Part 8 (2/2)
All conscious presence of the Universe!
Nature's vast ever-acting Energy!”
WORDSWORTH:
”a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, And rolls through all things.”
CARLYLE:
”Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of G.o.d; that through every star, through every gra.s.s-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present G.o.d still beams. But Nature, which is the Time-vesture of G.o.d, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.”
Moreover, this idea of G.o.d as the Creative Power conceived in spiritual terms need not lose any of the intimate meanings which have inhered in more personal thoughts of him and which are expressed in the Bible's names for him: Father, Mother, Bridegroom, Husband, Friend. There is indeed this danger in the approach which we have been describing, that we may conceive G.o.d as so dispersed everywhere that we cannot find him anywhere and that at last, so diffused, he will lose the practical value on account of which we want him. For we do desire a G.o.d who is like ourselves--enough like ourselves so that he can understand us and care for us and enter into our human problems. We do want a human side to G.o.d. A man who had seen in Henry Drummond the most beautiful exhibition of G.o.d's Spirit that he had ever experienced said that after Henry Drummond died he always prayed up to G.o.d by way of Drummond. We make our most vital approaches to G.o.d in that way and we always have, from the time we prayed to G.o.d through our fathers and mothers until now, when we find G.o.d in Christ. We want in G.o.d a personality that can answer ours, and we can have it without belittling in the least his greatness.
I know a man who says that one of the turning points of his spiritual experience came on a day when for the first time it dawned on him that he never had seen his mother. Now, his mother was the major molding influence in his life. He could have said about her what Longfellow said in a letter to his mother, written when he was twenty-one. ”For me,” wrote Longfellow, ”a line from my mother is more efficacious than all the homilies preached in Lent; and I find more incitement to virtue in merely looking at your handwriting than in a whole volume of ethics and moral discourses.” So this man would have felt about the pervasive influence of his mother. Then it dawned on him one day that he never had seen her. To be sure, he had seen the bodily instrument by which she had been able somehow to express herself through look and word and gesture, but his mother herself, her thoughts, her consciousness, her love, her spirit, he never had seen and he never would see. She was the realest force in his life, but she was invisible. When they talked together they signalled to each other out of the unseen where they dwelt. They both were as invisible as G.o.d. Moreover, while his mother was only a human, personal spirit, there was a kind of omnipresence in her so far as he was concerned, and he loved her and she loved him everywhere, though he never had seen her and never could. If spiritual life even in its human form can take on such meanings, we need not think of G.o.d as an expanded individual in order to love him, be loved by him, and company with him as an unseen friend. Let a man once begin with G.o.d as the universal spiritual Presence and then go on to see the divine quality of that Presence revealed in Christ, and there is no limit to the deepening and heightening of his estimation of G.o.d's character, except the limits of his own moral imagination.
IV
With many minds the difficulty of achieving an idea of G.o.d adequate for our new universe will not be met by any such intellectual s.h.i.+ft of emphasis as we have suggested. Not anthropomorphic theology so much as ecclesiasticism is the major burden on their thinking about deity. Two conceptions of the Church are in conflict to-day in modern Protestantism, and one of the most crucial problems of America's religious life in this next generation is the decision as to which of these two ideas of the Church shall triumph. We may call one the exclusive and the other the inclusive conception of the Church. The exclusive conception of the Church lies along lines like these: that we are the true Church; that we have the true doctrines and the true practices as no other Church possesses them; that we are const.i.tuted as a Church just because we have these uniquely true opinions and practices; that all we in the Church agree about these opinions and that when we joined the Church we gave allegiance to them; that n.o.body has any business to belong to our Church unless he agrees with us; that if there are people outside the Church who disagree, they ought to be kept outside and if there are people in the Church who come to disagree, they ought to be put outside. That is the exclusive idea of the Church, and there are many who need no further description of it for they were brought up in it and all their youthful religious life was surrounded by its rigid sectarianism.
Over against this conception is the inclusive idea of the Church, which runs along lines like these: that the Christian Church ought to be the organizing center for all the Christian life of a community; that a Church is not based upon theological uniformity but upon devotion to the Lord Jesus, to the life with G.o.d and man for which he stood, and to the work which he gave us to do; that wherever there are people who have that spiritual devotion, who possess that love, who want more of it, who desire to work and wors.h.i.+p with those of kindred Christian aspirations, they belong inside the family of the Christian Church.
The inclusive idea of the Church looks out upon our American communities and sees there, with all their sin, spiritual life unexpressed and unorganized, good-will and aspiration and moral power unharnessed and going to waste, and it longs to cry so that the whole community can hear it. Come, all men of Christian good-will, let us work together for the Lord of all good life! That is the inclusive idea of the Church. It desires to be the point of incandescence where, regardless of denominationalism or theology, the Christian life of the community bursts into flame.
As between these two conceptions there hardly can be any question that the first idea so far has prevailed. Our endlessly split and s.h.i.+vered Protestantism bears sufficient witness to the influence of the exclusive idea of the Church. The disastrous consequences of this in many realms are evident, and one result lies directly in our argument's path. An exclusive Church narrows the idea of G.o.d. Almost inevitably G.o.d comes to be conceived as the head of the exclusive Church, the origin of its uniquely true doctrine, the director of its uniquely correct practices, so that the activities of G.o.d outside the Church grow dim, and more and more he is conceived as operating through his favourite organization as nowhere else in all the universe. In particular the idea grows easily in the soil of an exclusive Church that G.o.d is not operative except in people who recognize him and that the world outside such conscious recognition is largely empty of his activity and barren of his grace. G.o.d tends, in such thinking, to become cooped up in the Church, among the people who consciously have acknowledged him. What wonder that mult.i.tudes of our youth, waking up to the facts about our vast and growing universe, conclude that it is too big to be managed by the tribal G.o.d of a Protestant sect!
The achievement of a worthy idea of G.o.d involves, therefore, the ability to discover G.o.d in all life, outside the Church as well as within, and in people who do not believe in him nor recognize him as well as in those who do. Let us consider for a moment the principle which is here involved. Many forces and persons serve us when we do not recognize them and do not know the truth about them. This experience of being ministered to by persons whom we do not know goes back even to the maternal care that nourished us before we were born.
No mother waits to be recognized before she serves her child. We are tempted to think of persons as ministering to us only when the service is consciously received and acknowledged but, as a matter of fact, service continually comes to us from sources we are unaware of and do not think about.
”Unnumbered comforts to my soul Thy tender care bestowed, Before my infant heart conceived From whom those comforts flowed.”
This principle applies to mankind's relations.h.i.+p with the physical universe. Through many generations mankind utterly misconceived it.
They thought the earth was flat, the heavens a little way above; yet, for all that, the sun warmed them and the rain refreshed them and the stars guided their wandering boats. The physical universe did not wait until men knew all the truth about it before being useful to men and at last, when the truth came and the glory of this vast and mobile cosmos dawned on mankind, men discovered the facts about forces which, though unknown and unacknowledged, long had served them.
This same principle applies also to man's relations.h.i.+p with social inst.i.tutions and social securities that have sustained us from our infancy. If a boy knows that there is a Const.i.tution of the United States, he does not think about it. Then maturity comes and he begins vividly to understand the sacrifices which our forefathers underwent in building up the inst.i.tutions that have nourished us. He recognizes forces and factors of which he had been unconscious but whose value, long unacknowledged, he now gratefully can estimate.
This same principle also applies to our unconscious indebtedness to people who have helped us but whom we have not known. This is a far finer world because of souls who have been here through whom G.o.d has s.h.i.+ned like the sun through eastern windows, but we can go on year after year absorbing unconsciously the influence of these spirits without ever knowing them. I lived for twelve years in a community to which in its early days a young minister had come, and where for forty years he stood as the central influence in the town's life. He brought it up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. As was said of Joseph in Potiphar's prison, ”Whatsoever they did there, he was the doer of it.” The height of his mind, the unselfishness of his spirit, the liberality of his thought, made all the people gladly acclaim him as the foremost citizen of the town. There is a quality in the town's life yet which never would have been there had it not been for him.
Sometimes yet his spirit must brood above that community which for forty years he cherished and must say to people whom he never knew, but who are being blessed by the benedictory influence of his life, what Jehovah said to Cyrus the Persian, ”I girded thee, though thou hast not known me.”
So, from mult.i.tudinous sources services flow in upon us that we do not recognize. It should be impossible then to think that G.o.d never touches men until men welcome him. Some people seem to suppose that G.o.d ministers to men, saves them, transforms them, raises them up and liberates them only when they confessedly receive him. That cannot be true of the G.o.d of the New Testament. He is too magnanimous for that.
Jesus says a man is unworthy of his disciples.h.i.+p when he serves only the friends who are responsive, that we must serve the hostile and ungrateful, too. Can it be that G.o.d is less good than Jesus said we ought to be? We in the churches have drawn our little lines too tight.
We have been tempted to divide mankind into two cla.s.ses, the white and the black: in the Church the white, the saved, who recognize G.o.d; outside, the black, the unsaved, the unG.o.dly who do not recognize him.
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