A PROMINENT PART has been played in Christian thought by the notion of “faith,” and in Indian religious thought by the kindred notion of bhakti. Both are words for a deep and positive and essentially moral element in religious experience. Yet in Christianity so much emphasis has been laid upon questions of doctrine that in the popular mind “the faith” is but another name for a creed, and we joke about the schoolboy who defined faith as” believing what you know ain’t true.” Even this, however, indicates that faith is no ordinary belief. People cannot, by faith, believe things they know are not true; but they can and do, by faith, believe things they would not ordinarily regard as true. This applies both to the supernatural and to natural and social phenomena, as when one has faith in the integrity of a friend in spite of strong circumstantial evidence to the contrary. In such cases there is an element of emotion, or the will to believe, determining the conviction, and it is this feature that suggests that faith is a kind of belief that does not rest on good evidence. It does not follow, however, that all cases of faith are cases of insecure belief. We speak of faith in the skill of a great surgeon or in the security of United States government bonds. Obviously it is not the element of uncertainty that distinguishes faith from other forms of belief.
Further, as was pointed out in an earlier chapter, faith involves much more than belief. To have much faith or true faith is to be faithful; and faithfulness is an attitude in which [ p. 302 ] a person holds fast to pledges and implicit understandings in the letter and the spirit; he trusts and proves worthy of trust. The element of belief in the total attitude of faith may be relatively small, as in the faithfulness of a sentry in a post of danger, which is principally a matter of will. The essential thing in faith would appear to be a value judgment — a judgment that something is good — and faithfulness consists in holding fast to that value judgment and its implications. Where those implications chiefly concern conduct, as in the cases of the sentry and the lover, the element of will comes into prominence and the total mental attitude is usually called “faithfulness.” Where the implications under consideration are chiefly cognitive the element of belief comes into prominence and the resultant attitude is usually called “faith,” or even simply “belief.”
Belief itself is merely the attitude of mental rest in the acceptance of a judgment. Its antithesis is doubt, which is the tentative holding of a proposition in mind without accepting it as a part of that body of meanings whereby we feel we grasp or understand our world. Accepted or believed propositions become bases for deliberate action. Doubted propositions do not, except tentatively, with hesitation. Judgments wherein we simply formulate in significant terms the result of our own experience are always accepted without hesitation unless they are thought to conflict with some long accepted or equally well grounded judgment. Then we may doubt the reality of what has appeared in experience or the accuracy of our judgment concerning it. Judgments derived by inference, and propositions obtained by suggestion and other forms of communication or formulated tentatively in imagination, tend to be accepted or doubted according to their observed agreement with what is already believed.
Thus the general body of beliefs is built up and continuously sifted by checking it with new judgments. Among these [ p. 303 ] beliefs are some that seem to be so well grounded as analytical formulations of experience or as inferences from such judgments that we call them knowledge. Others are held as more or less well substantiated beliefs, shading off into mere tentative opinions. The line between knowledge and the beliefs we feel we can scarcely claim as knowledge is not hard and fast, for the simple reason that, except in regard to abstractions and the immediate particular experiences of the moment, knowledge never amounts to certainty.
The distinction between faith and other forms of belief arises out of a distinction among the data of our experience. Our objective data may be classified as either sensory-motor or valuational. Judgments concerning merely the former are never described as acts of faith, however certain or uncertain, immediate or derived. Yet, even where mere inanimate things are concerned, if the acceptance or rejection of a judgment turns upon a value judgment it is recognized as an act of faith. Any judgment that puts faith in our fellow men is based on judgments concerning the values involved, as values to which they may be relied upon to respond. Even such a marginal case as a boy’s act of foolhardy faith in skating on thin ice is a judgment concerning the probable stability of the ice, affected by wishful thinking determined by his high evaluation of the pleasure of skating. In such an act there is faith, but no genuine inference from the value judgment. In a careful man’s faith in a good bank there is sound inference, based first on his knowledge of the values involved in a bank’s stability, and second on his knowledge of how people in general and the bank’s officers in particular respond to those values. He says he knows that bank is sound. And he may be quite justified in his claim, for values are sufficiently objective, and human responses to them sufficiently regular, to enable us to include many of our acts of faith not only in the realm of belief, but in that of knowledge — recognizing the [ p. 304 ] limitation of certainty attached to all knowledge, as stated above.
Now, if the analysis of the foregoing chapters is sound, our belief in God [1] is the kind of belief that is rightly called faith; but that does not mean that it is not knowledge. If the argument of the last two chapters should stand the test of critical examination we should be entitled to call it knowledge, even though, like so many other well grounded convictions, it could never amount to certainty. But however well established the belief may become it will still be something known by faith, for it rests ultimately upon judgments of value. The initially given datum — the disinterested will to the good — may be known with certainty as a fact of observation. But like all such facts it is only a momentary particular. The rest is interpretation. We judge it to be an element in a personality greater than our own, one to which our own is organic, by reason of the three characteristics we have seen stamping it as suprahuman and supraindividual — its conflict of evaluations with the ego, the objective values it discloses, and the authoritative sense of obligation attaching to it. The recognition of each and all of these three features involves value judgments; and upon these rests faith in God, a faith which we may call knowledge, belief or opinion according to the degree- of certainty we feel to be attached to it.
It is, of course, true that there are other reasons for the belief than these; and some of those other reasons, such as the cosmological argument, do not involve value judgments. If any person’s belief in God rested entirely on such nonvaluational grounds it would be a mere intellectual belief, not faith, and would contain no moral element. It may be [ p. 305 ] doubted whether that is the case with any person’s belief in God; but it is certain that the value judgments involved are often slight, unimportant and irrelevant; e.g., a belief accepted merely on the authority or prestige of officials or elders, which is primarily a faith in the intelligence and integrity of these persons rather than in God. The belief that arises or is confirmed chiefly through the individual’s own religious experience is, however, a genuine faith; and the moral judgments involved are, I think, always chiefly those brought out in the above analysis. Such judgments involve the exercise of serious moral reflection, discrimination, effort and choice. Thus the faith so developed is essentially a moral attainment.
The recognition of this fact must not, of course, be allowed to suggest that a moral stigma attaches to those who do not arrive at a similar faith. Many who have very earnestly sought to arrive at such a faith have found themselves faced with intellectual difficulties compelling them reluctantly to reject it. Others, in the light of a different experience, have felt that such a faith issues in disvalues which constitute a refutation of the value judgments on which it appears to rest, and so must be rejected in order that those very values may be saved. In cases of both types an entirely different set of conclusions may be based on essentially the same judgments of value. Such conclusions are also acts of faith, often of very high moral quality. Such considerations reveal the truth of Tennyson’s trenchant lines:
There lives more faith in honest doubt.
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Only a closer and more careful analysis of the whole range of experience involved can decide the issue here; and only harm is done by one side’s casting aspersions on the intelligence or moral integrity of the other. Both belief and doubt concerning [ p. 306 ] God can be acts of faith based on high, sound and earnest moral judgments. The differences and extravagances of opinion are due sometimes to failures of moral judgment, but also to purely extraneous and nonmoral circumstances.
In order properly to appreciate the significance given to faith in religious thought it is necessary to recognize clearly that, whether logical or not, to the thoughtful adherent of an ethical religion his faith appears as an expression of his moral life — and really is so. When asked for the reasons for his belief he will probably try to find arguments of a more objective character than these “reasons of the heart.” Yet the lines of Tennyson express a typical religious experience:
If e’er when faith had fallen asleep,
I heard a voice, ‘believe no more,’
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep,
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part.
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d, ‘ I have felt.’
What our analysis has revealed is that this answer of the heart is not mere “wishful thinking” and not a mere expression of emotion of no objective significance, but an expression and interpretation of a deeply rooted and sound moral experience — and thus of the kind of experience of most significance for an understanding of the place of personality in the world order.
Whatever the theory of the grounds of this belief in God may have been, the actual felt connection (however vague) between the moral consciousness and theistic belief has led to the general conviction that the holding of such beliefs is an [ p. 307 ] important part of the moral life. This is a transference, to the resultant belief, of the moral quality of the moral judgments which underlie the total attitude of which the belief is a part. That total attitude is faith, and many features of it, including the belief, may change without the loss of its essential moral quality. It is thus a mistake to pin the moral quality to the belief. It belongs to the active attitude of faith as a whole. In general this has been fully recognized by Christianity. In addition to the emphatic protests of St. James against the notion of a faith that consists of mere beliefs without works [2] there is the famous essay in the Epistle to the Hebrews in which faith is described as the ground (“substance” and “evidence”) of hope, belief, understanding of God’s work, and moral and mystical power.[3] Paul rejects intellectualism with the assertion that “with the heart man believeth unto righteousness.” [4] And Christian theologians have been careful to distinguish between mere historical and temporary beliefs, on the one hand, and “saving faith,” on the other, emphasizing the moral content of the latter even though often denying its moral foundations.
It is the felt connection between their personal moral integrity and their religious faith that accounts for the feeling of Christians that the doctrine of justification by faith is a moral doctrine. Unfortunately, Thomas Aquinas [5] taught that faith is primarily a matter of the speculative intellect and only secondarily of the practical, and he was followed in this by many Protestants. But on such an interpretation, as critics of this theology have so often pointed out, the doctrine of justification by faith is most immoral. It would mean that God’s forgiveness is conditioned upon the acceptance of certain historical [ p. 308 ] and metaphysical propositions which are quite independent of our moral attitudes. On the other hand, if we recognize that faith is an attitude of the personality, involving a lively moral experience and an earnest effort to work out its implications in thought and practice (whatever the resultant beliefs) , then justification by faith is the only truly moral doctrine. It puts both belief and works in their place as the outcome of faith, differing according to other circumstances. And it points to moral attention and aspiration as the only truly praiseworthy moral characteristics, for these are the essential features of faith.
The common human judgment of a person’s moral worth is assessed upon his overt acts; he is judged to be as good or bad as that which he does. And he is treated accordingly in our legal and social sanctions. Yet it does not require much reflection to show the injustice of this treatment of each man according to his works, for all men do not have the same opportunities. Circumstances of heredity and environment make it easy for some of us to be highly respectable citizens, and very difficult for others. So no judgment of any person’s moral worth based purely on externals can possibly be fair, and legalism must necessarily involve inequity. This fact has impressed itself upon sensitive souls in the great ethical religions. In India it issued in the doctrine of bhakti and in Christianity in that of justification by faith. Even long before Christ the Hebrews had realized the problem, as is manifested, for example, in the statement of the psalmist, “A humble and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” [6]
Judaism, however, never shook off legalism. The only way to keep the favor of God was by the “works of the law.” That this view was inadequate was the deepest insight of the apostle Paul. If a person’s moral ideals are not very lofty, and if the circumstances of his life are morally propitious, he can go [ p. 309 ] through life feeling that God should be very well satisfied with him; at most, he may persuade himself, a few special offerings, prayers and penances should be all that is necessary to make up for his slight deficiencies and secure full divine approval. But if a person’s ideal has been raised by measuring himself beside the moral stature of Jesus of Nazareth, or if unpropitious circumstances have involved him in serious moral lapses, he cannot, if he is in earnest, so easily persuade himself that his deeds must win the commendation of God. In these cases legalism can only suggest strong condemnation. Paul found himself subject to both conditions — convicted of his error in persecuting the Christians, and doubly convicted by comparison with the lofty ideal of Christ. The result was a deep conviction of sin. But yet his conversion experience convinced him he was not rejected by God. So legalism must be wrong. He had been accepted by God, “justified,” without the works of the law. Apparently it was some echo from the teaching of Jesus that supplied the answer. It was his faith that had made him spiritually whole. He was “justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” [7] Yet Paul could not altogether escape from the legalism of his early training. Before he could be entirely satisfied with the truth of his new insight he had to harmonize it with his former religious beliefs, which he did through a legally phrased theory of atonement. Further, he, and his successors still more, laid too much stress on the intellectual content of faith and not enough on its basic elements — the attentive consciousness of moral values, and aspiration and active endeavor toward their realization.
In this, Paul and the other disciples of Jesus seem to have missed the profounder insight of their master. We have the [ p. 310 ] teaching of Jesus only at second hand, and it is difficult to say how much of what is attributed to him was really his. But, unlike Socrates, Jesus had no Plato to improve upon his teaching in the recording of it. The writers of the Gospels were much lesser men than he, so we can confidently credit him with all the more profound and original elements in the sayings they attribute to him. Other parts may lack authenticity, but not these, even though they may not be quite in the form he gave them. There is not much doubt but that the general tenor of his teaching is fairly well preserved.
Now any thoughtful reader of the Gospels is sure to be impressed with the emphasis Jesus laid on faith, but full significance of that emphasis is apt to escape us unless we remember the essentially moral character he gave to faith (which generally escapes his biographers) and connect it more closely than they do with his teaching on sin. The first significant fact about his teaching on sin is that praise and blame are laid, not on the overt act, but on the inner motive or choice of values. It is not only murder that is wrong, but the harboring of a grudge; it is not only adultery, but the lustful look.[8] The second point of great significance is the value attached to aspiration. In the parable of the Pharisee and the publican [9] the Pharisee can boast an impeccable record of overt acts, but he is totally lacking in any aspiration, any consciousness that he might make his life count for any greater good. The publican is a sinner and knows it, but he repentantly aspires to be something better. Life has led him into difficulties too great for him and he feels he can do nothing but ask God’s mercy. Yet he, says Jesus, is justified rather than the other. Again in the parables of the lost coin, the lost sheep and the lost son[10] we see the same idea. Ninety-and-nine “just persons [ p. 311 ] who need no repentance” arouse no heavenly rejoicings. The reason, obviously, is that they are self-satisfied and have no right to be, since all have some cause for repentance. Their spiritual inertia and lack of aspiration, even though circumstances have been propitious for their moral development, brands them as personalities of no spiritual vigor, no active faith. But in the turning back of the prodigal son to renew the finer moral life of the home from which he had fled something different is manifest. Here, in spite of the unpropitious circumstances, there is spiritual activity, aspiration, faith. And though it be small and struggling in unfavorable circumstances, the angels rejoice over it.
These sayings of Jesus reveal the thought that it is spiritual inertia, the lack of attention to moral values, that is sin. Active attention to moral values generates a sublime discontent with the level of virtue that is easy to maintain, and an aspiration toward higher ideals. Life is necessarily active, and the moral life is no exception. Unless it is active in pursuit of the good, ever seeking new goals, it becomes dormant and dies. Self-satisfaction is the great enemy of moral progress, for it breeds stagnation. Even the humble cry of the soul that feels itself lost is better than that. It is at least a contribution to some further growth of spiritual life. And where there is life there is hope. Indeed, Jesus goes farther and declares that such spiritual activity “justifies” the individual before God. It is all that God expects of him. Circumstances may have made life too difficult for the achievement of greater perfections of character, but in the aspiration and moral effort that struggle against these disadvantages there is the essential spiritual fact that links his life to the divine. Such attention to moral values and pursuit of them is the essential fact of faith, and he who is thus attentive is “justified by faith apart from the works of the law.” Paul, here, was holding true to an insight derived from his master. [ p. 312 ] But that insight, in the mind of the greater teacher, shows no signs of legalism or of the overemphasis on mere religious belief.
In the light of our best modern knowledge of human motivation we must make the same moral judgment as Jesus attributes to God and the angels. We may praise overt acts to give social encouragement in the performance of them, but the judgment of the moral worth of a personality must be based on the inner attention to values and the response to them. It must recognize that these exist genuinely in unexpected places, even in the feeble aspirations and sometimes futile repentances of the moral outcast. And we must recognize that there is no moral worth in the smug self-satisfaction of self-centered people, however impeccable may be their habits. In brief, true moral worth is summed up in the inner attitude of faith, a life of the spirit oriented to what it finds of finest value, a life that may live in honest doubt as well as in unwavering belief. If we may use the terms of the theologians, it is this that is “saving faith and the “communion of the faithful” is not a bond of common belief, but a bond of common orientation toward the finest ideal each can see. In so far as that communion is Christian it is because it finds in Christ the concrete exemplification of that ideal.
If, with this understanding of the concept of faith in mind, we return to what has been said concerning the conditions of immortality, a still deeper significance is revealed, which is still in harmony with the fundamental Christian insight. In chapter 8 the conclusion was drawn that the possibility of the survival of a personality depends upon its development of an active life reaching out toward values other than those with which the ego is concerned — all of which latter are rooted in tendencies seeking the welfare of the mortal organism. If [ p. 313 ] it be granted, as was urged in that and the two subsequent chapters, that will is rooted, not in the physical organism but in the larger spiritual order of the universe, then it may be reasonably assumed that an organization of will, developed within that larger spiritual order and directed toward goals not dependent on the existence of the physical organism, would go on in pursuit of those goals after the dissolution of the body. Such goals would be the cultivation of truth and beauty through such impacts on the world as remained possible without the body, and assistance in the development of other personalities through such communication as could be obtained. The extent of such possibilities of action we do not know, but it is obvious that they must be much greater than our present knowledge reveals, for our present knowledge falls far short of explaining such control of the mental over the physical as is manifested in everyday purposive behavior.
Thus the extent to which an existing personality is “saved” or preserved for a further life beyond this would seem to depend upon the extent to which it had developed an active system of volitional tendencies concerned with objectives that might still be realized in that further life. Pre-eminent among those objectives would be the good (the further personal development) of other persons; and that further personal development would consist in their active impact upon their world in the creation of forms of beauty, the grasp of truth, and the social co-operation found to be good. But an active system of volitional tendencies of this character is precisely that which manifests the attitude we, in harmony with the most profound element of the Christian tradition, have called “faith.” Thus we see the truth in the Christian declaration which, out of a deep insight into its own religious experience, declared that it is faith that saves — faith, not works, and not mere belief. That this insight should ever have been misinterpreted as salvation obtained by believing a creed is a [ p. 314 ] tragedy due to an overemphasis upon the otherwise desirable goal of obtaining and maintaining correctness of theological opinion.
What, it may be asked, is the advantage gained by showing that conclusions arrived at by objective analysis of religious experience are thus in harmony with the essential insights of the founders of Christianity? One practical advantage may be pointed to: this recognition may make it easier for people of different religious opinions to work and worship together. But there is also a consideration of theoretical importance. Religious convictions that have proved their value in the cultivation of a high and vigorous spiritual life have thereby obtained a certain pragmatic justification of considerable importance. And there is no doubt that, in spite of some concomitant bad effects, this can be claimed for the doctrine of justification by faith. It has liberated and invigorated the souls of millions of men and women, including such vital personalities as Paul and Luther. Its value must surely be due to its being, in some very significant way, a correct diagnosis of the religious life, its disvalue to elements of error in it. What we have done is to show that the disvalues attached to the traditional doctrine are due to its overemphasis upon the importance of mere matters of belief, while its real value lies in the soundness of that essential insight into moral and religious values whereby it is seen that faith is more than mere belief and of greater moral worth than its outcome in good works.
But on this same ground we may be met with a further objection. We have as yet taken no account of the further Christian conviction that the faith whereby a man is saved is not merely the product of his own effort but has been created in him by the hearing of the gospel and the work of Christ. A similar pragmatic justification, with similar qualifications [ p. 315 ] might be claimed for this part of the doctrine also. So it, too, calls for examination. In this connection it should first be noted that, while Christian experience may be pointed to as positive evidence of the saving power of the gospel of Christ, it constitutes no negative evidence to the effect that such spiritual effects can be wrought in no other way. In spite of a dramatic assertion attributed to Peter, that there is “none other name . . . whereby we must be saved,”[11] it would seem that the church of the days when the New Testament was being compiled did not always make this claim. Thus the writer of Hebrews refers to the many heroes of the past whose spiritual achievements are attributed to their faith, and looks forward to their resurrection.[12] The apostle Paul states that Abraham’s faith was” imputed to him for righteousness.” [13] As he also states that the Gentiles are judged of God according as they observe the law “written in their hearts,” [14] it would seem to be his view that a similar faith would be efficacious for them. Among the theories of the atonement later developed by the church, it is true, the greater number attributed to the death of Christ a mystical efficacy such that human salvation would appear to have been altogether impossible without it. But this is not the case with all those theories. In particular, the “moral interpretation,” first propounded by Abelard and today widely accepted among Protestants, is purely rational. It teaches that the efficacy of Christ’s life and death in the salvation of man lies entirely in the power of his example. This type of theory becomes objectionable if it is suggested that Jesus deliberately chose to suffer in order to set a powerful and moving example. But if we examine the circumstances of the world into which [ p. 316 ] Jesus was born and the problem with which he was faced, all arbitrariness disappears from the situation; the sheer moral necessity of his personal sacrifice becomes clear and its place in Christian religious experience is established.
Jesus took up the mission begun by John the Baptist as preacher of righteousness. He added to it a still loftier ethic of his own, preserved for us chiefly in the collection of sayings known as the Sermon on the Mount. It was a righteousness that must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, a righteousness intolerant of all forms of exploitation, of the hardness of religious formalism, of racial exclusiveness, of inequity between the sexes, of national bitterness, but tender toward the moral outcast and full of compassion for the afflicted. It challenged the attitudes of the social and religious leaders at many points. It aroused opposition which soon presented the threat of death. Thus, after a brief ministry which had won the devoted attachment of a small band of disciples and a vast popular enthusiasm which everywhere challenged established evils and drew attention to his principles, Jesus found himself faced with two alternatives. One was to retire into relative obscurity, leaving behind him a deep sense of the hopelessness and failure of such ideals as he had preached — a state of affairs worse than he had found. The other was to go steadily forward with his mission until it should lead him to the cross that always, in those days, awaited those who openly challenged constituted authority, whether by force and guile or by truth and love. He chose the latter way because it was the only path that one in his position could consider right. It led him to Calvary.
But after his disciples had recovered from the first stunning effects of the blow they saw in that choice the consummation of his career. And indeed it was that. Without it, his ethics would have stood as the noblest expression of the moral ideal known to man. He had taught that there are no limits [ p. 317 ] whatever to the love, or good will, that human beings should show in their relations with each other — neither race, nor creed, nor caste, nor sex, nor national or personal enmity — and that to this ideal one should be true to the death. But it is one thing to teach ideals and another to live them. Had he never himself been put to the supreme test they might have remained as shining ideals without much power, considered too lofty for practical men. But he preached them in conditions in which he was bound to be tested. And when the test came he did not shrink. Thus his personality became the concrete embodiment of his ideals, the exemplification before the world of all that he had taught.
But the significance of this fact escapes us if we think merely of its force as a positive ideal calling for imitation. Its real dynamic in the spiritual life of the world comes from its power to convict the world of sin. Here again the insight of the traditional theology is thoroughly sound in fundamentals, even though somewhat distorted in certain aspects. Enough has already been said in criticism of the exaggerations of this doctrine. What is important now is to be clear about its essential truth. For an understanding of that we must go back to what has already been said about faith and the nature of sin.
In our discussion of faith we have seen that it can reach its lowest ebb in the self-righteousness of respectable people as well as in the hardened evil habits of the moral outcast. Society is apt to settle down to the toleration of certain abuses within it which do not affect the great majority, so that the social conscience is not aroused by these things. Then the individual is apt to tolerate in himself what society tolerates in him. If he should reflect deeply enough, the disinterested will to the good would be stirred within him to prick his conscience. But he does not reflect. So the higher growth of personality stagnates at the level already attained. In such conditions [ p. 318 ] of stagnation the ego is apt to expand its demands until the whole of life, including every natural element of altruism, is subordinated to it. This is spiritual death. An active spiritual life requires that there be an acute awareness of the preventable evil in the social order, and a keen consciousness of the obligation to avoid participation in it and actively to oppose it. There must be a similar attitude toward whatever is evil in one’s personal past. If the individual fails to take home to himself these obligations there can be no active spiritual life. Something must awaken him to his personal spiritual deficiency, his spiritual inertia, which is sin.
It is here that the power of the life story of Jesus makes itself felt. We have but to reflect upon it and it breaks in upon our self-righteousness to force home to our own consciousness the facts of social evil and personal deficiency. It is its power to stir the human conscience out of smug moral self-satisfaction, and to pierce the protective armor of excuses whereby we defend ourselves, that makes the story of Christ a dynamic for the spiritual regeneration of mankind. In the light of his ideals and his example of supreme devotion, even the finest of human characters must recognize his own personal deficiency. If we frankly face the challenge of Christ it is impossible, at any level of moral development, to slip into the inertia of moral self-satisfaction. The most saintly souls, practicing the contemplation of his example, have found themselves kept morally sensitive, spiritually alive. At the lower levels of personal development, upon which most of us live, a similar meditation can work with equal power.
It was this stimulus to the awakening of an active faith and life of high devotion that the early Christians found in their knowledge of J esus. Through coming to know him they found such new life in their souls that they said they were born again. They literally lived anew, through the power of the faith that was begotten in the knowledge of Christ. It is no matter for surprise that they called him Savior, for such he was and is.
[ p. 319 ]
In conclusion we may try briefly to gather up the threads of this study. We began our effort to understand religion by seeking its distinctive characteristics as manifested in its initial phases in the individual consciousness. Here we found that the distinguishing feature is the dawning consciousness of the individual that he is but one of a number of experient agents, and that there is something within him that urges him to be concerned with the good of some at least of these other selves. This factor, in the light of further investigation, we called the disinterested or altruistic will. We found that disharmony with it is the most fundamental cause of the sense of sin, while harmony with it tends to create the sense of assurance. We found that in the natural and inevitable conflicts between the disinterested will and the ego we could see the explanation of all the typical phases of religious experience, including that of the primitive, out of which grew the belief in a spiritual order wider and greater than human society. Thus we saw that this it is that man has called God and interpreted in so many and various ways. This then clarified for us the nature of the religious ideal. We saw that it gave us grounds for a new faith in man to know what it really is that he has called God, and that God, in this sense, is really operative in all; and we saw the value and the need of a great religious society to cultivate and implement this devotion to God.
Next we turned to the question of the philosophical significance of this discovery of the disinterested will, to seek an answer to what Kant called the third of the great questions of philosophy, “What may we hope?” We saw reason to believe that that disinterested will is the factor upon which, as root and foundation, has grown the structure we call personality, and that that structure, being a system of processes responsive to value, could not be conceived as a product or part [ p. 320 ] of an order of physical processes (such as that described by physics and chemistry) in which values play no part. Thus the disinterested will of the individual was found to appear as a factor organic, not merely to the individual organism, but to the wider order of the world. In other words, God was found to transcend the limits of our personalities and to be the creative agency from which pur lives arise and in harmony with which they find their good. No reason was found to assert God’s immediate control over all the forces of nature, but sufficient reason to believe that nature is not so foreign to him that any tendency within it could continuously counteract his creative will — a will that we know as good because it seeks in and through each of us the good of all.
Finally we found, in this last chapter, that the deepest insights of Christianity have formulated their concepts of the power of God, as it has been felt to be at work in the human soul, in essentially these same terms. Christians have seen unfolding in history a self-revelation of the nature of God, of peculiar force and clarity, in the life and teaching of a succession of religious leaders who gradually developed more and more fully the ideal of a universal good. This revelation — occurring in and to the consciousness of individuals through their participation in a society already permeated by it — they have seen to culminate in the person of Jesus Christ, who thus becomes the central figure of that society. They have found that in and through the knowledge of him individuals are stirred to a new consciousness of the presence of God within them and a lively devotion to the ideal toward which that presence directs them. This attitude they have called faith, and they have found that it releases the spirit from the sense of sin, gives to life an assurance that it is ultimately worth while, and invigorates the spirit in every good work. In that faith they found the salvation of their souls, assuredly for time and, as they hope, for eternity.
[ p. 321 ]
Amidst much misconception and misinterpretation we find that our whole analysis of religion endorses these central concepts and attitudes of Christianity as intellectually and morally sound, and finds in them the secret of its power. And, our analysis having been directed purely to the discovery of the facts of the religious consciousness, this endorsement stands, so long as the analysis is sound, whatever may be said of our further theoretical interpretation. Even if that is denied, the religious ideal, the goodness of the divine as found within, the historic leadership of Jesus, and the cultivation and implementation of the ideal in and through the society formed around him — all these remain. Men still will find the salvation of their souls, in all that that can mean for this world, through faith in these things. But if also we can believe, as I have sought to show we can, that these facts point to the reality of a divine life far transcending our own, then faith takes on a richer significance, a brighter hope to lighten the dark places of life, and a deeper note of authority in the call of an ideal that is our own — and yet so much more than merely ours.
What is referred to here, and in the rest of this section, is the theistic belief that God is personal, immanent and transcendent. ↩︎
Jas. 2:14-26. ↩︎
Heb. 10:38; 12:2. ↩︎
Rom. 10:10. ↩︎
Summa Theologica, 2 II., questions i~iv. ↩︎
Ps. 51:17. ↩︎
Rom. 3:28. ↩︎
Matt. 5:21-28. ↩︎
Luke 18:9-14. ↩︎
Luke 15. ↩︎
Acts 4:12. ↩︎
Heb. 11, especially v. 35. ↩︎
Rom, 4:20-22, ↩︎
Rom. 2:14-16. ↩︎