By the Same Author 
 MYSTICISM AND MODERN LIFE 
 
RELIGION AS 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM 
 
 PBOFESSOB OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN PACIFIC SCHOOL OF RELIGION 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK ! CINCINNATI 
 
Copyright, 1922, by 
 JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 TO THE MEMBERS, IN BOTH WORLDS, 
 OP CROMBIE STREET CHURCH 
 
 IN SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS, 
 
 IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE 
 
 OF A PASTORATE OF TWELVE YEARS, 
 
 WHICH HAS BECOME TO THE AUTHOR 
 
 A FRAGRANT MEMORY 
 
 AND AN ENDURING INCENTIVE 
 
 TO FAITH IN GOD AND MEN 
 
 48'. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 .. 
 
 PREFACE 9 
 
 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE . tf. 11 
 
 CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE . . . \<. 32 
 
 EXPERIENTIAL THEOLOGY H 50 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AMONG THE RELIGIONS 61 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 80 
 
 MYSTICISM AS EXPERIENCE 102 
 
 CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE AND CHRISTIAN UNITY, if.. . 118 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE following addresses and articles, all con- 
 cerned with aspects of a central theme, will, I 
 think, exhibit a unity, and I hope a harmony, 
 such as to warrant bringing them together in a 
 volume. The varied viewpoints of the reviews 
 in which the articles appeared indicate how 
 widely welcomed is the discussion of religion as 
 experience. 
 
 My thanks are extended to The University 
 of California Chronicle, The Constructive Quar- 
 terly, the Methodist Quarterly Review, The 
 Hibbert Journal, The Homiletic Review, and 
 The Biblical World for permission to use the 
 respective articles accredited to each in the 
 text. Further indebtednesses will appear to the 
 reader as he pursues his way; and others there 
 are which neither writer nor reader can de- 
 fine, including One which I trust has not been 
 unfelt throughout. 
 
 JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM. 
 
 Berkeley, California. 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 1 
 
 THE deeper thought of our time is turning 
 away from religion as dogma, as sentiment, as 
 theory, as ethics, to religion as experience. Not 
 that this concept excludes the others, but is at 
 once the more definitive and inclusive. 
 
 What, then, do we mean let this be our 
 first inquiry by the term "experience" in its 
 common, not in its technical, sense? In the 
 first place, we mean do we not? something 
 that is one's own, that affects oneself, that has 
 penetrated the privacy of his individual ex- 
 istence. We mean to use a crude illustration 
 something like what would happen to the 
 puppet in the shooting gallery if he were con- 
 scious and able to say, when the ball or the 
 bullet strikes, "I am hit." Experience, that is, 
 means "I am hit." Whether any others are hit 
 at the same time or not is a secondary matter. 
 The main fact for the experient is: "This thing, 
 whatever it may be, has come home to me. It 
 has entered and domiciled in my private in- 
 
 1 An address delivered before the Philosophical Union of the University 
 of California and published in The University Chronicle, October, 1915. 
 
 11 
 
12 RELIGION A3 EXPERIENCE 
 
 closure, where I must live with it, for better or 
 worse, for longer or shorter." 
 
 In the second place, experience means some- 
 thing felt. One cannot have an experience with- 
 out sensation or emotion of some kind. The 
 experient cannot be indifferent except in the 
 sense of schooling himself not to yield to his 
 feelings. The puppet in the shooting gallery, 
 to have an experience, would have not only 
 to recognize, "/ am hit," but "I am hit. I feel 
 it." Now there is feeling and feeling. Nor is 
 it a mere difference of intensity but of kind and 
 quality. We have been too gross altogether in 
 our ideas of feeling, as if it were all of one 
 nature, yet Janus-faced pleasure and pain. 
 On the other hand, there are colors and tones in 
 feeling as diverse and delicate as in music and 
 painting, and some are both pleasurable and 
 painful at the same time. / We need a psy- 
 chology so sensitive to these differences that it 
 would be no longer possible to mass all our 
 emotions and sensations indiscriminately under 
 the one term "feeling" and then pass predi- 
 cates upon it as if it were all alike devoid of 
 intelligence and of ethical and spiritual quali- 
 ties and values. There are feelings that are 
 obscuring and debasing and there are those 
 that are illuminating and sacred. 
 
 Once more, an experience is something known. 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 13 
 
 It is not only something felt but something 
 apprehended. I do not mean understood. That 
 would involve an outside and all-around knowl- 
 edge of an experience in all its relations and 
 implications. But it is something grasped as 
 real and thus set among the facts enough of 
 whose own nature is seen, so that when it re- 
 turns one can say to it: "Here you are again* 
 I know you; you and I have been in close quar- 
 ters. I am aware not only of the feelings which 
 you arouse; I know something of yourself." Into 
 the discussion of what kind of knowledge this 
 of experience is, we will not enter. As Bergson 
 would say, it is at least inside knowledge. 
 
 We are not meaning to say by this that ex- 
 periential knowledge is purely empirical in its 
 nature. There is no such thing as purely em- 
 pirical knowledge. The mind enters into all 
 knowledge as the constructive, architectonic 
 factor. What I am insisting upon is the su- 
 periority of the kind of knowledge which 
 though constructed by the mind is inner, 
 sympathetic, experiential, to that which is 
 external, descriptive, discursive. 
 
 We have been describing experience as if it 
 were something purely passive, at least until 
 we began to speak of the knowledge factor in 
 it. This receptive element is essential. Expe- 
 rience does not arise out of the mind itself 
 
u 
 
 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 alone. It is due to something or someone that 
 impinges upon us. And yet in the activity 
 that arises out of this impingement the mind, 
 or, rather, the whole self, asserts itself and thus 
 constructs the experience and makes it what it 
 is. So that it is not the puppet who best illus- 
 trates the experience, but the person who does 
 the hitting. Better still, experience includes 
 both action and reaction, the experience both of 
 the hit and the hitter. In every genuine ex- 
 perience one is both passive and active, both 
 receptive and constructive. 
 
 It is this wholeness and awareness that char- 
 acterize experience. Experience is not pure 
 sensation. Neither is it pure reflection. It is 
 thinking, feeling, willing, all in one. It is 
 realization. 
 
 II 
 
 If such is the nature of experience in gen- 
 eral, what of that form of it that we call "reli- 
 gious" experience? 
 
 Manifestly, this is an order of experience 
 outside the realm of our ordinary or sense ex- 
 perience. It is not necessarily supernatural in 
 the sense of being remote from our every-day 
 life as persons, but it is extra-sensuous. It has 
 to do with another and higher sphere of reality. 
 Again we must remind you that we are using 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 15 
 
 the term "experience" in a far from strictly 
 Kantian sense. But it is a common usage; and 
 wisdom is justified of her children. 
 
 In the realm of religion experience has the 
 same qualities characteristic of all experience. 
 It is something directly felt and known by 
 oneself for himself. In this sphere experience 
 often goes by the name of "faith," which is "a 
 conviction of an axiomatic character which re- 
 fuses to be analyzed into reasons, and which, 
 indeed, precedes all reasons." 2 
 
 Is there, then, a religious experience of this 
 distinct and self -attesting kind? If so, what 
 is it? 
 
 In searching for an answer to this question, 
 in the first place we would have you take pre- 
 liminary account of the very general convic- 
 tion, or impression, that reality is wider and 
 more inclusive than the limits of the material 
 world. As President Woodrow Wilson once 
 said: "Even men of science now feel that the 
 explanation which they give of the universe is 
 so partial an explanation, so incomplete an 
 explanation, that for the benefit of their own 
 thought quite aside from the benefit of their 
 own souls it is necessary that something 
 should be added to it. They know that there 
 
 2 See Rudolf Eucken, by Abel J. Jones, p. 76. 
 
16 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 is a spiritual segment in the complete circle of 
 knowledge which they cannot supply and which 
 must be supplied if the whole circle is not to 
 show its imperfection and incompleteness." 3 
 
 If this is true, as I think many men of science 
 would themselves say, it is extremely signifi- 
 cant. It indicates thar*those who know most 
 about the physical world feel that it does not 
 encompass all reality /'that there is something 
 over and above material existence which can- 
 not be ignored^ If scientists feel this way, 
 how much more the rest of us, bathed as we 
 are in mystery, moved by impulses which we 
 cannot explain and thoughts which we cannot 
 fathom except when we are philosophizing. 
 
 Yet this sense of the unexplained margin is 
 only the negative side of this experience. It 
 has a positive side. Countless millions of men 
 and women have had the conviction, ranging 
 all the way from a dim and shadowy impres- 
 sion to the most complete and regnant cer- 
 tainty, of a Something, or a Someone, Out 
 There or Near at Hand, Far Away or Within 
 the Soul, Transcendent or Immanent, or both. 
 The savage religionist called It "Mana"; the 
 Israelite dared not name It; Confucius termed 
 It "Heaven"; the Brahman "Atman," the 
 
 1 Hartford Seminary Record, vol. rix, No. 3, p. 227. 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 17 
 
 Self; Plato conceived of It as "The Good"; 
 Aristotle as "The Unmoved Mover"; Plotinus, 
 "The One"; Spinoza, "The All"; Jesus called 
 It "Father"; Paul, "Him that filleth all in all"; 
 Hegel, "Spirit"; Fichte, "Will"; Matthew Ar- 
 nold, "The Power not Ourselves"; Spencer, 
 "The Unknowable." All these are ideas, at- 
 tempts to enfold a Reality that proves too great 
 and manifold for complete enclosure. 
 
 "But can we have the experience of such a 
 reality and not have an idea to embody the 
 experience?" Surely not. The intellect, or in- 
 terpretative faculty, is essential to our inner 
 life. Idea is related to experience as the body 
 is related to the spirit. They cannot be sev- 
 ered. And yet the experience underlies the 
 idea and is greater than it, just as the soul or 
 personality undergirds and is greater than the 
 body. Moreover, the harmony is often imper- 
 fect. The idea often thwarts and misrepresents 
 the experience, as the body does the soul. 
 Sometimes the idea burgeons and dilates while 
 experience fades and pales. Sometimes it re- 
 mains when the experience has fled a corpse 
 that mocks at reality and cries to heaven for 
 either revitalization or burial. 
 
 It should be our constant care and duty to 
 keep experience and idea in the closest possible 
 accord; for they react upon each other. He 
 
18 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 who flouts or ignores ideas in the interest of 
 experiences makes as disastrous a blunder as 
 he who flouts experiences in the interest of 
 ideas. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This deeply rooted human experience, or 
 conviction, of Something transcending the 
 world of sense and time is seen upon reflection 
 to be, in the very nature of the case, not merely 
 Something but Someone. In other words, It 
 cannot be less, or lower than, ourselves in na- 
 ture and worth, else It would cease to com- 
 mand our reverence and allegiance. If It were 
 only blind unconscious Force, however mighty, 
 It would be only another Thing or Potency, 
 like Electricity, capable of arousing our inter- 
 est, but not of stirring that deep and moving 
 experience of which we have been speaking. 
 
 This means no less, I take it, than that in 
 the very nature of this experience itself is in- 
 volved that its Object be either Personal, using 
 the term "personal" in its broadest, least lim- 
 ited sense, or Super-personal. Whether the 
 Super-personal is not a contradiction in terms 
 the Super-personal being the super-possible 
 I leave for you to cogitate. For my part I 
 see no other reasonable conclusion than that 
 this Somewhat experienced is Person not a 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 19 
 
 Person, much less an Individual, but Pure Per- 
 son free from all the limitations which we 
 find in ourselves and others as persons. What 
 such Perfect Personality is, and how such Being 
 is related to ourselves and to the world, in- 
 volve problems requiring much thinking- 
 problems which are stirred, if they are not 
 settled, in the theological classroom. 
 
 How much this experience or, if you choose, 
 this faith in One behind the veil of outer 
 things has meant to humanity, no words can 
 adequately describe. By it men have "sub- 
 dued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, ob- 
 tained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, 
 quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge 
 of the sword, from weakness have been made 
 strong." Very poignant is the question: Can 
 men keep up heart if they cease to believe in 
 such a Being? Can they go on singing, striv- 
 ing, enduring, hoping, when "the Great Com- 
 panion is dead"? Can man bear the strain of 
 life without God? Will not his spirit be crushed 
 under the weight of nature's ills? Will not the 
 light of joy and trust die out of his heart? 
 George Romanes, true scientist, true man, 
 voiced the natural results of the abandonment 
 of theism, when, in his revolt from Christianity 
 in 1876, he wrote: "And now in conclusion, I 
 feel it is desirable to state that any antecedent 
 
20 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 bias with regard to theism which I individually 
 possess is unquestionably on the side of tradi- 
 tional beliefs. It is therefore with the utmost 
 sorrow that I find myself compelled to accept 
 the conclusions here worked out, and nothing 
 would have induced me to publish them, save 
 the strength of my conviction that it is the 
 duty of every member of society to give his 
 fellows the benefit of his labors, for whatever 
 they may be worth. ... I am not ashamed to 
 confess that, with this virtual negation of God 
 the universe to me has lost its soul of loveli- 
 ness, and although from henceforth the precept 
 to 'work while it is day* will doubtless gain 
 intensified force from the terribly intensified 
 meaning of the words that 'the night cometh 
 when no man can work/ yet when at times I 
 think, as think I must, of the appalling con- 
 trast between the hallowed glory of that creed 
 which once was mine, and the lonely mystery 
 of existence as now I find it at such times I 
 shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharp- 
 est pang of which my nature is capable." 4 
 Romanes' recovery of his faith, which he 
 achieved with perfect honesty and without sur- 
 rendering anything of the scientific spirit, is 
 
 A Candid Examination of Theism, by Physicus; see Romanes' Thoughts 
 on Religion. 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 21 
 
 surely one of the significant incidents in the 
 history of modern science. 
 
 Yet, reassuring as the experience of God 
 may be, we cannot be true to ourselves and 
 cherish it at the expense of our mental and 
 moral integrity. As has been well said: "No 
 one wants to be a fool, even a blessed fool." 
 I cannot agree with Professor James that we 
 are justified in creating a God in order to meet 
 our own needs and longings. That would mean 
 to undermine the very foundations of the moral 
 order and threaten to bring the whole social 
 structure down about our ears. Unless this 
 consciousness of God can be justified to our 
 intelligence we cannot continue to hold it with 
 either self-respect or abiding advantage. 
 
 That it can be so justified I think has been 
 demonstrated throughout the history of Theism. 
 In our own time none perhaps has done it with 
 more of acumen and conclusiveness than Pro- 
 fessor Howison. 5 And yet for myself I must 
 confess that it is the experience and not the 
 proof that is primary and basal and that with- 
 out the experience the proof would be of little 
 avail. Not that the experience is itself irra- 
 tional or nonrational. On the contrary, it is 
 
 8 See The Limits of Evolution; also The Contribution of Professor Howison 
 to Religious Thought (J. W. Buckham), The Harvard Theological Review. 
 
22 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 of the very essence of that personal, intuitive 
 reason which furnishes the premises of all rea- 
 soning. Given this substantial datum of expe- 
 rience, of the same order as our consciousness 
 of self and of others, the intellect, or discursive 
 reason, has its part to play in interpreting, 
 defending, and relating it to the rest of our 
 knowledge. Yet the fundamental reliance is 
 the experiential. And so I ask you to return 
 once more to this experience of Something or 
 Someone There and to consider with me the 
 chief objections to its validity. For we cannot 
 contentedly and securely maintain it so long as 
 there are unanswered objections prodding us at 
 every step. 
 
 IV 
 
 There are three possible objections that may 
 be raised against the validity of this experience 
 of God: first, that it is an illusion; second, that 
 it is merely subjective; and, third, that it is a 
 misconception. Let us take these up in turn. 
 
 1. If this is an illusion, there are three things 
 that may be said of it: first, that it is a singularly 
 persistent illusion other illusions give way, 
 this one perdures through the generations; sec- 
 ond, that it is a singularly well-fortified illusion 
 capable, as has been said, of the most thor- 
 ough and convincing rational explication and 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 23 
 
 defense and third that it is a very widespread 
 illusion, common to all races and peoples. 
 
 But though the experience is so widespread 
 it must be admitted that many nevertheless do 
 not have it. Why is this? Let us pause to 
 consider this question a little before passing on 
 to the other objections. 
 
 If one man says, "To me this Presence is 
 real," and another says, "To me it is not," 
 how shall we decide between them? It is easy 
 to call the consciousness of God "temperamen- 
 tal" and so dispose of it with the arrow of an 
 adjective. But the arrow is too light. Apply 
 to the God-consciousness some fair tests. Can 
 one come up to this experience again and again, 
 for example, and find it real? Can other expe- 
 riences be made to harmonize with it? If both 
 these tests can be met, then comes the farther 
 one: Can this man who says he hasn't it, have 
 it? Has he it already, perhaps, in a form and 
 degree different from the first? If not, which, 
 if either, is abnormal? If God's presence is real 
 to a large proportion of mankind and unreal 
 to the rest, is the fact that he is unreal to a 
 part proof that he is unreality? Is not the 
 positive experience better evidence than the 
 negative? Was Plotinus right when he said, 
 "The One is not far away from anyone, and 
 yet is liable to be far away from one and all, 
 
24 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 since, present though It be, It is present only 
 to such as are capable of receiving It, and are 
 so disposed as to adapt themselves to It, and, 
 as it were, to seize and touch It by their like- 
 ness to It?" 6 
 
 It must be acknowledged that temperament 
 plays a considerable part in realizing the pres- 
 ence of God. The mystical temperament con- 
 stitutes a marked human type, although not 
 every one who has such a temperament has the 
 beatific vision. To possess such a temperament 
 undoubtedly makes it easier to realize vividly 
 the reality and nearness of God, but it is hardly 
 the condition of such an experience. If it were, 
 religion would be an esoteric cult and not the 
 broad human experience that it is. Jesus did 
 not say, "Blessed are they that have a religious 
 temperament, for they shall see God." Let it 
 be noted that differences in temperament, real 
 as they are, are liable to exaggeration. Quali- 
 ties and characteristics which are very marked 
 in some individuals appear to be wholly lacking 
 in others; but the lack may be in development, 
 not in possession. Every individual has latent,^ 
 undeveloped capacities of which he hardly 
 dreams until some unwonted experience calls 
 them out. To quote again Von Hiigel: "In 
 
 Enneads, vi, is, 4; quoted by Baron Von Hiigel in The Mystical Ele- 
 ment of Religion, ii, p. 92. 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 25 
 
 even the most purely contingent-seeming soul, 
 and in its apparently but institutional and his- 
 torical assents and acts, there ever is, there 
 never can fail to be, some, however implicit, 
 however slight, however intermittent, sense 
 and experience of the Infinite." 7 
 
 There is a fundamental like-mindedness of 
 men which underlies all differences as the bed- 
 rock underlies the varied soils, with their differ- 
 ing flowers and fruits. It is upon our like- 
 mindedness far more than upon our differences 
 that human society is founded. It is to this 
 like-mindedness that the best literature, the 
 noblest art, the soundest ethics, the deepest 
 religion makes its appeal. There may be here 
 and there an individual who does not respond 
 to Hamlet, or the Sistine Madonna, or the 
 Hallelujah Chorus, or the Golden Rule, or 
 the twenty-third psalm; but if so, we count 
 him either an undeveloped or an abnormal 
 human. 
 
 Wide, confusing, baffling, as are the differ- 
 ences among men, in preference, in judgment, 
 in belief, in everything, their agreements far ex- 
 ceed their divergencies. The life of humanity 
 often seems but a seething sea of contrary winds 
 and conflicting waves, but underneath all this 
 
 1 The Mystical Element of Religion, ii, p. 283. 
 
26 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 surface disturbance are the untroubled deeps 
 where great controlling, steadying convictions 
 hold sway. And one of the deepest of these is 
 the abiding assurance of God. 
 
 There is probably something of the mystic in 
 everyone. Many a person who has thought 
 himself a mere commonsense, everyday "tough- 
 minded" practicalist has awakened one day to 
 find himself strangely "tender-minded," to feel 
 deep calling unto deep within him, a great wave 
 of emotion overwhelming him, the breaking in 
 upon him of a new light, or, as it has been put, 
 the sudden opening of an unsuspected chamber 
 in his soul. There are in all of us capacities 
 that we have not fathomed. To deny to any- 
 one the possibility of some form of mystical 
 experience is unwarranted dogmatism. There 
 is reason to assume that every man, speaking 
 broadly, has enough of the mystical in him to 
 realize the presence of God experientially. In 
 that stirring passage in which Tertullian, who 
 certainly could not be called an irrational mys- 
 tic, calls upon the soul of man, "simple and 
 rude, uncultured and untaught," to stand forth 
 and declare itself concerning its experience of 
 God, he declares, "Whenever the soul comes to 
 itself as out of a surfeit, or a sleep, or a sickness, 
 and attains something of its natural soundness, 
 it speaks of God," and adds, "There is not a 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 27 
 
 soul of man that does not from the light that 
 is in itself . . . proclaim God." 8 
 
 Yet still the "tough-minded" man is repelled. 
 He feels compelled in honesty to say that this 
 sense of the Presence of God seems to him an 
 unreal, vapid, pathological experience. He 
 neither has had it, nor expects to have it, nor 
 cares to have it. It seems to him wholly out of 
 place and useless in this rough, hard, work-a- 
 day world. And his protest is worth attending 
 to, for he too may be a son of Abraham. Let 
 him ask himself, however, why he has such a 
 sense of the sacredness of Duty? Is there not at 
 the bottom of it a consciousness that in some 
 way duty is linked with a God of duty? 
 
 2. As for the objection that the experience 
 of God is subjective and by no means certifies 
 any objective existence, it is true if "objective" 
 is used in the literal sense. God is not an Ob- 
 ject, but an Other, a personal Other. If it is 
 meant to deny that there is such an Other cor- 
 responding to our personal prescience of Him, 
 then the denial cuts through all our knowledge 
 of the existence of persons. There can be no 
 objective proof of the existence of a self. How 
 can one know that he himself exists? Only by 
 personal consciousness. How can he know that 
 
 * De Testimonio Animae, chap, i; see R. M. Jones' Studies in Mystical 
 Religion, p. 82. 
 
28 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 other persons exist? By personal recognition. 
 How can he know that God exists? Again, by 
 personal knowledge. If this is subjective knowl- 
 edge, then all knowledge of persons is subjec- 
 tive. Yet it is the most real of all knowledge. 
 Well did Descartes start with the existence of 
 himself, as the only thing he could not doubt. 
 Not blindly did he pass to the existence of God 
 as the next most certain truth. And thence to 
 the existence of other persons. And yet, as 
 we have now come to recognize, the existence 
 both of other selves and of God was bound up 
 in that primary truth of his own existence. 
 
 3. But suppose it be said, "Yes, this expe- 
 rience is real; there is, indeed, Something there; 
 but what it really is is either the universe, the 
 sense of the whole of things, or the totality of 
 persons, or both, which gets itself before the 
 mind as if it were some distinct and superior 
 personal Reality." 
 
 What shall we say to this ever-recurrent and 
 now so prevalent view? I can only offer here, 
 and very briefly, these criticisms of it. First, 
 it falsifies the plain implicates of consciousness, 
 if it does not actually falsify consciousness it- 
 self. If, when one experiences, or believes he 
 experiences, a Being self -existent and perfect, 
 he is really experiencing a vast unconscious uni- 
 verse, or a company of selves like himself 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 29 
 
 what confidence can be placed in the testimony 
 of consciousness? A similar case might be 
 made out regarding friendship. It might be 
 said: The person whom you regard as your 
 friend is not a self at all, but only an exudation 
 of the universe. You are not loving a person 
 at all, but a phenomenon, not a reality, but an 
 appearance. What would be the best way to 
 answer such an assertion? Would it not be by 
 the expressive word which Professor James 
 uses so aptly, "Bosh!"? 
 
 Not only does this assumption affront the 
 integrity of experience; it fails, in the second 
 place, to satisfy the needs and longings of the 
 soul. In place of bread it offers a stone. I 
 will not repeat here the overpressed but not 
 inapt argument that the existence of a need 
 assures its fulfillment, and that therefore there 
 must be a God to correspond to our need; but 
 I will suggest that the presence of moral recti- 
 tude and sympathy hi ourselves points, at 
 least, toward a Fontal Rectitude and Sympathy 
 from whom it issues. 
 
 The final criticism that I have to offer of this 
 monistic interpretation of the God-experience is 
 that it raises more problems than it lays. For 
 example, how could a material universe, in- 
 ferior in nature to the perceiving person, get 
 itself transformed in his consciousness into a 
 
30 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 spiritual Self superior to himself? Or how could 
 the aggregate of imperfect persons get itself 
 incorporated in consciousness as a Unitary, 
 Self -existent, All-perfect Person? 
 
 Thus we come, not without good reason, to 
 trust the God-experience as meaning essen- 
 tially what it seems to mean. That so many 
 have found it to work is not a proof of its 
 reality, but a strong indication of it. 
 
 Not that there are not immense and ubiqui- 
 tous difficulties in clothing this experience in 
 adequate and comprehensive ideas, in relating 
 it to this "too, too solid flesh" and this often 
 unintelligible world; but the difficulties are no 
 greater than in making any hypothesis you may 
 adopt fit this rebellious, recalcitrant frame of 
 things with its obstinate encounters and its 
 ever-escaping margins. Evidently, we were not 
 intended to have an easy time of it here, either 
 in our living or our thinking. Perhaps it is 
 best so. Otherwise what use would there be 
 for philosophy, say nothing of religion? 
 
 Into the question of whether this God- 
 experience is individual or social I cannot here 
 enter farther than to say that if it is, as I have 
 treated it, individual, that by no means pre- 
 vents its being social also. For individual and 
 social are not as we are coming to see 
 exclusive, but complementary. 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 31 
 
 , 
 This deep down, ineradicable experience of 
 
 God, too deep to be fully understood, yet 
 capable of convincing rational explication and 
 defense, is the central factor in religion. Not 
 that this is all of religion. From this root reli- 
 gion spreads far and wide, flowers and fruits abun- 
 dantly and makes all the areas of our human 
 life comely and glad. Religion thus becomes, 
 as Professor Hocking has called it, "the re- 
 sidual inspiration of human life." By its effects 
 we know it. It incites the arts and mothers 
 the enthusiasms. It appears in moral charac- 
 ter as "anticipated attainment." It refreshes, 
 sustains, ennobles the soul. But beneath all its 
 activities and manifestations lies this elemental 
 experience of God, not always distinct, but be- 
 coming clearer and clearer through the double 
 dialectic of life and thought until one finds in 
 him the Person of persons. 
 
 It is a great thing for religion, as well as for 
 the philosophy of religion, that there has come 
 to us in these days of alternate confusion and 
 clarification the full purport of this distinction 
 between the experience of God and the idea or 
 doctrine of God. Too long have ideas and doc- 
 trines of God been substituted for God himself. 
 Hence have arisen skepticism, revolt, agnosticism, 
 atheism, all of which have often been rejection 
 of ideas of God rather than of God himself. 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 1 
 
 THE appeal to experience as the justification 
 of religion is so strong that it might well be 
 stronger. Its full strength cannot be revealed 
 until it is subjected to the most thorough and 
 critical examination. After the question: What 
 is religious experience and how is it related to 
 experience in general? comes the question: 
 What is Christian experience and how is it 
 related to racial religious experience? Until 
 such questions as these are asked and an- 
 swered many minds will refuse consent to a 
 faith which comes to them clad only in its own 
 native power, but without philosophic creden- 
 tials. Only by a thorough critique of Christian 
 experience can the convincing character of the 
 claims of Christianity be disclosed. 
 
 I 
 
 The term "experience" is very loosely used 
 to cover physical sensation, mental activity, 
 and spiritual knowledge. We speak of ex- 
 periencing bodily pleasure or pain, as if it were 
 our very selves who were pleased by a taste or 
 hurt by a blow. Yet, at the same time, we 
 
 > From The Constructive Quarterly, vol. v, No. 2, June, 1917. 
 32 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 33 
 
 know that it is our body that is affected rather 
 than ourselves. Similarly, we speak with much 
 more of a sense of closeness of identification 
 though it is noteworthy that here we do not 
 customarily use the term "experience" of un- 
 derstanding a mental proposition, as if we our- 
 selves as personal intelligences recognized it as 
 true (for example, a geometrical demonstra- 
 tion). Yet here again, upon more careful 
 thought, we realize that it is the mind rather 
 than the innermost self that is involved in such 
 knowledge. For our reasoning faculties are in 
 a sense only instrumental to our deeper self, as 
 is implied in the familiar lines, 
 
 "A man convinced against his will 
 Is of the same opinion still." 
 
 In religious experience, however, it is clear 
 that the very self is involved far more com- 
 pletely and unreservedly than in either physi- 
 cal sensation or mental judgment. There is an 
 authoritativeness, a sense of reality and of 
 conscious self-commitment in religious expe- 
 rience which give to it a singularly central and 
 sacred place in human life. Its intensity may 
 be transitory, but it leaves a vivid impress of 
 abiding reality. 
 
 This is true of religious experience wherever 
 it is found, hi a lesser degree in its lower and 
 
34 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 more primitive forms, in a higher degree in its 
 higher forms. Whatever its cause, there is a 
 certain commanding and serious quality in re- 
 ligion, when it is genuine, which sets it apart 
 from all other forms of experience as pos- 
 sessed of greater significance. 
 
 It must be granted that in some cases there 
 is a revulsion from the intense consciousness of 
 assurance of religious experience toward what 
 sometimes comes to seem the more solid though 
 skeptical reality of reason; but in such cases 
 there is almost invariably a sense of loss, as if 
 one had been compelled to drop to a lower 
 level to gain reality. And often there remains 
 a lurking conviction that reality may lie, after 
 all, in the more ideal realm. 
 
 II 
 
 When we seek for the inner essence of reli- 
 gious experience we find ourselves confronted 
 with such a multiplicity of beliefs, practices, and 
 emotions that it seems hopeless to fasten upon 
 any one as definitive. And yet when one goes 
 below all these to their root one comes upon 
 something, as we have seen, which, however 
 elusive, however overlaid with corruptions, un- 
 derlies all religion. It is what we call spirit, 
 the supernatural, the divine. In its lower 
 forms only a vague indefinite mana, in its 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 35 
 
 higher it rises into something worthy of the 
 name of God. Something or Someone (either 
 one or many) beside oneself and other creatures 
 and objects that is the consciousness that 
 haunts the human mind and gives rise to what 
 we term religion. 
 
 It is possible to explain this consciousness of 
 a spiritual world as imaginary, marginal, unre- 
 liable. Certainly it is mystical in its nature; 
 but its power over human life and its persist- 
 ence do not readily admit of this explanation. 
 It does not fade away as racial intelligence 
 grows, but develops in strength and sanity. It 
 not only allies itself to, but stimulates, a ra- 
 tional interpretation of the universe. The 
 conviction arises that this religious experience 
 is in itself rational, possessing a kind of ele- 
 mental self-evidencing rationality that sur- 
 passes the bounds of ordinary reasoning. The 
 basis of this conviction cannot here be ex- 
 amined. Suffice to say that, as intuitionism, 
 it has strong support in the history of human 
 thought. 2 
 
 In the greater ethnic faiths this experience 
 becomes theistic, ethical, spiritual. In Chris- 
 tianity it attains its purest and most vital 
 form. Its manifest superiority has led us to 
 
 2 For a further discussion of this subject see my Mysticism and Modern 
 Life, chap. v. 
 
36 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 look upon Christian experience as something 
 quite by itself, original, new, unrelated; but a 
 larger outlook convinces the student of reli- 
 gion that Christian experience, unique and su- 
 preme as it is, is not something apart and alone. 
 Rather is Christianity the culmination and ful- 
 fillment of the religious experience of the race, 
 revealed, to be sure, but as the climax of a pro- 
 gressive revelation. 
 
 As the highest form of the racial religious 
 experience, Christian experience has a definite 
 character and content, distinguishing though 
 not separating it from the experiential content 
 of other religions. Just what this "essence" of 
 Christianity is has been the object of diligent 
 quest. 
 
 Before endeavoring to define its content let 
 us not fail to recognize that Christian expe- 
 rience itself has assumed quite different forms 
 in various stages of its history. The Christians 
 of the second and third centuries, emerging 
 from Judaism or paganism and standing face to 
 face with martyrdom, had an experience differ- 
 ing in many ways from that of the Christian 
 of to-day. So with the Christians of the Mid- 
 dle Ages, living in a well-nigh spent civilization, 
 and confronting a supposedly imminent end of 
 the world. The Roman Catholic type of expe- 
 rience exhibits a marked contrast to the Prot- 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 37 
 
 estant. The evangelical and the liberal types 
 of experience differ. It is hardly just to assert 
 that one of these is right and all the rest wrong. 
 To one brought up under the sway of evan- 
 gelicalism it is quite natural to assume that his 
 is the only genuine kind of experience; but he 
 can hardly fail to recognize that the evan- 
 gelical type is undergoing constant alteration. 
 One kind of Christian experience may, it is 
 true, be purer, higher, nearer to the heart of 
 Christianity than others, but that does not 
 prove that the others are false or fruitless. 
 Each may grasp an aspect of the larger expe- 
 rience. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Is there, then, a common Christian experience 
 which underlies and unites all of its forms, as 
 one ocean fills many bays and inlets? If so, 
 how shall we discover it? Not by merely going 
 back to original Christianity, as Harnack would 
 have us do; nor by taking it as a whole, in all 
 the forms and phases of its development; nor 
 by fixing upon the most highly developed form 
 and making that the criterion. Rather, by 
 seeking the underlying formative content com- 
 mon to all types of Christian experience and dis- 
 entangling it as far as possible from the subor- 
 dinate and temporal factors bound up with it. 
 
38 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Proceeding thus, we find that the common 
 and constitutive root of Christian experience is 
 the bond uniting Christians to God through 
 Christ. It is his relation to Christ that makes 
 the Christian a Christian. 3 It is true that 
 Christ may be conceived in very different 
 ways. To one Christian the historic Jesus may 
 be central; to another the conception of the in- 
 dwelling, living Christ. One may find the 
 lineaments of Christ blend and lose themselves 
 in those of the Spirit, or the heavenly Father. 
 To another they may be confused and obscured 
 in that of the Church. Even so, these expe- 
 riences varying not only in clarity and po- 
 tency but in truth and worth may all of them, 
 in differing degree, be infused and vitalized by 
 the personality of Jesus Christ. In other 
 words, the Christian experience is an experience 
 of personal relationship to a personal Spirit 
 through the medium of an incarnate revela- 
 tion, however diversely that revelation may be 
 mentally represented. 
 
 The Christian experience, centering thus in 
 Christ, is a regenerative, redemptive experience. 
 Whether this be chiefly through a sense of for- 
 giveness of sin or of entrance into a larger, 
 freer life, or both, whether it be sudden or 
 
 * A very striking and beautiful expression of this truth is found at the 
 beginning of the Second Epistle of Clement. 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 39 
 
 gradual, is secondary. It is a new life. The 
 terms in which this new life is represented 
 differ widely; that again may be but a testi- 
 mony to its reality. It is true that this renew- 
 ing power of Christian experience has often 
 become weakened and impoverished. Ration- 
 alistic and naturalistic tendencies of thought 
 have overshadowed it. Conventional forms of 
 Christianity have at times reduced it to a mere 
 sense of secured safety. Nevertheless, through 
 the whole stream of Christian experience runs 
 this sense of a life renewed a life imparted by 
 Love, at cost of the sacrificial suffering which 
 love entails when sin has intervened. 
 
 Once more, the Christian experience is an 
 idealizing, prophetic experience. It is charac- 
 terized by the active pursuit of an ideal, indi- 
 vidual and social. It is ever looking toward a 
 goal. Something better on before, toward 
 which men are to press, that is part of Chris- 
 tian experience. It is thus not only individual 
 but social in its nature. 
 
 Here, again, there has been enormous di- 
 versity of ideas and programs. Heavenly 
 homes, New Jerusalems, imminent millen- 
 niums, new social orders to be won by labors 
 together with God all imaginable forms of 
 the kingdom of God yet ever a kingdom, of 
 one sort or another. For this is part of the 
 
40 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 normal Christian experience; it looks for a 
 better self and a better city. It is true that 
 there have been periods in Christian life and 
 thought when this spirit has been languid, 
 when an alien temper of pessimism and stag- 
 nation has gained the ascendency. But a 
 faith, as an individual, should be judged 
 neither by its lapses nor its self-contradictions, 
 but by its ruling temper and spirit. 
 
 It is needless to add that genuine Christian 
 experience is a profoundly and vitally ethical 
 experience. Otherwise it would have had no 
 stable and enduring quality. 
 
 Christian experience, then if one may at- 
 tempt to define what is too rich for definition 
 is an individually enlightening and regenera- 
 tive, ethically purifying, socially redemptive ex- 
 perience of God through the historical-spiritual 
 person Jesus Christ. It is thus both the in- 
 terpretation and the fulfillment of racial reli- 
 gious experience. 
 
 IV 
 
 Compare this conception of Christian expe- 
 rience with older and more limited versions of 
 it. 
 
 The common Protestant conception of the 
 content of Christian experience goes back for 
 its sanction into the beginnings of the evan- 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 41 
 
 gelical movement. Its prevalence is probably 
 due more to John Wesley than to any other 
 single individual. The strength of Wesley an- 
 ism lies in the fact that it sees Christianity to 
 be an experience, not chiefly a belief or cult. 
 The two essential elements of this experience 
 are conceived to be conversion and sanctifica- 
 tion. That which gives impulse and activity 
 to both of these is the "testimony of the 
 Spirit." The testimony of the Spirit is defined 
 by Wesley as "an immediate impression on the 
 soul, whereby the Spirit of God directly wit- 
 nesses to my spirit that I am a child of God, 
 that Jesus Christ has loved me and given him- 
 self for me, and that all my sins are blotted 
 out, and I, even I, am reconciled to God." 
 
 That is an admirable statement of the Chris- 
 tian faith, but consider for a moment how 
 much it presupposes. First, that there is a 
 God and that there is a soul both of which, 
 to the inquiring mind, are open to question 
 and must be proved. It presupposes also a 
 historic-spiritual person, Jesus Christ, who is 
 of so exceptional a nature that he can know 
 and love in all the ages each individual who 
 turns to him. Then, too, it involves the real- 
 ity of sin, that sin has power to alienate the 
 soul from God, and that this alienation may 
 be removed through the mediation of Christ. 
 
42 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 All this, Wesley would say, is a matter of 
 experience and rests upon the experimental 
 basis. In the main this is true. Yet expe- 
 rience cannot establish historical fact, though 
 it may witness to it. Nor can it of itself alone 
 establish the doctrines here involved. The ex- 
 perience which Wesley calls "the testimony of 
 the Spirit" is, evidently, not the simple, iso- 
 lated and self-supported fact which he assumes 
 it to be. Historical and intellectual factors are 
 involved in it. It does not come to the Chris- 
 tian as a solitary individual. It is mediated by 
 the Christian Community. It roots deep down 
 in the primary religious impulse of the race. 
 It is attached to a definite historic religion, 
 which itself is closely related to an anterior 
 faith, and that again to a great family of reli- 
 gions. 
 
 Moreover, the Wesleyan is only one 
 though one of the purest and most vital of 
 the types of Christian experience. The author 
 of the Epistle of James did not define his ex- 
 perience in such terms; neither did Justin 
 Martyr, nor Ignatius, nor Augustine, nor Saint 
 Francis, nor Theresa, nor Luther, nor Calvin. 
 Yet they all represent genuine varieties of 
 Christian experience and all shared much that 
 Wesley experienced and he much that each of 
 them experienced. All of which clearly con- 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 43 
 
 firms the two truths we have already reached, 
 (1) that Christian experience is far more in- 
 clusive and varied than we have been accus- 
 tomed to regard it, and (2) that its forms and 
 effects are largely molded by ideas or doctrines. 
 
 What, then, is the relation of ideas to expe- 
 rience in the realm of Christian faith? Do the 
 ideas beget the experience or the experience 
 the ideas? We have already taken the ground 
 that the experience is primary and the ideas, 
 or doctrines, secondary. This is further indi- 
 cated by these two patent facts. First, Chris- 
 tian experience is manifestly far deeper and 
 worthier than its doctrinal statement. 4 To say 
 this is not to reflect upon the doctrines, but to 
 magnify the experience. The doctrines are es- 
 sential and valuable interpretations of the ex- 
 perience, but they are inferior to it, as words 
 are less than thoughts. Nor is it to exalt 
 emotion. For to define experience as emotion 
 is no more adequate than to define it as idea. 
 Idea and emotion invariably attend experience 
 perhaps we should say are parts of it but 
 it is greater and deeper than they. 
 
 Again, not only is the Christian experience 
 greater and deeper than Christian doctrine, but 
 
 4 "Christianity is based upon recorded experiences, which are eternally 
 self -verifiable in the soul of the man who puts them to the test." Profes- 
 sor B. W. Bacon, at the Modern Churchmen's Conference, England, 1920. 
 
44 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 often the doctrines, especially as formulated by 
 individuals, are plainly out of accord with the 
 experience. How often we meet with Chris- 
 tians of an intense and profound experience, 
 eager to present theories which (perhaps owing 
 to a lack of intellectual training) are painfully 
 short of or even contradictory to the expe- 
 rience which we can detect burning warm and 
 true beneath the smoke which issues from it. 
 Their ideas fail to represent their experience, 
 and not seldom misrepresent it. The failure to 
 recognize this discrepancy between idea and 
 experience, doctrine and truth, has led to end- 
 less confusion and misunderstanding. 
 
 Once more Christian doctrines change more 
 or less with changing social and intellectual 
 environment. They cannot be detached from 
 the total life and thought of the age. 5 Expe- 
 rience changes too. Only, the latter has a far 
 deeper continuity from age to age. The like- 
 mindedness of men in all ages is a fact, in spite 
 of their differences, but their like-heartedness is 
 a still greater fact. Paul's doctrines, for ex- 
 ample, appeal to us still, as embodying univer- 
 sal truths, however changed our environment; 
 but Paul's experience is far nearer and dearer 
 to us than are his doctrines. 
 
 6 Compare Francis J. McConnell, Public Opinion and Theology- 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 45 
 
 V 
 
 Experience first, doctrines second. That is 
 the natural order. Only, there is no interval 
 between; for as soon as experience begins, 
 thinking begins, just as the shoot springs from 
 the swelling seed. Christ first, then Christ- 
 ology; the new birth, then a doctrine of re- 
 generation; the consciousness of forgiveness, 
 then a doctrine of atonement; progress in holi- 
 ness, then a doctrine of sanctification. 
 
 Yet doctrine, once formed, begins to color 
 shall we not say also to arouse? experience. 
 When a church has once become established 
 doctrinal instruction begins as early as, some- 
 times even earlier than, the experience. In 
 this way have come into existence types of 
 Christian experience so wedded to certain doc- 
 trinal presuppositions as, for example, Roman 
 Catholic, Evangelical, and Liberal and thus 
 wearing so different aspects that they have 
 hardly been able to recognize each other as 
 Christian. And yet, granted the presence, in 
 some if not all sects, of ideas and practices 
 which can hardly be called less than corrup- 
 tions, there is in each a residue of experience 
 that is genuinely Christian. And upon the 
 basis of this common experience, and the com- 
 mon body of doctrine arising from it, unity is 
 made possible, if only we are willing to go be- 
 
46 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 neath the surface to the experience underlying 
 it. 
 
 The effect of doctrine upon experience is 
 something to which the church should give 
 careful attention. For doctrine may exercise 
 either a restrictive and devitalizing or a re- 
 leasing and stimulating influence upon expe- 
 rience. Experience should have room to 
 expand and create new doctrinal forms and 
 expressions. Otherwise, it either ferments or 
 loses its vitality. A doctrine, or rather a doc- 
 trinal formulation, that to one generation is 
 an aid to experience may to the next be an 
 encumbrance. 
 
 For example, the experience of sin is one of 
 the permanent factors of the religious con- 
 sciousness, essential to the realization and 
 progress of the religious life. As such it is 
 peculiarly clear and poignant in Christianity 
 leading to certain doctrines which in evan- 
 gelicalism have been extremely potent in 
 arousing Christian experience, for example, to 
 the doctrines of total depravity and everlasting 
 punishment. Yet both of these doctrines do 
 violence to another equally fundamental con- 
 stituent of religious experience the conscious- 
 ness on the part of humanity of an honest 
 endeavor to do right and of the consequent 
 approval of God. Side by side these two ap- 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 47 
 
 parently hostile constituents of the religious 
 experience consciousness of worth and con- 
 sciousness of sin have dwelt together in our 
 humanity, and even hi the same breast. To 
 be true to human experience both of them 
 should be recognized. The theology which 
 recognized human sin only, and ignored human 
 goodness, for a long time held sway over the 
 larger part of Protestantism, and wrought 
 mightily, because it was true to one hemisphere 
 of experience. Yet because it was an exag- 
 geration, because it ignored a section of expe- 
 rience which should not have been ignored, for 
 this among other causes it has now come about 
 that the doctrine of sin has lost much of its 
 hold upon our generation and the experience 
 itself has been blunted by reaction. 
 
 Doctrine must be constantly squared with 
 experience, or such results are sure to follow. 
 The place of logic in theology must be subor- 
 dinated to the deeper realities of experience. 
 Then the interplay of the two will be normal 
 and fruitful. 
 
 Take another illustration. The doctrine of 
 Providence, one of the most characteristic yet 
 difficult doctrines of Christian faith, is based 
 upon experience of providential direction in 
 one's own and in the general life. That expe- 
 rience has led to a doctrine of Providence 
 
48 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 which attempts an indiscriminating application 
 of the experience of individual divine guidance 
 to the whole realm of humanity and nature. 
 Hence arise insuperable difficulties. Obstinate 
 facts emerge which refuse to yield to an easy 
 and roseate doctrine of Providence. As a con- 
 sequence a subtle distrust of the doctrine dif- 
 fuses itself. The scientist raises his eyebrows; 
 the Christian himself begins to wonder and 
 doubt. The doctrinal instinct has overreached 
 itself and constructed too soaring a doctrine, 
 one which falls of its own weight. Thus the 
 doctrine of Providence has, especially in the 
 light of the Great War, come to seem to many 
 a fabric of fancy. For example, a soldier 
 wrote to his pastor from the battlefield: "This 
 war makes one hate God . . . Omnipotent! 
 and he let it happen. Omniscient! He knew 
 it in advance and he's let it happen. I hate 
 him . . . You have been kinder to me than 
 God has been." What is the course to be 
 taken? Is it not to go back to the base-line of 
 experience and start over again, asking, "What 
 is this experience? What does it involve as to 
 the relation of God to my life and that of 
 others?" and then to study the facts and laws 
 of history and science, as well as of experience, 
 and thus to build up a doctrine of Providence 
 which is true both to experience and to the 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 49 
 
 world in which we are living? The result may 
 be very modest and incomplete, but it will at 
 least be true to all the facts involved. 
 
 The relation of religious experience to cult is 
 another subject which calls for more careful 
 study. What is the influence of ritual in arous- 
 ing and renewing individual experience? How 
 far do common worship, the use of prayer and 
 praise, rite and symbol, arise out of experience 
 and promote it? And how far are they in dan- 
 ger of becoming substitutes for it? Here lies 
 the key to cult as well as to doctrine. 
 
 Thus the return to experience, conceived in 
 an ampler way than heretofore, as the source 
 both of doctrine and cult, brings a fresh reve- 
 lation of the fundamental nature of all religion, 
 reveals the universality of Christianity as the 
 interpretation and fulfillment of the religious 
 life of humanity, and throws a flood of light on 
 the nature and function of theology. Best of 
 all, it reveals the basis and hope of a unified 
 Christendom. 
 
EXPERIENTIAL THEOLOGY 1 
 
 THOSE who dwell close to the banks of 
 theology have for some time been aware of a 
 rising flood. There is a warmer atmosphere 
 and a more copious flow of forceful thought. 
 The war may have checked this outflow; it 
 has purified and refilled its sources. It is not 
 so much a "reconstruction" of theology that 
 we are witnessing as a rebirth a new infusion 
 of life, a fresh springtide. The theology that is 
 now manifesting itself is newer than the "New 
 Theology" and older than the "Old Theology." 
 It is a theology that has put off the old man 
 with his deeds dogmatism, systemism, specu- 
 lation, controversialism and has put on the 
 new man that after God has been created in 
 righteousness and holiness of truth. 
 
 I 
 
 The chief characteristic of this regenerated 
 theology is its experiential character. It is 
 the theology of Christian experience. 2 This 
 means an almost revolutionary change. Theol- 
 ogy as a science takes its place as secondary 
 
 1 From The Methodist Review (Quarterly) April, 1917. 
 
 2 By experience, it is needless to repeat, is meant not empirical experience, 
 but spiritual experience, in which the rational and ethical rather than the 
 "feeling" element predominates. 
 
 50 
 
EXPERIENTIAL THEOLOGY 51 
 
 and subordinate to a greater reality. It has 
 become ancilla religionis. It has learned that 
 its sphere is not to be ministered unto but to 
 minister. It is to be henceforth the interpreter 
 and servant of experience, commissioned not to 
 lead but to follow, not to corral truth but to 
 clarify it. "Theology is preceded by religion 
 as botany by the life of plants," as one of the 
 foremost to recognize and promote this change 
 has said. 3 Manifestly, this means a change in 
 the whole spirit and attitude of theology. 
 Henceforth she must take her pitcher to the 
 living well and draw water from deeps of which 
 she has not hitherto been fully aware. Be- 
 neath doctrines lies Truth; beneath under- 
 standing, Experience; beneath interpretation, 
 Reality. 
 
 II 
 
 To base theology upon experience calls, how- 
 ever, for a conception of experience far wider and 
 deeper than that which is ordinarily held. In 
 many respects the very word "experience" is mis- 
 leading. It is apt to suggest a mere superficial, 
 passing stimulus something that has to do with 
 subjective feeling rather than with objective re- 
 ality. Many weak, exaggerated, and irrational 
 notions of religious experience have attached 
 
 William Newton Clarke, An Outline of Christian Theology, p. 1. 
 
52 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 themselves to it and beclouded its true nature. 
 It has been identified solely with the exotic phe- 
 nomena of revivals. Abnormal forms of mys- 
 ticism have become associated with it, lending 
 it an atmosphere that has alienated many minds. 
 Religious experience has too often meant only 
 conventional conversion or spasmodic emotion. 
 Only of late have unprejudiced students of 
 religion come to realize that these manifesta- 
 tions of religious experience are not to be taken 
 as adequate indices of its true character. They 
 are but outward and often lurid signs and 
 accompaniments of a deeper reality, whose un- 
 derlying nature is something that neither psy- 
 chology nor metaphysics can explain or explain 
 away. We are just beginning to appreciate the 
 varied and comprehensive wealth of religious 
 experience. Leibnitz had a religious experience 
 as well as Luther, Wordsworth as well as Wes- 
 ley, Emerson as well as Edwards, Edward 
 Everett Hale as well as General Booth. 
 
 Ill 
 
 While religious experience is far too deep and 
 vital a reality to be a mere intellectual process 
 or attitude, it is nevertheless fundamentally 
 and indubitably rational. For at the heart of 
 religious experience is faith, and as Fries said, 
 "Faith springs immediately from the very inner 
 
EXPERIENTIAL THEOLOGY 53 
 
 essence of Reason." Faith is the reach of the 
 soul into the eternal verities. It is that by which 
 we understand that the worlds were formed by 
 the word of God. Its atmosphere is that of 
 sanity and calm and sweet reasonableness. 
 
 It often seems quite otherwise. Clouds and 
 darkness are not seldom round about religious 
 experience mental confusion, nervous excite- 
 ment, sometimes even moral instability. Yet 
 beneath all these disturbances there is an abid- 
 ing calm of rational conviction. A person who 
 has a religious experience knows, and knows 
 that he knows. He may make sad work of de- 
 fining his knowledge. He may make even sad- 
 der work, at times, of living it. Yet he knows 
 that he has touched Something, or Someone, 
 that is real, rational, abiding. The use of such 
 phrases as the "Rock of Ages," the "sure foun- 
 dation," "blessed assurance," and the like, 
 however crude, indicates this sense of having 
 reached the foundation truths, the roots of 
 rationality. Religious truth is rational because 
 it is personal. The very precipitancy and dog- 
 matic assurance with which the possessor of a 
 Christian experience sometimes hastens to pro- 
 pound and defend an incongruous set of doc- 
 trines is evidence of the strength of a convic- 
 tion far greater than the ability to formulate it. 
 
 But can truth be rational in essence unless it 
 
54 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 is correct in explication? Certainly it can. 
 One can grasp truth too great for him to un- 
 derstand, much less explain. The failure to 
 realize this indicates that one has not yet got- 
 ten below the surface of truth and imagines 
 that it consists in definitions, propositions, and 
 demonstrations, not knowing that these are but 
 its trappings and suits, and that there is that 
 within that passeth show. One may seize with 
 a firm and unrelaxing grasp an eternal and vital 
 truth and yet be quite inconsequential in his 
 understanding and interpretation of it, just as 
 a scientist may gain possession of indubitable 
 facts in nature and form a hypothesis regarding 
 them which proves to be entirely untenable. A 
 religiously awakened man may be "very sure 
 of God" and yet propound and defend a theol- 
 ogy as impossible as the Ptolemaic theory of 
 the heavens. Yet because one holds the Ptole- 
 maic theory we do not regard the sun as a 
 myth. It is his theory of it that is at fault. 
 
 The inherent rationality of religious expe- 
 rience is revealed not only in the sense of convic- 
 tion it begets, but in the strong impulse it gives 
 to thinking as well as to action. It stimulates 
 thought. It is true there is a type of religious 
 experience that seems to stifle thought, that 
 lives in mere feeling rising and falling in tem- 
 perature with the fluctuations of a mere emo- 
 
EXPERIENTIAL THEOLOGY 55 
 
 tional caloric. This hectic, contagious sentiment 
 sadly needs the corrective of disciplined thought. 
 However inaccurate and blundering the think- 
 ing that arises from religious experience may be, 
 it is essential to its life, and tends unless it 
 becomes divorced from experience to self- 
 correction and ever closer approximation to 
 an adequate expression of the reality behind it. 
 Moreover, the theory reacts upon the expe- 
 rience, aiding or hindering it by giving it either 
 a normal or an abnormal expression, a free or a 
 choked channel. Not only so, but theology 
 helps to induce experience through the medium 
 of ideas. 
 
 IV 
 
 If, then, theology flows normally and freely out 
 of religious experience, if it is the means of the 
 self -interpretation and an aid to the impartation 
 of experience that by which it relates itself to 
 the thought-world what are the natural forms 
 which an experiential theology will take? 
 
 It is clear is it not? that the form of 
 theology which lies nearest to experience itself 
 is purest and best, that is, the simple, spon- 
 taneous theology which we hardly recognize 
 to be such at all. This is the theology of 
 insight. It expresses itself in clear and simple 
 affirmations and aphorisms. It finds its most 
 perfect embodiment in the teachings of Jesus. 
 
56 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 It is not customary to think of Jesus as a 
 theologian. In the sense in which we usually 
 use the term he is not; and yet, in the truest 
 sense, he is the greatest of theologians partly 
 for the reason that he does not appear to be 
 one. As has more than once been said, glass is 
 made not to be seen, but to be seen through. 
 Jesus was so transparent a teacher that we see 
 the truth through him, or, rather, in him, and 
 forget that by his very transparency he shows 
 himself the master theologian. The simplest 
 truth is the greatest truth, in theology as else- 
 where; and he is the greatest theologian who 
 can make great truth simple and self-evident. 
 We hesitate to call Jesus a theologian for the 
 same reason that we hesitate to call Lincoln an 
 orator; and yet as the Gettysburg Address is 
 the purest of oratory, so the parable of the 
 prodigal is the purest of theology. 
 
 Theology at the first remove, however, is 
 not the only theology that is needed. Truth in 
 its noble simplicity is most precious, as well as 
 most convincing; but truth needs also to be 
 formulated, correlated, organized shall we not 
 say systematized? Thus we find ourselves, in 
 spite of ourselves, calling back from banish- 
 ment that old-time offender, systematic theol- 
 ogy. Can any one doubt that there is a place 
 for systematic theology provided it does not 
 
EXPERIENTIAL THEOLOGY 57 
 
 become the victim of its own method and put 
 system above truth? Surely there is a place 
 for unity and order in the interpretation of 
 religious experience. It can never be less than 
 one of the great tasks of the human mind to 
 endeavor to coordinate religious experience with 
 other forms of experience. We cannot live an 
 ordered and harmonious life until the truths of 
 religion are adjusted to those of the outer 
 world as well as to that complex of mental 
 activity which makes up our inner microcosm. 
 
 Another kind of theology for which there will 
 always be need, and toward which there is a 
 natural impulse from Christian experience, is 
 the theology of persuasion and defense, or 
 Apologetic. Just as surely as one who has come 
 into possession of a great and releasing expe- 
 rience, moved by the desire to impart it, seeks 
 to induce another to share it, just so surely he 
 finds himself formulating an Apologetic, a the- 
 ology of rational persuasion. Questions and 
 objections appear, and must be met. Such a 
 theology arises as naturally and inevitably as 
 the artist fulfills the impulse to put upon 
 canvas the vision of beauty that invests his 
 soul, or the poet to sing the song that fills his 
 heart and will not let him be silent. 
 
58 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Apologetic theology has, it is true, often be- 
 come mechanical, unconvincing and unper- 
 suasive; but that is the fault of the artist, not 
 of the art. Apologetic in the age of Justin, of 
 Origen, and of Chrysostom was no perfunctory 
 or fruitless task. Even in the days of Butler's 
 Analogy and Schleiermacher's Addresses it 
 proved itself more puissant than all the weap- 
 ons of skepticism or the panoply of indiffer- 
 ence. The power of Apologetic is not yet 
 exhausted. It only needs the freshening and 
 vitalizing of a new passion for truth. 
 
 Still another form of theology, Speculative 
 theology, flows freely from the fountain of 
 Christian experience. Speculation for some 
 minds at least is the natural overflow of the 
 upwelling spring of the religious life. Through 
 it the eager mind gains scope and play and 
 enlargement. Never was the speculative in- 
 stinct more exuberant and untrammeled than 
 in the patristic age. Here is, as it were, the 
 playground of theology. Men like Clement of 
 Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine were like 
 minds that have been suddenly given wings 
 and found themselves afloat in the boundless 
 and sustaining atmosphere of the divine free- 
 dom and love. Should they not fly at will 
 here, there, everywhere unrestrained and with- 
 out too great regard for consequence and 
 
EXPERIENTIAL THEOLOGY 59 
 
 consistency? Nor have they lacked successors 
 through all the centuries. The abuse of the 
 speculative impulse has indeed been great, but 
 abuse never justifies permanent disuse. 
 
 In these gray, pragmatic days the specula- 
 tive instinct has been crushed. The bound- 
 aries of speculation have been fenced with 
 caution; and wisely so. For speculation had 
 been guilty of assumptions and vagaries by 
 means of which the verities became confused 
 with the possibilities, and steady values with 
 fluctuating theories. And yet there is a place, 
 and always will be, for speculation in the 
 realm of religious truth. Even science, with all 
 her magnifying of exactness and precaution, 
 has of late indulged in quite as free speculation 
 as that for which she has too freely condemned 
 theology. In each field speculation has its 
 place. Only let us beware not to mistake 
 speculation about truth for essential truth. 
 
 VI 
 
 Thus the theology of experience gives us back 
 the fundamental forms of theology, only with a 
 new spirit, a clear guiding principle, and a hith- 
 erto unregarded criterion of values. Instead of 
 the lifeless and repressive theology which has 
 created so strong a reaction, with its dogmatism, 
 its systemism, and its unanchored speculation, 
 
60 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 we are gaining a theology grounded in self -evi- 
 dencing truth-experience personal, intuitional, 
 spiritual which from this underlying expe- 
 rience proceeds reverently and freely to the es- 
 sential task of interpretation and organization. 
 
 Experiential theology, then let it be said 
 once more is, in the best sense, also rational 
 theology, though at the opposite pole from ra- 
 tionalism. It is no theology of tongues, though 
 inspired by the same Spirit whence issues the 
 gift of tongues. It does not, as Paul did not, 
 despise tongues. On the contrary, theology has 
 learned, somewhat, how to understand tongues 
 and to interpret. Yet it would rather prophesy. 
 Of prophecy without the Spirit, however, it 
 has learned to be cautious. That way im- 
 potence and dry-rot lie. When the Spirit 
 speaks it would speak, and in terms as rational 
 as they are spiritual; and when the Spirit is 
 silent it would be silent. 
 
 A theology of this order wins respect upon all 
 sides. It does not affront philosophy, for 
 philosophy itself is slowly coming to recognize 
 the inadequacy of mere intellectualism. It does 
 not antagonize science, for its realm is other 
 than that of science, though contiguous to it. It 
 does not offend the childlike soul, for itself has 
 the childlike spirit; yet it wins the thoughtful 
 mind, for it seeks to give a reason for its faith. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AMONG THE 
 RELIGIONS 1 
 
 THE interpretation of Christianity as expe- 
 rience helps greatly toward an understanding 
 of its place among the religions. The roots of 
 Christianity have never been thoroughly ex- 
 plored. Only in recent years, indeed, has 
 Christianity been thought of as having roots, 
 or as being a plant, a growth, at all. Rather 
 has it been looked upon as a donum Dei, a 
 supernatural deposit, a treasury of knowledge 
 and beatitude delivered incomparable and com- 
 plete to mankind. For the better part of two 
 millenniums this conception prevailed. Now 
 and again, however, the cunning eye of scien- 
 tific criticism, trained in the laws of a universe 
 inconsonant with this assumption, saw through 
 its meagerness and caught glimpses of a wider 
 relationship and a deeper meaning. 
 
 I 
 
 The impossibility of a completely segregated, 
 independent, and purely supernatural religion 
 has become increasingly evident. Even from 
 the first the dependence of Christianity upon 
 Judaism was so clear that the two Testaments 
 
 1 From The Hibbert Journal, vol. vii, No. 3, April, 1909. 
 61 
 
62 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 were incorporated as complementary parts of a 
 single revelation; but that left the revelation 
 still static, unrelated, isolated. 
 
 It meant the coming of a great change when 
 the discovery was made that other kindred reli- 
 gions, notably the Babylonian, disclose ideas, 
 practices, legends, strikingly similar to those of 
 Israel, suggesting a common origin. Likewise 
 was the assurance of the older Apologetic dis- 
 turbed by the accumulating testimony of his- 
 torical scholarship to the large place which 
 Hellenism has had in the development of 
 Christianity. It was not merely an "influence 
 of Greek ideas upon the Church," as Edwin 
 Hatch termed it in his Hibbert Lectures; it 
 was a mighty current of idea and impulse that 
 poured into Christianity from Greek Philos- 
 ophy and mingled its waters with the earlier 
 fount from Sion's hill and the fresh pellucid 
 stream from the hillsides of Galilee. "The in- 
 flux of Hellenism, of the Greek spirit, and the 
 union of the gospel with it," says Harnack, 
 "form the greatest fact in the history of the 
 church in the second century; and when the 
 fact was once established as a foundation, it 
 continued through the following centuries." 2 
 Earlier even than this, in the Pauline and Johan- 
 nine theologies, the molding power of the Greek 
 
 * What is Christianity? Second ed., p. 214. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AMONG RELIGIONS 63 
 
 mind had begun to make itself felt in Christian- 
 ity. And who can doubt that the Christianity of 
 to-day, on its intellectual side, carries the per- 
 manent impress of the Greek mind? It is signi- 
 ficant that so many of our church buildings are 
 in the form (more or less) of the Greek temple. 
 Yet Judaism and Hellenism are far from ex- 
 hausting the indebtedness of Christianity to 
 other religions. That life-and-death conflict 
 between good and evil the good God and the 
 righteous man pitted against the forces of 
 darkness and falsehood which absorbed the 
 soul of the ancient Persians, may have made 
 over to Christianity, chiefly through the Per- 
 sian-Jewish contact in Babylon, something of 
 its virile sense of powers to be overcome and 
 wrongs to be overthrown, which has quickened 
 the Christian spirit and moved it to greater 
 earnestness in the battle with sin. The strength 
 of the Christian belief in a future life and in 
 the Fravashis, the spirits whose faces always 
 behold the face of God does it not come in 
 part from that firm-knit faith that nerved the 
 souls of the followers of Zarathustra? 3 
 
 3 "Before the Exile the Jewish creed was very dim indeed as to resurrec- 
 tion, immortality, future judgment, and all we hold most dear. . . . The 
 Irano-Vedic lore developed in Iran the first definite form of our ideas as 
 to the future state, according to the obvious data in the case." Dr. Law- 
 rence H. Mills, Zarathustra, Philo, the Archemenids, and Israel, p. 208. It 
 should be added that Professor James Hope Moulton did not recognize 
 any considerable influence of Persian upon Jewish theology. See his The 
 Treasure of the Magi, chap. iv. 
 
64 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Modern Christianity is characterized by a 
 devoted loyalty to the home "the Christian 
 home" we often call it, knowing how closely it 
 is associated with that elevation of woman 
 which everywhere follows the footsteps of the 
 evangel. Whence did Christianity acquire this 
 devotion to the home? Hardly from the Orient 
 alone. Jesus deeply sanctioned monogamy, 
 and enforced the principles upon which alone 
 the home can be built; but it was only with 
 the advent of the Teutonic peoples into the 
 family of Christianity, with that sacred foster- 
 ing of the home life which was their especial 
 virtue, that the home came to occupy the 
 place of peculiar honor and sanctity which it 
 now holds in our Christian heritage. 
 
 Without attempting a summary of all the 
 contributions, religious and ethical, which 
 Christianity has received from sources outside 
 its own immediate content, it is becoming in- 
 creasingly clear that, both in origin and in de- 
 velopment, it has drawn largely from the best 
 religious thought and life of the race. The 
 two deepest strata of the religious life of hu- 
 manity, Semitism and Aryanism, have given of 
 their richest ores to Christianity. When we 
 say that Jesus was a Jew, and that upon the 
 best religious inheritance and instruction of his 
 people and age he constructed his faith, we may 
 
CHRISTIANITY AMONG RELIGIONS 65 
 
 not forget that this heritage of his reached far 
 back of Hebraism, back of Jacob and of Abra- 
 ham, back to that primitive and shadowy 
 realm of human origins in which there first 
 sprang up the idea that there are gods at all 
 and that a tie of some sort unites the individual 
 man to his tribal god and to his tribal brother. 
 Out of the Semite the Hebrew, out of *he Hebrew 
 the Jew, out of the Jew the Christian. And who 
 shall say how much the Christian of to-day owes 
 to that savage, remote Semite, struggling out of 
 his animalism towards a dawning light within? 
 In the same way, when we say that Hellenism 
 furnished a large part of the intellectual con- 
 ceptions out of which Christian theology was 
 formed, we may not justly leave out of account 
 the antecedents of Hellenism. For Hellenism 
 did not begin complete, any more than Athene 
 sprang full-armed from the head of Zeus. Far 
 down in the early aspirations and outreachings 
 of the mind of the Aryan race, before its migra- 
 tions from the steppes of Southern Russia, 
 were germinating those rational unifying con- 
 ceptions which the new religion of Jesus caught 
 and consecrated to its urgent ends. Out of 
 Aryanism Hellenism, out of Hellenism Platon- 
 ism, out of Platonism Alexandrianism, out of 
 Alexandrianism, reaching down to the present 
 day, the New Theology. 
 
66 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Neither royal family of Europe nor self-made 
 man of America can deny relationship with the 
 savage man and the ancestral ape. Nor can 
 Christianity ignore its kinship with religion in 
 its lowest and crudest beginnings. What then? 
 Is it degraded by the relationship, polluted by 
 the superstitious crudities of religion's earliest 
 awakening? Rather does it by this kinship 
 gain touch with total humanity in its upward 
 striving, added sense of the greatness of the 
 instinct which out of such chaos and meanness 
 can produce such harmony and grace as the 
 water-lily, with its roots in the slime of the 
 lake-bottom, blooms snow-white and fragrant 
 in the summer sun. 
 
 II 
 
 The study of Comparative Religion is reveal- 
 ing Christianity in a wholly new light, from the 
 vantage ground of a fresh viewpoint. For the 
 first time we are getting perspective. In two 
 ways the gain is inestimable. Comparison is 
 disclosing the inherent strength and superiority 
 of Christianity as it could appear in no other 
 way. All values are clarified by comparison. 
 The great Kohinoor, placed beside lesser dia- 
 monds, does not render them worthless, but 
 only thus does its own resplendence appear. 
 When the birds are caroling their gayest, and 
 
CHRISTIANITY AMONG RELIGIONS 67 
 
 suddenly the song of the hermit-thrush rises 
 above the roundelay, soulful, wistful, master- 
 ful, one perceives to what wealth and height of 
 expression a bird-song can attain. It is only 
 when Jesus moves across the field of vision 
 where other men have walked that we know 
 what a man can be. Other religions do not 
 lose when placed beside Christianity, except 
 relatively, but Christianity gains. There is at 
 once a clearer understanding, both of them 
 and of itself. The presence of the best reveals 
 in the same instant the goodness of the good 
 and the supremacy of the best. It was the 
 folly of unfaith to hesitate so long to place 
 Christianity upon a common base level with 
 other religions, fully, freely, and without preju- 
 dice. For only as it stands on the same level 
 can its true height be seen. The Parliament of 
 Religions, though it cost many of us a pang of 
 dismay at the time, was one of the greatest 
 furtherances of Christianity that the friends of 
 true religion ever accomplished. 
 
 The supremacy of Christianity appears by 
 comparison, both in what it includes and in 
 what it excludes. All that is worthiest and 
 highest in other religions proves by comparison 
 to be in Christianity. Is it the reverence of 
 Hebraism, the freedom of Hellenism, the moral 
 earnestness of Zoroastrianism, the mysticism of 
 
68 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Brahmanism, the sacrificial spirit of Buddhism? 
 All are here in Christianity, and here, not in 
 excess of emphasis, but in full and balanced 
 harmony. And in much, too, that is in other 
 religions and not in Christianity, its supremacy 
 may be seen quite as clearly. Angles of distor- 
 tion, ignoble and limiting ideas of God, asceti- 
 cisms that wrong humanity, conceptions of 
 nature and spirit that fetter and retard the 
 spirit how free on the whole from these de- 
 fects of other religions is Christianity! Not 
 that such excrescences have not become at- 
 tached to Christianity and worked serious ill, 
 but they do not belong to its spirit and essence. 
 We must not, however, suffer this broader 
 outlook upon religion as a whole to blind our 
 eyes to the true character of Christianity, lest 
 we rob it of its own individuality. The fact 
 that Christianity conjoined Hebraism and Hel- 
 lenism by no means reduces it to a mere 
 syncretism. Nor does the fact that it has in- 
 corporated elements from other religions make 
 it an eclecticism. No one who understands 
 Christianity would hesitate to say that it is 
 far more than a union of Hebrew and Greek 
 elements. Whatever Christianity has taken up 
 it has assimilated. This is its secret a mar- 
 velous power of assimilation. With that aston- 
 ishing alchemy which indicates originality of 
 
CHRISTIANITY AMONG RELIGIONS 69 
 
 organism, Christianity has made its own, trans- 
 formed, renewed whatever it has laid hold upon. 
 Syncretisms combine, eclecticisms choose and 
 construct, but only life assimilates. Explain it 
 as you may, there is something in Christianity 
 that enabled it to take Hebrew piety and 
 Greek thought, and transform, vitalize, adapt 
 each to its own nature and ends, so that it goes 
 forth not wearing them as garments but in- 
 carnating them as life. It is only an inherently 
 puissant and vital faith that can be receptive 
 without becoming amorphous and demoralized. 
 One has but to contrast Christianity and its 
 power of assimilative receptivity with the later 
 religion of ancient Rome and its heterogeneous 
 confusion of incongruous faiths, to recognize 
 that the difference is no less than that between 
 life and death. 
 
 When we come to ask for the secret of this 
 assimilative power we find ourselves approach- 
 ing the problem which has proved so fascinat- 
 ing of late: What is the essence of Christianity? 
 Where is the hiding of its power? It is not diffi- 
 cult, by analyzing Christianity, as Harnack has 
 done, to discover certain potent fundamental 
 truths the Fatherhood of God, the worth of 
 the soul, the kingdom of God which, at least 
 in their emphasis and fervor, are distinctively 
 and characteristically Christian. But, after all, 
 
70 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 close as these truths lie to the heart of Chris- 
 tianity, they are not its inner essence. Our 
 New Theology is in great part characterized by 
 its showing that Christianity won its way by 
 uniting two great truths concerning God which 
 no other religious philosophy has harmonized 
 Transcendence and Immanence. Yet no one 
 would think of finding even in that synthesis, 
 important as it is, the essence of the Christian 
 religion. The ethics of Christianity too, and 
 even its cult, reflect a simplicity and sincerity 
 which help to account for the strong hold which 
 Christianity secured and kept over the human 
 mind; but none of these things solve the prob- 
 lem of its essence. To reach that, one must go 
 deeper into that profound and subtle realm 
 that holds the hidden springs of all that moves 
 us most personality. At the very source and 
 center of Christianity there glows a Person 
 who say what we may of the incompleteness 
 of his life-story and the later misconceptions 
 which have obscured his true character is the 
 most compelling, transforming Fact in human 
 history. The "incomparable significance of 
 this personality as a force still working in his- 
 tory," says Harnack 4 "this is the real essence 
 of Christianity." "When God and everything 
 that is sacred threaten to disappear in dark- 
 
 Christianity and History, p. 44. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AMONG RELIGIONS 71; 
 
 ness, or our doom is pronounced, when the 
 mighty forces of inexorable nature seem to 
 overwhelm us and the bounds of good and evil 
 to dissolve, when, weak and weary, we despair 
 of finding God at all in this dismal world it is 
 then that the personality of Christ may save 
 us. Here we have a life that was lived wholly 
 in the fear of God resolute, unselfish, pure; 
 here there glows and flashes a grandeur, a love 
 which draws us to itself." 5 Making the largest 
 possible allowance for idealization in the por- 
 trait of Jesus in the gospels, there remains, as a 
 necessary basis for it, a personality so strong, 
 so pure, so noble, as to leave an indelible im- 
 press upon the human mind, which "far from 
 fading, rather grows," and gives promise of 
 growing till it shall remold humanity into its 
 likeness. "We needs must love the highest 
 when we see it," and, loving it, grow like it. 
 Only let Jesus Christ be kept before humanity 
 long enough and clearly enough, and he will 
 make it over into his own image. 6 
 
 P.47. 
 
 8 The supremacy of Jesus in the eyes of others than Christians is well 
 illustrated in the generous words of an orthodox Hindu to his fellow Hindus: 
 "How can we be blind to the greatness, the unrivaled splendor of Jesus 
 Christ? Behind the British Empire and all European powers lies the single 
 great Personality the greatest of all known to us of Jesus Christ. He 
 lives in Europe and America, in Asia and Africa, as King and Guide and 
 Teacher. He lives in our midst. He seeks to revive religion in India. We 
 owe everything, even this deep yearning toward our own ancient Hinduism, 
 to Christianity." See J. P. Jones, D.D., India's Problem, p. 357. 
 
72 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 But is not Jesus himself also a product of 
 evolution? Yes, in a sense Jesus certainly was 
 a racial religious product. Generations of 
 spiritual culture entered into his individuality. 
 He was the consummate flower blooming on 
 the most vigorous branch that had put forth 
 from the religious trunk of humanity. And 
 yet that does not explain him wholly; it does 
 not touch the deepest secret of his being. That 
 transcendent Self within him which rose above 
 the physical, the temporal, the racial, which 
 met and mastered limitation and circumstance, 
 and all the slings and arrows of outrageous for- 
 tune, and turned all into splendid victory- 
 how shall we account for that? It cannot be 
 accounted for, save as one sees in him another 
 self beside the merely racial man the Second 
 Man from heaven. Not that this twofold self- 
 hood is peculiar to Jesus Christ it belongs to 
 man as man but that the eternal Self, which 
 in us is but inconstant and indistinct, in him 
 was so full-orbed and supreme that of him, as 
 of no other, the author of the Fourth Gospel 
 could write: "And the Word became flesh." 
 
 Ill 
 
 The conviction is gaining ground that the 
 hour has struck for a universal human religion, 
 that the advance of humanity, as a whole, re- 
 
CHRISTIANITY AMONG RELIGIONS 73 
 
 quires that mankind move henceforth under 
 one spiritual leadership toward a common goal. 
 Christianity is the only religion that can pos- 
 sibly fulfill this office. In the light of the study 
 of comparative religion, it seems an extreme, 
 almost a fanatical aim, to advance Christianity 
 as entitled to supersede all other faiths; and 
 yet it is only in the light of such a study that 
 this aim gets its highest encouragement. 
 
 A sufficient reason whether there be others 
 or not for pressing Christianity as the only 
 religion fit to become the world's religion is 
 that the others to put it squarely, and I think 
 fairly have failed. Buddhism, Confucianism, 
 Mohammedanism, with the minor religions, 
 have all failed. Not that they have failed in 
 the sense of not holding their own outwardly, 
 and even making gains, nor in the sense of not 
 containing a great deal of truth, and of ac- 
 complishing great good but in the sense of 
 not having done for their adherents and for 
 humanity what religion ought to do. Not that 
 Christianity itself has been absolutely success- 
 ful; far enough from that. But Christianity 
 has, at least, not failed. In spite of serious 
 deficiencies and limitations on the part of 
 Christians, Christianity has, by comparison, 
 accomplished vastly more for human progress 
 than any other of the world's faiths. And not 
 
74 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 only by its works does Christianity make itself 
 known, but also, and supremely, by that inher- 
 ent, essential superiority which manifests itself 
 to the eye of unprejudiced and pure rational 
 judgment, discerning the things that are ex- 
 cellent. 
 
 In nothing is the true supremacy of the 
 Christian Faith better attested than in the 
 inner regeneration which takes place in other 
 faiths when Christianity comes into close con- 
 tact with them. This is the most remarkable 
 religious fact, perhaps, in the life of the Orient 
 to-day. Buddhism in India, in China, and in 
 Japan is undergoing a marked purification in 
 the direction of Christian ideals. Moham- 
 medanism itself is becoming leavened with 
 Christian principles to an extent but little un- 
 derstood. A Hindu, writing for The Hibbert 
 Journal, has said of Christianity that "it has 
 quickened Hinduism with a new, full life, the 
 full fruition of which is not yet." 
 
 Why not, then, be content with this result? 
 Why not let Christianity do its work indirectly, 
 and depend upon these rooted religions to de- 
 velop into a purity and power sufficient for the 
 needs of their own races? The answer is that 
 these religions, in spite of temporary resuscita- 
 tion, are effete, and have not the power of 
 development and adaptation; they lack the 
 
CHRISTIANITY AMONG RELIGIONS 75 
 
 moral and spiritual vigor and resources to 
 meet the multiplying demands of advancing 
 humanity. It is the old parable of the new 
 wine and the old wine-skins. 
 
 But, granted the need of a universal religion, 
 and that none of the Oriental religions is able 
 to meet the need, why should it be any indi- 
 vidual religion, and not, rather, a new and 
 greater religion made up of the best in all the 
 religions, a religion of religions, a splendid hy- 
 brid obtained by what has been termed the 
 "cross-fertilization of religions"? At first blush 
 there is a certain fascination in this idea. It 
 has an air of breadth and cosmopolitanism that 
 gives it glitter, but it soon fades. It is seen 
 that a religion which is coldly compounded of 
 various religions, which is everything in gen- 
 eral and nothing in particular, is no religion at 
 all. To disdain a particular religion in favor 
 of Religion is, as Dr. Oman has said, like ob- 
 jecting to being born because one cannot be 
 man, but must be some particular man. The 
 dream of a polyglot religion is evaporating. 
 What humanity needs and will demand is a 
 religion with a character of its own and a his- 
 tory of its own, a religion whose roots have 
 gone down deep into the soil of many genera- 
 tions, which has grown up in its own strength 
 and with a sense of its own mission, against 
 
76 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 which storms have beaten and suns have 
 burned in vain, and which has stood the test 
 of time and transplanting, and changing civili- 
 zations. A religion which has thus sufficient 
 might of its own, and yet sufficient real breadth 
 and inclusiveness to absorb and conserve the 
 truth of other religions, is far better fitted to 
 become the religion of mankind than any 
 syncretism or eclecticism. 
 
 IV 
 
 If Christianity is to be set forward as a 
 world-religion, a faith for universal humanity, 
 its adherents must strike away all the shackles 
 that bind it, all the cumbersome, adventitious 
 nonessentials that have become attached to it, 
 and restore 'to it the freedom of its qualities, 
 the strength, and simplicity of its original un- 
 obscured vision and unencumbered power. 7 
 Too many intelligent men of our own time, who 
 have never looked for the essence of Chris- 
 tianity, have identified it with dogmas and 
 forms which really have no more to do with 
 real Christianity than clothing has to do with 
 
 7 "I must again express my belief that, before Christianity is to gain 
 acceptance by the people of India, it must be dissociated from many 
 Western ideas and practices which seem to us essential even to its very 
 life." Dr. J. P. Jones, India's Problem, p. 356. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AMONG RELIGIONS 77 
 
 the man. Whatever any school of Christians 
 may protest as to the infidelity of refusing to 
 identify Christianity with a miraculous revela- 
 tion, or an infallible Bible, of predestination, 
 or substitutionary atonement, or eternal pun- 
 ishment, it is inexcusable for an educated 
 person to be blind to the fact that these doc- 
 trines never were, nor can be, a part of essen- 
 tial Christianity. The Christian faith has won 
 its way sometimes with the aid of these doc- 
 trines, sometimes in spite of them, but never 
 because of them. Christianity is a religion of 
 rational freedom, and if it has too often been 
 forced to assume the form of a religion of ex- 
 ternal authority, the result can only be a 
 transient travesty of its true character, certain 
 in time to be cast aside. 
 
 And not only must Christianity be divested 
 of its impedimenta if it is to make conquest of 
 the world; there must be restored to it also 
 that genius of adaptation to varied human 
 need and environment which enabled it to 
 break the bonds of Judaism and respond to the 
 unconscious call of the Gentile world. This 
 inexhaustible adaptability, this power of lend- 
 ing itself to the deeper needs of varied races 
 without losing its own character and indi- 
 viduality, is, I repeat, characteristic of Chris- 
 tianity. It can come only from a character so 
 
78 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 richly human that it speaks to the spirit of 
 man as man. No other religion has shown a 
 power of adaptation comparable with this. 
 Who would have dreamed, at the outset, that 
 Christianity could ever have found its most 
 congenial home and development in the Teu- 
 tonic race? Itself Oriental in origin and set- 
 ting, why should it ever have won the Occident, 
 save that it belongs to man as man? so large 
 and human in its resources that nothing else 
 can vie with it in its appeal to a discerning and 
 developing race. 
 
 It is a natural blunder to imagine that we of 
 the West have made Christianity exclusively 
 our own, explored it, exhausted it, stamped 
 upon it its final form. We carry it back to the 
 Orient as if it were our gift to the peoples that 
 gave it birth. In a sense it is, in another sense 
 it is their gift to us. Already Christianity is 
 escaping our hands to do its own great work in 
 its own way. The day of the missionary, noble 
 as it has been and is, already draws toward 
 its close. Vitalized and vitalizing Christian 
 churches and civilizations are rising with firm 
 but not ungrateful insistence to claim the right 
 to develop in their own way. Again the herald 
 of the Coming One is forced to proclaim with 
 mingled sadness and joy, "He must increase, 
 but I must decrease." 
 
CHRISTIANITY AMONG RELIGIONS 79 
 
 V 
 
 The result of placing Christianity among the 
 religions, of subjecting it to a free and impartial 
 comparison with other faiths, is thus twofold. 
 In the first place, its kinship with other reli- 
 gions is proved. The religious development of 
 the race is one, culminating in Christianity. 
 The Christian faith has drawn up into itself 
 and assimilated the highest ideas and aspira- 
 tions of mankind. The life-blood of the religion 
 of humanity flows in its veins; its victories are 
 the fruitage, in part, of all the spiritual strug- 
 gles of the race from its infancy. In the second 
 place, such a comparison reveals the inherent 
 supremacy of Christianity, its historical unique- 
 ness, the vitalizing personality of its Christ, its 
 unparalleled power of adaptation and develop- 
 ment, thus laying upon it, with increasing 
 urgency, the divine obligation of universality. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 1 
 
 IN the ratified, though yet unwritten, treaty 
 of peace which has closed what we may now 
 haply term the "late unpleasantness" between 
 science and theology, at least two articles of 
 supreme value are guaranteed. The first is 
 that providing for the complete recognition of 
 natural science. All truth is sacred, all forms 
 of truth-seeking are holy. 
 
 Equally evident and final is this other article 
 the indispensability of theology. When the 
 extreme of foolish word has been spoken about 
 the uselessness of theology, when the utmost 
 effort has been made to snub or to stamp it 
 out of existence, suddenly it springs again 
 where we should least expect it, in the very 
 precincts of science. Not more pronounced 
 was the disposition of the old-time theologian 
 to invade science than is that of the present- 
 day scientist to invade theology. The compre- 
 hensive scientist cannot easily resist the temp- 
 tation to carry his thinking over into the 
 realm of theology. Completeness of thought 
 requires it. Thereby he pays theology the 
 greatest tribute possible the recognition of its 
 
 1 Inaugural Address, Pacific School of Religion. 
 80 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 81 
 
 indispensability. A very considerable and able 
 company are these scientist-theologians of our 
 time, and gladly does the theologian welcome 
 them to a share in his problems large enough, 
 surely, to go around only asking for himself 
 a like freedom when he ventures across the 
 boundary line of science in search of that in 
 whose pursuit we may rightly leap all barriers 
 and ignore all boundaries Truth. 
 
 n 
 
 Among the discoveries of natural science 
 which inevitably lead the theologian to science 
 and the scientist to theology the most revolu- 
 tionary and reconstructive is evolution. The 
 religious implicates of evolution cannot be ig- 
 nored by either theologian or scientist. They 
 have long clamored for settlement, at one time 
 threatening disruption and anarchy, at another 
 promising profounder solution and a diviner 
 order. For many years evolution has been at 
 once the hope and the despair of theology, now 
 vainly denounced and resisted, now profusely 
 welcomed and given the keys to the whole 
 domain of religious thought. But the earlier 
 agitation has passed. The storm has settled 
 into calm. Hostility and dismay have disap- 
 peared. The time has come when, without 
 heat or prejudice, in an atmosphere no longer 
 
82 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 surcharged with the odium theologicum and the 
 scientific scorn which it provoked, in the clear 
 light of perspective, the student of theology 
 may calmly and hopefully face the task of esti- 
 mating the real values and deficiencies of evo- 
 lution as a purveyor to theology. 
 
 m 
 
 It will lend concreteness and interest to our 
 enterprise if we can select some single state- 
 ment of evolution theology, that can be rightly 
 regarded as representative, upon which to con- 
 centrate our thought. Fortunately, we are able 
 to find such a statement ready at hand. Among 
 those who have attempted to outline or to con- 
 struct an evolution theology there is one who 
 is justly preeminent, both as regards personal 
 character and distinction and the value and 
 success of his work. I refer to the eminent 
 scientist, the ideal teacher, Joseph Le Conte. 
 It is already clear that the name of Joseph Le 
 Conte is to grow more and more luminous and 
 his works are to follow him with the increasing 
 influence of an assured reputation. Of the 
 present scientific standing of Professor Le 
 Conte's Evolution and Its Relation to Religious 
 Thought I do not pretend to speak, but of its 
 very great influence in clarifying and popular- 
 izing evolution and in commending it to reli- 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 83 
 
 gious minds there can be no question. A book 
 written at the suggestion of Henry Ward 
 Beecher which won the approval, on the side 
 of science, of Professor Romanes, and on that 
 of religion of Bishop Gore, has sufficient ex- 
 ternal commendation. But, far more than that, 
 it has the almost unique distinction of combin- 
 ing a thoroughly comprehensible interpretation 
 of evolution and a clear, free, and at times pro- 
 found, treatise on theology. Here, if anywhere, 
 theology and evolution have been reconciled. 
 Scientific ardor, religious enthusiasm, clearness 
 and comprehensiveness of thought, and lucidity 
 of expression unite to give this volume voice 
 and wings, and it has flown far and found wide 
 and warm acceptance. To this teacher and to 
 this book let us turn, then, for a representative 
 presentation of the theological implications of 
 evolution. A word or two further concerning 
 the author and his peculiar preparation to act 
 the part of mediator between Christianity and 
 science. Reared in a devout home, undergoing 
 during his college course an experience which 
 he describes as "a very great crisis in my life," 
 in which "life took on a new and glorious sig- 
 nificance," an earnest church member, cultured 
 in the Bible, in literature, and to some extent in 
 philosophy, educated in medicine as well as in 
 science, deeply in sympathy with the widest 
 
84 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 humanistic interests of his time, Joseph Le 
 Conte was most remarkably fitted one might 
 almost say predestined to fill the role of 
 mediation in the greatest intellectual contro- 
 versy of last century. He himself felt most 
 deeply this commission. In the closing words 
 of his autobiography Professor Le Conte speaks 
 of himself as "the pioneer in the reaction 
 against the materialistic and irreligious impli- 
 cation of the doctrine of evolution," and gives 
 expression to his satisfaction in preaching this 
 gospel, as he ventures to call it, "of glad tidings 
 of gre^at joy which shall be to all peoples." 
 
 It would be strange indeed if this earnest 
 conviction of a message, this striking volume, 
 this great scientific discovery which lay back of 
 it, meant nothing of worth to Christian theol- 
 ogy; it would be equally strange if it meant 
 the complete subversion of the great truths by 
 which men have lived and wrought righteous- 
 ness and subdued kingdoms before the discov- 
 ery. But, now to our difficult task of estima- 
 tion and criticism. First, then, let us seek to 
 deliminate the values of evolution theology, 
 and then, so far as we may, to point out its 
 defects. 
 
 IV 
 
 The first and perhaps the greatest religious 
 implicate of evolution is the truth of the Divine 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 85 
 
 Immanence. The conception of the Absentee 
 God of deism, with all the theological anthropo- 
 morphism and all the religious frigidity which 
 accompanied it, evolution has made impossible 
 in the future. It is difficult to overestimate 
 the value of this result. We shall have no more 
 forever the idea of a "carpenter God," an an- 
 thropomorphic God, one whom men think they 
 can localize, externalize, placate, bargain with, 
 and inwardly despise. Professor Le Conte's 
 uncompromising alternative must be accepted: 
 "The issue (let us look it squarely in the face) 
 is: Either God is far more closely related with 
 nature, and operates it in a more direct way 
 than we have recently been accustomed to 
 think, or else (mark the alternative) nature 
 operates itself and needs no God at all. There 
 is no middle ground tenable." 2 Many evolu- 
 tionists have accepted the latter alternative, 
 giving to evolution that materialistic interpre- 
 tation which Professor Le Conte so earnestly 
 renounces and so ably refutes. For himself, he 
 saw the truer meaning and found God in every 
 step and process of evolution. 
 
 It would be a shortsighted exaggeration to 
 attribute the discovery of the truth of the 
 Divine Immanence to evolution. It is as old 
 as the Psalm-book, as Greek philosophy, as 
 
 1 Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 297, second edition. 
 
86 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Hinduism. The early Christian fathers were 
 filled with it. But it was largely lost under the 
 schemes and systems of a later theology. 
 Theistic evolution has rediscovered for us the 
 truth of God's nearness to nature and set it 
 where it can never again be lost. This means 
 no less than the recovery of nature to the uses 
 of the religious life. It is the vindication of the 
 psalmist, the nature-lover, the poet, who have 
 ever found God in the light of setting suns, in 
 star and bird and flower, and in all the won- 
 drous life and beauty of nature. If the con- 
 sciousness of the Divine Presence has wrought 
 itself afresh into our modern theology, our 
 literature, our education, our daily contact 
 with nature, imparting a new faith and joy 
 and peace to life, let us not forget that the law 
 of evolution, as interpreted by such men as 
 Joseph Le Conte and Nathaniel Shaler, Henry 
 Ward Beecher and Lyman Abbott, Alfred 
 Tennyson and Robert Browning, has opened 
 the way for this larger, deeper conception of 
 God in his world. For the Divine Immanence 
 is at last only an aspect and expression of the 
 Divine Love. 
 
 To supplement this truth of the Divine Im- 
 manence evolution has furnished also a posi- 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 87 
 
 tive contribution to theism in unfolding the 
 unity and teleology of the universe. Evolution 
 indicates that "through the ages one increasing 
 purpose runs." 
 
 Here is signal confirmation of the evidence of 
 design. "It has been said, it is continually 
 being said, that evolution has destroyed for- 
 ever the teleological view of nature that is, 
 the idea of design in nature. Yes, if we mean 
 the manlike, cabinetmaking, watchmaking de- 
 sign of Paley, and older writers a separate 
 petty design for each separate object. It has 
 indeed destroyed this, but only to replace it 
 by a far nobler conception a truly godlike de- 
 sign, a design embracing all space, and running 
 through all time, including and absorbing all 
 possible separate designs, and predetermining 
 them by a universal law of evolution." 3 It is 
 impossible to overestimate the scope and splen- 
 dor of this new teleology. "The process of 
 evolution," says John Fiske, "is itself the 
 working out of a mighty teleology, of which 
 our finite understandings can fathom but the 
 scantiest rudiments." 4 If evolution has taken 
 away special design, it has given us in place of 
 it cosmic design. 
 
 3 Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 357. 
 
 4 Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii, p. 406, quoted by James Seth in Ethical 
 Principles, p. 431. 
 
88 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 VI 
 
 Another very valuable asset has come to us 
 through evolution in the vast enlargement and 
 enrichment of the conception of progress. It 
 is true that the law of growth, of unfolding 
 the larger law which should be termed Devel- 
 opment, of which evolution is but a segment- 
 was recognized almost as early as man began 
 to think. Aristotle gave it scientific statement. 
 Jesus Christ dwelt upon it with profound em- 
 phasis and wrought it into the very structure 
 of his lifework. No other, in any age, philoso- 
 pher, teacher, scientist, has ever approached 
 Jesus in insight into this divine law of develop- 
 ment and absolute confidence in its results. 
 Unto it he intrusted with unwavering certainty 
 the seed of his Kingdom. And the result justi- 
 fied his faith. No age, no generation has en- 
 tirely missed the vision of this law of progress. 
 And yet no generation has ever had the full 
 effulgence of it until our own. And evolution, 
 all unwittingly, but not unguided, has been the 
 means of opening its splendor to our view. 
 
 Through the doorway of scientific evolution 
 we have passed into a new and larger world, 
 wherein the law of progress is seen to have not 
 only cosmic scope, but universal human sig- 
 nificance. In the light of development history 
 takes on a new meaning. Law, literature, 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 89 
 
 science, social science, theology all are reborn. 
 Life itself is transfigured. All things fall into 
 harmony. Eternal hope springs in the heart 
 of humanity. The man who has not felt the 
 music of the law of eternal progress in his soul 
 is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. He 
 alone will hope to frustrate the Divine order. 
 He is blind to the Divine revelation that has 
 been made to his age. Nor is this law of pro- 
 gression limited in its horizon to the present 
 world. As Professor Le Conte so earnestly 
 argues, it has promise for the life that now is 
 and for that which is to come. 
 
 Coming as it has with such noble and re- 
 splendent truths to rebuke narrow views, to 
 overturn errors, to enlarge our thought of God 
 and nature, it is no wonder that to Professor 
 Le Conte, and many another, evolution seemed 
 wholly revolutionary and reforming a new 
 orb, in whose light old things are passed away 
 and all things become new. But perspective, 
 which reduces all things to their true propor- 
 tion, has been silently doing with evolution 
 what opposition and controversy could not do. 
 It has not only disclosed the true values of 
 evolution, but it has also revealed its inherent 
 limitations and defects. To the consideration 
 of these very important limitations and defects 
 let us now turn our attention. 
 
90 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 VII 
 
 The most marked defect of evolution is in its 
 entire failure to recognize and explain person- 
 ality, human and divine. The individual, evo- 
 lution knows and helps to explain; the indi- 
 vidual as a person it does not know. The most 
 that evolution can say of this subject-object, 
 beside whom all other existences pale and fade, 
 is this, according to Professor Le Conte: "Some 
 portion of the all-pervasive energy again indi- 
 viduates itself more and more, and therefore 
 acquires more and more a kind of independent 
 self-activity which reaches its completeness in 
 man as self-consciousness and free-will." 5 
 
 A portion of the all-pervasive energy which 
 acquires a kind of independent self-activity, 
 and finally reaches self -consciousness, is all that 
 evolution can offer in place of that in-breathed 
 spirit, in the image of God, that creature 
 crowned with glory and honor whom the Old 
 Testament gives us, that soul whom Jesus sets 
 over against the whole world, that being "with 
 large discourse of reason looking before and 
 after," whom Shakespeare sings. Between 
 these two we must choose the portion of 
 energy evolved from below and the self-con- 
 scious, supernatural, autonomous spirit coming 
 from above. 
 
 8 Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 349. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 91 
 
 With man, science stops and philosophy be- 
 gins. Here enters the philosopher. No ulti- 
 mate problem can be settled without him. 
 Never is he so needed as in an age of science. 
 Too long the scientist has scorned him, as he 
 too long has scorned the scientist. The stu- 
 pendous self-assertiveness of evolution (it is no 
 less) has been due to its pitiful ignorance of 
 philosophy. Hardly a man among the leading 
 evolutionists has been a thorough student of 
 philosophy. Spencer discloses as much of him- 
 self in his autobiography. Darwin, Huxley, 
 Tyndall how much did they know of philos- 
 ophy? Professor Le Conte states that he read 
 a little philosophy, but never with much in- 
 terest. The naive ignoring of the problem of 
 knowledge on the part of evolution philosophers 
 is damaging evidence. It shows the panevolu- 
 tion philosophy to be one that is built upon 
 the sands. And the clouds are rising and the 
 rain descending fast upon it. Such ignoring of 
 philosophy is an astonishing begging of a prior 
 question. What if the very conception of evo- 
 lution is imposed upon nature by the mind, 
 instead of coming out of nature to the mind? 
 What, then, becomes of panevolutionism? It is 
 a case of the mind evolved saying to the mat- 
 ter that evolved it, "Why hast thou evolved 
 me thus?" To which the mindless matter can 
 
92 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 make no reply, for it knows not the speech of 
 reason. This is not only tragedy; it is comedy 
 as well. 
 
 It is a most significant fact that not only was 
 this scientist, who did much to commend evolu- 
 tion to modern religious thought and to exhibit 
 its theological values, a member of the faculty 
 of the University of California, but so also was 
 the philosopher who has done much to expose 
 the limits of evolution and to uphold the sacred 
 worth of personality which evolution overshad- 
 ows a modern apostle of freedom and person- 
 ality, Professor George H. Howison. Thus 
 truth corrects and balances itself, finding ever 
 its own eternal equilibrium. With a lance as 
 unerring as it is earnest, Professor Howison has 
 penetrated to the fatal weakness of the evolu- 
 tion philosophy and revealed not only its in- 
 herent limitations, but its absolute dependence, 
 as a law, upon the mind. For him, the great 
 fact is "man the spirit, creative rather than 
 created, who is himself the proximate source of 
 evolution, the cooperating cause and lord of 
 that world where evolution has its course." 6 
 When and how man, this lordly spirit from 
 another realm, entered the process of animal 
 evolution, assuming the developed physical and 
 nascent mental nature prepared through long 
 
 The Limits of Evolution, p. 55. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 93 
 
 seons for him, we may not know. Enough that 
 he is here, explaining evolution rather than ex- 
 plained by evolution. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Not only does unlimited evolution submerge 
 human personality; it also extinguishes Divine 
 personality. Spencer is the true architect of a 
 consistent philosophy of unlimited evolution. 
 His conclusions follow his premises. Agnos- 
 ticism is the very best that can be made out 
 of an evolution that fills the whole horizon. 
 By a fine act of his Christian faith, won long 
 before he became an evolutionist, Professor Le 
 Conte transcended the bounds of evolution, 
 and by positing a God at the very beginning of 
 the evolutionary process, found him again 
 throughout. 
 
 But to interpret God (whom the soul comes 
 to know first in its own consciousness, enlight- 
 ened by Christianity) as Professor Le Conte 
 interpreted him, as confined to nature and 
 coming into the soul through nature, inevit- 
 ably leads to pantheism. It was in vain that, 
 prompted by his ardent devotion to the Chris- 
 tian revelation, Professor Le Conte strove to 
 save his doctrine from pantheism. He himself 
 was no pantheist, but his theology is pantheis- 
 
94 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 tic. It has no recognition, no place, for the 
 transcendent God, the God of Abraham, of 
 Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ 
 the Personal Being, above nature as well as in 
 nature. 
 
 Unless God is transcendent as well as im- 
 manent we are caught between the horns of a 
 fatal dilemma deism or pantheism. Can tran- 
 scendence and immanence both be true of God? 
 This is the great issue of theology. The strict 
 logician, the man who measures truth with rule 
 and compass, will say, "No; both cannot be 
 true; our rules forbid." But a larger and pro- 
 founder insight answers, "Both may be true of 
 God, both must be true, or God is not God." 
 The two attributes, as Aristotle said, 7 are not 
 mutually exclusive. God cannot at the same 
 time be both good and bad, but he can be both 
 here and there, both above and within his uni- 
 verse, though he cannot be identical with his 
 universe and above it. Thus Christianity, af- 
 fording in its higher unity a synthesis of He- 
 brew and Greek thought, presents him. Thus 
 the souls sensitive to the deeper harmonies of 
 truth and life find him. 8 
 
 > See Weber, History of Philosophy, p. 117. 
 
 Professor Le Conte himself saw this. With an instinctive denial of the 
 pantheism which he beckons with one hand and waves away with the 
 other, he says: "The only rational view is to accept both immanence and 
 personality, even though we cannot clearly reconcile them" (p. 337). 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 95 
 
 "Enthroned above the world although He sit, 
 Still is the world in Him and He in it, 
 
 The self-same power in yonder sunset glows 
 That kindled in the lords of sacred writ. 
 
 "Though one with all that sense or soul can see, 
 Not prisoned in his own creation, He, 
 
 His life is more than stars or winds or angels; 
 The sun doth not contain Him, nor the sea." 9 
 
 IX 
 
 The limits assigned to this paper permit lit- 
 tle more than the mention of other serious 
 defects of evolution theology. Two at least are 
 conspicuous. One is its absolute failure to ac- 
 count for Jesus Christ. Jesus, as the re- 
 ligious genius of the race, its moral and 
 spiritual prototype and ideal, can no more be 
 explained by evolution alone than a flower 
 by the soil in which its roots are hidden. Sun 
 as well as soil is needed to account for the 
 flower; God and man for Jesus Christ. This 
 priest after the order of Melchizedek, whom 
 evolution can explain only as a racial epiphe- 
 nomenon, a freak of nature, humanity has 
 greeted as its revealer and goal, by whom 
 alone nature and human nature can be under- 
 stood, and through whom, by means of the 
 ethical power of vicarious sacrifice, God and 
 man are reconciled. 
 
 Richard Hovey. 
 
96 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 In Jesus Christ we see consummated the real 
 force which has effected the ascent of man, 
 that is, the ideal, the goal, the final cause. In- 
 stead of resident forces we have nonresident 
 ideals. No one recognizes this change more 
 clearly than Professor Le Conte. "Organic 
 evolution," he says, "is pushed onward and 
 upward from behind and below. Human evo- 
 lution is drawn upward and forward from above 
 and in front by the attractive force of ideals." 
 Blessed inconsistency of the true seer! But 
 manifestly this is no longer evolution at all, 
 according to Professor Le Conte's own defini- 
 tion, in which "resident forces" is one of the 
 three determining factors. Evolution knows 
 nothing of ideals; Jesus Christ is the ideal. 
 Evolution knows nothing of finalities; Jesus 
 Christ is a finality. 
 
 X 
 
 Finally, evolution furnishes a misleading and 
 superficial estimate of evil. By confounding 
 moral evil with physical evil, evolution theol- 
 ogy is duped into accrediting moral evil as only 
 good in disguise, virtue in the making, foster- 
 ing thus a conception of life based upon a half- 
 truth and fraught with serious consequences to 
 the individual and to society. In common with 
 all the philosophizing evolutionists, Professor 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 97 
 
 Le Conte, though stoutly protesting against 
 moral evil as "sin, moral disease, more dread- 
 fully contagious and deadly than any organic 
 disease," is nevertheless borne on by the cur- 
 rent of his evolutionism to pronounce, not only 
 its possibility, but itself "a necessary condition 
 of all progress, and preeminently so of moral 
 progress." 10 How much deeper, saner, truer to 
 human fact and consciousness is Paul's attitude 
 toward evil! A dark, inexplicable mystery Paul 
 conceives it, something or some one opposed to 
 God, which we must resist with all our might, 
 because its very nature is inherently and for- 
 ever hateful, which man by the grace of Christ 
 can destroy but can never subjugate, and yet 
 whose effects an all-wise God, an overruling 
 Providence, doth so dispose and frustrate that 
 it may work together with other human expe- 
 riences for good. 
 
 As evolution knows nothing of sin as such, 
 so it can know nothing of regeneration as an 
 extra-cosmic process, nor of that Holy Spirit 
 through whom we have communion with the 
 spiritual realm. 
 
 XI 
 
 Such are some of the values and defects, the 
 worths and wantages of the theology which 
 
 10 Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 373. 
 
98 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 has grown up alongside of agnosticism and ma- 
 terialism as if to challenge their dim and 
 dismal conclusions out of the doctrine of evo- 
 lution. Wheat and tares have grown together, 
 but the harvest day of separation has come. 
 Let us gather the wheat into the storehouses 
 and cast the chaff away. And then let us turn 
 to other harvest fields, for this one does by no 
 means exhaust the divine resources. 
 
 Were evolution to be disproved in toto to- 
 morrow, hardly a progressive and thoughtful 
 student of theology but would feel himself the 
 poorer. For evolution has stimulated and bene- 
 fited theology, though it has not remade it. 
 Narrowed horizons never suit the man of faith; 
 he will not willingly part with any true gains 
 that have been gathered in any field of God's 
 truth. Happily no such result is to be antici- 
 pated. Well-meaning theologians assure us from 
 time to time that evolution is going to pieces. 
 But we know that they have simply caught 
 the echoes of the disputes of evolutionists over 
 the extent of natural selection or the range of 
 variation or some other side issue. Over the 
 main issue there is no controversy. Evolution 
 is virtually established. Nevertheless the whole 
 tendency to-day, not only in philosophy and 
 theology, but in science itself, in what Lloyd 
 Morgan has called "the evolution of evolu- 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 99 
 
 tion," is to limit the boundaries of evolution. 
 Those bounds are fixed at least at the spiritual 
 nature of man. No universalizing of evolution 
 can account for personality. Only a philosophy 
 of evolution, not a science of evolution, can 
 venture to include that which no science can 
 measure nor philosophy fathom the soul. If 
 the contributions of evolution to theology have 
 proved to be less inclusive and reconstructive 
 than such a buoyant, truth-devoted spirit as 
 Professor Le Conte, in the high tide of con- 
 quest, imagined, we are not the less grateful 
 to him for that insight of faith and boundless- 
 ness of enthusiasm which discerned and her- 
 alded the theistic character of the new truth. 
 
 XII 
 
 Yet it is with no slight sense of relief and re- 
 assurance that the theologian returns to the 
 old, old verities and the old, old problems with 
 the consciousness that evolution has neither 
 sunk nor solved them. What should we do 
 without these problems, so persistent, so en- 
 gaging, so disappointing yet so fascinating, so 
 luminous yet so insoluble? It is a noble priv- 
 ilege to hold high converse with these prob- 
 lems daily and to incite fresh and earnest minds 
 to face them devoutly and hopefully. I be- 
 
100 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 lieve in these problems of theology. Like the 
 Scriptures themselves, they are profitable for 
 teaching, for reproof, for correction, for dis- 
 cipline which is in righteousness. Theology is 
 a science rather than a system, a discipline 
 rather than a dogmatic deliverance. Religion 
 would be but a scant and narrow inclosure 
 without its mysteries and its problems. Milk 
 for babes the church has, strong meat also for 
 strong minds. And yet, theology is not wholly 
 brawn and sinew. No more than philosophy 
 is she 
 
 "harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, 
 But musical as is Apollo's lute." 
 
 There is such a thing as experiential, heart- 
 to-heart theology. May its day be hastened! 
 The mood of the hour, which disparages and 
 evades theology, will pass. Her office is not 
 yet fulfilled. The future beckons. Nor are 
 her problems wholly insoluble. New and 
 large glimpses of mist-enveloped realities ap- 
 pear. New viewpoints open. Especially are 
 we of to-day aroused to fresh anticipations in 
 the application of the Christocentric principle 
 to theology. Progress rules in the realm of 
 theology, as everywhere throughout God's un- 
 folding universe. This, evolution has helped 
 us to understand. With new faith and confi- 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND EVOLUTION 101 
 
 dence theology may go forward to her task, 
 exclaiming with Browning's Paracelsus: 
 
 "If I stoop 
 
 Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 
 It is but for a time. I press God's lamp 
 Close to my breast; its splendor, soon or late, 
 Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day." 
 
MYSTICISM AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 IF religion were not so deep, so manifold, 
 and so persistent a reality, it might be possible 
 to fear that humanity is drifting into nonreli- 
 gion. Certainly, old conventions and stand- 
 ards are breaking up. Yet in the very midst 
 of the disintegration a new reconstruction of 
 social Christianity is taking place, and in the 
 swirl and current of secularism and hedonism 
 a secret longing for spiritual reality is making 
 itself felt. Men are searching after the mystic 
 cord that leads out of the labyrinth which they 
 have constructed. Religious experience finds 
 its highest, or at least its most intense fulfill- 
 ment and expression in mysticism. Renewed 
 interest in historic mysticism is significant, but 
 it is only a slight indication of a deeper search. 
 There is no desire to revive the mysticism of a 
 past age. Oriental mysticism is turned to as 
 a help rather than as a finality. 2 The mediaeval 
 mystics are being studied as religious adepts, 
 but with no thought of imitation. Emerson 
 expressed the spirit of the age in his lines : 
 
 1 From The Homiletic Review, July, 1913. 
 
 8 Exception must be made of certain cults now flourishing in America. 
 102 
 
MYSTICISM AS EXPERIENCE 103 
 
 "I like a church, I like a cowl, 
 I love a prophet of the soul, 
 Yet not for all his faith can see 
 Would I that cowled churchman be.'* 
 
 Nor is it quite Emerson's type of mysticism 
 that the age desires. Perhaps there is no bet- 
 ter expression of the attitude of our time 
 toward mysticism than that contained in a 
 verse of George Croly's beautiful hymn: 
 
 "I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies, 
 
 No sudden rending of the veil of clay, 
 No angel visitant, no opening skies; 
 
 But take the dimness of my soul away.'* 
 
 What will take the dimness of the soul away? 
 Not a new religious philosophy, or theology, or 
 psychology. Not a new civic righteousness, or 
 a new social order. All these are effects, not 
 causes. They do not reach the heart of our 
 need. The hunger after reality, the longing to 
 find the central source and secret of all the vast 
 complex of forces and phenomena in which we 
 find ourselves, will be satisfied by nothing less 
 than an answer that conveys a direct and ex- 
 perienced assurance. Until we are able to say: 
 "This truth, this life, this reality is mine, my 
 own by personal experience," there will still be 
 dimness of soul, insecurity, vacillation. Can 
 anything besides mysticism furnish this in- 
 dubitable sense of certainty? 
 
104 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 I 
 
 Must we, then, to gain this boon of assur- 
 ance, take with it all that mysticism has stood 
 for in the past? its asceticisms, its absolut- 
 isms, its seclusions, its visions, its trances, its 
 ecstasies? Are these essential and inalienable 
 parts of its life? Are they not rather accidents, 
 attachments, forms of expression which grew 
 out of the ideas and atmosphere of the times 
 in which successive groups of mystics flour- 
 ished? It would be impossible, it is true, to 
 detach Anthony from the desert, or Saint 
 Francis from Lady Poverty, or Thomas a 
 Kempis from his cell, or to wrench Jonathan 
 Edwards from Calvinistic New England, or 
 Wordsworth from the Lake Country, or Emer- 
 son from Concord. Environment, intellectual, 
 material, religious, must have much to do in 
 forming the type and expression of mystical 
 experience; yet it does not make the mystic. 
 It is he who makes his environment clothe his 
 inner life. 
 
 II 
 
 When we come to search for the very soul 
 and core of mysticism all that is adventitious 
 and temporal, however close it may seem to be 
 wrought into the very texture of the mystical 
 life, falls away and we see the real singleness 
 
MYSTICISM AS EXPERIENCE 105 
 
 and simplicity that constitute its strength. 
 Mysticism may be resolved into three funda- 
 mental principles: direct, individual experience 
 of spiritual truth, the culture of the soul by 
 contemplation, the dedication of the self in 
 love. The other mystic truths and virtues 
 cluster about these three. The heart of mys- 
 ticism, that is, is personal and human. As such 
 it is attainable wherever the human spirit rises 
 to the highest level. 
 
 The nearer we get to the pure and simple 
 mysticism which realizes these cardinal prin- 
 ciples, the nearer we come to the type that is 
 valid in every age and that meets the need of 
 our own. The mysticism of Jesus was at once 
 the deepest and strongest that the world has 
 seen. Yet it was most simple and normal, 
 marred by no extremes, irradiated by no 
 ecstasies. It seems almost prosaic beside that 
 of some of the more dramatic of the mystics, 
 and yet it possessed a calm vitality and power 
 that leave theirs almost childish by compari- 
 son. 
 
 It is to a sane, simple, normal mysticism, as 
 we see it exemplified in Jesus a mysticism 
 that goes below all outward forms and expres- 
 sions to the unchanging substratum of the re- 
 ligious life, and yet is able to adjust itself to 
 and appropriate the larger meaning of life 
 
106 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 which has come to our age that we must look 
 for healing and hope for our modern life. 
 
 Professor Eucken writes as follows regarding 
 the mysticism needed to-day: 
 
 "The desire for the presence of the Infinite 
 at the individual point may be characterized 
 as an approximation to mysticism. Indeed, we 
 need both a metaphysic and a mysticism; but 
 we want both in a new form, not in the old. It 
 seems to us preposterous to declare that neces- 
 sary demands of the spiritual life are finally 
 disposed of because the older solution has be- 
 come inadequate. If man does not in some 
 way succeed in appropriating the spiritual life, 
 if it is not actively present as a whole within 
 him and animating him, then his relation to 
 the spiritual life remains forever an external 
 one, and this life cannot acquire a complete 
 spontaneity in him, can never become a genu- 
 ine life of his own. But the older mysticism 
 was the offspring of a worn-out age, which 
 primarily reflected upon quietness and peace, 
 and was under the influence of a philosophy 
 that sought the truth in striving toward the 
 most comprehensive ideal, and saw in all par- 
 ticularity a defect. And so, to be completely 
 merged in the formless infinite could be re- 
 garded as the culmination of life. As the 
 spiritual life is to us, on the contrary, an in- 
 
MYSTICISM AS EXPERIENCE 107 
 
 creasing activity and creation, a world of self- 
 determining activity, so its being called to life 
 at individual points is a rousing of life to its 
 highest energy; in this also a continual appro- 
 priation is necessary." 3 
 
 Here is a word of rich significance as to the 
 true meaning of mysticism and its relation to 
 the spiritual need of our age. It reveals at 
 once the inadequacy of the older mysticism 
 and the potency and promise of the new. 
 
 Ill 
 
 From such a mysticism, sane, strong, sim- 
 ple, will come the relief of the restlessness, the 
 confusions, the wrongs, and the doubts of mod- 
 ern life. Nothing else will suffice. In religion 
 lies the key to the solution of the human 
 problem, and mysticism is the heart of reli- 
 gion. 
 
 To be more explicit: what needs most to be 
 done for our age and why may we expect mys- 
 ticism to accomplish it? 
 
 In the first place, the spirit of mysticism 
 alone can give to our modern life the unity, 
 which it so greatly lacks. Never was human- 
 ity so torn and dizzied by diverse and often 
 conflicting interests as now. The difficulty 
 to-day is not where to lay one's head, but 
 
 s Life's Basis and Life's Ideal, pp. 246, 247. 
 
108 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 when. We are the victims of an overcomplex 
 civilization. As Charles Wagner wrote in that 
 wise message to our time, The Simple Life: 
 
 "The complexity of our life appears in the 
 number of our material needs. It is a fact 
 universally conceded that our needs have 
 grown with our resources. This is not an evil 
 in itself, for the birth of certain needs is often 
 a mark of progress. . . . But if certain needs 
 exist by right and are desirable, there are 
 others whose effects are fatal, which, like para- 
 sites, live at our expense." 4 
 
 There is no escape from this tyranny of over- 
 civilization, from the pressure of problems and 
 the hopeless maze of conflicting interests and 
 activities, unless we can find a unifying power 
 clear enough and strong enough to introduce 
 self-guidance, order, mastery, into the turmoil 
 and confusion. 5 
 
 Chap. i. 
 
 8 There is, to be sure, a kind of skillful, superficial handling of life which 
 has no real unifying power. "My artificial self becomes the only self I am 
 acquainted with. This self is built up according to self-conscious stand- 
 ards of criticism, universal in character, derived largely from my social 
 consciousness, and passing current in the world, just because I have thus 
 duly universalized myself. It is a well-known selfhood known in fact 
 through and through, empty of mystery well behaved, also, conven- 
 tionally confirmed in its own successful technic of self -handling, the man 
 of the city and of the world, betraying at every point the failure of privacy, 
 of recourse to the individual I am, the sealing of spontaneity, the formal 
 hardening of the heart, the unhumanizing of men by over-contact with 
 humanity, the strain of general attitudes not wholly naturalized in one- 
 self." Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 417. 
 
MYSTICISM AS EXPERIENCE 109 
 
 It is a fascinating world in which we live 
 to-day. Art, science, nature, literature, amuse- 
 ments, social life permeate all social strata and 
 offer more and more to stimulate and attract 
 minds of all types and tastes. The modern 
 man is dazzled by the wares and allurements 
 of modern life. He is easily caught in the 
 mesh of the external world, and loses his self- 
 identity in it. Many of these interests are 
 unselfish and altruistic, and the better man 
 responds to the appeal of these, and in so far 
 as he lends himself to them is enlarged and 
 ennobled by them. Yet he does not get down 
 beneath them to the secret of his selfhood, nor 
 find the one thing that he as a self can best 
 be and do. Doubtless it is his own fault chiefly, 
 yet it is due in part to the complexity and ex- 
 ternalism of the life in which he finds- himself. 
 "To what end, then," questions Schleiermacher, 
 "this greater power over matter if it does not 
 further the real life of the spirit?" 6 
 
 There is no way out of this externalism, no 
 way to find oneself and thus to take command 
 of the outer life and reduce it to unity, except 
 to find and enter into the spirit life, the world 
 of personality where our true selfhood lies. 
 Thence having found the "perfect law of lib- 
 erty," one can master the outer life and re- 
 
 6 Monologues, chap. iii. 
 
110 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 duce it to unity and make it serve and embody 
 the life of the spirit. 7 
 
 From a superficial viewpoint the mystical 
 principle seems extremely ill adapted to serve 
 as unifier and organizer of life's activities. It 
 appears to be so absorbing, so other-worldly, 
 as to inhibit other activities and interests and 
 reduce life to a tame, angelic tete-a-tete with 
 the Infinite. Von Hiigel, in his discussion of 
 this difficulty, quotes the following from the 
 Danish mystic Kierkegaard: "The absolute is 
 cruel, for it demands all, while the relative ever 
 continues to demand some attention from us " 8 
 But the attention that the absolute demands 
 is one that can act through the relative. That 
 which is best in the finite is enhanced by means 
 of an undercurrent of devotion to the Infinite. 
 Love of God does not conflict with love of 
 neighbor, but increases it. The only way to 
 serve God is by serving men. There are times, 
 the mystic holds, when the whole and undi- 
 vided attention must be concentrated on the 
 Absolute, but those periods need occupy but a 
 limited amount of time. The Absolute does 
 demand all in the sense that the time given to 
 "secular pursuits" (a phrase entirely alien to 
 
 7 Compare the chapter on "The Personalizing of Life," in my Personal- 
 ity and the Christian Ideal. 
 
 The Mystical Element of Religion, ii, 353. 
 
MYSTICISM AS EXPERIENCE 111 
 
 the mystic mind), recreation, everything, shall 
 all be undergirt and transfused with devotion 
 to the Absolute. As Jacob Boehme has it: 
 "Let thy hands or head be at labor, thy heart 
 ought nevertheless to rest in God." 9 Such a 
 mysticism as that cannot fail to give unity to 
 life, selecting, ordering, harmonizing all pur- 
 suits and interests and filling them all with the 
 one pervasive and passionate interest, God. 
 Lives thus unified, as we have known them or 
 known of them, have not been lives out of 
 touch with the modern world on its best side, 
 nor cold to human interests and joys, but lives 
 of exceptional breadth, warmth, and vitality, 
 permeated through and through with a single 
 purpose and attuned to one all-harmonizing 
 note. We find, that is, that mysticism has the 
 power not only to unify, but by that very fact 
 the power to enlarge. 
 
 IV 
 
 The new mysticism alone can give to life 
 freedom and fullness. The older mysticism 
 lacked here. It gave depth, intensity, strength 
 to life, but not fullness. Heroic, clear- visioned, 
 large-minded, as the mystics of the Middle 
 Ages and those of the Reformation were, they 
 were a little afraid of life. They shrank from 
 
 9 The Supersenxual Life, p. 65. 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 its possibilities; they distrusted its attractions. 
 They found the right key to life, simplicity, 
 but they did not use it to unlock all of the 
 chambers in which great treasure lay hidden. 
 They preferred the humbler rooms and the 
 lowest places. They knew that all things were 
 theirs, but they did not take possession of 
 them. No one can be a mystic in any age 
 who does not share their principle of values. 
 They knew that one has no right to the good 
 things of the world who does not take them as 
 a son of God; but they did not realize how 
 much one may rightly appropriate in gratitude. 
 Having the one thing needful, they did not 
 much concern themselves with the many things 
 lawful. 
 
 The spirit of limitation, even though it be 
 self -limitation, does not fit our modern world; 
 we have come to know too well the goodness 
 and largeness of life. Unless the modern mys- 
 tic can take life in its amplitude, mold it, master 
 it, he cannot exert the influence that the mys- 
 tic of the Middle Ages possessed under another 
 Weltanschauung. Can he be true to the mysti- 
 cal ideal and yet swing out into a fuller tide 
 of life? 
 
 Perhaps we shall best find our answer by 
 turning to one or two of the typical mystics of 
 our own time. Probably no man in the later 
 
MYSTICISM AS EXPERIENCE 113 
 
 American pulpit has been more distinctly mys- 
 tical, both in his personality and his message, 
 than Phillips Brooks. His face, his voice, his 
 manner, his utterance, were all those of a 
 mystic; and a mystic we find him as portrayed 
 in his biography. Yet how rich and full a life 
 he lived, so many-sided, so outreaching and 
 varied in its interests and sympathies a life 
 enriched by art, travel, music, literature, so- 
 ciety full to the banks with joy and service! 
 These volumes, replete with movement and 
 fascination, are indicative of the nature of the 
 life they record. Yet the most attractive parts 
 are not those that chronicle the outward con- 
 tacts and influences, but those that give us 
 glimpses of the inward development. The 
 thoughts recorded, for example, in those preg- 
 nant years in the theological seminary at 
 Alexandria, and the years following, are as 
 truly the reflections of a mystic as are those of 
 the Imitatio Christi or the Diary of David 
 Brainerd. Yet how great the contrast! Here, 
 for instance, is a typical aspiration in verse: 
 
 "Oh, for a wider life where flower 
 
 With more of breath gains more of bloom; 
 With more of peace since more of power, 
 And more of rest since more of room." 10 
 
 ">A. V. G. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, i, 239. 
 
114 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 The second volume contains a picture of Bishop 
 Brooks' study in Boston. Contrast its furni- 
 ture, its statuary, its pictures, its shelves of 
 books, its atmosphere of comfort and culture 
 with the bare, cold, comfortless cell of Henry 
 Suso, with its crucifix and instruments of self- 
 torture. Yet each was the retreat of a soul in 
 communion with God. 
 
 Almost equally radiant in the wealth of its 
 human interests and influences, as well as in 
 its mystical quality, was the life of that win- 
 some modern woman, Alice Freeman Palmer, 
 as it is so sympathetically and skillfully de- 
 scribed by Professor Palmer. Hers was a 
 habit of life in striking contrast with that of 
 Saint Teresa or Catherine of Siena. Little of 
 its ministrant hours was given to direct, unin- 
 terrupted intercourse with God; and yet, "He 
 was her steady companion, so naturally a part 
 of her hourly thought that she attached little 
 consequence to specific occasions of inter- 
 course." 11 Doubtless it is only the rarer and 
 more fortunate souls that can maintain so 
 deep and steady a spiritual life with so little 
 of seclusion and effort. And yet does not such 
 a life reveal the very highest and finest kind of 
 mysticism? 
 
 It is not always easy to detect the modern 
 
 P. 347. 
 
MYSTICISM AS EXPERIENCE 115 
 
 mystic, vital, active, absorbed in service, in 
 fresh touch with all that is going on about him, 
 yet nourishing his soul at a well of water within 
 springing up into everlasting life John Bige- 
 low, journalist, diplomat, art critic, "first citi- 
 zen of New York," yet feeding his soul on the 
 writings of Swedenborg and in attendance at 
 the little New Church chapel on East Thirty- 
 fifth Street; 12 Dr. Grenfell, sailor, physician, 
 friend of a forsaken people to whom he has 
 brought untold material as well as spiritual 
 good with his herd of reindeer and his plans 
 for social and economic betterment, yet a stu- 
 dent and lover of the Scripture and a devoted 
 follower of the Master; 13 Helen Keller, scholar, 
 woman of culture, bathed in a mystic faith 
 that is the deepest secret of her marvelous un- 
 folding such lives as these reveal to us how 
 real and beautiful is the presence of the mysti- 
 cal life in our so prosaic and material age. 
 
 The mystics are everywhere still, scattered 
 through all the ranks and ways of human life. 
 One of the most illuminating results of the 
 inquiries conducted by Starbuck, Coe, Pratt, 
 
 12 Compare John Bigelow, The Bible That Was Lost and Is Found. 
 
 In his Noble Lectures, The Adienture of Life, Dr. Grenfell, while show- 
 ing on every page the practical and common sense turn of his mind, has 
 nevertheless presented an intimate revelation of a vital mystical fellow- 
 ship with the living Christ, of whom he says at the close: "There is no life 
 but the life which comes from him; to me, as I have said, the rest is merely 
 existence." 
 
116 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 and other students of religious psychology, is 
 the revelation they have made of the wealth 
 and variety of mystical experience all about 
 us. Who would look for a mystic on the police 
 force? And yet he has been found, writes Mr. 
 Trine: 
 
 "I know an officer of our police force who 
 has told me that many times when off duty, 
 and on his way home in the evening, there 
 comes to him such a vivid and vital realiza- 
 tion of his oneness with this infinite Power, 
 and this Spirit of peace so takes hold of and 
 fills him, that it seems as if his feet could 
 hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and 
 so exhilarated does he become by reason of 
 this inflowing tide." 14 
 
 Men and women, humble and unknown, 
 have at the touch of the religious investigator 
 disclosed phases of mystic experience, so real, 
 so individual, often so tender and beautiful as 
 to awaken our surprise and wonder. It is as 
 if a veil had suddenly been drawn back from 
 commonplace human beings, revealing a spirit- 
 ual individuality that we had never dreamed 
 was there. Have any romances of our day 
 been more fascinating than those which Har- 
 old Begbie has uncovered to us? 15 
 
 " William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 393. 
 18 Twice Born Men; Souls in Action. 
 
MYSTICISM AS EXPERIENCE 117 
 
 Idiosyncrasy, incongruity, individualism, 
 doubtless color many of these mysticisms, but 
 underneath there is a current of strong and 
 sane reality. Not one of these experiences but 
 gives to the life it lights greater freedom and 
 fullness. For mysticism is in its very nature 
 expansive. It enlarges the soul vertically and, 
 when blended with intellectual strength, edu- 
 cation, and culture, horizontally as well. Truly, 
 as Shakespeare has it, 
 
 "out of these convertites 
 There is much matter to be heard and learned." 16 
 
 As You Like It, Act V, Scene II. 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE AND 
 CHRISTIAN UNITY 1 
 
 ANY fair-minded observer, ignorant of the 
 history and present condition of the Christian 
 Church, upon reading the New Testament 
 would say, "Here surely is a religion so simple, 
 so vital, so rational, and so spiritual that its 
 followers can have no possible occasion or ex- 
 cuse for quarreling or disfellowshipping one an- 
 other." Are we, then, Christians? 
 
 One of our most familiar and beloved hymns 
 has as its opening line: "Blest be the tie that 
 binds." What is that tie? Is it a doctrinal tie, 
 or a sentimental tie? It is neither. It is the 
 tie of Christian experience. 
 
 One knows very well when he has it and 
 when he shares it. It is a life in his soul and 
 thus a tie that binds him to others. In the 
 strength and hope of it he takes up the task of 
 winning himself and of making this a better 
 world, and because of it he joins heart and 
 hand with his fellow Christian, that together 
 they may take possession of the world for God 
 in the name of Christ, for this too is a part of 
 the experience. It is in some way bound up 
 
 Reprinted from The Biblical World, vol. xlv, No. 4, April, 1915. 
 118 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 119 
 
 with a personal, spiritual Being who is greater 
 than the experience and from whom it comes. 
 All this is very clear and real. But when these 
 convinced and united experients, these sharers 
 of a new faith and a new life, begin to define; 
 trouble begins. One says his experience means 
 so and so; this is the doctrine and it involves 
 these other doctrines; and another and an- 
 other say, "Yes, so it is to us, so it must be." 
 But another says: "It does not look so to me, 
 you must be wrong; this is the meaning, this 
 the doctrine." 
 
 Or, these sharers of a common experience, 
 finding that they need symbols and forms of 
 worship and methods of organization to main- 
 tain this inner life, institute certain rites and 
 lay down certain forms of government and dis- 
 cipline. And having different ideas and pref- 
 erences they begin to diverge, and as they 
 become centered upon the externals rather 
 than the reality that underlies them, differ- 
 ences lead to disagreement, separation, strife. 
 
 And then one party begins to call another 
 "heretics, schismatics, enemies of orthodoxy." 
 Thus division and subdivision occur. Sect 
 creates sect, denomination creates denomina- 
 tion, party creates party. And here we are. 
 It's an old story and a sad one. But the main 
 question is: What are we going to do about it? 
 
120 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Well, the first thing to do is manifestly to 
 go back, or, rather, to go down, to the funda- 
 mental reality itself and there to find again 
 our one foundation, our common faith, our ele- 
 mental tie that binds. How sure that founda- 
 tion is, how unshakable, how imperishable, we 
 have forgotten lost in the maze of our creeds, 
 our theologies, and our polities. 
 
 "But are there not many forms of Christian 
 experience?" Surely, there are. As many and 
 varied they are as the shades of light in the 
 sunset sky or the colorings of the rose. But 
 each is a form of the one common experience, a 
 manifestation of the one Spirit, just as each 
 color consists of broken rays of the one light. 
 The man of the sudden conversion may not 
 say to him of the slow unfolding, "I have no 
 need of you." Nor may he of the gradual 
 growth say to him of the swift surrender, "I 
 have no need of you." For we are all made to 
 drink of one and the same Spirit. And when 
 we go together to the same Fountain in prayer 
 we learn the common source of our faith and 
 our common brotherhood. 
 
 Another objector arises. "Is not life, con- 
 duct, character," he asks, "rather than expe- 
 rience, the more vital thing?" "What is the 
 worth of an experience if conduct contradicts 
 it?" The question is certainly pertinent. One 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 121 
 
 is reminded of the old Negro in the prayer- 
 meeting who, as the story goes, arose and said: 
 "Bred'ren, I'se broken all de commandments, 
 but thank de Lord, I'se got my 'ligion still." 
 There is not much value in that kind of reli- 
 gious experience, it must be admitted. But 
 that is hardly a typical working of Christian 
 experience. If it were, Christianity wouldn't 
 have lasted long. Normal Christian experience 
 reveals itself in life. It issues in right conduct, 
 as the flower passes into the fruit. Automati- 
 cally? No. Nothing happens automatically 
 in the spiritual realm. But faith nerves the will 
 and braces the determination, and out of the 
 purified heart flow pure deeds. Paul ex- 
 pressed the secret of it all when he said: "If 
 any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; 
 old things are passed away, all things are be- 
 come new." "In Christ." Can you analyze 
 that? Can you define it? That is experience, 
 not theology. Out of that experience, life; in 
 it, unity; after it, freedom. I see no way to a 
 unified church, a revitalized Christianity, a 
 convinced world, but this: the recovery and 
 recognition of the one fundamental Christian 
 experience, or, if you prefer, Christian faith 
 the two are practically the same underlying 
 all creeds, theologies, cults, enterprises. 
 
 But one thing is needful. Oh, all ye fierce 
 
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 warriors of the faith, Athanasians and Arians, 
 Augustinians and Pelagians, Abelards and 
 Bernards, Luthers and Zwinglis, Calvins and 
 Servetuses, Reformers and Remonstrants, An- 
 glicans and Dissenters, Puritans and Quakers, 
 Old School and New School, Conservatives and 
 Liberals, but one thing is needful faith, love, 
 Christ in the soul, Christian experience. Every 
 Christian knows what that reality is and what 
 it means, though it can be defined about as 
 accurately as life, or light, or electricity, or 
 anything else that is too real for definition. 
 
 The trouble has come has it not? from 
 substituting something closely connected with 
 this great uniting reality for the reality itself. 
 The church, for instance, in which this expe- 
 rience occurs, has been substituted for the ex- 
 perience; the Bible, with which the experience 
 is linked, has been substituted for it; and often 
 a doctrine about Christ, for Christ himself. It 
 is perfectly natural and understandable that a 
 medium or a definition of a reality should thus 
 be substituted for the reality itself; but the 
 result is confusion, trouble, dissension, disaster. 
 
 What then? Is theology of no account? Is 
 Christian doctrine valueless? On the con- 
 trary, as we have found, theology, which is the 
 interpretation of Christian experience, is of the 
 utmost value. It grows out of experience as 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 123 
 
 the branch grows out of the stock and is as 
 necessary to its life. 
 
 Christian Experience might well address 
 Christian Doctrine in the language of Christ 
 in the Fourth Gospel to his disciples : "I, Expe- 
 rience, am the Vine; ye, Doctrines, are the 
 branches. As the branch cannot bear fruit of 
 itself except it abide in the vine, so neither can 
 ye except ye abide in me. If any doctrine 
 abide not in me, it is cast forth as a branch 
 and is withered and men gather them and cast 
 them into the fire and they are burned." 
 
 Precisely that has happened to a good many 
 doctrines in our day. But when doctrine abides 
 in experience, when it represents the life of the 
 spirit expressing itself in intellectual leaf and 
 blossom and fruit, it is needful and nourishing. 
 Through it experience itself is enriched and 
 advanced. 
 
 Let me offer an illustration. The disciple 
 who wrote our Fourth Gospel was "far ben," as 
 the Scotch would say, in his experience of 
 Christ. He knew what it was to abide in the 
 living Vine. He was also a student, a pro- 
 found thinker. In the course of his study and 
 reflection he had fallen in with a philosophical 
 concept, current in his time, which is known 
 as the Logos. With that profound philosophic 
 conception he prefaced his interpretation of the 
 
124 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 person and life of his Lord in those calm, ma- 
 jestic words that take one to the very heart of 
 the secret of all existence: "In the beginning 
 was the Logos and the Logos was with God 
 and the Logos was of God." "Through him 
 [not by him] were all things made. . . . And the 
 Logos became flesh and dwelt among us and 
 we beheld his glory, glory as of the Only- 
 begotten of the Father full of grace and 
 truth." There is theology at its very best, rev- 
 erent, deep, moving theology saturated in ex- 
 perience and pervaded with the Spirit; and 
 this luminous conception runs through all the 
 wonderful chapters that follow. This illus- 
 trates how our ideas enter into our experiences 
 and our experiences into our ideas. A new 
 idea is often like a shaft of light thrown into a 
 darkened room where we were dwelling in the 
 midst of realities that we knew and felt and 
 yet did not clearly see. In its light we see as 
 well as touch divine things. 
 
 Apply this to the Bible as a whole. Anyone 
 who has lived at all responsively in the atmos- 
 phere of the Bible knows that it is a sacred and 
 life-giving book, knows, indeed, that it is in- 
 spired. As Professor George Mooar used to 
 say, "The Bible is inspired because it is inspir- 
 ing." And yet one may hold a theory of in- 
 spiration which stands in the way of his fullest 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 125 
 
 appreciation of the largest meanings and deep- 
 est values of the Bible, a theory which reduces, 
 or tends to reduce, all its sunlit peaks and 
 shadowed valleys to one dead level. Such was 
 my own conception as a boy, and I diligently 
 plowed through all the dreary chapters of Le- 
 viticus and Numbers, spending time which 
 might a thousand times better have been 
 spent upon the Psalms and the Gospels, be- 
 cause I supposed it was all a necessary part of 
 one miraculously given revelation. I have 
 since come to see that when one accepts the 
 guidance of the Spirit in his own mind and 
 soul he will come to understand that certain 
 parts of the Bible are incomparably nobler 
 than others, that it contains a progressive and 
 not a static revelation and is a book of religion 
 and not of science or casuistry or predictions. 
 
 Upon the basis of an idea of inspiration 
 wholly out of keeping with the spirit and 
 teaching of the Bible itself, doctrines have 
 been extracted from it which were never there. 
 For instance, I for one am as certain that no 
 such doctrine as the Augustinian and Calvin- 
 istic doctrine of the Fall of Man in Adam as 
 essential to faith is taught in the Bible as I am 
 certain that the doctrine that God is our Father 
 and we his children is taught there. There is, 
 to be sure, a Fall story in the book of Genesis, 
 
126 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 full of suggestive truth, but no doctrine of the 
 Fall. There is in the Epistle to the Romans a 
 very striking parallel between a rabbinical doc- 
 trine of the universality of the Fall and that of 
 Redemption in Christ. Paul was not teaching 
 Adam but Christ. If he were to come back 
 to-day, he might well ask: "How did you man- 
 age to make so much of that doctrine of the 
 Fall out of the letter I wrote to the Romans? 
 That Fall doctrine was not mine; I simply 
 took it to make more real the truth that I 
 was teaching the greatness and completeness of 
 Christ's redemption" 2 
 
 There are, it is true, certain simple, cardinal 
 doctrines growing directly out of experience, 
 such as the Fatherhood of God, the Redemp- 
 tive Personality of Christ, the guidance of the 
 Spirit, the Life Immortal, upon which we all 
 agree. It is upon these, next to faith itself, 
 that we should throw our common emphasis. 
 Upon less essential doctrines we should agree 
 to differ. 
 
 That is not saying, let me repeat, that it 
 does not matter what we think about doc- 
 trine. It does matter. It is of great concern, 
 
 J If the champion of exactness wishes to press the point by asking: "Paul 
 would not have used the doctrine of the Fall in Adam if he had not be- 
 lieved it, would he?" I would answer: "Doubtless he did accept it, but 
 that does not make it his doctrine. There is no reason to think he would 
 ever have referred to it except as a means of enforcing his teaching con- 
 cerning Christ." 
 
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE 127 
 
 it seems to me, that for the sake of the honor 
 of Christianity, for the sake of young and in- 
 quiring minds growing up about us, we have 
 the clearest, sanest, most reasonable theology 
 possible, a theology that reflects the best 
 thought and the best knowledge of our time 
 while anchored fast to the fundamental reali- 
 ties of the New Testament. 
 
 But some things matter vastly more than 
 others that matter much. And the thing that 
 always matters most, and especially just now, 
 is that all Christians, New Theology and Old 
 Theology, of every sect and denomination, 
 stand together upon the one fundamental re- 
 lation to Christ, where there is neither Old 
 Theology nor New Theology, Orthodox nor 
 Liberal, but Christ is all and in all. 
 
 "Love," says the great apostle, "beareth all 
 things." It should be able to bear doctrinal 
 differences. An increasing number of us are, 
 I think, determined that doctrinal differences 
 shall not shut us away from our brethren. It 
 is always possible to get the better of the man 
 who tries to exclude you, if it is done in the 
 spirit and manner of Edwin Markham's lines: 
 
 "He drew a circle that shut me out 
 Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. 
 But Love and I had the wit to win; 
 We drew a circle that took him in." 
 
128 RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE 
 
 It is no time to cherish misunderstandings 
 and alienations and suspicions, when the forces 
 of materialism and indifferentism and immoral- 
 ity are flooding in upon us as they are to-day. 
 When men and women are drifting from their 
 moorings and out upon a sea of loneliness and 
 hopelessness, when young men and women are 
 giving way to doubt and pessimism, when foes 
 of the Kingdom are pointing the finger at a 
 disunited and ineffective church, it is no time 
 to be bickering among ourselves over theo- 
 logical and denominational differences. 
 
 If there is any scorn or self-satisfaction in 
 the hearts of New Theology men, any hyper- 
 criticism, any failure to recognize the funda- 
 mental value of Christian experience, let us 
 repent of it lest we use our liberty as a cloak 
 of bondage. 
 
 And if there is any bitterness toward their 
 brethren on the part of the defenders of ortho- 
 doxy, any ungenerous and un-Christlike doubt 
 of their sincerity and loyalty to the faith, 
 should it not be flung to Gehenna where it 
 belongs? 
 
 Behold how good and pleasant it is for 
 brethren to dwell together in unity nay, how 
 imperative, if we would be true to our faith in 
 one Master and experience the truth which 
 makes men free! 
 
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