| I. OBSTACLES AND HINDRANCES TO CHRISTIAN FAITH IN A NEW AGE | Title page | III. THE TESTIMONY OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE |
When one turns to examine seriously and impartially the essential ground for a disastrous collision between modern science and the foundations of faith in spiritual verities on which religion has flourished in the past, there is surprisingly little basis to account for a collapse or for a shattering of those foundations.
The President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in his presidential address for 1931 calmly stated the sober opinion of the leaders of scientific thought in the words: “Materialism has practically disappeared. The ancient spiritual goods and heirlooms of our race need not be ruthlessly scrapped.” A similar conclusion came from the International Congress of Philosophy held at Oxford in 1930 in the words: “The materialist front has broken up and scientists [are] no longer dominated by the notion that to be real is to be like a piece of matter and to work like a machine.” Professor J. H. Haldane, in his Biology and Wider Knowledge (1931), says: “We are still [ p. 43 ] [ p. 44 ] living in an age which I think our successors will look back upon with curiosity and wonder as an age characterized especially by physical realism — an age strangely blind in some but by no means all respects to what will then appear as an outstanding spiritual reality, and concealing this behind scientific abstractions which it has taken for representations of reality and proceeded to bow down before.”[1] The main trouble is that while the pillar thinkers of the world have seen and announced the bankruptcy of materialism there are hosts of lesser men who go on retailing materialistic theories of the universe to their students and leaving them stranded on the windy waste of speculation. It is the ancient tragedy of continued slaughter on the remoter fronts after the battle has been won and the armistice has been agreed upon by the responsible military chiefs.
As a matter of actual fact what does science undermine and what does it leave untouched? It undermines, or is likely to undermine, conclusions that have been built on primitive superstitions and mythologies. Scientific research slowly eats away these doudland structures of imaginative fancy and they take their place with the beautiful dreams and epics of the race rather than with the solid indispensable realities of life. Such imaginative creations tell us much concerning the nature of man’s mind, but they throw very little light [ p. 45 ] upon the essential realities of the world itself. Primitive theories and child-minded interpretations of the universe and of life must be examined in the light of fuller knowledge and of enlarged collections of facts, and only those theories and interpretations which bear the insignia of tested truth will in the long run abide. Grown-up people must expect to give up those things which belong to the doll-stage and the cradle habits of mankind. Such losses are not tragic; they are cleansing and purifying. It is not seemly to be playing with dolls and ratdes when the dispensation of the fullgrown man has come.
The present unsettlement in religion has in large measure been due to a widespread revolt on the part of young people and others against the unreal and the imm ature features which have survived from earlier times and which are felt to be out of place in a world that is committed to scientific explanations. So much which is heard in the name of religion sounds unreal to them that they easily fly to the 'conclusion that it is all alike words and imaginations.
A little more patience and penetration would convince those who take life seriously that the central realities of religion are unshaken and that only the dead husks and outer shells are being shaken off. What is bound to slough away with the increase of maturity and with the progress of exact knowledge will be those relative and temporal aspects which suit one age, [ p. 46 ] but do not fit the intellectual climate of other times. They may well drop away, as the old dead rustling leaves do when the budding germ at the spring equinox pushes them off with its growing forces operating from behind, or as the tadpole’s tail disappears by being transmuted into new motor organs in the expanding life of the frog. If one can learn to discriminate between the accumulated superfluous additions that have come to seem comfortable and desirable and the consummate jewel of the soul which cannot be bartered without the loss of all that is essential to life itself, then such a person will go bravely on walking in his high places, if he feels assured that the safety of his central treasure is guaranteed.
There has been, no doubt, along with the normal ripening processes, an element of perversity and superficiality in the spirit of revolt which surrounds us. The World War with its aftermath has loosed the moorings and flung groups of young people out into uncharted seas. It is a time of yeast and ferment and there are bound to be bubbles as well as growth. It is impossible to pass through such an unprecedented catastrophe without having the stable order of thought and action affected by it. We need not, however, be too much concerned over temporary caprices and momentary mental fashions. They will pass. The real problems which religion faces to-day are from those deeper currents of maturing thought which reach down to the [ p. 47 ] roots of things. The profoundest alterations of outlook and approach that have occurred have been due to the demonstrative methods of the laboratories. Science has been speaking with enviable authority. It has rolled up an immense total of achievements. It has pushed back the skirts of ignorance at many points and in as many regions it has widened the area of light.
But as its work has progressed in the sky and earth the fact has steadily grown clearer that the exact quantitative scientific method of description and explanation cannot be applied to the entire sphere of reality. There are many aspects of this rich and complex world which cannot be exhaustively interpreted from an outside point of view. When such aspects are known only externally they are only partially comprehended. They are of such a nature that they are incapable of division and analysis and therefore they do not yield to exact description. The mind itself which does the describing and the explaining in every case cannot, for one thing, adequately be dealt with by a method of analysis and external description. There is always something more involved in the nature of mind than can be brought under any system of observation. There is something over and above the bare facts that get caught and [ p. 48 ] presented. The supreme attitudes too o£ a personal min d such, for instance, as conviction of truth, or joy in beauty, or awe in the presence of sublimity, or dedication to goodness for its own sake, or the personal surrender of all selfish interests for the sake of exalted love, are realities of an order quite different from changes in the orbit of a planet or from any movement of masses of matter in space. Any life-forming loyalty is an instance of something real and something dynamic which can be known in its true meaning only from within. When science as a descriptive method of knowledge comes face to face with the facts of religious experience it is utterly incapable of dealing with the essential feature of it. It studies it from the outside as an observable phenomenon, but it misses just the interior attitude of the participant that makes all the difference.
Science can show that certain temporal interpretations of facts and events in religious history are immature and inadequate and need revision. It can demonstrate that events did not happen exactly as earlier interpreters thought they happened and that more factors were involved than were taken into account by primitive observers. No one need be disturbed over later revisions and reinterpretations of early human experience or of primitive man’s observations of his world. It would be very depressing if there were no signs of growth and advance with the process of
the years. If the methods of minute study together with die added range of microscope and telescope and spectroscope brought no new knowledge to the race it would chill us all with discouragement. If the returns of truth were all in before we were bom the nerve of all our strivings would be cut by the time we cut our teeth. We may rejoice and be glad for every achievement that the laboratory can make in the field of knowledge and for every grain of truth which can be added to the accumulated gains of the centuries. We shall be better men and we shall stand more firml y on our feet for every untruth we drop out of our faith and for every superstition we leave behind as we press forward in our quest for reality.
There are, as we have seen, certain severe limitations to the range and scope of the scientific method of knowledge as it has been taken over from physics. It can deal with the facts and events of the visible universe, down to infinitesimal magnitudes and out to cosmic worlds unbelievably remote. Its range in this field seems to have no limits. But it has nothing to say, and can have nothing to say, on the question of ultimate realities of an eternal order which are essential to a spiritual religion, nor, it must be added, can such a scientific method unaided give a completely intelligible explanation of the things which it reports and describes. It cannot deal with ultimate origins or goals. If there are other positive ways of approach to such realities, or if there [ p. 50 ] are inescapable implications of a spiritual order no less real than the visible one, science has no right to close the door to it, and it has no dominion over it.
The exact scientific method in the stria Newtonian sense can have reference only to objeas in space and can carry no weight of authority beyond the frontiers of its proper domain. The most that could be said authoritatively in terms of scientific knowledge either now, or in the future, would be that observed phenomena when explained and interpreted in terms of antecedent causes are bound to conform to a system of natural processes and that this system operates under an unvarying order. To assert that there are no other possible realities of any type in the universe besides those which its method can discover and describe would be an unwarranted dogmatism and would merely indicate that the individual who made the assertion had a determined bent and preference for a world composed entirely of masses of matter in space. A claim of such universal scope as that would run far beyond the range of experiment or of tested experience. It would be construaed in defiance of genuine scientific method since it applies quantitative categories and causal explanations in domains where they have no significance and it fails to take into account all that is involved and implied by life and thought. Too often science in the hands of its crude disciples slides over into pseudo-science and takes the r61e of the old-fashioned [ p. 51 ] dogmatist. Instead of being the carrier of man’s burdens it becomes an intolerable load to be borne, like those travelers in the fable who ended their journey by carrying the beast that should have borne them.
Strict “scientific knowledge” as the expert uses it can be properly applied only to knowledge which rests on the solid basis of observation, experiment, analysis, exact description and discovery of universal aspects which can be formulated as laws. It means, further, explanation in terms of discoverable causes. It is the ideal of science to bring all its facts into a predictable system. That ideal is, however, seldom attained. It is possible of attainment, or of approach to attainment, only in fields of research where the objects that are being studied can be broken up into measurable units, and the wholes can be treated as the mathematical sum of the units or parts. Even in a world reduced to such simplicity as that, where we are busy only with units moving in space at specific velocities, we are still confronted with disturbing mysteries which no science as pure science can solve.
What, for example, is space, in which atoms are said to move? Even more urgent and more baffling, too, is the question, what is time, without which movement, or [ p. 52 ] process, becomes meaningless? What is the ultimate source and nature of energy, which makes movement possible? Why do atoms reveal such striking and unvarying preferences in their linkages with one another? Are molecules, which are composed of different kinds of atoms, nothing more than the sum of parts? Or has something novel and unique happened when a molecule is born? What after all is meant by a cause? “Cause” is a tiny word, often on our tongues. It is astonishing, however, how little we know of the real meaning of this word by which we work such miracles. A good deal of old-fashioned magic attaches to the word. The source of power in a “cause” is as mysterious as Moses’ rod. Does the “cause” push and pull with coercion? Is die sequence between the “cause” and the “effect” “inevitable,” i.e., something that must happen, and if so, what makes it “inevitable”? Where does the dynamic “drive” come from? Or do we perhaps mean by “cause” merely a “statistical account” of what we observe? Or is “cause,” as William James once said, “an altar to an unknown God?” In any case, explanation in terms of a “cause” would compel a consistent thinker to ask what in turn caused the “cause” by which we explain the event. If we are severe and persistent in our search we shall find ourselves carried back in an infinite regress — a cause behind each cause ad infinitum. That method never brings us back to a real first cause. It turns out to be as irradonal an ex- [ p. 53 ] planation of actual events as was the Indian’s famous explanation of what holds up the earth. He began with the supposition of a tortoise on the back of an elephant, the elephant on the back of another elephant, and he ended with elephants all the way down!
This method of “explaining” by causes, which is quite adequate for purposes of control and prediction, is manifestly inadequate and unsatisfactory if we are bent upon finding the ultimate ground of truth and reality. This method of regress leaves the universe hanging loose in mid-air with no final rational support. It becomes “an insubstantial pageant.” It fails to make the universe a completely intelligible affair. On this theory the universe has come from nowhere and it is going nowhere. We are left in the last analysis without an origin, without a rational explanation, and without any significant goal. Both the Alpha and the Omega fade away. It may be that we have such an uncanny universe as that on our hands, but we ought to be perfectly certain that we have sounded out all its possibilities before we resort to such a conclusion.
Beyond all these obvious difficulties there is another fundamental difficulty. Science by its method of external observation finds it necessary to regard the mind of the observer as though it were a disinterested spectator of facts and events, which would go on exactly the same if the spectator were not there. This spectator [ p. 54 ] mind is supposed to report what is there outside itself, like a faithful camera, without altering or coloring in the very least what is presented to it. It should be noted in passing that we are left on this supposition with no origin for the spectator mind, and we are offered no explanation of how such a mind can know facts that are outside itself and foreign to itself.
But when we come to grips with the facts we have no convincing assurance from any source that minds are ever of that spectator sort. It is just possible, as Kant, the major philosopher of the modern world, vigorously maintained, that the mind of the beholder is always a contributing factor, and brings important and essential aspects of construction and interpretation to the scene which it reports. It is a strange “coincidence” or something more, that the mathematical forms and principles of our human min ds, fit, as a glove does to a hand, the mathematical order of the vast system of the universe. We can predict the speeds of electrons and the eclipses of the sun by the same mathematics with which we calculate the amount of our humble grocer’s bill. There are certain “inevitable” forms and axioms of the mind of man to which not only atoms and globules here on earth conform, but even the move- [ p. 55 ] ments of Orion and of the remotest nebula obey the same unalterable forms.
Nobody yet in the long procession of philosophers or scientists has given the least inkling of an explanation of how mind could possibly be produced by matter, or be evolved from it. The latest “explanation” is to say that it has “emerged.” Mind is always presupposed in all explanations. Mind is the prius of all theories and formulations about the universe. There are no “facts or events” about which we can talk or argue, or even imagine that are not facts or events for minds. They are what they are because our minds have already organized and interpreted what was “presented” to us. The belief that objects, outside things and events, fall ready made upon our passive minds, as a seal would stamp wax, and are apprehended precisely as they would be in themselves, if no mind were occupied with them, is as naive a view as was the animism of primitive man. It is another instance of cradleminded credulity.
It requires but little serious reflection to discover that science has no magic key which can unlock all the realms of the universe, or to be convinced that science has no legitimate method by which it could deprive man, if it would, of the reality of the spiritual. If we ever lose our spiritual birthright and fall to a material and secular level it will not be due to the authoritative pronouncements of science. Science has not [ p. 56 ] dosed, and will never dose the soul’s east window of divine surprise. We are built for two kinds of worlds — one a space-time world and one a world of spiritual values — and we can be denizens of either world. We have senses of perception that link us up with the world which sdence describes, and we have just as certainly inlets of connection with a world of beauty, truth, goodness, and love that can be achieved and realized only by our own creative attitudes and activities. The mind is its own kingdom, and can find its own correspondences and relationships. A very little consideration will convince any thoughtful person of the reality of this kingdom of the mind. The taproot of religion is to be found in the nature of the human mind itself, and its true environment which is an order of realities that fits the deepest nature of man’s mind.
Our everyday experience reveals plainly enough to us a stream of thought and interpretation busied with our world of external facts and events. The flow of “thought and interpretation” in the mind of the beholder plainly enough belongs to a different order of reality from that stubborn external realm. The mind of the interpreter is inward and private in a sense in which the so-called “facts and events” are not. The interpretation never can be brought out into the open and looked at in the same way as we observe the facts and events which confront us. The so-called facts and events [ p. 57 ] belong to a world of common group-experience, they are there for a hundred persons to see, they conform to methods of exact description, they can be tested and verified in well-known ways, but the inward, mental interpretation, without which no experience has any meaning or significance, is there for one only. It is private, personal and “windowless” as far as any other beholder is concerned. This private, mental, personal, inner process of interpretation of our external facts and events, the consciousness of meaning and significance which forms our inner life, belongs to a “spiritual order.” It is not made up of shifting masses of matter, nor is it the play of physical energies. It is a process of thought with the incontrovertible feeling attaching to it that belongs to a persistent self. It may very well be a fact that the process of thinking is linked up with physical processes of a brain that is composed of matter, of masses and motions and energies, but thinking in its essential aspects is wholly other than physical processes and can be reduced to nothing but itself. It can be dealt with properly only in terms of what it reveals itself to be, and that is, not in terms of vibrations or impacts, but in terms of ideas and insights and meanings and significance and purpose, all of which are “spiritual” aspects, since they involve mind and can be truly known only from within. But what is known through the private experience of a single individual is capable of test and verification through the [ p. 58 ] experience of others, and our personal convictions thus receive public confirmation.
We cannot have any external world, material or otherwise, without making our own interpretation of the series of facts and events that compose that outside world for us, and the “interpretation” is not one of the “events” that comes from without. It belongs to a different order from the events which we describe as external and material, for if they are “external” and “material,” they are so for us. They are something that can be, and can be known, only where mind is operating. The mind of the observer must all the time be reckoned with as an essential feature in the knowledge of facts and events. What may be granted as seemingly a mere physical fact before the experience occurred is now, through the experience, lifted up, interfused with meaning and brought over into a different order of reality, namely, into a spiritual order. We can think clearly only by means of ideas, which are communicable thoughts, and we can interpret our world to ourselves and to others only through ideas, charged with meaning. The external world is, thus, all the time submitting to the mediation of an inner world which is just as real as the outside one. If we grant, as the commonsense man does, that the physical order has an existence of its own, we must, nevertheless, hold that the world as it is for us, the world that is crammed with meaning and significance, has passed through the alchemy of an [ p. 59 ] interpreting mind which is of another order of level from any kind of material process. There is plenty of ground to give us pause before we rush into unrestricted materialistic and mechanistic theories of the universe taken in its totality. It is forever impossible to crowd all that is real and true and beautiful and good into a mathematically described and causally organized world system. There are many features of the universe which do fit into such a mathematically described and causally explained system. But even so, that kind of a universe is not complete in itself. It is not self-explanatory. It is, as we have seen, a nest of insoluble mysteries. Such a world as that keeps demanding another kind of world to supplement and explain it, a deeper environment which is its ground of being and explanation.
When we move up to higher levels and include in the survey of our universe the processes of life, the scope and range of self-consciousness, the intrinsic nature of beauty, the absolute value of truth, die infinite worth of the good will, the unfathomable aspects of personality and the reality of a type of love which transcends all utilitarian considerations, we are confronted with a nature of things totally unlike that [ p. 60 ] which is presented to us in the best-constructed ‘‘naturalisms/’
Before we undertake to raise the question whether there are realities of a spiritual nature above and beyond ourselves in the universe, it may be best to consider the undeniable spiritual pathways revealed within ourselves. The strange fact confronts us first of all that we who are so seemingly finite, ask, and are bound to ask, ultimate questions. We find it impossible to regard ourselves as chance dust wreaths whirled up from below. We cannot consistently hold that we are bits of the earth’s crust, or curious shapes of cooled star waste. We are haunted with intimations of the infinite and eternal. We live out beyond the bounded and the limited. We ponder on realities which by no stretch of imagination can be thought of as made of dust, even of star dust.
The most significant thing of all in our make-up perhaps is our inescapable faith in the reality of some sort of truth. The completest skepticism that can be imagined always presupposes faith that there is something that can be called truth. If I say in my darkest moments of despair, in my lowest approaches to a dustwreath condition, “there is no truth,” “all is mad error and insane confusion,” even so, I have asserted a universal statement to which I attribute “truth.” My mind has organized a body of facts, and has come to a positive conclusion. In making it, as is always the case with [ p. 61 ] truth, I go far beyond anything that sense experience has reported, or ever could report. There is a downright and absolute aspect to all assertions that belong in the sphere of truth.
In this particular case, my statement is either true or false. Whether it is true or false will eventually be settled by an appeal from the mind in its narrower ranges of the moment to the mind in its more inclusive scope. All experience is an appeal to more experience. If the statement is true, we are then faced with this odd situation that “it is absolutely true that there is no such thing as truth.” In the domain of logic and in the realm of truth the mind falls into self-contradiction when it denies its capacity to know and when it tries to take refuge in mere relativities. We cannot know without knowing that we know. In any case, all assertions of truth or of the impossibilities of truth carry universal implications and involve that strange aspect of logical necessity which we express by it must be so. That carries us far beyond anything a dust wreath could conjure out of its empty hat!
Materialists of ah types and fashions in one breath banish everything spiritual from the universe and in the next breath claim that they know that they know. But knowledge with such ranges of universality and certainty could not possibly be got through senseobservation. There is no “sense” for universality nor is there a “sense” for certainty! There is no way that such [ p. 62 ] knowledge could get stamped in on the brain. Knowledge involves vast coherent mental processes. First of all there is the organization of observed facts, then a comparison of them and a reflection upon them. The min d seizes upon universal implications and makes a judgment of logical necessity. That far-reaching work of interpretation by the mind carries with it the glowing refutation of the claims that are made for materialism. If truth is real the reality of something that is spiritual irresistibly follows.
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington in a radio address from London which was heard throughout the Western world recently made this point clear and vivid. He said that responsibility for truth is a typical manifestation of our spiritual nature. It would be the attribute that would most completely differentiate us from a mechanistic being of the robot type. The robot might have all the outward signs of being a man, but by no stretch of possibility could he get “the inward concern for truth such as I have.” The great scientist then proceeded to draw dais conclusion: “My inmost ego, possessing what I call the inescapable attribute — responsibility for truth — can never be a part of the physical world unless we alter the meaning of the word physical to spiritual, a change hardly to the advantage of clear thinking.” That is the testimony of a major authority in science. He recognizes that the moment one passes over from die domain of atoms and molecules and physical ener- [ p. 63 ] gies — masses of matter in space — and discovers die conviction of truth and the capacity to know that we know, one has found an unmistakable clue to the reality of the spiritual.
Another famous scientist, Sir James Jeans, has heartily backed up this same conclusion. In The Mysterious Universe [2] he says: “To-day there is widespread agreement, which on the physical side of science amounts almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter.”
Our moral imperatives are no less inevitable and no less absolute than our logical or our mathematical certainties. There are moments when we see what ought to be with a conviction as sure as our certainty that things which are equal to one and the same thing are equal to each other. This does not mean that what is right or good in one epoch of human history will always be right and good among all peoples and for all epochs of the ages. It only means that what is “morally” good is “absolutely” good, in the sense that it [ p. 64 ] cannot be reduced to a utilitarian calculation, nor turned over into a profit and loss account. What is good is not discovered to be “good” because it ensures survival. It is not “good” because it promotes “safety.” Persons who talk about moral goodness lightly in these terms of calculation have not felt it in its unique power nor in its most august manifestation. Loyalty to the conviction of ought belongs on the main line of our rationality. It is not an antithesis to reason. It is not a capricious freak of the emotions. It is not an imaginative hope. It is reason at its noblest level. It is one of man’s clearest marks of inherent grandeur.
Kant found in this moral imperative, rooted and grounded in the central structure of mans’ being, a way to the discovery of a world of spiritual reality. He felt that the deepest experiences of his human life carried implications of a central spiritual nature within him that belonged to and partook of a universe of a different order from the one in space and time. Nothing has happened in the hundred and fifty years since Kant dropped his plummet down the moral deeps of man’s inner realm to shake the spiritual foundation of this position. Kant’s lumbering method of arriving at his conclusion is a curiosity of his generation and may be treated as a détour, but his clue to a world not made of atoms is as clear and significant to-day as it was when he first saw that this “imperative ought” in us is loaded with transcendent meaning.
Kant’s emphasis on the moral will did much to exalt [ p. 65 ] the value of human personality. Two of his sayings have become classic. The first one: “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world or even out of it, which can be called good without qu alifi cation, except a good will,” i.e. a mind that can will the good, attributes to man at once a spiritual goal and destiny. The other saying carries in it a universal dignity for man as man: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thy own person, or in that of any other, in every case as an end and never as a means.”
The constant use of men for “cannon fodder” in the Napoleonic wars which followed Kant’s period, and the coming of the factory system and the machine age which have perhaps in the total entailed greater agonies than even war has done, seem to defy the reality of the spiritual order announced in Kant’s great maxims. But the idea that man belongs to a kingdom of ends and not merely to a world of corporeal bulks and magnitudes has never been wholly lost. New theories of man’s origin from lower forms of life would naturally seem to be likely to blur Kant’s noble proclamation, and for some persons it has, no doubt, done so, but on the whole, the estimate of the absolute worth of personality, which Kant raised to a place of primacy over everything else, has gained in standing rather than lost during the intervening years since the death of the Konigsberg philosopher, a hundred and twenty-five years ago.
Some such estimate of the worth of personality lies [ p. 66 ] at the toot of many of the efforts that are being made to eradicate intrenched injustices and wrongs. It is a faith like that which has produced the new sensitiveness of soul for the unnecessary sufferings and ills of humanity. Behind the movements for better care of children, for the liberation of those who toil under insufferable conditions, for sounder methods of correction and punishment of criminals and for a transformed social and economic order, there lie powerful springs of faith in the absolute worth of personality, though they are not always explicit.
There can be little question that this estimate of the intrinsic worth of personality has gained in extent and in power with the flow of years. More persons back that faith with their lives now than was ever the case before. The counter ways of cheapening human life are only too apparent and seem, in a superficial review, to discount the optimism of the above statement. There are waves of banditry and outbreaks of suicide which come as a shock to our serene hopes. Life seems in such instances to count for almost nothing. A crash in the stock market is likely to be the occasion for a number of persons to throw away their lives as though they were not worth having after their visible assets are [ p. 67 ] gone. And the bandit plainly indicates that he considers a handful of money to be of more account than are the lives of those who are the owners or the guardians of the property. There are, furthermore, altogether too many movie-shows and other commercialized forms of entertainment and pleasure which cheapen life and treat persons as only means to be used for the accumulation of desirable gains. In fact, the prevailing drifts and tendencies to treat men as tools ramify far and wide and are unmistakably sinister signs of a low estimate of life.
But in former times such practices have gone alm ost unchallenged and they have had behind them a basic interpretation of life which considered man in his essential nature to be depraved and perverse. Men and even little children were reminded so often that they were “miserable sinners” that it became quite easy and natural to act upon the general supposition and to make that expectation real. It was always true through all the darknesses of faith that Christ had raised the absolute standard of human value, that he had announced that there is no exchange value which can be set upon a person’s life and that every man is a possible child of a divine and loving Father. That stupendous vision of life, however, had sadly waned and had given place to the pessimistic account which dominated Christian thought for many centuries. There has come in our time a rediscovery of Christ’s original [ p. 68 ] estimate of worth which brings Christian faith into harmony with the noblest interpretations of philosophy. Practice always runs behind theory and we need not be surprised to find that men are still far too often treated as though they were “things.”
It is, however, some gain on the dial plate that such cases of treatment bring a profound “shock” to many sensitive souls in nearly every land and that the quickened consciences of a great moral army, which no one can number, are engaged in the fight for the recognition of the absolute worth of personal life. It can be said, further, that there has come to birth in the modern world a remarkable and far-reaching spirit of philanthropic good will which is a powerful spiritual agency. This man’s or that man’s philanthropy may possibly be traced to egoistic motives or to the desire to make a partial remedy for the ills which his business methods produce, or to the wish to lull discontent to sleep with this sop of an opiate, but in spite of all that can be said on the debit side of the account there is a mighty spirit of unselfish generosity abroad in the world that is a revelation both of the nobility in the heart of humanity and of inspiration from a higher source.
The world-wide constructive work of enlightenment and for social amelioration and for the elimination of age-old intrenched evils bring a genuine refreshment to the minds of those who follow the trails of light that lead from the central agencies in Geneva to the ends of the earth.
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That faith in the worth of personality will in the long run tend to restore once more the hope of immortality. The appraisal of life as something worthy of immortality is the first step toward the discovery of solid grounds for the faith that it will be immortal. Cheap and shallow estimates of the worth of life cut away the basis on which any telling argument for the conservation of personality can be built. Let any person who has imaginative powers of contemplation dwell upon the august significance of a life of moral and spiritual adventure, lived in the faith that what ought to be will be, and it will be difficult for him to believe that these lives of ours which have such extraordinary value as ends and goals of life are to share the fate of dust wreaths and corporeal bits of earth’s crust. Religion adds new grounds for this larger hope, as later sections will indicate, but there are implications in the very nature of man’s being and in the moral life itself which are of momentous significance. These basic values of life, which are grounded in man’s essential nature and which are in very truth spiritual realities, form a solid foundation on which religion can be built. If man is a being living in and yet above space and time, partaking at once both of the world of matter and of the world of Spirit, we need not be anxiously concerned over the future of religion. It will be perennial. Auguste Sabatier seemed to many extravagant when he said that “man is incurably religious.” But if what he meant was that the roots of [ p. 70 ] religion are planted deep down in the spiritual nature of man’s inmost being it was not extravagant, it was a well-balanced statement of fact.
But this chapter must not end on such an optimistic note that it leads us to forget the sinister facts which are there and the stubborn squares of black which are as real a part of our checker-board kind of world as the white squares are. The central faith of the chapter, however, is the faith which Phillips Brooks so powerfully preached a generation ago, that in the ultimate nature of things the black squares are on a white background and not the white squares on a black one.
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