[ p. 230 ]
MAN completes the meaning of all that has gone into his making. His distinctive powers reveal something about the process which he consummates. His ability to be religious has, therefore, cosmic significance. It relates to the tendency, characteristic of life from the very beginning, to reach out for more than is yet possessed. The fact that the “more” actually came to be possessed, to the vast enrichment of life itself, is the justification of the tendency and is the sufficient reason for it. Religion is the highest form of this faith that what life deeply needs is actually provided for. Its result is to give life here and now a deeper meaning and to bring to it an increasing range. The manifold of existence within which this occurs becomes thereby more fully declared. Religion is therefore at once discovery and revelation discovery from the human side, revelation from the divine side. The initiating power, however, is not in man : religion, while it issues in man’s completion and touches him at the point of his deepest need, gets its final meaning in the fact that it is the evidence to a divine invasion. Keligious experience is therefore not a monologue, but a dialogue.
[ p. 231 ]
WE have been saying that an evaluating being like man implies the existence of the better and some power to realize it. Here is the root of all human progress. Man would build a better world than the one he knows, and he would establish himself in it. He is the subject of an unrest which, properly construed, is indeed “divine.” The foundation of progress for any living organism is in something intrinsic to the very nature of the organism. There was a time when biological science made change and growth the result of purely external forces playing upon the given life. That day has gone. It now sees progress as a co-operative achievement: life and its circumstances work together to realize an end. They are therefore parts of the same whole. Circumstances have the power to evoke from life a response, but life also has the power to make the response. Each power is necessary to account for the result. Whatever anything comes to be, it is clear that it could only become that because already it had the power to do so. A “tendency” is present which waits only on the appropriate conditions in order to manifest itself. No view of things is adequate which does not take complete account of this reciprocity, and which does not show that both the life and its conditions, explained however these may be, rest back upon a common ground. [1]
[ p. 232 ]
In the world of present reality we find religion understood as a form of human behavior and experience. It has a history, which means that it is continuous with something in the past. But the presupposition of the history is man himself. The history of religion is not something [1:1] apart from the history of man. This is sometimes overlooked. Historical religion is treated as though it were a body of independent reality, a sort of fixed mass of objective fact. A little reflection, however, quickly shows that religion is inseparably connected with human life. It is what it is because man is what he is. The study of religion is the study of man. Whether one directs one’s attention toward a religious institution, or a religious dogma, or a religious custom, neither the institution, nor the dogma, nor the custom has any significance except as it is connected with human life. It takes men to account for any one of them and for all of them. But if this is so, then men are the kind of beings who are able to create religious history. There is that in men of which religion is the evidence, and, but for which there would be no religion. The old charge that religion was foisted upon men by a few unscrupulous priests is palpably absurd : it leaves the priests themselves quite unaccounted for. Men are able to be religious. The ability is the foundation of all its own expression and achievement, whatever the form it has taken. Even a perverted form witnesses to a possible good.
This ability is but one among many others. Human history is not only continuousi: it is also amazingly diverse. It is so diverse because man himself is such a versatile creature, able to do more different things [ p. 233 ] than any other creature on the face of the earth. Eespecting his physical equipment man is, as Hocking says, “as nearly as possible animal in general”; [2] and concerning his psychic equipment he is, we may say, as nearly as possible “soul-in-general.” That is to sayj he not only gathers up in himself the meaning of the innumerable animal organisms but for which he would not have been at all, but he also gathers up in himself the meaning of the psychic concomitants of these organisms since every sentient form has “soul” to some degree. [3] These meanings are carried on into man’s most distinctive achievements : his’ family life, his social life, his political life, his commerce, his art, his intellectual life all are but the more complete expressions of powers whose historical origins we may dimly discern in the first lowly stirrings of remotest life. The ascending and advancing life has ascended and advanced in response always to something that lay within. [4] The internal has laid hold upon something external and pulled itself forward, so to speak : the function of the external has been just this of giving the internal its chance. The inner impulse to grasp and rise has therefore received cosmic justification, just as the intricacies of the cosmic adjustments receive their explanation in the service they render to expanding life. The nature of things has always been found to contain the necessary conditions for the further expression and the more complete satisfaction of the life in its constant aspiration. Never has nature wholly denied itself in mocking its own offspring. Life has been led to feel that it must do certain things ; and while the response to the urge has involved experimentation, with its at [ p. 234 ] tendant risk and liability to error, the total result was progress, made possible by the very fact that there was some degree of environmental co-operation with the urge. Whatever form this progress took, whether the acquiring of the power to swim, to walk, to climb, to fly, or whether some more delicate internal adjustment, the result was to vindicate the original impulse and to prove that the world was in a measure “friendly.” What was demonstrated was, shall we say, the “togetherness” of existence. The inner and the outer “worked together” to do what neither could do alone. Imagination glows and kindles before the pictureinvisible life becoming slowly more “integrated,” more intelligent, more forceful, more capable, and finding the universe caring sufficiently for what was going on to provide the necessary conditions. All that we mean by civilization, and eventually by the kingdom of God, is but the exhibition of this co-operative principle on an everwidening scale.
There is still no better way of describing this process than by the word “revelation.” Here we link up our thought with what was said before about “the word and the mind.” We are environed with symbols, and symbols are not self -explaining. The history of life is one of two things : it is either absolute creativity, the appearing of the new without adequate antecedents or grounds; or it is a series of effects springing from a cause whose nature these effects more or less reveal. On the first supposition, the sumtotal of reality is held actually to increase. But if we inquire as to the cause of this increase, no intelligible answer can be given. There is “more” now than [ p. 235 ] there was once, but apparently this “more” i to be accounted for simply by the fact that a certain amount of time has elapsed. But Bowne showed years ago that to make time a cause was to invest a mere relation with the qualities of real existence, [5] and nothing that Alexander has said about the metaphysical and creative significance of “space-time” has weakened the force of Bowne’s criticism. [6] Others, still with this idea in mind of increase without cause, would make evolution itself “creative.” They use Bergson’s phrase, but without being quite fair to Bergson. Thus the affirmation of Holmes: “God is evolution.” [7] But evolution is not an entity, and if God is only evolution, that, as Haeckel once quoted Schopenhauer in a slightly different connection, “is simply a polite way of saying that there is no God.” [8] The most that can be said of evolution is that it is a method a modus operandi. A method is not any sort of substantial reality, and how it can of itself be “creative” is difficult to see. How could the utterly nonexistent at last become the existent purely by virtue of a method ? Even Hoffding, sane thinker as he in general is, must be held to be at fault at this point, in his subscribing at least by implication to the idea, so reminiscent of Heracleitus, that God is eternally in “a state of becoming.” [9] The only possible way of making creation by evolutionary method a credible conception is by postulating a reality which works by this method. Evolution as itself the creative force, able to produce something from nothing, the sole cause of all the rich variety of existence, is not only not intelligible it is one of the most amazing proposals ever entertained by the mind of man.
[ p. 236 ]
Men who profess to be unable to assent to the idea of Creative Will seem to have no least difficulty in assenting to the idea of Creative Nothing ! The alternative view is that life and history shall be regarded as the manifestation in time of a reality which exists out of time, and would still exist even if there were no temporal manifestation. The creative source must be adequate to the created issue. [10] What is created is characterized by continuity and increasing richness and variety. In the series of events, therefore, one event will be the condition, or, as Lotze would say, the “occasion” utilized by the creative source for an advance in its work of self-manifestation. Whatever comes into being or comes to pass tells something of its own origin. The simplest fact or event, or the simplest form of life, speaks of something besides itself. It is not self -explaining : it is always dependent, and the dependent is a revelation in one way or another of that upon which it depends. But as we examine this dependent, we see it becoming ever richer, ever more complex, ever more capable and more truly master of itself and its conditions, and the revelation becomes correspondingly significant. If a single sentence reveals a thought, what does an entire drama do? If the amoeba manifests an intelligent source, how much more is that source manifested in rational and ethical man ? Why are we not justified in taking the highest points of the achievement of life as most fully revealing that otherwise hidden reality whence all life issues ? This revelational principle is fundamental in most modern theistic philosophies of evolution. [11] The very fact of progress, it is here being claimed, [ p. 237 ] is to be construed as evidence that the insistent demands of life for an increasing range and depth have been found not to be imaginary. Life has reached out, even though it may be “blindly” in the sense that it had no clear idea of what it wanted, and it has found something on which it could lay hold. It has assumed that its vehement desire pointed to some sort of possible satisfaction, and it has not been disappointed. It has more and more subjugated to itself what at the time was a “beyond,” and in making that “beyond” its own it has found for itself vast enrichment. What else can this mean than that there is a profound and purposeful relation between whatever that is in life which sends it on a quest and those facts, realities, and experiences to which the quest leads? The claim that life is simply compelled to act “as if” these things were so, but that in reality they are not so, or at least may not be so, is simply to reduce the whole process of experience to one vast illusion. “The illusions by which we live” may be a clever enough phrase, but if that which makes life most rich and meaningful is not what we take it to be, then, indeed are we here “as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.” Or, to use yet another of Arnold’s figures, we are afloat on an uncharted sea, crossed as it is with despotic trade-winds, ourselves without compass or rudder, threatened with freshening wind and blackening waves,
“And then the tempest strikes us; and between
The lightning bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck [ p. 238 ]
With anguished face and flying hair
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port, he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.” [12]
Is life such a mad thing as this ? We cannot but seek, and we cannot but believe that we find. That is what life is a search and a discovery. What else can we do but believe that the discovery is of the real, and that what it leads to is real ? And if this; be so, then we shall take the final step and say that the very reason for the search, the very reason for the divine discontent that lies enshrined in the heart of all life, was that thereby the waiting reality might be discovered. “Every spring,” says Francis Thompson, in true Platonic fashion, “is the flash-light of one Spring” in the passing is the sign and seal of the permanent. [13] So every first is the promise of its own last ; every Alpha presages its own Omega ; every arc points to “the perfect round” -and every least outreach of the least-considered life spells God. With all his limitations in respect of his thought of the divine nature, Aristotle stated elemental truth when he solved the ancient problem by affirming that “God is the object of the world’s desire.”
Religion, we are implying, is a form of this faith that what life deeply needs is somewhere provided for. The ensuing response in the enrichment and exaltation of life is evidence that the faith was not mistaken. Nobody will dispute that there have been [ p. 239 ] forms of religion which have often enough seemed to debase life rather than to exalt it. But the very excesses of religion have their own significance : they are so much testimony to the strength of men’s conviction that “the life is more than meat and the body than raiment.” The evils perpetrated in the name of religion were not perpetrated in the certain knowledge of their evil character. They were therefore for the most part the result of errors of judgment, explainable largely by prevailing circumstances, rather than evidences of the essential untruth of the religious purpose and spirit. And in any event to repeat what has been said before the excesses and the ills have not been the whole story. The most religiously-minded men to-day deplore most sincerely those features of religious history of which the skeptic makes so much. Even a convinced Roman Catholic like Von Hugel admits the necessary imperfections including “killing for matters of religious belief of historical Christianity as represented in his own church.” [14] But these men also know that religion is not to be judged by the mistakes and blunders which have been committed in its name. They properly distinguish between the essence of religion and its manifold forms, and they claim for the essence of religion an absolute validity. What they know religion means for themselves they believe it must have meant for other men. The real “communion of saints” crosses all lines and embraces men of all faiths and of all ages. These men believe that it is utterly incredible that so universal a fact as religion should be without ultimate significance. They admit its need of continual rebirth. They admit that it [ p. 240 ] sometimes creates conditions so intolerable that eventually men arise in their might and sweep it away or think they do. When religion is attacked on the ground of its being tyrannical and obscurant, the attack itself is made in the name of that very spirit which religion is properly intended to produce and foster. Religion, therefore, can never for long stay submerged. To say nothing else, the men who think they have disposed of it are succeeded by another generation and the new generation finds itself confronted with the same problems, asking the same questions, impelled by the same deep needs, seeking the same satisfactions, which have been among the reasons for religion at any other time. Still “the same restless pacings to and fro,” still “the same vainly throbbing heart.” Particular men may become irreligious. They may argue themselves into a flat rejection of all that it represents. They may invent substitutes for it all the way from the Goddess of Licence of the French revolutionaries to the Social Service of our time. But man, using the term in its collective and. universal sense, is a religious being religious not by an imposition from without but by a demand from within. As between religion and irreligion, it is religion that is “natural” to man, and irreligion that is the result of sophistication. This is plainly enough implied in Otto’s analysis of the root of religion as in “the sense of the numinous.” [15] The attacks on religion usually come from those whom culture so-called has rendered one-sided. It is the naturalness of religion that is the promise of its permanence. Not that there has been no change in its form and expression. This change is one of the best signs of its [ p. 241 ] vitality, and we may expect the change to continue in the future. Religion is as versatile as life itself. The versatility, however, rests back upon an impulse which is as native to man as the impulse that leads to art, or science, or government. We might have to agree with McDougall as against W. P. Paterson that the idea of a “religious instinct” is untenable; [16] unless, as may be the case, Paterson means by “instinct” in this connection simply “propensity,” and if so, he is right. [17] In any event, there is always a reason for man’s diverse activities. The reason is in man himself, in the kind of being he is, in the kind of needs he is subject of, in the kind of capacities he has. Religion is no more an “invention” than science is ; it is no more a “superimposition” than government is ; it is no more a “defense mechanism” than art is. The major human interests are revelations of human nature, and the two combined the interests and the nature are revelations of a still deeper reality. Because religion is one of these interests, we may regard it as an authentic voice in which the very nature of existence is heard speaking. Can we learn what it is saying ?
Religion meets a deep human need. It is useless to contend that the countless millions of men who have lived and died in a faith any faith were nothing but the victims of a vast cosmic hoax. If “hopes were dupes,” wrote Arthur Hugh Clough, it is also possible that “fears may be liars.” Then why not take counsel of our hopes rather than of our fears, since we must choose between them ? If those who want religion to be true are wrong, those who want it to be false may also be wrong. We have already remarked [ p. 242 ] that the “wishful thinking” argument works both ways. Since desire is fundamental to all effort, why treat desire as necessarily misleading? Desire is predictive. It is the evidence to the possibility of “more life and fuller.” Hoffding has shown the close relation that exists between desire and religion. [16:1] Similarly, Galloway, in common with many others, traces it to “a felt need.” [18] Perhaps there has not been written in our time a more striking testimony to a man’s need to believe those things to be real that makes for his peace and happiness than Bertrand Bussell’s essay on “A Free Man’s Worship.” [19] Yet Bussell is supposed to stand before the modern world as the last word in exact, unbiased, detached thinking, and himself declares that he is a “rationalist” an exponent of the supremacy and sufficiency of reason. [20] Life itself confronts us with situations from which more than one possible inference may be drawn, yet only one of which can be true. A choice is therefore inescapable. The claim of the religious man that by his religion he lays hold upon enduring reality, finds peace, inspiration, motives and power for high living, must necessarily be more weighty than the arbitrary retort of the irreligious man that he does nothing of the kind. He who has ever sincerely and deeply loved knows the meaning of love as it can never be known to the cynic who has talked himself into the supposition and would fain talk others that love is a purely “physical” thing. If the cynic were right, the libertine to whom love means simply lust would be the truest lover which is just the one thing which he is not. It is true that other human interests may seem to have an empiric support even [ p. 243 ] a scientific proof that religion lacks, but this lack necessarily goes with the esoteric nature of religion. One thinks of Schleiermacher’s words: “Religion, as I wish to show it, in its own original characteristic form, is not accustomed to appear openly, but is only seen in secret by those wlio have it.” [21] The words are not beyond criticism from one point of view, but they express the truth that religion involves a venture whose significance lies just in the fact that it is made, and he who makes it is most sure of what it brings to pass. So that religion is empiric after all, only it is a higher empiricism than that which consists in the application of “instruments of precision” for measuring what is obtained. You cannot put inward peace under a microscope. You cannot weigh a prayer. You cannot measure moral certainty. You cannot reduce to the requirements of an exact science those attitudes and tempers and aspirations and renewed moral energies which religion has proved itself able to develop. Yet if you deny that religion has done this, you put yourself under the necessity of discounting the testimony of a cloud of witnesses of every age and clime “a multitude which no man could number.” And since when has science decided that the testimony of human experience is entirely to be rejected? In true Quaker fashion, Eddington the scientist insists on the reality of man’s experience of “the divine indwelling.” [22] Even John Stuart Mill, discussing Hume’s argument against miracle, concedes the possibility of circumstances in which the testimony of human experience to miracle could be accepted. [23] Religious experience, like all other, may very properly be subjected to searching criticism, the [ p. 244 ] inward separated from the outward, the essential from the accidental, the permanent core from the changing form ; but what Hegel means by the “idea” of religion, the underlying universal of which particular expressions are but the historical unfolding this remains as the only adequate explanation of the rest. “The truth of religion” does not mean that all that has gone with religion is true, any more than “the truth of science” means that science has never had to renounce a past opinion. “The wrong-headed notions,” as John Caird called them, that have been fostered by religion are amazing enough, but no more amazing than those that fall in other realms. In all cases such notions simply mean that men are fallible learners in the school of life; they do not mean that religion per se is based in illusion and is wholly without validity.
Religion has significance for the here and now. Men have reached into a “beyond,” and laid hold upon it, or have felt a “beyond” reach out and lay hold upon them, and then have found in that “beyond” a power immediately operative, effective for the problems of everyday life. It has already been said that the religion of a given time and place will be, respecting its form, congruent with the time and place. That in an age quite generally characterized by credulity there should be an abundance of miracles associated with religion is only what we should expect. Neither Milton’s “Paradise Lost” nor Dante’s “Inferno” could have been written in the twentieth century. Great religious utterance, whatever form it take, demands sincerity : men must believe that what they are doing, whether writing, painting, carving, or building, em [ p. 245 ] bodies and represents the truth, and that the truthfulness extends to the form as well as to the content. The work of both Dante and Milton possessed verisimilitude for a past age as accounts respectively of the early world and of the doom of the lost. The poems were not simply poems: they were scientific theological treatises. They were read as truth. The modern man reads them simply as poems. Their form has become for him so much symbolism. But when they are so read he sees how profoundly true they are. What the modern mind could not itself produce it may none the less appreciate and understand. If there had never been a Dante’s “Inferno,” and it were published to-morrow for the first time as the work of a contemporary poet, one shudders to think of what the critics would do with it the very critics who, as things actually stand, regard it as a work of genius. But we do not thereby condemn the critics: we only imply that they appreciate the fact that what would be sincere in one age would not be sincere in another. Any age, however, even ours, will recognize the truth in the pictures. What was Milton really saying ? He was saying that man, in the fundamental idea and purpose of him, is a son of God, who for a price sold his sonship and at an infinitely greater price must win it back. Was Milton wrong?
“O conscience! into what abyss of fears
And horrors hast thou driven me; out of which
I find no way, from deep to deeper plunged I” [24]
And what was Dante really saying? He was saying that the man who will not pay the price of his restoration must remain forever in his chosen condition of [ p. 246 ] servitude, an alien from his true home, an echo who should be a voice, a lamentation who should be a paean. Dante is as right as Milton.
“. . . . We are come
Where I have told thee we shall see the souls
To misery doomed, who intellectual good
Have lost. . . .” [19:1]
The common objection, that this has to do with futurity and may therefore be regarded as only imaginative, and that it is the chronic vice of religion that its “beyond” is something that “never is, but always is to be,” loses sight of one of the most patent of all facts. Religion will have no meaning for the future which it does not already have for the present. Moral status is being created now. Men are being driven from their Eden now. Men are finding their way up their Mount of Blessedness now. Whenever religion becomes anticipatory, it is always with reference to the significance of some present fact. The anticipation assumes that very causal order which in any other connection than the religious may be so loudly proclaimed and so deeply reverenced. The “beyond” with which religion has to do is not a mere future somewhat. The term is qualitative, not temporal. It is as much a here as a there, as much a now as a then: “it is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart.” It is, indeed, properly regarded as the Utterly Holy, as the Moral Absolute, and when so regarded it infinitely transcends the furthest leap of human thought. But even when the “beyond” is regarded in this transcendent way in effect equated with God, infinite and eternal it still remains that man is its [ p. 247 ] created and finite correlate. It and he the divine and the human belong to each other. Every prayer is proof of it ; every unselfish deed reveals it ; every twinge of conscience there finds its source. That which is so far above man none the less intimately dwells with him as the tree dwells with the rain the rain it must have, or perish. All the offices of religion, which are but so many results of man’s attempts to adjust himself to the Higher are we to suppose that they mean nothing for the stern business of daily living? The Sublimity which Hegel said was the characteristic of Hebrew religion, the Beauty which he said was the characteristic of Greek religion, the Conformity which he said was the characteristic of Eoman religion did they not mean something for the men who practiced them? [25] If we add that Sanctity is the characteristic of the Christian religion, will anyone dare to affirm that there have been no saints saints in the New Testament sense to demonstrate that sanctity is a possible attainment in this present world of flesh and blood, here
“In the very world which is the world
Of all of us the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all.” [26]
The empiricist who is so “radical” that he cannot bring himself to believe in anything that he cannot see with his eyes or lay hold upon with his hands or reduce to the dimensions of his own petty pragmatism does he not see the difference that religion makes ? or the difference that irreligion makes ? He may, of course, see only impossible creeds, and still more impossible hymns, and ugly buildings, and [ p. 248 ] altars reeking with Wood. He may see shepherds of the flock who are nothing but “blind mouths” the apt figure used in Milton’s “Lycidas” and explained by Ruskin with characteristic meticulous care. [27] He may see interminable bickerings over this and that, the glorification of passion, the indictment of the natural, war blessed by priests, social ills ascribed to Providence, and so on ad nauseam. But is his empiricism afflicted with such a deadly unimaginativeness that it stops with faults so palpable? Does he suppose that the rapt mystic has seen nothing, and that the prophet who declares the word of his God has heard nothing, and that the singer of the sweet songs that faith has inspired is but “the singer of an idle day”? Does he see no difference between a Gothic cathedral and a Chicago skyscraper except in the architecture? When he smiles knowingly at the emaciated ascetic who does continual penance that so he might the better subdue the flesh, does he never stop to consider what strength of conviction the man must have as to the deeper issues of life who will go to such lengths of self -discipline ? Saint Simeon Stylites on his pillar, Amandus Suso with his nailed shirt and gloves. If sex has the unrestrained right to rule which the modern cult of Venus is claiming, is not the ascetic an infinitely more impressive figure than the libertine, since the one stands where the other simply yields ? Whether it be the worshipers who at morning sacrifice have left empty “the little town” of Keatsf glorious ode; or whether it be a few quaintly-garbed souls sitting in an inspired silence in a Quaker “meetinghouse”; or whether it be a Salvation Army girl-lieutenant electing to spend her days [ p. 249 ] and nights! in London’s foulest slums; [28] or whether it be a vast throng hushed and awed in the presence of the stupendous miracle of the mass whichever it be, men engage in these exercises because to do so has a meaning for them here and now. If it were not so, it is incredible that these exercises, and others like them or in place of them, should continue. When all has been said against religion that can be found to be said, it still remains that religion has vitally and constructively affected life. Men have prayed, and prayer has made them strong and why the suggested psychological theory in the case should be held to affect the reality of the fact is difficult to understand. Men have been oppressed with a sense of sinfulness, and they have sought forgiveness, and the burden has rolled away. New purposes have been born, wills have been re-enforced, passions have been subdued, imaginations have been purified, selfishness, jealousy, hatred, have been driven out and unselfishness and brotherly love put in their place, because religion came to its own in human life. This is present experience. If it be claimed that it also has promise for the future “godliness,” says the apostle, “being profitable both for the life that now is and the life that is to come” who will deny it ? But how shall religion have promise for to-morrow unless it exists and is active for to-day [2:1]
“No, no ! the energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun ;
And he who flagg’d not in the earthly strife,
From strength to strength advancing only he,
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.” [29]
[ p. 250 ]
The response that religion finds is a response of reality. Many will agree with much of what has just been said who yet will presume to deprive it .of all value by reducing it to purely subjectivism. That is to say, they will not deny that religion has been a vital and even a constructive factor in human life and history, but they will explain it all as due to the force of illusory ideas. The effectiveness of religion, so they argue, depends upon the strength with which something is believed. But the power of the belief is no proof of the validity. Comfort and strength come by praying because one already believes that by praying comfort and strength will come. But that is no necessary proof that the comfort and strength are from a source over and above the man’s own being. Thus Leuba, for example, makes the characteristic claim that there are no religious “experiences” that cannot be explained without resorting to “transcendent causes.” [30]
But perhaps the objector is in danger of being hoist by his own petard. It may turn out that if he will allow no transubjective or objective reference in religion, he may be hard put to it to validate the objective reference in any other form of experience. A. J. Balfour was wont to present this dilemma with telling force. He showed the inconsistency of accepting as valid various postulates about the existence of the material world on the ground that this was justified by experience, and then refusing a like concession in the case of a spiritual world. [31] If the vast amount of religious testimony to the ineradicable conviction of a real Other who has answered when he was called upon is to be set aside, and this on purely [ p. 251 ] philosophical and psychological grounds, what is to prevent all other forms of response being denied objectivity on grounds similarly philosophical and psychological? Few assumptions are more naturally made than the assumption that one is continually in touch with other minds like one’s own ; yet no assumption is seen to yield, under analysis, more theoretical difficulties [1:2] as to its validity. Thus Bertrand Eussell writes that if we believe in other minds, it must be “on some ground short of demonstration.” [32] The evidence to such other minds reduces itself in the end to certain elements of our experience, chiefly forms of sight and sound. These, as we have shown already, we treat as so many words, utterances, symbols. It is quite impossible for us to get “behind” what we see and hear, to learn the “cause” of it. We make, in effect, a vast leap “from idea to fact,” namely, another mind like our own, in order to account for the experience. There are various ways by which we may test the worth of the assumption, yet even in testing it we are still unable to get “outside of ourselves,” or to dispense with sense-data, which data in their turn we have to take to be reliable. Yet no sane person refuses to make the assumption in question. He may deny this or that theory as to the structure of mind, but he will hardly affirm that he is all alone in the universe. A distinguished nontheistic humanist has . expressed himself in the poignant phrase, “You see, we have only ourselves.” If he had said, “You see, I have only myself,” he would have denied his own statement, since it is addressed to you! So that even one who cannot bring himself to believe in God because the evidence is lacking nevertheless admits that [ p. 252 ] he has experiences which cannot be made intelligible to himself on any other ground than that of the reality of other minds than his own. He takes his own experience as the evidence that he is not alone in the world. He has faith.
It would be too much to say that the case for the reality of the religious Object is as clear as this. But it would not be too much to say that there have always been men who were as certain of the fact of God as they were of the fact of their fellows, and certain for substantially the same reason a felt response which they could take to mean only one thing, namely, a communion of mind with mind. The possibility of reducing the alleged response to so much more belief, or so much more idea, depending upon such circumstances as training, expectation, habits of association, the sheer will to believe, and the like, is not to be denied. The warning uttered by Thouless too must always be borne in mind that the formula, “the objective validity of religious experience” may very easily come to be a substitute for clear thinking. [33] For all that, it may still be urged that those men should realize what they are about who make the religious experience purely self-contained a species of self-hypnosis. They are assenting to a principle which may easily be employed to impugn the veracity of experience in general. 'They are justifying the claim a modern version of Protagoras that all experience of an alleged “otherness,” whether it be of a so-called physical or a so-called psychical, is in the end nothing but a psychologism. They are grounding the noblest achievements of the human race in an essential illusion. Respecting the question at issue, [ p. 253 ] they are saying that in religion nothing is discovered, but that something is simply imagined. One can only ask, with Strachan, if those who take this position are prepared to go the full length of its implicit logic, and place a question mark over against all their other experiences and all their other conclusions. [34] Nobody would deny that all sorts of impossible and contradictory statements have been made about the religious experience and its Object. But differences in the characterization of the Object differences due in large part4o ascertainable conditions in the time and place cannot be allowed to invalidate the reality of the Object; any more than differences in the individual descriptions of the experience of the Object can be allowed to invalidate the experience. Perhaps it is the realization of this fact that explains the curious tenacity with which the modern school of nontheistic humanists insist that religion must stay even although God must go. The differences between Buddha and Jesus are marked enough, but it can hardly be maintained that these differences entirely invalidate their religious testimony. The real issue, then, would seem to be not whether there is a religious experience consisting in the quickening of all the powers since the most skeptical would admit the fact of an experience of some kind but whether the experience is at the same time the revelation of an independent Other. If it be such a revelation, other questions at once arise. Is the “Other” One or Many ? Is it Personal or Impersonal? Is it Creative or Created ? Is it Absolutely Holy or is it a Struggling Prometheus? On such questions, men have differed profoundly. Otto, in his discussion of “the Wholly [ p. 254 ] Other,” points out how universal is the experience of the Other as feeling: men divide only when they endeavor to give the feeling and its Object ”clear conceptual expression." [35] These very differences, however, are themselves the evidence to a common experience which men have endeavored to account for the experience of a Somewhat which they have not been able to escape, and which, indeed, so far from escaping, they have vehemently desired.
All students of the philosophy of religion agree that that characterization of the religious Object will be the most reasonable which best accounts for all the observed facts in the case. This is scientific enough. What is being said here is that, judged by this requirement, the ancient claim may still stand that the religious Object is most truly described as an all-sufficient Someone. Worship, submission, fellowship, service, devotion, empowerment, co-operation all these various “notes” of the religious experience, if they be allowed to have any objective reference at all, justify the belief that the nature of the religious subject a person is the best clew to the nature of the religious Object. It may not be an exhaustive clew, but it is at least not a misleading one. God may be very much more than what we mean by “personal,” but he cannot be less if we are going to rely upon religion at all. It is true that great numbers of religious men have not followed the clew, and have understood God otherwise, but why may not this be regarded as a deficiency of interpretation rather than the final word ? If we say that God is either Infinite or Finite, either All-Sufficient or Struggling, either Personal or Impersonal, either the Source of All or a [ p. 255 ] Derived Reality, either the Altogether Holy or the Morally Advancing, and if we say that the question of which of the two he is may not be fairly answered except as the testimony of religious experience is fully considered if we say this, then we shall go on to affirm our conviction that God is Personal Spirit, to be characterized as All-Sufficient and Altogether Holy. And from the fact of God’s complete adequacy for all of man’s religious needs, it is an easy and natural step to the claim of his complete adequacy for the cosmic stage on which the religious drama is being worked out. The God who can produce the saint can also produce the saint’s environment. God the Holy is God the Creator.
Religion is an invasion from without as well as a felt response to an approach. No account of the religious experience would be complete which failed to recognize this fact. A. E. Taylor speaks of “The Initiative of the EternaL” [36] Hocking in similar strain speaks of “The Divine Aggression.” [37] Middleton Murry describes with characteristic power that mo* ment when “the room was filled with a presence, and I knew I was. not alone.” [38] These men here refer to what is as nearly undeniable fact as anything can be. “I should not seek thee unless I had already found thee,” said Pascal in the true Augustinian fashion. Indeed, remembering Augustine’s unrelenting emphasis on divine grace, we would better say that God finds man before man finds God. The first sign of God is when? the heart turns to God : there were no turning but for the divine prompting to turn. In the language of the Scholastics, there is a grace that precedes grace. Gratia prceveniens prepares the mind [ p. 256 ] and will for gratia cooperans: the grace that inclines us is the basis for the work of the grace that assists us. It is all very well for the skeptic to say that religion is purely subjective a self-contained circle of ideas. What he needs to consider is the fact that again and again men have found themselves mastered by a conviction of which they could give no account, and from which they could not escape, try how they would. “Suddenly I heard a voice from heaven,” said Saul of Tarsus. “I have felt a Presence,” wrote Wordsworth not merely a Presence which the poet went out to find, but a Presence which found the poet, and “disturbed him.” The history of religion is full of such experiences as those of Moses in the land of Midian, and Jonah as he fled to Tarshish, and Gautama under the Bo-tree, and Jesus as he submitted to John’s baptism and “straightway saw the heavens rent asunder,” and Saul of Tarsus on the way to Damascus, and Augustine in his garden, and Loyola in the sick-room such experiences as those to which in our own time Francis Thompson and John Masefield have given such completely authentic expression, the one in “The Hound of Heaven,” the other in “The Everlasting Mercy.” [39] No doubt there are psychologists who would undertake to explain all this plausibly enough on purely subjective grounds. As to that, one can but repeat what has already been said by Canon Eaven that if all the joy and power that comes of the Unseen Presence is an illusion, then God is to be thanked who amid the mockery of existence grants men so beautiful and potent a dream, and we can but hope that such illusions will continue to the end. [40] If every fruitful idea, every revolutionizing [ p. 257 ] conviction, every enthusiasm for a holy cause, every radical transformation of character, every reintegration of the life if all these are to be explained by “illusions,” “obsessions,” “subjectivisms,” and the like, what possible hope is there of making human experience a rational process ? If we are misled in the high, but not misled in the low, then, verily, “let us eat, drink, and ” be resigned, for we are already lost. Or may we not hope that some day it will occur to “the unbelieving psychologist” that what he regards as a process of illusion because he can so glibly explain it is in reality God’s chosen way of getting at men’s hearts? If there is a “real” sunset, it is obvious that the only way men can know it is by an experience which is essentially subjective. It would be the height of psychological refinement to regard the experience as unreliable because the person who has it cannot, so to speak, go outside of the experience, and in some other way than by experience prove that the sunset is “there.” In other words, our knowledge of the genesis and growth of an idea is not the last word to be said about the idea. We have still to ask whether it puts us in touch with reality, and the proof that it does is in the extent to which, as William James would say, it helps us to “get about.” Idea at work is idea in process of verification : that much will be willingly conceded to pragmatism. The idea that some men have, therefore, that God has spoken to them, that he has commissioned them, that he has renewed their strength, that he has called them to high endeavor, that he must have the entire control of their lives this idea is not lightly to be brushed aside as being purely self -induced. It is not [ p. 258 ] a question of being dogmatic : it is a question merely of stating the alternatives as the preliminary to a reasonable choice.
The basic facts are undeniable. Religious experience has had the characteristics and has produced the results herein described. These characteristics and results may mean simply that man is the sole creator of the ideas which admittedly have had such transforming power in particular the idea of a Perfect Other with whom partnership is possible. Or they may mean that such a Perfect Other is an absolute and independent fact, whose way of making himself known to men is by means of those desires and ideas and convictions which are fundamental to the religious experience, in part as cause, in part as effect. Because the form under which God is presented to the mind is necessarily an idea, why should it follow that that is all God is an idea ? How else can God be known except as we can be brought to think about him ? Mental activity is the basis of all experience, even of that in which the sense-data are so overwhelming as to seem to leave us no alternative, or of that which is purely instinctive or habitual. Do not the “critical realists” themselves bear us witness at this point, in their contention that the knowledge of any reality involves a mental construct? [41] Religious experience, we are claiming, is under law as much as is any other. That is to say, a definite process is required for arriving at certitude as to God. It is true that the certitude comes through idea, but why may not idea be held to be wedded to fact at this so important place just as well as at places far less important ? .We are not denying that there are plenty [ p. 259 ] of ideas of which men are very sure which yet lack factual reality: we are only saying that there is no factual reality which can be known otherwise than by representation in a mind. Factual realities send out their ambassadors possessed of full plenary powers, and these ambassadors are affections of the mind. That affection of the mind which is the certitude as to God may be entirely misleading : the credentials it presents purporting to bear the divine signature may be forgeries. But, again, they may be genuine. True, they may be badly soiled. The marks of a difficult journey may be on them. But to the question, “Whose superscription is this?” there can be but one answer. Deus hoc fecit. Doubtless^ God infinitely transcends our highest thought of him ; but that our highest thought of him should be only a thought, so that if there were no men to think about him there would be no God to be thought about NO !
The alternatives, then, are these: either the mere idea of a God otherwise nonexistent, or a God actually existing in his own right, and revealing himself in the very process by which men are led to believe in him, and revealing himself also in the manifold results to which the belief leads. “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.”
We conclude that religious experience, like all other valid experience, is not a monologue but a dialogue. It is not only a revelation of something within man : it is also a revelation of something without him. It is not a process whereby man lifts himself: it is a process whereby man is lifted, on condition that he will suffer it. It is the supreme achievement of the divinely conducted dialectic of man’s progress. The [ p. 260 ] lowly beginnings of the experiment are in man’s instinctive efforts to satisfy the most elemental of physical needs. Step by step he is led on, by the same law of “reach and grasp” always desiring that which is higher and better. But the higher implies a Highest, the better implies a Best. At last he sees it. In the heart’s desire for the Highest and Best, and in the mind’s power to adumbrate it, and in the will’s power to pursue it, and in the impulse of his whole nature to respond to it, he sees that Highest and Best self-revealed according to the necessary law of human experience, and knows it for a personal possession. He may “make God in his own image” what else can he do ? but the man intends the image to be not of himself but of Another. And what is significant is not the crudity of the image, so that the Highest is in effect low and the Best is in effect poor not that. What is significant is the fact that man can be so greatly daring as to believe that in the mystery of his own deepest experience there is revealed something of the Primal Beality, and that this Beality is not “it” but “he” that, in one single word, it is GOD.
See Dampier-Whetham, A History of Science, pp. 294-303; H. H. Newman, ed., The Nature of the World and of Man, chap* xiii; Kropotkin, Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution, passim; J. A. Thomson, Concerning Evolution, pp. 117-124, 178-191. For a philosophical interpretation of “the autonomy of life,” see Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, lect. iv, on “The Influence of Biology.” ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Cf. Smuts, Holism and Evolution, chap. ix. ↩︎
See Patten, The Grand Strategy of Evolution, pt. i, chaps, i-iii. ↩︎
Personalism, pp. 179-196; cf. his Philosophy of Theism, chap. v. ↩︎
See Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, vol. ii, bk. iv, chap. i. Cf. Chapter II, note 19, above. ↩︎
See his chapter on “A Struggling God,” in My Idea of God, ed. J. F. Newton, p. 117. ↩︎
The Riddle of the Universe, chap, xv, sect, ii, on “Pantheism.” ↩︎
See The Philosophy of Religion, Eng. trans., par. 55. We could agree with Hoffding that created existence is never finished, but he extends the principle of change to all existence. ↩︎
See Patrick, The World and Its Meaning, pp. 96-103, for the various ways in which this agency has been conceived. ↩︎
Cf. Ward, The Realm of Ends, lect. xx ; J. Y. Simpson, The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature, chap, xvii; Hobhouse, Development and Purpose, pt. ii, chaps, v and vi; Leighton, Man and the Cosmos, bk. v, chaps, xxxvixxxix; Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, lect. xv; Henry Jones, A Faith That Enquires, lect. xiv ; Fulton, Nature [ p. 262 ] and God, chaps, xiii and xv; Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, vol. i, lect. vii. ↩︎
Matthew Arnold, A Summer Night, stanza iv. ↩︎
From the Night of Forebeing, “An Ode After Easter” :
“For all the past, read true, is prophecy, And all the first are hauntings of some Last, And all the springs are flash-lights of one Spring.” ↩︎
Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, first series, pp. 258, 272. ↩︎
See The Idea of the Holy, Eng. trans., chaps, ii-v. ↩︎
Paterson, The Nature of Religion, pp. 98-104. , ↩︎
See Philosophy of Religion, pp. 57-58. ↩︎
Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, vol. i, regards Russell’s essay as “too-much-belauded” (p. 32), and as representing “a desperate way of trying to escape from temporality” (p. 308) . Sellars, Religion Coming of Age, quotes the well-known closing paragraphs of the essay, but doubts if it still expresses Russell’s outlook (p. 157) . ↩︎ ↩︎
See Skeptical Essays, p. 46. Cf., however, The Conquest of Happiness, pp. 108-109. ↩︎
Discourses on Religion. Eng. trans, of the Reden by Oman, pp. 26-27. ↩︎
See Science and the Unseen World, Swarthmore lecture for 1929, pp. 42-48. Cf. the section on “Mystical Religion” in The Nature of the Physical World, pp. 338 342. ↩︎
See Three Essays on Religion, the Essay on “Theism,” pt. iv. ↩︎
Paradise Lost, bk. x. ↩︎
See, the exposition of Hegel in Sterrett, Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, pp. 250ff., the section on the classification of religions. ↩︎
Wordsworth, French Revolution, closing lines. ↩︎
See Sesame and Lilies, lect. i, “Of Kings’ Treasuries,” pars. 19-25. Buskin has a delicious paragraph (in par. 22) on the duties of a bishop as “overseer of the flock.” He writes: “The first thing that a bishop has to do is at least to put himself in a position in which, at any moment, he can obtain the history from childhood of every living soul in his diocese, and of its present state. Down in that back street, Bill and Nancy knocking each other’s teeth out does the bishop know all about it? Has he his eye upon them? Has he had his eye upon them? Can he circumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit of beating Nancy about the head? If he cannot, he is no bishop, though he had a miter as high as Salisbury steeple.” This is part of the exposition of priests as “blind mouths.” ↩︎
See Hugh Eedwood, God in the Slums. Redwood was a London night-editor who in this book gives “the testimony of an ordinary man to the truth of things which for years he thought he disbelieved” (p. 127). ↩︎
Matthew Arnold, Immortality. ↩︎
A Psychological Study of Religion, pp. 272ff. ↩︎
See Foundations of Belief, p. 384 ; also Chapter I, note 2, above. Cf . Von Hfigel, op. cit., the two articles on “Religion and Illusion” and “Religion and Reality.” ↩︎
See Our Knowledge of the External World, pp. 99103. ↩︎
See An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion, pp. 266-267. ↩︎
See The Authority of Christian Experience, p. 36. Strachan’s entire discussion of “The Subjectivity of Religious Experience” (chap, iii), while brief, is judicious and well-informed, and makes full use of the relevant literature. [ p. 264 ] ↩︎
See The Idea of the Holy, Eng. trans., chap. v. ↩︎
Op. tit., vol. i, chap. vi. ↩︎
Op. tit., chap. xlvi. ↩︎
God, p. 29. ↩︎
See Trevor Davis, Spiritual Voices in Modern Literature, for expositions of the spiritual meaning of these two poems. ↩︎
See A Wanderer’s Way, p. 204. ↩︎
See Essays m Critical Realism, art. by C. A. Strong on “The Nature of the Datum.?” Strong holds that “in contemplating the datum” 7 ’ which is admittedly “the logical essence of the real thing” and therefore to some extent a mental construct “we virtually behold the object” (p. 239). ↩︎