Chapter 17
Again, and if as persons we are to grow in relationship to a personal God, we must both speak and listen to our Father; in other words we must use the great dynamic of prayer. "More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of." We are told that one of the requisites of the really good talker is to be a good listener; the apparently good talker is in reality a monologuist. In our prayer-life today do we recognize sufficiently the need for _listening_ to God? We are perhaps ready enough to ask for blessings and mercies, but that is only a part of the full life of prayer which must include also thanksgiving, lifting of the heart and mind, and quiet listening or interior prayer. There was an age in the world when this interior prayer was so much more joyful and natural a thing than the world of matter that it had to be taught "to labour is to pray." Today, when we accept the necessity of labour, and even worship activity for its own sake, do we not need to be reminded that to pray is to labour? If you doubt this, try to make that concentrated form of prayer known as meditation, out of which springs a resolve and determination to do better; try to do this faithfully for fifteen minutes a day and it may prove the hardest work you have ever undertaken. A great servant of God has said, "I believe no soul can be lost which faithfully practices meditation for fifteen minutes a day." Nor must we forget that in this work of prayer we are companioned by the Holy Spirit, the Peace-maker, Who maketh intercession for us "with groanings which can not be uttered" and "Who leads us ever gently but surely into that closer communion with God whose result is life more abundant." After prayer it is easier to realize that "to be spiritually minded is life and peace"; it is easier to obey the injunction "And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice, and be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven you." And for those that seek after peace it must be _all_ wrath, _all_ anger and _all_ evil speaking which are put away: This leaves no room for what the world calls "just wrath" "righteous anger," or speaking evil of evil doers. Let us call to mind the incident in the early life of St. John, afterwards the great disciple of love, when he wanted to call down wrath on the wicked inhabitants of a city and was rebuked by Our Lord who said, "Ye know not in what spirit ye speak." After love had supplanted wrath, and the good spirit had taken the place of the evil in St. John's heart, he was sent to convert the people he would have destroyed. Yes, it is the spirit that matters, the wrath that is wrong and that must be put away before we can love God or our neighbour as ourself, for the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.
When we understand that the object of life and of education is the creation of a spirit and not the doing of things, we are freed from the tyranny of results in this world as a final test and come to realize that judgment belongs only to God Who as a Spirit judges the effort.
Of course this does not mean that we are freed from the moral law, that certain evil things in ourselves and in others are not always the results of an evil spirit, but rather that in addition to avoiding and shunning those things which are obviously evil, we must with equal care avoid doing even good things in a bad spirit. The commandments still stand, the moral law is abated not one jot, but in Christianity and in Christianity alone are we given power to fulfill the law and to add the new commandment, the summing up of them all, of love to God and man. No human soul comes into the world without some desire to be good, because each human soul is a child of God. To each one, not blinded by pride (and surely it should be easy in these days to be humble) comes, sooner or later, the realization of his own inability of himself to do what he would, the need for a power outside himself, the power which is available and of which we have heard "I am come that ye might have life and more abundantly." Let us examine how the apostles set about living this abundant life. In Dr. Genung's "The Life Indeed" we read, "One and all they made it a matter of the spirit that is the man, but the spirit they recognized was not an abstraction, or a theory, but a present Person and helper who was witnessing with their spirits. St. John makes the matter equally definite: 'The Son of God,' he says, 'was manifest that he might destroy the works of the Devil,' and St. Paul, mindful of the inner subtleties of the conflict, warns his readers that Satan has changed his tactics and has transformed himself into an angel of light. I am not sure that we have gained greatly by letting our notions of spiritual life grow dim and abstract. Perhaps for this very reason the rebellious, negative, designing spirit that is so prone to invade the hearts of us all is the more free to gain a foot-hold and go about controlling the tone of our life. There is real advantage in bringing the large issues of life to a point where not only our mind but, as it were, our senses, can lay hold on them. It is the impulse of simple-minded men like those early disciples, and if we continue straight-seeing we do not outgrow it. What makes these views of life so deep is not that they are less simple than those of others, but that they are more simple. To St. John the reality that has come to win the world is not the promise of salvation, or prophecy of an eventual life eternal, but just life without modification or limitation, life absolute, full-orbed, pulsating through worlds seen and unseen alike. 'I am the Life,' he makes Christ say, not, 'I am working to secure it.' St. John it is who preserves to us that conception of eating the Flesh and drinking the Blood of the Son of Man. No philosopher in the world, we may roundly say, would ever have put it so, and yet how effectually is thus revealed what it means to get the power of the new life thoroughly incorporated with our blood and breath. He it is who identifies the most inner values of life with the simplest acts and experiences, reducing it to terms of eating bread and drinking water, and walking in daylight, and bearing fruit like the branches of a vine and following like sheep the voice of a shepherd, and entering a door and finding pasture."
Let us cease trying materialistic and intellectual means for supplying the power to live the spiritual life and let us each one establish the needful relationship with the true source of power. May our time not be likened to the Oriental traveler, who, appreciating the convenience and force of electricity as seen in a room he occupied, fitted his palace, on his return, with a set of elaborate fixtures and was surprised to find no illumination therefrom! We are torches who can not shine in themselves, but who, when connected with the great central Source of Power, the Blessed Trinity in its three glorious manifestations, can show forth the light of the world. Christians should be torch bearers, and the true torch bearer lights not his own path so much as the path of those who come after him. And this brings us to the fundamental reason for personal responsibility. Our motive in seeking personal righteousness it not, as might hastily be thought, because of a selfish desire to save our own souls, or to withdraw either here or hereafter from other souls, but for "their sakes" to sanctify ourselves; for the lives we live today create the spiritual atmosphere of tomorrow.
From Spain come the following suggestive thoughts in regard to the value of the person. "The individual is the real purpose of the universe. We may seek the hero of our thought in no philosopher who lived in flesh and blood, but in a being of fiction and of action, more real than all the philosophers. He is Don Quixote. One cannot say of Don Quixote that he was strictly idealistic. He did not fight for ideas: he was of the spirit and he fought for the spirit. Quixotism is a madness descended from the madness of the cross; therefore it is despised by reason; Don Quixote will not resign himself to either the world or its truth, to science or logic, to art or aesthetics, to morals or ethics. And what did he leave behind him? one may ask. I reply that he left himself, and that a man, a man living and immortal, is worth all theories and all philosophies. Other countries have left us institutions and books: Spain has left soul. St. Theresa is worth all institutions whatever, or any 'Critique of Pure Reason.'"
Yes, this is I think the lesson we have to learn, now at this turning point in history with the epoch of intellect crumbling about our ears, and the great World's Fair of multiplied, ingenious mechanisms we have called "modern civilization" at a point of practical bankruptcy. It is the spirit that counts, the soul of "man living and immortal," and only through our own living, and the spiritual force that we can command, and through ourselves apply, shall we be able to compass that social regeneration that is the only alternative to social degeneration and catastrophe. The man who does not live his belief is powerless to redeem or to create, though he were a Solon, a Charlemagne, a Napoleon or a Washington; the man who lives his belief, even if he is a mill-hand in Fall River, is contributing something of energizing force to the task of re-creation. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."
Fantastic and paradoxical as it may seem to link together Don Quixote and St. Theresa, I am not sure that we could do better than to accept them as models. The loud laughter of an age of intellectual ribaldry and self-conceit dies away and the gaunt figure of the last of the Crusaders still stands before us heroic in his childlike refusal of compromise, his burning compassion, his deafness to ridicule. In a sense we must all be ready to accept the jeering and the scorn that were poured out on the Knight of La Mancha, if like him we are to fight, even foolishly, for the things that are worth fighting for--either that they may be destroyed, or restored. And with St. Theresa we must be willing to endure obloquy, suspicion, malice, if like her we live in faith, subjecting our will to the divine will, and then sparing nothing of ourselves in the labour of saving the world for God in the twentieth century as St. Theresa laboured to save it in the sixteenth century.
The call today is for personal service through the right living that follows the discovery of a right relationship to God. Not a campaign but a crusade; and the figures of St. Louis and St. Francis and St. Theresa, together with all the Knights and Crusaders of Christendom, rise up before us to point the way. We would find the Great Peace, the world would find the Great Peace also, but
_The way is all so very plain That we may lose the way._
We have been told: "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you, for your Heavenly Father knoweth ye have need of these things." If we go forth on this new and knightly quest--quest indeed in these latter days, for the Holy Grail, lost long since and hidden away from men--we may, by the grace of God, achieve. Then, "suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye," and before we are aware, for "the Kingdom of God cometh not with watching," we and even the world, shall find that we have compassed the Great Peace, and if we do not live to see it, yet in our "certain hope" we shall know that it will come, if not in our time, yet in God's good time; if not in our way, yet in His more perfect way.
In these lectures I have from time to time, and perhaps beyond your patience, criticised and condemned many of those concrete institutions which form the working mechanism of life, even suggesting possible substitutes. In ending I would say as in beginning; this is not because salvation may be found through any device, however perfect, but because this itself, by reason of its excellence on the one hand or its depravity on the other, is, under the law of life, contributory to the operation of the divine spirit (which is the sole effective energy) or a deterrent. I have tried at long last to gather up this diffuse argument for the supremacy of spiritual force as it works through the individual, and to place it before you in this concluding lecture. Perhaps I can best emphasize my point thus.
The evil of the institutions which now hold back the progress that must be made towards social recovery and the Great Peace, is far less the quality of wrongness in themselves and the ill influence they put in operation, than it is the revelation they make of personal character. It is not so much that newspapers are what they are as that there should be men who are pleased and content to make them this, in apparently honest ignorance of what they are doing, and that there should be others in sufficient number to make them profitable business propositions by giving them their appreciation and support. It is not so much that government should be what it is as that character should have so far degenerated in the working majority of citizens that these qualities should show themselves as a fixed condition, and that there should be no body of men of numerical distinction, who regard the situation with sentiments much more active than those of indifference and amused toleration. It is not so much that the industrial situation should be what it is, as that there should be on both sides moral wrong, and that this condition could not have come about, nor could it still be maintained, except through character degeneration in the individual. It is not so much that many forms of religion are what they are, as it is that they should progressively have become this through their exponents and adherents, and that there should be so many who are still willing to defend them in this case.
Every ill thing reveals through its very quality the defects of the individual man, and as upon him must rest the responsibilities for the fault, so on him must be placed the responsibility for the recovery. The failures we have recorded, the false gods we have raised up in idolatry, even the Great War itself, are revelations of failure in personal and individual character. We may recognize this, but recognition is not enough. We may found societies and committees and write books and deliver lectures, but corporate action is not enough, nor intellectual assent. There is but one way that is right, sufficient and effective, and that is the right living of each individual, which is the incarnation and operation of faith by the grace of God.
It is my desire to close this course of lectures not with my own words but with those of one of the great personalities revealed by the war. First, however, I wish to say this. If there is any thought or word in what I have said that seems to you true, then I ask you to use it not as a matter for discussion but as an impulse toward personal action. If there is anything that is of the nature of explicit error, then I pray that the Spirit of Truth may make deaf your ears that you hear not, and blot out of your memory the record of what I have said. If there is anything that is not consonant with the Christian religion, as this has been revealed to the world and as it is guarded and interpreted by the Church to which these powers were committed, then I retract and disavow it explicitly and _ex animo._
There are two great spiritual figures that have been revealed to us through the Great War: Cardinal Mercier, the great confessor, who held aloft the standard of spiritual glory through the war itself, and Bishop Nicholai of Serbia who has testified to eternal truth and righteousness in the wilderness the war has brought to pass. It is with his inspired words that I will make an ending of the things I have been impelled to say.
"Christ is merciful, but at last He comes as the Judge. * * * He comes now not to preside in the churches only but to be in your homes, in your shops, to be everywhere with you. He wants to be first; He has become last in Europe, * * * Civilization passes like the winds, but the soul remains. Christianization is the only good and constructive civilization. Americanization without Christianization means Bolshevism. Europe is suffering today for her sins. Christ has forgiven seventy times seven, and now it seems that He is the Judge, turning away, rejected, leaving Europe and going through the gate of Serbia to Asia. Pray for us. * * * Send us not your gold and silver for food so much as send us converted men. Convert your politicians, your members of the press, your journalists, to preach Christ.
"Christ is choosing the perfect stones, the marble of all the churches, to complete His mystical body in Heaven. He thinks only of one Church, made from those true to Him of all the churches here. Civilizations are moving pictures, made by man. Without God they perish. The soul, the spirit, lives. The war is not against externals; the war is against ourselves."
APPENDIX A
From the point attained in the lecture on "A Working Philosophy," a point I believe to be clearly indicated by Christian philosophy and sharply differentiated from that of paganism or modernism, I would adventure further and even into a field of pure theory where I can adduce no support or justification from any other source. Speculation along this line may be dangerous, even unjustifiable; certainly it introduces the peril of an attempt to intellectualize what cannot be apprehended by the intellectual faculty, an effort which has been the obsession of modernism and has resulted in spiritual catastrophe. On the other hand we are confronted by a definite and plausible system worked out by those who were without fear of these consequences, and while this already is losing something of its common acceptance, it is still operative, indeed is the only working system and consistent theory of the majority of thinking men outside the limits of Catholicism. I think it wrong both in its assumptions and its inferences, and it certainly played a deplorable part in the building up of the latest phase of modern civilization, while its persistence is, I am persuaded, a barrier to recovery or advance. This theory, which has gradually been deduced from the wonderful investigations, tabulations and inferences of Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer and others of the great group of British intellectuals and scientists of the nineteenth century, is known under the general title of Evolution.
The following suggestions are offered with extreme diffidence, and only as uncertain and indeterminate approximations. In some respects they seem not inconsistent with the most recent scientific research which already is casting so much doubt on many of the assumed factors behind evolution and on the accepted methods of its operation. The true solution, if it is found, will result from the cooperation of scientists, philosophers and theologians, illuminated by the fire of the Divine Wisdom--Hagia Sophia--for in such a problem as this, almost the final secret of the Cosmos, no single human agency acting alone can hope to achieve the final revelation, while all acting together could hardly escape falling into "the falsehoods of their own imaginings" if they relied solely on their unaided efforts in the intellectual sphere.
Assuming then that life is an enduring process of the redemption of matter through the interpenetration of spirit, what is a possible method of action? To explain what I mean I must use a diagrammatic figure, but I admit this must be not only inadequate but misleading, for instead of the two dimensions of a diagram, we must postulate three, with time added as a vital element, and, I dare say, a "fourth dimension" as well. Confessing inadequacy in the symbol, let us conceive of a space divided into four strata. The lowest of these is the primary unknowable, the region of pure spirit, pure spirit itself, the creative energy of the universe, the unconditioned Absolute, in the terms of Christian theology, Almighty God. The second is the plane of matter, an area of potential, but in itself inert and indeterminate. The third is the space of what we call life in all its forms, the area in which the transformation and redemption take place. The fourth is the ultimate unknowable, that is to say, that which follows on after life and receives the finished product of redemption.
Now there is eternally in process a penetration of the stratum of matter by jets of the _élan vital_ from the realm of pure spirit, each as it were striving to detach from the plane of matter some small portion, which is transformed in its passage through life and achieves entrance into the ultimate unknowable, when the process of redemption is, for this small particle, completed. Always, however, is exerted the gravitational pull of matter, and the energy that drove through, instead of pursuing a right line, tends to bend in a parabolic curve, like the trajectory of a cannon ball. In the completion of the process some portion of redeemed matter "gets by," so to speak, but other portions do not; they return to their source of origin and are reabsorbed in matter, becoming subject to the operation of future interpenetrating jets of spiritual energy. The upward drive of the _élan vital_ constitutes what may properly be known as evolution, the declining fall the process of devolution or degeneration. Evolution then is only one part of the cosmic process, it is inseparable from degeneration.
This process holds in the case of individuals, of families, of races, of states and of eras, or definite and completed periods of time. As man is begotten, born, developed to maturity and then is brought downward to the grave, so in the case of races and nations and the clearly defined epochs into which the history of man divides itself. There is no mechanical system of "progress," no cumulative wisdom and power that in the end will inevitably lead to earthly perfection and triumph. For every individual there is the possibility of spiritual evolution within the time allotted that will open for him the gates that bar the frontiers of the world of reality and of redemption that lies beyond that world of earthly life which is the field of contest between unredeemed matter and redeeming spirit, of contest and of victory--or of failure. In the case of races and nations and epochs there is the same conflict between material factors and spiritual energy; the same crescent youth with all its primal vitality, maturity with its assurance and competence, and the dying fall of dissipating energies. In each case death is the concomitant of life but there is always something that lasts over, and that is the spiritual achievement, the precious residuum that remains, defying death and dissolution, that infuses the plane of life with its redemptive ardour, and is the heritage of lives that come after, acting with the sacramental agencies of religion in coöperation with God Who ordained and compassed them both, in that great process of redemption and salvation that is continually taking place and will continue until matter, and time which is but the ratio of the resistance of matter to the redeeming power of spirit, shall be no more.