My Religion--Retrospect and Arrival

I

THE editor of the Atlantic Monthly has asked me to describe the pathway by which I have reached Christian faith. The invitation is at once a challenge and an opportunity. It is hard to compress into short space the experience of a lifetime. Moreover, intuitions and arguments which appeal to one man may have little meaning for others, and my approach to religion may satisfy no one but myself. Yet, if faith means anything to me, I want it to mean something to others.

I may describe myself as by turn an agnostic, a skeptic, a believer in an anthropomorphic God; a student of the history of religion, interested in all world religions which seek to frame a philosophy of the good life. I am a doubter and a dogmatist, a sinner and a saint, an ardent Catholic and a Protestant of the deepest dye, a Modernist and a Fundamentalist, a Bible Christian, yet one who cannot accept the Bible as infallible, while believing nevertheless that it ‘contains all things necessary to salvation’; always a seeker after God — a seeker who thinks he has found. Perhaps I stand where I am because I have the ‘will to believe.’ This may sound like a confession that one comes to faith because he wants its power, peace, and comfort, and grasps at any straw to get what he desires. That, however, is not what William

James meant by the phrase. Some things are, from their nature, not provable, yet we feel we must decide; we do so on grounds that appeal to us, though not necessarily to others. And, at any rate, too many have cultivated the will not to believe.

I am not a deep theologian; a practical man of affairs hardly has time for close study and is not naturally attracted by an examination into the meticulously discriminating statement of doctrine. I am not a philosopher. I know comparatively little of science; but the difficulties it raises have seeped into my mind as into the minds of thousands of other people who have less knowledge than myself. I am just an ordinary person who tries to make the most of the knowledge he has. Plain, everyday people have two characteristics: first, some questions they settle in a homely, common-sense way, without full knowledge; second, on other matters, especially those involving settled convictions, they are like the people of Missouri — they have to be shown. Let me explain, therefore, what I mean by some of my religious attitudes listed above.

II

I have confessed to skepticism. It seems to me that ever since childhood I have been puzzled by problems of faith. There is in my mind a picture of a small boy, sitting in church with his mother, somewhat restless, but rather more attentive than most small boys and listening when the clergyman read the Scriptures as one seldom hears them read now; listening, often, with a puzzled mind, because he had been taught at home that the Bible was the Word of God. One Sunday morning fierce doubts assailed him. The lesson was the story of the beginnings of the national life of the Israelites, and he heard of Moses and his work in Egypt and how ‘the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart,’ so that he would not let the people go. What did that mean? Was n’t it unjust? Why should God punish the people of Egypt for what their king did? And why should He punish Pharaoh for doing what he could not keep from doing because God Himself had hardened him?

It was not till years after that the boy heard any explanation, and then it was not altogether satisfactory. It was years more before the boy grew to an age when he learned of a £ new ’Bible — not the old one which was supposed to be an inspired manual of science, a divinely dictated handbook of history, an infallible guide in morals; not a Book, but a library of books; the record of the gradual growth of a people in morals and an evolution in their idea of God; the story of a company of ‘incorrigible optimists,’ prophets who kept on believing in God no matter how hardly He allowed them to be treated; of a people who thought of Him, at first, only as a tribal deity, to be worshiped on their own soil, one whom they placed ‘above other gods’; then thought of Him as the God of the whole earth, who held all nations in the hollow of His hand; then as the Creator of all things; then as the Moral Governor of the world He had created; then demanding of His servants, not merely ritual sacrifices, but moral conduct — ‘to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly’; then as a loving God; finally as the High and Holy One who inhabiteth eternity, whose will is ‘Be ye holy, for I am holy’; reaching a climax in the theme of the New Testament, where God is the Heavenly Father.

The book which tells the story of this moral growth, the young man learned, was written by all sorts of people: poets, preachers, ecclesiastics, great national leaders, members of the king’s cabinet, world-weary old men, scholars and unschooled, mystics and hard-headed literalists — every manner of man writing literature of every sort: myth and legend and folklore, poetry, prose, and drama, philosophy of a sort, history as they knew it, history as some of them wanted it interpreted, moral codes, liturgical manuals, a poem dealing with the problem of evil, parabolic stories like the Book of Jonah, a romance of passionate and faithful love, sermons of great preachers of social righteousness, and, running through it all, the one increasing purpose, till ‘ in the fulness of time ’ God was to send His Son.

The ‘new’ Bible was far more interesting than the young man had ever found the old to be. The naive idea that all the Bible was equally valuable passed into a conviction that there were ‘mistakes’ in the sacred literature; sometimes bad morals. The young man had to modify the early teaching explaining its inspiration; yet, despite its mistakes, its limitations, its blunderings and defects, no other book seemed quite like it; one could gather from it wonderful passages which speak to the heart as does no other ‘bible’ of any other religion, all leading up to the high level of the New Testament — which also is not free from human error, yet gives a picture of God never to be excelled. The amazing thing about the Old Testament is that from such beginnings it progressed to such a conclusion. Other religions have their sacred books; but the Hebrew Scriptures were unique in this advance.

As the years went on, the man had to modify other ideas of which he grew skeptical. He was always in difficulties about something he had to unlearn. Of course, it was not merely a question of the inspiration of the writers of the Bible; it was a question as to whether the whole idea of God finally arrived at in the Bible was a real revelation or only the best that men could arrive at by their own thinking. Was an honest God only the noblest work of man? Or should we put it, ‘God made man in his own image, and man returned the compliment’? That question the young man tackled later, just as he tried to see through other skepticisms.

III

Meanwhile, he had more troubles. He was not only a skeptic, but an agnostic. There were many things he did not know, felt he never could know, only gradually grew content not to know. For at first he was not content. There was a time when he seemed to be the first man who had ever faced the fact of sin, suffering, and sorrow. Why did not God, if there be a God, make the world good and keep it good? It was not merely a question of human suffering and sorrow. Something was wrong with this great machine universe. Earthquake, fire, hurricane, and flood; deluge or drought; torrid heat or arctic cold — what did they mean? Nature is indeed, only too often, ‘red in tooth and claw.’ Beasts fight with beasts; then men fight the beasts; men fight with men; now men fight germs.

There was always this problem of evil. Plain people, however, cannot believe the universe uncreated, or without moral governance, nor could this plain man. He postulated a Will and Intelligence behind the universe. But was there a Divine Person with whom he could have acquaintance? And a Supreme Good? A God of Love? Like George Tyrrell, he felt that ‘to believe that this machine world, with all its seemingly blind fatalities, comes from God, and lies in God, and that somehow all things work together for good — that means faith in long trousers; all else is faith in knickerbockers.’

So there were things about which he was compelled to confess his ignorance and yet eventually be content to remain in ignorance. For there must be in God that which corresponds to, yet infinitely transcends, the greatest thing we know in life — human personality. The gift cannot be greater than the Giver.

Perhaps our bodies derive from some prehuman type of life; perhaps our brains are but refinements of elementary nerve ganglia that used to respond, automatically, to the necessity for food and shelter; perhaps all romantic literature is but an elaboration of the animal’s urge to reproduce itself. But, assuming a physical evolution, biology has no explanation of human personality. Why not the explanation of religion, that (in the quaint phrase of the creation poem in Genesis) ‘God made man in His own image’? We have but sought to find what is best in ourselves, and we feel that the best in us must be the reflection of the Supreme Good. How can we think about God at all unless we think along the line of things we already know?

Of course, God is not as convincing as a stab of pain, nor as obvious as a lovely sunset; but, despite all that shrieks denial, the question persisted: Whence came our own love, pity, compassion, our own perception of truth, our response to beauty, our admiration of goodness, our passion for justice? Because there is the sense of right and wrong in ourselves, we believe in God’s goodness. The morals of mankind may often be crude; morality may seem at times to have a utilitarian basis; yet there is something still to be explained, and the explanation carries us back to the same source from which comes our own personality. Conscience also is of God. The world does not become progressively moral just because morality is the best policy. Nor are our moral judgments just tricks of nature to induce the individual to sacrifice himself for the good of the race. I might not be able to prove to the man who robs goodness of any deep reality that he is wrong, but he could not make me believe that the difference between Herod and Jesus is that Ilerod was clever enough to follow only selfish ends. Our goodness is a reflection of God’s — broken, distorted, defective, ‘seen in a glass darkly’; but good, nevertheless, and the pledge of that Perfect Goodness for which our goodness craves.

IV

Faith in God, then, — a personal God of Love, — is not a matter of positive proof. Faith is the ability to take hold of things which from their very nature cannot be fully proved or wholly understood. The young man who was an agnostic made the experiment of faith. He tried it out. It worked. It still works. Whenever he tries hard to get near to God, he finds life taking on radiance and glow. Nothing will convince him that this experience is merely a psychological reaction to his own ‘wish-thought.’ The certainty comes at times of fullest surrender; the doubt comes when he is not quite ready to make the surrender. His belief is strongest when his wall is set to accept the highest and best and follow it at whatever cost.

Perhaps, then, the plain man who finds God in experiment and experience is but walking the path of the great mystics, seers, and prophets who have testified that their religious experience is first-hand and real; that, seeking God, they discover that God also is seeking them. There are other hypotheses, but, for the seeker who has found what he sought, this clinches the matter. ‘Religious knowledge,’ says Dr. Frederick Grant in his New Horizons of the Christian Faith, ‘is not just an inference from religious experience, nor is it merely hypothesis; it is itself given in experience.’

So (returning to the first person singular) there is in me at times something of the Quaker. I have my ‘quiet times.’ I must cultivate the faculties by which spiritual things may be apprehended. The poet or the artist uses faculties other than scientific in the discovery of the beautiful.

This explains what I find of value in the Eastern religions: they place an emphasis on meditation which we Westerners sadly overlook, whereas we engage in increasing activities to avoid the pains of solitude or hard thinking, or fear the boredom or the danger of being left alone. Only — my meditation has its practical side. I want not merely to realize God through an act of worshipful recollection; I want to realize Him that I may know what He would have me do. And, when I try to do His will, assurance becomes doubly sure.

V

The time came when the man who had been a skeptic began to deal with other skeptics. It has been his experience that thoughtful men who are willing to speak out loud about their difficulties now emphasize the problem raised by the scientific demonstration of an expanding universe. They balk at the attempt to reconcile the power of a God great enough to have created galaxies with the thought of one tender enough to have a particular, personal interest in the individual. The everyday man feels the difficulty as sharply as the intellectual. It brings him to a sudden sense of the seeming futility of human affairs.

Years ago I was spending a vacation on the coast of Maine, my companions being a research physician, a geologist, and a professor of astronomy. They talked much of the age of the cliffs we climbed, of the sea life we examined under the physician’s microscope, of the vast interstellar spaces. We had as our guide, philosopher, fisherman, and friend a man who listened to such conversation with staring eyes. It was the year of a presidential election, the one in which William Jennings Bryan was making his last desperate effort to become President. Maine was a rockribbed Republican state. By and by our Maine friend began to ask questions. Were the rocks that old? Were we descended, so to speak, from sea worms? Was the universe so unutterably big? When all had been explained, he sighed heavily and spake his mind. ‘Well,’ he said, ’I guess it won’t make a powerful lot of difference even if William Jennings Bryan is elected.’

This sense of the insignificance of our little life lies back in the heads of many whose knowledge of science is fragmentary and inaccurate. It comes to them as a new and startling difficulty.

Yet it is actually no new thing. The Isaiah of the exile felt it when he spoke of the nations as ‘a drop in the bucket,’ ‘the small dust of the balance,’ to be ‘counted as less than nothing and vanity.’ The contrast between the geocentric universe he knew and the staggering conception of James Jeans does not alter the problems. In contrast with either universe, humanity is ‘a very little thing.’ Astronomically speaking, man is negligible. Yet the answer this seeker found seemed pertinent: ‘Astronomically speaking, man is the astronomer.‘ And he embodies values, houses potentialities, beside which even Arcturus, whose rays lighted the Century of Progress, is meaningless and sterile. What about the men who harnessed its light?

‘I speak as a fool’; yet I felt I had found here a seed thought. Greatness delights to do little things exquisitely, and there need be no contradiction between the might of God made clear by the men of science and the tenderness of the God made known by Jesus Christ, who ‘knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God and went to God,’ took a towel and basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet.

So, it will be seen, I had come to my belief as a Christian. Brought up in an environment where the whole thought about Jesus Christ centred upon Calvary and the cross, I came back, however, to the earlier creeds which centred in the Incarnation — not a deification of man, but the entrance of God into human life. The glory of the Christian religion seemed to be that it brought a distant God near and made Him real. I, who had been seeking God, found God moving to meet me.

Common elements are in all creeds; there is a common felt need; there is a light lightening all men. But Christianity is unique. I once thought of Christ only as a human example — He is that. Life, for Him, was no matinée girl’s daydream. He came, not to make life easy, but to make men great. He faced all of our problems with human strength. He knew them with deeper knowledge than ours — certainly He knew the problem of pain and evil. He gave no philosophical explanation of pain; He showed how to endure. All honor to Zarathustra as he sought God in the skies; to suave Confucius and all family loyalties; to contemplative Buddha; to valiant Muhammad — to me nothing answers the hard problems of life so completely as do Calvary and the heroic Victim who spoke from the cross, still calling God ‘Father.’ Here are love and trust so far above our understanding that we bow before them in wonder and amazement.

All this became strengthened by the fuller faith in Christ, the faith which found in Him not only an example, but the unveiling of the heart of Deity. To tell what such a faith means to me defies all my effort; it is so real and revealing as to move one, occasionally, to feel that the world can never be quite the same again for him.

VI

Faith may exist independently of theology. For the thinking man, however, some theology of his own is indispensable. The doctrines of Christianity are the logical exponents of the facts of Christianity. In religion, it has been said, it is faith that saves, and not doctrine or theology; yet there is, for most of us, a compulsion to think out the theoretical presuppositions of the experience of faith. To that extent I am a dogmatist; I have come to definite conclusions about certain fundamentals of faith, although realizing that in all walks of life there are some questions for which we find no sure answers.

Even in college days I disliked ‘bull sessions’ in which men loved to argue for the sake of argument rather than with the determination to reach moral decisions and definitely ‘ make up one’s mind.’

I try to approach the Gospel story of Jesus Christ with honest desire to seek the truth, freed, as far as possible, from preconceptions and prejudices, appreciative of exact scholarship and acute literary criticism, ready to accept the assured results of reverent investigation — for only in reverence should we approach such a subject as that of the Man whose teachings have revolutionized the world’s moral standards and influenced forever its conceptions of God and its estimates of life. Yet, like Gore, I find the Modernists ‘strong in their denials, but weak in their affirmations’; and I accept the essential beliefs of the Fundamentalist, — the deity of Christ, His sinless life, His sacrificial death, His glorious resurrection, the founding of the Church, the gift of the Spirit of powder, — and this despite the Fundamentalist’s many mistakes, his scorn of science, his utter lack of sympathy with some of the problems of faith or even real understanding of some of the questions involved, his insistence on outworn theories and teachings and his exaggeration of their importance.

It is impossible that one like myself should be thoroughly conversant with modern criticism, although I know something of the work of such men, for example, as Harnack and Schweitzer, the one a Liberal Protestant, the other the leader of the Apocalyptic school. To a plain man, they seem to reject and put aside as of no historic value what they do not find consistent with their own theories. Sane criticism seems to me to be moving steadily toward the older views of the date and authenticity of the Gospels, though many have ‘closed minds’ as to the miraculous and the supernatural. In modern Biblical scholarship the work of the Formge~ schichtliche Schule has for me a special fascination, though, again, I cannot accept its final conclusions. This ‘formmethod’ study of the Gospels makes them more vivid, brings their story closer to the times of the events recorded, explains many difficulties.

In other days study of the Gospels seemed based upon the naïve idea that their authors sat down, years after the events recorded, to write, at first hand, a ‘Life of Jesus.’ On the contrary, there must have been, from the earliest days, fragmentary written accounts — recollections of those who had known and loved Him, remembered acts, records of their conversations with Him, treasured reports of His teaching. Saint Luke says as much, in the introduction to his Gospel. There was a ‘Gospel before the Gospels,’ and the books we have now were written for men already well acquainted with the facts of their Master’s life. Our Gospels are not concerned so much with the facts as facts, as with the transcendent reality of the revelation they record.

How, then, did the apostles’ belief begin? It had its beginning in one of the richest of all human experiences, an intimate friendship. As they lived with this wonderful Companion, the truth would, to use Charles Lamb’s phrase, gradually ‘slide into their minds.’ It was of the essence of Christ’s method that their life with Him should be perfectly natural; that they should never be ‘told plainly’ the things they were to know, but must learn for themselves — slowly, the only way by which they could learn surely. And learn they did. We cannot understand how the first preaching of Christianity proved so wonderfully effective unless we realize that the early disciples lived in the warmth and glow of an experience the thrill of which never left them. They were as men who eventually found themselves transplanted, as it were, into another world; they had been in vivid contact with the divine. Looking back, after the resurrection, to the days when the Lord Jesus had companied with them, they seemed to say, ‘Now — now, at last, we understand what it all meant.’

VII

Again, like Professor Bacon and other modern scholars, we may start at the end rather than at the beginning and read what the apostles actually proclaimed, later, as their faith; then going back to find its roots in the Gospel narrative, when as yet they had no theory and had made no effort to explain the extraordinary thing that was weaving itself into the fabric of their lives, when, though not formulating their beliefs, they had been brought by an irresistible influence to pay divine homage to the Friend whom they believed to have conquered death and to be reigning in glory.

Saint Paul’s undisputed epistles express clearly what the Gospels state implicitly. It is remarkable, indeed, to realize how these Gospels reveal the situation as it actually was, ‘ in the days of His flesh,’ when Jesus was winning their adoration and as yet the disciples had not asked why or how they could have come to the attitude toward Him which seemed always natural and inevitable. Saint Paul was not one who could be content to worship without asking why. His doctrine — and we must remember that it causes no surprise and arouses no opposition; it is only his position as to the universal acceptance of the Jewish law that gives any trouble — explains, as nothing else can explain, the impression made upon the disciples.

Whether we call it truth or error, there cannot be any doubt as to what this reasoned belief was, as we find it in Saint Paul or Saint John. There is a gladness of surprise about it. One sees it in the glorious preface to the Fourth Gospel; one feels it in the startling words of Saint John’s first epistle: ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life . . . that declare we unto you.’ One feels the hushed devotion of the author, repeating silently: ‘Think of it! I actually touched Him; I looked into His eyes!’ There is a like poignant beauty in the words of Saint Paul: ‘ We have seen the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’ He strikes the same note of awe again as he reminds his pupil, Timothy, how ‘great is the mystery of godliness’; how God was ‘manifested in the flesh,’ ‘believed on in the world,’ ‘received up into glory.’ And all this is the more impressive because Paul is not building a doctrinal system; he is writing practical letters of pastoral counsel, but bases his appeal on fundamental beliefs which are generally accepted.

Surely we have hero more than an intellectual conviction. This skeptic, like Thomas the Doubter, does not wait for tangible evidence; he falls on his knees, with his cry of faith, ‘My Lord and my God.’ His pilgrimage is over. He has found in Christ what God is like. All that Jesus was, God is; all that He said, God says; all that He did, God is doing; all that He felt, in the infinite affection of His infinitely loving heart, God feels.

VIII

This record of a man’s progress toward faith must close with many questions untouched. It cannot, for example, discuss the reasonableness or possibility of an Incarnation; only declaring, with Rudolf Otto, that ‘if there is a God at all, and if He chose to reveal Himself, He could do no otherwise than thus.’ It cannot stop to show how later thought safeguarded the real humanity of Jesus, while yet declaring His true divinity. It cannot take up the problem of miracles. It cannot touch upon the ‘ethic’ of Jesus. It cannot even begin a discussion of the practical possibility of the life He enjoins — a life which was vindicated by His triumph over death. It cannot deal with the proofs of the resurrection, save to say that we start upon an adventure into absurdities when we study other theories which seek to account for the apostles’ faith; they are so ingenious as to be more difficult of acceptance than the facts they seek to explain. I do not see how the radiant confidence of the disciples can be accounted for except by actual facts of experience. ‘If the agony of the cross was really the end of a life without blemish, then this is indeed a mad world and the universe a moral chaos.’

Nor is it a part of our task to show what the resurrection was, nor what changes had occurred in the Lord’s physical body, nor what our own spiritual bodies may be, nor to what the resurrection world may be likened. These are matters beyond human experience, and impossible, therefore, of explanation in human language. It is enough to believe that we have assurance of continued personal life beyond the veil.

All these problems run back to the question of who and what Jesus Christ really was. I am a believer in the traditional Catholic faith, though still enough of a Protestant individualist to be unable to accept it merely on authority. I must reach faith in my own way, even though I accept authority as the voice of age-long experience and take its statements as a working hypothesis.

Here, then, we reach a definite faith. It is dogmatic — even in an age when dogma does not commend itself in religion. However we may tacitly accept it in other affairs of life, in religion, by a strange twist, men always suspect doctrine. ‘None of your dogmas,’ we are told; ‘we want a practical religion — character and conduct, not creed. The essential thing is to follow Christ, not to define Him.’ Ah, how we cheat ourselves with phrases! It is true, of course, that doctrinal religion has often been hard, all too often divorced from conduct; yet how can we ever follow Christ if His voice is not, for us, the Voice of God? Christianity is a new plan for right living, a new ‘way’ of life — how can we believe that it will work in a rough world like ours unless we accept it as a divine message? The real heresy of to-day is a moral heresy, which talks beautifully about Christ’s plan of life, but actually regards it as something to be accepted with reservations and exceptions, not the divine plan, but something academically true and right and idealistically lovely, yet apt to smash to pieces under the hammering of hard facts.

It is the same when we think of life beyond as when we are thinking of life here. It was said of Thomas Carlyle that once he passed a wayside crucifix in Brittany and, standing before it, said, ‘Ay, poor fellow, your day is done.’ Time passed, and he was in his last illness. Someone read to him, in the chill and shadow of the approaching night, the familiar words, ‘Let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.’ And Carlyle

cried out, ‘ Ay, if you were God you had a right to say that! But if you were only a man, what do you know more than the rest of us?’

For me everything runs back to this glorious faith that He is God. Problems which troubled me before become less pressing since I have reached this turn in the road to God. In this light I see all things more clearly. I said, at the start, that I was at once a sinner and a saint; a sinner who becomes a ‘ saint ’ in the Biblical sense of the word — not as one who has attained to holiness, but as one who has come out of the world into the Church (Christ’s own institution), there to seek grace through Christ’s sacraments and to walk stumblingly in the way of holiness.

There died, last Eastertide, in Virginia, a man who had given his life to teaching young men — Dr. W. Cosby Bell. As a religious philosopher he had faced frankly the problems of faith. The evening before he died he asked to know the truth, and was told that he could not recover. Before he lapsed into unconsciousness he insisted on dictating a message to his students. I pass it on, in the hope that it may encourage and strengthen others in the pathway to faith. ‘Tell the boys,’ he said, ‘that I have grown surer of God every day of my life, and I’ve never been so sure as I am now. Why, it’s all so! It’s a fact; it’s a dead certainty. ... I’ve always thought so, and now that I’m up against it I know. . . . Tell them I say “good-bye”—they’ve been a joy to me. I’ve had more than any man that ever lived, and life owes me nothing. I’ve had work I loved and I’ve lived in a beautiful place among congenial friends. I’ve had love in its highest form, and I’ve got it forever. I can see now that death is just the smallest thing — just an incident — and it means nothing. I know.‘