Part 7 (1/2)
I say these things will happen. But they will not happen unless men are sufficiently resolved that they shall.
Let the reader remember that those who now flock to the schoolmaster are less likely than men of the previous generation to fall into the pit of materialism. They begin at a point which the previous generation did not believe to exist--a visible world reduced by positive science to the invisible world of philosophy. They confront not a quant.i.tative universe, but a qualitative. They almost begin at the very spirit of man; they cannot advance far before they find themselves groping in the unseen, and using, not the senses given to us by action, but the eyes and ears of the understanding by which alone the soul of man can apprehend reality. Even the Germans have gone back to Goethe.
This, then, is the contribution which Dr. Jacks makes to modern thought.
We are to consider man as a creature of boundless potentiality, to realise that his first need is for light, and to define that mystic all-important word in terms of education. Christianity was not concerned with the moral law; it was concerned with the transcending of all law by the spirit of understanding.
I need not guard myself against the supposition that so true a scholar is satisfied with the system of education which exists at the present time. Dr. Jacks looks for a reform of this system, but not from the present race of politicians.
”How can we hope to get a true system of education from politics?” he asked me. ”Is there any atmosphere more degrading? Plato has warned us that no man is fit to govern until he has ceased to desire power. But these men think of nothing else. To be in power; that is the game of politics. What can you expect from such people?”
He said to me, ”Men outside politics are beginning to see what education involves. It involves the whole man, body, mind, spirit. I do not think you can frame an intelligent definition of education without coming up against religion. In its simplest expression, education is a desire to escape from darkness into light. It is fear of ignorance, and faith in knowledge. At the present time, most people have escaped from darkness into twilight; a twilight which is neither one thing nor the other. But they will never rest there. The quest of the human spirit is Goethe's dying cry, Light--more Light. And it is from these men that I look to get a n.o.bler system of education. They will compel the politicians to act, perhaps get rid of the present race of politicians altogether. And when these humble disciples of knowledge, who are now making heroic efforts to escape from the darkness of ignorance, frame their definition of education, I am sure it will include religion. The Spirit of Man needs only to be liberated to recognise the Spirit of G.o.d.”
Most people, I think, will agree with Dr. Jacks in these opinions; they are intelligent and promise a reasonable way out of our present chaos.
For many they will shed a new light on their old ideas of both religion and education. But some will ask: What is the Unitarian Church doing to make these intelligent opinions prevail?
Dr. Jacks confesses to me that there is no zeal of propaganda in the Unitarian communion. It is a society of people which does not thrust itself upon the notice of men, does not compete for converts with other churches in the market-place. It is rather a little temple of peace round the corner, to which people, who are aweary of the din in the theological market-place, may make their way if they choose. It is such a Church as Warburton, to the great joy of Edward FitzGerald, likened to Noah's family in the Ark:
The Church, like the Ark of Noah, is worth saving; not for the sake of the unclean beasts that almost filled it and probably made most noise and clamour in it, but for the little corner of rationality that was as much distressed by the stink within as by the tempest without.
It is significant of the modesty of the Unitarian that he does not emerge from this retirement even to cry, ”I told you so,” to a Church which is coming more and more to accept the simplicity of his once ridiculed and anathematised theology.
”You must regard modernism,” I said to Dr. Jacks on one occasion, ”as a vindication of the Unitarian att.i.tude.”
He smiled and made answer, ”Better not say so. Let them follow their own line.”
No man was ever less of a proselytiser. In his remarkable book _From Authority to Freedom_, in which he tells the story of Charles Hargrove's religious pilgrimage, he seems to be standing aside from all human intervention, watching with patient eyes the action of the Spirit of G.o.d on the hearts and consciences of men. And in that little masterpiece of deep thought and beautiful writing, _The Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion_, from which I have made most of the quotations in this chapter, one is conscious throughout of a strong aversion from the field of dogma and controversy, of deliberate determination of the writer to keep himself in the pure region of the spirit.
Christianity, he tells us there, has seen many corruptions, but the most serious of all is not to be found in any list of doctrines that have gone wrong:
We find it rather in a change of atmosphere, in a loss of brightness and radiant energy, in a tendency to revert in spirit, if not in terminology, to much colder conceptions of G.o.d, of man, and of the universe.
”As man in his innermost nature is a far higher being than he seems, so the world in its innermost nature is a far n.o.bler fabric than it seems.”
To discover this man must live in his spirit.
”G.o.d,” said Jesus, ”is Spirit,” and it is a definition of G.o.d which goes behind and beneath all the other names that are applied to Him.
The spirit is love; it is peace; it is joy; and perhaps joy most of all. It is a joyous energy, having a centre in the soul of man.
It is not a foreign principle which has to be introduced into a man from without; it belongs to the substance and structure of his nature; it needs only to be liberated there; and when once that is done it takes possession of all the forces of his being, repressing nothing, but transfiguring everything, till all his motives and desires are akindle and aglow with the fires and energy of that central flame, with its love, its peace, its joy.
A man who sees so deeply into the truth of things, and lives so habitually at the centre of existence, is not likely to display the characteristics of the propagandist. But the work of Dr. Jacks at Manchester College may yet give not only this country but the world--for his students come from many nations--a little band of radiant missionaries whose message will repel none and attract many.
BISHOP HENSLEY HENSON
DURHAM, Bishop of, since 1920; Rt. Rev. Herbert Hensley Henson; b.
London 8th Nov., 1863, 4th s. of Late Thomas Henson, Broadstairs Kent, and Martha Fear; m. 1902 Isabella Caroline, o.d. of J.W.
Dennistoun of Dennistoun, N.B. Educ.: Privately and at Oxford.