BR 125 .H68 1923 Hough, Lynn Harold, 1877- Synthetic Christianity OTHER BOOKS BY DOCTOR HOUGH THE EYES OF FAITH THE MAN OF POWER IN THE VALLEY OF DECISION THE MEN OF THE GOSPELS THE LURE OF BOOKS ATHANASIUS: THE HERO THE THEOLOGY OF A PREACHER THE QUEST FOR WONDER, AND OTHER PHIL¬ OSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL STUDIES THE LITTLE OLD LADY THE CLEAN SWORD THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION FLYING OVER LONDON THE OPINIONS OF JOHN CLEARFIELD A LITTLE BOOK OF SERMONS THE INEVITABLE BOOK TWELVE MERRY FISHERMEN ©lie iHerricfe lectures, ©elibeteb at ti)t (Wo ^esflepan (Hnibcitfitp ittap 6-10, 1923 FEB 22 19 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY By ✓ LYNN HAROLD HOUGH THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI Copyright, 1923, by LYNN HAROLD HOUGH All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian Printed in the United States of America TO MY FRIEND ALONZO CORNELL MONAGLE Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/syntheticchristiOOhoug CONTENTS PAGE Foreword. 9 Triumphant Truth. 11 Triumphant Goodness. 50 Triumphant Beauty. 89 Triumphant Brotherhood. 128 Triumphant Godliness . 168 FOREWORD The Merrick lectures at the Ohio Wesleyan University have been delivered by such men as Doctors James McCosh, James Stalker, Sir George Adam Smith, George Jackson, Walter Rauschenbusch, John Kelman, Charles E. Jefferson, Bishop Francis J. McConnell, G. A. Johnston Ross, and Henry Sloan Coffin. The man who is invited to follow in such a suc¬ cession feels highly honored. He also feels a sense of very profound responsibility. It is inevitable that he shall bring to the lecture¬ ship the most serious and thorough work of which he is capable. Personally, I would like to express my hearty appreciation to Presi¬ dent John W. Hoffman and to Professor Rollin H. Walker, the chairman of the Com¬ mittee on the Lectureship, and also to all those who listened to the lectures with such gra¬ cious friendliness and such evident mental sympathy. Lynn Harold Hough. \ LECTURE I TRIUMPHANT TRUTH A little while ago Professor James Har¬ vey Robinson published a startling, vivid, and scintillating book entitled The Mind in the Making . It would be hard to imagine a book better fitted to rouse the sluggish mind or to awaken the slumbering perception. A great mass of erudition is used by a mind of singu¬ lar agility, and if the result is somewhat topsy-turvy, it is undeniably productive of amazing stimulus. As an intellectual shower bath one could scarcely prescribe a better book. But as one thinks it all over it is easy to perceive that Professor Robinson’s think¬ ing is much stronger on its destructive than on its constructive side. With huge gusto he sets about clearing away the rubbish, but he does not seem to be very clear as to what will be left when the rubbish has all been destroyed. Whatever else he is, one would never think of calling him a synthetic thinker. 11 12 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY A good many very able men who are at work just now seem to share more or less this char¬ acteristic of the author of The Mind in the Making y different as they may be from him in many ways. When you read such a brilliant volume as Professor George Santayana’s Character and Opinion in the United States, you find plenty of searching criticism and no end of skillful writing, but when you seek a view of life which shall rest upon certain clearly defined and productive principles you meet with disappointment. There is a good deal of urbane and distinguished disillusion¬ ment back of all the penetrating insight and under all the cogent analysis. The typical writing of our time frequently, perhaps usu¬ ally, is quite devoid of the synthetic passion. Such a volume as Amy Lowell’s Tendencies in Modern American Poetry reveals many a fine artistic impulse at work among our keen and enthusiastic innovators. There are many no¬ table qualities. There is a robust honesty. There is a hatred of that cloyingly sweet sen¬ timent which expresses the emotions in proc¬ ess of decay. There is a great delight in the sharp and gritty word and in the clear and swift-cutting phrase. There is an enthusiastic sense of emancipation from many a form of mental and sesthetic slavery. But what strikes TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 13 one as most significant is this: there is a com¬ plete absence of propelling constructive en¬ thusiasm. There is no sense of life as a noble structure which must be seen in its complete¬ ness and set forth as a glorious unity. Indeed, you have an uneasy suspicion that these writ¬ ers are busy with the exquisite working over of fragments just because they do not believe that life offers anything more than bits of tissue which never combine into a great organ¬ ism. There is no faith that life is organic. There is no profound and creative belief that all of experience fits together into a mighty meaning the searching for which is the poet’s and the philosopher’s meat and drink. All this is in striking contrast to the mood which saturated the life out of which the greatest achievements of the period behind us came. Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philoso¬ phy may have had faults and limitations enough, but through it all moved one tremen¬ dous belief. It was possible, the author of the Synthetic Philosophy believed, to think together the vast and varied experiences of men and to give them scientific standing in a coherent view of existence and life. There were ultimate mysteries which Spencer never placed in this articulate scheme of things. But the synthetic passion commanded his 14 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY deepest and most characteristic activities. In America a thinker like Josiah Royce, while conscious of the difficulties and the problems presented by the new knowledge and the uninterpreted relationships of many of the new sciences, was all the while driven by a consuming belief that it is possible to think of life in such a way as to put great moral and spiritual forces in command of all of our thinking and all of our activity. The Philoso¬ phy of Loyalty represented the eagerness of an ethically synthetic mind moving among the confusing and sometimes not entirely digested materials of an age of transition. A certain creative quality which characterized the best writing of a period out of which w T e have passed is seen very characteristically in the writing of Robert Browning. He saw every gargoyle on the cathedral of life. But, after all, he did believe that there was a cathedral. And he believed that it was a consummate piece of exquisite building. He had the syn¬ thetic mind. But he had more. He had a sort of glorious synthetic enthusiasm. He believed in life so tremendously that every sight of the ugly and the evil (and no man was more honest than he) led him on to a beauty which transcended the ugliness and a good which mastered the evil. TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 15 It is very easy to see that the notable thing about all this was just that it released a con¬ stant stream of creative energy. The syn¬ thetic passion is always making builders. It produces great thinkers and great workers and great artists and men and women who live great lives under the inspiration of mighty enthusiasms. It is very clear, too, when we stop to do a little close thinking, that our own time must find a capacity for creative enthusiasm if the vitality of the world and of civilization itself is not to suffer depletion. We must find the secret of the synthetic mind in the terms of our own experience of life. We cannot take over without critical exam¬ ination the features of even noble views of the past which attempted to give life com¬ pleteness. But with the instruments of our own minds and with the materials life gives us, we must conquer our way into the terri¬ tory of synthetic thinking. The first problem which emerges when we confront this necessity has to do with the nature of truth itself. Here we have a funda¬ mental issue, and the way in which we meet it will determine in the most vital fashion our relation to everything else which has impor¬ tance for our thinking and for our living. So fundamental and far reaching are the matters 16 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY at stake at this point that it deserves our most thorough attention. And the most fruitful fashion in which we can approach the discus¬ sion is by a consideration of the way in which truth has been regarded especially by the thinkers who belong to the historical continu¬ ity of intellectual pursuits in the civilization of the West. We can take time for reference to at least the typical thinkers who have given character to the whole great argument as the centuries have passed along. That sixth century, when Greek thinkers first undertook what in a critical sense may be called speculation, was far enough from us in its ways of thought. Distinctions which seem commonplaces to us had never been made, and assumptions which we would find impossible were made in the most natural fashion. But certain matters can be lifted from all the clutter of mythology and primi¬ tive thought. There is such a thing as change. And yet there is a unity which maintains itself through the change. So the problem presented itself to Thales, and he found in water with its obvious changes the principle which harmonized unity with diversity. Truth to Thales was found in that which pos¬ sessed capacity for change and yet was char¬ acterized by fundamental unity of life. Of TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 17 course the matter could not remain here. The Eleatics believed in stability, and they believed in it so deeply that their explanation of life made change impossible. Heraclitus believed in change, and he made it so com¬ pletely controlling that stability ceased to have a place in his thought. To the Eleatics truth was stability. To Heraclitus truth was change. The mood of the Eleatics has per¬ sisted in all the conservatisms of the world. The mood of Heraclitus has persisted in all the activities of radicals in every generation. It w r as inevitable that a new attitude should now develop if the mind of man continued to be active. And with the Greeks it remained very active indeed. Democritus felt that a way of uniting the truth as regards stability and the truth as regards change must be found. His atomic theory makes the stability to lie in the constitution of the atoms and the change in their varied relations. To De¬ mocritus truth was in reconciliation. The Pythagoreans had discovered the endless wonder of the relations of number. Here was an exhaustless world of unfolding rela¬ tionships unbroken by the hazards of human life and completely coherent and harmonious. Truth, it began to be suspected, lay in mathe¬ matical relationships. Anaxagoras, feeling 18 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY dimly beyond the mutability of human life and the hard mutations of things, caught a pre¬ liminary view of the possibility of thinking of governing mind as the basis of everything else. In the meantime the alert and versatile men of Athens had discovered that the human mind is an instrument of wonderful play and of endless agility. The sheer delight of the mental game allured them. The practical power of the man who by clever argument could draw men to his way of thinking fasci¬ nated them. They began to develop an art of argument, not for the purpose of finding truth but for the purpose of reducing an opponent to discomfort and of carrying an assembly. This, of course, was not a form of the quest for truth. It was a relinquishing of the quest at the very moment when the instruments of the quest were being used. The enemies of truth had appeared in its own household. But back of all the adroit unscrupulousness was a sense that the quest was hard and that there was no goal. And so fundamental skepticism began to appear. Clearly, a new direction must be found if thought was to move forward to new triumphs. In Socrates a new type of critical mind was found. Clever and adroit as the Sophists, he used all his skill to clear the field and make way for certain command- TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 19 ing conceptions. The view of Protagoras was that the individual is the measure of all things, sounding, it is true, the democratic note, hut in such a fashion as to open the way for intellectual anarchy, for if the individual is the final measure of truth, there will he as many kinds of truth as there are individuals; that is, there will he no truth at all. It was this insight which was fundamental with Socrates. He saw the necessity of rising above the eccentricity of the individual, and so he lifted the thought of the class as the determining factor. Over against the indi¬ vidual man he put humanity. Over against the isolated unit he put the group. Truth was to be found in the general rather than in the particular, in the class rather than in the particular member of the class. This sharp definition made way for a great forward move¬ ment. Carrying this set of principles much further, Plato, sadly convinced of the par¬ tiality and inadequacy of that which comes to us in this transitory experience, lifted the thought of the class into a conception of a system of fundamental truths, the ultimate realities permanently existing as the founda¬ tion and the goal of all that truth, hints of which we find in this phenomenal world. This world of ideas was the ultimate reality. Only 20 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY by participating in that reality did anything belonging to this world and this life secure a measure of reality for itself. Secure in eternal splendor, the world of ideas remained the pure and changeless truth of things. Aristotle was trained in this way of thinking, but his shrewd and practical mind found many dif¬ ficulties. He saw that it was easy so to express the thought of Plato as to make truth a remote and abstract thing and to reflect unpleasantly upon all the meaning and possi¬ bilities of the experience which comes to men here and now. He could not avoid the feeling that truth comes to light in the relationships of this present order and is not to be pushed away as something whose actuality is entirely beyond them. At the heart of his thinking he accepted more of Plato’s transcendental view than he himself probably realized, but he was characteristically what we should call a man of scientific temperament and method and his great work was in the analysis of the proc¬ esses and possibilities of thought and in the classification of all the branches of human knowledge which came within the ken of a man of his time and of his insight. For prac¬ tical purposes Aristotle found that truth lay in clear and logical thinking and in depend¬ able classification. TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 21 Conduct rather than a sense of the ultimate mysteries began to engross the Greek think¬ ers. The Stoics began to apprehend a con¬ tinuity and a meaning in the course of nature itself. The truth of living was to be found precisely in life according to nature. This life was to be one of rigid virtue, of noble self- control. So the truth of things became one with the virtuous life. The Epicureans, seek¬ ing a complete deliverance from the fear of the gods and the fear of death, accepted the atomic theory of Democritus. But their cen¬ tral insistence was upon happiness as the goal of life. This pleasure, with the nobler mem¬ bers of the school as with Epicurus, its founder, was a serene and noble and gracious thing. But in the hands of more passionately lawless men it was easy to make the principles of the school a basis for a life of indulgence. It was easy to carry the principles of the vari¬ ous Greek schools to extremes, and this was often done. The really creative period of Greek think¬ ing passed by and the center of the intellec¬ tual life of the world shifted from Athens to Rome. The genius of Rome was practical rather than theoretical, and while men like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius added new laurels to the Stoic faith, and Lucretius put 22 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY Epicureanism into beautiful Latin poetry, the really creative qualities of thought did not often appear in Latin writing. As the cen¬ turies passed, certain regions were explored with enthusiastic energy. The idealism of Plato was capable of inspiring a kind of rap¬ turous mysticism which might easily become the basis of a commanding philosophic inter¬ pretation. This, indeed, was the very signifi¬ cance of the work of Plotinus in the third cen¬ tury A. D. In a way Plato dominated such thinking as there was in the earlier part of the Middle Ages. The reality of the “idea” rather than the individual easily became the reality of the institution rather than of the units which composed it and this fitted in wonderfully well with the growing power of the church and its consciousness of its own life as well as with the thoughts about the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper which were growing in men’s minds. With the appear¬ ance of the Holy Roman Empire another ele¬ ment in a world situation which was adjusted in the completest fashion to the Mediaeval realism had made its place in the thought of man. To the typical mind of the Middle Ages truth lay in those solidarities which gave order to the life of man, to the church and the state as expressions in human life of the TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 23 reign of God, the ultimate reality of all. Such theories and the practice which came out of them inevitably tended to crush out many a liberty of the individual. So criticism became inevitable. A typical voice representing the new mood is that of Abelard, and his Sic et Non announces the arrival of the critical mind. With a sort of inevitable logical pre¬ cision the criticism of the Realism of the Middle Ages took the form of asserting that the general way was only a name and that the truth of things was to be found in the individual. Thus Nominalism took its rise. So the assertiveness of the individual and the power of the church and the claims of the world state met in the minds of men in the Middle Ages. The seed was being sown for the Protestant Revolt. The attempt to medi¬ ate between the free-moving individual mind and the authority of the church led to the sort of attempt at compromise which bodes ill for the interests of truth itself. The suggestion of two kinds of truth and that a thing might be true for the mind of man but false because of the authority of the church meant that men were entering a blind alley where truth itself was being robbed of its sanctity. There was endless intellectual adroitness developed in the whole period. And there were attempts 24 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY to find the psychological basis of truth which was put in the will by Duns Scotus and in the mind by Thomas Aquinas. Modern thinking really begins with Des¬ cartes. Once more mathematics was in process of making great strides. And once more a really critical mind with a constructive enthu¬ siasm back of all its processes had arrived. Descartes began by doubting everything it was possible to doubt. And so at last he was confronted by his capacity to think which he could not question and step by step moved out until God and the reality of the world of experience were safely brought back. In working out the detail of his thinking Descartes more and more set thought and extension as over against each other, yet some¬ how related. If all the while the very quest of philosophy is the seeking of that which exists in its own right and independence, the really substantial basis of all, it is clear that the dualism between thought and extension suggests that there is a longer journey to take. This journey was, as a matter of fact, taken by Spinoza, who regarded both thought and extension as merely the attributes of the ulti¬ mate reality. But in Spinoza’s hands this ulti¬ mate reality became a process so bound by necessity, so empty of creative freedom that it TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 25 proved incapable of bolding the minds of men searching for a reality at least commensurate with their own sense of creative action. The problem of connecting the world of thought and the world of things was still engrossing men’s minds. Leibnitz by his theory of monads and preestablished harmony tried to bridge the chasm. It w^as a brilliant theory, but it left a sense of life as something whose basis was a sort of artificial system of me¬ chanics. And the mind of man cannot rest in conceptions which are not really organic. The English philosopher Locke turned from vast and alluring fields of speculation and tried within rather close limits to see how the mind works and what assumptions we must make for the practical purposes of life. So arose the sensational approach to philosophic thought. Sensation and reflection give us all the material about which we think and con¬ cerning which we act. It is clearly seen that some things at least are modified by our men¬ tal experience of them and that sensation is not so simple a thing as at first appeared. Moving out from this study of the process of the mind in apprehending, Berkeley made the bold declaration that there is no reality out¬ side the mind. Things are just the mental experience of which we are conscious in sen- 26 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY sation. If there were no minds, there would he no things. By referring everything at last to the mind of God, Berkeley escaped some difficulties which would immediately have confronted him had the mind of man been his ultimate reality. Hume in a daring process of analysis took the next critical step and denied the existence of that unified mental life upon which Berkeley staked everything. The difficulty with his brilliant process of argument, as it is rather easy for us now to see, is precisely that at every step he found it necessary to assume for the purposes of argument the very things which he denied in his conclusion. It was evident that the whole process of human experience must be sub¬ jected to an even more searching criticism at the hands of some thinker who in all his work cherished a constructive purpose. And now in the critical hour the critically important man arrived. Immanuel Kant in his far town in Germany brought one epoch in the history of philosophy to an end and inaugurated an¬ other. The Critique of Pure Reason estab¬ lished permanently the share of the mind in the whole process of apprehending and utiliz¬ ing reality, a share so fundamental and so far reaching that it is only possible to have expe¬ rience under terms which the mind brings to TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 27 it. This makes it clear that we must think of things in certain ways if we are to think of them at all, but it does not at all prove that the ultimate reality corresponds to our thought of it. In fact, it leaves us with a phe¬ nomenal world, where we must move in a cer¬ tain fashion, and a real world quite out of the reach of the processes of rationality. From this pessimistic conclusion Kant attempts to save us by the Critique of Practical Reason. Here the acceptance of those postulates which are necessary as the basis of the moral and spiritual life is argued not as a matter of mathematical reason but as a necessary method of securing postulates upon which we can build the fullest life for man. The phe¬ nomenal side of experience seemed itself the worthy basis of a philosophy which discarded any ultimate questions, and Comte in the Positivist philosophy set about the practical classification of the materials of the phenom¬ enal world as the real task of the mind. To Fichte it seemed that Kant’s “thing in itself” beyond the reach of the rational mind was a needless and useless thing. The self which apprehended by means of processes of its own was the ultimate reality. Schelling saw in the reality apprehended by the spiritual processes an ultimate fact. It was inevitable that a 28 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY synthesis doing justice to all these fragmen¬ tary insights would be sought, and this was the endeavor of the powerful thinker, Hegel. The logical process was the movement of a fundamental reality expressing itself in all the experiences of life. This process was of the nature of the absolute itself, and as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis expressed itself in the world without and the world within, com¬ ing to consciousness at last in the mind of man. In such a view as this the structural nature of the mind was the fundamental matter. It gave a new meaning to history, to art, and to life. It was the basis of a glow¬ ing and expectant optimism. Over against this Schopenhauer put his searching pessi¬ mism with its emphasis upon the will rather than upon the mind of man. The main out¬ lines of modern thought had now been laid. The clear synthetic analysis which tried to avoid ultimate questions was carried further in brilliant fashion by Herbert Spencer. The view of the structure of the mind as offering the basis for a triumphant ideal of rationality as the core of reality became the basis of a great idealistic movement. The sense of per¬ sonality as fundamental and all interpreting when combined with idealistic positions be¬ came the basis of personal idealism. The view TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 29 that the intellect must take a lower place in philosophic speculation and that life itself has the right of way in interpretation as well as in experience became the basis of the Prag¬ matism of Schiller and James, the Activitism of Eucken, and the Creative Evolution of Berg¬ son. The attempt to find a meeting place for all the facts which would not reduce the objec¬ tive world to a phenomenal existence led to the speculations of the Neo-Realists. The brilliant achievements of a growing mathe¬ matical science suggested again the thought that new insights coming from an advanced mathematics might offer the key to many a problem. So in ever-changing form, idealism and realism and various half-way houses have furnished homes for the minds of men in our time. The man with a working hypothesis organizing the material nearest to him and hesitant about far-reaching generalizations is perhaps the typical man of the intellectual life in our period. Even this hurried and summary survey, with many a great name omitted and many a significant movement passed by, suggests that the history of man’s attempt to find truth has been a chronicle of checkered and difficult struggle. It has been a story of constant and inevitable conflicts. It has been the tale of 30 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY the perpetual battle of “either—or.” We are tempted to feel that we are quite lost in the swirling tempest of conflicting conceptions. If we believe in unity, it seems that we must fight the belief in variety. If w T e believe in solidarity, it seems that we must lose the belief in freedom. If we believe in mind, we seem to behold the material world disappear¬ ing from our view. On the other hand, if we believe in freedom, we seem to watch the disappearance of law; and if we believe in the matter, we watch the disintegration of the mind. If we believe in life, we have difficulties with logic; and if we believe in logic, we have difficulties with life. It is tremendously interesting to find that all critical thinkers have found it easy to do de¬ structive work. But when they came to con¬ struction it seemed that they .were merely erecting an edifice for the destruction of some clear-minded antagonist who would see that what was meant to be a palace of the mind was only a house of cards. If in the light of all this a man feels tempted to take an attitude of universal skepticism, he can only justify this position by the use of mental utensils which presuppose the validity of positions which he is trying to destroy. In the light of all this, we come to a closer TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 31 inspection of those thinkers like Democritus who have tried to find a unity which included the really vital assertions in opposing views. We become willing to try as a working hy¬ pothesis at least the conception of Hegel that there is a synthesis which will harmonize the truths lying in every thesis and its antithesis. We become ready to look upon the task of interpretation as a synthetic endeavor. Just as soon as we take up this position new light begins to fall upon many problems. We dis¬ cover that very often positions which seem to contradict each other can only exist by means of each other. Stability can have no meaning in living experience apart from change. And change has no solid meaning apart from sta¬ bility. The mind has no material to work upon without objective experience. And the world of objects is empty enough apart from the perception and activities of knowing minds. It is not merely that assertions which seem to oppose each other need in a larger view to find that supplement which they give to each other. This is true. But, deeper than this, when we analyze closely we find coiling in the heart of an assertion the very postulate which we are at the moment tempted to put over against it. You can always find the cor¬ rective of a system in some premise essential 32 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY to the position of the system itself. The study of the history of philosophy is pretty largely the tale of the emerging of neglected truths. But the tragedy of the history of philosophy is precisely the fashion in which any truth when once it has emerged wants to dominate the whole landscape. There is a kind of curi¬ ous assertiveness about particular truths as we watch their behavior in the history of thought. Each truth at some stage of his¬ tory wants to be considered the only truth. Somehow we must teach our truths to live to¬ gether. For a truth which wants to kill all the other members of the family when it comes to the throne always turns into a falsehood. It is this sort of thing against which the synthetic mind is always on its guard. It has an eye always open for the self-willed and spirited truth which wants to take the bit in its teeth and go galloping away. If you look at it in one fashion, the history of philosophy is the story of a succession of intellectual runaways. When we begin to have some genuine appre¬ hension of the power of truths to supplement each other, when we begin to see the fashion in which one involves the other, when we catch a glimpse of that organism of truths which is the very constitution of reality, we become TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 33 by the very nature of these insights synthetic thinkers. And as we go on with our work we develop eagerness to find some principle or set of principles, some fact or circle of facts, some process or some experience about which we can organize everything else in our con structive thinking. We become pilgrims seek¬ ing for a principle of synthesis and a method of coordination. And when we have reached this position we are ready for a new and searching inspection of the Christian religion. We are now ready to study truth as it emerges in the Christian experience of life. At the very beginning we find the work of harmonizing in operation. For we are not now studying truth apart from life and we are not studying life apart from truth. We are studying truth in action. We are study¬ ing life inspired by truth. We do not mean by these sentences to be begging the question as to just what amount of truth the Christian religion contains. We only mean to assert that the conception which we find emerging in Christianity of its own nature involves the thought that it is a religion of truth in action. Here we find at once the most genuine points of contact with many a vital aspect of con¬ temporary thinking. We can easily under¬ stand the attraction which Christianity pos- 34 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY sesses for a mind like that of Professor Encken when we approach it in this fashion. We can see how it possesses a kinship to char¬ acteristic assertions of Professor Bergson. And we can see how easily it speaks in lan¬ guage often used by the pragmatist. There have been religions which made little demand of thought, and there has been thought which has had little connection with religion. The very history of the greatest moments of the Christian religion shows how it lifts thought to commanding passion and sends it forth in productive action. The thinkers of the world have too often been spectators. The men of brilliant action have too often lacked clear and consistent thought. But in the Christian religion the philosophy of life is alive as an inspiration to conduct. Thought and action meet in harmony in the living synthesis of the Christian life. As we continue our investigation we find that in Christianity the intellect and the will each come to their own. To be sure, they have not always come equally into emphasis in individual thinkers who bore the Christian name. We do not forget the battle between the Thomists and the Scottists in the Middle Ages. But, surveyed in a large and under¬ standing way, the Christian faith in action TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 35 in the world reveals a great appeal to the in¬ tellect which is at the same time a great appeal to the will. The deepest thing which Hegel was trying to say about the mind and the deepest thing which Schopenhauer was trying to say about the will come to full expression in the Christian religion. And it is entirely free from the colorless abstractions into which Hegelianism so easily fell and from the abysmal pessimism which clouded the thought of Schopenhauer. Christianity is the farthest remove from those religions which are satis¬ fied by a routine of ritual which never speaks to the mind. At the same time it is anything but a process of dialectic where mental activ¬ ity is made the substitute for moral action. All the while there is the most searching demand that the mind think closely and c]early and profoundly. There is a tremen¬ dous dialectic implicit in the Christian faith. But at the very moment when we say this we must also say that it is a bugle blast sum¬ moning men to action. Its ideas all turn into conduct. Its thought is always the reverse side of action. It is a perpetual builder of character. It is a synthesis in which the processes of thought and the processes of ac¬ tion work happily together. The study of the genius of Christianity re- 36 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY veals the fact that it offers a possible recon¬ ciliation of the conceptions of stability and change. The God whom it preaches is not a majestic abstraction lost in the colorless dis¬ tance of his own infinity. He is not a lifeless Absolute in whose awful vastness all distinc¬ tions lose their meaning. He is eternal action. His very nature is that of perfect and per¬ petual activity. Not Heraclitus himself offered a universe where the vast processes of change were more definitely recognized. But this perpetual activity, this constant change, is not movement without order or action with¬ out a clearly defined and stable basis. If God is a God of deeds, he is also a God of char¬ acter. All of this manifold and ceaseless activity, all of this process of perpetual change, is based upon the solid strength of the nature of a God to whom goodness and order and harmony are of the very essence of life. The Eleatics made the universe incapable of real movement in their passion for stability. Christianity finds a sure basis for stability in the character of God, but leaves infinite room for movement and action. Heraclitus was so sure of movement and change that he found no adequate stability at the heart of things. Christianity finds infinite room for all the variety of movement and change and yet has TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 37 a solid basis for all this wonder of perpetual activity and change. The same problem emerges in another form in the questions which have to do with free¬ dom and necessity. Here again particular thinkers have been advocates of the partial rather than of the complete. But when we view Christianity in the largest way we find that it does ample justice to the place of free¬ dom while it clearly recognizes the limitations of freedom. Every summons in the calls to goodness which we find in the Old Testament and the New is based upon the implicit as¬ sumption of a royal freedom, of a capacity for responsible choice. And with all this there is a conception never far from view that the ultimate matters of goodness are deeper than any matter of choice. They are structural necessities in the universe. They are a part of the very character of God. The result is that you are never plunged into anarchy for the sake of freedom and you are never plunged into tyranny for the sake of law. And the testimony of Christianity on the larger field of history reveals the same emphasis. In dark¬ est hours men of many a century and of many a land have found their faith confirmed as they have meditated upon that place of struc¬ tural necessity which goodness occupies in the 38 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY life of God. It has made their faith as solid as Gibraltar. And all the while they have found in their experience of the things of God a creative freedom of the very genius of the loftiest and completest sort of liberty. It is not so much that Christianity has represented a dialectical process in defense of this har¬ monizing of freedom and necessity. It is just that the two have lived together in vital har¬ mony in the actual experience of the Christian m religion. And, of course, this actual experi¬ ence of harmony is the very basis of the only possible dialectic to provide theoretical ex¬ pression of this harmony. When man becomes aware of the range and marvel of his own mental powers there arises the temptation to misuse them for selfish ends, by adroit processes of argument to make the worse appear the better reason, to lose all sense of moral responsibility in vivid and dramatic mental action. We have seen how just this sort of thing injected large elements of irresponsibility and intellectual dishonesty into the activities of Sophists. When we have apprehended the nature of the problem which this sort of situation develops we find that in the most definite way Christianity enables us to meet it. On the one hand it is a religion which encourages and, indeed, makes inevi- TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 39 table the most daring use of the mind. The processes by which Paul broke away from the legalism which chained his people represent an amazing quality of sheer intellectual dar¬ ing. The Summa of Saint Thomas Aquinas is built about the very principle of the most thorough and searching investigation of everything which can be said upon all sides of every subject discussed. But while all this is true, and illustrations of its truth lie every¬ where in the history of Christian thought, it is also true that the very genius of Christian¬ ity is constantly acting in such a fashion as to prevent intellectual daring from becoming intellectual irresponsibility. In individual cases, the inhibitions may not always prove effective. But on the large field, the noble seriousness which is essential to the very character of the Christian faith always be¬ comes operative, and so a certain lofty and splendidly ethical seriousness combines with the most astonishing and daring versatility in Christian thinking. Christian thinkers sooner or later incorporate the very living qualities of the thought of every age, but before the end of the chapter these elements are mastered by the high and eternal verities of the faith itself. As Nathaniel Hawthorne once put it: “The light of God shines upon every age 40 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY through the colored glass of its own cathedral windows, but it is the ageless light shining through the colors of the age.” The Stoic emphasis upon duty and the Epicurean emphasis upon pleasure may seem to be poles apart, and yet these two principles find their reconciliation in the Christian reli¬ gion. We shall have more to say of this in a later lecture. Here it is sufficient to remark that the moral insistence, the categorical im¬ perative, nowhere receives greater emphasis than in Christianity. But as the experience of the Christian religion unfolds duty itself becomes transfigured. By the central experi¬ ence of the Christian “I ought” takes on all the brightness of “I w T ant.” Duty and desire are wedded when desire is lifted to the height of the loftiest demands of duty. The very experience in which conscience comes to its own is at its consummation an experience of rapturous and spontaneous gladness. So the true elements in the thought of the Stoic and the true elements in the thought of the Epicu¬ rean meet in a higher unity in the Christian religion. The student of Plotinus, if he is a man of profound personal responsiveness and of deep feeling, can scarcely fail to be impressed by many an insight which flashes out from his TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 41 teaching. The mystic approach to truth has fascinations which are immediately appar¬ ent, and the candid thinker is likely at last to admit that there are aspects of reality which can be approached in no other way. But just as the wealth of the mystical phil¬ osophy is coming within reach one begins to see that for every gift he offers Plotinus takes something very valuable away. And the world above the processes of the mind where specific affirmation becomes utterly impos¬ sible seems a very empty place to reach at the end of so promising a journey. If we have the synthetic habit of mind, we will begin to con¬ sider the possibility of a use of this approach so marvelously interpreted by Plotinus in such a way as to keep the mystical insights without being lost in an experience the nature of whose fullness is such that it has no mean¬ ing which can be expressed in the terms of the intelligence. When our minds are moving in this fashion, if we turn our attention to the Christian religion, we will discover that in the most astonishing fashion mysticism and the rational processes meet in a noble har¬ mony in the experience which is fundamental in the Christian life. A man like Jonathan Edwards is an illustration of a capacity for mystical experience combined with a mind of 42 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY the most extraordinary acuteness and of the most astonishing dialectical power. In Christianity mystical insights are perpetually giving new depth and richness and creative power to the activities of the intellect. And the processes of careful and analytical thought are all the while stabilizing and giv¬ ing intellectual form to the wealth of material which comes from the hours of most illumi¬ nated devotion. Here, again, sometimes the mystic masters the thinker in individual cases. And sometimes the thinker leaves no room in his method for the contribution of the hour of mystical insight. But taking the largest view, we may say that in Christianity the mystic makes peace with the thinker and the logical faculty welcomes the contribution of the hour when devotion becomes a new and glorious intuition into the nature of reality itself. The battle of the Middle Ages between Real¬ ism and Nominalism is at bottom a conflict between two sides of the same coin. The mood of the Realist persists in the Roman Catholic Church. The mood of the Nominalist is fundamental in Protestantism. But the cen¬ turies since the sixteenth have seen many a development in the direction akin to the in¬ sights of Realism in the Protestant faith and, TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 43 of course, this was really happening as one aspect of the thinking of Luther and Calvin themselves. If you approach life from the standpoint of the class, of the group, of the general which includes the particular, you are in a measure a Realist. Much has been done in the political field in working out these principles. And it is interesting to see how both in thinking and action the tendency has been toward finding a higher unity which would include the truth in both positions. Our republic is Nominalist in its emphasis upon individual rights. It is Realist inasmuch as it emphasizes federal authority. From the standpoint of the matters before us now it is wonderfully significant to find in what fash¬ ion the individual and the group each come to fullness of meaning in Christianity. If at times one seems to ignore the rights of the other, after a while the correcting influence begins to be felt. Christianity will always be a glorious individual experience of the things of God. So the deepest note of Nominalism is retained. Christianity will always be an organic brotherhood of men and women and little children who, in the oneness of their corporate life, find a new meaning in faith and life. So the deepest note in Realism finds ample expression. 44 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY It may seem at first that such a note as that sounded by the tremendously thorough¬ going attempt to doubt everything which could be doubted when Descartes came upon the scene expresses something very remote from the attitude of Christianity. As a matter of fact, that brushing aside of the unessential and coming face to face with the ultimate matters of experience which lay back of the endeavor of Descartes is inherent in the deep¬ est life of the Christian religion. And again, as a matter of fact, the experience of Luther on the religious side preceded the experience of Descartes on the intellectual side. We are prepared by what has already been said for the insight that the positions taken by K*ant’s Critique of Practical Reason have the deepest kinship with the method of Chris¬ tianity as an experience active in the lives of men. And we see at once how Hegel’s thesis and antithesis and synthesis speak in the very terms according to which Christianity has acted for ages without the formula. When we come to the conflicts between systems based upon the reason and philosophic approaches asserting a higher sanction, we find that Chris¬ tianity sees and appropriates the truth in each position. It is pragmatic as to method. But it reaches positions so firm and sure that they TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 45 may be expressed in terms which in their own way savor of a philosophy of the Absolute. Christianity can rejoice in the spiritual qual¬ ity of Berkeley and of many an exponent of a fully developed idealism, yet it understands fully the sanctions which the thinkers would conserve who insist upon the ontological real¬ ity of the objective world. It moves to the very time of a personal philosophy, yet it meets frankly those uniformities of the physical world which have been the basis of a materialistic interpretation. Enough has been said to indicate in outline at least the synthetic method which so won¬ derfully expresses the very genius of the Chris¬ tian faith. Indeed, the Christian religion may say as it approaches the great historic phil¬ osophical interpretations, “I came not to de¬ stroy but to fulfill.” And once again in all the ages of its action it has incorporated some higher principle in which contending inter¬ pretations have met in harmony. Every deep need of the mind of man which has emerged in the history of philosophic speculation has found notable and sympathetic expression somewhere in the very structure of the Chris¬ tian religion. With all the ground which they cover in common there are important distinctions be- 46 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY tween philosophy and religion. The one reaches its full expression in analysis and classification and interpretation. The other becomes a kindling experience filling the soul with inspiration and the life with enthusiasm. One comes to a climax in a clear light of thought. The other reaches its fruition in a blazing fire of passionate devotion. When religion touches philosophy it sets philoso¬ phical principles and sanctions on fire. And, like the burning bush, although they blaze in perpetual flame, they are not consumed. It is just at this point that the Christian religion most nobly includes and yet transfigures the whole circle of insights which philosophy has given to the world. Philosophy at its best gives a system of thought. Christianity turns the system into a consuming passion. The strategy of all this is seen most characteristi¬ cally in the figure of the One who said, “I am the truth.” The very essence of his person¬ ality is to be found in the fact that in him truth was alive. It looked out of human eyes. It spoke with a human voice. It used human hands and feet. It was alive in a human per¬ sonality. It cast aside all remoteness and abstraction and became infinitely near and infinitely compelling. And this truth was all 0 the while alive with the wonder of victorious TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 47 action. It ceased to be merely analysis and became conduct. It was a heart and a con¬ science as well as a mind. All the elements of thought which seem determined to meet only in clenched antagonism find that they unite in a strange capacity for harmonious action as they live in the victorious life of the personality of Jesus Christ. In all these rela¬ tions truth attains a completely new power. It possesses a wonderful moral contagion. It is characterized by a mighty spiritual inspira¬ tion. It releases the most amazing potencies and the most far-reaching and transforming energies. And in doing these things it both reveals and justifies its inherent quality. It is only in living contact with the personality which is truth alive that we reach a place of triumphant certainty or of triumphant action. So we come to know the truth, and so the truth makes us free. It may be suggested that a good many as¬ sumptions which have been made very easily and without patient dialectical processes for their support lie along the way of the dis¬ cussion we have been conducting. The reply is a rather simple matter. We have not been trying to prove everything, but only to make clear one or two things. We have endeavored to show that it is the very genius of Chris- 48 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY tianity to form a synthesis in which elements in many views which have contended on the field of speculation have united in a higher unity. We have also endeavored to show that this synthetic spirit opens the way to a meet¬ ing place between philosophy as a long ad¬ venture of analysis and interpretation and Christianity as a living passion. We have a suspicion that if these things are true, Chris¬ tianity is found to occupy a position of very strategic advantage and that in the light of it many things must be appraised with which it has not been possible to deal in detail in this analysis. In other words, our only assump¬ tion, though it has appeared in varied forms, has been this: Christianity has a right to speak according to its own nature, and we must value the specific claims it makes in the light of the fashion in which its whole organ¬ ism relates itself to the deepest life of the mind of man. It does not appear, then, to be very far from the position we have reached to that put by Robert Browning in the words of one of his characters: “that life that death accepted by thy reason solves for thee all questions in the earth and out of it.” Of that more will follow. At least this much is sure. In Chris¬ tianity we find truth conceived in terms of TRIUMPHANT TRUTH 49 inspiration and action. In Christianity we find principles which organize the very his¬ tory of philosophy into new meaning and re¬ veal in it new unity and harmony. In Chris¬ tianity thought and action meet in the hour of moral and spiritual victory. LECTURE II TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS There is scarcely a more delightful exer¬ cise than vicarious repentance. The prescrip¬ tion for this sort of observance is simple, but it must be followed with careful attention to each detail. First, you pick out something which you would never be tempted to do. Then you discover somebody who does this particular thing continually. Then with the subtlest flavor of complacency giving a deli¬ cate pleasure to the experience you repent of the other man's wrongdoing. You have a notable sense of moral elevation without any sense of personal humiliation. There has been a good deal of vicarious repentance in contemporary writing. A number of our clever and consciously able young intellec¬ tuals have recently been telling us in sorrow embroidered by anger what is the matter with this Republic. For a long time Mr. H. L. Mencken has been repenting of moral respect¬ ability wherever he finds it. Ferociously earnest young radicals have been repenting 50 TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 51 of our devotion to the Ten Commandments. Within the cages of our stern moralities fierce young libertines have been repenting of Puri¬ tanism and all its works. Carried along by their noble enthusiasm, energetic intellectuals have done everything short of the conducting of revival meetings to convert us to the prac¬ tice of ancient vices which we are now to re¬ gard as the super virtues of an emancipated age. Momentarily we may expect the Billy Sunday of the movement to appear accom¬ panied by a swarming bevy of publicity ex¬ perts and preaching the gospel of license with an abandon of evangelical fervor. All of this at least indicates a fresh ap¬ proach to the problems of life, and inasmuch as the solemnly brave young apostles of moral anarchy produce more pyrotechnics in the night sky than power by which the machinery of life can be kept moving, we need not be too much disturbed by them. All their wedlock of literary distinction to moral madness is just an indication of the fashion in which the yeast of a new and restless eagerness is mov¬ ing through contemporary life. They are the froth. But there is a real and deep movement in the great and far-lying sea. Professor Sherman has been administering the antidote at places where an antidote was badly needed, 52 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY and we may see many a sign that the older sanities will be able to maintain themselves in the midst of the intellectual jazz which some clever men please themselves by calling thought. A deeper expression of that restless desire to brush away conventional distinctions and to come to the heart of reality itself is found in such writing as appears in those anonymous volumes The Glass of Fashion and Painted Windows so persistently ascribed to the pen of that versatile journalist Harold Begbie. Here the ethical passion once more comes to its own and a fierce honesty unites with a genuine moral enthusiasm. The deep cutting sword into which Dean Inge has turned his pen is another example of criticism inspired by deep and stable ethical conviction. If General Smuts is right in saying that hu¬ manity is on the march, there are at least those who are reminding us that the march may have the guidance of the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. A world of such seething unrest at least provides a most stimulating place in which to attempt to think honestly and constructively about the problems of human life. In our first lecture we considered philosophy rather as a series of theories of truth, and we saw the TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 53 fashion in which Christianity provides a syn¬ thesis of all the noblest insights which have come to light during the course of philosophic speculation. We could not avoid noticing many a connection between philosophy as a theory of truth and the matters of conduct, but it was truth which was kept in emphasis. Now we are to think of the human endeavor to answer the question which probes deeper than the question, “What is truth ?” namely, that other question, “What is life?” To be sure, the two are inextricably connected, but we shall now find a different accent in our thinking and we shall find ourselves moving about with a different series of perspectives. The attempt to interpret experience so as to discover the nature of the good and the method by which it may be appropriated is that su¬ preme ethical endeavor whose result is the total achievement in character in the world. Broadly speaking, two opposite conceptions of the good of life have been outstanding in the history of human thought and action. On the one hand there has been the philosophy of life as duty. On the other there has been the philosophy of life as pleasure. Virtue has claimed the complete allegiance of man. En¬ joyment has made the same thoroughgoing and masterful claim. By the close of the 54 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY fourth century before Christ the two attitudes toward life confronted each other as Stoicism and Epicureanism. The Greek mind, with its characteristic clarity and lucidity and its en¬ deavor to get at the root of things, had reached these two positions as the opposite poles of thought and action. Out from the two ways of viewing life went great streams of influence upon the world. At its best, Stoicism pro¬ duced men who transcended national boun¬ daries in a great and noble conception of hu¬ manity and achieved a lofty and inspiring view of that great movement of the nature of things which defines the direction and mean¬ ing of all right-minded human conduct. At its worst, Stoicism was hard and angular and self-conscious, without generous human sym¬ pathy and without grace or charm. It was the apotheosis of a rigid self-control from which all understanding of the loveliness of life had passed away. At its best Epicurean¬ ism was a serene and noble appreciation of the stable elements of life, a quiet and urbane enjoyment of its permanent qualities of love¬ liness. At its worst, Epicureanism was a sur¬ render to all the lawless impulses of a gross and unbridled sensuality. It was the apoth¬ eosis of lawless passion. If we watch these two impulses playing TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 55 upon the world with all the fine contribution to its life and all the devastation of beauty on the one hand and of virtue on the other which has lain at the heart of a one-sided emphasis of either of them, the thought is sure to occur to us that each has its gifts to make to the life of man and that each needs to be supple¬ mented by the other. It was a notable day when on the Areopagus at Athens, Paul con¬ fronted the representatives of these two views of life. For though Paul’s thought was not moving along these channels, we can see that the thesis and antithesis met that day in a higher unity which included the elements of truth to which each bore witness. The insistence upon righteousness in the prophets of the Old Testament moves in the same mental and moral realm as the ethical passion of Stoicism. One represents the voice of conscience speaking Greek. The other rep¬ resents the voice of conscience speaking Hebrew. The prophets made compelling to Israel the sense of a set of absolute standards to which men must conform and by which they would be judged. They filled the moral de¬ mand with such fire and passion as it never developed among the Greeks. In fact, had it been possible to set Stoicism on fire, you would have had something not unlike Hebrew 56 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY prophecy. Amos, who turned conscience into a sword, is typical of that royal race of men whose lips were edged with lightning and whose words reverberated like thunder in the minds of men. But even in the Old Testament prophecy becomes something more than an in¬ carnate “ought,” There is a famous passage in Micah where a new note of moral and spiritual gentleness is heard amidst the artil¬ lery of the prophets’ battle. And when we come to the New Testament, “I ought” is transfigured as it changes into “I love.” It is the glory of Christianity that it turns moral obligation into spiritual delight. It turns duty into pleasure. It makes us love the things which we ought to do. Duty and en¬ joyment, virtue and pleasure are wedded in that glorious and lyrical outburst which we find in the thirteenth chapter of First Corin¬ thians. No wonder that it inspired Professor Henry Drummond to write his little classic on love as the greatest thing in the world. So it is that even as law and prophecy are met and transcended in Christianity even so Stoi¬ cism and Epicureanism meet at their best in the experience of the Christian life. The moral passion of Stoicism is saved and its hard angularities are cast off. The hearty spontaneousness of Epicureanism and its TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 57 frank gladness are saved, and its tendency to descend into grossness and evil indulgence is transcended by a passion for goodness which makes it impossible to enjoy evil things. To be sure, particular Christian groups and individuals have not always realized the meaning and strategy of this synthesis of duty and pleasure. There were high ecclesiastics of the Renaissance who preserved the mood of the epicure without the moral passion of the prophet, and so they reverted to that licen¬ tiousness from which Epicureanism has al¬ ways been striving to rise. There were Puritan leaders of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen¬ turies who preserved all the Stoic passion for virtue and who had quite lost sight of the beauty of holiness. And in this fashion they reverted to the hard and rigid and self-con¬ scious qualities with which Stoicism has had always to contend. But when the full wit¬ ness of Christianity has been heard, it has expressed virtue in terms of gladness and has reconciled pleasure and moral passion. Even self-sacrifice when it is completely Christian is so glorified by love that the person making the supreme offering is often scarcely con¬ scious of the cost. His gift of himself seems a perfectly obvious thing And he is trium¬ phantly glad as he makes the gift. 58 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY At this point it is important to observe that a part of the strategy of the Christian religion is its perpetual lifting of men to a higher level of enjoyment. You know a great deal about a man if you know what he means when he says that he has had a good time. He may mean that he has been eating an appetizing dinner. He may mean that he has been sail¬ ing a boat. He may mean that he has been in¬ dulging in the gratification of some wild and hectic desire. He may mean that he has been busy about some great human task. He may mean that he has been enjoying a noble poem. He may mean that he has been solving a prob¬ lem of mathematics. He may mean that he has been pursuing some high path of philo¬ sophical dialectic. It is fair to believe that Charlie Chaplin as we see him in one of his comedies and Sir Henry Jones as we sense the quality of his personality in that closely reasoned volume A Faith That Enquires represent different standards of enjoyment. Christianity is perpetually opening new paths of noble enjoyment to men, and it is all the while so refining their capacity and their taste that they are able to enter into posses¬ sion of ever more wonderful promised lands. It is not that Christianity decreases men’s power to participate in simple and homely TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 59 enjoyments. Indeed, the enthusiasm for the artificial and the bizarre is in its own way an indication of the fact that we are moving away from the genius of the Christian re¬ ligion. But without robbing men of the fine and homely simplicities, Christianity is all the while making them ready for loftier and more subtly distilled gladness. It is all the while making their pleasures more ethical. It is all the while making their pleasures more spiritual. It is all the while building a gran¬ ite edifice of goodness and then making the loveliest of vines to clamber all about it and the rarest of flowers to hang upon its walls. Duty at its most commanding and pleasure at its loftiest moment are united in a noble har¬ mony in the Christian faith. There is another contrast which is inherent in the moral process itself and which emerges in different fashions in the ethical experience of man. This has to do with the philosophy of goodness as conduct and the philosophy of goodness as a life of the motives in the soul of man. In one way you have a typical mind with the emphasis on the outer in the phil¬ osophy of Aristotle, though in Aristotle this is a matter of emphasis rather than a lack of recognition of the place of the inner life in the experience of man. In Plotinus you have 60 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY such an emphasis on the inner that both thought and conduct may seem to be entirely transcended in the rapturous apprehension of the ultimate reality by the spirit of man which Plotinus feels to be the ultimate good of humanity. One attitude toward life is ex¬ pressed in the words of Matthew Arnold— “Conduct is three fourths of life.” The other is at least suggested in the familiar words of Ralph Waldo Emerson—“What you are speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.” There is much to be said for each position. It is easy to see how inevitable it is that the statesman and the practical moralist should emphasize matters of conduct. Good will which is not crystallized into concrete diplomatic ac¬ tion never prevents wars. The enthusiasm for a peaceful world must take solid and tangible form if we are to have sanctions strong enough to hold the nations steady in the hours of stress and strain. The most gentle and kindly spirit on the part of a captain of indus¬ try is curiously ineffective if the methods used in the industrial organizations which he con¬ trols are all the while depleting the vitality of the workers, making for poverty and fomenting unrest. A man may be a good citizen at heart, but he must get his attitude expressed at the ballot if he is to make his TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 61 position influential in the life of a municipal¬ ity or a commonwealth or a nation where the political form is that of a democracy. The fine spirit which never gets itself expressed in action has a curious futility in the midst of ail the heaving and throbbing activities of men. On the other hand, it is not hard to see how empty are all external actions which do not have the soul of reality behind them. The very genesis of blue laws is the putting upon the legislative records enactments which do not express the inner insights and the inner convictions of the people. The soul of a nation must be back of a law if that law is actually to be enforced. Then once and again we have met the phenomena of good deeds which were for public consumption only. They did not express the intention of the doer. They did not represent the spirit of the man who was responsible for them. They were a shrewd appeal for the good will of the public. They stood not for what the man was, nor for what he desired to be, but for what he desired people to think he was. Very often good deeds have been the mask of an evil character. Sometimes they have been a smoke barrage to cover a subtle attack upon the good¬ ness of the world. 62 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY The peril of the tremendous emphasis upon publicity in our own time lies partly at this point. For at one stage publicity consists in getting people to think that a thing is true. And this may be done quite apart from the facts in the case. It is easy for men who are ready to take moral shortcuts—and there are always many of such men in the world—to refuse to take the trouble to square the facts with the moral demands of the situation if they can meet the immediate requirements by persuading the public that the facts are as the public would like to have them be. There is an even subtler danger in the philosophy of goodness as a matter belonging to the outer life when it is upheld apart from the fuller knowledge of all that must go to make a deed good. This arises from the fact that a good deed coming from a wrong or inadequate motive may be so hard and un¬ lovely that it loses all moral and spiritual power. There have been plenty of stepmothers who were real mothers of profound affection, but the old distinction between a stepmother doing rightly by the children in a home from a sense of obligation and the actual mother doing the same things with a heart overflow¬ ing with unselfish devotion does illustrate what we mean. You cannot get a perfect deed TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 63 until the inner life is glowing with the rap¬ ture of it. The fact is that the moment we attempt to make an analysis of the elements in a deed which is really good we must transcend the one-sided emphasis on the outer and the one¬ sided emphasis on the inner. A good deed must get clearly in action that which is noble and true. And a good deed has as a central element in its constitution a spirit full of the inner strength of loyalty to goodness. And a good deed becomes as nearly perfect as any¬ thing in this human world can be when back of its fine adequacy on the field of action and the loyal will which propels it there is a heart of rapturous love of goodness filling the deed with the subtle beauty and fragrance of its rare bloom in the inner life of the spirit. Goodness is expressed in what we do. It includes what we mean by what we do. And at its highest it is set to the music of a pas¬ sion which sings unceasingly in the soul of the man to whom the good has become a living inspiration. Now, the moment we examine Christianity in the light of this discussion, we are fairly surprised to find in what a thorough fashion it provides the synthesis which unites every element of good in the philosophy of conduct and the philosophy of motives. No 64 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY one ever spoke more searching words regard¬ ing the inner life than did Jesus. He drew the contrast between the outer and the inner with a power which the world can never for¬ get. His picture of whitened sepulchers full of dead men’s bones to describe a life fair without and loathsome within, goes to the very heart of the matter and presents it in a picture which fastens itself upon the mind. The utterance which we often describe as the Sermon on the Mount has as one of its funda¬ mental movements this taking men from the outer and fastening their eyes upon the inner. The man who prays upon the street corner but has no corner for prayer in his heart is held up to scorn. The man who gives lavishly in public but has no love of giving for its own sake in his heart is exhibited in all the crass externalism of his life. The searchlight of Jesus penetrates the last recesses of men’s souls and finds in its final lair the true motive which is back of the deed. Jesus delivered ethics from dependence upon the visible and set up the moral tribunal in the invisible recesses of the heart. But while all this is true the same mighty Master of the art and practice of living put a tremendous emphasis upon conduct. “Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” “If ye TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 65 love me, keep my commandments.” “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love.” “He that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them is like a man whose house was builded upon a rock.” “He that willeth to do shall know.” So runs the mar¬ velous refrain of great utterances whose con¬ summation is action. The philosophy of good¬ ness as a life of the motives which dwell in the heart and the philosophy of goodness as a life of action met and found perfect harmony in the higher unity of the teaching of Jesus. It is in the Christian religion, too, that the difference between goodness as loyalty and goodness as love is perfectly appraised, and the loyalty is caught up and transfigured in the higher devotion. This point has such far- reaching elements of importance that it deserves more than a passing attention. Per¬ haps we can best approach the matter by a study of Falstaff in the days when the reck¬ less and carefree Prince Hal was his boon companion and the same Prince Hal when high responsibility has made him into a seri¬ ous king who has no time for lawless vaga¬ bonds. The curious thing about such a study is just that we are forced to admit that the moral vagabond Falstaff is much more to our liking than the serious king and that Prince 66 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY Hal himself is a much more attractive human being when he is a careless young Bohemian than when as a dignified king he rebuffs his one-time comrade. The more we analyze the situation, the more perplexing it becomes. For most of us can think of people who were more attractive in their days of careless good fellowship than after they had come to moral decision and had attained ethical maturity. We begin to wonder if there is something wrong with the structure of things. Is a man really more lovable when he has no moral purpose than when he is mastered by a great ethical loyalty? The problem which we raise in this fashion is not so difficult of solution if we follow the moral process all the way through. You can never judge an apple tree by the hard and juiceless apples in one stage of development. You must wait until the apples ripen if you are going to judge fairly the fruit of the tree. It is so with moral pur¬ pose. The vagabond is not attractive because he has parted company with his conscience. He is attractive because there is something wonderfully spontaneous about his life. A virtuous man in the green-apple stage of his development is not unattractive because he is in earnest. He is unattractive because he is hard and self-conscious. There is something TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 67 mathematical about his loyalty. He is always remembering the formula. There is no splen¬ dor of creative freedom about his life. Now, the wonderful thing about the man who has taken the whole moral journey and whose goodness is transfigured in the joyous devo¬ tion which Christianity gives is just the fact that he has won back all the glad spontane¬ ousness which at one stage of his moral growth he seemed so entirely to have lost. He has parted company with self-consciousness. He is not all the time thinking of the book of rules. The law of God is written on his heart and he does the thing which is good because he loves to do it. He has all the zest of Fal- staff and all the earnestness of a Hebrew prophet. It is just this secret of Christianity which it must be confessed many professing Christians have missed. And it is just this secret which many critics of Christianity have never understood at all. A good many of our hot-headed young intellectuals who think that you have to break one of the Ten Command¬ ments to prove that you have any creative freedom in your life are unconsciously long¬ ing for that goal of Christian goodness where righteousness as a command is transcended by righteousness as a living passion. The man at this higher place in the journey of moral 68 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY experience often does the same things which are done by the man at the lower stage of the journey. But he does them with a different motive. He does them with a new enthusiasm. He does them with a splendid and creative joy. The romance of Vagabondia is lost in the earlier stages of the moral pilgrimage, but it is found again all transfigured and glori¬ fied upon the uplands of sainthood. And as we study the process intelligently we begin to have very deep suspicions that the creative spirit at the heart of goodness is ready to come to most of us far sooner than we are ready to welcome its bright and glowing ministry. So the outer and the inner meet and blend in the Christian experience of the ethical life. And so both are changed from the driven obedience of ethical slaves to the glad and spontaneous freedom of a morally and spiritu¬ ally creative life. This is what Paul means when he talks of being no more a bond servant but a son and heir. Paul had taken the whole journey, and he knew its every vicissitude and all the wonder of its ultimate triumphs. The man who wrote the amazing outburst regard¬ ing the glory of the divine love knew secrets which many dull and blase critics of Chris¬ tian morals have never sighted even from a far distance. The green-apple stage of moral TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 69 development lies far behind. We are now in the presence of the ripe and luscious fruit. “Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things pres¬ ent, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The theory and the practice of life have been built about the opposing sanctions of another set of principles. There have been those who have found the good of life essen¬ tially in self assertion. There have been those who have found the good of life essentially in self-denial. Whole civilizations have felt the impulses and the inhibitions coming from these opposing attitudes toward the nature of what is really good. The most dramatic and brilliant apostle of the ethics of self- assertion was Frederick Nietzsche. He was one of the few men who have been ready to carry a theory to the remorseless end of its logical implications. He found in the asser¬ tive and masterful and imperial will the supreme good of life. The will to power, the will to conquer, the will to subdue—these gave life its true virility, its only permanently crea- 70 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY tive zest. Any other view represented a deca¬ dent and diseased slave morality, a subtle endeavor of the weak by a system of ethics which they adroitly created to make a place for themselves in a world which belonged to the strong. The only safety of civilization lay in a fierce strength. An unscrupulous vigor of mind and will which swept everything be¬ fore the passion and the power of its own triumphant virility was the hope of the world. The consummation of the whole process of biological evolution was the superman who could impose his own mighty will upon a world whose finest and fiercest product he was. Darwin had seen a little of the meaning of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. Nietzsche believed that he had visualized the whole process and was able to express its deep and ultimate meaning. Self- assertion on the part of the strong was the very central meaning of life. It was the first and the last word in the meaning of conduct. It is easy to see what an appeal such a philosophy of life would make to hot and impetuous young men impatient of compro¬ mise and with the vital tides of life sweep¬ ing powerfully through their whole person¬ ality. Here was an interpretation which with terrible courage faced every fact and TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 71 called every actual element in experience by its right name. It was brave enough to be cruel and free enough to brush scruples away if they stood in the road of that triumphant achievement of assertive and conquering will which was the very essence of life. There were multitudes of powerful young intellec¬ tuals in Europe who felt that now at last the word of ultimate vitality had been spoken. Now the strong man had found an ethic worthy of his strength. Now the man of im¬ perial will had found a philosophy which answered to his own power. Over against the philosophy of self-asser¬ tion stood a very ancient and venerable system of ethical beliefs which centered about the idea of self-control and self-denial as the method by which the ultimate good of life was to be achieved. For centuries deeply medita¬ tive thinkers in India had been insisting that the repudiation of the world, and not the ac¬ ceptance of the world, was the ultimate good. Not a rapturous and remorseless assertion of the will to live and the will to conquer, but a denial of the will to live, a thrusting out of the will to conquer, was of the very essence of the life of the seer and the saint. The serene and lovely beauty of the soul delivered from all the passion of desire, even the desire 72 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY for life itself, was the good toward which all understanding minds desired to move. Cen¬ turies of brooding quiet when thinker after thinker and seer after seer traveled the dim and silent ways of profound and self-denying thought had left their impress upon the very atmosphere of India itself. The sense of that ultimate reality in which all the sharp and bitter assertiveness of the individual spirit would be transcended, of that glorious and serene Nirvana in which the destructive and disintegrating bitterness of the individual will would be forever lost, was subtly distilled in the very deepest places of the consciousness of this gifted and reflective people. The pas¬ sive here at last came to its own. The active found its ultimate repudiation. Whatever the individual views of a thinker and writer who owns India as his land and its deepest brooding thought as his inspira¬ tion, one finds all the while emerging a cer¬ tain lofty disdain for civilizations based upon the assertive will and the personality which goes about the fiercely achieving ways of action. Many an American remembers the chaste and faultless English, the subtle and powerful periods, the sword thrust of remorse¬ less irony with which Rabindranath Tagore weighed our modern civilization, and all its TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 73 buzzing mechanism and all its superficial activity, and found it wanting, standing like some ancient prophet and out of the classic richness of his mind and the deep and brood¬ ing insight of his heart pouring his high dis¬ dain of pretty much everything which the contemporary man of the Western world has learned to love. In these two opposing types of philosophy we may well seem to have found an ultimate antagonism which can never be resolved into a higher unity. Grim and terrible in their final contradiction, the philosophy of self- assertion and the philosophy of self-denial may seem to confront each other the ultimate rivals for the possession of the mind and con¬ science and heart of man. But the moment we begin to think in the mood of close and clear analysis we begin to see that each of these views alone is, when carried to its ultimate conclusion, the guide to a position which is impossible in a world which is to continue to live and grow. Self- assertion alone would destroy the world by the sheer impact of its hard and sordid self¬ ishness. Self-repression alone would destroy civilization by the utter lassitude of that pas¬ siveness which it would create in the minds of men. Each position, when taken as the T4 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY one good custom, does indeed promise to end by corrupting the world. The cruel monsters created by the will to power would turn against each other upon the ever smaller areas of a world whose life would be perpetually depleted by their perpetual strife, and at last nothing would be left but the final sword thrusts of the final antagonists in a world where all the fair and lovely things of art and life would have been buried somewhere along the path of the lonely and titanic will to power. The passive somnolent creatures cre¬ ated in a world which really surrendered to the philosophy of the denial of every impulse to action and vigorous achievement would waste away in the stern lands where men must work in order that they may secure their daily bread, and in the tropics they would live on for a while, dreamy and heavy lotus eaters, lost in the vague and evasive fantasies of their own half-slumbering minds until the will to live at last vanished and only fierce tropical creatures remained to move about the hot jungles where man’s life had worn out in final ennui. Now, it seems clear that we cannot surren¬ der to either of these interpretations of life pushed to the extreme of its own logic. And it seems equally clear that when once we allow TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 75 them to play into each other, checking and interpreting each other and finding a higher unity in a point of view which includes that which is really productive in each of them, we begin to find a fashion in which life may be made really full and rich and noble. The impulse toward self-assertion, the will to achievement, the desire to bend the forces of this mysterious world to the purpose of man is really responsible for some of the noblest and some of the finest achievements of civil¬ ization. And, on the other hand, the refusal to regard the rewards of action in the intense pursuit of the purposes of the aspiring will as the ultimate things of life, the preservation of the mood of deep analysis and understanding contemplation in the world of action have brought a depth and a fullness to the spirit of man to which too eager a tribute can scarcely be paid. The truth is that a man cannot be the greatest sort of man of action unless part of the time he is a spectator. And he cannot be the best sort of brooding spec¬ tator unless part of the time he is a man of action. It is self-assertion and self-repression which together make up a harmonious char¬ acter. It is thought and action which together make up a good life. It is the will to achieve and the capacity for a noble passiveness which 76 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY together round out the full circuit of the life of the world. But, farther than this, as we proceed with a really searching analysis, we discover that at its best the ethics of self-denial become the basis of a noble philosophy of action. Some of the most brilliant achievements in the realm of action have had a heart of self-denial at the center of all their quality. The will to conquer may be transformed into the will to conquer self. The will to power may be made into the will to power over self. The mighty motive of self-assertion may be bent to the purpose of the good of society instead of being the slave of the exploiter of society. The ethics of self-assertion and the ethics of self- denial may find a higher unity in the ethics of altruism where men become the most them¬ selves by being the most to others, where they find their lives again when they lose them¬ selves in unselfish service. The very moment when we reach the series of insights which we have just been trying to express it suddenly dawns upon us that by its very nature Christianity represents this syn¬ thesis of the best in the will of assertion and the best of the will of denial united in an un¬ selfish purpose to serve all human life. Whose life was it which was one per- TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 77 petual assertion of the privilege and joy of self-giving? Who was it who tilled self-sacri¬ fice with such noble and joyous passion that it became a positive and productive thing in¬ stead of a dull passiveness, depleting the life of all true vitality? Who was it who in one last great act, which was at once self-assertion and self-denial, gave his life for the sake of the world which he loved? Who was it who at the very moment when he refused to become the slave of the world, appreciated and util¬ ized a thousand good and noble elements in its life, loving the flowers, glad in the presence of little children, and believing in some soul of goodness in the heart of man which would respond to his great gift of himself? The truth is, of course, that there never has been such a combination of glorious self-assertion and of marvelous self-denial as we find in the life and ministry and death of Jesus. He gave the active all the glory of the passive. He enriched the passive with all the kindling quality of the active. In him the East and the West met in the wonder of a wedlock where the deepest meaning of the life of each was nobly conserved. He is the supreme challenge to men of thought. He is the supreme inspira¬ tion to men of action. He reveals anew the wonder of a wise passiveness. He shows forth 78 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY the power of action which has the insight of a brooding and passive spirit at its heart. That creative altruism which is the very genius of the life of Jesus is the reconciliation and the synthesis of every productive element in the philosophy of self-assertion and the philosophy of self-denial. Now, to be sure, many men and women who have named the Christian name have not understood these things. Indeed, in no end of relationships the very wonder of the Chris¬ tian religion lies in unsuspected and unappro¬ priated corollaries which flow from the very essential nature of its life. The ascetics of the Middle Ages were far enough from realizing the synthesis of which we are speaking. But many men have realized just the fashion in which self-assertion and self-denial each come to their own in the religion of Jesus Christ. And it is not hard to see that along the line of this insight lies a perfect field for expan¬ sive achievement in the future. Indeed, there is a sense in which the Christian who under¬ stands his own position is a Nietzsche who will never be contented until every man is a superman, and who knows that at last the very glory of self-denial is that when it is delivered from self-consciousness and wrought into the texture of the good of the world it TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 79 has all the positive and happy energy of self- assertion. Jesus called men to deny and to follow. In that sentence you have the very uniting in a higher unity of the attitudes which have carried such long and bitter con¬ tention into the minds and hearts of men. The moral history of man may be ap¬ proached along the line of another set of sharp and definite contrasts. On the one hand we find the philosophy of law. On the other we see the philosophy of lawlessness. On the one hand we have the ethics of obedience. On the other we have the ethics of revolt. Law emerged very early in the history of man. Indeed, one of the very earliest of the types of great men is the lawgiver. In Ham¬ murabi we find a very early expression of that regard for legal sanctions upon which the very fabric of civilization is woven. And Moses and Lycurgus and Draco and Solon and all the other lawgivers of antiquity are turn¬ ing ethics to the practical purposes of the state. In the sixth century a. d., when the codification which we know as the Justinian code was achieved, the nation whose supreme strength was in organization had expressed the sanctions which lie back of the orderly life of man in a form which marked an epoch in the moral history of the race. 80 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY The study of the Pax Romana is a very good approach to the strength and the weak¬ ness of that view of life which builds human relationships about legal sanctions. On the one hand there is a security over vast areas such as the world had never known before. The solid strength of the Roman roads mov¬ ing out from the imperial city to all parts of the empire is a fit symbol of that massive sta¬ bility which was the most notable achieve¬ ment of the Roman genius. All the varied races of men, all the manifold types of human life, seemed to find a welcome and a home under the vast canopy of Roman jurispru¬ dence. It does not seem strange that a sensi¬ tive and understanding mind like that of Virgil, dreading disorder on the one hand and believing in the fine flower and fruitfulness of an orderly life on the other, should have consecrated all his powers to the idealizing of that solid authority which Augustus was founding and to the writing of its sanctions deep in the affections of men. When we in¬ spect the decay of the life of civilization and the widespread disorder which fell like a blight upon the life of mankind when the Roman Empire disintegrated, and contrast this wild and lawless life, with ruin and deca¬ dence everywhere, with the highly articulated TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 81 life, with its commerce and its wealth and its learning, during the centuries when Roman power was most potent and productive, it seems that if we value civilization at all, we must he ready to accept an ethical code which bases life upon the observance of law. The matter is not quite so simple, however, as it looks upon first inspection. As we analyze the Roman life more closely we dis¬ cover that the Roman genius was much stronger on the side of organization than on the side of creative energy. It is to Greece rather than to Rome that we look for the great seminal qualities in philosophy, in art and in literature. At its best Rome was a wonder¬ fully gifted imitator, but even at its best, back of the Roman work you find Greek inspira¬ tion. The great Roman philosophers were the representatives of Greek schools of thought. The Roman could build roads and bridges, and he could weld the world together into such solidarity as it had never known. But he could not furnish the flame of fire, the crea¬ tive impulse, which is back of the supreme activities of the mind of man. It is tremen¬ dously significant to observe, on the other hand, that Greece, which was strongest in the realm of creative energy, was weakest on the side of organization. The nation which was 82 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY the inspirer of the mind of man was not the lawgiver of the world. It is also true that as we follow Roman life through the period when its organization became most highly articulated and its authority most absolute, the Roman world itself begins to show more and more clearly signs of decreasing intellec¬ tual vigor and at last of waning vitality. The machinery of its life seems to become too vast for the play of its mind. The nation which gave order to the world borrowed its inter¬ preters of beauty and its leaders in the quest for truth. So we are not surprised that in many nations and during many periods men have lived who have become the apostles of revolt. They have regarded walls as the boundaries of prisons and not as the protection of states. To them authority has been synonymous with tyranny. Law has been one with autocracy. They have longed for freedom where the emancipated spirit of man could go forth with all the intense passion of its own great powers. When they have carried their views to the full length of their logical implications, like Proudhon, they have become philosophical anarchists seeking an order where there is no coercion and a social life where no force com¬ pels men to observe community sanctions. TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS S3 When they have been the apostles of an im¬ pulse rather than the exponents of a clearly thought-out philosophy of life, they have been audacious men of letters, hotly condemning those things in the life of their time which they have felt stood in the way of free and creative expression. The French Revolution, which abolished the old regime in France itself and indirectly influenced so much of Europe and the world, felt the mighty move¬ ment of a tremendous yeast of lawless energy. This energy became at last so destructive that the tyranny of Napoleon was accepted for the sake of order, and all over Europe swept those tides of reaction which found full expression in the era of Metternich. It seems pretty clear that revolt is most alluring when it is ex¬ pressed in hot and derisive words. When it enters the field of action and goes to the full limit of its enthusiasm, it has a way of burn¬ ing down the house which it was going to reform. In fact, although the philosophy of law and the philosophy of lawlessness seem so utterly irreconcilable, the more we study the matter, the more clear it becomes that each represents a fundamental impulse which must be kept alive in the world. And we must seek a higher unity which conserves the true and productive elements in each. 84 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY The truth is that law can render its best services only among a people who are full of creative enthusiasm. And it is equally true that the apostle of revolt is able to play a really effective role only against a background of solid and orderly life. Whenever solidarity becomes oppressive you need the eager ener¬ gies of the men of revolt. Whenever revolt pushes on to the point where it begins to dis¬ integrate those sanctions which are struc¬ tural in civilizations, you need to feel the strong and unhesitating hand of law. It is when the two impulses work together, each acting as a check upon the other, each witness¬ ing to a truth that the other is constantly for¬ getting, that it is possible to have anything which deserves the name of progress. There is an even deeper psychological possibility than this. It is possible for obedience itself to become the expression of so free and spon¬ taneous a spirit that the authority of law be¬ comes as free and creative a thing as the energy of revolt. When a man has come to love the law which he obeys he has all the freedom of which the anarchist is so proud and all the advantages of a stable society which will not go to pieces under the blows of the lawless spirit. The truth is that not law itself but a slavish attitude toward law TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 85 creates the servile spirit and depletes the crea¬ tive energies of men. It is worth our while to pause for the obser¬ vation that the harmony of which we are speaking is all the while in a measure being realized in the democracies of the world. For democracy is orderly freedom. It is revolt become law-abiding. Its laws come up from the people and not down from some autocratic authority. From this point of view we can see that it was not the presence of law but, rather, the autocratic nature of authority which depleted the vitality of the organism of the Roman, state. When law becomes the expression of the popular will it represents in its own way the wedlock of liberty and authority. But we are most interested in the fashion in which these two opposing principles are reconciled and harmonized in the higher unity which is offered to them in the Christian religion. Indeed, we find traces of this higher unity in the writings which come out of that life whose tale is told in the Old Testament. For the Old Testament has its own Rome of law and its own Athens of spontaneous energy and its own meeting of the two in the loftiest insights of those prophets who saw the recon¬ ciling of the divine will and human desire. 86 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY The classical passage in respect of this recon¬ ciliation is the great word in Jeremiah where the prophet foresees the time when the law of Jehovah will be written on the heart of man. This is as perfect an expression of the idea of the synthesis of freedom and law as one could well desire. But what is at best the sudden flash of in¬ sight in the Old Testament becomes the very warp and woof of the fabric of the New. One of the most fundamental achievements of Jesus lay precisely in the fact that he made the Ten Commandments fascinating. In him goodness was not a demand coming from with¬ out. It was a spirit rising from within. The mechanical obedience of the copy book was impossible to him because the law of God was alive in his life. And for this very reason he kept it as no man of mechanical and slavish obedience could ever do. And all of this becomes the very heart of the message of Paul to the world. For Paul knew the way of slav¬ ish obedience, and when the revolt came it was not into license but into the freedom of spontaneous obedience. “With freedom did Christ make you free,” Paul cried. If one may be pardoned a paradox which none the less is an almost literal expression of the truth, Paul knew of nothing so gloriously law- TRIUMPHANT GOODNESS 87 less as obedience. You find the same note in all the greatest evangelical piety, and some¬ times Luther gives it such exuberant expres¬ sion as almost to court misunderstanding. Of course there have been times when the church did not understand the synthesis. When the church became an uninspired Judaism wear¬ ing the name of Jesus, the Reformation re¬ called it to the first fine rapture which it was forgetting. And so it has been once and again. But in the soul of the Christian religion there has always been found this capacity to unite in a higher unity the apostles of law and the apostles of revolt. So we see in respect of a number of the characteristic contrasts which have arisen in the course of the ethical thought and experi¬ ence of man that Christianity comes as a syn¬ thesis uniting all that is good in a large and productive harmony. But it does something much more fundamental than this. In Chris¬ tianity you have not ethical theory primarily, but first of all moral and spiritual experience. You have ethics alive in the soul of man. You have an inner inspiration which becomes an outer activity. You have something more fundamental than a system of ethics. You have a marching song. Indeed, you have some¬ thing deeper than that. You have the spirit 88 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY which makes men desire to sing as they march and the creative inspiration which creates the song. It is only as goodness becomes a tri¬ umphant experience that we come to actual comprehension either of its nature or of its authority. And this is just what happens when men experience its meaning in the re¬ ligion of Jesus Christ. LECTURE III TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY Philosophers have been put to a good deal of perplexity in the matter of working out a theory of aesthetics. It is clear that the love of beauty is in the world. It is clear that it has had a marvelous if checkered history. It is clear that it furnishes the commanding motive in many lives and a powerful motive in the lives of multitudes. But from whence does it come? What is the basis of its appeal? What is its real meaning in human life? How is it related to the love of the true and the love of the good? What place does it have in a fully rounded interpretation of life? Our task in this lecture is a good deal less ambitious than the range of the inquiries sug¬ gested by these questions. We will content ourselves with examining some of the forms in which the love of beauty has expressed itself and with attempting to appraise their rela¬ tion to the Christian religion with the hope of getting some light on the possibilities of Christianity in relation to a synthetic treat¬ ment of the realm of beauty. 89 90 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY In a sense human life is just a great series of quests. And of these one of the very most fascinating is the quest for beauty. Somehow at once it seems to bring us into contact with invisible and impalpable values. From some¬ where deep in the nature of man the desire for loveliness arises and he proceeds to find a symbol and an expression of that desire in the world of things or the world of sounds. The wonder of the world in which he finds himself, the splendor of the night sky, the challenge of color and form in all living things, the amazing appeal of the songs of birds—these speak to something far in the depths of his spirit and without much attempt to philosophize about it, he responds with all his heart. Then, not contented with the love¬ liness which he finds, he begins to create. He forms objects which express his sense of this invisible and wonderful appeal which has moved his heart. They may be very crude at first, but he sees them with the eyes of the emotion which has swept over his spirit. He makes sounds, or creates instruments which make sounds, having the same fathomless appeal. Their first value is not in what they are. It is in the fact that they are symbols and expressions of a sense of infinite loveli¬ ness and of infinite mystery. And so at last TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 91 the quest for beauty becomes a fully conscious eagerness to work out all the implications of an aspect of life as actual as physical hunger, as intellectual eagerness, and as the passion for goodness. The quest for beauty is both a glorious and a tragic thing. It has produced a series of arts which at their best have had a loveliness which forever haunts the imagination of man. It has made its own contribution to the char¬ acter of many a nation, for the love of beauty at its highest is full of moral and spiritual power. But the love of beauty may be isolated from these moral and spiritual sanctions, and then it becomes a disintegrating and even an evil thing. The Italian Renaissance reached the point where all its sanctions needed to be lifted into full moral and spiritual meaning or it would sink lower and lower until dark possibilities of loathsome sensuality and uncontrolled brutality emerged. And the tragedy of the Italian Renaissance was just its ethical failure. In the long run the love of beauty is sure to be¬ come a diseased thing unless you can give it a conscience. Some groups of men have despaired of ever putting a conscience into the heart of beauty. These men have been respon¬ sible for that repudiation of loveliness which 92 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY we so often connect with, the Puritan move¬ ment. As a matter of fact, some of the great Puritans were also great lovers of beauty. Milton kept the lamp of loveliness burning as did few other men in the world during his time. But it cannot be denied that many earnest men completely despaired of ever unit¬ ing the love of righteousness and the love of beauty. And there are great branches of the Christian Church which still feel the inhibi¬ tions of this despairing attitude. Viewing the matter critically, we come to see very clearly that the love of beauty, like beauty itself, has been connected with some of the noblest and some of the most ignoble things in the world. Beauty, like the loveliness of those women’s faces which great artists have beheld with such rapture, has in some cases been conse¬ crated to the highest ends and in some cases has been prostituted to the lowest. A deca¬ dent nation is likely to see beauty through decadent eyes, and its enjoyment of beauty may easily become a hectic and psychopathic thing. A strong nation is likely to infuse its own virile and robust qualities into its inter¬ pretation and expression of the love of beauty, and so strength and loveliness will meet in noble wedlock. It is tremendously significant that the first TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 93 great art of the world expressed beauty in the terms of strength. The art of ancient Egypt was the challenge which the daring spirit of man created as he faced the ugly and bitter fact of mortality. It was as if the soul of man had never realized its own imperial nature until at last in the valley of the Nile the full sense of the tragedy of death swept wave upon wave over the spirit of men who felt some¬ thing eternal and unconquerable in their own mighty spirits. Monuments like the pyramids are. the prayers of the ancient world thank¬ ing whatever gods there be for man’s uncon¬ querable soul. They are more than this. They are a claim, a demand made in solid masonry that the universe shall somehow justify and vindicate this unappeasable spirit, this death¬ less kingliness which man finds in his own soul. This inner vigor, bending the hard materials of the physical world to express its behests, is of the very genius of art as strength. This mood of challenge you find expressed in most memorable fashion in another ancient work of art, the book of Job, which we have preserved for us among the documents which make up the Old Testament. Here the prob¬ lem of unjust suffering as well as the problem of death emerges. Here we have the same imperial spirit, though it comes before us now 94 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY with a new quality of ethical passion. And when the great words ring out, “I know that my vindicator liveth,” you have the apex of a moral and spiritual pyramid of speech in which the spirit of man expresses itself in triumphant strength. It is worth our while to notice that very early man learned that whatever he could do with things he could also do with words. And sometimes he could do it with words in a surer and more effective fashion, bending words to his purpose with a power which made them the immortal expres¬ sion of some experience which had become the central and mastering meaning of his life. With the sense of beauty as strength we usually find a certain austere grandeur of line, a grave and lofty majesty of words befitting the fundamental intuition which is expressing itself in such artistic form. The rugged moun¬ tains lifting their rude shoulders against the sky form the counterpart in nature to this variety of art. The mood has never passed completely from the soul of man. The love of beauty has taken manifold forms, but once and again we find this note of beauty as strength emerging. We have already seen that it finds memorable expression in the Old Testament. Indeed, we shall not be far wrong in summing up the highest Old Testament attitude toward TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 95 this matter in the great and ancient words, “Strength and beauty are in thy sanctuary.” Worship was the meeting place of strength and beauty in the minds of those who had thought most deeply about the matter and who understood it best. A good many artists have served Christian¬ ity in less than the happiest fashion in their portraiture of Jesus when it comes to this matter of the relation of strength and beauty in the life of its Founder. They have created a traditional figure of such delicate and almost feminine spiritual loveliness as hardly to suggest Tennyson’s great apostrophe, “Strong Son of God, Immortal Love.” Yet the insight of Tennyson is right and the great statue of Thorwaldsen, “Come Unto Me,” has at least this quality of uniting the sense of power with the sense of goodness and beauty. But, of course, we do not get to the root of this matter by calling a catalogue of artists or sculptors or poets. The question has to do with the fundamental genius of Christian¬ ity itself. And no candid student of the Gospels can deny the tremendous impression of strength which these documents convey as they present to us the figure of Jesus. It is not merely that we sometimes stand in the presence of a flash of dynamic indignation 96 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY before which men are powerless. It is not merely that Jesus passes through a crowd eager to throw him from the edge of a cliff with such regal mien that no one dares to touch him. It is not merely that his words once and again come forth with a fearless robustness which gives them a sort of granite strength. More than this, Jesus’ whole life, with its sure and masterful quality of self- control, was a sort of crystallization of strength into action. And when the crisis came the very quality of his passive endurance was made of sterner stuff than ever sent sol¬ diers over the trenches to their foe. That kind of endurance is heroism lifted to its very highest power. And with all this there was a gracious beauty of life which turned strength itself into an immortal loveliness. In its Founder at least Christianity reveals the ele¬ ments of strength and beauty in abiding union. In him strength is beauty and beauty is strength. It is, of course, in the Athens of the period lying in and about the fifth century that beauty first actually comes to its own. And here we see beauty expressed as serene com¬ pleteness. When Professor Paul Shorey spoke of the passionate pursuit of passionless per¬ fection, he captured a phrase which with TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 97 singular felicity expresses much that is most distinctive of the Greek sense of beauty. The Greek temple, which seemed a part of the very landscape where it rose, was a sort of mate¬ rial deliverance from the world of human struggle and striving, a sort of expression in tangible form of that perfect and harmonious repose which can never cease to speak its own message to the man who has once felt the power of its still and serene harmony. The Greek language itself became the vehicle of this sense of complete and untroubled loveli¬ ness. The very structure of the Attic speech caught the spirit of its great artists, and the typical Greek writing often seems like a Greek temple turned into words. The Greek drama caught the passionate pain of man and ex¬ pressed it in deathless words. But in the very process of expression the struggle and the pain were lifted into some lofty realm of still and grave contemplation. It is as if you are seeing time from the heart of eternity. It is as if from the stainless heights of Olympus you see with crystal clearness the story of man in a vast perspective where a perfect poise and quiet work their own lofty magic even upon the most tragic things. To the typical Greek the love of beauty was not a thing which happily belonged to some bit of 98 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY his life. It was life itself. Ugliness hurt him like a sharp wound. And the complete and the serene filled his spirit with something of its own cool and ample and splendid loveli¬ ness. This fundamental mood worked itself out in many qualities of chaste simplicity in Greek art at its best. It poured its inspira¬ tion into Greek philosophy and came forth in deep and fruitful philosophical insights. It wrought itself deeply into that deathless thing which we call the Greek spirit. Over and over again this passionate search for passion¬ less completeness has emerged in many a nation, in many a land, and in many an age. And once tasted, the wine of Attica can never be forgotten. We seem in a vastly different world when we stand in the presence of the typical art of the Middle Ages, best expressed in those great Gothic cathedrals which turned the deepest feeling of these Middle Ages into stone. Here the perfect and passionate poise has disappeared. Life is seen as struggle. The harsher aspects are included in the total vision of beauty. With a grim and marvelous humor gargoyles leer out at you from the most mightily upreaching cathedrals. The sense of beauty has ceased to be a sense of stainless completeness. It has become a sense TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 99 of perpetual aspiration. The pointed arch is the true symbol of Gothic building, and it is the expression of the very soul of the Middle Ages. It is an endless movement toward the perfect, a realization that in some marvelous and glorious fashion the goal is in the quest. The circle is a fit symbol of the Greek sense of beauty. It leaves no more to be said. It is finished. It is entirely complete. It is a perfectly glorious thing. But it has this tragic element: it is the period at the end of the sentence. There comes a time when its very perfection robs it of creative power. A Gothic spire has just the opposite effect. Its marvel is that it is perpetually suggesting the element of exhaustlessness in the spirit of man. There is no period in the sentences suggested by the sense of beauty as aspiration. It simply goes on forever. It is as exhaust¬ less as life itself. This exhaustlessness of aspiration and this capacity to incorporate the things which seem the very antithesis of the serene quiet of beauty give a new quality to the spirit of man in all his relationships. The sense of beauty ceases to be an escape from life. And Greek art was all the while becoming just that. It becomes a battle for beauty in the midst of life. And it finds that battle itself the most beautiful thing in all the 100 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY world. Not the repose of attainment but the relentless conflict in the name of the ideal becomes itself a thing of supreme and match¬ less beauty. The pointed arch has its own tragedy of incompleteness. But it has its own glory of perpetual promise. Here, again, you have an expression of the intuition in respect of beauty in the realm of literature. The Divine Comedy } by Dante Ali¬ ghieri, is a Gothic cathedral turned into the most marvelous poetry. It is completely satu¬ rated with the Gothic spirit. You see this at the very beginning in Dante’s use of the Italian language. He does not use a speech associated Avith the distant and stainless per¬ fection of classic artistic ideals. He uses a tongue never yet bent to the greatest purposes of literature, and in his use of that tongue he transforms it. The passage through Hell and Purgatory and into the glories of Heaven is the tale of struggling movement toward a perfect goal. You have all the spiritual mean¬ ing of the pointed arch in the very story of the soul of Dante as he moves through the dolorous woe of the Inferno, the discipline of that Purgatorio where there is much pain but no unhappiness because all the pain is on the way to victory and joy, and moAung out into the expanding glories of the perfect consum- TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 101 mation. Indeed, the Paradiso itself is sug¬ gestive of pure and perpetual and glowing passion. The perfect rose of love and lire is different enough from the cool and unkindled loveliness of the classic dreams of beauty. But the more closely you come to the heart of Dante’s masterpiece the more you discover that there is something besides the Gothic spirit. The sense of beauty is, indeed, the sense of endless aspiration and of endless ful¬ fillment. But with all that there is a wonder¬ ful appropriation of the classic mood. It is not by chance that Virgil guides Dante through so many of his amazing and unbeliev¬ able experiences. For in the Bivine Comedy the sense of serene completeness is all the while finding its way through the confusion and turmoil and tragedy. And the Paradiso itself, for all the flame of its undying fire of blazing beauty, holds at the heart of its per¬ fect rose some strange suggestion of that pas¬ sion for completeness which never left the spirit of Attica. In the Divine Comedy we have at least a hint of a higher unity, of a synthesis in which the deepest insight of the Greek intuition of beauty and the noblest in¬ sight of the Middle Ages may be united. Aspiration and completeness must, indeed, be perpetually meeting in a living experience if 102 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY the sense of beauty is to be a growing and pro¬ ductive thing in the life of the world. When we go back to Jesus—and, of course, we are not forgetting that the Divine Comedy is itself a great Christian poem—we are aston¬ ished to find that the portrait of the Master in the Gospels has precisely those funda¬ mental notes which give their meaning to the Greek and the Gothic types. Who can follow the story of his life from the temptations to Calvary without feeling the perpetual throb of struggle, of aspiration after a great ideal and the perpetual reach forward, the per¬ petual endeavor to make it completely real with the materials of this mortal life. There is precisely the same sense of exhaustless pos¬ sibilities in the portrait of Jesus in the Gospels which you find in Gothic architecture. Indeed, at last you begin to suspect that there is a sense in which a Gothic cathedral is just the spirit of Jesus caught up in human hearts and turned into stone. But, on the other hand, who can read the Gospels and escape the sense of fulfillment, the sense of complete¬ ness, the sense of poise which comes from the life of Jesus? What matchless serenity, what perfect harmony, what entire control of all the forces and all the elements of his life Jesus shows all the while! There is wonderful pas- TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 103 sion. But all the endless emotions are fused into an inner serenity which baffles descrip¬ tion and yet forever haunts the conscience and the imagination of men. The poise of inte¬ grated passion seems to be a phrase which fairly well characterizes the thing which we find alive in the life of Jesus. But the very phrase suggests a synthesis of the passion of the Gothic and the poise of the Greek. Indeed, the more we study this one life the more we see in it the perfect wedlock of aspiration and completeness, an aspiration which goes on forever and a fulfillment and completion which at every stage match the aspiration. This very thing has at least been an ideal never far lost from the heart of the church. For Christianity in action is precisely the place where the rainbow touches the ground, the place where the ideal meets and masters the real. It is true that very often there are too many gargoyles in the Christian edifice. But at least the edifice itself is a perpetual witness to the belief that the ideal may master the real, that aspiration may move on to com¬ pleteness. In its fundamental spirit, then, Christianity offers a synthesis in which the noblest elements of the Attic spirit and the most passionate aspirations made articulate in the art of the Middle Ages may meet to- 104 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY gether in the harmony of a unity which includes them both. The note of realism which we find expressed with such rugged gusto in the gargoyles was bound to have a history of its own as time went on. The Renaissance was in a measure a going back to classic thoughts and classic ideals. But all the while something else was happening. Even in the thirteenth century Roger Bacon had been conducting practical scientific experiments and the new freedom which came with the Renaissance gradually became a going back to nature as well as a going back to Greece. So the dawn of the scientific era cast its first dim light over the edges of the world and at last brightened into the full light of the age of experiment, of the mastery of the forces of nature and of all the achievements which made themselves at last into the age of science. Along with this development the artist was having his own experience of going back to nature. The ex¬ periment took many forms. One of them was a sense of beauty as an honest reflection of the actual. This spirit has had a long and varied history. It has expressed itself in a type of fiction which has made a close and analytical study of all the slime and evil of life, giving a sort of scientific accuracy to its picturing TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 105 of the most loathsome aspects of human experience. It has been characterized by notable honesty. It has been possessed by a remorseless candor. And it has so far reacted from a smug overemphasis upon the more genial aspects of human experience that it has seemed to develop a sort of selective instinct for the sordid and the hectic and the heart¬ lessly selfish. A cynic might be tempted to say that sometimes the same spirit has un¬ consciously entered into architecture and has led to the erection of buildings of scientific and consummate ugliness. The value of the sense of beauty as candor has lain just in the fact of its apotheosis of honesty, though when the selective process has inclined with perti¬ nacity toward the evil the simon pure quality of that honesty itself has perhaps suffered in quality. Wherever this sort of realism has come it has sooner or later led to a reaction. And so curious is the history of these things that without desiring to be too paradoxical we may perhaps say that sometimes the reac¬ tion has come before the most characteristic expression of the thing against which the re¬ action set in. It is extremely interesting to find Rousseau insisting on going back to na¬ ture and then finding at the end of the quest as purely imaginary and romantic a creature as 106 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY ever haunted the mind of man. At all events over against the realistic movement we find the romantic movement appearing again and again. The more complete the temporary victory of a sordid realism the surer the com¬ ing of an ethereal romance. The mid-Vic- torian era in poetry is a good illustration of certain aspects of the Romantic movement in its larger relationships. Wordsworth, with all the shrewd, quiet observation which is so dis¬ tant from the fiercely romantic rhetoric of Byron, did at last read into nature what only the glowing spirit of a great dreamer could ever put there. When he made nature him¬ self he made it Romantic. Tennyson allowed his music to run away with his sense of actuality again and again, and despite the fact that he could talk musically about mod¬ ern science and the deepest matters which move the spirit of man, he had at heart the Romantic outlook. To be sure, life had become very highly articulated by the time the mid-Victorians arrived, and many forces go to make up their complex and varied art. But that Romantic movement which had such brilliant expression on the Continent still moved masterfully among the new forces, and just because it entered into such complex re¬ lationships proved its vitality. In Dante TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 10T Gabriel Rossetti yon seem very near to the finest essence of the Romantic movement as an escape from the hard and sordid into realms of supremely delicate loveliness. “The Blessed Damosel” is a translation into words of the very quality of its poignant and im¬ palpable charm. The tragedy of the Romantic mood is just the danger that it will descend into a sweetness which is cloying because it evades much of the actual tang of life by its own deft and skillful legerdemain and pro¬ duces a world of subtly sophisticated feeling which is further and further removed from the reality of things. So the mid-Victorians have come into a vast disrepute and their great virtues are lost to the thought of a good many people who can think only of one vice which they particularly despise. There is a good deal of difference between the art which is an escape from life and the art which is a mastery of life. And below the art which is an escape from life is the art which is an evasion of life. Sincere men cannot be contented perma¬ nently to live in a world of artificial emotions arising from the appropriation of not quite honest experiences. Then the Romantic mood in all its forms lends itself with a sort of fatal ease to the use of the man who has mastered its passwords without ever feeling its really 108 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY authentic quality. A good many of the films to be seen on the screen in our big towns and little Tillages to-day represent a clever attempt to arouse and gratify feelings which the producer of the scenario and the makers of the pictures regard with a quite cynical aloofness. The exploitation of the emotions has always represented a particularly tragic sort of commercialism. And in the process the Romantic motive becomes thinner and thinner and finally loses all semblance of reality. So the day conies when jaded audiences find temporary satisfaction in the sort of picture which gives respite to the soulless spectator who has been trying to feel as if he had a soul by frankly speaking to his body, which there is no doubt in the world he does possess. In this whole situation you come upon a tragedy whose meaning reaches deeply into the philosophy of art. You find depleted per¬ sonalities trying to rouse feelings which can come only to personalities which are intensely alive. Real decadence in art arrives in many nations and in many periods just at the point of this experience. It is all a very subtle process, for, of course, the nation which is bleeding to death never recognizes its loss of blood. It revises its standards. It ceases to admire the robust virtues because it no longer TKIUMPHANT BEAUTY 109 practices them. It ceases to believe in those intuitions which come only with health. It quite unconsciously lowers its taste to meet the quality of its actual life. It develops noisy apostles who declare that now at last a genuine insight into the nature of beauty has arrived. These men mistake their own deca¬ dent enthusiasms for the love of beauty, and they condemn all the enthusiasms which their devitalized personalities are incapable of sharing. Of course the whole movement goes much deeper than a reaction from artificial romance should go. As a matter of fact, when a nation is keenly alive it finds its own way from artificial romance to a romance based upon the eternal mental and moral and spiritual adventures of the human spirit. It is a civilization whose own life is depleted which finds no way out of the debacle but to change its standards of taste in accordance with the subtle disintegration of its life. Many a critic mistakes a mind which is in a com¬ pletely pathological state for a mind rejoicing in the ripe fruits of intellectual emancipation. And there is a good deal of criticism which is merely the attempt of disease germs to propagate themselves. As this process goes on all the slowly evolved sanctions of civiliza¬ tion are one by one tossed aside by men who 110 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY find in the keen fury of destruction a sense that life is vivid and full. You can always keep warm if you stand just near enough to a burning house. But if the house is your own, the aftermath may not be entirely agree¬ able. There may be some question about the permanent satisfactions coming from that genial warmth which subtly steals over the feelings when we stand at just the right spot while the structure of moral and spiritual sanctions burns before our eyes. The sensa¬ tions are no doubt very pleasant while they last but there is just a little question as to their permanence. No doubt many things which ought to be destroyed do become con¬ sumed in the holocaust of the moral experi¬ ence of the race. But, after all, burning down the house is not just the very best sort of sub¬ stitute for the spring house-cleaning. So the love of beauty as decadence is, after all, a good deal like the brilliant beauty of the eye and the shining glow of the face of a patient in full possession of tuberculosis. You flinch just a little as you look at this unnatural beauty because it is an evidence of decay and a prophecy of death. Of course disease is not the sort of thing you can deal with finally by argument. The processes by which health is restored justify themselves in the very experi- TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 111 ence of their renewing powers. And the in¬ sight of health has a way of brushing aside all the hectic assertions of diseased souls and moving out in the clean air and the clear sun¬ light for the really creative thinking and feel¬ ing and activity of the world. In the meantime in every age where deca¬ dence is mistaken for beauty a number of things happen. In one group at one stage of the process there arises a sense of beauty as urbane cynicism. You do not need to read far into The Way of All Fleshy by Samuel Butler, to feel in the presence of a mood which finds a certain artistic delight in the clear and cynical analysis of the weaknesses of men. With infinitely delicate distinction this mood is expressed in such a bit of writing as Mr. Galsworthy’s Patrician. With a good deal of crude power the same sort of thing is found in the waitings of Mr. Sinclair Lewis. Some¬ times, as at an earlier day, you have a mood of terrible wrath which pours itself forth in brilliant and corrosive writing like that which came from the pen of Dean Swift. Sometimes you have the attempt of the artist to lose him¬ self in the hot intensity of the passionate human story, a mood to be found in Balzac. Sometimes you find art used as a means of attack. Here emerge the long line of artists 112 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY of revolt typified sufficiently well by the mas¬ sive achievement in letters of Victor Hugo. Then there comes a period when many men utterly unhappy and morbid and conscious of a complete lack of inspiration in the existing forms of expression invent wild, new forms. Cubism and Futurism in painting and the freakish forms of free verse emerge, the per¬ fect expression of aesthetic bankruptcy hiding its penury from its own eyes by new and fan¬ tastic theories of beauty and of its expression in art. In all these types of confusion emerg¬ ing in so many ages in the wake of so many types of disillusionment, there are bits of pure gold in the midst of the folly and the futility and the lawlessness which would disguise it¬ self as beauty. And by and by some artist of calm poise and wide outlook and robust moral and spiritual health comes along and incorporates the vital elements in these move¬ ments in a sure and strong synthesis which has all the elements of permanent beauty. When you study the romantic movements and their antithetical expressions you come at last to have a very definite sense of good to be conserved and of evil to be avoided in each group. If you take the pure high passion of Tennyson’s Romanticism at its best, how much it contains which has elements of per- TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 113 manent loveliness! And at the same time how frankly you have to admit that once and again the glowing beauty seems to be moving from actual experience rather than toward the reality of this human world! If yon study the output of the vigorous young intellectuals who represent the new poetic movements in our own day, you have a terribly fascinating honesty, a use of the concrete and brittle and descriptive word which fills you with aston¬ ished pleasure. And at the same time you often find a complete lack of contact with any deep and ultimately creative passion. You have the skillful and wistful and distinguished dis¬ illusionment which is expressed with such subtle finality in the writings of Edwin Arlington Robinson, the perfect and soulless technique of Amy Lowell’s Patterns. All the while you feel more intensely that these vigor¬ ous contemporary writers have something we must incorporate and lack something we must regain. Then you turn to Robert Browning and, by one of those curious anachronisms not impossible in art, you find that in the heart of the mid-Victorian period he reacted from the cloyingly sweet as definitely as any of the young intellectuals of our own time. He too learned how to use the hard and con¬ crete word whose brittle power captured the 114 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY rigid intensity of a situation before it was dissolved after the fashion of those changing scenes which make up life’s phantasmagoria. He knew the secrets of the imagists before the imagists were born. He anticipated the qualities of the movement which is so noisily vocal and so easily sure of itself in our own day. But he did something else. He main¬ tained that deep and creative passion, that sense of eternal loveliness which breaks out in such lyric magnificence in the best writ¬ ings of Alfred Tennyson. He kept the eternal spirit which glows at the heart of all healthy Romanticism and appropriated, before it had come to make a noise in the world and to establish a new school of poetry, that cutting honesty, that fearless bending of form to its own purposes which is at the heart of the revolutionary experiments of our own day. The living elements of Romanticism are all found in Browning. He is completely saved from the cloying sweetness and artificiality which has sometimes disfigured it. He is al¬ ways in contact with the facts and the experiences of actual life. He incarnates the very spirit which created free verse, yet he maintains the enthusiasm and, when he will, the methods which gave glory to the best poetic art of his own time. He is a sort of TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 115 living synthesis born out of due time. In fifty or a hundred years, when the movement of art itself has caught up with him, we shall realize his significance. But the moment we have said these things about Robert Browning we remember that he was in a definite and amazing sense a Chris¬ tian poet. I mean something very much deeper than that he wrote in “Saul,” “See the Christ stand.” I mean something very much profounder than that he wrote in “The Death in the Desert,” “That life that death accepted by thy reason solves for thee all questions in the earth and out of it.” I mean that the fundamental presuppositions of his art grow out of the fundamental insights of the Chris¬ tian faith. His instinctive reactions in the presence of great problems and great experi¬ ences are those which rise instinctively to a man whose inner consciousness is steeped in the essential qualities of the Christian re¬ ligion. It is not without significance that the most synthetic artist in the creation of great poetry in the last hundred years was thus in the profoundest contact with the genius of the Christian faith. It comes to mean just this when we have fully apprehended its impli¬ cations. The faith which had such a place in the deepest thought and feeling of the poet 116 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY has just the synthetic qualities which he him¬ self expressed. Christianity too has its eternal blaze of high moral and spiritual romance. But it also quickly reacts from the artificial, the dishonest, the cloyingly sweet. The Old-Testament literature, itself repre¬ senting a period before Jesus had walked the earth, is a series of pieces of writing whose honesty and candor is one of the most amazing things the reader confronts. You see the spots on every one of its heroes. No modern decadent writer is more terribly frank than the writers of the Old Testament. But there is this difference. Modern decadence has plenty of frankness and little soul. The soul of beauty, the soul of love, the soul of right¬ eousness shine out all the more resplendently in this literature of amazing frankness. And there is this difference. The Old-Testament writers tell all the ugly truth, but they never roll it under their lips as if it gave them a rapturous delight. Their spirits are unsoiled by all the evil and sordid facts which they must face. They have found some inner secret of cleanness even when they must deal with slime. Remorseless honesty and all the per¬ fect romance of spiritual beauty dwell side by side in the writings of the Old Testament. The character of Jesus gives you at once TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 117 and with your continued study an increasing consciousness of complete moral honesty. Nothing escapes him. He sees everything. He takes everything into account. He knows all that is in the human heart. There is no over¬ wrought emotion, there is no artificial feel¬ ing, but there is the most perfect uniting of candor and spiritual enthusiasm. He shocks his disciples by his realism. He can find a blunt phrase, “that fox,” to describe a man whose portrait is perfectly painted in that one word. But out of the depths of what his disciples dimly felt to be a terrible disillusion¬ ment as they stood baffled and perplexed by his words, he lifted the perfect and splendid enthusiasm which glowed with all the beauty of the rising sun. He was himself a synthesis of that spiritual adventure which is the very center of romance and that ruthless candor which faces the last and terrible and ugly fact. It is not less true that this ideal has haunted the historic church. Sometimes one element has temporarily triumphed over the other. Sometimes both have seemed lost in the adroitness of scheming ecclesiastics. But the ideals of the deathless romance of spiritual endeavor and the terrible honesty of the awak¬ ened mind have always been at the heart of the Christian faith, always ready to break 118 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY forth with vital energy to search and quicken and renew the life of man. As long ago as Plotinus in the third century A. D., the suggestion was made that beauty is essentially the spiritual shining through the material. The thought of an ultimate reality whose gracious loveliness is all the while at¬ tempting to work through the materials of this world and the forms of its experience is one of those seminal ideas which is sure to return again and again to kindle the mind of man. One form in which it may express it¬ self is in the conception of a universal experi¬ ence which underlies all the varied aspects of our individual lives. From this standpoint art may easily be viewed as the expression of the universal. When this conception of beauty arises men will emphasize all those deep and unifying aspects of experience and all those profound intuitions which unite men in a vast spiritual organism. It is easy to see that music lends itself particularly to this attitude toward the beautiful. In one way you come nearer to pure beauty in music than anywhere else. The contingent seems lost in the essential. Men do not have to understand the same language in order to appreciate the same music. They do not have to hold the same ideas to be moved by the same lovely TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 119 sounds. They can be separated by race and custom and all sorts of opinions and still bend before the majesty of the same glorious music. One cannot fail to see a connection between the recurring hungry desire for a common meeting place where all individual elements find their deeper meaning and the universal qualities of the greatest music of the world. It is significant too that the very period when German idealism was seeking to transcend individual differences on the philosophical side was the period of a most tremendous out¬ burst of immortal music. In all the arts the same principle can be expressed. When we transcend the individual and find the typical we are expressing beauty in the terms of the interpretation of the lovely as the universal. When we go once more to the portrait of Jesus in the Gospels we are astonished to find just this note of universality which we have been studying as related to the art impulse. It is not surprising that the artists of many lands have painted his face and figure in the very terms of their national qualities. That is just the impression which he makes upon you. He belongs to all lands. He belongs to all peoples. With the most easy naturalness, he transcends the provincial and the limited aspects of life. Everybody can understand 120 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY him because he speaks to a universal con¬ sciousness in a universal language. You are all the while feeling as you study his life that you have passed the incidental and have come to the essential in humanity. “Behold the Man” expresses the very quality of his per¬ sonality with its universal appeal. Only a cosmopolitan religion can become a universal religion. And the inherent nature of the Christian religion presses it out to the farthest boundaries of human life to the com- pletest service of the race. When it is fully self-conscious, it does not attempt to make modern men of the West of its converts. It releases inspirations and energies which help men of every race and of every clime to fulfill the potencies of their own national and racial and individual genius in such a way that their lives are all the while receiving sus¬ tenance from the universal ideals and prin¬ ciples which transcend all individual dif¬ ferences. If beauty is the universal shining through the particular, Christianity has the closest kinship with its operations, for Chris¬ tianity too is the universal bringing the individual to fullest life at the very moment when he is lifted above individual limitations. Closely related in its own way to the inter¬ pretation of which we have been speaking is TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 121 the thought of beauty as the expression of that mastery of things by ideas which is the goal of life. The idea is all the while in proc¬ ess in one way or another of bending material forms to its purposes. Its complete victory is that “. . . far-off divine event Toward which the whole creation moves.” Art is a prophecy of this victory. It is a symbol and an expression of its meaning. Hegel worked out this sort of conception in his aesthetic studies, classifying the arts ac¬ cording to their capacity for a more or less perfect expression of this conception of the mastery of the thing by the idea. The thought of art as the perpetual challenge of the ideal has never been far from the minds of the greatest artists, though sometimes it has been a deep and almost unconscious assumption and sometimes it has been clearly present in self-consciousness. Men of all periods and of the most varied attitudes have had their splendid flashes of inspiration when they have seen beauty as an eternal thing whose ideal reality is a perpetual challenge to the mind and heart of man. All this owes a tremen¬ dous part of its power to the philosophy of Plato, who set forth principles which lend themselves to a perpetual aesthetic inspira- 122 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY tion. A poet like Shelley, whose writing is almost more like music than speech, gives you this sense of an ideal world fully regnant in its own rights, a world whose reality is sure and whose potency is final. Keats seems to enter the very beatific loveliness of the king¬ dom of beauty itself as he turns human speech into an instrument of transcendent delicacy and charm. With Matthew Arnold there is a somber passionate sadness with its own strange secrets of self-control and of chaste and disciplined expression. But all the while above the misanthropy clothed in lovely words is that sense of a serene and beautiful ideal which lies like a golden sunset beyond human perplexity and human pain. One does not need to use much time in speaking of the relation of Christianity to this whole circle of ideas, for Christianity is essen¬ tially the ideal coming into the most definite contact with the real. It is the perpetual challenge of the ideal as it confronts the actual. But where too often art turns to an autumnal beauty of sad melancholy when it brings the two together, Christianity is full of the most robust courage, of the most dauntless optimism as it trails the splendors of the ideal along the ways of the actual. Where art is a challenge Christianity becomes a conquest. TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 123 There is no end of other things which might be said about men’s thought of beauty. There is the recall of men to a beauty which is good and a goodness which is beautiful with a brilliant apostle like Ruskin, who began to have the insight so eagerly expressed by Wil¬ liam Morris, that life itself must be made a beautiful art if art is to remain a sincere beauty in life. There is the pouring of the whole artistic impulse into the social passion, and the realizing that only a society whose life is beautiful can ultimately produce the things of beauty which represent the final triumph of art. There is the protest against a self-conscious ethical element in art which robs beauty of spontaneousness and gracious charm. There is the deep ethical passion which insists that art should be the Ten Com¬ mandments set to music. There are all the varied insights held with such enthusiasm that each has been ready to call itself a theory of beauty or a fundamental sanction in the realm of art. One or two matters, however, do deserve our attention. It is clear as we move through the noise and contention of varied interpretations that art is related to the invisible and also to the material. It is the place where the physical and the spiritual meet. Now we can 124 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY interpret all the higher aspects from below, endeavoring to make the subtlest spiritual grace the by-product of some such thing as the sex instinct. Or we may interpret all the physical aspects with their unmoralized and unspiritualized intensity as on the way to the recognition of moral authority and spiritual sovereignty. We can interpret the higher in the terms of the lower and draw it down to a low level. Or we may interpret the lower in the terms of the higher and lift it up to a high level. It is clear at least that in the presence of this problem Christianity does not hesitate. It looks all the facts in the face. It analyzes the situation with complete candor. And it sees all the facts in the light of the highest fact which comes within its ken. And so it preserves the integrity of its candid eye and the glory of its inspiring spirit. And when your art critic like Ruskin, with a passion for making life the finest and most beautiful art of all, lifts his prophetic voice, Christianity at once recognizes a friendly spirit. He is an ally in the great battle of the world, for Christianity itself is never content until its highest insight and its rarest intui¬ tion become a matter of human experience and so enter into the very warp and woof of life itself. When life is the realization of TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 125 beauty, then all the arts will come to new power. A depleted life will mean a depleted art. And the art of living lies at the root of all artistic excellence. Here we come upon that strange doctrine that the lawless spirit is the creative spirit. Mr. H. L. Menken has spoken with haughty scorn of that type of life which he is inclined always to associate with the old moralities as unproductive of the artistic impulse and the artistic performance. It is true enough that a conventional allegiance to great ideals never produces great art. Nor does it produce great living. But when the moral and spiritual sanctions become a passion in the blood, you produce Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Bun- yan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Raphael’s “Sis- tine Madonna,” and all the heavenly beauty of the greatest music in the world. When the Christian life is a make-believe, it inspires nobody. When it is a convention, there is nothing creative about it. When the tides of its power possess the soul, it has all the seeds of the greatest art. It is the power to renew the art as well as the life of the world. And the beauty which is thus to create a new era is more than the beauty of honesty and sincerity and earnestness, though it in¬ cludes all these. It is beauty triumphant. It 126 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY is beauty which has caught the coutagion of the moral and spiritual victory of Jesus and moves out with regal energy upon the world. Whitsunday is the birthday of the arts as well as the birthday of the saints, for Whitsunday is the festival of Christianity with the light of victory in its eye and the joy of victory in its heart. The truth is that only the most joyous and triumphant kind of art strikes the very high¬ est quality of beauty. There is much which has a real loveliness upon other planes. But art comes to its own when all the triumphant energies of a unified life are applied to its tasks. And the singing joy of triumphant life becomes the haunting and immortal beauty of triumphant music; the exquisite texture of words wrought into a lyric gladness whose heart almost breaks with the glory of victory; the shining whiteness of a sculptured triumph which makes marble itself sing and shout; the manifold beauty of a painting which bends all the colors to the symphony on the canvas, which fairly turns eyes into ears so that you fancy you can hear the song which the picture is singing; the harmony and strength of build¬ ings whose every line expresses vitality and power and the supremacy of intellectual and moral and spiritual ideals. The final synthesis TRIUMPHANT BEAUTY 127 which Christianity has it in its heart to give to the world of beauty is that inspiration to manifold and yet harmonious productiveness which comes from the sweeping in upon life itself of all the creative energies of tri¬ umphant goodness and ethical and spiritual joy. LECTURE IV TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD Humanity is not simply a lonely man with an infinitely hungry soul. Humanity is a group of men and women and little children with a corporate as well as an individual life. And one of the two or three fundamental prob¬ lems has to do just with the art of learning to live together which confronts the in¬ habitants of this world. The moment the man Friday is discovered on the desert island Robinson Crusoe has a social problem. He himself is a different man because of the pres¬ ence of the man Friday. New thoughts move through his mind. Old thoughts take on new color. All life has become subtly different. So all the while a process of mutual modifica¬ tion is going on in the world. In remote and isolated and primitive communities the task has a relative simplicity. In highly developed and thoroughly articulated civilizations the tasks assume proportions of almost endless complexity and difficulty. The moment the problem of organization arises you have the 128 TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 129 assurance that a new stage of civilization has been reached. And in a measure you may judge the quality and the success of a civiliza¬ tion by its skill in dealing with this problem. Exchange of thoughts and things, of ideals and plans is essential to a highly developed and achieving life. The laws of the exchange, the methods of give and take, the capacity for mutual surrender in the name of an ampler life are structural in the consciousness and in the activity of the races which define for us the meaning of civilization. When we meet the first great empires in the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates and in the valley of the Nile, we come upon an early method of achieving organization. We come upon a society created through con¬ quest. Some groups are more virile than others. Some groups prove able to produce men of dynamic personality and of command¬ ing leadership. Some races have an unfold¬ ing capacity for quick and courageous action. Some develop leaders of military genius. And so it comes to pass that other groups and other peoples find themselves subject to them. So Babylon and Nineveh become the centers of an authority based upon conquest, the marts of a world held together by military power. There is a vast display of wealth. 130 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY There is an overwhelming exhibition of power. The forceful man and the forceful nation sit in the place of lordship in the world. And as the strong nation becomes weak and deca¬ dent other nations are ready to overwhelm its armies and to take the place of power. It is all an expression of the law of the jungle applied by the keenly acting mind and the strong fighting arm of man. Empires come and empires go. There is infinite bloodshed and infinite agony. But out of it all a suc¬ cession of strong and effective organizations emerge. At first the strong body seems more important than the strong mind. But with the invention of more and more highly evolved implements of warfare the mind which makes the weapon becomes more important and the hand which uses it does not occupy the place of supreme strategy any longer. The inven¬ tion of a new weapon may change the whole face of civilization. It may make the serf the equal of the knight as a fighting man. So minds and hands combine to work out the ever more highly complicated organization of a society based upon conquest. The nations of physical and intellectual virility and with the moral qualities of persistence and stability control, in their turn, the peoples of the world. There may be a wonderful develop- TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 131 ment of gracious and beautiful sanctions. But everything rests down at last upon the fight¬ ing mind and the fighting hand. Society is created and it is maintained by conquest. Men learn to live together at the point of the sword. We now come upon a period when the aspirations of society move far beyond those matters of personal prowess and organized courage which have made conquest and cen¬ tralization possible. The love of all sorts of wonderful things emerges in the life of man. Philosophy is born. Art lifts its head. Commerce becomes more of exchange and less of piracy. Literature begins to be a thing of beauty. Ethics urge their sanctions upon ever enlarging areas of life. But it requires leisure to discipline the mind and the taste so that a capacity for these activities is pro¬ duced. It requires a class set free from the sor¬ did and grueling tasks of life to be the think¬ ers, the artists, and the poets of the world. The fine flower of this development comes in fifth-century Athens. The spirit of man ex¬ presses itself rapturously in creating manifold forms of beauty and in attacking the ultimate problems which have to do with the under¬ standing of truth. And all of this wonderful achievement is based upon slavery. You have 132 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY a gracious and lovely product of noble think¬ ing and high artistic achievement which rests down upon the foundation of human servi¬ tude. Some men must be slaves in order that other men may be free. Society as an achiev¬ ing civilization rests down upon slavery. No¬ body can deny the supreme loveliness of many of the products of this type of organized life. It created a free spirit as well as a marvelous mental and material product. The tyranny had room for a few manipulators of autocratic power. The Athenian democracy made room for a city of free and keen-thinking citizens. The area of freedom is wonderfully enlarged. There is a really wide circle where men meet as equals and act as self-respecting and self- governing units in a society whose sanctions rest upon the will of the citizens. But an amazing number of people live in Athens who are not citizens, and an astounding number of people who bend under the terrible burden of holding up the whole structure of society are slaves. There is a dark and tragic dual¬ ism under all the glow and beauty and charm and unity of the surface of Athenian life. Freedom is not a universal principle. It is the rare and high-priced privilege of the few. And that freedom itself is at last a freedom based upon conquest, a liberty based upon the TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 133 unwilling service of lives coerced to do the bidding of a superior or, at least, a more powerful race. Society based upon slavery is a wonderfully interesting stage of human evo¬ lution. It cannot possibly be its goal. But we are just upon the edge of a new sort of human experiment. Slavery still exists. Conquest is still the most potent of all of the forces of the world. But the conquest is char¬ acterized by a new spirit. And slavery is often modified and sometimes abolished as far as particular individuals are concerned. The freedman becomes a recognized element in the life of the world. The whole Mediterranean basin is overwhelmed by the power of Rome, and then that mighty power reaches out over ever-widening areas. There is an ultimate and autocratic authority. But there is also a wonderful practical capacity for compro¬ mise. There is a new sense of a world-order produced by a mingling of authority and con¬ cession and not by the hard and remorseless exercise of authority alone. The great Roman administrators began to understand that there are millions of men who will be con¬ tented to lose their freedom if they can keep their comforts, and even that a modified free¬ dom may give large room for the exercise of individual initiative so that the man who is 134 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY under authority may yet develop large ele¬ ments of personal leadership. The Roman governor studied the qualities of the people over whom he ruled. He tried to appraise the genius of their racial and even of their national life. And he adapted himself to these things with wonderful practical skill. The Pax Romana was a stern and iron-ribbed thing. But in a wonderful way it related it¬ self to the habits and the customs and often to the prejudices of the subject peoples. Political sagacity took its own place with the exercise of autocratic power in the ruling of the world. The organized life of man became a more human thing. Men began to feel that in a sense they might come to feel at home in the highly articulated life of a great empire not without its aspects of benevolent activity. To be sure, there was exploitation and tyranny, and men fattened upon unjust gains. But a new note had been sounded. And society took on a more mellow and gracious quality. Many beautiful vines grew over the hard and solid masonry of Roman rule. But the great and world-wide organism of Roman life came to its own experience of decadence and inner weakness, and at last it fell apart. Civilization itself seemed to have come upon a period of decay. The old Roman TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 135 roads fell out of repair. The old arts were forgotten. Travel became perilous. Life lost its disciplined and ordered quality. A new period of barbarism came to the Western world. Men seemed to have forgotten the les¬ sons they had learned through slow centuries of experience. They did not know how to live together wisely or productively or effectively. In the nature of things such a condition could not continue. Anarchy could not be allowed to settle upon the world. The resilient and vital spirit of man began to move in new chan¬ nels. A society gradually arose which had its own genius and its own quality. Feudal¬ ism spread over the territories of Western Europe. And now society was based upon per¬ sonal loyalty. There was a great hierarchy of loyalties. Each was bound with an inti¬ mate and personal tie. Together they held together the elements of a life which had seemed about to fall apart. There were many delightful aspects to the new set of sanctions. The personal faithfulness of a warrior to his chief took on at its best a quality of almost religious devotion, and the sense of responsi¬ bility on the part of the overlord for those bound to him by feudal vows was a thing full of noble beauty when a man of genuine char¬ acter and a high sense of his own position held 136 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY the place of leadership. There was a vast net¬ work of feudal ties. They overlapped in the most curious and illogical ways. They often produced a state of things where efficient and orderly administration was difficult. Some¬ times they produced a situation where it was impossible. Land as well as loyalty had a great place in the system. In return for his loyalty the vassal received a grant of land. And so the material possession and the spir¬ itual tie united in the society which the feudal spirit made possible. Flowers have a way of blooming in human institutions whenever they have any sort of opportunity. And so it was with the feudal system which took upon itself rare qualities of knightly courtesy in chivalry. Here the idealistic elements of human nature found most gracious expression. And chivalry at its highest brought into the heart of man an ideal of gentle and courageous and courtly living which still haunts many a wistful mo¬ ment in the lives of men busy with the tasks of an age which prides itself upon being sternly practical. But the virtues of chivalry, like those of earlier forms of social life, were limited in their expression. There were benev¬ olence and self-sacrifice and a rising in swift response to the sudden hour of need. But the knight had areas where all these gracious TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 137 qualities were not felt to apply. Knightliness was a tribute to a group. It was not a tribute to humanity. Of course even the virtues of the age of chivalry lent themselves to counter¬ feit, and there were many unlovely products enough, who went abroad bearing unworthily knightly name. All the while, however, we have the deathless aspiration of the human spirit making a place for itself as best it can in the terms of the organization of life in which it finds itself. And so the institution takes on a quality which has held the imagina¬ tion of men in many an age. Even when the brilliant Spanish man of letters laughed at the impractical and impossible elements in the chivalric ideal there was a sort of mellow sympathy moving through his laughter. The astounding thing about Don Quixote is just the fashion in which many people have found that in spite of all his absurdities he had his own secret of clutching at their hearts. During this period a very curious and sig¬ nificant thing was happening. The ghost of the Roman Empire was appearing in the world. It is not strange that men found them¬ selves unable to forget the old unity and the old stability of the Western world. And dur¬ ing the very period when feudalism was creat¬ ing a complex of bewildering loyalties all over 138 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY the world the dream of a more comprehensive unity was haunting the mind of man. The crowning of Charlemagne by the Pope on Christmas day of the year 800 is a pivotal date in its relation to this larger aspiration. The development of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany in the tenth century represents another stage. The new empire was to have two heads. The Emperor was to rule its body, the Pope was to rule its spirit. For all the wars which it inspired, the Holy Roman Empire was never able to become a real world- order. It mastered men’s imagination. But it actually proved a divisive force. The petty sovereignties of Germany and the lack of unity in Italy may be laid to the fact that rulers anxious to master the world proved unable to weld into solidarity the elements of their own land. Great Popes like Gregory YII and Innocent III gave a certain historic majesty to the idea. But, after all, it was the ghost of the Roman Empire, and not a new and actu¬ ally effective political organization, which had appeared in the world. The idea has tremen¬ dous significance. It kept the thought of unity before the mind of the Middle Ages. In Dante’s De Monarcliia we see how inspiring a conception it became when it kindled the mind of a poetic genius with profound capacity to TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 139 apprehend political principles. It was at least as influential as the ghost in Hamlet. But it did not become the inspiring center of a new world. As a matter of fact, the really vital experi¬ ments in political organization were to move through the great national phase before the international idea was to emerge again with commanding power. The making and the functioning of the mighty nations of the modern world has been the matter of supreme importance in the life of the last thousand years. Men began definitely to think of their life together in the terms of a cluster of inde¬ pendent states. And that idea gave color to the most characteristic aspects of modern life. France came to new national consciousness in the latter part of the tenth and the eleventh centuries and became the most highly articu¬ lated sort of state in the period of Louis XIV in the seventeenth. England came to a new national consciousness in the eleventh century and developed a tremendous sense of the aggressive energy of its independent life under the Tudors in the sixteenth century. Spain came to a new quality of life with the expulsion of the Moors and the uniting of separate kingdoms under Ferdinand and Isa¬ bella in the fifteenth century and under 140 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY Charles Y reached an apex of power. Russia felt new pulses of life under the leadership of Peter the Great in the latter part of the seven¬ teenth century and came to an increasing sense of its own life under such rulers as Catherine II. Italy and Germany did not achieve unity until the nineteenth century, when Cavour in the one state and Bismarck in the other proved the statesmen of an achieved national solidarity. The United States of America began an independent life toward the end of the eighteenth century and swept westward upon the North American continent in a mighty movement of expansion during the nineteenth century, in the very period when a great struggle for the main¬ taining of national unity was fought and won. These characteristic states illustrate the movement going on throughout a thousand years. The making and the functioning of the nations is a tale of vast and far-reaching rela¬ tions. The conception of a cluster of states and of a balance of power gives us the very lines which defined the thought of men as the idea of nationality came to its own. During this period the life of man came to many a full and rich expression. But there were elements in the situation which gave deep concern to those who were thinking most TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 141 deeply and seriously about the ultimate power of the national ideal to solve the problems of men as they went on with the experiment of living together in the same world. On the one hand there was the tendency of the strong nations to exploit backward people. From the latter part of the fifteenth century new continents and new and vast territories came within the ken of the masterful Western nations. There were tremendous days of dis¬ covery. There were wonderful achievements in exploration. There was a mighty expansion of trade. There was the growth of the idea of colonization. Powerful nations struggled for mastery in these tremendous games in all parts of the world. The long contention between England and France in the eigh¬ teenth century illustrates this process in action. Out of the whole period of discovery and exploration and colonization and the crea¬ tion of new states, the great powers emerged with their vast colonial possessions, and new national groups with various degrees of autonomous control came into being. The British Empire, after disastrous experience with the political consequences of the mercan¬ tile theory, came to a method of life which had increasing regard for the interests and the liberties of all parts of the vast domain. 142 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY The time came when the Dominion of Canada was practically an independent state though a part of the empire, and this example was fol¬ lowed in Australia and in South Africa. A process seemed to have been discovered by which a vast unity expressing itself in all parts of the world could be united with a growth of liberty and autonomy on the parts of the constituent groups. Other imperial nations did not move as rapidly as Britain. In fact, the idea of the benevolent despot using absolute authority for the good of the people, which had received such notable expression in the eighteenth century through Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine II of Russia, and Joseph II of Austria, continued to haunt the mind of many a European monarch in the nineteenth century. And there were forces not a few which made not merely for benevolent autocracy but for deliberate exploitation. The record of no nation was spotless. Great Britain has far and away the best record of the nations of Western Europe. But even here there has been a ceaseless battle with reaction¬ ary forces, and there is many a page which has to do with the dealing with backward races which does not make the sort of reading which delights the man of good will. Britain at least was all the while moving toward the TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 143 light and the Pax Britannica became a nobler thing than the Pax Romana had ever been. The world was full of plague spots, however. Wherever you found land with extraordinary resources and a backward people, the great states of the world were likely to gather like birds of prey. Any one of these bits of pro¬ ductive territory held in weak hands was likely to become a center of disturbance which might involve the whole world in war. The great powers understood this and more and more Europe became an armed camp. There was also a problem of another kind. This was the possibility of the emerging of the superstate. The balance of power was a very delicate adjustment, and the state which was strong enough to break it was all too likely to think very little of the subtle adjust¬ ments through which its own energies crashed with noisy power. And there was also the possibility that some state might become strong enough to dream again the dream of world empire. At the beginning of the nine¬ teenth century, before the working out of many of the delicate adjustments upon which the stability of the period just behind us depended, just this had happened in the case of France under the leadership of Napoleon. After Waterloo, Europe and the world breathed 144 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY freely. It was not expected that the super¬ state would emerge again. But the unifica¬ tion of Germany in 1870 brought a new ele¬ ment into the world situation. And the im¬ mense and perfectly articulated organization of the military and industrial and intellectual aspects of the German state gave thoughtful men cause for much searching of heart. It was easy to laugh at words of warning. It was easy to believe that the rattling of the sword in the scabbard was only a heightened form of harmless national rhetoric. But it was also possible that a great nation had begun to dream the dream of the superstate. And that meant if it had really occurred, that sooner or later the world would be plunged into war. But in the meantime something of another sort had been occurring. The problem of the internal organization of a state was as urgent as that of its external relationships. Men had to live together in nations as well as in the larger life of the world. And in this set of relationships political democracy had its rise. There is a long story of struggle in England, a tale which flashes with particular brightness when we come to the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights, a tale which comes to dramatic moments in the Reform bills of 1832 and of TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 145 1867, and attains other stages of completeness with the abolition of many of the charac¬ teristic powers of the House of Lords and the coming of women within the range of the franchise. There is a sense in which the his¬ tory of the House of Commons is the history of human liberties. But much of the story is told in the tale of other lands. The United States was an experiment based upon the principles of English lovers of liberty. Here too the movement, though it seemed radical and dramatic, was really cautious and con¬ servative. In certain colonies only church members could vote. In certain States after the adoption of the Constitution only property owners could vote. It was only after a great war that the vote came within the range of men of every color. And only recently have women been included in its responsibilities and opportunities. The movement in England and especially the experiment in America had the profoundest influence in France. And so came the day when the Old Regime was swept away and the French people rather than the French crown became the center of strategy. Even Napoleon called himself the Emperor of the French and not the Emperor of France. Through many a vicissitude the French people passed, but they now seem to have reached a 146 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY securely republican form of government. Take it all in all, the democratic principle has made vast headway in the life of the world. Political democracy has become more and more secure in one great nation after another in spite of what some pessimists would call the degradation of the democratic dogma. It is true that unless Demos has education and character, his rule is likely to be undependable enough. It is possible for him to be a victim even as he sits upon his throne. But at least a great step has been taken when, if Demos is a victim, he is the victim of his own lack of knowledge and character and not of the oppressive tyranny of some external force. It is true that it is possible for a republic which is characterized by the free functioning of the popular will in its internal affairs to be a leader of exploitation as regards backward people in some other part of the world. It is just as easy for a group of people to be sor¬ didly selfish as it is for an individual to be a remorseless master of exploitation. But here again if power is centered in the people, there is always the possibility of creating a national conscience. It was in such a world as this that the attempt of Germany to become a superstate was made. The attempt was all involved in TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 147 the coils of many a bewildering aspect of the politics of the world. And so it came to pass that the beginning of the Great War saw an autocracy like Russia united with a free com¬ monwealth of nations like the British com¬ monwealth in fighting the most efficient and highly organized autocracy of the world. A man who thought closely could have seen early that those who fought the Central Powers were not unified in all of their aims. The menace of the German superstate was a thing against which every one of the allied states could whole-heartedly fight, whatever its own constitution and whatever its own ambitions. Even a state which was tempted to cherish sinister aims of its own could honestly enough fight the achievement of any such aims by Germany. So that there was no question about the union of the spirit of the Allies in the endeavor to defeat Germany. But the moment the question was lifted as to what sort of order was to be established after the war a great many different attitudes emerged. France was actuated more by fear of Germany than by love of democracy and was capable of being tempted by ambitions of its own hardly within the range of the legiti¬ mate aspirations of the democratic state. Russia, plunged into the throes of an internal 148 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY revolution at last dominated by a group of men who looked to Karl Marx for inspiration, came to represent an autocracy of a small group of the proletariat which was fighting for its life and was ready to be guilty of all the savagery and lawlessness of an autocracy without a history, without traditions, and with only wild and imperfectly analyzed hopes. This situation leads us to another aspect of modern human experience which has greatly increased the difficulty of the problem men have to work out in learning to live to¬ gether. With the new interest in the natural world which came with the Renaissance, men began to study the forces which move in the material world and to take practical steps for their utilization and their mastery. The prac¬ tical utilization of gunpowder changed the character of war. The mariner’s compass made possible the great age of discovery. The invention of the modern process of printing made the era of the complete diffusion of knowledge possible. The telescope immeasur¬ ably enlarged man’s horizons in the universe wffiere he dwells. So the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries saw the beginning of a new world of knowledge and experience for man. It was toward the end of the eighteenth cen- TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 149 tury, however, that in 1764 James Hargreaves invented the famous spinning jenny. In 1771 Richard Arkwright invented the water frame. In 1779 Samuel Crompton combined the best features of the two inventions just mentioned in his “mule.” In 1784 Edmund Cartwright patented a power loom. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. In 1785 James Watt had made a practical steam engine which was used for the driving of machinery. Fulton’s steamboat was successful in 1807. Stephen¬ son’s locomotive was in successful operation by 1814. These are only a few of the multi¬ tude of inventions which produced the ma¬ chine age. Manufacture and transportation bent to their purposes the mighty energies of the natural world. The machine became the slave of man. It seemed clear that what human slaves did for Athens machines would do for the modern world. A vast new leisure was opened up to man with his command of all the mighty energies which his inventive genius had made his own. But as it turned out, the machine era was a period of a new human slavery. Things got into the saddle and began to ride mankind. Mrs. Browning’s poignant and terrible poem, “The Cry of the Children,” voices one aspect of the tragedy of the new age. A new type of city built about 150 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY great manufacturing establishments sprang up, and with the manufacturing city and the terrible slum sections poverty took on a new frightfulness. There was the reaping of tre¬ mendous wealth on the part of a small por¬ tion of the population. There was the sordid exploitation of masses of men and women and little children. Class distinctions based upon industrial and economic conditions became tragically sharp. The problem of poverty entered upon its modern phase. It was in this whole situation that new theories of the distribution of property, of ownership, and of control began to be formulated. Karl Marx worked out the most compact and brilliantly articulated system of socialistic principles. His doctrine of class war and the final victory of the proletariat became a gospel which cap¬ tured the mind and quickened the imagination of multitudes of people the world over. His materialistic interpretation of history and his position quite without the sanctions of re¬ ligion tended to produce a divorce between the prophets of the religious life and the apostles of the new social synthesis. But the same problems were felt by men within the circle of religion, and men like Kingsley and Maurice became the exponents of a religion which faced its social obligations. Russia, TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 151 staggering under the weight of centuries of autocracy, at last fell under the control of the most radical group of those who acknowledged the authority of Marx, and so there came into being the Bolshevist regime. A Bolshevist Russia became worse than useless for the pur¬ poses of the Allies toward the end of the war and complicated the situation at its close. But in every nation there were groups who were thinking in the terms of a more highly organized function of capital and those who were thinking in the terms of the larger func¬ tioning of every man who worked in the vari¬ ous fields of industry. The two groups saw many, perhaps most things with different eyes and they greatly complicated the situation at the Peace Conference at the close of the war. So with nationalistic ambitions and class rivalries and an undisciplined but relentless autocracy of radical thinkers in one great nation the situation was complicated enough w r hen men reached the place of practical dis¬ cussion at the close of the World War. By this time the figure of Woodrow Wilson had taken on the largest possible international significance. A scholar and a thinker and a convinced idealist of immovable purpose, he had seized upon the critical days of the war to gain a world-wide attention for a set of prim 152 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY ciples of world-wide democracy and good will which sounded like the evangel of a better day as they echoed and reechoed among the waste places of the world and were heard in the assemblies where all the subtleties of brilliant and selfish indirection had too often held un¬ disputed sway. It is hard to-day to reproduce in our minds that sense of contact with new and creative realities which came to us in the great days when the most significant utter¬ ances of President Wilson went forth like bugle blasts upon the world. His work as a prophet was superbly done. He won the atten¬ tion of the whole world. He kindled the heart of humanity as it has been kindled by no leader in the modern period of history. But it was necessary that prophecy should be fol¬ lowed by practical statesmanship, by skillful diplomacy, and by effective political leader¬ ship. And here something went wrong. Per¬ haps we are too near these great events to be sure of just what did occur. Perhaps we are as yet incapable of that sure and wide per¬ spective which can wisely estimate and truly judge. It is clear that the President of the United States found himself within coil upon coil of subtle diplomatic action on the part of those who did not share his own vision or his high desire. It seems clear that sometimes TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 153 he made questionable if not dangerous con¬ cessions. The soul of Britain was with him, but the most brilliant representative of Britain at the peace table was a seasoned poli¬ tician, who with all his desire for a better world saw elements and possibilities in the situation which were not within the area of President Wilson’s thought. There were times when he must have felt that he was play¬ ing a lone hand. And when at last he returned with the best he could achieve at the peace table, he was repudiated by his own country and left a broken man beside the wreck of the great organization from which he had hoped so much for the world. It seems very clear that party loyalties played a larger part than international insight in the breaking of Wood- row Wilson and the wrecking of his plans. But at all events the golden moment of world¬ wide idealism passed and a heavy cynicism settled down upon the life of the world. Europe staggered toward bankruptcy. France prepared to extract the last mark from Ger¬ many. The plague spots of Europe began to burn once more with fever, and the days of disintegration and disillusionment in which we are living came on apace. The conference on tbe limitation of armaments was a fine and noble gesture, but in a good many relations 154 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY it has not proved more than a gesture. Britain is working its way back to stability, and hav¬ ing risked almost everything upon a coopera¬ tion which the United States has not supplied, is finding its difficult way not without danger¬ ous antagonists of the reign of good will within its borders as well as confusing and baffling forces without its boundaries with whom it must live in some sort of understand¬ ing and cooperation. In the United States there is a slowly but surely rising tide of im¬ patience with a sordid national selfishness and a gradually maturing conviction that we must put our shoulders under the load and lift our share of the burden of the world. In the meantime another great industrial transformation is sweeping over the world. We did live in an age of machines directed by skill. Now we live in the age of the auto¬ matic machines. Mr. Arthur Pound, in that very significant book, The Iron Man in Indus¬ try, has clearly analyzed the features which go to make up the age of automatic machines. The automatic machine is essentially a substi¬ tute for brains. As far as the typical worker is concerned it requires so little that a sub¬ normal mind, provided it is united to a spirit of faithfulness and an even disposition, makes the best sort of worker in this sort of activity. TRIUMPHANT BKOTHERHOOD 155 The work of an attendant upon an automatic machine is learned with infinitely more ease than that where skill is necessary in directing the machinery, and so it is easy to pass from industry to industry and from place to place. Meantime the resilient mind of man requires occupation, and a new restlessness and a new surrender to hot and lawless vices is spread¬ ing over the world. Men with underdeveloped minds are given standing room by the new system. They are enabled to marry and be¬ come the fathers of children, and so inferior types can now develop at a more rapid rate than ever before in the history of man’s strug¬ gle upon the earth. Coincident with all these processes the whole body of Western scientific knowledge is becoming the possession of races other than the white race. The dominance of the white race is essentially the product of the powers put in the white man’s hand by modern sci¬ ence. And all this power is now within the reach of other races. The Russian-Japanese war when, for the first time, a nation belong¬ ing to the white race and handling all the implements of modern scientific warfare, was defeated by a nation belonging to the yellow race, sent a thrill of new race consciousness all through the world of color. Mr. Lathrop 156 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY Stoddard may overdramatize the matter in his Rising Tide of Color, but there is scarcely a question as to the necessity of our facing a whole series of problems arising from the fact that the other races, armed with all the powers conferred by Western knowledge, will play a new role in the future of the world. A devastating race war might well mean the end of civilization. And yet it is at least within the ken of thought which is cool and analytical and not at all driven by hectic excitement. Even apart from the set of contingencies involved in this situation the new warfare has become so fiercely and scientifically destruc¬ tive that one can scarcely visualize the devas¬ tation which another world war even between Western nations would release upon the world. It would be a war where non-com¬ batants might well suffer most of all, and great cities might easily be destroyed in a few hours. With unequaled control over the forces of nature, modern man is in danger of becom¬ ing the victim of the very energies which he has enslaved. More than this, the rapid process by which the Far East is being industrialized will bring about a dislocation of all the subtle economic balances which stabilize the industrial life of the world. When China and India and Japan TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 157 become vast centers of manufacturing and the machine age fully arrives in the Far East, all our present methods of world organization will become inadequate. With a world which has passed through such a history and a world which faces a series of problems of which we have given only a hint, the modern men and women confront their own task in relation to the great prob¬ lem of learning to live together wisely and nobly and productively. It is a wide area over which we have passed in all too swift and cursory a fashion. But at least we have seen some of the outstanding aspects of the experiments men have made as they have dealt with the problem of a com¬ mon occupation of the same country and the same world, and we have seen some of the elements w r hich go to make up our present situation. Now we must definitely lift the question as to the relation of Christianity to all of these things. Historically, we may say that in every sort of human articulation which it has touched Christianity has proved a mel¬ lowing and ennobling influence. It brought new and gracious qualities into the relations of men all over the Roman Empire in the last days of its life. It put a heart of kindness and a mind of justice to work in the midst of 158 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY feudalism. It was a haunting conscience of nobility in every one of the rising nations of the world. It was all the while developing a consciousness of new corollaries of that spirit of good will which dwelt in its heart. It made gladiatorial combats impossible. It dealt the death blow of slavery by creating a world¬ wide conscience which would not rest while slavery remained a recognized institution in civilized countries. It has been a force for amelioration constantly at work in the world. It must also be confessed, when we include the whole history of the church, as well as the functioning of the spirit of Christ through the church, within the range of our survey, that the ecclesiastical system has wrought its own havoc in the world and has been the fountain of a great stream of cruelty which has watered the earth with human tears. But the church has parted company with Jesus Christ whenever this has occurred. We must also say that in its moments of full¬ est consciousness of the meaning of its own genius Christianity has possessed just the synthetic quality in this realm which was so evident when we discussed truth and goodness and beauty. It has included in its own in¬ sights that necessity for corporate life which is fundamental to all ample living. It has TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 159 made organization a spiritual and not a mechanical thing, and so it has preserved all its strength at the very moment when it has been delivered from its weaknesses. It has appropriated every good feature in the grow¬ ing national loyalties and has moved on from them to the full conception of humanity as a great family which is one of the greatest con¬ tributions of Christianity to the world. As we study the history of the missionary enter¬ prise, we are all the while seeing a Christian conscience at work which finds in every man everywhere a potential son of God and cannot rest content until the heir enters into his in¬ heritance. The tremendous international vision which came to multitudes of people in years not long gone was just the world view of the missionary statesman seen in its political significance. Christianity made men citizens of the world before statesmen had seen the meaning of world citizenship. With the coming of the industrial age the con¬ science of the Christian religion began to deal with the new situation. And as the years passed by, that conscience became more power¬ ful and more searching until it is now prob¬ ably the most characteristic aspect of Chris¬ tianity in action. The prophet of social and industrial application of the principles of 160 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY Jesus is heard in every part of the church and his voice is lifted in every denomination. It is only expressing the truth if we say that Christianity has been the greatest socializing influence in the history of the modern world. But Christianity is preeminently a religion of haunting ideals. Its most fundamental characteristic lies precisely in the fact that it is never exhausted by its achievements. It always comes back to the battlefield with the light of new visions in its eyes and the fire of new purposes in its heart and the inspira¬ tion of new activities driving its hand. And there is no question at all that one of the most fertile fields in which its capacity for transforming influence is to be felt may be found in the ample socialization of the life of the world. We may well bring this lecture to a close by some investigation of the fashion in which this synthetic religion will apply its principles to the relations of the individual, to society, and to the creation of a Christian social organism as its inherent character is given an opportunity to express itself in these things. When we approach this matter our first in¬ sight may well be the apprehension that Christianity is essentially a society. An indi¬ vidual Christian is only a fragment. He can TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 161 never be Christianity. It is only a Christian society which can express the genius of the Christian faith. And as long as society is un- Christian or only partly Christian, you have only a partial view of the meaning of Chris¬ tianity itself. Its goal is corporate. Its con¬ summation is a society of brothers. Its achievement is to be the creation of a world¬ wide society of good will. And anything less than this is only a fragment of that reality which glows at the heart of the Christian faith. In the old empires based on force, in the society based on slavery, in the social sanctions founded on individual loyalty, in the rising tide of national enthusiasm you see attempts to realize often by tragically evil means, sometimes by means partly good and partly evil, sometimes by means good but in¬ adequate, that social synthesis which is the inevitable end toward which life moves unless progress is an illusion and goodness is to be defeated in the life of man. And it is tremen¬ dously significant that this social instinct, this consciousness of the necessity for organiza¬ tion which has expressed itself in such mani¬ fold forms, is found to be structural in the Christian faith. The New-Testament empha¬ sis on the kingdom of God is the flowering into speech of this consciousness of solidarity as 162 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY the goal of the Christian religion as well as the goal of human life. The second insight which will come as a result of our investigation may well be an understanding that Christianity can never come to its full expression without a profound influence upon the sanctions of government and the activities of political life. This does not mean a loss of religious liberty. A tyran¬ nical church mastering an enslaved state is no more a Christian ideal than a tyrannical state mastering an enslaved church. But we are to be very careful not to interpret a free church in a free state to mean a church whose moral insights never become the possession of the state, a form of religion which never offers a social conscience to the society of which it is a part. The real goal of this development is a morally commanding church in a freely influenced state. The church is to ask for no tyrannical power. It is to ask for no artifi¬ cial protection. But the moral power of its own conscience and the might of the social passion which it creates are so to permeate society that in the very moment when the church asks for no institutional recognition it becomes a greater power than in any previous period of its life. The government which does not recognize the validity of the Christian TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 163 social ideal will go to the rocks at last. The principles upon which Jesus based all social relations are to he made dominant in the state. A man cannot be a Christian in his private life and recognize no relation between his political activities and the movements of his government and the law of Christ. Christian¬ ity is to give a new soul to government, a new conscience to all political activities. A democ¬ racy offers the only real sort of opportunity for this consummation. But democracy is only an empty form until the character of the citizens equals their political power and their social vision keeps pace with their freedom. It is here that Christianity is to make its greatest contribution to political life. Then Christianity is simply unable to ignore all the complex and confused elements of our industrial and economic situation. And here it confronts several specific tasks. It must save the man whose sudden opportunity in this new age tempts him to become an ex¬ ploiter rather than a servant of humanity. It must do this for his own sake. The poverty of mind and conscience and spirit which comes to a successful practitioner of exploita¬ tion is one of the most tragic things in the world. It will do this for the sake of all those who are within reach of his power. 164 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY Human values must perpetually be kept in emphasis as more fundamental than property values. Of course this is sound economics as well as sound religion, for a depleted human society will ultimately mean a lowering of every other sort of value in the world. The insight that life is organic must be brought to bear upon all class wars. The folly of class war lies just in the fact that, carried to its bitter end, it becomes the suicide of humanity. And so Christianity has the support of the deepest of human instincts—the instinct of the self-preservation of society—as it puts the whole weight of its life into the struggle for a brotherly world. This means responsibility as well as privilege for all men everywhere. The Christian social passion does not cry out for a world where some particular group of workers shall have rewards without service. It is opposed to exploitation by the proletariat even as it is opposed to exploitation by any other group. As it confronts the age of the automatic machine, it comes with an insistent emphasis upon the fertilizing and productive use of leisure in those activities which up¬ build the mind, enrich the conscience, develop the body, and enlarge the spiritual life. Every hour gained from the factory through the slav¬ ery of the machines to the human will is an TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 165 hour won for the opportunity for the develop¬ ment of a fuller and better life. Men’s work, their environment and their play must feel the commanding inspiration of the great Chris¬ tian ideals. Industry must be made Christian if men are to live together as brothers. And inevitably the Christian social ideal must become operative in international rela¬ tions. This is the greatest task before the social mind of man. The League of Nations may be no more than a step. But it is a step in the inevitable direction. The world can only survive by means of the development of some genuine sort of world order. No real value in national life is to be lost. Indeed, the nation in its essential meaning can be saved only through the solving of the inter¬ national problem. A world with one science and one vast and infinitely articulated indus¬ try and one marvelous complex system of transportation is inevitable if civilization is to survive and such a world is possible only on the basis of recognized international rela¬ tionships. All of this is necessary from the political and economic standpoint. It is Christianity which gives a soul to the whole movement and sees in all its aspects an approach to that form where the sense of humanity as a family shall become universal 166 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY and men shall find in brotherhood practical efficiency as well as moral and spiritual power. It is just this thing which strikes us as having a real element of the marvelous in it. We come to a new world evolving from the application of an entirely new set of forces. And in this world we find a whole complex of social necessities in respect of which Chris¬ tianity has the inspiring and interpreting word to say. If there is such a thing as social progress, Christianity will preside at its con¬ summation. But the strategy of the Christian position has profounder aspects. We must face two great problems in the creating of the new society. The first is the creation of the indi¬ vidual capable of functioning in the new social world. The second is to preserve the integrity of personality in a world which real¬ izes its social destiny. Now, the moment we realize the actual elements in these problems we begin also to see the fashion in which Christianity meets them. There is no other force the world knows equal to the spirit of Jesus in producing the social mind in the indi¬ vidual, and there is no other power with such resources for transforming the individual life so that without weakness or inner disintegra- TRIUMPHANT BROTHERHOOD 167 tion, it will be able to take its place in a world made truly social. It is here that what, in our loose way of speaking, we denominate the individual and the social gospel meet and are harmonized in a higher unity. The indi¬ vidual gospel is to reconstruct the individual to make him capable of social functioning. The social gospel is to give him his task and his world, the great organism of which he is to become a part. But all the while we are wondering if society is not so great that it will quite overwhelm the individual. Can that precious and unique thing personality be kept at its richest and fullest in a world which is at last a great social organism? The reply is that the very nature of Christianity is the creation of a society where each individual is of infinite value, each personality has eternal significance, and yet together and not alone they reach the goal of all experience and of all endeavor. Indeed, it is only in the society of friendly men that individual personality can reach and maintain its full stature. That great building rooted and grounded in love which inspired the mind of Paul is indeed our individual and our social goal. And Chris¬ tianity proves the synthesis of our social hopes as well as the power harmonizing all the ele¬ ments of beauty and goodness and truth. LECTURE V TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS Dr. T. R. Glover, the wealth of whose erudition and the sudden flash of whose in¬ sight have a way of filling us with glad surprise, gives one lecture in Progress in Re¬ ligion to the Christian Era to “Early Man and His Environment.” It is a fascinating attempt to trail the mind of man back to its primitive reactions in the presence of its own experiences and the curious baffling world. A good deal of work has been done in this field, and if most of what we read seems to belong to the category of brilliant guesses, there are some things of which we may be fairly sure. From the very beginning of his life as a being who could think and know, man has con¬ fronted the infinite mystery with an over¬ mastering desire to find an ally. Many of his experiments in this direction were crude and rude enough. But from the first he was all the while trying to get the powerful mystery or the powerful mysteries which he felt in the world to be on his side and not against him. There came lonely hours of spiritual wistful- J68 TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 169 ness when he wanted not only an ally but a friend. These were great hours and perhaps represented a high consummation in the evo¬ lution of religion. But at every stage man knew that if his world were against him, every¬ thing would go wrong. And so his attempt to find allies in the powers that moved so in¬ scrutably was his first and fundamental and, in a sense, his perpetual endeavor. We can discern two attitudes as man went on with his adventure of discovering and utilizing the Deity. One was the tendency to regard the divine as a series of mysterious powers. The other was the tendency to regard the divine as a series of conscious individuals. We may at first be inclined to regard the second as inevitably an advance upon the first. That which was an echo of human personality seems without a peradventure of a doubt higher than that which was an echo of the processes of nature or of the vitality in action seen in animal life. It is at least significant, however, that the later stages of man’s experience in respect of these matters has had a way at times of turning his mind to a more noble sense of potencies and forces rather than to the type of life which we see reflected in the experience of man himself. Matthew Arnold’s “power not ourselves” may seem infinitely re- 170 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY moved from the mysterious power which commanded the allegiance of primitive man. But with all the infinite refinement of Mat¬ thew Arnold’s conception, it finds its roots in a religion which was inspired by things and forces rather than in a religion which was inspired by the inner life of man himself. At all events, the practice of religion as the com¬ ing to mastery over mysterious powers and the practice of religion as the gaining of the favor of conscious individuals who could aid the worshiper in all sorts of ways in a measure stood over against each other. The one had its own kinships with all the later develop¬ ments of magic. The other had its inevitable relations to all the developments of personal religion. When the one became scientific it could believe in the reign of law. When the other became ethical, it could believe in a God with a character. But here we are running ahead of our story. What we want to see now is just the fashion in which a personal and an impersonal approach to religion can be found in very early stages of the life of man. When we think of the Christian religion in relation to the sort of insight which developed in respect of these two fundamental religious attitudes, we are tremendously interested to find that the essential elements in the two are TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 171 both found in the Christian faith. In the study of Jesus himself you always find a sense of conscious individual life in clear emphasis on the one hand and on the other a sense of a world of vast and mysterious forces over against which he stands. Only he approaches this world never as a foe but always as a master. We are far from having thought through to any complete understanding the relation of the power we find in things and the power we find in personality. And it is easy to raise no end of confusing questions in respect of Jesus’ attitude of mastery toward the world without him. It is at least tremen¬ dously significant that the attitude of Jesus toward the earliest dualism of human thought, the problem of the power w T hich came to light in human consciousness and the power which came to light in all the processes of the natural world, was that of a master in both realms. He is Lord in both worlds. And as we shall see this finding of a higher unity has been a persistent attitude of the Chris¬ tian religion as the mind of man has developed and the problem has assumed aspects in¬ finitely complicated and baffling. It is won¬ derfully significant to observe that any man at any stage of the unfolding religious life of early man could he have come into contact 172 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY with the Jesus whom the Gospels portray would have felt that this marvelous Master included in his own experience and action the thing which was central in religion to him. To be sure, Christianity cast off many aspects which are important in various forms of primitive faith and practice. Magic has no place. That sense of a universe which may prove fickle either through the incalculable action of forces or individuals is now tran¬ scended. But the root ideas of powers which must be on a man’s side and of conscious life behind this world’s manifold activities remain in the higher unity which is implicit in the whole mind and method of Jesus. He could have made a quick and authentic contact with any human being at any stage of the develop¬ ment of the religious life. So much cannot be said to be sure of all the followers of Jesus. That sure instinct for the thread of truth to be unraveled from the mass of error has some¬ times seemed to be quite foreign to the atti¬ tude of the Christian missionary. It is one of the happy things about our present situation that in every part of the world we are learn¬ ing to approach men through that element in their experience and worship which offers a real point of understanding with the faith which we would bring to them. A faith which TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 173 was absolutely original would be absolutely incomprehensible. And so the contacts which Christianity could have made with primitive forms of worship illustrate the contacts which it may make with backward peoples who still represent in some measure the primi¬ tive mind. At a later stage of the religious develop¬ ment of men, we see two conceptions set sharply over against each other. On the one hand there is the idea of the divine as a great hierarchy of gods. On the other there is the conception of God as a lonely only one. On the one hand there is such a society of deities as that represented by the Greek or the Roman Pantheon. On the other there is the supreme and only Deity found at the center of the worship of the greatest Hebrew prophets. The society of gods had many attractive aspects. It made the mysterious region above the ken of mortal mind and beyond the reach of human experience a wonderfully vivid and various world of experiences of infinite romance and of all the range of which a per¬ sonal life is capable. It gave the opportunity for every human desire and every human im¬ pulse to have its own tutelary deity. If the love of wisdom could look to Athena, the love of wine could look to Dionysius. But this 174 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY very richness of life was also a thing with tragic elements in it. For if every good thing in humanity had a divine existence beyond human ken, the same thing was true of all which degraded the mind of man and defiled his body. The gods had all the vices of which men were guilty. The worst thing which could happen to men was just to become like some of their deities. And it is also clear that the endless contentions of mutually antagonistic deities with the perpetual clash of perpetually differing desires offered no explanation of such amazing unity as the world obviously possessed and no basis for a nobler moral unity yet to be attained. The hierarchy of deified impulses might explain the moral con¬ fusion of the world. It could surely offer no way out of it. The inevitable tendency of the clearest Greek thinking was away from the tragic con¬ tention of immoralities made divine to a belief in a world-order with a real unity and a nobler reality at its base. The worst characteristics of the deities began to be ignored or forgotten or denied by being reduced to allegory. Loftier and loftier attributes were ascribed to the most powerful gods, and something very like monotheism finally emerged in the great¬ est of the Greek thinkers. TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 175 But in the meantime another nation which was to be the religious teacher of the world had achieved a sure and lofty belief in one God, the Lord and Master of all existence everywhere. The story of the struggle toward monotheism in Israel and of its final and com¬ plete triumph can only be referred to in pass¬ ing. There is a good deal which is dim and uncertain about the tale. And perhaps we are more inclined to consider its stages and aspects important than the actual facts would justify. The important matter is just that a completely self-conscious monotheism did emerge in Israel and that it received immortal expression in the hands of the greatest of the prophets. There are passages in the Isaiah of the exile which carry human speech near to its limits in the sublime expression of this mastering thought, which was a living experi¬ ence in the mind and the heart of the writer. We feel that we are on the mountain tops of the world as we listen to these outbursts of insight into the nature of the great and only Master of the World. But the situation is not quite so simple as it appears at first sight. We now know that monotheism itself may become a hard and rigid and barren thing. We know that we may think of God as so isolated among his 176 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY lonely perfections that he seems forever for eign to all the pulsing wonder of the world and all the glad richness of its social life; Between a decadent polytheism and a lofty monotheism we would not hesitate for a mo^ ment. There is a sense in which Israel has made monotheists of us all at least so far as to making us incapable of being polytheists. But even as we admit this we are aware that there is a monotheism which proves too much. There is a monotheism which seems a strange basis for elements which are structural to all that we know of experience at its very high¬ est. When the social passion is fully alive and fully self-conscious there is a question as to whether it can ever be contented with a bleak and barren monotheism. And so the question arises and at last becomes pressing: Is there no way to maintain all the fresh full¬ ness of life which is characteristic of polythe¬ ism and at the same time all the lofty unity of the divine life which is the central meaning . of the faith in one God? It may seem that here we confront an ultimate choice. We can¬ not have the good of one system and also the good of the other. We have reached a dualism which cannot be bridged. However, we have seen so often that Chris¬ tianity represents a synthesis in which oppos- TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 177 ing views come to a higher unity that it may be worth our while to make some investigation of the characteristic assertions of the historic faith in order that we may see if they throw any light upon this question. When we come to the study of Gnosticism in the second cen¬ tury we see at once that it was an attempt on the part of the spirit of polytheism to make a home for itself in the Christian faith. But the results are very bizarre. The Gnostics so easily accept all sorts of superstitions. And they so break company with every charac¬ teristic of the faith as it speaks in the New Testament that the pursuit of this path does not seem very promising. Indeed, the church itself very definitely repudiated Gnosticism and there is not any indication that it has looked back upon the decision with anything like mournful regret. We are driven, then, to look into the heart of the historic faith to see if at any point there is a position which suggests the synthesis which would offer a higher unity to that sense of life’s fullness and social meaning which we find in polytheism and that lofty unity which we find in the faith in one God. Now we find that we are coming right up to the historic thought of God as triune which has haunted the mind of the church through all of its his- 178 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY tory. And immediately a belief which may have seemed a bit of utterly valueless meta¬ physics imported into the simplicity of the Gospels takes on new meaning. For we now see clearly enough that the root of the Chris¬ tian idea of the Trinity is precisely the har¬ monizing of the idea of the unity and the social life of God. Whatever difficulties the minds of men may find with the doctrine itself, one cannot deny the amazing fact that with a sure instinct for the deepest things in experience the church sought for a view of God which would account completely and happily both for the unity and the variety of the world. The God who is worshiped as Father and Son and Holy Spirit, one great Life with one harmonious will and all the while three centers of consciousness and love, is indeed a deity regarding whom we may ask many baffling questions, but he is also a deity in whose own nature the social prin¬ ciple has perfect expression and the richness of whose life is the natural counterpart even as it is the source of all the richness and variety of the life of the world. All the evil elements of polytheism are cast utterly away and the insights which gave polytheism a cer¬ tain vitality are kept perpetually alive in the Christian thought of the Trinity. And at the TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 179 same time all the lofty apprehension of one dependable will, one final unity of life as the basis of the life of the world remain clearly and completely expressed in a thought of God which sees all this ample richness of con¬ sciousness within the harmony of one unified divine life. It is clear that if we are to find the basis of the social passion in the very nature of God and not in the will of a lonely Being who created human spirits to be as utterly unlike him as possible, we must have some such solution as the conception of the Trinity offers. From this point we can easily see how this thought of God has perpetually haunted the minds of all thinkers whose inves¬ tigation of ultimate problems as they are related to the Christian faith has moved in the largest areas and has included the sense of the strange and sometimes seemingly ulti¬ mate antinomies of life and thought. We now turn to two other conceptions of deity not unrelated to those which we have just been considering which have had their own curious and checkered history in man’s adventurous quest for the knowledge of God. There is the thought of the Divine as vital energy. There is the thought of God’s moral character. On the one hand you have all those aspects of religion which have been most 180 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY impressed by tbe productive power of nature —tbe passing of tbe seasons, tbe planting of seeds, tbe growth of all living things, the golden harvests, and tbe strange and mysteri¬ ous powers lurking in tbe reproductive proc¬ esses of animals and of man. You have here a vast realm of amazingly vital potency, and it is easy to understand bow men were im¬ pressed by it and in all sorts of fashions came to worship tbe power which it expressed. But along these lines there was infinite danger as well as a kindling sense of living forces. It was easy to put upon the throne those pas¬ sionate desires which man early began to understand must be mastered and steadied and controlled and not allowed to master the whole personality. Fire is a wonderfully im¬ portant and useful thing. It gives heat in winter. It gives illumination in darkness and it comes as the heat of the sun in summer to give life to all growing things. But if you should decide to worship fire and to express that worship by burning down a beautiful house or a noble temple every time you came to the celebration of a religious festival, the results would be tragic and disintegrating in¬ deed. And this is precisely the sort of thing which happened in religious prostitution and in many a dark and obscene rite of that wor- TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 181 ship whose fundamental inspiration was the thought of the Divine as vital energy. In all such forms of worship, a man’s religion be¬ came the greatest foe of that wise and noble self-control which is the essential of progres¬ sive life. It was inevitable that men to whom the moral meaning of life became increasingly clear should lift up wistful hands for a divine ally in the great ethical battles of life. And the full and perfect expression of the insight into the Divine as moral character is found in the mighty Hebrew prophets who pronounced the word “righteousness” in such fashion that they became the creators of an ethical civ¬ ilization with a moral passion which swept over the plains of human life like wind from the hills. To a modern man it is almost start¬ ling to find how many religions have been unethical or only incompletely ethical. The lifting of religion, clear and clean, into the ethical realm is one of the most marvelous experiences in the moral history of man. Now the worshiper finds the Deity on the side of his own noblest insights, and he finds those insights infinitely enlarged and enriched. He is never tempted as men have been tempted in so many religions to become better than his God. Here, again, we have two principles which 182 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY have had the most varied expression. And it is an infinitely complex series of conceptions and experiences which a man must trace out and follow if he is to gain any comprehensive understanding of the battle of the ethical in¬ sights for a place in religion. He must survey that utter pessimism which turns from all the hot and vivid energies of life in final repudia¬ tion, as if a man should decide never in all his life to have anything to do with fire be¬ cause it may become deadly conflagration. He must read all the strange and often abnormal tales of the varied asceticisms of the world. He must follow the periods of reaction when the life which was denied comes back with tremendous and tempestuous power, and he must see the reaction itself often taking forms which burn out the very worth of the human spirit in the hot fires of lawless indulgence. As he goes over this varied and tragic tale he comes to long more and more for a syn¬ thesis of the thought of the Divine as vital energy and the thought of the Divine as moral character which shall bend all the intense forces of life to its own high self-control and at the same time shall keep the thought of God warm and vital. There is the desire to escape from the intense heat of the tropics of unbridled passion and the cruel cold of the TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 183 arctic circle of an ethic whose terrible “ought” has no place for the glow of a warm and eager desire, from a God whose cold and distant austerities would freeze the life of the world. It is at this point that a man is ready for an inspection of the Christian religion from a new angle. And the results are wonderful and inspiring enough. On the one hand Chris¬ tianity takes oyer all the supreme ethical in¬ sights of the Old Testament and lifts them to new places of power and beauty. The God whom Christians worship is indeed a God with a character and a God to whom moral interests are supreme. But you soon discover that this moral intensity is not the cutting bitterness of freezing cold. It is the burning intensity of tremendous heat. Morality itself is set on fire. Morality itself becomes a con¬ suming passion in the life of God. And it is this fire which has such surgical and healing power to burn out evil desire. In Christian¬ ity evil thoughts are not frozen by a blight¬ ing cold. They are burned up by a marvelous moral fire. And evil passion is met and mas¬ tered by a mightier good passion. Righteous¬ ness becomes the most glowing and blazing of all experiences in the life of God and in the life which he creates in men. And this con¬ suming fire of virtue is the steadying and the 184 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY interpretation of every human impulse. The love of Jesus for little children and his hearty regard for every normal human experience and for every wholesome human joy is an expression of a certain warm and eager appre¬ ciation of every bright and vivid human rela¬ tionship. In a way the most amazing triumph of Christianity is the Christian home which takes a fire which might easily become a con¬ flagration and controls and enriches and even transforms it into the perpetual hearth fire of all the gentle sanities and goodness of the domestic life. So it comes to pass that in Christianity self-control is a positive and crea¬ tive thing. It is not the great refusal. It is the great assertion. The truth is that there are only two ways to interpret the great urges of life. You may interpret the higher in the terms of the lower and so drag all life down. You may interpret the lower in the terms of the higher and so lift all life up. The wor¬ ship of a God of infinite goodness who is at the same time the source of all the glowing and vital energies of the world means a con¬ tact with those great and searching moral energies which shall purge the life of evil and enthrone the good. A man is never more vividly and vitally alive than when he refuses the lower because he has learned to love the TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 185 higher. It is only when he tries to refuse the lower without any higher to put in its place that life becomes a strange and abnormal and ugly thing Jesus put this with memorable power into his little story of the man out of whom a devil was cast with nothing to put in its place. In the Christian conception the God with a character brings infinite richness and fullness to the life of his children. And self- denial itself becomes a glad and glorious thing at last because the thing for the sake of which the denial is made is so much ampler and better and more fruitful than anything which is lost. Every “Thou shalt not” of the Chris¬ tian religion is clearing the way for a greater “Thou shalt.” When we view historic Chris¬ tianity at its moments of fullest consciousness of its own genius these things are shiningly clear. When it has fallen below them it has been through an incomplete apprehension of its own nature and character. So here, again, in the most glorious fashion, Christianity proves the living synthesis which preserves the good and transcends the limitations and the evils of two opposing views, indeed of two opposing forces which move through the world and through human life. Taking another step we find another con¬ trast which easily connects itself with the one 186 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY which we have been considering. It is pos¬ sible to view the divine as matter. It is pos¬ sible to view the divine as mind. In a good deal of Greek thought the distinction between mind and matter had not emerged. But it is one of those distinctions inevitable as man’s reflection upon his own experience becomes clearer; and once the distinction has emerged, it is equally inevitable that mind and mat¬ ter shall do battle for the full possession of the field. The world of things in the thought of the every-day man is so insistently and per¬ petually present that it may seem to occupy the place of control by a sort of divine right. The world of mind is so evasive and elusive that it may seem little able to maintain itself in the fierce struggle with things. But the little soldier we call the mind, like another David, has slain many a Goliath of matter in the long struggles of the passing years. The disconcerting thing is just that in this realm battles are not at an end with one victory or with a series of them. Even when the intel¬ lectual victory is clearly on the side of mind, the practical claims of the material are felt, and often men end by worshiping with their actions what they have denied in their thought. In some form or other every man must meet the fight. As we look carefully into TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 187 the situation it seems here again that we may well try to find a harmonizing word. What¬ ever the ultimate nature of matter, it is un¬ doubtedly true that material values are an important part of every human experience. And the more we think about it the more we see that unless the material is mastered and interpreted by something which is beyond, the material life goes down in shipwreck at last. We need a view of God which shall put mind upon the throne and which shall make matter the willing and happy servant of mind: or if this is too much like personifying matter, shall make all physical experience the harmonious expression of spiritual values. When we approach the Christian religion with this thought in view, we find at once that assured mastery of the mind which is so clearly the goal of our quest. But to Jesus, at least, the material was not something foreign to his power and use. Every material thing became the vehicle of his mental insights, of his moral purpose, and of his spiritual apprehension. Indeed, the material suddenly takes on a new and sacramental value as in his hands it be¬ comes so completely the instrument of the spiritual vision which dominates the mind of Jesus. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are indeed two expressions of something very deep 188 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY and significant in the Christian faith, namely, the insight that at last all the physical realm is the symbol and the expression of spiritual values when dominated by a mind controlled by these values. And as we study the influence of Christianity upon the world we see that to just the degree that its real character has impressed itself upon human life, to that degree the physical has been caught up into mental and moral and spiritual meaning. Here, again, Christianity proves most notably a synthetic experience in the life of man. Turning now to another approach to the thought of the Divine, we are confronted by another set of seemingly opposing conceptions. There is the thought of a Divine as infinite. There is the thought of the Divine as finite. On the one hand there is the deep and abiding intuition that the Deity must transcend all that is mutable and passing in this frag¬ mentary world. He must be the absolute as over against the relative. He must be the utterly complete as over against the frag¬ mentary. The Divine Life must be that in¬ finite perfection which stands in the sharpest contrast to all the imperfections of this pass¬ ing world. He must be the final end of all our thinking, the goal of all our aspiring, and in him all the elements of existence must be TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 189 lifted to their highest power. As the ultimate reality he must fill all the realm of thought and action with a transcendent splendor. He is infinity itself in its ultimate meaning. As we view the history of the whole series of thoughts of the Divine which connect them¬ selves with this approach, we soon come to realize that the practical outcome in respect of many of them is to push God far away from human life and all the tragic aspects of human experience. It is easy to think of the Abso¬ lute in such terms that he loses all contact with any such experience as is the pain and passion, the glory and fear of human life. We come to think of God so loftily that we put him entirely out of reach. We find a deep gulf set between the world of human experi¬ ence and the world of Divine Perfection. And it becomes increasingly evident that it is a gulf which God himself finds it hard to cross. Theories of emanations are resorted to in order to get a God who can venture to have contact with humanity without being too much defiled. But this only shows how hope¬ less the problem has become. The problem which arises from the tendency to isolate God in his own perfections is one of the most dif¬ ficult and one of the most acute in the whole story of thought about religion. 190 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY On the other hand, in sharp contrast and sometimes in definite reaction from this specu¬ lative view of God which loses him in the subtle mazes of its own dialectic, there is the sense of God as finite, as the One who is a part of our life and shares its limitations, who struggles with us through the difficulty and tragedy of situations which bear upon him as upon us with almost intolerable strain. This sort of interpretation has been given with memorable felicity and power by Mr. H. G. Wells. In the stress and strain of the World War, men like Mr. Wells felt that they must have a Deity who shared with them in all the terrible struggle with human passion and pain and evil. They could not abide the thought of a remote and distant Deity lost to man in the lonely splendors of his own infinite per¬ fections. They wanted a God who could be a Brother even as he must be a Leader. And the thought of a finite God seemed to make the Deity human and near, a partner in all the woeful strain of life, the great heroic Leader in all the battle with evil. One has no disposition to deny the attrac¬ tive features of such a thought of God. You have a warm and hearty human nearness which brings its own wonderful message of comradely fellowship. But as time goes on, TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 191 the sense of what is lost grows more impres¬ sive than the sense of what is gained through this view of the Divine There is no ultimate Master who is powerful enough to bend all the energies of the universe to his own purpose of goodness and truth. The throne room of the world is vacant. Man has a friendly Leader, but the universe has no infinite King. You can never tell what may happen in such a universe. You have no final basis for moral certainty or for spiritual security. The God you worship is himself a lonely fighter in a universe which may decide against him at last. And the dreadful sense of in¬ security grows with the passing days. Good¬ ness has no clear and permanent basis in the nature of things. Truth has no abiding basis in the constitution of the universe. Even the finite God, with all his heroism and good will, is a pathetic figure as he moves about in brave contention with an unfriendly world. A God with a fine character but with no secure hold upon power can never satisfy the need of the spirit of man. We stand confronting a particularly test¬ ing dilemma. On the one hand is a Deity lost in the splendors of his own infinity. On the other is a God marvelously near and attrac¬ tive but with no firm security in the ultimate 192 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY reality of things. Is there no way in which the two views may be united? Is there no way in which all the ultimate powers of the infinite God may be harmonized with the near and human attractiveness of the finite God? In this moment of bewildered questioning we turn once more to the Christian faith. And we find ourselves in particular inspecting the Christian view of the incarnation. The flood of light is instant and wonderfully reassur¬ ing. Here is the very meeting of the Divine and human for which we have been longing. And it worked itself out in the winsome splen¬ dor of gracious and loving human living right at the heart of the historic process of man’s life. Jesus has every quality which would give attractiveness to the finite God. He bends under man’s burden. He accepts his limita¬ tions. He makes himself one with humanity in the most astoundingly complete and authentic way. And in it all he maintains the stainless beauty of a life whose perfect sympathy is in constant union with flawless deeds. The ideal has indeed touched the real. The infinite has come into contact with the finite. At that word we pause. For we do indeed realize that there is an aspect of the experience of Jesus which opens toward in¬ finity. With all the bright and attractive TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 193 appeal of Ms human qualities there are a depth and a fathomless quality about him which perpetually lead the mind and the conscience and the heart on to the thought of the infinite and perfect God. His view of God as Father makes the Absolute himself approachable in moral quality even as he is transcendent in nature and power. In fact, the more we study the whole impact of Christianity upon the world the more we see that it has a tremen¬ dous seizure in just the fact that men have always felt when they accepted its sanctions that at one moment they were in contact with the ultimate reality of the infinite life of God and at the same time with the most winsome expression in time of the meaning of eternity. The ultimate faith of the Christian is just this: that no fact and no experience in any range of the universe will be able to contra¬ dict the belief in God which Jesus brought to men. There is nothing more ultimate than the truth which Jesus brought to the world. It may be seen in ampler relationships, it may be seen in fuller apprehension, but the man who knows God as the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has come to an ultimate matter which nothing in the uni¬ verse can change or dislodge from its place of commanding power and reality. Whether 194 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY we study the incarnation as a conception taught by the church or as a belief arising inevitably from the experience of men in con¬ tact with the personality of Jesus, it is clear that here we have a meeting of the two sets of interests which view God on the one hand as infinite and on the other as finite. The two views meet in a higher harmony in the thought of God coming into human life in the person of Jesus Christ. And this harmony becomes a personal experience of constant and kindling inspiration in the life of the Chris¬ tian man. The tale of religion in the world makes it clear that it is possible to think of the Divine with the emphasis upon eternity or with the emphasis upon time. An enormous amount of the history of the religious experience of the past has been filled with the rapturous, mystical consciousness of the glory of the per¬ fect felicity of eternity. “ Jerusalem, the golden, by milk and honey blessed/’ has sounded a note which has rung across the ages. That great day when the incomplete is lost in the complete, when evil is finally conquered by good, when tears and sighing and death are finally conquered and perfect joy and per¬ fect peace reign forever, has been the central joy of religion for multitudes of men. To TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 195 them God has stood for the security of all this. Religion has been the conquest of time by eternity. On the other hand, much of the most characteristic piety of our own period takes the form of a belief in the injection of divine ideals into the world here and now. God is the God of the present, however mys¬ terious the future may be. God is the master in the fight for cleanness and justice and goodness in the very world where we dwell. God is the Lord of time. He is the master of to-day. The more we think of it, the more we discover that both notes must be sounded in a complete religion. The echoing glories of an eternal hope must not be lost. The mighty imperatives of to-day must be retained. God is the same yesterday, to-day, and for¬ ever. And this synthesis is triumphantly achieved in the Christian religion. On the one hand it gives us those triumphant visions of perfect felicity in the future which bring the New Testament to a close in a perfect hal¬ lelujah chorus of rejoicing. On the other hand it sees the glory of religion in visiting the fatherless and the widow and in keeping our¬ selves unspotted from the world. How “call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” asks Jesus. And from the same lips fall the great words about the many 196 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY dwelling places in the Father’s house. To Jesus, godliness was both a present activity and a future hope. God stands in the Chris¬ tian religion as the Mighty Master of To-day and the Lord of all the unfathomable future. The Father of Jesus Christ may be trusted with all the infinite meaning of the unfold¬ ing years. And to-day he must be obeyed with an inspired mind and a loving heart. So godliness as action and godliness as hope meet in perfect harmony in the Christian faith. If we are approaching the thought of wor¬ ship with a profound apprehension of the need of an ultimate stability, we are likely to think of the Divine in terms of necessity. If we approach the thought of worship, full of the sense of the need of kindling inspiration and of an ample life of creative energy, we are apt to think of the Divine in terms of freedom. And the two soon take on the qualities of belligerent antagonism. Our security is likely to become a hard and rigid thing, cold and mechanical with an inescap¬ able hardness. Our freedom is likely to be¬ come a lawless thing, moving with uncon¬ trolled license about the world. Our stability becomes too stable. Our freedom becomes too free. And so we begin to look about for a method of combining necessity and freedom, TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 197 of uniting stability and liberty. The Chris¬ tian religion speaks to us in no uncertain voice as we approach its sanctions, full of the thought of this tantalizing problem. It offers us a Deity as free as the perfection of spon¬ taneous goodness and a divine life as stable as a nature whose structural quality is the very reality which comes to conscious expres¬ sion in all moral distinctions. It gives us a universe as secure as the character of God and as free as the spontaneous energies of the divine life. And it reveals these qualities of stability and freedom united in the per¬ fect union of the life of Jesus himself in the world. Freedom and necessity find their ulti¬ mate harmony in the life of God. They find an astoundingly harmonious expression in the life of Jesus in the world. They are all the while meeting in the lives of those in whom the Christian religion does its most charac¬ teristic work as it goes on with its transform¬ ing activity in the life of man. It is one of the most interesting aspects of the mental activity of men that the moment an insight becomes structural in their thought of life they put that insight right into their thought of the life of the Deity. If they are thinking of life in the terms of power, God is the all powerful. If they are think- 198 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY ing of life in the terms of righteousness, God is the all righteous. If they are thinking of life in the terms of love, God is the all loving. But these particular insights have a way of getting into isolated control even in the his¬ tory of Christian thinking. We have a way of thinking of God in such a fashion that one of his characteristics captures our imagina¬ tion until we have no room for any other. With some Calvinists, the thought of the sove¬ reignty of God was so all-possessing as to leave little room for anything else. There were Puritans who had no place in their mind for any other thought than that of the justice of God. And there have been those who so em¬ phasized the love of God as to put kindly emotion in command of his life. It is evident at once that some commanding synthesis of all these insights is needed. And it is to be said that not always wisely but at least per¬ sistently Christian thinkers have been haunted by the knowledge of this necessity. The tale of those theories of the meaning of the death of Christ which have been built about the thought of reconciling the compassion and the justice of God have at least had this laudable aim, however crude has been the method by which the aim has at times been wrought into intellectual form. The truth is that if religion TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 199 is to be commanding, we must think of God in the terms of the totality of his perfect vir¬ tues as they blend into the completeness of his divine life. And if all this is to be com¬ manding in the life of men, there is a great need of being able to point to some command¬ ing deed and to say, “There you have ex¬ pressed in action just what God is in the full quality of the moral and spiritual meaning of his life.” It is from this point that we shall best approach the consideration of the cross of Christ. We do not suggest that this method will exhaust its significance. We do suggest that it will reveal a wealth of wonder¬ ful meanings. It is not a battle between con¬ tending attributes. It is that perfect deed of loving giving of self in which all God’s thought and feeling and hope and desire re¬ garding the children of men find perfect expression. If we really want to know what the Christian God is like, we have only to point to the cross and to say, “He is a God who is capable of that.” All that we mean by goodness, all that we mean by justice, all that we mean by compassion, all that we mean by love, all that we mean by sovereignty seeking the allegiance of willing hearts and not the forced submission of un¬ willing spirits, all that we have been able to 200 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY think or feel or dimly apprehend of the best man can believe of God is met and infinitely transcended in the deed npon the cross. The moral and spiritual synthesis of Christianity is revealed with triumphant power upon Gol¬ gotha. Now, when we pause to consider the sig¬ nificance of the elements in religion and in Christianity which we have been considering, we are able to see that a great series of atti¬ tudes toward the Divine and the interpreta¬ tion of Deity are possible, and, indeed, have emerged upon the field of man’s life. And these attitudes can be classified as a series of positions which tend to express themselves in the terms of mutual hostility. What one asserts another is immediately inclined to deny. But when we study these contending positions more closely we discover that they really need each other. They are mutually supplementary rather than mutually contra¬ dictory when seen in their true meaning. Taken alone, they tend to move off into ex¬ tremes of disastrous folly or of hard rigidity. But when used to guide and check each other so that the essential meaning of each comes to its own place in the harmony of a higher view, we find a surprising satisfaction. And when we bring these opposing attitudes to Chris- TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 201 tianity we are astonished to find that in every case it offers a higher unity in which they find such a harmony that each is saved from extravagance. Each vital insight into the nature of the Divine is included in the Christian faith. We see this wonderfully illustrated in the past, but it is even more striking as we think of the future. The most astonishing thing about Christianity from this standpoint is the matter of the unrealized implications of its own positions. We can see at once that a satisfying religion must be a religion which men cannot outgrow. It must move in advance of their growing in¬ sights. It must be able perpetually to fill them with creative expectancy. And this is precisely what Christianity does. It is a re¬ ligion of infinite promise as well as a religion of notable achievement. The synthetic religion has the future on its side. The principles we have been discussing also offer a criterion for the judging of the past. Whenever Christian¬ ity has been most deeply conscious of its own nature it has pressed forward toward that great service of offering a higher unity in which the good of opposing principles found reconciliation. Whenever particular Chris¬ tian men were so conscious of the importance of one approach that they forgot the meaning 202 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY of its complementary interpretation they were only able to render fragmentary service. As the synthetic religion Christianity enables ns to view the past and the present and the future in a great unity where divergent meanings find harmony and opposing principles meet in organic reconciliation. In our discussion of the Divine and its rela¬ tion to the experience of man, we have con¬ tinually spoken of life in the terms of a quest for God on the part of man. There is no doubt that there is much truth in this conception of the nature of religion. There is an un¬ appeasable hunger in the heart of man after some sure and satisfying contact with the Divine. He lifts his voice in a far call which only a voice from the infinite can answer. In his deepest moments and in his greatest hours he is engaged in the great quest. He wants many things, and some of them he wants with tremendous intensity, but deepest of all and most of all he wants to find God. And the great religions of the world are full of the story of the quest. But as we look more deeply into the story of man’s experience in the realm of religion we begin to suspect that this is not all of the truth. Again and again we come upon a con¬ viction that an approach is being made from TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 203 the other side. Men digging their way out after a fall of earth closing a passage in a mine have heard the sound of the picks on the other side of the vast deposit working toward them. They were not working alone. They had invisible allies. And so once and again man has been conscious of an approach from the darkness and the mystery of that sphere beyond the reach of his mind. He has heard the sound of picks on the other side. He has known that a party of rescue was working its way toward him. You find this intuition at the most golden moments of all the great re¬ ligions of the world, but you find its suprem- est expression in the Christian religion and in that noble ethical monotheism from whose loins it sprang. The Hebrew prophets do not come speaking of thoughts which they have worked out concerning God. They come alive with the wonder of the truth which he has whispered into their ears. “Thus saith the Lord,” is their characteristic assertion. Re¬ ligion to them is not man in action seeking God. It is God in action for the sake of man. And all this comes to final and infinitely won¬ derful expression in the life reflected by the New Testament and to perfect flower in the person of Jesus Christ. The whole secret of the Gospels comes at last to this. They tell the 204 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY story of God’s great and glorious adventure for the saving of men. In Jesus God is break¬ ing away all the barriers. He is seeking man at infinite price of peril and pain. The su¬ preme story of adventure in all the world is the tale of the coming of Jesus Christ to meet men upon the level of their own experience of tragic struggle and painful battle. The New Testament is the supreme expression of the story of God’s quest after man. The deepest hours in the religious life of the Christian Church have been full of the wonder of this insight—the sense of the great Ally. The conviction of the great, seeking, friendly God ever ready to go to great lengths for the rescue of men is the fundamental insight of Chris¬ tian experience. In our own modern world this consciousness has been expressed with memorable felicity and abiding power in that great poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” by Francis Thompson. When we see the matter in all its relations we are certain enough that the religion which is to bring permanent in¬ spiration to men must embody something more than man’s quest for God, great and noble as this is. It must be the triumphant expression of God’s quest for man. And here again Christianity occupies a place of lonely splendor among the religions of the world. If TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 205 religion is indeed God’s quest for man, then Christianity is the only religion which can offer complete satisfaction to the human spirit. We have seen all these things, looking upon them over the sweep of large territories of human thought and experience. Now we must remind ourselves that a religion reaches its central power of kindling vitality as a master¬ ing experience in the life of an individual man. People in general cannot experience the presence of a God in general and so achieve the glory of a transforming faith. It is the particular man, living in a particular place, bending under the burden of particular dif¬ ficulty, fighting a battle with particular and fascinating evils, which come up against his life with a strange allurement and yet beset by mighty ideals which refuse to lower their flag—it is this man who must meet religion right in the midst of his passion and pain and hope and fear, and so meeting it must come to a personal experience of its creative power. It is precisely at this point that Christianity has expressed its potency with almost startling strength. Men of every nation and of every age since the coming of Christ have stood before the world the actual expression of a mighty and transforming ethical and spiritual force 206 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY at work among the children of men. If Chris¬ tianity has ever brought complete renewal to the life of one man anywhere, there is a new hope for all mankind, for what has been done once may be done again. As a matter of fact, none of us are so poor that we do not know lives shining with the matchless splendor of the glory of Christ. And this personal appro¬ priation of the religion which has gone through the ages, leaving a bright trail of moral and spiritual transformation behind it, is the central ethical act of a man’s life. From this act all sorts of mighty forces are released in the life of the individual, and from it all sorts of new potencies move out upon the world. But what begins as an individual experience does indeed have vast social relationships. Christianity creates men of a new quality of good will in the world. Then it becomes the experience of the community of good will, and so it becomes a vast social organism. Every Christian is able to be and do more because of that which other Christians are being and doing. The mighty social pressures are cap¬ tured and utilized by the Christian faith. And now upon the basis of individual char¬ acter and individual responsibility rises a vast edifice of social attainment, and the facing of TRIUMPHANT GODLINESS 207 the social requirements of the Christian faith, for Christianity is the making of a new society as well as a new man. Indeed, it is only as part of the new society that a man can ex¬ perience to the full the meaning of the Chris¬ tian religion. In all this Christianity becomes an infinitely more intimate thing than noble thought. It becomes the very inmost experience of the soul. It becomes the most creative energy released in the human spirit. And so godli¬ ness becomes the triumphant consciousness of the presence and transforming potency of the living God, the deep and abiding fellowship of the living Christ. And as it triumphantly possesses the sources of thought and feeling and action in the individual and in the group, it becomes more than an ideal, it reaches that place of power where it is indeed a new world entering into possession of the life of man. In discussing such a theme as this in a brief series of lectures one’s utmost hope is to se¬ cure the release of seminal thought. One does not dare to aspire to anything like complete¬ ness of analysis or fullness of treatment. Life itself, indeed, is required for the working out of such a view of the meaning of the Christian religion as that which has engaged our atten¬ tion. If we have seen a preliminary view of 208 SYNTHETIC CHRISTIANITY Christianity as the ultimate synthesis in ex¬ perience of truth and goodness and beauty and brotherhood and godliness, the purpose of our hours together has been attained. Is there lying in the corner of our mind one baffling and insistent question, a question which re¬ fuses to be put down? And is this the ques¬ tion? “After all, how may we be sure?” If there is such a question, this is the answer. Certainty is found not in a process of dialectic but in the laboratory of life. Let us venture forth in the activities of the experiment sta¬ tion, using the positions we have set forth as working hypotheses. And in life itself we shall find certainty. If we will to do, we shall know. We shall know the truth and the truth shall make us free. And there is no argument for freedom which equals the fact of being free. The experience of the synthesis of truth and goodness and beauty and brotherhood and godliness in the Christian religion is its own authentication, its own defense. If the final solution of these problems were in the intel¬ lectual realm, only intellectual giants could reach it. As the final test is in the field of experience, it can be made by all of us. That is the real meaning of life, and the men and women of honest heart and true purpose need have no fears as they make the test. Princeton leologica Seminary Libraries 1 1012 01197 2413 Date Due K 1 ’4fi