Beyond the Crossroads

WE have been much warned of late by earnest persons that we are approaching a crisis in religion. Father Tyrrell wrote a book called Christianity at the Crossroads, in which he said that the church must now choose whether to turn to right or left. Father Figgis, lecturing at Harvard and making his lectures into a book called Civilization at the Crossroads, tells us that we are all going to destruction, the church and the world together.

These forebodings are not peculiar to the fathers; they are shared by the professors. Dr. Shotwell of Columbia says, ‘ We are in the midst of a religious revolution. The old régime of immemorial beliefs and customs is vanishing before our eyes. Faiths so old that they come to us from the prehistoric world are yielding to the discoveries of yesterday. Institutions that have embodied these faiths and held the allegiance of the civilized world arc now crumbling to pieces or transforming themselves wherever the new forces of the revolution touch and penetrate. The authority of our venerable orthodoxies, seemingly so securely centred in inspiration and once so emphatically asserted in creeds, is now assailed from within and without. We are reconstructing, — and so on, and so on. Dr. Shotwell’s book is entitled The Religious Revolution of To-day.¹ It is an interesting description of an ebb tide.

The ebb tide, however, is not an alarming phenomenon. The tide ebbs every day, but the sea returns to its strength when the morning appears. As for crossroads, it is true that we need to be circumspect in the sparsely settled country, for if we make a wrong turn we may go a considerable distance out of our way before we discover that we are in error. But the nearer we approach to centres of population, the less important are the crossroads. In the city, they appear with commonplace punctuality at the end of every block. We become accustomed to them. Indeed, we perceive that the crossroads do not compel us to make a choice between the right and the left. For the most part, our natural course is to go straight on, beyond the crossroads.

It is true that we live in the portentous presence of a crisis; but so did our grandfathers, and their grandfathers; so did Luther, so did Augustine, so did Paul, so did Adam and Eve. The world has come to an end a hundred thousand times since it began. The sun has been turned into darkness and the moon into blood over and over again.

In his History of Religions,² Professor Moore recalls the despondency of Hesiod. ‘Hesiod,’ he says, ‘paints a sombre picture of the degeneracy of his time. Age by age, from the beginning, the world has grown worse. On the golden age with which human history began followed one of silver, and on that the age of bronze; the present is the iron age, and the decadence is still in progress.’ Hesiod laid the blame on Prometheus, who lighted the first forge in the first factory.

It is instructive and encouraging to read the pages in which Dr. Bacon, in his History of American Christianity, describes the ‘low tide in religion’ a hundred years ago, Yale College, in 1795, was ‘in a most ungodly state. The college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were sceptical. That was the day of the infidelity of the Tom Paine school. The total membership of the Methodist Church for three years ending in 1796, ‘diminished at the rate of about four thousand a year.’ The Presbyterian General Assembly of 1798 perceived ‘with pain and fearful apprehension a general dereliction of religious principles and practice among our fellow citizens, a visible and prevailing impiety and contempt for the laws and institutions of religion, and an abounding infidelity. The profligacy and corruption of the public morals have advanced with a progress proportionate to our declension in religion.’ At the same time, Bishop Madison of Virginia agreed with Chief Justice Marshall that the Episcopal Church was too far gone ever to be revived.

Christianity had passed these crossroads, and with a long breath of relief and a sigh of thanksgiving was jogging comfortably along over a highway paved with uncriticized assumptions, when Charles Darwin undertook to repair the road. His method was extraordinary. He broke the dam which had been laboriously constructed, like the road, with square blocks of uncriticised assumptions, and let loose the flood. Mr. Talbot, in his contribution to the book called Foundations,³ recalls ‘the swirl of the waters, whether of dogmatic and agnostic science, or of uncritical Bible criticism, as they rushed through the formerly impenetrable bulwarks of Victorian religion.’

To the uninformed observer, who has not seen the plans, and has no intelligent knowledge of the processes, construction in its earlier stages looks like destruction. He cannot tell the difference. He laments the old, well-ordered street, now dug into, torn asunder, strewn with broken stone, attacked by fierce engines breathing out steam and flame, and bearing no longer the least resemblance to a road: none may pass that way. Mr. Talbot quotes from Mr. Bertrand Russell a description of an intellectual street in that condition. ‘That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.’

The people who rise from the reading of the latest book with the conviction that Christianity is now discredited forever, ought to consult history. They may there learn how many books the Christian religion has quietly outlived, how many invasions it has survived, how many crossroads it has passed. The seriousness of the situation has been profound; and the wise and good did well to confront it ‘with pain.’ When, however, to this perfectly proper pain they added ‘fearful apprehension,’ they exceeded the necessities of the occasion.

The history of religion, as Dr. Moore recounts it, shows indeed that some religions have died; but it shows that these religions died of isolation and inactivity. The Egyptians, for example, had brought their religious system to perfection; they had completed it. Being thus completed, it died, according to the order of nature; having ceased to grow, it no longer responded to changes in the environment. The salvation of religion is new ideas, as the salvation of nations is new blood. Life is continually renewed, in religion as in humanity, by the necessary effort to make adjustment to changed conditions.

Thus, Professor Myres, in The Dawn of History,⁴ shows how civilization began in the grasslands of Northern Arabia and southern Russia, and was forced into further development by lack of rain. The famished tribes had to get out. They made their way to the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, and to the islands of the Ægean Sea. There they met new conditions, and grew in strength and wisdom by contending with them and conforming to them. Of course, they hated drought, as the orthodox hate doubt . But it was their salvation.

Similarly, the crisis is essential to the good health of religion. Religion needs the exercise which is taken by walking regularly and briskly in the direction of the crossroads. In every generation, the heretics, the nonconformists, the dissenters, the unbelievers, save the church. They save it by calling attention to the fact that religion is not properly responding to the present situation; it is not answering the new questions, or keeping pace with the new movements, or employing the new methods, or taking account of the new ideas. Religion would settle down satisfied in the grasslands. Then comes criticism and forces it out; as the race has been forced by drought, or invasion, or by the pressure of increasing problems, from the grasslands to the great rivers, from the rivers to the inland sea, and from the sea to the wide oceans, Atlantic and Pacific.

The present situation is admirably stated by Professor Gerald B. Smith in his Social Idealism and the Changing Theology.⁵ It is the best book of the past year for the information of perplexed persons who perceive that something is happening in the theological world, but do not quite understand what it is. Dr. Smith says that a part of the difficulty is in the fact that, to a great extent, the language, and, to a less extent the thought, of religion are still in terms of the eschatological theory of the world. According to that theory, the world is coming to a speedy end, the earth with all that is in it is likely to be burned up at any moment, and heaven and hell shall take its place. Such a theory lingers in the hymn-book, finds expression in the idea that the most important thing to do is not to improve the world but to save the individual soul, and requests the preacher to confine himself to ‘the gospel’ — meaning that his proper business is not with social betterment but with individual salvation.

Thus we stand at the eschatological crossroads. Science, society, humanity, all the forces of modern progress, are turning in one direction, along the way whose signboard declares that this present world is likely to last a long time, and that man’s mission is to improve it. If the church takes the other turn, it will lose many of its strongest workers till it comes back and joins them at their work.

Another part of the present difficulty in religion is in the fact that churchmen arc still inclined to attach an overvaluation to authority. They may not agree with Tertullian, who ‘ could triumphantly declare that a rational absurdity was really a positive reason for believing a doctrine to be true, if only it rested on revelation’; or with Gregory the Great, who ‘declared that there is no merit in believing what can be rationally proved; only when, on the basis of authority, one holds to be true something which his natural reason does not validate, is there any moral value in the belief. Nevertheless, in religion a place is given to authority which is no longer accorded to it in science. Religion uses the deductive, science the inductive process.

To many people, this distinction is without significance. They are quite content to take truth at the hands of authority. In the nature of things, independent thinkers are few in number. Most men and women get their ideas at second hand. The situation is one which justifies authority as a pedagogical method. There is a diflerence, however, between the authority which assists and the authority which compels. Mr. Rawlinson, in his essay in Foundations on ‘The Principle of Authority,’ holds that the popular antagonism between the religion of authority and the religion of the spirit arises from a misunderstanding of the idea of authority. It confuses it with infallibility and with the disposition which logically ensues. Authority, as he says, is properly the pronouncement of ‘authorities’; that is, of those who by learning and experience are experts — in art, in medicine, in law, in science, in theology. It depends for its value upon the wisdom of the authorities; upon the sages, who are no more infallible than the saints are impeccable. Authority brings us our inheritance from the past, and is the basis of progress as grammar is the basis of language, and is thus the necessary guide of beginners; but it must be subject to revision.

The fact must never be forgotten that there are those whose independent minds, original ideas, and equipment for discovery, forbid them to submit to the dictation of authority. There are proud souls who hate ‘authority as they hate ‘charity.’ They resent it. Nothing is further from their desire than that they should be given any truth which they have not earned. They are intellectual democrats who will not submit to the paternalism of a spiritual aristocracy. They believe in the superiority of the present to the past. It is not necessary to prove to them that they know more than Thomas Aquinas ever dreamed of: they admit it. When they see that theology begins with conclusions, and estimates the value of intellectual exploration by its agreement with propositions that were established before the exploration began, they understand that it is separated from science by a whole diameter of being.

Again we are at the crossroads. However it may be with many persons, it is certain that men of science, intellectual leaders, and most men and women of letters, readers of books, teachers in colleges, are turning in the direction whose signboard declares that investigation comes first and the announcement of results afterwards: facts first, then principles. If any Christians are taking the other way, and are still insisting on estimating the work of scholars not by the correctness of their methods but by the character of their results, then every mile of the journey parts them so much further from the best thought of their time.

It may be this modern preference for having the conclusion at the end rather than at the beginning which makes such good books as Worsley’s Theologyof the Church of England⁶ and Briggs’s Fundamental Christian Faith ⁷ somewhat hard to read. They deal with matters of cardinal importance, and speak in the spirit of uncompromising conviction; they are perfectly safe books. But we have so perverted our taste by reading books of theological adventure that we are tempted to regard safety as a defect. The road is too straight and smooth and well policed. As we begin to ride over it we lean back and shut our eyes, knowing that there will now be nothing new to see, nothing strange or startling, for twice three hundred pages. We confess with shame that we miss the pleasant uncertainty of the crossroads. The conversation of these excellent companions is most improving, but we cannot deny that we are more interested in the foolish talk of the heretics.

The heretics say things which we never thought of before. They exercise our minds. When Dr. Briggs says, ‘The Apostles and their associat es were endowed by the Holy Spirit with charisms suited to their commissions by theophanic manifestations on the Day of Pentecost,’we do not feel ourselves st imulated. If we accept t he statement, we accept it passively, at the hands of authority. Then we find ourselves turning with a quickened interest to Dr. Thorburn’s book, Jesus the Christ, Mythical or Historical ?⁸ and to Dr. Loofs’ lect ures, What is the Truth about Jesus Christ ? ⁹ knowing that in their pages we shall meet the best of bad company. Of course, Dr. Thorburn and Dr. Loofs are themselves excellently orthodox, and their intention is to demolish heresy; but in their debates they tell us what the heretics say. We learn how Mr. J. M. Robertson ‘believes that the Jesus of the Gospels was practically identical with an old Ephraimite sun-god named Joshua’; and how Mr. P. Jensen maintains that Jesus was ‘a reproduction of one (or possibly more) of the heroes of the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic’; and how Mr. A. Drews has discovered that Paul invented the idea of Jesus by combining several pre-Christian cults with several pagan nature-myths. It is true that we look up from these books with a guilty feeling, as if we had been reading Alice in Wonderland when we ought to have been improving our mind. But the fact remains that this irresponsible sort of writing is interesting.

Both the interest and the profit are increased when the critic is able to show the reader how the sermon sounds when it falls upon indifferent or unsympathetic or uninstructed ears. Mr. Fielding-Hall, in The World Soul¹⁰ tells us what it meant to him when he was a lad. ’A God all-powerful, all-wise, allloving made the world, no one knows for why. It is a failure, full of misery, sin and suffering. So he sent his Son to save it by his blood, because God had to be propitiated for the sin of his own creation. Jesus was born of miracle, lived in miracle, died in miracle, a denial of God’s own rule of law. He taught that the world is evil, and we must escape from it. We must be innocent and pure, abjure the world, and wrhen we die those who succeed will go to heaven to live forever uselessly, because t hey are unfit for any work, and there is no work to do. The majority will burn in hell.’ Mr. Fielding-HaH adds, ‘I did not believe a word of it.’

There is always that consolation. When Christianity is misrepresented there will always be hearers who will know better. Unhappily, some of them will identify Christianity with the passing exposition of the local preacher, and will imagine that because they know better than the preacher they know better than Christianity. It must have been a good many years ago that the author of The World Soul heard the queer sermons from which his youthful mind revolted. Recently he has been reading the Gospels. The World Soul is an informal commentary upon them, full of odd little revolts and attacks, full of the innocent ignorances of one who is unread in the literature of his subject, but full also of fine emotion and clear insight, and of excellent conclusions reached by difficult crossroads: he might have got there more comfortably by following the old thoroughfare.

Sometimes Mr. Fielding-Hall’s path to a conclusion is so straight and heedless of obstacles that the reader who follows him arrives breathless. He says, ‘Prayer means obtaining by begging; that is the only meaning it has.’ He admits that there are other alleged meanings. ‘ It has been obvious that by begging, humiliating yourself, or flattery, you only degrade yourself for nothing; and therefore, to justify prayer, the qualities of aspiration, self-concentration, and thought have been added.’ But he insists that ‘prayer means obtaining by begging, and that only.’ This will interest the saints, who know by experience what prayer is; and it will interest the philosophers also, who know that they can prove that blue is yellow, if only they may be permitted to make their own definitions.

Mr. Fielding-Hall, who finds the true life of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel only, says that it was written by the apostle Philip. Does not the author speak of himself as ' the disciple whom Jesus loved?’ And does not Philip mean ‘Beloved?’ Mr. Fielding-Hall, who is as good at etymology as he is at definition, says that it does. It is mighty pleasant in these days of technical and specialized scholarship to see this brother suddenly fling open the door into the room where quiet students are working on the Johannine problem, and call out in a round, bold voice this entirely foolish information.

Whether the Fourth Gospel was written by St. Philip, or by St. Simon and St. Jude, matters not to Dr. Martin, whose Life of Jesus¹¹ depends on Matthew, Mark, and Luke. From these Gospels he omits the nativity stories and the resurrection stories and thus finds in them an entirely human hero. At the same time, he very justly reprobates the ‘shallow criticism which fancies that it has revealed the total truth about these stories when it has stigmatized them “the worthless product of an age steeped in superstition.’” Dr. Martin recognizes with gratitude their ‘imperishable worth,’ and perceives that they are ‘testimonies to the transcendent qualities of Jesus’ character and life.’ Thus the account of the temptation, which Dr. Martin calls ‘a weird, fanciful story, sketched with fine imaginative power and artistic skill,’ testifies to ‘ the spiritual greatness of Jesus, for of no average, ordinary man would such a story have been told.’ He quotes the saying of Aristotle that ‘there is a truth of art which means vastly more than the truth of mere history.’

Of this truth, however, Dr. Martin’s book contains no satisfying statement. In what the ‘spiritual greatness’ of Jesus consisted, he does not say. The critical processes are skillfully conducted, in a reverent spirit, and with careful regard to the susceptibilities of the gentle reader, but they are not constructive. At the end one is at a loss to account, on these grounds, for the position of Christ in the history of religion and in the hearts of Christians.

Of course, as Dr. Martin says, he is dealing with his great theme ‘in the light of the higher criticism.’ This is quite different, both in its methods and in its results, from the interpretation of Jesus in the light of spiritual experience. The difference is evident as one turns the pages of Miss Underhill’s The Mystic Way.¹² The whole atmosphere is changed. Incidents which Dr. Martin examines from the point of view of historicity or probability are here illuminated by illustrations from the lives of the saints.

Take for example the transfiguration. As Jesus prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistening. So, one time, St. Francis was ‘beheld praying by night, his hands stretched out after the manner of a cross, his whole body uplifted from the earth and wrapped in a shining cloud.’ So Ana de la Encarnacion, stationed at the door of St. Teresa’s cell in case she wanted anything, saw ‘her face illuminated by a glorious light, which gave forth a splendor like rays of gold.’ Miss Underhill compares these appearances with ‘the aura, which the abnormally extended vision of many “ psychics” perceives as a luminous cloud of greater or less brilliance surrounding the human body; which varies in extent and intensity with the vitality of the individual, and which they often report as shining with a white or golden glory about those who live an exceptionally holy life.’

From his baptism to his resurrection, the life of Jesus is presented in Miss Underhill’s book as the perfect, example of the ‘Mystic Way.’ From the initial vision and audition, through discipline of strife in solitude, through transfiguration in prayer, by the joy of the freedom of complete self-sacrifice, to the supreme beatitude of union with God, the mystic follows in the footsteps of Him whose ‘ peculiar province was to exhibit human life at its height and fullness, as the perfect fusion of the “natural” and the “divine.”’

One difficulty in the way of interpreting the life of the Son of Man and the lives of the sons of men in terms of mysticism is that this is an esoteric doctrine. The mystical experience, like the temperament in which it is developed, belongs to a few choice spirits, who are able to communicate it to those only who are of a like mind and soul. Another difficulty is that the mystical experience is individual, not social. The Christian doctrine of life, as Professor Royce says in The Problem of Christianity,¹³ is an essentially social doctrine. He finds the heart of the Christian religion in what he calls the ‘beloved community.’ Loyalty to this community, he says is the characteristic and distinctive Christian quality. It is the chief duty of man.

In the light of this loyalty, Dr. Royce understands the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. He embodied the spirit of the Christian community. ’The mystery of loyalty is the mystery of the incarnation. According to the mind of the early church, one individual had solved that mystery for all men. He had risen from the shameful death that, for Christianity, as for its greatest, rival, Buddhism, is not only the inevitable but the just doom of whoever is born on the natural level of the human individual;— he had ascended to the level of the spirit, and had become, in the belief of the faithful, the spirit of a community whose boundaries were coextensive with the world, and of whose dominion there was to be no end.’

Also, in the light of the idea of loyalty, Professor Royce understands the doctrine of the atonement. The heart of sin is disloyalty to the community. The sinner is a traitor. What he needs for his redemption is not only a consciousness of his wrongdoing and a sense of repentance, by reason of which his neighbors may forgive him, and God may forgive him, but a perception of the unexpected and blessed fact that his sin has occasioned an answering deed whereby the world is better than it would have been had not his sin called forth that deed. Thus he is able to forgive himself. ‘Be not grieved,’ says Joseph, ‘nor angry with yourselves that ye sold me hither, for God did send me before you to preserve life.’ Thus Christ died for our sins. ‘Christian feeling, Christian art, Christian worship,’ says Professor Royce, ‘have been full of the sense that somehow (but how has remained a mystery) there was something so precious about the work of Christ, something so divinely wise (so skillful and divinely beautiful?) about the plan of salvation, — that as a result of all this, after Christ’s work was done, the world as a whole was a nobler and richer and worthier creation than it would have been if Adam had not sinned. This, I insist, has always been felt to be the sense of the atoning work which faith has attributed to Christ.’

Professor Royce, in the spirit of the ideal philosopher whose concern is solely for the truth, notes in his preface the criticism of ‘a distinguished authority upon Christology ’ who objected that as a matter of fact the ‘ beloved community’ was not its own creator but was founded by Jesus Christ. ‘Must it not have been Jesus Himself, and not the community — not the Church — which is the central source of Christianity? Otherwise does not your theory hang in the air? But if the founder really created this community and its loyalty, does not the whole meaning of the Christian religion once more centre in the founder, in his life, and in his person?’ Dr. Royce replies that ‘the historical evidence at hand is insufficient to tell us how the Church originated.’

But the criticism stays in the reader’s mind. After all is said, he feels that he is being led across a bridge which has no safe connection with either bank. It begins without a clear connection with history; for the idea of the beloved community, to which St. Paul attached such value, came but slowly into the general Christian consciousness. And it ends without clear connection with practical life; for the beloved community is found at last to be the human race. Our allegiance to it does not summon us to be members of any church.

It was also foreseen by Professor Royce that Dr. Mackintosh, whose book The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ¹⁴ appeared while he was preparing his lectures, might like to ask a question: ‘ Is the fragment of traditional Christian doctrine which, in your own way, you interpret and defend, worthy to be called a religion at all? And, if it is a religion, is this religion Christian?’ Dr. Royce replies that he does not greatly care what it is called; but the question remains, and the reader asks it as he goes from page to page. ‘When Hegel,’ says Dr. Mackintosh, ‘has waved his wand, and uttered his dialectical and all-decisive formula, a change comes over the spirit of the believer’s dream; everything appears to be as Christian as before, yet instinctively we are aware that nothing specifically Christian is left.’ Dr. Royce’s wand seems to effect a like transformation.

Principal Selbiein his study of Schleiermacher¹⁵ quotes from an interpreter of that great theologian who says, ‘ Moses may be taken from Judaism, and the Law remains; Mahomet may be taken from Islam, and the pious Moslem can still practice his accustomed ceremonies. But to sever Christ from Christianity, even in thought, is an impossibility.’ This idea of the impossible was formed before the publication of The Problem of Christianity. And yet this book, in which Christianity and Christ are nominally severed, is as Christian, page after page, as the meditations of the saints.

Professor Royce is profoundly aware of the approach of a crisis in religion. His book is a sign of it, and is intended to be a help in its perplexities. What changes the contemporary crisis may effect in the institutions and formulas of the church nobody knows. It is safe to say, however, that the crisis will be as gradual as most such crises are, — for a good while the observer is doubtful whether the tide is going out or coming in; also, that it will hardly make more serious difference in our ways of thinking than was made by the publication, in 1859, of the Origin of Species; also, that, through all the changes, we shall come into a wider future, into an increase of righteousness and truth.

‘The Kingdom of Heaven is still at hand,’ says Dr. Royce, ‘in precisely the sense in which every temporal happening is, in its own way, and, according to its special significance, a prophecy of the triumph of the spirit, and a revelation of the everlasting nearness of the insight which interprets, and of the victory which overcomes the w’orld.’