Part 15 (1/2)
The experience was constantly repeated in the early church. It was the most striking of all those genuine ”miracles”--the wonders of spiritual creation and growth--which were the wealth of the Christian society.
At the most dark and depressing hour of that society; when in gaining dominion it had lowered its purity, and before the barbarian invasion the whole social fabric shook,--that same miracle of a divine love, realized as a saving and transforming force, was wrought in the great personality of Augustine, and inspired through him anew the life of the church.
The intellectual vestment of this experience--the form under which the crude thought of these men gave it body and substance--was the Incarnation and the Atonement. Those doctrines have lasted through all changes, even until this day, because of the pearl of truth cased in their rough sh.e.l.ls.
When now we try to express that truth in its simplicity--finding always a great difficulty in putting in articulate words the deep things of the spirit--we say that the man who sees and sorrows for and seeks to escape from his wrong deed or habit may come into the consciousness that he will escape,--may feel with a profound a.s.surance that he is upborne by some power of good which will save him and bless him. He is recoverable; he is lovable; he is loved, and shall be saved. And the way in which that consciousness is awakened is oftenest by the contact of some soul which the sinner reverences as better than himself, which knows his guilt and loves him in spite of it, and declares to him that he shall live and recover. The minister of forgiveness may be a mother or a wife; it may be the sincere priest speaking to the sincere penitent; it may be Christ or Madonna; it may be the unnamed Power whose token is the sunset, or the rainbow, or the voice within the heart.
The especial limitation of Christianity at its birth was the expectation of the speedy ending of the existing order. Hence an indifference to such subjects, belonging to permanent human society, as industry, government, knowledge, the control of the forces of nature.
As to all these, the limitations of Christianity hindered its progress; as to each, the natural and secular world exercised an influence unconfessed or striven against; as to each, the perception was reached that it must be recognized by religion, until in our day the _Here_ and _Now_ takes the foreground in place of the _Hereafter_. The personal life in its present relations, the human society under earthly conditions,--these give to us the main field and problem. The hereafter of the individual gives background and atmosphere.
For ”holy living and dying” we put simply holy living. To give fullness and perfection to each day, each act, is all and is enough.
The thought of death should not swerve or alter a particle. When the last hour of life comes, what retrospect shall we wish? Only to have filled life with the best.
The religious emotion will often and freely personify, and must do so.
The highest feeling takes on a quality of love, and love goes to a personal object. It is sometimes as toward one divine friend and G.o.d, sometimes toward the one beloved human being, sometimes the Christ, sometimes a universe of living and loving beings. These are distinctions of form rather than of substance, the expression by different minds of the same reality.
To the modern mind, the distinct personification of deity is less natural than formerly. The very vastness of the Infinite, as we conceive it, precludes this definite personalizing of it as a habitual mode of thought or basis of conduct. Yet under lofty and high-wrought emotion, the yearning of the soul toward the Supreme Power often breaks spontaneously into the language of personality. In the exquisite sense of deliverance from sharp trouble,--when the trouble itself seems more than justified by the heightened gladness, as in t.i.tian's a.s.sumption the face of the Virgin Mother s.h.i.+nes in the welcome of that heaven to which the way has led through all earthly and motherly sorrow,--in such emergence, the heart utters again the very words of the Psalmist: ”I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.
The sorrows of death compa.s.sed me, and the pains of h.e.l.l gat hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow. Then called I upon the name of the Lord, O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul! Gracious is the Lord and righteous; yea, our G.o.d is merciful. Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with me. For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.”
If we would weigh and measure the value of mankind, we have no scales or measures. As much is to be said for the badness of men as for their goodness. Still more impossible is it to trace their individual responsibility for what they are. But the determination of the value of mankind, even the lowest, is by a different process from that of the speculative intellect. Are men worthy of love? Love them, and you shall know! The att.i.tude of love vindicates itself. No one who has heartily given himself to the service of others turns back saying, ”They are not worth it.”
Encompa.s.sing light creates in the developing creature an eye. So encompa.s.sing love--human love--draws out response in its object, makes it lovable.
One cla.s.s of truths are certain for all and at all times. These are such as: the excellence and authority of the highest moral ideal; the obligations of purity, truth, and honesty; love as the true att.i.tude; receptivity toward knowledge, beauty, and humor.
There are other perceptions which vary greatly in their frequency and vividness. They are impulses of rea.s.surance, joy, hope, victory. They surpa.s.s all other sources of strength and comfort.
They cannot, in their clearness and fullness, be transferred or expressed; they cannot even, by the mind experiencing them, be resolved into intellectual propositions.
They are not peculiar to what we usually call religion. The experience of love between man and woman opens a new world. So does music; so do all the finer forms of happiness.
All these, when they come, are felt as gifts,--as revelations. They are not within our direct and immediate command.
What relation do they bear to the life which is within our command,--to our deliberate, purposeful, self-ordered life? First, in that life we cultivate the two traits which fit us for the vision, though they do not command it,--sensitiveness and self-control.
So no man or woman can foresee whether the love of wedlock shall come to them, but each can render himself worthy of love, and no high experience of love is possible except to one trained long beforehand in purity and unselfishness.
Next, these higher moods, when they come, should be accepted as giving law to the unillumined hours. They do not change, but they intensify, the aim at rightness of life, and they add to it the spirit of courage, of trust, of joy.
The hope of immortality--the a.s.surance of some good beyond, which we express by ”immortality”--is born from a sense of the value of life.
Life is felt to be precious as it is consecrated by the moral struggle in ourselves, and as it is viewed in others with sympathy. We give our moral effort and our sympathy, and these are encountered by the tremendous play of human joys and sorrows, and the result is a sense of life as intensely significant.