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RELIGION AS LIFE

•The

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK ¦ BOSTON ¦ CHICAGO • DALLAS
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

RELIGION AS LIFE

BY
HENRY CHURCHILL KING, D.D., LL.D.
PRESIDENT OF OBERLIN COLLEGE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
19*3
Jill rights reserved

Copyright, 1913,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1913.

Norhiooti press
J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Maas., TJ.S.A

CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I. The Choice of Life .

PAGE 3

II.

The Method of Life .

• • 36

III.

The Realities of Life

• 7i

IV.

The Sources of Life .

• 105

V.

The Enemies of Life .

• 134

VI.

The Essence of Life .

. 162

RELIGION AS LIFE

THE CHOICE OF LIFE
The Peril of the Lesser Good
If one is to do justice to the breadth of
human nature, he may not forget that
there are always two questions to be asked
concerning any of the phenomena of the
world and of life : How did it come to be ?
What does it mean ? — the question of
process, of mechanical explanation, and the
question of meaning, of ideal interpreta
tion. And men cannot help asking the
second question as well as the first. As
Watts says, endeavoring to put into words
the constant thought back of all his own
work as an artist: "As long as humanity
is humanity, man will yearn to ascend
the heights that human footsteps may not
tread, and will long to lift the veil that
shrouds the enigma of being; and he will
most prize the echo of this longing in even
the incoherent expression of literature,
3

RELIGION AS LIFE

music, and art." The ideal interests are
here all at one ; for they all seek to find
meaning in life, and they all voice an under
lying faith, which, it may be suspected,
finds its natural and inevitable culmination
and justification in religion. One probably
has nowhere fathomed the mysterious power
of beauty, for example, until he finds in it,
as Lotze has suggested, the prophecy and
promise of final and universal harmony —
an essentially religious conviction.
The very conception of religion as life,
implies that religious faith is thus basic,
and has the power everywhere to give
meaning and value to life ; that it stands in
every realm for the largest, richest, most
rewarding life. Even when religion is so
conceived, the question that first arises is
this : Does one really want life, the largest
life, though it appear in the guise of diffi
culty and self-denial ? Does one decisively
choose it with his whole being ? — the ques
tion of the choice of life. The second ques
tion then follows : Can one get some clear
view of the method of life, and see here
the essential unity of religion with all life,
in the double demand for inner integrity

THE CHOICE OF LIFE

and fellowship ? That method, it will be
found, inevitably includes an honest facing
of the facts of life, a thoughtful recognition
of the outstanding realities of the spiritual
world. Just because the method of life
includes, also, as everywhere requisite,
fellowship, men are driven to find the great
sources of life, short of God himself, in the
most rewarding personalities of the moral
and religious sphere, and so to give special
place to the great line of prophetic seers of
the spiritual, culminating in Jesus. But the
whole range of the moral and religious life
is in the realm of personal relations, and one
has not fully learned the lesson of the life
of Jesus, nor squarely faced the facts of
life, until he has confronted the enemies of
life arising out of these personal relations.
This darker side cannot be honestly ignored.
But it is the characteristic message of the
life of Jesus, that the enemies of life cannot
finally defeat the true soul in its quest for
the largest life either for itself or for others.
In clear vision of the darker aspect of life,
therefore, religion may still conceive the
great outstanding personalities and realities
of the spiritual realm as at least a partial

RELIGION AS LIFE

revelation of the will of God, and must find
the essence of its life in harmony with that
will of God. For religion must ultimately
mean some real sharing in the life of God
himself. It is such a survey of religion as
life, that is here undertaken.
Our age is often called an irreligious —
an unideal — age. The truth of the state
ment may well be doubted. The age is a
realistic age, in the sense that it wants to
know that everywhere it is dealing with
reality — that it is not deceiving itself
with even the fondest of delusions. And
from that test religion has no right to with
draw itself. But that the age is averse to
religious life and faith where they have
the ring of reality, it would be difficult
indeed to show. Men cannot so easily
escape their own natures and the grip of
their own birthright.
The seeming declension in religious faith
is probably due in part to the waning power
of authority in the religious sphere, because
of the increasing demand in this realm, as
in all others, for the verification of expe
rience. But this is, in truth, an evidence
of greater not less earnestness in the

THE CHOICE OF LIFE

pursuit of religion. For it is a refusal to
substitute the mere say-so of some other
for living experience on one's own part.
In that result every believer in the insight
of the teaching of Jesus may rejoice ; for
Jesus sought nothing else so persistently
as this utter reality in the spiritual life.
He has indeed no plea to make for any
religion that does not mean the experience
of a larger, richer life. He deliberately
courts that test: "I came that they may
have life, and may have it abundantly."
He has no criticism of men's thirst for life.
He only has pity that they seek to satisfy
the thirst at such unpromising springs.
He could not have objected to the line of
argument of a great German theologian,
that the truth of religion is best shown by
the fact that it alone can quite satisfy
men's "claim on life." That must seem
to him the most obvious inference from his
own initial faith in the Father. Life —
large and rich and free, increasing, inex
haustible life, because sharing in God's
own life ! This, religion must be able to
offer, if it is to abide. For man cannot give
up the quest for life. Can religion still

RELIGION AS LIFE

make good this offer even for the modern
man? All forms of frivolity and passion, even,
think of themselves as seeking life. The
men who yield to them say that they want
to "see life" ; that they want to "live while
they live." And there is a certain uncon
scious logic in their claim ; for they all
seek some kind of emotional excitement.
Now it is quite true that one cannot get
the tang of reality in existence without some
stirring of emotion. None of us has any
right to forget this close and inevitable
connection of the sense of reality with
feeling. The claim of feeling, therefore,
cannot be ignored by any interest or cause,
however ideal. Unless religion, then, has
power to awaken such faith and hope and
love as insure profounder depths of feeling,
as are able to make all the natural joys of
men instinct with far richer meaning, and
as can give permanent satisfaction to the
greatest in us, it must fail.
The momentous building up of the senti
ment of romantic love, in the history of
western civilization, is a good illustration
of the way in which ideal interests have

THE CHOICE OF LIFE

this power immensely to deepen and
heighten natural feeling. And romantic
love cannot come to its supreme height
without full religious faith, as many of our
best love songs quite unconsciously testify.
Now exactly the kind of transformation
that the ideal interests have brought about
in the natural attraction of the sexes,
rehgion believes that it can bring into
every part of life. And it blames the
devotee of frivolity and passion, because
at every point he prefers the shallow and
fragmentary and steadily lessening and
self-centered life, to the profounder and
larger and steadily growing and all-em
bracing life open to him. It sees, there
fore, how inevitable was the yearning pro
test which the old Evangelist put into
the mouth of Christ: "Ye will not come
unto me that ye may have life." The
thing that so stirs the soul of Jesus is, that
men are so constantly striving to satisfy
the quenchless thirst for life, of natures
capable of endless development, with at
best petty goods. So Browning in his
Easter Day sees that no severer judgment
could be pronounced upon a man, willingly

10 RELIGION AS LIFE
falling below the best, than that he should
be permanently shut up to the goals he
himself has chosen :
The austere voice returned, —
'So soon made happy ? Hadst thou learned
What God accounteth happiness,
Thou wouldst not find it hard to guess
What hell may be his punishment
For those who doubt if God invent
Better than they. Let such men rest
Content with what they judged the best.
Let the unjust usurp at will !
The filthy shall be filthy still !
Miser, there waits the gold for thee !
Hater, indulge thine enmity !
And thou, whose heaven self -ordained
Was, to enjoy earth unrestrained,
Doit!' Now the gradual building up, in all pro
gressive civilizations, of some kind of ideal
interests, means that it is the experience
of the race that men cannot continuously
get more life without deepening life. It
is a necessarily narrow life that stays on a
mere sense level. The choice of the larger
life must mean, therefore, just such steady
deepening of life. The very existence,
indeed, of art, of science, of philosophy,

THE CHOICE OF LIFE n
of ethics, of sociology, and of religion is
evidence that man is more than a creature
of the senses ; that it belongs to his very
nature to set aims that take him beyond
the sense world ; that each of these achieve
ments is an ideal which man's own nature
sets before him for accomplishment — is,
in Miinsterberg's language, "a child of
duties." From the point of view of re
ligion, therefore, that believes in God as
Creator of man, body and soul, these ideals
are all at least a partial revelation of the
will of God for man ; and religion may be
said thus to take up into itself all the other
ideals ; and, alone of all the ideals, to give
man's life the permanent meaning of re
lation to the Eternal. The religious life,
therefore, should give the greatest deepen
ing of life possible.
Our own time, with all its prodigious
material and intellectual achievements and
its unequaled material development, it
self seems more and more to be awaking
to the fact that no one nor all of these are
sufficient of themselves to give meaning
and value to life. The world never had
such enormous resources of power and

12 RELIGION AS LIFE
wealth and knowledge, never so great
means of all kinds. We are, indeed, in
danger of finding our lives swamped by
the very magnitude of our possessions.
Just because our resources are so prodigious,
there is the indispensable need for men of
spiritual insight and vision and passion,
men of assured relation to God, and there
fore men of dynamic power to guide these
stupendous lower forces to ideal ends.
Thoughtful men, thus, seem constrained
increasingly to ask themselves whether
the age is to be great enough to be able to
make these stupendous resources, means
indeed. Eucken's protest, making just now
so wide an appeal, is surely symptomatic
of the time. "To every thinking man,"
he says, "the great alternative presents
itself, the Either-Or. Either there is some
thing other and higher than this purely
humanistic culture, or life ceases to have
any meaning or value." "Not suffering,"
he says elsewhere, "but spiritual destitu
tion is man's worst enemy." But spiritual
destitution cannot be relieved from with
out. It requires, indispensably, inner
spiritual activity, growing insight, decision

THE CHOICE OF LIFE 13
and choice on one's own part. Any truly
spiritual view of life must therefore put,
as Eucken does, this free choosing and
decision in the foreground. Even the in
tellectual inheritance of the achievements of
modern science cannot come to a man with
out earnest labor and appropriation on his
own part. Still less can the meaning of the
spiritual life be his without active personal
appropriation. It is not by accident, therefore, that one
is led to put at the very beginning of any
thoroughgoing consideration of religion
as life, the choice of life, — and that choice
as made with all ethical earnestness and
decision. We may well raise the question
whether our time, in the reaction from abuse
of mere appeals to the will — has not been
ignoring quite too much the strategic place
that definite and avowed decision must
have in the development of the spiritual life.
Dr. Bushnell's account of his own expe
rience may suggest how vitally important
such spiritual decisions may be. "A kind
of leaden aspect overhangs the world.
Till, finally, pacing his chamber some day,
there comes up suddenly the question,

14 RELIGION AS LIFE
' Is there then no truth that I do believe ? '
' Yes, there is this one, now that I think of
it ; there is a distinction of right and wrong
that I never doubted, and I see not how I
can; I am even quite sure of it.' - Then
forthwith starts up the question, 'Have
I then ever taken the principle of right
for my law? I have done right things as
men speak ; have I ever thrown my life
out on the principle to become all it re
quires of me?' 'No, I have not, con
sciously, I have not. Ah ! then, here is
something for me to do ! No matter what
becomes of my questions — nothing ought
to become of them, if I cannot take a first
principle, so inevitably true, and live in it.'
The very suggestion seems to be a kind of
revelation. It is even a relief to feel the
conviction it brings. 'Here, then,' he says,
'will I begin.' " That striking scene in the
history of Israel, in the Valley of Shechem,
with Israel divided into the two groups on
Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, to re
spond, the one to the curses and the other
to the blessings, between which they are
to choose, sets forth dramatically the per
petual challenge to humanity. For life is

THE CHOICE OF LIFE 15
constantly saying, as there: "I have set
before thee life and death, the blessing and
the curse. Therefore choose life that thou
mayest live." No man chooses a curse as
such. He chooses it under the guise of
some kind of good, or as at least accom
panied by a good that seems to him to
make up for the curse. Man's peril is
always, therefore, that of the lesser good.
And it is this peril that demands so insis
tently the choice of life.
There is a section of the teaching of
Jesus, in a single chapter in Mark (Mark
10), that deals with exactly this, peril of
the lesser good in three of the common
realms of life : the realms of wealth, of love,
and of ambition. These teachings may well
chaUenge our attention when we are thinking
of what it really means to choose life.
It is a characteristically compact and
vivid picture which Mark gives of the young
man who runs to Jesus, as he is going out
into the highway, throws himself on his
knees before him, out of the consciousness
of a clean and upright life voices his further
aspiration and wins from Jesus his look of
love, only to find himself unable to respond

16 RELIGION AS LIFE
to Christ's full call to abandon his wealth
and follow him, and goes away with fallen
countenance, sorrowful.
The ordinary reader of the Gospel, it
may be suspected, would underwrite this
incident of the rich young ruler with the
subtitle, "A Hard Test." Dante, with
keener insight, calls it "The Great Refusal."
For it is exactly this common inability to
see that the failure to meet the hard test
is a great refusal of life, that makes life's
tragedy. We see the hardness of the test ;
Jesus and Dante see the greatness of the
life refused. For here, in this New Testa
ment incident, is the appeal of eager, beau
tiful, upright, aspiring youth. Jesus loves
him and covets for him a far greater destiny
than he has yet achieved — high service
in his kingdom. But the young man's
riches are too strong for his aspiration. He
cannot rise to the height of Jesus' call.
Reluctantly, indeed, but surely he puts the
great opportunity aside — for it was the
proffer of life in the guise of self-denial.
Not, thus, in desperate wickedness, but in
simple peril of the lower good, he makes
"the great refusal."

THE CHOICE OF LIFE 17
The story is a perpetual parable of human
struggle ; for life's supreme test and chal
lenge are never — as men so commonly
think — Can you withstand the evil ? but
rather, Can you rise superior to the lower
goods? The constant struggle is between
aspiration, on the one hand, and one's
already "great possessions," on the other.
Everywhere life brings the challenge of
the call to denial of the lower ; the soul
responds either with the great commit
ment or "the great refusal."
This figure of the rich young ruler is one
fit to stir any man to serious thought.
For his is no sordid soul. He is still warmly
touched with the eager aspiration of youth.
The spell of the "great possessions," it is
true, is already on him, as Christ clearly
sees ; but it has not yet been fully wrought ;
he is no "swine of Circe" who does not
longer care. And one can hardly help
imagining a different issue of this conversa
tion with Christ. Suppose the rich young
ruler had risen to the occasion and the
result were changed ?
The test which Jesus applies seems very
severe to us, with our modern love of riches,

18 RELIGION AS LIFE
and it is hard enough. But his "great
possessions" were all too evidently coming
to own him, rather than he to own them ;
and they were sure to corrode his life. The
question which Jesus really brought to
him that day on the highway was, Have
you the nerve, the grit, the simple, plain,
high wisdom to cut off this deeply corroding
element that is eating into your very life ?
It seems a hard test. But suppose he
had met Christ's challenge and followed
him positively, to play such a part as Paul
played ? Suppose he had been clear-sighted
and strong-souled enough to .enter into his
supreme opportunity ? Who would have
pitied him ? Would he have needed any
one's pity, and not rather had deep admira
tion and the envy of all high souls, and
given heroic inspiration, and have become
one of the great life-giving forces of the
world ? Something like that he had before
him. Something like that Jesus offered
him that day in the guise of his severe test.
In soberest reason, were his "great posses
sions" worth the price he paid? Did he
not make "the great refusal" ?
It is a hard test? Yes, but how great

THE CHOICE OF LIFE i9
the opportunity ! For the seeming hard
demand — the call for sacrifice in the uni
verse of God — is always a call, could
we but believe it, to larger life, to wider
outlook, to more permanent service. And
life's constant question is, Are you equal
to the call ? Can you rise to it ? Can you
meet the challenge of your best possibility ?
Or must you be "let off"? Can you so
feel the appeal of the greater glory as to
loosen the hold of the lower on you ? Can
you escape from the thralldom of the in
ferior good into life ? We have great as
pirations and occasional visions ; have we
the determination to follow them to the
end, or, with fallen countenance and sor
rowful spirit, must we go away from the
uplands of life, enchained by our "great
possessions" ?
It is a hard test ? Yes, but were the
"great possessions" so sure a blessing?
Had they so much to give? Had they
rather no heavy price which they were
certain to demand, and were they to take
it out of the young man's life ? It is this
aspect of the matter that is so forced on
Christ's mind as, in words of the most

20 RELIGION AS LIFE
solemn warning, he comments on the going
away of the rich young ruler.
Three times, in unmistakable terms,
Jesus asserts his sense of the tremendous
peril of wealth. "How hardly," he says
to his disciples, "shall they that have riches
enter into the kingdom of God." And this
solemn warning of Jesus we are ready to
treat almost as a joke. We are "willing,"
our newspaper paragraphers say, " to run
the risks of wealth." But let no man think
it a trifling risk, or one lightly to be entered
on. For the danger of the rich young
ruler, we may be pretty certain, is one of
the greatest dangers that besets our own
people to-day, nationally and individually.
When one recalls the revelations of the
recent years, beginning with the insurance
investigations, and remembers the shame
less willingness disclosed everywhere to
sacrifice public interests to private gain, he
cannot doubt the magnitude of the peril
to the nation's life.
It was one of the most thoughtful of
American editors that wrote of this phase
of our national history: "That we are
passing through a great moral crisis be-

THE CHOICE OF LIFE ax
comes every day more clear. That crisis
has come not a day too soon, if the soul of
the country is to be kept alive ; it cannot
be too severe in its arraignment of baseness,
too thorough in the punishment it inflicts,
too drastic in the methods of cleansing and
reinvigoration which it adopts. There has
never been a more shocking story of dis
honor told among any people, nor one
which makes the reader or hearer more
indignant or ashamed. In whatever direc
tion the light searches, instantly mean
little men of great financial position come
into startling light, and are seen managing
affairs with great financial ability but with
the moral ideas of semi-savages. An un
endurable moral vulgarity stamps them
as men of large brains and little souls ;
capable of great material achievements,
but with rudimentary spiritual development.
On this group of betrayers of trusts, the
great mass of Americans looked first with
incredulity, then with astonishment, and
lastly with deepening indignation. Sound
at heart, but dull with prosperity, and
overtaken by a kind of moral sleeping sick
ness, the Nation opens its eyes, looks about

22 RELIGION AS LIFE
with dismay, and gathers its forces for a
passionate fight against the vices that have
brought shame and disaster to it."
And since those words were written, how
heavy has been the price paid in dishonor
for simple greed for gold by a long list of
men, who had been held in public esteem
— some of them high in religious councils.
It is a list to make a man sick at heart.
Was the money worth the price ? How
surely this passionate pursuit of wealth be
comes soul-absorbing, blinding the eyes,
paralyzing the higher powers, blunting the
sense of honor, a veritable disease and in
sanity, without compensating reward and
without worthy goal ! And how almost
certainly must children be sacrificed in the
process! Unless wealth is subdued by
higher ends as only a subordinate good,
unless it is made means in very truth, it
insures not enlarging but steadily lessening
life ; we have been defeated by the peril of
the lower attainment.
Our whole age, as we have seen, has
peculiar dangers at just this point, because
of the very magnitude of its resources.
Prodigious material prosperity is with us

THE CHOICE OF LIFE 23
— and it is a good beyond doubt — pro
digious enough to blind and smother all.
It is not strange that we are a little dizzy-
headed. But its challenge is unmistakable.
We cannot evade it. Can we stand it ?
Or must we be drowned by it ? Can we
save our lives? Are we great enough, as
a nation, to make the material, means only,
to use it for high service ? If so, only
ideals and enterprises great enough and
spiritual enough to dominate these gigantic
material interests can save us here. We
have no choice.
But the peril of the lesser good is not to
be found in the pursuit of wealth alone.
And in his record of the teaching of Jesus,
Mark puts side by side with the perils of
wealth, the perils of a false love, and the
perils of a false ambition. For "the great
refusal" is nowhere refusal to refuse some
thing else, refusal to cut off, refusal to give
up something of life — as the call of re
ligion is so commonly conceived. Rather,
it is "the great refusal" just because it
is refusal of the highest good, the refusal
of life, of service, of the greater glory.
Subordinating the lower good is no end in

24 RELIGION AS LIFE
itself; it is only the means to making the
highest dominant. The method of Jesus,
therefore, is nowhere a merely negative
cutting off, but the method of life, of growth,
of positive heroic achievement.
In his teaching concerning divorce, thus,
Jesus seeks to raise the whole conception of
marriage to a higher plane. To him,
marriage meant infinitely more than to the
Pharisees, with their loose ideas of divorce ;
more than to us Americans, with our
shameful record here, also, of practical un
blushing trading in husbands and wives.
I do not forget that this record of divorce
bears witness at many points to a deepening
sense of the respect due to a person. But
still, I cannot doubt that we need, as a
nation, to hear and to heed Charles Wag
ner's protest, — "All of us have need to
regain respect for love"; and Tennyson's
indignant witness, — "I would pluck my
hand from a man even if he were my greatest
hero, or dearest friend, if he wronged a
woman or told her a lie"; and Ruskin's
clear judgment, — "Every virtue of the
higher phases of manly character begins
in this : in truth and modesty before

THE CHOICE OF LIFE 25
the face of all maidens ; in truth and
pity or truth and reverence to all woman
hood." Now it is quite true that any pleasurable
emotion at the height of its intensity does
seem for the moment to be its own excuse
for being. It may often honestly seem
justified forthwith, and be inclined to scout
all other considerations in the powerful
sweep of its passion. It can then say with
mistaken pride, in the words of a poet of
the day :
Be thine that white engendered spark,
And nought can feed it, nought can make it less. ]
Virtue and vice, nobility and shame
Are rags that drop away, while you sweep on
Stripped as a flame, with arms about your star.
No doubt there is a natural reaction of the
soul, eager to test the full meaning of life,
against the tame limitations of the conven
tional and prudential, that may often make
one feel like saying with Walt Whitman :
Oh for something pernicious and dread,
Something far away from a puny and pious life,
Something unproved, something in a trance,
Something escaped from the anchorage and driving
free.

26 RELIGION AS LIFE
But nevertheless, let not one lose the dis
tinction which belongs to him as man, of
being able to think, to discriminate, to
exercise his kingly power of self-control,
and not be swept off his feet in any realm
by mere tempest of feeling. This is indeed
just what should distinguish the civihzed
man from the barbarian. The thoughtful
man is likely to have a sense of disgust
when the novelists begin to talk about the
"red blood" of the hero, just when he is
most disgracing himself ; as though it did
not require far more grit to conquer passion
than to yield to it.
Now, what are this "virtue and vice,"
this "nobility and shame," that are to
"drop away like rags" as one yields to the
onrush of passion ? They stand, it is well
simply to remember, for the deepest dis
criminations that the human race in its
development has been able to make. They
concern the eternal loyalties upon which all
conceivable decent society must be based.
Love cannot be this heedless, utterly selfish,
reckless, treacherous, and spoiled thing
here represented, and be love at all, or
remain love at its best, even for one, though
that one be called a "star."

THE CHOICE OF LIFE 27
If we are to come to the largest life in
this realm, we need to come up to the high
call of Christ's thought of marriage. And
when he thought of marriage, he thought
of an unselfish, reverent love, that made it
forever impossible for a man to treat a
wife as a thing, as property to be kept or
bartered at will. He thought of a deep
and sacred and lasting community of soul
with soul. He thought of marriage as no
mere compact of two individuals, dissoluble
on any caprice, but as a solemn covenant
with society and with God, fraught with
interests precious beyond all estimate. And
so he must say: "What God hath joined
together, let not man put asunder." Jesus
does not chide men that they love too much,
but that they love too little. His appeal
is an appeal to rise to the possibilities of
the most intimate of human relationships.
He sees in marriage, physically based
though it is, the possibility of a high friend
ship that can steadily transcend the physical
and last beyond it. In effect he says:
"Do not throw away the best and most
sacred thing in your life for a passing desire.
Do not make impossible the sweetest and

28 RELIGION AS LIFE
highest, that shall grow with your growth,
deepening as your life deepens, a love be
yond all aging, of eternal quality, knit up
indissolubly with all that is best in you."
It is such a love that Mrs. Browning has
worthily conceived, and that one may dare
to place beside the other conception of love
as ineffably more significant and worthy
and satisfying, a love of which a man has
no need to be ashamed in any hour.
How do I love thee ? Let me count the ways,
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right ;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life ! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Here, too, is to be found the peril of the
lower attainment — of "the great refusal,"
that cannot discern under the demand for
seeming self-denial the call to larger life.

THE CHOICE OF LIFE 29
How desperately have men sought here
what they called freedom and found only
slavery, and fought as slavery the highest
freedom. And ambition, too, has its peril of the
lower attainment. The two disciples who
came seeking for themselves the chief places
in Christ's kingdom, are met with his
sobering, chilling challenge: "Ye know
not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink
the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with
the baptism that I am baptized with?"
You are very ambitious. Is your ambition
great enough ? Do you really aspire to
sacrificial service ? They make, it is true,
the highest prayer: "Grant unto us that
we may sit, one on thy right hand, and one
on thy left hand, in thy glory." But they
do not highly mean it. For they have no
desire to share Christ's real glory.
It is the picture of all ambitious self-
seeking, always misconceiving true great
ness. We find it hard to rid ourselves of
the notion that glory lies in conspicuousness,
and is measured by large financial returns.
We easily persuade ourselves that the more
conspicuous and the better rewarded place

30 RELIGION AS LIFE
is the place of greater service. And yet
so judging, one may have given up the
larger service and taken the poorer op
portunity. He may have given up his own
highest growth and consented to do the
cheaper kind of work, thinner, less quicken
ing, dealing more with externals and or
ganization, and less with personal life,
serving men in less vital ways, and giving
less of his own best life. For the peril of
ambition is like the peril of riches, every
where challenging you with the question
in the midst of it, Can you save your life ?
Can you keep deep the zest of work ? Can
you keep unselfish love in yourself and
others? Can you keep taking in great
draughts of hfe, knowing how to "take time
to be alone" and to "be silent unto God" ?
The peril of the driven, conspicuous life
is great, for it is likely to find all too little
leisure or desire to think, or to pray, or to
live deeply, — to make sure that it has a
worthy self to give. Can you stand it?
Can you maintain in it the highest service ?
If God lays it on you, you must bow under
it, and go humbly forward in deep sense of
the need of God. But "seekest thou

THE CHOICE OF LIFE 31
great things for thyself? Seek them not."
Such places may give great opportunity,
in the chance to bring about the control of
great ideals in wider spheres. But they
have this opportunity only for the man who
can withstand the "devastator of the day"
— only for the man who is making steady,
earnest fight for time to grow, to be his best
self. For the only deliverance from the
glamour and corrosive power of the selfish
ambition is the still mightier power of the
glory of unselfish ambitions, wide as the
kingdom of God. And the peril here, too,
to be feared above all, is "the great re
fusal," the peril of the lower attainment,
the danger that the meaner and smaller
ambitions may thwart the greater.
For he has dealt very superficially with
the teaching of Jesus, who has failed to
find in it, in the face, apparently, of certain
and absolute defeat, the simple, calm in
sistence upon the sole omnipotence of self-
sacrificing love as the law of life and the
way to glory. It is his central, fundamental,
revolutionary, distinctive principle, of which
the plain historical results of his own cross
and of even the very partial practice of his

32 RELIGION AS LIFE
teaching are the proof. The future belongs
"to the Lamb that hath been slain." The
spirit of self-giving is on the throne of the
universe. But have men ever really taken
it in ? Do we really believe that now and
forever, for self and for others, for character
and influence and happiness, for this world
and for the next, the one great supreme
condition of greatness, under a self-sacri
ficing God, is service, — self-giving ? Here
lies the only Godlike life, the only way to
glory. And we are just so far saved, we
have just so far learned the lesson of life,
we have just so far reached the end of our
being, as we have learned the lesson of
love — of self-sacrificing service. To turn
from this is "the great refusal" — the losing
of one's life.
Thus it is, that day after day, the
thoughtful man feels like saying to those
whom he most loves : I sum up all my desires
for you in the single prayer, that you may
be kept from the peril of the lesser good.
I do not much fear that you will be swept
into outbreaking evil ; I do fear that you
will fall under the spell of the lesser goods.
I am not anxious concerning your success

THE CHOICE OF LIFE 33
as men count success; I am anxious lest
the smaller success jeopardize the greater.
I do not expect you to prove arrant cowards ;
but I dread for you that subtler cowardice
that cannot choose largeness of life in the
guise of self-denial. I would not keep you
from all sorrow, if I could, for that were to
shut you out of life itself ; but I would save
you from the sorrow of high aspiration
defeated by "great possessions" — the deep
and abiding sorrow of "the great refusal."
I could covet for you the vision of all life's
values ; but though your eyes be holden
to every lesser value, may they not fail
to catch the vision of "the life that is life
indeed." I expect from you great con
victions along many lines ; but underlying
them all may there be the conviction of
convictions, that if God is such a God at
all as Jesus revealed, then plainly the hard
test is always a call to life, the demand for
service and sacrifice, always an invitation
to share the life of God himself in his highest
glory and blessedness.
It is not too much to say of those who
are entering active life to-day, that it is
their privilege to come to it in a new period

34 RELIGION AS LIFE
of the world, when new standards are
already set up. Under these new standards,
they may count upon it, the tribute of
greatness is increasingly certain to be denied
to the man who has not mastered his own
flesh, who has not mastered his possessions,
who has not mastered his selfish ambitions.
Steadily there is being pressed home upon
men the imperative demand for reverent
personal relations everywhere. Steadily is
growing the conviction that the man whose
income surpasses the service he renders is
not to be envied, for he has not earned
what he has, and an unearned "special
privilege" is not an honor but a disgrace.
Steadily upon even the selfishly ambitious
is borne in the persuasion that "whoso
ever would be first among you shall be
servant of all."
Within the lifetime of those entering
active life to-day, it may be confidently
expected that the same great powers that
are now employed so largely in the building
up of private fortunes and of selfish am
bitions, will be dedicated far more gener
ally to transcendent public service and to
the world-wide interests of the coming

THE CHOICE OF LIFE 35
civilization of brotherly men. In the bring
ing on of that new and better time, when
love and wealth and ambition shall take
on their true honor, because they have
risen to their highest possibilities, the true
man must hope to have his share.
We ask for life ; God answers with larger
life. "He asked life of thee, thou gavest
it him; even length of days forever and
ever." AU real life begins with the choice
of the larger life.

II
THE METHOD OF LIFE
The Way into Life's Values
If one has honestly faced the chaUenge
of his existence, and is ready to make the
decisive choice of life, in the preference
ever for the larger life, the question stiU
remains: How is one to come actuaUy
into this larger life? What is the way
into life's values ? What is life's method ?
It is one of the chief ends of education
to enable one to enter with conviction and
appreciation into the great spheres of value ;
into aesthetic and intellectual and spiritual
ideals ; into the beautiful, the true, and
the good : into music, and literature, and
art ; into the scientific, the historical, and
the philosophic spirit ; into the riches of
friendship ; into moral and religious ideals.
Now it is particularly suggestive that it
may be said that the way into all these
values of life is essentially the same way.
36

THE METHOD OF LIFE 37
For to see that this is the case, brings to
one anew the sense of the singular unity
and simplicity of life, and helps one to dis
cern the great direction for significant
living. One may approach the matter from
several angles with a like result. First
of all, the fact that the Master of the art
of living conceives of his disciples as "the
salt of the earth," suggests at once the
ruling method of life. His method is
simplicity itself — keeping a few men in
companionship with himself, until they
catch his spirit and so become fitted in
their turn to become centers of life for
others. His words, — "Ye are the salt of
the earth : but if the salt have lost its
savor, wherewith shall it be salted?" —
assume two things : the method of the
contagion of the good life; the indispen-
sableness of the integrity of the individual
spirit. The words of Jesus find only an accurate
modern echo in Herrmann's deep-going
summary of the moral law: "Mental
and spiritual fellowship among men, and
mental and spiritual independence on the

38 RELIGION AS LIFE
part of the individual, that is what we can
ourselves recognize to be prescribed to us
by the moral law. Each of the two is a
particular expression of what is morally
good. We ought at every moment to make
the rule of our conduct this : Thou shouldst
throw thy whole being into the effort to
attain the profoundest and most far-reach
ing fellowship with other men that is pos
sible ; and at the same time this also :
Thou shouldst be inwardly independent,
and in virtue of that truly alive. Both of
these propositions go together. For only
by willing what we ourselves recognize
to be eternally the final aim of aU things
can we regard ourselves as independent
beings, and so as free masters of the cir
cumstances in which our existence is placed.
On the other hand, the mental and spiritual
fellowship which we are obliged to con
ceive of as the final aim is possible only
among independent beings. For whoever
lacks inward independence has nothing in
him that he can give to others. In that
case he may indeed, as a thing, serve as a
means employed by others. He renders
this service even without taking any notice

THE METHOD OF LIFE 39
of it. He means to exploit others and is
being exploited by others. FeUowship with
them he can have none."
The analogy of aesthetic appreciation,
as we shall see, would bring us finally to
the same two indispensable elements : fel
lowship and honesty. The method of
modern science, too, is essentially identical.
For all scientific progress involves the co
operation of scientific workers, but requires
at the same time, if this cooperation is to
be of any value, honest independence on
the part of each worker. We can be very
sure that we are, therefore, coming here
close to the secret of life in all its ranges.
The method of life is the method of fellow
ship and of utter inner integrity.
In the first place, one is not prepared
to come into any of the great values of life
without dealing honestly with himself in
the sphere in which he seeks achievement,
whether the values are those of music, or
art, or literature, or of scientific or philo
sophical appreciation, or of friendship, or of
moral and religious ideals. In every case,
any element of pretense is a positive hin
drance. The value of all possible fellowship

40 RELIGION AS LIFE
depends on such honesty, such integrity
of spirit. For that my fellowship with
another who has preceded me in the ap
preciation of aesthetic or spiritual values
should be of worth to me at all, on his part
there must be honest testimony concerning
what he has himself found, and on my part
there must be no pretense of sharing what
I have not yet come to share. One cannot
build solidly on sham anywhere, and pre
tense in one's own original experience or
in one's testimony concerning his experience
alike prevents real growth.
If I am to reach, for example, genuine
musical appreciation of my own, I may not
allow myself idly to echo others' opinions
that either grow out of insights that I do
not have, or bear witness to experiences I
have not yet attained. We are all tempted
to take our values more or less second
hand, because we shrink from both the
intellectual effort and the inner honesty
required to get them first-hand. Mental
and moral laziness is an immense hindrance.
The discerning musical critic has much to
give us, if we will use honestly what he
brings. But he will only hinder our own

THE METHOD OF LIFE 41
growth in musical appreciation, if he does
not bring us to a point where we can see
for ourselves and feel for ourselves some
thing at least of what he points out. When
one of my friends, more honest than most,
reached in his travels the Sistine Chapel
at Rome, to take in, if he might, the glories
of Michael Angelo's ceiling frescoes, he had
to admit a great sense of disappointment.
But he did not hastily conclude that the
fault was all Michael Angelo's ; and, on
the other hand, he was not willing simply
with sham enthusiasm to catch up the
opinions of the critics. While he availed
himself, therefore, of the help of the best
authorities, he insisted on coming back
day after day until he could feel that he
himself had come into some honest ap
preciation of his own of the beauty and
majesty of the figures and ideas there
portrayed. The same law holds even more clearly
in the realm of scientific appreciation. It
is the very essence of the scientific spirit
that one should see straight, should report
exactly, should give an absolutely honest
reaction upon the situation in which he

42 RELIGION AS LIFE
finds himself. Without this complete hon
esty there is no scientific facing of the facts
at all. And it is, I suppose, just this utter
integrity of the inner spirit that Jesus has
in mind when he says, " If the salt have lost
its saltness, wherewith shaU it be salted ?"
Insight in any sphere, that is, must be
genuinely our own or nothing is accom
plished. Insight, appreciation, conviction,
decision, ideal, hope — all these have no
meaning at all if they are simply words
caught up from another, and have not
become realities in our own experience.
The one thing that life cannot stand any
where is sham. And where one consents
in any measure to pretense at any point in
the supposed pursuit of life, he has really
abandoned the method of life and involved
himself in inevitable self-contradiction.
And as there must be honesty in the
original experience, so too there must be
a like honesty, as has been already sug
gested, in all testimony to one's experience.
There must be no careless handing on, in
any of the realms of life, of what we have
not ourselves verified. The literary or
art or musical critic, the scientist, the

THE METHOD OF LIFE 43
friend, the moral or spiritual prophet, who
speaks, as out of his own insight, what he
has only caught up from another, is him
self a fraud, and cannot help another into
reality of life. The whole history of human
thought, however, illustrates how often
it has happened that men have taken up
without verification the opinion of some
supposed authority, to hand it on, some
times for generations, to have it finally
challenged by some honest soul and proved
utterly without foundation.
Modern thought confirms, thus, in many
ways, Jesus' conception of unreality as a
root peril in every realm of life. And Jesus
has no words so scorching as those which he
aims at hypocrisy, fundamental falseness.
Certain great notes of reality, therefore,
come out repeatedly in the teaching of
Jesus. First of all, Jesus builds — as he must if
true to man's nature — directly on the
principle of the unity of the inner life.
He knows that the whole life of a man
tends inevitably and persistently to unity,
to logical consistency ; that any attitude
persisted in tends to permeate the entire

44 RELIGION AS LIFE
spirit of the life, for good or for evil, as the
case may be. "If thine eye be single, thy
whole body shall be full of light," he says,
"but if thine eye be evil, thy whole body
shall be full of darkness ; if, therefore, the
light that is in thee be darkness, how great
is the darkness." The false, the selfish, the
prejudiced taint manifested at any point,
affects the whole hfe. And just as surely,
the true, the loving, the candid spirit any
where shown helps everywhere. It is amaz
ing how surely and immediately this unity
of the spirit makes itself felt.
This conviction of the necessary unity of
the inner life carries with it at once, it
will be seen, the demand for reality every
where, — for utter integrity, even in the in
most man. Just because the life is one,
and cannot possibly be divided off into
mutually exclusive compartments, the spirit
must be sound at every point, with no
slightest trace of falseness. Jesus must,
therefore, say, "If thy right hand cause
thee to stumble, cut it off." "Salt is good ;
but if the salt have lost its saltness, where
with will ye season it? Have salt- in
yourselves."

THE METHOD OF LIFE 45
But if there is to be reality everywhere,
with no taint of sham at any point, the
truth that I declare must be reaUy my own
truth. I must have chosen it and yielded
to it. The principle necessarily involves,
thus, mental and spiritual independence on
the part of the individual — not in the sense
of conceited denial of the indispensable need
of the mental and spiritual fellowship with
others, but in the sense that convictions
and decisions and ideals and hopes that are
effectively to count in my life, must be
genuinely my own — in some true sense
my own achievement. One must see for
himself, and choose for himself. Truth
that is vital he must himself have earned.
Jesus is constantly seeking, therefore, to
bring men to insights, convictions, and
decisions of their own ; to real experience
out of which they can themselves authori
tatively speak. He would not have them
echo unthinkingly even his own convictions.
The spiritual life,, in the nature of the case,
must be purely inward. And therefore he
chaUenges them, "And why, even of your
selves, judge ye not what is right ?" "He
that hath ears to hear, let him hear."

46 RELIGION AS LIFE
His message, consequently, must be
always one not of external authority, but of
the authority of that inner conviction that
comes from direct appeal to the reason and
conscience of men. This, I suppose, is the
reason why his teaching is so largely simply
a series of insights with inevitable appeal.
How many of his sayings are of this sort :
"Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do
good or to do harm ? to save life or to
kill?" "Is the lamp brought to be put
under a bushel or under a bed, and not to
be put on the stand ? " "With what meas
ure ye mete it shall be measured unto you."
" If the blind guide the blind, both shaU fall
into a pit."
These, then, are insistent notes in the
teaching of Jesus, and necessarily involved
in one another : the essential unity of the
spiritual life, utter inner integrity, mental
and spiritual independence on the part of
the individual, the necessary inwardness of
all spirituality, the direct appeal to reason
and conscience.
But we are never to forget that for Jesus
these demands are no mere demands as to
the form of life, but as to its essential con-

THE METHOD OF LIFE 47
tent. His application of the principle of
the unity of hfe is that danger impends if
the virus of the faithless and selfish life
enters at any point. The inner integrity
which he demands is the integrity of a
love genuine through and through, with no
least germ of treachery. The mental and
spiritual independence which he seeks from
his disciples is that they should come for
themselves into his great unshaken con
victions of the infinite love of the Father,
and the possibility of the life of a like self-
forgetful love for every man. Such a life
must have its deep inner root, though it
will have manifold outward expressions.
And Jesus believes so fully in the omnip
otence of the love of the Father, that he
knows that his message of that love must
find echo in the heart of every son of man.
Now these notes of reality in the teaching
of Jesus themselves suggest the way that
one must take into reality in the religious
life. In the first place, it is as if he said :
Settle it with yourselves that the one thing
that you want is truth, to know the will of
God. And this single high determination
to know and to do the will of God is the

48 [RELIGION AS LIFE
greatest possible help in finding the truth,
in finding that will of God. The man who
is saying after Jesus, "I am come, not to do
mine own will, but the will of him that
sent me," and who holds persistently to
that purpose, cannot wish to deceive him
self, to manipulate the evidence, to take
the prejudiced view. As his one desire
is to find the truth, he will welcome every
ray of light from whatever source, and being
utterly true himself, is on the certain way
to truth and reality in his religious life.
For the earnest man cannot faU to see
also that Jesus is here virtually saying to
his disciples, If you would get that real
sharing in the life of God in which anything
that can be called religion must consist,
do not begin to juggle with your reason
and conscience. Do not twist the evidence.
That is to smother the light, to corrupt
the eye. Do not allow the beginning of
prejudice. Do not be a sophist with your
own soul, blinding your own eyes with
smooth persuasions that at bottom you
know are false. Do not hunt for excuses
for doing what you know you ought not
to do. As you value your soul's life and

THE METHOD OF LIFE 49
all that is worth while in life, keep the ab
solutely open mind, the single eye ; be
utterly true to your own best vision. For
no man can set any limit to that to which he
may come, if he begins by juggling with his
reason and conscience.
Jesus' whole uncompromising war upon
the Pharisaic spirit shows how constant in
him is the passion for reality. He perfectly
exemphfies, in the realm of the moral and
spiritual, that of which we think to-day as
the very essence of the scientific spirit at
its best. For he is here insisting with his
disciples, in the third place, that it must
be the habitual purpose of their life, as we
have said of the scientific spirit, to see
straight, to report exactly, to react with
absolute honesty upon the situation in
which they are placed. Less than this at
any point means that one will be both
misled himself, and will mislead others.
The utterly honest reaction is the one
necessity for one's own growth, and it is
at the same time the one great service that
a man can render to his fellow men. And
few men need so much this passion for
reality, this habitual honesty, as the

So RELIGION AS LIFE
teachers of youth. They are blind guides
guiding the blind, unless, with Jesus, the
very habit of their souls is thus to see
straight, to report exactly, to react with
absolute honesty.
And once more, the man who is in dead
earnest to come into reality in religion, wiU
find help in making sure that he sees things
in proportion. One of the chief ends of
education is the production of the thought
ful man; and the thoughtful man is the
man who sees things in true proportion —
who sees life steadily and sees it whole.
It was the distorted vision of the Pharisees
that accounted for so many of their char
acteristics. This it was that made it
possible for them to substitute the negative
for the positive, neutrality and indifference
for commitment and enthusiastic devotion,
the empty for the filled, the sign for the
reahty, the external marvel for the inner
appeal, the outer observance for the inner
spirit, the petty for the great, rules for
principles. Now, however necessary any
or all of the things for which the Pharisees
contended might be, it must stiU be plain
to the man who sees things in proportion

THE METHOD OF LIFE 51
that they are all but of the smallest con
cern, compared with the greatness of the
interests that they replaced. Against this
distorted vision Jesus must protest, if he
is to be true either to his own soul, or to the
God whom he revealed, or to the men whom
he loved.
Jesus cries out in all this for some real
seed of life, no mere show of it, or form of it,
or rule to guard it, but for life itself, abound
ing life — not respectable deadness. And
he felt sure that he who would have this
seed of life, real participation in his own
spirit, genuine sharing in God's life of love,
must be vigilantly on his guard against
these manifestations of the blinded soul.
Why, now, is Christ so insistent upon
the integrity of the inner spirit ? In the
first place, just because the whole progress
of the kingdom of righteousness depends
upon the absolute soundness of the indi
vidual life. Jesus must be insistent here.
Dead seed wiU give no harvest.
Moreover, he felt the deadening effect
of many tendencies of his own time, and
he must save his disciples from that trend
toward externalism, toward conventionality,

52 RELIGION AS LIFE
and toward mere authority, which so char
acterized his age. And like tendencies
continue to work in every generation.
The man who would be real, who would be
awake, who would be himself, must resist
daily the pressure of authority, of the ex
ternal, of the conventional. We need the
sharp, unsparing criticisms of the most
ruthless prickers of bubbles, like Nietsche
and Ibsen and Shaw ; not, once more, that
we may follow them blindly, but that we
may be sure that we have not substituted
the mere conventions of custom for genuine
moral insights and enthusiasms. Inner in
tegrity and individual, independent in
sight and conviction, — upon these de
pends the moral health of the world.
Everything is here at stake, and the en
vironment threatens.
But the peril of failure at this point has
a still further reason. The paradoxical
demands of the moral life themselves make
failure easy.
Conscience demands both mental and
spiritual fellowship, and mental and spirit
ual independence. Just because we need
others so much and so decisively, it is easy

THE METHOD OF LIFE 53
to surrender all independence and initiative
of our own, easy to forget that truth is
not truth until it has been earned. Just
because we must modestly admit that we
constantly require the witness of others who
have preceded us in the experience of values,
it is easy to allow ourselves simply to repeat
their confessions after them, instead of
compelling ourselves to see for ourselves
as they saw for themselves. In another's
words, "Religious tradition is indispensable
for us. But it helps us only if it leads us
on to listen to what God says to ourselves. "
"We all need moral help from others, but
not the substitution of a ready-made list
of duties for the results of our own think
ing." So, too, just because the inner spirit
must have its external embodiment, some
form of outward expression, if it is actually
to work in the world at all; just because
the external is, in this, indispensable, it is
all too easy to insist upon the external, and
be careless whether it is — what it must
be if it is to be of any value — the inevitable
manifestation of an inner life. We may make
glass flowers so cunningly devised that we

54 RELIGION AS LIFE
can hardly tell them from the real blossom,
but there is no life in them, no least evi
dence of an unfolding life.
So, too, just because one cannot bring
in light without dispelling darkness, just
because one cannot bring into the soul great
causes and great enthusiasms without
thereby casting out the evil, and even the
petty; just because all positive enthusiasms
involve in themselves certain negations, it
is easy to mistake the negations and the
subsidiary means for ends in themselves,
and make negation the goal of life, and be
content with the empty soul. The petty
then replaces the great; "the hedge" of
the law, the great ends of justice and mercy
and faith. Emptiness is substituted for
the engrossing enterprises of the kingdom
of righteousness.
Thus, in varying forms, the paradoxical
claims of the moral life themselves make it
easy to fail at the vital point. For in any
one of these ways there may insidiously
come in the creeping paralysis of inner
futility and falseness. It is because of this
constant peril of failure at the center of
life that Jesus is here so insistent. I sup-

THE METHOD OF LIFE 55
pose that Jesus' insistence means that, if
he were to address the graduates of our
colleges to-day, the questions that would
seem to him vital are such as these : Have
you any vision of your own ? Have you
moral and spiritual insights that mean
anything to you? Have you God-given
convictions wrought into the very fiber
of your own life ? Have you any message
that is yours, and that you feel that you
must utter ? Have you any indignations
and enthusiasms that shake you to the
center of your being ? If your college
education has left you without these ; or,
worse still, if it has robbed you of them and
left you sophisticated and blase, having
mistaken moral and religious indifference
for tolerance, and lack of conviction for
breadth, then may God forgive you and
the coUege, for no other can.
But side by side with this indispensable
inner integrity, the method of life requires
as equally fundamental, fellowship. Hon
esty is not inconsistent with modesty. It
rather requires the open mind. For while
one insists on that complete honesty that
does not aUow him to catch up, without

56 RELIGION AS LIFE
interpreting experience, the opinions of
another, there should obviously be at the
same time the modest perception that one
has probably not exhausted in his own ex
perience the meaning of any of the great
values. And he may weU expect, therefore,
if he goes honestly forward, to share in
creasingly in the larger insights of those
who have lived most in these spheres of
value. Just as in the realm of the aesthetic
and of the scientific and of the philosophical
we cherish just such expectations, so in the
realm of the moral and religious we have a
right to hope for much more in the line of
the experience of those who have given here
most time and thought. We need their
testimony, their leading ; we may weU
clearly recognize it, and keep toward them
the open mind. We wish to share in the
deeper convictions of the great souls every
where, but we wish really to share and not
to have fellowship in name only.
The fact is that the rule in all the realms
of life is that we are commonly introduced
through the testimony of some other who
has preceded us in appreciation of the value
we are seeking. We are born into a world

THE METHOD OF LIFE 57
in which many are already living in these
values. Our insights here cannot, in the
nature of the case, all be fresh discoveries of
our own. The constant and immensely
effective factor of imitation in human re
lationships makes it certain that we cannot,
if we would, avoid this introduction into
the great values. And he would doom him
self to a poverty-stricken life indeed, who
should attempt the folly of discovering all
values for himself. Is it not the very busi
ness of the literary or art critic, of the
teacher, of the scientific worker, of the
friend, and of the religious leader to share
with us their own best ? Just because
"art is long and time is fleeting," we may
not hope that all the insights into which
we come are to be discoveries of our own.
And it is commonly through this introduc
tion of some other that aU the values have
come to us. The books, the pictures, the
interests, the friends, the moral and spirit
ual ideals which we have in our inner pos
session, have largely come to us at the
beginning through the testimony of others.
That this should be the rule in religion also
is therefore quite to be expected. It is

58 RELIGION AS LIFE
natural, then, that Professor Bosworth
should be able to say that the program of
Christianity is the conquest of the world
by a campaign of testimony through em
powered witnesses. And it is no accident
that in the Gospel of John, side by side with
the great words Light, and Life, and Love,
there is another — Witness.
The fellowship that life requires is always
a double fellowship. For there are just
two services of supreme value that one
man can render another : he can lay upon
that other the impress of a high and noble
character by being the kind of man he
ought to be; and he can share with the
other his own best vision — that by which
he himself most lives. Beyond this there
is nothing of supreme worth that one can
bring into another's life. And this method
of the contagion of the good life, in the
sharing of its spirit and of its vision, is
everywhere the method of hfe.
Jesus has used various illustrations to
make clear his sense of the only way in
which society can be brought to its true
goal. Only men can save men. The good
hfe is the salt that must preserve the earth

THE METHOD OF LIFE 59
sound. It is the light that must enlighten
the world's darkness. It is the leaven that
must permeate every element of the lump
of society. It is the seed of life that must
grow and reproduce itself. The kingdom
of love can be established only through the
loving life. It cannot be legislated into
existence. It cannot be created out of
hand. Life comes only from life. This
is the theory and method of Jesus, and it
does seem, at first sight, hopelessly simple
and ridiculously inadequate.
And yet the method of the contagion of
the good life is a hopeful method. It is
with great hope in his heart that Jesus
sets himself, thus, through the divine touch
of his own life, to create out of the little
circle about him this life-giving seed and
nucleus of the world's civilization. For
he has matchless faith in the contagion of
the good, in its capacity for growth. If
one would have a figure of what may be
expected from the single good life hidden
in society's mass, let him look, he says, at
the million-fold growth of a single grain of
mustard seed; such is the promise of the
good seed of the Kingdom, divinely quick-

60 RELIGION AS LIFE
ened. The hidden forces of the universe
— the power of Almighty God — are in
the seed. The good life is the life that
seeks the ends of God, and he who seeks
the ends of God may count upon the power
of God. Surely the Kingdom of God is
like a grain of mustard seed ; we may
believe and hope endlessly. Salt will pre
serve, light will enlighten, leaven will work,
life will grow. The good life is inevitably
and mightily contagious. We may count
upon it for every germ of good in ourselves,
in those we love, in the world. We are to
keep high our hope.
Nevertheless, men scout the forces that
Jesus counted alone sufficient, as hope
lessly feeble. The power of a loving life
— how little, they have said, can it do !
And through the generations, they have
brought, for example, the whole enginery
of the state to bear, with force and violence
and punishment, upon the criminal, only to
drive him further into crime. While claim
ing the name of Christ, they have scorn
fully abjured the methods of Christ as
weakly sentimental and ineffective. It is
against this infidelity of professedly Chris-

THE METHOD OF LIFE 61
tian states, against the unspeakable folly
of. refusing to use the only , omnipotent
forces, that Tolstoy has justly cried out.
And it is the greatest glory of our own time,
that in it are found men, who are slowly
regaining the faith of Jesus in the omnip
otence of the humble, believing, loving life.
Judge Lindsey's marvelous Juvenile Court
record is a plain translation into a piece
of modern life, of Christ's own method of the
contagion of the loving life. And the
increasing adoption of the "big brother"
method in Juvenile Courts is only an ex
hibition of the same spirit. It is no cheap
and easy method. But open-minded humil
ity and trust and patient self -giving love are
proving the only really effective forces for the
conquest of evil. « The method of the con
tagion of the loving life is a hopeful method.
The simplicity of Christ's method im
plies, further, that ultimately it is the in
evitable method ; that the only thing,
finally, that any man has to give is him
self — the contagion of his own spirit.
If that self is significant and worthy, so is
his service. If the self is worthless, so is
all attempted service. No machinery, no

62 RELIGION AS LIFE
device, no externals of any kind, no magic,
no miracle, can get worthful service out of a
worthless self. Neither education nor re
ligion can furnish a way by which one may
trick the laws of hfe. Acute lawyers may
find loop-holes in human legislation, but
there is no way of tricking the laws of
God. There is no possible manipulation
by which life can be gotten from death,
truth from falsity, genuineness from sham.
Both the critics and the defenders of
educational methods, therefore, are quite
certain to exaggerate. There is, no doubt,
a choice in methods. But the one final
method back of all subsidiary methods is the
contact of life with life. Ultimately the
one indispensable thing is a man of char
acter and judgment, and the honest re
sponse of honest souls to such a soul.
Granted that, the most faulty methods
cannot wholly fail. Lacking that, the most
scientific pedagogy will not suffice. The
method of the contagion of the good life
is the inevitable method. Finally we are
shut up to that.
This method of Jesus, too, is a positive
method. Jesus cares for no goodness that

THE METHOD OF LIFE 63
is merely negative. The only goodness he
knows is the goodness of a positive, minister
ing, self -forgetting, self-giving love. It is
the very business of salt to season, of light
to enlighten, of yeast to leaven, of the seed
to die to itself and live again in far larger
life. The stupidity of shutting any one of
these up to itself, of depriving them of their
very reason for being, is, in Jesus' thought,
exactly the stupidity of the righteousness
that exhausts itself in separation of itself
from evU, in shutting out the possibility of
contamination. As surely as the salt is to
season the savorless, and as light is to en
lighten darkness, so is goodness to penetrate
the world with its own spirit and throw it
self with abandon into the life of the world
for the world's saving. The method of
love is perforce the method of fellowship.
It may not withdraw itself from association
with men without losing its own identity.
The disciple of Christ, therefore, knows
that it is self-contradiction to talk of saving
oneself in forgetfulness of others. The
righteousness of the Kingdom is the right
eousness of high and positive and loving
conquest, the carrying through of great

64 RELIGION AS LIFE
enterprises of good for men. Goodness, in
Christ's thought, is not only not uninterest
ing, it is the one most interesting of all
things. The disciple of the righteous life,
therefore, feels the express obligation and the
high privilege of mental and spiritual f eUow-
ship, of constantly multiplying and deepen
ing relations with men.
The method of the contagion of the good
life is a positive, aggressive method. It is
hopeful, inevitable, positive.
But all the values of literature, and music,
and art, of science and philosophy, of
friendship, and of moral and religious ideals,
are after all but a partial revelation of the
riches of some personality, and our one great
road, therefore, into life in all realms
is this road of personal association with the
richest, the largest, the best lives. The
greater and the more significant the values
we are seeking, the more do we need to share
the visions of many concerning them, and
these, the best. It must be peculiarly
true for the religious man, with his search
for fellowship with the Infinite, that he
needs imperatively the supplementary
visions of all the greatest souls.

THE METHOD OF LIFE 65
The one all-inclusive counsel, therefore,
as I have elsewhere said, for attainment in
all of the spheres of value is this: Stay
persistently in the presence of the best in
the sphere in which you seek achievement,
with honest response ; the rest will largely
take care of itself. Hear persistently the
best in music, and only the best ; one need
not be anxious under those circumstances
concerning his musical taste ; it will steadily
refine, and his judgment become more and
more accurate. See persistently the best
and only the best in art ; once again, the
reaction on one's own artistic judgment is
practically certain. Read persistently the
best in literature ; the poor stuff will faU
off of itself, and one will come instinctively
to prefer that which deserves his approval.
Share persistently in the insights and
methods of the ablest workers in science,
and history and philosophy; no one can
then cheat you of real participation of your
own in the historical, the scientific, or the
phUosophical spirit. Stay persistently in
the presence of the best in character, in
moral and religious ideal; the richest re
sults that life has to offer are then insured

66 RELIGION AS LIFE
to you. This is precisely the principle
which Paul enjoins when he writes : "What
soever things are true, whatsoever things
are honorable, whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of
good report ; if there be any virtue, and if
there be any praise, think on these things."
It is well that we should make it per
petually clear to ourselves that, when, in
any of the realms of value, we give the
best, opportunity with us, we are reaUy
sharing in the personal revelation of some
personal life. The supreme law of life is
this law of personal association, in which we
give time and thought and attention to the
wealth of those personalities that have most
to give. There is no cheaper road to the
best in any realm. Life knows no less
costly method than this persistent associa
tion with those to whom we can look in
admiration and love, and who are ready to
share unstintedly with us the best that
they have themselves achieved. And we
can count with certainty on the effects of
this law of personal association. No one,
perhaps, has put more impressively than

THE METHOD OF LIFE 67
George Eliot this need of the incarnate
ideal, in a passage that I have often quoted :
"Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun-
fiUed eyes cannot discern them — they pass
athwart us in their vapor, and cannot make
themselves felt. But sometimes they are
made flesh ; they breathe upon us with warm
breath, they touch us with soft responsive
hands, they look at us with sad sincere
eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones;
they are clothed in a living human soul,
with aU its conflicts, its faith, and its love.
Then their presence is a power, then they
shake us like a passion, and we are drawn
after them with gentle compulsion, as flame
is drawn to flame."
This law of association means, further,
that just as we require from those whose
testimony concerning any of the great values
is to count with us, that they shall them
selves have undoubted conviction, character
and judgment that we can trust, manifest
disinterestedness, and the power to make
their witness real and rational and vital;
so for us also, who in our turn are to help
others into the great values of life, there
is need of these same qualities of effective

68 RELIGION AS LIFE
testimony. And there is no way to these
very qualities so sure as this same way of
persistent association with those who have
achieved most in these realms of value.
Moreover, if in "all these realms we are
dealing not with vain imaginations, but
with reality, we can be sure that the great
law of personal association means also,
that we have no need in any realm to pre
tend, or to put pressure upon our minds
to reach a certain attitude or position.
We have one obligation only, and that is
simply to let the great facts and values
make their own legitimate impression. The
great values do not need that we should
force our minds to faith in them ; they need
only opportunity and honest response.
And if the best does not attract us, we
have not so much judged it, as been judged
by it.
It is true that different kinds of values
make a different kind of appeal to the
human personality. What an "honest re
sponse" means, therefore, varies somewhat
with the realm of value concerned. But
an honest response to any value requires
some element of activity on our part,

THE METHOD OF LIFE 69
 7 
either the activity of intellectual appre
hension, or of warm aesthetic appreciation,
or of earnest ethical commitment of will.
And where character and moral or religious
ideal are involved, it is plain that the ap
peal is made to the whole man to a degree
that does not hold of the lesser values.
Here, then, it is not enough that we should
respond simply with intellectual apprehen
sion or with aesthetic admiration ; here we
must make answer with commitment of
will and the loyal response of our whole
being. The ethical and religious challenge
us to decision that cannot be gainsaid:
WiU you or won't you have it so ?
But just because all the great values of
life go back to the revelation of the riches
of some great personality, our plain life-
task, as Kaftan used to say at the Uni
versity of Berlin, is to enter with conviction
and appreciation into the understanding
of the great personalities of history. Herr
mann has already been quoted as saying:
" We ought at every moment to make the
rule of our conduct this : Thou shouldst
throw thy whole being into the effort to
attain the profoundest and most far-reach-

70 RELIGION AS LIFE
 w  '
ing fellowship with other men that is pos
sible." And this, both for giving and for
receiving. For the strengthening of our
own life, and so for greater power to give,
we peculiarly need the fellowship of the
best lives. Our great life-task, therefore,
may be truly said to be, to come into some
rewarding fellowship with the great souls
of human history; with the great artists,
and discoverers, and seers, and heroes, and
saints, culminating in the matchless life of
Jesus, until we reflect, however imperfectly,
something of their character and of their
vision of beauty, and truth, and God.
"The prophet," Professor James says, "has
drunk more deeply than any one of the cup
of bitterness, but his countenance is so un
shaken and he speaks such mighty words of
cheer, that his will becomes our will, and
our life is kindled at his own."
The method of life is the method of
mental and spiritual feUowship, as weU as
the method of mental and spiritual in
dependence, — the contagion of the good
life. Men are to be salt, and the salt must
not have lost its saltness.

Ill
THE REALITIES OF LIFE
Facing the Facts of Life
We have seen that the method of life
includes, as indispensable, utter honesty,
open-minded facing of the facts, and honest
reaction upon them. And the really honest
man must be willing to face all the facts,
— not only the facts that lie upon the sur
face, but the facts of the whole man ; the
less obvious but deeper realities ; the facts
that underlie man's whole ideal struggle.
What would that mean to the thoughtful
man? I suppose there are few things that the
real man or woman hates more than simply
to mark time — to go through the motions
of things without getting anywhere. And
surely, if there is any place where, above
all, the real man does not wish to mark time,
it must be in the region of his moral and
spiritual life. It seems, therefore, pecul-
71

72 RELIGION AS LIFE
iarly worth while, at times, to call up into
clear consciousness those silent assump
tions that underlie all earnest moral and
religious endeavor. Beneath all such in
dividual effort, beneath all the activities
and services of the Church, beneath all the
labor of Christian education, beneath aU
the ideal enterprises of the race, there lies,
first of all, the clear assumption that the
supreme interests are those of character;
that, as Thomas Arnold used to say to the
boys at Rugby, whence have gone out so
many of the leaders of English political hfe,
"The only thing of moment in life or in
man is character" ; or, as another has put
it, "The great soul will be strong to hve,
as well as to think." To have failed here,
is fundamental failure, whether for the in
dividual or the civilization. For, as Eucken
says, "every culture that does not treat
the ethical task, in the widest sense, as the
most important of tasks, and the one that
decides all, sinks inevitably to a mere sem
blance of culture, a half culture, indeed a
comedy." But this assumption, which underlies
all effort to attain noble living, implies

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 73'
another : that convictions and decisions
and ideals and hopes are needed. For
character does not spring up out of vacancy.
It roots in certain great convictions ; it
expresses itself in certain great decisions ;
it is guided by certain great ideals ; and
it is inspired by certain great hopes. And
the only thing that justifies the agencies
of morals and religion, and all our efforts
and our studies and our plans is that out
of them, somehow, we expect that there
shall come some producing, some deepening,
some maintaining at least, of convictions,
decisions, ideals, and hopes. Unless some
thing of that is attained, we merely go
through the motions of things ; we mark
time ; we do not achieve.
But this assumption, in turn, involves
another, that time and thought and atten
tion are necessary. For no man can come
by mere drifting into significant convictions
and decisions and ideals and hopes. They
necessarily imply that we have stood, with
time and thought and attention, in the
presence of the abiding truths — of the
majestic facts that make for character and
for reality in the spiritual life, and given

74 RELIGION AS LIFE
them opportunity with us. Every thought
ful appeal to men, every service of the
Church and every agency of the Church,
and every ideal claim go back ultimately
to this assumption, that men need to give
time and thought and attention, if the
things of the spirit are to have for them the
grip of reality. In the long run, we may
not forget, the world of the spirit is hkely
to be real to its, in just about the propor
tion in which we allow it to become real
by earnest honest attention.
There is still one more of these sUent
assumptions of all the ideal activities:
that these questions of the moral and
spiritual life, as we have already seen, are
always individual questions. No man may
act iri another's place. A decision is no
decision, if it be not the man's own. Truth
that is truth must be earned. Faith, a great
philosopher urges, is a deed. One's father
may bequeath to one his fortune, but he
cannot bequeath his convictions. One's
mother may give to one some precious
heirloom; she cannot give, much as she
might desire to do so, her ideals or her
decisions. Convictions and ideals and de-

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 75
cisions are essentially individual, and they
must be continually reaffirmed even for
the same individual from time to time, and
still more for every generation. One is
reminded of that great picture of Raphael's,
"The School at Athens," with the little
group of students gathered about a geo
metrical demonstration on the floor. One
pupU is manifestly following the teacher
with full appreciation, evidently getting
his own insight. Another pupil, not quite
catching the point, looks up with inquiry
at the one bending over him to find whether
he sees. Now it is no help to the second
pupil that the first sees ; it would be no
help to him to find that the third saw. He
must himself see, if the truth of the demon
stration is to be his at all. In like manner,
in the whole realm of the moral and spirit
ual life, if we are to see at all, we must
see for ourselves. "Faith is a deed."
But if the supreme interests are those of
character; if, therefore, convictions and
decisions and ideals and hopes are requisite ;
if to this end, time and thought and atten
tion are necessary; and if these questions
of the spiritual life are inevitably individual

76 RELIGION AS LIFE
questions — that no other can meet in
our place — then, the very determination
not to mark time in the spiritual life, must
carry us infallibly into a steady honest
facing of the facts of life — the outstanding
realities of the moral and religious life.
For convictions, decisions, ideals, and hopes
can arise within us only by honest reaction
upon the facts.
This age has been, in singular degree,
an age of intellectual revolution. And yet
there remain, in spite of this enormous in
tellectual revolution, certain great, com
mon, human facts that are just the same,
and that give abiding significance to human
life. These do not vary with the trappings
of civilization. Human nature remains.
Our true life lies not primarily in relation
to things, but in relation to persons. The
outstanding realities, then, that it most
concerns us all steadily and honestly to
face, are those great common facts that
belong alike and equally to all of us simply
as human beings. They abide through all
intellectual changes. They are essentiaUy
the same to-day as they were centuries ago,
and shall be the same centuries hence ;

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 77
the same for the West as for the East ;
the same everywhere.
The question, then, that chiefly concerns
the soul in earnest pursuit of life is this :
Am I wilhng to face the facts of life, or am
I ignoring them — the great, common,
essential human facts ? I cannot forget
that my own old college president used to
remind us that the essence of unbelief was
not denial of the truth, but refusal to treat
the truth as true. That is all. We are
not measured by the truths that we deny,
but by the truths that, recognizing, we
stiU are practically ignoring. That is,
therefore, a momentous sentence that lies
so near the beginning of Coleridge's Aids to
Reflection: "Truths, of all others the most
awful and interesting, are too often regarded
as so true, that they lose all the power of
truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory
of the soul, side by side with the most
despised and exploded errors." Our real
inner creed is not that list of propositions,
short or long, that we might be persuaded
to write out some day in our libraries, but
that much shorter list that we are ready,
steadily, day after day, to put into our life.

78 RELIGION AS LIFE
That is our real inner creed. But as
Gladstone long ago said: "Many men
know their opinions, few their convictions ;
but in the long run convictions rule, opin
ions go to the wall." And convictions come
only from honest reaction on the facts. It
is a matter of supreme moment, then, that
a man should not ignore the fundamental
facts of his own being and life.
Here, the man who means to show utter
inner integrity, must be willing squarely to
face, not only the facts that lie on the sur
face of his life, but those less obvious but
deep-going facts that underlie man's entire
endeavor for the accomplishment of ideal
aims.
1 First of all, the honest man cannot aUow
himself to ignore the laws of life, involved
in his very nature. That is a very signif
icant definition of education which Huxley
gives: "Education is the instruction of
the intellect in the laws of nature — under
which name I include not merely things
and their forces, but men and their ways ;
and the fashioning of the affections and the
will into an earnest and loving desire to
move in harmony with those laws." Now,

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 70
it is of the very essence of the moral life
that a man should thus come to know and
obey the laws of life. And the thoughtful
facing of the facts of life surely includes
just this readiness to see and obey these
laws that are involved in man's very nature.
Now religion must look upon these laws of
fundamental human nature as laws of God,
the creator of that nature, and as, therefore,
laws of enlarging life, to be taken on not
reluctantly, but with joyful eagerness, as a
part of the will of the loving God. The
ethical and religious come here inevitably
together. To refuse to recognize these
facts of the immanent laws of our beings,
is to run away from life altogether.
One may approach the matter from a
slightly different angle, when he recognizes,
as among those facts that underlie man's
whole ideal struggle, the fact that the sense
of beauty, the sense of truth, and the sense
of duty belong to normal human endow
ment. Men have differed widely enough
in their judgments as to what is beautiful,
as to what is true, as to what is duty ; but
that a creature had no sense of beauty or
truth or duty would seem to us equivalent

80 RELIGION AS LIFE
to asserting that the human plane had not
been reached at all. That is, we simply
cannot question man's ideal endowment.
At the lowest, he is inevitably more than a
mere creature of the senses. He cannot
find all his life only in the change of raw
sensations. Man shall not live by bread
alone. To refuse to face this fact insures
inner discord, — makes it certain that one
must live at cross purposes with himself.
What would it not mean, on the other hand,
honestly to take account of this fact, that
in the fundamental structure of one's being,
one is made forever to seek truth, to fulfill
duty, to reach out not only for the appre
hension, but for the embodiment, of some
real beauty of life ?
To face these more basic facts of human
nature would mean also to ask the question,
How deep-going is religious faith? how
essential is it to normal humanity? And
one can hardly follow to the end that in
quiry without seeing, as I have elsewhere
pointed out,1 that a faith essentially re
ligious, logically underlies all our reason
ing, all work worth doing, aU strenuous
1 Personal and Ideal Elements in Education, pp. 90-98. !

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 81
moral endeavor, all earnest social ser
vice. I do not repeat the argument here ;
but even so absolutely fundamental is
rehgion, that we must affirm and reaffirm
it implicitly in every act of our lives. For
in every one of the realms named we are
constantly obhged virtually to assert the
possibUity of a goal that assumes a larger
reason and plan and purpose than can be
given by finite beings. We seem quite
unable otherwise to bring into our lives
unity or meaning or harmony or permanent
value. If we may not assert the essential
certainty of religious faith, we seem doomed
only to fruitless agony of thought, every
where baffled of its goal. And then it is
useless to talk about the possibility of
rational thinking at aU. Are we facing
this basic faith, involved in our very natures,
and building consistently upon it ? In the
background of all the rest of life, thus, lies
the mighty all-inclusive fact of God and of
the possibility of living relation to him.
If we have any access to ultimate reality
at all, then, the thoughtful man will not
need to feel that he must manufacture a
rehgion for himself or for others. He

82 RELIGION AS LIFE
knows men's need of God, and he believes
that the fact of God is so great a fact, that
it will verify itself to those who will give it
access to mind and life. Nevertheless, this
supreme, all-inclusive fact of God and of
the possibility of relation to him is not
the fact first reached, and is not to be
taken as a matter of course for men.
Rather is it, as has been imphed, the out
come of fidelity to many other facts, that
themselves silently assume at each step the
reality of God.
But when one speaks of honest adjust
ment to the facts of life, he must think not
only of these deeper underlying prerequisites
of all human endeavor, which we have been
considering, but also of those common out
standing spiritual reahties of the dahy
life of men.
Of these daily facts there is, to begin
with, the fact of our double nature : that
we have that in us which links us with the
animal downward, and that in us which
links us not less certainly with God upward.
No man who means to live the life that he
ought to live can leave that fact out of
account. We are not to be spared the fight,

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 83
which that fact involves. Whatever one
believes about evolution, he cannot doubt
in his own experience the fact of the inner
conflict between flesh and spirit. And
neither for himself, nor for those whom most
he loves, may the earnest man forget this
fact or think the fight quickly over. There
is a paradox involved, for the goal is not
ascetic, and the sense good is a real good.
And yet the struggle cannot be evaded.
The fact of man's double nature, moreover,
concerns not youth alone ; for the sensuality
of the older man, though more cold-blooded,
may be even more deadly and deadening
than the hot passion of youth. And there
is a subtler sensuality that is hardly rec
ognized as such at all. We are all tempted,
under the pressure of our present material
civUization, to allow in some form or other
the material aspect of things to dominate
the ideal, to make the sense world really
supreme. But it is still as true as when
the words were first written, that aU of us
have need to guard ourselves against the
"lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes,
and the vainglory of life." It was not for
nothing that one of the world's best fighters

84 RELIGION AS LIFE
said of himself: "I buffet my body and
bring it into bondage : lest by any means,
after that I have preached to others, I
myself should be rejected." "I therefore
so run," he says, "as not uncertainly;
so fight I, as not beating the air." When
does a man really face the fact of his double
nature? Not until he is making it sure
that he is living his hfe on such a plan that
the hold of the animal on him is steadily
weakening, and the hold of the Godlike
on him is steadily strengthening.
Side by side with this fact of our double
nature is the fact of the fateful gift of wiU.
We can choose with God, we can choose
against God, and this choice can be made
by no other. It is no merely metaphysical
question which is thus raised. Whatever
one's philosophical formulation of the per
ennial question of freedom and necessity,
no one doubts that men have much to do
with the shaping of their own characters.
It was one of the least sentimental of our
poets who compared this fateful fact of
will with that other fact, that men often
think so solemn — the fact of death, to
remind us that this is still more solemn :

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 85
Men think it is an awful sight,
To see a soul just set adrift,
On that drear voyage from whose night
The ominous shadows never lift ;
But 'tis more awful to behold
A helpless infant, newly born,
Whose Httle hands unconscious hold
The keys of darkness and of morn.
And he goes on to make the man who has
come down to an unworthy end say :
Mine held them once ; I flung away
Those keys that might have open set
The golden sluices of the day,
But clutch the keys of darkness yet ;
I hear the reapers singing go
Into God's harvest. I who might
With them have chosen, here below,
Grope shuddering at the gates of night.
What would it be rationally, squarely,
honestly, to face this fateful gift of will ?
Not less, one must think, than this : that
one should make it certain, once more, that
he is living his life on such a plan as to in
sure that the righteous will is gaining in
steadiness, in breadth of application, in
depth of application, and in skill and tact
and delicacy of application. It ought to be
true, that is, as the years pass over our

86 RELIGION AS LIFE
heads, that we should find it more and more
second nature steadily to do that which we
believe we ought to do. There should be
less feeble vacillation of will. It ought
to be true, with our widening knowledge,
that we should now be awake to whole
spheres of human life in which we have ob
ligations, to which we used to be blind.
It ought to be true as a man deepens the
meaning of life for himself in his own ex
perience, that there should deepen at the
same time a sense of his obligation to his
fellow men. And it ought to be true as
he comes into a sense of what fine, reverent,
personal relations mean, that he should be
capable now of a tact and skiU and delicacy
that his youth could not know.
With the fact of wilf, the honest man
must recognize, also, the fact of responsi
bility, — that we are members one of
another. For this is of the very essence
of the moral universe. This conviction
should peculiarly characterize this age,
that glories in its claim to be called the age
of the social consciousness. For if we have
become convinced that economically,
sociaUy, and politically we are members

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 87
one of another, we can hardly fail to draw
the certain inference that we are not less
members one of another in the highest
ranges of our lives. And no man belongs
truly to the age of the social consciousness
who does not recognize the fact of this
mutual responsibility as not alone inevit
able, but as desirable and indispensable ;
who would be willing if he could, to have
his life cut off from these rich relations to
other lives. The man who refuses to face
this fact of responsibility, who can say of
himself — "I do not care to influence any
body," needs to be reminded that the in
evitable relations of his life make it certain
that he cannot go up or down alone ; that
he has no choice as to whether he shall
influence others ; he can only choose what
kind of influence he shall exert. Steadily,
hour in, hour out, day in, day out, we are
all tending to bring to our level, with the
whole power of whatever personality we
have, those about us, pulling them down to
our level, or raising them up to it, as the
case may be. We are inextricably members
one of another.
And how powerful a motive this inevitable

88 RELIGION AS LIFE
connection of one's life with others' lives
may be, William Canton suggests in the
poem addressed to his little daughter, in
which he compares her influence to the
power of the angels.
God's angels, dear, have six great wings,
Of silver and of gold.
Two round their heads ; two round their hearts ;
Two round their feet they fold.
The angel of a man I know,
Has just two hands — so small !
Yet they're more strong than six gold wings
To keep him from a fall.
In his own darkest and weakest hours, when
it seems to him that he does not care at aU
for himself, let a man use with himself this
powerful motive ; let him make it clear
to himself that it is utterly impossible for
him to go down alone or to go up alone.
One cannot fail and not make the fight
harder for every other life that is touched
by his ; and one cannot conquer and not
help thereby every one of these related
lives. The moral and religious life of one
city of one of our great central states re
ceived a deadly thrust, because two men
widely known and greatly trusted proved

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 89
utterly false. On the other hand, it is our
great privilege, by simple • fidelity of life,
to make another's fight less bitter, to make
it easier for him to believe in truth and
honor and purity and God. We are mem
bers one of another.
The earnest man cannot fail to face, also,
the fact of men's capacity for indefinite
growth. Breathing through the whole life
of the earnest man, there is to be the con
viction, that'there came a time in the history
of the world, when there was introduced
a creature in whom psychical changes
meant more than physical ; a being once
for aU made capable of endless progress in
knowledge, in power, in character. Brown
ing has emphasized for all this generation
that it is the great single characteristic
of man that he is a growing creature, and
that to that growth no limits can be set.
A man is turning his back, therefore, upon
his destiny as a man, unless he is making
sure that he is laying foundations broad
and strong for endless development. He
must lay claim here to his destiny as a
man, and make sure of the glory of life
through certain and steady growth. For

90 RELIGION AS LIFE
the opportunity of this endless progress for
man lays upon him at once the universal
obligation of growth. He owes a steadily
developing life to himself, to his friends,
to the world, to God. He owes it to him
self to plan for persistent growth. In
the words of President Jordan, "Your
first duty in life is toward your after-self.
So live that your after-self — the man you
ought to be — may in his time be possible
and actual." Only through such a growing
self, too, can he meet the obligation he
owes to his friends, to the world, or to God.
No one can claim, therefore, to be facing
squarely and honestly this momentous fact
of his capacity for indefinite progress, unless
he is making certain of constant develop
ment. In the last analysis, as one has so
often to see, we none of us have anything
to give but ourselves, and those selves
must be steadily richer and more signifi
cant. It may well stir in any man an
endless ambition, that he is made on so
large and divine a plan that to his growth
no limits can be set. One large element,
too, of a man's courage in his work must be,
that he recognizes that he works for others,

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 91
also, who are capable of this same endless
progress into likeness to God, and therefore
for those who are abundantly worthy of
the faithful exercise of every power he has,
and of aU needed sacrifice.
But if the honest man is to recognize,
on the one hand, as undoubted, this capac
ity of men for endless growth, he cannot
shut his eyes, on the other, to the equally
certain fact of sin, which our modern
novels and the daily paper, as well as the
ancient rehgious literatures of the world,
are forced to admit as an abiding fact. It
is quite as imperative that one should not
forget that sin is a growing fact, as well, in
a man's life, unless he is steadfastly setting
his face in the right direction. With his
faith in God, and his faith in man's capacity
for endless progress, the man who is to
throw himself with earnestness into the
struggle of the race for character and spirit
ual achievement, has to recognize the fact
of sin with absolute honesty but not with
discouragement. The optimism of Jesus
is no blind and shallow optimism. It is
able to take into account the darkest facts.
Nor can the honest man deny in his own

92 RELIGION AS LIFE
experience the fact of sin. He knows hbw
often he has seen far better than he has done.
And the unfulfilled vision is his unanswered
accuser. He needs to be vigilantly watch
ful, therefore, not so much against the
onsets of overwhelming attacks, as against
that subtle) gradual, deadly deterioration
that damns himself and damns those for
whom he would labor. One need not fear
for those whom most he loves, that they
shall suddenly, under some tempest of
temptation, be swept over the precipice
of outrageous wickedness. That practi
cally never happens. Long before the
gross defiance of righteousness arrived, the
battle was lost within, the inner guard had
been broken down ; the man had failed in
the inner citadel. In confronting frankly
the fact of sin, therefore, our chief fear
must be of that subtle and gradual deteriora
tion that sets in and goes on almost uncon
sciously to the man, until it eats out the
very heart of his life. This is the lesson of
that terrible book of Harold Frederic, The
Damnation of Theron Ware. For the dam
nation of Theron Ware, the young minister,
was that he had laid down his inner guard,

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 93
and had started so gradually upon the
down plane, that he could still think of
himself as sleek and prosperous, while in
fact he was false and hollow and corrupt.
No one is honestly facing, then, the fact
of sin, unless he is making it certain that he
is living his life on such a plan, as insures
that, so far as in him lies, sin shall be for
him and for aU those committed to him, a
steadily lessening, not a growing, fact.
Moreover, it is given us to set side by side
with this dark fact of sin, the endless,
glorious miracle of unselfish human love.
Let a man give this fact its full weight.
In spite of pettiness, and falseness, and
selfishness, what a wealth of human love
the world contains ! No man can have
seen even a little of love's marvelous ca
pacity for joyful sacrifice, and feel that he
can have deserved such a love. At its
best, this unselfish human love is a rebuke
of our own smallness and a challenge to a
nobler self -giving, and at the same time a
great ground of faith in the Love back of
the universe. What can more surely steady
a man's faith in God, and strengthen the
desire for some share in his eternal self-

94 RELIGION AS LIFE
giving, than this perpetual witness of daily
human love ?
Among the outstanding realities of life,
also, there cannot be left out of account,
for the man who means to face the facts,
the fact of death. One may quite sympa
thize with his generation in the feeling,
that the best preparation for death is to
think upon living, not upon dying;
and yet in his more thoughtful moments
be compelled to confess that the reaction
from the older point of view has gone quite
too far, if it has come to mean that the
thoughtful man is to leave quite out of
account that one inevitable experience that
comes to all. The thoughtful man can
not wish to go like a dumb brute into the
experience of death. Rather wiU he prefer
to say with Browning :
I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes and
forebore
And bade me creep past.
He will wish with open eye and mind to
face that inevitable experience of death,
to get out of it all that God has in it for
him. That will mean that he will need to
forecast the memories that will be his in

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 95
that hour ; that he will need to anticipate
how life is going to appear to him as he
looks back over it from its end, and to ask
himself whether that backward vision is
going to show that in the years of his life
he has seen things in anything like their
true proportion. In that retrospect will
the manifestly greater interests of life loom
large, or be seen to have played an insig
nificant part in the earthly years ? The
thoughtful man must wish to make sure,
too, who his visitants are going to be in this
experience of the closing of the earthly life.
And it is a part of his business as one who
lives not for himself alone, to secure not
only for himself, but, so far as it hes in his
power, for all those whom his life touches,
that the faces that front them in the final
hour shall be friendly faces, and that no
soul committed in any way to him shall
have then to say :
There my dead Youth doth wring its hands,
And there, with eyes that goad me yet,
The ghost of my Ideal stands.
God bends from out the deep and says :
"I gave thee the great gift of life ;
Wast thou not called in many ways ?
Are not my earth and heaven at strife ? "

96 RELIGION AS LIFE
Oh, glorious Youth, that once was mine !
Oh, high Ideal ! all in vain
Ye enter at this ruined shrine
Whence worship ne'er shall rise again.
The bat and owl inhabit here ;
The snake nests in the altar-stone ;
The sacred vessels molder near,
The image of the God is gone.
The fact of death leads, thus, at once to
the fact of accountability to God for hfe
intrusted. One may set aside as simply
pictorial, if he will, the Biblical representa
tions of a great single solemn assize ; stiU,
so far as I can see, the essential fact of ac
countability forever abides. I did not
bestow my nature on myself, and I cannot
deny, therefore, the trust of that peculiar
individuality that has come into my hands.
For that individuality I am accountable.
I cannot resist the sense of caUing, of divine
vocation so involved. These plain facts of
my nature themselves make me feel that,
in some high sense, I am "sent" into the
world. And in this calling of my own in
dividuality, I catch some glimpse, at least,
of a Good Power back of aU, to whom I
must return account of my stewardship
of this unique personality, not self-be-

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 97
stowed. For if there be any rationality in
the universe at all, then the life into which
we go must be the logical and inevitable out
come of the life lived here. In this sense,
at least, some judgment must always be
passed upon the life, and accountability
must always stand. In its essence, there
fore, it remains as true to-day as when
Paul wrote it, "So then every one of us
shall give account of himself to God."
When one faces, then, with any real thought-
fulness the mysterious trust of life, and the
sobering challenge of his divinely given
individuality, it cannot seem to him strange
that a great American statesman should
have affirmed, that the most solemn thought
that ever occupied his mind was the thought
of his personal accountability to God.
For we are not animals, who can live con
tent on the sense plane. "A spark dis
turbs our clod"; and when we would
quench it, our own self-contempt seems
but the prophecy of a still diviner judgment.
The fact of accountability implies, in
turn, the fact of the future life. We can
not be overwise concerning it, however
thoughtfully we have studied all that we

98 RELIGION AS LIFE
can know about it. There are mani
festly many interesting and curious ques
tions concerning it, to which no answer has
been returned. There is plainly much here
that we cannot know. And yet there is not
only the assurance of the insight of Jesus
and of the whole spirit and atmosphere of
his life for the reality of the future life;
but the further fact that many of the most
thoughtful in all generations have felt the
imperative need of the future life to give
any adequate meaning to this life. And,
moreover, so tremendous is the bare possi
bility of the future life, that, rationally,
we can only build as though it were going
to be. But if there be any future life at
all, there is one thing concerning it that
we may know : every man must hve it out
with himself, and he wiU wish to make
certain that he is going to be decent com
pany for himself. He will wish so honestly
and wisely to face the endless future, as to
make sure that he has laid such foundations
here, that the self with which he is to spend
the eternal years is to be good company —
a self rich and interesting, inspiring and
noble. The very meaning of the earthly

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 99
life must be that men are here to learn to
live ; that here and now they are to live a
growing, steadily deepening and enriching
life, and so lay indeed foundations deep and
broad for that endless growth of the future
life. The great rewarding factors of the
future life, too, as of the present life, must
inevitably be in personal associations and
significant work. But how much either
work or personal associations can mean to a
man, must depend on the quality of the self
which he brings to them.
There is still one more fact that the man,
who means to live in any degree for others
besides himself, may not forget : the fact
of his need of help for other men. No
thinking man can face the sin and suffering
and ignorance and weakness of men, the
cramping, deadening conditions in which
many hves are lived, and not see that he
has no need so great as the need of being
able to give adequate help to the inner life
of other men, — to open to them the abiding
springs of being. Have we any message of
life quite large enough and deep enough to
fiU the need of men ? Have we ever made
it real to ourselves that somewhere down the

ioo RELIGION AS LIFE
years, time and again, we shall find our
selves face to face with souls at a crisis ;
souls desperately in need? It will not
always look so on the outside. No ob
server may be able to teU of the inner
struggle, or of the despairing appeal that
is made to us. The common things will
seem to go on. But here and there, there
will be given to us a glimpse into the depths
of another life, and we shall a little under
stand how great the need is. And if that
other is some one for whom we greatly care
— a son, a daughter, or nearest friend —
how sternly must come home to us our
spiritual destitution ! If for us, then, our
great convictions are ah in the past, our
great decisions unrenewed, our ideals
dimmed, and our hopes buried, what can
be our word of help ? Here again every
thoughtful man must be driven back to
God, to the sources of life, to make sure
that there his own life has been refreshed,
enriched, and deepened, so that he may now
speak out of his own experience and with
convincing authority of the "good news of
God." There is one prayer that the ear
nest soul, who wishes to live in any degree

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 101
outside himself, it would seem, must be
perpetually offering to God : Lord, speak
to me, and then speak through me. For
it is perfectly certain that we cannot bring
home to another soul with the grip of con
viction, a truth that has not first of all
gripped us, and God must first have spoken
to us that he may speak through us.
In this search for adequate help for other
men in sorrow and sin and desperate need,
the thoughtful man will find himself coming
back of necessity again and again into the
presence of the great prophetic souls as
the most important facts of human history.
Here are facts never to be ignored. Here
are insight and courage and faith and love.
Here is deep experience of the spiritual
world. Here is assured relation to God.
Nothing else conceivable can throw such
light on the meaning of life and the nature
of God, as the great personalities of his
tory. And the greatest have never been
satisfied on the sense plane. They bear
witness to ideal aims, and disclose a faith
in something greater than themselves.
Even when the immediate ends of their
religious struggle are mistaken ends, as

RELIGION AS LIFE

in the long history of asceticism, they still
testify to the reality of the unseen and
eternal. Are we taking these transcendent
facts of the great prophetic personalities
of the race fairly into account, and giving
them their due weight ?
In the line of these preeminent, prophetic
personalities of the race, stands transcendent
the figure of Jesus. If persons must always
be for us the most significant facts of his
tory, Jesus cannot fail to be history's
supreme fact, — a fact that deepens every
other fact of life. At the end of every in
quiry one finds his majestic figure looming
up, shedding light where else were darkness,
and hope and joy where else were despair.
For, setting aside every theological prop
osition, here at least in Jesus, as judged
by the highest standards that men are able
to apply, is the best life that the earth
has seen, the surest word of the God of all
being. Here, as proved out of the expe
rience of the centuries, are the world's best
ideals, the best insight into the laws of life,
the best dynamic for life. Because here
are embodied the greatest convictions and
the highest hopes. The least inference, it

THE REALITIES OF LIFE 103
would seem, that the thoughtful man may
draw, either for himself or for others, is
that no man can pretend to be in dead
earnest in the attainment of character for
himself or of the message of help for other
men, who is not putting himself steadily
and intimately into touch with that central
life, to take on as of second nature Christ's
thoughts and feelings and purposes ; to
allow him to be to him all that he can.
Not until then wiU a man have proved
himself in earnest either for himself or for
others. And through this transcendent fact of
Christ the thoughtful man looks out with
other eyes upon all the other facts of life.
Through him he sees the heart of God.
Seen in the light of the great personality of
Jesus, he can face with cheer and courage
and mighty hope in his heart all these other
fateful facts of life : those deep underlying
prerequisites of all human endeavor —
the laws of our natures, man's sense of
beauty and truth and duty, and the- in-
evitableness of religious faith; and those
other outstanding spiritual realities of the
daily life — the fact of man's double nature,

104 RELIGION AS LIFE
of the gift of will, of the inevitable way in
which he is bound up in the bundle of life
with all other lives, the fact of man's capac
ity for indefinite growth in knowledge and
power and character and fellowship with
the living God, the dark fact of sin, the
irradiating fact of human love, the inevitable
fact of death, the fact of accountability,
and of the future life, and of the need of
help for other men. It was something
like this, I suppose, that was in the mind of
Browning when he makes the aged John
say:Then stand before that fact, that Life, and Death ;
Stay there at gaze, till it dispart, disspread,
As though a star should open out, all sides,
Grow the world on you, as it is my world.
These facts — these abiding, common
human facts — need no exaggeration.
They need only to be squarely faced.
Whatever other changes may take place,
their truth makes life endlessly significant.

IV
THE SOURCES OF LIFE
The Abiding Significance of the Bible,
and of Jesus
We have already seen that the method
of life includes as indispensable, honesty
and fellowship. The demand for such
utter honesty compels a frank facing of
the realities of life, just reviewed. And the
greatest of even these realities were found
to be personal lives. The method of fellow
ship, too, impels us to seek rewarding per
sonal associations. We have also seen
that the two supreme services that any man
can render to another are, to lay upon him
the impress of a high and noble character
by being the kind of man he ought to be,
and to share with that other the sources
of his own life. This means, of course,
that the greatest needs of us all are the con
tagion of high and significant personalities,
and the opportunity of sharing in their best
105

106 RELIGION AS LIFE
visions. It is on these two lines that we
are driven so surely, even in this twentieth
century, to find the great sources of our
moral and religious lives in the Bible, and
in its supreme personality, Jesus.
First of all, is it mere tradition that
sends us back to the Bible in the search for
spiritual life ? Or is there here a real sur
vival of the fittest ? If a man's greatest
discovery, next to the discovery of God, is
the discovery of himself, and if the complete
discovery of himself in all his spiritual
possibilities involves the discovery of God,
we may perhaps get a new light on the
significance of the Bible for our spiritual
life if we think of it as an aid to self -dis
covery.1 Has the Bible any preeminent place
in bringing the man of the twentieth cen
tury to such deeper self -discovery ? Es
pecially can it help him to that highest
self-knowledge that implies conscious rela
tion with God ? If so, it must be because
in preeminent degree it makes available a
1 Use is here made of a portion of an address by the
author, contained in the transactions of the Religious
Education Association.

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 107
wealth of complex experience, puts us in
direct contact with the most significant
personal lives, and challenges our every
power even more by the depth than by the
breadth of its appeal.
It is worth noting, from the beginning,
that the question has been already tested
for us in history. As a simple matter of
fact, it was the Christianity of the Bible
that awoke men to real self -consciousness
and made forever impossible the simple,
satisfied attitude of antiquity toward life
and the world, and compelled the bringing
in of the modern romantic spirit. As
another has said, for us modern men "the
fever of man's conflict has passed across"
the face of nature ; "the shadow of human
ity falls wide, darkening the world's play
ground." In the words of a great philos
opher, "Christianity had demolished this
calm self-sufficingness of the secular world"
in which the ancient rested. "There began
then to be developed for the first time that
personal consciousness which thenceforward,
with aU its problems — freedom of the will
and predestination, guilt and responsibility,
resurrection and immortality — has given

108 RELIGION AS LIFE'
a totally different coloring to the whole
background of man's mental hfe," and
which no modern can wholly escape. The
Greek artist, compared with the modern
man, Kedney has said, "was asleep and
wrapt in the lovely visions of the En
chanted Ground, as though there were no
cavernous depths and fearful declivities,
no river of death beyond." To the same
intent, Paulsen makes "the longing for
the transcendent" one of the truths which
" Christianity has engraven upon the hearts
of men." "Antiquity," he adds, "was
satisfied with the earth ; the modern era
has never been wholly free from the feehng
that the given reality is inadequate."
Now, the book whose influence has been
thus powerful enough to draw the dividing
line of demarcation between the ancient
and the modern worlds, and to awaken the
modern man to that which is most char
acteristic in his consciousness, can hardly
fail of preeminent power in bringing the
individual to any deep discovery of him
self. It cannot be spared by the most
modern of men.
No man, certainly, is likely to come to

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 109
full self-knowledge independently of those
influences which have streamed forth from
the Bible. It both suggests the laws of our
hfe and tests our powers in too concrete
and telling a fashion, to be wisely ignored.
In the first place, the Bible is a most
deeply and broadly human book, and so
furnishes that appeal of complex experience
so necessary to full self-consciousness. It
touches unerringly the whole gamut of the
deeper human emotions and aspirations,
and embodies them in figures that mankind
wiU not willingly let die. The experience
of the race increasingly confirms the testi
mony of Lotze, who says even of the Old
Testament, that "for the most faithful
delineation of the ever-recurring funda
mental characteristics of human life . . .
the Hebrew histories and hymns are im
perishable models." And he adds, con
cerning this, universal human appeal of the
Scripture : "The treasures of classic culture
are open to but few, but from that eastern
fountain countless multitudes of men have
for centuries gone on drawing ennobling
consolation in misery, judicious doctrines
of practical wisdom, and warm enthusiasm

RELIGION AS LIFE

for all that is exalted." A book with such
breadth of appeal cannot fail to stir to
larger self -consciousness any man who wiU
face its phenomena with attention.
Moreover, it is of vital importance as
an aid to self -discovery, that the Bible
should be in such rare degree a personal
book; for persons are chiefly stirred by
persons. And the Bible is so instinct
with life, that it is hardly possible to put
the point of a needle into it anywhere with
out drawing blood. It brings us face to
face with what must be counted, I judge,
— when estimated as to its value for the
highest life of men, — the most significant
line of personalities which history anywhere
presents. And it is the great glory of the
historical and critical study of these later
years, that it enables us to see these pro
phetic men as living personalities, facing
precise problems in a strong developing
career. So the free critic Cornill can say of
Amos : "Amos is one of the most marvelous
and incomprehensible figures in the history
of the human mind, the pioneer of a process
of evolution from which a new epoch of
humanity dates." And Hosea he counts

THE SOURCES OF LIFE m

(<

among the greatest religious geniuses
which the world has ever produced";
and he says of Isaiah: "In Isaiah we find
for the first time a clearly grasped con
ception of universal history." It is into
the presence of such personalities that the
modern historical study of the Bible in
troduces us. They become for us warm
reahties, and touch us as never before
with the inspiration of a personal life in
which God works. And nothing so stirs
and fructifies our own life, nothing so brings
us to glad sense of our own higher possibili
ties, as even this partial but appreciative
and responsive sharing in the visions of the
higher man. Like children, we grow best
by trying to measure up to things beyond
our present capacity. And this splendid
vision of another — moral or religious —
which we have partly shared, haunts us
perpetuaUy, until we have tried to make it
our own in deed as weU as in thought. We
come to a new self-consciousness. Can
the most modern of men afford to miss the
contagion of this line of spiritual seers ?
For it is only true to say, on the one hand,
even of the Old Testament, that it is the

ii2 RELIGION AS LIFE^
one great moral book of antiquity. As I
have elsewhere said, "it is not a mere col
lection of moral aphorisms, but shows the
developing moral sense everywhere, in every
thing. Character is really the supreme
interest in this book. Among aU the an
cient peoples, in truth, only the Jews have
the modern sense of sin, and the Bible is in
this particular the only ancient book with a
really modern tone. Compared with these
sober Jews, even the gifted Greeks are but
playing children in their sense of sin and
character. This clear and constantly de
veloping ethical tone marks out the Bible
distinctly from aU other ancient books."
And when one passes to the New Testa
ment, this powerful ethical impression is
only increased. One may weU say with
Sabatier: "What other book like this can
awaken dumb or sleeping consciences, re
veal the secret needs of the soul, sharpen
the thorn of sin and press its cruel point
upon us, tear away our delusions, humiliate
our pride, and disturb our false serenity?
What sudden lightnings it shoots into the
abysses of our hearts ! • What searchings of
conscience are like those which we make by

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 113
this light?" And all this means that in
sober fact we must concede to the Bible
unrivaled power in bringing a man to moral
self -consciousness .
In a similar sense it must be said on the
other hand, even of the Old Testament,
that it is, if I may quote myself again,
"the one great religious book of antiquity.
Religious books in abundance of course the
ancient world had, and we need not under
estimate any of them. But for the actual
hfe of the civilization of this twentieth cen
tury only the Bible is of prime significance.
These Old Testament writers have been, as
a matter of fact, among all the ancient
writers, the world's great spiritual and re
ligious seers. In even higher degree than
we owe art and literature to the Greeks, and
law to the Romans, do we owe religion to
the Jews. Here in this ancient literature,
whatever the critical results, is contained
the record of the preeminent meetings of
God with men, down to the time of Christ."
And if this can be said even of the Old
Testament, how much more is it true of the
New, with its vision of the supreme per
sonality of Jesus. And for spiritual self-

ii4 RELIGION AS LIFE
discovery, this is most significant. For,
just so surely as religious interest is deeply
laid in the very foundations of man's nature ;
just so surely as religion is the supreme
factor "in the organizing and regulating
of our personal and collective life"; just
so surely as it brings us into the highest
personal relation of which we are capable
— the relation that gives reality and mean
ing and value to all other relations ; just'
so surely as religion is thus the deepest
experience into which a man may enter ;
— even so surely must that book which is
the transcendent religious book of the
world, stir our whole natures as nothing
else can stir them, in just the proportion
in which we lay ourselves open to its in
fluence and enter with appreciative under
standing into the experiences there laid
bare. For the unity of our natures makes
it impossible that this highest appeal should
be responded to, without profound influence
upon all the rest of our life. As does no
other book, therefore, the Bible brings to
consciousness the whole man.
As the record of the progressive seeking
of men after God, and of the progressive

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 115
revelation of God to men, moreover, the
Bible offers peculiar help in the develop
ment of our own highest consciousness;
for it enables us to relive, as it were, in
our own personal experience this whole
rehgious hfe of the world, to apply thus,
to our own deepest life-problems a real
historical method. And hardly any pro
cedure could be more helpful in bringing
us to intelhgent consciousness of ourselves
than this retracing of the most important
steps in the working out of character and
faith in the world.
But the Bible is all this, finally, because
it is above aU else a book of honest testi
mony to experience. Its supreme value lies
just here. For the testimony of another,
as we have seen, is our chief road to en
largement of life. Most of all, it is through
such simple honest witness that the New
Testament puts us face to face with the
redeeming personality of Jesus. What
ever our theories about the Bible, it is not
as compelling authority, but as simple
honest witness, that the New Testament
brings us emancipating power. In Herr
mann's words, "The inner hfe of Jesus is

ii 6 RELIGION AS LIFE
stamped on the testimony of men who have
been set free by him. In this way has it
become a force in history, and in no other
way was that possible. Hence we can lay
hold on it and make it ours only when we
let the witness of his disciples lay hold on
us. " And that witness the Christian ' ' finds
in Scripture as nowhere else."
Now if this is the priceless and indispen
sable service of the Bible, it would seem to
indicate that man's greatest source of
spiritual hfe is stiU the personahty of
Jesus. And we are brought, therefore,
face to face with the question of the abiding
significance of Jesus.1
President Harris of Amherst CoUege
said, four or five years ago, "I venture to
say that the Protestant Reformation itself
did not work a greater, though perhaps a
more violent, change than the last quarter
of a century has marked in religious thought,
belief, and life." In this short twenty-five
years — it is a commonplace to say —
1 Another line of treatment is followed in the author's
Theology and the Social Consciousness, pp. i84-l2oi. Cf.
also Letters on the Greatness and Simplicity of the Christian
Faith, pp. 179-199.

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 117
rehgion has felt increasingly the influence
of natural science, of the conception of
evolution in particular, of the new psy
chology, of the new science of sociology,
and its practical accompaniment — the
social consciousness, the application of the
historic spirit to religious ideas and doctrines,
the whole consequent work of higher criti
cism, the great movement of study that we
denominate "comparative religion," the
more and more searching investigation of
New Testament sources, and a great new
practical emphasis and test in philosophy.
Is it possible that the meaning of anything
can be the same in the face of a union of
movements like these ? Let us ask it
frankly, Has Jesus still supreme meaning ?
And yet, Adolf Harnack, speaking as
Rector of the world's greatest university,
in this twentieth century, and in the face
of all these movements, can begin his
famous book, What is Christianity? with
the sentence, "The great English philos
opher John Stuart Mill has somewhere
observed that mankind cannot be too often
reminded that there was once a man of
the name of Socrates. That is true; but

118 RELIGION AS LIFE
still more important is it to remind mankind
again and again that a man of the name of
Jesus Christ once stood in their midst."
It seems like an echo of the apologetic of
the New Testament writers. And it is
indeed only another man trying to say, as
honestly to his own generation as they to
theirs, what significance this man Jesus has
for him.
What significance has Jesus for us?
Has his personality still indispensable help
to give us ? That depends upon the answer
to another question, What do we want ?
The shortest and truest answer to that
question probably is in the single word —
life. We want the fullest, richest, largest
life that men are capable of ; and that
would at least require answer to certain
great, insistent questions of the race, like
Kant's famous three : What can I know ?
What ought I to do ?. For what may I
hope ? Few of us would doubt — what
these three questions imply — that the
largest and richest life cannot be lived
without convictions and ideals and hopes ;
and the answer to these questions must
be an answer, too, that gives power to

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 119
hve this life of convictions, of ideals, of
hopes. Now if we are to come anywhere into
larger life, the method, as we have seen,
is mental and spiritual fellowship, and our
greatest need, thus, is always the touch of
significant hves. The continuous miracle
of the centuries is the miracle of individual
personality. Large and rich and varied
have been the lives of earth's greatest ones,
and we are still, in the daily education of the
schools, sharing the visions of many an
ancient Jew and Greek and Roman ; and
our lives would be poorer without them.
But, in spite of all the questions and en
largements of knowledge, and change in
points of view of this whole revolutionary
time, is there any reasonable doubt that,
for the living of that larger life which we
modern men demand, and for any signifi
cant deepening of our life, no personality
has any help to give comparable with that
of the Galilean Jesus? Is there, even to
day, any surer road to the satisfaction of
the thirst for life in all its profounder mean
ings, than that a man should count himself
— with whatever questionings — first and

120 RELIGION AS LIFE
foremost, a disciple of Jesus ? In the light
of all that modern research has brought to
view, let us put to Jesus Kant's three
questions : What can I know ? What
ought I to do ? For what may I hope ?
And, first, has Jesus still power to help
the modern man to answer the question,
What can I know ?
Under this question, the most insistent
inquiry of all, for the human race, is, What
.can I know of God, and the consequent
meaning of my own life ? And upon the
answer to that question, more than upon
any other, depend the significance and
peace and joy of the life of men. And for
the man of to-day who wishes to buUd his
faith not upon ingenious argument, but
upon assured and well-recognized facts,
there is no ground so sure for belief in the
existence and in the love of a real hving
God as this single great fact of Christ him
self, and of ,the results that have flowed
from his life. The argument goes upon the
simple assumption that if we are ever to
discern the real nature of the ultimate
World-Ground, our best light must come,
not from the lesser, but from the greatest

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 121
and most significant facts. For myself, I
see no way to doubt that, as the supreme
person of history, Christ is the most signifi
cant of all facts known to us, and therefore
the best basis for direct and decisive
inference to the nature of the World-
Ground — to a God of character like his
own. And so Paulsen, present-day philosopher,
after speaking of various dogmas and opin
ions often asserted to be of the essence of
Christianity, says for himself: "But if I
am allowed to say what I mean, and to be
heve what I can understand and conceive,
then, unmindful of the ridicule of the scoffer
and the hatred of the guardian of literalism,
I may, even in our days, confess to a belief
in God who has revealed himself in Jesus.
The life and death of Jesus make plain to
me the meaning of life, the meaning of all
things in general; but that which enables
me to live and shows me the import of life,
I caU God and the manifestation of God.
The most upright, truthful, and liberal-
minded man may subscribe to all that to
day as openly as ever before."
Have we adequately measured the great-

122 RELIGION AS LIFE
ness of the gift to our modern life of the
personality of whom these words may be
truthfully spoken? Quite aside from any
doctrine of Messiahship, and unaffected
by the Greek theory of the Logos, must
not the modern man who truly understands
himself still say unfeignedly, with Paul,
"Thanks be to God for his unspeakable
gift" ? For it is here implied, it should be
noticed, that there is much more in Jesus
than bare evidence of the existence of God.
There is "that which enables me to live,"
says Paulsen. The greatness of the gift
of Jesus is not merely that he points, thus,
however convincingly, to the fact of God,
but that he means to bring men into real
fellowship with God.
Here, I venture to think, the modern age
needs Jesus as no other age has ever needed
him. The road into assured communion
with God for earlier generations was far
easier than for ours. For our age has come
in such preeminent degree to scientific and
moral self -consciousness that for men to-day
the previous easier roads into the religious
life are in large degree closed. The psy
chological treatment, for example, of mysti-

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 123
cal experiences has made it impossible
for us to take at their own valuation all
kinds of ecstatic states ; and we can feel
no surety in these short cuts to communion
with God by means of a religious experience
that cannot bear the rational and ethical
test. It is just at this point that Christian
ity has its supreme gift to make to the man of
to-day. For the deeper our moral conscious
ness, the greater our sense of moral need.
In Herrmann's words, "We feel ourselves
to be separated from God, and conse
quently crippled in our faith by things
which troubled the ancients very little. . . .
Therefore, the only God that can reveal
himself to us is one who shows himself
to us in our moral struggle as the Power
to which our souls are really subject. This
is what is vouchsafed to us in the revelation
of God in Jesus Christ." Christ does not
merely teU us of God and of his holiness and
love ; he does much more, — he makes us
able to believe this. He, and no other as
he, searches, humbles, assures, and exalts
us at the same time. "When once he has
attracted us by the beauty of his Person,
and made us bow before him by its exalted

124 RELIGION AS LIFE
character, then, even amid our deepest
doubts, that Person of Jesus will remain
present with us as a thing incomparable, the
most precious fact in history, the most
precious fact our life contains."
What language can measure the greatness
of the gift that Jesus thus makes to the
present work-a-day life of the man who
thinks ? What language can measure the
meaning of the simple fact that there has
once appeared among us men a life that can
call out absolute trust, a life into the pres
ence of which we may come, out of any ex
perience, to find renewed within us our
deepest faith, our highest ideals ?
In all this there is implied that in the life
and spirit of Jesus we have the best hght,
also, on our ethical ideals, that human
thought and experience know — the best
answer to our second question, What ought
I to do ? Ranke only expresses the
common judgment of men when he writes :
"More guiltless and more powerful, more
exalted and more holy, has naught ever
been on earth than his conduct, his life
and his death. The human race knows
nothing that could be brought, even afar

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 125
off, into comparison with it." Here is for
us a genuine "personalized conscience."
As to Christ's contribution to human life
at a single point of ethical significance,
Harnack can say: "Jesus Christ was the
first to bring the value of every human soul
to light, and what he did no one can any
more undo. We may take up what rela
tion to him we will : in the history of the
past no one can refuse to recognize that it
was he who raised humanity to this level."
And Wundt and Lotze confirm this judg
ment. There has been printed in editions of
many thousands and translated into several
modern languages a plain little story with
the subtitle "What Would Jesus Do?"
We may contend that the question is not
accurately phrased, but we cannot doubt
that the asking of that question has a sig
nificance for men that the substitution of
no other name for Jesus would permit it
for a moment to have. It was John Stuart
Mill who wrote: "Not even now could it
be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a
better translation of the rule of virtue from
the abstract into the concrete, than to

126 RELIGION AS LIFE
endeavor so to live that Christ would ap
prove of our life."
Moreover, though one sees clearly that
Jesus is not dealing primarily with questions
of modern culture and civilization, it re
mains true that the modern social conscious
ness, in its most earnest endeavor, can do
nothing more than apply the spirit of his
teaching and his life to the newer problems
of our own day. And that higher civic
virtue, for which we wait, is the embodi
ment only of his principle : "He that would
be first among you shall be servant of ah."
It is not too much to say, in the words of a
modern historian, "The image of Christ
remains the sole basis of aU moral culture,
and in the measure in which it succeeds in
making its light penetrate is the moral cul
ture of the nations increased or diminished."
With these answers to the questions, What
can I know? and What ought I to do?
Jesus enables the most modern of men to
turn to the question, For what may I
hope ? with an assurance nowhere else to be
gained.1 The greatest proposition of re-
1 Cf . the author's The Seeming Unreality of the Spirit
ual Life, pp. 237 fi.

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 127
ligious faith to which the human race has
attained, or to which, so far as our highest
ethical imagination can see, it ever may
attain, is the simple affirmation, God is
like Jesus. And if God is like Jesus, life
cannot possibly prove a mockery for any
soul who has been true to the inner light.
If God is like Jesus, it is not true that men
have been made on a plan so large that ages
cannot suffice for growth equal to their
capacity, and still must find themselves
snuffed out like a candle in the dark, after
a few vain years of aspiration, of cherished
ideal, of hard-fought struggle, of deepening
friendship. No, it is not true ! Doubtless
our best human achievement is faulty
enough ; but his life and vision are poor
indeed, who has not caught glimpses of
other lives, redolent of the grace and mercy
that we would fain ascribe to God ; and
God knows, if there be a God, that they
deserve to go on and not to die.
Here, again, we are driven directly back
to Christ for our strongest assurance. So
Matheson speaks, in a passage I have else
where quoted, of "the impossible conse
quences of a denied future." "If there be

128 RELIGION AS LIFE
no immortality, Christ is dead — the purest,
the fairest, the loveliest life that ever
breathed has become less than the napkin,
less than the grave-clothes, less than the
sepulcher. It is to Paul an impossible
consequence. He cannot think of Christ
as dead. He says, 'If Christ be dead,
death must be a delusion.' Did you never
feel this experience ? You parted with a
friend an hour ago, and the next hour you
heard that he was dead ; you said, ' Im
possible ! ' And when it was confirmed, you
said again, ' Impossible ! If he be dead, then
death is not to die. I must have mis
named it, misread it, mistaken the in
scription on its doorway. Death hence
forth is a gate of life to me.'" "Son of
Man, whenever I doubt of life, I think of
Thee. Nothing is so impossible as that
Thou shouldst be dead. I can imagine the
hills to dissolve in vapor, and the stars to
melt in smoke, and the rivers to empty
themselves in sheer exhaustion ; but I feel
no limit in Thee. Thou never growest old
to me. Last century is old, last year is
old, last season is an obsolete fashion ; but
Thou art not obsolete. Thou art abreast

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 129
of all the centuries, nay, Thou goest before
them like the star. I have never come up
with Thee, modern as I am. Thy picture
is at home in every land. A thousand have
fallen at its side, but it has kept its bloom ;
old Jerusalem, old Rome, new Rome —
it has been young amid them all. There
fore, when oppressed by the sight of death,
I shall turn to Thee. I shall see my im
mortality in Thee. I shall read the possi
bilities of my soul in Thee. I shall measure
the promise of my manhood by Thee. I
shall comfort myself by the impossible con
clusion, ' If there be no immortality, Christ
is dead.' " The real ground, that is, of
faith in immortality is Jesus himself, his
character, his teaching, his death.
It is written of one of those fateful crises
in the life of Jesus, when was fought out,
under the leadership of Peter, one of the
world's "decisive battles," that, in the sift
ing out of his following, Jesus finally turned
to the Twelve to ask: "Will ye also go
away?" And the fourth gospel makes
Peter answer in words often since wrung
from human lips in like crisis hours : ' ' Lord,
to whom shaU we go ? Thou hast the words

130 RELIGION AS LIFE
of eternal hfe. And we have believed and
know that thou art the Holy One of God."
And this answer of a struggling soul in a
Capernaum synagogue in the far-away
years remains still, so far as I can see, the
best answer that the human heart, reaching
out for God and right and hope in answer
to the challenging questions of our own day,
can make: "Lord, to whom shall we go?
Thou hast the words of eternal hfe. And
we have believed and know that thou art
the Holy One of God."
The situation described in the gospel
was not an easy one for the Twelve. They,
too, understand but partially what Jesus
means, though he has made it all too clear
that many of their conceptions of Messiah-
ship are doomed to disappointment. But
still they have been long enough with
Jesus to know that there is no one else to
whom they may better go. If the secret
of the spiritual life, they are saying through
Peter, if the true life with God, if the as
surance of the Father, are not with thee,
surely they are with no one. If there is
any hope at all, it is with thee ; to go back
from thee and to give up our faith in thee,

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 131
is to give up all faith in truth, in righteous
ness, in God. A situation very like this is
the exact situation to-day. Questions and
difficulties and doubts we may have, but we
cannot have less of them away from Jesus.
Such light as we have gathers right here,
about him. "Lord, to whom shall we go ? "
And we too, with Peter, pass on, through
the troubled, half-bewildered questioning
and struggle, with gathering strength and
assurance, to the positive ground, and
say with him: "Thou hast the words of
eternal life." We have found new life with
thee; little by little, as we have stayed
with thee and heard thy words and felt the
touch of thy spirit, our point of view, our
desires, our ambitions, have changed. And
now that you force the question upon us,
the answer is ready, and we can see that
"all the springs of our life are in thee."
We cannot give thee up. We live in thee ;
and the quality of this new life we have
found with thee verifies itself as eternal.
Thou bringest us into the very certainty
and sharing of the life of the eternal God.
Thou canst not'pass. ' ' Thouhast the words
of eternal life."

132 RELIGION AS LIFE
With faith tested, thus, by experience of
Jesus in life, Peter is able to go on to say :
"We have believed and know that thou
art the Holy One of God." Whether this
was a Messianic title or not, he can hardly
have used it here with the full sense of it
as such. He is simply speaking out of his
heart what he has found Jesus to be, and
naturally drops into this sacred confession.
In this hour, of questioning he has hardly
gone far enough yet for any theological
formulations ; he is only answering the
heart-searching inquiry of his Master, and
he finds that he can say, and must say that
— as never before, and as nowhere else,
as no prophet has been imagined by him
— he has felt in Jesus the living touch of
God. Jesus has made him feel his sin and
God at the same time. The words indicate,
too, the source of his feeling — "the Holy
One of God. " His great argument, that is,
finally, and ours too, is the character of
Jesus. With the prologue of this fourth
gospel, we still may say: "We beheld his
glory, glory as of the only begotten of the
Father, full of grace and truth." This
is the great miracle of the history of the

THE SOURCES OF LIFE 133
race, and if this is true, we can easily
grant or spare all the rest. And it is true
— the one great fact of this history of our
earth. "The Light is come."
Thus, even in our hours of crisis, Jesus
answers our insistent questions : What can
I know ? What ought I to do ? For what
may I hope ? And, face to face with him,
we may say with Peter: "If the solution
is not in him, there is no solution. He meets
the test of hfe. And the great ground of
our confidence is his character and the inner
appeal of God in him." So surely has
Jesus abiding significance for the entire
spiritual hfe of men. He is still the great
source of life.

V
THE ENEMIES OF LIFE
Opposing Personalities
Our previous discussion has already in
dicated that life finds most dangerous
enemies in the peril of the lower attain
ment, and in the lack of honesty and fellow
ship with the best ; and so in refusing to
face the outstanding facts of life with an
honest reaction upon them, and in turning
away from the supreme sources of life.
Here, however, we are thinking not of these
impersonal perils, but of the dangers lurk
ing in those essential personal relations
from which we cannot turn aside. The
spiritual life is so entirely a life ultimately
of personal relations, that we cannot ignore
the dangers that lie here. In simple hon
esty, too, we have no right to be oblivious
to this darker side of life. The considera
tion of the perils in our personal relations
peculiarly concerns, also, those whose caUing
134

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 135
is largely personal in its nature. More
over, few lessons are so valuable to any of
us as those that may be learned from
studying our own lives side by side with
the lives of far greater souls. There is a
great wealth of suggestion for the man who
is willing to put his life, thus, alongside
of that of the great Master of life, to learn
the lesson of its paraUel experiences.
It is Matthew who has made most plain
for us in the central section of his Gospel
(Matt. 11-14) the personal elements of
opposition in the life and work of Jesus.
He sees Jesus confronting the doubt of
John, the shallow and unappreciative re
sponse of the Galileans, the prejudiced and
malicious opposition of the Pharisees, the
attempted spiritual dictation of his kindred,
the contempt of familiarity of his fellow
townsmen, the opposition of Herod, the
constant breaking in on his sought retire
ment with his disciples, the slowness and
dullness of this inner circle, and even their
disloyalty. How much of all this concerns
us ? The thoughtful observer of his own life
is certain to find, it may be suspected, experi
ences running quite parallel to these of Jesus.

136 RELIGION AS LIFE
First of all, in loyalty to truth and to his
own growth, and in the inevitable difference
of ideals, every earnest growing man, and
especially every leader and teacher, must
expect what Jesus found in his relation to
John — growing distrust of previous warm
friends. These friends may be, like John
the Baptist, those who believed in you
first and most, and those who perhaps
started you toward your present ideals, or
encouraged you in them. Or they may be
those who began with you and have not
gone on, or have gone another way, and, in
any case have lost touch with your point of
view and with your way of approach to
things spiritual and divine. They are those
who miss, perchance, the old phrases, or
who had mapped out your course for you
and you have not followed it, but have
grown away from them. It is not easy to
face, as a practically certain element in
one's life-work, this growing distrust of
previous warm friends. But one can hardly
expect to be spared it.
How, now, is one to meet, with calm
and courage of spirit, this growing distrust
of friends whom he has loved and whose

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 137
faith he would gladly sacrifice much to
keep ? Because he cannot be as sure as
Jesus was with reference to his own position,
he may well, in the first place, make this
growing distrust of old friends an occasion
for carefully reviewing the grounds of his
own position again, for making sure that
he has not, in heedlessness or haste or prej
udice, drifted or rushed into positions
which he cannot justify. He may not as
sume without question that he is certainly
right and that these who distrust him are
certainly wrong. But when, in modesty,
he has made such a resurvey of his posi
tion, he is sure, in a number of cases, still
to find that he cannot hope, in loyalty to
the truth, and in obedience to his own con
science, to take a position which can satisfy
these old friends. He will find it possible
only carefully to foUow Jesus' own method
in meeting the doubt of John: He will
warmly sympathize with their difficulty;
he may gently appeal for their confidence ;
he will generously praise, recognizing their
true worth; and he will send the tender
message back with the evidence of the life
and power of his work in fruits, as Jesus

138 RELIGION AS LIFE
said to the messengers who came to him
from John: "Go your way and tell John
the things which ye do hear and see."
To bring pain and disappointment to
warm friends, to gain only growing dis
trust — sometimes from fathers and
mothers, sometimes from earlier teachers
and one's childhood companions — is a
sad and bitter experience, but it is a practi
cally certain part of the experience of every
earnestly growing soul.
The faithful teacher or leader in any high
sphere may expect, also, to share with
Jesus the experience of the shallow and in-
appreciative response of an enthusiastic
following. It is particularly hard to be
conscious of failure, where one seems most
to succeed ; to find the hour of one's ap
parent triumph in truth the hour of bitter
defeat. But this was the experience of
Jesus himself. It may be confidently ex
pected, in his measure, by every real leader
in high things.
For the worst enemies of a great and
deep cause are its shallow friends ; the
friends who, because of their very shallow
ness, do not understand it, constantly

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 139
misrepresent it, and therefore always hinder
it. They have no abiding care for the
deeper riches. They offer only the shallow
ground or the choking thorns, putting
small comparative estimate on the great
cause to whose support they are pledged.
They are those who, overriding Jesus' own
conception of himself, would "come and
take him by force and make him king."
They see in him only a bread-king, not lord
of aU hfe, and the supreme revelation of
God. They have no power to weigh spirit
ual worth ; they can measure only economic
values, can count only loaves and fishes.
They hear, therefore, no deep message,
whether from John or Jesus. They are
fickle, vacillating children in the market
place, not willing to play either wedding
or funeral — unable to respond greatly
to the appeal of either joy or sorrow. They
can face, on the contrary, the greatest
divine manifestations and be unaroused in
the depths of their nature, untouched by
what would move the hardest. The moral
and spiritual leader becomes to such what
Ezekiel became to many who heard him:
"Lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely

140 RELIGION AS LIFE
song, of one that hath a pleasant voice
and can play well upon an instrument, for
they hear thy words, but they do them not."
These shallow hearers who hear at first
with prompt enthusiasm are they for
whom small things are enough ; who feel
no great thirst, but are pettily satisfied;
who refuse to accept the best one has to
give. Now this shallow and unappreciative
response of a following that may be still
really enthusiastic, may be, on the one
hand, a grievous disappointment, or it
may be, on the other hand, even greater
peril. If the leader stiU keeps his aim
high, if he knows the greatness of his mes
sage and of the kingdom of truth in whose
service he is, the shallow response is bitter
disappointment indeed, but it does not
imperil his own life. But if he accept the
shallow construction put upon his message
by some who will count themselves his
most enthusiastic friends, but who, never
theless, minister not to his best, nor call
that best out ; if he accept as satisfactory
the support of those who are whling, rather,
to serve his selfish ambitions and make him

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 141
in his turn bread-king, or would like him
to be their hired man in the ideal realms,
hke Micah's priest, and pay him well on
the lower side, but who yet would wrest
him from his noblest purposes to their
lower ones, even "by force" — here is
deadly peril. The larger service of many a
hfe has been wrecked by this shallow re
sponse, taken as sufficient and satisfactory
or even to be gloried in; because that
meant that the man himself was lowered,
his vision lost, his message made as shallow
as the response. As the member of any
high caUing values his life and that calling,
he may count no such shallow enthusiastic
following as success, for it is in truth deep
failure. He can only face its bitter dis
appointment as Jesus faced his — send the
multitude away, retreat to the mountain to
pray, bring succor to the faithful few in
danger of being dazzled by this surface
enthusiasm, and go back to Capernaum to
sift out his following.
And he will try definitely to meet this
shaUow response as Jesus met the similar
response of the Gahleans, by showing its
unreasonableness, by reproof of its blind

142 RELIGION AS LIFE
folly, by appeal and tender recurring invita
tion, while throughout refusing, nevertheless,
to lower his message or his mission to the
low demand of this shallow and inapprecia-
tive, though it be enthusiastic, response.
But he may not hope either wholly to pre
vent or wholly to evade such an answer to
\ his work.
Neither is it possible for one to escape,
in any faithful ministry of the truth, the
bitter, prejudiced, malicious opposition of
self-satisfied and self-ordained conservators
of the truth and savers of the ark. Here,
too, one must walk in the way of the Master
of life. The teacher and every servant of
the truth must have a passion for reahty,
an earnestness in pursuit of the truth, that
brooks no arbitrary limits. He is sure,
therefore, to have to face the opposition
of those who profess to judge from high
standards, but yet are sticklers for hoary
rules, repeaters and testers of phrases,
worshipers of customs, and echoers of
creeds never really their own, rather than
contenders for judgment and mercy. They
are so prejudiced that they may ascribe,
as in the case of Jesus, the divinest works

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 143
to evil, thus perverting all moral and spirit
ual discernment. They are therefore able
to understand only certain magical signs,
not the true spiritual and moral appeal.
They are empty souls, destitute of all real
moral and religious appreciation and en
thusiasm, and with no sense of the great
ness of the spiritual call. It is still quite
possible that the worst enemies of the truth
and of real spirituality may be among the
most zealous religionists, and those that
count themselves most concerned for the
truth. Even a humble and patient and tolerant
and loving ministry to the lives of others,
that is nevertheless faithful, cannot hope
whoUy to escape such bitter and malicious
opposition. And one needs all the power
ful influence of the example of Jesus to be
able to meet such opposition rightly. Re
membering one's own need and short
sightedness and temptability, one will wish
first of all to make sure that he has not
deserved any part of this opposition, to see
to it that if at any point he has failed herein,
he does not further provoke needless an
tagonism. But with this point guarded,

144 RELIGION AS LIFE
one will have to meet the inevitable opposi
tion which still remains, with Christ's own
profound sense of the emptiness of soul
involved, and with the deep pity which
such a state provokes as can nothing else.
For none are so hopeless as those who do
not care, who have lost all power to dis
criminate in values.
And then, for oneself, turning from the
thought of the opposition which cannot be
wholly stayed, it will be possible only to
gird one's soul again for this steady going
forward with one's work and one's testi
mony to the truth, as Jesus did, while
provoking no needless controversy. Truth
can only so make progress. How many
times in the years of every faithful life,
night after night and morning after morn
ing, wiU the soul have to come back to this
one thought: The only thing I can do is
simply to go on doing as nearly right as I
know how; for I must not, in any case,
allow myself to be provoked into an atti
tude akin to that which opposes me.
" Consider him that hath endured such gain
saying of sinners against himself, that ye
wax not weary, fainting in your souls."

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 145
"It is enough for the disciple that he be as
his Master."
Beyond the distrust of previous warm
friends, beyond the shallow response of en
thusiastic followers, beyond the prejudiced
opposition of the self-satisfied, every highly
determined soul may expect, with Jesus,
attempted spiritual dictation on the part of
those near and dear. In the thick of your
battle, pressed on every side, because of the
very strenuousness of your fight, these,
with natural concern and perhaps with
some wounded pride, — saying he is "be
side himself," — still "stand without," hold
aloof, and yet wish to dictate your course.
If they come in love, it is still largely mis
taken love, caring more for your comfort
than for your growth and for your work.
In this attempted dictation on the part
of those one loves may lie a dire and deadly
temptation, all the more so because of its
source. It was not for nothing that Jesus
said, "And a man's foes shaU be they of
his own household." There is a point
beyond which you may not aUow even love
itself to tempt you. Love makes it hard
to refuse to listen. And yet you had not

146 RELIGION AS LIFE
loved them hah so much, loved you not
honor more. One must therefore straightly,
though tenderly and reverently, face this
opposition and this peril, We must make
it forever clear to ourselves that no other
may dictate in our inner life, in the ultimate
decision of our duty. No other may decide
for us, no other may force our decision ;
and they are not true friends who would do
it. They make, rather, the mistake of the
companions of Socrates, who would dehver
him from prison to bind him over to con
tinuous self -contempt.
"He that loveth father or mother more
than me is not worthy of me." "And
there is meaning in Christ's words," as
Ruskin says . ' ' Whatever misuse may have
been made of them, whatever false proph
ets — and heaven knows there have been
many — have called the young children to
them, not to bless, but to curse, the assured
fact remains, that if you will obey God,
there will come a moment when the voice
of man will be raised, with all its holiest
natural authority, against you. The friend
and the wise adviser — the brother and
the sister — the father and the master —

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 147
the entire voice of your prudent and keen-
sighted acquaintance — the entire weight of
the scornful stupidity of the vulgar world
— for once, they wiU be against you, all
at one. You have to obey God rather than
man. The human race, with all its wisdom
and love, aU its indignation and foUy, on
one side, — God alone on the other. You
have to choose."
Every leader in the pursuit of the truth
and in spiritual endeavor is sure to find one
of the most common and certain elements
of opposition, as Jesus found it, in the
further fact that "the prophet is not with
out honor, save in his own country and in
his own house." The unreadiness to recog
nize the message of the known man may be
assumed, as well as the very common failure
to support the prophet as prophet and for
what he really is until after his death. The
building of the tombs of the prophets, rather
than following their living voice, was not
confined to Christ's day. All real leaders
may expect, therefore, something of that
contempt that belongs to familiarity from
those for whom the familiar, just because
it is familiar, seems of small account ; and

148 RELIGION AS LIFE
who, for this very reason, are the more ready
to run over to the strange voice and the
novel message. There will always be many
in any community who find it difficult to
recognize greatness or worth in itself.
They are able to see it only when it has been
properly indorsed by others from outside.
They repeat again the old questions of the
contempt of familiarity: "Is not this the
carpenter's son ? is not his mother caUed
Mary, and his brethren, James, and Joseph,
and Simon, and Judas ? And his sisters,
are they not all with us ? Whence then
hath this man all these things ?"
While this obstacle is by no means the
most serious that a man must meet in his
life-work, it is stiU a real hindrance, often
leading to a quite unjust overestimation of
the outside strange voice or message, that
may be hard to bear because one cannot help
feeling the essential injustice of the judg
ment. And this very fact may lead one to
yield to the temptation either to strive
after the merely novel and strange, or
popular, rather than the true, — straining
for effect, — or to press for public recognition
outside, in the treatment of caUs, in public

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 149
exploitation of one's self in the press or on
the platform, and so to force recognition at
home. In either case, the man has con
sented to some lowering of himself; and
the straining for effect is especially likely
to give a false note to one's own work and
message, and to react on one's mood and
feeling, so that he is no longer a true man
with a God-given calling. Every true man
will need rather to stay his soul with Paul's
conclusion, "It is a very small thing that
I should be approved of man's judgment."
When a man asks himself how he is to
meet in a high and unselfish spirit, and with
real dignity and success, this element of
difficulty in his life-work, it is plain that he
must first of aU, in simple fairness, recognize
a certain justice in the difficulty he con
fronts. He must plainly admit the value
of different points of view and of the fresh
putting of things, and allow himself neither
to oppose nor to be jealous of any gain that
may so come. Least of all is he to yield
to the involved temptation to "stoop to
conquer." He is to keep himself high and
noble, and to be sure that the appreciation
of the seemingly more successful work or

150 RELIGION AS LIFE
messages of others drives him only to seek a
stronger, deeper, truer work and message
himself, in order to keep true to his own
best ideals. For the unjust judgment which
still remains after all possible allowance,
the spiritual leader needs to remember that,
as in Christ's case, popular response is no
full proof of truth and wisdom, no adequate
measure of the value of the work done.
And he must simply keep steadily on in the
faithful proclamation of the best vision that
God gives him. Nothing else, in any case,
is open to him.
It is Herod, in the conception of Matthew,
who, moved by Herodias in her exposed
wickedness, puts an end to the more pubhc
ministry of Jesus and drives him into com
parative retirement. And in every age
there is always a strong tendency on the
part of the regular authorities, the powers
that be, the forces of society, to crush the
unwonted, to deprecate anything that es
sentially changes the routine of the cus
tomary, to block any more serious changes.
The prophet's voice, on the contrary, must
often be a disturbing voice, and the persis
tent caU of our own generation for "the

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 151
sane," it is to be feared, quite often means
only, "Leave us undisturbed, don't call the
conventional in question."
Of course the real leader in any ideal
realm must expect the uncompromising
opposition of those whose evil is challenged
and who resent the high standard which
condemns them, who would silence the
prophet's voice and gladly appeal to the
authorities against "this stirrer up of the
people," this "disturber of the peace."
From the days of Socrates and of Jesus, it
has been easy to make the established
authorities find an enemy of society in the
prophetic messenger. The danger of the
spiritual leader is that he will not be willing
to be a real prophet speaking out his mes
sage; that he will love peace more than
purity, and be unwilling to say the de
manded word. Some of the best men I
have known have been tempted to failure
at this point. It is the peculiar temptation
of the public man to keep his popularity
and his reputation for sanity, at the expense
of real cowardice. He yields to the
prophet's temptation, — "Speak unto us
smooth things, prophesy deceits." To be

152 RELIGION AS LIFE
a prophet is no holiday task. A spiritual
and moral leader must lead, and he must
often subject himself to severe criticism
on that account. A prophetic ministry
to a community or nation must fear God
rather than men. And the more such pro
fessions as preaching and teaching and
writing become regularly organized func
tions in human society, the greater is the
danger that they will not remain untram-
meled. The spiritual leader must never
for an instant admit, either to himself or
to any one else, that he is the hired man
of either few or many. He is called to be a
preserver, helper, inspirer, warner for men's
moral and spiritual life. He is put in trust
with the truth, with great community in
terests and with men's souls, and as he is
true to that trust he must speak some
things, though in meekness and in charity,
that men do not want to hear. The danger
at this point in any life-work is very great.
How, then, may a man meet, in Christ
like spirit, this opposition of the customary
and of unveiled wickedness ? First of all,
he must make his own position unmis
takably clear, though with charity and

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 153
meekness, and courageously stand for it.
In the second place, he is neither to seek
conflict nor to provoke it needlessly. He
is not to pursue martyrdom, nor to pose as
a radical reformer. The best reformers
the world has ever known found their
work forced on them reluctantly. The
true prophet can as little covet martyrdom
as he may allow himself in cowardice.
And when, through such public opposition,
his work seems hindered and narrowed, he
is to turn, as Jesus turned, only the more
earnestly and fully to his deeper, though
less conspicuous, work. The shutting out
of the more public opportunity may mean
the fruitful shutting in to more significant
work. But even when you have turned with
full heart to that deepest work given you
with a few, you must still expect the diffi
culty of the constant breaking in on your
sought retirement and on that deepest work.
It is sure to come. As men who are trying
to accomplish some significant and solid
work, the "devastator of the day" will be
always with you. There are few things
that earnest men need more to make clear

154 RELIGION AS LIFE
to themselves from the beginning of their
hfe-work, than that they wiU have to fight
for time to grow, for time to do solid en
during work, for time to do especially the
particular definite piece of work which God
has laid on their souls to do. High achieve
ment is possible to no man who does not
carry to his work deep reverence for it, as
given him of God. One must count on the
constant interruption and multitudinous
unforeseen extras that always crowd the
life of the busy public man. One wiU be,
thus, in constant danger of frittering away
himself and his work and his deepest service.
It is most important, therefore, that one
should face definitely and fully this further
enemy of his life — the constant breaking
in on his sought retirement and his deepest
work. Here, too, one needs the inspiration
and the counsel of Christ's own example.
One may not allow himself to make the
monk's mistake ; you cannot withdraw
from life if you would minister to life. You
must live in the very midst of it. These
interruptions, it is true, may be either
temptations, or calls of God ; and one must
learn to discriminate. You cannot do every-

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 155
thing, and you will find yourselves obliged
to cultivate vigorously Dr. Trumbull's
"duty of refusing to do good." One may
well confront himself, in the face of mul
titudinous opportunities, with the persis
tent question, Have I just here a real mes
sage ? Is this God's opportunity for me
just now ? or does it, rather, mean leaving
more imperative and immediate obliga
tions ? If the threatened interruption is
for you truly God's opportunity, then you
are to use it to the full, gladly, and with
abandon, and to get back promptly to
your regularly given work. For your great
est work must always lie with that small
inner circle whose lives you may touch most
closely. But even the few, it must always
be remembered, one is training not for their
own sake alone, but for the service of the
larger number beyond his immediate reach.
Even in this most fruitful work, with the
few nearest to him, the leader cannot escape
another persistent obstacle. In the work
with this inner circle particularly committed
to him, he wiU be compelled to feel often
their slowness and dullness; for they are
giving, and can give, much less time and

156 RELIGION AS LIFE
thought to the themes of the ideal world
than he. It will often seem to him as if
exceedingly small progress were being made,
and he will chafe under the constant need of
adaptation, of accommodation to narrow
ness and prejudice and false education and
different temperaments. And he wiU es
pecially feel, in what will prove to be some
of the darkest hours of his higher life-work,
the painful lack of full sympathy and com
plete response to his best, even on the part
of those who stand closest. He wiU know
what it is in much to be left quite alone,
and he will enter, in his measure, into the
experience of the solitariness of the Master
of life.
One will be able to meet this most in
terior obstacle of his life-work, only as he
definitely aims to cultivate patience with
what must often seem to him slowness and
dullness. This greatest work that it is
possible for any man to do — the giving
of himself fully to a few — in its very
nature requires much time and continuous
association. But as surely as Christ's great
est work was not his miracles, nor his public
preaching and teaching tours, but his

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 157
close personal training of the little inner
circle, so surely must any man's greatest
work lie in the same sphere. This most
significant opportunity one can meet only
as Christ did, with time and close associa
tion and the steady putting of the truth,
while he keeps firm in his heart the spirit
of high hope, because he understands that
as this intimate work with a few is one's
most significant and fundamental work,
as the ends here sought are supremely great,
so he need not begrudge the greatest pains.
One must often come back for the staying
of his soul to the fact that it seems quite
probable that the larger part of even the
so-caUed public ministry of the Master of
life was devoted chiefly to the training of
the Twelve ; and one will seek to come into
the sharing of his own infinite patience and
hope. There is yet one further bitterness which
the earnest soul may not be spared. It
is hardly possible that any true leader in a
large work should be wholly without the
experience of disloyalty on the part of some,
even in the inmost circle. There will be
some betrayals on the part of those who

158 RELIGION AS LIFE
belong only nominally to the inner group,
but there will be at least the temporary
denials of those who really are of the inmost
circle. That within this bond of intimate
fellowship disloyalty should appear, must
always give the sharpest pain of all. No
considerations can make that experience
easy ; none can make it other than an abiding
sorrow. Nevertheless, it is open to every learner
of the Master of life to drink even this
bitterest draught, in the spirit that Jesus
showed, — to face the certainty of coming
defection — "Ye shall be scattered every
man to his own and shall leave me alone"
— -with the quiet firm faith in God that
makes it possible still to say, "And yet
I am not alone because the Father is with
me." He may connect, too, with this faith
in God, Christ's own conquering, towering
faith in man, which can look forward even
past denial and desertion to the assurance
of the return, and urge, in confidence in that
work of God already begun in these men, " I
made supplication for thee, that thy faith
fail not ; and do thou, when once thou hast
turned again, stablish thy brethren."

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 159
To attempt any reaUy spiritual service
of men — and none of us can be satisfied
to do nothing here — is no lackadaisical
calling. It demands, rather, the most virile
and heroic qualities, coupled with the deep
est and most spiritual insight. It invites
one, as we have seen, to face misunder
standing, shallowness, pride and prejudice
and malice, spiritual dictation, the con
tempt of familiarity, the opposition of the
customary and of unveiled wickedness, the
thwarting of one's quiet hours, slowness
and dullness and even disloyalty in the
inner circle. And one may find them all
within the bounds of a very small com
munity. All classes are represented in these
enemies of one's life, all degrees of intimacy
— previous warm friends, enthusiastic fol
lowers, open bitter enemies, intimates and
kindred, authorities, common acquaintances,
true foUowers, casual claimants on time
and thought. All kinds of temptations,
too, — plain and hidden, subtle and direct,
— here confront one : the appeal of previous
warm trust to his loyalty and his desire
not to pain ; the appeal of shallow followers
to his love of success and his desire not to

160 RELIGION AS LIFE
disappoint ; the appeal of bitter opponents
to his love of fight and his possibility of
prejudice and of hate ; the appeal of kin
ship and love to the tenderness of his
affection and to his love of ease ; the appeal
of one's familiars to his desire for popularity
and to his spirit of envy ; the appeal of
institutional opposition to fear and to ob
stinacy ; the temptation, in the casual
meeting, to thoughtless and careless neglect
of opportunity; and with one's intimates
the temptation to impatience and short
sightedness, sometimes even to bitterness
and resentment, to discouragement and to
doubt of the love of God and of the possi
bilities of men. The appeal is made, thus,
to motives the lowest and almost the
highest ; for the very heights which one is
called to walk in his highest service them
selves prompt to giddiness.
All these enemies of life, too, are not only
difficulties, but, as we have seen, personal
perils as well. Can one maintain, in the
face of them, his faith and hope and love ?
With large tolerance and with tender sym
pathy, can one still keep his convictions
firm, his own ideals high ? The prophetic

THE ENEMIES OF LIFE 161
life, dedicated to the highest service of men,
just because it is of the prophetic spirit,
must face aU this. On the way to life one
must face the enemies of life.

VI
THE ESSENCE OF LIFE
Life in the Will of God
We have found the ruling method of life
to be honest response to the highest realities
and personalities of life, regarded as the
completest manifestations we have of the
Source of all life. In pressing our way to
the most significant of these personalities,
we have found ourselves again and again
impelled to give the supreme place to the
personality of Jesus. It cannot seem to us,
therefore, of small moment, what he thought
of our relation to the will of God. For it
seems plain that that ultimate harmony of
life to which religion looks cannot come to a
man while he feels himself still at war with
the universe, constantly baffled by the
eternal purposes that he sees at work in
the world. The deepest condition, then,
of fundamental peace must be, in the
language of religion, the union of our wiU
162

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 163
with the whl of God. At the center of
that most universal of the vital religious
documents of the race — the Lord's Prayer
— Jesus places, thus, most naturally the
petition, "Thy will be done." It is the
very heart of religion, the heart of ethics,
the center of humanity's highest aspiration.
We have a right to expect that its thought
wiU range wide.
Yet it may not be forgotten that the
prayer, "Thy wiU be done," has seemed to
many to be the end of hope rather than the
assurance of hope. Strange as it sounds,
it seems almost true for most that this
prayer is said with a gasp, and connotes
only bitter trial, deep sorrow, despairing
outlook. Our hymn books quite univer
sally put all hymns gathering about this
great theme of the wiU of God under such
headings as submission, resignation, dis
cipline, and trial. The old test of con
version — that paradoxical "willingness
to be damned for the glory of God " — was
a legitimate climax of this view of the will
of God. Indeed, there is a singular lack of
hymns or of other writing that connect
the note of hope and triumph with the

164 RELIGION AS LIFE
thought of the will of God. Are these
things, now, an accurate reflection of the
thought of Jesus ? Are they signs of a
genuinely Christian spirit ? or do they come
far short of such a spirit ? Can we reverse
the seemingly dominant conception at this
point, and change the atmosphere of this
petition from one of gloomy, corroding
foreboding to one of confident hope ?
In the fulfillment of this purpose we may
weU consider three things : What this
prayer meant to Jesus ; how it confronts
and transcends all the inadequate concep
tions of religion that have marked the prog
ress of the centuries ; and the necessity
that modern Christianity, in hne with the
thought of Jesus, should enlarge and deepen
its conception of the will of God to meet
the need of the modern world.
Remembering that the teaching of Jesus
is never to be separated from himself, a
threefold assumption plainly underlies this
petition, and each assumption is a great
ground of hope: first, that there is a
heavenly Father, of character like Christ's
own ; second, that there is a heavenly life,
in which God's wiU is already perfectly

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 165
done ; third, that God's will is pledged to
a like heavenly life here on earth. Out of
these assumptions is born the prayer "Our
Father, thy will be done, as in heaven, so
on earth." God's will, that is, backs up
with its infinite resources every such peti
tion, and every corresponding endeavor.
First of all, then, for Jesus there is at
the heart of the world a personal will —
for even our later philosophy can hardly
carry through an impersonal, or subper-
sonal, conception 1 — and that personal will
is the wiU of a Father, with a character
like that of Jesus. God is hke Jesus ;
that is the very essence of the Gospel, the
source of all hope for every worthy aim and
desire in the heart of man.
Secondly, this wiU of the Father has an
eternal outlook upon another life, for which
this life is but a training school. There is
a sphere where God's will is already per
fectly done, into which this life emerges.
There is the immortal hope. This so-called
eschatological element in the teaching of
Jesus is unmistakable. It is not to be
JCf. the author's The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual
Life, pp. 74-78.

1 66 RELIGION AS LIFE
blinked at nor apologized for. The view of
Jesus would be quite too small, if it failed
to take in another life and the activity of
God. This faith is needed, deeply needed,
if the hearts of men are to be satisfied.
If death ends all, it is mockery to talk of a
satisfying hope ; for no jugglery with pretty
words and phrases can fiU empty hearts
or make good extinguished lives. If we
must give up the hope of personal im
mortality, let us do it, at least, with self-
respecting honesty, and not befool ourselves
or others with substitutes that are not substi
tutes at all. I confess I much prefer on this
point the blunt honesty of John Stuart MiU to
the ingenious befogging of some modern al
truists. That some men seem to themselves
to have discovered that they have no need
or desire for the immortal life may be true ;
but it is not a thing to be said boastfully,
and it is small proof for those of us who
have both desire and need. For us it
must seem that such men have not
awakened to full self-consciousness, or at
least not to the logical thought of what
such self-consciousness means. One won
ders if they have ever had aims not to be

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 167
snugly packed within a few years, or if
they are aware of what even one friendship
may involve.
Jesus, at least, is in no uncertainty here.
He does not so much assert, or assure, as
assume. The atmosphere of his whole life
is that of the eternal. He walks in the
midst of it ; his thought, his spirit, are no
where else fully at home. And, therefore,
he dehvered "all them who through fear
of death were aU their lifetime subject to
bondage." But, in the third place, Jesus is not
thinking in this petition merely, nor mainly,
of another life. The language is directed
unmistakably to earth and to this life.
"Thy wiU be done, as in heaven, so on
earth." The attempt on the part of some
modern scholars to make the aim of Jesus
merely eschatological and miraculous is
wrecked on this petition alone, as well as
on the whole sweep of his ethical teaching.
Unless this petition and this ethical teach
ing are quite to be emptied of meaning, or
an absolute break is to be made between
the different parts of his teaching, Jesus
is steadily thinking of an increasing reign of

1 68 RELIGION AS LIFE
God on earth. Indeed, the reign of God,
in its very nature, must look to all men
wherever they are, and to all that concerns
them. This prayer, therefore, looks in
the mind of Jesus to the great goal, the one
ambition of his life, — the reign of God in
the individual and social life of all God's
children in heaven and on earth — the
bringing of heaven to earth, and the train
ing on earth for the great goals of the
heavenly life. Other men set as their goal
some one good, some single aspect of this
will ; Christ's goal is universal, all-embrac
ing: "Thy will be done, as in heaven, so
on earth." In the coolness and calmness of
careful deliberation, this Galilean peasant
— just as other men decide to be farmers,
or lawyers, or physicians — takes on as
his earthly calling, as his reasonable life
ambition, the full reign of God on earth.
For simple audacity and vitality of wiU,
the world knows nothing comparable with
that ambition. Into .the splendor of that
audacity and vitality of will all who would
name themselves after Christ are asked to
come. For to this purpose he soberly
commits his disciples, every one, in this

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 169
central petition of the prayer that was
always to characterize them — "Thy will
be done."
It is, then, no cringing cry; it is no
slave's submission to superior strength ;'
it is no plaintive wail ; it is no outcry of an
enfeebled, broken will, as we may be some
times tempted to think. Rather is it the
highest reach of a will superbly disciplined
to a world's task, enlightened by a reason
that can think the thoughts of God, in
spired by an imagination that sees the
ultimate consummation, warmed by a heart
that feels the needs of men, and glows with
the greatness of the Father's purpose for
them, — "Our Father, thy will be done."
This petition includes every good for
every son of man, — all high enterprise
and aU great goals. All justice, all truth,
all beauty, all merciful ministry, are here
enclosed — aU the triumphs of science, of
literature, of art, of music, of philanthropy,
of highest spiritual endeavor — the vision
of the city beautiful, the city honest, the
city serving, the vision of a redeemed hu
manity sharing in the very life of God.
For all these are but expressions of men's

170 RELIGION AS LIFE
God-given natures. All this, then, we
may believe this prayer means for Jesus.
The history of religion — nay, the his
tory of humanity itself — may be said to
be the history of the varying conceptions
of the will of God ; for religion grows with
growth in that conception, and religion, we
may not forget, is life's supreme factor.
We are to consider, therefore, in the second
place, how Christ's thought of this prayer,
with his clear sense of a God whose purpose
includes all good for aU men in both hves,
at once confronts and challenges and tran
scends all those wavering, inadequate con
ceptions of the will of God that have marked
the progress of the centuries. In line with
one of the deepest trends of our own time,
we need to put the will in the foreground
and to confront these defective interpreta
tions of the will of God with Christ's own
thought in this prayer.
Religion is, therefore, first of all, no
matter of ceremonial, of ritual distinctions
of clean and unclean, no pleasing of an ar
bitrary God with sacrifices and offerings,
as most pre-Christian religions thought, —
no external observance of any kind. A

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 171
holy God of character can find satisfaction
in nothing short of inner obedience. The
Father finds delight only in the filial spirit.
Even the Old Testament prophet knew
that "to obey is better than sacrifice."
It has been a long and toilsome evolution
of humanity, this sloughing off of the
ceremonial conception of religion ; and
many are still in bondage to it. But when
Jesus put in the hearts of men the prayer
to a God revealed in his own life, "Our
Father, thy wiU be done," all external ob
servances shpped away from essential re
ligion, as having all their significance, only
as being absolutely insufficient expressions
of an inner life. "Thy wiU be done" in
the inner life.
Religion, again, is no merely beautiful
thing for aesthetic admiration, as Hellenic
thought, and many a modern echo of it
have tried to conceive. Its life is beautiful,
but with a beauty no mere aesthete can ever
take in. For it is beautiful with the glory
of the most majestic of all possible aims —
those of the wiU of God — aims that do
not balk at precise and prosaic manifes
tations on earth, and do not stop short of

172 RELIGION AS LIFE
the sweep of the ages. "Thy wiU be done
as in heaven, so on earth."
Religion, too, is no merely true doctrine
for intellectual apprehension, as Greek and
Roman philosopher or orthodox or rational
istic modern would have it. Its teaching
is true, but with a truth no mere scholar
can ever reach ; for its truth is the truth
born of experience and wrought out in the
laboratory of life. "Thy will be done."
And religion is no mere seeking of mystical
experiences, either that half swoon and hah
ecstasy, for which, as Nash says, the Jew
forsook his prophets with their social vision,
and the Greek his philosophers with their
rational pursuit of truth. The sweep of
religion's emotional life is, indeed, widest
of all, just because it has to do with the
unsearchable riches of the divine personality.
But its prayer is not, "Give me great
emotions, ' ' but ' ' Thy will be done. ' ' Under
neath the thought of that will of God lie,
it is true, peace and joy unfathomable,
and nowhere else to be found; but the
emotion is incidental to the will, not in
dependent of it, or an end in itself. "Our
Father, thy will be done."

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 173
Rehgion, once more, is no practice of
ascetic seh-mortification, as the monk,
ancient or medieval, thought it. It is
good tidings. It rejoices in life. It aims
to bring continually larger life. It does
pay gladly the price of unhesitatingly
subordinating all lesser goods, for it knows
the cost of high attainment, even in small
enterprise ; and it takes joyfully what so
comes in the greatest endeavors. But it
seeks "the life that is life indeed," in union
with the wiU of God. And it knows that
whatever self -discipline, whatever surrender
of lesser goals are involved in that will,
that wiU of God alone is largest life. There
fore, not in abandonment of life, but in
secure possession of it, it prays, " Our Father,
thy wiU be done."
Nor is religion an idle longing for heaven,
or an awaiting for some miraculous de
liverance from heaven, as the ascetic and
world-weary have ever tended to think.
It knows, indeed, its need of a goal more
than earthly. Its vision is age-long, and
it stays its soul with the immortal hope,
but it is the hope of a life of ethical content.
It cannot, therefore, be indifferent to the

i74 RELIGION AS LIFE
triumph of righteousness right here on
earth. It faces the earthly life, therefore,
in no despairing, pessimistic mood. Earth,
too, is a room in the Father's house ; his
will is here too, to reign. To that, every
child of the Father is pledged. As in
heaven, so on earth, thy will be done.
The prayer of Jesus means, too, that
religion is no bare adoption of abstract
ethical principles, as Stoic philosophy con
ceived. It is the great contribution of
religion that it is able not only to unify all
ideals, but to make these all, living, warm,
tender in their union in the personal wUl
of a personal God. And that wiU, in the
conception of Jesus, is a Father's wiU, that
says to each child :
0, heart I made, a heart beats here !
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself !
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love.
" Our Father, thy will be done."
And conceived even as response to a
personal will, religion is not something
arbitrary laid upon man from without,
external and foreign to him, as the Pharisee

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 175
in all generations has conceived. God's
will is laid down in the structure of man's
very being, and we cannot be true even to
ourselves, and say "No" to him. The
deep, far-reaching questions of our own
time are driving us back irresistibly to the
thought of God as working in us. It is as
though God were himself saying to us, in
aU these questions concerning miracle, super
natural birth, and bodily resurrection of
Jesus, — "You shall not believe in me on
any of these external grounds." It is
Christ's insistence that men shall follow
him not because of the signs, but for what
he is in himself. It is the providential
demand of our own time, God's own voice
to us, — "You must have an inner religion,
if you are to have one at all." It is not a
light error in Jesus' thought, this laying
the whole stress upon external, marvelous
sign ; for it involves, he believes, rejection
of the highest in him ; and he will be fol
lowed for what he is, not for marvels that
he works. To our generation, even as to
his own, he seems to be saying, "There
shall no sign be given to it." And by this
very path, perchance, we shall find our way

176 RELIGION AS LIFE
back to faith, where faith now is difficult.
For, in the words of another, "You can
never compel moral admiration by physical
power; but you can understand that the
lower ranges of life may be subservient to
one whose greatness lies in the highest, —
that is, in the moral order of life." Ex
ternal authority has its undoubted function
in the history of the race and of the indi
vidual. But it is temporary and provisional
always. Its end is the doing away of the
need of itself, for it seeks the establishment
in each soul of an inner life of its own.
Authority itself means nothing where it
does not make an inner appeal. And,
once more, therefore, with Jesus we pray
to the Father of our spirits, whose wiU is
in our very being, "Thy will be done."
And finaUy, religion is no merely negative
aim of any kind, as the Pharisee again and
all mere fighters of evils have often been
tempted to think, but the fulfiUment of a
great divine, positive will. The religious
man is not to thank God that he is not as
other men are. The history of mankind
shows all too plainly appetites so dangerous
as easily to seem best extirpated altogether.

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 177
Nevertheless, it is no emptied soul that can
satisfy the thought or desire of Jesus. It
is not mere absence of evil, but the kindling
of great new enthusiasms, devotions, asso
ciations, and causes, that can alone fulfill
the will of God. It is this that makes the
relation of Christ's teaching to the previous
age so revolutionary. He sees clearly that
this new spirit of rejoicing sonship cannot
be put into the old forms — the new wine
into the old bottles. The new spirit neces
sarily breaks through them, if it is really
honest and true to itself. Even of evil
there is no final expulsion but by the new
affection. And the disciple of Jesus must
therefore pray, not the negative prayer,
"Empty my soul of evil," but the positive
prayer, ' ' Thy will be done, ' ' — the prayer for
the reign of God within, as well as without.
In all this, Christ's thought of religion
as union with the will of God is able to
take up into itself every element of truth
in aU these inadequate conceptions, and
yet to transcend them all. There is fullness
of life in the will of God, as Jesus conceives
it. Here is the essence of life.
In exact line, now, with Christ's own

178 RELIGION AS LIFE
thought, we men of the modern age must
enlarge and deepen our conception of the
will of God, if we are to meet the real de
mands of our time. For certain great con
victions have been forcing themselves in
upon the minds of men in this modern
age, that cannot leave our religious con
ceptions unaffected.
We live in a world enlarged for our
thought quite beyond the possibility of
conception by earlier ages : enlarged in
the infinite spaces of the revelations of
astronomy ; enlarged in the mighty reaches
of time, measured not only by geological,
but by physical, research ; enlarged in
perception of inner, endless energy, mi
croscopic as well as telescopic, and com
pelling our admission even far beyond aU
possibility of vision. We find ourselves
living not less in a vastly larger social
environment, wide as the earth — every
part of it tributary to every other, every
part sharing in the life of every other;
there can be finally no exclusions. A man
cannot help asking himself in such a world,
"Is thy God adequate to this enlarged
universe?"

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 179
We live, too, in a unified world : unified,
too, beyond all possible earlier conception ;
unified in the thought of the universal
forces of gravity and magnetism ; unified
in the principle of the conservation of
energy ; a world that acts as one world, as
though permeated with one will. It is so
permeated. For our time, as for no other,
the thought of unity dominates. The world
is one, past our denial. Man is one, in
spite of his seeming duality. Man and
the world are akin, and man is the micro-
cosmus in a deeper sense than the old
Greek philosopher could guess. Man and
man are one in great central likenesses back
of aU racial differences. And man and God,
too, are akin ; and our key to the under
standing of God is to be found within, not
without. No age so certainly as ours
should be able to say of man, with the
Psalmist, "Thou hast made him but little
lower than God, and crownest him with
glory and honor." Is thy God adequate
to this unified world ?
Moreover, whatever changes come in the
great conception of evolution, mankind
will never escape again from the idea of an

180 RELIGION AS LIFE
evolving world. Physics, biology, embry
ology, psychology, sociology, make it im
possible for us to forget that man is, in
some real sense, the goal of the whole phys
ical universe, containing within himself
the promise of endless progress. And men
have dared to dream that, in this evolution,
physical, individual, and social, they could
even catch the trend of the ages, the direc
tion of the mighty ongoing of God's pur
poses. Is thy God adequate to this evolv
ing world ?
Once more, with the emphasis of the
whole of modern science on the conception
of law, men look in upon themselves and
out upon the universe with other eyes.
For the perception of law means discern
ment of the ways of the universe ; means,
therefore, insight into its secrets and power
to use its exhaustless energies. It means
insight into economic and social as well as
natural laws, into laws of personal relation,
into the modes of the activity of God
himself. The idea of law brings, thus,
the glorious promise of world-mastery and
self-mastery and of conquest of our high
est ideals — hope hitherto unimagined. Is

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE

181

thy God adequate to this great world of
law? We men, thus, of the modern time, who
live in this enlarged world, in this unified
world, in this evolving world, in this law-
abiding world, are forced to enlarge our
conception of God and of his will, if we
have not already done so, to match this
greater vision of the world and of men.
For we shall not long believe in a God who
is not greater than his world.
When, then, we think of the enlarged
world of our time, we shall not be able to
make the measure of the will of God petty
projects of any kind or order. Here is
reason for hope.
When we think of the unified world so
necessary to our modern thought, we shall
not be able to doubt that the will of God
cannot be shut up to small fragments of life
or of the race, but must be inclusive of all
goods, and of aU men, and consistent
throughout. Here is reason for hope.
When we think of the mighty evolving
world, in the midst of which we see ourselves
placed, we cannot but believe that the wiU
of God is in it, working out great purposes

182 RELIGION AS LIFE
that we can at least dimly discern, and in
which, intelligently and triumphantly, we
may share. Here again is hope.
And when we think of the wiU of God,
laid down in the laws of nature and of human
nature, we find it no longer possible to
think of him as mere onlooker in the drama
of life ; since he is sharing in our very life,
and we in his. For, in another's words,
"Even the agony of the world's struggle
is the very life of God. Were he mere
spectator, perhaps he too would caU life
cruel. But, in the unity of our lives with
his, our joy is his joy, our pain is his."
Here too is hope, great and abiding.
These convictions, thus, of our modern
scientific age may help us to the largeness
of the measure of the meaning which Jesus
— and Paul after him — put into this
thought of the will of God. Under these
convictions, it is not too much to say, the
ambitions of men to-day have taken on a
titanic quality that he must be quite blind
who does not see : financial and economic
enterprises, world-wide in their outreach;
social projects and the pursuit of social
ideals that concern not one nation alone,

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 183
but all nations, and that go deep down
into the heart of all living ; missionary
movements that, in their very nature, can
not be carried out without affecting the
entire personal and social life of every race
touched thereby, and changing the very
face of nature. Every profession is sharing
in this enlarged vision of positive achieve
ment. The physician has begun to dream
of a race physically redeemed, through the
triumphs of preventive, not merely' re
medial, medicine. The lawyer is beginning
to think he need be no mere attorney, but
a servant of the public weal, put in trust
with the great heritage of law. Every
calling feels that it must more and more
think of itself as a social servant, justified
by nothing less. We seem to ourselves to
be just awaking out of sleep, and out of
duU lassitude of will. Now we see what
life means. We live in an infinite world,
and in that world we have our part to play.
We live in a unified world, and just on that
account we may work effects wide as the
universe of God. We live in an evolving
world, the direction of whose progress is
not wholly hidden from us; and into the

184 RELIGION AS LIFE
very plans of God, therefore, it is given us
to enter. We live in a law-abiding world,
in which God himself is immanent ; and
he works in us, both to will and to work of
his own good pleasure. Is it any wonder
that the ambitions of men of the present
day, when seen thus in the large, seem to
dwarf all previous aims of common men?
We build again, and with eager hope, our
heaven-scaling tower, but now on founda
tions laid by God himself; and the con
fused tongues give promise of changing
into a higher harmony in the unity of our
wills with the will of God. Now, one can
not so see these mightily enlarged ambitions
of men without a great deepening of this
always sufficient prayer, "Our Father, who
art in heaven, thy will be done, as in
heaven, so on earth."
But in order that into that prayer we
may put ourselves with confidence and hope,
there must underlie it that threefold as
sumption of Jesus : of the personal will of
the Heavenly Father, of the heavenly life,
and of the will of God pledged to the bring
ing of heaven to earth. For only he can
see thus greatly his own ambitions who is

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 185
able to gird and undergird his own will
by faith in the eternal and all-sufficient
wiU of God. He must know he attempts
no hopeless task. And the more neatly
men approach that rational, ethical de
mocracy, which seems to be the goal of all
earthly endeavor, the more clearly will they
see, in Nash's words, that "every form of
polity lays a certain tax upon the will.
But democracy lays the heaviest tax of all.
The vital relationships into which the in
dividual should enter are far more numerous
than under any other form. And with
each one of them he must go deeper. So
the tax levied upon the earnest will is
exceeding heavy. It cannot be paid, year
in, ( year out, and paid with increasing
gladness, unless the individual be assured
that the resources of eternal good are at his
back. And this certitude only possesses
and pervades him when he has been made
whole by trust. The idea of God given to
him is a missionary idea. The good is
forthputting, or it is nothing. God is an
infinite missionary force. There is no fate
in him that hinders him from putting forth
his best. And the man who touches Christ

186 RELIGION AS LIFE
and is touched by him to the quick becomes
like God, a missionary force, making of
himself a redeeming energy that relates
itself to the energy of God, as a man's
right hand is related to the man. Hence
forth there is no fate in him, nothing which
cannot be mobilized and put in the field
in the service of his fellows."
He who has come into this mighty faith
of Christ's in the eternal personal wiU of
the Father, is evermore capable of mighty
convictions, mighty surrenders, mighty
endeavors. And in this identification of
his purposes with God's eternal purpose, it
must seem to him, as it seemed to Paul,
that he catches a glorious vision of sons of
God, come for the first time into their true
heritage — a consummation so wonderful
that in the glory of it all the rest of the
universe, animate and inanimate, seems to
share. "The whole creation groaneth and
travaileth in pain with us untU now."
"For the earnest expectation of the creation
waiteth for the revealing of the sons of
God." Let us ask, now, one further question
involved in this thought of life in the wiU

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 187
of God. What would be the natural and
inevitable effect upon a man's own inner
life of steadily and whole-heartedly tak
ing on the will of God in the faith and spirit
of Jesus ? First of all, the man whose sole
purpose is to find and to do the will of God,
as disclosed in the laws of his being and in
the fundamental facts and personalities
of life; whose whole anxiety, thus, is to
know the truth; who can say of himself,
"I am come, not to do mine own will, but
the will of him that sent me" ; — that man
wiU naturally find this very purpose lifting
him, as nothing else could, above personal
prejudice and caprice. This will be true
in the precise degree in which he has gen
uinely taken on that purpose. The very
attitude of mind involved tends to clear
the judgment, to sweep away befogging
sophistries and subtleties, and to make it
possible to giye a judgment according to
the facts. The man with this one deter
mining purpose, in his measure, thus, can
truly say, "As I hear, I judge: and my
judgment is righteous ; because I seek not
mine own will, but the will of him that
sent me." He is, so, on the normal high-

RELIGION AS LIFE

road to the knowledge of all needful truth.
His present determination to be utterly
faithful to his present light is the best
possible assurance of the larger light to come.
"If any man willeth to do His whl, he shall
know of the teaching." The fourth gospel,
therefore, naturally represents Jesus as
saying : "If ye abide in my word, then are
ye truly my disciples; and ye shaU know
the truth, and the truth shall make you
free." Not only does this single all-absorbing
purpose to do the will of God help the man
to the knowledge of the truth ; but it also
affects the temper of his life, and his capac
ity for work. To seek solely the will of
God gives a singular singleness and sim
plicity to a life and makes it take on some
thing of real greatness. For the utterly
candid soul has a transparency of life that
seems to make it possible for the world
of the spirit to shine through it with con
vincing power. Even in the case of the
greatest, the supreme greatness is in the
spirit of the service, not in the size of the
task assigned. It requires the domination
of a great purpose to make any hfe truly

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 189
great, and there is no purpose so great as
the purpose to do the will of God. Large
capacity for work, too, is a natural resultant,
just because of the concentration of aim
involved in the thought that God has for
me now just one thing to do, and because
of the energizing sense of God, as back of
aU one's work when thus undertaken.
And this latter faith also brings relief from
anxious responsibility. When one's will
is genuinely identified with the will of God,
he can leave the results with God. As
Cecil says, "Duties are ours, events are
God's. This removes an infinite burden
from the shoulders of a miserable, tempted,
dying creature."
As surely, too, as a man's life can be no
more permanent than the objects to which
it is given, and as surely as "the world pas-
seth away and the lust thereof," so surely,
on the other hand, ' ' he that doeth the will of
God abideth forever. ' ' God's plan is an eter
nal plan. What is inwrought there abides.
Nothing conceivable can give such abiding
worth to a man's life as that he should have
identified his aims with the eternal purposes
of God. How else can one be said to have

190 RELIGION AS LIFE
triumphed in life? To have learned
steadily and wholeheartedly to take on
the will of God in the faith and spirit of
Jesus — this is indeed to have finished
one's work, to have "overcome," in the
highest sense of that great word. Jesus
meant to make possible to his disciples the
clearness of judgment, the privilege, the
power, the rest, the freedom, the fruit-
fulness, the greatness and the triumph of
that life.
It seems hardly too much to say that the
whole battle of the race has been for knowl
edge of the will of God and for obedience
to it. The very meaning of education, too,
is the learning of that will in the laws of
one's own being, and of the world. If the
line of thought we have been following is
justified at all, the race has achieved, and
education is finished, in just the proportion
in which that will of God, in all its majesty,
is known and obeyed. This — and this
alone — is to have found oneself, to have
found one's powers, to have discovered the
possibilities of one's world. Whether stu
dents have recognized it or not, their whole
endeavor for a true education has been this

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE 191
prayer to the God of their lives — "Thy
will be done."
May we not say it out, say it boldly, say
it largely, say it with reverent but mighty
ambition, say it with joy in our hearts,
"Father, thy will be done" ? For human
lips can frame no other prayer so great,
none so full of blessing, of achievement, of
peace, of rest, of joy, of eternal hope.
Doubtless, some hard experiences await
us. We need not hesitate plainly to say so.
We should hardly think any enterprise
worthy of our steel that did not have its
risks, its difficulties, its obstacles, that
chaUenged and gave worthy employ to all
our powers. We mean to be men and
women. But still these ills are all by the
way, incidents and means, not ends ; and
the prayer "Thy will be done," we may be
sure, is not a prayer for calamities, but
for greatest blessing.
Doubtless, submission there must be —
hours when we shall feel capable only of
bare submission ; yet even that submission,
when with cold chiU hands we hold still to
God, wiU prove "not a weakening denial of
self, but a strengthening affirmation of

192 RELIGION AS LIFE
self. ' ' For the prayer, ' ' Thy will be done, ' '
we may be sure, is not submission to an
arbitrary will without us, but the assertion
of the highest self within us.
Doubtless, many minor plans may fail,
and we may know in them the bitterness
of defeat ; but in the greatest purpose we
cannot be defeated except by our own con
sent ; for we may take on God's purpose,
and share in his triumph. The prayer,
"Thy wiU be done," becomes thus no
longer a plaintive cry, but a jubilant,
triumphant note. For back of the prayer
lies the triumphant conviction voiced in the
crusades, " God wills it." For it is a prayer
for the triumph of God's loving purpose in
us and in aU men, a dedication of ourselves
to the consummation of his mighty plans
on earth and in heaven, dedication to the
magnificent sharing in the infinite purposes
of God himself, "whose service is perfect
freedom." I live in triumph, Lord, for thou
Hast made thy triumph mine.
We are to dare to believe in the splendor
of the plans of God. We need not doubt,

THE ESSENCE. OF LIFE 193
as Browning suggests in his Easter Day,
that far beyond all the exhaustless beauty
of nature, past aU the wealth of art, past
all the reach of "circling sciences, philos
ophies and histories," past even all tender
ministries of human love, stretches the
reach of the will of God. These all are but
the glories of the earth, God's antechamber.
The wise, who waited there, could tell
By these, what royalties in store
Lay one step past the entrance door.
We are brought, thus, to what sometimes
seems to me the deepest of our modern
hymns, just because it sounds so insistently
the note of larger life, --- of hope and
triumph in the will of God :
O Love, that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in Thee ;
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in Thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.
0 Light, that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to Thee ;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in Thy sunshine's blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

194 RELIGION AS LIFE
O Joy, that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to Thee ;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain
That morn shall tearless be.
O Cross, that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from Thee ;
I lay in dust life's glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.
No goal can be greater than that of
sharing in the life of God. Here is the
essence of life.

¦ I "HE following pages contain advertisements
of Macmillan books by the same author

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Moral and Religious Challenge of
Our Times
By HENRY CHURCHILL KING
President of Oberlin College. Author of " The Ethics of Jesus,"
"The Laws of Friendship," etc., etc.
Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62
" A thoughtful work, designed for thoughtful observers and
students of the novel and rapidly changing conditions under
which great problems of human happiness and national des
tiny are being slowly worked out. ... It is instructive rather
than argumentative — this calm, impersonal survey of un
toward developments in human affairs. Like the more ob
jective social philosophers, who go down into the arena and
fight, this clear-visioned, secluded student of civilization ar
rives at conclusions adverse to the existing order. His argu
ment is all the more effective because of its freedom from any
tinge of partisan prejudice or class distinction." — Philadel
phia North American.
" With much insight into the latest teachings of economics,
psychology and comparative religion, the president of Oberlin
studies the problem of human development in its entirety, as
a world problem. Perhaps the master stroke of. the book is
the most suggestive contrast between ancient and modern
civilization." — Boston Advertiser.
" President King first makes a careful survey of the out
standing external features of the present life of the world, to
see the challenge that they bring to the moral and religious
forces, and then he does the same thing for the new inner
world of thought . . . the book is, above all, practical, as is
everything from this author's pen." — Buffalo Express.
"A serious and wise discussion of the meaning of the
present age." — Kansas City Star.
" Its appearance is timely and undoubtedly it will aid in a
better understanding of the difficulties that are to be disposed
of, as well as indicate the spirit of broad humanity in which
they should be approached." — Knickerbocker Press.

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Publishers 64-6S Fifth Avenue New York

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Ethics of Jesus

Cloth, izmo, $/.J0 net; by mail, $1.62

" I know no other study of the ethical teaching of Jesus so
scholarly, careful, clear and compact as this. A large amount
of learning, sound judgment and fresh insight is here pre
sented in brief compass and in a style that any one can under
stand." — Extract from letter of Professor G. H. Palmer of
Harvard University.
"An original, able and stimulating discussion." — Biblio-
theca Sacra.
"A real contribution to the literature of ethics." — Boston
Transcript. " It is the chief value of this book that the lay reader will
find stated in it with great clearness and simplicity the con
clusions reached by some of the more radical analytical
scholars." — Outlook.
" A capital book which teachers and preachers will find in
valuable." — Literary Digest.
" Valuable both as showing how much we really know of
the teaching of Jesus and the immense value of this teaching
for the modern world in which we live." — Christian Register.

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Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Laws of Friendship, Human and
Divine
Haverford Library Lectures
Cloth, i2mo, $r.2j net; by mail, $1.34
" By his spiritual intentions, his apt illustrations, and gen
uine human sympathy, Dr. King glorifies a subject like this.
It enables him to speak out his inner self. He believes that
the laws which make human friendships possible and endur
ing, apply to the proper relations between God and men."
— Methodist Review.
" It is a book which it would be well if all young people
would read, married people also, and people of all classes." —
Book News Monthly.
" This book is full of sermon themes and thought inspiring
sentences worthy of being made mottoes for conduct." —
Chicago Tribune.
Rational Living
Some Practical Inferences from Modern Psychology
Cloth, i2mo, 2J1 pages, $1.23 net; by mail, $1.36
" An able conspectus of modern psychological investigation
viewed from the Christian standpoint ; it is an excellent ex
position of its bearing on life, and it is a lucid and inspiring
exhortation to rational living." — Philadelphia Ledger.
"Easy to understand and interesting for all thoughtful
minds." — Living Church.

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Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Reconstruction in Theology
Cloth, i2mo, 257 pages, $1.30 net; by mail, $i.6z
"The student of theology who is preparing to preach a
vital Christianity, and, as well, the layman who is seeking for
a higher and more satisfactory interpretation of the modern
movement of life and thought, will find here wise guidance
and wholesome inspiration." — H. P. De Forest in Bibliotheca
Sacra. " It is a book that the busy man delights to read — frank
and open in its discussions, simple in its statement of great
principles, and free from the terminology of theological sci
ence." — W . D. Van Voorhis in the Christian Evangelist.

Theology and the Social Consciousness
Cloth, i2mo, 232 pages, $1.23 net; by mail, $1.36
" The strength of Professor King's eminently sane and help
ful book is not in brilliant and suggestive sentences, but in its
clear unfolding of an elemental truth, and fearless and vigor
ous application of that truth to religious thinking. One can
not read it carefully without realizing that his thinking has
been cleared of much mistiness, and that he has a deepened
conception of a truth of superlative importance to which he
has but to be steadily loyal to find a rational interpretation of
his spiritual experience, and a safe guide amid the mazes of
theological speculation." — The Congregationalist.

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Seeming Unreality of the
Spiritual Life
Cloth, i2mo, $1.30 net; by mail, $1.60
"A book of surpassing interest and value." — Book News.
" A subtle and suggestive presentation of the reaction from
materialism." — Boston Advertiser.
" A book invaluable for the provision of Christian armor.
The vast army of ministers who study it will find in it as clear
an expression as is likely to be made, of the doubts which
assail the thinking mind, and of the rational and logical argu
ments which must dispel them." — Christian Herald.

Personal and Ideal Elements in Education
Cloth, i2mo, 277 pages, $1.30 net; by mail, $1.61
"To the student of modern educational problems these
addresses will be of interest and value. Their distinguishing
characteristics are spiritual perception, broad-mindedness,
practical good sense in the application of fundamental prin
ciples to current questions, and suggestiveness of thought." —
The Outlook.
" Every president of a school among us should read this
book ; every teacher, too, as for that. And the preacher who
will not be helped, by such a chapter as that on Christian
training and the revival is blind to the wider meaning of his
ministry." — Christian Advocate.

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