Chapter 15
"There is a third mood of direct experience by which one approaches the religious life. Surely no man in our civilization can grow far in years without finding out that, in the effort to live a life obeying his desires and worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with Christ's commands; and he knows that the promises of Christ, so far as they relate to the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself day by day; he can escape neither the ideal that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ in respect to the working of that ideal on others and within himself. He perceives the evil of the world, and desires to share in its redemption; its sufferings, and would remove them; its injustice, and would abolish it. He is, by the mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, a humanitarian. But he is more than this in such a life. If he be sincere, he has not lived long before he knows in himself such default of duty that he recognizes it as the soul's betrayal; its times and occasions, its degrees of responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty or of an evil will, its greater or less offence, are indifferent matters; for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels a stain as a wound, and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the purest souls. It is death that is dull, it is life that is quick. It may well be, in the world's history in our time, that the suffering caused in the good by slight defections from virtue far overbalances the general remorse felt for definite and habitual crime. Thus none--those least who are most hearts of conscience--escapes this emotion, known in the language of religion as conviction of sin. It is the earliest moral crisis of the soul; it is widely felt,--such is the nature and such the circumstances of men; and, as a man meets it in that hour, as he then begins to form the habit of dealing with his failures sure to come, so runs his life to the end save for some great change. If then some restoring power enters in, some saving force, whether it be from the memory and words of Christ, or from the example of those lives that were lived in the spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love and more tender affection enforcing the supremacy of duty and the hope of struggle,--in whatever way that healing comes, it is well; and, just as the man of honest mind has recognized the identity of his virtue with Christ's rule, and has verified in practice the wisdom of its original statement, so now he knows that this moral recovery, and its method, is what has been known on the lips of saint and sinner as the life of the Spirit in man, and even more specially he cannot discriminate it from what the servants of Christ call the life of Christ in them. He has become more than a humanitarian through this experience; he is now himself one of those whom in the mass he pities and would help; he has entered into that communion with his kind and kin which is the earthly seal of Christian faith.
"Yet it seems to me a profound error in life to concentrate attention upon the moral experience here described; it is but initial; and, though repeated, it remains only a beginning; as the vast force of nature is put forth through health, and its curative power is an incident and subordinate, so the spiritual energy of life is made manifest, in the main, in the joy of the soul in so far as it has been made whole. A narrow insistence on the fact of sin distorts life, and saddens it both in one's own conscience and in his love for others. Sin is but a part of life, and it is far better to fix our eyes on the measureless good achieved in those lines of human effort which have either never been deflected from right aims, or have been brought back to the paths of advance, which I believe to be the greater part, both in individual lives of noble intention, and in the Christian nations. Sin loses half its dismaying power, and evil is stripped of its terrors, if one recognizes how far ideal motives enter with controlling influence into personal life, and to what a degree ideal destinies are already incarnate in the spirit of great nations.
"However this may be, I find on examination of man's common experience these three things, which establish, it seems to me, a direct relation between him and God: this spontaneous gratitude, this trustful dependence, this noble practice, which is, historically, the Christian life, and is characterized by its distinctive experiences. They are simple elements: a faith in God's being which has not cared further to define the modes of that being; a hope which has not grown to specify even a Resurrection; a love that has not concentrated itself through limitation upon any instrumental conversion of the world; but, inchoate as they are, they remain faith, hope, love--these three. Are they not sufficient to be the beginnings of the religious life in the young? To theological learning, traditional creeds, and conventional worship they may seem primitive, slight in substance, meagre in apparel; but one who is seeking, not things to believe, but things to live, desires the elementary. In setting forth first principles, the elaboration of a more highly organized knowledge may be felt as an obscuration of truth, an impediment to certainty, a hindrance in the effort to touch and handle the essential matter; and for this reason a teacher dispenses with much in his exposition, just as in talking to a child a grown man abandons nine-tenths of his vocabulary. In the same way, learning as a child, seeking in the life of the soul with God what is normal, vital, and universal, the beginner need not feel poor and balked, because he does not avail himself as yet of resources that belong to length of life, breadth of scholarship, intellectual power, the saint's ardour, the seer's insight.
"The spiritual life here defined, elementary as it is, appears inevitable, part and parcel of our natural being. Why should this be surprising? Surely if there be a revelation of the divine at all, it must be one independent of external things; one that comes to all by virtue of their human nature; one that is direct, and not mediately given through others. Faith that is vital is not the fruit of things told of, but of things experienced. It follows that religion may be essentially free from any admixture of the past in its communication to the soul. It cannot depend on events of a long-past time now disputable, or on books of a far-off and now alien age. These things are the tradition and history of the spiritual life, but not the life. To the mass of men religion derived from such sources would be a belief in other men's experience, and for most of them would rest on proofs they cannot scrutinize. It would be a religion of authority, not of personal and intimate conviction. Just as creation may be felt, not as some far-off event, but a continuing act, revelation itself is a present reality. Do not the heavens still declare the glory of God as when they spoke to the Psalmist? and has the light that lighteth every man who is born into the world ceased to burn in the spirit since the first candle was lit on a Christian altar? If the revelation of glory and mercy be an everlasting thing, and inextinguishable save in the life itself, then only is that direct relation of man with God, this vital certainty in living truth,--living in us,--this personal religion, possible.
"What has reform in religion ever been other than the demolition of the interfering barriers, the deposit of the past, between man and God? The theory of the office of the Holy Spirit in the Church expresses man's need of direct contact with the divine; the doctrine of transubstantiation symbolizes it; and what is Puritanism in all ages, affirming the pure spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of man in his loneliness, seeking God face to face? what is its iconoclasm of image and altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the Councils and the Fathers, but the assertion of the noble dignity in each individual soul by virtue of which it demands a freeman's right of audience, a son's right of presence with his father, and believes that such is God's way with his own? This immediacy of the religious life, being once accepted as the substance of vitality in it, relieves man at once of the greater mass of that burden in which scepticism thrives and labours. The theories of the past respecting God's government, no longer possible in a humaner and Christianized age, the impaired genuineness of the Scriptures and all questions of their text and accuracy, even the great doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital consequence. A man may approach divine truth without them. Simple and bare as the spiritual life here presented is, it is not open to such sceptical attack, being the fundamental revelation of God bound up in the very nature of man which has been recognized at so many critical times, in so many places and ages, as the inward light. We may safely leave dogma and historical criticism and scientific discovery on one side; it is not in them that man finds this inward wisdom, but in the religious emotions as they naturally arise under the influence of life.
"This view is supported rather than weakened by such records of the spiritual life in man as we possess. Man's nature is one; and, just as it is interpreted and illuminated by the poets from whom we derive direction in our general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated by saintly men and holy women in the special sphere of the soul's life with God. Our nature is one with theirs; but as there are differences in the aptitudes, sensibilities, and fates of all men, so is it with spiritual faculties and their growth; and, from time to time, men have arisen of such intense nature, so sensitive to religious emotions, so developed in religious experience, through instinct, circumstance, and power, that they can aid us by the example and precept of their lives. To them belongs a respect similar to that paid to poets and thinkers. Yet it is because they tell us what they have seen and touched, not what they have heard,--what they have lived and shown forth in acts that bear testimony to their words, that they have this power. Such were St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas à Kempis, and many a humbler name whose life's story has come into our hands; such were the Apostles, and, preeminently, Christ. It is the reality of the life in them, personal, direct, fundamental, that preserves their influence in other lives. They help us by opening and directing the spiritual powers we have in common; and beyond our own experience we believe in their counsels as leading to what we in our turn may somewhat attain to in the life they followed. It is not what they believed of God, but what God accomplished in them, that holds our attention; and we interpret it only by what ourselves have known of his dealing with us. It is life, and the revelation of God there contained, that in others or ourselves is the root of the matter--God in us. This is the corner stone."
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The sun was high in the heavens when we ceased talking of these matters and saw in a lowland before us a farmhouse, where we stopped. It was a humble dwelling--almost the humblest--partly built of sod, with a barn near by, and nothing to distinguish it except the sign, "Post Office," which showed it was the centre of this neighborhood, if "the blank miles round about" could be so called. We were made welcome, and, the ponies being fed and cared for, we sat down with the farmer and his wife and the small brood of young children, sharing their noonday meal. It was a rude table and a lowly roof; but, when I arose, I was glad to have been at such a board, taking a stranger's portion, but not like a stranger. It was to be near the common lot, and the sense of it was as primitive as the smell of the upturned earth in spring; it had the wholesomeness of life in it. Going out, I lay down on the ground and talked with the little boy, some ten years old, to whom our coming was evidently an event of importance; and I remember asking him if he ever saw a city. He had been once, he said, to--the hamlet, as I thought it, which we had just left--with his father in the farm-wagon. That was his idea of the magnificence of cities. I could not but look at him curiously. Here was the creature, just like other boys, who knew less of the look of man's world than any one I had ever encountered. To him this overstretching silent sky, this vacant rolling reach of earth, and home, were all of life. What a waif of existence!--but the ponies being ready, we said our good-byes and drove on along fainter tracks, still northward. We talked for a while in that spacious atmosphere--the cheerful talk, half personal, half literary, lightly humorous, too, which we always had together; but tiring of it at last, and the boy still staying in my mind as a kind of accidental symbol of that isolated being whom my notes had described, and knowing that I had told but half my story and that my friend would like the rest, I turned the talk again on the serious things, saying--and there was nothing surprising in such a change with us--"After all, you know, we can't live to ourselves alone or by ourselves. How to enter life and be one with other men, how to be the child of society, and a peer there, belongs to our duty; and to escape from the solitude of private life is the most important thing for men of lonely thought and feeling, such as meditation breeds. There is more of it, if you will listen again;" and he, with the sparkle in his eyes, and the youthful happiness in the new things of life for us, new as if they had not been lived a thousand years before,--listened like a child to a story, grave as the matter was, which I read again from the memoranda I had made, after that April morning, year by year.
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"Respect for age is the natural religion of childhood; it becomes in men a sentiment of the soul. An obscure melancholy, the pathos of human fate, mingles with this instinctive feeling. The fascination of the sea, the sublimity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well as the beautiful and solemn stars, which, like them, the mind does not distinguish from eternal things, and has ever invested with sacred awe. It is the sense of our mortality that thus exalts nature. Yet before her antiquity merely, veneration is seldom full and perfect; her periods are too impalpable, and, in contemplating their vastness, amazement dissipates our faculties. Rather some sign of human occupancy, turning the desert into a neglected garden, is necessary to give emotional colour and the substance of thought; some touch of man's hand that knows a writing beyond nature's can add what centuries could not give, and makes a rock a monument. The Mediterranean islet is older for the pirate tower that caps it, and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed graves, makes England ancestral soil. Nor is it only such landmarks of time that bring this obscure awe; occupations, especially, awake it, and customary ceremonies, and all that enters into the external tradition of life, handed down from generation to generation. On the Western prairies I have felt rather the permanence of human toil than the newness of the land.
"The sense of age in man's life, relieved, as it is, on the seeming agelessness of nature, is a meditation on death, deep-set far below thought. We behold the sensible conquests of death, and the sight is so habitual, and remains so mysterious, that it leaves its imprint less in the conscious and reflective mind than in temperament, sentiment, imagination, and their hidden stir; the pyramids then seem fossils of mankind; Stonehenge, Indian mounds, and desolate cities are like broken anchors caught in the sunken reef and dull ooze of time's ocean, lost relics of their human charge long vanished away. Startling it is, when the finger of time has touched what we thought living, and we find in some solitary place the face of stone. I learned this lesson on the low marshes of Ravenna, where, among the rice-fields and the thousands of white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, from whose ruined sides Christianity, in the face and figure it wore before it put on the form and garb of a world-wide religion, looked down on me with the unknown eyes of an alien and Oriental faith. 'Stranger, why lingerest thou in this broken tomb,' I seemed to hear from silent voices in that death of time; and still, when my thoughts seek the Mother-Church of Christendom, they go, not to St. John Lateran by the Roman wall, but are pilgrims to the low marshes, the white water lilies, the lone Byzantine ruin that even the sea has long abandoned.
"The Mother-Church?--is then this personal religious life only a state of orphanage? Because true life necessarily begins in the independent self, must it continue without the sheltering of the traditional past, the instructed guidance of older wisdom, and man's joint life in common which by association so enlarges and fortifies the individual good? Why should one not behave with respect to religion as he does in other parts of life? It is our habit elsewhere in all quarters to recognize beyond ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer judgment, a more efficient will enacting our own choice. To obey by force is a childish or a slavish act, but intelligently and willingly to accept authority within just limits is the reasonable and practical act of a free man in society; the recognition of this by a youth marks his attainment of intellectual majority. Authority, in all its modes, is the bond of the commonwealth; until the youth comprehends it he is a ward; thereafter he is either a rebel or a citizen, as he lists. For us, born to the largest measure of freedom society has ever known, there is little fear lest the principle of authority should prove a dangerous element. The right of private judgment, which is, I believe, the vital principle of the intellectual life, is the first to be exercised by our young men who lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which would repeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of the swaddling bands of the primer and catechism before we would remove all questions to the court of our own jurisdiction. The mind is not a _tabula rasa_ at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, we will remedy that, and erase all records copied there. The treasure doors of our fathers' inheritance are thrown open to us; but we will weigh each gold piece with balance and scale. All that libraries contain, all that institutions embody, all the practice of life which, in its innocence, mankind has adopted as things of use and wont, shall be certified by our scrutiny. So in youth we say, and what results? What do the best become? Incapables, detached from the sap of life, forced to escape to the intellectual limbo of a suspension of judgment, extending till it fills heaven and earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; the most we can attain to is an attitude of mind. In view of the vast variety of phases in which even man's great ideas have been held, a sense of indifference among them, a vacuity in all, grows up. Pilate's question, 'What is truth?' ends all.
"This is the extreme penalty of the heroic sceptical resolve in strong and constant minds; commonly those who would measure man's large scope by the gauge of their own ability and experience fall into such idiosyncrasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive social schemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, for most men, the pressure of life itself, which compels them, like Descartes, doubting the world, to live as if it were real, corrects their original method of independence. They find that to use authority is the better part of wisdom, much as to employ men belongs to practical statecraft; and they learn the reasonable share of the principle of authority in life. They accept, for example, the testimony of others in matters of fact, and their mental results in those subjects with which such men are conversant, on the ground of a just faith in average human capacity in its own sphere; and, in particular, they accept provisional opinions, especially such as are alleged to be verifiable in action, and they put them to the test. This is our habit in all parts of secular life--in scholarship and in practical affairs. 'If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God,' is only a special instance of this law of temporary acceptance and experiment in all life. It is a reasonable command. The confusion of human opinion largely arises from the fact that the greater part of it is unverifiable, owing to the deficient culture or opportunity of those who hold it; and the persistency with which such opinion is argued, clung to, and cherished, is the cause of many of the permanent differences that array men in opposition. The event would dispense with the argument; but in common life, which knows far more of the world than it has in its own laboratory, much lies beyond the reach of such real solution. It is the distinction of vital religious truth that it is not so withdrawn from true proof, but is near at hand in the daily life open to all.
"Such authority, then, as is commonly granted in science, politics, or commerce to the past results and expectations of men bringing human life in these provinces down to our time and delivering it, not as a new, but as an incomplete thing, into the hands of our generation, we may yield also in religion. The lives of the saints and all those who in history have illustrated the methods and results of piety, their convictions, speculations, and hopes, their warning and encouragement, compose a great volume of instruction, illustration, and education of the religious life. It is folly to ignore this, as it would be to ignore the alphabet of letters, the Arabic numerals, or the Constitution; for, as these are the monuments of past achievement and an advantage we have at our start over savage man, so in religion there are as well established results of life already lived. Though the religious life be personal, it is not more so than all life of thought and emotion; and in it we do not begin at the beginning of time any more than in other parts of life. We begin with an inheritance of many experiments hitherto, of many methods, of a whole race-history of partial error, partial truth; and we take up the matter where our fathers laid it down, with the respect due to their earnest toil, their sincere effort and trial, their convictions; and the youth who does not feel their impressiveness as enforcing his responsibility has as nascent a life in religion as he would have, in the similar case, in learning or in citizenship.