Part 27 (1/2)
Thou who in times past didst pity the prayers of our forerunners, and especially of that suffering servant of Thine whom Thou hast made our Leader unto Thee! be pleased to strengthen us now, O Lord, to bear our lighter cross and surrender ourselves for duty and for trial unto Thee. Show us something of the blessed peace with which they now look back on their days of strong crying and tears, and teach us that it is far better to die in Thy service than to live for our own. Rebuke within us all immoderate desires, all unquiet temper, all presumptuous expectations, all ign.o.ble self-indulgence, and feeling on us the embrace of Thy Fatherly hand, may we meekly and with courage go into the darkest ways of our pilgrimage, anxious not to change Thy perfect will, but only to do and bear it worthily. May we spend all our days in Thy presence, and meet our death in the strength of Thy grace, and pa.s.s thence into the nearer light of Thy knowledge and love. Amen._--John Hunter.
COMMENT FOR THE WEEK
I
So far in our studies we have been dealing with the individual believer in his search for a reasonable faith. But we must face at last what from the beginning has been true, that there is no such thing as an individual believer. _All faiths are social._ However little we may be aware of each other's influence, however intangible the social forces which shape the convictions by which we live, no man builds or keeps his faiths alone. We may pride ourselves on our independent thought, but the fact remains as Prof. William James has stated it: ”Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.”
The realm of religious conviction is not the only place where we hold with a strong sense of personal possession what has been given us by others, and often forget to acknowledge our indebtedness. We believe in democracy and popular education, not because by some gift of individual genius we are wiser than our unbelieving sires, but because, in the advance of the race, that faith has been wrought out by many minds, and, with minute addition of our own thought, we share the general conviction. As a man considers how rich and varied are the faiths he holds, how few of them he ever has thought through or ever can, and how helpless he would be, if he were set from the beginning to create any one of them, he gains new insight into Paul's words, ”What hast thou that thou didst not receive? but if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?” (I Cor.
4:7).
Indeed, this same truth holds in every relations.h.i.+p. Nothing is more impossible than a ”self-made man.” In no realm can that common phrase be intelligently applied to anyone. If in business one has risen from poverty to wealth, he has used railroads that he did not invent and telephones that he does not even understand; he has built his business on a credit system for which he did not labor and whose moral basis has been laid in the ethical struggles of unnumbered generations. For the clothes he wears, the food he eats, the education he receives, he is debtor to a social life that taps the ends of the earth and that has cost blood not his and money which he never can repay. If granting this, a man still say, ”My power and the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17), he may well consider whence his power has come. His distant ancestors stalked through primeval forests, their brows sloped back, their hairy hides barren of clothes, and in their hands stone hatchets, by the aid of which they sought their food. What has this Twentieth Century boaster done to change the habits of the Stone Age to the civilization on which his wealth is based or to elevate man's intellect to the grasp and foresight of the modern business world? All the power by which he wins his way is clearly a social gift, and any contribution which he may add is infinitesimal compared with his receipts.
By this truth all declarations of individual independence need to be chastened and controlled and all boasting cancelled utterly. Normal minds have their times of self-a.s.sertion in religion, when they grow impatient of believing anything simply because they have been told. As a college Junior put it: ”I must clear the universe of G.o.d, and then start in at the beginning to see what I can find.” But to a.s.sert a reasonable independence ought not to mean that one cut himself off from the support of history, the acc.u.mulated experience of the race, the insight of the seers, and in una.s.sisted isolation walk, like Kipling's cat, ”by his wild lone.” No man can do that anywhere and still succeed. Imagine a man, in politics, dubious of his old affiliations and disturbed by the conflicting opinions of his day. If, so perplexed, he should throw over all that ever had been thought or done in civic life, and in an unaided individual adventure attempt out of his own mind to const.i.tute a state, in what utter confusion would he land! No mind can begin work as though it were the first mind that ever acted, or were the only mind in action now. All effective thinking is social; contributions from innumerable heads pour in to make a wise man's knowledge. And to suppose that any man can climb the steep ascent of heaven all alone and lay his hands comprehensively on the Eternal is preposterous. No one ever apprehended a science so, much less G.o.d! Even Jesus fed his soul on the prophets of his race.
II
Indeed, Jesus' att.i.tude toward the fellows.h.i.+p of faith is most revealing, seen against the background of his nation's history. In the beginning, there was in Israel no such thing as individual religion.
In the earliest strata of the Bible's revelation, we find no indication of a faith that brought G.o.d and each of his people into intimate relations.h.i.+ps. Jehovah was the G.o.d of the nation as a whole and not of the people one by one. When he spoke, he spoke to the community through a leader; ”Speak thou with us and we will hear,” the people cried to Moses, ”but let not G.o.d speak with us lest we die”
(Exodus 20:19). It was at the time of the Exile, when the nation fell in ruins, and the hearts of faithful Jews were thrown back one by one on G.o.d that individual trust, peace, joy, and confidence found utterance. It was Jeremiah (Chap. 31) and Ezekiel (Chap. 18) who saw men individually responsible to G.o.d, and who opened the way for loyal Jews to be his people even when the nation was no more. And what they began Jesus completed. He lifted up the individual and made each man the object of the Father's care. ”It is not the will of your Father ... that _one_ of these little ones should perish” (Matt 18:14). ”What man of you, having a hundred sheep, and having lost _one_ of them ...”
(Luke 15:4). ”The very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt.
10:30). As for religion's inner meaning, it became in Jesus' Gospel not a national ritual but a private faith: ”But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father who is in secret” (Matt. 6:6).
While Jesus, however, so emphasized the inward, individual aspects of religion, he did not leave it there, as though persons could ever be like jugs in the rain, separate receptacles that share neither their emptiness nor their abundance. He bound his disciples into a fellows.h.i.+p. He joined their channels until, like interflowing streams, one contributed to all and the spirit of all was expressed in each. He braided them into friends.h.i.+p with himself and with each other, so close that the community did what no isolated believer ever could have done--it survived the shock of the crucifixion, the agony of sustained persecution, the frailties of its members, and the discouragements of its campaign. On that _group_ the Master counted for his work: ”The gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). And when the New Testament Church emerged, the fellows.h.i.+p which Christ himself had breathed into it was clear and strong. Men who became Christians, in the New Testament, came into a new relations.h.i.+p with G.o.d indeed, but into a new human fraternity as well. They were ”builded together for a habitation of G.o.d through the Spirit” (Eph. 2:22), and even when death came that fellows.h.i.+p was not destroyed. They were still ”the whole family in heaven and on earth” (Eph. 3:15). John Wesley was right: ”The Bible knows nothing of a solitary religion.” In the Old Testament religion was predominantly national; in the New Testament, individuals rejoicing in the ”Beloved Community” could not describe their life without the reiteration of ”one another.” They were to ”pray one for another” and ”confess sins one to another” (James 5:16); they were to ”love one another” (I Pet 1:22), ”exhort one another”
(Heb. 3:13), ”comfort one another” (I Thess. 4:18); they were to ”bear one another's burdens” (Gal. 6:2) and in communal wors.h.i.+p ”admonish one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Col. 3:16).
So when they thought of their faith, they never held it in solitary confidence; they were ”strong to apprehend _with all the saints_ what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which pa.s.seth knowledge” (Eph. 3:18).
III
When a modern believer endeavors to interpret this spirit in the New Testament in terms of his own wants, he sees at once that he needs fellows.h.i.+p for the _enriching_ of his faith. Cooperation for achievement is a modern commonplace, but when Paul prayed, as we have quoted him, that the Ephesians might be ”strong to _apprehend_ with all the saints,” he was stating the more uncommon proposition that men must cooperate for knowledge. He saw the divine love in its length, breadth, depth, and height on one side, and on the other a solitary man endeavoring to understand it. Impossible! said Paul; the divine love in its fulness cannot be known in solitude, it must be apprehended in fellows.h.i.+p.
At first nothing seems more strictly individual than knowledge. To know is an intimate, personal affair; it cannot be carried on by proxy. But even casual thought at once makes clear that in solitude we cannot know even the physical universe. No man can go apart and through the narrow aperture of his own mind see the full round of truth. For astronomers study the stars, geologists the rocks, chemists know their special field and physicists know theirs; each scientist understands in part, and if one is to know the breadth and length and height and depth of the physical world he must be strong to apprehend with all the scientists.
In religion this necessity of cooperation in knowing G.o.d may not at first seem evident. In the secret session behind closed doors, as Jesus said, one finds his clearest thought of G.o.d, and in the individual heart the divine illumination comes. So some insist; and the answer does not deny, but surpa.s.ses the truth in the insistence.
_Is yours the only heart where G.o.d is to be found? Does the sea of his grace exhaust itself in what it can reveal in your bay?_ Rather, in how many different ways men come to G.o.d, how various their experiences of him, and how much each needs the rest for breadth and catholicity of view!
One man comes to G.o.d by way of intellectual perplexity and he knows chiefly faith's illumination of life's puzzling problems; another comes through the experience of sin and he responds to such a phrase as ”G.o.d our Saviour” (I Tim. 1:1); another comes to G.o.d through trouble and has found in faith ”eternal comfort and good hope through grace” (II Thess. 2:16); and another by way of a happy life has found in G.o.d the object of devoted grat.i.tude. One, a mystic, finds G.o.d in solitary prayer; another, a worker, knows him chiefly as the Divine Ally. Some are very young and have a child's religion; some are at the summit of their years and have a strong man's achieving faith; and some are old and are familiar with the face of death and the thought of the eternal. How multiform is man's experience of G.o.d! Some compositions cannot be interpreted by a solo. Let the first violinist play with what skill he can, he alone is not adequate to the endeavor.
There must be an orchestra; the oboes and viols, the drums and trumpets, the violins and cellos must all be there. So faith in G.o.d is too rich and manifold to be interpreted by individuals alone; a fellows.h.i.+p is necessary. Even Paul, in one of his most gloriously mixed-up and yet revealing sentences, prays for fellows.h.i.+p that his faith may be enriched: ”I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established; that is, that I with you may be comforted in you, each of us by the other's faith, both yours and mine” (Rom. 1:11, 12).
Poverty of faith, therefore, is not due only to individual lapses of character and perplexities of mind; _it is due to neglect of Christian fellows.h.i.+p_. One who with difficulty has clung to his slender experience of G.o.d, goes up to the church on Sunday. Even though it be a humble place of prayer, if the wors.h.i.+p is genuine, the hymns, the prayers, the Scriptures gather up the testimony of centuries to the reality of G.o.d. Here David speaks again and Isaiah answers; here Paul reaffirms his faith and John is confident that G.o.d is love. Here the saints before Christ cry, ”Jehovah is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer” (Psalm 18:2), and the sixteenth century answers, ”A mighty fortress is our G.o.d”; and the nineteenth century replies, ”How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord!” We go up to the church finding it hard to sing, ”_My_ Jesus, _I_ love thee, _I_ know thou art _mine_”; we go down with a _Te Deum_ in our hearts:
”The glorious company of the apostles praise thee; The goodly fellows.h.i.+p of the prophets praise thee; The n.o.ble army of martyrs praise thee; The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge thee.”
In the rich and varied faiths of the Church we find a far more fruitful relations.h.i.+p with G.o.d than by ourselves we ever could have gained. Without such an enriching experience men can only with difficulty keep faith alive. Twigs that snap out of the camp-fire lose their flame and fall, charred sticks; but put them back and they will burn again, for fire springs from fellows.h.i.+p. Amiel, after an evening of solitude with a favorite book on philosophy, wrote what is many a Christian's prayer: ”Still I miss something--common wors.h.i.+p, a positive religion, shared with other people. Ah! when will the church to which I belong in heart rise into being? I cannot, like Scherer, content myself with being in the right all alone. I must have a less solitary Christianity.”
IV
Men need fellows.h.i.+p, not only for the enrichment of their faith, but for its _stability_. No man can successfully believe anything all alone. Let an opinion in any realm be denied, despised, neglected by common consent of men, and not easily do we hold an unshaken conviction of its truth. But let it be agreed with, supported and endorsed by many, especially by men of insight, and with each additional testimony to its truth our faith grows confident. A fundamental experience of man is that his faiths are socially confirmed.