YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

ACQUIRED BY EXCHANGE

THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
IN MODERN LIFE

THE
EXPERIENCE OF GOD
IN MODERN LIFE

BY
EUGENE WILLIAM LYMAN, D.D.
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS
OBERLIN GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
AUTHOB OF "THEOLOGY AND HUMAN PROBLEMS" AND
"THE OOD OF THE NEW AGE "

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK * * * * 1920

Copyright, 1918, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published April, 1918

TO
THE FACULTY OF THE
OBERLIN GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
IN GRATITUDE AND AFFECTION

PREFACE
This book consists of lectures delivered
last autumn at Union Theological Semi
nary. The subject discussed is much more
difficult than it was when it first occurred
to me several years ago, but it is corre
spondingly more important. There should
be no moratorium for theological and re
ligious thinking during the period of the
war. The relation of such thinking to the
morale of the forces of the Kingdom of
God is too vital for that. We should not
expect valor without vision, nor steadfast
ness without faith. The democracy, social
and world-wide, which so many of us in
creasingly feel to be our true and only hope
(is itself a matter of rehgion, and rehgion
can fulfil its mission only as it issues in
such a democracy; but this reciprocal re
lation will not be clearly grasped without
the aid of earnest thinking. It was, ac
cordingly, with the hope of making some
slight contribution toward meeting our
vii

viii PREFACE
present spiritual emergency that the argu
ment of the following chapters was worked
out. For helpful criticism and counsel I wish
to express my especial thanks to my col
league, Professor William J. Hutchins.
Eugene W. Lyman.
Obeblin Graduate School of Theology,
March 29, 1918.

CONTENTS

BAGS
Introduction  I
CHAPTER
I. The Experience of God and the Devel
opment of Personality  8
IT. The Experience of God and Social Prog
ress  51
III. The Experience of God and Cosmic
Evolution  101

Index  153

THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
IN MODERN LIFE
INTRODUCTION
The modern world is in quest, dumbly
and half-consciously, of a religion. That
is, it is moving out toward a new adjust
ment to reality, human and cosmic, and
toward a new appropriation of ideals,
which when accomplished will be funda
mental, comprehensive, spiritual, and so
essentially religious; and of this move
ment it is growingly aware. The old atoms
of our thought, supposed to be indivisible
and unchangeable, are breaking up, but
the new ions which shall resolve some of
the deadlocks in our thinking have not
been surely discovered. The old empirical
medicine by which we used to poultice the
social order is thoroughly discredited, but
the new antisepsis and hygiene which shall
secure vigorous social health and growth
are only in their beginnings and are regarded
in many quarters with superstitious fear.

2 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
Even the written constitutions of the eccle
siastical world sometimes experience a cer
tain strain, though none of the supreme
courts that interpret them have frankly
followed the example of our national su
preme court and adopted the "rule of rea
son." Of the radical character and the
extent of these changes not a few minds
were beginning to take some account be
fore the World War, but with the progress
of the war they are more and more com
ing home to the minds of people at large.
We do not expect to emerge from this
war with the same intellectual, social, and
spiritual systems that we had when we en
tered upon it. We know that the war is
bound to be followed by a new world, vastly
different — whether for better or worse —
from the old. Times of such tremendous
change men instinctively feel are in a
peculiar sense times for religion. And so
they are asking: "What religion shall we,
and can we, have ? " It will be our purpose
in the following discussions to try to do
something toward answering this question.
The first aspect of our question— "What
religion shall we have?" — turns partly
upon what modern life most urgently needs,

EST MODERN LIFE 3
and partly upon what religion has to offer
that meets those needs; and the second
aspect of our question — "What religion
can we have?" — turns upon the relation
of these central modern meanings of re
ligion to reality as a whole. These turning-
points, therefore, may well furnish the
orientation by which the course of our
thought is determined.
If one flings out a general inquiry as to
what modern life needs from religion he is
likely to provoke a multitude of divergent
and contradictory answers, ranging all the
way from "Nothing" to "Everything."
But in these days of world convulsion the
modest and respectful attitude on the part
of contrasting groups of thought is the only
commendable one. No one of them has
any very good claim to be self-sufficient —
able to say to any of the others: "I have
no need of thee." It is a time for coahtion
cabinets in the realm of social philosophy.
And in fact modern life is far from feeling
itself to be self-sufficient as regards rehgion.
On the contrary it is peculiarly plastic to
such influence, provided religion will speak
straight to its deepest needs.
So, too? the determining of what rehgion

4 THE EXPERIENCE OF. GOD
has to offer to meet modern needs cannot be
done in an arbitrary and dogmatic spirit.
Religion, in view of the present moral re
lapse in the civilized world, is having to
refund many of its most valuable assets
with long-time promises, to keep which at
their par value will tax its utmost energies.
The "note of authority" so often demanded
of rehgious teachers must reduce itself to
the open-minded sincerity of a rehgion that
seeks to be the servant of life. The world
situation, then, sets aside all assumption
of self-sufficiency on the part of modern
life, and of dogmatic authority on the part
of religion, and challenges them to mutual
co-operation. At what points, if anywhere, may we
expect this co-operation to be most real
and successful ? A detailed and exhaustive
analysis of modern needs is obviously be
yond the scope of the task of these three
lectures. We can only select certain needs
which are clearly vital and comprehensive,
and with which all others are hkely to prove
more or less directly bound up, doing some
thing to justify the selection as we proceed.
Let me suggest, then, that modern life
needs aid from religion in three great tasks :

IN MODERN LIFE 5
the development of personality, the pro- ,
motion of social progress, and the inter
pretation of cosmic evolution.
But in what form, in turn, may we most-
hopefully look for the co-operative action
of rehgion in respect to these tasks ? Here
the whole wide field of the psychology and
history of rehgion stretches out before us,
and here again we must select. Let the
present-day emphasis upon rehgious ex
perience be our clew, and in order that we
may be dealing with that which is unmis
takably rehgion let us take the experience
of God as a conception which is broadly
inclusive of what rehgion has to bring to
the great tasks of modern life. This selec
tion, however, I hasten to add, is made
merely in order to delimit a field of inquiry,
and with the express intention of not
drifting into the dogmatic attitude already
condemned. It involves on the one hand
no denial of the possibility of a religious
experience without an experience of God,
and on the other hand no assumption as
to the nature or validity of the experience
of God. These are matters which must not
be prejudged, for they are themselves sub
jects of our inquiry. Here at the outset of

6 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
our discussion, then, we mean by the ex
perience of God simply that which in their
own personal lives men feel or think of as
such an experience. Thus our question,
"What religion shall, and can, the modern
world have?" when more fully stated, be
comes an inquiry into the meaning, value,
and reality of the experience of God in
modern life.
Under this general topic the three great
needs which we have said were fundamental
for the modern world give us the themes
for our three discussions. They are: "The
Experience of God and the Development of
Personality," "The Experience of God and
Social Progress," and "The Experience of
God and Cosmic Evolution." And in this
statement of our themes is involved the
scientific method which will be governing
our inquiry and which should be pointed
out here. We are not bringing the experi
ence of God as men feel or beheve them
selves to have it, in all its heterogeneous-
ness, to modern hfe, with the insistence
that it all be found valuable. Nor are we
assuming that modern life furnishes the
final framework to which religion must
be ruthlessly pruned. We are simply seek-

IN MODERN LIFE 7
ing for certain significant points where the
experience of God and modern life are
capable of interacting with each other with ,
mutual quickening effect. In other words,
we shall not take final norms from religion
to impose upon modern life, nor final norms
from modern hfe to impose upon religion;
but out of the vital conjunction of the two
we shall hope to obtain certain working
principles which are of importance for the
growth of the human spirit. This would
seem to be the legitimate meaning of the
empirical method in an evolutionary world.
We are, accordingly, to consider the ex
perience of God in its relation to modern
life from three points of view — the per
sonal, the social, and the cosmic.

THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD AND THE
DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY
We turn, then, to the immediate theme
of the hour: the experience of God and
the development of personality. The jus
tification already promised for the selec
tion of the development of personality as a
fundamental modern need is in one sense
hardly necessary. Personality is certainly
one of the great words of the present, a
word to conjure by even with the popular
mind. But perhaps for this very reason
it is in danger of degenerating to a merely
superficial use. An advertisement -in The
New Republic reads as follows: "Build up
your personahty. It is your greatest social,
professional, and business asset. Other
persons may successfully copy your busi
ness and social methods but no one can
copy your personahty. Become a per
sonality. Our correspondence course will
teach you how. Write for particulars."
Fortunately this advertisement comes not
from the school of religion on 120th Street,

THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD 9
but from an institution on 12th Street.
For no correspondence course will teach one
how to become a personahty. The word
has acquired a depth and a range that
cannot be hghtly passed over. Into it and
its equivalent have been put the highest
dreams of the race. Lotze has given us
the conception of personality as an infinite
ideal toward which man may indefinitely
approach. Nietzsche has struck out for
us the idea of the Superman, which among
other meanings suggests to us that there
are ranges of personality entirely beyond
our present horizon. Democratic thought
presents the ideal of a genuine personahty
for every human individual. And Chris
tianity, with its conceptions of freedom,
service, and immortality, has brought the
essential features of these dreams into a
hving union the fruitfulness of which we
may well believe is far from being ex
hausted yet.
But notwithstanding the possession of
these great dreams and all they have done
for us, the development of personality
confronts us as our most urgent and per
plexing task. For our other development
has outstripped the development of per-

10 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
sonality. Science has had a swift develop
ment, but conscience has by no means kept
pace with it. Yet only the' harmonious
interaction of science and conscience can
bring forth true personality. Production
has expanded enormously, while education
has progressed but moderately. Yet only
as production and education keep step can
vigorous personalities be built up. The
diffusion of ideas has reached a high de
gree of perfection, but the ideas diffused
are often cheap and thin; the means of
enjoyment are at the disposal of all, but
the power wisely to enjoy is at the command
of but few. Yet only as intelligence and
taste interpenetrate with information and
entertainment can sane and elastic persons
result. And so it has come to pass that,
even in the free republics in which the
opportunities of life are most widely shared,
the opportunity to be a personahty is
denied to whole classes; and while the
technique of controlling physical things
forges ahead, the art of developing per
sonalities lags behind. And at the present
crisis it often seems as though our entire
civilization were nothing but a wrecked
airship, with the personalities supposed to

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 11
be most especially in control helplessly
entangled in the wreckage.
If, then, the task of developing per
sonahty is one whose fundamental urgency
for moderri life can hardly be denied, what
aid for its accomphshment can be looked
for from the experience of God ? We shall
consider first the meaning and value of
such experience for this task, and then its
reahty or validity.

Much experience of God, as men have
felt or believed themselves to have it, has
had — it must be confessed at the outset —
quite other aims than the development of
personality. This is indeed true on the
whole of the great non-Christian religions |
of the present, except that form of Judaism
which stands close to Christianity. And in
the Christian rehgion itself the conscious
aim has often been indifferent or hostile to
the development of personahty. Never
theless I think it can be shown that the
experience of God has proven itself capable
of being a powerful force to this end, so that
in Christianity at least it is coming more
and more to have this end as one of its chief

12 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
conscious aims. We shall look to the
Hebrew and Christian religions as the most
hopeful sources of evidence that such is
indeed the fact.
The most unique personal experiences
of God in the Hebrew religion are those of
the great prophets; and with the rebirth of
prophecy at the beginning of Christianity
the most characteristic personal religious
experience is that of sonship to God. Now
the significance of these types of experience
for personal development is that they hft
those who have them to the level of crea
tive moral living. Amos, the herdsman and
dresser of sycamore-trees, is transformed by
his sense of the will of God into a preacher
of social justice, a believer in international
ism from the ethical and religious stand
point, if not- from the pohtical, and a
foremost teacher of ethical monotheism.
Hosea, the victim of cruel domestic tragedy,
is made by his sense of God's faithfulness
into an interpreter of divine redemptive
love for his nation. Isaiah, the courtier,
is through his profound experience of God
also the righteous statesman and the typi
cal seer of his race. Jeremiah, the priest's
son, becomes, through the burning fire

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 13
shut up in his bones, the one who detaches
the faith in Jehovah from the temple and
interprets it as an inward and personal
rehgion. And though we have fewer bio
graphical data from other prophets, the
messages they bring give evidence of a like
transforming experience. Moral creativ
ity is clearly one of the most significant
fruits of the prophetic consciousness.
But a fuller evidence of the moral creat-
iveness of the prophetic consciousness is
its power to propagate itself. Anonymous
prophecy doubtless means, on the whole,
a decline of the prophetic spirit, but in one
sense it means its triumph. For it shows
that the prophetic experience can spread
through a variety of minds — some of them
perhaps lesser minds, but all capable of a
first-hand experience of God. Just as the
anonymous work in many of our great State
documents proves that statesmanship is a
co-operative matter, so anonymous proph-
'ecy proves that the prophetic conscious
ness is more widely sharable than we some
times have supposed. And with the great
anonymous prophet of the exile comes the
conception of Israel as a prophet nation.
Thus the prophet's divine call was extended

14 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
to any that had ears to hear; and that this
call was apprehended and responded to by
many, to be sure with varying degrees of
clarity and vigor, is proven by the vitality
of Jewish rehgious literature, whether in
the form of prophecy, or apocalypse, or
psalm, or gnomic poem.
While, however, the prophetic experience
of God with its moral creativity persisted
long through the clash of civilizations and
the havoc of war, it gradually declined.
Yet even in its decline it was vital enough
to engender something greater than itself.
With Jesus came a profoundly new experi
ence of God and at the same time a won
derful new appreciation of human values
and power to give those values vital embodi
ment. This new and greater form of proph
ecy expresses itself under the conscious
ness of sonship to God. And the outstand
ing characteristic of this consciousness of
sonship is its union of an experience of God
of new intimacy and depth with a moral
creativity of the greatest scope and energy.
This new religious and moral life of course
makes use of many contemporary forms of
thought, historical, psychological, theologi
cal — as for example the Messianic eschatol-

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 15
ogy — at the same time that it is bursting
and abandoning other contemporary forms.
And perhaps the attempt to distinguish
between essence and form, with the idea
that the essence is authoritative though the
form is not, is a dubious one. But our
point is simply this: that here at the be
ginning of Christianity is a spiritual process
from which can be learned things of most
vital moment for modern hfe. In Jesus'
consciousness of sonship we see the ex
perience of God making powerfully for the
development of personality because it is
so intimately united with moral creativity;
and if the development of personality is a
fundamental and permanent modern task,
Jesus' consciousness of sonship may well re
tain for us the utmost significance.
This consciousness of sonship proved
able to propagate itself with even greater
vitality than the older prophetic conscious
ness. And this propagation is evidently the
direct intention of Jesus. Indeed, he sets
no limit to the extent to which he seeks to
share his filial experience with others.
Men are to become sons of God even to
the extent of sharing in the great redemp
tive experience of love for one's enemies.

16 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
They are to become sons even to the ex
tent of those words which President Mc
Giffert has somewhere called the bravest
that man ever spoke: "Ye therefore shall
be perfect, as your heavenly Father is per
fect." Here is limitless development of
personality combined with the deepest ex
perience of God, and it is hard to imagine
how either could have come to pass with
out the other. For it is the sharing of
the mind of the Father which gives the
moral creativity, and without the moral
creativity the mind of the Father is not
really shared.
That the early Christians responded
widely to Jesus 's teaching and example
of sonship the great New Testament writ
ers make plain. From Paul we learn that
the key-note of the early Christian's prayer
was "Abba, Father"; and he himself inter
prets Christian conversion as adoption into
sonship, and declares that: "As many as
are led by the spirit of God, these are sons
of God." With Paul, too, as with Jesus,
this sonship means the union of freedom
and service — the freedom which can be
realized only in service, and the service
which can be accomplished only by free

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 17
men. Or, in the terms that we have been
using, this experience of sonship to God
means moral creativity. John likewise is
interpreting essentially the same experience
in those great sayings: "As many as re
ceived him, to them gave he the right to
become children of God"; and, "Behold
what manner of love the Father hath be
stowed upon us, that we should be called
children of God; and such we are." And
the meaning for the development of per
sonahty is again essentiaUy the same —
purifying the self, walking in the hght, do
ing the works of God.
AU too soon, it is true, the Christian ex
perience of God ceased to be a conscious
ness of sonship. And one can hardly help
thinking that with this change went a loss
of moral creativity. Indeed, one of the
important reasons for believing that Chris
tianity has great development still ahead
is that Christians are beginning .to recover
this consciousness of sonship in its deeper
religious and moral meanings and without
the traditional theological limitations which
have resulted from marking a metaphysical
boundary line between the sonship of Jesus
and that of other men. At all events the

18 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
Christian experience of God has expressed
itself chiefly in other ways and has had for
the development of personality very vari
ous results.
But we have not undertaken the task,
so utterly impossible at this time at least,
of indicating all that the experience of God,
even the Christian, may have meant for
or against the development of personality.
We are simply seeking evidence that the
experience of God is capable of having
great positive significance for such develop
ment. And we shall have to limit ourselves
to a few instances which have an added
meaning because they are comparatively
close to the present and have influenced
our modern world in significant ways.
One of the creative centres of American
spiritual life is the personality of Horace
Bushnell, and the inner explanation of
this fact his biography shows to be his
experience of God. Let me cite the most
striking phase of that experience. "The
year 1848," writes his wife — that is, when
he was forty-six years old — "was the cen
tral point in the life of Horace Bushnell."
"I believed," he himself said of the years
just preceding, "that there is a higher,

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 19
fuUer life that can be lived, and set myself
to attain it." Months of study and spiri
tual seeking ensued. "On an early morning
in February," his biography states, "his
wife awoke, to hear that the hght they had
waited for, more than they that watch for
the morning, had risen indeed. She asked,
'What have you seen?' He replied, 'The
Gospel.' It came to him at last, after all
his thought and study, not as something
reasoned out, but as an inspiration — a
revelation from the mind of God himself."
Looking back on this experience Bushnell
said: "I seemed to pass a boundary. I
had never been very legal in my Christian
life, but now I passed from those partial
seeings, glimpses and doubts, into a clearer
knowledge of God and into his inspirations,
which I have never wholly lost. The
change was into faith — a sense of the free-
ness of God and the ease of approach to
him." And of the meaning of faith he else
where said: "It is not the committing of
one's thought in assent to any proposition,
but the trusting of one's being to a being,
there to be rested, kept, guided, moulded,
governed, and possessed forever." Of this
experience his wife wrote: "The greatness

20 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
of this change and its profound reality made
him a new man, or rather the same man
with a heavenly investiture."1 This judg
ment is borne out by the facts, for the
greatest days of BushneU's intellectual and
spiritual productivity were still ahead of
him. Of the power of this creative spiri
tual experience to propagate itself to others
a single testimony must suffice. Doctor
Washington Gladden has written of Bush
nell: "I could not have remained in the
ministry, an honest man, if it had not been
for him. ... If I have had any gospel to
preach, during the last thirty-five years,
it is because he led me into the light and
joy of it."2
By the side of this instance of what the
experience of God can mean for the de
velopment of personahty let us place an
other, found in the life of one whose influ
ence in England was in many respects very
similar to that of Bushnell in America.
James Martineau was a remarkable in
carnation of that liberahsm of which New
man was so fearful, but to which the
* Life and Letters af Horace BushneU, by Mary Bushnell Cheney,
pp. 191-3.
2 Horace Bushnell : Preacher and Theologian, by T. T. Munger,
p. 375.

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 21
greatness of England during the last cen
tury was so largely due. Particular phases
of this movement no doubt found sharper
and more consistent expression in other
great intellectual and pohtical liberals of
England. But Martineau was in singu
larly close relation with all its groups, and
in its many-sidedness and inward meaning
he is perhaps its best single embodiment.
What is the secret of this creative re
lation between Martineau and the spirit
of England? We may venture to answer:
his experience of God. The evidence of
this, as with BushneU, runs all through his
biography, but no single experience con
centrates it, as in Bushnell's case, in a
dramatic moment. It however has re
ceived a unique expression in that wonder
ful product of his early career, Endeavors
after the Christian Life. Throughout these
rich meditations the autobiographical note
is unmistakable. I cite a single passage
from the chapter entitled "The Besetting
God." After speaking of God in nature
throughout space and time he turns char
acteristically to the moral consciousness;
"But there is a moral presence of his Spirit
to our minds which places us in relations

22 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
to him more intimate and sacred. Surely
there occur to every uncorrupted heart
some stirrings of a diviner life; some con
sciousness, obscure and transient it may
be, but deep and authoritative, of a nobler
calhng than we have yet obeyed; a rooted
dissatisfaction with self, a suspicion of some
poison in the will, a helpless veneration for
somewhat that is gazed at with a sigh as out
of reach. It is the touch of God upon us;
his heavy hand laid upon our conscience,
and felt by all who are not numb with the
paralytic twist of sin. Even the languid
mind of self-indulgence, drowsy with too
much sense, complacent with too much self,
scarcely escapes the sacred warning. . . .
And as for minds that are awake and in any
wise in quest of him, he haunts them every
way. O that we could but know it to
be false that the good man is satisfied from
himself ! When was there ever one of us
who did not feel his recollections full of
shame and grief, and find in the past the
cup that overflowed with tears? When
one that did not look into the future with
resolves made timid and anxious by the
failures of experience, and distrust that
breaks the high young courage of the heart,

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 23
and prayers that in utterance half-expect
refusal? Which of us can stand this day
at the solemn meeting-point of past and
future, without abasement for the one, and
trembling for the other ?,— without being
beset by the divine Spirit in penitent re
grets from behind, and in passionate aspira
tions from before? And herein we should
discover only this : that he has laid his hand
upon us; has resolved to claim us to the
uttermost; and wiU haunt us with his re
bukes, though they wither us with sorrow,
till we surrender without terms."
In such a passage as this the notable thing
is the way in which the experience of God
and that of moral renewal and creative
power interpenetrate. And this, expressed
with varying shades of feeling — now solemn
and now glad — is the distinctive note of
Martineau. For him goodness and God
are so related that neither merely dissolves
into the other and yet each is inseparable
from the other.
As a further instance of the relation be
tween the experience of God and moral
creativity we may take the personahty of
Albrecht Ritschl. The moral creativity of
Ritschl was in one sense less, and in an-

24 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
other greater, than that of Bushnell or of
Martineau. He touched life on fewer sides
than they, and he lacked their imaginative
and literary power; but his work was more
sharply concentrated about a few construc
tive ideas, and he became the centre of a
large and fairly definite school of thought
; — which was hardly true of the other two
men. This Ritschhan movement, coming
at a time when both speculative idealism
and pietism in Germany had largely spent
their force, has had so important an in
fluence in ethicizing and sociahzing con
temporary rehgion, both in Germany and
in other lands, that originahty and creative
energy can hardly be denied to its author.
Ritschl was through and through a theo
logian. He was not the author of important
devotional hterature, and his biographer
records no unique religious experiences.
At first sight it might seem, therefore, as
though he were merely the thinker about
religion instead of the possessor of a first
hand experience of God. But a little
closer examination of the matter makes
plain that Ritschl was characterized by a
religious experience of a singularly simple
and rugged type. The most creative period

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 25
of his life centres about the year 1874, when
the second and third volumes of his Justi
fication and Reconciliation were published,
and that same year he issued a pamphlet
on Christian Perfection which is so succinct
and comprehensive an interpretation of
the Christian hfe as to furnish the clew for
tracing his personal religion both in his
biography and in his theological writings.
What is this clew ? It is that the experience
of God and the moral life stand in the most
intimate reciprocal relation. Christian per
fection is the perfection of a finite and grow
ing hfe which at the same time attains
wholeness of character after its kind. This
wholeness of character is attainable as man
on the one hand gains mastery over the
world, and on the other loyally dedicates
himself to his ethical vocation in the ser
vice of the Kingdom of God. How dis
tinctly ethical and social is Ritschl's con
ception of the Kingdom of God becomes
apparent from his characterization of it in
the Justification and Reconciliation as "the
organization of humanity through action
inspired by love," and also from his further
statement — we of the new century should
note this carefully — that "it rises above the

26 THE EXPEREENCE OF GOD
limits of nationality and becomes the moral
society of nations."1 Now this mastery
over the world and this obedience to the
principle of organizing human life through
love are the very qualities which for
Ritschl constitute the divinity of Jesus
and the perfection of God himself. To
be growing into them is to attain sonship
to God, and the source of such growth is
that relationship to God, in humihty, faith,
patience, and prayer, which we learn from
the sonship of Jesus.
Around such simple, vital ethical and
religious ideas Ritschl organized not only
his thinking but his personal life. Loyalty
to one's ethical vocation and rugged in
dividuality mastering the conditions of
life, under the sense of doing the will of
God, are seldom better seen than in Ritschl.
And if the humihty which he declares to
be the characteristic religious virtue often
seems to be too little dominant in his life,
this is partly because to him humility
toward God means strenuous moral energy
in conduct, and partly because — in reaction
against pietistic pride in humihty — he holds
humility to be "the secret of the religious
1 Justification and Reconciliation, pp. 10-12.

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 27
man with himself."1 The psychology of
rehgion which recognizes wide differences
of temperament in rehgious experience will
hardly deny the originality of Ritschl's
experience of God, or its vital influence upon
his personahty and career.
To the American Bushnell, the Enghsh
Martineau, the German Ritschl let us add,
as evidence of the positive relation between
experience of God and the development of
personahty, the Russian 'Tolstoi.,. The lit
erary creativity of Tolstoi's earlier, years,
does not explicitly connect itself "with re
ligious experience, but the moral creativity
of his middle life and later years has in such
experience its vital roots. >" And though it
would be fruitless to guess which phase of
Tolstoi's genius the future will value the
more highly, in the vast crisis of the pres
ent it is certain that the moral phase looms
up with the greater significance. For Tol
stoi's teachings in their total influence are
a powerful ferment for democracy. Note,
for example, his challenge to the. science
of our day. Political economy he declares
should deal with but one question: "What,
is the cause and purpose of some people
1 Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, sec. 52.

28 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
doing nothing and others working for
them?" Historical science, too^ should
treat of only one question — "How the
workers, that is nine hundred and ninety-
nine thousandths of all mankind, lived?"
So for jurisprudence the one essential ques
tion is: "Why do people exist who allow
themselves to exercise violence toward other
men, to rob, imprison, execute them, send
them to wars, and much else?" Technical
sciences should be directed solely to the
end of "alleviating the labor of the people."
Philosophy has but one problem to which
it should address itself: "What am I to
do?"1 To be sure, pohtical democracy
was to his mind hardly more hopeful than
any other form of the state. It was
democracy based solely on universal re
hgion, with its universal law of brotherhood,
in which he put- his faith. Nevertheless
his ideas, incarnated as they were in his
self-identification with the life of the com
mon people in their toil, are proving a
democratic yeast and are leavening society
— and even the pohtical institutions in
which he disbelieved — in a startling and
far-reaching way.
1 What is Religion ? pp. 28-31.

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 29
The rehgious experience which brought
to birth the new moral creativity of Tol
stoi's later life he recounts in his Con
fession. "I felt," he writes, "that some
thing had broken within me on which my
life had always rested, that I had nothing
left to hold on to, and that morally my life
had stopped."
"Behold me then . . . hiding the rope in
order not to hang myself to the rafters of
the room where every night I went to sleep
alone; behold me no longer going shooting,
lest I should yield to the too easy temptation
of putting an end to myself with my gun."
"Then I turned my gaze upon myself,
on what went on within me, and I remem
bered that I only lived at those times when
I beheved in God. As it was before, so it
was now: I need only to be aware of God
to hve; I need only to forget him or dis
believe in him, to die. . . . 'What more
do you seek ? ' exclaimed a voice within me.
'This is he. He is that without which one
cannot hve. To know God and to hve is
one and the same thing!' . . . And the
light did not again abandon me."
"I returned to belief in that Will which
produced me, and desires something of me.

30 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
I returned to the behef that the chief and
only aim of my hfe is to be better, i. e., to
live in accord with that Will. And I re
turned to the belief that I can find the ex
pression of that Will, in what humanity, in
the distant past, hidden from me, has pro
duced for its guidance: that is to say, I
returned to a belief in God, in moral per
fecting, and in a tradition transmitting the
meaning of life."1
Thus the fact of the positive significance
of the experience of God for the develop
ment of personality presents itself to us
as being no less real in the modern world
than in the distant times of the past. And
it is a fact witnessed to not merely by a few
isolated lives such as these four but by the
self -propagating power of such experiences
in other lives. Moral creativity passes
from life to hfe and spreads out into social
movements — just as the intellectual in
ventiveness of Edison or Marconi or the
Wright brothers sets hundreds of others
inventing and inaugurates a new age in the
control of nature — and with moral creativity
a consciousness of an experience of God is
bound ud.
1 Ayfjner Maude, Life of Tolstoi, vol. I, pp. 417-18.

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 31
But now there is one characteristic of the
experience of God in the data before us
which should be especially stressed if we
are to realize the meaning of such experience
for the development of personality. For, as
we have already said, that which men feel
or beheve to be the experience of God may
have quite other aims than that of develop
ing personahty, and even quite other results.
The characteristic referred to is the way
in which, in the modes of religion that we
are deahng with, the experience of God and
that of moral creativity mutually pene
trate each other. God is felt or beheved
to be a present fact of the inner life in pro
portion as creative moral energy is rising
and maintaining itself within. The marks
of his presence are moral renewal, new in
crements of moral insight and power, the
ceaselessly growing moral life. Not that
the sense or thought of God and of the self
are simultaneously and continuously pres
ent in consciousness in such an experience.
But when one feels that he is experiencing
the presence of God, or judges that he has
experienced him, the event so apprehended
proves to be marked by moral creativeness.
And the acme of this type of experience is

32 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
when one is engaged in some work that
proves to be genuinely fruitful for the de
velopment of personahty in others. To
evoke moral originahty in others is to feel
the creative thrill that seems to pass from.
Jehovah's outstretched finger, in Michael
Angelo's fresco, to the awakening Adam.
It is to have a sense of being in contact with
reality in a new and deeper way and of
functioning harmoniously with it. So with
the preacher expression and insight often
come in the same flash. The teacher often
finds that the successful imparting of truth
brings with it fresh discovery. ' The parent
knows that as he reverently tries to guide
the development of his child's personality
he is deepening his own relation to the prin
ciples of existence. The statesman, as he
is forced by great responsibihty to think and
act for his people in new ways, experiences
a corresponding enlargement of personal
powers and finds himself gaining a new grasp
upon the laws of life. Or if in such experi
ences the state of mind is too largely ob
jective to permit these apprehensions of
their meaning, then afterward one judges:
"At those times of work for the unfolding
of human hves I hved most deeply. The

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 33
deeper facts and the greater values met
right here in my soul in some new and con
structive way. I experienced God."
This then is the great meaning and value
that the experience of God is capable of
having for the development of personahty.
It can interpenetrate with the experience of
moral creativity in such a way as to further
that experience. It can either give birth to
new creative powers, or it can in turn be
reborn from them, so that the total effect
becomes a sustaining, fostering, and en
larging of spiritual originahty, a new growth
of personal hfe. And this is simply the old
rehgious paradox which must be experienced
afresh whenever rehgion rises to these
higher levels — in losing one's hfe for others
there is a new finding; working out our own
salvation means God working his own will
within us; in service is the true freedom, and
only the free can truly serve; the true great
ness is humihty, but he only is humble who
courageously does the wiU of God.
Even without a conscious recognition of
this paradox its fruits for hfe may come to
pass. An experience of God which has
other aims than the development of per
sonahty may yet produce such develop-

34 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
ment; and certainly great creative powers
have not infrequently appeared in persons
who possessed no conscious experience of
God. But if the paradox is sufficiently
grounded in reality, the conscious recogni
tion of it, and the shaping of life in harmony
with it, should be matters of vital impor
tance. And to an age for which the develop
ment of personality has become a momen
tous problem, and which at the same time
is reaching out in new ways after. rehgion,
we can say: There is an experience of God
which makes for the development of per
sonality because , it interpenetrates in a
vitalizing way with the experience of moral
creativity. II
But if the religious paradox is to have the
meaning and value for modern hfe of which
we have been speaking it must be ade
quately, grounded in reahty. For in the
modes of religion that we have brought
before ourselves,, the objective and the sub
jective aspects, while they interpenetrate,
by no means completely merge. The ex
perience of God does not dissolve into that
pf moral creativeness, but is felt to be also

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 35
a functioning in relation with a super
human moral power. There is no question
that this is true in the case of the prophetic
consciousness of the Old Testament or the
filial consciousness of the New; but it is
also true of those men whose lives touch
so influentially our own time. Bushnell,
as we have seen, regarded faith as "the
trusting of one's being to a being." Mar
tineau has expressly defined religion as be
hef in "a Divine Mind and Will ruling the
universe and holding moral relations with
mankind."1 Ritschl's experience of mas
tery over the world and fidelity to an
ethical vocation is conditioned upon a
filial relation to a Power upon whom the
entire world-order depends and who is
working to accomplish a universal moral
order among men. Tolstoi, although he
is much more pantheistic in his thinking
than any of these others, vigorously chal
lenges the idea that religion can be dis
solved into morality and science, and inter
prets the Infinite Will by the ethical teach
ings of Jesus, as he understands them.
God, as an objective reality as well as an
inward experience of moral creativity, is
1 A Study of ReUgion, vol. I, p. 1.

36 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
unmistakably felt and beheved to be pres
ent in these modes of religion which promise
real meaning and value for modern life.
Now let us disregard the particular in
tellectual setting given by each of these
men to their experience of objective divine
reality, and let us try to find an equivalent
for that experience for ourselves, as men
facing an environment and a future already
different from theirs in certain momentous
ways. We are bound to do this, first of all,
because all our thinking to-day must be in
terms of evolution — an idea which in its
modern sense had not been fully assimi
lated by any of these thinkers. And we are
justified in doing this, because the most
distinguishing mark of this objective divine
reality is that it relates itself so vitally to
moral creativeness. Putting this equiva
lent in a single phrase we may say: the
rehgion that promises most for the develop
ment of personality is an experience of be
ing coworkers with an Eternal Creative Good
Will. This is an experience which relates
itself not to a world ready-made but to a
world in the making, not to a world that as
a whole is good or ever was good but to a
world that is becoming good; it denotes

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 37
not a God who once was the author of crea
tion or of a plan of salvation, but a God
who all through the time process and at
this present moment is creating new facts
and new values, and whose moral energies
are ceaselessly going forth to eliminate
evil from the world and to organize every
bit of mind that exists into a spiritual uni
verse; it involves a conception of man as
revealing, when he rises to the heights of
moral creativity, the deepest mystery of
existence, and as capable of being a sharer
in the creative and redemptive work of
God. In its great characteristics it is ex
pressed in the wonderful eighth chapter of
Romans, and particularly in its closing
words, so meaningful for the present hour:
"For I am persuaded that neither death,
nor hfe, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor
power, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
creature, shall be able to separate us from
the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord." But it is an experience which,
if sufficiently grounded in reahty, must be
ever renewing its forms of expression and
ever taking on new meanings through the
ages.

38 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
But in the minds of some of our leading
psychologists of rehgion this experience of
being coworkers with an Eternal Creative
Good Will is lacking in validity. In par
ticular Leuba, in his Psychological Study of
Religion, takes such a position. "The re
hgion of the future," he asserts, "will have
to rest content apparently with the idea of
a non-purposive Creative Force, making
of the universe neither an accidental crea
tion nor one shaped in accordance with
some preconceived plan." He recognizes,
it is true, a legitimate need for a concep
tion of "the transhuman Force of which
humanity is an expression," but he rejects
the thought of this Force as Purposive In
teUigence because that would land us back
in theism, the error of which he feels that
he has shown. He rejects, too, the Chris
tian conception of a Father God, on the
ground that "belief in the Christian God
rests no longer upon the wonders of the
physical universe, nor upon metaphysical
arguments, but upon certain inner experi
ences,"1 and that this belief is substanti
ated by modern theology only by withdraw
ing these experiences from psychological
1 Op. cit„ p. 232.

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 39
analysis and arbitrarily giving them final
ity.1 But he holds that "A religion in
agreement with the accepted body of scien
tific knowledge, and centred about Human
ity conceived as the manifestation of a
Force tending to the creation of an ideal
society, would occupy the place that a
rehgion should normally hold — even the
place that the Christian rehgion lost when
its cardinal behefs ceased to be in harmony
with secular beliefs."2
The issue raised by Leuba, then, is be
tween rehgion involving behef in a Purposive
Intelligence with whom one can have a spiri
tual relation analogous to the human social
relation — that is, the Father God of Chris
tianity — and a cult of "Humanity idealized
and conceived as a manifestation of [non-
purposive] Creative Energy."3 Thus on
the basis of an inductive psychological study
of rehgion Leuba chaUenges at a vital point
the experience of God which consists in
being coworkers with an Eternal Creative
Good Will. One important difference, how
ever, must be noted between the issue as
Leuba states it and as it develops out of the
1 Cf. op. cit., chap. XL
» Op. tit., p. 336. s Op. tit., p. 335.

40 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
study we are making. It is not simply a
Purposive Intelligence of which we are
speaking but a Creative Intelligence; not
a Providence working only according to an
eternally fixed plan but a Creative Moral
Intelligence both working toward the real
ization of his purposes and creating new
purposes. Nevertheless the issue in its
rehgious meaning remains largely the same.
It is the old and fundamental issue of the
personahty of God, simply adapted to
evolutionary thought and to certain new
ethical values. For, as William James
wrote: "In whatever other respects the
divine personality may differ from ours or
may resemble it, the two are consanguin
eous at least in this — that both have pur
poses for which they care, and each can hear
the other's call."1
The importance of this issue is shown by
the fact that the shock to our conception of
humanity produced by the war is causing
many to react from the idea of an imper
sonal non-purposive God, not indeed toward
an omnipotent Providence who has mysteri
ously planned all that happens, but toward
a personal God, purposive and creative even
1 The WiU to Believe, p. 122.

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 41
though finite. In fact, it is held by some
that he must be finite, in order not to be the
author of the colossal evils of humanity.
But to the values involved in this issue we
shall be returning in the following lecture;
and Leuba himself seems almost to admit
the superior practical value of Christian
theism over the more pantheistic view.1
His objection is rather that Christian theism
is illogical and arbitrarily derived from the
facts of religious psychology, and on this ob
jection his whole argument rests; for he
says little to justify the idea of "a non-pur
posive Creative Force."
Now let us freely grant Leuba's conten
tion that no inner experiences can legiti
mately be withdrawn from the analysis of
the psychologist of rehgion, and let us admit
also that modern theology often has done
this and so has given a fictitious "finality"
to its results. Our question then becomes
that of the legitimate interpretation of the
consciousness of being coworkers with an
Eternal Creative Good Will — making use
of any facts or values from the psychology
of rehgion which may throw light upon it,
arbitrarily excluding none, and holding
1 Cf. op. tit., p. 291.

42 THE EXPEPJENCE OF GOD
both data and results open to further anal
ysis. William James, in his Varieties of Relig
ious Experience, discusses "the Reality of
the Unseen," and he begins by pointing out
how ideas may produce in us the feeling of
reality just as truly as objects of sense.
/This they do when, like objects of sense, they
determine our practical attitudes and elicit
reactions from us of sufficient intensity and
range. And he gives abundant evidence to
show how religious ideas have this property
to a peculiar degree. "It is," he writes,
"as if there were in the human conscious
ness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective
presence, a perception of what we may call
'something there,' more deep and more
general than any of the special and partic
ular 'senses' by which the current psy
chology , supposes existent realities to be
originally revealed. If this were so," he
continues, "we might suppose the senses to
waken our attitudes and conduct as they
so habitually do, by first exciting this sense
of reality; but anything else, any idea, for
example, . that might similarly excite it,
would have that same prerogative of ap
pearing real which objects of sense normally

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 43
possess. So far as religious conceptions
were able to touch this reality feeling, they
would be beheved in spite of criticism."1
Now in the type of rehgion with which we
are here concerned — the consciousness of
coworking with an Eternal Creative Good
Will — that which most profoundly stimu
lates this reahty sense is the experience of
moral creativeness. That is to say, in this
type of rehgion the process of discovering
values and reconstructing facts in accor
dance with those values — which is what
moral creativity means — is felt to be more
real than the facts taken by themselves. It
is felt to be the fullest contact between the
individual soul and the environing world.
Moral creativity in the human personality
presents itself as continuous with a greater
moral creativity in the universe at large.
When original moral power is finding ex
pression in us, and when we are aiding in
calling forth the like in others, we most truly
live, we are most real, and at the same
time we are most harmoniously related to
the wider reality on which we all depend.
Such is the testimony of the type of re
ligion before us, and upon it rests the first
- i Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 58.

44 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
point in our argument for the objective
validity of the experience of an Eternal
Creative Good Will. Not that such testi
mony can be accepted uncritically. On the
contrary it will mean little for modern life
unless it will stand criticism. Our point
here is simply this. Like every other atti
tude toward hfe the attitude of rehgious
faith centres in some experience or function
which has a peculiar power to stimulate
the sense of reahty. For the naturalistic
attitude it is the objects of the physical
senses which do this most successfully;
for optimism it is feelings of happiness; for
pessimism those of pain; for authority re
hgion it is fixity of spiritual institutions and
ideas; for mysticism it is experiences of
ecstasy; for the type of rehgious faith we
are dealing with it is moral creativity.
Each of these attitudes must subject itself
to the fuUest testing and criticism from all
sides of experience if it is to offer itself as a
philosophy of hfe for the modern world,
but no criticism would be adequate which
did not penetrate to the organizing centre
of the several systems, namely, the ele
ments in experience which most effectively
stimulate the reality sense.

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 45
But some one may object at this point:
Are you not, in employing this term "the
reality sense," accepting as an ultimate
datum something that itself is susceptible
of psychological analysis? We may re
join, however, that nothing in our argument
depends upon this sense of reality being
unanalyzable. James himself has sug
gested something in the nature of an
analysis in the conjecture which he makes
as to the Organic seat of this reahty feehng.
"Nothing," he says, "could be more nat
ural than to connect it with the muscular
sense, with the feeling that our muscles
were innervating themselves for action.
Whatsoever thus innervated our activity,
or 'made our flesh creep' — our senses are
what do so oftenest — might then appear
real and present, even though it were an
abstract idea."1 But the point for us
now is that this reahty feehng, whether
f further analyzable or not, inevitably enters
ias a relatively simple element into all our
more comprehensive attitudes toward life,
and hence is a legitimate part of their
claim to convincingness.
But this fact — that moral creativity is ca-
1 Op. tit., p. 63.

46 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
pable of arousing in a unique way the reality
sense and so of furnishing a clew for the
interpretation of the universe — if left to
itself would i not go far toward establishing
the objective vahdity of the consciousness
of coworking with an Eternal Creative
Good Will. The completion of the argu
ment, indeed, will require the discussions
of the two following lectures, which are to
deal with the relation of the experience of
God to social progress and to cosmic evolu
tion. But a further step can be taken here
in closing the discussion of our data taken
from the psychology of personal religion.
Professor Coe, in his recent Psychology of
Religion, has arrived at a result which is
important for our thought at this point.
"It is of the utmost significance," he says,
"that, whenever one takes an absorbing
interest in any particular thing or enter
prise, one ideahzes it, organizes- other in
terests about it, and thus finds one's real
world partly by having a share in making it
real. This way of organizing experience
in terms of ideal values is a first item in the
rehgious nature of man."1 Now if this
be true, there is something in the very na
ture of rehgion, making it possible for it to
1 P. 324.

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 47
test, to verify, to criticise, and to recon
struct its own ideas. At all events, this is
what a philosophy of religion must do. It
must test all religious ideas by their capacity
to organize experience. Now in the in
quiry which we already have made into the
meaning and value of the consciousness of
God for modern hfe we have found a type
of that consciousness which has great ca
pacity for organizing experience in that it
makes for the development of personality,
and working through one personahty is a
powerful aid in calling forth personality in
others. But it is precisely the blending of a
supreme value — moral creativity — and the
reahty sense which gives to this conscious
ness its organizing power. The conscious
ness of God and an experience of moral
creativity interpenetrate, and thereby the
personahty as a whole becomes newly or
ganized and enters into a more harmonious
and persistent development. One has an
experience of coworking with an Eternal
Creative Good WiU, and the accompanying
development of personahty, together with
the power of this development to propagate
itself to others, is a partial verification of the
reahty of that kind of God.
Now let us be very specific about the

48 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
nature of the argument we are making.
The fact that a great value powerfuUy
stimulates the reality sense simply gives
us a working hypothesis; but this is the
legitimate first step, which any philosophy
of life must take. The power of this work
ing hypothesis to organize and fructify ex
perience is its verification, and a partial
verification has already been produced in
the development of personahty which this
working hypothesis fosters. This verifica
tion helps to raise the hypothesis, to the
level of a reasonable theory. It is of course
no a priori demonstration of God which
this kind of reasoning will yield, but simply
a reasoned interpretation of experience.
But on the other hand we are aiming to
avoid the error, charged by Leuba against
modern theology, of giving arbitrary final
ity to certain inner experiences by isolating
them from the rest of experience. By the
method we are following the apprehension
of values and their verification move along
together, as a tractor advances upon its
own caterpiUar track. This may not mean
inteUectual rapid transit, but it is perhaps
a good way of getting into new country.
But the view which we are developing

AND DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 49
does not simply stand alongside that of
Leuba as a legitimate rival theory. For it
presents a higher value than Leuba's view
and is capable of completer verification.
From the standpoint of value a Non-Pur
posive Creative Force is most inadequate,
since even with man the purposive develop
ment of life is actually taking place on an
important scale. To think of God as being
unqualified for this highest of human func
tions can hardly be an inspiration to faith.
And the verification for the idea of a
Creative Moral Intelligence is greater than
that for a Non-Purposive Creative Force to
aU who find that the progress of the human
race in the past, and that hoped for in the
future, is proportionate to the exercise of
mind in discovering values and realizing
them in facts. A Non-Purposive Creative
Force is like a blind Samson, able to tri
umph over the Philistines only by pulling
the temple down upon them and upon
himself. A Creative Moral Intelligence is
hke the pioneer who compels his very ob
stacles in the wilderness to furnish the ma
terial for a new civihzation.
Thus to an age that is reaching out after
a new religion, under a desperate sense of

50 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
overwhelming unsolved problems, we may
make this response, which our other dis
cussions will seek more fully to justify:
there is a religion in the world which has
self-renewing and self-reconstructive power
and which affords a solution of one of the,
most fundamental problems of our confused
and aching time — the problem of devel
oping personality. It is not the religion
of any institution, though it can mould in
stitutions. It is not the religion of any
authoritative creed, though it can produce
great guiding convictions. It is not the
religion of a revelation finished in the re
mote past, though it has its roots deep in
the past. It is the religion of the Hebrew
prophetic consciousness, of Jesus' filial con
sciousness, of the modern Christian experi
ence of coworking with an Eternal Crea
tive Good WiU.

n
THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD AND SOCIAL
PROGRESS
The idea of social progress made the first
thirteen years of the twentieth century a
period of great exhilaration. The nine
teenth century had brought men a marvel
lous control over nature, and in the new
century society as a whole was beginning to
reap the benefits. The vast accumulations
of wealth which machinery and industrial
organization had made possible were be
coming, available in new ways for the com
mon welfare. The general diffusion of
education which ' political liberalism had
brought about had awakened the collective
mind and had set the masses of the people
to thinking about the improvement of their
own condition. Humanity was like a pio
neer, family, which, after a long struggle to
subdue the wilderness and make it pro
ductive, is beginning to take a more direct
and conscious interest in its own intellectual
and social advancement. Each of us, as we
felt the pulses of new life moving in the
51

52 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
social order about us, must have faced the
future with fresh alertness and zest.
The rapidity with which this idea of
social progress was permeating humanity
was indeed remarkable. Professor Ross,
of Wisconsin University, discussing "the
world-wide advance of democracy," wrote
in 1912: "Within six years we have seen
the creation of parliaments in Turkey, Rus
sia, Persia, and China, the birth of a re
public in Portugal and in China, the over
throw of 'Diaz-potism' in Mexico, the
startling spread of unrest in India, and the
growth of political socialism in all Western
countries."1 And this development was
no less remarkable in its intensive than its
extensive aspect. Said Professor Rauschen
busch, returning in 1908 from a year in
Europe: "Meanwhile the social awakening
of our nation had set in like an equinoctial
gale in March, and ... I found myself
caught in the tail of the storm. . . . Men
asked: 'What must we do? And what
must we undo? What social ideal should
guide us? What methods can we safely
use in realizing it ?' "2 Indeed one has only
1 Changing America, p. 21. ¦
2 Christianizing the Social Order, p. vii.

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 53
to enumerate a few of the matters that were
agitating the public mind — initiative, ref
erendum, and recaU, the short ballot, con
servation, child labor, progressive taxation
of inheritances and incomes, government of
cities by commission or manager, arbitra
tion of industrial disputes, playgrounds,
rural betterment, eugenics, social hygiene,
feminism — one has only to make such a
random hst to reahze how far into the old
social order the virus of progressive ideas
had penetrated. Progressivism had be
come a pohtical creed, a philosophy, al
most a rehgion.
And then came the Great War upon us,
and we began to perceive that all this
social awakening had arrived too late — at
least too late to proceed by any process of
normal evolution. Rapidly as the spirit
of social progress was spreading, it could
not cope with the long-accumulated mass
of social problems. For seventy-five years
most of the best minds had been occupied
with the material development of the world
and comparatively few had concerned them
selves with social reconstruction. Physical
invention had outrun moral invention.
Organization for business had altogether

54 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
surpassed organization for living. Inter
national trade had flourished like a green
bay-tree and international ethics had lan
guished like a sickly vegetable underneath.
The agents of exploiting syndicates were
backed up far more consistently in their
projects than the missionaries of the king
dom of God. And thus had arisen a con
dition of tension in the old social order at
countless points — between races, nationali
ties, diplomats, tariffs, banking syndicates,
and military and naval strategists; be
tween property and the proletariat, the
home and the shop, the franchised and the
disfranchised, the standpatters and the
muck-rakers — while to the rehef of these
points of tension had come only a few
spasmodic reform movements and' the ten
tative programmes of a few detached social
thinkers. What wonder, then, that the
social awakening at the opening of the
century brought to many of us the exhila
ration of a great hope ! And what wonder
that it came too late !
I once saw a conflagration rage through
a city. The whole population mobihzed
itself to fight the flames, and every one
"did his bit," but in an afternoon and a

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 55
night the heart of the city was eaten out.
The fire was said to have started from the
sparks of a tobacco-pipe dropped by some
men who were gambling and drinking in a
ramshackle, empty warehouse. But every
thoughtful citizen knew that the deeper
causes were lax building laws still more
laxly enforced, fat rentals from flimsy
buildings, and lack of civic spirit necessary
to make an efficient city government and
to grasp the new needs of a prosperous and
growing city. Some such event as this is
required, I believe, to symbolize the out
break of the present world disaster. It
started, in one sense, of course, from the
pistol-shot of the boy revolutionist in a
little Bosnian town, but in a deeper sense
it sprang from the inflammable material of
unsolved social problems tolerated among
the solid structures of civilization because
the spirit of social progress had been allowed
to slumber so long.
At all events probably no one to-day will
deny that social progress is, for us, not a
swiftly unfolding and self-operating move
ment, but a tragically comphcated and
baffling problem. The ideal, indeed, has
established itself in our minds. We have

56 THE EXPERffiNCE OF GOD
dreamed the dream of a vast social recon
struction; and we have even conceived
reconstruction to be, not an abnormal
event to remedy abnormal evils, but a
normal continuing process by which evils
should be prevented from arising. But
what are the socializing forces which can
set the ideal in operation, along what lines
shall the reconstruction proceed, and what
is to sustain and inspire humanity in the
endless task ? Such are some of the features
of the problem of social progress which is
bewildering the mind of the world to-day,
and which is causing that groping after a
new religion mentioned in the previous
discussion. It is in relation, then, to this
mtensest of present problems that we are
to-day to consider the significance of the
experience of God. Continuing the plan
i of the previous lecture we shall consider,
first, what meaning and value for social
progress the experience of God may have,
and then what evidence for the validity of
the experience of God may be afforded by
social progress.

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 57

When one asks for the meaning and value
of the experience of God for social progress
one is confronted by the fact that some
earnest thinkers hold that there is none —
at least for enhghtened minds. And in
taking this position they have in view not
simply the influence of the dogmatic creeds,
which hberal theology itself has long since
subjected to radical criticism, but the sim
ple Christian faith in a Father God. This
faith, they say, not only has no positive
value to enhghtened minds for social prog
ress, but from the standpoint of the high
est values is subtly deleterious.
Professor H. A. Overstreet has given ex
pression to this view in a recent article in
The Forum, entitled "New Loyalties for
Old Consolations." * He writes: "I re
member at the time of the San Francisco
earthquake passing one of the cathedrals
of the city and finding its broad, stone
steps, covering a goodly portion of a city
square, black with kneeling worshippers.
There could be no question of their reason
for being there. They were setting them-
»Vol. 52, pp. 499/.

58 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
selves right with their God, hoping that in
the fervor of their devotion he would have
mercy upon them and save them from
destruction." In contrast to these Over-
street says: "Other men and women were
distributing bread and clothing to destitute
famihes, or were building shelters, or were
clearing the streets of debris, or were pa
trolling with gun on shoulder against crim
inal disorder." And farther on he sums up
his thought as follows: "Is it unfair to say
that the old religion with its confident,
childlike resting on God ('He loves the
burthen') developed a type of character
that was not, in the mass, conspicuously
heroic? 'God knows best'; 'It will all
come out right'; 'Thy will be done' — these
are not expressions of fighting men; they
are expressions of men who resign them
selves to the ruling of powers greater than
themselves. A civilization characterized by
such an attitude will not be strenuously
alive to eliminate the sorry evils of life.
But the men who believe that the issue of
the universe is in doubt, that there is no
powerful God to lead the hosts to victory,
will, if they have the stuff of men in them,
strike out their manliest to help whatever
good there is in the world to win its way

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 59
against the forces of evil. A civilization of
such men will be a tough-fibred civilization,
strenuous to fight, grimly ready, like the
Old Guard, to die but never surrender."
"There is," he concludes, "something subtly
weakening about the optimism of the tra
ditional rehgions. Like the historic sooth
ing syrup, with its unadvertised opiate, it
soothes the distress- not by curing the dis
ease, but by temporarily paralyzing the
function. 'To trust God nor be afraid'
means in most cases — not all — to settle
back from a too anxious concern about the
evils of the world. 'God will take care of
his own ! ' How different is this from the
attitude: 'The task is ours and the whole
world's and we must see it through !'"
A view similar to this is taken by some of
the well-known leaders of the Ethical Cul
ture movement. Doctor Felix Adler, writ
ing from a standpoint less sharply con
trasted with theism than Overstreet's,
nevertheless says: "Shall we then continue
to think of a benignant and omnipotent
Spirit bending down toward us from on
high, whose face, indeed, may sometimes be
veiled, but the light of whose love is never
extinguished or diminished; to whom we
can ever come as children saying: 'Father,

60 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
protect us; Father, deliver us; Father, for
give us our trespasses'?" Doctor Adler
holds that the modern man no longer can
use such terms, and he considers it better
that he cannot. For, he says, "Life is a
fight. We must take our part in it — the
man's part. We must get rid of the notion
that the affairs of the universe are managed
with a view to securing our private benefit;
that Fate, or the Power that overrules Fate,
is disposed to coddle us."1 So W. M.
Salter, writing of "The Basis of the Ethical
Movement," says: "To go straight to the
heart of the matter, men have heretofore
conceived of the Supreme Power of the
world as a personal being like themselves.
Many to-day, on the other hand, are con
strained to regard the personahty of the
Deity as an open question, and prayer as a
useless expenditure of human energy. . . .
Prayer seems almost a belittling of that
solemn mystery in the bosom of which we
and the wide world rest. For it is not . . .
in the name of materialism or phenomenal
ism, but because of a deeper sense of that
mystery, that I abandon prayer."2
1 The Religion of Duty, pp. 46, 47, 59.
> Ethical Religion, pp. 288-9.

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 61
The classic expression of the central point
involved was given by Guyau in his Non-
Religion of the Future; although he goes
somewhat beyond the thinkers just men
tioned in that he rejects not only theism
and the positivist's religion of Humanity,
but also aU attempts to think out for the
future a new rehgion, and puts his faith
solely in an idealistic sociology. I quote
but a sentence: "The substitution of a
human providence for the omnipresent in
fluence of a divine providence might be
given as being, from this point of view, the
formula of progress." *
Now these thinkers are aU imbued with
that loyalty to the ideal of social progress
which we have seen meant a new awaken
ing of soul for the modern world, and which
any rehgion that is to serve our time must
promote; and yet they see in the Christian
faith in' a Father God something that,
though fine and noble as compared with
most forms of rehgion, nevertheless falls
short of the best. They regard it as a seda
tive rather than a tonic, as a message of
solace instead of a rallying-cry. They con
sider that its tendency is to inhibit the full
1 Idem,' p. 450.

62 THE EXPEPJENCE OF GOD
development of the moral nature, whereas
they want a philosophy of life which con
centrates upon science, upon human effort,
upon social enterprise.
First of aU, in considering this position,
we should recognize that it is only a re
constructed form of the Christian experi
ence of God that can hope to stand against
these criticisms. Many of the strictures
on contemporary religion that have just
been quoted need to be carefully weighed.
They certainly are justified so far as the
ideas that give form to religious experience
have not been thoroughly thought through
in relation to modern truth and modern
needs. One cannot simply take over the
metaphysical attributes of God, nor even
the moral attributes, which were constructed
in a world of thought radically different
from our own, without producing an experi
ence of God that in some respects will be
less than the best. Brave men rightly
object to fighting with antiquated equip
ment. So earnest social workers will sim
ply drop by the roadside implements of
thought which merely hamper them in
their great offensive campaign. The idea
of God must be remoulded in the light of our

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 63
newer ethical values and of evolutionary
philosophy, if it is to make a real contribu
tion to the solution of our urgent modern
problems. But it was such a reconstructed form of
the Christian experience that was intended
in the first lecture when we spoke of the
consciousness of coworking with an Eternal
Creative Good Will. Those who have this
consciousness put effort, the development
of personahty, moral creativity, in the fore
front of their thinking, and they are ready
to face an imperfect but growing universe
and to bear their part in its risks, its sacri
fices, and its toils. And yet, notwithstand
ing these reconstructions, the issue raised
by Overstreet and the others, in one im
portant sense, remains. For we have held
the consciousness of coworking with an
Eternal Creative Good Will to be but the
modern equivalent of the prophetic and
the filial consciousness, and the idea of
God involved is of One who is real and ob
jective as well as ideal and immanent.
Moreover, to this idea of God personahty
is applicable. For, while the Eternal Crea
tive Good Will is vastly different from hu
man personahty in many ways, yet, to use

64 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
James's words again, the two are akin at
least in this: "That each has purposes for
which he cares and each can hear the
other's call." It is a vital question, then,
whether a religious experience that is bound
up with this idea of God will make a posi
tive contribution toward solving the prob
lem of social progress or will subtly hinder
such a solution.
Now if we bring before ourselves clearly
the largest issue upon which men's think
ing divides to-day, it will become evident, I
believe, that social progress is vitally bound
up with the experience of coworking with
an Eternal Creative Good Will. The largest
issue confronting our time is between an aris
tocratic, deterministic, nationalistic ethics and
the ethics of democracy, of moral freedom, and
of internationalism. In other words, it is
the issue-between the interests of selected,
privileged, and in some respects superior
groups bent upon maintaining the fixity of
inherited ideals, and the interests of aspir
ing humanity bent upon the reconstruction
and expansion of all its ideals. On the one
side the autocrat, the captain of industry,
the empire-builder, the dogmatist, the ec
clesiastical prince, administering the world's

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 65
affairs — perhaps benevolently, always au
thoritatively; on the other side the mass
of humanity, struggling up through the
sense of individual liberty, through "class
consciousness," to race consciousness, and
beginning to insist upon doing its own
thinking, upon finding out for itself the
real laws of the universe, and upon shaping
the world according to its own deepest
needs. To bring this issue more fully before us
let me give a few citations from outstand
ing representatives of contemporary modes
of thinking. For the meaning of aristo
cratic ethics in the modern world we look,
of course, to Nietzsche. He sees the su
preme social issue as foUows: "It is neces
sary for higher men to declare war upon the
masses ! In aU directions mediocre people
are joining hands in order to make them
selves masters. Everything that pampers,
that softens, and that brings the 'people'
or 'woman' to the front, operates in favor
of universal suffrage — that is to say, the
dominion of inferior men." x For the super
man, he says, "the rest of mankind is but
the soil on which he can devise his higher
1 WiU to Power, vol. II, sec. 861.

66 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
mode of existence."1 Over against this
standpoint we may place that of democratic
ethics, as expressed by Rauschenbusch.
He writes: "We are told that democracy
has proved a failure. It has, in so far as it
was crippled and incomplete. Political de
mocracy without economic democracy is an
uncashed promissory note, a pot without a
roast, a form without substance. But in
so far as democracy has become effective
it has quickened everything it has touched.
. . . Democracy has even quickened the
moral conscience of the upper classes. . . .
What aristocracy calls hereditary rights, a
democracy caUs scandalous graft." "De
mocracy is the archangel whom God has
sent to set his blazing foot on these icebergs
of human pride and melt them down."2
ParaUel with the contrast between aris
tocratic and democratic ethics we may
place that between determinism and moral
freedom. Not that the individual thinker
is always both aristocrat and determinist,
or democrat and libertarian; but in their
larger social effects the two contrasts tend
to become one. If Nietzsche protests
1 Idem, sec. 866.
2 Christianizing the Social Order, pp. 353, 354, 364.

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 67
against determinism in the interests of the
superman, his doctrine remains determi
nistic for the masses of the people. If the
sociahst's creed includes economic deter
minism, the larger democratic movement
aims at creative personahty for every man.
No better representative of the deter
ministic point of view, in respect to popular
influence, can be found than Haeckel.
"The great struggle," he declares, "be
tween the determinist and the indetermin-
ist, between the opponent and the sustainer
of the freedom of the will, has ended to-day,
after more than two thousand years, com
pletely in favor of the determinist. The
human will has no more freedom than that
of the higher animals, from which it differs
only in degree, not in kind. . . . The
character of the inchnation was determined
long ago by heredity from parents and an
cestors; the determination to each partic
ular act is an instance of adaptation to the
circumstances of the moment wherein the
strongest motive prevails, according to the
laws which govern the statics of emotion."1
With this fatalism goes not only his rejec
tion of theism but his gross distortion of
¦* ' Riddle of the Universe, pp. 130-1.

68 THE EXPERD2NCE OF GOD
Christianity, including its ethics. To be
sure he accepts the Golden Rule. But he
also says: "The supreme mistake of Chris
tian ethics, and one which runs directly
counter to the Golden Rule, is its exagger
ation of love. . . . One of the Christian
precepts that were impressed upon us in
our early youth as of great importance, and
that are glorified in millions of sermons,
is 'Love your enemies, bless them that
curse you, do good to them that hate you,
and pray for them that despitefully use
you and persecute you.' It is a very ideal /
precept, but as useless in practice as it
is unnatural."1 Such an attitude throws
aside the redemptive and progressive power
of Christian social ethics and tends to re
duce social relations to a mechanical and
static level.
In contrast to this we may take the
ethical standpoint of William James, which
is adopted on the basis of his well-known
belief in indeterminisml "The deepest dif
ference," he says, "in the moral life of man
is the difference between the easy-going and
the strenuous mood. The capacity for the
strenuous mood probably hes slumbering in
1 Idem, p. 353.

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 69
every man, but it has more difficulty in
some than in others in waking up. It
needs the wilder passions to arouse it, the
big fears, loves, and indignations; or else
the deeply penetrating appeal of some one
of the higher fidelities, like justice, truth,
or freedom. This is why, in a merely
human world without a God, the appeal to
our moral energy falls short of its maxi
mum stimulating power. Life, to be sure,
is even in such a world a genuinely ethical
symphony; but it is played in the compass
of a couple of poor octaves, and the infinite
scale of values fails to open up. When,
however, we believe that a God is there,
and that he is one of the claimants, the in
finite perspective opens out. The scale of
the symphony is incalculably prolonged.
The more imperative ideals now begin to
speak with an altogether new objectivity
and significance, and to utter the pene
trating, shattering, tragically challenging
npte of appeal. All through history, in the
periodical conflicts of puritanism with the
don't-care temper, we see the antagonism
of the strenuous and genial moods, and
the contrast between the ethics of infinite
and mysterious obligation from on high,

70 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
and those of prudence and the satisfaction
of merely finite need. Our attitude toward
concrete evils is entirely different in a
world where we believe there are none but
finite demanders, from what it is in one
where we joyously face tragedy for an in
finite Demander's sake. Every sort of en
ergy and endurance, of courage and ca
pacity for handling life's evils, is set free in
those who have rehgious faith. For this
reason the strenuous type of character will
on the battle-field of human history always
outwear the easy-going type, and religion
will drive irreligion to the wall." * In such
words as these the ethics of faith and moral
freedom, essentially Christian in its re
demptive and progressive quahty, rings out
with inspiring and convincing power.
But parallel to these contrasts between
aristocratic and democratic ethics, and be
tween the ethics of determinism and that
of moral freedom we have placed the con
trast between the ethics of nationalism and
that of internationalism, and we must add
brief examples from representatives of these
two attitudes. A philosophy of history
1From "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," in The
WiU to Believe, pp. 211-13, much abridged.

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 71
which has the effect of justifying nation
alism has been worked out by Houston
Stewart Chamberlain in his Foundations of
the Nineteenth Century. Chamberlain holds
that modern civilization is due to the Teu
tons, meaning thereby not only the Ger
mans but the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks,
and the people of northern Europe in gen
eral so far as their blood has not been cor
rupted by intermingling with other stocks
than the Teutonic. The essential point for
understanding civilization is that of purity
of stock. The Greeks brought forth classi
cal culture because of their purity of stock,
but the Roman Empire hindered the rise of
modern civilization by producing a "chaos
of peoples" around the Mediterranean,
and by bequeathing the idea of the Holy
Roman Empire to northern Europe. Chris
tianity also hindered it by the idea of the
oneness of humanity and by producing the
Roman Catholic Church, which assumed to
transcend lines of nationality — Jesus, how
ever, is claimed for modern civilization by
a curious theory that he was not of Semitic
but of Aryan stock. The Renaissance also,
instead of being the beginning of modern
civilization, hindered its coming through its

72 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
vague humanitarianism. But now at last
a characteristic civilization is being worked
out by the Teutons, and the thing of most
importance for the furtherance of this civili
zation is to recognize this principle of purity
of stock. The ethical significance of this
position comes out in such words as the fol
lowing: "So soon as we speak of humanity
in general, so soon as we indulge in the
fancy that we discern in history a develop
ment, a progress, an education of 'mankind,'
we leave the sure ground of facts and float
off into airy abstractions. This humanity,
about which men have philosophized so
much, suffers from the grave defect that it
does not exist at all. Nature and history
present us with a great number of different
types of men, but not with one humanity."1
So strong is Chamberlain's emphasis upon
distinctions of racial stock that he declares :
"The hunter through sympathy under
stands more of the soul of his dog, and the
dog more of the soul of his master, than
that same master understands of the soul
of the Chinese, with whom he may be out
hunting." Over against such a standpoint we may
' Vol. II, p. 837,

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 73
place the words of a man who is perhaps the
greatest single force for internationalism in
this warring world, John R. Mott. The
missionary enterprise, he affirms, "must
ever be looked upon as but a means to the
mighty and inspiring object of enthroning
Christ in individual life, in family life, in
national hfe, in international relations, in
every relationship of mankind."1
Now just as aristocracy means determin
ism from the standpoint of the masses of
men, and democracy means moral freedom,
so aristocracy and determinism together
naturally make common cause with nation
alism, which tends to give finality to exist
ing political, economic, and cultural group
ings, and democracy and moral freedom
make common cause with international
ism, which would provide for the progres
sive reconstruction of all such groupings.
Hence the contrasts which we have drawn
between individual thinkers are parts of
one dominating contrast which is fundamen
tal for our age — the contrast between the ethics
of privilege and the ethics of progress, or the
contrast between an aristocratic, determin
istic, nationalistic ethics and the ethics of
1 The Evangelization of the World in This Generation, p. 16.

74 THE EXPERLENCE OF GOD
democracy, of moral freedom, and of in
ternationalism. And this contrast is es
sentially the one drawn long ago by Jesus,
when he said: "Ye know that they who
are accounted to rule over the Gentiles
lord it over them; and their great ones exerr
cise authority over them. But it is not so
among you: but whosoever would become
great among you shall be your minister;
and whosoever would be. first among you
shall be servant of all."
But the point of especial importance to
us at this time is that each of these types
of ethics is supported by a characteristic
world view. The world view which sup
ports the aristocratic ethics is that of
naturalism. Nietzsche's doctrine is defi
nitely atheistic. "Dead are all the gods,"
he cries; "now let the Superman live!"/
And his whole philosophy of the "will to
power" rests upon an interpretation of
evolution in which the struggle for existence
is the last word. Haeckel considers that he
has reduced the Christian idea of God to a
piece of outgrown anthropomorphism, "a
gaseous vertebrate," to use his own term,
and eliminated him. Chamberlain, it is
true, makes much of Christ, of personality,

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 75
and of creative genius, but he subordinates
them all so completely to the struggle of
racial stocks, which he accepts as a finality,
that he does not escape from naturalism.
Evolution in the narrower sense of the strug
gle for existence is for all these thinkers the
basis of their theory of hfe. Whereas in
former times the ethics of privilege in
trenched itself in ecclesiastical dogmatism,
now it seeks to buttress itself with science,
but with a science that, in its turn, is inter
preted in a dogmatic way. It is the facts,
the plain hard facts of biological evolution,
of class division and of race conflict, which
are appealed to as the key to the meaning
of the universe and hence as being the
justification of the ethics of privilege.
On the other hand the world view which
supports democratic ethics is spiritualistic.
"Wanted: a faith for a task!" cries Rau
schenbusch. "A great task," he insists,
"demands a great faith. To live a great
hfe a man needs a great cause to which
he can surrender, something divinely large
and engrossing for which he can live, and,
if need be, die. A great religious faith will
hft him out of his narrow grooves and make
him the inspired instrument of the univer-

76 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
sal will of God. It is the point at which
the mind of man coincides with the mind of
the Eternal." "Our moral efficiency de
pends on our religious faith. The force of
will, of courage, of self-sacrifice hberated by
a living religious faith is so incalculable, so
invincible, that nothing is impossible when
that power enters the field." "Our genera
tion needs a faith, for it is confronting the
mightiest task ever undertaken consciously
by a generation of men."1 From essen
tiaUy the same standpoint James insists
upon the need of the moral life for "an in
finite Demander" and affirms that "Even
if there were no metaphysical or traditional
grounds for believing in a God, men would
postulate one simply as a pretext for liv
ing hard."2 So likewise Mott's great work
for internationalism is bound up with the
missionary faith in the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
This alliance between faith and demo
cratic ethics cannot be broken down by
pointing to the historic movement which
has social democracy and internationalism
as its creed but which has linked itself up
1 Christianizing the Social Order, pp. 40, 41
2 Will to Believe, p. 211.

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 77
with the philosophy of naturalism. For
this situation is too plainly the result of
reaction against antiquated theology, and
against the support given by ecclesiasticism
to the ethics of privilege, to reveal the deeper
issues involved; and it is a situation that,
before the war, had shown marked signs of
giving way.1 Such a situation indeed con
stitutes a chaUenge to the Christian Church
which it cannot evade, and which it must
prove its power to meet successfully with
out too long delay. Nevertheless in prin
ciple it seems plain that naturahsm, with
its emphasis upon the struggle for existence
as a finality in this universe, is an alien
enemy in the ranks of social democracy,
masking as a friend but destined sooner or
later to betray it to Nietzscheanism and the
ethics of privilege.
But Overstreet and the leaders of Ethical
Culture, on the other hand, unmistakably
i stand for the ethics of progress. Such prin
ciples as democracy, moral freedom, and
internationalism occupy a foremost place in
their teachings. What then of their adverse

1 Cf. Jesus in ihe Nineteenth Century and After, by Weinel and
Widgery, chap. IV; and Haw, "Religioifs Revival in the Labor
Movement," Hibbert Journal, 1915.

78 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
judgment upon the Christian faith in a
Father God? In the light of the funda
mental issue which we have found running
through the thought of our time one must
raise the question whether these thinkers
have rightly appreciated the vital relation
between men's ideals of progress and the
world views by which they relate those
ideals to experience as a whole. This may
be due, in some instances, to the fact that
they have been largely preoccupied with
another issue — that between ethics and a
dogmatic, authoritative theology. Or it
may be due in part to the slow emergence
of the more fundamental issue, which has
only become fully manifest through the
Great War. But whatever the cause it is
fair to ask whether, in view of the fact
that the ethics of privilege has intrenched
itself in naturalism, these critics of Christian
theism can support the ethics of progress
with an adequate world view.
I say an adequate world view, for it is by
no means true that these writers have over
looked altogether the point in question.
While Ethical Culture as an organized
movement purposely declines to adopt any
views whatever as to the transhuman realm,

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 79
as individual thinkers the men we have
quoted all feel the need of a conception of
the universe in some sense spiritualistic.
Doctor Adler, indeed, states his convictions
about the universe in such a way that one
wonders whether he really rejects the faith
in an Eternal Creative Good Will. "Three
ideas," he says, "the idea of righteousness,
the idea that justice will gain the ascendant,
and that there is a subhme purpose in things
— three aspects of one idea — these I would
not give up. I do not see how any coura
geous attitude toward hfe is possible unless
one, either avowedly or surreptitiously,
retains them."1 Salter, on the other hand,
limits himself to an agnosticism pervaded
by a spiritualistic tone of feehng, as we
already have seen in his reference to the
Supreme Power of the universe as a mystery
too solemn for prayer and as "hght unap
proachable, unthinkable."
But more characteristic of this ethics of
progress which rejects theism is the pan-
psychic view of the universe, and this is the
fine of Overstreet's speculation. He con
fronts the prophecy of naturalism that the
universe is running down and will end in a
1 Religion of Duty, p. 57.

80 THE EXPEREENCE OF GOD
lifeless, frozen mass, but affirms that "the
old dogmatic materialism has had to give
way to a critical and open-minded evolu
tionism."1 "Even now," he says, "psy
chology is making groping advances into
the region of plant life, with results that
increasingly confirm our suspicion that the
region of psychical activity extends below
the so-called animal plane of life." And
then, pointing to the continuity between
the organic and inorganic realms, he reaches
speculatively the result that the inorganic
may prove to be "fundamentally the same
in kind as the most advanced forms of life."2
This, in the form of a hypothesis, is the
panpsychic view of the universe. And I
have called it the more characteristic posi
tion of the trend with which we are dealing
because it easily links itself up with the
"republic of souls," with which as a dis
tant ideal this trend seeks to replace the
monotheistic faith in God and the kingdom
of God.
Can the panpsychic view of the universe,
projected on toward a republic of souls,

1 Forum, vol. Ill, p. 507.
8 "The Democratic Conception of God," Hibbert Journal,
vol. XI, pp. 405, 406.

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 81
replace the consciousness of coworking
with an Eternal Creative Good Will as a
support for the ethics of progress over
against naturahsm and the ethics of priv
ilege? It seems to me that the idea that
such a substitution can be made success
fully, for mankind in general and in the
long run, is open to the gravest doubt.
Panpsychism, apart from God, lines up be
hind class struggle, race struggle, war, and
imperialism, and supphes them with a phi
losophy suited to their needs. The struggle
between Persian and Greek, Goth and Ro
man, Saracen and Christian, Mongol and
Chinese, the social conflict between prop
ertied classes and the proletariat, the pres
ent chaos of civihzation through clashing
economic forces and military alliances —
these are for panpsychism not only facts of
existence, as they must be for any philos
ophy, but ultimate facts, to cope with which
there is no intelligence higher than the
human. Panpsychism without God reduces
the universe to a welter of instincts, on
the surface of which human inteUigence
would seem to be httle more than a tran
sient phosphorescent hght. Its inherent
tendency, therefore, is toward an aristo-

82 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
cratic rather than a democratic ethics — that
is, toward finding the meaning of the whole
in the select breeds and' the segregated social
cultures which here and there may arise
rather than in a redemption for all men and
for all human society.
Not so with the faith in an Eternal Crea
tive Good Will. In the midst of all the per
plexing maze of facts, evil and good, it finds
God himself as one of the facts — a striving
God, working through and beyond all hu
man moral strivings toward the elimina
tion of the evil and the establishment of the
good. One who has an experience of co-
working with such a God does not throw a
robe of charity over the evil facts and call
them good, after the fashion of the absolutist
philosopher or theologian. Nor does he
seek an emotional rhapsody in which the
distinctions between evil and good dissolve,
after the manner of the mystic. But he
does know the stern joy of sharing in the
making of a moral world with a God who
has brought man upon the stage of existence
in the midst of his own creative processes.
The work, the struggle, the sacrifice, the
insights, the defeats and the victories are
his and God's together. He is quite willing

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 83
to interpret the kingdom of God as a com
monwealth of God, so much does the idea
of coworking with God and man in a great
moral enterprise mean to him; but the God
from whom he draws his strength he be
lieves to be great enough to be working in
the distant stars as well, and to have been
working when the first instinctive life be
gan to move upon this planet.
Such an experience gives the strongest
support to the ethics of progress. The
consciousness of sonship to God which it
involves gives a far bolder ideal in its for
ward reach than that of the superman, and
at the same time it is a dynamic source of
democracy because it recognizes the infinite
value of every human soul. Such an ex
perience too sustains and nourishes moral
freedom, because it recognizes every crea
tive impulse within itself as a pulse-beat in
the Infinite Creative Life. And out of
such an experience arises likewise the ethics
of internationalism. For from the begin
ning the Christian consciousness of son-
ship has worked toward the breaking down
of every "middle waU of partition" be
tween race and race, and has set forth the
ideal of the organic unity of mankind in

84 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
Christ. Through its support of the ethics
of democracy, of moral freedom, and of
internationalism we may justly maintain
that the consciousness of coworking with
an Eternal Creative Good Will has inex
haustible meaning and value for social
progress.

II

But it is time for us to relate what we
have been saying to the topic of the ob
jective validity of the experience of God.
In the first lecture we found that the
'experience of moral creativity is in a pe
cuhar degree capable of arousing the real
ity sense and thus furnishes a hopeful clew
to the meaning of the universe. In the
consciousness of coworking with a morally
creative God this experience gains an im
portant verification through its power to
promote the development of personality
and to propagate that development to
others. Thus what is at first, from the
standpoint of philosophy, a working hy
pothesis becomes elevated to a reasonable
theory. And this takes place by the only
process by which a philosophy of life can

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 85
hope to estabhsh itself— by the process of
organizing experience.
But the verification of the faith in an
Eternal Creative Good Will which comes
through the development of personahty is
necessarUy only partial and points on to
social experience as the realm where it can
be made more nearly complete. Our next
step, therefore, is to consider the objective
validity of this faith in the hght of social
progress. It must be pointed out at once, however,
that our argument for the objective validity
of a moraUy creative God has been implic
itly given already in setting forth the mean
ing and value of the experience of him.
For any thorough-going organization of
experience wiU have to include values as
well as facts. And consequently, in show
ing the high social value of the conscious
ness of coworking with God, we have es
tabhshed a reasonable presumption of the
reahty of God and have furnished for that
presumption important positive proof. In
other words, the ideal of social progress
postulates an Eternal Creative Good Will,
and the fact of social progress affords to that
postulate the most significant verification,

86 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
Yet there are important aspects of this
argument from social progress which must
be exphcitly brought out, if we are to ap
preciate it rightly. In the first place, the
postulate of God which is contained in the
ideal of social progress might be thought
of as resting upon an a priori authority
of the moral consciousness, conceived after
the manner of Kant; and if so, the rejoinder
immediately is suggested that a moral con
sciousness possessing that kind of authority
is sufficient to itself, and is only weakened
by the claim that a God must be postulated
in its support. It is, indeed, some such
idea of the absolute self-sufficiency of the
ethical consciousness that appears to lie
behind the tendency of Ethical Culture
and similar movements to swing loose from
religion. It is remarkable how long the
appeal to authority can maintain itself
over against empiricism by means of stra
tegic retreats. From the infallibility of the
church, or of dogma, or of the Bible, or of
the words or the person of Christ, it may
retreat by way of philosophy into the moral
consciousness and may imagine that there
it has something that is infallible. But
men are more and more coming to realize

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 87
that the moral consciousness, like every
other spiritual possession, is a product of
evolution and education; and if so, that
we must look for the forces which will sus
tain it and secure its further development.
The moral consciousness is not sufficient to
itself, as Kant supposed, for the reason that
it is a thing of growth, which, like aU results
of the growing process, may degenerate, but
which ought to keep on growing. And just
because of this lack of self-sufficiency it
postulates whatever is most favorable for
its maintenance, vitality, and ceaseless
growth. Thus the ideal of social progress postu
lates the Eternal Creative Good Will, not
as the statue postulates the pedestal —
simply in order that the quahties which
unchangeably belong to it may appear in
their fuU dignity — but as the fertile soU
postulates the sun. Just as the fertile soil
has stored up energies from the sun through
millenniums of cosmic evolution, so the ideal
of social progress is the product of countless
generations of moral evolution, during which
the human conscience has stored up en
ergies from the experience of God. And
again, just as the fertility of the soil cannot

88 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
be long maintained, still less increased,
without being acted upon by the immediate
hght and warmth of the sun, so the ideal of
social progress can hardly have permanent
and increasing fruitfulness unless it is cul
tivated through being opened up to a pres
ent experience of the Eternal Creative Good
Will. Not that individual men cannot pro
mote social progress without a conscious
experience of God — perhaps more effec
tively than some other men who possess
such an experience. But, even so, such in
dividuals draw upon the accumulated social
effects of man's experience of God, and they
could accomphsh little objective social good
without the co-operation of great masses of
men in whom the experience of God is
working as a positive social force. Cer
tainly if the Eternal Creative Good Will be
a reahty, he can work through socially
minded men who are unable to beheve in
him. But the more we realize that the so
cial mind is a hard-won evolutionary and
educational product, which at the same
time stands in great need of development
and expansion among men, the more ra
tional it becomes to postulate the validity
of those ideas and experiences which have

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 89
proven of the highest value in producing
the social mind. And that the experience
of coworking with an Eternal Creative Good
Will is of the utmost significance for sus
taining social progress and promoting dem
ocratic ethics we already have shown.
But, again, the idea of social progress
postulates a world favorable to its reahza
tion, and hence postulates as the dominant
principle of the world an Eternal Creative
Good Will. That is to say, social progress
is not a purely mental matter, as though it
could be worked out in sermons and uni
versity lectures and would be an accom
plished fact when these secured the assent
of men. On the contrary, it is to a very
important degree a physical matter, in
volving the scientific control of nature, for
production, the securing of individual and
community health, the imparting of forms
of beauty to physical things, especially to
useful things and to the physical setting
of community hfe, the devising of apparatus
for research, and the keeping of ethical and
spiritual development in close relation to
these other tasks. Now if the physical uni
verse is inherently and on the whole as in
different or hostile to the social enterprise

90 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
as it appears to be, let us say, within
the arctic and antarctic circles, then social
progress is a circumscribed and broken
ideal. Men may resist the encroachments
of the physical universe as Eskimos raise
meagre crops at the margins of glaciers or
build camp-fires to hold back the relentless
cold. But the odds are overwhelmingly
against them, and they are foredoomed to
a slow but sure extinction. But if, on the
contrary, the dominant principle in the
world is a Creative Intelligence, working
out the realization of good and steadily
devising new good, then the programme of
social progress is full of hope. It is not
predestined to succeed, even so, for there
can be no truly social progress except as
man has an intelligent will toward progress.
But the reahty on which man is conditioned
is on the side of his highest ideals and re
inforces at every point his efforts for their
realization. Hence when the idea of social
progress is taken in its most comprehensive
and practical meaning, including both an
upbuilding of the social order and a trans
formation of the physical order, it is seen
to postulate an Eternal Creative Good Will
as the controlling principle in the universe.

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 91
This aspect of the postulate of God which
is contained in the ideal of social progress
is closer to the thought of Kant than was
the preceding aspect, yet even here there
is an important difference that should be
noted. Kant says that, as beings who are
bound to obey the moral law in this world,
we must postulate as Cause of the world a
Power that is working out moral ends. But
according to Kant we never get beyond the
mere postulate, so as to arrive at a real
experience of this Power. It is as though
a traveller in a foreign land felt bound to
assume that his government would protect
him wherever he went but never could
have any concrete evidence of the fact,
nor any real communication with his gov
ernment. But, according to the interpre
tation that we have reached, in which social
progress is thought of as the joint achieve
ment of man and God, the postulating of
God should prove to be a means of enter
ing into a genuine experience of him. The
situation is like that of the free citizen who
postulates a democratic government in re
lation to which he may realize his freedom.
The reahzation of his own freedom and the
functioning of his government come to be

92 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
in constant interaction. So, when one
postulates God as the underlying force in
social progress, he thereby anticipates that
' the co-operative action of God will become
a matter of living experience to him. And
thus we reach the concluding thought of
the present discussion, namely, in the fact
of social progress the postulate of God has
substantial verification.
At the present tragic hour in the world's
history such an argument may seem at
first sight to excuse us for faltering in our
rehgious convictions instead of aiding us
to stand firm. When society is going pros
perously forward there would appear to
be no better evidence- of the reahty of God
than just this fact. But when society has
been overwhelmed by a cataclysmic war
we naturally grasp for evidence of God
outside of human evolution as a means of
steadying our faith. But in such vital
questions it is not well to surrender to
panic; it is better to yield a httle ground
than to suffer our lines to be broken. The
present crisis calls, not for an abandonment
of the appeal to actual verification, but for
a re-examination of the conditions upon
which the securing of that verification de-

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 93
pends. When during the construction of
the great Quebec bridge across the St.
Lawrence it twice occurred that a long sec
tion buckled and fell into the river, the en
gineers did not abandon the ruin, but re
vised their calculations, and now the bridge
stands complete and traffic is moving across
it in security. When the Culebra cut was
repeatedly filled by- huge landshps, the
Panama Canal was not given up as a fail
ure by its engineers; instead, new means
for removing the obstacles and keeping
open the great waterway were invented. So
the verification of the faith in an Eternal
Creative Good WiU which actual social
progress affords is not now to be abandoned;
but rather we are to examine more care
fuUy into the conditions of securing that
verification. One condition of securing the verifica
tion of the postulate of God through actual
social progress has often been overlooked,
but now is becoming increasingly evident.
It is this : the evidence for God which may
be secured through his hving manifestation
in social progress is conditioned upon the
exercise of faith and of creative intelligence
by man on a democratic scale. Each item

94 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
in this statement deserves a few words of
emphasis. Faith, actively exercised by man, condi
tions the manifestation of God in social
progress. For, if God aims to make man
a coworker with him, man must gain some
vision of the joint task and must experi
ence some reaching out for God's co-oper
ation and some setting of the will toward
the great enterprise. An outreach for
divine fellowship in toiling for an unrealized
vision of the good — that is faith, and that
is an attitude on man's part which gives
the Eternal Creative Good Will a new op
portunity. And let it not be objected that
faith cannot precede evidence, for evidence
must precede faith. It is not a question
here of precedence but of organic interac
tion. Bodily exercise is conditioned upon
food, but food can neither be gathered
nor assimilated without bodily exercise. If
there has been no manifestation of God in
the world at all, doubtless we shall be un
able to make the venture of faith, but the
venture of faith is none the less necessary
for new manifestations of God.
Creative intelligence in man also condi
tions the manifestation of God in social

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 95
progress. Professor Dewey says that "we
hve forward," but that our philosophies
have been chiefly occupied with looking
backward; hence human development has
lacked the guidance it should have had and
has suffered partial arrest. Now, if God is
creating creators, any failure of men to
apply their utmost inventive thinking to
social problems inevitably holds back his
creative work. The race may, indeed,
make some progress — slowly, painfully, and
with much kicking against the goads —
through being driven forward by God as
the drover urges on his herd of cattle.
But what God seeks to do is not to drive
but to lead, and this requires men who are
alert to foUow God in the expression of
his Creative Moral Intelligence. Inventive
ness in the physical realm has had a won
derful development in recent decades, and
has opened to us a new experience of God's
reahty and purpose. And this suggests to
us what inventiveness in the moral and
social realm may accomplish, and what
may thereby be gained in the way of new
evidence of God.
But both faith and creative intelligence
must now be exercised on a democratic

96 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
scale, if we are to have that new evidence
of God which awakens fresh conviction.
Authority in rehgion, autocracy in pohtics
and industry, academicism in philosophy
and art set hmits to God's work of creating
creators and so hold back social progress.
So far as these principles hold sway great
masses of men are deprived of the living
evidence of God which comes through per
sonal discovery and are offered only that
which is second-hand. But the true " Chris
tian evidences" are never merely second
hand. They are of the kind that are re
alized in personal experience of sonship to
God and brotherhood among men, and they
require the evoking of active faith and of
creative intelligence in every man. Here
again we must point out the organic and
reciprocal relation between the proof and
the thing proven. If the ethics of democ
racy, df moral freedom, and of internation
alism is nourished by the consciousness of
coworking with an Eternal Creative Good
Will, this consciousness in turn expands and
gets corroborated in proportion as the ethics
of democracy, of moral freedom, and of
internationalism is taken as our guide. In
proportion as the ethics of privilege gives

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 97
way to the ethics of progress man's faith
in God will gain in rational strength.
But there is plenty of foothold for faith
in the social progress of the past. The
backward look gives us much evidence of
God. It shows us prophetism, by its faith
in God, maintaining loyalty to righteous
ness through the break-up of a nation and
holding together in the midst of the clash
of empires a community possessing the
purest worship and morals that the world
then knew. It shows us Jesus striking
out a new type of faith and morals, uni
versal in its scOpe, and capable of so uniting
itself with the best in Greco-Roman cul
ture as to survive the disintegration of the
ancient order and to furnish the basis for
what may yet prove to be a world civihza
tion. It shows us the Reformers winning
for the Western world that liberty of con
science necessary for the new developments
of science and of pohtical life. It shows us
the Puritan and the Wesleyan movements
rescuing faith and moral seriousness from
a smothering worldhness and establishing
them among the common people. It shows
us a missionary movement that has at
tacked the world's superstition and social

98 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
stagnation in an ever-broadening campaign
and has laid the foundations for interna
tionalism. It shows us a new social con
sciousness, challenging intrenched privilege,
championing the rights of labor, of the
propertyless classes, and of women, and
bent upon securing the widest possible
sharing of the fruits of production and of
culture. And these are but the more out
standing and consciously religious features
of social progress, which need to have the
many achievements of science and pohtics
and art interwoven with them in order to
make a true picture of what God has
wrought in human society.
But the forward look opens to us great
possibilities of new evidence of God. Our
vision to-day is not the apocalyptic vision
of the premillennarian, nor the transcen
dental vision of the mystic. It is the so
berer and yet more warm-hearted social
vision. It is the vision of the sons of God
working together with their Eternal Father,
by science and creative moral intelligence,
for the building of a better world. It pre
sents us a race of men with a new conscious
ness of brotherhood, co-operating to abol
ish war and translate brotherhood from a

AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 99
name into a fact through constructing a
Federal World Republic. It depicts for
us woman free to attain her full develop
ment and to take her full part in the social
order. It promises us a solution of the
industrial question, not through the efforts
of capital to consolidate its positions and
extend its intrenchments along the whole
industrial frontier, nor through labor's ef
forts simply to expropriate capital, but
through the development of industrial de
mocracy. It portrays for us a church
which gives due scope to the manifoldness
of rehgious experience and which thereby
is able to concentrate its moral forces upon
the real moral issues, to guide moral edu
cation, and to make its worship the great
source for a growing social consciousness
among men.
After all, the great proof of God is the
ever-coming Kingdom of God. And this
evidence is most fully open to those who
interpret the moral achievements of the
past in the light of thoughtful social vision
for the future, who are striving to realize
to the full their possibilities for moral crea
tivity, and who are seeking to evoke and to
co-operate with a like creativity in other men.

100 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
But social progress must take place in
the midst of the general processes of cosmic
evolution; and while we already have had
occasion to describe the postulate which
the social ideal makes with reference to the
cosmos as a whole, the validity and mean
ing of this postulate require interpretation
in the hght of the general nature of the evo
lutionary process. This interpretation will
be the task of the next lecture.

in

THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD AND COSMIC
EVOLUTION
To bring these two ideas into relation at
the present juncture in human affairs may
seem to be a venturesome task. For cos
mic evolution has become again a matter
of painful ambiguity in its bearing upon
the rehgious consciousness. The situation
is, indeed, not the same as it was fifty years
ago, when the idea of evolution first gained
scientific authority through Darwin's Origin
of Species and wrought such havoc in the
realm of rehgious faith. For then the ques
tion was not primarily whether there was
enough good in the world to justify the
idea of God, but rather it was the question
whether the good that was here had not
come about in entirely natural ways, thus
making the idea of a supernatural source
for the good unnecessary. Natural selec
tion was felt to be entirely hostile to the
ideas of creation and providence; evolution
101

102 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
seemed to leave no room for theism. And
so for many, as for Romanes, the universe
"lost its soul of loveliness" and faith be
came no longer tenable; while most of those
who retained their faith felt that the idea
of evolution was something to be bitterly
opposed. But for our intellectual leadership, and
to a large extent also for intelhgent popular
thought, this situation has practically dis
appeared. In fact, evolution has been in
creasingly looked upon as furnishing the
strongest kind of support for faith. Evo
lution, we have been wont to say, is simply
God's method of revelation. The uniform
ity of nature, rehgious teachers have often
affirmed, is but the steadfastness of the
divine character, and physical laws are the
habits of God. And while Christian theists
have long since ceased to draw an argument
from design from the human eye or ear or
hand, they frequently have claimed that a
much more adequate and conclusive argu
ment from design was to be obtained from
evolution as a whole. The view that evo
lution emphatically supports faith is well
illustrated by Drummond's Ascent of Man.
In the closing chapter he says: "Up to this

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 103
time no word has been spoken to reconcile
Christianity with evolution, or evolution
with Christianity. And why? Because
the two are one. What is evolution? A
method of creation. What is its object?
To make more perfect hving beings. What
is Christianity? A method of creation.
What is its object? To make more per
fect hving beings. Through what does
evolution work? Through love. Through
what does Christianity work? Through
love. Evolution and Christianity have
the same Author, the same end, the same
spirit." x So John Fiske, in his Through Na
ture to God, argues that evolution establishes
"the everlasting reahty of rehgion," and
representative Christian ministers, like Ly
man Abbott or Newman Smythe, find in
evolution the basis for their theism.
But the Great War has brought about a
new tension between the idea of evolution
and faith in God. This new tension springs
not from the irreconcilability between evolu
tionary law and supernatural creation but
from the clash between the actual facts of
evolution and the idea that the cosmos is
realizing a moral purpose. How can evolu-
IV. 342,

104 THE EXPERDJ1NCE OF GOD
tion be in any sense the work of God when
it results in anything so palpably irrational
and so colossally hideous as this war?
We do not call it moral progress when the
building up of a great fortune ends in
wholesale waste and debauchery on the part
of its possessors. In what sense can moral
progress be claimed for a civilization which
can issue in such a debacle as is now tak
ing place, in which the human race is
slaughtering or deforming its toilers by the
million, squandering the fruits of a cen
tury's toil, and dooming untold numbers of
its httle ones to a burdened and enfeebled
existence ? Can these things take place in
a world in which a God is in control ? Such
are some of the questions about the rela
tion of cosmic evolution to religious faith
which are irresistibly raised by the present
world calamity.
Now this situation is being met in two
different ways that have an important
bearing on the conclusions to which we
came in our preceding discussion; for they
lead, in the one instance to a complete, and
in the other to a partial, abandonment of
the postulate of God, which we found to be
bound up with the ideal of social progress.

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 105
The first way is that of those who say
that the war, like everything else, is a
product of bhnd cosmic forces. It was
made absolutely necessary, they hold, by
the conformation of the planet on which
we hve, by the "pressure of race proto
plasm," and by the struggle for existence
between antagonistic cultures. Its issues
are not those of right and wrong but those
of an inevitable conflict between rights.
One brilliant American exponent of this
interpretation of the war sums up considera
tions like these by taking Phillips Brooks's
phrase, "Nothing that ought not to be
need be," and transmuting it into "Noth
ing that ought not to be can be."1 In
other words, whatever happens should be
accepted as what ought to happen, because
nothing else was possible. Now this view
entirely excludes the faith in an Eternal
Creative Good Will, and for that reason,
as we note, it reverts to the aristocratic,
deterministic, nationalistic type of ethics.
Thus we get indirect testimony to our con
clusion that the ethics of democracy, moral
freedom, and internationalism really does
postulate an Eternal Creative Good Will.
1 H. H. Powers, The Things Men Fight for, p. 364.

106 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
But what is of importance for us now is that
this view challenges us to consider directly
the nature of cosmic evolution, in order to
see whether it admits of any real postulate
of God.
The other way of meeting our present
spiritual situation is that of Mr. H. G.
Wells, who brings forward the doctrme of
a finite God. Mr. Wells fully identifies
himself with the ethics of progress as over
against the ethics of privilege, and he does
not desire to leave that ethics with the
fragile support of a vague tendency in things
or a panpsychism without a God, as the
Ethical Culture thinkers have done. Hence
he affirms a definite God who is more than
the sum of humanity, but finite. But as for
the postulate of God as the immanent con
trolling force in cosmic evolution, he holds
that to bemot only unjustifiable in the light
of the facts, but also unnecessary and un
desirable. These two ways of reacting upon our
present intellectual and moral perplexity
furnish the questions for our concluding
discussion. Is the experience of God as
an Eternal Creative Good Will corroborated
or discredited by cosmic evolution? And

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 107
does the idea of God as the immanent con
trolling force in cosmic evolution enhance
or impair the vital value of the experience
of God for modern life ?

The question whether the experience of
God is corroborated or discredited by cosmic
evolution is the question whether or not
cosmic evolution gives evidence of being the
manifestation of a comprehensive purpose.
Does cosmic evolution, we must proceed to
ask, eliminate the idea of a comprehensive
purpose in the universe, or is it more ade
quately interpreted by means of that idea ?
Now if one begins with the more ele
mentary cosmic problems and reviews the
stages of the evolutionary process up to the
problems that are most intricate, with the
expectation that at one or more points
nothing but the idea of a divine purpose
will serve as an explanation, one is destined
to be disappointed in his expectations. In
astronomy La Place found the hypothe
sis of a God unnecessary when he had
worked out the apphcation of the laws
of mechanical evolution. In biology Dar-

108 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
win eliminated the appeal to a Great De
signer when he established the principle of
natural selection. In physiology Huxley,
on the basis of evolution, came to regard
even human consciousness as an epiphenom-
enon. In ethics Clifford, by evolutionary
reasoning, substituted for the doctrine that
conscience is the voice of God the explana
tion that it springs from the tribal con
science of primitive man. And in pohtics
our pohtical scientists explain the state,
not from the divine right of kings, but from
sovereignties established and maintained by
military force.
And in general one must admit that the
substitution of an evolutionary explanation
for the direct appeal to a divine purpose is
valid ; for the appeal to a divine purpose as
a scientific explanation means a breach in
the continuity of nature, whereas it is only
through the discovery of continuity that
we can effect the accurate adjustment to
our environment and control over its events
which is the object of science.
But suppose that we begin with our
present universe, which we can concretely
know, instead of with a past universe which
we can only abstractly know, and suppose

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 109
that we seek to trace the continuity of the
universe backward instead of forward. We
shall then find that the purposive principle
is indispensable for an adequate under
standing of our universe, and that the work
ing of this principle can be traced, if not
throughout the cosmic process, at least very
far back in its course.
First of all, we see at work in our present
universe, as a significant factor in its evo
lution, a co-operative social intelligence.
This is of course obscured by the present
war, but the tragedy of the war centres pre
cisely in the fact that it to so large a degree
suspends the co-operative social thinking
which was becoming more and more a force
in human affairs. There is, for example,
co-operative social thinking in the ranks
of labor — thinking in terms of trades, of
organized industries, of internationahsm.
If the latter phase of this thinking broke
down with the war, that is no more than
must be admitted, so far as practical con
trol is concerned, of every other force for
internationalism; and this internationalism
of labor remains as an important basis for
reconstruction, since the democracy for
which we are fighting is destined to be an

110 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
industrial democracy. There is co-opera
tive social thinking, too, in the ranks of
capital, for the most intelligent capitalism
thinks, not simple in terms of money, but
in terms of populations and their needs.
The advance of political democracy around
the globe is another evidence of co-operative
social intelligence. Science is to a large
degree a conscious application of the same
principle. The Christian religion, with its
ideal of the Kingdom of God on earth and
its application of this ideal in morals, in
philanthropy, and in missions, furnishes —
in spite of all divisive tendencies-^-the most
significant example of all.
Now this co-operative social intelligence
is actually transforming this planet, and so
is a positive force in the physical evolution
of the cosmos. It has given the earth a
nervous system through the telegraph, the
telephone, the ocean cable, the wireless
apparatus. It has given the earth a mus
cular system by means of the machinery of
manufacturing, and a circulatory system by
means of the machinery of transportation.
It has increased the fertility of the earth
by irrigation, drainage, conservation of
resources, and scientific sanitation. And

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 111
it is even finding out how to increase the
beauty of the earth by adding to the charm
of wildness the charm of ordered grace.
The whole earth may almost be said to
be in process of becoming literally alive
through the work of co-operative social in
telligence. But more important than this: it is upon
co-operative social intelligence that all fu
ture social evolution now turns. Mankind
apparently has gotten about as far as it can
by mere unconscious social evolution. We
now see that the Superman cannot arise
without the Super-race, and that the ge
niuses that are to contribute most to the
progress of the world will be those who
have a genius for democracy. The old
principle of individual intelligence work
ing unaided, or apparently so, must give
way to the principle of co-operative social
intelligence, if evolution is to continue to
unfold new and higher modes of existence.
But the next step in tracing backward the
continuity of purposiveness in the universe
is to note that this co-operative social in
telligence which is now in process of forma
tion is conditioned upon a long evolution of
mind — and by mind I mean, not any psychic

112 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
activity whatever, but conscious thinking
and purposeful action. One great factor
in evolution, no doubt, is mere unconscious
pressure, like the movement of a glacier
down a mountain under the weight of
the constantly accumulating snow and ice
above. But a still more vital factor is the
thinking and the purposeful action which
are illustrated by the building of the funicu
lar railway to the mountain-top. Conscious
wants, the effort to surmount difficulties,
and the invention of means for so doing —
these are factors without which evolution
as we know it could not have proceeded,
and without which of course no co-operative
social intelligence would ever have been
possible. The long but dramatic story of
the transition from the first movement of
savage curiosity, the first tool, the first
articulate word, 'the first picture writing,
the first feehng of the tribal conscience, to
the laboratory, the airplane, the address
that sways a nation, the great charters of
democracy, and the conscientious thinking
for humanity — this story is now worked
out in its main features, and it establishes
mind as an element of prime importance in
the process of evolution.

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 113
But we must take another step in trac
ing back the continuity of purposiveness in
the universe. In the age-long evolution
through which natural selection has led up
to mind the most significant element has
been psychic selection. By psychic selec
tion I mean the reaction upon environment
which is made possible by sensation and
instinct, and which works long before any
thing hke intelligent selection comes in.
We say that natural selection explains the
development of the eye, but we should not
forget that the eye — :from the first pigment
spot sensitive to light to the eye of man —
is a selective organ that in turn explains
natural selection, and that its efficacy is
due to psychic activity. And so with every
other aspect of organic development. A
vital element everywhere is the awareness
of environment which appears in sensation
and the useful reaction which depends upon
instinct. How far back this psychic selec
tion can be traced is of course undeter
mined, but the psychic activity of micro
organisms is one of the most significant lines
of present biological inquiry. What con
cerns us here, however, is that so far back
as this psychic selection can be traced there

114 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
is no breach in the continuity of purposive
ness in the universe.
But here we shall almost certainly be met
by an objection. Is not reasoning like
this, it will be protested, destined to be
nullified by the opposite tendency of biolog
ical science to extend the mechanical ex
planation of phenomena into every field of
its inquiry ? Suppose that a chemical origin
of life can be found, and the chemical ex
planation of physiological functions con
tinues to make progress, will not then the
principle of purposiveness be undermined
and the mechanical theory of evolution be
sure of triumph?
For answer I must borrow an argument
from L. T. Hobhouse's important work on
Development and Purpose. Professor Hob-
house argues that, so far from the tele
ological explanation being superseded by the
mechanical, the mechanical explanation, as
it is elaborated, tends to pass over into the
teleological. Let me adapt freely one of
his illustrations to bring out his thought.
A machine is characterized by the mutual
indifference of its parts, and gets its unity
and coherence only from some principle
outside itself. Hence if one part breaks

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 115
down the rest go pounding on till they too
are broken and the whole comes to a stop.
Not so with an organism. When one part
is injured the other parts instantly begin to
co-operate for its repair. Or, if a part is
subjected to special strain, it is soon thick
ened up by aid of the rest of the organ
ism so that it can stand the strain. So
likewise an organism provides by nutrition
against its own wear and tear and by re
production even against its own death. In
short, an organism is a sympathetic whole
the parts of which instantaneously co-oper
ate for its own maintenance and develop
ment. But suppose we expand the mechanical
explanation to cover the case of the organ
ism, as we may legitimately try to do. We
may add a governor to our machine, as in
the case of the .engine, or compensating
devices against fluctuations in temperature,
as in the chronometer. Let us imagine
that we could continue adding such com
pensating and regulating devices until the
machine could secure its own maintenance-
and growth. Have we then displaced teleol
ogy by mechanism ? On the contrary, says
Hobhouse, we have passed through meehan-

116 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
ism to teleology. Our machine has become
an organism. For, instead of being charac
terized by the mutual indifference of its
parts, which is of the essence of the machine,
it is characterized by instantaneous sympa
thetic co-operation of its parts for the main
tenance of the whole, which is of the essence
of the organism. The teleology which we
see in an organism is, of course, not the tele
ology of an external designer. It is an imma
nent teleology, in which an organism secures
its own maintenance and growth — not neces
sarily through any prevision of these ends,
but simply through an awareness of its own
inherent causal tendency. But what is a
purpose even in human experience? It is
never a complete prevision of results . ' ' The
purposive state of our experience," says
Hobhouse, "is a process moving under the,
control of the idea of its own causal ten
dency."1 Thus a completely .self -regulat
ing machine is nothing more or less than an
organism, and explanation by mechanism
passes over into explanation by purpose.
Let chemical and mechanical explanations
of hfe and its functions be extended to the
limit, they still cannot eliminate the reality
1 Op. tit., p. 319.

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 117
of that purposiveness in the universe, the
continuity of which we have been tracing.
But now, having traced purposiveness in
the universe from co-operative social in
telligence in humanity back to the rudi
mentary psychic selection in the simplest
organisms, what shall we say of the process
as a whole ? And what shall we say of the
inorganic world, where no psychic functions
are experimentally discoverable? The an
swer of Hobhouse to this general problem
will help us to define our own answer.
Hobhouse argues that reality as a whole
so far possesses an organic character as to
lead us to- postulate a Central Mind.
"If," he says, "a purpose runs through the
world-whole, there is a Mind of which the
world purpose is the object. Such a Mind
must be a permanent and central factor in
the process of Reality, but how in detail
its relation to reahty in general, and the
individual mind in particular, is to be con
ceived is a question about which it is best
frankly to confess ignorance."1 But not
withstanding our need of confessing igno
rance Hobhouse claims — I quote his words —
"not in the least as a matter of faith, but
1 Op. til., p. 365,

118 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
as a sound working hypothesis, that the
evolutionary process can best be under
stood as the effect of a purpose slowly work
ing itself out under limiting conditions which
it brings successively under control."1
But we must heed especially Hobhouse's
view of these "limiting conditions" under
which he conceives the Central Mind to be
working. They consist of whatever has
not as yet been organized into the harmoni
ous expression of purpose, and they may be
subdivided into two classes: on the one
hand, the partial purposive processes which
clash with each other, and on the other
hand, processes of mere blind mechanism
— which is "the antithesis of purpose."
Out of these limiting conditions Hobhouse
gets his explanation of evil: physical evil
being "the outcome of the blind operation
of mechanical forces," and moral evil be
ing "the result of the pursuit of partial ends
without regard to the effect on others."2
And so Hobhouse holds that the Central
Mind "must neither be confused with the
whole of things nor with an Omnipotent
Creator of things," 3 but must be regarded
as developing in the midst of reality.
' Op. tit., p. xxvi. l Op. tit., p. 368. » Op. tit., p. 367.

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 119
Thus we see that the Central Mind, as
Hobhouse conceives it, is a finite God, and
so is formally akin to the doctrine of H. G.
Wells, which we are to take up as the last
topic of our discussion. Nevertheless, Hob
house's idea is founded on such different
reasoning and is so much wider in its scope
that it requires separate consideration, and
by considering it on its own merits we shall
be aided to the next step in our thought.
The reasonableness of the idea of a Cen
tral Mind we aheady had given evidence
for in tracing the continuity of purposive
ness in the universe from co-operative social
intelligence back to primitive psychic se
lection. And whUe the evidence does not
constitute an independent philosophical
basis for faith — a basis worked out inde
pendently of rehgious experience after the
manner of natural theology — it does furnish
an important corroboration for faith. Cer
tainly if we can go so far as to say that the
reahty of a Central Mind is a sound working
hypothesis for the interpretation of evolu
tion, that gives support to the religious
experience of coworking with an Eternal
Creative Good Will. But further, in view
of the reality and magnitude of evil in the

120 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
world, especially as revealed so appallingly
in this war, it seems inevitable that we
should recognize the Central Mind to be
working under limiting conditions. But
the important question remains: are these
limiting conditions such as are inherent in
the nature of the world purpose, or are
they in part entirely external to that pur
pose? Certain limitations — and very mo
mentous ones — are inherent in a world
purpose that is moral and social and that
is to be realized by an evolutionary process.
Such conditions are meant by Hobhouse
when he speaks of partial purposive proc
esses not yet organized into harmony.
But when he speaks of limiting conditions
due to blind mechanism operating in an
entirely unorganized way, of course these
must be thought of as wholly external to
the world purpose. Now I believe it can
be shown that this latter interpretation of
the limiting conditions which exist for the
Central Mind is philosophically unneces
sary, and that, if it be retained, it makes
the idea of a Central Mind religiously in
sufficient. While if we can recognize the
limiting conditions as aU being inherent in
the world purpose, the idea of a Central

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 121
Mind unqualifiedly serves our religious
needs. For we can then think of the en
tire process of cosmic evolution as being
controlled by an Eternal Creative Good
Will. In considering this question of whether
there are in the world mechanical processes
wholly external to any purpose we cannot
afford to ignore Bergson's doctrine of Crea
tive Evolution. Bergson regards mecha
nism, not with Hobhouse as a realm of re
ahty originally unrelated to evolutionary
forces, nor with the naturalistic philosopher
as the real nature of evolution, but simply
as an aspect of the evolutionary process,
which in its deeper nature is a Creative Life.
For example, one who simply looks at a
motion picture of a runner gets merely the
mechanical equivalent of the reality by
means of a swift succession of static
photographs; but the runner himself, do
ing his hundred-yards dash, experiences the
creative energies of reality in its fulness.
So one who examines an inventor's blue
prints perceives only a static and mechan
ical aspect of the real inventive process;
whereas the inventor himself, experiment
ing, rejecting, devising, is in the real stream

122 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
of creative evolution. Or once more, the
musical score is only a mechanical repre
sentation of a symphony; but the com
poser, as he originates the symphony, or the
orchestra as it renders it, embodies the
vital creative impulses to which all evolu
tion is due.
Thus, according to Bergson's view,
mechanism is incapable of representing any
portion of reality in its fulness. For cer
tain practical purposes, indeed, we rightly
make great use of the principle of mecha
nism. It helps us to grasp facts in the mass,
to deal with them swiftly, to effect new
groupings and combinations — just as a
commander-in-chief handles his army as one
mass, makes it mobile, reorganizes it, by
mathematics. But as the commander-in-
chief cannot safely forget that his army is
after all made up of striving and suffering
human beings, so we cannot wisely regard
any portion of reahty as mere mechanism.
On the contrary, from Bergson's standpoint
all reahty is included in one eternal process
of creative evolution, of which God is the
inexhaustible source. "God," says Berg
son, "is irlcessant life, action, liberty";
and he is the centre from which the re-

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 123
ality of the universe is continuaUy leaping
forth.1 Now these features of Bergson's concep
tion of evolution aid us in interpreting the
limiting conditions under which, in view of
the reality of evil, we must think of God
as working. For on the basis of Bergson's
doctrine there are no limiting conditions
outside of the creative process^ and yet
within the creative process there are limit
ing conditions of a very real nature. Such
conditions are — if we may introduce a
classification of our own here — first, new
finite creative processes, relatively separate
and not yet harmonized; second, the re
sults of past creative activities, which must
be more fully organized; third, processes
of disintegration needing to be neutralized.
Each of these kinds of limitation may be
iUustrated, for the sake of clearness, from
the human realm.
The new and unharmonized creative
processes have a palpable illustration in the
rival modern cultures — Anglo-Saxon, Teu
ton, Latin, Slavic — each having certain
merits and yet each endangered for lack
of integration with the others. And we
1 L'Evolution CrSatrice, p. 270.

124 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
must admit that such rivahy of cultures is
hardly preventable where co-operative social
inteUigence is only midway in the course of
its development. The results of past cre
ative activities needing fuller organization
are illustrated wherever within a given
group the problem of social education is an
urgent one, as it is in the case of the con
flicts of capital and labor. And the dis
integrations needing to be neutrahzed are
apparent wherever older forms of social
control — those of the tribe or of the back
ward civilization — are breaking down be
fore modern civilization, and the social
order is in danger of becoming poisoned
through slavery, political or industrial, or
through new forms of vice.
Now these examples, though taken from
the human realm, illustrate processes that
are traceable all the way back along the
course of creative evolution to the most
rudimentary beginnings. The rivahy of
cultures, taken lower down in the scale, is
the mere struggle for existence between
groups and types. Nor does a point like
this mean the recognition of the bhnd strug
gle for existence as omnipotent, for in a
process of creative evolution new and

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 125
higher forces are to be recognized as appear
ing along the way. We are interpreting
the lower stages of evolution by the higher,
instead of the higher by the lower, but a
continuity between all the stages must also
be recognized. In like manner the need
for fuUer organization, in order that a type
or group may assimilate its past gains, is
apparent all through evolution wherever
the principle of correlation comes in — as
for instance in the correlation between the
use of weapons and tools by primitive man
and his acquiring an erect posture. So,
too, the need of neutralizing processes of
disintegration appears wherever parasitic
forms of life develop.
Now the features of the evolutionary
process which we have just been tracing
constitute limitations upon the realization
of the world purpose, and yet they are
necessary conditions on which the realiza
tion of that purpose depends. They are
inherent in the creative evolutionary proc
ess itself, and so are germane to the world
purpose which gives the whole process its
meaning. Thus the dualism of Hobhouse's
view — due to his regarding mechanism as
originally a realm external to the working

126 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
of the Central Mind — is avoided, and yet
a no less genuine explanation of the occur
rence of evil in the evolutionary process is
gained. But while we have turned to Bergson for
the point of view which best enables us to
understand the limiting conditions involved
in God's creative work, there is a central
characteristic of his doctrine which chal
lenges criticism on the basis of the inter
pretation we are working out. Bergson,
while eliminating the dualism just referred
to, admits into his thinking a dualism of
another kind, which is liable to serious con
sequences. This is the dualism between
intelhgence and intuition. Intelligence, in
Bergson's doctrine, is backward-looking;
it analyzes facts for practical, purposes
and then organizes them into mechanical
schemes. It is intuition that is forward-
looking and that makes us aware of the
pulsing reality of evolution. Now while
Bergson holds that both the view of reality
given by intelligence and that given by
intuition must be taken into account in
making up a total philosophy, yet he does
not combine intuition and intelligence into
a unified function of the human mind. But

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 127
just such a combination is needed for the
understanding of evolution. It is creative
inteUigence to which evolution leads up,
and it is upon a further achievement of
creative inteUigence that any further for
ward movement of evolution depends. And
it is the absence of a clearly unified concep
tion of creative inteUigence, in man and in
the life of the universe, that leads Leuba
and others to regard Bergson's conception
of God as that of a non-purposive Creative
Force. What Bergson's system may grow
into we do not know, but it certainly seems
to be severely handicapped by the dualism
which he has left between intuition and
intelhgence. How now shaU we summarize our thought
under this first topic? To what extent
have we found cosmic evolution corroborat
ing the religious consciousness of coworking
with an Eternal Creative Good Will ?
We have traced the evidence for a world
purpose from the co-operative social in
teUigence at work in human society, back
through the evolution of mind, back through
psychic selection in its more rudimentary
forms, to the inorganic world. And we
have found the hypothesis that the in-

128 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
organic world, so-called, is really the mani
festation of an inexhaustible Creative Life
to be preferable philosophically to the hy
pothesis that it is a realm of mechanism
originally external to the Central Life or
Mind. To such an interpretation of the
cosmos we may give the name of evolu
tionary theism. Now the prime signifi
cance of evolutionary theism lies, in the
synthesis which it makes between the idea
of a world purpose and the need of recogniz
ing limiting conditions. This synthesis con
sists in the recognition of hmiting conditions
which really retard, or temporarily defeat
the world purpose, and which nevertheless
are inherent in the nature of that purpose
and necessary for its realization. How
important this synthesis is we already have
seen from the consequences which follow
from its absence. In the preceding lecture
we saw that panpsychism without a God
tended to support an aristocratic, deter
ministic, nationalistic ethics instead of the
ethics of democracy, moral freedom, and
internationalism, and in the present dis
cussion we have seen that the doctrine of a
Central Mind in evolution, if combined
with the view that there is a realm of pure

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 129
mechanism, results in an unsatisfactory
dualism. But evolutionary theism makes
it possible for us to avoid both these errors,
because it helps us to conceive of a demo
cratic world purpose which is being pro
gressively reached by a continuous process
of cosmic evolution through limiting con
ditions which are bound up with the very
nature of that purpose.
An iUustration of the way in which, in
evolutionary theism, the world purpose and
the limiting conditions are interrelated may
serve to bring out the conclusion at which
we have arrived. Let us suppose a modern
educator who combined the largest ideals of
democratic education with the highest ad
ministrative efficiency to be placed in charge
of the educational system of the teeming
millions in China and to be given unlimited
pohtical power and financial resources.
His purpose would include responsible par
ticipation in the national life on the part of
every Chinese from the lowest coolie to the
highest mandarin. But his purpose could
be accomplished only by a long process
of evolution, and notwithstanding the full
political powers given him and his unlimited
financial resources, he would be subject to

130 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
many limiting conditions, due to the fact
that the Chinese themselves were at so
many different stages of development, and
that each stage was necessarily connected
with every other stage. Many hindrances
and positive evils would result from these
limiting conditions, and yet they are not
conditions foreign to the purpose of the
educator but are inherent in its very nature.
So on the basis of evolutionary theism the
Central Mind is conditioned at each point
in evolution by the stages that have gone
before and that coexist, and by the increas
ing spontaneity of individual centres of
life; and yet without such conditions his
purpose could not be accomplished. To
take a specific instance, God can hardly be
thought of as eliminating by miracle what
ever germ life becomes parasitic to the
human body and causes disease, just as
fast as that may occur. That is not con
ceivable if his purpose is one that needs
to be accomplished through evolution and
through moral development. Such an elim
ination he is indeed seeking to make.
Diseases are not to be accepted passively
as visitations of providence or as mysteri
ous disciplines. But the elimination must

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 131
evidently come through increase of human
intelhgence and co-operation and mastery
over environment. And yet, just as we
beheve that education for democracy is a
workable ideal for the Chinese, so we may
beheve that cosmic evolution can be brought
forward to the reahzation of democratic
ethics in aU human relations, to a federal
world republic in which human brother
hood is the controlling ideal, to an establish
ment of the Kingdom of God on earth.
It must be made plain, however, that
faith is indispensable for this interpreta
tion, just as it is for rehgious experience in
its more specific sense — not a faith that flies
in the face of the facts, nor that arbitrarily
cuts loose from the facts, but a faith that,
candidly reviewing the facts, chngs to the
principle that the facts can be combined
with the great values — either by construc
tive thinking or constructive moral hving.
Our interpretation of cosmic evolution,
then, is not an underpinning for faith, such
as natural theology claimed to furnish,
without which the whole structure of the
religious life would fall to pieces. Nor is it
a palace of philosophic truth such as Hegel
sought to erect, to replace the provisional

132 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
shelters that faith had provided. It is
rather like the clothes that a working human
being needs to wear in a rugged world.
If the world of our experience were all a
tropical zone, where ideals could live with
out effort, faith might not need to provide
itself with a protective clothing of theory.
But since the world of our experience is
more like the northerly climate, where ideals
must live by toil, where seasons change and
tempests come, the protective clothing of a
working theory of the universe must be
formed by faith for the sake of its own
health and efficiency.

II
H. G. WeUs, however, in his recent writ
ings has vigorously challenged the view
which we have been developing, and, since
his thinking in many respects reflects the
modern situation, we need to measure our
argument by his challenge. Moreover, he
approaches the subject from the side of
social and spiritual values instead of through
an analysis and interpretation of an evolu
tionary process, such as Hobhouse and
Bergson give, and so his position will give

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 133
us an opportunity for testing our argument
in the realm of values — which for religious
experience must always be the highest
court of appeal. At the beginning of this
lecture we formulated, on the basis of Mr.
WeUs's position, the question, Does the
idea of God as the immanent controlling
force in cosmic evolution enhance or im
pair the vital value of the experience of God
for modern life? and to that question we
now directly turn.
It is, indeed, legitimate, with reference
to the argument that we have been making,
to raise the question whether any theory of
cosmic evolution is not bound to be too
heavily weighted by the facts of evil to be
able to give support to the experience of
God. And if such a theory in the last
analysis is a matter of faith instead of
demonstration, one may be disposed to ask:
"Why not unload it altogether?" It is
possible to increase one's protective cloth
ing until it becomes more like a suit of
antiquated armor than a means to the
health and efficiency of ideals. To Mr.
WeUs this appears to be not only a possi
biUty but a fatal necessity, whenever the
experience of God seeks to take up any posi-

134 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
tive interpretation whatever of the cosmic
process as a whole. Let us turn for a
moment to his own statement of the matter.
The God we need, Mr. Wells affirms, is a
finite God, definitely personal, whom we
know as we know a friend. He had a be
ginning in time, but he is immortal. He is
courage, he is youth, he is austere love.
He hopes and attempts, and gains his ends,
not by passive suffering and non-resistance,
but by fighting. His supreme goal is the
conquest of death — "first," says Mr. WeUs,
"the overcoming of death in the individual
by the incdrporation of the motives of his
Jife in an undying purpose, and then the
defeat of that death that seems to threaten
our species upon a cooling planet beneath a
coohng sun."1
Now of such a God Mr. Wells holds that
we may have an actual experience, and all
do have an experience of him who par
ticipate in genuinely modern rehgion. But
this experience has nothing whatever to
do with any theory of the universe and
should be kept entirely distinct from all
such theories.. God, he says, is the God
of the heart, not the God of the universe.
1 God the Invisible King, p. 99.

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 135
He is not the ultimate ground of reality.
"The ultimate of existence," declares WeUs,
"is a Veiled Being, which seems to know
nothing of life or death or good or ill."1
Nor is God "the Life Force," of which
WeUs speaks as a "second Being" and
"the maker of our world." "This heat
and haste and wrath of life," "this Demi
urge," seems to be both good and evU.
"If it gives all the pain and conflict of life,
it gives also the joy of the sunshine, the
dehght and hope of youth, the pleasures."
But in any case it is not God. So far is
God from being identifiable with either the
Veiled Being or the Life Force that he
must be thought of as having originated
with man. "Somewhere," says Mr. Wells,
"in the dawning of mankind he had a be
ginning, an awakening, and ... as man
kind grows he grows." And again — "He
is the undying human memory, the in
creasing human wul." 2
And yet Mr. WeUs will not admit that
his idea of God makes him only the collec
tive mind and purpose of the race. He in
sists that God is more than the sum of the
best in mankind, and is a real Being in
1 Op. tit., p. 14. 2 Op. tit., p. 61.

136 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
himself, just as a temple is more than a
gathering of stones, or an organism more
than an aggregate of cells. Hence his
position is different from a mere devotion to
ethical and social ideals to which Ethical
Culture in the official sense of the term
limits itself, in that he lays the utmost stress
upon a clear experience of a personal God,
however limited the application of that
experience to the world of reality may be.
Now if this doctrine of Mr. WeUs be the
true interpretation of the experience of
God in modern life,- then we have been
utterly asttay in seeking to bring out a
relation between that experience and the
idea of cosmic evolution. The experience
of God can only be compromised and per
verted by establishing such a relation — as
it has been in the past, according to this
author, by the Christian doctrines of crea
tion and providence and by the whole trend
of Christian theology. But no such doc
trine can be accepted solely because of the
zeal and enthusiasm with which it is set
forth, nor yet because it is developed in re
action against limitations in the Christian
doctrines of the past, which must be ad
mitted to be very real when judged from

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 137
the standpoint of modern needs. We are
bound, therefore, to ask whether either the
idea of an experience of God or the needs
of modern life are rightly interpreted by the
doctrine of a God so decidedly finite as Mr.
WeUs represents him to be.
There are two fundamental objections to
Mr. WeUs's doctrine; and the first is that
the metaphysics of nature and the meta
physics of humanity cannot be sharply
separated, as he assumes. He frequently
writes, to be sure, as if his views involved
no metaphysics whatever, but were the
product of pure experience alone. "Mod
ern rehgion," he says, "bases its knowledge
of God and its account of God entirely
upon experience. It has encountered God.
It does not argue about God; it relates."1
And we may freely grant that a genuine
experience of God is at the heart of the posi
tion that he has developed. A single pas
sage iUustrating this should in justice be
quoted: "Then suddenly, in a httle while,
in his own time, God comes. This cardinal
experience is an undoubting, immediate
sense of God. It is the attainment of an
absolute certainty that one is not alone in
• Op. tit., p. 20.

138 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
one's self. It is as if one were touched at
every point by a being akin to one's self,
sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, stead
fast and pure in aim. It is completer and
more intimate, but it is like standing side
by side with and touching some one that
we love very dearly and trust completely."1
But this immediate experience receives a
speculative interpretation at the hands of
Mr. WeUs as truly as the Christian experi
ence has been given a speculative interpre
tation by theology. Only Mr. WeUs would
fain have simply a metaphysics of human
ity. His God is the concrete organic unity
of the best part of mankind, and he re
pudiates the idea of a God of the Universe.
But the whole trend of modern scientific
thinking leads us to recognize the unity
between man and nature, so that apart
from the metaphysics of nature there can
be no metaphysics of humanity. And this
fact Mr. WeUs involuntarily bears witness
to when he speaks of God as originating with
mankind, claims immortality for him, and
assigns him the task of conquering that
great death of the race which is in store for
it because it dwells "upon a cooling planet
1 Op. tit., p. 23.

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 139
beneath a coohng sun." Such ideas really
require a positive and extensive connection
between the conception of God and that of
cosmic evolution — a requirement that can
not be evaded simply by ignoring the con
ception of evolution, as Mr. Wells so gen-
eraUy does. Indeed, by interpreting God
only as the concrete unity of the best part
of mankind his conception of God has be
come so finite that it is left without protec
tion against two dangers — on the one hand
the danger that it shaU become absorbed
into the type of rehgion which is only an
other name for ethics; and on the other the
danger that to the average mind it shall
come to stand only for a national or racial
god — identified with a single national or
racial culture.
But one to whom Mr. Wells's idea of a
finite God seems emancipating may ob
ject that the God to whom the present dis
cussion has pointed, even though immanent
in cosmic evolution, is also finite. This
we should have to grant if the term "in
finite" were to be used in a merely abstract
logical sense, meaning the absence of all
limiting conditions of whatever nature. In
such an Infinite, it is true, the experience of

140 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
God in modern life has no interest. But
this experience is vitally interested that
God should be infinite in the pragmatic
sense of the term — that is, adequate for the
practical solution of all our finite problems.
Surely men who in this scientific age are
consciously deahng with the universal laws
of nature need a God who is infinite in the
sense of being able to control those laws
to moral ends. This need and the faith
which satisfies it are admirably set forth in
the following fines of Edwin Markham, who
is no more bound by conventional religion
than is Mr. Wells:
" Keep heart, O Comrade ! God may be delayed
By evil, but he suffers no defeat;
Even as a chance rock in an upland brook
May change a river's course; and yet no rock, —
No, nor the baffling mountains of the world, —
Can hold it from its destiny, the sea.
God is not foiled; the drift of the world Will
Is stronger than all wrong. Earth and her years,
Down joy's bright way, or sorrow's longer road,
Are moving toward the purpose of the Skies."1
The second fundamental objection to
this doctrine of a finite God is that it re-
1 Published first in Nautilus.

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 141
sorts to metaphysical dualism for the ex
planation of evil. Mr. WeUs is bent upon
reheving God from all complicity with evil,
especiaUy with such colossal moral evils as
this present war, and hence he declares that
God is finite. But as a consequence he is
led, as we have seen, to define the ultimate
reahty as a VeUed Being apparently in
different to good or evil, and to hypostatize
the Life Force into a second being, aimlessly
producing both good and evil. Thus the
reheving of God from complicity with evil
is secured through the assumption of cos
mic forces quite other than God to which
it ultimately can be ascribed.
Now with the motive for this phase of
Mr. WeUs's thought doubtless we all sym
pathize, especially so far as it springs from
the problem of the war. I surmise it to
have been the experience of many of us to
feel, as the awful horror of the war grew
upon us, that the responsibihty for it must
not be assigned to God. The idea that
it was an inscrutable providence, or that
it was a special divine judgment, would
not suffice to make it behevable that God
could be its source. If God must be
thought of as the cause of the war, we felt

142 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
that we could not believe in God. But as
we have tried to think the problem of the
war through, many of us have felt that it
also must not be assigned to cosmic forces
other than God, but that the full responsi
bihty must be borne by man. It is in fact
always dangerous to find the explanation
of moral evil outside of man himself. For
just so far as that is done the possibiUty
of man's ehminating the evil and establish
ing the good is diminished. It is only too
common for both the social philosopher and
the man of the street to-day to affirm that
wars will be inevitable for indefinite cen
turies to come, and to stigmatize the idea
of a federal world repubhc as utterly Uto
pian. And the danger of this form of
unfaith is that it can make itself true, just
as the opposite doctrines, if held as a posi
tive faith, may make themselves true. If
then the assigning of evils hke the war to
God is fatal to rehgion, the assigning of
them in great part to cosmic forces outside
of man may be fatal to ethics. The modern
man has too recently freed himself from the
idea of a kingdom of Satan over against
the Kingdom of God to find in the doctrine
of a finite God over against huge semi-evil

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 143
or aimless cosmic forces an adequate form
of religious faith.
These fundamental objections to the
doctrine of a finite non-cosmic God are in
themselves enough to show the positive
value for modern rehgious experience of that
conception of God which presents him as the
immanent controlling force in cosmic evo
lution. But at the same time the idea of
divine immanence gets its significance, in
turn, chiefly from the kind of God who is
beheved to be immanent. Our preceding
discussions led us to the conception of God
as essentially moral creativity, and hence
it is the moraUy creative God whose signif
icance is enhanced by being recognized as
the immanent controlling force in cosmic
evolution. When we are able to find moral
creativity as the unifying principle through
out the whole process of cosmic evolution,
then we have the final element in that ex
perience of being coworkers with an Eter
nal Creative Good Will which we have seen
to be of powerful constructive value for
modern life.
Thus the cosmic God to whom our argu
ment leads up is not a God who did all his
thinking at some remote point in the past

144 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
and who now, like the bureaucratic official,
has only to put his past thoughts into exe
cution; rather is he a God who hke the
prophetic genius of a new democracy, is
creatively thinking now and whose supreme
aim is to bring the sons of men to creative
thinking, in harmony with himself and with
each other. Nor, again, is the cosmic God
of our conception a static, sphinx-like God
whose eternity consists in comprehending
past and present, good and evil, in one un
changing gaze; rather is he a God who is
living and working in time and who is
eternal by reason of the inexhaustibleness of
his creative love. And once more, the cos
mic God of our thought is not a great Um
pire of the Universe, who has constructed
the rules of the game of life according to
his own sovereign will, and who now ad
ministers the rules and deals with all viola
tions in the spirit of aloofness and strict
neutrahty; on the contrary, he is the great
Teacher of the Universe, guiding the studies
and experiments of the school of life ac
cording to the living needs of developing
spirits, and dealing with all their aspirations,
struggles, and adventurings out into the
untried and unknown — and likewise with

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 145
all their blindness, waywardness, passions,
and sins — with completely self-giving love
and boundless faith. .
Our whole interpretation of evolution,
therefore, rests back upon a characteristic
type of rehgious experience — the conscious
ness of being coworkers with a morally crea
tive God. When faith in God's fatherhood
and man's sonship, in Jesus as Seer and
Saviour, in the moral authoritativeness of
prophet, apostle, and saint, lifts us to a new
level of insight and power, we rightly judge
that here if anywhere we are experiencing
the divine. When the brotherhood of man
and the Kingdom of God on earth present
themselves to us as the supremely chaUeng-
ing tasks and draw us into the great co
operative work for their reahzation, we are
impelled to beheve that the divine is ex
panding in new creative power. When the
bitterness of class strife and the woe of a
war-torn world lead us to a new self -dedica
tion to social redemption, we instinctively
feel that the divine reality in its intensest
and most poignant meaning is drawing us
into fuller relation to itself. When the
present experience of eternal values gives
new substance to the hope of personal and

146 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
social immortaUty, we gain a fresh sense
of the depth and range of divinity in this
universe. In all these experiences fact and
value meet and blend both in human ways
and in ways that reach far beyond the con
fines of humanity. Experiences like these,
we irresistibly feel, are experiences of God.
They reveal to us the very essence of crea
tive power and they bring us into a veritable
sharing in the creative process.
Now if we are able to extend the meaning
of these experiences — speculatively, if you
will — throughout the entire range of cosmic
evolution, and find in them the immanent
controlling force of the whole cosmic proc
ess, the experiences themselves gain most
significantly in richness and power. They
transcend the realm of merely human as
piration and effort as the tragic but tri
umphant harmonies of the orchestral sym
phony transcend the plaintive melody of
the folk-song from which their theme is
taken. And in this very fact, as well as
in the scientific continuities that we have
sought to trace, the cosmic interpretation
of these experiences gains a real verifica
tion. Pre-eminently now, in the midst of our

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 147
present world tragedy, must the value of a
cosmic interpretation of our supreme re
ligious experiences be evident. Mr. WeUs
says: "God comes to us neither out of the
stars nor out of the pride of life, but as a
still smaU voice within." 1 But Kant points
us to a more adequate working philosophy
when he testifies: "Two things fill my soul
with awe: the starry firmament above me
and the moral law within me." And Paul,
notwithstanding the limitations of the an
tique thought world, attains a yet higher
spiritual synthesis when he finds God, the
source of all things, perfectly revealed in
Jesus Christ and through the triuinph of
Christ's redemptive work becoming liter
ally all in all. But Jesus himself expresses
the same synthesis with unrivaUed sim
plicity and completeness when he teaches
that the Power revealed to us in the sun
shine and the rain is a Heavenly Father who
is calling all men into sonship and who is
seeking through forgiving love to lead them
all forward together toward the perfect
life. And can we doubt that, for the men in
the endless zigzag lines of trenches in
1 Op. tit, p. 18.

148 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
Europe, and for all who are praying and
working for a better and more democratic
world, the revelation of the stars can rein
force the revelation of the heart? Here a
social order all unfinished and in vital
danger, but there a cosmic order unshake-
ably established. Here the purposes of
wisdom and love foiled and thrown back
ward by the unexampled outbreak of hatred,
cruelty, waste, and vice; there unfailing re
sources for curative and redemptive work.
Here exhaustion, pain, and wavering faith;
there infinite energies for new idealism and
for endless progress. It is true that when
men looked to external nature for the main
evidence for faith in God they were often
led into the moral indiffereritism of the max
im, "It will all be the same in a hundred
years," and such indifferentism in a crisis
hke this is equivalent to moral surrender.
But when men proceed from the God known
in the heart and in the moral struggles and
triumphs of history out to the cosmic inter
pretation of God they gain perspective for
a more comprehensive social strategy and
courage for a longer moral campaign.
Then they are brought into the full mean
ing and power of that religious experience

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION 149
which — whether summoning them to savior-
hood in times of social catastrophe or to
constructive endeavor in times of tran
quillity — lifts them into the consciousness of
being coworkers with an Eternal Creative
Good Will.
It has been our aim in these discussions
to recognize the momentousness and the
hopefulness of the present outreach — blindly
groping or consciously purposeful — after a
new religion; and the principle for the right
appreciation of this outreach we have found
in the fact that it seems to be the product
of two convergent tendencies. On the one
hand there is the demand that any experi
ence of God to which men are summoned
shall be one that is possessed and expressed
unreservedly in the terms of modern life.
On the other hand there is the recognition
that modern life is far from being self-
sufficient without rehgion, that it needs
religion — -and more specifically a living ex
perience of God — provided these are of such
a character as to contribute directly toward
the solution of its central problems. The
convergence of these two tendencies, we
have felt, constitutes a direct challenge to

150 THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD
our thinking to do what it can toward giving
this outreach for a new religion some gen
uine satisfaction.
From this point of view we have been
discussing three central modern problems:
the development of personality, the pro
motion of social progress, and the inter
pretation of cosmic evolution. And the
result of our discussion has been that we
have found the new rehgion which could
make the largest contribution toward the
solution of these problems to be — not that
which centres in a non-purposive Creative
Force, nor that which is comprised in
Ethical Culture alone, nor that which offers
a Finite God beginning to be with man
kind — but that which appears in the self-
renewing power of the Christian religion at
its best. We have traced this self-renewal
of Christianity through some of its signifi
cant stages and have seen it manifesting
itself again in our own time wherever men
are meeting life in the consciousness of
being coworkers with an Eternal Creative
Good Will. If the salt does not lose its
savor — that is, if Christianity does not fail
to apply to itself that creative moral in
telligence demanded everywhere else in the

AND COSMIC EVOLUTION • 151
social order — the modern world will not f aU
to find the new rehgion that it needs and
will be able to have as the unifying principle
of its reorganized life a vital experience of
God.

INDEX

Adler, Felix, 59, 79.
Bergson, H., 121/., 126.
Bushnell, H., 18/., 35.
Chamberlain, H. S., 71 ff., 74.
Coe, G. A., 46.
Democracy, 64 ff., 73/., 95/.
Design, the argument from,
102, 108.
Determinism, 67.
Development of personality,
8-50.
Dewey, J., 95.
Drummond, H., 102.
Ethical Culture, 59/., 77/
Ethics, the —
Of privilege versus the
ethics of progress, 64-
82, 89, 106, 128.
Evil, the problem of, 118 /.,
141/
Evolution, cosmic, 101 /
Evolutionary theism, 128-132.
Experience of God, the —
Its validity, 34-50, 84-
100, 107-132.
Faith, 44, 94/, 131/
Freedom, 63/, 68/
Gladden, W., 20.
God, experienced in moral
creativity, 30-34, 145.
An Eternal Creative Good
Will, 35 /., 41-50, 63
/., 81-84, 85-100, 119-
132, 143/

A non-purposive Creative
Force, 38-50.
Finite or infinite? 41, 182-
151.
Validity of the experience
of, 34-50, 84-100, 107-
132.
As a Father, 57/., 78/
Personality of, 40/., 63/
Attributes of, 62.
Postulate of, 85-100.
As a Central Mind, 117-
132.
Limiting conditions for,
118-132.
Bergson's idea of, 121-127.
Immanence of, 143.
Guyau, J. M., 61.
Haeckel, E., 67, 74.
Hobhouse, L. T., 114/
Humanity, the cult of, 39/
The ideal of, 72.
Immanence of God, 143.
Intelligence, creative, 40 /.,
127. Co-operative social, 109-
111.
Internationalism, 64, 73, 83,
99.
Intuition, 126-127.
James, W., 40, 42, 45, 68-70,
76.
Kant, Immanuel, 86, 91.

Leuba, James H., 38-50, 127.

153

154

INDEX

Markham, E., 140.
Martineau, J., 20-23, 35.
Mechanism, 114/
Mind, a Central, 117-132.
Mott, J. R., 73, 76.
Nietzsche, F., 65-67, 74.
Overstreet, H. A., 57-59, 63,
77, 79.
Panpsychism, 80-82.
Personality, the development
of, 8-50.
Postulate, the, of God, 85-100.
Powers, H. H., 105.
Progress, social, 51-100.
Providence, 40.
Psychology of religion, 5, 38/
Purposiveness, 109-114.
Rauschenbusch, W., 52, 66, 75.
Reality, the sense of, 42, 44,
45.

Religion, a new, 1, 49, 149.
Its paradox, 33, 34.
As an experience of co-
working with God, 36-
50, 63 /., 81-84, 96-
100, 143-151.
Ritschl, Albrecht, 23-27, 85.
Ross, Edward A., 52. *
Salter, W. M.( 60, 79.
Selection, psychic, 113.
Teleology, 109-114.
Theism, 41.
Evolutionary, 128-132.
Tolstoi, 27-30, 35.
Validity of the experience of
God, 34-50, 84-100, 107-132.
War, the Great —
Its relation to faith, 2,
53-56, 92/., 103/., 141,
146^-149.
Wells, H. G., 106, 132/

3 9002 08540 0381