Part 4

Jesus, we say, preached the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. But he was not _always_ preaching them, and as a matter of fact he never mentioned either of them in exactly those terms. He enforced them, illustrated them, revealed them, exemplified them, by living as though they were true, which is a very different thing from "preaching" them. His days were spent going about doing good, his preaching being little more than a comment that arose naturally from the good that he did. The Gospel is neither a sermon nor a treatise on religion; but a _story_, which tells how Christianity began in something that happened, in a deed that was done, in a life that was lived. It abounds in parables and is a parable itself, revealing things hidden from the foundation of the world.

The order in which _we_ take these elements of religion--first, moral and religious propaganda, then performance to follow--is here reversed. The performance comes first; the propaganda, which reduces itself to the very simple form "Go and do thou likewise," comes afterwards. The proportions, too, are different. Instead of an immense campaign of preaching which leaves little energy for doing the things preached about, the work done, the life lived here overshadow everything else. The accusation of Carlyle against modern civilization, that it has run to seed in mere talk, parliamentary eloquence, stump oratory, and such like, has no application to the birth of the Christian religion. Something to talk about, something worth talking about, was furnished before the talking began.

There we touch the dynamic principle of Christianity, cut free from its entanglements with a mass of things that do not belong to it; the power which still keeps it alive under a mountain of verbal accretions that would smother anything less divine. In the beginning was the deed: go thou and do likewise. So presented, Christianity is not perplexing; but quite the most convincing religion ever offered either to the intellect or the heart. The perplexities have arisen from the reversal of the true order; from the attempt to subordinate the thing done to the thing said; to lay the foundations in argument and propaganda which can only be laid in actual performance; and from the loss of reality and the descent into hollowness and windiness which inevitably follows when the talkers get the upper hand of the doers, or when theology gets the upper hand of religion, which is the same thing. The deeds that I do, these bear witness of me. What other conceivable witness could there be?

Not only has Christianity evolved an institutional selfishness which shows plain signs of having been copied from the kingdoms that are of this world--the strife among churches as to which shall be greatest proves that--but the very form of its thought has become infected with ideas from the same source. Even philosophers have a difficulty of getting away from the notion that the universe is an immense political state, which most assuredly it is not; while careless thinkers will constantly refer to the laws of nature as though they were legal enactments, to which they bear no resemblance. At no point has Christianity become more deeply secularized. Instead of the Kingdom which is _not_ of this world transfiguring the kingdoms that are, lifting them up to its own level, where every term of law is translated into a term of love, and the very notion of a Kingdom passes into that of a Father's house of many mansions, the reverse process has taken place. Love has forsaken its mission of converting law to its own essence, and become a timid and apologetic fugitive, harried by the police.

No wonder that men declare themselves perplexed by Christianity. No wonder they find this mixture unacceptable. No wonder that official Christianity, tied up as it is with a political system which manages its own business none too well, is continually breaking down under the assaults of a critical age, which has grown almost as tired of the one thing as of the other.

I am far from saying that Christianity excludes the idea of God as the moral Governor of the universe or forbids us so to think of him. But it does not _begin_ with that idea, as we are apt to do. It allows us to arrive at it, perhaps, at the end of a long pilgrimage in experience; but if we never get there at all it makes no lamentation, pulls no long face, and does not treat us as lost souls. It does not say "Begin with the idea of a Cosmic Potentate and make everything else fit in with that." It does not require us to dismiss from our minds as blasphemous every thought of God which makes him other than the omnipotent legislator of the universe. In the religion of Jesus I am struck by the absence, by the total absence, of all these pompous conceptions of the Divine Nature, which show such speaking signs of having originated under lawyers' wigs.

The idea that I do find seems to have originated in a very intimate and loving comradeship with man and with nature. Indeed, the religion of Jesus is precisely this spirit of comradeship raised to its highest power, the spirit which perceives itself to be "not alone," but lovingly befriended and supported, extending its intuitions to the heart of the world, to the core of reality, and finding there the fellowship, the loyalty, the powerful response, the _love_, of which the finest fellowships and loyalties of earth are the shadows and the foretaste. In its essence the Gospel is a call to make the same experiment, the experiment of comradeship, the experiment of fellowship, the experiment of trusting the heart of things, throwing self-care to the winds, in the sure and certain faith that you will not be deserted, forsaken nor betrayed, and that your ultimate interests are perfectly secure in the hands of the Great Companion. This insight, this sure and firm apprehension of a spirit at hand, swiftly responsive to any trust we have in its answering fidelity, coming our way the moment we beckon it, motionless and irresponsive till we hoist the flag of our faith and claim its fellowship, but then mighty to save--this is the centre, the kernel, the growing point of the Christian religion, which, when we have it all else is secure, and when we have it not all else is precarious. God, said Jesus, is spirit: man is spirit no less; and when the two meet in fellowship there is religion.

I am approaching my conclusion and must gather up my threads.

All along my theme has been that we make a mistake when we look to religion to relieve us of the perplexities and difficulties of life, whether intellectual or moral. In a sense we should look for the opposite. Religion will bring our perplexities to a focus; will concentrate them on a point; will show us in one clear and burning vision the depth of the mystery that confronts us in life. But in raising our difficulties to that high level it will raise our nature to a higher level still, by liberating faith, courage and love, qualities that spring from a single root. In revealing the world as a world fit for heroes to live in, that is, a difficult world, it will arouse also the heroic spirit in ourselves, which is fit to live under those conditions. It will give us a part to play in life which puts our souls on their mettle at many points, but it will also give the spiritual power which stands the strain and even rejoices in it. It will show the Cross we have to bear; but it will also show the Christ who bears it, and will awaken the Christ, as a victorious principle, within us all. Pain and suffering it will not remove; but it will quicken a divine substance within us, which is more than conqueror over these things. And, lastly, when courage, faith and love have won the victory at the supreme point of their trial, and so established themselves as the ruling powers, it will turn these qualities back upon life as a whole, will interpenetrate everything with their energy, and transfigure everything with their radiance, and raise everything to their level, and so fill the world with music and beauty and joy.

So, then, in expecting religion to reconcile the world with our notions of a "good time"; to smooth and simplify our path; to accommodate itself to what we, in our weaker moments, desire--in looking for this we look for what is not forthcoming. Religion will meet us, not on the level of our weakest moments, but on the level of our strongest. It will give us power rather than satisfaction; courage to face danger rather than safeguards against it; inspiration rather than explanation. Whatever satisfaction it brings will come through the power; whatever safeguards, through the courage; whatever explanation, through the inspiration. It will not teach us to see no evil in the world; but immensely increase our resources for dealing with evil when seen. A power in the world which is for ever on the side of those who are brave enough to trust it, causing all things to work together for their ultimate good, and making them conquerors, and more than conquerors, over whatever confronts them, whether in life or in death,--this, and nothing less than this, is what we have to expect and to ask for. Our mistake has been not that we have asked for too much, but that we have asked for too little.

A true religion will be optimistic. It will end in a radiant and joyous vision of the meaning of life. But it will not begin with that, will not give us that for nothing. The radiant and joyous vision will not come to us through listening to arguments, through proving that there is more happiness than misery in the world, through shutting our eyes to the dark side of things and looking only at the bright, through crying "Peace, peace" when there is no peace, nor by any of the cheap and shallow devices on which mere verbal optimism is made to rest. We must win our optimism at the sword's point. We must pay the price. We must go through "the Dark Valley" and not listen to the man who thinks he knows of a way round. At certain stages of the journey we shall see the whole creation, as St Paul did, groaning and travailing together in pain until now; and only at the last stage, when loyalty has stood the test, shall we see this world of suffering and death delivered, by redeeming love, into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

Such a religion as I have been trying to describe will be found in Christianity--yes, and in other religions also. Far be it from me to set up an exclusive claim for Christianity at this point. Anyone who does that goes a long way towards forfeiting his title to be called a Christian. Let each of us look for truth where it is most accessible and where it speaks the language he best understands. For most of us here Christianity has this advantage. It gives the sharpest point to the challenge of life as we know life.

Christianity is the simplest and most difficult religion in the world, best adapted therefore for strong races, endowed with deep but silent affections, and with the plain-dealing mind whose conversation is "Yea, yea and nay, nay." But here let me utter a word of warning.

There is an outcry in these days for a Christianity shorn of its complications, and reduced to its simplest and most intelligible form. It is a thing greatly to be desired. I have been pleading for it in what has gone before. But let nobody suppose that, when Christianity has been reduced to its simplest and most intelligible form, it will be found an easy religion to put into practice. It will be found immensely more difficult than before. Only there will be this further difference. Whereas the old difficulties, those that came from presenting Christianity in complicated forms, merely irritated and confused us and caused us to waste ourselves upon irrelevance, the new ones, the difficulties of simple Christianity, meet us on a far higher level, introduce us to essentials, and give us a battle to fight that is really worth fighting. That is an enormous difference, but not in the direction of making simple Christianity easier than the other kind.

It has been said that Christianity reduced to its simplest and most intelligible form needs only two words to express it--"Follow me." It has been said, also, that if all Christian men for the next twenty years would give up the attempt to _explain_ Christ and devote their attention to _following_ him, at the end of that time they would know more about the person of Christ than they had ever known before, and they would have put Christianity in a posture to conquer the world. I accept all that. But before we claim that our problem is solved, let us think for a moment what "following Christ" really means, and to what it commits us, when we make it the keyword of simple Christianity.

Whoever sets out to follow Christ will have to follow him a long way and to follow him into some dark places. The path we have to follow is a narrow one. It runs all the time on the edge of a precipitous mystery, sometimes taking you up to the sunlit heights and the Mount of Transfiguration, and sometimes taking you down into the fires of suffering and into the shadows of death. Following Christ means that when you find these dizzy things before you, these dark things in your path, you go through them and not round them. Have you a good head? Have you a stout heart? Are you loyal to the leader in front? Easy enough while the road runs by the shining shores of the Lake of Galilee, but not so easy when it turns into the Garden of Gethsemane and becomes the Via Dolorosa.

There are those who think they have followed Christ when they have obeyed the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, loved their neighbour as themselves and done unto others as they would that others should do to them. To follow as far as that is to go a long way, much longer indeed than most of us can claim to have gone. But to stop _there_ is to stop in the middle, to miss the end of the journey, to come short of the point of arrival, where the key lies to the meaning and value of all that has gone before. We are too apt to rest in the thought that to follow Christ is merely to follow a teacher or a reformer, so that enough has been done when we have repeated his doctrine of Fatherhood and brotherhood, voted for his precepts, and practised as much of them as we can, or perhaps only as much as we find convenient. Let there be no mistake as to the inadequacy of all that, whether presented in a simple form or any other. To follow Christ is to follow a victor in life's battle, a conqueror over suffering and death, through the completeness of his loyalty to the Great Companion. Hence the power which makes his teaching live; hence the driving force which makes his Gospel effective for the regeneration of society.

You see, then, what is involved. Unless we can follow him through the point where his victory was won, all the rest will not amount to very much. We must follow him to the _end_ if we are to be his disciples. It is said of his first followers that when they came to this last lap of the journey, when the road before them took that critical turn which led through the Garden of Gethsemane, and became a Via Dolorosa, they all forsook him and fled. Do not some of our modernized versions of Christianity show a similar weakness, a similar reluctance to grasp the nettle, a similar tendency to stop short in their following of Christ precisely at the critical point? They forsake him and flee--flee for their lives!--This it is that makes simple Christianity so difficult; so difficult but so splendid, so infinitely worth achievement.

There was a phase in the ministry of Jesus, a comparatively untroubled one, when he went about among men in a temper of radiant optimism, declaring his confidence in the Divine Companion, a confidence so complete that all anxiety for the morrow was banished and the soul freed for a life of the utmost generosity and beneficence. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Nothing too bad to be incurable; nothing too good to be hoped for; nothing too high to be attempted; nothing so precious that we cannot afford to give it away. Yes, even that! For there is that within the hero which is so rich that he can afford to give his very life away, and be none the poorer, but the richer; a strange discovery, made by many a brave lad during the recent war, as he prepared himself to "go over the top," and thought of his mother or of his beloved.

Then came another phase, such as we too must meet sooner or later, when his mission had to be fulfilled not by saying these things, not by saying anything, but by doing and bearing up to the limit of courage and endurance. The silence of Jesus in the presence of Pilate is the silence of one for whom the day of speech is over and the day of battle begun, the ultimatum delivered, and the trumpet sounding the attack. Where are his followers now? They have all run away, as verbal Christianity always runs away when it comes to the critical point. Fugitives from the crisis, every man of them! And what of that radiant optimism that broke out by the shores of the Galilean Lake? Well, it came near to breaking-point, as near as it could without actually giving way. But it held! It carried him through! The infinite Friendliness did not forsake him in his extremity, as his followers had done. At one point he thought it had forsaken him, but it had not. For its nature is to be as true to the loyal soul as any loyal soul can be to it; waiting to attest its presence wherever the courage exists to make the experiment of trusting it. All prayers to it sum themselves up into one, which when it comes from the heart makes other prayers almost unnecessary--"Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit." _In tuas manus, Domine, meam animam commisi_.

So far, then, as I am able to understand these high matters, there is no such thing for any of us as getting rid of religious perplexity. But there is such a thing as exchanging the perplexities which depress and weaken our nature for those which exalt and strengthen it. This world is ill adapted to the fearful and the unbelieving; but most exquisitely adapted to the loyal, the loving and the brave. To poltroonery of one kind or another the Spirit makes no concessions; it wears the face of a hard master to all pusillanimous demands. To its own children it is not only gracious but faithful. It gives them commissions bearing the sign manual of God; shares their perplexities; goes with them into their battles; stands by them in their time of need; interprets their bright hours to a tenfold brightness; and changes the mystery of their pain from an unfathomable darkness to an unfathomable light.

Behind the battle of the Creeds lies the battle of life--a much more serious affair. Wherever the seriousness of the greater battle is deeply felt the acrimony of the lesser is mitigated. The two battles are not unconnected, but let us take them in their right order. Churches and sects which begin by fighting for their creeds are apt to end by fighting for their own importance--which is contrary to the spirit of the Christian religion and to the express command of Christ. Are there not some among us who think that the way to establish their own creed is to destroy the creeds of their neighbours? But is that so? Does the flourishing of my form of Christianity depend on the languishing of yours? I say it does not! The more your form prospers the better for mine. Christianity is big enough to find room for both of us. The more devout you are in holding and practising what you believe the more you help me in being faithful to what I profess. There is only one way in which the truth or falsity of any creed can be demonstrated--that is, by trying whether we can live up to it and observing what happens. What is needed, therefore, first of all, is not that we should destroy our neighbour's creed, but that we should help him to live up to it by living up to our own. I know of no other way in which the union of Christendom can be brought about.

[1] For doubts on this point see the last chapter of _Our Social Heritage_, by Professor Graham Wallas.

[2] I refer to the fact that for the last twenty years I have been Editor of the _Hibbert Journal_.

THE END

BOOKS BY

PRINCIPAL L. P. JACKS

THE LEGENDS OF SMOKEOVER

"A brilliant book.... 'The Legends of Smokeover' contains the most daring of all Dr. Jacks' inventions.... The book is a masterpiece of essentially English good humour, magnanimity, and keen thinking."--HORACE THOROGOOD in the _Star_.

"An unusually striking book.... Those who enjoy clever and allusive writing will find every page of the volume an intellectual delight."--_Scotsman_.

"This remarkable and original book."--_Pall Mall Gazette_.

HODDER & STOUGHTON LTD., LONDON

THE LOST RADIANCE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

1/- net

THE LINDSEY PRESS