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Copyright, 1913, by
RALPH TYLER FLEWELLING
©CI.A361074
TO J. C. F.
WHOSE UNWAVERING LOVE AND
APPRECIATION HAVE BEEN A
GUIDING LIGHT ACROSS THE YEARS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER I
PAGE
The Causes of Doubt 3
Basis of the problem — Doubt comes with
culture — Arises from the existence of moral
and physical disorder — From the missed
aim of happiness — From mental and moral
readjustment — Lack of adequate life
motive — From the failure of spiritual
ideals.
CHAPTER II
The Epochs of Doubt 18
The drama as an expression of the problem
in its most living form in all lands and ages
■ — The age of iEschylus — The age of Job —
The age of Hamlet — Of Shakespeare — Of
Goethe — Of Ibsen.
vi CONTENTS
THE FIRST STEP
Prometheus Bound — The Struggle with an
Impossible Theology
CHAPTER III
page
The Revolt Against an Inhuman God 35
Story and problem of Prometheus Bound —
A God without moral responsibility in an
increasingly moral world.
CHAPTER IV
Groping After the Way 45
The law of retribution an assured fact — The
law of sacrifice making demands on life —
The necessity of reconciliation between
man and God — (a) On the part of Pro-
metheus — (b) On the part of Zeus — The
Grecian demand for the incarnation.
THE SECOND STEP
Job — The Struggle with the Mystery of Pain
CHAPTER V
"When the Storm of Death Roars Sweeping
By" 59
Job the drama of doubt deepest in its hold
on life — The false estimate of happiness —
The story and problem.
CONTENTS vii
CHAPTER VI
PAGE
Defending Tradition Against Light 69
The inadequate theology of Job's day —
Adequate only in theory — The defense of
tradition against the facts — Where lies
faith?
CHAPTER VII
A Religion or Barter 82
The religion Satan sneered at — Righteousness
for its own sake — A new note in Christian
teaching.
CHAPTER VIII
The Plains of Peace 93
The things that time and sense cannot restore
— That which is better than happiness —
The partial nature of human experience —
Understanding not necessary to peace —
Doubt not to be solved intellectually — To
have God is enough.
THE THIRD STEP
Hamlet — The Struggle with the Problem of
an Outraged Moral Order
CHAPTER IX
The Heart of Tragedy — Practical Doubt . . 107
Hamlet's a practical doubt — The story and
problem — The unethical character of in-
viii CONTENTS
tellectual belief — The insidious nature of
practical doubt — The modern lesson in
Hamlet's problem — The Divine Nemesis.
CHAPTER X
PAGE
The Task Beyond the Powers 119
The stupendous character of Hamlet's task —
The pessimism of modern life like that of
Hamlet — A moral paralysis in the face of
tasks — The sense of God in the moral order.
CHAPTER XI
The Unlit Lamp and the Ungirt Loin. . . . 131
The harvest of irresolution — The common
ruin of guilty and innocent — Indifference
to moral questions inexcusable — To lose
the soul — What does it mean? — Hamlet's
salvation in the existence of a moral order.
THE FOURTH STEP
Faust — The Struggle with the Problem of
Redemption
CHAPTER XII
A Problem of Unpardonable Sin 143
The difficulty of analysis of Goethe's work —
The story and problem — The intellectual
aspect — The spiritual element.
CONTENTS ix
CHAPTER XIII
PAGE
Redemption by Confession 157
The irremediable nature of sin — The tradi-
tional moral supports of Margaret — The in-
effectiveness of remorse alone — The neces-
sity for retribution — The Great'Renuncia-
tion.
CHAPTER XIV
Redemption by Striving 170
Difference between Faust's and Margaret's
problem — The sin against light — Living in
the good and beautiful, selfishly — The
wilderness of strife — "The hunter is home
from the hill."
CHAPTER XV
Did Goethe Solve the Problem? 184
The attempt to avoid a Dualistic world —
Too short to span the distance between
hell and heaven — The "Streben" philosophy
in modern life — The unappreciated secret
of the Cross.
x CONTENTS
THE FIFTH STEP
Brand — The Struggle Arising from the
Failure of Spiritual Ideals
CHAPTER XVI
PAGE
"All or Nothing" 201
The iron conscience — The story — Brand's
character analyzed — The successive tests
of Brand's motto of life — "All or nothing"
in present-day life.
CHAPTER XVII
"Where Love Is, God Is" 219
Brand's failure from an overemphasized in-
dividualism — From a false view of the
meaning of sacrifice — Mercy too is a virtue.
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XVIII
The Problem in Modern Thought 235
The modern pessimists — Readjustment of
ideas — Misconception about happiness —
The presence of moral and physical disorder
— The lack of motive — The Breakdown
of religious ideals — Re'sume' of the problem.
CONTENTS xi
CHAPTER XIX
PAGE
Jesus of Nazareth and the Personal Solu-
tion 259
The individual must be considered in relations
— The identification of God with cosmic
^ life — The identification of God with human
achievement — The lifting of the individual
life to the universal plane.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 273
INTRODUCTORY
CHAPTER I
THE CAUSES OF DOUBT
A clergyman is said recently to have
announced that he would preach from the
subject, "Why do the corners of the mouth
turn down?" We do not know how the
good brother dealt with his question, nor
what was the outcome, but in his homely
phrase was a world of meaning. The phrase
might well have been the theme of this
chapter. In one form or another, now
facetious and now in the darker phrasing
of tragedy, it has been the fateful question
of life which men have been working at
from the beginning even until now. And
though many misconceptions have been
cleared away, in its abstract aspect very
little positive ground has been gained.
The problem still faces us, the despair of
poet and philosopher alike. The reason for
this failure to put at rest these questions
4 CHRIST AND THE
will eventually be found to lie, not in the
imperfection of the natural world, but in
the unfinished, unperfected quality of the
human spirit, which cannot be satisfied
with a world which is less than perfect and
as yet is far from the moral goal which is
home. The eternal words of Augustine
come with a new pertinence and conviction
to the present age, and we know them
true: "Our hearts are restless till they rest
in Thee."
Basis of the Problem
How deep and how ancient is this problem
may be seen by reflection upon the earliest
history of religion. The great religious
myths are all concerned with the struggle
of gigantic forces for mastery: light against
darkness, good against evil. The rising and
setting of the sun, the morning and evening
stars, the waxing and waning moon, the
approach and recedence of the seasons
become but the poetic symbol and imagery,
the outward representation of that which
was, in the last analysis, the deeper strug-
gle of man's own unresting heart. It is
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 5
not to be wondered at that all in him which
called out for the eternal, the good, the
pure, the abiding, seemed linked with the
higher powers and processes of nature in a
world in which he was but an atom.
Doubt Comes w t ith Culture
In this early stage man was not a doubter.
Despair may have been a constant factor
in his life; fear surely was, but to his naive
imagination there was no place for doubt.
Doubt is not the product of those active
days in the life of a race, a nation, or an
individual, when struggle is being made for
conquest of natural forces. Those nations
that have had the hardest struggle for ex-
istence have ever been the most religious.
Doubt comes with ease, with reflection, with
fullness — physical and intellectual. It there-
fore never appears in decided form in early
stages of civilization, when men are pio-
neering the world, but is, rather, the prod-
uct of more cultured days. The great
literature of doubt appears not in the
beginning but in the decadence of cul-
ture.
6 CHRIST AND THE
Doubt Arises from the Existence of
Moral and Physical Disorder
Perhaps the first great shock to the re-
flective mind arises from the existence of
moral and physical disorder in a universe
created and controlled by a good God.
However much certain persons may arise
to affirm that evil, pain, sorrow, and mis-
fortune are but aberrations of the mind,
such a solution can never satisfy the souls
of any but the well fed, well dressed and
comfortable. It is a useless thing for men
whose lives are daily tragedies, and who
are not satisfied with a perfectly selfish and,
therefore, immoral solution. However one
may go on in his isolated self-sufficiency,
the fact remains that great floods devastate
and destroy the earth and the people in
it. The pathos of Jean Ingelow's "faire
Elizabeth," with her children drowned by
the high tide on the coast of Lincolnshire
and cast by the ebb before her own door,
is a tragedy that has been often repeated.
The ebbing tide of disaster too often lays
our dearest and most precious stark and
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 7
lifeless at our feet. Great fires destroy the
innocent and the guilty. Earthquakes have
no way of passing by the homes of the
just, but move with a startling impartiality.
Epidemics of disease carry off the brightest
and the best. Ofttimes the vicious, the
useless, and the evil live through long years,
corrupting the stream of life, while the
good and the brave do not live out half
their days.
Nor do we seem to be much better off
when we approach the moral realm. Here
we see not only the innocent suffering with
the guilty, but the innocent suffering for
the guilty. The greatest sufferer is not
the man who commits sin, but some inno-
cent and blameless life that is tied to him
by bonds of relationship and affection.
Very often there is an obtuseness in the
criminal by which he seems to be incapable
of deep suffering. The more revolting his
crime the less his capacity for sensitive feel-
ing. The burden of a man's sin falls less
upon himself than it does upon those near-
est to him.
When the seven sons of Saul for Saul's
8 CHRIST AND THE
crime were hanged by the men of Gibeah,
the greatest suffering was neither Saul's
nor his sons'. The great sufferer was the
tearless Rizpah, watching through days of
heat and starless nights, from the beginning
of harvest until the coming winter. The
same truth is borne home in the verses of
Kipling's "Mother o' Mine." 1
If I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose love would follow me still,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
If I were drowned in the deepest sea,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose tears would come down to me,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
If I were damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine J
He who declares there is no pain nor evil
takes but a shallow and inadequate view
of the deepest moving facts of life. Nor is
this all. Many lives seem to go astray in
the scheme of things. Sometimes the finest
spirits are forced to pessimism by a sense
of personal wrong and social isolation, as
1 Kipling, Dedication to The Light that Failed.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 9
in the case of Shelley and Heinrich Heine.
The shallow and the superficial are often
exalted to the place of prominence and
power, and set to rule over men of far greater
capability, whose capacities go undeveloped
and undiscovered, and who sink out of life
with no opportunity to speak their message
to the world — "of whom the world is not
worthy," and of whose possibilities the
world stands in sore need.
No age has ever been so conscious of
the immeasurable wastes of society as the
present. Little children toil away strength,
childhood, imagination, the possibility for
the spiritual, the opportunity for mental
development, in sweatshop, home, and
factory. A greedy and materialistic age
robs them of the most priceless gifts of life
before they have attained the age of under-
standing, and turns them into middle life
with diseased bodies and minds, unculti-
vated spiritual lives, in some cases but
little better than the beasts of the field, in
some cases worse. The existence of moral
and physical disorder becomes thus one
of the most pressing problems of the age.
10 CHRIST AND THE
Doubt Arises from the Missed Aim of
Happiness
The darkness cast by the cloud of moral
and physical disorder might perhaps be
forgotten if only a considerable portion of
the race seeking happiness could find the
way thither. But this way seems forever
closed. Happiness does not dwell in the
halls of the great. No class finds life so
futile and unsatisfying as that which sits
continually in the lap of ease. The strug-
gle for amusement among the rich becomes
more tragic than in the so-called less fortu-
nate is the struggle for bread. That pes-
simism cannot be exceeded which, as Presi-
dent Jordan 1 says, is "a reaction from un-
earned pleasures and spurious joys."
All gratification that becomes an end in
itself seems to yield the same result. Un-
bridled indulgence makes further enjoy-
ment impossible. Pleasure, to remain pleas-
urable, must be earned. Even in the
religious realm this is true. Stirred emo-
tions and states of rapture which are never
David Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair, p. 27,
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 11
connected with genuine gains in character
and in service of one's fellows, end in a
disillusionment and spiritual poverty in
which one may hear the cry, "All is vanity."
This despair arises out of a false concep-
tion of happiness, a false estimate of its
relation to the remainder of life, and the
fact that nothing which is not itself eternal
can satisfy the human soul.
Doubt Arises from Mental and Moral
Readjustment
The necessity for moral, mental, and
political readjustment is also a cause for
despair in many minds. There come times
when the very face of the earth is so changed
by upheaval that men have to make com-
plete readjustment and build them new
homes before life can go on.
The scientist in his laboratory makes
a discovery which renders inconsistent a
whole system of theology that has remained
unquestioned for years. A political up-
heaval casts upon a monarchical theism the
necessity to look upon God across a rising
tide of individualism. The tribal god of
12 CHRIST AND THE
Israel's national life gives way with polit-
ical dependence to a God whom Jesus
teaches men to call Father. The vindic-
tive and irresponsible gods of older Greece
fall before a growing sense of individual
moral responsibility. A political theory goes
down in the crash of war, and for a time
there is much confusion and noise. Many
charges and counter-charges are made, and
only with time do many readjust their
thinking to the new order of things. Such
an age came to Israel with the exile and the
readjustment following that most signifi-
cant event in her national history. Greece
saw such a day when the little confederation
first realized its strength in the turning back
of the Persian tide under Xerxes which
made possible the age of Pericles. England
witnessed such a period of transition after
the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the
call to empire in a newly discovered world.
Europe witnessed like scenes of tumult in
the rise of a new individualism, the revolt
of the human spirit generally present but
spectacularly realized in the French Revo-
lution.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 13
When old systems of thought become
inadequate the extremists declare that the
old is without virtue and should be thrown
over altogether. The other side, realizing
the truth of the old, and not yet seeing the
way clear to readjustment, appeals to tra-
dition. Such an age is always one of doubt
and darkness.
Doubt Arises from Lack of Adequate
Life Motive
One very much underestimated cause of
despair has yet to be named. More pes-
simism springs from lack of adequate motive
in life than from all other causes. The
causes already named are speculative, but
this is practical. The world can move on
so long as doubt concerns itself exclusively
with the speculative issues, but when it
enters into practical life it- becomes vicious
and harmful. Speculative doubt is the
indulgence of a few reflective minds, or
of men with morbid physical and mental
conditions. Practical doubt is the pos-
session of vast multitudes. The man who,
devoid of motive, hid his talent in the earth
14 CHRIST AND THE
was not only struck with despair at his own
helplessness and weakness, but he was struck
also with moral blindness. He overlooked
his responsibility for what had been only
trusted to his keeping, and was cast out
both for his sloth and for his wickedness.
The reason men are struck with world-
weariness is because they have wandered
through the world of sense and experience
with no motive beyond that of self-grati-
fication. Their excursion into the world
of learning has been without moral aim.
It is such lives, with motive inadequate for
an immortal being, that turn back dis-
appointed on the toilsome way. Neither
the will to feel nor the will to know is
in itself enough. In a moral being they
demand a moral purpose. Both experience
and knowledge are the means to action.
They awaken the strongest impulses to
action, and if these impulses are resisted,
there is moral and spiritual deadness and
despair. Experience that is not wrought
out in life, that does not lead to a better
character, making one more honest, more
sympathetic, more loving, more serviceable,
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 15
is like Israelitish manna whose worth did
not last beyond a single day.
The men who despair for the well-being
of the world are never the men who are
throwing themselves into the saving of the
world. They are men whose hearts have
been convicted of responsibility. They are
men who have sensed the need of self-
giving, but have not been willing to enter
upon the saving of the world in the only
way it can be saved — by personal contact
and unselfish action.
When one hears the voice of despair one
may be certain of this alternative: the
presence of morbid pathological conditions
in the man's body or the weakening of the
man's moral fiber. The skepticism that is
most dangerous to the church does not
much concern itself with the theoretical
aspect of belief. The unbelief that threat-
ens the life of the church is the unbelief that
sings songs, repeats creeds, testifies on Sun-
day, and during the week gives itself solely
to the accumulation and enjoyment of the
things of the world. Such a religion is no
more exempt from the pit of despair than
/
16 CHRIST AND THE
is an intellectual world that learns and
learns and never comes to a knowledge of
the truth, because behind it is no adequate
motive.
Man must discover the personal im-
perative of duty between his life and the
world of relations around him. He cannot
take it out in intellectual dream or religious
vision. To be able to abide, it must touch
the ground. There must be a sense of per-
sonal relationship to God which calls him
to practical duty. The personal imperative
of duty must be a divine command on his
life. Knowledge or so-called religious ex-
periences not wrought into life and action
deaden and disarm both mind and soul,
and the end is despair. "The experience
of all the ages brings only despair if it can-
not be wrought into life." 1
Doubt Arises from the Failure of
Spiritual Ideals
This brings us close to the problem raised
by the failure of spiritual ideals. Some-
times men in the very pursuit of religion
1 David Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair, p. 14.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 17
seem to overshoot the mark and end in
absolute denial. This is sure to be true
of any man who follows a religious ideal
that is not open to revision by the growing
experience of life. Spiritual ideals must
have the power of expansion and change
under the light of reason and experience.
We undertake a dangerous course when we
decide upon a religious action which de-
mands that we hoodwink the mind or do
injustice to our finer sense. Religion, in-
stead of being out of harmony with the finer
sentiments of life, is in strict keeping with
them. No truly religious ideal can remain
ever the same for any living soul. Day
by day it must become something better
and more perfect. Dissatisfaction and
spiritual unrest should be taken not as the
tokens of failure but as the evidences of
a life struggling for expression. The true
man, having done his best, must feel that
he has failed. The mountain heights of
Jesus's character remain to rebuke the low
levels of his own attainment.
18 CHRIST AND THE
CHAPTER II
THE EPOCHS OF DOUBT
The Drama as an Expression of the
Problem in Its Most Living Form
in All Lands and Ages
So soon as one begins to study the great
literary monuments that deal with the prob-
lem of evil he will be struck by the similar-
ity of conditions under which they have
been produced. Upon the sands of time
successive waves have left their highest
mark, but there are many evidences of the
same primal impulse from the same un-
resting sea. Man's literary effort has
reached its high tide in the drama or trag-
edy, and tragedy's one question concerns
itself with the solution of the problem of
evil. We need but to name them over to
realize this fact. The book of Job, iEschy-
lus's masterpiece, the Prometheus, Hamlet,
and Faust would by common consent be
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 19
granted the highest rank in the literary
world. The most significant drama of
recent years might perhaps with less una-
nimity be accorded as being Ibsen's Brand.
The eras that brought them forth present
most striking similarities. Each of these
dramas brought the ever-recurring problem
to the surface at a time when a new in-
dividualism was forcing itself upon civili-
zation by reason of great religious, intel-
lectual, or political changes.
Because of this living element the drama
is the truest expression of real problems.
It presents problems as they exist in the
common thought of a nation or people.
Such problems are not dramatized, or, at
least, do not make successful appeal to
their time unless they have been keenly felt
in contemporary living. Their message
is thus more direct and clear than that of
other contemporary literature.
Awakened by new scientific and intel-
lectual attainment, startled by the dis-
covery of new worlds, or the renaissance of
old civilizations, men follow the stars of
great hopes. But the moment of fulfill-
20 CHRIST AND THE
ment is sure to be a moment of disillusion-
ment. The national triumph looked for-
ward to, instead of settling national prob-
lems, only opens the way out of the old
contentments into a far more perilous road
of larger tasks and struggles. Man casts
his spear into the ground at every hill-
crest of attainment and, before looking
around, says, "Here we rest" — but the next
moment discloses to his startled perception
higher peaks and vaster pilgrimages. He
cannot rest, and his task seems too great for
him.
In the religious realm the tragedy be-
comes far more acute, for here men are ever
demanding certainty. The possibility of
theological change threatens to the common
mind the direst calamity. We are strictly
told that we walk by faith and not by sight,
but who can be content with so dangerous
a program? We immediately endeavor to
bolster faith with philosophical theory that
shall make faith more or less unnecessary.
That theory we falsely dignify with the
name of faith. Growth in intellectual per-
ception, the rising tide of human experience,
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 21
has swept out the foundation of the under-
lying philosophy, and man in despair has
set forth again upon this shoreless sea, while
. . . evermore
Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam.
The accomplishment of political refor-
mation, the firm seating of new intellectual
systems, the triumph of a cause, the dis-
illusionment which comes with the unsatis-
fying Utopia, brings a moment of great
popular despair. Outside is hindrance
which, unforeseen, keeps man back from
entering his promised land, with the ruth-
lessness of an arbitrary fate. At such a time
the thoughts of men turn inward. There
comes within the consciousness of higher
spiritual qualities which can conquer, yea,
rise to the highest when the dearest ma-
terial dream 1 lies in hopeless ruin.
The Age of JEschylus
Such an age produced iEsehylus. The
Grecian confederacy had by a supreme
1 Courtney, The Idea of Tragedy.
22 CHRIST AND THE
effort turned back the barbarian hordes
of Persia. The threatened supremacy of
Persian culture was at an end. iEschylus
himself had been a soldier in that war
for Grecian independence and civilization.
Greece reveled in her triumph. At first
blush there was promise of a new birth of
freedom. She felt the call of a great
national destiny. Her triumph was the
triumph of Greek institutions. There was
to be a new girding of the loins for tasks.
The inspiration was thrilling the hearts of
all classes of society. There was a breaking
away from old thralldoms and superstitions.
The lower classes were demanding a place
and a voice in government. Along with
this came a new birth of the Grecian re-
ligious consciousness. The triumph of
Grecian institutions meant also the triumph
of the Grecian gods. Yet the old religious
conceptions were like old winesacks that
were incapable of containing the new wine
of religious feeling. With a new touch upon
Egyptian civilization there had come a new
sense of the sinfulness of sin. Egyptian
Orphism had rendered the older Grecian
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 23
conceptions inadequate by introducing a
new sense of sin and blood-guiltiness. 1
Men were awed by the seriousness of the
readjustments that faced them. There
were the ancient doctrines of divine malig-
nity and moral perverseness which had been
made impossible by the rising conscious-
ness of the supremacy of moral values. A
Zeus who could sit supreme and in laughing
contempt
Looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring
deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking
ships, and praying hands —
to whom all was as a tale of little meaning —
fell far short of satisfying the necessities
of the human spirit. To meet the problem
raised by such a crisis iEschylus wrote his
great tragedies. With all his faith he was
not without trepidation at the threatening
elements in the new day that had come to
Greece. He feared the growing power of
the masses. He feared the collapse of old
1 Campbell, Tragic Drama, p. 147.
24 CHRIST AND THE
institutions ; most of all he feared that in the
shifting tides of change might be lost the
consciousness of God. His mind was alert
to what seemed to him the impieties of the
time. Is not all this reflected in the suffer-
ings of an impious Prometheus, at the same
moment in which are prophesied the final
reconciliation and deliverance, and the
justification of the ways of God which we
must believe formed the climax of the third
and last member of the Promethean drama ?
The Age of Job
In the case of the drama of Job it is
not so easy to dogmatize, for there is among
scholars the widest range of opinion as to
the age that produced it. The foremost
objection to a late age for the book is the
almost total lack of any reflection in it of
Jewish institutions as we know them after
the exile. It was this fact that led Renan
to declare its author not a Jew but an
Idumean. There seems to be much plausi-
bility in this theory until we reflect upon
the possibility of literary culture and philo-
sophic grasp among the wandering Arab
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 25
tribes of Edom, the singular solitariness
of this great book, and the needed explana-
tion of its arrival in the Jewish canon.
If, on the other hand, the priestly litera-
ture did not arise until some time after the
return from exile, it would be possible for
the book to have been written after the
exile, and in that period following the return
when the high hopes raised by the resto-
ration had been blasted by partial failure.
It is best to leave this part of the problem
to the biblical experts with more adequate
resources and to go meekly where the
greatest own themselves puzzled by con-
flicting considerations. Suffice it to say
that from the exile on to the very coming
of Jesus there were recurring political situ-
ations in Judah that closely fit the common
condition for the drama of doubt. The
completion of the temple, the rise of a king,
the fall of an ancient enemy, each was
sufficient to awaken the consciousness of
defeated and misunderstood destiny.
After the exile the Hebrew race was ever
conscious of such a religious destiny. The
return from the exile and the reconstruction
26 CHRIST AND THE
of the temple were the tokens of God's favor
and the evidences of the national mission.
During this period that portion of Asia
was convulsed by sweeping tides of politi-
cal change. Kingdoms waxed and waned;
dynasties that had promised to be eternal
passed in a night. It was a period of great
migrations that decided the destinies of
the Western world.
Profoundly conscious of the superiority
of his religious system, the Jew lived pos-
sessed by a great hope that Israel was soon
to take her true place in the leadership of
the nations. The more the years grew away
from the exile the more intense became her
problem. She had held to a doctrine of
a God who overruled the stream of history, 1
and who rewarded righteousness with ma-
terial prosperity and evil with calamity
and adversity.
Hitherto Israel's religious problem had
been national, the problem of a group.
Ezekiel had filled the darkness of exile with
lightning flashes proclaiming inevitable per-
sonal responsibility. He declared their sins
1 Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism, pp. 16, 17.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 27
to be not the sins of a group but of indi-
viduals, who had brought destruction upon
the nation, and who would suffer their
individual punishment. But the temporal
reward of righteousness and the punish-
ment of the evildoers did not agree with
the facts as seen in human life, and to this
problem the author of Job addressed him-
self.
The Age of Shakespeare
The age that produced Hamlet was like-
wise remarkable. Europe was now reaping
the fruits of the revival of learning. Prot-
estantism had, over considerable sections
of Europe, come into undisputed power.
The destruction of the Spanish Armada
had been for England the birth of a new
national consciousness. It had brought
the idea of national destiny. Spain's em-
pire beyond the seas was already sending
home its golden argosies. Spain had been
conquered on the seas by the grace of God
and the intrepidity of English sailors.
Bacon, in the world of investigation, was
laying the foundation for the new day of
28 CHRIST AND THE
scientific knowledge. The heavy hand of
change had been laid upon medisevalism
with its constant tendency to substitute
theory for fact. Among the masses the
superstition concerning magic, satanic in-
fluences, the black arts, lingered still. On
the one side were the people clinging to the
mechanical mediaeval conception of the
problem of evil; on the other hand were the
scientific men tinctured with a spirit of
skepticism in the ardor of the new learning.
Hamlet represents the problem raised by
this contest. Was Hamlet Shakespeare's
English answer to the soliloquizing pessim-
ism of Montaigne? 1 Shakespeare's demand
was for action. He had a conviction of
divine Nemesis as clear as iEschylus him-
self. He saw the truth that evil draws
destruction in its own train. He saw also
that a living faith was necessary to a true
meeting of the problem of existence. The
sinews of righteousness would be cut by
doubt. It was better to stumble blindly
toward the goal than by inaction to un-
nerve the true forces of character.
1 Jacob Feis, Shakespeare and Montaigne.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 29
The Age of Goethe
The world that witnessed the production
of Goethe's Faust was also a world of fer-
ment, political, intellectual, and religious.
Over western Europe and America existed
the spirit of individualism which was most
spectacularly set before the world in the
French Revolution. An ancient feudal-
ists aristocracy was dissolved with great
heat, and its world passed away before the
new world had found itself. In the philo-
sophical world Kant had already come to
show the inconsistencies and failures of
the inductive philosophy. With the rising
demand for individual freedom there was
also a demand for greater freedom of
thought and the emancipation of the spirit.
Everywhere life was bowed down by con-
ventions. 1 The age was singularly poor
in the spiritual and moral values. Men
had lost the consciousness of personal touch
with God. In England the Wesley an re-
vival was only beginning. There was not
present, as in iEschylus's Greece or Shake-
1 Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets, p. 151.
THE FIRST STEP
PROMETHEUS BOUND— THE STRUGGLE
WITH AN IMPOSSIBLE THEOLOGY
CHAPTER III
THE REVOLT AGAINST AN INHUMAN GOD
Story and Problem
a. THE STORY
The Greek drama known as Prometheus
Bound was the outgrowth of the troubled
spirit of a great nation. The little land
had cast back the tides of invasion, her
white-sailed ships were in every port, her
high-walled cities were filled with the
treasures of art, her people were blessed
with a growing enlightenment, her political
star was rising to the zenith, but her heart
was filled with unrest. There was an
earnest desire to follow and to serve the
gods that every loyal Greek felt had been
the means of saving them from the Persian
tyranny. But their very victory had thrust
them upon darker and deeper questioning.
The pick and flower of the nation had all
too generally fallen upon the field. With
35
36 CHRIST AND THE
Lowell, iEschylus could mourn for those
who
. . . come not with the rest,
Who went forth brave and bright as any here!
I strive to mix some gladness with my strain,
But the sad strings complain,
And will not please the ear;
I sweep them for a paean, but they wane
Again and yet again
Into a dirge, and die away in pain.
It was a fact that the living had been
saved to a great destiny, but the true, the
noble, and the great had bought that destiny
with their lives.
Pain, misery, misfortune, and death had
ever been interpreted in the Greek religion
as the result of the anger of the gods. Now
they were faced by the paradox — the anger
of the national gods had fallen upon the
saviors of the nation. No one was fitted
more clearly to see or more deeply to be
moved by this problem than iEschylus.
He had, through his bringing up at the seat
of the Eleusinian mysteries, by his contact
with the newly introduced Orphism of
Egypt, been impressed with the fact that
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 37
sin brought its own sure and swift ruin.
The sins of the fathers were visited with
terrific vengeance upon the children. The
blood of the murdered cried from the
ground. Upon him was now thrust the
further problem of justifying a god who
would not only see to it that terrible sin
was terribly punished, but who did not
spare the stroke from the brave and the
good. Into what crisis of thought the peo-
ple were cast may best be read in the
literature and history of the time. iEschy-
lus was the last to write in the full belief
in the ancient Homeric and Hesiodic gods.
Euripides, who followed him, was an in-
novator and a heretic. Upon JEschylus
was cast the supreme task.
To serve his purpose he had at hand the
popular tradition regarding Prometheus.
The name means to iEschylus "Fore-
thought," though it may for an earlier day
have borne the simpler meaning "Fire-
b ringer." Prometheus was the fountain
of man's intellectual gifts, the one who
had enabled him to ameliorate his hard
lot and to conquer the earth. From him
38 CHRIST AND THE
had come not only the knowledge and use
of fire, but all the arts of civilization. He
was man's defense from the unrelenting
hates of Zeus. His intervention and defeat
of the sterner will of Zeus called down the
divine anger. Therefore, Titan though he
is, and in other days the helper of Zeus to
supreme rule, he is chained to a great rock,
exposed to the elements and suffers daily
to have his liver fed upon by the eagle.
We have arrived at the very climax of the
problem — the good, the beneficent, suffer-
ing for his beneficence. Had ^Eschylus a
memory of a darker hour when Cynegiras,
his elder brother, fell dying in his arms at
Marathon? But the spirit of defiance which
speaks through the lips of Prometheus is
also the protest of iEschylus against every
such heathen conception of God.
Let him hurl me anon into Tartarus — on —
To the blackest degree,
With Necessity's vortices strangling me down !
But he cannot join death to a fate meant for me.
The introduction of Io with her sufferings
at the hands of the inhuman Zeus is only
to complete the picture of the impossible
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 39
God. He faces his problem in the darkest
degree. Prometheus seems to perish in
the crash of worlds.
Earth is rocking in space
And the thunders crash up with roar upon roar —
And the eddying lightnings flash in my face
And the whirlwinds are whirling the dust round and
round,
And the blasts of the winds universal, leap free
And blow each upon each, with a passion of sound.
And iEther goes mingling in storm with the sea!
Such a course on my head in a manifest dread,
From the hand of your Zeus has been hurtled along !
O my mother's fair glory! O iEther enringing,
All eyes with the sweet common light of thy bringing,
Dost thou see how I suffer this wrong? 1
b. THE PROBLEM A GOD WITHOUT MORAL
RESPONSIBILITY IN AN INCREASINGLY
MORAL WORLD
It will be seen that the real problem of the
Prometheus is the justification of a god
who is the author of pain, suffering, and
sorrow, and the problem is not solved in
that portion of the drama which remains
to us. The Prometheus Bound is the
1 Mrs. Browning's translation.
40 CHRIST AND THE
second number of a trilogy of dramas which
brings the problem to intensest form and
statement. We must believe that the ques-
tion was met in iEschylus's own way in
the third member of the trilogy, the
Prometheus Unbound, of which we have
but the merest fragment.
The old religious teachers of Greece had
represented that Zeus was envious of the
success, comforts, and happiness of men;
that he loved to strike the fairest and the
dearest. iEschylus strove to show that
he was angry not against success but against
sin. 1
"In the half -century before his time,
what is vaguely known as the Orphic move-
ment, due partly to fresh contact with
Egypt and the East, had gained much
prevalence amongst enlightened Greeks.
. . . The horror of blood -guiltiness, the
sense of human sinfulness and divine wrath,
and of the need of purification and atone-
ment, were at the same time greatly deep-
ened. Religious hopes and fears, though
still largely turning on ceremonial con-
1 Plumptre, iEschylus, ix.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 41
ditions, became more individual and per-
sonal. 1
"Not the destruction of an existing order,
as in Shelley, not in the omnipotence of
human intellect, as in Goethe's lyric, but
the ultimate harmonizing of apparent op-
posites in the divine nature, with the cor-
responding peace on earth and good will
among mankind is the ground idea of the
trilogy as a whole." 2
Thus far has iEschylus come in the
statement of the problem. A god of ret-
ribution is an assured fact, witnessed by
the common tragedies of life. Suffering is
a necessity, cast upon those who would most
help the race, and who insure the rule of
the gods over men. This story life has
told him in scenes of heartbreak and aspi-
ration. But in a god of retribution who
punishes without moral responsibility he
cannot believe. If that is the highest con-
ception, man might better "curse God and
die," amidst the echoes of divine wrath.
Yet in rebellion against God there is no
peace. To fight and die for the good of
1 Campbell, Tragic Drama, p. 144. 2 Ibid., p. 147.
42 CHRIST AND THE
the race implies a daily recurring and mean-
ingless agony in which one's breast is torn
anew with heartbreak.
Hast thou not seen this brief and powerless life,
Fleeting as dreams, with which man's purblind race
Is fast in fetters bound? 1
In these words he voices the depths of his
despair in the face of his problem.
Mankind has made long marches away
from the darkness of thoughts which
filled the mind of iEschylus. We have
learned new and different things about God
through his revelation in the face of Christ.
And yet so little changed is human nature
that, in spite of the gospel, the mind is
prone to return to the primitive conception.
It is easy to interpret our misfortunes as
the wrath of God, and to compare our little
pleasures with the divine smile. We too
often think of God as inimical to human
happiness. With many still the greatest
criterion of sin is enjoyment. That in
which the natural man takes pleasure seems
Lines 558-560, Plumptre's translation.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 43
of itself sin. The catastrophes of nature —
fire, earthquakes and cyclones — continue
to be interpreted here and there as the
wrath of God. The death of little children
is now and then represented as a divine
judgment. The wearing of amulets has
not completely departed from this Christian
age. There lingers a suspicion of the divine
malevolence, a feeling that in pure joy we
are most unsafe. Human happiness is too
often represented to the young as framed
in misery and suffering. This sort of super-
stition about God could never hold for a
moment if w r e were to keep strictly to the
true conception of the God in Christ.
Because we have felt it necessary to con-
firm all the ancient Hebraic ideas of God,
we have hidden the full-orbed features of
the face of Christ.
Never does this question come so vividly
before us as when we stand over the grave
of a life that all too soon has been called
from work through pain, inhumanity, or
suffering. We wonder at the divine good-
ness. Or we see a life that has wasted its
opportunities, and, so far as human under-
44 CHRIST AND THE
standing can go, there is only a fearful
looking for of judgment.
Of this we need to be assured. We have
looked upon God in the face of Jesus Christ.
What Christ would have been to such a
soul God will be to him. What Christ
would be to us in our grief, were he present
as when in Galilee, that will God be to us.
There is no need to approach God with
indirectness. Christ was the human image
of the Father. Let us not think his love
is less than ours. Let us not dream his
sense of justice is less than ours. Our love
and justice are but a tiny cup where his are
a great sea. The judgment of this Grecian
seer of the long ago was correct. An in-
human God cannot command the worship
of men.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 45
CHAPTER IV
GROPING AFTER THE WAY
The Law of Retribution an Assured
Fact
iEscHYLUS, in all his tragedies, has held
true to the theory of retribution for sin.
It is maintained by some that there was
in him no thought of a remedial end of
suffering, but only of a retributory purpose.
At any rate, we may be sure that just here
was a point that most puzzled the mind of
the great dramatist. He saw the limita-
tions of his theory of retribution. One
crime demanding another for vengeance
was a process that would never end until
there were no more men left of a house, or
a race, to be murdered. In the end ven-
geance would defeat its own aim, and fall
upon the guiltless. The problem thus raised
he strove to settle in his Eumenides,
where even the hand of vengeance is stayed
46 CHRIST AND THE
from the final stroke after the sinner has
been driven, suffering, across the world.
Yet ^Eschylus held in the main to the
theory of the friends of Job. No sin could
go unpunished, and from this he drew the
doctrine that all suffering implied guilt.
We must believe this was his thought re-
garding Prometheus. Prometheus had been
the great benefactor of mankind. His
power had been used to seat Zeus on the
throne and to secure him reverence and
worship among men. His mind was able
to read as well the limits of Zeus' sway.
He knew the weakness of the Supreme God
as men then knew and read him. But
with access of knowledge came access of
impiety. His denunciation and rebellion
against God was sure to be met by punish-
ment. If we take Prometheus as the im-
personation of human forethought and
skill, with its constant contribution to the
rising tide of civilization, we shall see what
iEschylus meant. Human wisdom was
prone to flaunt itself in the face of the gods,
to rob them of their just dues, to question
their right] and power, and every such sin
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 47
of impiety, though it rise from men who
have done most for the race and the cause
of religion, must be met with its proper
punishment and retribution. No man,
though he be a Titan, could escape it. This
was in strict accordance with the world as
he saw it. The hand of death knocked at
every door. Calamity is no respecter of
persons. He had seen the loveliest and the
best giving their lives a forfeit for others.
Death fell not only upon the unjust, but
also upon those who were careful in main-
taining scrupulously the forms of religion.
There must be with them, as thought the
friends of Job, some secret sin, some vaunt-
ing of the heart, which could not escape the
all-seeing wrath.
It is a curious thing how deeply this feel-
ing is written into the human heart, how
wide a spell it has cast over our religious
conceptions, and how it lingers in the
minds of men. This is because it is the
easiest explanation, and the mind de-
mands explanation. Suffering may come
as the awful retribution and reward for
sin. No man has lived long who has not
48 CHRIST AND THE
had opportunity to see for himself that
"the wages of sin is death." Very many
sins we know carry within themselves fear-
ful consequences to the sinner in this life.
With a just God how could it be otherwise?
How easy it is when the misfortune happens
not to us but to our neighbor to lay it to
his sinfulness and error! If these are un-
seen, it is only a part of the frailty of human
judgment to conclude there are hidden sins
for which he is being punished. We ask
with unblushing casuistry the old, old ques-
tion of his disciples, "Did this man sin or
his parents?" They thought they were
presenting a dilemma to the Master, that
he must answer one way or the other.
How surprised they must have been to have
him answer, "Neither did this man sin nor
his parents!"
The Law of Sacrifice Making Demands
on Life
I am quite aware of the importance
of keeping in mind that we must not
allow our Christian conceptions to guide
our judgment on the implications of this
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 49
greatest of Greek tragedies. Yet it may
not be amiss to note that either con-
sciously or unconsciously in his thought of
divine Nemesis, or retribution, iEschylus
did hit upon the eternal law of sacrifice.
We know he must have seen it, though as
yet it was not very clear. He must have
been a keen discerner of the depths of
human experience. He had seen how the
blessings and prosperity of the present had
been won by the fearful sufferings of the
past. As I have mentioned above, his
brother had died beside him in the battle
of Marathon, that glory of Grecian history.
If tradition be true, 1 his other brother,
Ameinias, was in charge of the galley that,
single-handed, began the attack upon the
Persian fleet at Salamis when others were
retreating in fear. At any rate there must
have come close home to his heart this
problem of how the liberty and prosperity
of the many were purchased by the ill-
deserved suffering of the few. Prometheus
pictures his own life problem as it is done
by none other of his known works. He
1 Ridgeway, Origin of Tragedy.
50 CHRIST AND THE
had abundant opportunity to know the
deeper truth of what Annas meant so
falsely: "It is expedient that one should
die for the whole nation, and that the nation
perish not." The Greeks who came to
see Jesus should have recognized the con-
gruity of his words with their supreme
drama. "If I be lifted up," was his most
direct way of telling them that he would
most benefit the world by laying down his
life. Who may say that the Master did
not purposely voice thus his appeal to the
deeper Grecian religious consciousness, a
consciousness present not only in iEschylus
but in the Grecian religious mysteries?
Who can say that the men who heard that
day failed to understand? We must be
aware that the preparation for the gospel
was not carried on in Palestine alone, nor
was it alone in the singular providence of
the universal Roman rule, nor was a uni-
versal language the only contribution of
the Greek mind. The preparation for
Christ was deeper and more universal than
were even these. It is a matter not with-
out significance that the great preacher of
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 51
salvation by the cross was born and reared
under Grecian influences and with a Grecian
education, and that for the most part he
preached to the Grecian world. It was
no accident that his clear-seeing mind per-
ceived the vital interest of Christianity
where the more Jewish apostles were slow
in appreciation. Paul conquered the Greek
world with the message of the cross.
The Necessity of Reconciliation
a. on the part of prometheus
However striking the similarities and
coincidences may have seemed so far, these
will be deepened by a further consideration
of our problem. The one section of Pro-
metheus which is in our possession closes
with Prometheus engulfed in the debris of
crashing worlds. We are brought by dra-
matic climax to the intensest appreciation
of our problem, and there is no answer to
the question thus shouted into the dark.
We are not left, however, absolutely with-
out guidance. In the story of Io, iEschy-
lus has made Prometheus prophesy that
Io's descendant should eventually release
m CHRIST AND THE
him, and that God and man shall at last
be reconciled. We do know the title of
the last of the three dramas on Prometheus,
and that it was Prometheus Unbound.
We also know from his other work that
yEschylus was a believer in the moral qual-
ities of Zeus, and that he could not have
closed the tragedies with the impression
left by the only one we have. So we have,
after all, sufficient data to draw safe con-
clusions.
iEschylus was speaking to a public which
would have very quickly resented any
mark of impiety. The drama was given
at a religious festival, had for its object the
teaching of religion, and had to enter into
competition with others for the right of
presentation.
His mind would have been quick to
detect the necessity for reconciliation be-
tween God and man. All the elements
for such reconciliation had already been
introduced. All the forces, so little under-
stood, so mysterious, were moving toward
"the far-off divine event." The abused
and hapless Io, representing not "wisdom"
DRAMAS OP DOUBT 53
or "foresight," but just plain, suffering,
unrecognizing humanity, was suffering for
an end. By and by he who was born of
her should be the means of Prometheus 's
release. Heracles was to be a divine in-
carnation that should end the sufferings
and the impiety of Prometheus. What
wonder that early Christians caught up
quickly the analogy, or that the Grecians
so often identified Christ with their Her-
cules !
b. THE NECESSITY OF RECONCILIATION ON
THE PART OF ZEUS
In such a case as this iEschylus felt that
it was not sufficient that reconciliation
should be on one side. The mystery con-
tained in the inexplicable cruelties of Zeus
must be made clear. They must have some
eventual moral reason and they must be
for good to man. Perhaps, as one suggests, 1
Zeus, himself made perfect by suffering,
will relent of his hard reign, and at last,
far off, the mystery of evil will be solved.
When the infant Hercules lays low the
1 Campbell, Guide to Tragedy, p. 199.
54 CHRIST AND THE
vulture that has daily torn the vitals of
Prometheus, the agony of the ever-recurring
problem will be no more. "Foresight/'
the best attainment of human wisdom, was
sufficient only to intensify the problem.
In reconciliation and obedience to the will
of God alone lay the way to peace. God
seemed inhuman, there was no avoidance
of the issue. But, somewhere, when man
had the sufficient data of experience, and
had himself sufficiently progressed in moral
attainment, all would be made clear. The
heart thus fortressed throws itself back upon
the Everlasting Arms, as ^Eschylus makes
his chorus to sing in the Agamemnon:
"On him I cast my troublous care,
My only refuge from despair:
Weighing all else in him alone I find
Relief from this vain burden of the mind.
. . . Zeus, who prepared for men
The path of wisdom, binding fast
Learning to suffering."
What higher revelation than this could
there be for the Grecian mind, till Christ
should come? ^Eschylus had held by the
highest course that was possible to human
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 55
wisdom. He was the prophet of what
Christ fully revealed, for who could know,
either then or now, that God is not in-
human, except as he reads the truth in
the face of Christ? I think I see love and
goodness in its highest human expression
in the face that once bent above my cradle.
But even in that face, now glorified by
memory and the years, there was not per-
fect patience, nor perfect holiness. It is
not enough. I must find that human face
which is also the face of God before I can
know of a very truth that God is love.
And this I have in Christ. Any picture
of God that contrasts with the love of
Christ I instantly reject as spurious. No
man can confuse me on that point. What
was blind to iEschylus to me is certain —
my God is Eternal Love, because I have
seen his image in the face of Christ.
THE SECOND STEP
JOB— THE STRUGGLE WITH THE MYS-
TERY OF PAIN
CHAPTER V
"WHEN THE STORM OF DEATH ROARS
SWEEPING BY"
Job, the Drama of Doubt, Deepest in
Its Hold on Life
Of all the dramas that deal with doubt
it should occasion no surprise that the great-
est should spring from the Hebrew race.
The place of the book of Job in the Old
Testament canon is an eternal argument
for the right of a reverent skepticism. Its
place in the Bible is like the place of
Thomas, the questioner, in the discipleship
of Jesus. We do not often realize the debt
we owe to this rare book for its poetic,
singing lines. No poet of the ages is quoted
so commonly in daily life. The words of
Job have entered into the natural and
common speech of man wherever the Bible
is known. What holy grief does not at-
tempt to climb upward to the submission
59
GO CHRIST AND THE
of those lines, "The Lord gave, and the
Lord hath taken away"? Whose trials or
confusions have not been lightened by the
thought of that place, where "the wicked
cease from troubling; and the weary be
at rest"? What despair fails to remind
itself that "Man is born unto trouble, as
the sparks fly upward"? or that one's days
are "swifter than a weaver's shuttle"?
Who has not braced himself in sorrow with
Job's assurance,
" He knoweth the way that I take;
When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold"?
And so there are a hundred other lines
which are so interwoven in English speech
that we repeat them without knowing their
origin. What a testimony is this to the
vital value of the book!
The False Estimate of Happiness
While the problem of the book of Job is
very similar to that of Prometheus Bound,
there are certain very marked points of
difference. We can only guess what the
genius and spiritual insight of iEschylus
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 61
may have added to the solution of the
problem in those parts of the drama which
have been lost.
Prometheus is a hero. He withstands
a cruel and unjust god. But he is himself
a god, and therefore is immortal. He
knows his love and passion for men will
survive even if Zeus is dethroned and
cast to the scrap-heaps of time. His
heroism is a heroism against any possible
suffering.
Job is a greater hero. He stands up to
ask his question of life when to ask it is,
in the common thought, blasphemy that
may be immediately resented by a God who
can not only deepen his suffering, but can
take his life and perpetuate his suffering
in the life to come. His friends picture
God as sending material prosperity to the
righteous and adversity to the sinful. If
a man suffers, it is because God is angry
at his sins, and will get even. Job knows
that this theory does not square with life.
He too often sees the robber and the
plunderer blessed by prosperity. If God
has no deeper sense of righteousness than
m CHRIST AND THE
to call "getting on in the world" — robbing
by legal process — righteous, he will defy
him.
His friends confuse worldly happiness
with the smile of God. Their object of
worship is to be fortunate here and here-
after. They will be honest because it is the
best policy. They will subsidize their re-
ligion and make it pay both temporal and
eternal dividends. Job strikes through
the mists of this false philosophy and ir-
religious religion and presses toward the
heights. Happiness and sorrow are the
incidents of life. They come to the just
and the unjust alike. There are greater
things than happiness. To be true to his
own soul is better than to be happy. Here
he will rest. Here at last he attains the
plains of peace.
The Story and Problem
The opening scene of the drama is laid in
heaven. Among the sons of God comes the
Adversary, from walking to and fro in the
earth. He is the cynic who delights in
discovering and showing up the weaknesses
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 63
of human nature. He has many kin in
modern society, some of whom mistake their
cynicism for superior morality and religion.
He replies to God's satisfaction in Job
with a sneer that Job doesn't serve God for
nothing. This sneer of Satan gives the
motif of the drama — religion as a matter
of barter. It is the implication that no
men are religious save for what they hope
to get out of it. Satan is given his will
for the testing of Job.
Upon a day a servant comes running
to tell him that while his men were plowing
with the beasts in the field, suddenly all
have been carried away by mountain ban-
dits. While this one is yet speaking,
another comes to say that lightning has
fallen and consumed both the sheep and the
shepherds. His story is not yet told when
another hastens to say that the Chaldeans
have fallen upon the camels and have taken
them away. While this messenger tells
the story of disaster, lo! another, coming,
tells him that his sons and daughters lie
dead in the ruins of their home. So far
Job's answer to calamity is this, "The Lord
64 CHRIST AND THE
gave, and the Lord hath taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord."
But Satan is permitted a yet deeper test.
To leave no room for doubt as to his being
singled out for sorrow, Job is smitten with
leprosy, a disease that by the Oriental was
considered the supreme evidence of divine
displeasure. Outside every Eastern city
stood a great mound, where through cen-
turies the offal of the city had been borne.
Here in the dust, ashes, and filth is taken
the suffering Job, abhorred of men, cast off
by his wife, whose sardonic advice is to
"say good-by to God and die." Menials,
whose fathers he would not have trusted
with the dogs that guarded his flocks, pass
by mocking. His tale is on every lip.
It reaches at last far-away friends who have
known him in his days of greatness, and are
perchance drawn to visit him as much by
curiosity as by love. Far off, they discern
the solitary figure of their friend upon the
ash heap, but so changed and loathsome by
disease and neglect as to be unrecognizable.
In accordance with Oriental courtesy, they
wait through seven days and nights silent
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 65
till Job shall speak. Finally he begins to
curse the day of his birth and to lay the
depths of his sorrow before them. Their
answer was in strict keeping with the pre-
vailing theology. These calamities are the
testimony of God's judgment upon his past
sins. He is not the man they supposed him
to be. Job defies a God that would punish
without a trial and conviction, but they
are inexorable in their belief of his sin. At
last the real secret of their advocacy of this
inhuman God breaks upon him. They are
defending an unjust God because it is safest
to keep in with the Almighty. They dare
not question the traditional God for fear
they will lose their souls. They claim there
must be about him some sin which he has
concealed from everybody. The fact of
his suffering lets it out. Job can only reply
that his heart does not condemn him. But
his friends say that before the Infinite
Holiness lie sins of which the mortal is un-
conscious. To this view they are driven
by their adherence to the traditional theol-
ogy. They dare not face the deepest ques-
tions honestly for fear of offending God.
G6 CHRIST AND THE
They will defend the God of tradition even
when their convictions are against them.
This is Job's moment of heartbreak. He
can no longer trust his friends. The soli-
tary figure upon the ash heap is solitary
indeed. The last bond of mortal com-
panionship is snapped. He stands alone in
the universe with God.
God answers him out of the whirlwind.
As Elihu is repeating his pious platitudes
in a last effort to save the argument of the
three silenced friends, and to condemn Job,
a storm arises. At first, when it is far
away, he uses it to draw moral lessons to
Job's discomfiture. Soon he sees it to be
an approaching whirlwind. Terrified, he
cries out, "Has some one told God that I
was speaking?" The conviction of his
heart now told him that his pious words
about God had been false. The friends
crouch in terror of the lightning and the
fear of being swallowed up by the storm.
They are not themselves so holy but it
might strike them. Their theory of re-
ligion is exposed in all its emptiness by a
mere storm. It is the experience of selfish,
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 67
brutish Caliban told in its own inimitable
way.
What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird — or, yes,
There scuds His raven that has told Him all !
It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the
move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze —
A tree's head snaps — and there, there, there, there,
there
His thunder follows! Fool to gibe at Him!
Lo lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape. 1
No thunderstorm has power to add to the
depth of Job's troubles. Death would be
welcome to him. He alone of all that
company is undisturbed. His friends' ter-
ror refutes their respect for their theology.
But God has a word to say to Job. Out
of the sublimity of the storm he "hears
a deeper voice across the storm." He
learns how small is his place in the vastness
of the universe, to which his individual
1 Browning, Caliban on Setebos.
68 CHRIST AND THE
suffering is but as an ugly dream of the
night. God's ways are past finding out.
Trust on! He may never be happy, but
out of his pain he has come into God's Holy
Place. He finds that there is a peace
deeper than that which comes by material
happiness. His sense of righteousness and
devotion to the will of God is his peace
and his reward.
The close of the book is only incidental.
The return of material joys is not needed,
for Job has learned the secret of happiness.
It is added, rather, to keep the literary bal-
ance of the book and to furnish a satisfaction
for those who could not read its deeper
philosophy of life.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 69
CHAPTER VI
DEFENDING TRADITION AGAINST LIGHT
The Inadequate Theology of Job's Day
The prevailing theology of Job's day is
represented as being that God will reward
righteousness with temporal prosperity.
This was the teaching of Malachi, whose
prophecies had probably before this become
the vogue, and obedience to which had
not brought the anticipated rewards. He
urged the return of the people to tithing,
in order to insure the fertility of the field,
and perchance to avoid also the threatened
Edomite invasion. That, surely, was a bold
reaction which in the book of Job dared
affirm that material prosperity alone was
insufficient to indicate holiness of life.
How deeply this question and its resulting
theology must have been driven into the
national and individual life we may guess
from the pages of Israel's literature, il-
70 CHRIST AND THE
luminated by the pages of her history.
The days of religious faultlessness, after
the return from exile, and the rebuilding of
the temple, had not been met by prosperity.
She had never been more true to her faith,
more punctilious to the jot and tittle of
the law, than in the days of the Persian
ascendancy. Her theory of God led her
to believe that though Israel had suffered
for her sins in the past, now she had learned
her lesson and was to come into the summit
of her power. In the meantime the land
was harried by Edomite and Nabatean.
The more religious were the ones upon
whom the stroke fell heaviest. The old
thought that suffering was the wrath of
God on sin did not suffice for the solution
of her problem. Neither was there help
in the later theory that suffering is God's
warning to escape deeper judgment. We
may be sure these words were written near
some crisis in the national life when the
justification of God's ways had been
brought to a standstill, and men were left
horror-struck and lonely in the apparent
absence of a divine providence. The
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 71
moment had come when a large proportion
of the people could see that very often the
righteous man was made to suffer. Yea,
his very righteousness intensified the suffer-
ing, for he was troubled continually by the
flings of a troubled conscience, while his
conscienceless and ungodly neighbor reaped
his stolen gains undisturbed, and lived
anew, unrebuked, in the generations that
came after him. The question here pre-
sented was the existence of suffering when
one had lived up to the fullest light of
revelation granted him, and felt within his
heart that he had done the best he knew.
Even then the facts of life proved that in
specific cases there was suffering, that suf-
fering was long continued, and that its
purpose was not clear. Thus a theology
that had been sufficient for the earlier and
cruder days of Israel's experience was now
found to be broken down in the face of the
stress of life, and the great question re-
mained of how one should conduct his life
in the circumstances. How one could face
the facts and keep the faith was Job's
problem.
72 CHRIST AND THE
Adequate Only in Theory
The book admits that there is one class
to whom the old theory of temporal rewards
and punishments is sufficient. The theory
is perfectly adequate for the three friends
who are in comfortable circumstances, and
also for the youth, Elihu, with his limited
experience. It is easy to read the moral
and spiritual lessons of disaster to our
friends so long as we ourselves are com-
fortable. It gives a glow of superior wis-
dom, a feeling of superior management and
of superior traits of character, that we are
prospered, while the brother at our side
goes down in ruin. It is entirely human
to think, if he had directed his life according
to our wisdom, he would not now be suffer-
ing. So we fill up his cup of bitterness
with good advice, gratuitously and hope-
fully given. The truth is we do not under-
stand the problem. Its deeper thrust is
not brought home to us until the weapon of
pain stabs us wide awake. Our house of
complacency goes down about us in hope-
less wreck. Out of the ruins we try to
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 73
patch some theory that will enable us to go
on and will keep life from utter despair and
failure. Commonplaces that sounded to
us like the profoundest philosophies to
assuage others' woes we now find utterly
empty and inadequate. Many theories
of evil are adequate for our day of power
and prosperity. Whence comes he who
can answer the problem of our day of sor-
row? The minister comes and utters
his well-meaning words, the solemn-faced
friends speak conventionalities, but sorrow
is an indivisible thing — it is all our own.
It stalks like a specter through all our days.
It sits an unwelcome guest at our fireside
and makes the richest viands of our tables
tasteless. Theories may be adequate for
those who do not suffer. They are inade-
quate for him who suffers.
The Defense of Tradition Against the
Facts
The gap that yawned between Job and
his three friends was not then entirely
intellectual nor theological. Their theory
and Job's had been identical in the old
74 CHRIST AND THE
happy days. But the swift succession of
untoward events had put a great gulf
between them. They could not come to-
gether because they were not discussing
the question on the same plane. The
three friends and Elihu were arguing from
the standpoint of a traditional belief with-
out those deeper facts of experience which
alone could have made them conscious of
the failure of their theory. This is a situ-
ation that frequently recurs in theological
discussion. There is always barrenness and
futility when the intellectual settlement of
the problems of life is separated from actual
experience. This accounts for the fre-
quency with which the purposes of God are
hid from the wise and prudent and revealed
unto babes. So much must be said for the
immediate aspects of the situation. There
was this further complication: the friends
were defending a well-established theory.
This theory they made the mistake of
identifying with the eternal order of truth.
It was to them a divine and eternal reve-
lation, unchangeable, undevelopable, un-
answerable. Out of such a position two
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 75
ideas immediately arose into prominence.
If these theories were eternally revealed
truths, any man who, like Job, questioned
them was, to use their phrase, condemned
the moment he opened his mouth. In the
second place, any facts of nature or expe-
rience which contradicted their eternally
inspired theory must be denied or taken by
the shoulder and led quietly away where
they could be conveniently cast into the
outer darkness. If one is eternally sure
that he has the unadulterated, unmodifiable
truth, what need is there for light? what
place is there for further light?
All these facts took intense and dramatic
form in the dealing of the friends with Job.
Job held throughout his trial to two funda-
mentals which were like an anchor of his
soul and which moored him to God until
the storm was past. He refused to belie
the good testimony of his own conscience,
and he refused also to believe that God was
an unjust being whose ways with men
needed to be justified by a lie or by a denial
of the darkest facts of history or of life.
To his friends Job had been the human
76 CHRIST AND THE
ideal of righteous conduct. Even now in
his deep distress they appeal to that refuge
of a certain type of theology — imputed sin.
There must be a great deal of sin in him
which they could not see, of which Job
himself was not conscious, but which was
plain to the Eternal. There could be no
question of his wickedness, for, if so, why
did he suffer? The fact of Job's righteous-
ness is brought into square contradiction
with the traditional theory. To question
the traditional theory is impious. The
only thing left is to commit the sin against
common sense and deny the facts. Job
must be a wicked man.
Now, upholding eternally sure theories
against disagreeable facts has some very
patent weaknesses. For instance, it is an
evidence of unfaith and irreligion. Shut-
ting one's eyes to the facts, even for the
sake of God and the divine order of truth,
is not so much a matter of faith as it seems
to be. For if this is God's world, then his
manifestation of himself in the world of
the present cannot be denied. If, then, our
theory is found in contradiction to his
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 77
revelation of himself in the world of life
and of thought to-day, there is room for a
suspicion that what we thought eternal was
but a partial truth, needing revision. It
can never be necessary to deny the facts of
life and experience in order to defend the
truth. On the other hand, any supposed
truth that needs to be thus defended is
only a passing theory. Of one thing we
may be sure : we can lie down to our resting
beds in peace knowing full well that no
discovery can be made overnight that will
sweep away the truth. Yea, though our
resting bed be that of the long, long night,
we may know that Truth's candle will not
be blown out by any blast that can blow in
God's world. Some "will-o'-the-wisps" are
sure to go out, but the light of Truth never !
If a man is certain of truth, then he is never
called to defend it by questionable means.
Any fear on his part of its overthrow shows
that he is but half convinced himself, or
is so joined to his idols that he wishes his
theory to remain even though it prove to
be a lie. Such is an essentially irreligious
attitude of mind.
78 CHRIST AND THE
When Job made the discovery that his
friends were ready to defend their con-
ception of God by denying the facts, his
indignation knew no bounds. Hope lay
quenched within his heart. "Will ye lie
for God?" he cries. His scorn for such a
theory and such a God is without limit.
In such a light Job's doubt looks more like
faith in God than all the settled belief of
his friends. Job's world of experience was
too large to be accounted for by his friends'
theology. Their standpoint of upholding
God's justice by denying the facts of ex-
perience was insufficient for him, as it must
be for every great sufferer. To doubt our
insufficient and inadequate faith may be
an act of religion and the doorway into
larger faith.
Where Lies Faith?
Who, then, is the man of faith? Surely
not he who dares not trust his truth to the
bufferings of intellectual criticism and the
storms of human experience. Surely not
he who can commit mental dishonesty to
uphold the truth. To lie for God is the
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 79
most pernicious atheism. It denies the
power of truth to stand for itself and
eventually to command the minds of men.
In this book of doubt Job is not the doubter.
He is the only man of real faith. The
faith of the friends must inevitably fall
under such shocks of life as had come to
Job. Job said, "I will believe in a righteous
God against all appearances." He would
cling to the witness of his heart though
God were to slay him. His friends saw the
facts of life arrayed directly against the
conception of God in which they had been
brought up. Yet they insisted on belief
against the facts. Here the absence of
doubt was not the evidence of religion. It
was the evidence of inexperience, of shallow
thinking and of mental dishonesty. Who,
then, is the man of faith? It is the man
who, crushed by the hand of sorrow, has
looked into brassy and unanswering skies
all forsaken, yet in the darkness and numb-
ness of his heart has held fast to the God
whom he could no longer see, nor feel, nor
understand. Not he upon whose mental
calm has never blown the disturbing wind
80 CHRIST AND THE
of deeper questionings that will not be put
by, but he who has seen the faith of early
days lie shattered, and who, despite the
storm, holds true to the fundamental loyal-
ties. His house is founded on a rock.
"Defender of the Faith" may not, then,
be so high a title as the world has supposed.
Truth needs only to be spoken. Its de-
fense is never needed. The faith that men
defend is all too likely to be the passing
theory or "ism" of a day. Surely the
amount of noise that attends its procla-
mation is not to be taken as an evidence of
its eternity. "He shall not strive nor cry
... in the streets." His truth, nevertheless,
inarches on to the conquest of the world.
It can never be gainsaid, however plausible
the theories, however hoary the institutions,
that would bar its progress. The founda-
tion of God standeth sure on these two
principles : God's recognition of his children
in this world of time and the unanswer-
able argument of lives that have departed
from iniquity. If only we could be
grounded on these eternal facts, then we
had no need to be disturbed by changing
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 81
mental conceptions of this or any age.
No possible intellectual or scientific dis-
covery could have given us fear, and all
our religious energy might have been re-
leased for the bringing of Christ's kingdom
in the world of to-day and in the hearts of
our friends and neighbors.
82 CHRIST AND THE
CHAPTER VII
A RELIGION OF BARTER
The Religion Satan Sneered At
The crisis of the drama of Job comes
with the discovery on the part of Job that
his friends are ready to deny the facts of
his own integrity in order to save their
theology. The reason for this soon appears
to him. They do not intend to mince words
with one who is so evidently heretical. The
defense of the Almighty becomes a passion.
It is the only safe method to take with an
Almighty whose ways with man are so
incomprehensible and who punishes for the
secret thought of the heart.
One must not imagine that they were
without all feelings of sympathy for their
old-time friend. The contrast of former
prosperity with present abjectness was all
too pronounced. They must not, however,
let feelings of sympathy for his suffering
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 83
hold them back from speaking the disagree-
able truth. Job certainly must be very
wicked. His real wickedness must be in
proportion to his suffering. If, now, he
will only get after this secret sin which they
have been unable to discover and which he
disavows, all may yet be well.
"Who ever perished, being innocent?" r
says Eliphaz. Bildad follows up with the
declaration that doubtless Job's children
had received the just reward of their deeds,
and Job was spared because for him there
was some reserve of hope. Seek the Al-
mighty with pure hands and he will send
prosperity again.
Job replies out of the depth of a bitter
experience that he sees the earth given into
the hand of the wicked, while God permits
the faces of judges to be covered. So far
as the external appearance goes,
If I be wicked, woe unto me;
And if I be righteous, yet shall I not lift up my head.
What is the use of appealing to such a
God, a God of temporal rewards and punish-
ments, who rewards and punishes according
84 CHRIST AND THE
to these known facts? What use to appeal
to such a tribunal?
Zophar says, "Your sin is one of doc-
trine"—
If thou set thy heart aright, . . .
Surely then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot.
But Job, reasoning on their basis, replies,
"I cannot, however, get past the facts" —
"The tents of robbers prosper." They are
only lying about his integrity to save their
God of barter from the embarrassing ques-
tion, "What about the prosperity of the
wicked?"
Eliphaz is shocked by Job's impiety, but
declares the prosperity of the wicked is
temporary and external, and accompanied
by the greatest mental terrors.
Ah ! it is not, then, a question of external
rewards! But have they not been arguing
his wickedness from external punishments?
Bildad becomes hard, upbraiding his pre-
sumption of innocence from his own in-
ternal consciousness. The old argument
was for a moment in grave danger of cutting
off its own head. Job feels the injustice
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 85
of their words and cries out, "I know that
my Vindicator liveth."
Zophar interrupts, to bring him back to
the argument: 1
"The joy of the godless is for a moment."
"Wherefore then," says Job, "do the wicked live,
Become old, yea, wax mighty in power?
Their seed is established with them in their sight
Their houses are safe from fear."
Instead of being mentally disturbed they
gather comfort from their lack of fear of
Jehovah, "having consciences seared as
with an hot iron." "But," says Eliphaz,
"their prosperity is uncertain."
"How often is it blown away like chaff?"
is Job's appeal to fact.
"God layeth up his iniquity for his
children," says Bildad.
Job replies, "Let God punish the respon-
sible party, not the innocent."
And so the debate goes on in the attempt
to prove that it is altogether well to be
religious, if one is to enjoy the life that now
1 Following Professor Moulton's suggestion in the Modern
Reader's Bible.
86 CHRIST AND THE
is. Religion after this order is just the kind
at which Satan had sneered. It was just
the kind that Satan had declared Job's
was. If only nothing further were to be
gained in temporal reward, and only days
of unalleviable pain stretched out before
him, Job would be like all the rest of these
barter saints. Satan's only mistake was
in thinking the only religion practiced by
men was a religion of barter. He was not
wrong in his contempt for a religion that
did right for a reward. A religion that
loves righteousness chiefly because it de-
plores purging fires, a religion that loves
honesty because the gains that way are
largest, a religion that loves truth not for
its own sake but as the means of escaping
torment, is a religion that breaks down at
the moment it is most needed. It is sure
to fail when the divine smile seems with-
drawn. Instead of building character on
eternal principles of right and wrong, it
settles itself down to an external code of
conduct, a hollow category of external
exercises, which it hopes will bring eternal
blessedness. There can be no true nor
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 87
growing institution in which the religious
appeal is based preeminently upon the self-
ish interest, or where this interest long
remains predominant. The disciples again
and again sought to press this religion of
barter upon Jesus. His invariable reply
was that he could only promise them bitter
cups to drink, and fierce baptisms where-
with to be baptized. It was in proportion
as they forgot rewards in the doing of a
great and pressing task that their rewards
should be. The man who is good for a
consideration is like the child that is cour-
teous for a piece of candy. There is for
the moment the external appearance wished
for, but there is an eternal insufficiency
of character. The setting forth of the
appeal on this lower plane of being good
for a reward rather than for love of truth,
righteousness, and God has not been with-
out its disastrous results. In our midst
is the religious bargain-hunter who strives
continually to beat down the Almighty to
the smallest possible gifts and sacrifices that
may succeed in saving his soul. Grace has
little chance where the rewards of time and
88 CHRIST AND THE
sense are so carefully adjusted with the
Eternal. The words of Jesus fall with
startling rebuke across the ages: "Where
the treasure is there will the heart be
also."
Righteousness for Its Own Sake
It seems strange to us to have to listen
to such a message as this from across the
many centuries and to realize how slow
has been the growth toward the fact so
clearly recognized by Job — that righteous-
ness must be its own sufficient reward.
"Though he slay me, yet will I wait for
him," says Job. There was a truth danger-
ous to neglect in the declaration of the
older Calvinists of a willingness to be
damned for the glory of God. That
gruesome interpretation of God which re-
quired eternal torture for some, regardless
of the character of their lives, is well passed
as an impossible horror of the night. Who
is prepared to say that it is much inferior
to a conception of a God that saves by a
stroke of magic, such as are looking rather
toward a reward than toward the establish-
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 89
ment of a Godlike character, and the build-
ing of a kingdom of heaven among men?
We haven't gotten far toward the religion
of the Master until we have thrown over
the whole system of religious barter and
reached that happy place where we will do
right, "though goods and kindred go and
mortal life also," yea, even though to do
right means infinite loss, which, of course,
it ' cannot. That religion can scarcely
hope to rise above the trivial which expects
to sell a few poor vain and empty satisfac-
tions here and gain thereby an eternal
satisfaction of a similar kind.
To the Almighty the chief consideration
cannot be that we are rich or well clothed
or fare sumptuously every day. Neither
does he expect immortal souls to be satisfied
with that sort of program in the life to come.
The deepest tragedy of our mortal life
springs from the everlasting ennui of people
who have things — comforts, pleasures, hon-
ors, prides — instead of character. The note
of their wailing pessimism is abroad in the
land. We need but to ask a question out
of the depths of our own eternal spirits to
A
90 CHRIST AND THE
realize the emptiness of such satisfactions.
To have them prolonged for all eternity
would be to introduce man to a tedious
world made unending.
God has set us in the world to learn to
love him, to love him so much that we will
want to be like him. He desires in us, not
a passion to escape a divine wrath, but a
passion to be like Jesus Christ. Above all,
he would not have this end in self. He
wants us to have a passion for the coming
of the kingdom of Jesus Christ among men.
He wants every follower a flaming messenger
to declare the need of man for reconciliation
with the divine order. He gives no place
for stop or stay, no place to remember our
selfish gains or to count our selfish losses
until that kingdom has come in power.
We must be good because to be good is to
be like God. It is to be in full harmony
with God's world. It is to fulfill the highest
mission and possibility of one's own spirit.
It is to bring the greatest possible good to
the largest number. It is, in the end, to
make God dwell with men, and to bring
the day when sorrow and sighing shall flee
DRAMAS OF DOUBT' 91
away, injustice shall end, and man shall
have come into his kingdom.
A New Note in Christian Teaching
With such a conception of religion there
should come a new note in Christian teach-
ing. The appeal should be made no longer
to the spirit of barter, but to that which is
highest and deepest in man. Men need to
be approached not from the side of personal
profit, but from the side of eternal righteous-
ness and duty. To say that the personal-
profit appeal is the most winning appeal
is to slander humanity. Men need to be
told of their own responsibility for the
present evil conditions of the world. They
need to be made to see that to take the good
things of this life and to render inadequate
return to God is the act of a sneak. They
need to know that the wrath of God abides
upon all those who in selfish ease turn aside
from the divine order of self -surrender.
The wrath of God rests upon the children
of disobedience. They need to know that
there is no subterfuge of convention or
custom that can excuse them or allow them
92 CHRIST AND THE
to escape a righteous judgment upon any
careless living that allows a large portion
of society to rot in degradation, poverty,
and misery. They need to know that
society demands their best powers, that
only through the giving of those powers can
they be the best for those around them,
that only so can they be true to their own
best selves. We must hold fast to God
with the diligence with which the compass-
less mariner guides his course by an un-
failing star. Only so can man come into
the desired haven. The Church of Christ
has a most wonderful message yet to give,
and when she gives it generally she w^ill
come into a new day of power.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 93
CHAPTER VIII
THE PLAINS OF PEACE
The Things that Time and Sense Cannot
Restore
There is one fundamental position which
Job takes toward evil that is good for our
own aga to consider. He did not blink
at the hard aspects of the problem thrust
upon him. He did not fall into the ways
of modern pessimism by declaring that the
existence of evil makes empty the hope of a
righteous God. On the other hand, he
avoided that idiotic optimism which de-
clares that evil is an error of mortal mind.
His problem is fairly put: "God is good,
yet evil is real, this is the antithesis." 1
Job attempts no mental gymnastics nor
moral inconsistencies to hide from himself
the real problem.
Eliphaz tells him his righteousness is of
1 Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism, p. 18.
94 CHRIST AND THE
no particular moment to God. His sorrow
proves him a great sinner. Be converted
and happy. What is the use of trying to
maintain his cause? Accept appearances
and succumb to them! In that moment
Job cries out for God to judge him. His
mind is not to be stifled from the recog-
nition of the problem involved. Even
though the prosperity of the wicked is but
temporary, and even though shutting his
eyes and worshiping an unjust God would
bring the return of prosperity, who could
restore for him "the years that the locust
had eaten"? In a little while Sheol would
swallow all anyway. Job was coming to
the point where his friends' idea of happi-
ness, and the one that had once satisfied
him, was not large enough. There were
things that no turn of fortune could restore
to him. The return of flocks, and herds,
and servants, and greetings in the market,
and those high human honors of which he
had been deprived, would not bring happi-
ness. The darkness of his doubt was deep-
ening, but it was the darkness that precedes
the dawn. There was in his heart the
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 95
realization that his deepest blessings were
not, after all, material. There was the
broken love of a wife that was worse than
death. There were the silenced voices of
children, the memory of whose cradle-songs
wrung his heart. There were things that
were gone forever, and which no turn of
fortune could restore, for loss is loss, and
pain is bitter pain. What can the empty
years bring to fill again the dashed cup of
life? That is a superficial view that looks
on joy as if it were for sale in the market
place, or could be purchased with gold and
honors.
The Thing that Is Better than Happi-
ness
' 'There is in man a Higher than Love of
Happiness: he can do without Happiness,
and instead thereof find Blessedness." The
truth thus voiced by Carlyle 1 was the truth
to which Job was being brought on the
wings of his troubled experience. The
faithlessness of his wife, the infidelity of his
long-trusted friends, had removed from
1 Sartor Resartus, book ii, chap. ix.
96 CHRIST AND THE
him every human prop. There was nothing
left him in all the universe but God, and his
friends were trying to rob him of this last
resource, in order to save their theology.
No refuge of lies could become the haven
of his storm-beaten heart. Only a God of
truth and righteousness could save him
from ultimate despair. To this he clung
with desperation. To the witness of his
own inner soul he clung likewise, and at
last he learned the comfort of being at one
with God — the supreme blessedness of fel-
lowship with God. When he had arrived at
this Everlasting Yea, neither the disasters
of time, nor the breaking of his early love,
nor the false theories and heartlessness of
his friends could disturb him more. He
learned that there existed something better
than happiness, which was joy.
The whole misconception of the friends
sprang from a false ideal of joy. They
identified it with happiness, and happiness
is a variable quantity in a world of sin.
Joy may be permanent. Happiness is the
blessing of a very few. Joy may be the
possession of every man. Happiness is the
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 97
goal of small spirits; its search leads into
the shallows of life, and leaves man even-
tually disillusioned and despairing. Joy
grows with the years and the passing of
experience. Happiness, such as it is, is
dependent on the things of time and sense.
It grows with prosperity, attends upon
the friendly nod of men, but is hopelessly
eclipsed in the deeper passages of life. The
current of immortal spirits runs deeper
than the superficial circumstances of the
world. If it did not, man would be in no
wise superior to the passing show of the
world. Because he is or may be eternal,
he can rise to higher peace and become the
master of his soul only as happiness be-
comes incidental, and he has looked upon
the face of Joy.
The Partial Nature of Human
Experience
When at last Job had attained to the
point where he could meet God on the plane
of mutual relations, the Dreadful Voice
began to speak to him out of the whirlwind.
The things disclosed to him were these:
98 CHRIST AND THE
He had considered only the mystery of evil.
Happiness he had taken as the common lot
and expectation of man. But as he looked
about him with clearer vision he discovered
that joy was as difficult and as mysterious
as evil. Nature, with her singing birds
and lowing flocks, her seas lifting their
voice of eternal praise — this was an all but
universal chorus of joy. In this glad uni-
verse good and bad, deserving and undeserv-
ing were invited to partake, and God was
over all his works, rejoicing in them.
It is easy for us to project the shadow
of our sorrow over the universe, or from
our personal seclusion to talk of the sum
of human evil as if all the suffering of the
world could be computed like arithmetical
factors, and one could come to the positive
conclusion that the evil outweighs the good.
But the vanity of all such philosophizing
can be shown the moment we bring our
theory to the test of life. The world-
weary and despondent are very often the
best fed. The times when men would wel-
come death, however great their miseries,
would more than often be dispelled by its
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 99
recognized approach. Much of our pes-
simism is but the shadow cast by aimless-
ness and failure to enter upon one's way
of moral duty.
Another fact that was brought home to
Job with startling clearness by the Voice
out of the whirlwind was the relative in-
significance of his sorrow in the vast scheme
of things. This is a healthful thought for
any man who sits down to mourn his mis-
fortune. Had Job suffered? So had count-
less other men. He was but one unit in a
world that was too vast for computation.
Might it not be that in so vast a universe
he was repining over a single page in the
book of life, simply because, under his
human limitations, he had no means of
reading the other chapters of the book,
that revealed the plot and ending? Had
Job not been weak in this, that he had
yielded to sorrow? He had cursed the day
of his birth, as if the whole universe were
centered in his happiness, the whole world
clouded by his loss. In thus arraigning
the Eternal Goodness he had not taken a
worthy position, with his limited knowledge
100 CHRIST AND THE
and his own personal story but half read.
He had conducted himself more like a hire-
ling than like a hero. The first advice of
the Voice is "that he stand upon his feet
like a man." It was time to stop his wail-
ing like a fretful child, to begin to look his
sorrow in the face like a man, and to think
of himself in a world where there were others
with their hearts of sorrow.
Understanding Not Necessary to Peace
And then there came to him out of the
storm this deeper consciousness, that under-
standing was not essential to peace. Here
had been a weakness not only of his friends,
but a weakness that attends all attempt
to meet the mystery of suffering with argu-
ment. Deep sorrow goes beyond the pos-
sibility of any philosophy to explain. Yet,
though it may never be intellectually dis-
cerned, it is not a problem beyond solution.
If Job's friends had been allies of truth, and
possessed of the deepest mental insight,
their efforts would have been but measur-
ably more successful than they were. It
is not given to you or me to understand
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 101
our sorrow. We cannot understand why
our dearest should have been taken, nor
why the home of happiness should be broken
when there are so many that face the con-
stant tragedy of lovelessness — why sacrifice
should be met with hate. We cannot
understand.
Doubt Not to be Solved Intellectu-
ally — to Have God Is Enough
The reason for this is not far to see.
Paradoxical as it may seem, real doubt is
not, cannot be, solved intellectually, but
only by an inner experience of truth. One
can with all happiness burned out yet learn
to trust, to serve, to be faithful, to find his
joy in a new world of sympathy. When,
upon his ash heap, lonely and disconsolate,
this truth breaks in upon him, Job cries out,
"I have heard of thee with the hearing
of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee."
Within his heart there blossomed a great
joy. His soul had arisen at last from the
ashes of ruin. He had attained the plains
of peace. In the presence of the living God
he had the best that life could give; without
102 CHRIST AND THE
him every pleasure, every fullness was but
vanity. We can now understand the claim
that the fundamental thought of the book
is "the indestructible personal relationship
between God and the individual." 1
Perhaps we ought not to close our con-
sideration of this greatest poem of literature
without a summing up of the ground gained.
The book teaches that no unworthy con-
ception of God, however deeply engraved
in custom, belief, habit, or prejudice, can
remain. Only that which makes for right-
eousness makes for permanence. So also
no course of human action, no religion which
is not founded on this conception, can
endure the stress of actual life. No com-
fort to the soul can permanently come from
a denial of pain, or of the reality of the
devastations of the years. But above all
passing joys one may rise into Joy. For
confirmation of this truth we need only to
recall the experience of One named the
Man of Sorrows. In the last hour of his
life there came what seems like a moment
of suspense and doubt. The unforgotten
1 Bunsen, God in History, vol. i, p. 183.
DBAMAS OF DOUBT 103
cry of the ages was this: "Why hast thou
forsaken me?" Happiness was far away —
happiness of mind or body. But soon there
came another word — "Into Thy hands . . .
my spirit." Out of the pain there came the
peace of his Father's will.
The message of Job may be read in the
light of the experience of Jesus. It is a
living message, not an intellectual one.
Trust on, trust on "till morning break and
the shadows flee away."
THE THIRD STEP
HAMLET— THE STRUGGLE WITH THE
PROBLEM OF AN OUTRAGED
MORAL ORDER
CHAPTER IX
THE HEART OF TRAGEDY— PRACTICAL
DOUBT
Hamlet's a Practical Doubt
The doubt of Prometheus sprang from a
view of God that had by the march of
events, the lesson of history, become no
longer tenable. That doubt was answered
by the appeal to time as able to show an
eventual reconciliation in which all would
be made plain. The doubt of Job sprang
out of the personal suffering of the indi-
vidual, the finding and explanation of per-
sonal destiny. This was met by an appeal
to the probability that a perfect experience
— the complete view of life — would bring
the solution of what from the incomplete
human standpoint must seem irreconcilable
contradiction. The doubt of Hamlet is of
another order and one more closely akin
to the pessimism of our own age. It arose
107
108 CHRIST AND THE
from arrested impulses to moral action,
which issued in a sense of the futility of life
as over against its tasks. Hamlet's doubt
was practical doubt.
The Story and Problem
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is called from
his studies at the University of Wittenberg
by the sudden death of his father, the king.
His uncle succeeds to the throne, and within
two months becomes the husband of his
late brother's queen. This hasty marriage
arouses in Hamlet the suspicion of foul
play in his father's death. This suspicion
is confirmed by the appearance of his
father's ghost and by the attitude of the
guilty king and queen when a strolling band
of actors presents a similar situation in
the play which he facetiously names "The
Mouse-trap."
When the truth of the situation is made
clear to him, the one task thrust upon him
is to discover and expose the crime. In
this he is met by certain almost insuperable
obstacles — the power of the king, the ease
with which he can secure parties to his
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 109
crimes, the unfaithfulness of the queen-
mother, the weak falsity of Ophelia, the
almost complete lack of those who will lend
support. Added to all this is an evil heart
of unbelief in Hamlet himself, a propensity
to soliloquize when most he should act.
Rather than directing action he is driven
to action only by the almost irresistible
current of events. In the end he becomes
so entangled in the network of intrigue and
evil that he loses his own life and draws in
the train of ruin guilty and innocent alike.
At last the wrong is righted by accident
rather than by intent. Hamlet finds his
feeble impulse seconded by that Nemesis
in the heart of evil by which it works its
own destruction.
The heart of Hamlet's tragedy lay in the
fact that his life did not follow the truth
which his mind affirmed. He was placed
over against circumstances to which he
should have risen superior, but which, on
the other hand, made him their servant.
He had faith enough in the technical sense.
There was no questioning of the creed. He
would not slay the fratricide at his prayers,
110 CHRIST AND THE
lest the magic of the church should save the
hardened criminal. In a formal way no
fault could have been found with his mental
beliefs. His doubt was of that practical
kind which doubts the divine hand in the
present action.
The Unethical Character of Intel-
lectual Belief
In this Shakespeare has drawn the picture
truly. There is a sense in which men are
not responsible for their convictions. Any
man who seeks the illumination of the truth-
is bound to believe what is forced upon him
as being true. He has no option to say,
"Thus far I will accept what appears truth,
and no farther." For the man who can
commit such a sin against his own indi-
viduality to save any preconceived notion
or traditional point of view God reserves a
special judgment of wrath. He blinds him
— puts out his intellectual eyes — that
"seeing" he may "see, and shall not per-
ceive." It becomes an act of folly, then,
to assail men for their intellectual beliefs,
even though they be in error. Their par-
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 111
ticular viewpoint, and ours as well, may be
due to the bias of prejudice, training,
temperament, predisposition. Opinions
spring both from knowledge and from
ignorance. There are only two questions
that we have a right to ask: one is, "Does
this opinion square with what we know of
life?", and, second, "What is its practical
utility to make men better?"
In the past the chief consideration has
been given to the theoretical or intellectual
doubter. When we speak the words "skep-
ticism," "unbelief," "infidelity," we refer
invariably to men who fail to solve intel-
lectual problems. By these terms we mean
men whose chief difficulty is with the creed,
or with the miracles, or in the interpretation
of the being or person of God. In this we
make a disastrous mistake. By it we often
shut out the purest souls and the most
earnest seekers after God, while we keep
within the pale some who either have never
thought deeply or are willing to commit
mental dishonesty for a consideration. In-
tellectual clearness and faith are very
important factors in a Christian life, but
112 CHRIST AND THE
they are by no means the most impor-
tant. Intellectual honesty, on the other
hand, is closely akin to spiritual power,
and cannot be divorced from it. He who
to-day holds an honest opinion sincerely
may be only a pilgrim of truth on the way to
spiritual power. If men had to wait until
they were intellectually clear on all the
points of doctrine before surrendering their
lives to the perfect service which is freedom,
this would be a most unfortunate world,
and none could be saved. Intellectual
doubts are not the necessary evidences of
impiety. We need continually to remind
ourselves of the unethical character of a
great deal of the intellectual doubt that for
a period sways the minds of men. When
certain facts arise above the horizon of con-
viction, the man must yield himself to them
so far as they go, or until further reflection
and experience show them to be unworthy.
But there could be no coming to the truth
at all if men were never to trust themselves
forth upon the perilous sea of new ideas and
discoveries.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 113
The Insidious Nature of Practical
Doubt
We need to strike a clearer note upon
the insidious character of practical doubt.
There are great hosts of people who, like
Hamlet, take comfort from seeing the truth,
but who likewise fail to come to a knowledge
of the truth through actual experience.
Theoretical unbelief, if honestly held, and
with open mind toward any new light that
may come, is not a matter over which to
waste much care. There is an unbelief,
however, that is fatal; that is the unbelief
which displays itself by departing from the
living God. It is insidious in this, that it is
often the sin of the man who is without
intellectual doubt, and who therefore
dreams himself secure in the faith. His
intensity with respect to intellectual belief
is often in direct proportion to his de-
parture from living faith.
A man once confessed that in a certain
period of his life he had been not only
wicked but vile in his wickedness. He
added to the recital that from which he
114 CHRIST AND THE
took great comfort: In the midst of all his
wickedness he had never lost his faith.
Such a definition of faith was surely in need
of revision. However much we may dislike
to admit it, what we intellectually believe
is no particular religious credit to us. Our
faith in Christ will be measured exactly by
the fruits of Christ that appear in us. By
that supreme test we must stand or fall.
Hamlet was a practical doubter, though a
theoretical believer. He saw his duty and
took great comfort from seeing it. He
knew there was a grievous wrong to right.
He deplored the fact that he was set in the
whirlpool of action. He tried to appease
the conscience within him by upbraiding
the faithless queen, by unmasking the
murderous king, by insulting the character-
less Ophelia, and by the accidental killing
of the doddering Polonius. He was forever
delaying to face things as they were, and
to make insistent demands upon life. He
went at his task with the moral cowardice
that decided the parson not to attack the
liquor interests which were debauching
the life of his village because he was bent
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 115
upon character-building and the spiritual
care of his people. The rampant unbelief
of the intellectual scoffer may slay its thou-
sands, but this practical sort of unbelief
slays its tens of thousands.
The Modern Lesson in Hamlet's
Problem
Thus the heart of Hamlet's tragedy may
be seen to be close to the tragedy of modern
life. This tragedy is now being realized
through wide circles. The terrible con-
tradiction of which men are becoming con-
scious in modern life is the possibility of
being satisfied with a purely external or
intellectual form of religion. This was a
question which was likewise preeminent
in Shakespeare's own age. We may state
with great positiveness our beliefs in the
tenets of Christian faith, but what if we
take our religion out in the lazy comfort
of saying it? What if our age of supposed
culture, religion, intellectual attainment,
shall for the most part stand idly by and
see the tides of immorality and crime flow
unchecked? What answer is the age to
116 CHRIST AND THE
make to the cry of the benighted childhood
of the tenements? Of what use is our cul-
ture while men and women lose their footing
and drop to ruin through the savage com-
petitions of our commercial age? What
gift can we put into the hand of the Al-
mighty which shall compensate him for
those blasting inequalities that mar our
civilization? What if we say we believe
in Jesus Christ, and in a million toiling
marts neglect the children of his love, and
thus crucify him afresh in this modern age
and put him to an open shame? We, like
Hamlet, are set upon times which it is our
business to put right. We may long for
the good old days of intellectual ease, if
there were any, but we are in the midst of
our clamorous problem, and in how we
meet it or neglect it is our rise or fall.
Practical unbelief is more fatal, more damn-
ing in its results than any other. Intel-
lectual unbelief is important only in this,
that when men become parties to it, holding
it against light, it leads to the darker un-
belief of practice. But this is likewise the
end of that faith which testifies, "Lord,
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 117
Lord," but does not the will of God. Prac-
tical unbelief is the more insidious in that
it can exist alongside of a calm, self-con-
tented mind and can keep house with a so-
called religious ecstasy.
The Divine Nemesis
It will be a most unhappy experience for
our age if, like Hamlet, instead of directing
our course, we shall be compelled to blunder
into its solution. In the heart of every
evil custom and of every human wrong the
Almighty has placed the elements of its
own undoing. This is "the heart of good
in all things evil" by which God brings
his day of eventual righteousness.
One has suggested 1 that Hamlet's hes-
itancy arose from extreme conscientious-
ness in the midst of the unconscientious.
This is in part true. The task was thrust
upon him because of all that company about
the court he was the one who was aware of
the moral issues involved. To become
conscious of moral issues is to be burdened
Ford, Shakespeare's Hamlet: A New Theory.
118 CHRIST AND THE
with a task. To neglect that task is to
suffer moral shipwreck.
Upon this age, as upon no other, has come
the consciousness of an existing moral and
social disorder. The problem will be settled
in God's good time. No unrighteousness
can permanently remain. Let us utter
the fervent hope that our age may be saved
from the tragedy that ever attends the
prevalence of practical doubt.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 119
CHAPTER X
THE TASK BEYOND THE POWERS
The Stupendous Character of Ham-
let's Task
Goethe 1 has called attention to the
stupendous character of the task that was
thrust upon Hamlet by circumstance. "It
is quite clear to me," he says, "that what
Shakespeare wished to portray was this:
a great task imposed upon a soul which
was incompetent to perform that task." 2
The first shock to Hamlet was the loss
of his father in the vigor and strength of his
manhood. Then in quick succession came
the loss of his kingdom, the discovery of the
real character of his uncle, and, greatest
of all, the loss of love and respect for his
mother. Her complicity in the murder
of his father, her incestuous union with the
dead husband's brother, the utter lack of
1 Goethe, On Shakespeare, p. 30. 2 Id., p. 31.
120 CHRIST AND THE
restraint, even of the appearance of decency,
suddenly took out of his life the natural
props and assurances so necessary to the
peace of youth. Wherever he turned he
found himself forced back by the deep-
lying intrigue and falsity that had become
the very atmosphere of the court. Apart
from Horatio, there was no friend he could
trust. The wicked king, by reason of
wickedness and strength, seemed to possess
every power over him, being able to bribe
every friend and to accomplish through
the hands of others what he would not dare
to do with his own hands. There was the
absence of those proofs of the king's guilt
which would enable him to secure redress
in legal ways. The king had the advantage
which is always possessed by the unscrupu-
lous in power. Even the heartbreak of a
false mother might have been partially
atoned for if Ophelia had proved herself a
true woman. But here again fate was
against him. Ophelia was the child of the
court, and strong characters could not grow
up in the midst of such surroundings. The
innocence of immoral surroundings can be
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 121
scarcely better than unmoral. She could
not discover in the life of her father and of
the court that adherence to moral principles
that would have given her character. It
was because, though innocent, she was
characterless that she was the easy dupe
of the influences around her which were
working for the undoing of her lover. It
was because of this lack of character, which
became more and more evident with the
advent of every crisis in affairs, that Hamlet
became estranged from her. He was cast
upon the deepest days of his life. He was
surrounded by a living tragedy. She who
should have been his helpmate had been
so trained that she could not even realize
the forces that were driving his life forward
as by the Furies. It was useless to upbraid
Hamlet for his coarseness and lack of re-
finement toward her. It was Shakespeare's
way of telling us that there were not in
Ophelia those qualities which under the
trying stress of the situation could command
Hamlet's respect. Ophelia was the last
human refuge of Hamlet's life, save only
the old college mate, Horatio. Everything
m CHRIST AND THE
was against him. To rectify the moral
disorder of the court of Denmark demanded
that he suppress all the finer feelings of
his life, say good-by to the love of mother,
sweetheart, thronging memories of the past,
and literally "take up arms against a sea
of troubles" in the full consciousness of out-
ward failure and misunderstanding. He
could scarcely make the first move without
the forfeit of his life, and even though he
gave his life, there would seem to be no
promise that he would succeed in reforming
the conditions of the court. He would
be simply the disagreeable reformer put
out of the way, whose absence meant the
securer reign of evil. "To act and to love
are the twin functions of the human soul." 1
These functions were denied to Hamlet
by circumstance, and these have been
well said to have lain at the heart of his
tragedy and despair. He was called to
great tasks and called without that surety
of confidence which was necessary if he
were to meet them greatly. A man of
letters, of retiring disposition, a lover of
1 Pavid Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despair, p. 32.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 123
peace and order, of poetic and dreamy
temperament, his very learning had robbed
him of the certainties that would have been
strength to a less cultured man. Over his
life was blown the bugle of desperate war,
the demand of an overwhelming task, and
the contest threatened to be won or lost
before he could select the battleground
of action. At every point in this task he
was hurled back defeated because of his
own uncertainty of mind and hesitancy of
action. Where he should have had the
bulwark of a strong love he was likewise
disappointed. This fact added to his prob-
lem and increased his despair.
The Pessimism of Modern Life Like
that of Hamlet
Because we are trying to get at the prob-
lem of despair from the modern standpoint
I cannot pass without calling attention to
the close analogy of this despair of Hamlet
with that of the present day. This is
especially pronounced in the industrial and
business life of our age. Good men are con-
versant with the inequalities that oppress
124 CHRIST AND THE
society. They are not unaware of the moral
issues at stake. But they are struck
through with hopelessness at a task which
seems to be beyond their powers. If they
do in business and industry the things that
they feel would be the plain command of
the spirit of the Master, they think they
would be sounding their own death knell.
They would hasten to ameliorate the con-
dition of their employees but for the fact
that the competition of the unrighteous
would soon drive them altogether from the
field. A host of men do not anxiously
desire an unjust share of the rewards of
industry, and would be satisfied if con-
ditions could be brought about that would
insure fair profits to all. But immediately
there arise before them the seemingly in-
superable conditions of environment. They
are like Hamlet, the victims of a system
they do not love, and which they have not
the moral strength to oppose.
The feeling of their being cast up against
a problem that seems beyond practical
solution, which so far has been solved only
in the vagaries of imagination, is in large
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 125
part responsible for the pessimism of mqdern
life. This pessimistic note, present with
many of the best, is caught up by the
avaricious and the wicked, and is made as
a watch-cry of truth for the lowest elements
of society. All business is denounced as
being dishonest — as necessarily dishonest —
and this is made the excuse for every iniq-
uity. The political world is looked upon
as the field for public exploitation for the
benefit of the individual, and from this
watch-cry the ward heeler gathers new
effrontery. In the social world it is the
same. Social inequalities are declared to
be beyond remedy, wherefore a considerable
portion of society gives itself over to cheap
pleasure and lewdness that only accentuate
the tragic and unholy inequalities of the
present social state. Such is the pessimism
of the present, and a little consideration
will show how close of kin it is with that
which filled the soul of the hapless Hamlet.
It is not without significance that Shake-
speare represents Hamlet to be secure by
his uncle's choice and favor in the succession
to the throne. He has only to accommodate
126 CHRIST AND THE
himself to things as they are. He has only
to soothe the pangs of conscience with the
thought that the things that need to be
remedied are beyond his power to change,
and that therefore he cannot be held re-
sponsible. He has only to submit quietly
to things as they are and all desired happi-
ness — the throne, Ophelia, and a chance
in coming years to reform the rotten court —
will be his. It was at this point that Ham-
let managed to save the last vestige of
his moral self-respect. He would not sub-
mit to receive the recompense of evil; and
this is why, in spite of all weakness and
indecision, we love him. He would not
consent to the murder of his soul for the
sake of gain. There is scarcely a thinking
man or woman in modern life who will not
sense at once the application of this situation
to our problems. How shall we cease to be
partakers by profit in the wrongs of society,
the cruel injustices that are forced upon
helpless children, women, and men? This
is the disconcerting question of our age.
It is like the question which Hamlet
faced.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 127
Moral Paralysis in the Face of Tasks
"Were it not that the contradictions of
life had found ally within Hamlet himself,
they could not have overborne him thus.
'We are always accomplices in the evils
that oppress us.' This inner reply, as it
may be called, to outward questionings,
is best seen in relation to that 'pale cast of
thought' traditionally associated with our
hero. . . . His vivid realization of the
absolute value, yet comparative ineffective-
ness of man, constitutes his affinity for the
evil without, and renders him the more easy
prey to adverse circumstances. His irony
is of the highest importance in that it
springs from his central being, and almost
invariably sways him when in society. In
solitude his candor with himself borders
upon the awful. When he soliloquizes he
reveals not a little of that knowledge which
is the root of his bitterness." 1
It was just this inner contradiction that
was the cause of the moral and spiritual
paralysis of Hamlet in the face of his tasks.
1 Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism, pp. 104, 105.
128 CHRIST AND THE
He was not clear in his own mind regarding
which way duty lay. He allowed himself
to be too largely influenced by the fact that
he had no show of success. He had not
risen to the higher plane of unquestioning
sacrifice where alone could have been found
the solution of his problem. He was the
victim of circumstances in this deeper sense,
that at no point had he the necessary moral
courage to rise superior to them. We are
so constituted that God does not put great
weapons in our hands to fight the world
until we have begun to make use of the
weapons already given. This is the secret
of Jesus's life. So small a gap is there be-
tween utter failure and great success. Had
he rejected that apparent setting of all
hopes, the cross, he would not have been
crowned with the glory and honor of the
ages. Any refusal to do the nearest and
most obvious duty, because it appears to
offer no ultimate solution, or because it
promises to put an end to all effort, is a
compromise with the moral nature which
brings swift decay and results in the paraly-
sis of the moral powers.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 129
The Sense of God in the Moral Order
The inner contradictions of Hamlet's
heart could have been solved by the presence
of one element which was lacking. His
great lack was a lack of belief in the moral
order of the universe, and this not in its
abstract aspect alone. He was wanting
in a firm sense of that divine Righteousness
through the ages moving on, which would
bring to naught every evil device. He was
further unsure of its application to the
society of his age. He believed too much
in the evil of his world, he rated too highly
the power of the wicked king, he believed
too much in the power of that king to con-
trol the court and the kingdom. No man
can be strong and fearless against the evils
of society who does not realize the inherent
weakness of evil and the inherent goodness
of men. A Hamlet of this sort would have
been a hero and a redeemer. The high
ramparts of wrong, in spite of all appear-
ances and reports to the contrary, are
exceedingly vulnerable to the shafts of a
disinterested righteousness. This fact of
130 CHRIST AND THE
the moral order of the world was too much
for Hamlet's faith. In such a situation
as his the only salvation was a keen sense of
the overruling power of the Almighty, and
in this he was lacking. This was the source
of his weakness and his tragedy. No age
nor time can conquer its weaknesses nor
set its moral house in order which is wanting
in this practical sense of God. It was of
this consciousness that Lowell sang in words
that stirred the heart of a nation to its
depth :
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on
the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind
the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch
above his own.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 131
CHAPTER XI
THE UNLIT LAMP AND THE UNGIRT LOIN
The Harvest of Irresolution
In "The Statue and the Bust" Browning
has represented the great sin of two people
as not so much a contemplated crime as
the wasting and throwing away of life by
reason of such continued contemplation:
The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.
The preeminent sin of Hamlet was the
sin of "the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin."
The harvest of such an irresolution is often
as grievous as the harvest of sin. Some-
times in its power to involve others it be-
comes even more grievous. It is a truth of
which we should assure ourselves that in
morals and religion to will feebly is often as
disastrous as not to will at all. Especially
does this become true in times of change
ISt CHRIST AND THE
and action. The open enemy of righteous-
ness is limited in his power for evil by the
very knowledge which men possess of his
purposes. The weak-willed friend of right-
eousness intrusted with great issues, by
reason of a false confidence imposed upon
his good nature, often defeats by an in-
active weakness measures that an avowed
evil could not defeat. This element is too
often overlooked in life. We often give
ourselves the full credit of half-formed
intentions that have no hold on life. We
intend to be good, therefore we call our-
selves good. We intend to be holy, there-
fore we call ourselves holy. We intend to
serve God, to be unselfish, to surrender our
lives to the cause of humanity, and in-
stantly puff ourselves up with pride at our
good intentions. Too often it passes in the
place of righteousness. 'Tis true that only
a shallow mind ean be thus easily pleased
with mere dreams, but there are many shal-
low minds among fallible human beings.
The message of religious institutions has
too often been directed to the pleasure and
comfort of such. It is the danger whenever
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 133
religious or moral duties become either
predominantly formal or emotional or in-
tellectual. The good intentions that filled
the hours of Hamlet's wakefulness did not
particularly change the harvest of evil which
sprang from his inaction.
The killing of the king at his prayers,
in the beginning of the play, would at least
have cast the moral issue before the court,
and would have given the opportunity to
unmask the evildoer. To live alongside
of it allowed it to fester and grow till
Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Rosencranz and
Guildenstern were corrupted and drawn into
the common ruin with him. What might
have been a short and quickly passed issue
between himself and the king lengthened
out until it involved the whole court. This
is the eternal result of temporizing with evil.
Unless denounced it sends its poison through
the whole body.
The Common Ruin of Guilty and
Innocent
This formed not a small part of Hamlet's
pessimism and difficulty. On every side,
134 CHRIST AND THE
and daily, it was given him to witness the
fruitage of his cowardly inaction. First
it was Polonius, then Rosencranz and
Guildenstern, then Ophelia whose going
brought the problem home with an intensi-
fied force to his sensitive soul.
This problem arising from the social
dependence of individuals is not only one
of the great elements of Hamlet's pessim-
ism; it is largely accountable for that of our
age. Why the innocent should be involved
in the ruin of the guilty is the question which,
taken in the abstract, is past finding out.
There is no use to criticize Shakespeare for
Ophelia's unjust doom. It is a charge not
against Shakespeare, but against life. Un-
less we can find some solution for it, or at
least can lift it into a light where solution
may be seen to be possible, we shall wander
as did Hamlet, lost in the maze of things
as they are. In the light of this fact it
will be seen that it is not enough for us to
maintain an unmoral or an unreligious
attitude toward society. Neither is it
sufficient for us to be mildly moral or mildly
religious. Such an attempt has much the
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 135
force of an effort to be partially virtuous.
We cannot say what ruin we shall bring not
only upon ourselves but also upon society
and those whose lives we touch. The unlit
lamp may create a darkness that shall
blind many souls. The ungirt loin may
keep back in a great host the coming of the
kingdom. To let the moral questions of
our age go unanswered, to put our lives
but mildly or not at all into the struggle
for the reign of righteousness, to allow the
institutions that make for righteousness to
go unsupported by us, because of anxiety
for this world's gains, is to be not so far
removed from those actively engaged in the
spread of evil. Those whom Jesus con-
demned in the parable of the last judgment
were not accused of active evil, but only
of refraining from active good. This is
the constant theme of the gospel. The
outer darkness is no less dark by reason of
unfulfilled good intentions. The doom is
the same: "Depart from me, ye workers of
iniquity."
136 CHRIST AND THE
Indifference to Moral Questions
Inexcusable
There can be no employment of life of
sufficient importance to excuse any man
from taking his moral stand. His intel-
lectual attitudes, his prejudices, his dis-
covery of inconsistencies in the institutions
of reform — none of these form an adequate
excuse for inaction. Had Hamlet struck
his blow like a man instead of weighing
forever, and balancing the possibilities be-
tween good and bad, he might have saved
his world, his kingdom, and his soul.
To Lose the Soul — What Does It Mean?
What may it mean, then, to lose one's
soul? This was a question which much
concerned Hamlet. How did he work out
the answer in life? He was held back from
the way of duty by an extreme conscien-
tiousness which feared to offend the higher
powers. At the same time this conscien-
tiousness erred by reason of being more
formal and superficial than deep-principled.
His conscience was one that was largely the
product of his times. We may discover
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 137
some day that it is not sufficient to ask
whether a man is conscientious. It is
pertinent to ask what is the standard of
his conscience? Is it bent on trifles, the
weighing of mint, anise, and cummin? Is
it lacking in human breadth and sympathy?
Is it dominated by selfishness? Is it the
reflex of a petty life and small interests?
Is it born out of a low stage of civilization?
Is it the product of an impartial culture?
The wildest orgies, the utmost atrocities of
history have been committed in the name
of conscience. Persecuting flames that
denied the very nature of God, refinements
of cruelty have been constantly committed
in all good conscience. In good conscience
Paul held the garments of those who stoned
the sainted Stephen. In good conscience
he breathed out threatenings against the
saints in Judsea and abroad. When learn-
ing what a man's conscience may or may
not permit him to do, it is important to
inquire what his standard of righteousness
is. And in attempting to enforce our own
conscience on others we should look nar-
rowly to our own ways.
138 CHRIST AND THE
One may blind and deaden his conscience
to the real moral issues of life to such extent
that, seeming to pursue the way of life, he
follows the way of death. And this blind-
ness and indifference to the moral outcome
of one's own life and day, however much it
may be attended by a superficial conscience
— this blindness and indifference is the loss
of the soul. To take no side in the face of
moral tasks, and to persist, is to kill the soul
beyond the repair of magic of church, or
priest, or doctrine of truth.
Hamlet's Salvation in the Existence
of a Moral Order
Hamlet's salvation comes late. The rea-
son for his terrible failure is, as before
pointed out, lack of confidence in the moral
order of the world. At the same time that
he has been procrastinating and wondering
what he shall do, a Divine Nemesis has been
at work bringing the solution. The very
excess of wickedness is making way for the
coming of a better order. The unchecked
king and the wicked queen are their own
undoing. The wicked and unworthy
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 139
dynasty fills its cup of wrath and is blotted
out of existence. This end Hamlet has had
but little part in preparing. It has been
more in the capacity of a "puppet of God"
than by his own volition. His soul is
saved from utter ruin only by the fact of
his abhorrence of evil and his refusal to
be content with it. In that last action
at the grave of Ophelia, though in passion,
the pent up impulses of the soul find release,
and there breaks upon his astonished vision
in the approach of Fortinbras with his
army across the plain, the truth — of which
to that moment he had been skeptical —
that God was in his world working good out
of evil and turning to good the weak vacil-
lations of one who, though feeble in action,
would not wrong the heart of truth. He
bequeaths to Rosencranz the task which
has been too much for him. There had
been so much to do, so little done. Upon
Rosencranz must fall the friendly duty of
making clear to the world, out of all the
surrounding confusions, the purity of Ham-
let's intentions, and then, "The rest is
silence."
THE FOURTH STEP
FAUST— THE STRUGGLE WITH THE
PROBLEM OF REDEMPTION
CHAPTER XII
A PROBLEM OF UNPARDONABLE SIN
The Difficulty of Analysis of Goethe's
Work
If we were setting out to scale one of the
White Hills, we should study the map,
locate the trails, put up our lunch, and
a few hours of tramping would bring us
to any desired point. If we were trying
for the summit of McKinley in the Canadian
Rockies, not only would our preparation
be more complicated and toilsome, but the
arrival at the goal itself would be much
in question. The dramas of doubt which we
have studied up to the present were of far
more simple and accessible nature than is
Goethe's Faust. Each of these was written
to set forth some particular phase or phases
of doubt. The drama before us defies such
simple analysis and classification. We may
in this discussion climb some single peak,
143
144 CHRIST AND THE
catch some vista as through a window,
but we may not pretend that there are not
loftier peaks that you may already have dis-
covered, deeper and higher truths than here
set down. This difficulty and diversity
is due to the peculiar nature of this drama.
It lacks unity because it sets forth not an
idea nor a philosophy but a life. It has
certain great, strong, and noble points be-
cause these were elements of Goethe's char-
acter. Its points of weakness, likewise,
are those reflected from the life of its author.
The drama was first projected in his mind
at the age of twenty. It was not completed
until he was past eighty, and within seven
months of his death, when he felt the great
night drawing on.
The Story
The original Faust story upon the lips
of the German peasants was a story of sin
from which there could be no redemption.
It was a part of the popular speculation
upon the unpardonable sin. It is found
in other stories like Tannh'auser and Par-
acelsus. It was the expression of that
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 145
skepticism which arose from a sense of the
condition of a sinner who had deliberately
sinned against light; of whom the Scripture
declared there was no place for repentance,
though he sought it carefully and with
tears.
This material which Goethe found in
popular literature and drama he made his
own, working from it the masterpiece that
will evermore be linked with his name.
For him the Margaret motif was but in-
cidental to the greater work, but because
of its living interest it has become pre-
dominant in the popular mind. Goethe's
concern was with the salvation of Faust,
but this part is read by the few.
The drama opens, like the book of Job,
with a prologue in heaven in which Satan
appears before the Lord, referring in a
cynical way to the integrity of Faust and
offering to wager that he can be seduced.
What will you bet? There's still a chance to gain
him,
If unto me full leave you give,
Gently upon my road to train him! 1
1 Here, as elsewhere, Bayard Taylor's translation is used.
146 CHRIST AND THE
As in Job, the Lord gives Satan power
to test Faust, but declares he cannot be
seduced, because
A good man through obscurest aspiration,
Has still an instinct of the one true way.
Aspiration, or striving for something
better, is the key to Goethe's treatment
of the problem of life, as it is also to the
salvation of Faust. Faust comes before
us in the mental condition of Dante in
the opening of the Divine Comedy. Mid-
way of this mortal life he is discovered in
the wilderness of disillusionment from earlier
dreams. Wearied and disappointed with
the results of a life of study and research,
he is about to end all with poison when
through his window float the strains of the
cathedral bells, and the Easter anthem,
"Christ is arisen!" Memories of childhood
and days of simple faith rise up to divert
him from the contemplated suicide. Un-
satisfied with a knowledge of books, he
turns to enjoy the fresh flowing life of the
villagers, only to realize the unspanned
gulf which his study has set between him
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 147
and them. He turns to his Bible, but opens
to the first chapter of the Gospel of John
and meets this mystical phrase, "In the
beginning was the Word." He finds him-
self more puzzled than ever. His inde-
cision is voiced in the words,
What from the world have I to gain?
Thou shalt abstain — renounce — refrain!
That is the everlasting song
That in the ears of all men rings —
That unrelieved, our whole life long,
Each hour, in passing, hoarsely sings.
Then it is that, finding his house empty,
swept, and garnished, Satan enters in.
Under his direction, Faust plunges for
satisfaction into the life of the senses,
making a compact to be his forever, if
there shall come in human experience a
moment to which he shall say, "Ah, still
delay — thou art so fair." Then comes the
meeting with Margaret and the terrible
consequences that follow in the wake of sin.
Does anyone know a more powerfully writ-
ten illustration of the truth that sin bring-
eth forth death? Margaret's family, her
mother, brother, and child die violent
148 CHRIST AND THE
deaths as the result of her sin. She at
last, insane and in prison, by renouncing her
sin, refusing to escape its penalty, deciding
to be done with all falsehood forever, and
appealing to the merciful judgment of God,
is received into everlasting habitations, a
sinner saved. So ends the first part of the
drama.
But the road for Faust is traversed
only from heaven to hell. The distance
has yet all to be traversed from hell to
heaven. He knows not now, and perhaps
is never to know, Margaret's road of re-
pentance. He travels out into the night,
but his sin has not been one of impulse.
Deliberately planned and plotted, in league
with evil itself, where shall he find place for
repentance?
He seeks redemption in culture and travel,
but finds it not; then in the exercise of fame
and power, and finds it not. In extreme
age, when Care has entered at his door with
blindness, while Want and Necessity linger
at the threshold, he learns at last that man
can be happy only as he loses life for others.
In almost the last moment life begins to
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 149
turn on the rusted hinges of unselfishness.
At that moment he comes to a satisfaction
that has heretofore been denied him. He
utters the fateful words, "Ah, still delay —
thou art so fair!"
Satan claims him, but can do nothing
because the thing that has come ultimately
to satisfy has partaken of the eternal nature.
Angels bear away the spiritual part of
Faust. Margaret, the glorified penitent,
appears with a great company of the
heavenly host to sing his welcome home,
and the drama closes with the mystic
chorus —
All things transitory
But as symbols are sent:
Earth's insufficiency
Here grows to event :
The Indescribable,
Here it is done:
The woman-soul leadeth us
Upward and on!
The Problem
In taking up the study of Faust it is
important to an understanding of it that
we remember always that Mephistopheles
150 CHRIST AND THE
is the externalization of the subjective mind
of Faust himself. 1 He has not the same
character as the Satan of Job. He is the
warring, rebelling spirit of man himself
rather than an external personality. He
is the worse nature of Faust. This Goethe
has attempted to make clear in the very
beginning, when Satan is introduced to
Faust's room as a poodle that finally takes
the form of a traveling scholar. It is a
convenient way of avoiding soliloquy 2 and
increasing the dramatic interest and effect.
So long as Faust refused him place, so long
his skepticism remained academic, but
when he enters into a pact with his worse
nature to follow its bidding in the pursuit
of knowledge, the better Faust loses con-
trol, and in its train comes the possibility
of harm to others. 3
Intellectual Aspect of the Problem
Faust's problem was, first of all, intel-
lectual. It arose from the vain hope of
1 Davidson, Philosphy of Faust, p. 16.
2 Masson, Three Devils, p. 39.
3 Davidson, id., above, p. 22.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 151
satisfying the soul with knowledge. Faust
is hoping to discover God through the in-
tuitions of the mind. Great impulses had
been given to the doctrine of the unity of
life and nature. It seemed possible on the
one hand to trace to material sources the
very processes and results of thought, while
on the other hand was the insistent demand
for a God who was resident in nature. On
this basis it is not only impossible to arrive
at the knowledge of God, but, as was shown
by Thomas Hill Green so long ago, it is im-
possible to arrive at any intellectual cer-
tainty, to know that one's impressions of
the external world are true.
Faust rejects the pi atonic view of the
world when he turns from the interpre-
tation, "In the beginning was the Word"
and in its place substitutes the Aristotelian,
"In the beginning was the Act." Herein
lay the source of his doubt and also the
incompleteness of his final answer to the
problem. If we have only "In the begin-
ning an Act," there is no further need for a
directing personality behind the universe.
"Already a Creator is superfluous — the
152 CHRIST AND THE
Act is all; no Eternal Reason now, no
Essential Energy — a mere ebb and flow of
Becoming." 1 Such a God is without per-
sonal relations to man, so that no amount
of searching through the tomes of dusty
books, or even through "Being's flood or
action's storm," can ever draw him nearer.
This was the standpoint and the source of
skepticism both of Faust and of Goethe.
In the youthful Faust Goethe was stating
his own problem. The only adequate solu-
tion of it was the recognition of a directing
Personality. This Goethe is compelled at
the end to drag in by main force, after
having denied it throughout his argument.
Despite a great deal of fine talk about
communing with a God of nature, it is true
that man communes with his own spirit
in her darker, deeper, and sublimer pres-
ences. In the last analysis she is meaning-
less altogether if she be not the purposeful
manifestation of a Divine Mind. The ser-
mon that is preached by running brooks
varies with the intellectual and spiritual
caliber of the audience, and will be no ser-
1 Coupland, Spirit of Faust, p. 85.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 153
mon at all to one of undeveloped spiritual
nature. To the deep nature the physical
universe speaks deep thoughts of God, to
the shallow nature it speaks not at all.
Each receives back glorified, and sanctified
perhaps, only that which he has brought,
for nature is nothing apart from man, her
crown and her consummation. Man him-
self is a lonely, inexplicable tragedy, except
as behind nature there is a directing Per-
sonality, a Mind that can fellowship with
his. This was the one element which
Faust failed to bring to the world of knowl-
edge, and, later, to the world of nature.
Hence there should be no surprise that in
searching a supposedly aimless universe
one should return on one's weary way dis-
appointed and in despair.
The Spiritual Aspect of the Problem
There was also a deep spiritual lack
which prepared the way and was the basis
of Faust's pessimism. This was notice-
ably lacking in Goethe's own outlook on
the world. He adapted the Spinozian
ethics, in which the good was that which
154 CHRIST AND THE
was certainly useful and the bad was that
which would certainly hinder from the
attainment of good. Goethe's theory of
life was particularly lacking in the sense of
God as an element of moral consciousness.
The same want that hid God in a universe
of change, of ebb and flow, as the Unknow-
able, kept from him the deeper solution
of the moral problem. It is unfair to call
Faust a pagan, for pagans are supersti-
tiously religious. Faust's superstitions bent
the other way. Goethe sought to enlarge
and deepen his own life by summoning to
it everything good, beautiful, and true.
He diligently sought to keep out of it all
that suggested tragedy. He refused to look
upon the funeral cortege of a dead friend.
But only he can come to life's fullest measure
of joy and of discipline who fairly faces
the deepest tragedy life can bring. In this
failure it is easy to discover that peculiar
indifference to others which made tragic
the lives of those that lived closest to
Goethe. The same fountains of the heart
in Faust sent forth the bitter waters of
Margaret's misery.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 155
This peculiar lack of spiritual conscious-
ness was manifested in other respects.
There is not a sufficient sense of the irre-
coverable nature of sin. Faust endeavors
without repentance or confession to work
his way back to moral standing and self-
respect. This forms what is generally
recognized as an impossible problem. 1 One's
inherent sense of justice and righteousness
abhors such a solution. The ending of the
second section shows that it did not satisfy
the soul of Goethe. 2
This, then, was the problem cast upon
Faust: How can one who has lost the sense
of a personal God in the universe come to
that knowledge which will satisfy? How
can one who is troubled with the "uncom-
fortable gleam of heavenly light," but who
has no consciousness of Personal guidance,
reach the heights of moral achievement?
The question is whether one who hopes
to be satisfied with things can successfully
survive the disenchantments which lie in
1 Royce, The Second Death, Atlantic Monthly, February,
1913, p. 242.
2 Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets, p. 155.
156 CHRIST AND THE
all lesser satisfactions the moment they are
seized. The still deeper question is this:
Can one who has set out deliberately to sin
against light renew himself unto repentance,
though he seek it carefully and with tears?
The unpardonable sin was a lively theme
in mediaeval days, and the mediaeval answer
was that renewal was impossible. Did
Goethe succeed in answering the old denial,
and did he point the way to peace?
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 157
CHAPTER XIII
REDEMPTION BY CONFESSION
The Irremediable Nature of Sin
The first part of Faust deals with the
simple half of the problem — Faust's skepti-
cism and sin, and the redemption of Mar-
garet by confession and renunciation. Here
Goethe has drawn with master hand the
irremediable nature of sin. The path of
evil once entered upon, the whole universe
seems in league to enlarge and perpetuate
it. This is the case even though one be
unconscious of the real motives that with-
draw him from the path of right. Margaret
did not know the real character of her lover.
She did not know the nature of the sleeping
potion which she gave her mother. Yet
the consequences of her sin were no less
terrible upon those she loved. Her re-
sponsibility might be limited to her knowl-
edge, but the results of her evil deed were
bound by no such limitation. Her slight
158 CHRIST AND THE
variance from the way of absolute rectitude
led in train the terrible consequences which
in her innocence she could not foresee.
Her sin began in personal vanity, and
flowed from the guilelessness of her nature.
But it brought consequences which were
beyond her control the moment the evil
thought had passed into act. Under the
influence of remorse her sin has passed out
of the realm of the unintentional to the
darker deed. ^
The fact that one cannot retrieve the
consequences of sin is one of the darkest
problems thrust upon us. How could con-
sequences so out of keeping with the pur-
poseless human weakness that set them in
motion come to pass in a moral world?
Margaret finds that in her sin she has
opened a Pandora's box that lets loose upon
her all the Furies, and even Hope seems
to have escaped with the rest.
The Traditional Moral Supports of
Margaret
The source of Margaret's weakness is
not like Faust's, intellectual. Her weakness
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 159
lies in the purely formal and external nature
of her religion. Her questioning of Faust's
religion follows exactly this line. She does
not question his moral character, but his
acceptance of the beliefs and institutions
of the church. So she is easily deceived
by his meaningless jargon into accepting
his moral standing because what he says
sounds like the talk of the good priest.
Such a religion has not the strength which
will enable it to withstand the fiercest
assaults of temptation, nor to arise again to
recovery after having fallen, because it
has no root in itself. The wonder is often
expressed at the moral lapse of those who
have been notably faithful to the forms of
the church. The truth in every such case
is that the religious life has been purely
formal and external. It has not, therefore,
resulted in the development of character
necessary to withstand the assaults of
temptation. Faithfulness to external re-
ligion is always sure to be accepted as
superior until its emptiness is thus displayed
in the actual circumstances of life. It is a
question that should give pause to every
160 CHRIST AND THE
religious leader, as to how far the formal
religious exercises which are a part of his
work may go in building up the character
of those who attend. He must ask him-
self how far such exercises are merely per-
functory, pleasing to the religious imagina-
tion, but of no practical religious signifi-
cance. This danger is ever present when
fine sentiments are indulged for their own
sake, and do not get tied up to the actual
mastery of flesh and spirit, the overcoming
of selfishness of act and thought, and the
service of one's fellow men. Alas, how few
the religious institutions that could alto-
gether abide this test! Yet it is the one
that modern Christianity is, even now,
called upon to make.
The Ineffectiveness of Remorse Alone
In such a case as that of Margaret —
religion being merely formal and external —
it is interesting to note the forces that bring
to her a sense of her sin. She does not be-
come conscious of her sin through the un-
assisted processes of her own spirit, but
through the attitude of the external world.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 161
She is first made aware of the real nature
of her sin by the discovery of the future
attitude of the world toward her. This
is brought home by the coarse suggestions
of the gossip of Lisbeth at the fountain,
regarding a neighbor who has gone wrong.
In this she discovers the conventional at-
titude of society. The attitude of relatives
is next disclosed to her in the brutal up-
braidings of her brother, Valentine, dying
by the hand of Faust. The climax of her
woe is not reached, however, until she dis-
covers what will be the attitude of the
church. In the cathedral, under the awful
spell of the Gregorian chanting of the
"Dies irae," all hope flees from her heart,
and she falls in a swoon.
So far we have only remorse, and remorse
is about the best that a formal religion
can produce in the sinner. Yet to lead
only as far as remorse, and not to point to
the way out, is to fail miserably. Balzac
says: "Remorse is a weakness; it begins
the fault anew. Repentance only is a
force; it ends all." Remorse may be so
keen as to result in the paralysis of the moral
\m CHRIST AND THE
powers. It may destroy the possibilities
for better living, and keep one back from
making the most of such fragments of life
as may remain. God does not call us to
return ever to dead battlefields to fight
the phantom hosts of yesterday. There is
strength only in going ahead bravely with
what remains. Seen from this standpoint,
there is nothing more blasting to moral
progress than to brood over the mistakes
of yesterday. It is not a religious act to
keep them ever before the mind. Having
cast off the works of darkness, we are
under the moral obligation to forget as
much of them as is possible.
The Necessity for Retribution
The retribution that falls upon Margaret
excites our extreme pity. Yet we know
how true it is to life. By retribution refer-
ence is not had altogether to the external
punishment of her crime, but more to the
internal, for the external retributions of
sin are often escaped, and are not to be com-
pared with those that are internal and can-
not be escaped. Every sin is in a sense
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 1G3
irrecoverable. Every sin wounds and hurts
other lives. Having once passed out into
action, it can never be recalled. No true
man is satisfied to have his sin go on damn-
ing the world, ruining other lives, and pay,
himself, no price of atonement. He needs
suffering to save his own moral self-respect.
So the guilty criminal creeps back to take
his sentence because he realizes it is the
only way to manhood. That is a poor
sort of faith which hopes by some mental
turn of the hand, or some magic formula,
to enjoy sin and escape only its penalty.
We are giving this question deeper consid-
eration now than we have before in many
years. Our minds had been dulled to the
irrevocable nature and awfulness of sin by
a wooden theology of barter and trade.
The grotesqueness of the mediaeval thought
of hell has often raised the sense of humor,
while at the same time it has closed the eyes
to the abiding and blasting qualities of sin,
from which no sinner can escape. When
we have sinned we have done an eternal
injury to our own souls. And though
through divine grace we rise above the fault
164 CHRIST AND THE
to better living, there will ever be some-
thing missing from the soul's eternal satis-
factions.
We are sorely needing in our own day a
revival of the sense of the nature of sin.
Not that our judgments on conventional
sins are not deep enough. Sometimes they
are, sometimes they are not. Very often
we pass by the really serious offenders and
put upon the less offenders an added
punishment. Sometimes the man who is
most sinful in the sight of God retains,
like Faust, his position in society, while the
less guilty victim of his sin is compelled
to pay to the last drop of blood. The con-
sciousness of the inability of society to deal
with the deepest sinner is coming over men
with a new force, and is a potent source of
despair.
The practical effect upon society has been
the breaking down of respect for the in-
stitutional handling of the sinner. What-
ever sinner can attract popular favor by
arousing sentiments of pity can secure a
pardon, and set at naught the judgment of
the court. Men are thinking more deeply
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 1G5
than they have been able to build their
institutions. They will not longer be satis-
fied with the raising of legal quibbles to
save the wrongdoer. And this is because
there is -coming over the world a new sense
of the blighting character of sin, and the
necessity for retribution. By and by we
will not be satisfied to receive an eternal
pardon which has not called out upon our
part the full and complete giving of our-
selves to a new life of righteousness. In
God's thought no such easy way of salva-
tion has been possible at any time, and such
conceptions could never have satisfied any
mind that thought deeply or was filled with
a sense of the real character of sin.
Goethe is morally and historically in
agreement with the truth when he leaves
Margaret to the punishment of the law.
The way of retribution was now the only
way to peace. It was paying what price
might be paid as her atonement to society.
The Great Renunciation
The release of Margaret from the despair
of sin is truly and wonderfully told in the
166 CHRIST AND THE
closing lines of the first part. Faust ar-
rives at the prison to enable her to escape
the approaching execution. The deeps of
Margaret's heart are broken up. The voice
of her lover calls her back from the insanity
into which remorse and social misunder-
standing have plunged her. All the at-
traction of love, of liberty, of life, call upon
her to escape with him . But escape to what ?
Escape to be despised by the meanest, and
most of all by herself. Their mutual sin
has forever shut them out from their pos-
sible Eden. She may escape the hand of
society, but she cannot escape the hell-
hounds of fear. No, the only course for
her (and for him, if he knew it) is to face her
crime, and to expiate it. She will no longer
companion with evil. She no longer de-
sires to pass under false pretenses. She
desires to know if he realizes the depth of
her wickedness? She insists on his hearing
the dark story of her sin. But to escape!
That would mean to perpetuate her sin,
not to end it. That would mean to go back
on the way of repentance and undo every
step thus far taken toward the goal. She
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 167
makes the great renunciation — she re-
nounces the devil and all his works. A
voice from above is heard crying, "She is
saved." Margaret had attained at last
to character. Out of the bitter ruins of
life had been reared a refuge of the soul,
founded in Eternal Righteousness. What
the formal institutions of religion and society
had not given her she had now attained for
herself.
Margaret's way to peace is hard. Its
gate is narrow, and, alas, how few that find
it! In how many respects do we prefer
to live over the ashes of old volcanic fires
than to move out upon the plains of open
confession and peace! We allow so many
wrongs to go unrighted, so many misunder-
standings to remain uncorrected, that much
of the sweetness and light that might fill
life is replaced by bitter memories and bit-
ter thoughts. How slow is man to come to
the knowledge of the truth that no wrong
which he does to his finer sense of righteous-
ness and justice goes unpunished, but takes
its deadly toll out of life and character!
How fatal is any trifling of the human
168 CHRIST AND THE
soul with wrong, any receiving of the
rewards of injustice or of fraud! Our
close-shut universe will let no soul escape
from its sin, however secret, but will, if it
be not disavowed, write it with indelible
lines into character. How foolish for men
who have no desire for character to think
they can cheat or defraud the heart of the
universe and the great God, hugging to
themselves pet sins and follies, rejoicing
in the deception of their fellows — proud
in the superficial standing of society ! With
what glee do they hail the proposition that
there is no hell, and take comfort in sin
at the thought that the crude, mediaeval
conception is gone. No hell? God needs
only to turn upon them the white light of
unescapable conscience, and themselves are
hell — a hell that cannot be escaped without
a change in all that they have thought or
known or loved. If hell be an internal
thing, then, indeed, a Saviour that saves us
from the love and the following of sin is the
only Saviour adequate.
Over the horizon of the new day will arise
a new sense of the awfulness of sin. And
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 169
there are many who have lived but lightly,
and who have thought but superficially
hitherto, who will see this truth which moral
beings cannot escape.
We are saved not in our sins ; we are saved
by ending our sin; we are saved from our
sins. There must be for us what there was
for Margaret — the great renunciation.
170 CHRIST AND THE
CHAPTER XIV
REDEMPTION BY STRIVING
Difference Between Faust's and Mar-
garet's Problem
When Faust withdraws himself before
the high spiritual courage of Margaret,
displayed now for the first time, his problem
is consciously beginning where hers ends
forever. With her final renunciation of
every reward of sin, and her determination
to expiate to the full her crime against
society, Margaret rises to a height of moral
grandeur which is painfully lacking in
Faust. We cannot but feel this: if Faust
had only been a man! If it had been only
the weak and hesitating manhood of an
Arthur Dimmesdale which constrained the
latter to take his public stand beside Hester
of the Scarlet Letter, much might have
been forgiven him. But we see no such
wholesome evidences of manhood in him.
That is why the character of Faust is so
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 171
unpopular in the common mind. We see
at no time any evidences of repentance
in that long career. Faust receives all —
the satisfying of every appetite, the love
of a good woman, social position and power,
the gratifying of his aesthetic tendencies,
of his thirst for scientific attainment, and
his passion for philanthropy. There is no
form of this world's satisfactions which
does not come knocking at his door. One
grows impatient with the shallowness
of heart that can receive all these things,
and have no regret for the lives which his
selfish happiness has blasted. There is
lacking in Faust that spirit of repentance
which is essential to moral depth. In this
is reflected clearly the personal feeling of
Goethe himself. "Repentance seemed to
him something entirely negative and un-
productive, a gratuitous and useless self-
humiliation. Not through contrition and
self-chastisement, but through discipline
and self-reliance, he thought, is the way to
perfection." 1
1 Conversations "(of Goethe) with Eckermann, translated
by Kuno Francke, in German Ideals of To-Day, p. 60.
172 CHRIST AND THE
Yet despite Goethe's own word we cannot
feel that he continued absolutely true to his
personal feeling. We have already seen that
in the end he contradicts all his theories
in the mystic chorus, and the salvation of
Faust, because he finds himself driven to
it by the requirements of dramatic effect.
And what is that but saying that it was
necessary to answer to the common con-
science of men?
The Sin Against Light
There seems a deeper note of explanation
of Faust's indifference toward repentance
than even Goethe's own sentiment. The
original legend was the tale of a man who by
league with Satan had put himself deliber-
ately beyond the pale of repentance. Had
Goethe made the scene of Margaret's
spiritual triumph the point of Faust's sal-
vation, he would have been untrue to the
Faust of popular thought. Faust was sup-
posed to have committed the unpardon-
able sin, for which there was no repentance.
The story was created to impress the
mediaeval mind with the horrible end of
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 173
apostasy. It was only one of many similar
popular legends.
There was also an added reason why the
same way of repentance that stood wide to
Margaret was not open to Faust. It lay
in the comparative natures of their sins.
Margaret's was a sin of impulse, committed
against what was her usually dominant
better nature. It had come upon her
unawares, and she had yielded without
realizing what its sinfulness and its con-
sequences might be. The sin of Faust was
deliberately planned. Its consequences
were foreseen. There was no concern for
the effect upon others. Faust was exactly
what he appears to be — a thoroughly hard-
ened man of the world. Only in Marga-
ret's case the fire burned a little deeper into
his soul than he had expected. The unde-
served love of Margaret utterly destroyed
his old world of enjoyment and made the
obscenities of the Walpurgis night abhor-
rent even to his all but godless soul. Mar-
garet's sin had been more against herself
than others. With her willingness to pub-
lish it abroad, to put it from her and to
174 CHRIST AND THE
expiate it, came release and peace. But
no such sudden way was open to Faust.
If he were ever saved, even at the last,
he must enter in by greatest pain and diffi-
culty. That this was true lay in himself and
in the nature of his sin. What was known
as the unpardonable sin depended not on
some chance impulse of sudden choice.
It was the deliberate forsaking of the way
of righteousness against light, for tempo-
rary rewards that sin would give. It was
sin with perfect understanding of its re-
sults, with definite and final abjuration of
what was good and holy. This was the
nature of Faust 's sin, and there was no way
of repentance because his heart was hard-
ened against repentance. 1 It was steeled
against any testimony of conscience. If
it had not been for the shock of the Mar-
garet episode, if it had not been that the
purity, faith, and beauty of her spirit re-
proached him, in the midst of all the devil's
satisfactions of life, he never could have
found the way to redemption. This was
1 Read Royce, Atlantic Monthly, February, 1913, "The
Second Death."
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 175
the point in which Satan overreached him-
self and unwittingly planted the seeds of
Faust's salvation. It was the woman-soul
that led Faust upward and on.
"For Faust, the man, there is still one
way of attainment, and that is given in the
sentence of Jean Paul Richter, 'The only
repentance open to thee is a better deed.' "*
Living in the Good and Beautiful
Selfishly
"Spinoza defines good as that which we
know with certainty to be useful to us, and
evil as that of which we know with like
certainty that it will hinder us from the
attainment of any good." 2 Faust's fail-
ure, and Goethe's failure as well, sprang
from this inadequate basis for a life philoso-
phy. The weakness of such a philosophy
lies in its selfishness. To live in the good,
the true, and the beautiful is very well
unless it means to separate us from the
sinning, erring, and needy world. It is
a comfortable business, this saving of one's
1 Coupland, Spirit of Faust, p. 175.
2 Walsh, Faust, The Legend and the Poem, p. 81.
176 CHRIST AND THE
own soul regardless of others. It enables
us to be indifferent to social iniquities, it
saves the necessity for nervous excitement
in the face of great public moral crises, but,
unfortunately, its salvation is only a spe-
cious one. Its comfort is only a self-decep-
tion. There are some things of far greater
moral worth than peace. There are times
when peace, far from being a virtue, is a
sin. No man has a right to peace except
through the gateway of righteousness. No
man has a right to peace so long as there
remains a social horror that he can help
to right. Until the kingdom of God shall
come in power the man of God must daily
gird on his sword. The only peace he has a
right to is the peace of the bivouac and the
camp. It is peace in the midst of war.
A religious peace which is less than that will
be found a delusion and a snare. Because
there has been so much of this empty peace
talked of, and practiced, and praised as
religion, we are in danger of forgetting
quite what religion means. This is the
point of resistance for most of the "isms"
and "osophies" that unnerve present-day
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 177
religious endeavor. We are striving to
have peace in ourselves when we ought to
forget peace for self in a strife to save
society from corruption. Thinking mental
health in a world of sin utterly overlooks
the fact that the individual is not isolated,
but lives in a world of relations. These
relations are as much a part of his mental
and moral make-up as his subjective feeling.
In fact, what man is subjectively is to be
learned by his reactions upon society, and
not from states of bliss, nor from his own
testimony. Man has a greater task than
thinking mental health in a world of sin.
He cannot even think mental health unless
he is doing something to rescue that world
from its sin. In this Goethe has been true
to the experience of life. Though Faust
has all the world at his feet for purposes
of self-cultivation, there remains within
his heart an ache which never can be cured
by any selfish satisfaction. No height of
wisdom, power, or knowledge, nor even
wide extended philanthropy, can make fair
to him the passing moment until he comes
to the point of forgetting himself, his mental
178 CHRIST AND THE
health, and his personal satisfaction, in
a real self-sacrifice. In the present day
there are no more useless lives to be found
anywhere than those which retire within
themselves to enjoy the bliss of a subjective
experience or than those that for the sake
of mental health shut out from their vision
the tormented and suffering world. Such
lives have of all the least right to the term
religious. As in Christ's day, the publicans
and sinners enter in before them. Of a
truth "He that seeketh to save his life
shall lose it."
The Wilderness of Strife
Was it impossible for one who had started
out to find his satisfactions in the world of
time and sense to arrive at the goal by any
other way than the wilderness of striving
(streben) ? Probably not to anyone so com-
pletely given over to the folly of doubt
as was Faust. Back of all his skepticism
of any good in the world, of any satisfaction,
lay the deeper skepticism which was willing
to sell his soul, if in any of these things he
could be satisfied. So we see him run the
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 179
whole gamut of what the world can give,
and at every point he is turned back on self
wearied and disappointed. The wilderness
would have been unnecessary if there had
been less willingness to be led by the devil.
If he had not given himself into the slavery
of his lower impulses, he might not only
have been saved for a future life, but he
might have been saved for the life that now
is. The means and the methods that he
used in statecraft, culture, and philan-
thropy were dictated by this lower self,
that is, the devil. The successes he gained
were thus robbed of that moral significance
which alone could have made them of worth
and satisfaction to a moral being. Striv-
ing, to produce satisfactory results, must
have not a selfish but an unselfish and moral
end. Because this was lacking the very
attainment brought disillusionment. This
fact lends itself to the pessimism of the pres-
ent which is so common among those that
have attained distinction in the world. The
search for wealth, for fame, or honor, has
been undertaken at the behest of the lower
impulses. It has been a purely selfish
180 CHRIST AND THE
search. The moment of attainment has
also been the moment of disillusionment,
because the highest joy that is given in
this world is the joy which comes of un-
selfishness. He who hopes to tread any
path of selfishness to power and satisfaction
wanders in a " wilderness and a solitary
way," far from the springs of joy. To
have one's enemy in one's hand! — yes,
for a moment it gives a fleeting satisfaction,
but there is always our soul to reckon with.
Before we have even formulated that joy
to ourselves it is crying out, "Unworthy!
Unworthy!"
"The Hunter is Home from the Hill"
Up to the very close Mephistopheles has
tried to satisfy Faust with things, and Faust,
driven from one to another, has hoped for
satisfaction thus. But the truth at last
breaks upon him that peace can come only
in unselfish service. He finds that satis-
faction for man cannot come in achievement
of ends but in struggle for highest ends.
In his determination to drain the marsh
and make the home for a free people he
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 181
does not hope to endow them with institu-
tions of freedom that will last forever.
Freedom must be fought for by every
generation. Man's satisfaction is in fight-
ing out his own problem. He finds his own
way to peace. The task upon which hu-
manity is set is too great to be compassed by
any one century or age, but in the ceaseless
struggle to be free, to be just, to be right,
man finds his satisfaction and his peace.
In marching onwards, bliss and torment find,
Though, every moment, with unsated mind.
It is the truth which Tennyson set forth
so vividly in "Wages":
Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an
endless sea —
Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the
wrong —
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats
of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer
sky:
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.
182 CHRIST AND THE
The skepticism and world-weariness of
the young Faust is thus answered. The
perfect knowledge, the perfect achievement,
the perfect solution is not for him. Knowl-
edge, nature, industry, government, cul-
ture — in none of these can he hope to speak
or to know the final word. All such hoped-
for resting places are merely as dreams of
the night.
To know that life, flying amid the strug-
gle, is giving itself to help on the better
day — this is to be his satisfaction and his
salvation.
This perhaps was the deepest truth that
Goethe uttered for our modern age. It
is a truth of which we are being daily made
more conscious. We are no longer in love
with closed systems. The old demand
for absolute and finished truth is now being
put in the background. Experience,
through history, has shown too many
systems, supposed quite generally to be
the final word and forced on reluctant minds
with fire and sword, finally falling of their
own weight because they had not the power
of truth. That the truth of to-day will
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 183
be adequate for the growing life and moral
outlook of to-morrow is the most impossible
of dreams, for life can only be held of life.
We cannot constrain the future with our
theological opinion nor even with our in-
terpretation of the Christ. Because he is
living he can never lose his hold upon the
centuries. It is the task, the duty, and the
privilege of to-morrow to interpret him in
its own way. To have helped to realize
him in the world, to have helped in the reign
of his eternal kingdom — that should be
enough for any man, without attempting
to stretch his human understandings to the
point of infallibility for all time. "Man
finds his end only in the active conquest
of freedom, a task which from its very nature
cannot be completed in time." 1
1 Davidson, Philosophy of Faust, p. 143.
184 CHRIST AND THE
CHAPTER XV
DID GOETHE SOLVE THE PROBLEM?
The Attempt to Avoid a Dualistic
World
Did Goethe solve the problem upon
which he set himself? Did Faust find sal-
vation along the lines that Goethe intended,
or was that salvation, in the last analysis,
a contradiction of all that had gone before?
I believe that, considered from the stand-
point of his own philosophy, we must admit
he has failed. The contradictory redemp-
tion which he has assumed for Faust does
not satisfy the modern mind.
In the first place, Goethe set out to avoid
the prevalent dualism which violently
divided the universe in halves — the good
and the evil, Creator against creation — and
which was the fundamental basis of medi-
evalism. He ended by appealing for
Faust's salvation to that very theology
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 185
which in the beginning he repudiated. 1
In the last act of the drama that world of
mediaeval thought which has been so labo-
riously destroyed is invoked with its magic
to save a Faust who has not yet, as the
modern conscience sees it, done the things
meet for repentance and salvation. In the
beginning Mephistopheles is the subjective
spirit of denial to be found in Faust. In
the world he is the darkness which makes
us conscious of the light, but a part of the
universe, existing with divine sanction and
permission. In the end he is a mediaeval
devil, and no part of Faust, and no necessary
part of the universe. The dualistic world
is set up again and Faust is saved from the
wreck as by fire. Goethe set out with an
idea of the unity of creation — that evil is
only the shadow of good, bringing good in
spite of itself, that God is everywhere in
this creation, working here and there, a
Force, an Act, a Deed, but never a think-
ing Personality. The only goal of such a
philosophical progress is pantheism. But
1 For discussion of this point see Davidson, Philosophy of
Faust, chapter on "The Redemption of Faust."
186 CHRIST AND THE
Goethe had been driven by the very logic
of events to give up this position. Along
the horizon of life there may be sufficient
promise of salvation in all that Faust sets
out to achieve, but when the night ap-
proaches and the half-gathered harvest of
his good and evil is around him, it is dis-
covered to be so much of it tares instead
of grain that his heart is left unsatisfied.
This is the end of every moralist. There
is one thing more tragic even than the sad
hour when the scholar in world-weariness
turns from the stultified forms of his study
to seek the highest' in existence. That is
when at the last, rich beyond the reach of
Want, Debt, or Necessity, he cannot bar out
Care, ugliest of all, and Death, most menac-
ing of all. All the triumphs of his life —
love, statesmanship, culture, war, and com-
merce — have turned to dust and ashes, and
the last act of his life is only measurably
better than that which has gone before.
In that last moment he arrives at the ap-
prehension of the truth — that the reason
all he has done has given him no satisfaction
is because it has all been selfishly done.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 187
For the first time in his self-centered ex-
istence he contemplates a work that will
make others happy. In its contemplation
he bids the passing moment stay — and
expires. But there is here only the be-
ginning, not the end of salvation. Another
world is required to work it out.
This discloses the fatal dualism of
Goethe's thought. He fell into the very
error from which it was his purpose to
escape. He had not grasped the thought
of the eternity of this present world, or,
we might better say, the eternal character
of present action. If there is a God present
anywhere in the universe, he must be a
spiritual God with whom man can com-
mune and cooperate only through his own
spiritual nature. From this God of spirit
nature too must find her reason and her
interpretation. She cannot be something
of herself and apart from her Creator. She
possesses no meaning apart from his spirit-
ual ends. She is understood of man only
because of man's spiritual nature, which is
in kinship with God's. Starting out to
overcome that hopeless dualism between
188 CHRIST AND THE
good and evil which sunders the world of
God from the world of the devil, which puts
an endless conflict in the heart of nature
where God can never be eventually trium-
phant, Goethe, by the inadequateness of
pantheistic philosophy, falls back into the
fatal error from which he strove to emerge.
Too Short to Span the Distance from
Hell to Heaven
If the weakness of this attempt to solve
the mystery of life were philosophical alone,
the offense would not be so serious. But
the greatest failure lies in the practical
bearing on life. Though Goethe did not
so intend it, the practical import of the
drama is the darkest pessimism. This
springs from the unsocial character of
Goethe's idea, which is itself more or less
the product of an unsocial age. The whole
thought of Goethe and of Faust respecting
a philosophy of life was the culture of the
individual regardless of what surroundings
might be. Tennyson has aptly summed
up the dangers from intellectual pride in his
reference to Goethe in "The Palace of Art":
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 189
"O godlike isolation which art mine,
I can but count thee perfect gain,
What time I watch the darkening droves of swine
That range on yonder plain.
"In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin,
They graze and wallow, breed and sleep;
And oft some brainless devil enters in,
And drives them to the deep.
"I take possession of man's mind and deed.
I care not what the sects may brawl.
I sit as God holding no form of creed,
And contemplating all."
But for this essentially selfish attitude
of the soul there come painful misgivings
in this world of pressing human relations:
Full oft the riddle of the painful earth
Flash'd thro' her as she sat alone,
Yet not the less held she her solemn mirth,
And intellectual throne.
When she would think, where'er she turned her
sight
The airy hand confusion wrought,
Wrote, "Mene, mene," and divided quite
The kingdom of her thought.
In the dark places of her palace stood
Uncertain shapes; . . .
190 CHRIST AND THE
There lay behind Faust certain unpurged
sins which no amount of action could of
itself have purged. What he needed was
not a Pater Seraphicus to purge his sins.
He needed to do some spiritual house-clean-
ing himself. He needed a new heart, a
new conscience, 1 a new and living sense of
social responsibility — in other words, he
needed a real consciousness of the dark and
blasting sins that lay behind him and such
a forsaking of the devil and his works
in this life that he would have been a new
creature. There is no heavenly dram or
potion that could save the Faust who be-
trayed Margaret. The Faust who is borne
aloft must be a new Faust who has de-
liberately set behind him, in all humility,
every way of sin.
Goethe has characterized his work as
"a journey from heaven to hell and back
again to heaven," but the means he takes
to span the backward gulf are not sufficient.
His difficulty is one that is sure to attend
a purely personal ideal of salvation. The
1 Royce, "The Second Death," Atlantic Monthly, February,
1913, p. 242.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 191
salvation of Faust was not the most im-
portant thing in the world. From God's
standpoint there were also Margaret and
her mother and Valentine. Faust's salva-
tion must lie in the large in taking God's
standpoint. No human being is justified
in taking the position that his individual
salvation is the all-important matter in the
divine order. A true perspective on this
fact of life would make us less flippant and
more reverential in our treatment of God,
less selfish in our prayers, and more con-
cerned over our neighbor's welfare. I ought
to be honest enough with myself to realize
that God is more anxious over the salvation
of my neighborhood, with its some thou-
sands of souls, by some thousands of times,
than he is over my individual salvation.
If, then, in my intense anxiety, not for
godlike character, but to escape a future
prepared for the devil and his angels, I
shut my eyes to God's intenser desire, where
do I find that common standpoint with
God which would justify my salvation?
Faust was more concerned with a personal
salvation than he was with a character.
192 CHRIST AND THE
The only thing eternal in us is a godlike
character. That is the only thing we need
to struggle and strive for. If we do not
get at least the rudiments of that in our
earthly experience, it is futile for us to
expect it to come to us somewhere else. It
is a vain and empty satisfaction to imagine
the battle fought and won on ethereal
battlefields when it has not even been
sensed here. He who deliberately flings
away the culture of character for a salva-
tion afforded by the magic of mental assent
to doctrine, or the power of the church, or
the absolution of a priest, has not yet
learned what religion is. He has sold his
birthright for a mess of pottage. What
Faust needed was not philanthropy, but
character.
The "Streben" Philosophy of Modern
Life
The bearing of Goethe's philosophy of
"salvation by striving" upon modern life
becomes quickly evident. Goethe stood at
the opening of the industrial age, and therein
lay for him a great hope. To a large degree
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 193
our age has made his philosophy its own.
"Faust is the gospel of human salvation
through human activity." 1 Surely, the
philanthropic Faust, dying with a load of
sins on his head, but blessed in the thought
of topping off life with one deed devoid
of selfish greed, and winning thereby im-
mortality, lies very close to a common
modern conception. Our modern industrial
system, like a veritable Mephistopheles,
has driven us into some very questionable
ethics. We certainly need, if we can, to
purge ourselves of sin. In our great steel
plants men work under conditions that
shorten life and render them little less than
brutish. In the depths of the earth men
toil for us, never looking at the sun, with
never a thought from us of mercy or com-
miseration. Amid the awful ravages of
the white plague overwearied fingers sew
our "cheap clothes and nasty," of which
Mr. Kingsley spoke so feelingly so long,
so long ago. In the stores we, searching
for the cheapest, are served by hands that
1 Herman Grimm, quoted by W. L. Gage, Salvation of
Faust.
194 CHRIST AND THE
once were pure, and would be now only that
soul and body must be kept together, and
the hard-hearted employer is not willing
to pay wages sufficient without the assist-
ance that impurity gives. The hands of
lisping children of the tenements assist the
gratification of our demand for luxuries,
meantime laying the foundation for future
ill health and crime and ignorance. We
can "help lift their condition" with parks,
schools, playgrounds, the gift of libraries,
and foundations, but after we have done
all this, who will save our souls? So long
as we consent to profit by these evils where
is our boasted character, and what can God
do for us? The weakness of human sal-
vation by human activity is that too often
the heart of things is left out. Your atten-
tion is called to the fact that while Faust
takes pleasure in the good his industrial
establishment does by providing for so
many mouths, he himself lives in a palace
and is the dictator of it all. The rest are
like slaves with no power of self-govern-
ment. His philanthropy lacked the heart
of religion because it lacked real sacrifice.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 195
He gave out of undiminished comfort as
if it were his own and not God's treasure.
He did not move out of the palace to take
his place alongside of other men in the
struggle. Therefore his philanthropy was
devoid of religion and could not save his
soul. His bridge reached from a simpler
to a more complex and somewhat mitigated
hell, but it was devoid of that element
which alone could have redeemed Faust's
world and Faust himself, and the age in
which we live.
The Unappreciated Cross
"The highest moment attained by man
is the hour of intensest pain, and a crown
of thorns is the meed for the divinest
brow." 1 This is the fundamental truth
which Goethe failed to grasp and which
alone would have been sufficient to bridge
the gap from hell to heaven. Davidson
has called attention to the sad want of
moral appreciation in sending Faust out
from the prison scene with Margaret to the
Coupland, Spirit of Faust, p. 172.
196 CHRIST AND THE
refuge of a calm contemplation of nature —
"to think that the pangs of remorse can
be cured by a poultice of grass, moss, and
starlight." 1 This was Goethe's failing, and
it is too much ours. There is less peace to
be had in this modern life by contemplation
of nature and more peace of the sort that
endureth ever by the taking up of a real
cross of Christ. Unless the individual can
rise to that universality which love gives
in binding him to his fellow men, he has not
learned the way to life. Faust could have
been truly saved in character, and that
means in reality, only as the interests of
self had fallen before an all-giving sacrifice
for others. How strange that his eyes were
closed to the deepest fact of human life.
It was a part of his youthful pessimism
to note
The few who therefore something really learned,
Unwisely frank, with hearts that spurned con-
cealing
And to the mob laid bare each thought and
feeling
Have evermore been crucified and burned.
1 Davidson, Philosophy of Faust, p. 73.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 197
Why did not the older Faust discover the
secret? He looked upon common men as
"the mob," not from a heart of love.
And some day the world will read the
secret of Faust's mystery no longer darkly,
but plainly, and some day humanity will
discover what Faust never discovered —
that the way to joy, to power, and to sal-
vation is the way of the now unappreciated
cross.
THE FIFTH STEP
BRAND— THE STRUGGLE ARISING FROM
THE FAILURE OF SPIRITUAL IDEALS
CHAPTER XVI
"ALL OR NOTHING"
Introduction
the iron conscience
In Ibsen's Brand we have, worked out
to its practical conclusion, a problem which
was much more the problem of a previous
generation than of our own. Brand is the
impersonation of the iron conscience. He
had the highest scorn of all measures of
compromise. He seeks absolute obedience
to his conception of the will of God, but
with an absence of the tempering quality
of mercy. There still lingers, here and
there, a conscience of this kind, though it
is not, nor ever has been, a popular type.
More pertinent to the shallow philosophy
of self -culture which characterizes our own
age is Ibsen's Peer Gynt, but its consider-
ation would bear us beyond the limits of
201
202 CHRIST AND THE
this volume. Bernard Shaw and others
have been glad to discover in Brand a
refutation and denial of the Christian faith,
but such a view is singularly lacking in
insight, and results from the blinding of the
judgment by the personal wish. It is
easy to find in any vital work just what
one is looking for. Brand's religion is
only partly Christian. It is just because
of that fatal lack of the spirit which would
make him truly Christian that he fails.
This, we must believe, it was Ibsen's pur-
pose to show. If anything is refuted, it
is the Judaic form of religion which Paul
and the other apostles had also declared
partial and imperfect. One cannot of him-
self fulfill, even by the fullest sacrifice, his
complete and absolute obligation to God.
In the end he must be saved by grace, and
he must save others by his grace. This
must be ever the story of any adequate
salvation.
The Story
Young Brand, having finished his studies
for the ministry, is endeavoring to discover
the place and the substance of his mission.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 203
He views with supercilious scorn the make-
shift, easy-going character of the religious
ideals which rule the men and women
around him. He cries,
"Be what you are with all your heart,
And not by pieces and in part."
He scorns the half-hearted spirit of his
countrymen :
"His faults, his merits, fragments all,
Partial in good, partial in ill,
Partial in great things and in small;
But here's the grief — that, worst or best,
Each fragment of him wrecks the rest." 1
Importuned by a father to minister to his
dying daughter, Brand sets out with father
and son across the snowfields. The fogs
roll in to obscure the way, and render the
trip across the mountains exceedingly
hazardous. Fearing the deadly avalanche,
the father turns back and tries to dissuade
him. Brand, disgusted, pushes on, leaving
his companions behind, and arrives in time
to minister to the dying girl. The sun
soon lifts the fog, and he discovers Einar,
1 Brand, translation by Herford, Act I, p. 23.
204 CHRIST AND THE
an aesthetic painter, and Agnes, his sweet-
heart, sporting along the way from their
betrothal feast. They feel that life in its
deepest reality is only a thing of laughter,
joy, and song, and are unmindful of the
precipice along the edge of which they play.
From this danger Brand saves them by a
warning cry. Later he meets the mad
girl, Gerd, in wild abandon endangering
everybody as she throws stones at a falcon.
She tells him to forsake the conventional
ideals of religion for the ice-church in the
mountains, where the cataracts sing the
mass. In these three Brand finds disclosed
the three types of weakness which it is his
mission to fight. The father who turned
back for fear of the avalanche is "faint-
heart," Einar and Agnes, with their super-
ficial views of life, represent the type which
he calls "light-heart," while Gerd, with
her wild ways fighting against all restriction
of convention, is "wild-heart."
Light-heart who, crown'd with leafage gay,
Loves by the dizziest verge to play,
Faint-heart, who marches slack and slow,
Because old Wont will have it so;
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 205
Wild-heart, who, borne on lawless wings,
Sees fairness in the foulest things,
War front and rear, war high and low,
With this fell triple-banded foe!
I see my Call! 1
It is thus that Brand dedicates himself
to the "all or nothing" principle of life.
Henceforward farewell to all half-hearted
measures and that religion which is intent
only on self -salvation :
A little pious in the pew,
A little grave — his father's way —
Over the cup a little gay —
It was his father's fashion too !
He soon has opportunity to put his resolve
into action. As he approaches his native
village he finds the Mayor's clerk distribut-
ing food to the starving in completely pro-
fessional charity. Where one has died it
is not without its happy side, because there is
one less to feed. Should one come from out-
side the parish, no human want would argue
for his relief because "beyond our bounds."
I do my duty with precision —
But always in my own Division.
Herford's Brand, Act I, p. 36.
206 CHRIST AND THE
Into the midst of this scene breaks a woman
who appeals for some one to cross the
fjord to her dying husband, who, in a fit
of madness caused by the suffering of his
starving children, has slain one of them.
The only bridge was swept away as the
woman crossed. Upon the fjord rages a
tempest in which it seems no boat could
live. No one will volunteer to go with
Brand to hold the sail. All are held back
from the heroic by consideration for their
future, their families, or some convenient
excuse. Agnes demands that her lover
Einar go, to prove his manhood, but Einar
is like the others, and by his refusal puts
a great gulf between them. At last, as
the boat is pushed off, Agnes leaps in. The
heroism of Brand decides the people to call
him for their priest. He is at first unwilling,
having in view larger fields than would be
afforded by the narrow valley of his native
place. The clearer-sighted, because loving,
Agnes persuades him that here is as great
possibility as anywhere, and he remains.
His mother, a woman of the world and
a miser, forms the first great test of his new
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 207
philosophy of life. Thoroughly sordid and
low in life, she had hoped to save her soul
by educating her son for the ministry.
When he declares that she shall not be
saved except by giving to the poor all her
possessions, she finds it impossible to break
the bondage of long years of sin, and dies
unconfessed, crying out that God will be
more lenient than her hard-hearted son.
We next see Brand and Agnes married and
living with their little boy in the sunless
valley where their work demands their
presence. The child sickens, and the only
hope of saving his life is to remove him to a
gentler climate. This Brand is in the act
of doing when he is reminded by the people
and by Gerd, who represents now his own
conscience, that it is inconsistent with the
theory he has been preaching, that God
demands "all or nothing."
He remains and the child dies. But the
heaviest stroke is yet to come. The heart
of Agnes is bound up in her child. She
puts the Christmas candle in the window
where it may shine across the grave. Ac-
cording to Brand's principle, this shows a
208 CHRIST AND THE
heart rebellious against the divine prov-
idence and he commands that the candle
be removed. The last refuge of the wo-
man's heart is the little garments of the
dead boy. As soon as this new idolatry
is discovered it must be quenched. Here
occur some of the most moving lines of
literature. Brand commands that the gar-
ments be given the illegitimate son of a
hag of the ditch in all her foulness and
filth. A little cap concealed in the bosom
of Agnes's dress is the last and absolute
demand. As this is yielded there comes
in her heart the peace of complete surrender,
but, alas! also a breaking heart. She has
been called upon for the sacrifice which
passes the bounds of human strength. She
dies warning Brand that one cannot look
on the face of Jehovah and live.
Brand has long since felt dissatisfied
with his church. He has been led to feel
that conducted on a grander scale it will
be more satisfying. He builds a cathedral
with the ill-gotten hoardings of his mother,
but on the day of its dedication, he sees
how it is all a lie and instead of unlocking
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 209
it to the people he throws the keys in the
river and exhorts the people to follow him
far off, far up, to a new church uncon-
ventional but perfect in the mountains.
This the people, admiring his courage and
sincerity, at first do, but soon there are the
common difficulties, hunger, the means of
life; these are questions which must be
met. The schools of fish, returning, glisten
in the fjord. They stone their leader and
return to the normal and too common
life. Brand fares alone far up the mountain
to discover in the end that his ideal church
was only an ice-church. Here too con-
science is present in the form of Gerd, whose
pistol shot brings down the avalanche that
swallow T s him up, while a voice is heard
above the ruck exclaiming, "I am the God
of love." This legend indicates alike the
source of Brand's failure and discloses the
only hope of his salvation. Both stand-
points are true and both are allowable.
Brand's Character Analyzed
We shall not understand Brand's charac-
ter without taking into account the circum-
210 CHRIST AND THE
stances of his birth. In Brand's mother
there is a will quite as full of iron as in the
son. Only instead of going in the direction
of self-surrender its whole thought is self-
profit. In the mother's case it is the iron
will bent on its own satisfaction, expecting
in the end to bend God to its own uses.
To this end love and every dear treasure
of life are sacrificed. On the other hand,
Brand represents the opposite condition.
With him every love and every treasure of
the passing hour is sacrificed to what is
deemed to be the will of God, in the pursuit
of a supposed perfection. In the midst
of this Brand is pursued by a lawless im-
agination in the form of Gerd, luring him
now from all conventional forms, now be-
coming a pursuing conscience to keep him
from every compromise. Ibsen here read
truly the human heart. It is not often the
purest-minded priest that submits himself
to the deepest flagellations. The very law-
lessness of Brand's imagination became in
moments that conscience returned to domi-
nate, the deepest scourge of his soul. We
do not know how often behind the deepest
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 411
sacrifices of modern life there lie the shadows
of deeper sins of which by a sort of flagella-
tion the soul hopes to rid itself. Brand's
birth, his early memories, his bringing up,
all help to emphasize the completeness of
his revolt from the dead-level plane of con-
ventional religious ideals in an endeavor
to save his own soul and to make amends
for his mother's wickedness. In his con-
ception of the bearing of heredity on life
Ibsen is close kin with iEschylus and
Euripides.
This forms the tragic face of Brand's
problem. How to win a holiness that shall
undo the deeds of his mother; how out of
all that foul start to win a perfection which
God himself must recognize, which man
must recognize also, and which must change
the face of the earth — that was his problem.
Just here we witness the necessity for the
"all or nothing" principle of Brand. As
he saw it, this complete giving of himself
was necessary for one who from such foul-
ness would win his way to heaven. The
sense of his own unworthiness, the fear of
participating in the self-seeking of a mother
212 CHRIST AND THE
who turned holiest things to self-grati-
fication, made him what he was. He feared
to save his boy, lest he lose his own soul.
He feared to temporize with Agnes's grief,
lest his own heart should give way to
human weakness. His uncompromising at-
titude with his mother ruthlessly crushed
his lively affection, but he refused her the
comfort of religion that by a full and com-
plete sacrifice she might save her soul.
Such a thoroughgoing individual as Brand
is inconvenient to have about. He is ever
bringing religion into contrast with tasks
and duties that seem to be necessary to
life. He presents ideals which, if observed
to the letter, make life itself impossible.
The sheriff found how uncomfortable it
was for the existing order to have Brand
about and so asked him to please move on
to another neighborhood.
Religious fanatics spring out of the soil
of corruption that produced Brand, from
the days of Loyola to those of John B.
Gough. It is rare for religious intensity
to spring from surroundings of culture and
from normal habits of life and thought.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 213
The life that has a keen sense of being
digged from a pit is the life that is prepared
to go upon a crusade for righteousness.
Of this kind and temper the world is ever
in need to waken it from its conscienceless
lethargies and to set it upon the heroic.
The Successive Tests of Brand's Motto
of Life
The first test of Brand's absolute-per-
fection philosophy came through his mother,
and here was registered his first failure.
He felt v it necessary for her salvation that
she should strip herself to nakedness and
rags in order to kill the sin of covetousness.
However true we may consider Brand's
attitude in the matter, the fact remains
that his mother died unchurched and
unsaved. His "all or nothing" doctrine,
necessary or unnecessary, was not sufficient
to snatch her life from the impending ruin.
Who shall say but that a little more of
filial love, a little more of pitying consider-
ation for the remnants of good, might have
led her along the way and might have made
possible for her the great renunciation?
214 CHRIST AND THE
The next test came when the bearing of his
religious program on the lives of the inno-
cent and the earnest is seen. We can say,
perhaps, that the wicked mother simply
went her own way, for which her son was
not responsible. We cannot say this of
Brand's little boy, nor of Agnes his wife.
A sense of religious duty, because it is too
narrow in its outlook, causes the death
of the child. The Brand that refused to
take the child to a place of health has the
same vein of tin possessed by the Brand
who was so inexorable with his mother.
He will not leave the valley to save the
child's life because he is torn between love
and duty. But the ruling motive here is
close to spiritual pride. He fears what the
people will say about his consistency. The
voice of conscience in the person of Gerd
does not free itself from its baser nature.
Because Brand does not distinguish this
from the voice of God he fails in the second
great test. The test in the case of Agnes
is likewise a failure. All through his trials
Brand has been severe upon himself, and
upon others he has been harder than God.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 215
In hardness he broke the bruised reed and
quenched the smoking flax of Agnes's life.
So it was with the other tests. Of course
a church built by the rewards his mother
had won from sin could never be a fit place
in which to worship a God of "no com-
promise." The tainted dollar would ever
remain tainted and accursed, to whatever
use it be put. The same philosophy of
religion prevented the people from the
normal occupations of life and ultimately
led to Brand's rejection. When he follows
his ideal to its absolute end he arrives
at last in an ice-church of which he is the
sole member with only Gerd, his accusing
conscience, for an audience. The forces
that have made all previous tests a failure
now operate upon his own soul. By iron
will and conscience alone shall no man be
saved.
"All or Nothing" in Modern Life
The problem here set forth is the con-
scious possession of every earnest social
and religious worker of the day. How to
bring civic, mental, moral, and religious
£16 CHRIST AND THE
salvation to an indifferent people is the
heart-breaking problem which faced Brand
and which faces very many of us. We feel
the exact truth of Ibsen's withering scorn
upon the laissez faire attitude and shallow
self -contents of his age. It is the picture
also of our own half-hearted age. Were
there not here and there a Brand to hurl
himself in defiance against its half-truths
and whole lies, against its half-formed im-
pulses of good, its half -realized measures of
reform, its half-lived religion, humanity
would rot. But when such Brands have
thrown themselves away, giving life itself a
protest, their voice has been like the voice
of one crying in the wilderness. The light
has shined only in an uncomprehending
darkness. The problem comes home to us
in most vivid way. Where can we find the
solution? The march of the masses toward
the better land is so slow. The few earnest
leaders of reform would have long since
entered into the promised land, but the
lagging rear guard of the unseeing and un-
believing holds back their steps, preventing
even them from entering in. From some
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 217
far mountain top they see the vision of
what might have been, of what shall be,
but in their loneliness there they lay them
down to die. Long, long afterward the
rear guard catches up in time to build them
a tomb. That this should be the fate of
the world's earnest souls is the ever-abiding
tragedy of our humanity. Brand and Pro-
metheus are proclaimed brothers across
the confused and noisy ages.
Yet there is something to be said for the
slow rank and file. They represent the
practical side of life. The fiery heroism
of Phillips and of Garrison is matched by
the more practical heroism of a patient
and waiting Lincoln. The vanguard of
reform must proclaim abstract truths, and
by training men's eyes upon the absolute
and perfect, make them realize what, in
the end, may be less absolute, but better,
because it fits humanity. The idealist too
often forgets that good does not really
exist until it has left the clouds of abstract
principles and has taken form in life.
Most often to the idealist the picture
seems spoiled when it leaves the abstract
218 CHRIST AND THE
and is seen realized in the midst of human
weakness and error. Yet the imperfect
good seems to be of very great value to
God. It is God's way of bringing the per-
fect day.
The reformer blazes the way of "no
compromise with evil," proclaiming from
every housetop his "all or nothing" philoso-
phy. He has his mission and his place,
but blessed to humanity are those who
follow behind, patient to achieve what
to-day is possible, and working for the
better day.
He who refuses the least because he can-
not have all is equal in sin with him that
refuses all.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 219
CHAPTER XVII
"WHERE LOVE IS, GOD IS"
Failure from an Overemphasized
Individualism
Let us sum up the sources of failure
in Brand's life and ascertain, if we can,
the guideposts to a solution of his prob-
lem.
The failure of Brand's religious ideals
sprang, first of all, from his failure to realize
truly the world of human relations. The
first commandment, to love God with all
the heart, is accompanied by a second which
requires one to evidence that love by
loving his neighbor as himself. Brand
forgot that there was a second command-
ment. Yet the second commandment is
the practical side of religion without which
the first is nothing. It is a terrible thing
to have a perfectionist of this kind in the
220 CHRIST AND THE
family, as Brand's mother, child, and wife
too dearly learned. To love God with all
the heart was Brand's abstract ideal. It
had no earthly meaning at all until it began
to be evidenced in a world of human rela-
tions. The best evidence of his love for
God would have been shown by a deeper
and farther reaching sympathy for his gross
and sinful mother. Little Alf, too, had
his right to life and self-expression, which
bulked as truly and as largely in the thought
of God as any fancied duty of Brand toward
any community. Brand was living for a
world which was all too narrow. There
was a future and a distance as well as a
passing moment. That was a diabolical
religious fatalism that could calmly look
on Alf 's death as the expiation of his grand-
mother's sin, or even to be acquiesced
in as discipline for Brand and Agnes.
Too often, in such lives as Brand's, Satan
appears as an angel of light. His supreme
duty at that moment was toward the little
boy, for whom God had made him re-
sponsible. That was an arrogant egotism
in Brand which presumed the neighbor-
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 221
hood would go to the bad if he left it. God
has many means of bringing and preserving
his kingdom. He is never shut up to a
single instrument. "Remember," said a
shortsighted friend to a young theological
student, "while you are studying Hebrew
souls are dying." Such narrowness as-
sumes that God has limited means of carry-
ing on his work, and that he cannot wait
for men to prepare themselves. All such
theories fail because they consider the sub-
ject apart from the wider and greater world.
There is no ideal so great that it should
turn us from the real duty of the hour.
But some one says, "Did not Christ say,
'Let the dead bury their dead'?" Yes,
but a careful reading will disclose that
these were excuses by which men were
attempting to escape participation in the
closing ordeal and passion of Jesus's life.
These were trivial duties which were being
put forward as justification for neglecting
the paramount duty.
Then there was Agnes. Brand never
could have made the demands on her which
he did if he had rightly respected her per-
£22 CHRIST AND THE
sonality. A mother's love is one of the
God-given things that by its tender senti-
ment and beauty, a full-blown flower of
life, keeps humanity from corrupting. It
is insufficient to say that Brand did not
recognize it because it had never appeared
in his mother's life. That was doubtless
true. That was a part of his tragedy.
Failure to appreciate Agnes' s love was,
nevertheless, his sin. That is one of the
most exquisite pictures of modern litera-
ture — Agnes at the window on Christmas
Eve. We may be sure God has no quarrel
with such a love as that, though Brand was
sure he did.
There used to be a theory that to love
wife, husband, child, or friend sacrincially
was the idolatrous evidence of an absence
of love for God. I do not know who
broached this hoary heresy. It is in unity
with the worst elements of paganism. To
say God took your child because you loved
him too much is of a piece with saying that
it is your duty to offer your child to Moloch
or to cast him to the sacred alligator because
you love him. God is never jealous of your
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 223
human love. What a travesty is such a
thought upon Jesus 's teaching that love
for man is the evidence of love for God!
When Brand snuffed out the candle of
Agnes's longing for her boy, he committed
murder in the name of God.
It is no wonder that such a dreamer
was unable, with all his ideals, to lead
his people to the light. He could not
understand people because by his very
upbringing he was out of sympathy with
men and women. He laid down im-
possible demands because his program,
while it was possible to a man living
alone in a vast world, was impossible to
men living in a world of relations. This
is the real problem at the heart of many
of the vagaries and excrescences of Christi-
anity. Monasticism, asceticism, celibacy —
these are its children. People are so slow
to realize that a man can be a full-rounded
Christian only in a world of normal human
relations. Such a Christian a man cannot
be in a monastery, in a retreat, or in a
religious shell of any kind. He rises or he
falls with his attitude toward a world of
2U CHRIST AND THE
relations. If he cannot there religiously
adjust himself, he has religiously failed.
At the heart of all such systems is an in-
sufferable egotism. It assumes that our
individual salvation is the principal thing
in all the universe. In truth, we are not
worth saving until we can forget our mor-
bidly selfish desire to be saved, in an altru-
istic desire to be saviors. Only saviors
can be saved, if we but had the sense to
know it.
When Brand did to the death that flower
of Agnes's heart, her memory of her boy,
he did away with the most priceless spiritual
treasure of his home and heart.
Failure from a False View of
Sacrifice
Brand's failure sprang also from his
false notion of sacrifice. He valued sacri-
fice, and supposed God valued it, for its
own sake. A sacrifice can never be de-
manded as a sort of spiritual gymnastic.
Yet this was the type of sacrifice that Brand
demanded of Agnes. It was called out to
meet a merely theoretical exigency. Her
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 225
fondling of the child's garments was as-
sumed as a revolt against the divine will
in his death. Brand did not see that he
was far more accountable than God for the
lad's dying. It was not a matter of refusing
the hag with the foul child at the door.
Other clothing would have kept him equally
warm. The demand was for the killing
of the finest instincts of her mother heart.
It was not sacrifice with a meaning. It
was sacrifice for a theory. Neither Brand
nor God himself would have had a right
to require it. There is a domain of the
human heart, a sanctuary of the individual-
ity, which God considers too precious to
violate, where only men dare tread with
sacrilegious feet. Into this holy place the
Christ will enter only upon man's invitation.
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock."
Jesus was ever a respecter of personality.
Some surrenders can be made only at the
cost of spiritual idiocy, because the soul
has a right to itself. Therefore any sacri-
fice of this self which has not some higher
purpose is a crime against the individual.
Even the cross could not have been incum-
22G CHRIST AND THE
bent upon Jesus except for a great practical
purpose. That practical purpose was no
theoretical propitiation of wills either —
it was a practical redemption of men, or else
it was heaven's supreme injustice.
God never calls men to sacrifice for the
sake of a theory nor for the sake of sacrifice*.
True sacrifice is deep with practical purpose.
It has for its object the welfare not of the
individual, but of his fellows. Had this
truth been better understood, the horror
of asceticism would never have darkened
the world. My starved, belabored, and
failing body, if it be starved and belabored
for my own soul's good, hides a more starved
and more belabored soul. There is soul
health for me only when it is starved and
belabored to some true purpose, the help
and betterment of my fellow men. I may
not seek sacrifice for my soul's good, but
if it come as the result of serving and
redeeming my fellows, I am not to turn
from it. To avoid it then is to lose my
soul.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 227
And Mercy too Is a Virtue
Ibsen points out a third source of
Brand's failure by the lips of the doctor
who witnesses the household tragedy. He
says to Brand,
. . . "Your Love-account is still
A virgin chapter, blank and bare."
This was the deepest source of failure. We
cannot help realizing how predisposed to
this sin Brand would be by hereditary in-
fluence and training. His childhood had
been loveless. His early home had been
loveless, just as his mother's marriage had
likewise been loveless. But we must be-
ware laying too many shortcomings to
heredity. Perhaps the very absence of
love from that childhood home should have
yielded a keener appreciation of love in
his later home, if his own heart had not
been so hard. Our difficulty here is easily
made. How far Ibsen fell into it we do
not know. Brand's lovelessness sprang
not from any passing over in heredity from
his mother, for character is never trans-
228 CHRIST AND THE
mitted. His lovelessness sprang from weak-
nesses of character that were like his
mother's. Hers was a material selfish-
ness; his was a spiritual selfishness. The
lovelessness in each case sprang from ego-
tism. But we must remember that it
could not be inherited. Brand's loveless-
ness was all his own.
We shall see the truth of this when we
look back at the beginning of Brand's
life and remember that his religion began
in a scorn of the weaknesses and follies of
men, which he applied also to the men them-
selves. It was Agnes, his good angel, who
persuaded him that his native village was
as worthy a place as any for his work.
Brand scorned men as well as men's sins,
and no true religion or service can be built
upon the scorn of men. That was the fatal
plan in life which landed him at last in the
hopeless isolation of the ice-church. Agnes
was his last bond of connection with the
world of men. Brand could have developed
his best self through the side of mercy and
of love alone. His ideal failed because
it was so far from the haunts of man's
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 229
common needs. The multitudes' hunger
was the realization of Jesus, and he refused
to send them away until physical wants
had been supplied. His word was strong
because it was so humble as to be in keeping
with human toils, the lowly tasks of fishing,
the ungarnished room of the peasant, the
coarse food of the hut. These might be the
surroundings for a Lord's Supper of holiest
communion. A yielding of Brand to love
would have opened new springs of power
in his life and would have made possible
the realization among men of the ideal that
lured him on. It was a grievous wrong
he did to Agnes's love in forbidding her the
memory of her little boy. It was a far
deeper injury he did to his own soul.
One so deficient on this side of character
would be religiously impractical and could
only lead up barren heights where it was
impossible for common men to follow.
"His categorical imperative . . . 'all or
nothing,' does not bear the strain of experi-
ence. Life is simpler, is not to be lived at
such an intolerable tension." 1
1 Huneker, Egoists, p. 334.
230 CHRIST AND THE
Ibsen himself spoke of Brand as having
climbed "toward the peaks, toward the
stars, and toward the great silence," 1 and
this is poetically true enough. But the
One who lived to call himself Son of man
has shown us that the heights which lead
us away from lowly human sympathies are
heights only in vain imagination. The
religious luster that gathers about Brand's
head is largely fictitious. We admire his
sacrifice because it was great, but it must
eternally fail because at heart it was suffered
for an individualistic aim. We must learn
to shun even goodness that starves our
human sympathies. The way to the heights
is still through the depths of a lively human
sympathy. Brand was too selfish and too
wanting in humility to reach them, and
this in spite of all his sacrifice. "Though
I give my body to be burned, and have not
love, it profiteth me nothing." Olson has dis-
criminatingly said that Brand's Christ was
only the martyr, and that he never rose to
the better thought of Christ as Redeemer. 2
1 Quoted in Ibsen on His Merits, Sir E. R. Russell, p. 106.
2 Olson, Ibsen's Brand.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 231
We can best apply here the thought of
Tolstoy as the final test of Brand's charac-
ter: "Where love is, God is"; and by the
same token where love is not, God is not.
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER XVIII
THE PROBLEM IN MODERN THOUGHT
The Modern "Pessimists
While in the foregoing studies we have
been discovering the various phases of the
problem of evil and suffering as they have
risen to prominence in the literature of
the ages, we have also been disclosing the
sources of modern doubt. From Rousseau,
through Schopenhauer, down to the pessi-
mistic writers of our own time, we have
had a sort of apostolic succession of despair
that has exerted great influence upon exist-
ing culture.
Of this school Grierson says: 1 "We had
in the pre-Raphaelite movement the art
romance of modern melancholy; we have
the poetic sentiment of it in the dramas of
M. Maeterlinck; we have in Wagner's
Lohengrin and Tannhauser the musical
1 Grierson, Modern Mysticism, pp. 39-44.
235
236 CHRIST AND THE
emotion of it. . . . It is beauty and longing
in Rossetti, beauty and despair in Maeter-
linck, beauty and madness in Wagner.
... It comprises a vast social world from
the cynical despair of Montmartre to the
sentimental despair of the Madeleine. The
first is a frank confession of a glaring social
fact; the second, a religious and secret con-
fession of the same troubled state of the
soul. This art is not a Latin and Parisian
development; all nations understand it,
for the language and gesture of modern
Melancholy are universal." . . . "The pes-
simism of our day has neither tears nor
moments of mystical joy. It is scientific
and aesthetic, and the consolation, if any,
lies in resignation. The pessimists of the
present day are of two kinds: those who
feel keenly, but are incapable of deep
thought, and those who cannot help medi-
tating, analyzing, and classifying." 1
Readjustment of Ideas
This concerns only the great leaders of
pessimistic thought. There is a great fol-
1 Grierson, Celtic Temperament, pp. 69-70.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 237
lowing among the common people, and
especially among those who for one reason
or another have been alienated from the
church. The works of pessimism are the
most thumbed and frayed of any in our
public libraries. Schopenhauer's chapter
in defense of suicide, to judge by worn pages,
is more perused than that of any other
volume one can find. The causes for such
feeling among the common people are not
to be found in the shortcomings of philoso-
phy, but, rather, in the forces of modern
civilization. The uncertainty caused by
the break-up of traditional views regarding
God, religion, the Bible, and the authority
of the church has offered the desired
excuse to men whose hearts were already
weaned from religion and to others who had
not the mind nor the diligence to seek the
truth. However we may deplore it, the
church is not speaking with the old appeal
to authority, and where it is so speaking
it is not speaking with any abiding effective-
ness. The age demands a gospel which
shall carry in itself the evidences of its
divine authority, without the "Thus it is
238 CHRIST AND THE
said" that has ever been characteristic of
the teaching of scribes and Pharisees.
Because too large a portion of the teachers
of the church are still quoting infallible
authorities rather than relying on the
eternal elements of verification in the con-
sciences of men, she has in many instances
lost her distinctive place of leadership and
failed in her task. Among the masses there
is overfullness of material comforts; there
are disillusioned religious hopes; there are
doubts induced by the dissolution of old
systems of thought, of old understandings
of the natural world, by the unsatisfactory
nature of spiritual proof which makes it
compelling only for the spiritually minded.
Too often has the church depended upon the
fear of an artificial retribution, and too
often has she made her appeal for salvation
to the sordid and the selfish interests of
human nature. Men need to be made to
see that retribution for sin is a reality more
terrible than they have dreamed. They
need to see that the effect of sin upon the
soul, upon the highest uses and possibilities
of personality, is more terrible than any
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 239
pictured flames of brimstone. They need
to realize that, so far as human insight can
go, the damage is irreparable apart from a
Divine and Inscrutable Mercy. But the
chief emphasis should never be put upon
this negative aspect. The man who is
scared into the Kingdom from selfish motives
of salvation has but a feeble and wavering
start toward that spirit which was in
Christ. The appeal should be ever positive.
The case should be fairly stated. There
should be such an emphasis given that the
terrible and destructive nature of sin should
be made to fill the minds of men with un-
accustomed awe. But the motive for sal-
vation should, in this age, be put upon the
highest possible plane. Loyalty to a divine
world order — loyalty to one's race, to one's
nation, to one's friends, loyalty to the God
of righteousness, which means, in the last
analysis of all, loyalty to one's highest
self — should be the keynote of appeal.
The thought should be less of escape from
that which is undesirable in the future,
and more of one's escape from that which
in the present hour mars and destroys life
240 CHRIST AND THE
and, so far as human insight can reach, must
be eternally marring and destructive.
Is this only a new phraseology for a very
old truth taught from the beginning? Let
us not neglect nor despise it for that reason.
Why should we seek to keep our evangel
ever in the same words? Why not speak
it in words that men can understand? If
the present interest is predominantly scien-
tific, then it is the duty of this age to use
every discovery of science to drive home her
truth to scientific minds.
The great spiritual verities, whatever the
form of speech, stand out as an inalienable
portion of the human soul. As such they
can never be permanently lost, nor kept
from coming at last into their kingdom.
The form of man's thinking changes and
is bound to change with every added insight
from nature and life. The great moral
verities are as indestructible as man's soul.
There is no more need to fear the com-
pulsory readjustments of modern thought
than to fear that the sun would refuse to
rise because men have changed from the
Ptolemaic to the Copernican astronomy.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT £41
It is the same set of facts that is being
interpreted in either case. The facts are
more important for life than interpretation,
and the facts remain.
With such a grasp of essential truth the
church can stand forth boldly in any age.
She must recognize the necessity for con-
stant readjustment of the setting of truth.
Yet she knows that religious truth cannot
be permanently hindered by any discovery
that can be made. She should stand with
attitude of honesty and openness toward all
truth. To slavishly defend any theory
against overwhelming light is to cherish
tradition more than truth. In this respect
the state of the Christian Church to-day
is far more hopeful than it has been since
the early days of the Reformation.
Misconception About Happiness
Modern pessimism is also much con-
cerned over the unsatisfactory nature of
human happiness. The increase of material
comforts, the advance of medical science
in the alleviation of pain, the increasingly
successful struggle for material things, have
242 CHRIST AND THE
led to an overemphasis of the importance
of physical happiness. A recent writer 1
has pointed out that if happiness were the
supreme goal, the pursuit of happiness
would be the highest good; but happiness
can never be the highest consideration in a
moral and spiritual world. The fertile
source of this despair has been in the failure
to realize the relative nature of happiness.
Any inventory of the sum of happiness
must include the moral and spiritual, as
well as the mental and physical natures.
The one-sidedness of this despair is clearly
shown by the character of the people most
influenced by it. They are for the most
part people who have every physical means
to happiness. Their misery springs out of
the inability of an overplus of good things
to prove permanently satisfying. It is just
this oversight of the necessity for the moral
and spiritual elements in any true happiness
that is the seat of their difficulty.
The modern man is no longer satisfied
with the mere transfer of the problem to
another world. The thought of a sort of
1 Ward, Realm of Ends, Gifford Lectures, 1911; pp. 339-340.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 243
physical happiness in the life to come as a
recompense for that which is missed here
does not appeal to him. He has now too
much of a sense of the unsatisfying nature
of physical fullness to dream that such can
be the reward of his soul. If heaven is to
be a place of eternal wassail, in which is
heard "the shout of them that feast," the
man whose motive is the "main chance"
is likely to prefer the short and satisfying
wassail of this life to the eternal but un-
certain one of the life to come. It is not
strange that he recognizes his kinship with
the self-seeking so-called religious brother
who denies himself strictly now with a
lively anticipation of physical delights to
come. It seems strange that the un-
spiritual nature of all such conceptions
should not be apparent to the most be-
nighted. We must find our sum of happi-
ness, not in the absence of physical pain,
nor in the lack of tragedy in life, not in
continual success and the smile of material
fortune, but in the deeper joys of the soul
which can rise triumphant over every hour
of pain and find songs in every night of
244 CHRIST AND THE
loss. Such a soul has already begun to real-
ize a blessedness which is eternal because it
is already a part of the personality and can-
not be destroyed by any earthly shock. The
world did not give and cannot take it away.
Our unhappiness more often springs from
some lack in the higher realm of the spirit
than from any failure of physical comfort.
It springs often from the very loftiness of
our aims, and because the spirit will not be
satisfied with unspiritual things. The ani-
mal knows little of suffering or pain because
its pain is confined to the physical realm.
The man suffers by reason of his higher
spiritual consciousness. Out of this grasp
of the soul after higher self-realization
springs our unhappiness and also our peace.
In the words of Doctor Royce, "Were there
no longing in Time, there would be no peace
in Eternity." 1
The Presence of Moral and Physical
Disorder
The sense of the presence of moral and
physical disorder in the world has in our
1 The World and the Individual, 2d Series, p. 386.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 245
time become almost a new sense with its
new altruistic and social application. Hence
the despair arising from this source is most
keenly felt in modern life. The disorders
of society, which seem by reason of their
complicated nature beyond the power of
man to correct, give rise to a very deep
despair. Why aspiring men should set
upon tasks of human amelioration, giving
life and happiness for the social salvage
of individuals who do not seem strongly
to desire salvation, is one of the perplexing
questions of many a life. Many a man has
faced his moral and social responsibility
in the bitter mood of Hamlet —
The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
The amelioration of pain has heightened
our sense of the evil of that which remains
uncorrected. The commonness of luxury
and affluence has written in deeper lines the
contrast of those who are inexorably barred
from hope. Ignorance, poverty, and want,
from which escape is made impossible by the
exactions of organized society, forbid spirit-
246 CHRIST AND THE
ual repose. The suffering of innocent chil-
dren for the sins of the fathers creates a
new horror for the mind.
These dark thoughts are only deepened
by the occurrence of catastrophes that
sweep away guilt and innocence, culture
and ignorance, redeemers and debasers of
men in a common ruin. To these are added
the personal flings of fortune which seem
with malevolent perseverance to keep us
back from our highest hopes and our best
service.
For all such it will be seen that the indi-
vidual is attempting to interpret the prob-
lem of his life without the key of complete
experience. 1 The judgment on God's good-
ness and on the Divine Providence of the
present order should certainly rest on some-
thing broader than the partial experience of
pleasure or pain that is given in the present
hour. 2 It is as if the child should judge of
1 Bowne, The Essence of Religion, p. 67.
2 "The actual existence of moral evil in our world is only
incompatible with a theocracy, if God is the author of this
evil; if, in other words, God is the sole free agent and his
so-called creatures only so many impotent vessels of honor
or dishonor. Then, indeed, God and the world would be
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 247
the love of his parents by their refusal or
acquiescence in his requests. When we see
life in retrospect it becomes apparent that
for us the refusals of life have often been
the greatest blessings. This much we can
discover when we see them in the larger
relations which years and experience bring.
And as for one's overwhelming and thank-
less tasks, one finds in the acceptance of
their challenge the summoning and culti-
vation of one's highest powers. In life's
afterthought they appear bearing the most
precious and most inalienable gifts. "In
the conquest over suffering all the nobler
gifts of the spirit, all the richer experiences
of life, consist." 1
Men of another age, coming thus far,
might have been able to sit down satisfied,
but it is certain we of this age cannot. We
bad together, but God only would be morally evil. And
that, surely, is a supposition as absurd as it is monstrous.
Before the presence of evil in the world can be cited as evidence
that God is not present in it, it must be shown that the evil
is such as not merely to retard but absolutely to prevent the
onward progress of moral order and render the attainment
of the upper limit of moral evolution forever impossible"
(Ward, Realm of Ends, p. 375).
1 Royce, The World and the Individual, 2d Series, p. 409.
«-18 CHRIST AND THE
cannot say, "Because I have been able
from suffering to seize a higher good, let
me be satisfied that other individuals
around me have the same privilege." We
cannot escape our sense of responsibility
for the unalleviated suffering of others.
There is no joy in others' pain, though that
pain be in them the way to spiritual values.
We cannot forget the gusty night when One
who was going bravely to crucifixion used
every means to save His disciples from a
like fate. And though like Him who
received His final discipline through the
experience of the cross, we win our way
hardly into life, we are not blind to the
moral blackness of those who furnished
the cross and set its cruel beams up in His
life. In other words, we can through faith
reach a personal solution while as yet the
larger question remains unsolved.
Lack of Adequate Motive
The sense of aimlessness which formed a
fundamental of Schopenhauer's philosophy
has characterized the thought and life of
many of his pessimistic disciples. It was
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 249
inevitable in any scheme which found the
fountain-head of Being in no higher source
than that of non-personal and aimless
Will. Many lives are lost in the divine
order, and give way to hopelessness be-
cause their life-plan and motive are too
small to satisfy an eternal spirit. Despair
is inevitable to the life which lives only for
the passing day, or which has not caught
its bearing in the higher relations. That
night in the upper room, surrounded by the
conscious breakdown of many dreams, in
personal danger from relentless enemies,
the scattering of the discipleship imminent,
his own betrayal in process of accomplish-
ment, called to the petty task of rebuking
selfish disciples by acting the role of the
humblest servant, Jesus would have fallen
into deepest despair had it not been for the
consciousness that he came from God and
went to God. The thought of source and
end, of beginning and goal, made every task
and every humiliation a joy. Because he
saw his life in its larger relations, every
temptation to sadness was removed. A
great measure of the world's despair comes
250 CHRIST AND THE
from an inability to realize the meaning of
common tasks, labors, and disappointments.
It arises from absence of adequate motive
in life. The passing hour in which Faust
sought his satisfaction had nothing what-
ever to give him of joy, until he hit upon
its discovery in a higher relation. Our
lives, so long as they dwell upon a momen-
tary pleasure or pain, success or victory,
will remain in constant peril of the violence
of circumstance. It is not until the larger
relations of life begin to appear that the
passing moment sinks into the wider plane
of experience.
"We judge the goods of life by standards
of sensuous comfort and worldly success,
and God has a very different standard.
We desire to be happy; God wishes us to be
holy. We look at the outward appearance;
God looketh at the heart. We look at the
seen and temporal; God looketh at the
unseen and eternal. We seek to make God
the servant of our worldly ease and com-
fort, while he is seeking to make us his
children, meet to dwell with him in light.
A great many of our difficulties disappear
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 251
when we occupy the divine standpoint and
view things under the form of the eternal.
God is not much concerned to make us
any of the things which the natural man
desires to be — rich, prosperous, successful,
as men count success. These are acci-
dents that count for little in the eternal
years. Hence the apparent indifference,
and even cruelty, of the divine dealings
with us. We set our heart on things one
may not safely have. We desire things
which are of no essential moment or abiding
significance. We seek to rest in an earthly
paradise, while God is preparing us for a
heavenly. Thus God's plans and ours are
often at variance because we are not yet
able to appreciate that he is preparing some
better thing for us. But we gradually
grow toward the insight." 1
The Breakdown of Religious Ideals
A consideration of the elements of despair
would be incomplete without an account
of that deadlock which occurs with the
breakdown of spiritual ideals. Usually,
1 Bowne, The Essence of Religion, pp. 60-61.
252 CHRIST AND THE
these ideals are a one-sided view of some
portion of the gospel which in the heyday
of discovery and appropriation seems to be
a full, perfect, and complete answer to the
deepest problem of life, and which is shown
to be inadequate only by the shock of
individual experience. This truth is il-
lustrated in Brand with his ideal of a per-
fect surrender to the will of God. The
ideal of perfect surrender was not wrong.
The weakness lay in its application. There
are many things which God will not demand.
He will never require that which outrages
personality. The foremost article in the
creed of Christ was respect for the indi-
vidual. He never needlessly wounded or
transgressed it. "I stand at the door, and
knock: ... if any man open the door, I will
come in." Brand used his own renunciation
as a club to beat other lives into subjection.
In his very scorn for the weaknesses of the
unspiritual lay the source of failure. One
may be as severe as he pleases with his own
life. He needs to grant to others an equal
liberty. This Brand could not do, so he
was filled with a continual dissatisfaction.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 253
He was dissatisfied with self, because his
continual introspection kept disclosing new
fields unconquered by the principle, "All
or nothing." So he was driven to make
sacrifices which God never demanded. His
theory consistently and universally applied
would scorn every good gift of God and
make life impossible, ending in a loveless,
lonely impasse. Because the human ele-
ment was wanting from his religious zeal,
he ends far off in the ice-church, utterly
bereft of any following save the mad girl,
Gerd, while from his heart has been torn
that human love which alone could make
him perfect.
This conflict between the world and the
spirit is a very real one to the keenly con-
scientious soul. It recurs wherever there is
literal interpretation of divine commands
without the guiding light of reason. To
very many the human reason is too prone
to sin and to speak after the manner of self-
ishness. This forms the torment of sensi-
tive minds. And very often this peculiar
sensitiveness undoes itself. A life given
over to minute introspection of unessen-
254 CHRIST AND THE
tials is very liable to miss the great mo-
ralities. That case is not unusual in which
a person is torn by self-examination for any
lingering "roots of bitterness" who with-
out compunction conveys slander against
an enemy. One such was known who was
ever in this state of tortured conscientious-
ness about the "roots of bitterness," who
ingenuously told of commanding the small
son to sink in his seat upon the train, that
he might appear to the conductor under
age. The climax came with the recital of
how both mother and son escaped alto-
gether the vigilance of the conductor and
rode free. Perhaps the smallness of soul
aided the escape. It is not amazing that
when such pursuit of religious ideals is
watched from the outside it leads to utter
repudiation of religion by men of the world.
And eventually the life of those who thus
pursue it drops into a hollow mockery of
religious reality, intent alone upon tithing
its mint, anise, and cummin.
For the sincere soul it is a distressing
fact that no truly religious ideal is ever
perfectly achieved. It may be and often
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 255
is, in theory, in those minds which are
given over to a lively imagination of virtues
not actually possessed, and to those who
are blinded by an assertive egotism to
grave defects in personal thought and
action. The moment one cries out to the
passing emotion, to any subjective state
of the soul, or to any condition of living,
"Stay, thou art so fair," he is in the con-
dition of Faust. That moment he passes
into the power of the devil.
It is the condition of a healthy soul to be
ever continuing the fight for perfection.
Even Christ is represented as becoming per-
fect through life's deep experience. "With-
in the province of the inner life an earnest
effort is itself a fact,' 91 and in the intensity
and perfection of our struggle, the com-
pleteness of our gift of ourselves to the
search, not in the perfection of our attain-
ment, must lie our peace and our reward.
Stevenson's words are ever true, that "to
travel hopefully is better than to arrive."
Arrivals are the greatest disasters to the
human soul. They mean that the soul is
1 Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 409.
256 CHRIST AND THE
satisfied at last with less than the eternal.
That means that, for all practical purposes,
the soul is lost.
One thing life should teach us, and that
is to beware of havens. Many come into
what they consider an unending haven of
spiritual rest who are simply grounded upon
shallows. The sons of God are content
to sail God's unresting sea. It is peace
enough and haven enough if they have on
board the Heavenly Pilot.
Resume of the Problem
Modern thought is demanding a deeper-
going and more thorough solution of the
problem than has so far perhaps been
philosophically attempted. It is not a suf-
ficient sop to the clear-sighted to declare
with Monism that evil is necessary as a
foil or contrast to the good, nor that it is
nonexistent — a form of mental error. Such
a claim is too much contradicted by human
experience. Nor is the modern mind able
to rest in the assumption that God is him-
self responsible for evil.
The ancient dualistic view is equally
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 257
repugnant. We are no longer willing to
assign an eternity to evil in which it opposes
itself to the good will of God. The view of
a divided universe has become impossible
to us. But the deeper problem is with us
in intense form. The discoveries of science
daily disclose new unities in the universe.
Our own ideals call for the final and com-
plete triumph of the good, and the banish-
ment of evil. It is our ideal in society, and
we feel that God can have no lesser end.
How, then, are we to meet the dark ques-
tion of the existence of evil in a world in
which God is supreme? Philosophy's best
word leaves the heart unsatisfied. As yet
philosophy has not brought the satisfying
answer. Its highest and best work has been
to show that the problem is ameliorated
in experience by the triumph of the timeless
human spirit over passing wrongs and sor-
rows, by showing the relative nature of
evil, and how from its opposition arise
the limitless aspirations of man. A final
answer it has not given.
Does not this deadlock point us to the
only solution that is possible to finite minds,
2.58 CHRIST AND THE
namely, the personal and the individual?
Will it ever be possible to strike the balance
of logical contradictions and be at peace?
There is no promise of such an attainment.
Nevertheless, each one of us can answer
the question in actual living. We can rise
superior to every sorrow; we can gain
strength of character from every tempta-
tion; we can win discipline from every pain.
We can in personal living transmute every
evil into a larger good. The goal, whatever
it be, must lie in this direction.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 259
CHAPTER XIX
JESUS OF NAZARETH AND THE PERSONAL
SOLUTION
The Individual Must Be Considered
in Relations
The popular thought concerning sin and
salvation has been in one way too indi-
vidualistic and in another not sufficiently
so. We have thought of a man's sin as
something for which society was mainly
at fault, and of salvation as something that
could be achieved by him alone. We
have thought of the sufferings of the indi-
vidual as if he were an isolated atom of the
universe. This is natural, because suf-
fering is in the end that of an individual.
Our crosses are hewn from different trees,
But we all must have our Calvaries;
We may climb the height from a different side,
But we eacji go up to be crucified;
As we scale the steep another may share
The dreadful load that our shoulders bear;
260 CHRIST AND THE
But the costliest sorrow is all our own,
For on the summit we bleed alone. 1
But he whose suffering is not lifted into the
larger relationships has not learned life's
lesson. His suffering has been in vain.
So there is no solution of the problem of
evil which considers the individual apart
from his relations in society. We are
beginning to see in an increasingly social
age a truth that has been long in dawning,
that the individual cannot be saved without
being himself also measurably a savior of
those about him. Any indifference toward
his world of relations bars the individual
from that salvation which he selfishly seeks,
for, in our common life, there are many who
go down by very reason of the temptation
caused by social wrongs that are sanctioned
and profited in by the more fortunate.
There is coming over the minds of men a
new source of despair. It is the despair
that springs from a consciousness of profiting
by another's sufferings and sins. Men
begin to feel keenly their responsibility
for a damnation of society toward which
1 Frederic Lawrence Knowles, Love Triumphant, p. 45.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 261
they have not yet learned their practical
duty. The cry of helpless children, of un-
happy women, of men made brutish by the
exactions of poverty and toil, make all talk
of peace of soul seem like the foolish bab-
blings of idiotic joy at a funeral.
For men who are doing nothing to relieve
society of its burden of sin, wrong, and
injustice to talk about blessedness strikes
the modern world as hollow mockery. The
truth is, we cannot enjoy blessedness as a
passive experience. We are blessed only
as our lives are bringing blessedness to
others. This truth was illustrated in the
life of our Master. He refused to think
of his life apart from its relations. It had
a source; it came from God; it had certain
specific duties toward the souls amid which
it moved, and there were certain definite
purposes to be realized in the future. He
dared enjoy no blessedness that was held
in reserve for self. There was ever the ne-
cessity of bringing his world to the knowl-
edge and experience of God and of lifting
his life into its larger relations. Pains and
bufferings, the loneliness of scorn, the heart-
262 CHRIST AND THE
break of being despised and rejected by
those whom he loved unto death, toils,
privations, suborned witnesses, physical
pain, the degradation of the cross became
supreme sources of joy as he lifted his life
into its larger relations. Nor is this truth
an academic one. How unfortunate is that
life which is so lost in the maze that it has
nothing left to live for! What sorrows
have been borne with brave spirit, "for
the sake of the children"! How does the
degradation of failure, loss, or ridicule rise
into dignity as it is bravely borne for others,
for a Cause yet to be born, for a Will that
is perfect, or an End that is sure ! Wherever
the philosophical solution of the problem
of evil may lead us, it is certain that the
practical solution is here.
The Identification of God with Cosmic
Life
Jesus found the solution of the problem
in the identification of God with the life
of the world. If the claim of Jesus to
Messiahship means anything, it means that
we are to think of God as identifying him-
DRAMAS OF DOUBT £63
self with the life of the universe. Thus the
groaning and travailing of the whole creation
in pain has a divine interest and significance.
Jesus's teaching about the fall of a sparrow
being of moment to the Eternal was no
mere poetic fancy. It was indicative of
Jesus's whole thought of the relation of
God to the world. Men who have learned
only the fellowship of joy have scarcely
scratched the surface-meaning of com-
panionship. The fellowship in pain and
peril is the fellowship that binds souls into
one. That fellowship with his creation
God desires. That is exactly what Jesus
intends to tell us about God. God is a
companion of our suffering, and lest our
human understanding should fail to grasp
so extravagant a truth, Jesus identifies
himself with God. He tells the amazed
disciples that he and the Father are one.
Then he holds himself not aloof, but is
wearied with the weariness of their journey -
ings, is hungered in the famine of their mis-
fortune, weeps with them at graves, suffers
in the sickness of their little children, con-
cerns himself in their catch of fish, and,
264 CHRIST AND THE
finally, makes the astounding claim, "I
who am thus a part of your common life,
I am God."
What wonder these men stood in open-
faced surprise attempting to drink in his
meaning! It was like that silent hour of
glory in the morning when you stand in
the embrace of a great mountain. You
see the limpid mountain lakes like gems
set in a crown. You see the woods as if
new-washed and fresh-tinted by an Eternal
Hand set forth as if they were .your indi-
vidual treasure. Far off you hear the silver
bugles of the mountain cataracts calling
to your soul. High up soars a hoary sum-
mit that seems all but unattainable. Your
soul cries out: "All this for me! How can I
see it and live?" Thus must the vastness
of this truth have come home to the dis-
ciples, as they gathered up from it all they
could comprehend, even as you pitch your
little tent and build your camp fire, making
provision for the common wants in the con-
scious embrace of the old mountain.
It is little wonder that Jesus 's message
was received with scorn and ridicule. It
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 265
is not surprising that he was slain for
blasphemy. It is no wonder that there
still linger men who deny his Deity. It is
such a stupendous thought. I have no
doubt that there are many more who would
deny, but that custom, creed, familiarity
with the statement of truth have hid from
them the overwhelming nature of Jesus 's
claim for himself and for God. When we
say that Jesus is a High Priest, touched
with the feeling of our infirmities, and then
that Jesus was God, we mean that God
suffers in our sufferings, is agonized in our
agonies, enfolds our little lives with a love
more sympathetic and tender than that of
our own mothers.
In the words of a modern philosopher,
"In the absolute oneness of God with the
sufferer, in the concept of the suffering and
therefore triumphant God, lies the logical
solution of the problem of evil." 1
I am well aware that this leaves some
natural problems unsolved. What becomes
measurably clear to us regarding lives that
perish by sickness and age is not so clear
1 Royce, Studies in Good and Evil, p. 14.
Zm CHRIST AND THE
when we think of great natural disasters.
Here our horror arises mostly from the fact
of the wholesale character of the disaster.
An individual case stirs our pity and
sympathy for but a moment. We say,
"What are a few days of life more or less,
in the eternal years?" We think of dis-
asters worse than death, and of the indi-
vidual life as only suffering from ills in-
cident upon a system which an All-Wisdom
knows to be the ultimate best for character
and life. A great calamity intensifies our
questioning many fold. To us the fisher-
man, drifted out with his dory in the fog,
gives his life as the expected toll of the sea.
A thousand Titanic victims go down to-
gether, and we question the divine goodness.
Such questionings, inevitable as they may
seem, find no adequate answer in time,
though their case is in reality no deeper
than the suffering of a single individual.
Jesus does not present any theoretical solu-
tion at all. He offers us only the practical
one. He asks first for a suspension of
judgment. Of life's solutions he says, "Ye
cannot bear them now." On the other
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 267
hand, he asserts that they are not, as many
have thought, all evidences of divine wrath
upon sin. "Those upon whom the tower
of Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that
they were sinners above all men that
dwelt in Jerusalem?" He asks us to trust
God and to rest sure in the Eternal Good-
ness behind the universe.
The Identification of God with Human
Achievement
Not only does Jesus represent God as
interested in the natural phenomena affect-
ing life. He represents him as identified
with human achievement. What deeper
meaning of the incarnation can be dis-
covered? Jesus identifies God as living
and working in him. The works that he
is able to do are less of himself than of the
Father. It is the Father that works
through him. If they cannot believe him
by reason of his personality, let them look
back of him to his works, as the evidence
of God. They surely ought not to continue
blinded by partisanship in the presence
of the works of God. Every good and per-
268 CHRIST AND THE
feet work comes from God, is infilled with
God, is directed of God, is a part of the
perfection of his universe through human
achievement. Jesus's message was that
God desires to work through men with the
same freedom that now he works through
nature. To man are given will and indi-
viduality, that he may become a partner
with God in the final result. Here lies
the efficient reason for the possibility of
evil. It is only through moral choice and
the conquest of evil that we can become
partakers with God in a moral universe.
We become thereby not mere creatures but
creators as well. "The real world must be
the joint result of God and man . . . unless
we are to deny the reality of that in us which
leads us to God at all." 1 It is indeed the
divine purpose that we realize the apostolic
injunction to become coworkers with that
God who worketh in us to will and to do
of his own good pleasure. "In the order
of time you embody in outer acts what is
for him the truth of his eternity." 2
1 Ward, Realm of Ends, p. 352.
2 Royce, Studies in Good and Evil, p.
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 269
The uniqueness of Jesus's life sprang
from his unique consciousness of relation-
ship to God and to the world. He solved
his personal problem as we have never
solved it, and he looked clearly into the
very heart of life because his own life was
lifted to the infinite and eternal standpoint.
When the clouds that have obscured the
realm of modern thought have rolled away,
and the chatterings of a superficial learning
are heard no more, the intellectual world
will awaken to the deep cosmic and social
implications of the incarnation, the depths
of religious truth will be uncovered, and
Jesus will come into his own.
Lifting the Individual Up to the Uni-
versal Plane
Just as Jesus solved the problem of evil
by lifting his life into its cosmic relations,
so he intended we should find our practical
solution. An uncompleted world, 1 attended
by a spirit of unrest because of the un-
fulfilled yearnings of a "creature moving
1 Eucken, Truth of Religion, p. 51ff.
270 CHRIST AND THE
about in worlds unrealized," speaks in un-
mistakable tones for those who have ears
to hear that the solution is not theoretical
but actual, not universal but personal.
The personal solution must come first.
Just as the problem is now unsolved because
it is a living one, and in the individual life
calls for constant struggle, so for the race
it can never be solved until mankind
universally has emerged from the morally
evil into the morally good. Then we can
answer our question abstractly. Till then
our only solution can be a personal one.
The Captain of our salvation leads the way
and it is his purpose "to bring many sons
to glory." With our lives centered about
selfish joys and selfish successes, interested
only from the standpoint of selfish am-
bitions — the fames, pomps, and pleasures
of the world — there can be no solution
whatever. Our personal misfortune or
seeming misfortune, viewed from that stand-
point, will cause us to cry out bitterly
against God and the universal order. We
shall be tempted to join that sickening wail
of infants over lost bonbons that has
DRAMAS OF DOUBT 271
characterized the aesthetic, immoral, and
weakening pessimism of our day.
When the evils of our present life are
turned one by one into a new sympathy
for men, into a larger striving after the
perfect day, the mists that have darkened
vision fall from us. When our lives fall
into step with a Divine Will that worketh
hitherto and still works in us; when our
lives are looked upon from the eternal stand-
point, all shadows fall behind us, because
our faces are turned toward the Light and
the Ultimate Revelation.
We can face the worst that life can bring
with the triumphant joy with which Jesus
went to his cross. Even our sanctification
will not be sought for selfish ends nor to
achieve a passive goodness. It will be
for a larger serviceableness. "For their
sokes I sanctify myself" is the word of
Jesus.
Jesus ever tried to lift the disciples up
into this higher order of living in which
all mysteries should be solved at last. His
practical word of faith to them was this:
"In the world ye shall have tribulation:
272 CHRIST AND DRAMAS OF DOUBT
but be of good cheer, I have overcome the
world."
To face disaster with triumphant soul
for the sake of the world around you, to
sink your lesser ills in the universal need,
to live heroically and to die with one's
face to the light — this is the only solution
granted to mortals, and it is enough until,
speaking in the words of a teacher w T hom
many loved, "we pass beyond the night
and know as we are known." 1
1 Bowne, Essence of Religion, p. 69.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Including only the more important works.)
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Adam, Religious Teachers of Greece.
Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek
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Blackie, Prometheus, in Horse Hellenicse.
Courtney, The Idea of Tragedy.
Bunsen, God in History.
Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism.
Owen, Five Great Skeptical Dramas.
Plumptre, Prometheus Bound.
Renan, Le Livre de Job.
Genung, Epic of the Inner Life.
Gilbert, Book of Job.
Coults, The Poet's Charter.
Ulrici (translator), Shakespeare's Dramatic Art.
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Feis, Shakespeare and Montaigne.
Werder, The Heart of Hamlet's Mystery.
Lewes, Life of Goethe.
Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets.
Sanborn, Life and Genius of Goethe.
Lindsay, Philosophy of Faust.
275
276 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blackie, Wisdom of Goethe.
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with Eckermann.
Reichlin-Meldegg, Faust.
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Masson, Three Devils.
Coupland, The Spirit of Goethe's Faust.
Davidson, The Philosophy of Faust.
Heller, Henrik Ibsen.
Haldane Macfall, Ibsen.
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Moses, Henrik Ibsen, the Man and his Plays.
Olson, Brand et Dramatick Digt.
Stobart, New Light on Ibsen's Brand, Fortnightly
Review, August, 1899.
Henderson, Interpreters of Life.
Boyesen, Commentary on Ibsen.
Wicksteed, Four Lectures on Ibsen.
Herford, Brand.
Huneker, Egoists.
Dewhurst, The Losing and Finding of Life.
Russell and Standing, Ibsen on His Merits.
Bowne, Essence of Religion.
Bowne, Theism.
Bowne, Principles of Ethics.
Eucken, The Truth of Religion.
Grierson, Modern Mysticism.
Grierson, The Celtic Temperament.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 277
Caird (J), Introduction to the Philosophy of
Religion.
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy.
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Ward, The Realm of Ends.
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Royce, The Religious Aspects of Philosophy.
DEC 9 1913
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