is important that the companions of the social passion learn the historic sources of its power, and the secret of its vitality, that we 16 RELIGIOUS RESERVATIONS OF SOCIAL PASSION 17 may the better serve humanity in the undaunted unity of loyal souls. §2 Because of such a fellowship of the social passion, our time may be entitled an epoch of humanism. The word is indispensable because of its historic meaning. The social passion is not synonymous with it, ,but is its consummation, receiving content from the various developments of humanism. This ' word may follow other once unfamiliar terms of social meaning into common speech. Its connota¬ tions are not to be limited to a philosophic doctrine, a literary movement, or a method of education. It unites these and other manifestations into a univer¬ sal interest. It rrieans to us now the intensified resurgence of a great historic energy. It connects us with previous phases now revived. It has been rapidly forming for a period of years. Against the materialism of an epoch of physical science, which interrupted the historic sweep of humanism, social subjects have yet pressed to the front, and social interests have occupied more intensely an increas¬ ing number. The world’s agonies have that to which they can appeal, and rouse into a consuming passion. Humanism, as an historic process, merges its former attainments into a present consciousness deeper than they. As historic, it is prophetic of conceptions higher still than ours. Anticipations of modern humanism are to be recognized even in the so-called “ages of faith.” The modest request was submitted that there might be granted to some human powers, which were sub- 18 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION ject to religious and political institutions, not merely an indulgent concession, but rather a recog¬ nition of their independent worth, and a free course for their development. These distinctively human claims consolidated themselves into the assertion of the freedom of life for human ends, which, how¬ ever, were to have only a place alongside the tradi¬ tional dominations. When such a combination was seen to be impossible, the demand became inevitable that the human should be dominant, that all things should be subordinated to the human, centered in the human. Humanism, in the historic develop¬ ment of its meaning, is not merely the pursuit of human interests along with others—as for instance, the glory of a superhuman God—though in this re¬ striction its spirit is at work. Humanism is the conviction that all things must be subordinated to the human, centered in the human. If we who are humanists still explore physical things, it is not that we may be enthralled by their greatness and complexity, but that we may make them instruments of human self-realizations. The only sacredness to us of any commandment or cus¬ tom, of church, state, family, or whatever, is the furtherance of the human. All these, like the Sab¬ bath, were made for man. The same norm is ap¬ plied to religious faith. The difficulty has already been indicated, of persuading the humanist to faith in a superhuman God. Throughout the whole range of thought and action, humanism strives to subordinate all to the human, to center all in the human. RELIGIOUS RESERVATIONS OF SOCIAL PASSION 19 He serves a cause loyally who appreciates it dis- criminatively. We form unbiased estimates of humanism’s various manifestations, the lower and the higher, in order that we may learn its possibili¬ ties of realizable good, and that we may so serve it as to develop its intrinsic excellence. Such study will distinguish humanism from other character¬ istics of the times in which it has flourished, even though these alien qualities attached themselves to it so closely as to seem to belong to it. These distinctions may acknowledge the imperfection of humanism in every stage except the highest, which v is the object of our quest. Even in our conception of that highest, we shall be able to discern only approximations to the inexhaustible implicitness. Yet humanism’s impulse toward that highest is dis¬ coverable in every step of the ascending way. My unpretentious task does not include the theo¬ retical establishment of the validity of humanism, nor the waging of, a dialectical warfare against its enemies. We are humanists because we are con¬ strained to be. The qobler practical impulses of these tremendous days are moving one way. That way is no longer worldward in a scientific interest, nor God-ward in a distinctively religious awaken¬ ing, but manward in an intensified human self- consciousness and social passion. Enemies of the good are no longer resisted as godless, but as inhuman. Though there are no final proofs that a stage of humanity’s growth is characterized by this or that impulse, and though every generation must leave 20 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION to later times, perhaps distant, to conclude what energy of itself is most significant, we cannot wait for decisions pronounced over our graves. If we feel a passionate endeavor great enough to enlist all living men, if our nobler tendencies respond to it, and if we may learn that this power is not of today nor yesterday, but is of the depths of the human spirit in all times, and has been, in ever developing forms, the moving force of the times that appeal to our vitalities as especially worth liv¬ ing in, why seek another light to follow, another life to live! When we feel a power that concen¬ trates our devotion and assigns our task, that power we serve. In such devoted task our loyalty must be given to the cause entire, universal, and to its elements for the sake of the whole; not to some separated aspect, which by its separateness denies the good that all men may live in and work for. Nor must our par¬ ticipation be hindered by any class prerogative or prejudice, any ecclesiastical hesitancy, any cultural aloofness. Even the spiritual goods that have seemed most precious must be held subject to its demand, lest we lose the human fellowship which is for us a more vital grace than they. To an increasing brotherhood, the humanistic absorption, developing into the social passion, is our time's very soul and self. Those who are isolated from this spirit of the time must be won from ^ death to life, out of darkness to the light tha^ guides. Only those who have given themselves to he fused and refashioned in this flame can suspect RELIGIOUS RESERVATIONS OF SOCIAL PASSION 21 what energies it contains, to what august duties it impels, to what high enterprises of universal good it leads on. Not to live in the life of one’s own time is not to live at all, since life offers itself to any man only in that phase of the universal life which demands his action. Great leaders, more than others, are servants of their generation, directing their own age along its directive way for the generations fol¬ lowing. When a flood of the spirit sweeps through the world, that man perishes who does not embark upon it, unregretful for what he must leave behind, unconcerned whither he may be borne. §3 Humanism’s religious reservations are not con¬ fined to the denial of a superhuman God. They recognize the same repression of the human in the acknowledgement of moral law as transcendently absolute; or of ideas, conceptions, categories as sub¬ stantial. Humanism can accept none of the forms of the deterministic philosophy of the absolute, nor join in the adoration of an unintelligible mystery, an unknowable that may do to us we know not what. The repression of the human is obvious in the doctrine of an all-inclusive mechanism, con¬ ceived as superhuman, but not supernatural. What¬ ever humanism’s estimates of the physical, it cannot yield to any pessimism that impairs the worth or dims the victory of the human soul. Humanism’s contention with the traditional Christianity of the superhuman God is especially 22 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION in evidence, because that religion is the most pow¬ erful of its competitors. Whether that form of Christianity is really the religion of Jesus, whether the superhuman God is essential to Christianity, is a question that will meet us much later. What con¬ cerns us now is the inquiry, whether humanism has any vital power and satisfaction which can stand against what is offered by the Christianity of the superhuman God. That competitor offers men a spiritual life. In the view of humanism this is its highest offer. What has humanism to offer as equivalent? The conviction that all things must be subordi¬ nated to the human has a spirituality of its own, which can at least be brought into comparison with the spirituality which is claimed by the Christian¬ ity of the superhuman God. We may explore later the length and breadth and depth and height of the spiritual interpretation of humanism. The point now urged is simply that men of spiritual temper are not obliged to turn away from humanism at the outset, as failing to offer them that which they de¬ mand supremely. The spirituality of humanism attempts two achievements by whose success or failure it must be tested. One is the victory over the world, in the meaning of the great word, “I have overcome the world.” The physical order, and all intrusions into the human, this spiritual life strives either to repel or to subjugate. In and from and against the world, humanity must achieve the one thing precious, its own soul. The second attempt, in- RELIGIOUS RESERVATIONS OF SOCIAL PASSION 23 volved in the first, is the untrammeled development of those qualities which are recognized, without elaborate definition at this point, as the higher human powers. A large class of inspirational modern writings may be recognized as humanistic in this respect, that they are mainly occupied, not with thoughts of a superhuman deity, but with aspirations of humanity toward its own fulfillments of righteous¬ ness and love, of beauty and power. Their mention of a God above men, if occurring at all, is generally either incidental or an afterthought. In some great prophets of the spiritual life such allusion fails altogether, with no evident loss of conviction or inspiration. In these writers, in the men whom they express, and in those to whom they appeal, there are not lacking such values as faith, humility, contrition, and some at least of the purifying and strengthening upiooks of prayer. This spirituality bids us penitently to bare our hearts to the consum¬ ing light of those exalted souls in whom humanity has been consummately revealed. Unto them and the human heights which they essayed and unto Jesus above them all, this spiritual life aspires, with deepest sense of ill-desert, and with transforming, regenerating faith. As social consciousness, this spiritual life confesses the sin of the world, not as committed against a superhuman deity, but as out¬ rage of humanity by lust and greed, by insensibility and hate. This sin is revealed by the awful, com¬ passionate radiances of unselfish lives. Their re¬ generating forces are flung into the whole world’s 24 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION life, which, in every compassionately aspiring heart, travails in pain for men’s redemption. The aids to the spiritual life are in the spiritual life. When the human, as above the physical and against the brutal, becomes all in all, every power of devoted service in which men lose and save themselves pours itself out to the development of this spiritual life in mankind, cultivating all things that belong to man’s spiritual being. This spirituality desires to become every man’s service in his achieved power and opportunity to serve, devoted to every man, and rendered through every man to that concrete unity of interblended lives which is named human¬ ity. This spirituality feels no need of a super¬ human God. Such a deity, the humanist thinks, would suppress the spiritual energies, divert the human purpose. This spirituality has none of the aloofness and other-worldliness to which faith in the superhuman has so often inclined. Its victorious unfoldings cannot be in any retirement from the human, which it serves, nor from the inhuman, which it resists to the uttermost. The spirit reveals and vindicates itself in the real battle against the world and the flesh, which strive to possess the life of humanity. The spirituality which is the end and motive of the spiritually human devotion does not denote anything abstract, conceptual. Humanity has come to mean to us actual men, outraged but unsubdued, ravished women whose souls could not be violated, little children lifting up imploring, handless arms. Humanity means to us the victims of the scimitar, RELIGIOUS RESERVATIONS OF SOCIAL PASSION 25 starving men, men who die of pestilence—flesh- and-blood human beings in their needs and rights and capacities of pain and joy. Nor is a sum of separate individuals meant. Those for whom we toil are one with us who toil for them. All men are embraced in that interblended labor, anguish, achievement, which in the most concrete sense we call humanity. This is what we serve, and we will not suffer any superhuman object to divert to itself any part of that devotion. When the traditional re¬ ligion says, as is so constantly being said in defer¬ ence to the increasing social passion, “the worship of God is the service of men,” that identification practically ceases to be the religion of the super¬ human. For the object of our service occupies our service, and our service occupies us altogether, sub¬ ordinating all our powers to the service of men, centering all in the service of men. If this is sin against the highest, such sin becomes indistinct in comparison with enormities committed against men, women and children, so unified by suffering into one palpitating life that all the atrocities out¬ rage every heart that feels, violate the human worth of every soul that has not renounced humanity. Nor do we have to ask a superhuman being for greater powers than we ourselves possess. Against powers subject to waste we contend by spiritual energies which continually renew themselves. They include immortal impulses from the spiritual strug¬ gles of humanity. They are the purified aspirations of every age and clime, thoughts which demanded truth, magnanimous arousings of men's true selves, 26 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION solemn wraths against oppression, lowly self-sacri¬ fices. These are the spiritual weapons of our war¬ fare in humanity’s great name. But humanism ventures a more democratic test of its spirituality than the heights of humanity’s finest souls. The value of a principle is in its appli¬ cation to the common life of common men. The final test of spirituality is willingness to lay down one’s life. By that self-sacrifice the soul wins its final victory over the world, and attains itself. This devotion is continually exemplified by common men, with the faults and grossnesses of common men, and in peace as well as in war. Motherhood is that. A man’s fundamental claim to manhood is his readiness to fling his life in the way of danger which assails those for whom he is responsible, and to fulfill a trust through death if need be. But in nearly all instances the object of the devotion is human. The noble army of martyrs for God is small in comparison with the great host of martyrs for men. From this host is excluded those who gamble life for material goods for themselves: they have no connection with spiritual self-devotion. In that devotion the powers enlisted are humanistic powers. If religion sometimes cooperates—as re¬ ligion is commonly understood—that assistance ap¬ pears unnecessary, for life is given with equal read¬ iness by the religious and by the irreligious man. It is the task of humanism to extend this essential of human life to all human activities, so that men may enduringly live as they willingly die. Neither in the development nor the consummation, any RELIGIOUS RESERVATIONS OF SOCIAL PASSION 27 more than in the source of this spiritual potency, does there appear the need of a superhuman God. The value of a spirituality without this encum¬ brance was never more evident than now. The ever unanswered complaint, “Why is the Almighty neu¬ tral !” speaks out of the world’s heart with the voice of the millions and millions of young men slain, or suffering mutilations or incapacities harder to be endured than death, and with the lamentations of those whom they have left desolate; with the cry of millions and millions of women and children and old men devastated, starved, massacred, tortured, outraged; and with the moan of nations in intermi¬ nable suffering. Finding still no answer, the bitter complaint continually forms the denial of almighty God. What faith is left to those who face the in¬ sensibility of omnipotence, unless there be faith in the possibilities of the human soul? The church, which represents religion or is the test of religion to many millions, is especially in her recent history, a witness to humanism; both in her failure, and in whatever success she has won back: since the latter is largely due to her borrow¬ ings from that spirituality which subordinates all things to the human. It is a discredited church that emerges from the world war, forced into futile apologies. Against hell’s outbreak she was as helpless as diplomacy. The churches of the central powers shared the ig¬ nominy of their masters, who were permitted to sit in the Master’s place. The churches of the neutral nations were neutral churches, with a neutrality 28 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION whose motives were not derived from the Sermon on the Mount. The Greek church, an inefficient shepherd, is passing with her flock through the val¬ ley of the shadow of death. May she win through to a table prepared in the presence of her enemies! The Roman Catholic church was shamed by the time-serving of the Vatican. Where the church has retained some influence and is having A measure of success in re-establishing herself, it is because of the infusion of humanism. We pay our homage to Mercier and to those faithful churchmen of whom he is the foremost, not because of their churchly piety, but because they cham¬ pioned human interests, devoted themselves to human needs. But they receive no greater honor than unbelievers who were no less faithful to the cause of man. The service of many churches of every divergency, with whom must be honorably associated Jewish synagogues, is recognized because they sent forth healing mercy, with billions of sacri¬ ficial wealth in their hands. The spirit of these churches—representing also their non-Christian sisters—in the world war and since, seems not to be distinctively religious, but intensely humanitar¬ ian. Yet the members of the church are equaled in their consecration by men and women who acknowl¬ edge no allegiance to her; just as among the faith¬ ful who laid down their lives, no difference in devotion appears between those who confessed and those who denied faith in God. The human has become for the church, as for her secular partners in ministry, the evident source of power. A dis- RELIGIOUS RESERVATIONS OF SOCIAL PASSION 29 tinetively religious basis seems not to be necessary. The church is now estimated by her service to human interests. By this service her own children judge her. When she succeeds, it is because these interests rind her useful. In separation from them she languishes. When she sets herself and her re¬ ligion above them, she declines. Humanism is supreme even in the house of God. The reflection is obvious: what need has the sufficient human im¬ pulse to seek a reinforcement outside itself? The powers by which we overcome are ideal and spirit¬ ual : they are ideally and spiritually human. But, it may be challenged, does not spiritual humanism lead us back to a superhuman God who is its cause or ground? Certainly it is the duty, not only of metaphysicians, but also of all other earnest men, to seek the ground and source and farthest-reaching significance of this devotion and of all that is related to it and consummated in it, that we may interpret the significance of spiritual manhood. What may be the essential significance of this spiritual life, I have hardly intimated. But it is evident that to prove the superhuman origin of the human is a task beset with grave difficulties. Are they not insurmountable? As the attempt to reason from the physical world to a supernatural cause of it has been abandoned by many thinkers, who have found that no such argument could extri¬ cate them from the physical itself, so it is likely to be with the attempt to derive the spiritual human from anything above the human spirit. More promising would seem an attempt to account for the 30 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION human by searching* its own inmost being. Thus, against high appeals of faith in a super¬ human God humanism asserts a spirituality of its own, which is consistent with the conviction that all things must be subordinated to the human, centered in the human. No humanistic response is felt to the prevalent vulgar religion, whose interest is be¬ neath the genuine human—the religion which de¬ pends upon a supernatural deity to exploit for us the world of flesh and sense. Against both the lower and the higher faith in a superhuman God, humanism asserts the human values which are en¬ trusted to it, and which it cannot surrender, imperil, nor compromise. Does humanism then issue in a nobler and gentler atheism? That its history has frequently shown atheistic tendencies, no student of it can deny. But its highest developments, though they may seem to consummate the opposite of a religious conscious¬ ness, have so many resemblances to spiritual Chris¬ tianity that humanism may possibly become the interpreter of the Christian faith. Though human¬ ists cannot yield their conviction of the supremacy of the human, yet they must both claim and consider this: thaiuthrough all ages, assertions of the best and strongest human, which shame away unworthy thoughts of the divine, have pressed on to more vital affirmations of more intimate fellowships with God. Ill THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST When kneeling at the tempter's feet , to gain At that small price the world , our heart's desire , His hand upon us was infernal fire: No harm has followed; senses still remain To gorge his gifts—only our souls were slain. §1 G OD, man, world: in this order a clarified religious consciousness ranks the three con¬ stituents of the universe, the bewilderingly interfused trinity of all that is. In a spiritual esti¬ mate, man does not stand between “stars above” and “graves below,” but all that is not God, from stars to graves, is lower than he. How necessary, then, seems a supernatural and superhuman power, to beat back the physical, whose iron hands would drag us down to the extinction of the human in the physical! But humanism stations man on this ver¬ tiginous brink unsecured from above. In two important phases of modern humanism, the inevitable task of maintaining the human against the physical was too arduous. In the ren¬ aissance, nature suddenly disclosed itself as an enormous suppression. The repressive historic events along which we trace the decline of the ren¬ aissance, even through glorious transmissions from land to land, were reinforced by the annihilat- 31 32 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION ing comparison between the newly discovered great¬ ness of the universe and the littleness of man. To a later phase, the physical world seemed to offer itself as willing servant, but it soon unmasked a destructive enmity. §2 Man’s modern rediscovery of himself had been but just attained, when it was followed by the first discovery of the physical universe; for when men learned that their world is not central, they first beheld sun and stars. Fortunate for the original Hellenic humanism was its unsuspicion of the ex¬ tent of the physical. Though the Greeks forged science’s mathematical key, they tried it upon few locks. To them, no less than to the unscientific Semite, the heavenly bodies were “appointed for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years, and to give light upon the earth.” It was favorable for the renaissance that the irruption of the new astronomy was subsequent to the discovery of the new lands. This expansion of the earthly habita¬ tion was an inspiring challenge to the aroused hu¬ man, a new world for mankind to conquer, with accompanying victories over many fettering tradi¬ tions. But by what invasion may the nebulae be annexed! What winds shall waft our galleons across the shoreless seas! Might not science at¬ tempt the voyage? But for every league traversed, light-years stretched away. Discoveries in the physical world, even when we consider them apart from resultant inventions THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 33 which change human conditions, may affect the thought and life of men no less evidently than do events called epoch-making, or marked advances m culture or spirituality. Witness the consequences of geology and evolutionary method upon popular thought and faith and aim. But the discovery of the physical universe was more revolutionary than the discovery of anything in the physical universe. Men saw their world dashed to pieces, and the crea¬ tion of new heavens and a new earth. For earth, annexed by the physical universe, joined forces with it against men. Even those comprehensions of the physical which had formerly seemed attainable be¬ came transcendent of human powers. Problems which appeared practicable on the scale of this planet, and which might be hopefully reessayed even when each successive answer proved inade¬ quate, were found to involve innumerable unknown quantities. Though the popular knowledge of the vast expansion was limited by the illiteracy of the time, yet the sharers of humanism knew it, to whom the life of the renaissance had been committed. And they who had felt themselves sufficient to sub¬ due the world saw their diminished province taken from them, beneath the unregarding stars. A great recovered heritage of Hellenism turned against the children of the renaissance. The Greek, in his clear determination to subordinate all things to the human, had learned to weigh and measure physical things. Our physical science is mathemat¬ ical because of him. When we criticize the limita¬ tions of his scientific achievements, it is well to ask 34 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION whether this achievement of scientific method does not reveal more genius than all the discoveries to which it has been light-bearer. The Greek’s use of his method was limited because, for one important reason, humanity was his passion, and things were studied only as they might be made to serve the humanistic aim. Mathematics meant more to him as an intellectual power than as an introduction to external reality. But when the physical realm sud¬ denly became enormous, the inherited mathematical procedure laid an enormous weight upon the human soul. Into consciousness was thrust the mechanism of undeviating mathematical process. The over¬ whelming of men by the physical so conceived im¬ poses upon them, if not always a mechanical inter¬ pretation of themselves, yet at least a shrinking in the estimates of human worth, a fatal limitation of the assertion of spiritual freedom, and a directing of human life away from development of soul. Institutional restrictions upon religious and po¬ litical freedom, as in the Roman Catholic revival, the Protestant state churches, and the consolida¬ tions of monarchy, were reinforced by the accumu¬ lating pressure of the physical universe. As primi¬ tive people feel the human weakness before tiger and serpent, and their helplessness in the face of drought and pestilence, so men of a developed civi¬ lization cowered in the presence of the immense antagonist. The wraiths of necessity and fate which had haunted classic humanism became immi¬ nent realities. As the panic-stricken savage betakes himself to his wizard, and enchains himself to cus- THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 35 tom and its custodians, so the freedom of the renais¬ sance relapsed toward priest and king, while defi¬ cient in vital faith and steadfast loyalty. The decadent renaissance sank into the age of the enlightenment, which soberly inventoried achievements and limitations. This epoch was the humiliated soul's awakening to the actual. Neces¬ sary tasks were then accomplished or begun, for which the impatient temper of the renaissance was less competent. But it was a dreary time, both for those who accepted it and for those who strove, with imperfect success, to break away. Most men found a place to live in and to enlarge a little. Such adaptation is surrender of life’s essential claims. This is the pusillanimity which is content with aggressions over other powers than the op¬ pressor it dares not face. This is satisfaction with inferior activities, while the chief internal energy lies dormant. As from a deep and narrow gorge, men see the stars as indeed above them, but are enclosed from approach or vision of the slopes of Parnassus and the heights of Calvary. In our own experience, the immeasurable spaces have allied with themselves against us the inter¬ minable times. Our earth, in whose duration the whole stretch of human history is a brief incident, is as a single emanation of energy flung into the accumulated forces of the eons, to be swallowed up in them; and before and after its momentary exist¬ ence, the eternal heavens organize, perdure, disinte¬ grate, regather, from renewals and to issuings for which our mathematics has no comprehensible sym- 36 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION bol. The physical universe has not even scorn for us. What we resentfully fancy to be its mocking voices are only echoes, from impenetrable walls, of our sorry laughter against ourselves. §3 Humanism, preferring its own spirituality to that which is offered by the religion of the super¬ human God, may yet feel a human sympathy for that religion’s attempt to escape the immense physi¬ cal antagonist. The most common faith, commend¬ ing itself because it is common, is that which goes out to the imagined mightier than the might of physical things; even to him who is supposed to have created them, to rule them, to be our defense against them, our refuge from them. Was it not their oppression which drove men to faith in the omnipotent helper? But humanists and many others see difficulties in this faith. The argument is long, but the chief objection can be stated briefly. Many thinkers find no way from the physical universe—or from the universe in its physical as¬ pect—to a power that governs it. Tracing it back, they find no creator. Tracing it outward and in¬ ward, they never pass beyond its own properties and procedures. Tracing it on, it grinds out no rational values. They do not rise from nature in this sense to nature’s God. There is no affirmation here, these thinkers judge, of a superhuman and supernatural God; but how terrible, overwhelming, implacable, are the denials! Jehovah, no more than Baal, answers from heaven THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 37 by fire. Never in man’s conflict against his enemies does the sun stand still upon Gibeon. When we pray for any adaptation of the physical to our heart’s desire, to a God supposed to rule the physi¬ cal—however earnestly we seek, we do not find, however importunately we knock, it is not opened. Imaginings of favorable response reduce to some¬ thing different, shrink away before the innumer¬ able disregardings, and before the growing recog¬ nition that deviations of the physical order are never to be expected, never to be asked for. How the human may overcome can be told only after we have explored the powers which the human contains. At this point we can only say that the spirituality of humanism seems, even at this outset of our reflection upon it, to be an essentially better thing than dependence upon the superhuman deity of the physical universe. To rely upon a super¬ human God to guard us from physical evils and to exploit for us physical goods, and to rely upon our¬ selves for such necessities while we attain ourselves by learning and subduing some part of the actual— these two impulses seem to many practical people to be mutually exclusive. The twain are often seen together, but the closer the juxtapositions, the sharper appear the mutual antagonisms. Nor is it enough for the human to do but a part of the work. There never comes the moment in our task when we can say: Now we have done our utmost; now we will stand still and wait for almighty God. The resistance of Chateau Thierry advances into the offensive of Argonne Forest. There are always 38 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION human potencies still to be aroused. We are not insensible to the pathos of appeals to heaven of the sick, the famishing, those for whom reality is too stern. But it is humanity that hears these prayers and answers them. Our responsive compassion toils to relieve the sufferers by serviceable efficiency. And we teach them to practice the same deliverance upon themselves and others. When the great human cause is assailed, humanism does not expect the stars in their courses to fight against Sisera. It esteems the real victory to be the energizings of the supreme human qualities. §4 From the tyranny of the immense antagonist an aesthetic way of escape has been attempted. This path is for the few; or if for more, it is accessible to them only in exalted hours of dimly felt respon¬ siveness to nature, or is all but unconscious in the early years of a natural life not yet disillusioned. Poets, including the inarticulate, artists and musi¬ cians, including those to whom has been granted insight but not expression, accept the citizenship of the illimitable. The stars may seem no less friendly than when men hailed them long ago as radiant divine-human companions. They invite our love, which would win their responsive love to us; as earthly echoes of crag and woodland add to our returning voices the antistrophes of the spirits of mountain and forest. The soul may feel itself one with the distant in time. The fossil shell on a mountain top, touched by our pulsating fingers, THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 39 beats with the same life that is in our veins. Nor can that vital impulse greet us from so far back, even from other worlds than ours, as to be alien. All nature may hold such converse with us that we may, in the pregnant phrase of Jesus, “know all the parables.” These recognizations are not mere fan¬ cies. Fancy's task is to give them habitation and name. These attainments demand an insight that is dif¬ ferent from merely sensuous stimulation, shallow aestheticism, “pathetic fallacy," or overwrought rhapsody. The sentimentalist of the pleasurable impression produced by the spangled firmament deserved Carlyle’s rejoinder, “Hoot, mon, it's tur- rible." Nature is truly responsive only to intense personal and social consciousness. This is Words¬ worth's tenderly august message. This fellowship is congenial to the stronger and finer developments of humanism. It is consistent, with humanism that the aesthetic reconciliation with nature does not ask the interposition of a God above us, but is the arousing of our own spiritual life. The desired issue is other than that of the thunderous finale of the drama of Job, when the hero is overwhelmed by the outflamings in nature of that inscrutable power before which he must abase himself. The secret of the universe, as aesthetic humanism presages it, is not superhuman and supernatural, not a God separate from our¬ selves and from nature reconciled to the human soul. Yet even where there is true aesthetic insight, 40 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION rising into revelations of interpretive expression, art is far from attaining the solution of the prob¬ lem of ourselves and the universe. Those who seek here the reconciliation of the physical with the human spirit seem to be persuading themselves by excluding repellent aspects of nature and impera¬ tive demands of life. The aesthetic impulse, as they cultivate it, is but one power of the human soul; or rather it attains completeness only when it is blended with all our powers and with all of life’s experiences. Such a synthesis will be attempted later. It may be said that the aesthetic is not able, in isolation, to save the human from the immense antagonist. No less germane to it than its congen¬ iality with nature, is the consciousness of limitation and defeat as we confront nature. Its most poign¬ ant expression may be the death-song of the spirit, delivering itself up to be absorbed by that mystery. The spirit in its completeness must overcome the world. To that task our most winged potency is insufficient. Art is prophecy, not accomplishment; reconnoissance, not army of occupation; no final conqueror of the physical universe in every aspect, by the human soul in every power. §5 A supernatural and superhuman God to save us from the world which overwhelms us is not acces¬ sible to humanism. As unacceptable are invitations to yield ourselves to the great all of things. Yet these suggestions may awaken in men’s hearts a supposition preposterous at first thought, but in- THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 41 creasingly insistent. What if the spaces and times image forth the greatness of the human spirit, and summon us to spiritual expansions of which their immensity is a symbol ? Not into individual limita¬ tions can such a thought be received. It involves th affirmation of the social nature of each man’s essential life. Every personal power and worth grows from more to more when opened to human¬ ity’s life and pouring itself out thither. We cannot limit the range of this humanity. As a hermit nation opens itself to other nations, and as a se¬ cluded race learns that other races are of the same blood, why may not our world of men extend itself into other realms? Is death perhaps the initiation into this enlargement of humanity? And will that initiation be necessary for the mankind of riper ages? The sights of earth and of the sky at night, the sounds we hear and those which we attribute to the stellar choir, are they, when understood and related, faces looking love upon us and voices call¬ ing? Here the aesthetic impulse invokes other spir¬ itual powers to fulfill its premonitions. The natural processes in which life lurks so subtly and perplex- ingly, are they beatings, however faint, of hearts implicitly human, in geneses of love and joy and spiritual passion? Is the spiritual task of over¬ coming the world the fulfillment of the vast intrin¬ sic humanness ? After the decadence of the renais¬ sance and the dullness of the enlightenment, a great recovery and advance of humanism endeavored to achieve such answers to these questionings as would 42 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION spiritualize the universe, by the intensified powers of the human soul.* Philosophy and music were the chief forms, the inexhaustible fields of Germany’s interrupted, long deferred renaissance. Music of the great German type thrusts its intense emotions into all depths and heights, with stupendous intellectual develop¬ ments of expressive form; and idealistic philosophy was its companion, undertaking to make these realms of the insatiable heart a spiritually ordered universe. Beethoven and Fichte are inseparable. Similar is the relation of this philosophy to the best literary romanticism. German idealism accom¬ plished great things, in redeeming the spirit from the cramping poverty of the enlightenment, and in awakening historic forces. It belongs to the human¬ istic thought of our time to renew the work of these great humanists, by methods inclusive of all human powers, with enlarged resources of knowledge, and in a more concrete and vital social consciousness. As if fearing defeat from this and other forces of humanism, the physical antagonist changed its front, its armaments, its strategy. Serious have been humanism’s recent reverses. Formidable ap¬ pears this new assault upon the soul. *A humanistic interpretation of German idealism is here affirmed. Every humanist indeed stands against the ossifications of the Ger¬ man renaissance of thought. No humanist can come to terms with its unexperimental dialectic, subservient to Platonic and scholastic tradition, and issuing in an unhuman, all-engulfing, self-annihilat¬ ing absolute, nor with its neglects of life in the interest of intel- lectualism. Notwithstanding, the idealistic philosophy of the great German thinkers was essentially the humanistic attempt tO' reassert man against the world, to subjugate the physical order to spiritual forces whose home is the human soul. THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 43 §6 Through recent years the physical order has be¬ come a familiar associate, with opportunities of treacherous seduction. The epoch of human rights through democracy receded before the onrush of the age of science. By that title we have dehuman¬ ized the last decades. It is a science pre-eminently physical. The physical order, which had repressed man, gave more and more of itself into his hands. Baring hypotheses have been so brilliantly verified that they seem to have sprung not from the human mind but from nature itself. Through inventions that propagated inventions an historic phase shaped itself, which seemed undeveloped from the spiritual advances of humanity, and with forces which had remained hidden from all past ages. But these servants may become our masters. We may be enslaved by that which promised us a larger liberty. The age of science cannot indeed be radically crit¬ icised because its contribution to human welfare falls short of expectation, and because the old bur¬ dens still crush men, not only in exigencies like the world war, but continuously. Comparisons of this epoch in general with other times give us much cause for self-congratulation. We may reflect upon our heightened standards for judging human wel¬ fare. Men estimate their conditions not so much by what they enjoy or suffer as by what they desire; and inventions stimulate desire. Beneficent powers of the age of science are still unfolding, probably have only begun their growth. 44 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Frightful discoveries of infernal destructiveness into which these energies can be turned are miti¬ gated by the constructive applications of the de¬ structive agencies. Disturbances of social condi¬ tions are to be expected from any great newly ap¬ plied forces, physical or spiritual. Especially omi¬ nous are the transfers of men from natural to artificial environments, the exchange of healthful simplicities for feverish complexities, the descent from work with a personal interest to a depersonal¬ ized drudgery, often less exhaustive but generally less educative. These evils are relieved in part by the tendency of applied science to amend the sordid monotonies of simple conditions. The congestions may prove to be transitional. The mechanization of workers by their work, desperate as the rapid in¬ tensifications now appear, is checked here and there by developments in the mechanizing processes themselves. The growth of mutual antagonisms in the industrial order seems at present irremediable by anything that this age has to offer, but increas¬ ing cooperations may be thrust upon us. In any case, wind and tide are too strong for us. We can only drive on, wishing for calmer seas. All this is tentative. We fear dire disappoint¬ ments. Other ages have been weighted too heavily by their own attainments to withstand the assaults of wind and wave. It is significant that such hopes as have been mentioned of the better issue depend upon the development of forces more mechanical than human, in that they do not belong to human¬ ity’s spiritual powers. The age of physical science THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 45 regards them as sweeping men along with them. If they should prove beneficent, the soul of man would have to thank them, not its own forces. To trust a mechanic tendency too mighty for human control is still to be at the mercy of the immense antagonist, both in its benefits and its mischiefs the antagonist of that which humanity must demand of itself. §7 Even if the age of science should refute all these charges except the last mentioned, the principal challenge to it might still remain unanswered: what is the age of science doing for the human soul? “For we throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-ad¬ miring, With, at every mile run faster—(O the wondrous, won¬ drous age!) Little thinking if we work our souls as nobly as our iron, Or if angels will commend us at the goal of pilgrimage. If we trod the deeps of ocean, if we struck the stars in rising, If we wrapped the globe intensely with one hot electric breath, ’Twere but power within our tether, no new spirit power comprising, And in life we were not greater men, nor bolder men in death.” The problem is not to be formulated for the indi¬ vidual, but demands wide and deep social interpre¬ tations. The conditions of life wrought by physical science might be favorable to individual happiness generally, and to efficiently organized cooperations, 46 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION and yet be repressive of the soul of humanity, in which each man must find his own soul. On the credit side, our age has accomplished great things, in physical lines, to help the soul to help itself. The service to health is only one large item in the long list of such benefits. Where life is stunted and confined, first aid is sought from phys¬ ical science, just as the first thing to do for a hun¬ gry man is to feed him. and for a cold man is to warm him. Our science knows how to feed and what fires to kindle. Urgent are men’s physical needs, and unless these are met, talk of ministering to the soul is mostly vaporing. Nor is the benefit limited to suffering, and to urgent necessity. Requisite for any improvement or advance are physical appliances, and of these our science has increasing store. But first aids are only first aids. Though they continue through the whole process, they are essentially preliminary. The body warmed and fed may house a cold and hungry soul. When our science extols its own work as anything more than subordinate and preliminary, it ignores the souks worth. From the last imagined ascent of the path to its heaven of well-being, even though it should have ferried us across the river of death, there opens before us, as in the Bedford tinker’s dream, the portal of the physical abyss. What, beyond the services which have been indi¬ cated so inadequately, has our physical science done for the soul ? It has transformed the face of man’s earth and of human life upon it. A great thinker has said, employing perhaps not his deepest reflec- THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 47 tion, that important inventions are the epoch- making- events of history, which wiser generations than ours will commemorate as we now celebrate military achievements and political decisions. From the first cart-wheel, through locomotive en¬ gines and electric girdles of thought which by land and sea and air bind imperial republics together and draw isolated and backward peoples into the one world-civilization, through machine-making machinery which scraps worn-out types of social order and shapes another with immense, new, ap¬ palling issues, it is physical science in its inventive operations that is decisive of the more obvious, at least, of human relations, in their formation of the one humanity. Yet, when we boast of the world's advance under science’s shepherding, we may do well to compare ourselves with less scientific periods, estimating all epochs by those things which make for inner wealth. By these must all externals be appraised. Without these we attain only increasingly compli¬ cated degeneracies. The Athens of Phidias and Sophocles did very well without our scientific in¬ struments. Other influences enriched the soil which grew Petrarch and Shakespeare, and the painters who have remained incomparable, and the many more in ages of undeveloped science and in¬ vention to whom we now look back with amaze¬ ment. We think with still greater reverence of the Buddha, Zoroaster, the prophets of Israel, and of the name which is above every name. r Though rev¬ olutionized conditions which renew the face of the 4S THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION earth also enter deeply into the unfolding life of humanity, they meet there forces of a higher order, and the spirit, the supreme. They are but servants of these lords, instruments for the supreme human disposer of all things. Unless this deeper potency be developed, through uses indeed of these tools, but by the impulsion of its own underived life, all our enginery is as gold in the slippery hands of a fool. It is the heart that must be kept with all dili¬ gence, for out of it, not out of any of its instru¬ ments, are the issues of life. Great may be the stimulus of these physical successes upon each soul, and upon humanity’s interblended life. But their floods may wreck the spirit which they should bear on, by the spirit’s own piloting, to discoveries of new spiritual realms. In every external progress the internal leader must assert his generalship, lest his insubordinate forces follow ways that are not in the direction of his advance, become an army of tfye last Darius, destructive to its king by its very size and complexity. The scientific temper approaches the aesthetic in the attempt to reconcile man with man’s world. Though nature has disclosed to science a repellent mystery of strife and suffering, and we have knowl¬ edge of that which Paul felt when he wrote of the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain to¬ gether, yet there has been opened to us an indefi¬ nitely enlarging borderland, ruled by kindly pow¬ ers. We once supposed them hostile, because we unwittingly crossed their irresistible courses. This" intimacy with them is fellowship in work, of all THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 49 \ alliances the most intimate. The friendliness be¬ tween the man of science and a widening part and aspect of nature, is an added value among the riches of the soul. It is felt by all who share his knowl¬ edge, though in a small measure, and are apprecia¬ tive of his beneficent applications of it. Here is one of the sharpest distinctions between culture, which meets the world fearlessly, and savagery cowering before the natural, which appears so alien to men in the stage which we confusedly call natural. This scientific friendliness helps to guide painter, musician, poet, and the artistic sense of an age, into intimacies of nature and man. Yet, in this alliance, shall the hegemony be as¬ serted by soul or by things? It is a servitude to things when men find their good in them, bow down to them as to favorable and generous gods. Only when we initiate a spiritual companionship with them do we gain the abiding reconciliation, the friendship which reverences them too deeply to use them against the supremely human purpose, which we then share with them. Science makes ready the large upper room for the august feast of humanity. A purely human self-assertion must rule the physical relations into which science brings us. Science, in its service to soul, has removed from man’s path unintellectual and unspiritual hin¬ drances. Frorp every department of human activity it has brushed away metaphysical confusions, ir¬ relevant prejudgments. Though it has often offered in their place decisions that must be revised, yet 5® THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION scientific method progressively corrects its own mis¬ takes, and wins continually firmer grasps of the actual. It has routed superstition. It has dashed down the sword of the monstrous cherubim which guard man’s heritage against man. It has partaken of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which is a seedling of the tree of life. It has stultified dogma and ecclesiasticism, claims to infallibility of institution or individual, every external authority, which as authority imposes slavery of soul, en- feeblement of mind and debauchery of conscience. These conquests have not only annnexed wide stretches of the physical order, they have also de¬ livered, quickened, illumined the soul itself. The age of science has enfranchised latent human po¬ tencies, and has given them scope. It has done great service to our inmost selves by confronting us with concrete, practicable difficulties, to be over¬ come in an unshadowy, unghostly conflict, and to issues which need not be fought over. It has taught men to see the truth, and to be veracious witnesses of it. It abhors a lie. It has so brought men into the actual that the thought and life of recent dec¬ ades seem, in comparison with some other times, like vigorous work hours after a morning dream. The science of our time has done other high things. It has, though to a less extent than was expected, given support, opportunity, and material to those whose work is a more direct ministry to soul. It has bestowed upon compassion instru¬ ments, and therefore stimulus. It has brought to¬ gether wealth and need, in world-wide contacts THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 51 which have worked to convert insensibility into fellow-feeling and generosity. Physical science, in its industrial enterprises, has forced men into com¬ binations, which may be increasingly socialized if men will. Humanism itself demands a growing energy in the exploitation of nature, both for tools to work with, and for larger arousements of its own powers. All the higher contributions of physical science to the human soul are demands that the age of science pour itself into an epoch of the human spirit. The age of science has not been bereft of proph¬ ets of the soul. In their realms of creative imagina¬ tion, fundamental thinking, spiritual intuition, so¬ cial passion, they have made large use of the scien¬ tific mind and its veracious conscience. Their in¬ fluence has reacted upon great leaders in science, who are not among those who would keep men within the bounds of the physical. Not in that in¬ ferior company belong the names whose fame is secure, because they, modestly serviceable in their departments, have left the souls of men free to ad¬ venture higher realms. Or, if some genuine leaders have undertaken to bind souls to things, it is not that part of their work which abides. A few of the higher scientific rank have risen into the spiritual order, bringing their acquisitions to the nobler serv¬ ice. But even in them the sources of leadership are largely from influences which preceded the age of science, or developed along other lines. Our guides have drawn from the awakenings associated with the French revolution, and from the idealisms of 52 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION the German renaissance. The epoch of the modern rebirth of humanity is, in them, renewed and de¬ veloped. Such sources of vitality they have inter¬ preted as onflowings of that great tide of human¬ ism, increasingly social, which has been the domi¬ nant current, often flowing beneath the surface, of sacred, classic and modern history. Into this flood, as they have appreciated, the choked and parceled stream of medievalism forced its way. From re¬ mote treasures of peoples and races they have brought energies for the development of the human soul. And their influence has drawn into itself, that it might be kept pure and sweet, the simple, com¬ mon hopes and loves, toils and pains, joys and as¬ pirations, which are forever the essentials of human life. §8 Much more than the service which has been so sketchily indicated has the age of physical science done for soul. Yet each contribution must be watched lest it should be repressive, and there must always be the fight to keep the spirit dominant. Thus far we have set down the credit entries—with deductions—of the account of the age of physical science with the soul. There is something on the debit side. Some of the debits may pass for credits until they are scrutinized. The age of physical science has, in its character¬ istic task, accomplished nothing radical and per¬ manent against that repression of the soul by the physical order which dimmed the renaissance. We cannot claim the conquest of the physical when the THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 53 circle illumined by our arc light reveals a greater circumference of darkness. Our larger informa¬ tion of the past history of the universe has made us the more conscious that the entire duration of man's tenancy upon the transient earth is as the kindling and extinguishing of a shooting star. “Look!" you cry, and before the eyes of your com¬ panion can locate it, it is gone. We have reverted to the epoch of the enlightenment. We find that the temper of what we thought our unprecedented time is that decadent absorption in activities limited and repressed. The arrogation of the chief place for physical science makes manhood inferior to size, duration, force, which cannot rise above their essential quali¬ ties, however big and long and strong they be. The depreciation of ourselves loses that for which we made the surrender. It loses the meaning of things, which must be declared by mental activities beyond this scientific investigation. It loses the moral power which might be developed in the sub¬ jugation of the physical to the spiritual. The age of physical science sacrifices more in nature itself than it gains, unless it shall learn to use its exact and accumulating explorations of nature for higher gains. Its gain is loss if we are forced to confess, “Little we see in nature that is ours," for “We have given our hearts away." The imposing claim that our age has initiated man into the citizenship of the universe needs to be discriminatively estimated. It is indeed an impres¬ sive thought that our evolutionary science finds our 54 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION human life to be an unfolding of the illimitable past of innumerable worlds; that we are taught to recog¬ nize our own life in all life, and its basis in all that contributes to life in any wise; and that this inheri¬ tance constitutes enduring, multiplying, developing relations. We seem to be delivered from the plane¬ tary provincialism of the human into a really cos¬ mic cosmopolitanism; and this consciousness in¬ volves practical, concrete knowledge, which helps in many ways to efficiency and worth. We belong to all, though we cannot say that all belongs to us. The meaning of citizenship in the universe will meet us toward the end of our journey. The mean- •v ing must include all that physical science can im¬ part to it. At this point, certain preliminary re¬ flections are suggested. One is, that the conception, in order to be worthy of the human soul, must be ideal and spiritual, rising above the physical science which has helped to form it, initiating us into dis¬ coveries and interpretations of a higher order. An¬ other reflection is, that our claim to this citizenship must not disregard either that aspect of the phys¬ ical which opposes us, or the process of spiritual development in which we find our real selves, with the responsibility to compromise nothing of our re¬ sistance to the great antagonist. From these dis¬ criminations unfold the questions: Of what status is our citizenship in the universe? Is it a free citi¬ zenship? Does it subject us to powers of a lower order than ourselves, or does it summon us to the task of reconstructing them? Every acquisition shifts to the debit side, when THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 55 for our possessions we exchange the possessor. “These things which thou hast provided, whose shall they be?” It was indeed necessary to gain the possessions. Each age must do the task set for it. Scientific discovery and invention are promi¬ nent in the special task committed to the evident needs, abilities, and opportunities of recent dec¬ ades. This part of our toil must be continued, though not necessarily as the largest part. But for whom is it being done? For man? But the human energies cultivated by an age of physical science are directed to the world as viewed by physical science, and to men as immersed in that physical world. Even the enfranchisement from dogmatic superstition, and the awakenings of beneficent helpfulness, have turned their liberated powers in that direction, in which their freedom is again re¬ stricted. The deeper human energies, which are concerned with higher objects, have been subordi¬ nated or ignored. Prominent in this epoch has 7 been the attempt to account for the human by the physical, to reduce mental powers to weight and measure, counting it a success to express any of them by a mathematical formula. Physical science is indeed unable to give a spiritual answer to the question, “What are we?” For it can give no answer. It can only make its own contribution—along with other experiences— to the answer. It renders invaluable service here in its forming of genetic knowledge of ourselves, as it traces our alliances with the mechanism which we must learn, in order to use; in determining the 56 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION survivals in human beings of that which was before them, in order to equip our spiritual task with the knowledge of what we have to work with and against; in distinguishing and mutually relating the inner and the outer energies. These are valuable contributions to the answer. But if they are con¬ fined within physical limitations, they obscure the answer. The attempt to account for the human by the physical encounters this difficulty, that the familiar assumptions of physical science are losing their fixed meanings. It is found that scientific formulae must be continually revised, to be sufficient even for their own field. Before our eyes matter has changed to energy. We look out today not upon a static or a' cyclic universe, but upon a plastic universe. There is an opening question, whether the work of physical science cannot be done best in alliance with a spiritual interpretation of reality. Idealistic thought, by which is not meant abstractly concep- ♦ tualistic thought, may give to physical science the clearest task, freest scope, and most serviceable methods. Still the habit clings, to reduce the human to the physical, and it will continue till the age character¬ ized by the dominance of physical science yields to an age of another quality. Yet we can say for it, though not to its praise, that the age which directed itself to the physical has become the vindicator of the spirit, in two respects at least. It has shown that the invasion of materialism can never again be mobilized with so great an initial advantage, and THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 57 with such unpreparedness on the part of the human. It has also shown that the pursuit of truth, along any path, encounters spiritual considerations by which it must be judged, and in which it finds its own fulfillments. The failure of physical science, when usurping beyond its own domain, is evident in that form of social science which attempts to interpret social re¬ lations by physical conditions. Its practical failure before the accumulating social chaos is among the most ludicrous of current tragedies. Only in spir¬ itual humanism can the social sciences find supplies for the poignant social needs of our times. The sociology which has passed through the biological phase into the psychological is passing on into the spiritual, where practical use is made of the accum¬ ulations of all the dreary way. It may have been inevitable that the decades which found their urgent task to be the scientific knowledge and exploitation of the physical order should become obsessed by a necessary function, until by a reawakening of humanism this transi¬ tional time might find its place in the true service to humanity, spiritually discerned. But there is a more ignoble moral quality, a voluntary decadence, in the high-priesthood of science before the idols of the market-place. Science may indeed render, as reasonable serv¬ ice, the manifolding of the world's wealth. Any limitations of the inventive expansions of industry and commerce, directed to the general welfare, must be crossed over. In these ministries and disciplines 58 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION the human soul may form itself. It is a question of the directive purpose. Only Phoebus Apollo can drive the chariot of the sun. If any other than the deity of the higher human potencies attempts to di¬ rect the aerial steeds, harnessed for the service of man, the result is the destruction of man’s domain. Even if scientifically developed industry and its ad¬ ministration were competent to organize themselves for the general benefit, and if the equitable distri¬ bution of increasing wealth might be secured by anything less than humanistic forces, such consum¬ mations, if not achieved for the finer, purer, larger life of men, might well prove to be a more inclusive bondage of men to things. The age of science, vulgarized into the age of steam, of electricity—or is it the unfragrant age of gasoline?—by what other nickname will it dub itself in honor of the material! Or if it becomes the age of tidal and solar energies, actinic rays, atomic disruptions, what is the real gain! The practical materialism of which science is unworth¬ ily the minister is a nightmare from which our ob¬ sessed souls shake and groan themselves awake: universities offering as a sacrifice to efficiency, not antiquated classicism, which is of no importance, but the genius of perennial Hellenism; popular edu¬ cation “fitting for life” and losing life in the pro¬ cess; wealth emerging in a couple of generations from its parvenient vulgarities, to establish the con¬ summate vulgarity, the pride of wealth, while the mass of men, unsuccessful in their frantic covetous¬ ness, prepare the fight for social chaos; meanwhile, THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 59 vital simplicities bartered for mechanical artificiali¬ ties; productions multiplied and no purpose to use them for; possessions manifolded and no possessor: —but the tale is too long to tell. One word may be barbarous enough to express it all—Hohenzollern- ization. Of no slight significance is our time’s conscious¬ ness of being new. Exasperating is the smug banality, that if a citizen of any previous age should come back to earth, he would be aghast at new sights, noises, and smells at every turn. We have indeed accustomed ourselves to say that every his¬ toric phase develops from its predecessor. Evolu¬ tion has been our watchword—how ungeneticalty conceived we may see presently. But that affirma¬ tion, though itself claiming novelty, does not ex¬ press our self-assurance that the age of physical science stands distinct and separate from its past, on a newly furnished earth, under a newly deco¬ rated sky. This characteristic of the age of science seems at first thought incongruous with its most imposing novelty. Our modern knowledge, we affirm, is gained by the study of becomings. Our science is a tracing of continuities. Our biological advances of knowledge claim to be consummately genetic, evo¬ lutionary. Yet that doctrine of evolution which has been dominant till recently, and which is still nearly unshaken in the popular apprehension, has endeavored to express vital changes by shiftings of unchanging elements, to account for growth by re¬ combinations of lifeless constituents. But no dif- 60 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION ferentiations, integrations, complications of these things can ever attain a vital connection between any imagined instants of static grouping, nor lead along the path of life, nor even find that path. The detailed refutation of the imposing fallacy I must leave to those in whose department the exposure belongs. If Bergson and his associates are right— and I assume the cogency of their luminous state¬ ments—the age of science, notwithstanding its vast contributions to a genuine study of evolution, is weakest where it conceited itself strongest, in evolutionary principle and genetic method. Our historic science has shared with physical science a thoroughness and accuracy which have turned into folly multitudes of old wives' tales, re¬ iterated for centuries. It has reversed many his¬ toric judgments long unchallenged. Unwearied are its investigations. Very great, but manageable, is its wealth of verified and classified knowledge. It has evoked ancient civilizations and primitivisms inconceivably remote, from long concealed tombs and cairns. This historic science has sought to de¬ rive event from event, historic phase from historic phase, as working by genetic method, evolutionary principle. But the forces which it has least ac¬ knowledged, in what was recently at least its domi¬ nant school, are just the personal forces of concentrated vitality which it has attempted to de¬ personalize, thus losing the social energies which are meaningless without the recognition of the personal. Not by such procedure can life be traced along the course of human history, which is human- THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 61 ity’s life. Again it is evident that this age is weakest where it conceited itself strongest, in evo¬ lutionary principle and genetic method. The sin propagated by the Hohenzollern was sin against humanity in the deepest sense: it was sin against the continuity of humanity’s growing life. The time’s self-glorification of being new became as rampant in Germany as the false prophets after whom she raved. She would force a new spirit, a new order, underived from the past, disconnected from the great human process, as her leaders cut themselves off from mankind. The international law, which is the developing conscience of the great human brotherhood, the inner values which men have been learning to recognize, the amenities of mutual tolerance and respect which men have been gradually seeking to live by, the impartings and receivings between nations to whom have been sev¬ erally entrusted the diverse but harmonious out- workings of humanity’s progress—Germany would have none of these. Repudiating present coopera¬ tions and sympathies, she would sever herself from the past and from the future. Yet, unable to break away from the course of history, she descended the ascent, back to Assyrian inhumanities, to bestial- ized lust of ruin, rape, torture, indiscriminate mur¬ der. Attempting disconnection with the past of humanity, Germany annulled for herself her own past, whose glory has been beneficent to the whole world, and shall be, to the confusion of her betray¬ ers, for all the future. Our heart mourns like a harp for Germany—for 62 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION we are disciples and foster-children of the true Ger¬ many, the musician’s, scholar’s, thinker’s home¬ land. We long to follow her guiding feet again, when, purged of filth and blood, they once more tread the heights. We would not have her add to her offense the undiscriminating plea of the sins of other nations; but we would join in the confes¬ sion which must be the beginning of her spiritual recovery and ours, by summoning to the supreme judgment-seat those forces of the time which cut themselves off from the universal spirit of human¬ ity, derive from that which is beneath the human, direct themselves away from the soul’s enlarging purpose. In the conviction of our necessary union with humanity’s advance, there is attempted in the next three chapters an estimate of the humanizing forces of Hellas, Galilee, and their modern heirs. Devel¬ opments of humanism in other climes and civiliza¬ tions are omitted, but not in any depreciation of their enrichment of the humanity which forms it¬ self universally. The brief review may make more distinct the judgment, that our time is a decadent age, which has failed to maintain vitalizing union with the universal current of human life which we call history. In separation from that, no man and no time can live a life worthy to be called human. Such unity with the past can be secured only by a humanistic age. Like one who forgets his child¬ hood and neglects to renew his youth, like a nation that drifts away from her origins and from the epochs in which her liberties were founded, forget- THE IMMENSE ANTAGONIST 63 ting the reverent celebration of memorial days, like waters of a spent tidal wave wasting into salt and slime because they have arrogantly rushed be¬ yond their home, the sea—such is an age which in the conceit of newness and underived greatness, ignores its living union with the advancing life of mankind. Because its brilliant knowledge of the physical outstrips all comparison with the science of other times—its science of human relations has run a less triumphant course—and because the ap¬ plications of its science have made new the surface of human existence, it has indulged an unhuman self-sufficiency which costs it the very sources of its life. Either way of yielding to the immense antagon¬ ist, in either of its assaults, is humanity's loss of its own soul. When the physical overwhelms us, crushing out our truly human life, nothing but brutishness is left. But the issue is the same, and the manifestations are essentially the same, when the physical, seeming to subordinate itself to the human, lures us into the pursuit of physical ends. Against both the invasion and the seduction of the great antagonist, the spirit must assert itself. But there are many whose hearts humanity has touched. From their fellowship, cemented by sub¬ lime resistances and sufferings, issues the spirit of the better time. In them the humiliated age of science, with physical powers which need spiritual aims, passes, that it may fulfill itself in ministries to the human soul. “Thine handmaid is a servant, to wash the feet of the servants of my lord.” IV THE HELLENIC SOURCE OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Sweet bride of Hellas, from the dead By hand of strong Alcides led, Again to die, Grasp thou the pierced hand instead Eternally. §1 IFE unifies itself from its great awakenings, The supreme love should ever deepen and • intensify youth's romance. Wisdom should unfold from the great teacher in whom it met us. The spiritual life should continually renew the first revelation of itself to our amazed souls. The worths of life should grow perennially from the earliest recognition of the fatherhood and mother¬ hood that imparted them. Many of these determi¬ native experiences are included in that phase of our development which is anticipated in the dawn of adolescence, and accomplished when we attain manhood or womanhood. From its demonstrations of our capacities we trace out our normal growths and serviceable tasks. For then our powers awoke in prophecies which we cannot disregard without breaking life into detached futilities. So the united life of humanity should renew and guide itself from the Hellenic attainment of hu¬ manity's youth and entrance to manhood. From 64 HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION 65 the daybreak of Hellenic humanism we project the orbit of our sun. In its original virilities mankind may be forever young. We would not revert to it, seeking to reinstate outgrown forms, any more than the individual would try to reconstruct the condi¬ tions of his own formative period. We would not disparage the centuries between us and Athens, for they increase Hellenism’s dominating current with waters from other springs. We do not need to idealize the life of ancient Greece, nor to condone its incompleteness, perversions, recrudescences of bar¬ barism. The free Hellenes inhumanly regarded only themselves as really human. Yet, despite such glaring contradictions of humanism, Hellenism was the awakening of the human spirit, man’s discov¬ ery of himself. It directs forever humanity’s un¬ folding, inspires the universal historic task. Hel¬ lenism is humanism in the first clear self-discovery of the impulse to subordinate all things to the human, to center all things in the human. The fundamental impression received from Hel¬ lenism is of that repose which is mastery of self and task, humanism’s self-possession. It is this which compels our admiration, rebukes our fret, uncertainty, formlessness. The symbols of Hellenism are the calm brows and majestic limbs of sculptured gods and heroes. The genius that conceived them and the perfect crafts¬ manship that formed them possess their repose. Here is no vagueness of an elusive thought strug- 66 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION gling for an expression which is only an uncertain intimation. The artist's interfused conception and execution, attained by whatever toils and pains, are, in the final attainment and impression, direct, un¬ erring, clearly conscious of that which is to be told and of the way to tell it. This great, strong rest¬ fulness of creative genius is radiant in Hellenic art, philosophy, practical achievement, manners, life. It excludes everything alien, superfluous. Each work becomes distinct and complete in its own sym¬ metrical simplicity. Mutually related creations at¬ tain the same impression in their combinations, as the statue of Pallas and the enshrining Parthenon, or as protagonist and chorus in a drama's unity. In each element and in the whole, there is no dis¬ tracting intrusion, nor any deficiency which the spectator must disturb himself to supply. These revelations proclaim that human life must be dis¬ tinct and complete, self-possessed without excess or defect or disharmony. This satisfying reposeful completeness is the soul of Hellenic beauty. In barbarian lands our hearts are homesick for that beauty. Fortunate are the hours when we can pass from our distorted pover¬ ties and superfluities into its peace of clarity and grace, summoned thither by a luminous sentence of Greek reflection, by an exactly expressed phrase of poetic sentiment, by a sculptured line that separates perfectness from excess or defect. From these we may bring into common work-days the essential of the Greek’s beautiful reposefulness, the exquisite secret of his peace, the self-possession of the human. HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION 67 Our age knows so little of inward peace that we distinguish its kinds imperfectly. There is no peace in our lust of things, neither when we have gained them, nor when we distractedly pursue them, nor when, exhausted in a vain endeavor, we sink into inertia. Of the great historic kinds, one is the separative peace which withdraws from ob¬ jects, calling them illusions. This flows into Nir¬ vana. There is the transcendent peace found in Christianity, where the conscious antagonism to the supreme holiness has been calmed by the forgiv¬ ing grace of God, and there is peace with God and with all things that he wills. Omitting other types and variations of these types, for enough has been instanced for comparison, there is the Hellenic in¬ ward peace, which, harmonizing all human powers in the republic of the soul, accomplishes ever en¬ larging tasks with calm mastery. Strain and fret so characterize present activi¬ ties, and their vacillating desires, that repose may mean to us absence of action. The Hellenic repose is action conscious of its aim, of inward powers suf¬ ficient to attain it, and of the instruments that must be used. Hellenic humanism takes exact account of the things which must be subordinated to the hu¬ man. Its accurate objectivity is an element of its clear self-consciousness. The Greek, with his clear conceptions of the work to be done, faced the things which entered into his work with steady mind and fearless heart. Unlike the Hindu, he would not evade them. To try to evade them is supinely to yield to them in their inexorable encounters. Un- 63 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION like his Persian contemporary and our own age of physical science, he would not serve things by seek¬ ing his satisfaction in them. He appropriated them for instruments of the soul’s task. The sculptured symbols of Hellenism are not withdrawn from the world of things. They are either in action or ready to act, conscious of their power, or resting after action, in the satisfaction of work done. Their faces are perceptive or reflective; not introverted, as in the image of a Buddha, nor ecstatic, like the paintings of Christian saints. The Hellenic repose is in and of the Hellenic task, which is the task of humanism. In this task, the soul that subordinates things must organize itself. The lower faculties must be ranged under the sway of the higher. The body must be made the mind’s adequate instrument and expression. Alien to Hellenism were those Jewish confusions of the spiritual and the physical which to this day degrade the Christian hope of the here¬ after. Through the body must be continued the mind’s ordering, subordinating process. This re¬ poseful mastery is splendidly realized amid external turmoils. The wild steeds rear and plunge, but with calm self-possession the charioteer directs their onrush. This reposeful concentration is evi¬ dent amid the clash of arms, the fury of slaughter. The barbarian rabble scream themselves frantic in their disorderly charge and panic-stricken flight. There Achilles is the self-collected master of every tremendous energy. HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION o9 § 3 * The Hellenic endeavor to accomplish the human task in reposeful mastery may seem to be transcended by a permanently significant movement in Greek philosophy, extending, though with an in¬ terruption equally significant, from Thales through the Neo-platonists, and through medieval and mod¬ ern thought. Unhumanistic may appear the initial attempts to account for all things by water, or by fire, or by the atoms and the void, or by the un¬ changing One, or by ceaseless change. When thought advanced to seek the significance of reality in thought, and the Socratic concept was developed into a conceptual universe, this interpretation of reality seems to our humanistic criticism to absorb into an abstraction all the variety of human life. This philosophy appears to annul human interests by dissociating itself from the content of men’s thought and act, and to fix the untraversable gulf between the transcendent reality and the world of human experience, which can then only seem to be. When, in the course of Greek philosophy, the ava¬ lanches of intellectual criticism, ethical failure, and spiritual confusion swept away the approaches to that chasm, and the bridge by which men had hoped to cross it appeared as unsubstantial as the rain¬ bow that spans the plunge of a river down a moun¬ tain gorge, then a flight across was attempted by mystic ecstasy, into the obliteration of all that con¬ stitutes our human world. Is that august course ♦If any reader finds himself on too unfamiliar ground in this section of this chapter. he can omit without losing the connection. I have been careful to keep this section distinct from the others. 70 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION of speculation the retraction of humanistic Hellen¬ ism by a deeper Hellenic self-consciousness? The negative answer to this question is sug¬ gested, when we view this movement not from its medieval and modern derivatives, nor from ancient and recent criticisms, but from its own impulse. The beginnings of its fundamental reflection were in Greek cities which stood on the borders of the Hellenic world. In these city-states an alert inter¬ est arose, to reduce to order in thought the nature worship of neighboring peoples, and their associ¬ ated conceptions, including those of maritime traders who imported variations of the immemorial lore of older civilizations. How could this chaos of naturalism be reduced to the essentially human orderliness of an inclusive principle? It was in¬ evitable that these thinkers should first adopt a naturalistic principle, since they were affected by the traditionally naturalistic cults of their own pantheon. To them the face of Phoebus Apollo was blurred against the blazing sun. Poseidon was but lifting his head from the waves. Zeus had not yet completed his throne above the sky. The early Greek philosophy, like the religious advance, was a movement out of nature into mind. It was inevit¬ able that a physical element should be chosen to explain and order all things. But it was implicitly intellectual, inasmuch as that element was used as an interpretive and organizing principle. The ab¬ stractness and unanalyzed formlessness of their succeeding apprehensions of mind, and no less their divergence into a more developed materialism. HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION 71 marked equally necessary stages of progress toward the mastery of things by human thought. With Plato it is necessary, as with the German idealists, to distinguish his appreciation of the human from the conceptualism by which he sought to interpret the ultimate problems. This concep¬ tualism grew from that appreciation, though de¬ humanized in his developments of it. His aim, his passion, was the same as his master's: the ra¬ tional ordering, beautifying and noble energizing of human life. When we read in his most familiar passage of “beauty only, absolute, simple, and ever¬ lasting, without diminution and without increase or any change," such beauty may be judged by us to be inaccessible to any concrete object, and to be itself the absence of beauty. But he adds, however inconsistently, that this supernal beauty “is im¬ parted to the ever growing and perishing beauties of all other things." The conceptualism of his transcendent world was in his intent the comple¬ tion of human life. His city of the soul was the republic of harmoniously living men. In his great competitor the chief interest, as the titles of Aris¬ totle's writings specify, is the more critical and practical ordering of human life. When we translated Plato in our sophomore year, we children of the Puritans found continued in a new field the chief excitement of our early Sunday- school instruction. We delighted in the victories of Socratic and Platonic light over the benighted sophists, as we had reveled in the sanguinary tale of pious Joshua's massacre of the ill-deserving 72 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Canaanites, man, woman, child, babe and beast. The dialectical annihilation of Protagoras affected ns hardly less pleasurably than the disjecta membra of Agag, hewed in pieces before the Lord. We took Plato’s word and the professor’s for the complete¬ ness of the triumph. We gave little heed to the sig¬ nificance of a movement mightily pervasive of the Hellenic world, akin to its rival in the passion to rationalize, beautify, and ennoble life. From the humanism common to both was devel¬ oped the deeply ethical, broadly practical type of the Hellenism which dismissed the attempt to blend human reality with a transcendent imagining. Though fallen on evil days, the Stoic and those with whom he disputed bent serene, intense brows upon the task of making the human the best that it might become. This ripely representative Greek thought, finding beneath the human that which is intract¬ able, acknowledges in matter an irrational resid¬ uum ; and also confessing that the inmost secret of the universe is untraceable, reverently withdraws from things too high; and between the abyss and the summit organizes, within farflung boundaries, which ever expand downward and upward, the ex¬ quisitely penetrated world of rational satisfactions, intellectual harmonies, a life free, rich, beautiful, of well-ordered, self-restrained buoyancy of soul. The transcendent aspirations with which Plato strove to infuse human affairs were revived in the face of unhellenic contents of life. In Neoplatonism the humanistic Hellenic spirit can still be traced, as it seeks vainly to recover its lost values by the HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION 73 transference of the spirit into another world. Plo¬ tinus and his associates found, as in Kant’s Hellenic symbol, that the element that retards the flight of thought is necessary to sustain it. Here, as in all the failures of Hellenism’s magnificent endeavor, is the growing consciousness of a task too great for Hellenic powers. The pathos of disappointment deepens the significance of Hellenic humanism. §4 The Hellenic attitude toward the physical world was not our attempt to attain the scientific mastery of the physical for physical needs. Nor did nature declare to the Greek the glory of a superhuman God. The conception was not strange to him of “A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things,” Yet, when we encounter cosmic pantheism in Greek thought, its finest development subserved ethical purposes.” More congenial to him was the thought of nature as either the minister and adornment of human life, or its companionable reflection. We boast that our conceptions of nature are better, whether scientific, religious, or romantic. The romantically pantheistic mood imagines itself to be an original discovery of the deepest that nature is. But these complacencies may find that his intuitions are necessary for any insight of ours, and that some paths out from Hellenism must be retraced. When we assume superiority to the Greek’s de¬ ficiency in physical science and invention, it may be 74 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION profitable to recall two things, already referred to in the preceding chapter. One is, that the mathe¬ matical key of physical science is of his forging, though we, with inferior scientific genius, have un¬ locked with it many treasure-houses unknown to him. The other reflection is, that we have fancied it to be the key to reality, whereas he knew that its purpose is to exploit the physical for the human soul. Our achievement in scientific invention is our most obvious advantage over Hellas. But this does not necessarily imply superiority in any of the higher faculties. Inventions, when one has the Hel¬ lenic key, axe due largely to favorable economic conditions. Without these, clearest thought and consummate craftsmanship lack field and motive. Inventions belong among the more mechanical his¬ toric developments, which are distinguishable from the spiritual, the essentially human forces of ad¬ vance. The annals of invention are indeed full of spirit¬ ual achievements, such as indomitable patience, self-denial, concentration upon a beneficent aim, compassionate devotion to human welfare. Here also is incentive for the soul. But the power that does the inventing is of the more mechanic range. The inventive faculty may be less related to other faculties than others. It may be in ludicrous isola¬ tion. Of the higher forces the most prodigious in¬ ventor may be destitute, and the age of most daz¬ zling inventive triumphs. These may be won at the expense of our real selves. Their great sendee HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION 75 indeed is to set the human spirit free from limita¬ tions, that it may pursue higher tasks. But they may bind the spirit with heavier chains. Our in¬ ventive triumphs might well appear to the Greek an offering to the inferior gods. The classic human¬ ism, though historic conditions led it to grant its privileges to free Hellenes only, w r ould have rejected our mechanizations of human labor for men who call themselves free, our sordidness of accompany¬ ing social conditions, our prostitution of human powers to idols beneath Apollo's scorn. The Greeks, if faithful to their genius, would not have separated themselves from nature by enormous piles and holes that defile earth and air, nor surround themselves with cities, in a meaning so different from their idea of the city. If led to the brink of the inventive age, the Greek spirit would pause to count the human cost, to assert the human aim, and then would advance clear-eyed and confident of ability direct mechanical tasks to human ends. What the Greek invented ministered to the beauty and order of life. Here he showed consummate skill. We need to learn of him what kinds of things to make, and what use to make of them. The Greek's scientific curiosity was subordinated to intellectual processes, as well as to ideal aims. This habit may check for awhile the course of phys¬ ical science, but it develops mind and soul for all subsequent victories over the physical world. In the pathetically short time allotted to his inde¬ pendent career, he laid the foundations of mathe¬ matic, logic, fundamental thinking; of an ethic by 76 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION which he strove to live superior to fate; of an aesthetic which our dull appreciations fail to re¬ cover, and in which were involved exquisite prac¬ tical applications, as in architecture, worked out as far as was required by beauty, impressiveness, and adaptability to high uses; of unmatched speech in prose and verse; of a political science, to whose fundamental principles mankind has only recently begun to grope back. All his science turns man- ward, into art for life's sake. When we praise ourselves that our attainments in physical science are so superior to his, we may also reflect that it is by his development of mind that we have become able to study nature. When from our knowledge of nature we learn more of mind, this also is derived from him. And we still have to learn life in the world, and the life of the world, from his discover¬ ies of soul. His irony, a trait of intellectual clarity, would have rejoiced in our belated discovery that our time's devotion to physical science has brought us to no final knowledge of reality. We have learned to exploit a little of the world for our lower needs. We have formulated a superficial aspect of it. Our processes, erring in their incompleteness, have tried to mechanize the vital, to divide the indivisible, to tear to shreds the garment woven without seam. To formulate and manipulate a reflection of nature by a mechanically intellectual cleverness is not knowledge nor possession. When Hephaistos, the lame artificer, attempts to serve the Olympian ban¬ quet, inextinguishable laughter rocks the assembly HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION 77 of the gods. It would be too grave a jest if the arduous course of our physical science should limit us to incidental conveniences, provisional concep¬ tions, and fail to become an element of real knowl¬ edge and thought and life. In order to minister to these higher ends it must associate itself, in a sub¬ ordinate capacity, with a more deeply human inter¬ pretation of the world. The masters of our physical science are pleading with us to learn reality in essentially Hellenic ways, and to organize scientific procedure in the light of this knowledge. For the Greek knew that the world was alive, and he was on his way to know its vital unity. The Greek possessed nature by knowing his own soul. Who shall guide us to greet the world with his sense of companionship? We may guess that nature was to him what a radiant night is to us, when we discern, in her perfect place in a perfect frame, like a great cameo seen through a mist, the lady of the moon—pale, pure face, gleaming bosom, luminous hair billowed by celestial winds; and she is the charm and glory of the night. Such as the skies are in her regency, we may suppose the sea to have been to those who heard its whispers and thun¬ ders as voices of a human song; and mountain woodlands disclosed to them, in plays and shiftings of form and color, glimpses of human grace. Nothing of the rich variety of the music and the vision is lost when reflection passes on to the human unity in which they are. Shall we ever return thither, to press on from his insight into spiritual 78 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION deepening^ of that companionship? Or is human¬ ity, grown old, doomed to lament always: “It is not now as it hath been of yore; Turn wheresoe’er I may By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more?” § 5 Beautifully expressive of Hellenic humanism were fair cities’ festivals, with their dancing forms, and with music of another genius than ours. In our land the dance is regarded as at best an unessential addition to life. It is either clumsily inartistic, or else is an exotic art, as still generally on the stage. Exotic, but not artistic, is the waning craze of un¬ couth imitations from savages. Few of our dances —but those few are beautiful—come from the life of the people, except among our Negroes, Indians and immigrants. In this respect—and other re¬ spects—European peasantries are far more Hel¬ lenic than we. To the Greek, the dance was the successful endeavor to make orderly, stately, beau¬ tiful, the personal and social manifestations of the human through its impersonator, the human body. His dance expressed the sensuous as it expressed other impulses, distinctly, separately, in its place and measure. There was no tendency, until the Hellenic decadence, to make the sensuous pervasive. The dance was universally human in its range, whether decorously conducted by the Muse of tragedy, or whirled along by the wild Maenads. Viewing Hellenic life as dance, we must listen to it as music. We enter only a little way into the HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION 79 Greek's thought and action if we forget that he filled his life with music, set life to music. To him it did not speak “of that which we have not seen and shall never see." It had no pinions to mount above experience. Its spirit is not akin to that union of Christian aspiration and Gothic mystery which is the consummation of our supreme art, though our expressive harmonies are derived from the Greek sense of form. His music was for life to dance to. As grace and exhilaration of human life not seeking to transcend itself, this art, as we may judge from its effects and relations, ap¬ proached perfection in its kind. The dance and music of the festival were in honor of the gods. But their gods were expressive of the human. All the more because of the religious con¬ secration were dance and music expressive of humanity, in clear and buoyant feeling of its own worth, beauty, symmetry, effectiveness for the human task. Is there any religious influence to be derived from that self-consciousness? Whatever we may learn from Hellenism concern¬ ing the humanizing of the objects of faith must be derived from the Hellenic religion in its genuine¬ ness, not from that syncretism to which we super¬ ficially impute an Hellenic influence upon the early developments of Christianity. This influence has not been exaggerated, except by a few, but it has been misnamed. In our New Testaments we read Greek words, but not Greek sentences. The same may be said of most of the “Greek fathers." We find much metaphysic of a sort in Pauline and 80 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Johannine writings and their successors, but not genuine Greek philosophy. Gnosticism and mystery cults affected Christianity mightily, but not with a purely Hellenic consciousness. There wmre Hellenic mystery cults, but they are to be distinguished from the so-called Hellenic mystery religions, which rivaled and affected Christianity. That mingled flood of unregulated speculation, superstition, char¬ latanry, effeminate faddism, bewildered agony of spiritual struggle, aspiration, insight, was one of the mightiest of the decadent movements of reli¬ gious history. Christianity was safeguarded from complete conquest by the historic supremacy of its founder. This movement contained Hellenism as water contains hydrogen, which in water is no longer hydrogen. Not that the authentic Hellenism had passed from the earth. It continued essentially apart from that unhellenic bewilderment, through Constantine’s barbarous betrayal, and even until our forefathers from the north trampled it into the ground, to become the seed of a remote harvest. But it was not by this survival that the Christianity of the Roman Empire was deeply influenced. Though we trace the Hellenic spirit in the alien content of Neoplatonism, it was not that Hellenic survival which deeply affected the Christian faith. The historic creeds of Christendom are far from being purely Christian. But when we call them Hellenic, we give them an undeserved honor. If a meeting-place of thought and life and aspiration may be discovered for Greek and Christian, it must be for the Greek of Athene’s fostering and for the Christian who is in the direct discipleship of Jesus. ' HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION 81 The Greek’s worship of the “fair humanities” is not superficiality in religion, nor an episode in men’s search for God. It is not a bypath ending at the castle of despair. It is not a superstition, which must fade away before the revelation of superhuman deity. It is the attempt to humanize religion. Shortcomings and perversities may be due, not so much to a deficient consciousness of the supernatural and superhuman, as to the imperfect apprehension of the human—necessarily incomplete in so early an endeavor. It may be possible to dis¬ cover within this incompleteness a power which can impel our inherited humanism toward spiritual con¬ summations. In Greece, as nearly everywhere, religion lagged behind other developments. For religion, with few 7 exceptions, does not lead on, but it holds back. This is due in part to the rigidity of cult and creed, and to priestly interests in things established. But a deeper reason is, that religion hesitantly forms its changes from secular developments, historic move¬ ments, social awakenings. This is shown nowhere more plainly than in the religion of Israel, culmi¬ nating in the great prophet of humanity. In su¬ preme moments these developments converge into a mighty spiritual passion, which then becomes leadership of all human interests, in a great prophet and in the fellowship which he inspires. No such epoch is found in the pathetically brief period when Hellenism was unhampered by alien intrusions. Its advancing humanism in other elements of life far outstripped its worship and faith. 82 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION The Hellenic gods were not too human: they were not human enough. In their short life-time of men's vital faith in them they could only partially outgrow the physical forms from which they origi¬ nated. Only the supreme artists, and those capable of receiving their vision, conceived them as dis¬ tinctively human, and even they as incompletely human. The reflective brows of the Phidian Zeus might be pondering the unclean numina from w r hich he had been spawned so recently. Athene of the Parthenon was almost within hearing of the shrieks of human victims in her Arcadian shrines. The Dionysos who inspired the perfectness of Athenia* tragedy was reminded even there of his brutish shapes and rites obscene. The gods, emerging from the physical and animal, did indeed draw nature up with them, in man's apprehension of nature. The growth of these humanizations both of nature and of man's life in it, is one of the most fascinating of studies. It was inevitable that animal passions should cling to their incompletely humanized con¬ ceptions of deity: for, the Greek might ask, are not these passions natural to man? It is a similar phenomenon when w r rath and vengeance are stiH attributed to the Jahveh of the Arabian marauder, even in the faith of modern Christendom. The al¬ ternative would seem to the Greek to dehumanize the thought of the divine, either by its lapse into physical nature, or by the fading out of the god* into vague abstractions. When great thinkers tried to unify the thought of God, they found the ele¬ ments of religious faith too little developed for their HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION 83 undertaking. The Hellenic humanism was in nearly all respects an interrupted task which we must complete: in religion it was left the most incom¬ plete. All the more urgent, then, is our task, to work out and unify the spiritual humanizations which they began, which they inspire. Other undeniable imperfections of Hellenic spir¬ ituality, such as a deficient sense of sin, of holiness, of regeneration, were, as our further reflection may find, not because their gods were too human, but because of the incompleteness of their humanity. Whether clearer humanizations of the thought of God can deepen sufficiently the essentials of spir¬ itual life, we w r ill inquire later. It may be found that the Greek conception of the humanness of deity, confused though it was, is among the chief historic values of the spiritual consciousness. § 6 The soul’s reposeful mastery of the human task, the genial companionship of nature, the humanness of the divine—these three aspects of Hellenism give us essentials of man, the world, and God. They are mighty stimulations of our reviving humanistic en¬ deavor, to subdue all things to the human, to center all things in the human. The inspiration is all the greater because the Greek, in his tragically short period of free self-development, found the under¬ taking too great. Reposeful mastery proved to be ideal, not attainment. There was the brooding consciousness that his work must be left unachieved. Over Achilles’ plumed helm hovers the shadow of 84 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION untimely death. To build in a few short years the human universe, with materials which the Hellenic genius must itself transform from mud and slime, against monstrous consolidations confronting him and new destructive powers fast forming to over¬ whelm him, was a work beyond hope of accomplish¬ ment. It is enough for our grateful praise if, under such conditions, the nature of the task was discov¬ ered, for later ages to develop, with additional ener¬ gies. Not the least incentive of our loyalty to Hellenism is its tragedy. It was the Greek's political failure that involved the most poignant consciousness of universal defeat. For he shared the antique conviction of the suprem¬ acy of the state, as inclusive of every human inter¬ est, and with final right over each individual right. In the state, thus revered, he desired that every individual capacity should be fulfilled, and the supreme will discovered in the unity of self-govern¬ ing citizens. This was the form in which Hellenic humanism sought to work out its noblest aspiration, its social consciousness. This socialized humanism was to him the consummate ideal, the fundamental principle, the pervasive spirit and energy of his growing human universe. Whatever causes are al¬ leged for the Hellenic decline (and it is now the fashion for each specialist to locate the sufficient cause in his own specialty, however restricted) the Greek reduced the causes to the failure of that which he considered fundamental, pervasive, ideal. When the state failed, as it was continually fail¬ ing, through the inherited omissions of essential HELLENIC SOURCE OF SOCIAL PASSION 85 elements, the selfish corruptions of democracy, the various usurpations of tyranny, interminable strife between cities and of factions in each city, through a forced consolidation, whose conquest of the East proved to be a further Hellenic disintegration, and through the Roman conquests, this continuous po¬ litical defeat was to the Hellene the increasing overwhelming of humanity by inhuman powers. Under the thickening shadow, death became more than the doom of individuals and generations. It was the extinction of the Hellenic ideal, the destruc¬ tion of human ambitions. Stronger than they are necessity and fate, aloof, impassive, implacable. The Athenian tragic drama has all Hellas for its chorus. This is the crown of sorrows, that the human in its mightiest consciousness of excellence is arrayed against invincible powers. §7 Our present civilization is heir of all ages and climes—though other civilizations or barbarisms may be our heirs. To limit our wealth to the Hel¬ lenic inheritance would be least Hellenic. But as great a loss would be incurred if we should fail in the Hellenic organization of these other wealths. The larger our appropriations of other inheritances, the greater is our need of Hellenic humanism. One of the applications of this reflection is to that region which we of Western Europe and Amer¬ ica have traversed along our historic course. Our path dipped from sunny, genial Hellenic heights, into the Gothic forest, cavernous, abysmal, perilous, 86 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION demon-haunted; from the appropriation of the world by the human soul to intractable suppress¬ ions; and from the attempted mastery of all things by the human to the absolute mastery of the human by the ruler of all things and all souls, the inscrut¬ able mystery, the supernatural and superhuman God. Yet the Gothic consciousness is a vast enlarge¬ ment of our world. No bounds shut off any realm of emotion and longing. Here are the most signifi¬ cant expressions of music, and here is that which the greatest music confessess to be inexpressible. Here are floods of the heart, deep, passionate, tumultuous. Here are terrible premonitions of death and of what may be beyond death. Here are radiances of the supernal hope, the beatific vision, the eternally towering ecstasy. Here is contrite reverence for all high things and their august sym¬ bols, with agonizing repentance, utter self-abnega¬ tion, rapture of redemption. At the entrance of this domain the challenge con¬ fronts us: shall the human spirit suffer itself to be overwhelmed, or shall it still advance, chastened, renewed, and equipped with powers which Hellas did not know? The conviction that all things must be subdued to the human, centered in the human, should be intensified with the enlarging of every human scope and task. Everything that encounters us from every age and clime arouses the human to larger efforts. Every mystery reveals that the deepest of all mysteries is the human soul. V THE GALILEAN SOURCE* Accept those, Christ, as wholly thine, Who seek Thee by the shepherds’ sign; They find Thee in each little child, They find Thee in each mother’s care, Where pain has sobbed, and love has smiled, And grateful faith lifts up faint hands of prayer. Thou who art present everywhere In common things of highest ivorth, Descend to us, in lowly birth, Cleanse Thou the hearts by pride and scorn defiled, And make of us Thy manger, Lord Christ-child. §1 N OT from Hellenic springs alone must our age be humanized, though we include con¬ tributory springs from other sources, which are swept into the main current. Our hu¬ manism flows also from the hills of Galilee. Its purer, nobler origin is Jesus, the supreme humanist. Rut what part has humanism in him, whom we •onceive to be the most religious of teachers, the most devoted to God, the most absorbed in the di- <1 acknowledge very gratefully the courtesy of tlie editor of The Journal of IReligion for permitting me the use of this chapter, which was published in the first number of The Journal of Religion, sub¬ stantially as given here. It was written for this book, and its pub¬ lication as an article was an afterthought. It tinds now the place f*r which it was intended. 87 88 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION vine will? Was there any tendency in him to sub¬ ordinate all things to the human, to center them in the human? While this challenge is left to be an¬ swered later, attention is called here to essentials in the teaching, ministry and personality of Jesus, which profoundly affect modern humanism. But is not this influence due to a misunderstand¬ ing of him? 55 ' Our hopes of finding in him solutions of the human problems which our civilization must solve or perish are met by the fact that his teach¬ ings have reference to the kingdom of God, which, as he conceived it, is not to be obtained by historic progress, but is to descend suddenly from heaven in divine power. The short interval, which he ex¬ pected between his announcement that the king¬ dom is at hand and its catastrophic inauguration, was not to be for its evolution, but for preparation of heart for the kingdom’s appearing. His absorp¬ tion in that celestially originated order excluded from his mind the problems of the developments of industry, government, culture, as these demands confront us. The influence of Jesus upon the prog¬ ress of social institutions seems to many to be based upon one of the most fortunate misconceptions that ever blessed mankind. But now that his authentic *1 find it impossible to revert to what seem to me unhistorical interpretations of Jesus, which are coming into vogue in some places. To try to make Jesus a man of modern affairs, as if con¬ sidering modern conditions, seems to me to help to an understand¬ ing of him no better than when he is rhetorically characterized as “the sublime mystic of the Galilean hills.” Welcome and necessary are criticisms by real scholars upon the exaggerations and omissions of “the eschatological interpretation of Jesus.” I do not discuss the question of the advance of our Lord’s thought and plan of work during his ministry. That advance seems to me to be a deepening of his supreme and inclusive purpose, the Kingdom of God. THE GALILEAN SOURCE 89 thought and ideal have been recovered, we can no longer profit by the mistake. A detailed knowledge of Jesus’ expectation would require much clearer and fuller reports of his teach¬ ing than we possess. In such paucity of data we should be cautious of exaggerating contradictions and incongruities, and should concentrate upon ele¬ ments of his prophecy that are pervasive. There are important differences from Jewish, Pauline, and other forms of the hope then prominent in Is¬ rael, of an impending revolution of the world by divine interference. From these are derived many statements incorrectly attributed to Jesus by the evangelists. But there remain in the synoptic rec¬ ords utterances derived from their most authentic sources, and which are consistent with our best substantiated knowledge and clearest impression of him. In these reports we rec:g~ize his own mes¬ sage. Jesus shared the general hope. He purified it. He poured into it his own spiritual conscious¬ ness and social passion. Jesus’ expectation differs from the materialism, secularism, and nationalism dominant in the Jewish and—with modifications—the Jewish-Christian es¬ chatology. It also differs from the celestially in¬ clined hope of Paul, from which the colors of Jesus’ earth of the glorious future have faded, and from the still more transcendentalized expectation of the gospel and epistle called by the name of John. Jesus looked into the near future of the world for the realization of the Kingdom of God, and anticipated 90 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION there a social order worthy of God to give and of men to receive.* The change which Jesus expected is only subordi- nately a change in the material world. It is a re¬ generated, revolutionized order of human life upon the earth. Some synoptic passages indeed, judged to be essentially his because they are characteristic of him and closely represent their oldest sources, appear inconsistent with this anticipation. Such incongruities are unavoidable in a conception which no vision or thought can make a complete unity. There are glorious confusions so exultant that they can never, to our thought at least, be realized on this earth; as the absence of death, the tangible presence of those risen from the dead, including himself, and the ordering of the forms of human life upon celestial models—“like unto the angels.” That these confusions did not confuse him is due to his prophetic consciousness, essentially different from the claim of a magical clairvoyance of future events. It is not a rationalizing, systematically constructive consciousness. He was not concerned to work out a utopian system. The new order is the Father's gift. It includes every good which the Father can bestow upon his children. How its blessings are to be interrelated is the Father’s con- *Careful readers of the New Testament, though not: technically trained, can construct the expository argument on its main lines for themselves. 'They should keep to the first three gospels, read “age” for “world” in most places where it makes sense, and understand “treasure—or reward—in heaven” not of where the treasure is to bo enjoyed, but of where it is being kept. Also, “the Kingdom of God" is evidently Jesus’ usual phrase; and Luke 17:21 refers to the King¬ dom’s sudden irruption: the translation “among you” is near enough. These hints may help to correct other misapprehensions. THE GALILEAN SOURCE ft „ cern, not his. Of inexhaustible significance is his relation of the kingdom to the divine fatherhood. In his thought, nothing men can do hastens or retards this impending divine event. Its coming and the moment of its coming depend upon God only. Far from his faith was the Jewish assump¬ tion that if Israel should keep the law for one day the Kingdom of God would come. Yet men are to await it, not with folded hands, but with girded loins and lamps trimmed and burning. ‘‘Repent” was his proclamation, “for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” The word inadequately translated “re¬ pent” means an inward revolution. It is not merely a repudiation of the conduct condemned by the morality and religion of his time or of any imper¬ fect time. It is not satisfied with standards of righteousness below those which his own life ex¬ pressed. The very spirit of the kingdom, the in¬ ward holiness, self-renouncing devotion, and all- enduring, all-forgiving ministering love, to which the blessings of the new order correspond, must be implanted and must grow in the receptive heart. Not that this establishes the kingdom in the heart thus directed to it. Nor has it become established in the present fellowship of men thus changed in mind. It is to be a regnant social order, not yet realized. Yet this new life in the soul makes its possessors sons of the kingdom, no longer children of the present age. This part of Jesus’ gospel opens to us his own inexhaustible treasures of character, spiritual life, and devoted ministry. These are the two essential, inclusive elements of 92 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Jesus' message: the all-important divine event in the near future, and preparation of heart for it. “Be changed inwardly: for the Kingdom of God is at hand." But we know that between these two ex¬ tends a vast field of human tasks. Only by the ful¬ fillment of our responsibility to the tasks of civiliza¬ tion may mankind advance toward the perfected world-order of Jesus' hope. Admitting, as we are forced to admit, that Jesus was mistaken both in the nearness and the manner of the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth, and that he made no conscious provision for our inalienable responsibility, must we undertake it with only incidental help from him, acknowledging that his gospel is not for the world as it is, to make it the world as it ought to be? §2 The significance of Jesus' expectation, it is said with increasing currency, is his perception that the betterment of the world depends, not upon a process of natural evolution, but upon spiritual forces. In this sense, it is said, the kingdom descends from heaven and is God’s gift, whether it comes soon or late, suddenly or progressively. Without entering upon a critical analysis of this thought, we may accept its estimate of spiritual powers. That appre¬ ciation will, I believe, make evident that the essen¬ tials of Jesus’ hope are indispensable for the task of civilization which we have to do, and inevitably translatable into it. Also, our fulfillment of our task will be found to be historically conditioned Upon his hope as he held it, to the practical suffi- THE GALILEAN SOURCE 93 ciency of which its mistakes and limitations are requisites. One with the best spirit of our age, one with a militant and devoted humanism, is Jesus’ prophecy of a perfected earth. “The distant triumph song” sounded for him, not from the heaven above us, but from the earth as it is to be, from happy, pure, and loving men; even as we hear it, whose hearts hu¬ manity has touched, while we toil for the world’s perfecting. His deepest and tenderest consolation to his disciples about to be bereft of him, was not that they should “meet the Lord in the air,” nor that he, coming again, would “receive them unto himself,” in that heaven to which he was returning, but that he who had so often pledged with them the cup of joy and love would “drink it new with them in the Kingdom of God.” It is not heaven that we are working for or can work for, but earth as he foresaw it. The toiler’s Kingdom of God is to be here. Often our hope of the world’s progress is turned to doubt, sometimes to despair. Then we limit ourselves to patching one rent or another of an old decaying garment. We fret to make some conditions a little less intolerable, some human in¬ terrelations a little less discordant, if we can, be¬ tween man and man, nation and nation, race and race, those who are in possession and those who are frantic to possess. Then we sink to futile compro¬ mises. We wander along desert trails that lead nowhere. Both aim and inspiration depart from resultless tasks. We need the reassurance that abides in the spirit of humanity, and which rises in 94 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION our hearts from the insight and confidence of him who was most human. In his vision we see that the aims most spiritual, the faith most heroic, move unfalteringly on to the hope that is set, not unre- latedly above us, but attainably before us. It is this hope which Intensifies the great task of human¬ ity upon earth, the realization of humanity in the conditions and relations of earth. Jesus' gospel of the kingdom offers not only in¬ spiration to an attainable goal, but guidance no less. His kingdom is for the poor; this is our directive principle. His dominant beatitudes are to the hun¬ gry, who shall be filled; for them that mourn, who shall be comforted. The earth is the inheritance of the meek, even the lowly and oppressed. These announcements are not figurative. Does one offer rescue in a figurative sense to drowning men, or figuratively promise bread to starving children? Nor is he pointing to heaven, as we have indolently and supinely misunderstood him. He is speaking of the establishment of his Father's Kingdom upon the earth. Those who groan under the intolerable yoke of tyranny, inequality, inhumanity, and are hunger¬ ing and thirsting for God’s righteousness on the earth, shall have their longing satisfied. The last are first in his exultant hope, as in his beneficent compassion: the last must be first in every human task. The initial object of every service is the least of these his brethren. In this incontrovertible interpretation of his words, ministry, social passion, our discipleship to Jesus gains a meaning more revolutionary than any THE GALILEAN SOURCE 95 socialistic programs, which must be tested, without prejudice either way, by their practical working out of his aim. His gospel of the kingdom imposes a task pervasive of all our life, of every man's call¬ ing, of all our organizations and institutions. Only as practically directed to the redemption of the poor, the neglected, the miserable, is any comfort, pleasure, character, spirituality permissible, any advantage of birth, opportunity, ability. All things which are not directed and proved effective to this end are to his disciples unclean, hateful. They are blasphemies of his name, repudiations of his leader¬ ship, rejections of his salvation. They are Peter's denials of him, and Judas's betrayal. Ministry to the last and least is the primary and inclusive pur¬ pose of all government, all commerce, all industry, all social relations. By service directed to them im¬ partial benefit is secured for all. For this purpose the gifts of genius descend from the wisdom and compassion of the all-loving fatherhood, wealth is accumulated and distributed, inventions conquer the material to human uses and ends, and the church preaches the gospel to the poor. The spiritual nobility of Jesus' hope exempts it from particularistic and materialistic aims. Moral and spiritual regenerations are inseparable from the blessings of his kingdom. Into it may enter only the righteous, kind, loving, forgiving. There¬ fore our ministry to the last and least, which regu¬ lates all personal and social action is, above all else, though not prior to all else, cultivation of their mind and heart and soul, of their character, spirituality, 96 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION service. Of them is required devotion to his self- renouncing ideals, including the forgiveness which brings men back to one another from every hatred, hostility and prejudice, however caused, and makes those who were enemies of one another fellow- workers for the Kingdom of God. When we merge with Jesus’ compassion for the poor his demands upon them—for the least in that kingdom is to be greater than the greatest of this age—when we rec¬ ognize them as first in human and divine regard, that they may be blended with all citizens of the kingdom in equal and supreme privilege and serv¬ ice, it can be said with clearer meaning, that there is no other practicable all-inclusive aim for human¬ ity and every member of it. Then every other principle of advance yields to Jesus’ compassionate concentration of all human forces upon the neg¬ lected, the oppressed, the last and least. The opposite principle, most monstrous inhumanism of the passing era dominated by physical science, that the inheritance of the earth is the contention of the strong and the spoil of the strongest, has gone down in the world war to everlasting contempt. Between the two principles there is no standing ground, and Jesus’ principle can make no compromise. What¬ ever aim is not directed to that or comes short of that, thereby reverts to the opposite. It is time to shame its antagonist out of thought as out of his¬ tory. Let the ape and tiger die out of our philoso¬ phies. For men are of a higher order, which has attained another principle, save as the brutes have devotions to the helpless, in anticipations of the THE GALILEAN SOURCE 97 human. The futility of the anti-Christian prin¬ ciple is attested by the dark places of the earth, the habitations of cruelty, and by suffering bodies and barren souls about us, by the groaning ages, the horrible reverses of humanity, by irreparable wastes of ability stifled under poverty and oppres¬ sion, by potencies of ministry suppressed, by thought and beauty and leadership wrenching in vain at their prison bars, or dead at hungry moth¬ ers’ empty breasts. §3 But what did he do about it? He did the only thing he could do, and it was the strongest thing that could ever be done. ^He founded the new humanity, which is the fellowship of his social pas¬ sion. This was not the church . No utterance of his which meets the tests of authenticity, as demon¬ strated in the general trend of modern scholarship, mentions the church. It receives no sanction or inheritance from him, except in so far as it belongs, with other practical stimulations and agencies, in the fellowship of his social passion. Many tests of membership which all branches and divisions of the church agree in imposing are nonessential to the fellowship which he formed and is ever forming. Even the confession of his name is not a requisite. Multitudes of those whom he has united in his spirit do not know the source of their regenerated social and personal life. This result is to his un¬ speakably greater honor, to the deeper recognition of his power. Multitudes in distant climes who 98 , THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION never heard of him, multitudes who lived before his coming, are members of the brotherhood which he established by completing it; for their spirit is so akin to his, and his regenerative power is so much greater than theirs, that their true devotions to humanity must find his deeper intensities, must be merged into his larger and clearer aims. The sym¬ pathetic student of spiritual history must judge that the greatest names are destined to array them¬ selves under the name that is above every name. This judgment becomes conviction in men who at¬ tain conscious discipleship to him. In the way most direct, simple, inevitable, he established the new humanity, into which everything truly human pours itself. He attached to himself a little company, in most of whom he kindled a spark from his own fire. That little company became an enlarging nucleus— not conterminous with the church, even in its early history—-of the new humanity, or rather of human¬ ity restored to its own inmost nature. This re¬ newed mankind, which is not an abstraction or a mass, but a concrete unity of souls interrelated in him, endured, expanding, contracting, corrupted, repurified, baffled, resurgent, but ever on its way to subdue all human life unto itself. Against the discredited interpretations of history which, in various formulations, reduce its power of advance to material forces, capable of only material results, stands history's own witness that its power grows through companies of men in whom a vision has dawned and a passion has been enkindled, and that material things and developments are their THE GALILEAN SOURCE 99 instruments. So, when we are tempted to despair of any predominant good resulting from the colossal sins, sacrifices, heroisms, of the world war, and we sorrow over reactions of greed and insensibility, confusions breeding confusions, recrudescenses of brute and devil, our courage grows strong again when we find, in high places and lowly places, men to whom life can never again be as far as it was from Jesus’ hope and aim. We become aware of heart responding to fraternal heart, and determined will joining determined will, into the fellowship of those whom the woes and intrinsic spiritualities of humanity have absorbed. We know that the world's future is given into their hands. This fellowship springs from the heroic devotion of those who gave their lives that humanity might live. So the all- inclusive fellowship created by Jesus, in which this fellowship from the world war was formed and is completed, is vitalized forever from his heroic sacri¬ fice. His glorious death of love, agony, and shame rises increasingly, in immortal life, into the broth¬ erhood of the world as it is to be. This is what he did about it. He did the only thing he could do, and it was the strongest thing that could ever be done. Jesus’ expectation of the almost immediate gift of God’s Kingdom can connote a lack of wisdom only to those who suppose that thought has any value when it is less than a transforming power. The dissevered intellectualism which then remains is on a level with the performances of arithmetical prodigies. The wise man is not one who separates himself from those limitations of his time which 100 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION enshrine its noblest hopes and aims. The prophets of Israel were greater, not less, for conditioning the world’s hope upon the fortunes of Israel. If it were true that certain medieval thinkers anticipated the German idealists, and died leaving no trace upon the mind of their age, those barren cliffs of desolate seas cannot compare, in the world’s gratitude, with men who spoke to their own time some comprehen¬ sible word that stirred it on. It is wisdom to take into one’s own soul the highest, strongest impulse which at the time broods on the hearts of men. This Jesus did when he fused the contemporary expecta¬ tion of the Kingdom of God into all his thoughts and deeds. It is wisdom to ennoble and humanize the supreme impulse of one’s own time, to enforce the moral and spiritual conditions of realizing its hope, and to create its devoted brotherhood. This Jesus did. If he had attempted or even imagined more, he would have accomplished little, for only through appropriation of the best in one’s own generation can one work upon the ages following. And when the form bursts asunder, the spirit, which pours itself into the molds of each generation, remains to inspire and guide through all successive forms. What personal expectation mingled with his uni¬ versal hope? Did he anticipate a seat on the right hand of power, coming on the clouds of heaven, and all his holy angels with him? Such claims wake little response in hearts attuned to his self-renounc¬ ing ministry. We welcome every success of criti¬ cism in sifting out from the Gospels the additions to his authentic sayings concerning the Kingdom of THE GALILEAN SOURCE 101 God, because so little is left of the pretensions at¬ tributed to him. His theme was the kingdom, not the Christ. All the more evidently is he central in his eternal religion, because the supreme signifi¬ cance is forced upon him by the experience of his disciples. So the fourth Gospel would be a tawdry thing if understood to be an authentic report of his own words and deeds. It is a glorious thing, not¬ withstanding its ecclesiasticisms and long anti¬ quated attempts at philosophy, when it is recog¬ nized as the imaging of the significance which Jesus has attained in the mind and heart of humanity. Criticism has not been able indeed to deny his mes¬ sianic consciousness, but has made evident that this consciousness was predominantly of the inspired and empowered herald of the kingdom. Every for¬ ward look into his own destiny was the confidence of the victory of his mission, expressed in whatever incidental and traditional forms. The modern pop¬ ular understanding of the title “Son of Man,” though it has no suspicion of the original meaning, does not misinterpret essentially his mission and his consciousness. He who announced the kingdom, building better than he knew, as does every man in proportion as the spirit of humanity and the God of it sweeps through him, founded the kingdom from the spiritual attainments of humanity and his own soul, by forming the brotherhood of service to the last and least. He desires no pompous throne from which to lord it over us and to exercise author¬ ity upon us. He came into the world's history never to be ministered unto, forever to minister, to the 102 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION utmost power of redemptive sacrifice. The attain¬ ments of his life, the triumph of his cause, are his only lordship. They are his supreme lordship be¬ cause he gave himself to them utterly. The heralding of the kingdom, his essential mes- siahship, determined all his ministry. For the suf¬ ficient herald has more to do than to announce his message in words. The very spirit of the kingdom must possess him, must be expressed in him, and this is one with the Holy Spirit of God. He could not have announced the kingdom if his life and deeds had not enabled him to say, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me.” That spirit of the kingdom makes its representative holy in its holiness, loving in its love, unto the last demand of heroic devotion, and stern as the conditions of entering the king¬ dom are inviolable. It urges him to those minis¬ tries which shall constitute the kingdom’s consum¬ mations: it impels him to open the blind eyes, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the gos¬ pel to the poor, to receive sinners and to eat with them, to pour himself out to the last and least. His unparalleled but not miraculously incredible influ¬ ence upon sick bodies and distracted minds, through the faith wdiich his announcement awakened, was derived from the same consciousness, that as am¬ bassador he was the representative of the king¬ dom’s beneficent power. Through all the wild exag¬ gerations of the gospel reports there is manifest in him a calm restraint in his exercise of this influ¬ ence. He subordinated it to his office of herald of the kingdom, and made it contributory to his high THE GALILEAN SOURCE 103 calling. Therefore it never led him into failure, through attempts to exceed that power’s legitimate exercise. He correctly viewed his mighty works as attestations of his message, credentials of his of¬ fice. And as the kingdom is God’s gift, so these works of his are by God’s power. In every way Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom rises into the power of his life to organize it. Complaints against Jesus, that he failed to attack the evil or senescent institutions of his day, need not long detain the historic sense. These criticisms take too little account of his terrific indignations, his blastings of those abuses which encountered his high mission. In the reports of his denunciations, the bitterness, unfairness, and scurrility attributed to him by the evangelists manifest so plainly the temper aroused in his successors by their conflicts with Judaism, and are so unlike his habitual poise in the face of his antagonists, that no unbiased his¬ toric criticism can charge them against him. He entered the conflicts necessary to his heart-search¬ ing and persuasive announcement of the Kingdom of God. Whatever opposed that proclamation he fought down, though the battle swept on to Cal¬ vary. His two chief antagonists were hypocrisy and inhumanity. Hypocrisy was to him the sub¬ stitution of another spirit for the spirit of the king¬ dom. Inhumanity culminated in the laying of a stumbling-block in the way of God’s little ones. This was the battle which his heralding encoun¬ tered. Upon it has depended our age-long strife. 104 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION ! Faithful to his orders, he refused to divide his forces for any other. §4 The work left for us, in connecting the two great elements of Jesus’ gospel, involves modifications of some of his teachings in the interest of his purpose, to which alone they are subordinate, and by which alone they are amendable. Literal faithfulness to them is spiritual unfaithfulness to his aim. Non- resistance to the evil man, or that waiving of an individual right which compromises the progress of universal human rights, means something differ¬ ent from Jesus’ view, to those who must work out the order which he expected to descend soon from God. The accumulation, distribution and use of wealth may be different from the unsocial covetous¬ ness and self-indulgence against which he prophe¬ sied, when we take wealth as an instrument for serving his ends. The developing institutions and goods of civilization are different when they become the progressive incarnations of the good most dear to him. In these tasks we develop instruments out¬ side his absorptions, and unnecessary for the work he had to do. The work which is left to us makes the demands of our discipleship severe and difficult. A man who loses in the things of it Jesus’ spirit and purpose is none of his. Then our toils and strifes, however we may attempt to justify them, become subversive of Ms desire. When the pursuit or retention of these things contradicts his purpose, we must unbind our¬ selves from them and fling them away. None the THE GALILEAN SOURCE 105 less, ineffectiveness in any man’s part of the world’s work is more severely judged by the standards of the Kingdom than by the world’s inconsiderate de¬ mands. God’s workmen have no time off. Sleep and food, recuperations and replenishments of ex¬ hausted powers, play, respites when “I loaf and in¬ vite my soul,” books and art, joy and love, prayer, meditation, and the cultivation of the spiritual life, —all are for the world’s work that we have to do, and implicit in it; and the sternest demand of the work, which is the life, is that it shall somehow and every way direct itself and concentrate itself upon Jesus’ great purpose of ministry to the last and least. When this is done, the care and fret and exhausting self-regarding ambition, with slavish dependence upon the world’s estimates of success, fall away, leaving it all a delight in the spirit and purpose which now occupy even its least details. Whatever powers we employ for his Kingdom’s service, the supreme energies are from his heart. The age to come is the conquest of his sacrifice and ours, as at every morning’s renewal of our tasks we take up our cross and follow him. Force beats back evil that a space may be won where his plants of life may grow, from his light, his tears, his bloody sweat. We use resisting, annihilating force to the end that it may become unnecessary. The carnal weapons of our warfare achieve victories by the superior strength of heroic devotion, not because we take the lives of his enemies, but because we give our own. From the compulsions which we enlist for his cause, we keep out, so imperfectly, the 106 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION opposites of liis spirit, which cancel his designs. And we find, in sublime contrasts to our inefficien¬ cies, how great were his ways of getting things done. So wealth, though it may be his instrument, may suddenly change, even in the hands of best intention, from a rod of power to a serpent that darts at the face of him who holds it. Still the covetousness of its accumulation and the self-in¬ dulgence of its use are as evident as when Jesus branded the mammon of unrighteousness. Dives, faring sumptuously every day, is eulogized because some crumbs from his table are fed to Lazarus laid at his gate full of sores. Even wealth’s purest philanthropies are infected by the injustices of its accumulation and tenure of proprietorship in an un-Christianized, unhumanized industrial order. Many who have the talent, which they must use, for getting it, and are oppressed by the load of it, struggle in vain against the present barbarous con¬ ditions, to find a practicable way to the righteous acquiring and distributing of it. Those who are most blatant to show the way out are blind leaders whom only the blind can conscientiously follow. The intensifying class struggle for wealth makes little progress because it neglects to consider the purpose of wealth. The church, though not com¬ petent to work out a science of wealth, is under obligation to proclaim a gospel of its motives and ends, by which its methods may be tested; but she shirks her responsibility. To this inefficiency is due a large part of her futilities. And meanwhile the wealthiest benefactions descend from riches of THE GALILEAN SOURCE 107 the soul. So institutions which house the finer accumulations of civilization are transient taber¬ nacles of the humanity regenerated from Jesus' heart. Many which seemed essential have become superfluous. Artificial complexities will work out into natural simplicities at last. Our tasks are like those which we give to a child, when we care little for what is outwardly accomplished, if only the child is developed by them. Yet all the more earn¬ estly do we apply these insufficient devices because we perceive their insufficiency; for our task is not only to use them, but continually to improve the means which we must use, unto perfectings beyond our sight, changing the earth as it is into the earth that is to be. All the realm bequeathed to us between Jesus' goal and his creation of the new humanity, we fill from his life which continually renews and unites us, and from his purpose which guides us. We are servants bidden to wait and watch for our lord; but his way to us is impassable; therefore we go to meet him, and across the flood that bars his progress, we, with labor and long pain, build the road by which the King of Glory shall come in. § 5 Now that Jesus’ hope is found to be fixed upon a perfected earth, the charges against him of other¬ worldliness and historic pessimism fall to the ground. They were always evidently contrary to his view of nature and his estimate of men. But from the opposite direction objections arise, only to be merged into his hope. 108 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Perfection, it is urged, is unattainable and unde¬ sirable. It would turn to evil if attained. A per¬ fected earth, with all its problems solved, all its ambitions accomplished, with nothing to do except the same old things, nothing left to strive for, to amend, would be lubber-land, a garden of Eden, a blank, an extinction. But it is a deeper thought that perfection is not static, but dynamic, an energy of holy love that fulfills itself and accomplishes evolving tasks always and from more to more. No lower, idler perfection than this is in Jesus’ soul, nor is anything unworthy of this in his hope. Hope does not contradict the energies that form it. But, it is again objected—and these two objec- jections seem to involve whatever may be chal¬ lenged from this side—this earth, which Jesus made his goal in what he supposed the fulfillment of God’s purpose, is as a spark in the flaming uni¬ verse, gleaming for a moment, and then ashes. What are the traversible miles of its circumfer¬ ence, in spaces which light years cannot measure! What are the computable millenniums of its pos¬ sible habitableness, in eons to which the birth, dura¬ tion and death of the star-mist beyond Andromeda are an incident! The expectation of Jesus may seem to disappear with the shriveling up of his cosmology. Is the human spirit, in this instance at its most generous ideal, again overwhelmed by superspatial and supertemporal immensity? Yet in some estimates all bigness sinks into insignificance in comparison with the universe of Jesus’ soul Nor would our astronomy have changed his hope and THE GALILEAN SOURCE 109 purpose any more than, upon reflection, it need change that of us today, who know the science of which he was ignorant, and are learning the rudi¬ ments of the wisdom which he knew. For the work which anyone must do is the work next his hand. If it is an eternal task, it begins and continues with the task at hand. The universe beyond this world is not now our field of labor; it becomes so by our work upon this earth. Every faithful man works in the lot assigned him, or rather, attainable by him, to make that place better, in Jesus’ spirit, toward Jesus’ goal. Every faithful man works with every other, in the works which unite and ad¬ vance to redeem the earth, in Jesus’ spirit and to Jesus’ goal. And when we feel ourselves transcend¬ ent of these limitations, for God hath set not the world only but eternity in our heart, we may see our earth task flashing its signals beyond the orbit of Mars. They are responsive signals. God’s work of redemption is everywhere in his encircling skies, and is accomplished by those who, in every lot at¬ tainable, work together for his Kingdom in the works appointed them. The perfecting of earth is essential and directive in Jesus’ work and ours. It is not final. The service to the last and least everywhere is final. The work and the workers beyond us are one with us in his prayer, “Thy Kingdom come.” § 6 When we ask what detailed contributions Jesus has made to the consciousness and the tasks of our awakening spiritual humanism, the wealth of the 110 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION answer amazes us. He discovered, to mention only a part of his discoveries, the child, the woman, the common man, the union of spiritual aima with daily toils, the fundamental answer to the perplexities of human relations. From the God of the social passion down to the place of the sparrow and the grass of the held in the universal order, which is the Father's love, everything that enters man’s life, or touches it, is implicit in Jesus’ gospel. Every prob¬ lem of politics, of industry, of the courses of In¬ dividual lives, of the unity of lives in the great human brotherhood, depends for the essentials of its solution, and therefore for the use and direction of every element in the process of its solution, upon his progressive creation of a new humanity con¬ centrated in the primal devotion to the last and least. The demonstration of this thesis is far be¬ yond the scope of these few reflections. It can be completely established only when the Kingdom of God is come. Yet it is safe to derive our guiding principle, whose proof can be only in its outwork¬ ing, from the fusion of Jesus’ hopes with the works we have to do; especially as that principle has never yet failed to result in deep satisfactions, to the man who tests his life’s efficiencies by their work¬ ings out of character and spirituality, of joy and love, and of the conditions favorable to these things. This effectiveness is the supreme instance of the universal content, the inexhaustibly unfolding ap¬ plication of simplest principles. Nor is this appre¬ ciation lessened by the recognition of the wide realms which Jesus could not enter. The greatness THE GALILEAN SOURCE 111 of any thinker is measured by the applicability of his thought to activities which are, by historic necessity, outside his view. The wisdom which meets that test has attained the heart of things. It is a continually evolving and orginating power of thought and action in its disciples, and becomes more originative with each successive generation of them. In our day, as in other epochs of change, mankind has seemed to have come to the parting of the ways, the parting of Jesus’ way from ours. Once more many earnest men, with tender reverence, with stern devotion to the work at hand, bid him fare¬ well. They and the generations after them, they know, can never forget the gentlest, holiest, manli¬ est presence that ever blessed the earth. Sanctify¬ ing memories of him will, they gratefully acknowl¬ edge, impart inspiration to tasks which, they judge, are not his tasks, and which must be pursued along ways that are not his way. With aching hearts of loneliness we follow the path which now opens to our advance. And before us again we see the guiding presence of our Master. In his leadership we are united into the new humanity continuously created by him, as he leads us, one in heart and purpose, to the neglected, the oppressed, the last and least of his brethren. To the starving, ruined peoples he leads us, and to the waste places of the earth, many of them at our doors; wherever there is ignorance, wherever there is crime, and the publi¬ cans and the harlots rise up and follow him; wher¬ ever there is poverty that withholds the largest 112 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION human privilege; wherever a little child of a back¬ ward race is denied equal and supreme opportunity of all the accumulated excellencies of mankind. It is into a regenerated civilization that we follow him. It were better for a civilization that a mill¬ stone were hanged about its neck and that it were drowned in the depth of the sea, than that it should lay a stumbling block before one of these little ones. Through this earth and beyond it, we, his brother¬ hood, sweeping into our front ranks those who were the neglected and oppressed, follow him, to the spirits in prison, to the innumerable dead of unillumined ages, wherever in his unending path there are blind eyes to be opened, dead souls to rise again, hate to be won to love, lower forms of ex¬ istence to be led up into his universal human, forms of spiritual life unimaginable to us, to be united in the fellowship of his inexhaustible helpfulness; there is his leading, there is our following, into fulfillments everywhere of the love for which he died. VI MODERN APPROACHES Wearily we strain and twist Through the tangled wild: Singing up the path we missed Comes a little child. 0 synopsis of the history of modern humanism is attempted. The aim is, to distinguish in ^ 1 that development the elements which succes¬ sively became distinct. These elements are still at work, not having been lost in the processes which they began. Their present aspects help to inter¬ pret their original energies. We may hope to unite these developed elements in an inclusive humanism. § 1 As the student of medievalism traces the course of its dominating forces, he is often interrupted by a lilt of popular song, a racy old tale, a stirring passage of a chronicler absorbed in fight and festi¬ val. How large a part of medieval life eluded the forces that tried to repress it! The church, for ex¬ ample, asserted a superhuman order against the natural life of man, and labored to penetrate life with that superhuman order. Her success was greater in the first ambition than in the second. She dominated more than she penetrated. That she penetrated to a considerable depth there 113 114 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION can be no question. The word medieval connotes a peculiar religious quality residing in most men of the middle ages in Western Europe. But a hin¬ drance to its pervasiveness was just its dominance. [The assertion that human life is in itself without independent value, implicit purpose, and inner law, aroused that life's self-consciousness. Its native instinct, however shaped by the domination of the church, repelled at a certain point the penetration of the church. This human impulse was contorted into strange forms, grotesque, outrageous, elusive, obscene, hideous, pathetic, beautiful, by the incon¬ gruous forces of heathenized Christianity and christened heathenism. That which concerns our subject is a repressed humanism, struggling to¬ ward that degree of self-consciousness which may assert, against religious and political enthrallments, its own original and independent value, aim, and law. It is not the culture of the middle age as culture to which attention is called, though the rebellious popular impulse had many contacts and some in¬ terpenetrations with that culture. It is also evi¬ dent that medieval culture, though employed by the church, and adorning the courts of princes, often cherished the same rebellion in its heart. It is not cathedral builders whom I have in mind, nor those who kept the Hellenic torch still burning, or passed on the lyre to Petrarch's hands, so much as the impulse of the people, how uncouth in com¬ parison, yet no less essential to the later awaken¬ ings of humanism. MODERN APPROACHES 115 If we limit humanism to cultural developments, we lose the human and have only an ism left, for¬ mal, bloodless, ineffective. When we consider hu¬ manism’s Galilean source, we find there the recog¬ nition of simple, natural impulse, which Jesus would not destroy, but fulfill. The purpose of Hellenism is the democracy of culture. Humanism is not something to be superimposed upon the fun¬ damentals of human life, but is the interpretation of the common, and its empowering against every religious and secular domination. Humanism, which is the flood of historic life to fill our lives, is his¬ torically derived not only from Hellenic culture and the social spirituality of Jesus, but also from medi¬ evalism’s self-assertions. Humanism’s progress is not only along Parnassian heights and through the mountain city, Christ’s Jerusalem, but it must also be traced by the print of the white feet of Nico- lette upon the dew-drenched grass, through the am¬ orous night, and by the stench of witch-rides. The path leads through riotous merry-makings, inter¬ minable feuds, across plough-lands fertilized by the peasant’s grimy sweat and diseased blood, through famines and pestilences, through hard-won exten¬ sions of civil and industrial rights, and hard-lost restrictions of them, through smouldering or flam¬ ing indignations against religious and secular im¬ positions. The human claim to its own original and independent value, aim, and law, though re¬ peatedly mutilated, crushed, left for dead, ever rose again mightier than the two swords. For the weak¬ ness of men was stronger than the alleged divine 116 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION order, before which it was bidden to renounce it¬ self; its ignorance more wise; its miseries more august; its sins less unholy. Today the humanism of our social passion must not only devote itself to farm and shop, thorough¬ fare and alley, but must also accept their contri¬ butions. With all their vulgarities, there resides in them the human impulse, capable of all high things. As we continue our glimpses of humanism's historic progress, we shall find ourselves for awhile among elect men and distinctive opportunities. But the strength of the rude medieval impulse was a part of their inheritance. The wanings of that fair humanism were caused in large measure by its dissociation from the life of the people. The later revivals of humanism include harvests from, medievalism's prolific soil. §2 The plant of humanism became fertilized with pollen from a far off tree of life. Petrarch means to us the fourteenth century’s awakening to that ■which he called humanism. Though he was un¬ familiar with the Greek language, he clearly dis¬ tinguished the Greek spirit in its Roman continua¬ tions. From Hellenic Latin writers he learned a human life beautiful and noble in its own right, apart from church arid Christianity, a life of un¬ derived worth, with its own purpose and inner law. Loved by all the world as prince of lovers, his exquisitely refined sentiment, dedicated to the In- MODERN APPROACHES 117 carnation and idealization of human loveliness, ex¬ pressed the humanism of this pioneer of modern men. It was a humanism calm, disciplined, un- militant, with most attractive dignity and charm. His noble scorn of ecclesiastical corruptions was not fierce enough to drive him into attempts at radical reform, by challenge of church authority. The opposite of recluse or pedant, he lived a genial, active life in the superior interests of his time, which he advanced by appreciations of the Hellen¬ ism that was accessible to him. It was not in his genius to perceive that a life essentially independent in worth and law and purpose cannot stop short of subduing all things to itself, and that it must generate new guides for humanity, and pervade mankind. The humanism which he named by right of rediscovery was content to limit its reconstruc¬ tive powers. The historic optimist may judge that this was best for humanism's course. Humanism might have been submerged under the Impending storm if it had put far out to sea. It was finely self-indulgent, and concessive to the powers that were. Patrons needed it for the enrichment of their pride, and were considerate of their minister. The early humanists consented that the mass of men should live more brutally than humanly. Those who could attain were welcome into the select de¬ mocracy of culture. Yet humanism is nothing less than life asserting its right to be unrestrained from without. It cannot be confined permanently within exclusive amenities, any more than lightning can be kept within the cloud. 118 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION It is a long voyage from the fourteenth century to our rising tide of humanism, democratic, social, spiritual. A reversion to Petrach’s spirit is human¬ ity's betrayal. There is a difference greater than the distance in time, between the quality of men to whom humanism’s deeper implications had not been disclosed, and those who now reject the sum¬ mons to the larger human life. These cannot know the whole-hearted delight of the rediscoverers of humanism, who plunged into the worths and exulta¬ tions of the life which they felt in its underived value, purpose, and inner law. We of today can¬ not be restricted to their task. To imitate them now is to make oneself the center of intellectual and aesthetic gratifications, so forfeiting the right to humanism by denying its universally social essen¬ tials, now revealed. An aesthetic as well as ethical in¬ sensibility is evident. Generally this withdrawal from humanity entails perverse judgments and tastes concerning the intellectual and artistic goods, for which the social self is bartered. But even when this peril is avoided, so that a few such men are ranked among the authorities of knowledge and the arbiters of beauty, and even when the creative gift is added, so that they gratify themselves most by expression, still they are at best contributors to life, not guides of life. Alas for young souls that accept them as guides! There is a different quality when elect thinkers, poets, artists, passionate for truth and beauty, blend deep wisdom and rare loveliness with social appre¬ ciations, sympathies, and participations, and pour MODERN APPROACHES 119 their gathered wealth, thus completed, into the universal life. Of the same spirit are those who plant in humble door-yards, and along common ways, flowers whose fragrance blesses all the neighborhood. The Petrarchan humanism, if re¬ ceived as an element of life, may penetrate all life with grace and understanding. To its inner shrine the servant of humanity may often retire in the rest times which test character, because then a man goes where he will, not where he must. From the finer thoughts and Hellenic forms he brings wisdom and beauty for men’s houses and shops and fields and market-places. To infuse these goods into life is an abiding task of humanism, a relief from the austerities of the strife by which the social passion achieves its spiritual ends. And if at length old age makes our hands too feeble and our knees too re¬ laxed for the rushing charge—though what we desire is that the trumpets clanging all around us may be the last sound we hear—if retirement to calm realms of truth and beauty be forced upon us who, through all the strife, have loved the repose of truth and beauty, how sweet, for a little interval, will be those fair, untroubled meadows of our exile. In the amazing fourteenth century, there grew pregnant harvests of that other humanistic impulse which we recognized under medieval repressions. In Chaucer—to confine ourselves to a few English instances—the popular humanism is lustily repre¬ sented, along with finer things. Langland and Wat Tyler are nobler names. Later, among the protagon¬ ists of the English renaissance, the great Eliza- 120 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION bethans owe no less to that rankness than to Petrarch’s fineness. We must ever be mindful of this indigenous hu¬ manism, if we would share the progress of human¬ ity. It struggles up from the heart of the people, which desires, with whatever wildness, uncouth¬ ness, fleshliness, to learn the intrinsic values of human life. It is to be recognized whenever there are unschooled attempts to express the human seif, not only in gentleness, strength, and devotion, but also beneath some moral perversities—not only in truth, but also under many forms of error. Self- expression is the note of it. It is wherever one draws or paints it, sings it, dances it, or breaks heads for it. Such recent and contemporaneous self-expressions in lands long priest-ridden, king- ridden, alien-ridden, are among the most bewilder¬ ing auguries of the world’s tempestuous tomorrow. The two humanisms seek one another to destroy one another, until they learn that they are to be fulfilled in unity. In considering the phase which we call, too narrowly but conveniently, the renais¬ sance, it is customary to emphasize the former power. In the phase which centers in the French Revolution, the second is evident. In humanism’s present stage there are intimate interblendings. § 3 The Italian renaissance, the rebirth of the Occi¬ dent, was obviously the result of an historic process, with initiations through many degrees. But the men of the Italian renaissance were not concerned MODERN APPROACHES 121 with the fore hung reflections of Apollo’s gleaming wheels. If we dwell too much on the preliminaries, we miss participation in their wonder and delight when “the dawn came up like thunder’ out of the Ionian Sea. The renaissance created intense individualities. It is this quality which I select, not arbitrarily, I trust, for our glance at this great time. The recognition of this characteristic is important for the understanding of the humanism which is broader and deeper than they conceived, but into which this quality enters. The renaissance tended to illustrious exemplars, born of its spirit of virile personality. Such men were concentrations of their time. They were not limited to the circle of finely intellectual and artistic genius, in which were the creators of many forces in modern thought and life. From this personal reinvigoration were developed also the consolidaters of monarchy, in which the European nations were formed for men’s develop¬ ment and repression. The renaissance, by no means limited to culture, included many whose interest in great thoughts and beautiful forms was super¬ ficial, incidental, or nil. All those were of the renaissance who felt the individual life as having its own right and value, its own purpose and inner law. The conviction was more than medieval, for it was less defiant than self-assertive. It was more than Petrarchan, for it was unconcessive. Varied were the forms assumed by this emanci¬ pated individualism. Cultural proclivities did not always repress incongruous qualities in the same 122 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION individual. There were men of great devotions, for often devotion to another person is born of intense personal self-consciousness. These are the great lovers. That love, thus derived, might extend to all, include all in one’s self. Browning’s penetrative historic imagination has given us instances. From the same individualistic energy there arose men of great hates, of monstrous bestialities, of im¬ pregnable self-centered indifference, and men who flung themselves into incredible cruelties, greeds, treacheries. Thence also were derived the eccentric¬ ities of the renaissance, including its vulgar eccen¬ tricities. Among men of elegant manners mingled eminent humanists who fed from the sumptuous tables of the Medici as from a trough, and whose proximity antidoted the incense-breathing gardens. There were individualists of resplendent culture who loved its reflections in less gifted men, and in an enriched civic life; and there were men of a culture no less accomplished who enclosed it within their own bosoms, or shot it forth in devouring flames. There were servile copies of dominant per¬ sonalities. This imitation worked against personal distinctiveness, and yet belongs to the individualism of the time. Before the eminent, inferior men cringed and fawned, to gain in any way the ma¬ terials for personal ends; and with this motive great men cringed to one another. Yet along with all that is despicable, there is a certain infernal dignity in the worst of the renaissance. Then, if ever, men were “magnificent in sin.” This individ¬ ualism, noth with standing terrible and grotesque MODERN APPROACHES 123 perversions, is especially needed now, to be blended into democratic, social, and spiritual developments of humanism. The individualism of the renaissance stimulated religion to stress the value of each human soul. But here opens a path which this type of humanism could not follow. For while the social conscious¬ ness, when spiritually awakened, seeks the thought and experience of the divine in developments of social life, the individualistic consciousness, when spiritually awakened, finds no hope, no security, no basis for the soul’s being, except in the super¬ human God. Then the divine will leaves nothing to the human will except complete submission. And before the absolute will, to which there is uncon¬ ditional surrender, the human will finds no place for itself. It is overwhelmed, annihilated. The Calvinistic temper becomes inevitable. In that loss the humanity is lost which has asserted for itself an independent value, intrinsic purpose, and inner law. The Calvinistic spirit may have magnificent out- workings. Men whom the pilgrims of Plymouth typify, strong in the will of God, contemn every insolence which opposes the divine. They fear no man, since they fear the Almighty, They feel themselves impelled, by that irresistible power, into organizations in which there can be no human pre¬ rogative. Here Calvinism transcends itself by making the will of God one’s own achieving soul. There are baser issuings of the Calvinistic spirit. The soul, overawed, may accept whatever bondage 124 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION is imposed in the name of the supreme sanction, as enslavement to a book, a creed, a Catholic reaction, an ecclesiastical order, whether Romish priesthood or Puritan ministry. Humanism is driven either to renounce itself, or to reassert itself against re¬ ligion, to the incalculable detriment of both. Or some compromise is attempted which is neither humanistic nor religious. Against the overstressed individualism of the renaissance the solidaric force of reaction mar¬ shaled its myrmidons. It opportunely reformed Catholicism, and so consolidated it that frequent cannibalistic roastings of human flesh were per¬ mitted to the inquisition, with ignominious repris¬ als in Protestant lands. Monarchy exploited the solidaric religious tradition. Both ecclesiastical and political tyrannies, under the lead of individ¬ ualists with solidaric aims—a frequent combination in all times—turned to account strong personali¬ ties, like Loyola and Machiavelli. The enemies of humanism, and of religion as affected by human¬ ism, had this advantage, that individualism drives its participants against one another, to the destruc¬ tion of themselves and their principle. Because of the excesses and deficiencies of humanistic individ¬ ualism, the representatives of the superhuman and its sacred institutions could fulminate against humanism in the name of morality, social order, and all high things. Tyranny sang a raucous sec¬ ond to this tune, for there was given to it divine right, with other nauseous religious pretences. The continuance of the renaissance, and its transmis- MODERN APPROACHES 125 sion from land to land, were due far more to its own inherent powers than to the dubious monarch- ieal patronage, under which its virility declined. It is significant that representative philosophies, with exceptions prophetic of the great German idealism, for a. long period left undeveloped the principles of personality and inner freedom. Church and state repressed the personal, and opposed, as the chief antagonist of reaction, the social develop¬ ment of the consciousness of personality. Thus the humanistic individualism of the renais¬ sance disclosed many defects, was insufficient for religious needs, and was weak before its enemies. None the less is the emphasis upon the individual an essential element of those inspirations of the renaissance which rend every tomb, attaining glorious resurrections. The social passion of our time has imperative need of this individualism, and must know it especially in its potency of social fulfillment. The irreconcilable opposites are not the social and the individual, but the social and the solidaric. The instances of the latter which have been cited may serve in place of a definition. Every individ¬ ual, as the following chapters may describe, owes himself to the social, and is therein fulfilled. The individualistic and the solidaric have strange alliances. The former is frequently won to the purposes of the latter. Ecclesiasticisms, Roman and other, have often made fervent personalities their tools. Nietzsche's doctrine of an individual¬ ism blind to its social completions was useful to 126 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION colossal institutionalism controlled by ruthless des¬ potism. The solidaric and the social are opposites. The favorite device of solidaric strategists is to urge a social motive for an unsocial end. They blasphemously appeal to generous impulses. They prank themselves with holy names. When they fail to deceive or to seduce, they try to coerce, and, failing in that, to crucify. To young manhood and young womanhood, whom we must win to the social passion, it must be said, for their sakes and in be¬ half of the cause which is inherently theirs: that whatever asks of them less than the fulfillment of every personal power must be rejected, however gruesome its threats, as of hell, or moral ruin, or a disordered world; however insinuating its cajoler¬ ies, as of heaven, or perfection by such sacrifice, or a redeemed humanity. The religion of Jesus helps here; for it is equally true that his gospel is social gospel, and that it asserts the supreme worth of every soul. These two faiths are one. The renaissance manifests the social importance of great personalities. Strong individuals are also indispensable in the narrow fields, to which lack of opportunity restricts, or love constrains. The disparagement of this importance by the school which traces history by tendencies alleged to be independent of great souls, desocializes the social forces which it stresses, by depersonalizing them. The great personalities do indeed form themselves from influences and tendencies, from combinations of events and of human contacts that are beyond any man's planning. But strong personality con- MODERN APPROACHES 127 centrates these forces, simplifies and intensifies them, makes them vital and personal in itself, so that they may not go to waste, like the unharnessed tides. Every emphasis therefore of a great per¬ sonality's dependence upon his time demonstrates his indispensableness to his time and the times suc¬ ceeding. Whenever there is a groping after a “great cause to array us" the prayer must rise: “King and leader, appear! Thy soldiers sorrowing seek thee." When he does not appear the cause halts. The most generous impulses, the most en¬ thusiastic aspirations, how often in history, how pitifully now, are they like sheep without a shep¬ herd. There is required in the king and leader a marked individuality in a developed social con¬ sciousness, a dominant personality fused into a great cause. Without this combination no assump¬ tion of leadership is accepted, unless to be soon re¬ pudiated. The cultivation of superior personalities is neces¬ sary for every kind of social advance. We recog¬ nize them when we glance along our library shelves, or when we recall from school days the teachers who led us by sympathetic wisdom, and the boys and girls endowed with leadership, they and their fellows knew not how; the city upon which, in its formative stage, high-minded men of affairs stamped indelibly their honorable standards; rever¬ ent friendships, which influence us increasingly with the lapse of bereaved years; the home thrilled with the presence of a grand, sweet woman; com¬ munities which we have known, especially those of 128 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION simple people, which advanced as some plain, faith¬ ful man or woman showed the way. To leadership by the development of one’s own personality one must aspire who lives and loves, and he dedicates his enlarged powers to remove everything that ob¬ structs the growth of other men, and to reinforce every favorable influence, yet never halting in the advance of his own soul. Must not every man say that love has led him on ? Love to some rich souls whose faces we have seen, to some whom we have never seen, to one whom we hope to be like when we see him as he is. Those whom the world loves lead the world on. Because love is strongest, the great personalities who inspire love are essential to humanity’s advance. The advocacy of every organization of men which claims to be efficient and humane must meet this test: does it tend to the development of indi¬ viduality ? Does it open a free course for each man to work out whatever he is? While it is obvious that men can live together only by the frequent surrender of individual preferences, by mutual adaptiveness, by the shaping of each career for the advancement of all, yet none of these adjustments should be the sacrifice of individual quality, but rather its social self-realization. Attempts at re¬ ligious unity which concede away any spiritual freedom are self-condemned. A united church uni¬ versal would be too dearly bought by the silencing of “one accent of the Holy Ghost.” First of all, from every repressive and divisive sectarianism let the untrammeied spirit set men free! MODERN APPROACHES 129 The same regard for the individual must be ap¬ plied to all standardizations, educational, industrial, or whatever, and to all that government undertakes for the advancement of the people. International alliances must respect national characteristics. It is not enough to get things done. We must get men accomplished, in that variety of talent and oppor¬ tunity which gets things done that are worth doing, in that free unity of effort and spirit which this variety secures. The danger of movements for social betterment is that they may revert to their solidaric opposite. The advocates of a new industrial order are con¬ fronted with this stultification of their purpose. If they cannot overcome it, it does not follow that we must limit ourselves to developing the forms of our present organization; but we must together find a way on for individual power and variety. If the prerequisite of a new order is that each man must commit his career to the decision of others, however democratically they may be chosen, and however faithful and able servants of society they might be, the worst evils of the present order would be intensified. From the present repressions of in¬ dividuality we must set ourselves free, from the fearful waste of individual possibilities, from the innumerable abortions of intellectual, administra¬ tive, and spiritual potencies, while great voices “die with all their music in them,” and unsuspected capacities of leadership leave men “as sheep with¬ out a shepherd.” Yet even in the present order ^re forces which foster individuality, and 130 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION these must be retained, either in the evolution of what we have, or in revolution. No alleged rights of property may block the way. Property can be nothing more than the instrument of the human soul. It possesses no right except that service. Our immediate effort must be for the equal and supreme opportunity of every human being, of every nation and race and clime, to fulfill itself and its service. The individualism of the renaissance is an imma¬ ture expression of humanism. But if that individ¬ ualistic intensity is relaxed, so much the weaker becomes the force of individualism’s social fulfill- ments. §4 Later phases are the humanism of democracy and the humanism of the social passion, which is most conscious of spiritual aims. Of the former it is almost impertinent to write, after the book which crowned the career of James Bryce, supreme student of democracy. The little that is written here concerns the transitional nature of the demo¬ cratic spirit, as it passes from individualistic to social humanism. The epoch of physical science, which followed the outburst of democracy, appears to the humanist not to be the magnificent advance which it boasted, but an intrusion, so far as this servant of humanity presumes to direct its master’s course. Democracy, when its social implications are un¬ developed, attempts to make the rights of any man the rights of every man. Its basis and definition of rights are vague, because it has not attained the MODERN APPROACHES 131 social conception of rights. Its purpose springs from the heart of the people, long repressed. It is also an extension to all men of the individualism of the renaissance. No historic movement was more evidently popular than that which the French revolution typifies. No historic movement owes more to men of culture for its preparation and in¬ spiration. The earlier awakenings of humanism appeared to their participants to be aristocratic. Their note seemed to be distinction, not universality. Their goods were offered to individuals or localities ex¬ ceptionally favored in ability or position. The sun¬ rise from the Ionian Sea irradiated the heights, while darkness enshrouded the valleys. Yet in the renaissance, and in the fourteenth century also, democratic elements were indispensable. Human¬ ism, the assertion of the human spirit, is as broad as humanity, however it may try to limit itself. This was especially evident in the highest places, as in Lorenzo’s court. Poets and artists, even when under princely patronage, are forced by the nature of their task and the impulse of genius, to express the universal human. Distinction belongs only to the universal. So even in the most exclusive in¬ stances, humanism’s individualism tends to a gen¬ eral individualism as its next achievement. The democratic principle aroused men, united as in a great army, fervent to impart to all men the rights of any man. But the principle easily became disruptive, a war of rights against rights, and ever in danger of reverting to solidaric institutionalism. 132 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION It was a plain man of the people, seeing far be¬ yond the vision of his time, who exclaimed, at the beginning of the French revolution, “My God, my country, my fellow-citizens have become myself.” The right of every man was to him the equal and supreme privilege of participation in the universal life. The rights of the individual had unfolded for him into the social consciousness. The rights of each involve the rights of all, not as a sum of indi¬ viduals, but as a concretely interblended life of humanity. This man had risen above the balanc¬ ings and bargainings of mine and thine, the com¬ mercializing of human relations, which make for the advantage of the unscrupulous and the despot¬ ism of the strong. Democratic humanism cannot claim to derive any right from a superhuman power. There is no ground of right in external conditions. An indi¬ vidual can have rights with reference to other individuals only in that which connects him with them, and that is social. There appears to a humanist no ground of rights in any abstract con¬ ceptions, imposing to the multitude. The philoso¬ phy which commends itself to the mob when it begins to think it thinks, is that which exchanges concrete reality for pretentious words. Popular shibboleths may be as empty as metaphysical cate¬ gories. The words liberty, equality, fraternity, Americanism, even humanity, may mean whatever fools and knaves put into them. Democracy, which connotes social relations, attains validity in the MPDERN APPROACHES 133 social consciousness, and enduring vitality in the social passion. This social impulse is in the heart of the com¬ mon people, which is the principal source of dem¬ ocracy. The select person is satisfied to walk alone. Plain men much prefer to walk in company. They benevolently force their society upon your observ¬ ant, meditative strollings, in some lovely haunt which invites solitude—because they suppose you are as lonely as they would be. The trained voice delights to sing its solo. A popular audience de¬ sires to accompany the vocalist. In spite of all vulgar selfishness, the life of simple men, so far as they live indeed, consists mainly of mutual loves and common cares. Gregariousness clamors for in¬ dividual rights, but in a chorus which expresses the social passion in the heart of man. The cultural movement toward democracy had social implications which look beyond democracy. Though the dawn had faded, the humanism of the renaissance gained partial revivals, some of which were advances toward a social consciousness. How varied they became may be indicated by citing some names from among the heralds of the democ¬ racy destined to be more than democracy: Wesley and Voltaire, Cowper and Rousseau, Kant and Jef¬ ferson. The name of Wesley suggests a religious move¬ ment more humanistic than the Protestant reform¬ ation, nothwithstanding the omission of many human values. For he recognized not only the worth of the human soul, but also its active partici- 134 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION pation in its own redemption. Wesley’s God and Christ are not so much above us as within us. His religion is of the inner spiritual life for all men. He far surpasses the earlier reformers in sympathy for the joys and sorrows, the struggles and attain¬ ments of the spirit working under the conditions of common life. There is for him no exclusion of non-elect souls. The universal grace connotes the participation of all in the indivisible humanity. The Wesleys were necessarily contemporaneous with the assertion in literature of that democratic element which is essentially social. Its expressions of common life are of individual experiences. Yet they are common in the highest sense: they are uni¬ versal. They blend all hearts into one music. So the rills of folk-song flowed into the great deep of the symphony. The German idealism, when we in¬ terpret its fundamental thoughts by the spirit which awakened them, directed each man to turn for truth to his own soul, that he might find there the portal of the universe. Into the founding of the American republic and the advance of English liberalism entered social forces of long growth, however imperfect and dimly conscious of their own nature. Up from the people swarmed the devils which had been driven into the oppressed people. The grossness, fleshliness, and lightly slumbering fury of that continuing medievalism are grotesque in the shapes of slaves: they are monstrous, devastating, when they come to rule. Yet even in the bewildered beginnings of the democratic phase of humanism. MODERN APPROACHES 135 we must admire its fervent sympathies, its flaming indignations. These impulses unfold the conscious¬ ness of the universal human. They tend to free all forms of human relations, not the political alone, from being distortions of the soul. The inadequacy of its social consciousness was manifest, among other examples, in the lack of that historic sense which recognizes the course of events as the onflowing of the one great interblended life, in which every attempt at further progress must be vitally related to those which have been already won. Defects were evident, in absorptions in political affairs, in stress of rights above obligations, in waverings between emphasis upon the individual and reliance upon magi¬ cal powers of institutions and abstract conceptions. The history of democracy consists of two opposite efforts, one a reversal, the other an unfolding. In the first it attempts to establish itself in forms which become solidaric. In the second it labors to unfold its implicit social consciousness, with forms socially free from that perversion. That it must do one or the other shows that its nature is transi¬ tional. We must recognize democracy as a magnifi¬ cent advance, and prove ourselves faithful by blend¬ ing it with humanistic achievements which pre¬ ceded it, and by fulfilling it and them in the social humanism that is in process of becoming, and with the spiritual humanism that is to be. Democracy, political, industrial, in all its ex¬ tensions, is ever in danger from its own transitional nature. The influences that formed democracy testi- 136 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION fy that it is provisional. Both its achievements and its failures manifest its need of unfolding higher powers. If humanity furls its wings here, it drops like lead into a bottomless abyss. Our con¬ fidence is in democracy’s completion of itself in social and spiritual humanism. §5 Concerning this further advance of humanity, two reflections are suggested, preparatory to a fuller treatment in the remaining chapters. The first is: that we need not despair of the emergence of a more developed social consciousness among men. These are indeed days of bitter dis¬ illusion, when the world’s infernal sufferings seem unrelieved even by celestial sacrifices.. The great tidal wave does not raise permanently the surface of the sea. Wanderings through the night bring lost men back to the dismal place they started from. It is indeed true that nothing else will lift the sick world up and send it on its way, except a new social consciousness among men and in all affairs. Nothing short of a new consciousness of international responsibility and privilege is suffi¬ cient to lift our own land out of its own peculiar infamy. But we have confidence in those whose hearts humanity has touched, and in the impartive power of their social humanism. The progress of mankind has been repeatedly the awakening of a new consciousness, though with many turnings back and retracings of the way. The progress of any human life that really goes on is by successive MODERN APPROACHES 137 awakenings to new consciousness. These are more than the natural advances of maturing years. Regeneration is the law of progressive life. The appeal of every prophet is: Be changed within, for the new order of life is at hand. Beneath the purifying waters of sacred rivers the humanity that has been sinks in voluntary death, to rise again in new life. These renewals are manifest in such achievements as the passing of serfdom, the de¬ struction of slavery, the safeguards thrown about human life. These are but precursors of more indignant rejections, as of poverty and unproduc¬ tive luxury, and are harbingers of finer affirma¬ tions, as of equal opportunity. These advances blend into one great new conviction which sweeps the life of humanity along. The humanity that lives again is the humanity which has died to live, continuing by the law of life and resurrection, losing life to save it. The new life is the concentration of an unbroken proc¬ ess, the manifestation of its meaning and purpose. That which is new is then discovered to be that which was essential from the beginning, even as those who follow Jesus into his kingdom return to the simplicity of their original nature and be¬ come as little children. It is often said that the prophet, though right in his prediction, may easily be mistaken in the time of its fulfillment. This is not an exact state¬ ment, if his hope is already fulfilled in his own soul, though he cannot know the length of the process of dissemination, nor the future events which may 138 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION oppose or further. So the prophets of the social passion are not deceived when they declare that a new social consciousness is at hand, unfolding from the interrupted but resurgent democratic con¬ sciousness, fulfilling the humanistic premonitions of great phases of awakening, vital in an increasing company of those whose hearts humanity has touched, and further attested by many enemies. The second preliminary reflection is: that this social awakening is social and spiritual in one. In spirituality, as I have tried to trace out in another book,* all appropriations of the world must com¬ plete themselves by denying themselves and thus transforming themselves into the human spirit’s transcendence of the world. Jesus’ life is correct¬ ly interpreted in the words, “I have overcome the world.” This spirituality is not an attainment of the individual soul alone with God against the world. In whatever individualistic consciousness the spiritual life may seem to begin, the fulfillments are in social realizations. These fulfillments dis¬ close social elements implicit from the beginning. A spirituality that fails to unfold its social nature tends either to a mystical absorption wherein it contracts to nothingness, or to egoism at the ex¬ treme of selfishness and pride. Not by any un¬ social loss of himself can a man save himself. The social spirituality that overcomes the world gains continually human relations and interblendings, which flood the social soul with inexhaustible activ¬ ities, devotions, conflicts, victories. This is the *The Christian Reconstruction of Modern Life. MODERN APPROACHES 139 victory that overcometh the world. Spirituality is essentially social. The overcoming of the world by the human spirit is the great social cause, which demands united devotions. Every cause worthy of devotion is of that supreme spiritual cause. If at first there should be only one person loyal to the cause, the cause itself, since it is of social nature, impels him to unite other men in his loyalty. Though the forms and immediate aims of a cause worthy to be served may seem to be other than spiritual, these must be directed to the transcendent victory of the spirit. They fail, if insight into their spiritual meaning fails. The social spiritual task, I hope to make clear, satisfies every religious need, so satisfying every human need and bringing on toward perfection all united human powers. I VII THE RECEPTIVE FAITH OF THE SOCIAL PASSION If thou hast faith in one pure soul, Know that thy faith hath made thee whole : Thou need'st not seek God's grace elsewhere; God, Christ, eternal life are there. W HAT are the spiritual implications of the humanism which subordinates all things to the human, centers all things in the human? We saw at the beginning of our path that there are in humanism implications of the spiritual life, which is the overcoming of the world and the fulfilling of the soul. All along our brief historic review of humanism, we have been considering a reality which contains spiritual potencies, though they often present themselves under strange dis¬ guises. How do they unfold in one’s own soul, and in humanity, in the task of subordinating all things to the human, of centering all things in the human? § 1 The spiritual potencies of humanism have a pur¬ pose in themselves, an object before them. The overcoming of the world and the fulfilling of the soul constitute the cause we serve. All thought and life are to penetrate, unfold, and realize the cause we serve. The humanist’s faith and love, devotion 140 RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 141 and worship, are supremely and inclusively for the cause we serve. As we serve, that cause discloses its social nature from more to more. There is a singular variance between two prin¬ cipal meanings of the word cause. It may mean origin, ground, or whatever synonym in the line of this significance one may prefer. Or it may mean a social end to be devotedly achieved. The religions of the superhuman have made large use of the former meaning, in their doctrines of God. To humanism the latter meaning is inevitable for the highest that it reveres. There can be, from the humanist’s point of view, no comparison of moral values between the two meanings. The first seems to him to have in itself none, the second to have all. Yet the higher significance may transforming- ly appropriate the lower. The creator of every good in us is the cause we serve. In the humanist’s view, the quality of anything is decided by its outworkings. So a spirituality is to be estimated, not by what it looks back to, nor by what it looks up to, but by what it works forward to. I leave argument on this principle to others. I only state the humanist’s conviction, who is a humanist because devotion to the human seems to him the only life worth living. His forward work¬ ing spirituality has as the cause it serves the purely human good, which is humanity’s victory over the world, humanity’s self-fulfillment. This spirituality’s uplookings are for its out- workings. It was so with Jesus, as was made evi- 142 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION dent, I trust, in the chapter on the Galilean source of the social passion. He looked upward that he might make the Father’s will, directed to the supreme purpose, his own will, and he flung his life into the attainment of the kingdom of God, which was the cause he served. His God is the holy will of perfect love, with which he blended his whole soul. The quality of Jesus’ religion was determined by what he looked forward to and worked for. When the divine purpose is accepted with passive resigna¬ tion, it sinks below anything worthy of that holy name. Its object must be the cause to be served. Our lookings back are also for the sake of the workings on. This spirituality does not break with its own past, for that would be severence from its own growing life. But it uses the past for the supreme purpose. If anything in its past has ceased to serve this purpose, it must be recon¬ structed or even rejected, however venerable, or useful in its day. The scriptures, creeds, and in¬ stitutions of Christianity, from which it inherits, it estimates only by their use or uselessness to the cause we serve. When inherited conceptions of God become inconsistent with our clarifyings and deepenings of the cause we serve, the former must yield to the latter, if the spiritual life is to grow. Thus our attempts to describe the unfoldings of the social into the spiritual have their path marked out for them. It leads into the human cause we serve, which is humanity’s self-fulfillment, wherein it overcomes the world. RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 143 §2 The roots of humanity's social consciousness strike very deep. It has sources immeasurably re¬ mote. In all the spaces and times from which the constituents of our life are gathered, the individual thing is found only in interblendings. All things flow into one another, attain themselves from one another. Most distinct seems a star, beating upon our vision like the throbs of a mighty heart. Most separate it seems, for the glory nearest it is light- years distant from it, and the splendor which we behold is not of tonight or yesternight, but of years away or of centuries or millenia away. Yet who can mark its boundaries? If “a thing is where it acts"—and the analysis of the conception of location seems to yield just that equivalence—the star pours itself out through immensity, and all that to which its action extends is interblended with it. The light of my vision which hails it is of it, and itself is of my vision. The star is of my thought, and my thought is of the star. And if, as humanism holds, thought is of life and for life, the star is of my life and my life is of the star. Each atom of the star is a universe to its consti¬ tuents, and if we might penetrate to these, every attainment of our science foretells that we should find them convergencies of forces. Nor are they limited to the atom, their universe, for it acts forth from its own depths, sometimes in such vivid ways that we can begin to trace and measure its out¬ pourings of itself. 144 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Yet if one says, because we find no individual thing existing in separateness, “I have gained the ultimate secret of the One, I contemplate Thee, O Brahm,” then all energies, all movements, which are the interplay of things that are not merely one being, disappear from our thought. Then for us their very being ceases, and not even at the instant when the mystic yields up his consciousness can he affirm, “I contemplate Thee, O Brahm.” The con¬ ceptions of a monistic universe and a pluralistic universe (or universes) may find their partial truths fulfilled in the social universe, of which and in which we are. The roots of the social consciousness strike very deep. Along the stream of life the individual thing is found only in interblendings. The lowest forms of life, from which we come and which have con¬ tinuance in us, search through swift disruptions and associations for an individuality which con¬ tinually eludes them. Life’s upward strivings for distinctness do not make for separateness. In the degree of their increasing distinctness are their wider relations to the world of things and lives. The growth of self-consciousness in the higher forms of life is the gathering of elements which ever tend apart, which ever attempt to unify them¬ selves, and definitely to relate this slowing forming unity to that which is beyond themselves. The upward struggle of life is toward a distinct¬ ness which is formed by wider and by more intimate relations. The trend is individualistic and social in one. The phenomenon of multiple personality RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 145 in human beings may interpret to us the effort of the brute soul to unify itself. And as a broken human mind is mended when its lost social relations are restored, so the individual life below the human strives socially to gain itself. This is most evident when the brute enters the companionship of man. My dear pathetic dog, whose states of consciousness are so ludicrously irrelevant to one another, as appetites or fears or angers disrupt him into all kinds of dog, looks up exultantly when my voice calls his name, or at the summons his eyes seek mine, yearning, inscrutable, devoted. I am calling him into the centralizing of his unstable conscious¬ ness, and with that, into a new social world, whose master impulse for him is to lay down his life, attained through me, for me, his creative lord of life. It is his task to lead me, sympathetic, com¬ passionate, into the life beneath me. How well he leads, how lamely I follow, to that neglected attain¬ ment without which my personality lacks an essential! My task is to lead him into my higher life than his. How poor is my leading, how brave his bewildered, trustful following! Would that I might be as faithful in following my guides, and the supreme of them, into a consciousness undis¬ rupted by anything that is not human, into a personal life which continually gathers itself, con¬ tinually imparts itself, and so achieves itself from and in and unto the fellowship of interblended souls, the social universe! When life advances into the human, all human forces socially combine to work for personality. All 146 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION forces which the human appropriates from lower orders of life and existence it turns to the making of personal souls. Personal beings unite their powers to this end. The mother uses the long help¬ lessness of human infancy, and the long dependence of human childhood, to pour her life into the child’s life. That which she has is gathered from other souls, themselves recipients of still others, in vast successions and social interblendings. Her appro¬ priation, which she imparts, includes the remoter transformed inheritances from the lower than human life. Thus humanity is motherhood in every motherhood. Each soul is derived from humanity’s interblended personal life, and from spaces and ages which that life has made its own. In the ex¬ ultant fellowship of every such creation, the morn¬ ing stars sing together and all the sons of God shout for joy. When we reflect upon the mystery of our birth, neither ignoring physical facts nor estimating them carnally, it is dignity enough that we come, “trailing clouds of glory,” from humanity, not from any superhuman God, that we have our being In human¬ ity, and that our life flows out to humanity. For in each new soul all its inheritances become new. Each human soul in its own peculiar life is a new universe formed from other universes, and its ful¬ fillment is to form itself from them all, blending into itself, and so transcending, the interblended life of all. Thus the individualistic impulse of the renaissance is vastly justified and completed. The whole human universe, with all the inheritances RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 147 which it has humanized, is for each new soul. And each new soul, in its own personality, is an advance from all that has contributed to it. By the same law, each soul is for the formation of other souls, is for humanity's personally inter- blended life. This is the social consciousness, the social passion. It is spiritual, but not as seeking above the human its origin, energy, law, or purpose. It energizes unto the fulfillment of the human in the conquest and transcendence of the world, and in the illimitable developments of the human in each and all. This is the object of our spiritual faith. This is the religion of the social passion. This is the cause we serve.* Some familiar elements suggest themselves of the formation of a man from other men, and of his forming of other men from himself. The first of these two aspects of human life is attempted here. The second will be undertaken in the next chapter. § 3 Before the memories which mature years dis¬ criminatingly recall, the soul begins its task of forming itself from the great interblended human life. The new-born child, fresh heritage from humanity's inexhaustible, continually self-creative life, awaits a second birth, which is the beginning of its own realization of the social consciousness. *It does not belong to my task to discuss the psychological and metaphysical problems which suggest themselves at this point. T am not conscious of any evasion of them in my own thinking. Will kind critics not discover in what I write implications which are not there. In particular, I am not entangled in the error—as human¬ ists must regard it — of attempting to unite persons into a moni¬ stically conceived somewhat alien to them. 148 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION In this is the dawning of the personal consciousness, which socially forms itself from the impartings of the mother’s soul. Spiritually creative is the cumula¬ tive moment when the child knows her, not merely with the animal instinct that turns to her life- giving breast, but with the recognition of heart forming itself from her heart, of mind forming itself from her mind, of soul forming itself from her soul. From that moment the child takes from her more and more of the gift, which is continously graduated to its increasing capacity. Each successive imparta- tion must in no wise repress, but altogether develop, that concentration of life which we call a person, as the mother is careful not to impose herself, but to impart herself and the spiritual universe of which she is mediator. The impartation is for such a concentration of the social universe as may be¬ come a personal enlargement of this universe, a contribution to its vast developments. If she is self-indulgently remiss or thoughtless, if she trivi¬ ally or ambitiously prefers other things or other social services to this most intimate and intensive contribution to the spiritual universe, she becomes less than the brute mother. Therefore she must continually renew and enlarge that which she has to give. She may not shut herself off from any¬ thing in human life that is impartive to her of that which she must impart. When poverty or any other repression despoils her of time and power for this self-giving, and for self-receiving that she may give, then the wrong RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 149 and folly of our present economic conditions are most evident. The energies of social reform will do well to concentrate themselves upon the mother and her child. The education of women, which has been misshapen by the economic exigencies of an unhumanistic time, must have this as interpretive and directive aim. This reflection applies not only to those who are mothers in the full sense, which includes and transcends the physical, but to all women in every motherly occupation, as teaching, domestic service socially humanized, and everything in the world’s work where there is need of mother¬ ing. All women have the right to scope and re¬ sources for spiritual motherhood. Because her giving of humanity must become ultimately the task of all souls united for the in¬ creasing creation of each soul, she magnanimously welcomes assistants in her task, demanding only that they shall assist indeed. The most eminent of her associates is normally the father, in the ethical romance that unites man and woman in one spirit¬ ual task. The next rank belongs to whatever com¬ petent children are available. For childhood has its own secret of the impartation of humanity to a child. If there are other children in the home, their fulfillment of this function is the most distinguish¬ ed. But there should also be enlisted, under her watchful and liberal selection, all sorts and con¬ ditions of children, in their wisdom to impart child- life in great variety and unexpectedness. Among these the mother again is chief, newborn to child¬ likeness with the child’s birth. All his life long 150 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION the child richly and purely receives humanity from her mediation. And her impartive task is per¬ formed most effectively when her physical presence no longer glorifies the earth. The most intimate of these impartations even poets and artists must render with the reserve which is the test of their insight. Common speech dares to express receptions from motherhood only objectively and generally. Such reverence must be offered to those few who are heart of a man’s heart, soul of his soul, or to that one. The intensest of creative words it is not lawful to utter. They are spoken in more august sanctuaries than the Para¬ dise beyond the Third Heaven. Impartings of soul to soul more fateful than the seven thunders of the Apocalypse must, like them, remain forever un¬ written. Yet the soul’s inviolable sanctuary is a social creation. For the thrice-holy abiding pres¬ ences built it with that which they brought from the universal life of humanity. There cannot be too intense a receptivity to a great, pure soul. The religions of a superhuman God have admonished men against cherishing for a human being a faith too pure, or a love too devoted, lest we set a creature in the Creator’s place. We have been warned and threatened not to permit a human being to interpose between God and our¬ selves, not to be diverted from the singleness of a divine dependence. Though Christ is often ex¬ cepted, it is on the ground of his alleged divine nature. In the higher forms of this instruction, we are told that the supreme human souls RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 151 are stepping-stones to God's throne. Even the finest forms of this doctrine chill hu¬ manity to the heart. The humanist admits no disparagement of trust and love to the human. A soul whom we trust and love does not point us away from himself to the superhuman. He invites us to enter ever more deeply into the humanity which he has made his own. Of this spiritual life of humanity in receptive and impartive lives Jesus is representative, not the Christ of the two natures, the divine overwhelming the human, but the human Jesus. In the degree next the highest, it is our friends who have been to us mediators of the human.* Per¬ haps the greatest word concerning friendship is that which is attributed to Jesus, not unworthily, in the Fourth Gospel: ‘‘I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you." The office of friendship is to make known, in the fourth evangelist's vital significance of knowledge, that which has been re¬ ceived of the Father. And the humanist may, as we will reflect later, find this fatherhood in the concrete humanity of which we are. That making known is no merely intellectual instruction. It Is love's self-imparting. Its purpose is, “As thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us." The office of friends, who must first receive, is such a transmission of humanity that ♦The course of this chapter is not formally directed by group classifications. I trust that my more personal method may not be found to. be inconsistent with those valuable contributions to social science, in some of which the treatment is too mechanical. 152 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION our life may become socially one with theirs, may become the increasing love-life of mankind. These our friends have been reverent of us in their desire, that, for our sake and humanity's sake, their gifts of humanity should contribute to the concentration of a full-formed personality. If any of them have tried to limit us by imposing them¬ selves upon us, let this offense be lost in their true fulfillments of friendship. May we be forgiven for our thwartings of their high endeavor, if we have imitated them or made them authorities. If we have become in any wise estranged from them, by their defects or our own unworthiness, by sordid frets or material aims, by pride, insensibility or self-conceit, or by forgetfulness because of any dis¬ tance or lapse of time or their irremediable absence from our sight, may they renew their benefactions, as we reascend these downward paths, taking back to them, though it be but to their living memories, the deepened appreciations of our repentant faith! Various have been their gifts, as their capacities to impart humanity were varied. One brought us men's laughter, another human tears, another com¬ passions, another fortitudes. Later experience often discovers that they are most deserving of gratitude whose enrichments of us were almost disregarded. We trace back the best that is in us not only to the illumination of our friend the seer, and to the inspiration of our friend the hero, but also to the prattle of our friend the little child, and to the un¬ conscious impartations of the fundamental worths by our friends who were common men. Happy is RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 153 he whose friends have sounded most variously the scale of the human music, making him most broadly, deeply, simply human. It is remembered of Phillips Brooks that in his vacations he would sometimes slip back to the city to which he gave the best things, and from a win¬ dow of one of the busiest streets, at the hour most thronged, watch the crowd pass by. From all sorts and conditions of men, women, and children, from their faces and movements, expressive of nobility or baseness, success or defeat, ambition, apathy, or discontent, aspiration or self-satisfaction, service¬ ableness or selfishness, he drew most variously the flood of human life into his own soul, that he might pour it forth, deeply interpreted and purely ful¬ filled, for manifold enrichments of the humanity from which he continually formed himself. No less revered than the friends whom w r e have seen are the friends whom, not having seen, we love, the thinkers, composers, artists, who fulfill the highest offices of friendship to multitudes and cen¬ turies. They blended into themselves men’s thoughts and dreams, storm and repose, great moments and common days. Their originality sig¬ nifies their power to receive from the human its obscure potencies, unsuspected combinations, and to bestow them expressively upon generations of receptive hearts. With these benefactors we asso¬ ciate the inspirers of motives, the prophets of great causes, the leaders of progressive eras. The world’s heroes advance humanity to great new creations in their own personalities, so that great new crea- 154 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION tions may issue from them. In all humility we be¬ seech them to call us friends, that all things which they have received they may give to us. Gratitude can be felt only for gifts of soul. To receive into my own life a fellow-man's contribu¬ tion of life is itself an act of gratitude. To reject it is ingratitude. One must never slight a present from a child or a childlike person, though it be in itself useless or cumbersome, for the soul is given with it. If I am ignorant of the source of any vital good, or if, in the confusions of affairs, I have for¬ gotten one who was such a giver, the ignorance or forgetfulness decreases the value of that which I have received; but when the knowledge is gained or the recognition revived, then the gift is multiplied. If the imparting to me of any inward power and joy is accompanied with a material object, as its instrument or embodiment, then the material good is sacramental, and is to be used for riches of the soul. A spiritual interest must be in the heart of the giver of the simplest thing, the most ordinary service, and a spiritual benefit must be imparted, as in the cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple; else even the builder of aqueducts shall have no reward. A large part of the complaints of those who would be called benefactors, against the ingratitude of men, may be therefore without foundation. It is salutary to ap|fly this reflection to our own casti¬ gations of thi^e whom we accuse of thanklessness to ourselvesjjf/ Only the soul can be grateful, not filled stomach or warmed skin, and the soul can be RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 155 grateful only to enriching souls. Did many of us who have been college boys feel a responsive thrill, when we read upon ornate facades the highly re¬ lieved names of donors, unless it was the name of one whose building we knew ourselves to be ? When the college president felt constrained to stand a distinguished philanthropist up before us, and grandiloquently to recite his munificence, how much thankfulness irradiated our faces, unless there was something in the victim of the eulogy which told us that he himself was ours and was worth the taking! It is the impecunious mediator of the large endowments who is thanked for them, when they are the occasion of his giving that in himself which is a richer gift than those things. How many rich men's sons repay with gratitude the monies lavished upon them by fathers who gave no personal good, until the son’s discovery, as frequently set forth in affecting tales, that there was a soul in the lavishness? None are so ungrate¬ ful as beggars snatching a gift bare of the giver; or there is offered with the dole superficial senti¬ mentality or condescending pity; and none has a better right to be ungrateful, among the great host of those who are robbed of soul by the gift of, things. The scatterer of millions for object^fSw- ever worthy is met by the challenge: |^Wnat are you yourself, and what floods of good and evil have poured into humanity from your acquisitive career? The splendid temple at Jerusalem was dear to Jesus, but we find no word of his in recog¬ nition of the Herod who built it at prodigious cost. 156 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Even the contributors of a knowledge or a power which is not their inmost life win little gratitude. If the giver of wealth has given himself, having a self to give, no envy or obloquy can keep him long from his reward. The proverbial ingratitude of republics should be thus discriminated. This is in truth their ingratitude, that they so often reject the thought, the heart, the purpose, of a lover of his country. But when they at length accept these— the soul of Abraham Lincoln is not poor in the good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and run¬ ning over, which men give into his bosom. What thanksgiving do we owe to a deity whose gifts, ex¬ ternal to himself, cost him nothing! When we dis¬ cover that every gift of his is love’s supreme, holy, sacrificial self-imparting, then our hearts are his. We must gain ourselves not only from our friends, but also from our enemies. An enemy is one who attempts the twofold injury, to repress our personal life and to rob us of our inheritance of humanity. He may work his mischief unwit¬ tingly, or in a foolish conceit of bestowing favor, or with premeditated malice, or with insensibility. He may be thief, murderer, seducer, or false teacher, blind guide, who in church or state or school, in home or business, imposes his own small measurements upon us. Some, who are in the main beneficent friends, mistake in certain re¬ spects the nature of their service. May none of us be such enemies, even in the least degree, of those whom we love, as to try to fashion them into the likeness of our own limitations! The worst of our RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 157 enemies are the Hohenzollerns, in high place or low place, or sunk from a high place to eternal infamy. They go forth to destroy men's personality and human heritage, to make each individual and all humanity a smaller and baser thing. Yet even those worst can be made to contribute to our riches of the soul. We gain from our enemies the necessity of guarding ourselves against them. They compel us to distinguish between the human and the inhuman, between those things which increase life and those which diminish it. Each holy city has twelve gates, is trebly accessible on every side. To each gate are brought the glory and honor of the nations, and the riches of their kings. Against each entrance violations and importunities storm or crawl. There¬ fore at each gate is stationed a strong angel, to re¬ ceive and to exclude. Because of this enforced dis¬ crimination, the acceptance of the glorious things is no passive acquiescence, but a discriminating ap¬ propriation. The sentineled soul is made wise and strong by this necessity of selection. Our enemies awaken in us a higher purpose: that we will not separate ourselves from them. We will not exclude what they may beneficently become to us, nor withhold that which we may be to them. For every man, whatever he is, is potentially a new constituent of humanity, an original essential of its enlarging life. To separate oneself' from any man is therefore suicidal. To be estranged from one who has been our friend is among the most poign¬ ant of disasters; or if we have ceased to care, some- 158 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION thing in us has died. To be estranged from one still closer would be the most unendurable of agonies. Yet the consciousness of loss stirs in us, not always faintly, at the exclusion from us of the man who least appeals to us. This loss from our own selves is felt whenever we see the isolation of an enemy of mankind; as by a criminal's imprison¬ ment, or by the infliction of the death penalty upon a murderer; or when the execration of mankind drives its betrayer into the outer darkness. Even then we and humanity, whose life beats in us, have lost something necessary to us. When we exclude a destroyer of the human, we lose something human in that destroyer. W~e are not without hope that the utmost necessary severity may in every case stop short of the elimination of the offender; that underneath the destructive force which for human¬ ity’s sake we are compelled to destroy, there may be found a constituent of humanity, when the un¬ human of him has been swept away. Even for our own sakes we cannot believe in the final perdition of any soul. Every soul is indispensable to every soul, for to lose any soul is to lose something of the humanity from which we are. This loss was an¬ nounced by Jesus, when he taught that every act or word or sentiment which tends to separate us from our fellow men endangers the soul that pro¬ nounces the separation; and that the utterly sepa¬ rative contempt, which is congealed hate, makes us liable to the extreme spiritual disaster. Yet if we suffer the gates to be forced by the onrush or the wiles of our enemies, then every per- RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 159 sonal sanctity is betrayed, and we commit against humanity the treachery which Belgium spurned. Only a redemptive forgiveness can transcend this dilemma and accomplish humanity’s hardest task. But this thought leads us beyond the subject of this chapter. Out among throngs of men, into the welter of human interrelations, we go armed against intru¬ sions, impertinences, hasty confidences, usurpa¬ tions of authority, assaults upon the personal rights which a man must maintain, not for himself alone. All these diminish men. They prevent the true participations. We cultivate self-defense and re¬ ceptivity, the former for the sake of the latter. He can give little who receives little. Many a stupid philanthropist’s zeal to give to needy men is thwarted by his failure to receive the understand¬ ing of them. Many a teacher fails because of in¬ ability to learn the wisdom of the simple. As repellant as hate is the stupidity of those who find men or any man uninteresting—when we get below the artificial and mechanical to the humanity of him. We are creditors, as well as debtors, of all sorts and conditions of men. Unless we collect what men owe us we shall have nothing wherewith to pay our debts to men. From men of different nationalities, different opportunities of culture, various ages of life, diverse pursuits and experiences and social status—so long as that bar against the tides of life continues—we must receive. Among events we welcome, as mightily formative of us, those which 160 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION reveal in greatest variety the universal human; as when a crowd becomes one variously pulsating tenderness around an injured child; or as when a variegated democracy fulfills, though only for a little while, its social implications by “men meeting at their summits” in a superb devotion. From the pathos of humanity we must form ourselves, es¬ pecially when, as in the world war, human suffer¬ ing becomes the inexhaustible spring of heroism. With infinite vibrations the hearts of men pene¬ trate our hearts. It is nothing abstract, conceptual, which we feel creative of our enlarging selves. We are wrought from individual pains and overcom¬ ings, which are so blended together that each of them becomes the more distinct by its relations. Our sharings of men’s life, present and past, open to us the hope of fulfillments of our lives from souls and generations of the future. Personality is from all men who are and from all who have been and from all who are to come. This greeting to every soul is implicit in every soul: I am thine and thou art mine, that we all may become perfect in one. This formation of social personality is gained from groups of men, as from one’s family, circle, neighborhood, community, industrial combination, professional fellowship, transitory or permanent poolings of interests, organizations for cultural ends, state, country, race. The fundamental ques¬ tion in these and other groupings is, whether we receive from them human impartations to which their material objects are made ministrant. Are RECEPTIVE FAITH OF SOCIAL PASSION 161 they so organized that each man receives from them his personal social self? Each group must serve the groups that include it, if this aim is to be attained. A class conscious¬ ness, a national or a racial consciousness, may be either creative or destructive of the human. An organization of labor or capital which does not minister to the higher unities is doomed by its sepa¬ rateness from humanity. A patriotism which is not thus cosmopolitan robs its country of that which assures men’s loyalty. But when a group consciousness, while concentrating and creating human powers for its own tasks, relates them to the higher unities, it then has earned recognition and co-operation. When one of the higher unities, our mother-country above them all, devotes itself and all which it includes to the supreme cause we serve, no faith in that glorious mediator of the human can be too receptive, no loyalty too sacri¬ ficial. “O Beautiful, My Country, . . . What were our lives without thee! What all our lives to save thee! We reck not what we gave thee, We will not dare to doubt thee, But ask whatever else and we will dare.” VIII THE IMPARTIVE LOVE OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Pour out thy rill of life, and it shall be Unsounded oceans surging back to thee. §1 E ACH personality then is formed, through the impartings of other personalities, from humanity's interblended life. A deeper so¬ cial consciousness than we have yet considered may make clear the distinction between the human that enlarges our personality and the inhuman in¬ trusions that diminish it. With this distinction anticipated, one may say: an essential part of my life task is to bring into my continually increasing personality every life which touches mine, and the lives which directly or mediately form every life that contributes to mine. These formations of a person come from as far as there are human be¬ ings, forming one another. All that humanity is, or rather may become, in all souls, each soul must strive to become, and each soul must also be a new creation, concentration and advance of humanity. A soul can accept no nearer, lower goal of its own becoming. Though inimitably distant, toward that must each man go on, finding his progress to be continual increase of worth and joy. These contributions of the human to one's own soul can never, we reflected, be from humanity in 162 IMPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 163 any abstract, conceptual sense. They cannot re¬ duce a man to a phase of humanity, as in the brute world the individual is regarded by some, though superficially, as merely for the species. The im- partings of humanity, however great and many they grow to be, cannot overwhelm or in any de¬ gree depersonalize. If it seems so, in suicidal imi¬ tations, servile acceptances of authority, weak sub¬ missions to a more aggressive will, it is not then the human that is accepted. We then let in the de¬ personalized things, which those who are perverted from the human would force upon other men, while whatever humanity there is in the suppressor stands aloof, unimpartive. Whenever the human is received, the personal life of the recipient be¬ comes more distinct, intense, in the measure of the reception. Your personal being is a social con¬ sciousness. The intensifying of your life is a social passion. It is humanity that you confess, it is the social life that you experience, it is the social pas¬ sion that burns within you, when, with a limitless aspiration, you dare to say: I am a man. But when this is said, much more is implied than the mere receiving of ourselves from humanity. For, obviously, when a man receives himself from others, they give themselves to him. The story of the formation of each man from other men might be told conversely, as the imparting of those lives and their content of humanity. And he who receives himself gives himself in the receiving. Faith, the receptive power, is self-surrender to that which it receives. If faith were for the sake of some ex- 164 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION ternal good, either here or hereafter, something not our very selves, there would not necessarily be in¬ volved the giving of our inmost selves. The human faith that receives its own soul from humanity and its personal mediators, receives those who are loved and their content of humanity. And every one who gives himself receives himself from him to whom he gives. The humanity which is the interblended life of human souls is enriched by every giving. The receptive element of our becoming is itself impartive, because the very thing received by faith is the self-impartive life. It is love that is given us from motherhood, friendship, and the inconspic¬ uous contributions of common men. Unless I re¬ ceive self-impartive love, I receive not anything essential to human worth. And I can receive it only as the self-impartive love-life of my own soul. Thus every element and aspect of a life that is truly human is a self-imparting. Even when we most receive, it is by giving ourselves that we re¬ ceive. The imparting of ourselves is the increase of ourselves. This life gains strength by action, and its action is the imparting of itself. All at¬ tempts to enlarge our lives in opposition to this principle, as those of a self-centered culture or an egotistic ambition, penetrate life with fatal mala¬ dies, undermine its foundations. It cannot be oth¬ erwise, for personality is socially formed and of social nature, and the social as such is self-impart¬ ive. The harvest of our giving is this: that every im¬ parting of ourselves to a human being, growing in IMPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 165 him, and from him in his impartings to others, and becoming in each and from each a new creation of humanity, is continual return of increased human¬ ity into the giver’s heart. In this giving of our¬ selves we create the human in which we live, and with whose advance we advance continually. Yet this creative reciprocity is not all. The mother is born again in the child’s birth, before its second birth from her to be a responsive soul. The per¬ fecting of Jesus by his suffering did not wait for the faith of even one disciple. The giving is itself attainment of self-imparting humanity, even though not one man should hold out receptive hands. Yet love will not thus be satisfied, but is insistent to be received by every soul. This interpretation of humanity is a postulate to be tested by its outworkings, which are humanity’s self-developments. But this supreme of human claims differs from other postulates in this respect, that it must not doubt nor falter in its self-affirma¬ tion. And it differs in this respect also, that its self-affirmation is self-realization, with immediate and increasing consciousness of worth and joy. In still another respect, the assumption that hu¬ manity is essentially impartive love differs from lower postulates. Its truth is judged by the en¬ largement of inner experience, one’s own and hu¬ manity’s. No accident or calamity can invalidate its experience of success, no extreme of pain and shame, no cross and tomb. It is indeed confident of subduing all things to itself; but that assurance is founded upon its own inner self-realization, not 166 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION upon any experience of external things. Realizing itself, it is conqueror: subduing all things to itself, it is more than conqueror. If all the human that a physical omnipotence could reach were tortured, outraged, destroyed, this would be no proof of in¬ sufficiency, no argument against success final and complete. The human, in this self-realization, can not therefore vindicate itself by citing any adven¬ titious gain in earth or heaven. It can only pro¬ claim itself as gospel, summoning men to this find¬ ing of themselves, as participants in the realization of humanity. When the human thus proclaims itself as impartive love, it is a resurrection trumpet to the slumbering life of souls that are not alto¬ gether dehumanized. §2 For the practical realization of the impartive love-life in the world of men, which seems so hostile to it, which supremely needs it, the following re¬ flections may be of service. Some are repeated from the last chapter, but with this higher point of view. Some of them may seem, at first thought, to fall short of love’s demands, which preserves its noblest nature in its lowliest ministries, conceding to nothing else, accepting nothing else except to transform it. But our reflections will, I trust, not only lead to the heights, but there will be found im¬ plicit in them all nothing less than love’s very self. The dispute between egoist and altruist has failed to take sufficient account of humanity. Every man has part in the life of humanity, which is in- 1MPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 167 creased by the giving of oneself, and this participa¬ tion is his own self-fulfillment. Reactions of one’s own personal worth against the individual altruist, the indignant affirmations of one’s own life to be lived, and one’s own task to be achieved, are justified. We may repudiate his less than social interpretations of such words as service, unselfishness, sacrifice. When sacrificial men say that they have never made a sacrifice, they affirm that every outpouring of themselves has been their own life’s consummate gain. How can I as¬ sert the supreme worth of every man when I deny it of myself! Criticisms directed against Jesus, because he offered as well as demanded, have not learned what humanity was to his soul. If any giving of oneself is not an enrichment both of humanity and one’s own soul, then there is with¬ holding, not a real giving. A woman may not re¬ nounce her womanhood, either outside of marriage or within marriage, which should be the pure and exquisite yieldings and attainings of womanhood. If she degrades herself, she impoverishes herself, the devastator, and humanity’s interblended life. There must not be, in any human relation, a gift which is the surrender of character, the impover¬ ishment of personal life. No person, least of all a child in its helplessness, must be required or per¬ mitted to give up to any industrial order—or dis¬ order—the development of those faculties whose neglect makes him a cog in a worthless machine. No despotism, whether insolent, or insidious under the fair titles of democracy, may require of any 168 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION citizen the sacrifice to itself of that which should be rendered to personal social ends. Essential to the value of any man’s offering of himself is his own discovery of just that which‘he is for humanity. The artist, the poet, the thinker, cannot deny those claims of their genius, in which is their supreme potency of giving. This admoni¬ tion is for those who possess these gifts, not for those who mistake a taste for expressive power. There must be the same regard for less distin¬ guished abilities in common men. All choices be¬ tween devoted ministries should be one’s own and not another’s. Humanity has formed in each man a unique potency, which others may indicate or awake, but only he discover. How limited a scope for these free choices is offered in present social conditions! None the less, the one test of a man’s personal fulfillment is the world’s need of him. The at¬ tempted development of powers except for the world’s need is the constriction of the soul, in the selfishness which is inaccessible to the wealth of humanity. In some cases this impulse may be un¬ conscious. Though the golden voice cannot help singing, its deepest joy of song is that it may make music for the world. The world’s need is impera¬ tive, even when it requires a man to fling what he is or might become into the ground to die, and to bear much fruit by dying, or when there is allotted to rare genius “A corner of some foreign field, To be forever England,” IMPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 169 or when the body of the crucified Christ is laid in the most desolate of sepulchres. A man's supreme determinative is the world’s need of him, and when he gathers and spends himself for that need, hu¬ manity and his own soul reap rich fulfillments. The very self must be given, not things merely. Devotion to humanity is accomplished not through anything external to a man, but in his own heart’s blood. In this vital meaning the saying is true, “We are saved by the blood of Christ.” Devotion is nothing less than the pouring forth of our own souls. Nothing less than this meets the world’s need. It is life of which the world’s veins are scant. The consciousness of every true benefactor is, “I am come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” The giving of our ex¬ ternal things is the pleasantest of pastimes, unless a man is so unreasonable as to expect payment in gratitude. Let him transform his gift by filling it with his impartive soul. Then he will find what it costs to give, and what gain there is in giving. One who gives himself is pierced through with many sorrows, and is crowned with many crowns. Yet the world’s work, in which we all have part, is for most men the giving of the things which the world requires. Through these things life must be given. Every ministry of things must be made the channel of soul from man to man, unto the fulfill¬ ments of humanity’s interblended life. It is this aim which must estimate and direct all the organ¬ izations of men’s work. The way is long, but it is the only way. There are many obstacles and ad- 170 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION versaries, but to overcome them is just the human task. That we may give, it is necessary to receive. The great reservoir must gather itself continuously from seeping forests and mountain streams, from skies and oceans, that it may be sufficient to water all the garden of humanity. Amenities, delights, raptures are yours, in high application of the prin¬ ciple, that the right to property is the social use of it. The passion to impart creates these receptivi¬ ties. Love is the supreme energy for increasing the riches of one’s own soul. In the proportion of my love must I gain the wherewithal to give. Even the accumulation of the mammon of unrighteous¬ ness is included. Yours are the holidays when you “loaf and invite your soul,” that you may have soul to impart. You must have joy, to radiate the joy¬ ousness of which the world has vast need. Many discriminations are required here. But whatever the appeals for renunciations, it is still true that to the unselfish soul there is open a world of pleasant¬ ness, engaging interests, happy thoughts. When exigencies of impartive love call you from them, it is to increase them—not always indeed immedi¬ ately—in amazing ways. Yours are art and music and all manner of fascinating lore of men and na¬ ture, shared with congenial friends and those who are closer than friends, and also making you the source of refreshment for all chance acquaintances. The consummate symbol of this realm is a devoted woman’s smile, which radiates the sweet riches of her happy soul. Because you owe the immeasur- IMPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 171 able debt to all men, you owe nothing to the exac¬ tions of “the devastator of the day,” the intruder, the inflicter of frets and worries: all-wise love re¬ sponds to these demands with greater and fine* gifts. It is love’s wisdom, not custom or convention, except as they smooth the ways, that decides what you shall give, and how it shall be given. Your deepest joy in your fair domain is to trans¬ form all into abiding riches of the soul, which in¬ crease as they are imparted. The self-consuming indulgencies and flaunting vulgarities, which are incapable of this spiritual transformation, are to you deserts littered with dead men’s bones. Yours is the delight of creative self-expression, in forms however inconspicuous, which is the outpouring of your treasure. Then every lovely possession, multi¬ plied in receptive hearts, returns into your life with amazing developments and variations. Among the recipients of our impartive love, we find the same discriminations as those which ap¬ pear among the men to whom we turn our receptive faith. As we receive in different measures the hu¬ manity which is our inclusive need, first and most in relations that are closer than friendship, then from friends, among whom we desire to include all men in the different kinds and degrees of their con¬ tributions to our life, and even from enemies, so do we give in various ways of giving. So inter¬ related are the receiving and the giving that the impartings of ourselves have been briefly reviewed, by implication, in the preceding chapter. A few re¬ flections may be emphasized here. 172 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION The most intimate impartations are most evi¬ dently universal, both in their source and in their purpose. They are intensifyings of humanity’s in- terblended life. The mother concentrates all her humanness, both that which she has received and that which she has new-created in her own life, to pour into the child’s heart. The completeness of the gift lays upon the child the obligation to be the servant and imparter of her service to humanity. Among the consummations of the human belongs the undying devotion of a man to one woman, which lavishes at her dear feet all he is and may ever become, and her exquisite response in the in¬ effable unfoldings of loved and loving womanhood; and the secret of the most intimate, most romantic love of man and woman is the consciousness of their united task. Their task together of impartive love to all men constitutes their life together. Their eternal life together, which they cannot doubt, is this eternal task together. The social passion in¬ cludes the supreme personal passions, demands them, completes them. In friendship, which implicitly contains all men, the art of impartive life requires us to be modest, but not too self-distrustful, in estimating that which we have to impart. Often our proffers are declined because they would diminish life. We must also be so humble concerning our skill to im¬ part, that we shall take pains to develop it. There are discriminations of occasions and methods, ap¬ preciations of the differences in men, patience to await a receptiveness which we may also foster IMPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 173 unobtrusively. The mother’s ways are our best guides. It is better to withhold a gift a while than to risk a premature offer. It is better to impart gradually than to confuse and bewilder by the offer of more than can be received. Varied tact charac¬ terizes the noblest benefactions. We cannot love too much, but we can urge too precipitately. It is better to be grateful that our small gift is accepted than to be resentful that a larger one is not appre¬ ciated. The art of impartive living recognizes a discrimi¬ nation of self-giving at the lower limit of human¬ ity. “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you.” It is worthy of note that Jesus is re¬ ported to have used two words for dogs, one for the masterless scavenger of oriental alleys, and the other for the companion of man. We are not warned against people who are like faithful, lov¬ able dogs. The contrast in this saying is extreme, between savage brutishness and holy, precious things. It is to such injurious defilers that the ex¬ cellent is not to be exposed. But many things may be given even to them. It is to be remembered also that Jesus warned against the judgment which pro¬ nounces a man to be wild dog or swine, and that his mission was to change human brutishness into manhood. Nothing limits love’s self-imparting except the refusal to receive. And love turns back only when its very offer arouses the extreme of brutishness. 174 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION There is no conflict between love and justice. Jus¬ tice is love's demand that nothing shall obstruct its self-imparting. In this demand love is inexorable. In this light moral discriminations and the condi¬ tions of attaining good are most severe. There is no divine justice which is not love’s minister. There is no human justice which is not love’s servant. There is no righteousness, no holiness in heaven or earth, which is not impartive love. There is no true law or necessary penalty which contains an element from any other source. All that has been written concerning justice must be restated in terms of impartive love. All attempts at justice must be reconstructed by impartive love. All that love can do, for enemies, for friends, for those who are closer than friends, and from the height of its heroisms to the depths of its compas¬ sions, is included in Jesus’ supreme law of life: '‘Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but who¬ soever shall lose his life for my sake and the gos¬ pel’s, the same shall save it.” The words “for my sake and the gospel’s,” whether or not they are lit¬ erally authentic, indicate at least an essential of Jesus’ thought and life. To him the losing of life must be for the supreme purpose, for the cause he served. As we view the complete statement in the light of Jesus’ life, of which it is the supremely au¬ thentic expression, the evident meaning is that the loss of life for the supreme object is itself the sav¬ ing of life. The true life is the blessedness and worth of the love that ever gives itself. That which love gives is love’s only possession. Love gives only IMPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 175 to souls, and creatively gives its own love-life to them, to be its very own. When a man loses his life for humanity's interblended life, in this hu¬ manity and in every member of it is life of his life, soul of his soul. What was said in the preceding chapter concern¬ ing our receptions from social groups has antici¬ pated the recognition of our devotions to them. We give to an individual that we may give through him to men, in the larger interblendings which socially form personalities. Even motherhood becomes petty if it does not labor to pour into the child the impartive life which is supreme in motherhood. A wedded love that is not dominated by the conscious¬ ness of the ministering task together, descends into the conventional relation. No power of the life which saves itself by losing itself may stop at any point, beyond which there are human beings to be served. All concentrations of self-giving are for the humanity still beyond. Loyalty to country is loyalty to the nations, by serving whom our coun¬ try fulfills itself. Thus it is with our loyal pride in our civilization, our race, and even with devo¬ tion to our whole world of men, if beyond this also there are human beings to be served. From every man there are paths to every man. In every serv¬ ice it is humanity we serve, not a conceptual, phan¬ tasmal humanity, but the interblended life which throbs in humanity's every vein. Every giving is unto the developing consummation of humanity: it is for the cause we serve. 176 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION §3 But that loving faith in concrete humanity, without which the human cannot be the supreme object of devotion, meets a concrete, vital, unspecu- lative objection. This is human sin. The recogni¬ tion of its significance has thus far in our journey been only foreshadowed. The postponement of its encounter may have aroused the indignant impa¬ tience of some readers. Such protesters need not be thought of as cynics, puritans in the unlovely connotations of that word, or traditionally minded theologians. Clear vision looks upon a mankind in¬ fected with revolting hardness, selfishness, bestial¬ ity. How shall that devotion to humanity which involves faith in humanity be attained across the monstrous gulf of human sin? Liberal religious thought has paled before the great evangelical inheritance, which asserts evil hearts that must be made holy, and a sinful world that must be redeemed. Though degrading concep¬ tions and obscene images—congenial to some of the new psychologists—have befouled the pages and seared the lips of many champions of this evangel¬ ical inheritance, though these men have blasphemed both pure natural loveliness and the holy motives of many exalted souls, though they have indulged strange dreams of everlasting tortures, physical and mental, as inflicted penalties, and have done despite to the compassionateness of Christ and the fatherhood of God, still this tradition makes a mightier appeal than any that is won by ignorings, palliations, or extenuations of the abhorrent fact, IMPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 177 the desolating infamy. When the exaggerations and distortions, the defamations of God and man, have been stripped away, then the proclamation of human sin becomes more clear and overwhelming. When these perversions are entirely absent, the conviction of sin is most penetrating before the holiness of Jesus, and his fate by the reeking hands of the same infernalities which run riot in the world today. The humanist can least of all men neglect the reality of sin. All his seeking begins with the un¬ shrinking envisagement of reality in the hearts of men and the life of mankind. Else he will make little progress toward the heights of life, crowned with the meaning of redemption, and the presence of the holy Christ and of Christlike souls. The social passion can least of all devotions neg¬ lect the reality of sin. The conviction is essential to practical ministries. The enthusiasm for social good encounters the entrenchments and aggres¬ sions of social wrong. It is the duty of the confes¬ sor of the social passion to be intimately cognizant of these antagonists, in their active oppositions and insensible brutishness, to detect slippery men and the purblind ease and smug complacency of their respectable confederates, else he himself becomes the tool of treacheries. Sanguine people of benevo¬ lent disposition are dupes and jest of all the hells. The traditionally inculcated division of the soul against itself must be to him a deeper disruption within the interblended life of humanity, and there¬ fore destructive of his own personal being. 178 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION What is sin, that it may be fought not as a spec¬ ter of the night, but in life's open field? This is not to ask how it came to be, nor how it is thinkable that sin should be. To recognize in sin the inheritance of the brute is helpful, for our warfare is of the human against the brutal. Much in “the new psychology" is our ally, since it drives out into the open the enemies that lurk in the secret places of the city of man- soul. Only we must summon our spiritual powers to arms against them. But to take the inheritance of the brute as the answer to the question of what sin is, is of no value to one who is in earnest with moral distinctions. For the brute does not sin, in any meaning that illumines our moral warfare. We do not inherit that which is not. That answer would put an end to moral distinctions, and so to humanism, which we have accepted because we could not endure to live in any other way. The answer is undiscriminating, for many normal things are inherited from the brute. To find the distinction between the normal and the abnormal we must look elsewhere. By our moral energies, our spiritual strivings, the inheritance from the brute must be transcended and subdued. In failure of that the humanist recognizes sin. It has indeed been helpful, in some ways, to say that sin is opposition to the will of God, or to a law transcendent of man, or whatever expresses man's disobedience to something superhuman. For such contritions recognize sin's antagonism to the high¬ est and best. Every evil thing, even back into the IMPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 179 inmost recesses of thought and desire, directs its violence against that which abhors it most deeply, feels it most sensitively. Yet, in order that this answer may have a practical value, it is necessary to seek what that holy will is, and where it is. For men have lightly inflicted all manner of inhumani¬ ties upon one another, while dreading as guilt in the sight of God unmoral infractions of taboo, rite, ceremonial, demand of witch-doctor or ecclesiastic, rule of church, or authority of creed. In the judg¬ ment of Jesus' supremely human heart, it is sin against the highest and holiest to cause one of these little ones to stumble, to betray a friend, to fare sumptuously while Lazarus is laid at the gate, full of sores, to leave the naked unclothed, the stranger unwelcomed, the sick uncared for, the prisoner un¬ visited, to shut oneself away from men’s joys and sufferings, to seek to save one’s life except by los¬ ing it. The humanist looks for the answer to the ques¬ tion of what sin is, not beneath the life of man nor above it. To him sin is the unhuman in man’s life arrayed against the human. It is beyond the scope of my unpretentious task to discuss and refute all other ethical theories, and to establish this convic¬ tion on the ruins of the others. My attempt is to describe what the human is, in the faith and love of the social passion, and to disclose its opposite. Sin is to the confessor of that passion the unhuman against the human in the life of men, but destruct¬ ive of their real life. Sin is inhumanity. This conviction of sin as inhumanity must be 180 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION held by the humanist as a postulate to be tested. The test is this: to see whether our fight against sin as antihuman is not essential to the develop¬ ment of humanity. The postulate is worth testing because the battle is worth fighting. It distin¬ guishes between friend and foe, with many start¬ ling recognitions of friends and foes. It opens be¬ fore us the field of a real conflict, with effective armament and strategy. It pours into our awak¬ ened hearts the sanctifying spirit of indignant compassion and sacrificial love. And if it is neces¬ sary, as humanists believe, to live in the life of one’s own time, when the time is characterized by the passion that burns in the hearts whom human¬ ity has touched, then it is against the inhuman and for humanity that we must array ourselves, in these days when the thunders of Sinai are less loud than the moan of one hungry child. The supreme spiritual worth is the human, that concrete interblended life which is named human¬ ity. We receive ourselves from this as from the opposite of every inhuman intrusion. Essential to this reception, as we have seen, is the beating back, as alien to us, of everything that cannot become a constituent of our truly human life. The real hu¬ manity forms each man’s true life. Sin, as con¬ trary to the human, diminishes, represses, perverts, destroys the human which we must become from more to more. Each man’s still deeper winning of himself, by losing himself, is by his pouring forth of the human into the human, and against the un¬ human which assails it. Humanity, the concrete IMPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 181 personal social interblended life of men is holy. Holiness is the very being of its receptive faith and impartive love. The social passion is a militant holiness, and holy is the cause we serve, which is the fulfilling and perfecting of humanity. §4 This militant holiness which is humanity goes forth conquering and to conquer, with a greater power than the progress of our thought has yet recognized. That power is forgiveness, to speak its less expressive name. Humanity without for¬ giveness would be less than a little company of exclusive spirits, with a pitifully impoverished life. It could not have any membership at all. For neither the receptive faith nor the impartive love, which constitute together the creative progress of human life, could exist without forgiveness. This is not only because actual forgivings are often necessary, but because no soul can receive or im¬ part unless it stands ever ready to forgive. What aTvain imagination would be mother-love unwilling to forgive everything in the child to whom it gives itself! Unto the emptying, nullifying of humanity tends every unforgiving sentiment, every Pharisa¬ ical separateness, every dislike and indifference, every consent to the loss from humanity of even the most perverted soul. The impartive love which saves itself by losing itself is in its inmost being forgiving love. The literal meaning of the word forgiveness con¬ notes remission of penalty for ill-desert. This is 182 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION true of the corresponding word in the language of the New Testament, and in many languages. But as a rule, with perhaps no exceptions, the original and literal meanings of sacred words present crude conceptions, which are transcended by spiritual developments. It is so, to cite familiar instances, with the words God, Christ, spirit, heaven, holiness. Who would seek in the original meanings of these words the satisfactions of the soul! One might prefer to use instead of forgiveness, the reflective word reconciliation. But it is nearly always better to fill the familiar word with the finer meaning. Forgiveness, as Jesus described it, is the restora¬ tion of a fellowship which has been violated. You forgive the man who has sinned against you, when you take him back into the relation from which he has separated himself. While this supreme grace of love is felt most poignantly in the taking back of one who has been closest, yet it extends to every sinful man. Because of the interblending of human lives, every offence is against every man, and in every forgiveness all men have implicit part. The heart of humanity is wounded in every wrong¬ doing, is healed in every forgiveness. Though the lost soul has separated himself from you and from humanity, though with virulent hate he outrages you and every human joy and grace, and strives to thwart the growth and to destroy the being of your life and the interblended life of men, still your heart is ever ready to welcome his return. “This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” But what if he will not return? IMPARTIVE LOVE OF SOCIAL PASSION 183 What if there be no receptive faith for the supreme outpouring of impartive love? Then forgiveness fulfills and energizes itself in redemption. This is the greater word, its meaning also transcending the original conception. Among the mountains the shepherd seeks the lost sheep. Redemptive forgiveness pursues through agony and bloody sweat, through cross and passion. It descends the depths of hell. Nor will its energies ever be relaxed, until there shall not be one soul lost to humanity in the outer darkness, nor until each restoration is complete, and every soul in full measure receives by faith and pours out in love in¬ creasing spiritual wealth, for the eternal unfold¬ ings of humanity. By redemptive forgiveness is perfected the cause we serve. IX HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE Say not the stars are vast—nor vast their spaces, Nor eons vast , through ivhich new worlds unroll; Masses of things and times this thought effaces : The Vast is thine illimitable Soul. HUS far we have tried to limit our appreci¬ ations of humanity to the disclosures of itself in this world, and on this side of death. Yet its prophesies, implications, seemed ever to be of something greater. It is not permis¬ sible for the humanist to draw an argument for these extensions from anything that is not human. Does the human itself involve them? What is the scope of humanity’s spiritual universe? §1 Two doctrines of death express the expectations prevalent among men who rate themselves as civil¬ ized. One is, that death is finality. “There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.” The other, so far as it is a hope, and not a dread, is that death is a transference into that heaven where faith is ex¬ changed for sight, conflict for victory, effort for rest, sacrifice for an unsacrificial happiness eternal. Faith in a superhuman God, able to transfer us, is deemed necessary for this hope. The best element in these two doctrines may be found to be the re- 184 HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 185 pugnance of each for the other, the ground of which in both is the dim consciousness of a faith missed by each equally. Each suggests a failure to estimate life's supreme quality. The chief goods of the brighter of these two ex¬ pectations are not faith, conflict, sacrifice, but their opposites, conceived as rewards for ennoblements which are to be discarded. Holiness and love are indeed promised, but as gifts conferred, and thus devoid of character achieved and progressing. Though there are often mingled with this hope finer elements derived from a purer source of con¬ viction, yet that other is essentially different. Even when the traditional hope emphasizes the vision and worship of God, or rises into mysti¬ cism’s dizziest heights, vision and worship are sep¬ arated from the essential serviceableness of the life taught by Jesus. The religion of Jesus, in this hope, ceases at the gate of heaven. The Crucified becomes at length our leader into the opposite of that which we love him for, and of that which we trust him to enable us to achieve. This conception of the future life loses all real content, save as it borrows reality from a faith based very differently. Therefore it expatiates in golden streets and robes and crowns and thrones, having no better materials for the construction of its dreams. This hope of heaven is founded upon our disil¬ lusions. We long for that which we never attain in this world, or attaining lose, and so we dream of fruitions under fairer skies. But heaven may be another cheat. We long for surcease of pain, sor- 186 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION row, disappointment, and, having to endure them while life lasts, we seek comfort in the thought that at death these burdens will be rolled away. Above all, our weariness longs for rest. The disillusion that conceives a remote hope be¬ longs to a small and ignoble part of life, and is alien to life’s manlier joys and victories. Its foun¬ dation is as insecure as are other disappointments of happiness. Even if we base this faith upon a good God whose pity will offer us relief at last, such a faith in God is itself founded upon the same ungratified desires. It is significant that this faith easily lapses into its apparent opposite,^ the expectation of the finality of death. For we cannot gain assurance that what we vainly long for here shall be given us elsewhere, or that the gift could satisfy us, or become aught else than a burden in¬ tolerable in its eternity. Our expectation is beset with fears on either hand, fears that it may be false, and fears lest it may be true. Therefore the hope tends to contract itself into the longing of our weariness for nothing else than rest, which any consciousness would render incomplete. The rejection of this hope on ethical and spir¬ itual grounds is not inconsistent with sympathy for it as the dream of the oppressed, as it was the con¬ solation of America’s Negro slaves, whose wonder¬ ful spiritual songs are full of it. One cannot refuse the relief of opium to intolerable pain, though the medicine has no curative value, and is pernicious save for exceptional need. Nor does the failure of HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 187 a positive worth in the traditional anticipation deny a relative usefulness. It is better to dream of such a heaven than to sink into sensuality, the alternative recourse for a life of sordid helpless¬ ness; though often both reliefs are used by the same pitiful person. Yet even so, to recognize something above the sensual may be the first step toward the spiritual. This hope of heaven is at any rate a hope, and hope is better than despair or insensibility. And “if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it”; and patience is the inalienable'virtue of the helpless. The condi- tions prescribed for the realization of this hope are partly ethical, though generally accompanied by superstitions and moral deadenings, imposed by an ecclesiasticism whose most potent weapons are this hope of heaven, and its obverse, the dread of hell; arid the ethical conditions are impaired by the unethical motive of external reward. It would be a desperate world if the great host of the very poor, the war-stricken, the outraged, were limited to this hope. But even halting apologies for that traditional view of the hereafter collapse, whenever a man finds a real life to live in the world, and in the de¬ velopment of his own soul and the soul of human¬ ity. Then it is no longer possible to wait for a heaven that is to be given, in a waiting which ac¬ complishes nothing radical for the improvement of human conditions, nor for the development of life itself, one’s own life in and for humanity’s life. The faith based upon fond longings is recognized 188 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION by thoughtful earnestness to be hostile to progress, supine before evil. It is no ground of censure that popular movements of social reform, whatever their other excellencies or defects, often repudiate this hope of heaven and the God of this hope, as opposed to that which is right and useful in their cause. If the hope is still held traditionally, as a creed, it is distinct from militant manhood, and its fading out is so inevitable as to be often uncon¬ scious. The denial of a future life has various causes. It may be the conclusion to which many intellectual men have felt themselves forced: that the relation of the physical and the mental—roughly termed body and soul—is such that the dissolution of the former marks the cessation of the latter. Yet when the case seemed most desperate for soul, the terrifying facts could not quite pronounce our doom. There still remained the possibility of some continuing spiritual potency beyond the cognizance of physical science. But we are not driven from investigation and thought into the merely possible inconceivable. Recent closer investigation of facts, with more careful estimates of them, leaves the question open from the physical point of view.* The physical is indeed incompetent to bear witness to the spiritual. The established physical facts of the connection between body and soul leave no physical element in the hope of the hereafter. If any insist upon constraining thought and life ♦For a positive construction of the relation of body and soul the reader is referred to Bergson, especially to his recent book of col¬ lected essays. HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 189 within the limits of the physical, the question of the future life is excluded, with all that makes life valuable. But to all others, there is no known physical fact that closes the discussion; nor, so long as any spiritual experiences remain, can there be. Yet all the physical facts drive us into the inmost heart of the spiritual life, to achieve our answers there. The surrender of immortality may have grounds debased or excellent. The brute knows nothing above the brutal. And though the brute may speak with man’s voice, and think in human categories, and though he may imagine his brutal gratifica¬ tions extended through eternity, yet his implicit consciousness is that the end of the flesh is the end of all. No answer is due to his blasphemy of the human, except the answer of men who by faithful¬ ness unto death have silenced such blasphemies. In the denial which has nobler motives, great affirmations are implicit. It is the rejection of a longing which has no basis of assurance, and which is beneath what any true man can desire, and which weakens life in this world. In a justified repulsion from the traditional hope of heaven, in the dis¬ claiming of reward for toil and sacrifice, when the reward, both as reward and in its contents, offers a thing infinitely inferior to toil and sacrifice, a rapidly increasing number of servants of humanity live without hope of the hereafter, that they may live more abundantly and serviceably in the world. They are beyond the reach of the traditional argu¬ ments, because they are so absorbed in the present 190 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION world of present service as to have no practical concern for any other world. For them the values of the present life are continually intensified and deepened. And these values contain two great faiths in one: the first, that their life is above ma¬ terial things; and the second, that the ends of their toil and conflict are permanent. The finality of death is the denial of that which such men hold dear, when they attain a clear con¬ sciousness of devoted and achieving life. There is indeed greatness of soul in working without hope of reward here or hereafter. But this self-abnega¬ tion cannot involve the destruction of the cause it serves. Though every unselfish soul might say: “Let me perish, if only that for which I die con¬ tinues to bless other men; let me die utterly that humanity may live/' yet those whom they serve to the uttermost would lose, in the annihilation of these servants, an indispensable good; and those to whom they sacrifice themselves are involved in their fate. If their doom be extinction, then, though the redemption which they wrought should for ages bring forth and expand every mortal good, even beyond the visions of the “Prometheus Unbound,” yet the countless billions of men whom they have made happy would, with their benefactors, and with those whom they themselves benefit, drop into noth¬ ingness ; until finally, throughout the lifeless earth, all the harvests of the ages grown upon their graves would be as if they had never been. If one rejoins, “Yet these goods are good while they last,” let him transfer that thought to the time when they HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 191 all have passed, and attempt to find any meaning in that judgment. How true is an assertion which is true only for an hour? There is then an eternal hope worthy of human¬ ity. It is the hope of the development of the spirit¬ ual social life of receptive faith, impartial love, limitless redemption, unto the cause we serve. Far from diminishing our present service, it pours into its inexhaustible energies. This hope is purest and strongest when we cherish it for humanity's eternal life. And in the hope for humanity is con¬ tained the hope for each human soul. In the chapters upon The Receptive Faith and Impartive Love of the Social Passion, we have felt, I trust, that humanity is the essential of every per¬ sonality, and that every personality is needed by humanity; and that this essential reciprocal need develops itself continually. Just this reference is sufficient, I trust, to make clear that our hope for humanity as the interblended life of men is hope for every soul in that interblended life. It is not permissible for humanism—may I re¬ peat? —to attempt to draw from outside of human¬ ity any proofs for the immortality of the soul. Im¬ mortality cannot be assured to us by a superhuman decree. The spiritual life, in every phase of its development, is a self-development. Its immortal continuance is ever to be achieved by every soul and by the humanity to which every soul contri¬ butes. Our eternal hope cannot limit itself to the im¬ mortality of a remnant of humanity, the spiritually 192 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION minded. Whether any soul may make humanity poorer by its own individual extinction, failing in the battle for eternal life which each and all must wage, can be decided only by the progressive issues of the conflict for the cause we serve. Such catas- trophies will not be if humanity's mighty forces of forgiveness and redemption can avert them. This hope of the hereafter contemplates the eternal salva¬ tion of every soul, its holiness in humanity's essen¬ tial holiness, its reception by faith of all that humanity can give, its self-attainment by the per¬ fecting of impartive love. What patient energies of forgiveness and redemption must humanity expend, to win to itself the souls that are all but unhuman or dehumanized! The only way to strengthen the eternal hope which has worth is by practical, serviceable living. This alone leads deeper into the life where this hope is. The opposite of other-worldliness confirms our faith in that larger life. One may indeed be so ab¬ sorbed in life's task as to seem to lose this signi¬ ficance of life's task. Yet through it all, the con¬ sciousness of its eternity is forming. There are in¬ deed reposeful, reflective hours. But their purpose is not to draw us away from our work, but to clarify and deepen it, until its eternal significance is clear. Not by any isolation from our fellows can this hope be confirmed, not by any retirement from the work of life, in which alone we are really one with them. Isolation is eternal death. Most efficient aids to this faith are co-operative friendships, and blendings of life deeper than friendships, if these HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 193 are granted us, in a task together more intimate than even friendship knows, with souls most un¬ selfishly, serviceably, consummately human, whom to know is eternal life. If it is asked whether the eternal life is believed or known, is faith or certainty, some simplifications of humanistic thought may clarify this aspect of the relation of faith and knowledge. To know is to ex¬ perience. Processes of thought have value by their service to experience, as they test and clarify and distinguish and unify our experiences, which make our life. What is logically demonstrated is not possessed by us until life makes use of it. If we do not find the life eternal in life’s unfoldings, we do not find it anywhere. We must find the life which is above the physical, and whose development can¬ not admit a limit without denying the very essential of that growing life. This is the life which each person may live in the interblended life of human¬ ity, the life of receptive faith and impartive love and essential holiness and unbounded redemption. The eternal life is the supreme social consciousness. This experience of the personal social life as above the physical and of limitless unfolding, is to be lived into, fought for. The formal distinction be¬ tween faith and knowledge is replaced by the de¬ velopment of experience. We take the eternal hope into our lives, devoted to the cause we serve, and test it there, whether it gives life more abundantly. We find it strengthening and deepening life, be¬ coming pervasive and essential in all that furthers the cause we serve. This certitude is never abso- 194 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION lute in the sense that, having gained it, we can leave it as a problem solved and turn to other in¬ terests. It becomes more and more life of our life, soul of our soul, in serviceable interblendings with the humanity in which our personality is fulfilled. Those who have risen above doubt are those who have refused to receive this conviction too easily, until their life task has become flooded with its power. This is the energizing certitude. One who supposes that he has a certainty greater than this has incomparably less. And this experimental, ex¬ periential confidence includes greater confirmations than any we have yet considered. These lead us farther into humanity’s spiritual universe. § 2 Humanity’s spiritual universe is an interblended life. We are not merely to cherish the conviction that those whom we see no more still unfold the spiritual life, apart from us, “till death us join.’’ We cannot be content with even a temporary break and separation in humanity’s spiritual universe. The hope that we shall be with them includes the demand that they be still with us. To think other¬ wise would be to impute to them the absence of that which has been the very essential of their being. If they live indeed, their life is that which it has been increasingly—their unity with us in the cause we serve, in which are included receptive faith and impartive love. This is the postulate which we must form and test. Dare we presume to say what their life is in that HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 195 impenetrable mystery! We must distinguish be¬ tween the mystery and the blank. The blank is of the forms and conditions, to us inconceivable, of the life which has ceased to make connections with the physical. Descriptions of the hereafter, picturings of the invisible, are idle fancies. They are fre¬ quently morbid and gross. If they who are in the hereafter should try to tell us—and this is a con¬ ception rendered meaningless by its incongruities —how could we understand the language of that which is by us untried, unknown! If we take our imaginings as symbols of the spiritual reality, the physical symbol may reduce the symbolized to an unsubstantial dream. Or if we attempt more than symbol, the hereafter is, in such an apprehension, dragged down toward a materialism like that which would degrade the divine into physical attributes. “The former things are passed away.” Distinguishable from that blank is the mystery of the hereafter. It is the mystery of the trans¬ cendent unfoldings of the spiritual life whose essen¬ tials in their beginnings we are achieving here. It is the mystery of the further developments of re¬ ceptive faith and impartive love, of holinass and re¬ demptive power, of devotion to the cause we serve. These unite human souls, and the more we develop them, the closer and deeper is the unity wherein those who are departed from our sight would unite themselves with us. What strivings are theirs along the upward way? What are the conflicts and devotions of their redeeming energies unto the attainment of the cause they serve, which is the 196 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION fulfillment of all souls in humanity's concrete, in- terblended life? Such outreachings of our thoughts are not toward the blank of the hereafter, but into its mystery. They are not unanswered. Yet the deeper our consciousness of mystery, the finer is our reverence, the mightier our aspiration, the more penetrative our love. The mystery is our assur¬ ance of their blessedness, for we know that the spiritual life is in itself all worth and joy. How much more then is the spiritual life the blessed life when the physical hindrances and intrusions have been overpassed, and the vast conflicts that unfold are, in their sacrificial loves and intensities, further attainments of that life which is all worth and joy! Our thoughts of the hereafter go out inevitably to those whose spiritual life, while they were in this world, now draws our reverent love toward their realm of essential joy. Yet the glorified souls whom we adore open our hearts even to the lowest and the vilest that have gone out into the great dark¬ ness. For those who are like their supreme leader are impelled, by the forces of forgiveness and re¬ demption, to follow him and to lead us along his redemptive way. There are tests and cultivations of this fellow¬ ship. Is the investigation of psychic phenomena one of them? That psychic phenomena are legitimate objects of scientific investigation is obvious. But it is doubtful whether the hypothesis of communication with the departed has been of value. That hypo- HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 197 thesis has indeed added a breathless interest to the inquiry. But it has also obstructed some investigations with undiscriminating prejudg- ments. Ghoulish charlatanry has not been altogether excluded, and the impatient credul¬ ity which is a recrudescence of animism plus a piti¬ ful sentimentality. Whatever elusive human powers may be discovered and developed in these investiga¬ tions, whatever amazing results may be won, it is a sane postulate that explanations are to be found within the confines of our mortal life, unless that postulate shall prove less adequate than it appears to be at present. Spiritual considerations are in accord with such scientific procedure. The hope that is often con¬ nected with the investigation of psychic phenomena would bring the manifestations of the departed down into the physical. At best this attempt ranks far below another, which is really spiritual. It is possible that the attempt through psychic phenom¬ ena may render service to the other endeavor. But its main tendency at least is not now in that direc¬ tion. Of its service the higher quest feels no need. He who desires to know the communion of saints may wisely take precaution against vision, or nerv¬ ous ecstasy, or any other physical intrusion. If the investigation definitively fails of any result beyond the elucidation of powers, normal and abnormal, of this mortal stage, that falure may be its best service to the spiritual fellowship which those who are here in the flesh may have with those who are not phy¬ sically here in any wise. 198 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION There is one such experience that is preeminent among mortal men’s spiritual experiences of the hereafter. This is so far from being unique that it involves a universal interchange between earth and the life beyond earth. I refer to the communion of Jesus’ disciples with their crucified Lord. That eternal fellowship of Jesus with his dis¬ ciples has but an impermanent connection with the legends of the bodily resurrection, which inevitably grew around it, and with the Easter visions. Such visions do not prove any reality, and no reality is dependent upon them. There are visions innumer¬ able from all sorts of occasions, including our in¬ tense affections. No vision has any other value than that which may belong to the conviction which is physically reflected in sight and hearing. The legends, which may spring up in less than three days, the visions, confusedly reported and exag¬ gerated, in individuals and probably in groups of men, did a temporary service, perhaps indispens¬ able, in seeming confirmation of Jesus’ continuing life, and as a testimony convincing to many men of that time. To the modern man they have no greater significance, and whatever other significance has been imputed to them must be eliminated in behalf of the reality which they, with all their beauty, distorted and materialized. Of importance to us are those innumerable testimonies to the living Jesus given by ennobled and redemptive lives from the apostles on, which have been lived in that consciousness, and the power, both direct and HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 199 mediated, of men's experience of the living Christ to energize humanity's spiritual advance. There are perversions of this experience, as there are of all high things. Here mawkish, other-worldly, self-conceited, loquacious sentimentality has done its worst. Ecclesiasticism has not hesitated to use the presence of Jesus as its chief instrument in ex¬ ploiting humanity. Over against these profanations stand such fine reverences as Whittier's “Our Mas¬ ter," and Gladden's great hymn of service. In both of these, as instances, there is independence of christological dogma, and an all-empowering prac¬ tical social inspiration. By this test, above all others, the sanity and genuineness of this conscious¬ ness are vindicated. This social inspiration has always constituted the power of the faith in the living and present Christ. The victorious conviction of the early Christians was of Jesus' inimitably energizing pres¬ ence in their life of love together, in their winning of others into this holy fellowship, in their redemp¬ tive invasion of the world in his name. The essen¬ tial of this experience has endured. There has al¬ ways been confessed a spiritual communion between the noblest human soul and those who love the noblest. It is a communion rich in all fruits of spiritual life. It is strength for humanity’s great task, and for the least detail of that task in the lowly work of common men. The living power of Jesus pours into our lives his moral strength, his mighty tenderness, his devoted accomplishment of the cause we serve. It opens 200 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION itself to all varieties of temperament and task. It is for man and woman, for poet and administrator. It is congenial both to the mystical temperament and to practical efficiency. It belongs to every type and stage of culture. It is for childhood, youth, maturity and old age, becoming both finer and stronger with the unfoldings of the years. It em¬ powers and directs our aspirations for an ever more Christlike social order, humanized by Jesus’ con¬ sciousness of what the human is and must attain. It is indissolubly bound to his mortal ministry, and especially to the culmination of his work in his ter¬ rible and glorious death, even as our thoughts of our beloved who are beyond our sight are linked with our memories of them. Dogmatism has alleged the essential difference between the divine Christ and humanity. Human¬ ism reverences Jesus as incomparable source of re¬ generated humanity. But the humanist, accepting no superhuman God, cannot confess a superhuman Christ. He cannot attribute to Jesus the unhuman monopoly of uniting this world and the hereafter. To the inmost heart of Jesus belongs the desire that all men should become what he is in holiness and helpfulness, and therefore in the task, both here and there, of uniting the seen and the unseen in one spiritual universe. In this work we are united with those who are united with him. There is one great cause, and one unbroken host of those who serve the cause in loyalty to the leader who has identified himself with the cause. Our spiritual and eternal life with the Master HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 201 can be spoken of, with the inevitable personal re¬ serves, because of its universality. Our spiritual life with our beloved unseen can be acknowledged because of its potential universality. Love is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. But detailed testimony of such spiritual experience is not to be uttered. It may be intimated symbolically, lyrically, by musician, artist, poet; for such ex¬ pressions, imaginative, universal, have their own magnificent reserves, never to be overpassed. One of the world’s great teachers has made an appeal for the opening of our civilization to the powers of the world to come.* Bergson considers this necessary in order to supply the spiritual lacks of our civilization, and to attain the spiritual fulfill¬ ment of its secular tasks. The occasion of his utter¬ ance made fitting an application to the Investiga¬ tion of psychic phenomena. But his thought did not stop there. He made no prejudgment concern¬ ing the results of these investigations, nor would his plea lose any of its force, if these experiments fail to gain communication between this world and the hereafter. His desire is that the world shall re¬ ceive the energies of that higher stage of spiritual development from its living source; and this source is the human souls that have gone on. How shall we receive them into our lives? Every thrice-hallowed communion with them is for our eternal task together, which is our eternal life to¬ gether. We receive them by making all the aims ♦Bergson’s Inaugural Address as president of the British Society of Psychical Research. 202 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION of life spiritual aims, by giving ourselves alto¬ gether to the cause we and they serve. The more deeply we share their purpose, the more intimate are the blendings of their life, which is their task, with ours. By this reception of them must all our present experiences of the eternal life be tested, to determine whether they are genuinely spiritual, and therefore real, or fond imaginings. There is attain¬ able such an intersphering of our devoted lives with theirs, that the eternal life in this consummation of the social passion, becomes the very consciousness of our existence, the essential of our being, reality at the heart of all reality. We have glanced at the disastrous consequences, when a nation or a phase of civilization breaks with that advancing flood of human life which we call history. We keep the connection close and effective when we recognize it as with the living, not with the dead. § 3 Does humanity include any whose habitation has not been this earth? A negative answer would not affect our affirmation of humanity's spiritual uni¬ verse, which is composed of all the human spirits there are, comprises all the humanity there is, whether its mansions be few or many, its personal components less or more. Physical science, which up to this time has re¬ turned no affirmative answer, cannot reach the negative answer. When there are found in planet after planet conditions that make impossible any HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 203 approach to the physical functions of life as we know them here, that conclusion must not be ex¬ tended beyond its proper scope. Though this ver¬ dict should be rendered upon every stage of every heavenly body, we have no warrant to limit spiritual human life to the forms we know or can conjecture. There are intimations of spiritual human influ¬ ence from above us and around us. They breathed into Jesus’ soul from the lilies of the field, and into souls of a spiritual sensitiveness like his. To earth’s exquisite voices our hearts reecho wonder and de¬ light, beauty and sublimity; and spiritual splendors descend to us from sun and cloud, and from the august revelations of the night. All these impart to us reverent strengthenings and purifyings for the cause we serve. These influences are socially recognized, socially potent. They unite those who look and listen together, even as the lips of lovers meet beneath the stars. It is the province of the landscape artist so to reveal nature that it shall blend men’s hearts. These influences we can attri¬ bute to nothing physical. Neither can we be satis¬ fied to attribute them merely to ourselves. Still more significant of their implicit humanness is the experience that we “look upon them with exceeding love.” The answer to our question is an increasing hopefulness of the human spiritual universe all around us and above us. And the increasing hope¬ fulness is the deepening experience of an inter- blended life with these appealing presences that are more than things. There is a way to this larger spiritual scope, not 204 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION different from that which has been intimated, but its continuation. The farther advance I must leave to others to tell, after a mere mention of it. Philo¬ sophy's highest endeavor is the construction of reality by the spiritual interpretation of all things. Those who dare this adventure have found it im¬ possible to think that the physical gives us final reality. The creative origin of the physical aspect, they may discover in humanity's imperfect appre¬ hension of itself, which it must progressively over¬ come in thought, in experience, in victorious recon¬ struction of all that is. The humanist finds no anti¬ cipations of a conceptual universe, of an all-engulf- ing absolute, but his progress is into humanity's concrete interblending of personal souls. This high adventure is not in my present task. That it is undertaken increases our hopefulness of a human spiritual universe all around us and above us. It is only experience that can prove it to be so. The unfolding of spiritual humanity may find it so. And deep implications of humanity even in our present experience lead that way. The social passion has its inspiring mysteries, which extend into the ultimate mystery. Yet we de not need to wait for reality's final word. Human¬ ity's spiritual universe is, whatever its scope. The social passion, occupied with the work next its hand, possesses, for the energizing and satisfac¬ tion of every detail of its work, the universal spirit¬ ual significance. In every service the purpose is the self-realization of the spiritual universe of hu¬ manity's interblended personal social life, here and HUMANITY’S SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE 205 in the hereafter, and in whatever worlds. This universal significance and aim is in every reception of human faith, in every impartation of human love, in every energy of forgiveness and redemption, in every devotion to the cause we serve. X THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Forgive, dear God, that we have sought Thy face Elsewhere than in these human faces dear, That our cold heart has thought to win Thy grace Save in their conquering smile, atoning tear. The throne vain fancy sets above the skies, Transcendencies our pompous schemes essay ,— Before the holy light of human eyes Flooding our souls, the shadows flee away; And when we claim Thee human, then we find Not less, but ever more and more of Thee ,— Exhaustless thought with simplest task entwined — Deepest because the closest mystery . Part 1 W HATEVER the advances of thought in spiritualizing our conceptions of that which we have been accustomed to regard as outside humanity, our practical attitude to that world is clear. We are to subdue it to the human. In and from and against the world, humanity achieves the one thing precious, its own soul. For this purpose science must press forward on its end¬ less way. To this end experiment must never be 206 THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 207 weary of seeking the masteries of all things by soul. In this sense we are “citizens of the uni¬ verse/' It is the realm to be conquered by the soul, in the conquest which develops each man in the advance of humanity’s interblended life. §1 We have surrendered to the physical universe much that must be yielded back to our indefeasible claim. When Wordsworth said, “Little we see in nature that is ours,” his words imply those things in nature that are ours if we really see them. There are mysterious forces of nature which are as essen¬ tial to our spiritual life as are words from human lips and expressions of human faces. It is signi¬ ficant that they often come to us when we are alone, or in the most intimate of companionships, in soli¬ tary places, wild stretches of mountain or sea. We have seen these transformed, revealed by sunsets whose splendor stopped for an instant the tides of our mortal being, and the heart forgot to beat, and then the tremendous glory passed with sublime reposefulness into the dawning of the stars. From such vast majesties, there have been created great energies in our lives and in humanity’s life. A humanism that fails to take account of these would be a paltry thing, unworthy to be an abiding pres¬ ence among the spaces and the times. These formations and directions of our life are not physical, whatever their relation to the physical may be. Experiences of them, it is important to observe, are not overwhelmings of the human by 208 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION physical size and power, for these experiences exalt the consciousness of soul above any extent or dura¬ tion of physical things. They are above our com¬ prehension, but it must be our untiring endeavor to comprehend them from more to more. Their mystery is included in the mystery of the human soul, interpreter of all mysteries. Let their essen¬ tial nature be estimated by their effect: he knows best the contemplative delight and awe of them who finds them to be calming, impelling powers of action unto the supreme object of spiritual faith, the cause we serve. Humanity is this cause and becoming, and experiences of nature reveal their human significance by pouring themselves into this cause and becoming. The aesthetic experience, to which men have given little heed, because most men, especially in the age of physical science, are so blind to what the artist sees, so deaf to what the musician hears, is a spiritual affirmation. Whatever physical elements it recognizes it subordinates. Every physical inter¬ pretation of it destroys its meaning. Or if one should insist, upon whatever grounds, that the beautiful and the sublime are of the physical, one then gives to the physical a spiritual meaning, transforms it into soul. That which we receive from nature is not something different from our¬ selves. It is an enlarged social consciousness that we receive, an intensified social passion. As vast as the stars proclaim it, is the human soul, human¬ ity's interblended life. From all that in nature which delights, refines, THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 209 elevates, empowers us, they who once shared with us are not shut out. They who are beyond the physical have the spiritual, the human, which is the essential, inexhaustably varied loveliness and glory of that which is dimmed by the medium of our mortal sight. Therefore every apprehension of natural beauty awakens thoughts of them; and thoughts of them lead us deeper, guided by their vision, into the realities of beauty within the things we see. There are other influences, no less vital than the spiritualized aesthetic insight, which connect us with earth and skies. The evolutionary conscious¬ ness, which has become indispensable to thought and life, is more than can be expressed by any formulations of science. Our relations with animal life and all its constituents and environments are so intimate that we hail earth as our mother, with a far deeper meaning than any past age has sus¬ pected. And this earth is so united with all other things and forces that we, as children of earth, are citizens of the universe. There are considerations suggested here beyond what this writing undertakes. Yet, even without these, man's distinguishing practical attitude toward the world is clear. To appropriate all that is in alliance with the soul's task of personal and social self-realizations, continually transforming and transcending that which we appropriate, and to achieve ourselves from every opposition, against which the soul wins itself, this is the practical dis¬ tinction which humanity's spiritual life acts upon. 210 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Both from and against the world humanity achieves the one precious possession, its own soul.* §2 Again we meet the physical as the immense antagonist. But humanity that is really conscious of itself does not fear to look its enemy in the face. We are a growing humanity. Every soul is a new consummation and development of humanity, pour¬ ing itself as a new creation into the continual in¬ crease of humanity's interblended life. Every re¬ ceptive faith and every impartive love, which ful¬ fills receptive faith, bear witness to the continual increase of humanity's spiritual universe of con¬ cretely interblended souls, with eternity in its heart. Unto us the soulless, soul-repressive antag¬ onist is compelled to surrender the essentially hu¬ man which has been so confusedly ascribed to it, and its very reality as independent of us is a worse than dubious claim. We need not dread the physical in its most for¬ midable confronting of the soul. At death, the physical is either all-powerful or utterly powerless. As we watch the last mortal hours, we see one of two things being accomplished: either the soul is being destroyed by the physical process, or the soul is ceasing to make physical connections. For *May I refer the reader to my book, The Christian Reconstruc¬ tion of Modern Life? A theory of the nature of the physical is not necessary for the purpose, of this writing. The physical may be, as has already been mentioned, that aspect of reality which we our¬ selves construct, in this imperfect phase of our development, and which has significance as subdued and transformed to the purpoa«a of the spiritual life. THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 211 science has stultified the expectation of the survival of any physical element in a consciousness beyond death. If we refuse to admit that the soul is de¬ stroyed by the physical process—and that refusal is essential to humanity—then in the last of the last gentle expirations we see the destruction of the physical by the soul. A physical universe which no longer exists to spirits in the spiritual realm, is not a thing to be reverenced or feared. This affimation of the spiritual in the process of dissolution, when physical connections are loosened and at length annulled, is also evident in the midst of our mortal life. When we are awed and thrilled by an act of devoted heroism, a smile of spiritual loveliness, and when in their radiance we consider man, what are all material things that man should be mindful of them, what are physical immensities that the soul should be other than a visitant among them! The physical universe, in the practical distinc¬ tion of it from the spiritual, imposes itself upon men because it is very big, and very strong, and very old. To begin with bigness—there is no reason why the winner of his own soul should be outfaced by any degree of that. The big circus elephant was magniloquently depicted on the pos¬ ters as a hundred times bigger than the little boy who laughed with delight, when he saw him tow¬ ering in the parade. But if he had been a trillion times as big, or a trillion trillion trillion times as big, if he were an elephantine universe, the child who persists in every spiritual manhood laughs at 212 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION the notion, that the biggest physical bigness can be brought into comparison with the greatness of the human soul. And the omnipresence of God—see how big he is! Is there anything in that physical attribute of deity which shall bend my knee? In the absence of that elephantine attribute shall I adore him less? Must I be diverted from my service to the Holy Spirit of humanity, to worship a big deity of all the worlds? But the elephant is not only much bigger than the pleased spectator, but ever and ever so many times physically stronger. And if he were decil- lions multiplied into decillions stronger, an inimit¬ ably elephantine universe of physical energies, why should any little child, growing in receptive faith and impartive love, be abashed before omnipotence? And if God has no connection with physical om¬ nipotence, shall we adore him the less? And if it is a very old elephant, so old that his duration is from everlasting, is the measure of duration the measure of adoration? Would we reverence God less if we should cease to say, in the physical con¬ notations of the words used in the same meaning as in the measurements of the physical universe, “From everlasting to everlasting thou art God?*” When we speak of the divine omniscience of physical things, we approach problems of knowl- *The idea of time involves difficulties all but insurmountable. The attempt of thought and of ecstasy to escape from time into a timeless eternity seems to humanists, and to many others, to attain no meaning. But a vital distinction concerning time has been offered, by masters in philosophy reinforced by masters in physical THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 213 edge and reality which are beyond the scope of this book.f I trust that the second part of this chapter may make sufficiently clear that our devoted adora¬ tion could not be deepened by the assumption that God possesses always the exact and complete un¬ derstanding of every detail of the physical universe. Such erudition will not, I think, seem essential to the spiritual life which we revere, to the cause which we serve. Indeed, I am conscious of no travesty or irrever¬ ence. If the religious sentiments of any reader are affronted, let him reflect whether he has not so connected spiritual convictions with notions of the physical attributes of deity that the depreciation of the latter seems to him irreverence to the former. It is in behalf of these spiritual convictions and as¬ pirations that I am pleading. Conceptions of the physically related size, strength, and duration of deity, and of his wisdom physically applied, seem to some of us pagan survivals in a Christianity essentially spiritual indeed, but still in process of finding itself. When prophet and psalmist attained monotheism science, which makes a practical appeal to the spiritual life. It is the distinction between the time w r e reckon by and the time we live in—between time as the measurement of the duration of the physical and time as the soul’s experience. The former belongs to the physical world, the latter to humanity’s spiritual life. For the formulation, unfoldings, acute discriminations and detailed applica¬ tions of this distinction, the reader is referred to Bergson especially, to whose conception Einstein has made an important contribution. But the mere statement of the evident distinction frees from physi¬ cal intrusion and obscuration the life of humanity’s spiritual uni¬ verse. The troublesome conception of beginning is evidently in need of the same distinction. tThe traditional conception of omniscience includes an undiscrimi¬ nated confusion of the spiritual and the physical. 214 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION they did not therefore surmount altogether the in¬ veterate pagan nature-worship. This paganism can be applied to one God as well as to many gods. Monotheism is only an advance toward the religion of the spirit—not always an advance. In our time, when the conceptions of the spatial and temporal boundaries of the physical universe are immensely extended, and apprehensions of its energies inimit¬ ably multiplied, there is the same paganism, enor¬ mously increased, which would drag God down into physical attributes. Ancient prophets and psalm¬ ists had this advantage over us: their physical uni¬ verse was so small and weak and young that they were able to conceive a divine physical power above it, and around it, and penetrating it without being lost in it, and before and after it. To us the physi¬ cal universe is so indefinitely big and strong and old that our deity of physical attributes cannot definitely free himself from it. His physical attri¬ butes attach themselves to the physical. He per¬ ishes, but it remains. When we find that we owe no reverence to the physical, there is danger of our reverting to its apparent opposite, to a Platonic or Hegelian uni¬ verse of conceptions—or concepts, or categories, or abstractions, or whatever one chooses to call them —whether considered as unchanging or as self- developing. It is in this realm as well as in the physical, that much of our traditional theology has sought God. To confute such imaginations by proc¬ esses of reasoning is no present concern of mine. We may watch the humanistic army of the heights THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 215 inflicting shocks that send them reeling. We of the valley who, in our simplicity, have given ourselves to the social passion because we saw no other life worth living, have found men to serve; not lifeless conceptions, but the concrete, interblended life of men which we call humanity. It is here that we seek God.* *It cannot be urged against religious humanism that its attempt has already been made, and has been repudiated. We are Comte’s debtors, not his disciples. Our affirmation of the hereafter, which he rejected, makes a decisive difference. For that also means an attitude tovyard the physical universe other than his. There are other differences, but it is enough to mention these obvious ones. This is said with all reverent gratitude to a great mind and soul. X THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION Part 2 § 1 HE life which strives to be an undivided, complete devotion has the right to call itself religious. We therefore speak of the relig¬ ion of the social passion, not as something which the social passion possesses, but as that which it is. Every element and moment of life must, according to its demand, be devoted to the cause we serve, and is therein hallowed and glorified. It is a life undivided in its devotion, as no life can be which attempts to serve both the human and the super¬ human. The social passion is religious in its receptive faith. This faith, in its union of complete depend¬ ence and closest intimacy with that from which life is received, is free from the externalizations and mechanizations of those impositions which, in faith’s name, suppress the soul. Since this faith is itself self-surrender, and is receptive of impartive love, it fulfills itself in love. Faith and love in one, uniting the whole life to that object which sum¬ mons to its service all elements and every moment of life, constitute a religious life ethical, holy, re¬ demptive. 216 THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 217 The social passion is religious in its subjugation of the physical to the spiritual. Its spirituality is the eternal victory of the spirit. It is religious in uniting men in a communion and fellowship potenti¬ ally inclusive of every human soul, in this world and in the hereafter, and however vast the scope of humanity may be and may become. A formally enrolled membership would seem to detract from that real communion of human souls whose hearts humanity has touched, and who are united through every variety of ministry, into the supreme ministry. This religion needs no formal cultus, be¬ yond its own inexhaustible self-expressions. Its participations in the spiritual elements and developments of historic Christianity, and its allegi¬ ance to Jesus as the supreme expression of that which it recognizes as supreme, mark the religion of the social passion as in and of the historic development of the human spirit. Its enrichments of life’s richest values, its humility of all lowly sympathies and services, its fulfillments of every normal human task—these vitalities make it no less religious, but transform all that is human into the life of the spirit. Such a religious consciousness could not be, if the object of the social passion were inadequate. That object is the cause we serve, which is the perfecting of humanity’s concrete interblended life. Can we give to that the supreme name? Is the religion of the social passion consummated in the God of the social passion? 218 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION If God is superhuman, then the social passion would be, as Buddhism is said to be, a religion with¬ out a God. And if God must be considered to be personal, with the limitations of individual person¬ ality, the religion of the social passion has no such God. But if the demand for the personal God means the God with whom we can be in most intimate personal fellowship, because our personalities are fulfilled in him, the inquiry is open to us whether the religion of the social passion does not grant this supreme longing of the human soul. No formu¬ lation of the conception of deity so experienced seems to the humanist necessary or possible. If the religion of the social passion is that experience of God, which so increases that no formulation of deity can be the final word, then we reverently claim that God is ours, and we are his. It is not enough that our faith in God should be merely a permissible interpretation, or one element among others, of the religion of the social passion. “As the hart panteth after the water- brooks, so thirsteth my soul after the living God.” For the deeper consciousness of our religious needs, we would do well to turn from the superficialities of our own time, which is just emerging, as we dare to hope, from the domination of physical science, to the great utterances, the profound convictions, the mighty visions of simpler, truer ages. We may open our souls to the noblest passages of Hebrew prophet and psalmist, and most of all to Jesus, whose life was one consummate prayer. And with them, and THE GOU OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 219 with those whom Jesus filled most directly with his own religious passion, we may ally the thirst for God witnessed by the deepest religious conscious¬ ness of Iran and India, and of other lands which make manifest our occidental poverty of soul, and we may revere the experience of simple hearts even among us, which have found God and are forever satisfied. Whatever manifestation of religion appears contrary to our humanism—and belief in a superhuman God has appeared to us to be the opposite of humanism—we must not so much re¬ place as reconstruct by a deeper spiritual conscious¬ ness, a mightier religious devotion, one with the length and breadth and depth and height of human¬ ity's spiritual universe, for the task given wholly to the cause we serve. A thorough treatment of the subject of this chap¬ ter would involve a description of religious needs, and the demonstration that they all are satisfied in the purely human religion of the social passion. But such an undertaking, which would involve an ex¬ haustive study of the religious consciousness, is far beyond the limits of this writing. It would have to be an historic study, an exploration of humanity's expanding soul. A single reflection is attempted, which however is presented as both a universal ex¬ perience and as implying the satisfaction of funda¬ mental religious demands. It does not seem neces¬ sary to go beyond that experience, to make infer¬ ences from it, or explanations of it from anything beyond it, but only to begin to enter the depth of just the experience itself. 220 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION There may be cited as a significant example of that experience, the child's reception of spiritual life from the mother's soul. In that receptive faith there are two indivisible essentials, one of which it may be permissible to repeat, for the sa.ka of the other not yet adequately emphasized. Concerning the first: when the faith of the little child receives spiritual life from the mother’s soul, the interblended life of humanity is received. The mother's own life has been formed from that humanity in a new personal creation, and this she gives to the child. From the concrete interblended life in her is born the child's own personal social life. The creative touch of her personality upon the child is the touch of humanity's spiritual uni¬ verse, unfolding its impartive creation to the child, with his every responsive development of the re¬ ceptive faith, which fulfills itself in impartive love. The second essential, which is now to be emphas¬ ized, and which is implicit in the first, is that this impartive mother-touch of humanity's spiritual uni¬ verse is personal. All that this imparting contains and unfolds is personal. Thus the child feels it and appropriates it. It is all creative of personal¬ ity from itself. And in every faith of man in man, which is always receptive of the spiritual universe, that spiritual universe is experienced as personal, is touch of soul on soul. It is indeed social, else it could not be personal. Every power of it, known, * surmised, or to be unfolded, comes to us as purely personal, touch of soul on soul. Every receptive faith must respond to just that which is offered, THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 221 and accept it as personal imparting. Whatever in the personal God the soul longs for, is given in the impartive touch of humanity’s spiritual universe, most clearly, deeply, humanly. Inseparable are receptive faith and impartive love. But now to emphasize the latter element of spiritual life: it was said that whenever one gives a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple, it is to the concrete interblended life of humanity that one gives. To give in the name of a disciple is to give as Jesus gave, every least gift being the accom¬ paniment, expression, and medium of the soul’s gift of itself. In that giving, and in all its reimpartings throughout humanity’s spiritual universe, the gift has always its personal object. Humanity’s inter¬ blended life meets us in every gift of ourselves, and meets us as personal recipient of our devotion. f Whenever the great spiritual life touches us in our faith’s receiving, whenever we touch it in our love’s imparting, it is always personal, there is always the touch of soul on soul. Beyond this constant experience of humanity’s spiritual universe as the touch of soul on soul, it is not the humanist’s task to adventure. His thought is content to remain within experience. He does not draw inferences from experience to something supposed to be beyond it. He does not attempt to explain or interpret it by something other. That procedure would be, it seems to him, the attempt to explain life by something that does not live. It would be to seek the living among the dead. The true interpretation of experience is the deepening 222 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION of experience. To find humanity's spiritual uni¬ verse in every receptive faith and impartive love, and to find that always at the heart of each experi¬ ence, and in the vital unfoldings of each experience, there is the touch of soul on soul; this is the living way into the heart of the God who is able to supply every need of ours. What do we include in this religion of the social passion ? We include of course all t acts of faith in men and of love to men which are accomplished in the conviction of this universal personal reality; and we include all men who act and live in this universal, personal conviction. Yet, never to be excluded from the religion of the social passion are those impulses of human faith and love in which this supreme significance is obscure, or even so latent that it seems absent altogether. The faith whose spiritual universe is the mother's smile, * the gift as unconscious of its impli¬ cations as the bird's song is unconscious of the universal heart of joy which it expresses, these flow none the less from their source, which is the universal personal, and pour themselves out none the less into the social personal cause they serve. They are of the religious fellowship of the social passion whose lives are essentially the re¬ ceptive human faith, the impartive human devotion, whatever their consciousness or unconsciousness of what that faith and love enfold. The religion of the social passion also claims all human faiths and loves even when they are all but overborne by selfish¬ ness, brutishness, insensibility. Even through in- THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 223 humanities, we penetrate to the human. The re¬ ligion of the social passion claims any man at any moment when this faith and love assert themselves in him, though his reversions be frequent and pro¬ longed. We would reveal these moments to him as his real humanity, which he must make exclusively dominant. This gospel's method is to draw men into acts of human faith and love, so into the uni¬ versal significance, the religious implication of these acts of faith and love. Even before we attempt deeper searchings and clarifyings of this experience, which embraces all our life that is really human, we come to the supreme name. That from which each personal life flows, and upon which it depends, that which is the cause we serve, that which is holy and militant against sin, that which works for the supreme end of its own fulfillment by holy love's energies of for¬ giveness and redemption, that which develops per¬ sonal life in us all, and blends us into its own social life, must be called by the supreme name, holy, mysterious, inexhaustible, when we also find every experience of That to be the personal touch of soul on soul. In God so experienced we find nothing physical or conceptual. We do not suffer our thought and adoration to be degraded into the former, or to be dissipated into the latter. We con¬ fess the God of the social passion. In him, satis¬ factions of religious needs continually unfold, and disclose new discoveries of religious needs, to be forever satisfied. 224 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION § 2 The mention of a great Christian idea is perti¬ nent to the recognition of the personal touch of humanity's spiritual universe. This is the idea of mediation. It is familiar to us in that conception of Jesus as mediator between God and man which bids us offer our prayers to God through him, and receive God's grace through him. It is not the ex¬ clusive possession of Christianity. To cite the idea of mediation in this connection, is not to interpret the experience of the personal touch of humanity by something outside that experience, but is simply to dwell upon that which the experience itself con¬ tains. The Christian idea of mediation must be human¬ ized in two respects. It must be extended to many persons and finally to all. Every man is mediator who imparts his own spiritual life, for in every such gift the life of the spiritual universe is communi¬ cated. The second emendation is that mediation is not of the superhuman, but of the human. Every imparter of himself in the least human kindness might say: “This is universal love’s gift to you through me; I give to you the human spiritual uni¬ verse in its touch of soul on soul." The mediatorship of common men is obscured by the faults and frailties of common men. Their in¬ humanities check their spiritual impartations. But there are great, pure souls of inexpressible loveli¬ ness and power, whose every word and look is the personal touch of God. THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 225 They do not claim to be “completely sanctified.” They profess imperfections which those who know them best cannot see. Through this spiritual humility every quality of them is refined, hallowed, perfected. Few of these crystalline souls have their names blazoned in the records of the world’s notorious achievements. It is better to look for them in less ostentatious places, more congenial to their exquisiteness of soul. In them the human ideal has been unconsciously achieved, not as the stationary goal, but as the continuous unfolding of their luminous mediation, their unprofaned impart¬ ing of God. Happy is he who has seen God in their eyes, heard him in their voices, felt his touch in their most gentle, irresistible ministries. Among these best, one is mediator in the supreme sense, since his mediatorship is most deeply and extensively creative. Nothing is added to the purity of Jesus’ mediation by the assumption that every other is impure. Our adoration of his holiness is enhanced when we recognize its spirit¬ ually creative power to make others holy as he is holy, loving as he loved. That supreme sense of mediation in Jesus is not, to the humanist of the social passion, the mediation to men of a divine distinct from humanity. What shall bridge the gulf which is assumed to be an absolute separation when we speak of a superhuman God? Only a mediator could do that who should be both these essentially separate things, at once human and superhumanly divine. But when such a being is sup¬ posed, he falls apart into two natures, the human 226 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION and the superhumanly divine, and the attempted unity of them seems to us unmeaning words. Noth¬ ing is gained by calling this difficulty a mystery. A contradiction in terms is not a mystery. The con¬ tradiction stops us short: the mystery leads us on into luminous depths inexhaustible. The human Jesus is, to the religion of the social passion, the impartive mediation of the human spiritual uni¬ verse, of the human God. If it were a mediation of the human and the superhuman, one mediator would be enough^ if there could be any. With such a conception of things to be mediated, protestantism seemed to do less badly than Catholicism, when the former re¬ jected the mediation of priest and institution, of saints and angels; until we recognize that the catholic cherished, very confusedly, really human mediations wherein is found the human God. We accept the intercession of the saints, not all of whose names are in the calendar. To call Jesus the one and only mediator, is made impossible by the mediations that are in every gift of holy love, in every imparting of spiritual life. Without the recognition of this universally human mediation, the mediatorship of Jesus means nothing. The purpose of Jesus was to make every man the pure mediator of God’s grace and love to every man. So various and inexhaustible is that of which we are mediators, that not one mediation can be spared, not one must be lost. In each personality is its own peculiar mediation. Each truly human deed has its own disclosure, its own gift, of the spiritual uni- THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 227 verse. In every human toil for any human need this contribtuion is at least latent. Mediations by undeveloped men, especially of children and un¬ sophisticated people, must be sought and cherished, and even those of evil men, as long as there is any¬ thing left in them which is not dehumanized. The cause we serve includes the gathering of all these mediations, even of the least and the most disguised, from every clime, and from every phase of human history, and strives for their purifying and per¬ fecting. Supreme among these mediations is that impart¬ ing of the human spiritual universe, with touch always personal, which is accomplished by sacri- fical love. On this theme scholastic dogmatism and recrudescent pagan superstition have combined to do their worst. That sacrificial love most imparts the human, most reconciles men with the human spiritual universe, most unifies humanity. It is not checked nor swerved by any degree of suffering. Through suffering it realizes itself and achieves its purpose. Yet suffering is not its essential. It may be unalloyed joy, yet always ready for any cost of pain and shame. Suffering may be degradation. It is that to men, as long as it remains an element of the physical order. Therefore the cause we serve seeks both its removal and its transformation. It is transformed when it becomes the free offering of redemptive love. It is impermanent; the supreme joy of love’s redemptive conquests subdues all suf¬ fering to itself. The most holy symbol of the cross must be so received into the heart of humanity that 228 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION it is continually transfigured into redemptive power and blessedness. All deeds of sacrificial love, among which the death of Jesus is supreme, all devoted souls, Jesus preeminent, are mediations of the spiritual universe as sacrificial love. § 3 Another Christian idea is pertinent to our recognition, that every experience of receptive faith and impartive love is the personal touch of human¬ ity’s concretely interblended life, of the human spiritual universe. This, along with all the great Christian ideas, is not limited to Christianity. The Christian re¬ ligion unfolds them into clearer moral and spiritual meanings; for its tendency is to fulfill all human aspirations in an unalloyed spiritual life. The Christian teachings are too great, too human, to be special revelations. Nor have the universal religi¬ ous convictions reached their final expression in that which Christianity has as yet attained. These re¬ flections converge in faith in the Holy Spirit. The religion of the Holy Spirit is the consummation toward which all religions grope or fight their way. It is a vital, unfolding consummation, not com¬ pletely achieved by Christianity or any other faith. The religion of the social passion desires to be noth¬ ing more, and nothing less, than the expression of the universal aspiration, which is the Christian aspiration. It is the Holy Spirit to which it aspires. This is the God which it confesses, finding him THE GOD OF THE ,SOCIAL PASSION 229 in the personal touch of humanity’s interblended life, of humanity’s spiritual universe.* It is said frequently: “I believe that God is both immanent and transcendent.” The metaphysical difficulties involved in this statement are many and great. It is not our present task to discuss them. The persistence of the latter part of the statement is mainly due to one vital reason, whatever sub¬ sidiary reasons there may be. It is because devout men recognize that religious needs are satisfied only by faith in the personal God, and they fear lest the immanent God may not satisfy their needs. The spiritual interpretation of humanism is convinced that the Holy Spirit of humanity gives that satis¬ faction. Personal is the touch of the indwelling human God in every human faith and love. Just that ex¬ perience of the divine personality gives us the per¬ sonal divine we need. And this experience of the divine personality keeps us always close to human life. It does not exist apart from our human joys and sorrows, conflicts and victories, dependencies and affections, sharings with every man of the humanity by which he is our brotherman. To seek a personal God outside this human is to diminish, is implicitly to lose God’s social personality and our own. It is helpful and inevitable that our thought and faith and love should sometimes dwell upon our sharings of that personal, social, spiritual unity, and sometimes stress that unity which we share. ♦This religious consciousness does not seem to me to be involved in the recent interesting discussions concerning the conception the inclusion of human persons in a supreme being. 230 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION When the latter alternation of the one experience is present to us, we have everything that the devout soul could ask of a transcendent deity, with the removal of many obstacles to thought and faith and love. In the alternation there is a danger against which we must ever be on our guard. It is that we may be drawn away from our fellowmen and from our common life of faith in them and love to them, and away from the common tasks in which that faith and love are realized. § 4 What is prayer to the Holy Spirit of humanity? No spiritual thought can be accepted as serviceable that fails to deepen and strengthen the life of prayer. And prayer, ever broadening, intensifying, not separating itself from any part of life, but penetrating, energizing all, must be prayer as the little child knows it, and as its compulsions grasp us at all times of our joys with their thankfulness, our sorrows with their consolations, our repentance with its atoning forgiveness, our restlessness calmed with the supreme repose, our aspirations which be¬ come realizations by the power of prayer. Can the religion of the social passion make more vital within us the prayer-life of Jesus? Can it lead us deeper into the fellowship of the deathless words: Father, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come; Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt; Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit? Can we gain THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 231 his confidence that our prayer is heard and an¬ swered ? Prayer to the Holy Spirit of humanity is not directed to a God of physical power. It is not neces¬ sary to repeat humanism’s reasons for rejecting the imputation of physical attributes to deity. But may there be mentioned once more the unspeakable relief from the anguish of unanswered prayer to a physical omnipotence, blind, deaf, insensible, as the physical must be. Since we permit no intrusion of the physical into our thought of the God to whom we pray, so we keep the physical out of our prayers. We do not pray for rain or fair weather, or for anything to affect the processes of things. We do not ask any physical protection against the out¬ rages which inhumanity may inflict upon us, though we pray that our enemies may be brought to re¬ pentance and a better mind. We pray for strength of mind and soul to overcome the physical, and to accomplish our tasks unto the triumph of the cause we serve. This apparent limitation does not separate him to whom we pray from any ills that beset us, but relies on the sympathy which is an essential of the help he gives for enduring them, for achieving in and from and against the world humanity’s one precious possession, its own soul. If this exclusion of the physical from our prayer seems too hard for our capacity of suffering, and we pray with strong crying and tears that the cup may pass from us, it will not pass except we drink it, but we shall be empowered to have his will done in us; and that will is the victory of the devoted 232 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION soul, and shall be a part in humanity's great con¬ flict, unto the triumph of the cause we serve. This prayer is not separated in any wise from our receptive faith in our fellowmen, and our im- partive love to them. Prayer is the concentration of this faith and love. Whenever my faith in a fellowman receives from him an essential of my own life, then I am praying to him. If I were not praying to him I would not be praying to God. So every impartive love to our fellowmen is the prayer which is the giving of ourselves. Whatever belongs to faith and love is, as we have seen, devoted to human beings, in their interblended life, in their mediation of the spiritual universe. In faith and love are included all elements and aspects of prayer, such as contrition, thanksgiving, supplication, con¬ secration. These prayers are directed to those against whom we have sinned, beseeching their for¬ giveness, which is our restoration to them; to those to whom we are grateful for our spiritual life; to those from whom we long to receive ourselves; and, in prayer's highest range, to those to whom we sacrificially impart ourselves. This prayer is essentially social. It is with others and for others, even as our life is, which has its concentrations there. In these prayers to them we pray to the one Holy Spirit of them all, for we are praying to the spiritual universe of humanity's interblended life. From that inexhaustible reservoir of spiritual power, from all the heroisms, nobilities that con¬ tribute to it, we receive power into our own souls. THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 233 Unto all that humanity can ever become we devote ourselves in prayer, and the supreme strength is ours in this devotion. All the blendings of human excellence from which we receive ourselves, and to which we give ourselves, are ours when we pray. When, in our concentrations of human faiths and loves, we are conscious of the Holy Spirit who is humanity’s spiritual universe in personal touch upon our souls, then prayer attains life’s most august meaning. But there is prayer in every re¬ ceptive faith and every impartive love, however latent may be that deeper consciousness. The times when that uniting consciousness is deep and intense, minister most effectively to our life of faith and love to our fellowmen. Such hours or moments must not be separations from the simple humanness of life. When prayer draws our hearts away from men, we have then ceased to pray, and it is time to go out to receive from men and to give to men, in the prayer life of common faiths and loves. The prayer of the mystic who would lose all action in God, has no place in the religion of the social passion. It has no place in our devotion to the cause we serve. Our religion has a deeper mysticism, which is social, human. We pray to all men in our human trusts and loves. This prayer is deepest and clearest when offered to those in whom humanity is most realized. Revered among them are the holy and loving whose mortal faces we shall see no more, who unite us with the spiritual universe which extends beyond this earth. Supreme among these is he in whose name we have 234 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION learned to pray. And when we pray to them, trust¬ ing and loving them beyond all mortal scope, we feel most reverently, transformingly, the innermost communion of the Holy Spirit of humanity. The prayer life of Jesus is the guidance of our prayer. Does the religion of the social passion follow his life of prayer? An obvious consideration here is that he prayed saying “Father,” and thus he taught his disciples to pray. The reverent discrimination must be made be¬ tween the conceptions which he inherited, or de¬ rived from his time, and those convictions which were essential riches of his own soul. This dis¬ tinction has been applied in a previous chapter to the significance of Jesus' hope. The Jewish theology included conceptions of deity which are not in the religion of the social passion. It was not his way to criticise his doctrinal inheritance, except as it clashed with his spiritual apprehensions. The personal, spiritual was predominant in Jesus' filial faith, and was pervasive of his prayer. That per¬ sonal, spiritual it is our privilege to follow, none the less when it removes some of his inheritances. Giving up his infallible authority, we gain accumu¬ lating riches from his soul, and nothing in his spiritual leadership is compromised. We do not depart from the religious conscious¬ ness of Jesus, when we identify the Father to whom he prayed, with the Holy Spirit as spiritual father¬ hood. We are then not in the realm of trinitarian distinctions, any more than Jesus was. His word, Father, differs from the credal significance of that THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 235 name. It does not differ from that faith in the spiritual God to which the religious consciousness of the world ever tends. Rather does his name, Father, express and fulfill that consciousness. Alien to him was the church’s early intrusion of physical attributes into faith in the Father. The apostles’ creed, as it is called, confessing faith in the Father, continues with the words, “Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” There is an evident loss of the name’s spiritual greatness and tender¬ ness. That creed is exchanging the spiritual for the physical. A similar loss of the spiritual was betrayed by the addition of the words, “who art in heaven,” in Jesus’ great prayer. The version of the Lord’s prayer which is nearest his utterance begins, “Father,” with no additional word of ad¬ dress. Nor did his prayer close with the less than purely spiritual ascription, “For thine is the king¬ dom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.” The first of these amplifications casts suspicion upon the authenticity of the phrase, “Your Father who is in heaven,” in reports of Jesus’ teaching. At the least, there is no proof that the predominant con¬ sciousness of Jesus was other than that of the spiritual fatherhood, and this consciousness is at¬ tested by the general tenor of Jesus’ teachings, and by the whole devotion of his life. It is to this spiritual fatherhood that the religion of the social passion strives to be faithful, in its worship of the Holy Spirit of humanity. The long-continued solitudes of Jesus’ prayers were for the unity of his life’s devotion. Devout 236 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION scholars have traced that unity in his attainment of the greatest decisions of his ministry, by his especially marked times of prayer. An example is his retirement from his work in Galilee to learn among the mountains, with his Father, that to acomplish his redemptive task he must go to Jeru¬ salem to be crucified. Gethsemane is the most tremendous instance. We, who ask him to teach us to pray, advance in the supreme human devotion, by escaping in prayer’s most illuminative hours from the confusions of our tasks, that we may gain whole views of them and of the cause we serve, and that we may become more deeply conscious of what that is which unifies and energizes them, recogniz¬ ing who he is whose personal touch we feel in every touch of our fellowmen. We do not leave these tasks, and those for whom they are performed, out¬ side our soul’s inmost shrine. They are never more present to us than when we thus unify, enlarge, and hallow the tasks, and learn to love more deeply those whom we serve. And this consciousness we take back into every detail of our service, so fusing, in Jesus’ way, every detail of life into one faith and love. § 5 Modified from traditional conceptions is our faith in the God who is on our side, faith in the spiritual universe in which we are embattled. Men have always felt the need of favorable powers. This is one of the sources of the religious consciousness, and has often been presented as the principal one. In this conscious need the savage cajoles magical THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 237 assistance against tiger and serpent, famine and pestilence. In this confidence the Hebrew wisdom literature promised length of prosperous days to those who trust in Jehovah. Less ethical are they who say, “Whatever is, is right,” and philosophies which find all things reconciled in the absolute. It is natural for men to indulge such a dream, for the realities of life and death are so stern. But they lose too much of that ministering sympathy with human sorrow, without which life is poor indeed. Such a faith does not make for manliness, and the goods it desires are unworthy of the human soul. Man has a warfare upon the earth, and against powers which exceed the earth. Nor does the con¬ flict end with life's mortal phase. There are no superhuman powers upon which we can depend for victory. Success is not assured by any divine de¬ cree, any overrulings by an invincible providence. The conflict is real because real is the possibility of defeat. Every soul bears responsibility for the outcome and for every step of the advance. Loss is loss. Disaster is disaster. Ruin is ruin. There are fearful reverses, and there is no omnipotent philanthropist to make good the misery and waste. Yet the confidence of the religion of the social passion is more assured than the trust of one who falls back upon any superhuman deity. Its faith is in the inherent powers of humanity's spiritual uni¬ verse, which are sufficient to overcome. And here is peace deeper than is known by those whom the belief in an absolute omnipotence lulls to sleep. This peace cannot be expected to discharge us from the 238 THE REUGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION strife, here or in any world. There are vast realiza¬ tions of humanity beyond this mortal phase, and in their achievement redemptive forces have many obstacles to overcome. We cannot expect a throne of complete victory, nor to lay down the weapons of our warfare and to take up golden harps, nor to exchange action for any contemplation that is not a power for action. Yet in all these things, not apart from them, is the sufficient peace, anticipated in the Greek ideal of reposeful mastery, deepening with every extension of love's warfare to subdue all things to itself. Peace is of our advancing spiritual universe in which we have confidence; it is of the toiling and striving God in whom we trust. Deep and mighty is our thanksgiving unto him for all his benefits. He is no Dives of a God whose giving costs him nothing, since it is only the falling of crumbs from a rich man's table. In all our afflictions he is afflicted. All our toils are his. It is not a compassion that is lost in an infinity of blessedness. It is a sympathy that is one with all human suffering and achievement. God rejoices with them that rejoice, and weeps with them that weep. All his blessedness is within the life of humanity. In Jesus this heroic compassion of love is realized, by the giving of self to the uttermost, for victory at so great a cost. Not in Jesus alone, but in every pressing forward of humanity with bleeding feet, is our human God. His are the strife and the victory, and the gentleness and holiness and love which are the militant blessedness through all. THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 239 Our devotion to God is no empty service, unneces¬ sary to a being that already possesses all things. Service is chilled to the heart when there is found to be no need of it. But whatever we do for our fellowmen, we do for the unfolding realization of the supreme life. God has need of us. He has need of the utmost sacrificial development of every soul. Every advance of any man is his advance. Every unfolding of human powers is his increase. In every ministering he is ministered unto, that his passion to minister may be accomplished. Every saving of life by losing it is his gain. We do not call him complete, for completeness can receive no addition. We do not call him absolutely blessed, for such blessedness could not be deepened by any love of ours. We call him altogether holy, for he is altogether human. There is no requirement of the religious con¬ sciousness more profound than this, that there must be the life of God in the soul of man. Every genuine religious impulse turns toward this, back from every separative way. But if this is but an individualistic aspiration, it runs into quietism or ecstatic mystic¬ ism, which are defeated by the world, for they flee from the world; and they are sundered from hu¬ manity's spiritual universe, where God is. Or that supreme impulse may limit itself to a community, which, boasting its possession of God, confesses a God no greater than itself. The social passion for the concrete humanity of interblended souls reveals God in ones own soul. Everything normally human enters into this life, 240 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION —not sin, for that is unhuman. The social passion fulfills the requirement of a life that is one, in its inclusion and harmony of all the elements of life. In its task of subordinating the physical to itself is included the impulse to know the physical, and to exploit it thoroughly for human ends. All is present there that the age of physical science has gained, and all that the developments of physical science have to gain. Humanity's socially interblended life demands all that social experience may yield from co-operations of men, in government, in industry, in united efforts to make all human activities and re¬ lations instruments of the cause we serve, and to that cause belongs the supreme name. When it is said in disparagement of our social efforts to normalize human conditions, relations, and organizations, that no improvement in these things can create the supreme good for a single soul, it is not necessary for us to apologize for this work as subordinate and preliminary. Our efforts are to make every relation of man to man the im- partation of life to life, the perfecting of personal¬ ities in their life together. This is the directive principle of all social science. It demands the ut¬ most of information, wisdom, and ability, which are the energizings of love. It arouses every power within us against every unrighteousness, every in¬ equality in mens' work together, against everything divisive and repressive in any social organization, political, industrial, or whatever. It labors to set free all human powers in these mutual ministries, for the sake of soul. It aims to develop all con- THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 241 eertecf tasks to their utmost efficiency for the per¬ fecting of the personal, social, divine love-life of all mankind. In this religion we include the heritage of the past, that great flood of human life whose vital elements we continually renew. The man of the social passion recognizes in every smile and every sigh, in every festival and day of grief, in all men everywhere, now and always, the personal touch of the Holy Spirit of humanity. And all these are dynamic, not static, ever progressive, never sta¬ tionary. They sweep on to their fulfillments, and these are spiritual from more to more. Every element of humanity realizes itself in spiritual life, which is the overcoming of the world and the un¬ folding of the human. § 6 The religion of the social passion claims the Christian name. None the less does this faith seek to be universally human. Religion is the growth of all the history of humanity, and the religious consciousness has to appropriate the unfoldings of religion in that great life of humanity. Of the uni¬ versal human, Christianity is the highest expres¬ sion, with far mightier demands when thus esti¬ mated than when acclaimed as a new divine announcement from the sky. And Christianity is not static, but dynamic. It grows with the advances of each new time. Yet no time changes it into something different, but rather reveals its enduring spirit, its unfolding life. Today its social implica- 242 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION tions are surging to the front, and are revealing Christianity’s very heart. In them the purpose of its incomparable founder is coming to its own. In them is given the answer to the question: What is the nature of Christianty? By the religion of the social passion we mean the universal religion, we mean Christianity human, social, spiritual. What is the attitude of the universal Christianity of the social passion toward the Christian church, the Christian creeds, and the supreme prophet of Christianity, Jesus? Those who hold the human faith cannot say, “I believe in the holy catholic church,” if that con¬ fession acknowledges the church as a peculiarly divine institution, deriving sanction and validity from above our common human life, or with efficacy in its sacraments beyond the memories, loves, and purposes which they renew, or with any authority over the thought and life of men. Still less can we acknowledge the church as a peculiarly divine insti¬ tution, if we deprive it of the title “catholic,” which may take the ascription “holy” along with it. Such faith in a sect, or an aggregation of sects, loses the arguments advanced by a church with the catholic consciousness—or pretension. Significant is the fact, which no untrammeled modern scholarship questions, that there is no mention of the church in any authentic saying of Jesus. It is not to the church but to humanity that we owe the supreme devotion. As far as the church is against humanity, we are against the church. Yet in this uncompromising decision there is in- THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 24.1 volved the recognition of the value of the church for humanity, and of the claim of the church upon all who love men. For as human interests of every kind are furthered by social combinations, so there is required the social combination for the further- ence of humanity’s spiritual consciousness, its in¬ clusive aim, its very soul. The church, deepening and clarifying this consciousness in all its worship, in all its life, relating to this supreme purpose all that men do and suffer, summoning every human interest and institution to fulfill this aim, so unify¬ ing all human affairs, and relating all parts of human life to one another, has an indispensable function in the service of humanity. In this service the church is wholly and universally religious. It is the church of Christ. We are prepared to be very patient with all remainders of opposition, in the church, to the cause we serve. Yet never, in any wise, will we sacrifice the social passion to the church, whose function is to foster that passion’s deepest, most spiritual, most human meaning. It is a church of complete spiritual freedom, in which “no accent of the Holy Ghost is ever lost.” Unity and catholicity are in the spiritual purpose. To the humanist, the historic creeds are less con¬ genial than the church, though he heartily recog¬ nizes their faithfulness to Christianity’s emphasis upon redemption, and their loyalty to Jesus the re¬ deemer. His chief objection to them is that they presuppose a separation of nature between God and man, confirmed by their attempts to bridge that separation. Certain liberal statements which accept 244 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION that separateness, and make no attempt to bridge it, seem to us to have no superiority over the old creeds. The least that we can ask is that the church's attitude toward the historic creeds shall be that of complete freedom, for two reasons, among others, which should appeal to all earnest men. One is, that they were formed without sufficient appre¬ ciation of the social purpose of Jesus. The other is, that we include as instruments or realizations of that social purpose, everything that science dis¬ covers and the progress of humanity achieves. This freedom best preserves that which is of abiding value in the historic creeds. Concerning the place of Jesus in the religion of the social passion—the reader is referred especially to the fifth chapter. The world, in all its affairs, must believe in him or perish. Never was the issue more clear and pregnant than it is today, between unchristianized principles, utterly inadequate and inapplicable to our civilization's continuing emer¬ gencies, and the leadership of Jesus, in which alone our civilization has any hope. Whether one nation or another, or one class, or one interest, is justified, in the light of those principles, in its procedures against another, is a question without meaning, for there is no justification by those principles. It would be just as sane to be guided by despotic or feudal principles. The religion of the social passion cannot share the traditional christology. Though we listen reverently to every ascription of praise to Jesus, because its intent is to honor him, yet our voices THE GOD OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 245 cannot join in those ascriptions, which, assuming the separation of God and man, seek to exalt Jesus above the humanity which is the divine life. We cannot attribute two natures to Jesus, a divine and a human, nor dismiss him to a trinity above the human. Even less satisfactory is the relegation of him to a humanity considered essentially separate from the divine. Since God is human, these reserva¬ tions are not a denial of the divinity of Jesus, though the traditional connotations of that phrase make it of doubtful value. Reverently studying Jesus as human, and apply¬ ing human tests, we cannot impute to him infallible authority even in religious matters. Limitations in Jesus’ thought are evident, though each of them testifies to the vast scope and depth of the mind of the supreme teacher. Such an authority would give men nothing of vital worth, and would take away the essential of his life-task and ours. The true teacher is the leader of his disciples’ search for truth and good. Jesus’ leadership of the search does not impair his wisdom, redemptive power. The Jesus of whom we speak is the historic Jesus. It is only to symbolists that he is only a symbol. The personal, historic power of Jesus is the power of an historic person. To men who live in the life of men, the attempt to disprove his historicity has been of value, in relieving us of the Christ of tradi¬ tional theology, rendering clearer to our appre¬ hension the Jesus who is essential to the historic stream of human life. There is no space in this writing for the detailed unfolding of the historic 246 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION argument. It is sufficient to read the historic gospels (the fourth gospel has many invaluable appreciations of the significance of the history) eliminating from the picture the intrusions of Jewish and syncretistic conceptions, and to estimate vitally, historically, the historic impression. This is done unconsciously by unlearned men who re¬ spond to the inmost spirit of Jesus. The postulate that Jesus is an historic personality, working ever upon men with personal power, is continuously, vindicated by deepening spiritual results in many lives, and in the interblended life of humanity. All that we may try to say of holy humanity, of receptive faith and impartive love, is incomparably surpassed in our purely human Lord and Saviour. Jesus Christ. In his mediation of the universal human is felt supremely the personal touch of the Holy Spirit of humanity, soul on soul. When we find exquisite spiritual holiness and redemptive love in souls in whom there is no intrusion of the un¬ human, they are witnesses to the glory of Jesus, for their lives are from him and in him. The supreme witness to his glory and power is hu¬ manity’s spiritual universe. §7 The detailed applications, which are the practical interpretations of the religion of the social passion, must be passed over to specialists in various fields, and to those who, with them, in extensive or in lowly ministry, work out the inexhaustible problems of humanity. Because spiritual ends are purely THE GO 13 OF THE SOCIAL PASSION 247 human, the religion of the social passion can be applied directly in every instance; and all knowl¬ edge, skill, practical experience, administrative talent, find immediate and progressive spiritual, human efficiences. The social process is the purely human interblending of life with life, the removal of every unhuman separation between man and man, class and class (until the present disruptive meanings of that word disappear), nation and nation, race and race. For this interblending, fulfilling life, the mighty must descend from their seats, to exalt them of low degree. Jesus’ preference for the last and the least must revolutionize our social order. Many palaces must be demolished or socialized, that hovels may be reconstructed into homes. Upon every destruc¬ tive wastefulness, separative self-indulgence, pomp of pride, must be passed the same condemnation as upon the more obviously brutal irruptions of the unhuman. Whatever a man has, either through favoring fortune, or exceptional talent, or long toil, he holds only that he may most effectively impart it, together with his own disciplined, enriched soul. Not only must equal and supreme opportunity and instruments of opportunity be opened to every human being of every race, of every clime, begin¬ ning with the last and least; but to every man must be given also the devotions of the social passion, urgent, patient, impartive of soul, inspiring the fulfillment of the equal and supreme opportunity, unto the perfecting of humanity’s interblended life, unto the fulfillment of the cause we serve. The re- 248 THE RELIGION OF THE SOCIAL PASSION demptive love which welcomes this tasK is both heroic and compassionate unto the uttermost. The social passion is not one impulse among others, but is the whole of the real human life. Unto this converges every constituent of our being, and is fulfilled in this forevermore. This is the true God and eternal life. God is love: and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.