FACING THE CRISIS A STUDY IN PRESENT DAY SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS PROBLEMS BY SHERWOOD EDDY ASSOCIATION PRESS NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY. FACING THE CRISIS. 1 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO M. L. E. M. H. E. M. M. E. 2135271 The Fondren Lectures Mr. and Mrs. W. W . Fondren, members of St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Houston, Texas, gave to Southern Methodist University on May 10, 1910, a fund, the proceeds from which were to be used in the establish- ment of the Fondren Lectures on Christian Missions. The following paragraphs from the conditions of the original gift will set forth the spirit and purpose of the Foundation. "The interest on the investment shall be used annually in procuring some competent person to deliver lectures on Christian Missions under the auspices of Southern Methodist University. This fund is dedicated to the foundation of a lectureship on Christian Missions in consideration of other donations made for the upbuilding of Southern Methodist University, and especially the School of Theology thereof and in the hope that something of good may come directly therefrom and that others more able to give largely may be inspired to devote some portion of the means which they hold in trust as stewards of the Lord to the increase of said fund or to some other laudable enterprise of our church." FOREWORD We are facing a crisis in the world today. There have been crises in the past and doubtless there will be again in the future. But we are confronted with an unprecedented situation in our war-torn world. The late war has left us rent and divided in three great cleavages of humanity, in national, racial and industrial strife. Almost every nation is demanding self-determination; every race is claiming its equal and rightful place in the brotherhood of man; every class, especially the industrial toilers of the world, demanding economic freedom and a more abundant life. We are standing at the beginning of a new creative epoch in history, in a vast period of transi- tion from the old order to the new. An old mate- rialistic order of selfish privilege and competitive force, an order of imperialism, congested capitalism and militarism, breaking out periodically into overt war, is lying in wreckage all about us. But the building of a new order has already begun. There is a crisis in our national and international affairs. Is war to threaten our final civilization or is it to be outlawed? There is a crisis in our indus- trial life. The writer on his last journey around the world found strikes in Japan, China, India, Egypt and throughout Europe, but he returned to find over three thousand a year in America. What is the meaning of this world-wide industrial unrest? viii FOREWORD There is a crisis in our race relationships. The trouble in India, Egypt and other lands has its roots in racial as well as in national antipathy. There is a new race consciousness observable since the war throughout almost the whole of Asia and it is now spreading in Africa. The United States with her problem of immigration and an average of two lynchings a week or about a hundred a year, must face this challenge of the unsolved race problem. There is a crisis in our religious life. We have made far more rapid advance in scientific discov- eries in the material realm than in our spiritual life. The war has revealed fundamental seams of weak- ness in our civilization. We must rethink our posi- tion, restate our faith in terms of modern thought, and endeavor to reconcile the undoubted and incon- trovertible facts of experience in the realm of religion and of science. This book is a plea that we face this crisis fearlessly and honestly, proving all things and holding fast the good, the true and the beautiful. There is a crisis also in the life of every individual, who, facing the challenge of our turbulent times, is forced to make the transition from the medieval to the modern point of view. At the Des Moines Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement where some seven thousand students from a thousand institutions in the United States and Canada had assembled, the crisis created by the war was evident in one meeting where scores of questions were asked on the vital religious, social and industrial problems which these students were facing. The meeting was of such interest that FOREWORD ix the experiment was tried in various colleges of this country and later in meetings for students in other lands as well. It was then that this strange fact was observed. We found that the students are ask- ing practically the same round of questions in every college, in every country today. In the state universi- ties of this country; in Cairo, or Assuit on the Upper Nile, in Turkey; in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Ger- many, or Sweden; in America, Europe or Asia we find students facing the same great questions. Many of these are the persistent problems that have always beset and baffled the human mind. Yet some face a new world with a fresh challenge in this period of reconstruction and of striving for the creation of a new social order. Many are demanding today reinterpretation of old beliefs and a restatement of all our thinking in modern terms. When asked to deliver the Fondren Lectures at the Southern Methodist University at Dallas in 1922, and later, the Sturtevant Lectures at Alle- gheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, it seemed that no better theme could be chosen than "Facing the Crisis," to endeavor to answer briefly the ques- tions of the hour that were actually being asked by the students themselves. They seemed to be indeed issues of universal interest, not alone to students but to all thinking men who have to face the prob- lems of our day. The questions asked fall naturally into two groups : I. Religious and Philosophical; 2. Social and Indus- trial. It is obvious that in the brief space of one short x FOREWORD volume all these great questions cannot be exhaus- tively or adequately discussed. The views expressed are personal and unofficial and do not represent those of any organization or denomination, nor can the writer speak as an authority upon modern science, philosophy, or theology. For more than twenty-five years he has been working among the students of Asia, America, and Europe, who feel the pressure of these problems, and, so far as in him lies, he feels that they are entitled to an honest answer to their questions. Quotations from the New Testament are prevail- ingly made from Moffatt's translation. As in the King James and Revised Versions pronouns refer- ring to God or Christ are not printed in capitals. The writer's thanks are due to many friends who have generously read and criticized portions of the manuscript. New York, 1922. CONTENTS PART I: RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL FACE I JESUS CHRIST WHAT Is His SIGNIFI- CANCE? 15 II GOD DOES HE EXIST, How CAN HE BE FOUND? 47 III THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IF GOD Is GOOD WHY Is THERE SUFFERING? ... 65 IV IMMORTALITY Is THERE A LIFE AFTER DEATH? 77 V MIRACLES HAVE THEY REALLY HAP- PENED? 87 VI THE BIBLE How Is IT DIFFERENT FROM OTHER BOOKS? 97 VII EVOLUTION CAN WE RECONCILE SCIENCE AND RELIGION? .no VIII PRAYER WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE PRAY? 122 IX THE NEW LIFE How DOES IT CHANGE A MAN? 131 X MORAL MASTERY THE FIGHT FOR CHAR- ACTER 140 XI WORLD BROTHERHOOD Is OUR RELIGION WORTH EXPORTING? 151 xi xii CONTENTS PAG* PART II: SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL XII OUTSTANDING NATIONAL PROBLEMS . . 161 XIII THE RACE QUESTION 165 XIV THE ETHICS OF WAR 173 XV INDUSTRIAL UNREST 179 XVI WEALTH AND POVERTY 182 XVII COLLECTIVE BARGAINING 187 XVIII THE OPEN OR CLOSED SHOP . . . . 192 XIX THE SOCIAL GOSPEL 198 XX THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 203 XXI MOTIVES AND OBJECTIVES 218 XXII CONCLUSION THE FAITH OF A MODERN CHRISTIAN 224 APPENDICES I: THE FELLOWSHIP FOR A CHRIS- TIAN SOCIAL ORDER .... 233 II: THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE CHURCHES 235 III : BOOKS ON CURRENT SOCIAL PROB- LEMS 237 INDEX 239 FACING THE CRISIS PART I: RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL I JESUS CHRIST Who was Jesus Christ? What is his significance as we face the present crisis? Was he in any sense divine? Was he unique, as the supreme manifes- tation of God? Let us study in turn his character, his teaching, his unique relationships, the historic effects of his life; and the strange contrasts and paradoxes in which he seems to transcend his environment. We shall then examine the otherwise broken arch of hu- man experience, in the incomplete structure of science, philosophy, art, morality and religion, to see if perchance he furnishes the key-stone and com- pletion of life. We shall finally see if he meets the test of personal experience. We have better records of the life of Jesus than of any character in ancient history. There is, more- over, a certain self-evidencing value in these narra- tives, a rugged, sober sincerity, a sense of reality, a straightforward honesty of purpose that makes 15 16 FACING THE CRISIS its own appeal. Let us then take these simple records and see whether they bring us evidence that Jesus was merely an ordinary man like ourselves, or whether he stands unique and alone, unlike all who came before, and all who followed after him. It may seem strange to some that Jesus was in any peculiar sense divine, but once granted a per- sonal or loving God who desired to help men as his children or to manifest himself to them, how other- wise could he do so intelligibly, helpfully and finally save in a human life like that of Jesus? Let us begin, however, with him just as a man, and study his life and teaching. I. His Character. How strong he was ! Fiercely tempted for forty days, he returns triumphant, with power enough to help a defeated humanity. How fearlessly he stands before his enemies, undaunted, unswerving from the path of duty. All the tyranny of Jewish legalism or of Roman imperialism could not crush him. Quietly and unafraid he moves to his appointed end. How strong is his hold upon men, as he calls them to leave home and kindred, ambition, possessions, all things, even life itself, to follow him. After sixty generations, his call is still the most commanding and imperative in hu- man life, as he leads men to go for him to the heart of social injustice, or to the ends of the earth, to the jungles of Africa, to the limits of Asia, to tropic heat or arctic cold, to carry his transforming message of good news. Feeble and failing humanity has ever turned to him in its deepest despair and in its highest hope as "strong Son of God." Still JESUS CHRIST 17 we say, "Purest among the mighty, mightiest among the pure, whose pierced hand has lifted empires from their foundations, has turned the stream of history from its channel and still guides the ages." Does not his whole life leave upon us the impress of overmastering moral strength and spiritual power ? How pure and sinless he was! All the world's literature and all its sacred books contain the record of no other sinless character, and none was ever con- ceived or successfully portrayed in fiction. Every other great religious leader has passed through a conversion, or a period of repentance. The best men have ever been most ready to confess their faults and failings, for "human piety begins with repentance." Jesus seems removed by a world from even the best of his followers, who like Peter cry, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man," or, like Paul, out of a tortured conscience of despairing legalism, "O, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me?" Out of the depths of a seemingly sinless consciousness, unconvicted before man and unrepentant before the very presence of God, he calls the world to a standard of perfect purity "Ye shall be perfect." He lays bare, as none other, the depravity of the human heart; yet seems con- scious of no guilt or shortcoming of his own. Who is this that calls a world to repentance, yet needs none himself; who prays, "Father forgive them'' but never, "Father forgive me"? After years spent in the daily intimacy of his presence, as he was pressed by the throng, weaned, 18 FACING THE CRISIS persecuted, deserted, nailed to a felon's cross, these men who companied with him, who would go to death rather than accord divine honors to Caesar or any other man living or dead, gave him in their thought and worship the supreme place as "Lord," as the very symbol of deity, as God revealed in a human life. His greatest enemy Saul of Tarsus places this Galilean carpenter beside God and finally comes to sum up human experience in the words, "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." If God were to manifest himself in a human life, could it be more Godlike in moral purity? And how loving he was! For three years we see him going about doing good, sharing his life with needy men in limitless self-giving, the great- est heart of all human history. None other ever compassed humanity, sounded the depths of its sin, swept the whole horizon of its sympathy. None other ever so loved the whole sordid world "unto the end." The multitude of the poor gathered about him as though drawn by a great human mag- net. Little children strangely loved him as he took them in his arms and placed his hands upon them. It was the taunt of his enemies, but the glory of history, that he was "the friend of sinners." He seems possessed by "the enthusiasm of humanity" that takes in the human race in its breadth and endless reach. And yet he loved each, one by one. He loves Peter, who breaks his heart, cursing and swearing as he denies him. He loves Judas as he JESUS CHRIST 19 stoops to wash the feet of his betrayer. Each in his presence felt the glow of his personal affection. We see him in his last agony, exhausted under the Roman scourging, spit upon, nailed to a cross, reviled, rejected, hated, his life plans seemingly fall- ing in wreckage about him, before the cynical hard- ness and hatred of impenitent Pharisees and Sad- ducees who were leading his people to destruction, yet crying, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." Higher than this, our thought of love cannot reach. And herein is a Gospel for humanity, a Good News for the race if we can believe that in this manifestation of unconquer- able love, he was "the likeness of the unseen God," and that God was like Jesus. Could God himself be more loving if revealed in a human life? This Jesus, strong, pure, and loving, stands be- fore us, our very brother-man. We find in him, moreover, a perfect balance and symmetry of char- acter. Who is this young rabbi-carpenter, who lays aside his tools and goes out to call all men to be his brothers and children of his Father in Heaven? Someone may say, Are we not all divine? If so, what is the difference between Jesus and ourselves? Yes, I know that God is in me as a sinner that is being saved. But God was in Jesus as a Saviour of sinners. Every human being is created in the image of God. The Father and his children share a com- mon life. God, Jesus and all mankind are spiritu- ally akin, for God is immanent in all. Jesus repre- sents the fullness, the completion, the supreme mani- festation of the immanence of God in human life. 20 FACING THE CRISIS There is a moral world of difference between the best of his followers, who cries that he is "the chief of sinners," and him who can say, "Thy sins are forgiven thee," "Come unto me and I will give you rest." * Think of his spiritual finality. Jesus is never out of date. He is humanity's eternal contempo- rary. If he were merely a good man, a well-mean- ing carpenter of Galilee, an unlettered peasant, we ought now after nineteen centuries of progress to be turning out from Oxford and Cambridge, Yale and Harvard, Paris and Berlin, better men than Jesus. In what other historic character could we transfer every attribute to God without a sense of blasphemy, and dare to say God was like him? If we can be sure that God eternally is what Jesus was here on earth, this is for us an eternal Gospel. Think of a God as loving as Jesus, with as tender a personal care, marking the sparrow's fall, number- ing, as it were, the hairs of our heads. Think of a God like Jesus in his moral distinctions, hating hyprocrisy and sin, yet loving the sinner. In his moral attributes what more can we conceive of God? And let us remember that in the question of Jesus' divinity, it is not a mere estimate of an a "We should expect that God would manifest himself in such a soul for the guidance and salvation of men. When we turn to the records of Jesus Christ we are enabled to look into his soul ; and there for the first time the immanence of God becomes a trans- parent reality. The distinctive marks of his consciousness as compared with ourselves and the best of men are three: i. He is not conscious of sin. 2. He enjoys an unclouded communion with God; he and his father are never separated in will or act. 3. He alone exists, only to save and serve humanity." R. F. Horton, "My Belief," p. 109. JESUS CHRIST 21 historic person that is at stake, but the character of God himself, our way of construing the universe, our attitude to humanity, the meaning and destiny of life itself. Your casual opinion or estimate of So- crates or Buddha, of Bacon or Shakespeare mat- ters little; but what you think of and do with Jesus becomes for you the test of life and the touch-stone of destiny. For he is the ideal realized. Who is this who so affects or determines our relation to God and man, to life and destiny? Has he the message we need in facing the crisis in the world today? 2. Jesus' Teaching. He has enlarged for man- kind the conception of God, of man, of duty, and of destiny. Jesus enlarged our conception of God. He puri- fied, unified, vitalized, and raised it to its highest power. He made God as Father real to humanity. The idea of God has been to the philosopher a postu- late, an hypothesis, a first cause, an explanation, or an abstract absolute. To religious people, the full realization of God had been prevailingly perverted or confused, by animism, polytheism, pantheism, en- slaving legalism and a chaos of conflicting ideas and superstitions. Jesus gathered all the thoughts and experiences of men into one glorious and vital unity of God as Father. He so introduces us to God, so shares his experience with us and so makes us acquainted with him that God becomes for us the central certainty of all life. Jesus teaches the inestimable worth of man as God's child, made in his image, capable of fellow- 22 FACING THE CRISIS ship with him, with the expanding power of an endless life. For him every man is of incalculable spiritual value, worth all the love of God and worthy of his own infinite sacrifice. Emerson tells us that one alone knew the worth of a man. In all previous history man had been cheap, enslaved, exploited, slain by thousands in battle, offered on the altars of the lust, cruelty, and greed of his fellow-men. Jesus alone measures his full worth in the purpose of God. In the light of his teaching even the lowest slave be- comes "the brother for whom Christ died." The modern world has confirmed the estimate he placed upon man. He taught the native spir- itual equality and democratic right of opportunity of all men, and as Benjamin Kidd reminds us, "around this doctrine every phase of the progres- sive political movements in our civilization has cen- tered for the last two centuries." He lifts our conception of duty. He raises man's life to new moral heights of possibility and places a new ethical ideal before humanity. And yet this humanly impossible standard seems natural to him and, in his presence, possible for us. He makes us joyously confident to dare the humanly impossi- ble. Fearlessly he sweeps aside or criticizes as in- adequate the most authoritative known standards of morality with his moral imperative, "/ say unto you." He places clear and firm before us, as an Alpine snow peak, moral altitudes which without him are inaccessible. In his call to duty, reinforced by the categorical imperative of conscience within, and the moral or- JESUS CHRIST 23 der of the universe without, we seem to hear the very voice of God. Who is this that stands at the moral summit of the centuries? He creates a new conception of destiny as he flings wide before us the entrance to endless life. He makes no labored proof nor cold argument for immortality. Beside the guesses and gropings and wavering uncertainties of the philosophers, he of- fers the sure and blessed hope of an eternal life already begun here on earth. He offers no mere selfish personal blessing in a future heaven, but the mighty concept of God, man, and duty united and realized in a universal and eternal Kingdom of God, here and hereafter. Reinhard bases the argument for his divinity solely upon this conception of the Kingdom. Who is this unlettered Galilean peasant who proposes a Christian social order involving the moral organization of all mankind? His con- cept embraces a sphere so wide that it is confined by no Pharisaic sect or clique or Jewish prejudice, but would embrace all men of all races and all re- ligions. Here is a kingdom already within us yet endless as the ages, high as the purpose and plan of God and deep as human need and sin. Royce asks where we can find "a cause, all-embracing, definite, rational, compelling, supreme, certain, and fit to centralize life." To whom shall we go, save to him who flings this challenging program before us as the highest conceivable goal for humanity? 1 *Mr. H. G. Wells in a recent article on the six greatest men in history- says of Jesus, "His is easily the dominant figure in his- tory. ... A historian without any theological bias whatever, should find that he simply cannot portray the progress of hu- 24 FACING THE CRISIS How high is Jesus' ethical standard! What a ureadth and sweep it embraces, appealing equally to Orient and Occident, to wise and ignorant, rich and poor, to men of all races, all ages and genera- tions alike! And how adaptable it is; not cramped or confined in rigid rules, but spacious in eternal principles, motivated by love, freed by the concept of liberty, containing the element of progress, and mighty with the dynamic of divine power. How final is his moral imperative ! How much have twenty centuries added to his ethical standard? His word seems to stand complete and final in eternal truth. Who is this young carpenter-rabbi, this peasant who sits on the hillsides of Galilee and proclaims eternal truth for humanity, to whom we turn today with the words, "To whom else shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life."? To whom shall we turn for the ultimate spiritual standards of life? To Moses or Isaiah, to Buddha, Confucius, or Mohammed? Can we find the full spiritual mean- ing of life unfolded by Socrates, by Plato or Aris- totle, by Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, by Kant or Hegel, by Dante or Shakespeare, by Nietzsche or Haeckel? To whom else can we turn for life? manity honestly without giving a foremost place to a penniless teacher from Nazareth. ... A historian like myself finds the picture centering irresistibly around the life and character of this simple, lovable man. . . . The permanent place of power which he occupies is his by virtue of the new and simple and profound doctrine which he brought the universal loving Fatherhood of God and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is one of the most revolutionary doctrines that has ever stirred and changed human thought. . . . The world began to be a different world from the day that doctrine was preached." The American Magazine, July, 1922, p. 14. JESUS CHRIST 25 Who, other than Jesus, completes the whole sweep of our thought of God, of man, of duty, and of destiny, and unifies them in one eternal Kingdom of Love? 3. His Unique Relationships. If we read afresh the records of his life, it seems evident that Jesus stands in a unique relation both to God and to man. We shall confine our references here to the first three gospels. 1 Whether we examine the claims he is reported to have made, or those made for him by his followers, or the overwhelming impression he made upon his contemporaries, or the functions he fulfills, he actually brings God to man and man to God. He is the supreme revelation of God and the Saviour of man. 1 We have better manuscripts, both as to quality and quantity, written nearer to the events described, than we possess of any other ancient character or writer. Of the plays of Eschylus we have some fifty manuscripts, none of them complete; of Sophocles about a hundred, but only seven of value; of Euripides, Cicero and Virgil some hundreds. But of the four Gospels and of the New Testament in the original Greek, we have over three thou- sand manuscripts and, with their ancient translations, more than twelve thousand copies to consult. Moreover, these stand chrono- logically nearer the events they record than the manuscripts of the classics. The earliest manuscript we have of Sophocles was writ- ten fourteen hundred years after his death; of Euripides sixteen hundred years, and of Plato, thirteen hundred years after he lived. Of Virgil, the best of the classics, we have no extant manuscript written within a hundred years as near the lifetime of the author as in the case of the New Testament manuscripts. Of the manu- scripts of Aristotle, we have only those written within two and a half centuries of his death. Yet none of us seriously doubts the worth and authenticity of these classic writers. We have their essential message and can estimate its value. As John Stuart Mill well says, "It is of no use to say that Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable may have been added by the traditions of his fol- lowers. Who among them was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels?" Cf. Bishop Welldon, Nineteenth Century, Oct. 1907. 26 FACING THE CRISIS In his relation to God, he alone fully knows God and completely reveals him. "All has been handed over to me by my Father : and no one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and he to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." * In his relation to man, he is the Messiah of the Jews, the hope of Israel, the light of the Gentiles, prophesied through the centuries. John the Bap- tist, of whom it was said that there was "none greater born of woman," is less than the least in his new Messianic Kingdom. According to the record of his contemporaries, this claim to Messiahship he repeats in the face of death: upon it he staked his life, and for it he died. He is the fulfiller of the law and the prophets, of the Old Covenant which culminates in him, and by his death he inaugurates a New Covenant of grace and truth, which super- sedes the law of Moses. He turns a new page of history for all mankind and men date their docu- ments and divide time by his birth. As Son of Man, he is the representative of a new humanity. As Saviour, he comes to seek and to save the lost among men. He satisfies the human heart. Who is this that is able to say, "Come unto me, all who are laboring and burdened, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find your souls refreshed; my yoke is kindly and my burden light." 2 J Matt. 11:27. 3 Matt 11:28-30. JESUS CHRIST 27 Who but the very Master of the heart would dare to say, "Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess before my Father."? "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, aye and his own life, he cannot be a disciple of mine: whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me, he cannot be a disciple of mine." He is greater than John, "greater than Jonah," or the prophets of the Old Testament, "greater than Solomon" in all his glory, greater than David, Israel's greatest king, who calls him "Lord." By his standard men will be judged. The des- tiny of men will be according to what they do to him as he identifies himself with all humanity, the least of these his brethren. His glad tidings of life are to be proclaimed to all the world, and even the loving act of an outcast woman, who breaks an alabaster cruse of ointment and anoints his weary feet, shall be told with the telling of his good news in distant climes to the end of time. Have not the centuries borne out these sweeping and stu- pendous claims? As the writer has traveled among the students of more than twenty countries for the last twenty- five years, he has observed one supremely significant movement in the religious realm extending around the world. In the spiritual sphere the world is be- ing very slowly but surely Christianized. The stu- dent world is not being converted to Buddha, to Confucius, or to Mohammed. There is a "World's Student Christian Federation." There is no 28 FACING THE CRISIS World's Student Buddhist, Confucian, Mohamme- dan, or Hindu Federation. Christ only is becom- ing supreme in the spiritual sphere, and there is no other to whom the students of the world are turning in spiritual hunger to find a rational and vital relation to God in personal renewal and so- cial redemption. Are the statements of the unique relationships of Jesus being fulfilled or disproved by the centuries? Does he seem to speak as a misguided enthusiast? As we test these claims pragmatically, does he or does he not actually in experience bring God to man? Does he or does he not bring man to God, as throughout the centuries he saves the sinful? Who is this who stands in unique relation to God and man, claimed or implied on almost every page of the narrative, varied in a hundred phrases and figures, and interwoven with his acts and teachings? 4. The Historic Effects of His Life. Have the centuries since he lived been proving or disproving his claims? What has been done toward the aboli- tion of slavery, the uplift of childhood, womanhood, manhood? What has been done for the sick, the poor, the ignorant and the sinful that is traceable to his influence? Slavery was first mitigated and finally abolished by the progressive application of the principles of Jesus, in spite of the long defense of the system by some of his misguided followers because of their vested interests. When Jesus entered the world slavery was practically a universal institution. He gave mankind a new conception of God as Father, JESUS CHRIST 29 of man as brother, and of life conceived under a new principle of liberty. Within a century the condition of slaves had been ameliorated in Rome. Chiefly as the result of the agitation of his follow- ers slaves were finally freed in every Christian country and ultimately even in the dark continent of Africa. Womanhood has been uplifted through his in- fluence. 1 Among the five hundred million women of over half the human race in the continents of Asia and Africa, under the ethnic religions, not one has to the full her God-given rights, apart from the application of the principles of Jesus. Jesus gave for all time a new status to womanhood. Un- der the influence of his teaching, monogomy became gradually prevalent, marriage was held sacred, sex- ual morality was lifted to a higher plane and the home possessed a new sanctity. Woman, who for centuries had been the toy or drudge of man, was increasingly given her rightful place in religion, in education, in art, in law, in all life. The sick have been cared for and a vast minis- try of healing has come down the centuries and extended to the limits of the world under the in- fluence of his teaching and example. The poor have been uplifted. Even the exalted Plato says that "the poor should be expelled from 'Even Plato believed in a community of wives. Aristotle ranked woman between man and the slave. Confucius in his own un- happy home never fully conceived of the worth of womanhood nor saw the high sanctity of marriage. Buddha gave thanks that he had not been born in hell, as vermin, or as woman. In Hindu- ism, the code of Manu permitted woman no equal place with man. Under Islam, with its polygamy, its slavery, and its sensuous con- ception even of heaven, a blight has fallen upon womanhood. 30 FACING THE CRISIS the markets and the country cleared of that sort of animal." But Jesus offers comfort to the op- pressed, and boldly arraigns the selfish rich. His gospel is a good news for the poor. The record of the ministry of his true followers to them would fill many volumes; from the sharing of their pos- sessions in their early enthusiasm for humanity even, to the present day they have continued Christ's com- passionate work for the multitudes. He calls not only for the palliatives of charity but for funda- mental social justice for all. The ignorant have been enlightened and up- lifted by his teaching and by the application of his principles to life. Jesus sought to make men whole in mind, as well as in body. The introduction of Christianity with the translation of the Bible proved a powerful educational factor in the civilization and progress of the half-barbarous peoples of early Eu- rope. Under the missionary impulse of Christ's teaching, more than two hundred languages have been reduced to writing among savage tribes in Africa and isolated portions of the globe, and Chris- tian schools and colleges have been founded by thousands in scores of lands. The sinful have been saved, and spiritual regen- eration has been experienced by multitudes who have sought to follow Jesus' way of life. His work of moral uplift has steadily gone forward in indi- viduals, in nations, and in human society. Can any- one deny that his influence has been the chief factor in the moral renewal and spiritual transformation of men for the last nineteen hundred years? JESUS CHRIST 31 After tracing through the centuries the results of his life and teachings upon slavery, upon the uplift of childhood, womanhood, manhood; upon the sick, the poor, the ignorant, the sinful, and upon all classes and conditions of men; then ask if his influence has not done more to regenerate mankind than all other influences combined. 1 If so, do not the cumulative historic effects of his life tend in- creasingly to show that he was the supreme revela- tion of God? 5. He Transcends his Environment and Limita- tions. Men are usually made by their environ- ment, limited by the circumstances of their lives. In some strange way Jesus transformed and tran- scended the limitations of his life. In the factors that contribute to the making of a man, we may study his race and family, his time and place, his education and opportunity. Let us note how Jesus rises above them all. 2 His race was probably the most hated and perse- cuted, the most bigoted and provincial in the world. Yet, though a Jew, he becomes the one universal man uniting Orient and. Occident, appealing equally to East and West. In him there is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, male nor female. He be- comes the symbol of unity and universality. His family was that of a peasant carpenter, yet for all time he gives a new and infinite content to l As Mr. Lecky shows, those "three short years have done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of the philosophers and all the exhortations of the moralists." 3 See "Maker of Men," G. S. Eddy, pp. 13-17. Also "My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," by J. Frank Manly, to whom we are in- debted here. 32 FACING THE CRISIS the words "Father," "Son," and "brother." He widens the thought of the family to a universal Kingdom of Love, a commonwealth of mankind. Let us note how he transcends his time and place. He had less than three years of public life in which to do his work in the world; less than any other great world leader. Socrates taught for some forty years; Plato for fifty; Aristotle had a long life and filled libraries with his learning. Jesus seems to outlive time and founds an eternal Kingdom. His place was a little, conquered, Jewish province in despised Galilee, as small as an American or an English county, yet he embraced the world in his thought and plan. His education at most was only that of the vil- lage school. "How knew this man letters having never learned?" And how pathetically limited and straightened was his opportunity. He was a mem- ber of a subject race and a crushed people who were bound by oppressive legalism, where every innova- tion was resented and opposed by reactionary scribes and Pharisees, priests and Levites. He was cut off from the earth by his fellow-men before his life work had fairly begun, leaving no book nor written word, no formal institution nor organization ; yet how he transcends his environment. He was no moralist, and yet he stands supreme in the moral sphere. It is he who creates the world's highest moral standard. He, and he alone, is the illustration and embodiment of man's ethical ideal. The supreme revelation of truth is thus realized in a person. He was no professional religionist or priest, yet he stands supreme in the realm of religion. If we turn to the ethnic faiths, or to atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, pessimism, positivism, or materialism do we find anything in these or in any modern system that can at once provide a rational ground for re- ligious belief for the educated and satisfy the deep- est needs of the masses of our common humanity? Jesus stands "the highest in the highest realm." In the moral and spiritual sphere he is supreme. He was no writer, yet he is more quoted than any author in history and his words are repeated to the very ends of the world. They are being read today in some seven hundred languages and tongues, and form the one universal book of humanity. No man has ever laid down his life in Africa to translate Aristotle, Kant or Hegel, nor any other great leader of thought, but hundreds have died to carry the words of Jesus to the ends of the world. More than two hundred languages have been reduced to writ- ing in order to embody his life-giving message. He was no architect, yet the carpenter of Naza- reth has somehow become the master-builder of time. The great cathedrals of the world were erected for his worship St. Sophia, St. Peter's, and St. Paul's; Milan, Cologne and Amiens; Canterbury and West- minster, and the masterpieces of architecture were reared in his praise. He was no artist, yet the works of the great mas- ters were dedicated to him. Fra Angelico, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and the great- 34 FACING THE CRISIS est of the old masters seem to attain their highest under his inspiration. He was no poet, yet he makes poetry the posses- sion of the common people. He lends a new rhythm to life, and teaches the human heart to sing. Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Browning, Tennyson, Whittier and a host of Q^reat writers with a spirit- ual message are inspired by him. He was no musician, yet Haydn, Handel, Beetho- ven, Bach, Wagner and Mendelssohn often reach their highest in the hymns, symphonies and oratorios in his praise. He was no social dreamer, yet his life and teach- ing have created a social conscience and furnished a motive and dynamic for a growing movement in the world today. After sixty generations, it is still gaining momentum and becoming the greatest social force in human life. As Washington Gladden says, he plants a social standard on the further side of twenty centuries and bids kings, lawgivers, prophets, and statesmen march on with all their hosts until they attain it. 1 He had no home, yet he creates the Christian family and secures its sanctity and its safety through a new conception of marriage. Before the degen- eracy of Greece and Rome, the bestiality of pagan- ism, the sensuality in some of the ethnic religions, 1 Jesus is the ideally socialized personality. He completely identi- fies himself with the welfare of all mankind. He exhibited the complete social attitude in all relationships. His Golden Rule is the perfect expression of socialization, for it sets the standard of one's own sense of personality as that by which one's attitude toward others is to be measured. Jesus is for all generations the norm. Scares, "Social Institutions and Ideals of the Bible," pp. 376-378. JESUS CHRIST 35 and the growing laxity of modern divorce, he holds up the highest ideal conception of marriage not as legalized licentiousness but as what "God hath joined together." It is an original relationship divinely ordained. He had no wide human opportunity of culture or travel. He was no versatile Greek nor cosmopoli- tan Roman, no citizen of Athens or Alexandria, but lived his life in the isolation of village farmers and fishermen. Yet no one in all history has such strange power of self-identification with all mankind with the suffering, the poor, the sinful, with little children, with men in all walks of life, in all times, in all nations. All claim him as theirs and seek to vindicate their position by appeal to his standards. Who then is this who seems ever to rise above the narrowing, cramping limitations of a peasant carpenter, with a life transcendent, universal and divine? In spite of all these limitations, how overwhelm- ing was the impression he made upon his contem- poraries. Jesus had come to have for them the value of God because he performed the function of God. So overmastering is this impression that Jesus makes, that even where men cannot philosophi- cally or theologically account for the mystery of his person, he yet commands and compels them by his constraining love, as they say, "If Jesus Christ is a man, And only a man, I say That of all mankind I cleave to Him And to Him will I cleave alway. 36 FACING THE CRISIS "If Jesus Christ is a God And the only God, I swear I will follow Him through heaven and hell, The earth, the sea, and the air!" One test of truth is to assume the opposite and see where such an hypothesis leads us. Let us suppose that Jesus was only a good man, a well meaning carpenter of Nazareth, but not the supreme revela- tion of the Father and quite mistaken in his con- ception of a loving, personal God. Whither does such a view lead? It would leave us with a Christ- less God, unmanifested and unknown. For if God was not as fully revealed in him as is possible within the limits of a human life, then he is nowhere ade- quately manifested. Like the men of Athens we would be left worshiping at the altars of an "un- known God." If in Jesus we may know what God is like, all life is immovably centered, and in him we have seen the very "portrait of the invisible God." If in his cry on Calvary, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do," we see not the very love of God, then we are not sure of that love and we are left with an unmanifested God. It is not primarily a question of what honor we would do to Jesus, or to what category we would assign him, but it is our conception of God himself and our relation to him that is at stake. If the beautiful teaching of Jesus was only the mistaken groping after truth of a pious carpenter, then what probability have any of us of finding ultimate truth? What kind of God does it leave us with if the world's highest spiritual progress for JESUS CHRIST 37 the last nineteen centuries has been based upon an untruth? Has the consensus of opinion of the Church throughout the centuries been false? If the lower view of Jesus as in no unique sense divine is true, why, when thoroughly tested over and again, has this interpretation so repeatedly failed? From the second century to the present a few have ever held this view. Yet it has never gained ground nor been able to hold the heart of humanity. It has never offered a glowing hope to man nor roused him to a mighty enthusiasm. It has not produced the noble army of martyrs nor the solid phalanx of the missionary host. Who has it sent to die in Africa to uplift savage tribes? It seems to have no message for the Dark Continent. The missionaries of the world today, like the martyrs of the early Church, are motivated by the constrain- ing love of a Divine Son of God, a living Christ, and a Saviour who saves. The Church through nineteen centuries has stood in solidarity and in historic continuity with the record of the Gospels, the unswerving belief of the Epistles, and the wit- ness of his contemporaries in the faith of the Son of God. 6. Christ the Completion of Human Experience. He completes the broken arch of science. Science is rearing before us a vast temple of human learn- ing. Through centuries of toil, by patient investi- gation it rises upward. The arch of science ascends toward one central truth that would complete the span of knowledge and make it whole. But, as Harnack shows, "to the questions of why, whence 38 FACING THE CRISIS and whither, science can give no answer." Descrip- tive science classifies that which is and has been. Jesus unfolds that which is not yet fully realized in the natural order, but is yet to be. The ques- tion of final harmony, in an all-embracing princi- ple which shall reconcile all differences, lies beyond science, but must be man's quest. The writer spent an evening recently, during a student conference at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, looking through the great Yerkes telescope, the largest of its kind in the world. We turned the superb instrument on the star Vega, from which the light that reached us that night had been on its way, the astronomer told us, for fifty years, though traveling at the rate of seven times around the earth in a second. Next we turned the instru- ment upon a nebula from which the light now reach- ing us had started before Washington was born; then upon a neighboring group of four suns, from which their present light had been coming from be- fore the time of Columbus. But in another quar- ter there was a dim spot of light which contained myriads of stars and a Milky Way of suns as vast in extent as all the stars visible in our sky, from which the light that reached us that night had been on its way for over a million years. Here was vastness of space and power that staggered the imagination. Yet neither telescope nor microscope nor all the investigations of science can of them- selves interpret the spiritual meaning of life for us. This is the work of Jesus. If his interpretation of God and man and the purpose of life is true, all is JESUS CHRIST 39 complete and we see life whole and lit with meaning. Christ is the keystone of philosophy, which has sought in vain throughout the centuries for some final principle to explain and unify its world, to find it indeed a uni-verse and not a multi-verse, a cosmos and not a chaos, with complete and ade- quate meaning. And yet philosophy itself can only find the crown and completion of life in a loving, intelligent will, in such a revelation of the source and ground of existence as we find in Jesus Christ. Are any of the systems of philosophy, or all com- bined complete without his interpretation of life, or are they sufficient without a loving God such as Jesus reveals? l He is the keystone of art. Art strives to realize and interpret some final ideal, some absolutely satis- fying object. It seeks the contemplation of per- fect beauty. Its quest is some image adequate to ex- press the world's ruling principle. Where do we find this? Only in Christ do we see the final symbol and image of God, the satisfying object of contem- plation and worship which incomplete human art must ever crave. 1 Cf. William Temple, in ''Men's Creatrix," pp. 1-4, 258-259, 351- 354, "We see how science and art and ethics and the philosophy of religion present converging lines which though converging can never by the human mind be carried far enough to reach their meeting point, but that that meeting point is offered in the fact of Christ. Here is the pivot of all true human thought; here is the belief that can give unity to all the work of mind. The creative mind in man never attains its goal until the creative mind of God, in whose image it was made, reveals its own nature and completes man's work. Man's search was divinely guided all the time, but its completion is only reached by the act of God himself, meeting and crowning the effort which he has inspired." Page 354. 40 FACING THE CRISIS He is the keystone of morality, which demands a life of love and fellowship. But for the realiza- tion of such a life some adequate power is needed to regenerate the individual, to create an ideal so- ciety, and to bind it together in love. This we find in Christ alone, the Saviour of the individual and the founder of the Kingdom of God. His Kingdom gives us the ultimate social ideal involving the moral organization of mankind, united by the motive of love. And lastly, he is the keystone of religion. For the last five thousand years of human history, re- corded on the monuments of Egypt, written in the sacred books of the East, and witnessed still in the vast multitudes of weary pilgrims in their search for truth throughout Asia and other lands, religion has ever been seeking rest in a God of absolute power and love. Apart from Jesus Christ, man seems to be separated from God and his fellow-men by his own sin and ignorance. Christ alone com- pletely bridges this gulf of separation, calls man back to God, reconciles him with his brother and completes the arch of religion, in a God of power and love equal to the whole world's need. Thus all human experience, in science, philosophy, art, moral- ity, and religion, is like an arch in one grand temple of humanity, as yet broken and incomplete, needing but the single keystone of Christ as the supreme revelation of one infinite, loving, intelligent Will to complete the span, to enable us to see life steadily, and see it whole. As Browning says: JESUS CHRIST 41 "I say the acknowledgement of God in Christ Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee All questions in this world and out of it, And has, so far, advanced thee to be wise." 7. He Meets the Test of Personal Experience* Jesus' teachings and claims may be submitted not only to objective historical examination, but to sub- jective verification. By their fruits we may know them. We may put to the test the question whether. Jesus was the supreme revelation of God or not, by asking whether he alone fully meets the three spir- itual needs of life for the past, the present, and the future. The writer desires to speak here per- sonally and with perfect frankness. For the past I need forgiveness and the sense of reconciliation; for the present I need deliverance in the midst of an overwhelming moral conflict; for the future I crave a sure and certain hope that life has adequate meaning and a moral purpose here and hereafter. I look back on a past of failure and of guilt that entails suffering to myself and to others. And that inexorable past I cannot relive or undo. Yet in some strange way Jesus breaks the entail. He sets me free from my feeling of guilt for the harm I have done to my own and other lives in the irretriev- able past, he gives me a sense of utter forgiveness, with a clear conscience and a new moral attitude of inward freedom. Somehow, whether I can explain it or not, I have found a new beginning of life through him who claimed authority to say, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." He meets my spiritual need in the present. I find 42 FACING THE CRISIS myself in a death-grapple with moral evil which is reinforced by sinful habit and heredity. The temp- tations of sense, the allurements of the flesh, the gravitation of the lower nature within are too strong for me. But here is one who in some strange way has actually set men free from the bondage of passion and made them victors in the moral strug- gle. Saul of Tarsus, speaking from the bitterness of long years of bondage, is but voicing the sense of defeat of the rest of us, and even of the great moral leaders of the race when he says, "The good that I would, I do not. O, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?" Yet he becomes the glad follower of Jesus, and is able to say, "The law of the spirit of life in Christ has set me free from the law of sin and of death." Out of this experience he is able to carry the dynamic of per- sonal spiritual life to the continent of our savage ancestors in Europe. Jesus alone has had such an assurance of the future that he could share it with the human race. The bulk of mankind has been held under religions of fear, where dread or superstition dominate life. The contagious certainty of Jesus in the absolute goodness of God substitutes faith for fear. He in- troduces men to God so that they become at home with him. His introduction leads to life-long friend- ship. His message is a good news and a great hope. Fear is expectation of coming evil. But all con- tingencies are covered, and all possibilities of evil can be worked together for good to those who fol- low his way of life. He promises not only per- JESUS CHRIST 43 sonal immortality, but the final consummation and triumph of good over evil, of right over wrong, in an eternal Kingdom of Good Will. The spiritual hopes of an enlightened humanity today are cen- tered in him and derived from him. For myself I try to think of what .life would be to me without Jesus Christ, but I find it impossible to extricate myself or my conception of life from him. From its tap root to its tiniest tendrils life has become so interwoven and bound up with him that it is inconceivable without him. I find it diffi- cult to imagine the sun blotted out of the heavens, or the landscape of life with the light of eternal faith, hope and love faded from its sky. I find it in- tellectually almost impossible to conceive of life as godless, for he is to me a presence that is not to be put by, and in him I live and move and have my being. But if I were to force myself to conceive of Jesus and his faith in the loving Father as torn from me, what then? Even then I could not turn to materialistic atheism because I could not sum- mon enough credulity to embrace its irrational con- ceptions, but I would be left with a soulless and impersonal pantheism, with a God who did not and could not care. Upon such a God I would turn my back, and even if Jesus were deluded and mistaken, I would render my last homage to this Galilean car- penter dying amid the wreck of his dreams and ideals with the prayer upon his lips, "Father for- give them, for they know not what they do." I would worship this defeated man as higher far, and holier, than a loveless God. But Jesus, and faith 44 FACING THE CRISIS and love in human life, are evidence of the love of God, and the faith we have received from him is daily validated in an experience that is slowly mak- ing and remaking us, as it made him. Oh for words, for thought, for life fine enough to tell what Jesus is! For twenty-six years I have worked among the students of Asia, and in the later years among those of America and Europe. I was with the men at the front in the British and later in the American army. I saw much of human life in that "hell" called war. In evangelistic meet- ings and in personal interviews I have worked among men of the ten great religions of the world. It has been a work so shallow and superficial with such measure of failure that I have often been ashamed to continue in a service that so failed to rise to such an opportunity. But East and West, among rich and poor, students and the depressed classes, I have seen something of life. I have known something of doubt and disappointment and the loss of earthly loved ones. But in all life I have found one cen- tral reajity, one foundation for faith, one experi- ence that interprets life and makes it whole. I have found one Person who brings me into right adjustment in the three ultimate relationships of life, with God, with myself and with my fellow men; one who is my very life. It is Jesus. Others may speculate and better define, but I have known him in my own soul since first I knew what life was. And I have seen him saving wrecked hu- manity in a score of nations, in many religions among all classes and conditions of men. I have JESUS CHRIST 45 little interest in metaphysical speculation and no craving for orthodox propriety, but for myself as I face this man I say with all the allegiance of my soul, My Lord! And my God manifest in human life! Let us now sum up the evidence and ask what is the significance of Jesus in facing the crisis in the world today. Think of the character of Jesus, strong, pure and loving. Recall the moral discovery of his teaching of God as Father, of man as brother, of duty as the revealed will of God, of destiny realized in his Kingdom. Think next of his unique relation both to God and to man. Here is one who is able to bring God to man and man to God, who is both Son of God and Son of Man, supreme revelation of God and Saviour of humanity, the touchstone of destiny, the standard of judgment, and the hope of eternal life. Think then of the historic effects of his life, whether or not he has fulfilled his claims and has made God real to multi- tudes of men. Think of the effects of his life on society, the influence of his teaching on the aboli- tion of slavery, on the uplift of childhood, woman- hood, manhood; the healing of the sick, the relief of the poor, the realization of social justice, the en- lightenment of the ignorant, the saving of the sin- ful. Recall the strong contrasts and paradoxes of his life in which he transcends his limitations and his environment and stands unique and alone in hu- man history. Contemplate the vast temple of human knowledge, and ask if he is not indeed the keystone of the otherwise broken and incomplete arch of 46 PACING THE CRISIS science, philosophy, art, morality, religion, and of all human experience. Put his claims to the proof and see if he meets the test of personal experience for the past, the present and the future. Who then is this? Can we deny that God was in him in some unique way? Was he a mere village carpenter, or in truth the Christ of humanity? As we ask him, with his judges and persecutors of old, "Art thou the Christ, the anointed of God?" He answers clearly and simply, from the depth of his consciousness, "I am." And as he questions us like Simon Peter, "Who do you say that I am?" are we not constrained to reply with Simon, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God"? As we feel the influence of his life upon us, shall we not rise up at his call, "Come and follow me" ? Not in abstract reasoning or empty theory but in actual experience, as we seek to follow Jesus' way of life, we shall find him indeed the supreme manifesta- tion of God. II GOD Is there a God? Can his existence be proved, or is there adequate rational ground for belief in a Divine Being? If so what is his nature? If we were asked to prove the existence of God, we would have to admit that philosophy alone can- not absolutely prove anything. As Tennyson says, "For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven." * In the realm of mathematics, we can see that two and two make four; practically or mathematically we can demonstrate it, but philosophy cannot prove the necessary validity of our perception or of our rea- soning process. Philosophy alone cannot prove or disprove the existence of matter or of the soul. I know that I am, but cannot prove what I am. 1 "Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, Thou canst not prove the world thou movest in, Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one: Thou canst not prove that thou art immortal, no, Nor yet that thou art mortal nay, my son, Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, Am not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven Nor yet disproven: wherefore then be wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to faith beyond the forms of faith." 47 48 FACING THE CRISIS Philosophy cannot prove or disprove either the existence or the character of your own mother. But you need no philosophical proof in the realm of personal experience. Philosophy did not give you your mother nor can it take her away. Philosophy does not give us God nor can it take him away. Just as you came to know your mother you may come to know God in a vital experience and in a personal re- lation answering to your own need. We shall find that God is not so much the con- clusion of one argument as the necessary ground of every argument and of all experience. As Ches- terton says: "God is like the sun. He is the one object in the world at which we cannot steadfastly gaze, yet in the light of which we see everything else." We cannot find God by the reason alone as Martineau shows, any more than we can find the scent of a rose with our fingers. But we can find God in experience and then justify that experience upon rational grounds. As Tolstoi says, "It is not the mind by which we know God; it is life through which we come to know him." Like Donald Han- key, wounded and dying alone upon the battlefield, we may find "God! God everywhere and under- neath, the everlasting arms," Perhaps we shall get light upon our problem if we assume the opposite of belief in God and see where the materialistic view of life leads us. If we can find no ultimate resting place in dualism, in agnos- ticism or in pantheism, of which lack of space for- bids discussion here, we shall have to choose between GOD 49 a theistic or a material interpretation of the uni- verse. Let us consider for a moment the materialistic view of life. 1 Let us suppose that matter and force make up the sum of existence, that mind is but a function of matter, that there is no soul to survive the body and no God who creates or guides the uni- verse. Does this materialistic view satisfy the mind or does it correspond with the facts of man's higher life? Can it account for the origin of matter, of life, of mind, in the light of their full development, or give an adequate cause of the marvelous universe about us? Does it satisfy the heart, to tell man that he must die as an animal, with no hope of meeting his loved ones again? Does it satisfy the will, if, as Spinoza shows, man's power is infinitely surpassed by the vast universe about him, and the individual is left with no possibility of realizing all the capacities and desires of his nature which crave life abundant and eternal? Does it satisfy the conscience, if, as 1 Is there any criterion by which we may judge the various philosophies or solutions proposed? To the realist, ideas that correspond with facts are true ; to the pragmatist ideas that work are valid. The writer himself can only accept a philosophy of life as true which will interpret its full meaning and which will fully develop and satisfy the whole nature of man. It must meet the test of self-realization. It must satisfy the mind and be rational. It must satisfy the heart in its loneliness and longing. It must satisfy the will, as pragmatic and practical, and reenforce its feeble and failing endeavor. It must satisfy the conscience, as truly ethical. Finally, it must satisfy the religious nature in its longing for adjustment to life. Further we must recognize that in a growing world our philosophy of life must grow with our world. Truth is not final and fixed. It is growing, dynamic. While I seek the truth which will meet the tests for life as I am facing it now, I must look forward to growing in truth as I grow in life. 50 FACING THE CRISIS Professor James shows, it ends in a wreck and de- nies that the moral order is supreme? Does it meet the demand of the religious nature, if it denies any ultimate object of worship, fails to disclose the source and ground of life, and leaves the deepest longings of man's nature unsatisfied? The materialistic view not only fails to satisfy and develop man's whole nature, but it also completely fails to bring him into right adjustment in the three ultimate relationships of life. By its denial of God it admits of no adequate source and ground of life; it does not raise personality to the full height of its possibilites, and it has always lacked social value; for it has not produced the great prophets, martyrs and reformers as the supreme servants of the race. It does not give us any basis for solving our problems in facing the crisis in the world today. It can offer only a stone in place of bread to hun- gry Russia, famished in body and soul. Professor Clarke in his book "Can We Believe in God the Father" has shown that if there is no God then there is no supreme mind : the world as a whole has never been thought or loved or willed. If there were no mind apart from the brain of the individual then there could be no science, for science depends on an ordered, rational world, and it implies two minds, the one producing and the other understand- ing. If there is no God and no supreme mind, then nothing ever has been or ever will be fully known; for each individual knows but an infinitesimal frac- tion of reality. If there is no God then there is no universal heart in the universe. There could then GOD 51 be no true religion, no answered prayer, no logical place for worship, no adequate ground of absolute moral obligation. As Professor Tyndall says: "I have noticed during years of self observation that it is not in hours of clearness and of vigor that this doctrine (of materialism) commends itself to my mind." It is impossible for the materialist to prove his point without violating the law of the "pragmatic imperative." He makes use of mind to disprove itself. Materialism has failed as a philosophy of life. It has failed yet more miserably as a practical 'way of living. It disproved itself pragmatically in the applied doctrine of Prussian militarism in the re- cent war. Since we cannot attain to absolute proof in any sphere of life, let us ask if it is reasonable to be- lieve in God. We may start with probability as the guide of life and seek to verify by progressive experience, holding that to be true which is capable of repeated verification. Practically all the greatest thinkers have admitted the existence of God in some sense. The real question is, What is his charac- ter? Even Herbert Spencer admits that we are everywhere "in the presence of an infinite and eter- nal energy," and that, "the power manifested throughout the universe distinguished as material is the same power which in ourselves wells up in the form of consciousness." At first we may take the word "God" to denote the cause, the ground, the principles and laws underlying the world. Later we may proceed to seek evidence of the Christian 52 FACING THE CRISIS conception of God as a cosmic Spirit of creative and redemptive love who is working to achieve a spir- itual universe. As a basis of all thought and of practical living we are compelled to postulate that the universe, so orderly and intelligible, which everywhere con- forms to law, is in its implications rational and trustworthy. All science, all philosophy, all thought compel us to view the world as reasonable. We look out upon a universe that has something in common with our own mind. If then the world is intelligible it is not merely dead matter. There is a corre- spondence between a rational mind and a rational universe. All our education implies this, for reason can only exist in a reasonable world. In actual ex- perience, apart from the problem of evil which we shall consider later, we find nature rational through and through, from the microcosm of the atom to the unity of the universe as a whole. As Eucken shows, "To every thinking man there comes the great alternative either, or either there is something higher than this humanistic cul- ture, or life ceases to have any meaning or value." Darwin also adds his testimony, "If we consider the whole universe the mind refuses to look upon it as the outcome of chance." If, therefore, we are forced to postulate the universe as reasonable and trust- worthy it is because it has some rational and reliable ground. All students of philosophy are acquainted with the three ancient arguments for the existence of God the Ontological, the Cosmological, and the GOD 53 Teleological. The Ontological maintains that the reality of God is involved in the idea of God. The Cosmological argues from the character of the world of cause and effect, to a first cause, God. The Teleological argument discerning the presence of order as an evidence of design, and observing that things conform to ends, argues the reality of a de- signer as its source, that God must be the single reason on which the ordered universe depends. If we add to the above three the moral and religious arguments, we may agree with Professor Flint, that "the universe owes its existence and its continuance in existence to the reason and will of a self-existent Being who is infinitely powerful, wise and good." No single argument seems convincingly to prove the existence of God. Yet if I may speak personally, God is as real to me as my own existence, "a pres- ence that is not to be put by," the One in whom I live and move and have my being, the one central certainty of my life. If I were pressed for evidence I would state that for myself I believe in God for three reasons. Taken together I find them a three- fold cord not easily broken. First, I believe in God because of the demand of my entire nature and the evidence of the entire uni- verse that cannot be explained without God. Second. The God that my nature demands and of whom the universe gives evidence, I find increas- ingly revealed in human life and history through the great prophets of the race, culminating in the revela- tion of Jesus Christ. Third. The God that my nature demands and 54, FACING THE CRISIS that human life reveals in the Jesus of history, I have come to know in joyous personal experience. And my own experience is confirmed and validated by that of thousands in every land and through succeeding centuries. 3 Let me endeavor to state these as clearly and as simply as I can, avoiding the use of technical terms. i. My mind demands an adequate cause for the solid fact of the universe as it is. I look out upon the world and everywhere see evidence of mind both in man and in nature. Thus, adequate to the whole rational universe, there must be a Mind as the cause of it, and that Mind I shall call God. Supposing I pick up a daily newspaper. Can I believe that the paper made itself or that the type set itself, or that it is a fortuitous work of chance? No, if it brings a message to my mind, that can only be because there is a mind behind it, a mind that thought and made it. If the newspaper could not make itself, how then could the vast and ordered universe make itself or be the work of chance? I pluck a "little flower from the crannied wall" and with every thinking mind before me my thought is driven back to the great Mind which must be the cause of it, that has expressed itself in the thought 'Thus Tolstoi in his "Confession" says, "I only lived at those times when I believed in God. I need only be aware of God to live; I need only to forget him or to disbelieve in him, to die. . . . To know God and to live is one and the same thing. . . . And the light did not again abandon one. ... I returned to the belief that the chief and only aim of my life is to be better, i.e., to live in ac- cord with that Will. ... I returned to a belief in God, in moral perfecting, and in a tradition transmitting the meaning of life." Aylmer Maude, "Life of Tolstoi," I, pp. 417-18. GOD 55 and beauty of the flower and of the entire universe. 2. My heart cries oulj for comfort and com- panionship in its loneliness and longing. As life stretches on through suffering, sorrow, sickness, separation and the death of earthly loved ones, ulti- mately I crave a "Great Companion." I look out upon a world of human love, the love of the mother for her child, the love of the patriot, the hero, the martyr, the saint. I see the love of Christ upon the cross, as he cried, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." What is the source of this love? Is it from mud, from matter, from star dust, from "cosmic ether"? As Pascal says, "The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing." It rises "like a man in wrath against the freezing reason's colder part." If there is such love in the universe it must be in the cause and heart of it. If love has been evolved in the effect, it must have been involved in the cause, and we are driven back with the men of twenty centuries of repeated Christian experience to a God of love, as we cry with Augus- tine of old, "Thou hast made us for Thyself and the heart is restless till it rests in Thee." 3. My will needs help. I look out on a wide world of power, power immanent in every electron and atom and in the incalculable force of the entire universe. I see not only evidence of power, but apparently also of purpose and of plan, for it is a cosmos not a chaos, a universe, not a multiverse. But purpose and plan as we know them in experi- ence are found only in connection with a personal 56 FACING THE CRISIS will. Back in the heart of the universe there must be power, purpose and plan. 4. My conscience rises with the categorical im- perative "I ought" or in old English "I owe." To what or to whom do I owe it? I look within at conscience and see a purpose that is apparently not my own, for I resist it and strive against it. It dominates and finally overcomes me. Whence this purpose if not from a mighty Purposer that speaks in the universal and evolving conscience of the race? What is the meaning of this whisper of conscience, and why is the world in harmony with right ? * From conscience within I look out upon a world of men and upon a universe that seems to give evi- dence of a moral order. Whence this demand of conscience and of a moral order save in the moral goodness of God? 5. My religious nature most of all demands God. If religion is conceived subjectively as spiritual self realization, experience shows that no man can fully develop his personality without it. No tribe or na- 1 Erskine of Linlathen says: "When I attentively consider what is going on in my conscience, the chief thing forced on my notice is, that I find myself face to face with a purpose not my own, for I am often conscious of resisting it, but which dominates me, and makes itself felt as ever present, as the very root and reason of my being. . . . This consciousness of a purpose concerning me that I should be a good man right, true, and unselfish is the first firm footing I have in the region of religious thought; for I cannot dissociate the idea of a purpose from that of a Purposer; and I cannot but identify this Purposer with the Author of my being and the being of all beings, and further, I cannot but regard his purpose toward me as the unmistakable indication of his own character. A righteous Being is at the helm if there is a moral purpose underlying the course of things." So Kant testifies: "Two things fill my soul with awe: the starry firmament above me and the moral law within me." GOD 57 tion has yet been found without the beginnings of this universal, normal human capacity and experi- ence. Such a book as Professor James' "Varieties of Religious Experience," drawn from a wide range of human life, leads us to the conclusion that religion is an objective reality and a valid experi- ence. We may add to the history of nineteen Christian centuries the longer record of Judaism. We may support this by the experience of India which for some three thousand years has held the unbroken conviction of God as the great reality of life, so sure of him that it has never needed an argu- ment to prove his existence. We may add the tes- timony of five thousand years of the religions of Egypt and of the ancient world, only to find that man always and everywhere is "incurably religious," that he prays "because he cannot help praying," be- cause it is as natural and as inevitable as breathing. Has man's universal experience of religion and his main motive of progress been based upon an un- truth ? l 1 In the realization of God's presence in human life there is pro- found significance in the verse: "Where two or three are met together in my name there I am in the midst." Social Psychology is throwing light on the process in such a fellowship. The "group mind" and the "social will" do not mean a mysterious, mystical something which hovers over the group. On the other hand, they represent something different from the "mob mind," the unthinking will of a crowd. These terms simply recognize the fact that in free and open-minded discussion thoughts are stimulated, solutions lo problems are arrived at, bigger and better than any one of the group could have suggested or than the unrelated totality of the group working separately. The process, in turn, fuses the group into a unity of purpose and will which stimulates individual and united action. Now if the immanence of God in human life is recognized, this "group mind," this "social will" forged out of such a fellowship 58 FACING THE CRISIS Let us take now this five-fold demand of my mind for an adequate Cause, of my heart for a Great Companion, of my will for a mighty Power, of my conscience for one who is morally Good, and of my religious nature for a God answering to my need. My whole nature and the whole universe demands God. If personality in man is found to consist of a loving, intelligent will, unified in self-consciousness; and if I see truth, beauty and goodness unified in an ordered universe, then I must conceive of God as an infinite thinker, lover, and wilier, the all loving intelligent Will, a personal God, in whom the uni- verse is unified and grounded. 1 Secondly, the God that my whole nature and the universe demands and requires I find growingly revealed in human life, especially in the life and of earnest Christians in thought and prayer may well represent more of the will of God for that group than the thought of any- one of the group. 1 Bishop Gore in his "Belief in God" writes, "I cannot hold the conception of mind or of truth or of purpose or of righteousness except on the background of personality. ... If personality is the highest known thing, must not God be at least that highest thing?" Marcus Aurelius could write: "The world is either a welter ... or a unity of order and providence. If the former, why do I care about anything else than how shall I at last become earth. But on the other alternative I feel reverence. I stand steadfast . . . I find heart in the power that disposes all." Men have felt a con- tradiction between the natural and the moral order, between the realm of nature and the realm of things, between what is and what ought to be, between the actual and the ideal. This contra- diction can only be reconciled in a free will choosing the good, and the two worlds at present apparently contradictory can only be explained by a God working out a moral purpose in a devel- oping world. Conscience is subordinate to an eternal goodness. "A power not ourselves that makes for righteousness." See Sorely "Moral Values and the Idea of God." GOD 59 teaching of the prophets, finally culminating in the revelation of Jesus. In his simple life, in his teach- ings, in his unique consciousness, he seems ever to dwell immediately in the very presence of God, and this faith of his was contagious. He never argues about God, never labors to prove him. Rather, he teaches men how to find him for themselves. Actually as an historic fact, in his presence men found God. Yet this experience was not dependent upon his physical presence and throughout the nine- teen centuries it has been capable of repeated veri- fication. To the mind, Jesus reveals God as all wise "Your Father knoweth"; to the heart he reveals him as all loving "the Father himself loveth you," "Love your enemies that you may be sons of your Father who sendeth his rain upon the just and the unjust and maketh his sun to shine upon the evil and the good." To our weak will Jesus reveals God as all powerful "All things are possible with God." To our conscience he is all holy "Holy Father," "Hallowed be Thy name." To our religious nature he is "Our Father who art in heaven." He is thus "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Somehow through Jesus, historically and experi- mentally, we have been introduced into an utterly new conception and experience of God. We have passed into a realm of the certainty of experience that no labored argument, no cold syllogism of logic could give us. To philosophy God may be an hypo- thesis, a postulate, a cause, a first principle, an ab- 60 PACING THE CRISIS solute, but sharing the experience of Jesus he be- comes our Father. 1 Finally, the God that my nature demands and of whom the whole universe gives evidence, the God that is revealed in human history, in the prophets and in Jesus, I have found in personal, vital experi- ence, for God has become to me the one central certainty of life. To my mind I have found him a God of wisdom "How unsearchable are his judg- ments and his wisdom past finding out." In my heart I 'have found that "God is love," and love, creation's final law. For my weak will I have found that he is able to do exceeding abundantly above all I can ask or think. My conscience joins the everlasting chorus of human experience in the church militant and triumphant throughout the ages saying, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty." And to my religious nature he has indeed become the God and Father of Jesus. If the reader will pardon a very personal testi- mony, I desire to say a word as to the reality of 'Thus with Plato we pass from a bridge of philosophic argu- ment, or from a perilous "raft" on the seas of fortune, to a more sure "divine word," "It seems to me, Socrates, as to you also, I fancy, that it is very difficult, if not impossible, in this present life to have clear knowledge concerning such subjects; but that, on the other hand, it is the mark of a faint-hearted spirit to desist from examining all that is said about them in every way, or to abandon the search so long as there is any chance of light anywhere. For on such subjects one ought to secure one of two things, either to learn or discover the truth, or, if this is impossible, at least to get the best of human argument and the hardest to refute, and relying on this as on a raft, to sail the perilous sea of life, unless one were able, more securely and less perilously, to make one's journey upon a safer vessel upon some divine word." Plato, Phaedo, 85 C. D. Quoted from "Belief in God," by Bishop Gore, p. 68. GOD 61 God in my own experience. In 1897 I came to the darkest day in my life. I had miserably failed in my own character and in my service. I was dis- couraged, bitter, rebellious. Somehow I had missed the mark and lost the way in life. After a sleep- less night, I cried to God as my Father to show me the way out. Then in a moment, without any special emotion or excitement, one simple word re- ceived in faith changed life forever. I did not then know that it was "forever" but for twenty-five years since that day God has been the abiding reality of my life and I have no fears for the future. And this was the word "Anyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again but anyone who drinks the water I shall give him will never thirst any more; the water I shall give him will turn into a spring of water welling up to eternal life." * The waters of this earth, wealth, pleasure, power, ambition, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life" do not satisfy, for the reason that man was made for higher things. But God does satisfy, for happiness is found in the harmonious exercise of function, in full correspondence with the ultimate environment of the soul, which is God. I thought how glorious that would be to "never thirst any more," but I could never hold out, I would forget and lose my grip as I had in the past. But then the thought came, could I trust, could I drink, could I live this way for one day, for I will never have to live but one day at a time. Yes, I said, I 1 John 4:14. Moffatt's translation which is prevailingly fol- lowed throughout this book. 62 FACING THE CRISIS will try it. I will test the promise and begin to drink, living one day at a time by faith. I will endeavor to live upon God, to draw my life from him as the spiritual environment of the soul, as simply as I would drink, or eat, or breathe, in correspondence with the physical environment. That day I began. Twenty-five years have passed but the thirst of the former years has never come back no, not for an hour ! There has not been an hour of darkness or despair, and, I mean it literally, not an hour of discouragement. I have often failed him. I have never been satisfied with myself, or my service, I have often sinned. It would be sheer dis- honesty to imply anything else. But he has never failed me. And he has kept his promise. He is my portion, my satisfaction, my life ; for it is not what I am to him, but what he is to me that determines life. And experimentally it is in the continuous pres- ent. We drink the well once for all, as it were (the Greek tense is in the aorist), but thenceforth we drink continuously of the inward spring. It does not say "Whosoever drank in the past," but "anyone who drinks" and keeps drinking, for just so long he "will never thirst any more." This ex- perience, or rather God himself, as revealed in Jesus, has become to me the perennial inward moral miracle, the central certainty, the daily joyous dis- covery of the great adventure of life. I have made an almost unbelievably poor response to this experi- ence, but I can no more deny it or doubt God than I can doubt my own existence. Twenty-five years GOD 63 have passed and that joy is undimmed. And before God, I lie not. One thing I know, he satisfies. And such an experience is possible for all, only varying in expression according to temperament and training. "If any man thirst let him come and drink." The sum total of it all comes to this; that God is always and everywhere like Jesus. Were it otherwise "The loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God." Were it otherwise, Jesus with his sublime love upon the cross, praying, "Father forgive them," would be higher and more divine than God himself. But Jesus is a fact that must be accounted for. Our definition of "God" as the adequate cause underly- ing the world, must be interpreted by the highest not by the lowest. 1 Are we to place Jesus above God in love, or must we enlarge our definition of God to take in the love of Jesus and all the good, the true and the beautiful in life? We must account for the good in Jesus and the best in ourselves. In the end we must "accept as real that to which the best in us irresistibly points." There is that within us which we cannot deny with- out surrendering our moral integrity and ceasing to be ourselves. "We needs must love the highest when we see it," and we needs must believe the best within our own souls and in all life. We must live 1 "The relations between man and God have, in the course of religious history, become more deeply personal and passionate, with the deepening sense of evil and spiritual distress. The soul finds at length its divine Companion." Hocking, "The Meaning of God in Human Experience," p. 336. 64 FACING THE CRISIS as though God were what our faith claims and let faith vindicate itself in experience. Here is a three-fold evidence that cannot easily be broken. It is interwoven in reason, in history, in human experience. This is why I believe in God; as the demand of my entire nature and of the uni- verse ; who is revealed in the prophets and in Jesus ; and found in a personal experience capable of re- peated verification. This God is our God. This God may be your God. Ill THE PROBLEM OF EVIL How can we believe in a good God in facing the crisis of the world today when we see about us pain and misery, injustice and inhumanity, poverty, privation, famine and war with their waste of human life? Is there any solution to the perennial problem of evil? Why should there be evil or sin in a good world? Can we find any meaning in a life thus conditioned by disease and death, any phil- osophy of pain, any solvent for suffering? Like the poor, the problem of evil is always with us. It touches every life. Every man who thinks at all must face it. Down the centuries it has been the hardest question man has had to meet, the heavi- est burden he has had to bear, the most difficult prob- lem of his existence. In a good world, why should there be any evil? Epicurus writing some twenty- two centuries ago well states the dilemma for all time: if God wishes to prevent evil but cannot, then he is impotent; if he could but will not, he is , malevolent; if he has both the power and the will, whence then is evil? If we were to state the answer in a sentence we should say, a good world must be a moral world; a moral world must be free; a free moral world must be one of gradual development under the dis- cipline of suffering. 65 66 FACING THE CRISIS President King, summing up the conviction of many writers, states what he believes to be the six prerequisites of moral character: some genuine free- dom of volition on man's part; some power of ac- complishment in the direction of his volition; an imperfect developing environment; a sphere of laws; that men should be members one of another; and that therei should be struggle against resis- tance. 1 If you should say, with Omar Khayyam, that you would shatter to bits this sorry scheme of things en- tire, and then remold it nearer to the hearts' de- sire, what manner of world would you make? Take the six alternatives presented by the above prereq- uisites of moral character. If you had your own way, would you make the world free or fated? If you made man free to do right or wrong, and make mistakes, if he is to learn by his own failure, how could you eliminate suffering? Or again, without some power of accomplishment, how could you have any real world at all, unless there were actual re- sults of your acts both good and bad to test and to reveal character? Or, take the third alternative. Would you make the environment of nature rough or smooth, pain- ful or painless? If you chose the easier path and made life a garden of delights, fitted for lotus eaters and dreamers, how would you develop man apart from the suffering and tragedy of life to stab him wide awake and arouse him from his selfishness? *Cf. H. C. King, "Fundamental Questions," p. 13, and "Theology and the Social Consciousness," pp. 30-32. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 67 "An imperfect, developing world is fitted to an im- perfect, developing man." All life above the vege- table involves sensation; and sensation necessitates both pleasure and pain. Sensitiveness and the capac- ity for pain rank the creature in the scale of being. The higher the life the larger the capacity for suf- fering, and the greater the possibility of progress. Again, would you make a reliable world of law and order, or one of endless interference and spe- cial miracles for each individual to prevent suf- fering? Such a world would be a chaos and not a cosmos, a madhouse rather than a place for the de- velopment of character. The very idea of law ex- cludes partiality and favoritism. It implies relia- bility and seeming impersonality. We criticize the present world. But imagine a condition where all goodness was instantly rewarded and all evil in- stantly punished! Imagine the charge of favoritism by those who suffered! And what test of faith or development would be possible for the good, what choice of virtue as its own reward? Wisely God makes his sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and sends his rain upon the just and the unjust. Again, would you make men interdependent, members one of another, bound together in close human relations, or individually separate and iso- lated, unable to influence one another either for good or evil? Would you not choose the responsibility and disciplinary development of real human rela- tionships just as they are, with the joyous love of friendship and family life, entailing suffering by virtue of the very intimacy of these relationships, 68 FACING THE CRISIS rather than the selfish isolation of an unrelated world ? And lastly, would you omit the struggle and hero- ism of life through which, as Carlyle shows "the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero"? If the moral life is a struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, darkness and light, then the physical environment, if made by the fore-knowledge of a wise and loving omnipotent Will should contain this same contrast for the discipline of an evolving moral humanity. It must be not a soft world of ease to lull us to sleep, but an ever changing environment of cold and heat, summer and winter, sunshine and shadow, light and darkness, pleasure and pain, prosperity and adversity. Is not life with all its ills better than a Sahara of dead monotony, or a garden of delights? Is it not better than a perfect mechanism, or mechanical toy with no possibility of moral good or evil? Is it not better than a world of chance and chaos? As a temporary discipline for the development of per- manent character, could it be better? When we dream our dreams or write our novels or dramas, do we make them smooth and soft as an untroubled Eden, or do we create difficulties to be overcome, bat- tles to be fought and won, a villain in the plot and a hero who wins against heavy odds? Our very games are but inventions of obstacles to be overcome in the competition of struggle, and therein is their fascination. If we try to understand the possible purpose of suffering, in facing the crisis in the world today, we THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 69 can clear much of the ground by recognizing at the outset that, granted a loving God, personal immor- tality, and a moral meaning in life, all suffering is temporary and much of it is man-made, unneces- sary and removable. God made man free, but men enslave one another. It is not God but man who makes slavery, the city slum, war, and human in- justice. Man's greatest woes are made by himself, and they are removable by him. Much of the evil in the world cannot be explained away, but it can be fought away. It cannot be removed by phi- losophy but only by loving labor and sacrifice. The contradiction between the actual and the ideal, be- tween the natural and the moral world can be over- come only by the free will of man choosing the path of duty. Our great need is not the explana- tion of evil but the secret of moral mastery over it. So far as it is God's world we may find that it is good, or the means for the making of good; and so far as it is morally bad we shall find later that man has made it so. We can ask no quick and cheap solution. If life has infinite meaning, it may re- quire eternity for its full realization. A fact so vast as suffering may demand vast time fully to solve the problem or even see it in perspective. As Sien- kiewicz says, we are willing to suffer if only we are sure there is something worth suffering for that lies beyond. 1 1 John Fiske, speaking of the omnipresent ethical trend of the universe, says, "Below the surface din and clashing of the struggle for life we hear the undertone of the deep ethical purpose, as it rolls in solemn music through the ages, its volume swelled by every victory, great or small, of right over wrong, till in the fulness of 70 FACING THE CRISIS The suffering that cannot be removed as man- made and unnecessary, can be resolved into three chief forms: disciplinary, remedial or redemptive. Some suffering is disciplinary, as a stimulus to man's development; some is remedial as a result of man's own sin; while some is redemptive, and when so recognized it may become voluntary and vicarious, borne for the reclaiming of men and the making of a better world. Some suffering is disciplinary. Man has two great teachers in every realm of life, prosperity and adversity, pleasure and pain, success and failure, en- couragement and discipline, reward and punishment, happiness and suffering. Of the two, which has been the better teacher? Pain has developed man's body and its faculties. Out of conflict, as science has shown, almost every attribute of form and function, of strength and courage, of beauty and nobility has been evolved. The five senses have all been thus developed. Pain has also developed man's mind. It has driven him to fresh discovery and invention. Suffering is educative. We say, "A burnt child dreads the fire." Suffering is a teacher for which there can be no substitute. It >s not optional or elective but required in the universal curriculum of life. None can omit it and take life's higher de- grees in character. Most of all, suffering has developed man's moral and spiritual nature, for it has taught him sympathy time, in God's own time, it shall burst forth in the triumphant chorus of Humanity purified and redeemed." "Through Nature to God," p. 129. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 71 and tenderness. It is only the corals broken by the sea that form the living rock. The bird rises against a strong head-wind, as the opposing force becomes a lifting force. The stars shine out by night which are unseen by day, and the shining hopes of humanity break forth in the darkness of despair. As Shakespeare says, out of his matchless knowledge of life, "Sweet are the uses of adversity." We must admit that some suffering is disciplinary. Again, some suffering has been remedial. Love's purpose in discipline is not vindictive but educative. The sufferings of an Augustine, of a Francis of Assisi, of an Ignatius Loyola were the means of reclaiming them from sensuous lives to saintliness. History a/id our own experience affirm that some suffering is remedial. Highest of all, suffering may become redemptive, when vicariously borne for others. Socrates calmly drinks the hemlock that Greece may be free. Telem- achus springs into the arena in protest against the gladiatorial games and gladly yields his life that this evil may be ended. The mother nurses her sick child, takes the disease and loses her life for her offspring. The hero dies for his country, the martyr for his cause. But each such sacrifice marks a milestone of advance. Finally Jesus appears as the one hope of man- kind. His short life failed to win an adequate fol- lowing, and his teaching, sublime as it was, was often uncomprehended, unappreciated or misunder- stood, for the world was far below his standard. But what his life failed to win, the seeming defeat 72 FACING THE CRISIS of his death achieved. Actually and historically out of this deepest evil in the world has there not come the world's greatest good? The Jew looked from the baffling problem of evil and a world of injustice to the last judgment for the vindication of God. There finally good would be rewarded, sin would be punished, and evil de- stroyed. But as he stood beneath the cross of Christ, he who had vision saw a higher and a better way, not of punishment but of the divine sharing of our suffering, not evil destroyed but rather borne by love, overcome by it and converted to good. The cross was God's way not of annihilating evil in wrath but of turning the other cheek to it in long- suffering love. Christ's death, which seemed to cut short and frustrate his life purpose, finally proved to be the very means of accomplishing it. Thus through the ages one increasing purpose runs a purpose of love, as creation's final law. And love facing a world in the making, an evolving, disci- plinary, and still sinful world, must suffer. There is no other way to redeem the ignorant and im- penitent. Hate may punish, selfish indifference may evade, but love must sacrifice to save, and by suf- fering win the secret and the triumph of life. It is thus in the cross of Christ that we see the final meaning of suffering. It is here that we can see the very heart of God; for if God was in Christ then he is always and everywhere what Jesus was. Then a suffering Christ means a suffering God, and in all our afflictions he is afflicted with us. As much suffering as there is in the world is ever at the heart THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 73 of God, borne and shared by him. All we suffer the Father's heart feels. In nature we see that God could do anything he would; in the cross we see that he would do anything he could. In nature we see his power; in the cross we see his love. Here is epitomized the whole meaning of suffering, the whole problem of evil. It is here that we learn the philosophy of life, that God works together into good all things for them that love him. 1 In the suffering of life, like Simon of Cyrene, we may be constrained to bear a cross, seemingly im- posed upon us by blind fate or chance, apparently arbitrary, meaningless, which we resent as a bitter burden. Or, we may accept it as Jesus did, and all life may become transformed thereby. We may, with the philosopher of old, say that "in suffering God has pitted thee against a rough antagonist that thou mayest be an Olympic conqueror." Thus Wil- liam Prescott, suddenly almost blinded in youth, "sang aloud in his darkness and solitude with un- abated cheer." With the help of others, mastering many volumes in foreign languages, he completed at last his "Conquest of Peru," and his "Conquest of Mexico." But his greatest work was never writ- ten; it was the conquest of himself. Thus to the Christian who sees the meaning of Christ's cross and accepts his own, time is conquered and his crown is won. The dualism and conflict of good and evil find their solution and harmony in the cross of Christ, where the divine and human meet. Here a God of absolute power and goodness meets the sin 'Romans 8:28, R. V. margin. 74 FACING THE CRISIS and suffering of evolving man, and the problem of evil is solved in the sacrifice of love. The meaningless cross of Simon the Cyrenian may become the voluntary sacrifice of the follower of Jesus. All suffering may thus be made vicarious. It may become a triumphant means to greater good, not only for ourselves but for others. Herein we may rise to life's highest glory and may share even in the vicarious redemption of God. 1 But this can only be by a venture of faith. We see but a small arc of the curve of human suffering in life's brief span, but we see enough to note the trend. We rest on rational ground; we see a partial solution; we must pass from this partial experience to the only complete truth which can make life valid and vic- torious, the absolute goodness of God. We must construe the universe either from cer- tain facts of evil or of good. "From partial proof we rise to the full conclusion, that good is the sun and evil is the cloud, and that the perfect and eter- nal sun is God." The short span of life offers no absolute proof of anything. Shall we believe in final evil or in ultimate good, or waver in nerve- less indecision? Shall we take the attitude of pes- simism or optimism, of hopeless unbelief or of stak- ing our life on the venture of faith? "Now faith is the supposition or working hypothesis of things hoped for, the testing out of things not seen." It is the adventure of life. It is the progressive, prag- matic verification of experience. And this is the 1 Colossians i -.24. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 75 victory that overcomes the evil in the world, even our faith. Some men have been baffled and beaten by what has seemed to them to be the evil in the world. Yet he who most experienced the evil of life, whose per- fect good was rewarded with a felon's cross, never wavered in his assurance of the love of the Father and the ultimate goodness of life. As no other he sees to the very bottom of the sin of the human heart, yet never loses faith in men. He suffers as no other from the ills of life and the opposition of sinful men, yet he staked his life on the good- ness of God. As he drank to the bitter dregs the cup of human suffering, he said, "the cup that my Father hath given me shall I not drink it?" He was spared no depths of shame, desertion, betrayal or death; no abyss of failure of shattered hopes, of uttermost loss when sin was allowed to work its worst upon him. Yet he held fast his faith in God and only asked forgiveness for his enemies who were doing him to death. His trust is unswerving in a Love that penetrates nature and history and per- vades all life. He does not explain evil but over- comes it with good. He does not offer a philosophy of death but an experience of life. In him life is epitomized. For us there is a depth of meaning in the reminder, "Christ also suffered." Such a faith strengthens us in facing the crisis in the world today. Without it in pessimism, doubt or agnosticism we cannot find firm footing for faith from which to wage victorious warfare against the giant evils that must be overcome, confident that 76 FACING THE CRISIS the ultimate power of the universe is behind us. Thus in facing the crisis of his time to Jesus it was God's world and it was good. He sees this vast complex of life as the interplay of God's purpose with the conflicting and colliding wills of men. In it any circumstance may for the moment be good or ill, a pleasure or a pain. But granted a good God of infinite power, a developing moral personality in man, and the meaning of life revealed, realized and epitomized in Christ, then all contingencies are covered, all present evil may be a potential bless- ing, and all things work together for ultimate good. 1 7 A fuller treatment of this subject will be found in the writer's "Suffering and the War," pp. 19-91 IV IMMORTALITY Upon what grounds do you believe in a future life? Is there any such thing as "a fufe and cer- tain hope" of immortality? For men who were going over the top in the World War, the future life became a vital ques- tion, for "eternal topics had become current." For them it was indeed facing the crisis of life. Many a man asked himself the question of old, "If a man die shall he live again?" This has been answered again and again from the time of Socrates and Plato and the writers of the Upanishads of India down to the present. Little that is original can be added today, but our faith gains firmer footing when we find that it is sustained by the experience of the centuries that have gone before us. There are many today who believe in social but not in personal immortality. They hold that the race and civilization are the product of our social inheritance. To this inheritance everyone in the past has contributed. To them, immortality means that nothing is lost and that each person's contri- bution to race progress is passed on biologically to his children or sociologically in the social inheri- tance. We are a part of all that we have met. We today are the embodiment of the race's experience 77 78 FACING THE CRISIS and achievements and this must satisfy our desire for immortality. While fully accepting the fact of our social in- heritance the writer believes also in personal im- mortality. He is but summing up the arguments of the past when he says that for himself he be- lieves this for the following reasons: I. The testimony of science to a world that is rational and trustworthy. All other deepest desires, instincts and hungers of the human life have the possibility of being satisfied. If this hunger for continued life were alone unfulfilled, it would be without parallel in our experience. Biologically, function determines structure and our present capac- ities and faculties have been developed by our en- vironment. As the climax of a long evolutionary process, man has sought to correspond to an eternal spiritual environment. If this practically universal desire were a mere subjective delusion, it would be contrary to the whole experience of the race in all other realms of life. If, as science testifies, even matter and energy are indestructible, how can the most priceless thing upon this planet, human personality, be lightly destroyed? The life beyond is the demand of our moral nature. Life's vast aspirations and capacities, unfulfilled at death, drive us to believe in God, in freedom and immortality. The disparity between our potentiali- ties and our present possibilities, between what we are and what we hope to be, can only be satisfied by a future life. Annihilation would be an injustice and an insult to the race. "When therefore we as- IMMORTALITY 79 sume, as science always does in the physical realm, that this is a reasonable world, we have a positive and assuring argument for immortality." 1 2. The testimony of religion to immortality is far stronger than that of science. Add to the un- broken faith of nineteen centuries of Christian ex- perience, the longer testimony of Judaism, and the three thousand years of the religious experience of India, whose spiritual certainty has needed no proof of God or of the future life. Recall the faith of five thousand years of the religious hope of Egypt, for even today around the ancient mummies we find wrapped those prayers from the Book of the Dead, "Let me live, O let me live !" Let us note the belief in the future life in the ancient religions of Chaldea, Assyria, and Babylon; then add the faith of Zoroas- ter, the early religions of Greece and Rome, the myths of Scandinavia, the testimony of Caesar re- garding the early Britons, the traditions of the North American Indians and countless other tribes. Let us face the fact that for something like a hun- dred thousand years humanity has buried its dead in the faith of a future life, and then ask if this hope has been founded upon a fallacy, if this deep- est instinct of the human race has been a mockery and a betrayal. The testimony of the highest re- ligion to immortality is overwhelming. Its basal as- 1 See the "Assurance of Immortality," H. E. Fosdick, pp. 113-141, to whom we are indebted in this section. Professor James and Bergson have endeavored to show that the mind overflows the brain, that the function of the brain is not productive of thought but merely transmissive, as in the case of the vocal cords in trans- n-itting sound; that the human brain is but the temporary and imperfect instrument of the mind that survives it at death. 80 FACING THE CRISIS sumption that the universe is beneficent argues for the permanence of personality. The faith of re- ligion has always held, "Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: Thou madest man, he knows not why, He thinks he was not made to die; And thou hast made him: thou art just." 3. The testimony of the great leaders of the race. Prophets, philosophers, poets, seers, the great moun- tain-peak men of human history have held to this high hope. Thus Socrates can say : "Then beyond question the soul is immortal and imperishable and will truly exist in another world." Plato holds "Our soul is immortal and never at all perisheth ... of necessity it always exists . . . Like victors assem- bled together we shall enjoy a happy life." Let us add the testimony of the long line of philosophers from Socrates and Plato to Kant and Hegel. Take the witness of the great writers from Homer and Virgil, from Dante and Milton to Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. We may add the outstand- ing statesmen from Cicero to Cromwell, from Wash- ington and Lincoln to Bismarck and Gladstone and the vast, unnumbered army of common men who with these leaders of the race have held this hope as imperishable. "The arbitrament of the great spirits of the race gets its authority for us because they but confirm the vision of our own elevated hours." 4. The testimony of Jesus Christ. He based his life upon the eternal. He staked everything upon IMMORTALITY 81 an historic movement that was to be founded upon his death and resurrection and whose fulfillment required his living presence. What was it that burst from that empty tomb on the third day with the greatest manifestation of life that the world has ever seen? It was this faith in the spiritual and eternal that made Jesus what he was. Nineteen centuries of Christian progress have been based upon it. In the face of martyrdom and persecution, death and defeat, his followers have held with in- domitable assurance the promise, "Because I live ye shall live also"; and "he that believeth in me shall never die." His was the assurance of one who already lived in eternity. And he made it com- municable and imperishable to multitudes of men not as an evanescent dream or an empty philosophi- cal speculation or wavering aspiration, but sustain- ing and unshakable, bearing the steady traffic of humanity from generation to generation, like the girders of a mighty bridge that spans a Niagara tor- rent that once seemed impassable. In the midst of all human life Jesus forever affirms, "I am the resur- rection and the life." "Socrates argued for immor- tality and believed it, Jesus never stopped to argue, but taking it for granted as an immediate and un- questionable intuition, lived as though it undoubt- edly were true. . . . When one considers therefore the character of Jesus, in which faith in God was the warp and certainty of life eternal was the woof, he is seeing the consummate verification of faith in immortality." 5. The testimony of the character of God. Ulti- 82 FACING THE CRISIS mately our hope of a life beyond is grounded in God himself. If there is an eternal, infinite and good God, if there is a living, loving Father, then the future life is assured. Well may John Fiske say, "I believe in the immortality of the soul as the supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work." Thus our hope in the future life is grounded in our faith in the moral integrity of God. 6. The testimony of experience. Faith in a future life is progressively verified by an expanding spirit- ual experience in the present. He that believeth, already "hath eternal life." The present life, if it is truly spiritual, is eternal. Immortality, rather than being a demonstration of logic is a spiritual achieve- ment and a present spiritual experience. He who knows this inward, moral miracle of a triumphant life overcoming temptation, surmounting the limita- tions of time and space, the bufferings of sorrow and separation, has already taken hold on the spiritual and eternal. Death is but a horizon, the limit of our present sight. Goethe held that "death is nature's expert device for securing abundance of life." Biologically, death was the price paid for a body, for the speciali- zation of function and the development of the higher life. Mere physical existence could not be finally and fully satisfying. It had little significance until death lent a new meaning to life as its great teacher. Time took on new value. The limit of man's thought was driven out to eternity. Death showed the true values of life. All fear is excluded from the life that knows this IMMORTALITY 83 faith at the full. Such an experience made simple fishermen into world apostles. It made Saul of Tarsus into Paul the herald of the Christian civiliza- tion of Europe. It made the noble army of martyrs, prophets and saints of the centuries. As one young officer wrote from Flanders, "Mother, I have seen death and death is indescribable, but under the shadow of the Almighty I have found a peace greater than the terrors of death." One who knows Jesus Christ and a living, loving God in a satisfying and expanding spiritual experience will have no doubts about the future life. Material things may pass away the body, wealth, the pride of the world, but a kingdom that cannot be shaken is revealed in a spiritual life that transcends death. The caterpillar crawls to its chrysalis but the butterfly soars into a new life which has the power of perpetuating itself. So death becomes but the portal to the life beyond. This faith in immortality we base upon the testi- mony of science, of religion, of the great seers and prophets of the race, of Jesus himself, upon the testimony of our faith in the character of God, and the witness of an ever growing spiritual experience. As Dr. Fosdick says, "The reasonableness of the universe is pledged to the immortality of man: the beneficence of God is unthinkable without it; the verdict of the spiritual seers confirms it; and when it is put to the verifying test of life it builds the loftiest character." If the writer may be pardoned a very personal word, this is no question of mere academic interest or of creedal orthodoxy, but has proved itself to him 84- FACING THE CRISIS a sustaining experience in facing the crises of his own life. The following letter written to a few intimate friends at the time of the death of our only son during the war is here added in the hope that someone now in the darkness of doubt may find this glad and sustaining reality, and know that eternal life is not only a future hope but a present expe- rience. "March I, 1917. "DEAR FRIENDS: "On Saturday night, February I7th, just before we reached him at midnight, our dear boy Arden passed suddenly and quietly away. He had been sick less than a week with a cold which developed into a slight case of pneumonia. On Saturday after- noon he took a sudden turn for the worse and in a few hours, before we could say good-by to him, he had entered into life. He leaves a memory of four- teen years of unclouded sunshine, rich with happy associations and with no regrets. "During the week that he was sick he had no pain or discomfort and it was not thought that he was seriously ill. He had talked with the nurse about going as a missionary to India. I remember when I took the first walk with him after we had just moved to Forest Hills, as we were returning to the house, I said: 'Well, Arden, we are almost home.' He looked up with a bright smile and said : 'This isn't home for me, father; I have no home but India, and it will be such a long time before I can finish school and college and go back again as a missionary.' "He had written to me several times about being regular in his morning watch, through the aid of Mr. Murray's little book for boys, "Daily Reading in the Gospel of Mark." Upon looking at this book IMMORTALITY 85 upon his desk, I found that he had checked each lesson as he read it. Each day was marked until I came to Saturday at the end of the fifth week, his last day of health. He had read and marked the passage Mark 5 =35-43, where Jesus had said: 'Fear not, only believe. . . . The child is not dead, but sleepeth. . . . And taking the child by the hand, he said ... I say unto thee, arise.' That was his last reading. He too has been raised into new life. "I found also on his desk his account book for the opening of the term, kept with no thought of any- one ever seeing it. The account showed that he had spent for necessities $1.26; for himself, only $.41 ; for giving, $10.30 of which most had gone to the prisoner-of-war fund. "He was a normal, healthy, happy boy, fond of sport, a good golfer and tennis player and half-back on his little football team. There was no death and no parting, just a sudden and peaceful entering into the life abundant. During a previous illness, when his mother asked him, 'Would you be afraid to die, Arden?' he said: 'No, mother, why should I be?' His whole life was joyous and peaceful, un- broken by a single sorrow, and now for us sorrow is swallowed up in joy. Our home has never been more happy than it is today, nor our family circle more unbroken and united. Earth is not poorer, but heaven is richer and life is fuller. "Although I found his last algebra examination paper on his table marked perfect, yet he found his lessons very hard. He will learn faster now in a higher school. There was nothing remarkable or precocious about our little boy. He only lived and loved, but he was the most affectionate boy I have ever known. He was not afraid to kiss me even on the street. Just as he was sinking, before I could reach him, seeing the doctor and thinking that I had 86 FACING THE CRISIS come, he threw his arms around his neck and said: 'You love me, father, don't you?', words which he had said so often during his life. As I look back on the fourteen years, I cannot recall one really wrong thing that he ever knowingly did, never a disobe- dience nor a lie. He was the purest little soul that I have known. The one great lesson that I pray I may learn from his life is that great first and last lesson of love. Somehow I think he will help us to learn it. I am only filled with thanksgiving for the rich gift of this little life. God never takes back a gift he gives, he has only taken him to himself till we meet in the larger life of perfect love." MIRACLES AND THE SUPERNATURAL Have miracles ever really occurred? In the light of modern science, are they not contrary to the uniform laws of nature? Are they not precluded by a rational view of the modern world? What is the relation between matter and mind, between the natural and the supernatural? Is it conceivable that God would break into the order of nature and interfere with natural processes by a miraculous event? Is there sufficient evidence for the miracles of Christ? In facing the crisis in the world of thought today we must frankly acknowledge that the modern mind has a natural antipathy to miracle. The extension of science, with its universality of law, the demand of the rational mind for unity, the spirit of the time with its over-emphasis upon the material and me- chanical and its inadequate experience of the spirit- ual, seem to leave no room for the miraculous. 1 1 Many approach the subject with preconceived prejudice. This is sometimes due to a misunderstanding of miracle as in the case of Huxley, as "an isolated wonder," or of Hume, who says that "a miracle may be accurately described as a transgression of a law of nature by a particular violation of the deity." It is thus supposed to be contrary to the "unalterable experience of the race," and no evidence is sufficient to prove what he misconceives to be a breaking of law. The misunderstanding of Hume's definition is well answered by Augustine, writing more than twelve centuries before him, "How can that be contrary to nature which takes place by the will of God, seeing that the will of the Almighty Creator is the true nature of every created thing? So that miracle is not contrary to nature, but only to what is known of nature." 87 88 FACING THE CRISIS Recognizing the antipathy to miracles at the pres- ent time let us remember that we do not have to begin the Christian life with belief in them. There is a heart of Christian experience, a central "core of reality," an inner certainty with which we may begin that is not at all dependent upon our opinion con- cerning miracles. Let us "fix firm the center first, then draw the circle round." If we may conceive miracle broadly as the free manifestation of the spiritual within the natural order, in ways not ac- counted for by the mechanism of that order, then a miracle is "not a disorderly occurrence but the mani- festation of a higher order." Beginning with the central core of Christian experience, are there not five widening circles of reality which we may in turn accept as we find sufficient evidence for them, all of which lead us on from nature to the supernatural? There is first of all the miracle of God. We must face the alternatives of a spiritual or a mechan- ical universe. Once we are sure of God, we can confine him to no mechanistic or material world. The whole of life is seen to be in its widest sense spiritual and miraculous. Do the facts of life show us a God intelligent, benevolent or "cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in"? Is the heart of life a machine, or "our Father in Heaven" ? Next we come to the great miracle of history, Jesus himself. His character, his teaching, his whole life in communion with God, his sinless conscious- ness, his overwhelming effect upon humanity loom large before us. He himself is the one great moral MIRACLES AND THE SUPERNATURAL 89 miracle. No isolated act, not what he did, but what he was and is this is the heart of miracle. Third, we come to the miracle of the resurrection. Picture the disciples despairing and scattered, all hope dead within them, but suddenly there bursts forth the greatest manifestation of life that the world has ever seen life overwhelming and indomi- table, life spiritual, moral, intellectual, and creative. Belief in the resurrection was universal in the early Church. 1 It was a fundamental fact four times foretold by Jesus himself, and repeated in all the records of his life. From this hour there is a new creative force in the world. Something happened at that time, for Christianity had died with Christ. He was crucified in shame, buried in despair, yet suddenly an overpowering inward experience pos- sessed his disciples. There must have been some objective reality corresponding to this new and over- whelming subjective experience. Here was the greatest infusion of moral and spiritual life that history records upon our planet strangely connected 1 Dr. Sanday says, "The truth is that the historian who tries to construct a reasoned picture of the Life of Christ finds that he cannot dispense with the miracles. He is confronted with the fact that no sooner had the life of Jesus ended in apparent failure and shame than the great body of Christians not an individual here and there, but the great mass of the Church passed over at once to the fixed belief that he was God. . . . There must have been something about the Life, a broad and substantial element in it, which they could recognize as supernatural and divine not that we can recognize, but which they could recognize with the ideas of the time. Eliminate miracles from the career of Jesus, and the belief of Christians, from the first moment that we have undoubted contemporary evidence of it (say A.D. 50) becomes an insoluble enigma." Hastings' "Dictionary of the Bible," Vol. II, p. 627. See "Reconstruction in Theology," by President H. C. King, pp. 66-7. 90 FACING THE CRISIS with a definite event that begins on the third day after his crucifixion. What was this power, this un- answerable and indubitable experience that sends men triumphant into life and joyfully to death, that faces three centuries of persecution by fire and sword of the Roman Empire and its legions, that survives after nineteen centuries of ancient, medieval and modern civilization, and that may be reexperienced and reverified today? Was it not the risen Christ possessing this new community by an extension of the incarnation of the life of God in the souls of men? But if Christ lives there is a fourth miracle of which we may now make sure, that is, the inward moral miracle of the spiritual life experienced by an ever-widening circle of men in all times and climes and races. Professor James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" is only one infinitesimal volume of an experience that if recorded would extend beyond the bounds of all libraries. Christianity and science have this in common. Both rest upon a fact, both stand upon experience. Religion affirms an experi- ence which science cannot deny or disprove. We can have within ourselves the last and final proof of the resurrection which rests, not on appearances to men of a bygone age, but upon an abiding vision for men of every age. The writer could add his own humble testimony to an abiding experience recorded in a previous chapter which he simply cannot under- stand or explain upon any basis of a mechanistic order, but only upon that of a universe of natural and spiritual law miraculous through and through MIRACLES AND THE SUPERNATURAL 91 with divine purpose and activity. Thus with Ter- tullian in North Africa, more than a millennium ago, men of five continents can summon their own souls in testimony as we say with him, "I summon a new witness, one more widely known than any book. . . . Stand forth in the midst, O Soul, . . . whether thou be divine and eternal as most think and there- fore the less likely to deceive. . . . Stand forth and give thy witness. ... I demand of thee such truths as thou bringest with thyself into man which thou hast learned either from thyself or the Author of thy being." As our own experience widens, we may pass to a fifth circle of miracle, in Jesus* acts of healing. Read through for an hour that first fresh Gospel of Mark and note how these works of Jesus are not vague wonders, mythological, fantastic exhibitions of power, but always manifestations of a loving pur- pose with moral meaning. Here he is proclaiming the good news of a restored humanity made whole in spirit, mind and body. His works simply illus- trate, validate and incarnate his message. Once granted that Jesus is the moral miracle of history, why should his works seem incredible? Why should not the spirit influence the body? Why should not goodness overcome evil ; and mind, pure, triumphant and God-possessed, dominate sinful, enfeebled and victimized humanity? Matter has dominated our spirits too long. We have not yet possessed our own souls nor our spiritual kingdom. 1 1 Do not the recent discoveries of modern science in the psychical realm tend to confirm Jesus' power of healing? If one reads the 92 FACING THE CRISIS It is when we take miracles in their full setting of the life of Christ that we may begin to see their spiritual significance. Let us remember that it was not a miraculous period. John the Baptist had wrought no miracles, nor the great prophets before Christ. It seems impossible to reconstruct the New Testament if we leave them out. They are inter- woven in the warp and woof of the record. If we take up the Gospels, we find they contain sober state- ments by matter-of-fact men. They are unequaled in the freshness of their impression. The vivid narratives bear the marks of eye-witnesses. As Pro- fessor Seeley, in his "Ecce Homo," says, "The fact that Christ appeared as a worker of miracles is the best attested fact in his whole biography." Repeat- edly, habitually, in vivid and varying detail, his works of healing are recorded, but Jesus always sub- ordinates them to spiritual purpose and moral con- trol. Moreover, the miraculous in Jesus is himself, as when Goethe says, "I bow down before him as the divine manifestation of the highest principle of morality," or, as Tennyson says, "What the sun is to that sunflower, Jesus Christ is to my soul." From chapter by Capt. Hadfield on "The Psychology of Power," in Streeter's "The Spirit," and sees these principles applied to shell- shocked patients in our own day, he gains fresh clews to these undeniable miracles of Jesus. Prof. A. G. Hogg says, "Man's readiness grows; God's readiness is always complete. This ex- plains why God's highest responses to the appeal of faith appear supernatural. They have been eternally natural to God, but they seem miraculous or astonishing to us because our dull faith has hitherto excluded them from our experience. God's eternal readi- ness breaks in upon us suddenly and in unprecedented manner, whenever our diminishing unreadiness reaches the vanishing MIRACLES AND THE SUPERNATURAL 93 such a person as we have found him to be we would expect an unusual knowledge of spiritual laws, an unusual power of mind over matter, of the spirit over the material. Thus we may advance in five widening circles of experience the miracle of God as the only alterna- tive to the dead mechanism of an unexplained ma- terialistic universe; the mighty miracle of Jesus him- self; the fact of his resurrection; the inward moral miracle repeated in every disciple who learns the spirit of a little child; and the reasonable and loving works of Jesus as he makes men whole. If we accept the impression that Jesus made upon the men of his day, the weight of evidence of long centuries which could not be built upon myth, and the testi- mony of our own souls, then miracle with moral meaning will be in harmony with our own growing spiritual experience. We must remember that the so-called "laws of nature" are only our subjective generalizations in which we try to sum up our limited knowledge of things, or the sum total of our systematized experi- ence. 1 Thus an unusual event, whose cause is to us unknown, might be contrary to our ordinary experi- ence, but a manifestation of some higher law. This is constantly happening with each epoch-making dis- covery of science which enlarges the boundaries of 1 The writer is especially indebted in this chapter to Dr. A. C. Headlam in his "Miracles of the New Testament," to J. A. Thom- son in "The System of Animate Nature," to Frederick Platt on "Miracles," "Basic Ideas in Religion," by Dr. R. W. Micou, "Re- construction in Theology," by H. C. King, "Direct and Funda- mental Proofs of the Christian Religion," by G. W. Knox, "God and the Struggle for Existence," by B. H. Streeter, etc. 94 FACING THE CRISIS our knowledge. Instead of Hume's "unalterable experience of the race," if one reads "The Wonder- ful Century," by Alfred Russell Wallace, he will see how many of the great achievements of science have opened up a new world and accomplished things which to previous experience seemed miraculous. Comte had hardly made his assertion that we would never know the chemical composition of the heavenly bodies before the discovery of the spectroscope re- vealed the elements in the heart of the sun and stars more perfectly than we know the hidden portions of our own earth. * If natural law is the simple action of things with no human voluntary agency behind them, we might define miracle not as a violation of law, but as "the ultimate nature of things asserting themselves, a revelation of the latent possibilities of things; of what they can become by divine activity within them." Thus a miracle might be a supernatural, fresh activity of the spirit which is its source. It might be due to the knowledge of a higher physical or spiritual law on the part of some spiritual per- sonality. 1 *In the eighteenth century Bishop Butler, followed by Paley, believed miracles to be the "direct and fundamental proofs of the Christian religion." At that time miracles were supposed to be the evidence that authenticated Christ. Today it is Christ that must authenticate miracles. Instead of their being direct proofs, we must turn to the self-evidencing, intrinsic truth and worth of Christianity and its appeal to our own experience. Only as it directly appeals to us as ethics and religion, as it satisfies our spiritual need and becomes incarnated in our character and embodied in our social activities is it validated. The eighteenth century was concerned with the vehicle of the message, while we are occupied with its substance. They demanded signs and mira- cles; we ask life and experience. MIRACLES AND THE SUPERNATURAL 95 Miracles may be a part of a vast and ordered spiritual world which inter-penetrates the natural order. Were our experience wide enough to gener- alize upon these seemingly unusual events we might see that they form a part of a larger order continu- ous with the natural. The whole sweep of evolu- tion, the inner heart and secret of nature itself would seem to point to a larger spiritual order con- tinuous with nature, of which man is a part. Sir Oliver Lodge shows that there are two conceptions of the universe, one spiritual and the other material, and we must take our choice. 1 If we suppose then that God, like man, may cause changing combinations of unchanging forces, and that nature is not a closed order or a dead machine but pliant to spirit and adapted to its use, we thus leave room for prayer, for providence, for miracle, for a whole spiritual order. If science is slow to recognize single miracles, it is for the reason that the whole of nature has become miraculous. Thus we may find that the supernatural would then be not a contradiction to the natural but an enlargement of it. Nature would then be law in process, and the supernatural the end for which law exists. The supernatural would be nature seen 1