CHAPTER VIII: THE ANSWER OF FAITH

CENTURIES ago, in a far-off Eastern land, a philosopher poet set to verse the sad music of his heart's doubts and longings, and the cry that rings again and again through his poems finds an echo in men's hearts to-day. The mystery of life and death over which Omar Khayam pondered has never ceased to attract the thoughts of men. Returning spring brings the old hopes back to our lives, sometimes with the same sadder echoes that troubled Moschus and Horace, and still thinkers and poets bow before the terror and the majesty of death which they are powerless to explain.

What use then is it to trouble ourselves with a problem which is as old as the life of man and which the greater intellects have failed to solve? Think about it we must, again and again, unless we deliberately stifle our thoughts when they turn to the things which matter most to us. And since we are social beings, born dependent on each other and made to help one another, it is natural that we should wish to share our thoughts. [p.117]

Whence? and whither? and why? is a triad of questions over which men have broken their hearts; in a sense they must always remain un answered, or at least incompletely answered; and yet as long as men have made them, one response at least has brought with it peace.

The problem of life and death was stated long ages before Omar's day by another Eastern thinker, and with a poignancy greater at times than his. Nowhere in Hebrew literature do we get a deeper sense of the gloomy mystery of life than in the book of Ecclesiastes, where again and again the writer makes lament over triumphant injustice, and the end that comes alike to good and bad. There passes before his eyes the melancholy pageant of the children of men, journeying along through the ages to the common goal of endless oblivion. "All things come alike to all," he cries; "there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath. This is an evil that is done under the sun, that there is one event unto all; yea, also, the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead." And so too, he goes on to speak of death as annihilation which puts the noblest of dead creatures below the basest of the living. Probably most men have known some [p.118] dark hour at least in which the tragedy of life comes home to them, and they have wondered whether after all the old thinker was not right. We take up as our own the refrain of Omar:

/I came like water, and like wind I go,/

/Into this Universe and why not knowing,/

/Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing,/

/And out of it as wind along the waste,/

/I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing./

Again there echo about us out of the past those ancient questions to which the mind of man is ever framing answers, ever finding unsatisfying those which others have made. How then can religion help, if even with its presence those answers still remain incomplete?

When faith comes into our hearts, the mystics may tell us, uncertainty does not go out of them. We are still facing an unknown future, and have no more knowledge of the past than have our fellows. But a new factor has come into our consciousness. We are able to go back and face the old questions, and lo, they no longer seem to cut, as once they did, at the roots of our being. We have hold of something which goes deeper than doubt can reach, or fear can fall to. And strangely enough, the very same metaphor which Omar uses to express his despair comes from the lips of faith, but with how different a meaning:

"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou nearest the sound thereof, and canst not tell [p.119] whence it cometh and whither it goeth. So is everyone that is born of the spirit."

Beneath the unanswered question now, there is the abiding sense of the reality that endures, a conviction that, though we do not understand its purpose, life is not purposeless, and that though we cannot lift the veil of death it is only a covering which hides from our eyes a wider and greater world than ours.

It may be that some will feel that all such talk of faith is meaningless to them. Religion and faith convey no such notions to their minds as they seem to imply to others. What they want is the clear demonstration, which a physicist might give us. If life goes on after death there must surely be some proof of it.

If we try and look at life merely from the stand-point of the physiologist, we do indeed perceive that we only observe it in connection with certain structures of organic matter, and that, as far as we are able to see, every act of human conscious ness is accompanied by certain processes and changes in the grey tissues of the brain. When those tissues are injured, the expression of this consciousness is interfered with, and when a certain condition of the brain material comes about life ceases, as far as our observation goes. So far as we can observe, indeed, every act of life is accompanied by and connected with some material condition, or at least some material concomitant. But this is as far as the physi- [p.120] ologist can take us. What life is he is still unable to say. To speak of life as energy, and to say that energy is a potential property of matter, is only to hide from ourselves with words the fact that life can only be explained to us in terms of life: the physicists cannot tell us what life is.

If we admit that we cannot explain what it is in its ultimate nature, we are yet all of us conscious enough of what we mean ourselves by life. The word has a real significance to us, although we cannot define it or explain it in any way.

Can we then find any answer from physical science as to whether or no our life continues when the bodily change which we call death happens? Since life is always connected, as far as we are able to observe it, with certain physical conditions of the body, can it continue when those conditions are no longer present?

There have been many thinkers impressed by the sense of a universe governed by necessary and unchanging laws, who have felt that they could only answer that since life is in our experience always accompanied by certain material conditions, it must cease to exist when those conditions have been removed.

There is one great assumption, however, which consciously or unconsciously underlies this position, that the only universe which exists is one that is intelligible to our thought, and that something [p.121] which we cannot possibly understand, necessarily cannot possibly exist.

But there is yet another thought which seems to have escaped such a thinker: the possibility of the co-existence of more than one world and of life passing from one world to another. Mathematicians have already shown the possibility of this by discussing the existence of a fourth dimension, and even working out problems involving the assumption of the existence of this fourth dimension. The suggestion has been made especially easy to grasp in the remarkable anonymous romance "Flatland," published some thirty years ago, which pictures the world of two dimensions, wherein one person gets the notion of the existence of a third dimension, and the extraordinary results that follow his heresy, or madness, as it seems to his less enlightened fellows.

If the theory of the existence of another, or other dimensions be a tenable one, we can conceive of the existence of a number of worlds around us, co-existing with our own and including it, of which we are either wholly unconscious or only very dimly conscious, and that not by the faculties by means of which we have knowledge of our own world.

Now if we suppose that somewhere within us, at the centre of our lives, is some meeting-point, some door through which we may have contact with these other worlds and pass out into them, [p.122] we can also conceive of a development growing out from this point of contact into that larger life of which we should necessarily remain unconscious here, or even if our whole nature were suddenly to be filled by a consciousness of how its life extended beyond this universe into those other worlds, we should yet be unable to express in terms of our own world this wider life, or could only express it by symbols. The incapacity of our friends to understand our experience would be no proof that it was not true, nor would our own inability to express it in any way lessen the reality of that experience to us. If such a hypothesis be correct, what may happen at death may be that we pass out of the narrower world of three dimensions into the wider world, which includes this and much more.

Another way of looking at the problem has been to conceive of our various senses as channels through which we have entered into communication with the world without us. At present we most of us are only conscious of five such channels. We may conceive of the possibility of many other channels of which we have no experience (and indeed observation of certain living creatures has already led to the hypothesis of a sixth sense, different from any of our own), and we can also think of the channels as being one by one closed. So that at death we may conceive of all our existing lines of communication with the outer world being removed, and wholly new channels, with [p.123] what may seem like an entirely different world, being opened up.[29] <#_edn29>

Such an explanation of the working of our universe is but a hypothesis. Yet after all, it may to some extent help us to understand phenomena otherwise very difficult to explain. Are not the mystics and seers, the inspired poets and prophets, just those whose lives are more in touch than ours with a world we cannot see, often able only imperfectly to express themselves, but yet conscious of vast realities beyond our ken? And may we not to some extent look upon faith as such a faculty, or sixth sense, taking hold of the unseen and translating it into our own life?

But all have not this faith, it may be urged; it is strongest often when the intellectual powers are weak enough, and men of the greatest genius tell us they are wholly without it. Yet cannot we conceive of a community of people almost wholly devoid of one of our own five senses, say that of hearing? How difficult it would be for one of them whose ears were suddenly opened to explain to his friends the new world about him. Imagine these people watching a skylark, and looking on with astonishment at the joy of the one man who heard it singing. A dull brown bird flying aimlessly up into the air: why should he look on it [p.124] with such wonder? They see all that he sees, and if he should try to explain his feelings as he listens to its song, will they not one and all be convinced that he is mad, or that he is at best only recounting some subjective illusion? If he would convince them, let him translate into terms of sight these curious sensations. He cannot do it, and they can only pity his condition.

This may help us to realize how narrow a view that is of life which conceives of this world of our consciousness as the only one which exists. It may even help us to frame a physical hypothesis of another life; but this is not enough for our need. If we are to go to the centre of the problem we must turn not to physical difficulties, but to the moral and spiritual ones. It is above all in its failure to solve the problems of our inward life that the materialistic explanation of the world breaks down.

All the explanations thus suggested have been too much akin to the physical one to touch the heart of the problem. It is when we realize the meaning of faith in our own lives here and now, that we cease to trouble about the future. In the realization of the supreme value of goodness, and the infinite meaning of it, we begin to understand that it must endure, in a sense far deeper than mere extension in time or space.

Faith is the organ of spiritual apprehension, and comes into play whenever we recognise in practice the claim of the ethical ideal as opposed [p.125] to the materialistic, when the will to do the good triumphs over the desire to get the good for our selves. In every act of the inward life by which being is set above having, and by which our own visible happiness is subordinated to that of our fellows, there comes into play this activity of the soul which we call faith, by which we come into contact with that which underlies our hopes, and put to test the things we do not see. [30] <#_edn30>

As this faith comes to dominate and control our lives we are able to reach a point at which the old doubts cease to pain us. We may still repeat to ourselves the riddle of life, and seek for an answer; but though we may continue to puzzle to find an explanation, we are conscious that we have known something in the presence of which the ancient questionings cease to trouble. We feel that somehow we have come into touch with a presence which brings with it the solution of the greatest of all problems. In the depths of our lives we listen to the answer of faith.

Thus it is that the very words which ring with such a sense of awful despair in the poem of Omar may express nothing but peace to one who has gone through this experience: "He knows about it all, He knows, He knows." The difference lies in this, that to Omar there is as he writes no sense of contact with the Unseen, the Omniscient, in whose power he lies; but to him who [p.126] has heard the answer of Faith that sense of contact has come. He knows that in this deepest experience God has come into touch with him, and henceforth life to him both came and goes, out of God's hand into God's hand.

When Christ was confronted by the sceptical Sadducees with the problem of human life enduring beyond the grave, he pointed to their faith that the heroes of old time, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, had had knowledge of God, and told them that this knowledge of God meant life. A being that has come to have communion with the Eternal cannot be conceived of as passing away with the changing husk of things, the accidents of the body and the outer world. Eternal life does not consist in the duration for ever of an accidental process. If we could conceive of a jelly-fish continuing thus an indefinite existence, which should involve neither inward development nor the possession of higher powers than such a creature is commonly believed to be capable of, we should still surely be unable to speak of such existence as eternal life. For what we mean by this is not the mere continuity of existence from a present of transient accidents into a like future, but something which goes beyond death because it goes beyond life too, as life is ordinarily pictured.

But can we hope to tread ourselves this way of the Divine life? There are times when, the spiritual end which is ever present in our lives makes itself evident to us, and now and again [p.127] across the centuries come periods when the latent desires of men seem to come to the surface. Such was that epoch of spiritual unrest and stirring which came to England in the seventeenth century, in which the Quaker and Quietest movements had their birth, and it may be that we are not far away from the dawn of such another age to-day. Now, as then, men turn from orthodoxy in search of something deeper and wider than its mere creeds can give. The works of the old mystics are reissued from the press, and in the by-ways of literature men are seeking for paths that may lead them to inward peace. It is still twilight time. No prophet's voice is clearly heard calling us towards the full light of the day, but our eyes turn towards the horizon and watch for the signs of dawn.

We share a common life, and our need to-day is the same, though we may express it in different ways. We are conscious of something lacking in our lives, sensible at least at times of the evil there. We feel the darkness about us, and long for light and for a power that shall take us out of our lower natures, upward and onward. At such moments we may earnestly desire to come ourselves into communion with God, that his life may flow into ours and transform it. But how, after all, are we to attain to some dim realization of this knowledge of God which illumines the lives of the great mystics and brings peace to-day to many a life which otherwise would be full of painful failure? [p.128] Perhaps another saying from the book of Ecclesiastes may put us upon the path to find the answer. It is one of those words which come sometimes to poet and thinker, bearing within them fuller depth of meaning than was clear to the writer who first framed them, groping as he may have been at the edge of some great truth which he has never consciously apprehended. "Also He hath set Eternity in their heart." [31] The words were written in sadness, but there is within them the promise of hope. There lies at once the key to the mystery of human unrest and the hope for some deeper peace than the world without can give. Somewhere in the depths of his own life every man is in touch with the Eternal. Sometimes we are conscious of this higher reality surrounding us, as pervading all about us; on some glorious day alone with Nature the wonder of the world flashes upon us, and all things become radiant with a new light which fills both us and them. Or silently in the quiet of the night, before the mystery of the starry sky, a great peace comes over us in which our own tiny life seems to take its place amidst the ordered harmony of all the spheres.

But we come, too, to a vision of the Infinite in other ways; whenever we see a good deed done, and behold its goodness, we are touching the hem of the robe of the Eternal. In the inward recognition of the supreme beauty of unselfish love we are directly conscious of a flash of intuition [p.129] which illumines not the intellect alone, but our whole nature. We are brought into touch with God at the very centre of our lives. Nature is indeed the priest of the Eternal, and every high place has still its altar, where we may worship in spirit and in truth. But in an even deeper sense is the priesthood given to man. There is no man but is called to that true temple service wherein every good act is filled with meaning, not for himself only, but for his fellows. Every pure and unselfish deed is sacramental, bringing the soul of him who beholds it into touch with the God who inspired the act. And this contact with the Divine through goodness in another may come to us in spite of all intellectual barriers. If with our whole heart we honour a good deed done our nature does obeisance to the God who is working within it, who makes the deed of worth. Unknown to ourselves, we are drawn nearer to Him, and His life touches our lives, and transforms them a little nearer to His likeness. For every pure and lovely act that men do is not only a revelation but an inspiration and an influence drawing others upward. We have never had trust enough in the infectious power of a good deed.

Thus as we are faithful to the highest it has been given us to see, our sight will be strengthened to see further: at the moment of vision we are conscious that in the presence of the good thought, the good personality, we are in contact with the source of strength that we need. We must keep [p.130] close to the same source when the darkness is about us.

It is surely this truth that has helped to make the worship of the Saints the power for good which it has been in the lives of devout souls within the Catholic Church of Rome and of the East. They have done reverence to that in the Saints which was of God, and in drawing near to them they have been drawn near to Him also. The worship of the Saints has done harm, not only in the case of the false reverence of the market place, but whenever it has led men to turn from the source of the saint's power to the accidentals of his life and character, and to imitate the man, rather than to get into touch with his spirit. But the words of the old Creed, "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church," express a great reality. We can get the greatest help from this belief in the dark hours of the soul, and in all times of transition to fuller knowledge of the truth, if by belief in the Church we mean belief in the whole body of those who have come into touch with God through Christ, and through his spirit, and who can be recognised as his disciples because they bear in their lives his likeness. As we believe in the Church in this sense, we shall strive to feel the inner bond of union that connects together the good and holy of all creeds and nations, and to bring our lives into harmony with the same spirit of unity.

Men who have shown singular devotion to some [p.131] hero saint whom they love may have erred in the past in trying to reproduce his life under altered conditions; and such imitation has sometimes led them all too far from the spirit of the one whom they have sought to follow. St. Francis of Assisi, and in later days John Wycliffe, and George Fox, have each had followers such as these. But there is at least one to whom we may look for this guidance without any of the narrowing influence that other hero worship so often brings. We cannot read about our heroes, look up to them and think of them, without coming under the influence of their personality and without our character growing unconsciously to bear in it some faint trace at least of theirs. Let us then turn thus in the dark hour to Jesus Christ. No matter if for the moment we cannot regard him as we have been taught the Church does. Let us put aside all theories as to his birth; the miracles which puzzle us, even the fact of the Resurrection, and the speculations of theology as to his Divine nature. Not because these are not important matters, and not because we may not have to go on thinking about them, and seeking more light about them; but because for the guidance which most of all we need we can go deeper than all these doubts and speculations. Let us make Christ our teacher as his earliest disciples did, who knew nothing about his birth, and only followed him at first just because they felt he was far better than they and they had need of him and loved him. [p.132] As we do this, and simply endeavour to keep near to his thoughts, to think over the meaning of his words and to act as men who are seeking to follow him, we shall begin to realize that there is in Christ himself a greater miracle than anything recorded of him in the Gospels, and that whatever the correct theory of the Resurrection may be, He is still a living influence working upon our hearts and inspiring us onward to good. When we doubt of God because of the world's evil, we can hear his voice speak of the love which watches even over the fall of the sparrow, and some sense of that love comes to us too, in the midst of our darkness. And when the sense of our own wrong-doing is heavy upon us, we may feel cheered to think that our Teacher never turned from the men of the world and the profligate when they sought his help in honest sorrow, but rather sought them first, and for the disciple who denied him had nothing but a look of love. He knew what it was himself to be discouraged, to spend long hours in prayer, to be misunderstood and to fail. And sometimes there may come to us a glimpse of even deeper depths into which he went for his fellow- men. As we feel all this we may not be able to explain it, but we know ourselves the stronger for it, the better able to face misfortune and temptation and suffering, and to hold manfully to the best that we know, in the midst of doubt. And thus, little by little, we come to feel we have found one who not only makes us realize what failures [p.133] we have been, but is ever calling out the best that is in us, drawing us on to a higher ground and clearer air, where our vision carries further, until at length there may come to us some glimpse of the Divine Love at work in the world and within us, and some sense that Christ has brought to us God's expression of Himself in the terms of humanity, so that we begin to understand a little of the meaning of the words: "This is life eternal, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent."

And meanwhile, let us have faith too for those who cannot yet feel this attractive power as we, perhaps, have known it. In the Fourth Gospel the Master tells his disciples that he has other sheep who are not of this fold; we may picture his thought as going out to far-off lands where men were striving to do their duty or to find the truth without any knowledge of him, without any intellectual knowledge of God perhaps; some legionary guarding the peace of the empire at the gates of the North, some Roman government official upholding the dignity and justice of the law amongst jealous robber tribes and unscrupulous traders, some Greek philosopher seeking to know a yet higher law, and simple men and women practising it unknown to themselves; or, further away in the far-off East, the Buddhist missionary teaching the worth of gentleness and mercy, or the disciple of Confucius learning to reverence the great moral truths he knew, and to apply them [p.134] in all life's relations. Some day all these should hear his voice; already they were his sheep. And so to-day, wherever the lonely thinker spends his hours in seeking, and the servant of science unselfishly gives up all thought of personal advancement and delight in the pursuit of truth, wherever in the politics of towns or peoples men seek to work out a higher form of public life, or in business as in leisure to be faithful not merely to their own interests, but to a wider ideal, we must see the seekers and servants of good, who are God's servants too. Sooner or later for these too will be fulfilled the words: "Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed."