A Lay Sermon

I

IT is with genuine diffidence that I speak in this place,¹ first, because I doubt if I have any acceptable message, and second, because the presentation of my thought in argumentative form here is in itself an apparent contradiction of the very thing for which I am going to plead, the limitation of the church to its religious function. But since I have accepted the cordial invitation to make use of the large freedom of this pulpit, I will waste no more time in apologies.

The phrase ‘religious function’ may seem to beg the question. There were said to be ten thousand definitions of religion already in 1904, and the science of religion is a flourishing discipline. The two conceptions most applicable to the present purpose are that religion begins in and must always consist of some kind of emotional thrill, and that religion is the conservation of values. The nature of the thrill that a religious service should give the modern man will depend on the kind of values that it is the business of religion to conserve; and with that we begin.

The proper work or function of a thing, Plato says, is that which it alone can do, or it can do best. If, disregarding totems and fetishes and mana and waconda, we look back over the history of the religion of civilized mankind and contemplate the beauty of all the fanes of we hope not fruitless prayer that the religious spirit has built, it becomes ever clearer that the values which true religion conserves are hope and faith — the hope that we are not merely cunning casts in clay, that life is not merely mechanism, not only dust and a scuttle of ashes in the final retrospect, and the faith in a moral law, in the sovereignty of ethics, in the something not ourselves that makes for righteousness.

To waive all niceties of metaphysics and theology, the indispensable minimum of anything that may be rightly called religion in the modern world is the rejection of materialism and the affirmation of a stable moral law.

We need not be frightened from these assumptions by the challenge to define materialism and the protest that it is only a term of abuse, or by the affirmation that since moral codes are changing every year, and there is a new morality every decade, there is no such thing as an immutable morality. We are not speaking metaphysically but practically, and for practical purposes we all know well enough what materialism is, and need not be baffled by the evasive tactics which modern materialists still borrow from Huxley, who had more excuse for employing them, in that some measure of persecution for heresy still survived in his day.

Materialism is obviously the affirmation that mechanism is all, the denial of a mind in the universe, and of a soul not identical with the neurograms in man. And similarly, in spite of the plausibility of the rhetoricians or the journalists who argue that there is not one but many moralities and that they change with the fashion of ladies’ hats, we all know well enough what an oldfashioned preacher means when he says that he believes that the Ten Commandments are laws of God and not tribal taboos. We know what Lowell meant when he wrote: —

We know Arnold’s meaning when he says: —

And hence I am confident that, whether you agree with me or not, you know what I mean when I say that the proper service of a church and of a religious institution is to confirm the hope that there is something more in the universe than mechanism, and to strengthen an active and coercive faith in an abiding moral law. This may not be all, and the religious life of a large portion of mankind may require the expression of these beliefs in the symbolisms of historic creeds and ceremonies; but this is the least that can be properly called religion. And if that is so, certain consequences follow, both for the religious and for the nonreligious, I will not say irreligious, man.

II

Some years ago considerable attention was attracted by an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled ‘Should Smith Go to Church?’ Well, that is Smith’s personal problem. He may feel that the groves were God’s first temples. He may, like Milton, not be uplifted by the sermons that edify his neighbors. He may be a busy man, and Sunday morning may be his only free time to think his own thoughts. He will not be greatly missed. All men have need of gods, and the churches will go on.

A more vital problem is what should be the attitude toward the church of the intellectual, unbelieving Professor Smith, or, let us rather say, Professor X. If he is not himself edified, if he cannot accept the creed, or if he is even a dialectical materialistic atheist, whatever that may be, is it his duty to attack the church, or to join it and undermine it from within the Sunday School, or to preach his materialistic atheism to the students and the world? If he is a Bolshevist who believes all religion opium for the people, he will, of course, think so. But I am not speaking of that extreme, but of a real problem of conduct here and now, on which we might bestow some of the attention which we waste on unreal and fantastic casuistries.

Let us first approach it pragmatically. On what other ground than the practical results of his conduct can a materialist argue this or any other question? I have recently read five books assailing religion. Indeed, we have all read a great deal of this kind of literature of late, much of it learned, scientific, and well meant. And yet the doubt will arise: Would any reasonable educator, whatever his metaphysical or theological opinions, prefer such books for the reading of ingenuous youth, I will not say to Matthew Arnold or the sermons of Dr. Fosdick, but even to the old-fashioned theological, devotional, and apologetic literature which these five books so bitterly assail?

Their only pragmatic justification, then, must be that historical religion is such a curse that it must be uprooted at any cost, or that the truth is sacred though ugly and must be proclaimed and the facts faced. No reasonable man could maintain that the churches of America to-day, whatever the errors of their fallible human instruments, are on the whole forces for evil; and, since all men have need of God, the historical churches are surely preferable to the alternative superstitions to which the people will flock if they are discredited. But truth, the truth is sacred, cry the materialists, and we possess the truth.

Well, we all pay lip allegiance to the truth. But we may not all mean the same thing. An eminent Harvard physicist (the physicists are our theologians now) is very earnest on the need of letting out a flood of intellectual honesty on the world. But, as we read on, it appears that the one service of what he calls intellectual honesty is to be the disintegration of religion and ethics as men have hitherto known them, in the faint hope of finding something better. It would appear that we do not need a flood of intellectual honesty for anything else. Perhaps he, like so many of our present teachers, was compelled to swallow Jonah’s whale literally and forbidden to read anything except Josephus on Sunday afternoons.

So overwhelming is the prestige of the physical sciences in their proper sphere that I believe many sincere and pious preachers are afraid that the materialists may be right after all, and do not dare to challenge them lest they be called obscurantists and fundamentalists. Let them take courage. If they will really study the question and examine the evidence, they will find that the dogmatisms of negation in this matter are pure bluff. The case for materialistic atheism is just what it was when Cicero discussed it two thousand years ago. The progress of science has merely made it seem more plausible to the half-educated. But the argument is just what it was when men became aware that a blow on the head may suspend consciousness, that the evidence for communication with the world beyond the grave is untrustworthy, and that there may be much eloquence in a cup of tea. A courageous clergyman with a mind disciplined by dialectics and a habit of public speaking should be able, after due preparation, to argue this question to a finish with any psychologist or biologist in any conversation, on any platform, or in print.

I of course do not mean that the clergyman should be a wrangling controversialist. I mean only that he should not be too skeptical or too timid to defend his faith on the proper occasion — otherwise his place is elsewhere than in the pulpit. Even the sober, positivist, scientific mind of John Stuart Mill says, ‘The truth that life is short and art is long is . . . one of the most discouraging facts of our condition. This hope [the hope of immortality, that is] admits the possibility that the art employed in improving and beautifying the soul itself may avail for good in some other life even when seemingly useless in this. The beneficent effect of such a hope is far from trifling. ... It makes life a far greater thing to the feelings ... it allays the sense of the irony of nature which is so painfully felt.‘

And, after Mill, let me remind you of the proclamation issued by forty eminent American men of science a few years ago. That pronunciamento has perhaps been unduly exploited on the one side, and has certainly been made the object of a persistent and venomous propaganda of ridicule on the other. And there are doubtless many whose first impression about it will be that it is merely another example of the expert in one field fancying himself an authority in others. But I do not quote it to prove any metaphysical or theological dogma. I speak of it only in order to argue that if it is still possible for so many distinguished men of science to believe in what we have called the indispensable minimum of religion it ought to be possible for the church to believe it, and to have the courage to affirm it and to base its institutional existence upon that and not upon any substitute or evasion.

III

The mockers may say that I who have no right to do so am affirming, perhaps with my tongue in my cheek, that the church ought to preach the gospel and nothing else. Well, though I have no right to use those particular symbols, that is practically what I do mean, and I never meant anything more seriously. The church is a religious institution or it is nothing, and no evasion will serve. The need of our age for this special service of the church must be apparent to any reflective mind. It is no less obvious that many tendencies in the literature and intellectual life of our time are hostile to religion in the sense that we have adopted. The intellectual ingenuity and the emotional enthusiasm that in the past were so largely enlisted in the service of traditional morality are now chiefly employed in disparaging it, revising it, or seeking for a substitute. I am not going to preach a sermon to denounce or deplore these tendencies, nor can I take much of my limited time to illustrate them by quotations. I will merely remind you of what no candid and thoughtful observer can deny — that ours is what is called an age of enlightenment, and that even more than in other such ages the general tendency of its philosophic reflection, its science, its literature, and its art is to break up, disintegrate, and abolish in the minds of the younger generation all the standards, the ideals, and the codes of human experience.

There have always been doubters, skeptics, cynics, flouters, revolutionaries, and radicals. Every New England Puritan village had its grocerystore philosopher and village atheist. There have been periods when this temper permeated literature. But never, I think, has it so dominated literature, the higher education, and the entire thought of the self-styled intellectual classes, as to-day. There were eloquent immoralists at Athens. There were festivals in which instincts were unleashed and human nature sought relief from the restraint of conventional moralizing. There were comedies which travestied and made a mock of the gods. But literature as a whole was sane, and the greater classical writers were, as a whole, on the side of the angels. But I think any sober observer would be justified in saying that never in any literature has there been such a carnival of unreason and immoralism as that which disports itself in the print that most of us have been reading in the past twenty or thirty years and in the films that children have been looking at.

I do not know whether the sane 51 per cent of the population are blind to this fact, or whether they lightly regard all literature as being, like crime stories, a form of escape from stodgy and uninteresting reality. But the fact stares us in the face, and the comparatively few exceptions cannot seriously qualify it. A working majority of the population, it is true, still retain an instinctive, if not always a reasoned, belief in the commonplace virtues of honesty, thrift, decency, and the practical necessity of private property, the keeping of contracts, the punishment of crime, and the maintenance and use of such imperfect human instruments as courts, police, and banks. But it is no exaggeration to say that the prevailing tone of the fiction, the drama, the literary criticism, and the films to which we abandon our minds is one continuous flouting, jibing, travestying sneer at these things.

More serious is the fact that this conscious or unconscious propaganda of the literature of entertainment is derived from and supported by a vast, supposedly higher, nonfictional literature which proclaims itself to be and is confidingly accepted as science. The practical effect, perhaps the aim, of much of this literature runs directly counter to the definition of religion which we provisionally assumed. It aims or tends to a disintegration of faith, a disvaluation of all old values, an abandonment of the gold standard, so to speak, in advance of the discovery of any other practically available rule and measure. Its spirit is what, for lack of time, I must briefly but intelligibly designate as immoralist and irrationalist.

This is evidently true also, in a sense, of the vast literature of popular science. We do not read it to learn science. We could acquire more of that from the study of any simple, objective, neutral textbook of physics, chemistry, or biology. We read it sometimes as an escape and a fairy tale — which is harmless enough. But we read it perhaps more often as a form of modernist and sometimes immoralist propaganda. We read it to be told how much wiser and better we are than our forefathers; how inept were all our ideas before the discoveries of Darwin and Karl Marx and Freud and Westermarck; what imperfect and prejudiced instruments of truth are all minds except those of the author of the book and his assenting hearers; how obsolete are all the traditional moralities; how dark were the souls, how imperfect the digestions, how befogged the consciousness of all authors who wrote before electric lights, canned food, and psychoanalysis.

This is not parody and I am not going to quote, but I challenge any addict of this literature to go through thirty or forty volumes of it, pencil in hand, and note how many pages are devoted to the rhetorical amplification of negative, radical, and denunciatory commonplaces. If he tries to frame a reply, in answer to his own stumbling and perhaps faltering, but real arguments from human experience, will he not again be told that consciousness is simply reflex action or response, that the biochemists have shown that man is an animal or a mechanism like any other, that the behaviorists have failed to discover any such entity as the soul, that the psychoanalysts have discredited the notion of will and responsibility, that the Ten Commandments are the taboos of a primitive tribe, that love and jealousy are only the sense of property, that all punishment and what men call justice is sadistic revenge, that all things flow, that all things are relative, and that there is therefore no presumption that any religion or any morality is truer or better than any other?

But I must not dwell further on details. I am merely trying to remind you of the actual situation which confronts the official mouthpieces of religion, regarded as the conservation of values in an age when all values are questioned and denied or held up to ridicule and contempt.

IV

But, to fulfill its function as a conservator of values, religion must first conserve itself, for religion is itself one of the first values that are disvalued by the spirit of contemporary literature and thought. And, in order to conserve anything else, it must itself have some other substance than the mere service of conservation. I am not trying to split hairs, but mean something quite simple and obvious to a little reflection. Highly cultivated individuals may choose to call any form of refined and elevated cosmic or aesthetic or social emotion religion, and may, if they are lucky, get through life tolerably on the basis of a few sound instincts inherited from religious grandfathers and a few wholesome habits, with the aid of literature and art, or, in rare cases, philanthropy and social service. All history proves that the majority of mankind cannot. They must have a church fellowship, a form of worship, and the indispensable minimum of a creed. All men have need of God, says Homer, in his simple way cutting short an infinity of profitless discussion.

And so, since we must draw to a rapid conclusion, my point, to put it bluntly again, is that in order to have a religion and a church you must believe in and have the courage to affirm something more than the materialism of a present dominant school of modern science. But you do not have to define that something more, either in terms of a metaphysical system, which is a pure illusion of words, or in terms of a theological creed which you may be personally unable to believe, though you may envy those who can. It is enough that you reject materialism and hope for and believe in something more. That gives you the right to have a church and a church service if they meet your spiritual needs, and enables you to tolerate and respect the theologies which for some are symbols and for others literal truth. But without that indispensable minimum you have no moral and intellectual right to a church and a church service, and without it your church will be a hollow shell that will not endure in competition with churches of a more robust and courageous faith. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.

And so we return to our real subject: What is the essential function of the church and what should a church service be? It should, as I hinted in the beginning, uplift and thrill our religious emotions, and confirm our faith in plain everyday morality by encouraging us to retire from the world for an hour and think on ‘whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report.’

But is not this abandonment to religious emotion a refined form of selfishness? Literature is full of satire and denunciation of religion that is good for only one day in seven. The poets warn us that it is dangerous to divorce the feeling from her mate, the deed. Psychologists tell us that it is relaxing to the moral fibre to come out of church feeling good and exalted unless you put your virtue to the immediate proof by speaking kindly to your aunt. I think these scruples are a little far-fetched and oversubtle. We are not limiting other services and functions of the church as a social organization. We are speaking of what should be the predominant, not necessarily the only, quality of a religious service. Men do not have to go to church to be made uncomfortable by the headlines of the Sunday newspaper, or disunited in spirit by the debating of controversial questions. They go to join in something that all can feel together and so be at peace.

I cannot believe that this weekly experience does them any harm, even if it is not directly and immediately related to practice. I intend no superstitious proscription of the liberty of prophesying. The pulpit may at times become a platform. I only doubt whether that is its chief or best service to humanity. If the church is to be a forum for political and social disputation, and the kind of ethics that raises doubts, a utilitarian brick structure filled with classrooms and lecture halls will serve as well. The men who covered Europe with cathedrals were not Marthas careful over many things, but Marys pouring forth the precious ointment of the spirit in lavish adornment of the highest that they knew. Without this spirit the architecture of the cathedral is a meaningless superfluity, and the spire is pointless if it points to nothing beyond. With all their human deficiencies, to point beyond is what some of the great historic churches have tried to do and what some of the new variations and inventions fail to do.

V

Not to prove anything, then, but in final illustration of what I have been trying to say, I will describe two religious experiences. I was visiting a small but civilized Southern town in what our most piquant critic would designate as the anti-evolution Bible belt. With my hosts I attended the service of a little Presbyterian church. The edifice was a well-kept colonial structure of dazzling whites and vivid greens, with a slender towering spire. The auditorium was of a pleasant homeliness rather than a forbidding austerity in its interior ecclesiastical decoration. The congregation which filled it appeared cheerful, earnest, and at home, but not too much at home in Zion. The hymns — I always supposed that I hated hymns — were judiciously selected, inoffensive, led by an adequate choir, and sung with zest and enjoyment by the congregation. The sermon, mercifully brief, was a friendly moral homily, relieved by anecdote and practical illustration. There was little technical theology, but there was no half-hearted apology or evasion of the main issue; the grounds of hope were fixed.

The church stood for something. It was not a radical debating club. It was something different for those who wanted something different. And as I issued into the sunlight with the congregation and summed up my impressions, then, as the roistering American bard put it, I had religion. Perhaps it was partly my mood, freed from the preoccupations of my ordinary routine; perhaps it was in part the glad realization that there is another America than that revealed by State Street and Washington Park. Perhaps it was the sense of refuge and escape from Vergil’s insane forum and raving politics and economics never at rest in every tag of conversation I overhear on the campus. But at any rate that was one of the rare occasions when I distinctly got religion; and though I, like Thackeray’s lover, sometimes hovered outside the sacred gate, I was glad that there are many millions of Americans within it, until somebody can show them a better place. The familiar allegory of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner seemed no longer a Tupperism and a platitude. The Ancient Mariner himself was a symbol of the soul of humanity, of normal man, alone on a wide, wide sea, that sea of infinite void space that frightened the universal philosopher Herbert Spencer when he dared to think of it. All men have need of God, said Homer.

The other experience would seem to have little in common with this except that it too taught me more of the meaning of religion than I could learn from a wilderness of dissertations on the origins of totemism. I arrived in Pisa about the middle of the forenoon on a hot July morning, and made my way at once to the cool refuge of the cathedral. But instead of the empty spaces I expected, and the few strolling American teachers with red Baedekers, I found myself participant in some magnificent ceremony which for a moment I could almost believe was Mrs. Browning’s visualization of a function in the theatre of Dionysus.

It was I forget what anniversary of the Church, and a deputation of great ecclesiastics had come down from Rome to join with the local clergy in the celebration of High Mass. Everything appealed to the historical and the religious imagination — the to me mysterious proceedings and goings to and fro at the bidding of little bells, the priests in gorgeous vestments, the allpervading incense, the great organ groaning for power and pealing through nave and transept with melodious reverberations, the angelic voices of the boys soaring to heaven in the Kyrie eleison, the Gloria and the Qui tollis peccata mundi of Palestrina, the sonorous and mystical Latin of the Mass, the thought that this had been going on for two thousand years and is still going on in every quarter of the globe. Tantus labor non sit cassus.

Could it be only the illusion that the ugly and arid book of Freud proclaimed it? It was beautiful, of course, and wonderful. Could it be meaningless? Or was it another way of pointing to that something beyond without which men cannot endure life? That was what it meant to me who again stood outside the gate.

But only the other day I received a beautiful, a really beautiful French poem on the symbolism of the Mass which helped me to divine what it may mean to those within the gate — ‘Ite Missa Est,’ by Armand Godoy. I should only spoil it if I tried to quote it in commonplace English verse. But I can best describe it by saying that French religious poetry has here done almost exactly what William Vaughn Moody did with a very different set of symbols in the choruses of his FireBringer. And so there too, in the cathedral of Pisa, as in the little Southern church, I experienced the special uplift and imaginative sympathy. I got religion.

Was I too broad-minded ? That is the last reproach I expect to hear in my conservative later years. I am not going over to Rome, nor trying to take you there. I am probably not broadminded enough for many of my hearers, for, though I could get religion from the cathedral and the little Presbyterian church, I lack the breadth of sympathy and the imagination to get it from

Universal sympathy and broad-mindedness constitute a generous ideal, but we have preached it quite sufficiently for the present, and we need a few sermons from the text, ‘Whatsoever things are lovely.’