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CHAPTERPAGE

THERE is a well known story of how a man of letters a century ago, when questioned as to his religious views, answered that all sensible men were of one religion, and to the further query as to what that religion might be, made the curt response: "Sir, sensible men never say." The story is characteristic of its age, and of the attitude towards religion of some of its ablest men. Many of the greatest thinkers, whatever the religious opinions of the circle in which they were educated may have been, held themselves aloof from controversy on questions of creed and church, looking upon such disputes with the kindly contempt of tolerant beings who themselves had reached a larger and freer atmosphere than that which surrounded those who struggled amid the dust of the plains beneath their feet. Something of this spirit, which is so clearly manifested in the world of politics and letters, can be seen too in many of the prominent religious organisations of the day. Men were weary of the hateful bitterness which had characterised the theological controversies of the seventeenth century, and the wider outlook which came with the age of illumination showed itself even as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, when in Germany Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastical authorities united in a common religious celebration at Fulda of the anniversary of the mission of Saint Boniface. But beneath the surface of this toleration, which seemed to be increasing between Catholic, Protestant and Jew, we may perhaps feel that the uniting influence lay not so much in a profound sense of the underlying verities common to all their various forms of faith as in a certain vagueness as to any form of dogmatic belief, a distrust of dogma in itself, if not an indifference to the things which that dogma attempted to represent. Men were willing to leave others free to have their own religious beliefs, and distrusted the enthusiasm of the fanatic, of the man who wished to convert others to view life as he himself did. The profession of a recognition of good in all religions went hand in hand with the recognition of their imperfection, and a doubt as to how far they were not so much alike sharing in truth as alike mingled with error. This attitude is illustrated by Lessing's famous fable of the three rings, which is perhaps the most quoted passage in "Nathan the Wise." None but the father can tell the true ring from the counterfeits which he has had made; the sons must therefore each treat the others as in the same position as himself. No one creed can claim to itself a pre-eminence over the others, none but God can distinguish the true from the false. The lesson of tolerance which Lessing taught in his drama was one of which our age, as well as his own, has need, but if we are only to view all forms of faith with respect because we are conscious of the difficulty of discerning the true from the false, we have reached a position which may indeed promote friendly relationships in the ordinary intercourse of life, but which cannot in the end be satisfactory either to ourselves or to others. Tolerance founded upon doubt can never be an inspiring virtue.

Is it not possible for us, however, since we realise this, to take a further step? We need to feel, not the imperfections of all the varying creeds, religions and irreligions, but the inherent strength of each, and from a consciousness of this to rise to some dim realization of the golden thread of truth which runs through all sincere faiths, however degraded or erroneous they may at first sight appear to be.

In the eighteenth century there swept over Europe a wave of new thought, which liberated men's minds from old superstitions and the narrowness of former dogmatism, and produced a sort of freemasonry of new ideas between men whose national religious and political upbringing had been wholly different. But this wave of liberal thought failed to produce a permanent sense of unity; in due time came a counter-movement when men turned from the generalisations and the vague optimism of these syncretist philosophers. The attacks which the sceptical critics had levelled on the older creeds were too negative in character: content to find out the weakness of their opponents' position and to expose it to contempt and ridicule, they had failed to realise the strength which lay deeper than the intellectual interpretations of belief which they had assailed.

Thus the nineteenth century has witnessed in the political world an extraordinary revival of national spirit, especially amongst smaller peoples, and on the other hand a similar revival within the different religious communities. The eighteenth century humanists would have foreseen the one as little as the other. To them it seemed that beneath the clear light of reason the old dogmas of the sects would each lose their force, just as the ignorant patriotism of their day, which they saw to be so largely built upon mistaken prejudice, would give away to their wide cosmopolitan spirit which felt itself above these petty views.

The revival of national feeling among the little peoples of Europe, with no wealth of capital or military force to give them aid, which we have witnessed during the last century, is, however, hardly less remarkable than the revival of life amongst the different Churches and religious communities of the western world. There was surely something lacking in the theory of life of these men of broad view of a former day who for all their breadth could not find room for enthusiasm such as this.

We are beginning to see that the truer cosmopolitan of the future will not cease to be a citizen of his own country when he becomes a citizen of the world, that the wider fellowship will lose its content and its meaning if it is to involve a denial of patriotism and not rather to subsume it as a necessary element in the true international spirit; and so in the inner life of the soul we must seek to harmonize the various contending creeds, not by destroying any particular creed, or attempting to replace it by some, vague generalisation, devoid of life or of attractive and inspiring force, but by attempting to appeal to the best in each, realising that each must have some value of its own, just as the poorest of peoples has its own peculiar traits and virtues; and thus gradually draw the sympathies and thoughts of men nearer together by reason of the common life from which must spring all that is good in the religion of each one.

There is a beautiful saying of Penn's which sets forth what many good men of very different creeds must have felt again and again before he gave the thought expression: "The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious, and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the divers liveries they wear here makes them strangers." May we not venture to carry further the thought and say, that this religion includes every servant of truth, and every man who is recognizing in practice in his own life the need of his fellows, by subordinating his own happiness and interest to theirs? That there is in reality a religion which all good men share we do, indeed, recognise in practice in everyday life; how else can we explain the appeal to conscience, to the sense of duty, to the unselfish desire to benefit others, which is constantly made to men of the most divergent religious views, whose theories of life would not be accepted by each other for a moment?

How is it then possible for us to make more clear to our eyes and to others this common basis of religion, and to build more securely upon it the structure of our lives?

We must not be disappointed if it is difficult to give intellectual expression to this basis of life; at best such expression must be imperfect, and we can only hope to arrive at it very slowly. Perhaps some hint of the way in which one may look at the problem may be given by that strange poem of W. B. Yeats "The Indian upon God." The poet pictures the way in which the creatures of earth each frame their own idea of the Divine Creator after their own image; some vast Brocken spectre, perhaps, some may say, cast by the reflection of imagination upon the clouds of the world without. And yet the poem has surely within it another meaning. To each creature comes, coloured, it is true, by different visions, some dim picture of the Maker, some sense of sustaining presence in the world and in their own lives:

/I passed along the water's edge, below the humid trees,/

/My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees,/

/My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moorfowl pace/

/All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase/

/Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:/

/"Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong and weak,/

/Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky./

/The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye."/

/I passed a little further on, and heard a lotus talk:/

/"Who made the world, and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,/

/For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide/

/Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide."/

/A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes/

/Brimful of starlight, and he said, "The stamper of the skies,/

/He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He/

/Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me? "/

/I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:/

/"Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,/

/He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night/

/His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light."/

One can readily understand that some readers might be shocked by what would seem to them to be idolatrous images. Yet does not the whole poem show something more than the fact that men worship images of God after their own likeness? Beneath the grossest idolatry there may be at least some sense of contact with the Unseen. Though man, like his fellow-creatures, cannot behold unveiled the vision of the Eternal, somewhere under every imperfect picture which our dogmas have framed of Him does not there lie at least some trait of faint resemblance? And, however much we may endeavour to remove from our minds all anthropomorphic conceptions we needs must think as men. Our most abstract thoughts are but spiritualised metaphors, the ghosts and shadows of the fully-coloured language of our earlier days or of a more primitive people. The moment we think of the origin and meaning of words, we realise that this is so; when we speak of conceiving a thought, grasping an idea, abandoning an argument, we are using metaphors which were once bold and vivid but are now scarcely perceived as such at all. And so in all our formulated thoughts of the Unseen we may be said to be in a sense idolaters. But only sinfully so, if we wilfully cleave to the lower forms when we have had vision of a higher. The fact that we express our thoughts on religion through the medium of the terms of the material world does not mean that the religious truths which they express are dependent upon, and are evolved out of, the physical world, any more than the intellectual processes of conception and perception are dependent on or derived from the physical processes after which they are named. But it does surely mean that we must recognise the necessary imperfection of our efforts to express the unseen realities, whether in religious creed or philosophical dogma. If we are convinced that there is a real unity underlying the religious life of every sincere man, whether he call himself religious or no, how can we best promote the growth of this sense of unity, so that in every form of faith the best may be strengthened and drawn into a sense of membership of a wider whole?

In the first place we must endeavour to be faithful to the best ideal of our own party, of our own church or creed, to insist on the positive side of what it teaches rather than its negations. The true protestant, for instance, should be zealous to protest for a living ideal which he feels to correspond to his needs, and not, as too often has been the case in the past, merely to protest against evils and mistakes connected with another ideal.

Then realizing the vastness of truth, and the limitations of our own powers of apprehending it, we must be willing to recognize that there must be other aspects of truth which we, as individuals or as a religious community, have not yet apprehended, and that the whole truth must needs be too great for any human mind or system to express. This attitude of mind should surely be perfectly compatible with an enthusiastic loyalty to that vision of the truth which has been given to us or our community, and with a desire to share this vision with others.

To attempt to surrender our own expression of the Truth as we see it, and replace it by an expression drawn from the vision of others is to make in the inner life an error like that of the school of Bologna in painting. The Caracci and their followers deliberately aimed at acquiring the peculiar excellencies of each of the great masters who preceded them, the harmonies of Raphael, the colour of Titian, the vigour and the grandiose forms of Michael Angelo. They hoped to combine all these and thus achieve a higher perfection than their masters, but in so doing they failed to express themselves in their own way, for they were always painting things as they imagined they ought to see them, and not as they really saw them.

The great artist, like Rembrandt, will honour and admire a Raphael or a Correggio without seeking to imitate them or to borrow their technique. And so while we recognise the vision of truth that comes to men of different views from our own, we must not abandon our own vision, or our attempt to express it faithfully, because we know that we see a part and not the whole.

Every great religious movement has been in its origin or at its highest point universal in its aspiration, claiming to make appeal to all mankind and to become at length the religion of the whole world. And it is this very universal claim which seems to some dispassionate critics so narrow- spirited and fanatical, which bears witness to the force and reality of that deepest religious life which underlies all difference of dogma, and finds its expression in all these varying faiths. At the moment of its budding forth, the tiny twig feels within it the expanding life of the whole tree. "I am the true tree, and the tree that is to be." it may be imagined as saying; though the great boughs above it do not stir in the wind that shakes it to and fro. The twig may have within it the possibility of growth to a size exceeding the stem from which it now springs, or it may remain only a twig; but in either case it is a part of the tree, and in a sense it is the tree; its life is the tree's life. So every great religious movement, when at its best and highest, looks forward to world-wide extension; it may be that the flood of life takes new channels and only a tiny sect remains to bear witness to what has been, but yet, when its members were filled with their first enthusiasm, and went forth into the world to win others to their views, they were strong because somehow or other they had come into touch with the eternal; their creed and organisation may have corresponded only to the need of the day, and of a limited number of people, or it may have been of wider application and able to endure for a longer time, but in spite of these limitations, the creed and organisation represent an inner life through which their members came into touch with the source of all life and strength.

Our task then must be to strive to be more conscious of this fact in our own lives, and in elaborating our own systems, as well as in dealing with and considering the religious views of others. In discarding the transient elements, the husks of dogma, we have to respect the seed-corn of life within them. The recognition of this will make us more reverent towards even the hoary errors of antiquity, and the methods of thought and life which to us are outworn, but were once living, and still may be living to some.

This surely is the lesson which we may draw from that touching story related by John Cassian of the monk Serapion, which Auguste Sabatier once told to his pupils. In his old age the good monk had suddenly been brought to realise, by the preaching of two missioners, the error which he had committed in thinking of the Eternal as a being like himself, fashioned in human form. His friends gathered round him to thank God for his deliverance from the grievous anthropomorphic heresy, when, in the midst of their prayers, the old man fell in tears to the ground with the pathetic cry: "Woe's me, wretched man that I am! they have taken away my God and I have none to hold to or worship or pray to now."

In our work of thought or of practical endeavour we shall need above all to realise the value of humble reverence for truth for its own sake, and of the recognition that wherever goodness is, there is that which the theist knows as the Divine, which others my speak of as the enduring spiritual ideal, but which, by whatever name we call it is the inspiring and illuminating reality which shines through every unselfish deed and thought, and makes our lives of worth.

We are sensible of this uniting force, however much our ethical ideals may differ. We cannot explain the common principles which justify the ideal of a Gordon and that of a Tolstoy, but we must surely feel that those ideals are in some way branches from the same good tree; it may well be that just as in the intellectual world different bents of genius each have their place and justification, so too in the moral have different types of the ethical ideal. The scientific mind, the practical, executive talent of the businessman, the speculative powers of the metaphysician and the creative gifts of the poet and artist, each have their place, and no one human mind can combine them all. So, too, it may be with the moral ideals realised here in our human lives. Because one is good, another is not wholly wrong. There may be varieties of goodness just as there are differences of shape and beauty between flower and flower. But while we recognise this, we surely need too to realise that there must ultimately be some vital connection between these different ideals, although we ourselves may not be able to perceive the unifying influence or principle. Is it not here that the Union of Ethical Societies fails, in that after insisting upon "the supreme importance of the knowledge, love and practice of the Right," their manifesto goes on to disclaim "the acceptance of any one ultimate criterion of right" as a condition of ethical fellowship? Yet unless there be some such criterion, can we speak of "the Right" at all? The capital "R" is an unconscious survival of the theistic expression of thought, or rather the expression of the essentially religious spirit of man, which in spite of a creed of intellectual agnosticism, recognises the Divine in life and does obeisance to it under another name. The idea of good and the thought of God are not connected together merely by a similarity of sound; they have but one origin. Thus, if where goodness is, there God is, we must be able to find evidence, even where there may be no intellectual knowledge of God, of the recognition of a unique worth in the good apart from all attempted explanations of its value. And perhaps we cannot do better than take an example from the writings of a master sceptic, to show how in spite even of an apparent intention to make mock of the failure of the good and unselfish man, and of the utterly impracticable nature of his ideal, a kind of homage is yet paid to the ideal and to its votary, and through them to the source of their inspiration.

Readers of Voltaire's "Candide" will recall the figure of the Anabaptist Jacques, the upright and unselfish man who perishes in spite of all his trust in overruling good. Voltaire in picturing his death would appear to be casting scorn upon a complacent view of a universe where such a thing might happen again and again, and as far as any practical teaching goes he would seem merely to point out that righteousness and faith may be not only unavailing to ward off calamity, but may actually bring it upon those who make such a standard their sole guide. And yet, even as you read, you feel how much nobler and better it is to perish like Jacques, with the unswerving faith of a good man, than to live on contentedly digging one's garden and enjoying its fruits in selfish peace. And however much we may be conscious that in the moment of trial, face to face with mortal peril, we ourselves might swerve aside, might hesitate and fail, we yet know that if we could make our choice in a cool hour, reviewing calmly what we ought to do, and what we would do if we could be true to the best that is in us, we should choose the honourable failure of the good man rather than the success of the bad. In itself we know it to be better, apart from all thought of consequence. And in practice we know how in the presence of the loveliness of an unselfish act all lower thoughts of pleasure and of profit fade away! Face to face with the enduring ideal that shines forth from. the good deed, lower ideals shrivel and sink into nothingness. Even truer is this of goodness made real to us in personality, and here it is that those of us who call ourselves Christians may find the keystone to the continual self-revelation of God to man, in that supreme revelation of the Divine nature in the unique personality of Jesus, which for the Church is the centre of inspiration and the explanation of the light which shines in all other lives.

If we can unite in reverencing the good and unselfish spirit, wherever it manifests itself in human lives, so too, we need to reverence every- where the search after truth, and the service of Truth for its own sake. Surely one of the most helpful signs our age is found in this increasing recognition of spiritual kinship between seekers after Truth of most divergent creed; not the least of the benefits of the Higher Criticism and the problems with which the minds of men have been confronted through the advance of science has been that in the readjustment of thought and life which is going on all about us, men have grown aware that they are not fighting their battles alone, but that far and near are kindred spirits going through a like struggle, and even that those whom they had fancied foemen were really their allies. This is the beginning of a movement wider and deeper than the so-called religious controversies which embitter the surface of our political life, the prelude to a new and wider Catholicism of the spirit, in which all the servants of Truth and humanity may unite without sacrifice of conviction in a sense of true brotherhood. Something of this underlying unity is recognised both in the supreme moments of our individual lives and in great times of national crisis, such as come in the birthpangs of a new movement or the brave endeavour to stem some rising tide of evil. Thus it came about that in the great uprising of German democracy of 1848, the colours which symbolised the new hopes of the people were often consecrated by a public religious ceremony in which all faiths united, and in the little Bavarian town of Furth, the Jewish Rabbi, as representing the smallest denomination of the town, was by common consent chosen to perform the ceremony. But we do not need to go so far back or to such a distant place to find instances of the way in which men of varying creed have found themselves uniting with those who are opposed to all forms of religion in defence of some common cause, inspired by some uniting ideal, though but dimly realized. Here, surely, is the truest test of that which is Catholic, the /quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus/, which the dogmas of theology can but imperfectly explain, but which is realized even now by all who seek to serve whole-heartedly the truth, and therefore, too, their fellowmen.

There remains a further practical question to be faced. If we recognise that the good finds expression in various ways, that men in act and thought alike may differ from each other, and yet the inner source of their spiritual life may be the same, are we to abandon the endeavour to find some intellectual synthesis of their divergent ideals? Must we cease to attempt to express in terms of thought that which we recognize as transcending all human thought and much more our imperfect terms? Surely this would be a mistake. Though not only for our own lives but for the whole life of humanity upon the earth it should prove that our processes of creed building and church making are necessarily imperfect, we must still for ever strive to express in thought and in act the life of the spirit, which grows and deepens as it is faithfully expressed. Creed and deed alike, we feel, are but the raiment of the life; they fade and are outgrown, yet they are not to be fiercely torn to pieces or lightly thrown aside. Even though we may never hope to be able to explain to ourselves or to others the common basis of our ethical ideals and of our religious life, we must never cease to try to find some explanation and to give what expression to it we can.

The vision of truth that we have now, our intellectual expression of our relationship to the world, and of our duty in it, is we recognise, imperfect; it is no key to the universe, to unlock every mystery for us, still less for others; but it may prove a sufficient lamp, and one whose rays grow ever brighter, to light our footsteps onward or it may be a clue to the great labyrinth about us which may be of use to others besides ourselves, though some may come to the goal by a very different way. Certainly the experience of all the great mystics would seem to show that as we ascend the Heavenly mountain, one from one side, one from another, our paths draw nearer to each other, and so across the night between, we may listen to our fellow pilgrims' voices, and realize that some day we shall meet face to face.

IT is difficult for us, and some may even feel that it is impossible, to make an impartial survey of an institution of which we ourselves form a part; on the other hand, it is equally difficult, unless one can realize something of its life from the inside, to appreciate the real nature of that life. And thus it must ever be peculiarly hard for us to understand the true relationship of the Christian churches to the world in which they work and to the ideal which guides them. And yet as we seek to see the difficulties others feel, and to enter into sympathy alike with the critic without and the workers within, we may come near at least to understanding some portion of the truth. It may remain true that "all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool," but as we endeavour to clear our minds and hearts of prejudice and to use others' eyes as well as our own, the pool grows clearer and the reflection becomes less broken, and more nearly an image of the reality it represents.

To see the failure of the Church does not mean that we ignore its victories: but if we are to carry those victories further, it must be by noting our shortcomings, and all that we have not achieved. Looking out upon the life of men to-day, we cannot forget how, bad as it is, society has been again and again in large measure redeemed and kept alive through lives that have been the light and strength of the Church as well as of the world, but this need not prevent us from seeing how far the Church as a whole has failed to act in the same way.

Organised Christianity to-day in England, as represented in the churches, is very largely a middle class institution. Not only the very rich, but the great mass of the poorer workers, stand aloof from it. It has not given its strength to prophesy against the evils that attack our social life; and to remedy above all that utter separation of the lives of rich and poor, employer and employed, which is the terrible characteristic of twentieth-century urban civilisation.

There is much religious "activity," of a limited kind, using old and recognised channels of expression, and an earnestness in defence of particular religious views or in attacking particular errors of doctrine or forms of worship. But if we can for a moment forget our own individual standpoint and endeavour to look from the point of view of an outsider upon such religious enthusiasm as shows itself upon different sides in , let us say the present education controversy. we shall surely feel that if this represents the life of the churches, they are far indeed removed from the spirit of their Founder.

"I love to see these Christians fight," was the remark of one able critic as he left a room where a public body had been engaged in discussing some phase of the "religious difficulty" in education. It is true that such a charge is no new one; as far back as the middle of the second century the philosopher Celsus brought a like one against the Christians of his day. But since those early days too, there has been continual protest within the Church against this very spirit, and it has been in that series of protests that some, perhaps, may trace the true apostolic succession of teachers and guides. Age after age these leaders have found new help and inspiration as they turned toward the source from which the strength of the Church first sprang, and it is noteworthy that now, as often in the past many of the men who are estranged from the Church have nothing but respect -- nay, often reverence -- in their thought of Christ and of these followers of His. They would have very different thoughts of Christianity if all who profess and call themselves Christians had realised that ideal of the meaning of the name by which they are called which William Penn once expressed in the words, "To be like Christ, then is to be a Christian."

If only we had all more clearly before us that vision, we could not but be filled not merely with burning shame at our own failure, but with longing to be more helpful to our fellows, and to draw nearer to them, as we would grow nearer to our spirit. And this desire within us will surely be strengthened as we turn towards that wonderful reflection of His teaching gathered together for us in the closing chapters of the Gospel of John. In that unique picture of the mind and heart of the Master there are traits over which we some- times pause and wonder; sayings which, when we can free our eyes from the scales with which custom has covered them, seem to shine with a light brighter than we can bear. And in that chapter, in which we listen as silent witnesses to the great charter of futurity, the prayer of the Founder for His Church that is to be, there are words which are so full of lofty purpose that we hesitate to apply them to our lives; unconsciously, perhaps, we have been wont to read them over and treat them as metaphor, meant to inspire but not to be realized; and gradually we have lost hold of their true significance, the inner life of thought beyond them. How truly can we say that we have realized, as individuals or as a Church, this picture which that prayer gives us of the Master's aim and desire for us?

"And I am no more in the world, and these are in the world, and I come to Thee. Holy Father, keep them in Thy name which Thou hast given me, /that they may be one, even as we are/. . . . Neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on Me through their word; /that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee,/ that they also may be one in us: /that the/ /world may believe that Thou didst send Me/."

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