Part 12 (1/2)

The attractiveness of this explanation of the universe as a huge physical machine is easily understood. It presents a simple picture, readily grasped. It packs the whole explanation of the world into a neat parcel, portable by any mind. In the days of monarchy the government of the universe was pictured in terms of an absolute sovereign; in feudal times the divine economy was pictured as a gigantic feudalism; we always use a dominant factor in the life of man to help us picture the eternal. So in the age whose builder and maker is machinery we easily portray the universe as a huge machine. The process is simple and natural, but to suppose that it is adequate is preposterous. Lord Kelvin, the chemist, knew thoroughly the mechanistic idea of the world. He felt the fascination of it, for he said at Johns Hopkins University, ”I never satisfy myself until I make a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model I can understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way through, I cannot understand.” But Lord Kelvin knew better than to suppose that this figure comprehended all of reality. ”The atheistic idea,” said he, ”is so nonsensical, that I do not know how to put it into words.”

The rejection of the no-G.o.d hypothesis does not necessarily imply that a man becomes fully Christian in his thought of deity. There are way-stations between no-G.o.d and Jesus' Father. _But it does mean that to him reality must be fundamentally spiritual, not physical._ What other hypothesis possibly can fit the facts? For consider the view of a growing universe which we see from the outlook that modern science furnishes. Out of a primeval chaos where physical forces snarled at each other in unrelieved antagonism, where no man had yet arisen to love truth and serve righteousness, something has brought us to a time, when for all our evil, there are mothers and music and the laughter of children at play, men who love honor and for service' sake lay down their lives, and homes in every obscure street where fort.i.tude and sacrifice are splendidly exhibited. Out of a chaos, where a contemporary observer, could there have been one, would have seen no slightest promise of spirit, something has brought us to the Ten Commandments, and the Sermon on the Mount, to great character and growing achievements in social righteousness, to lofty thoughts of the Divine and hopes of life eternal. _Something has been at work here besides matter. No explanation of all this will do, without G.o.d._

V

Another source of confirmation for the man who, valuing Christian experience, seeks a.s.surance that it is intellectually justifiable, is to be found in the effect of Christian faith on life itself. The nautical tables can be proved by an astronomer in his observatory; but if they are given to a sailor and he beats about the seas with them in safety, finding that they make adventurous voyages practicable, that also would be important witness to their truth. So the Christian ideas of life have not been kept by studious recluses to ponder over and weave philosophies about; they have been down in the market place, men have been practically trying them for generations, and _they make great living_.

The ultimate ground of practical a.s.surance about anything is that we have tried it and that it works. A man may have experience that other persons exist, may draw the inference that friendly relations with them are not impossible, but only when he launches out and verifies his thought in an adventure will he really be convinced of friends.h.i.+p's glory. In no other way has final a.s.surance about G.o.d come home to man. They who have lived as though G.o.d _were_ have been convinced that he _is_; they who have willed to do his will have known.

That religious faith does justify itself in life is a fact to which mankind's experience amply testifies. Men have come to G.o.d, not as chemists to bread curious to a.n.a.lyze it; they have come as hungry men, needing to eat if they would live. And they have found life glorified by faith in him. The difference between religion and irreligion here is plain. _How seldom one finds enthusiastic unbelievers!_ When all that is fine spirited and resolute in agnostic literature is duly weighed and credited, the pessimistic undertone is always heard.

Leslie Stephen thus summarizes life--”There is a deep sadness in the world. Turn and twist the thought as you may there is no escape.

Optimism would be soothing if it were possible; in fact, it is impossible, and therefore a constant mockery.” No gospel burns in the unbeliever's mind, urgent for utterance; he has no inspiring outlooks to offer, no glad tidings to declare. The more intelligent he is the more plainly he sees this. With Clifford he laments that ”the spring sun s.h.i.+nes out of an empty heaven to light up a soulless earth” and feels ”with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead”; with Romanes he frankly states, ”So far as the ruination of individual happiness is concerned, no one can have a more lively conception than myself of the possibly disastrous tendency of my work.” An unbeliever whose admirable life raised the question as to the philosophy by which he guided it, gave this summary of his creed, ”I am making the best of a bad mess.” Unbelievers do not spontaneously utter in song the glory of a creed like this, and when they do write poetry, it is of a sort that music will not fit--

”The world rolls round forever like a mill, It grinds out death and life and good and ill, It has no purpose, heart, or mind or will.”

When from poetry one turns to philosophy, he can see good reasons why hymnals and unbelief should be uncongenial. There is little to make life worth while in a creed which holds as Haeckel does that morality in man, like the tail of a monkey or the sh.e.l.l of a tortoise, is purely a physiological effect, and that man himself is ”an affair of chance; the froth and fume at the wave-top of a sterile ocean of matter.” Shall the practical unserviceableness of such an idea for the purpose of life, awaken no suspicion as to its truth?

Upon the other hand, suppose that by some strange chance the principles of Jesus should over night take possession of mankind. Even as it is, when one starts his thought with the Stone Age, the progress of mankind has obviously been immense. From universal cannibalism after a battle, to ma.s.sacre without cannibalism marked one great advance; from ma.s.sacre of all prisoners taken in war to enslavement of them marked another; and when slavery ceased being a philanthropic improvement, as it was at first, and became a sin and shame, humanity took another long step forward. With all our present barbarity, a far look backwards shows a clear ascent. As for the influence of Jesus, Lecky, the historian, tells us that ”The simple record of three short years of Christ's active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.” What if this process were brought to its fulfilment between sunset and dawn, and the new day came with every one sure of G.o.d's fatherhood and life eternal, of the law of love and the supremacy of character and with everyone living as though these were true? Whatever intellectual perplexities of belief a man may have, he knows that such a world would be divinely great. No war, no evil l.u.s.t, no covetous selfishness, no drunkenness! Mankind, relieved of ancient burdens which have ruined character and crushed endeavor, confident of faiths that give life infinite horizons and deathless hopes, in cooperative international fraternity would be making the earth a decent home for G.o.d to rear his children in. One finds it hard to believe that ideas which, incarnate in life, would so redeem the world are false.

As to the effect of the Christian affirmations on individual character, we do not need to picture an imagined future. A Character has been here who has lived them out. A jury of philosophers might a.n.a.lyze the wood-work and the metals of an organ, and guess from form and material what it is, but we still should need for our a.s.surance a musician. When he sweeps the keys in harmony we _know_ that it is an organ. So when the philosophers have debated the pros and cons of argument concerning faith, Jesus _plays_ the Gospel. His life is the Christian affirmations done into character. When religious faith, at its best, is incarnate in a Man, this is the consequence. And mult.i.tudes of folk, living out the implications of the faith, have found the likeness of the Master growing in them. Weighty confirmation of the Gospel's _truth_ arrives when its meaning is translated into life; the world will not soon reject the New Testament in this edition--bound in a Man.

To one in perplexity about belief, this proper question therefore rises: What do we think about the Christlike character? Is it not life at its sublimest elevation? But to acknowledge that and yet to deny the central faiths by which such life is lived is to say that those ideas which, incarnate, make living great are false, and those ideas which leave life meager of motive and bereft of hope are true. No one lives on such a basis in any other realm. We always mistrust the validity of any idea which works poorly or not at all. And so far from being a practical makes.h.i.+ft, this ”negative pragmatism” is a true principle of knowledge. Says Professor Hocking, of Harvard, ”If a theory has no consequences, or bad ones; if it makes no difference to men, or else undesirable differences; if it lowers the capacity of men to meet the stress of existence, or diminishes the worth to them of what existence they have; such a theory is somehow false, and we have no peace until it is remedied.” The last word against irreligion is that it makes life unlivable; the last word for faith is that it makes life glorious.

VI

One who is facing intellectual difficulties in the way of faith may well consider that the very Christian life for whose possession he is seeking justification is itself an argument of the first importance.

This life grew up in the universe; it is one expression of the universe; and it is hard to think that it does not reveal a nature kindred to itself in the source from which it came.

Mankind has always experienced a relations.h.i.+p with the Unseen which has seemed like communion of soul with Soul. When a psychologist like Professor James, of Harvard, reduces to its most general terms this religious Fact which has been practically universal in the race, he puts it thus: ”Man becomes conscious that this higher part (his spiritual life) is coterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fas.h.i.+on get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.” No experience of man is more common in occurrence, more tremendous in result than this. From the mystics whose vivid sense of G.o.d canceled their consciousness that anything else was real, to plain folk who in the strength of the divine alliance have lived ordinary lives with extraordinary spirit, mankind as a whole has known that the best in man is in contact with a MORE.

One does not need to be of a mystical temperament, given to raptures, to know what this means. Let him consider his own experience of love and duty, how he is bound by them to his ideals and woven into a community of personal life not only with his friends but with all humanity, until this spiritual life of his becomes the most august and commanding power he knows. When in our bodies we so discern a physical nature, whose laws and necessities we did not create, and whose power binds us into a community of need and labor with our fellows, our conclusion is confident. This experience is the basis of our a.s.surance that a _physical universe is really here_. When, likewise in our inner selves we find a spiritual life, which man did not create, in obedience to which alone is safety, and peace, and power, what shall we conclude? That there is a _spiritual universe_ as plainly evidenced in man's soul as the physical universe is in the body! And when we note the attributes of this Spiritual Order, how it demands righteousness, rebukes sin, welcomes obedience and holds out ideals of endless possibility, it is plain that we are talking about something close of kin to G.o.d. As in summer we beat out through some familiar bay, naming the headlands as we sail, until if we go far enough, we cannot prevent our eyes from looking out across the unbounded sea, so if a man moves out through his own familiar spiritual life far enough, he comes to the Spiritual Order which is G.o.d. Man has not drifted into his religion by accident or fallen on it merely as superst.i.tion; he has moved out from his inner life to affirm a Spiritual Order as inevitably as he has moved out from his bodily experiences to affirm a physical universe.

When from this general experience we turn to the specific experiences of religion, which prayer and wors.h.i.+p represent, the testimony of the race is confident. Men have not all these ages been lifting up their souls to an unreality from which no response has come. The artesian well of transforming influence in human souls has not flowed from Nowhere. Some, indeed, hearing confidence in G.o.d founded on the individual experiences of man, derisively cry ”Nonsense!” But if one were to prove that the Sistine Madonna is beautiful, he would have to offer his experience in evidence. ”I went to Dresden,” he might say, ”up into the room where the Madonna hangs ... and it _is_ beautiful. I saw it.” Met with derision by a doubter, as though his experience were no proof at all, how shall he proceed? ”I am not the only one,” he might continue, ”who has perceived its beauty. All these centuries the folk best qualified to judge have gone up into that room and have come down again, sure that Raphael's work is beautiful.” Is anyone in a position to deride that? So through all ages men and women, from lowest savages to the race's spiritual kings and queens, have gone up to the Divine, and, at their best, from experiences of prayer, wors.h.i.+p, forgiven sins, transfigured lives, have come down sure that Reality is there. _One may not call nonsense the most universal and influential experience of the human race!_

The force of this fact is more clearly seen when one considers that man has grown up in this universe, gradually developing his powers and functions as responses to his environment. If he has eyes, so the biologists a.s.sure us, it is because the light waves played upon the skin and eyes came out in answer; if he has ears it is because the air waves were there first and ears came out to hear. Man never yet, according to the evolutionist, has developed any power save as a reality called it into being. There would be no fins if there were no water, no wings if there were no air, no legs if there were no land.

Always the developing organism has been trying to ”catch up with its environment.” Yet some would tell us that man's n.o.blest power of all has developed in a vacuum. They would say that his capacity to deal with a Spiritual World, to believe in G.o.d, and in prayer to experience fellows.h.i.+p with him, has all grown up with no Reality to call it into being. If so, it stands alone in man's experience, the only function of his life that grew without an originating Fact to call it forth. It does not seem reasonable to think that. The evidence of man's experience is overwhelmingly in favor of a Reality to which his spirit has been trying to answer. Said Max Muller, ”To the philosopher the existence of G.o.d may seem to rest on a syllogism; in the eyes of the historian it rests on the whole evolution of human thought.”

CHAPTER VI

Faith's Greatest Obstacle

DAILY READINGS

The speculative doubts leave many minds untouched, but one universal human experience sooner or later faces every serious life with questions about G.o.d's goodness. We all meet trouble, in ourselves or others, and oftentimes the wonder why in G.o.d's world such calamities should fall, such wretchedness should continually exist, plunges faith into perplexity. Few folk of mature years can fail to understand Edwin Booth when he wrote to a friend, ”Life is a great big spelling book, and on every page we turn the words grow harder to understand the meaning of.” Now, the basis of any intelligent explanation of faith's problem must rest in a _right practical att.i.tude toward trouble_.

To the consideration of that we turn in the daily readings.