THE WORLD WITHIN 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 HEW VORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE 
 WORLD WITHIN 
 
 BY 
 
 RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., Litt.D. 
 
 Author of '"The Inner Life," etc. 
 
 H3eto gotfe 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1918 
 
 All rights reserved 
 

 Copyright, 1918 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 T& 
 
 "5j 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published, September, 1918 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Some of the sections included in the chapters 
 of this volume have already appeared as articles 
 either in the London Friend or in the Homiletic 
 Review. The editors of these two periodicals 
 have kindly given permission for the publication 
 of such articles in the present book. 
 
 385106 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 There is a fine passage in one of Keats's Let- 
 ters in which the poet says that our world is cre- 
 ated primarily as a place for making souls — in 
 his phrase it is " a vale of soul-making." 
 
 We are just now so absorbed with external tasks 
 and so occupied with the solution of problems in 
 our outside world that most of us hardly have time 
 to consider whether we have any souls or not. 
 We allow that question to await its turn for an 
 answer. But there are some questions — and this 
 is precisely one of them — which cannot be post- 
 poned while outer issues are being settled. In 
 fact all outer issues are intricately tied up with 
 just this inner one. It turns out to be forever 
 true that the inner aspect which we call morale is 
 the main factor even in contests which are sup- 
 posed to be only external. Those impalpable 
 things which we name faith and vision and spirit 
 and nerve are greater elements in the determina- 
 tion even of outside victories than are miraculous 
 long-distance guns. The conviction that our fun- 
 
vi INTRODUCTION 
 
 damental aims are righteous is an unspeakable 
 asset. Moreover, it appears as clearly evident 
 now as it was two thousand years ago in Syria that 
 it is of no use or profit to win the whole world if 
 the inner life and self-respect are lost in the proc- 
 ess; that houses and lands, territory and spheres 
 of influence, are a poor substitute for that intangi- 
 ble thing which we call the soul. 
 
 Some day, near or remote, this war will be over. 
 These unparalleled armies will demobilize and 
 these multitudes of young men who have been liv- 
 ing under most unwonted human conditions and 
 have been facing death every day in appalling 
 shapes will return to the pursuits which they have 
 intermitted for this vast business of Armageddon. 
 The new tasks of reorganization, rehabilitation 
 and reconstruction awaiting them and us will be 
 fully as unparalleled as the modes and magnitude 
 of the warfare have been. And beyond any ques- 
 tion the most important preparation for this im- 
 mense work of rebuilding the wrecked and shat- 
 tered world will be the clarification and fortifica- 
 tion of the soul. There will be, no doubt, enor- 
 mous economic issues to be settled. We shall be 
 confronted with a wholly novel group of political 
 problems. It will be a world charged with un- 
 usual dynamic social aspirations which must be 
 
INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 dealt with. But still deeper than all other issues 
 will be the issues of the soul. 
 
 We cannot build this new world of ours out of 
 material stuff alone. It will not be a matter 
 solely of iron and coal and foodstuffs. It will, as 
 always, be a matter of creative faith, of spiritual 
 vision — in a word, the ultimate issue will turn 
 upon the quality and character of the soul of those 
 of us who are to do the building. We must be 
 on our guard against low and miserable material 
 aims which would put the holiest hopes of our age 
 again in imminent peril. We must restore trust 
 and confidence in a living God who is not off be- 
 yond and above the storm and stress of life, but 
 in the very pulse and flow of it all, and whose 
 will for a good world is the deepest reality of our 
 universe. We shall certainly care less than we 
 once did for non-essentials in religion, for the ex- 
 ternal counters, for the time-worn survivals of 
 bitter controversies, but we shall, if we are wise, 
 care more than ever for the central realities by 
 which men live. St. Augustine was right when he 
 said: " My life shall now be a real life, being 
 wholly full of Thee." Variations in external 
 matters will become — are already becoming — 
 unimportant and negligible. The things which 
 form and fashion the soul and set it on " the path 
 
viif INTRODUCTION 
 
 to that which is Best " will be the abiding things 
 and the only ones of any permanent value for vital 
 religion. 
 
 We do not want a religion which meets the 
 needs of experts alone and moves in a region 
 beyond the reach of common men and women 
 who have no taste for the intricacies of theology. 
 If religion is, as I profoundly believe, the essen- 
 tial way to the full realization of life, we, who 
 claim to know about it, ought to interpret it so 
 that its meaning stands out plain and clear to those 
 who most need it to live by. I have always be- 
 lieved and maintained that the apparent lack of 
 popular interest in it is largely due to the awk- 
 ward and blundering way in which it has been 
 presented to the mind and heart of those who all 
 the time carry deep within themselves inner hun- 
 gers and thirsts which nothing but God can sat- 
 isfy. I do not want to write or print a line which 
 does not at least bear the mark and seal of real- 
 ity — and which will not make some genuine fact 
 of life more plain and sure. 
 
 The struggle for a conquering inner faith has 
 in these strenuous days been laid upon us all. 
 The easy, inherited, second-hand faith will not 
 do for any of us now. We cannot stand the stern 
 issues of life and death with any feeble, formal 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 creed. We demand something real enough and 
 deep enough to answer the human cry of our soul 
 to-day. We need to be assured that we do not 
 in the last resort fall back on the play of mole- 
 cules but that underneath us are everlasting Arms. 
 We want to know not only that there is law and 
 order but that a genuine Heart of Love touches 
 our heart and brings us calm and confidence. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson has somewhere told of 
 an experience that happened once to his grand- 
 father. He was on a vessel that was caught by a 
 terrific storm and was carried irresistibly toward 
 a rocky shore where complete destruction was im- 
 minent. When the storm and danger were at 
 the height he crept up on deck to look around and 
 face the worst. He saw the pilot lashed to the 
 wheel, with all his might and nerve holding the 
 vessel off the rocks and steering it inch by inch 
 into safer water. While he stood watching, the 
 pilot looked up at him and smiled. It was little 
 enough but it completely reassured him. He went 
 back to his room below with new confidence, say- 
 ing to himself, "We shall come through; I saw 
 the pilot smile! " If we could only in some way 
 catch sight of a smile on the face of the great 
 Pilot in this strange rough sea in which we are 
 sailing, we, too, could do our work and carry our 
 
x INTRODUCTION 
 
 burdens with confidence, perhaps with joy. I wish 
 this little book might help some readers to be con- 
 vinced that even in the dark and the storm there is 
 a smile of hope and victory on the Pilot's face and 
 that He is saying as the great Galilean said : " Be 
 of good cheer, I am winning the victory over the 
 world." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction v 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 The Deeper Universe i 
 
 I Where Love Breaks Through .... i 
 
 II Unseen and Intangible Realities .... 6 
 
 III The World We Form Within .... 12 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The Way of Faith and Love . 
 I The Central Act of Religion . 
 II Faith as a Way of Life . 
 
 III A Religion Which Does Things 
 
 IV The Gospel of God With Us 
 
 18 
 
 18 
 22 
 
 27 
 32 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The Way of Dedication 37 
 
 I Inner Compulsion 37 
 
 II The All for the All 41 
 
 III Habakkukeans 45 
 
 IV Consecration to Service 5° 
 
 V Poured Out 58 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Things By Which We Live 64 
 
 I The Plumb-Line 64 
 
 II The Fact of Must 71 
 
 III Where Arguments Fail 75 
 
 IV The Meaning of Obligation 81 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER V page 
 
 The Great Venture 88 
 
 I Concerning Immortality 88 
 
 II The Miracle Again 94 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Soul's Converse 99 
 
 I Prayer as an Energy of Life 99 
 
 II Prayer and Reflection 115 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Christ's Inner Way to the Kingdom . . .124 
 
 I "From Above" 124 
 
 II Like Little Children 131 
 
 III The Inner Issue in Gethsemane . . . .136 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Jesus Christ and the Inner Life . . . .143 
 
 I In the Synoptic Gospels 143 
 
 II In the Writings of St. Paul 158 
 
 III In the Writings of St. John 164 
 

 THE WORLD WITHIN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 
 
 WHERE LOVE BREAKS THROUGH 
 
 We do well to make strenuous exertions to meet 
 the threatening food-famine and to cultivate ef- 
 ficiently all the acres that are available for increas- 
 ing the food-supply of the world. But there is 
 another kind of famine which is threatening and 
 ominous, and which has not yet received anything 
 like adequate attention. I mean the spiritual 
 famine of our stricken world. Multitudes of men 
 are daily facing danger and death. Vast numbers 
 are weighted with loss, suffering and agony. The 
 deeper problems of life rest heavily upon all of 
 us. The old religious phrases are inadequate. 
 Human hearts everywhere are longing for fresh 
 and vital assurance that in this time of the world's 
 greatest spiritual need the everlasting Arms of 
 divine love are underneath us, and that one like 
 
2 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 
 
 unto the Son of Man is walking with us in the 
 midst of the fire. Where shall we look for this 
 assurance? 
 
 We know much more about the universe than 
 the ancient world knew, but the more we know 
 about it the harder it becomes for our spirits to 
 accept the visible universe as the ultimate and final 
 reality. The cold and pitiless forces of nature are 
 not less cold and pitiless when we succeed in dis- 
 covering their laws and habits. One comes back 
 from his study of the march of suns, and planets, 
 and the spiral movements of world-making nebulae 
 with very little to comfort the longings of the 
 heart. He sees that these curves are all irrev- 
 ocable and inevitable and that each event unfolds 
 out of the one which preceded. It is a wonderful 
 and amazing system, but it offers no tenderness, 
 no love, no balm for the wounds of the spirit. It 
 rolls mercilessly on, and he may be thankful if its 
 wheels do not ride over him — the midget of an 
 hour, riding on one of the flying globes of this 
 mechanical system. 
 
 It is useless to expect tenderness and love and 
 balm in a system of mechanical forces. That kind 
 of world can reveal gravitation and electricity, 
 attraction and repulsion; it can show us matter 
 moving under law; it can exhibit the transforma- 
 
Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 3 
 
 tion of one form of energy into some other form; 
 but from the nature of the case it cannot manifest a 
 heart of tenderness or a spirit of love. Those 
 traits belong only to a person, and a mechanical 
 system can never reveal a person. Physics and 
 chemistry, geology and astronomy do discover a 
 revelation of God, but it is necessarily a revelation 
 limited to the possibilities of their field. The test- 
 tube and the air-pump help to demonstrate the fact 
 that the universe is a realm of purpose, of order, 
 and of inexhaustible energy, but they must not be 
 expected to show us a divine face or a heart of 
 love. God puts no more of himself into chemistry 
 or physics or astronomy than chemistry or physics 
 or astronomy will hold ! 
 
 Even this external universe with its law and 
 order, its forces and energies, can not be as cold 
 and pitiless as it appears when it is mistakenly 
 sundered and cut away from the deeper and more 
 spiritual reality working endlessly through it and 
 forever preparing for a higher stage to succeed 
 and transcend a lower stage. Physical nature is 
 always more than the bare mechanical fragment 
 with which the descriptive sciences deal. " That 
 is not first which is spiritual, but that which is 
 natural; and afterward that which is spiritual." 
 Our life can not be completely sundered from the 
 
4 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 
 
 physical universe. We are in some way organic 
 with it and of it, and the God we seek can show 
 at least some aspects of himself through it. He 
 uses it steadily toward spiritual ends, though under 
 obvious limits. It is a realm of mighty moral 
 discipline and, fragment though it is by itself, 
 it points all serious souls to the larger whole, 
 the completer reality which supplements and ful- 
 fills it. 
 
 If the universe is deeper than physics and 
 astronomy can reveal, if there is some greater 
 reality than can be expressed in terms of energy 
 and law, how could this deeper reality reveal 
 itself? Where could the veil be lifted? Such a 
 revelation could be made to humanity only 
 through a person. Mountain peaks and stars can 
 not embody love and sympathy — they can em- 
 body only energy. Love and sympathy, tender- 
 ness and patience, forgiveness and grace are traits 
 of character, attitudes of a personal spirit. If 
 they are ever to be revealed, they must be revealed 
 in the life of a person. 
 
 Now, once there was a Person who felt that 
 his life was a genuine exhibition of the divine in 
 the human, the eternal in the midst of time. He 
 lived and died in the consciousness that through 
 his life he was showing God to men; that his love 
 
Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 5 
 
 was a revelation of the real nature and character 
 of God; that his sympathy for the weary, heavy- 
 laden, sin-distressed, heart-hungry people of the 
 earth was a true unveiling of the heart of the uni- 
 verse; that his suffering over sin, his grace and 
 patience made the Father's character visible and 
 vocal in the world. He felt this, and consecrated 
 his life to this deeper revelation of God. Some 
 have doubted and some have been perplexed, but 
 there have always been some — and it is a grow- 
 ing number — who profoundly believe that here 
 in him is the personal character of God revealed to 
 us. However leaden and pitiless the march of the 
 universe may be at other points, at this one point, 
 at least, love and tenderness break through and 
 enwrap us. This God who is unveiled in Christ is 
 the God our world needs to-day. Not a God of 
 abstract metaphysics, not a God apart in solitary 
 bliss and perfection, but the God and Father of 
 Jesus Christ, revealing himself to us in the closest 
 intimacy of fellowship with us, and suffering like 
 ourselves in the travail and tragedy of the world's 
 suffering — " A God who lives in the perpetual giv- 
 ing of himself." The Jesus whom Peter con- 
 fessed and Mary loved can become the Christ of 
 the world, and through him can come afresh to us 
 the God whom our chemistry and astronomy were 
 
6 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 
 
 too limited to reveal — we can see him in the face 
 of Jesus Christ. 
 
 II 
 
 UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE REALITIES 
 
 " That which is not brings to naught that which is." 
 
 St. Paul's saying is not quite a paradox. It is 
 rather a vivid and forceful way of saying what 
 he often says, namely, that unseen and intangible 
 realities build and shape the things we see. In- 
 discernibles are mighty factors. An invisible 
 world is behind and within the visible one. We 
 recognize this truth now in a multitude of ways. 
 In the fine peroration of his great message on 
 " The Leadership of Educated Men " — given at 
 Brown University in 1882 — George William 
 Curtis very impressively referred to the invisible 
 force of gravitation which holds the world to- 
 gether and controls all its movements. He said: 
 
 " In the cloudless midsummer sky serenely shines the 
 moon, while the tumultuous ocean rolls and murmurs 
 beneath, the type of illimitable and unbridled power; but 
 resistlessly marshaled by celestial laws all the wild waters, 
 heaving from pole to pole, rise and recede obedient to 
 that mild queen of heaven." 
 
 We have slowly come to realize, as science has 
 piled up its inferences and conclusions, that our 
 
Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 7 
 
 visible world is only a fragment of a larger uni- 
 verse and swims in a vast invisible world which 
 has no known or conceivable bounds. Out of this 
 inexhaustible sea of energy come the forces which 
 build our visible world — forces which we name 
 and use but do not understand. Gravitation, co- 
 hesion, attraction, magnetism, electricity, molecu- 
 lar energy, ether-waves are a few of the words 
 which stand for mighty forces. We say the 
 words and look wise, as though our finger were 
 on a secret. We know, however, no more about 
 the real nature of these forces which build our 
 world than Aladdin knew about the jinnee that 
 reared his palace when he rubbed his lamp. We 
 know little more than that the visible comes out of 
 the invisible, and that we can learn how these in- 
 visible forces work and how to direct them for our 
 practical ends. 
 
 Everywhere and always the invisible is the 
 builder of the visible. Michelangelo saw the 
 dome of St. Peter's in the viewless realm of his 
 own soul before he raised it into visible beauty 
 above the groined arches of the cathedral. Every 
 creation of art is an instance of the same truth. 
 The form of beauty which comes forth into visible 
 shape for the many to see and admire has first 
 been an inner possession, growing into perfection 
 
8 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 
 
 in the spaceless soul of the creator, where only 
 one could see it. 
 
 Plotinus used to hold that it is much truer to say- 
 that the body is in the soul than that the soul is in 
 the body. And strange as it may sound, there is 
 much to be said for this view of the ancient Greek 
 philosopher. There are many good evidences to 
 prove that some invisible reality — which we may 
 just as well call soul as anything else, at least until 
 we get a word that means more — that some in- 
 visible reality builds and vivifies and directs this 
 visible, corporeal bulk of ours. There is, for ex- 
 ample, a tiny speech-center in the left hemisphere 
 of the human brain, so complicated that all the 
 telegraphic instruments in the United States, com- 
 bined and worked from one central key, would 
 make a very simple instrument compared with it. 
 When a baby arrives here on his hazardous ven- 
 ture his speech-center is not yet organized. Even 
 if he knew all the wonders of the world he has left 
 behind he could tell nothing about it ■ — any more 
 than Beethoven could have rendered a symphony 
 without musical instruments. It looks as though 
 the expanding mind of the child slowly organized 
 and builded this marvelous center, which was only 
 fleshy pulp before the organization was wrought 
 
Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 9 
 
 out in it. There is, at any rate, no way to account 
 in terms of matter for the transcendent meanings 
 which burst into consciousness at the sound of 
 words, nor for the way in which conscious effort 
 and attentive purpose build the little bridges be- 
 tween the cells of the brain and make of it an 
 instrument for the spirit. 
 
 We are, once more, all familiar with the way 
 an invisible ideal holds and controls and dominates 
 and constructs a life. It is one of the most 
 notable features of our strange human experience. 
 That which is not yet — for an ideal plainly is 
 what ought to be but is not — works like a mighty 
 energy. It upholds the spirit in hours of defeat. 
 It makes one oblivious to pain. It conquers all 
 opposition. It carries the will, contrary to all 
 laws of mechanics, along the line of greatest resist- 
 ance. It turns obstacles and hindrances into 
 chariots of victory. It does the impossible. In 
 Paul's great. words, "the things which are not 
 bring to naught the things which are ! " What 
 cannon of unwonted caliber, pounding at the 
 battle-lines of men, can not do, the impalpable 
 ideas and ideals of the common people may after 
 all accomplish. Dreams and visions and hopes 
 are not so empty and useless as they often seem. 
 
io THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 
 
 Suddenly they find a potent voice, they grow 
 mighty, they gather volume, and they do what 
 cannon could not do. 
 
 " One man with a dream, at pleasure 
 Shall go forth and conquer a crown ; 
 
 And three with a new song's measure 
 Can trample a kingdom down. 
 
 " We, in the ages lying 
 
 In the buried past of the earth, 
 Built Nineveh with our sighing 
 
 And Babel itself with our mirth; 
 
 " And o'erthrew them with prophesying 
 To the old of the new world's worth; 
 
 For each age is a dream that is dying 
 Or one that is coming to birth." x 
 
 The religious books of ancient Persia say that 
 when the soul of a good man arrives at the river 
 of death a beautiful, shining, radiant figure meets 
 it and says to it: "I am your true self, your best 
 self, your real self. I am the image of your 
 ideals, your strivings, your resolves, your deter- 
 mined purposes. I am you. Henceforth we 
 merge together into one harmonious life." The 
 parable is a genuine one. We are forever what 
 our ideals make us. 
 
 1 The Dreamers by Arthur William O'Shaughnessy. 
 
Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE n 
 
 But deeper and surer than all other invisible 
 realities is that divine Spirit, not seen, but felt, 
 who is the ground of our real being, the source of 
 our longings, the inspirer of our larger hopes, the 
 inner energy by which we live. Some persons 
 think he must be dead or asleep or on a journey. 
 They see such stalking evils, such collapses of 
 civilization, such ugly shadows over the fair 
 world, that they cannot hold their thin clew of 
 faith any longer. It has snapped and left them 
 standing alone in their dark cave. But he is 
 there all the same, though they see him not nor 
 know him. He does not vanish in the dark or 
 in the storm. There is much love working still in 
 these hard, dark days. Grace abounds, often un- 
 suspected, even though sin seems so potent. 
 Courage and heroism never broke through and 
 showed their greatness more clearly than now. 
 Sacrifice, which is woven in the same warp with 
 love, is moving like a radiant light everywhere 
 through the storm. Faith in something still holds 
 men and women to their hard tasks of endurance. 
 All that Christ was and is still attracts the soul 
 that sees it. If an eclipse dims or veils the sight 
 of him for the moment, we may be sure that this 
 warm, healing Sun of our life has not set. He 
 is still there, and some of us continue to feel our 
 
12 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 
 
 hearts burn with his presence, which is as indu- 
 bitable a reality as is the rock-ribbed earth upon 
 which we tread. What he needs is better organs 
 to reveal himself through, richer, truer, holier 
 lives to show his love through, more finely organ- 
 ized personalities for his grace to break through 
 into the world. He cannot do his work without 
 us. He cannot preach without our lips, comfort 
 without our help, heal without our hands, carry 
 the truth without our feet, remove the shadow 
 without our faith and effort. The invisible works 
 through the visible, the unseen and eternal oper- 
 ates through little instruments like us! 
 
 Ill 
 
 THE WORLD WE FORM WITHIN 
 
 We have had many illustrations in these sol- 
 emn months of the momentous character of re- 
 sponsible decisions. Many lives hang upon one 
 man's judgment concerning a course of action, 
 and even the fate of a nation is involved in the 
 conclusion to which a single individual arrives. 
 If the responsible man blunders, dire consequences 
 follow; if he is wise, large advantages accrue. 
 National disasters are generally no accidents. 
 
Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 13 
 
 They attach to inadequate planning or to ineffi- 
 cient management of affairs. 
 
 What is true of the large outer world is true 
 also — inevitably true — in the smaller inner 
 world which the schoolmen used to call the micro- 
 cosm, that is, in the soul of man. Here also a 
 person blunders at his peril. Here, too, conse- 
 quences attach to decisions and deeds, and the 
 quality of the reaping is determined by the char- 
 acter of the sowing. This is a profound and 
 fundamental feature of Christ's teaching. Al- 
 ways and everywhere in his message the beyond is 
 within, destiny is bound up with inner attitudes, 
 with heart and mind and will. The secret of 
 heaven and hell has not yet been fully explored. 
 We have added little, in these later years of exces- 
 sive question-asking, to our scanty knowledge of 
 the regions beyond the margin of this life. " We 
 should listen," as a wise man has told us, " on our 
 knees to any one who by stricter obedience had 
 brought his thoughts into parallelism with celes- 
 tial currents and could hint to human ears the 
 scenery and circumstances of the newly parted 
 soul." 
 
 But while our ignorance about the Great Be- 
 yond is still as vast as that of Europe was about 
 the western hemisphere before Columbus sailed 
 
i 4 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 
 
 in the Pinta, we have been making steady prog- 
 ress in our explorations of this inner world of 
 ours — this microcosm. We know much about 
 that viewless realm we call the soul. And the 
 mor we know about it the more wonderful do 
 the words of Christ appear concerning this strange 
 world within. John was surely right when he 
 said, " He knew what was in man I " 
 
 One of the most fruitful of all our modern dis- 
 coveries is that which for the want of a better 
 term we call the " subconscious," the submerged 
 life below the threshold of consciousness. Some 
 wild things have been said and written about this 
 inside underworld, and the abnormal phenomena 
 of the subliminal have perhaps come too much to 
 the front, but the fact remains that the normal 
 processes of the world below the threshold are 
 as important for the microcosm as the battlefields 
 of Europe are for the great world. It is in here 
 that destiny is settled and the hereafter is built. 
 
 We all begin life with certain instinctive func- 
 tions which are admirably adapted to ends. 
 These instincts carry the tiny individual unerringly 
 forward. They build his future and make his 
 wider career possible. How he got them and 
 came by them he never asks. They are so much 
 a part of himself that he never thinks to investi- 
 
Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 15 
 
 gate the mystery. It turns out, however, that 
 they are the inherited deposit of racial experience 
 and habit, the contribution of practical wisdom 
 which the immemorial past makes to the present. 
 The slow gains of the ages are woven into the 
 fiber of the newcomer and he pushes safely out 
 for his venturous voyage on the accumulated in- 
 heritance which was piled up before he arrived. 
 
 Not less momentous and important are the ac- 
 cumulations of his own growing emotions and 
 thoughts and decisions. He is forever weaving, 
 for better or for worse, the indestructible stuff 
 of his inner subconscious life, which, at a later 
 time, without any thought about it on his part, 
 will steer and direct him as certainly as his in- 
 herited instincts did in the baby stage. Every 
 effort of will, every struggle of attention, every 
 battle with temptation leaves its slender trace in 
 the structure of the subconscious world which he 
 is building, and it will be heard from again in 
 some day of crisis or in some emergency of action. 
 Nothing is lost, nothing is uncounted, nothing is 
 negligible. The tiny becomes big with impor- 
 tance and the indiscernibly little grows into the 
 immense. Every feat of skill is the product of 
 patient practice, every case of unerring judgment 
 has behind it a multitude of careful decisions, 
 
16 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I 
 
 every revelation of grace in manner or disposi- 
 tion is the slow fruit of pains and effort. The 
 saint is no accidental mutation. Moral dexterity 
 of soul and beauty of character are the result of 
 human effort and of cooperation with God, as 
 surely as physical health is the result of corre- 
 spondence with the conditions of life. 
 
 An ancient psalmist prayed for truth in his in- 
 ward parts. It is a beautiful aspiration. But the 
 way to get truth in the inward parts is to practice 
 truth-telling as an unvarying habit. If one tells 
 the truth and thinks the truth yesterday, to-day, 
 and to-morrow, hates falsehood, abhors lying, and 
 sincerely conforms to reality — he need not worry 
 about the outcome. Truth is thus woven into 
 the structure of the soul. The subconscious life is 
 builded toward truth-telling and truth-living, and 
 the inward self inclines to truth as streams flow 
 to the sea. It is no accident that at last when 
 Christ's servants see his face his name shall be 
 on their foreheads. There is no caprice about 
 that; for, after all, the heavenly life is the life 
 formed by the transformation of our poor, feeble, 
 limited, imperfect, sin-defiled selves into some- 
 thing approaching a likeness of that holy, perfect 
 life of his. How it comes we cannot altogether 
 tell. There are mystery and miracle in it. But 
 
Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE 17 
 
 it does not " come " without our cooperation. It 
 is not thrust upon us without our choice and de- 
 cision. Here again the weaving of the character 
 and the writing of the name on the forehead are 
 the result of saying " Yes " to God and of patient 
 conformity to eternal laws of life. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE WAY OF FAITH AND LOVE 
 
 I 
 THE CENTRAL ACT OF RELIGION 
 
 Religion is too rich and complex to be reduced 
 to any one act or attitude or aspect of life. In 
 so far as our religion is real and genuine, it will 
 touch, heighten, and transform every feature of 
 our lives, and, if that is so, we must not expect 
 that we can pick out one feature and say here or 
 nowhere the consummate blossom of religion is to 
 be seen. But there is one act of life which does 
 bring us in a special and peculiar way into the 
 holy of holies of religion — a central act without 
 which any person's religion will always remain 
 dwarfed and unfulfilled. This central act is wor- 
 ship. By worship I mean the act of rising to a 
 personal, experimental consciousness of the real 
 presence of God which floods the soul with joy 
 and bathes the whole inward spirit with refresh- 
 ing streams of life. Never to have felt that, 
 
 18 
 
Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 19 
 
 never to have opened the life to these incoming 
 divine tides, never to have experienced the joy of 
 personal fellowship with God, is surely to have 
 missed the richest privilege and the highest beati- 
 tude of religion. Almost all of our modern 
 forms of Christianity make too little of this cen- 
 tral act, and, with some truth, it has been called 
 " the lost art of worship." The main reason for 
 the decline of worship is the excessive desire, so 
 common to-day, to have something always happen- 
 ing or, as we often say, to have something " do- 
 ing." Hush, waiting, meditation, concentration 
 of spirit, are just the reverse of our busy, driving, 
 modern temper. The person who meditates, we 
 are apt to think, will lose an opportunity to do 
 something; while he muses, the procession will go 
 on and leave him behind. We hear all the time 
 of the vast human tasks that are to be done; we 
 are crowded with practical problems, and some 
 of us are ready to identify religion with service; 
 we would like to turn the church into a soup- 
 house, or at least into an institution for minister- 
 ing to the wants of the neighborhood. 
 
 Another tendency into which we easily fall is 
 that of making religion consist of words, words, 
 words. Talking about God, expounding the ex- 
 periences of them of old time, saying apt and 
 
ao THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 
 
 lovely things about religion, occupy us much when 
 we come together, and quite rightly so. But to 
 what purpose do we " talk about God " if none 
 of us can pause in our inward rush and find him, 
 actually meet with him and enter into the joy 
 of the Lord? What have we gained by recount- 
 ing the " experiences " of past ages if nobody now 
 is to have similar experiences? It is melancholy 
 to hear of Bethels in the dim, far past if we are 
 to conclude that that ladder between the soul and 
 God has been pulled up, or pulled down, and that 
 direct divine intercourse has ceased. The apt and 
 lovely words about religion have place and mean- 
 ing only if they create in us the passion and the 
 positive intention to go ourselves on the spiritual 
 pilgrimage, the goal of which is this holy of holies, 
 where words about God fall away, since we have 
 entered into the joy of his real presence. 
 
 In the right place and in the proper degree we 
 may well consider what are the great truths of 
 our religion, what are the structural ideas of our 
 faith, and it is essential that we should work out, 
 and work out intelligently, the ways and means, 
 the plans and methods, of social service — the 
 practical application of our spiritual insight to the 
 society of our time — but in all these matters do 
 not let us make the fatal mistake of supposing that 
 
Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 21 
 
 religion is primarily either words or service. Re- 
 ligion is primarily, and at heart, the personal 
 meeting of the soul with God. If that experience 
 ceases in the world, religion, in its first intention, 
 is doomed. We may still have ideas about the 
 God whom men once knew intimately, and we may 
 still continue to work for human betterment, but 
 there can be living religion only so long as the 
 soul of man is capable of experiencing the fresh 
 bubbling of the living water within and can know 
 for himself that a heart of eternal love beats in 
 the central deeps of the universe within his reach. 
 
 To give up the cultivation of worship, then, 
 means in the long run the loss of the central thing 
 in religion; it involves the surrender of the price- 
 less jewel of the soul. In its stead we may per- 
 fect many other things ; we may make our form of 
 divine service, as we call it, very artistic and very 
 popular; we may speak with the tongues of men 
 and sing with the tongues almost of angels, but if 
 we lose the power to discover and appreciate the 
 real presence of God and if we miss the supreme 
 joy of feeling ourselves environed by the Spirit 
 of the living and present God, we have made a bad 
 exchange and have dropped from a higher to a 
 lower type of religion. 
 
 There is no doubt that, as with all the su- 
 
22 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 
 
 premely great things, the act of worship calls for 
 intense devotion, for unusual concentration, for 
 long-continued spiritual preparation. If it is, as 
 I believe, the very goal and pinnacle of religion — 
 the flowering of the tree of life — then we must 
 not expect that it will cost nothing or that it will 
 be reached along lines of least resistance. Reli- 
 gion has always demanded, for its best things, the 
 absolute price. There is no finding without los- 
 ing; there is no getting without giving; there is 
 no living without dying. For a few dollars we 
 can get a book on religion; for a few more dollars 
 we can get some one to talk to us about the things 
 of religion; but what we cannot get for dollars, 
 however high we heap them, is this experience 
 which is the heart of religion, this experience of 
 God, this practice of the divine presence, this joy 
 of being ourselves in the holy of holies. 
 
 II 
 
 FAITH AS A WAY OF LIFE 
 
 Some persons think of faith as a mark of weak- 
 ness. To their minds it is a form, or relic, of 
 superstition — a diet of "milk" to be discarded 
 for the " strong meat " of knowledge as soon as 
 one is full-grown. There are many grown-up 
 
Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 23 
 
 boys and girls who pride themselves on having 
 outgrown the need of this old-fashioned article. 
 " When I was a child," they grandly say, " I 
 thought as a child, but when I reached the age of 
 manhood I put away childish things. I mean to 
 accept nothing now which I cannot know." 
 
 That general program, however, turns out to be 
 very absurd. It will not work for a minute. In- 
 stead of bringing emancipation, it makes life a 
 poor rope of sand, with no power whatever to it. 
 A little thought and insight would show this per- 
 son, who is so eager to graduate from his child- 
 hood stage, that all his knowledge and all his 
 activities are penetrated through and through 
 with faith. He cannot move a step without it; he 
 cannot even start to think without it. He must 
 trust the evidence of his senses. He must have 
 faith that there is a world which corresponds to 
 his impressions of sight and touch, of taste and 
 smell. He must assume and believe that what is 
 outside and beyond his mind fits what is inside. 
 Who can ever " prove " to him that the world 
 actually is precisely the way it looks? Nobody. 
 That is a mighty venture of faith which we all 
 must make. We must live in the belief that the 
 world outside the mind and inside the mind make 
 together one whole and coherent world. 
 
24 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 
 
 Science, too, involves faith at every point of its 
 structure. All the tools, the instruments, the ma- 
 chinery of science must be taken as a venture of 
 faith. The greatest tool it uses is the principle of 
 cause — everything in the universe must have a 
 cause and must be explained by its cause. But 
 that universal principle of science never has been 
 " proved," and, from the nature of the case, never 
 can be " proved." It is assumed as a working 
 principle and used on a venture of faith. There 
 is no doubt that it works very well, but it is never- 
 theless faith applied to science. The " laws " of 
 the universe which science spells out are never seen 
 with the eye or touched with the hand. They are 
 not material " things." They are as invisible and 
 intangible as God himself is. They are in the 
 sphere of faith rather than in the sphere of knowl- 
 edge. We have no way of " knowing " that the 
 laws of nature will always remain uniform, will 
 always work as they do now, will always be re- 
 liable and trustworthy. No amount of experi- 
 ence could ever " prove " that. We make the 
 great venture of faith that it is so and act upon it 
 and it works well, and on the basis of it we predict 
 future events. 
 
 Faith is still more evident as a working energy 
 in the practical matters of life. Society could not 
 
Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 25 
 
 exist an hour on a bare " knowledge " basis. All 
 banks would suspend, all laws would become in- 
 valid, the world would be turned into a vast insane 
 asylum, each individual living in solitary isolation 
 in the whirl of his own ideas. Marriage and 
 home-building are beautiful instances of faith. 
 No one ever " knows," or can " know," that in 
 the stress of years, in the give and take of life, in 
 the lights and shadows of this world of mutabil- 
 ity, the friend of his youthful fancy will grow 
 dearer and truer, more inwardly beautiful and in- 
 dispensable to him, and that their two individual 
 lives and wills will merge into an indivisible union. 
 Marriage is of necessity a venture of faith, as is 
 friendship of every sort. That does not mean 
 that it is a mere hazard, a blind guess. It too 
 often is so, no doubt, but that is because the per- 
 sons marrying make a hazard and are not guided 
 by real faith. 
 
 Real faith — faith which carries in itself a con- 
 structive energy — always builds on solid founda- 
 tions and can test its building as it builds. Mar- 
 riage is always a hazard, a chance — to use the 
 current society word, it is "a gamble" — unless 
 the two persons who are to marry have already a 
 sufficient experience of love and friendship with 
 each other to warrant the faith that their intended 
 
26 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 
 
 future will increase in worth and joy. If mar- 
 riages are made for money or for beauty or social 
 standing, there is, of course, very little ground for 
 faith in a happy future union which will grow truer 
 and deeper as the years go. But if the two lives 
 have already found each other and are united in 
 common interests, in genuine friendship, in happy 
 personal fellowship; if their love has its roots in 
 moral character and not in surface traits, the step 
 is still a venture of faith, but it is a faith guaran- 
 teed and tested by experience. Faith in this case 
 is merely building out upon the solid pillars of ex- 
 perience. It is the power to see and to appreciate 
 and to trust what still remains hidden from us in 
 the life we have already proved. It is a well- 
 grounded belief that the future will bring out 
 and fulfill what the life we have come to know 
 promises and prophesies. We trust the un- 
 seen to complete the seen, and we make our 
 venture. 
 
 Religious faith in its highest and best sense is 
 of this type. It is not blind groping, haphazard 
 believing. It is building out upon the solid pil- 
 lars of the soul's experience. It is the soul's 
 power to see what fits and fulfills and completes 
 what is already here. Our very finite nature calls 
 for a world of infinite reality to fulfill it. Our 
 
Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 27 
 
 hunger and thirst of soul reveal something in us 
 which no earthly supplies can satisfy. Our sins 
 and failures and frailties call for the help and 
 healing of a divine Savior. We are made so that 
 we cannot live without streams of spiritual energy, 
 without the incoming of saving grace and trans- 
 forming power. We cannot be victorious and 
 triumphant without a heavenly Friend, a divine 
 Companion. And in our need, in our stress, he 
 offers himself to us. He comes with his help 
 and healing. He seems completely to fit our need. 
 But only a venture of faith can settle the matter 
 for us. He has saved others. He has enabled 
 others to more than conquer. It is a safe ven- 
 ture, and it stands and vindicates every test. 
 
 Ill 
 
 A RELIGION WHICH DOES THINGS 
 
 In his recent book, A Challenge to the Church, 
 William Temple says : 
 
 " The religious experience, which is indeed the soul 
 of personal religion, does not consist in passing states, 
 but is what the name should imply — an experience whole 
 and entire which is religious through and through, so 
 that our experience of business, of politics, of art, and 
 of all human relationships becomes a religious experience." 
 
28 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 
 
 He goes on further to say that the exalted mo- 
 ments of high-tide experience, when the soul feels 
 flooded with unusual incomes of divine life, 
 " should be merely moments perpetually renewing 
 the light in which we see the world and the vital 
 strength by which we live among men." 
 
 This is a modern way of saying what was so 
 wonderfully said in a letter written on the shores 
 of the iEgean Sea by a man who was " fighting 
 beasts " in an ancient city, " dying daily " with 
 crucifying struggles, and perpetually confronted 
 with entrenched evils and iniquitous customs. On 
 top of his load of perplexities in Ephesus had just 
 been piled the news of the growing disintegration 
 of his church across the sea in Corinth. A tale of 
 woe was pouring in — now from " the house of 
 Chloe," now again from a delegation of the 
 church sent over to*- ask help, and finally through 
 an epistle which some of his friends wrote to him. 
 It becomes only too clear that much " wood, hay, 
 and stubble " had been built in with the purer 
 saintly material there. Divisions and conten- 
 tions were playing havoc. Crass immoralities, 
 well known in that environment, were assailing 
 the members. Unanswerable metaphysical ques- 
 tions were confusing their minds, and practical 
 
Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 29 
 
 problems of organization and procedure were 
 urgently pressing for solution. 
 
 Somewhere in a little room of a private house 
 — perhaps of a certain Mary then living in Ephe- 
 sus, " who bestowed much labor upon us " — the 
 marvelous message was written to those " called 
 to be saints " in Corinth. The thing I preached 
 among you in those months of fellowship, he tells 
 them, was not a novel philosophy subject to end- 
 less debate. I made you acquainted with a new 
 power of life, an energy of salvation that demon- 
 strates itself through the whole life of the whole 
 man, until the entire personality, body and all, 
 becomes a temple, a place where the Spirit of God 
 is manifested. This religion of life and demon- 
 stration, expressed everywhere in this iEgean let- 
 ter, comes to its full splendor of expression in the 
 thirteenth chapter, where the beauty of the style 
 suddenly reveals the greatness of the soul of the 
 man, as great style always does. Religion, as it 
 comes to light in this extraordinary passage, is 
 not some rare exalted state, some startling ecstasy, 
 some spectacular wonder granted to a favorite 
 saint. Many persons coveted this high state and 
 strained after it. They looked upon the striking 
 " gift of tongues," the power to speak some celes- 
 
30 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 
 
 tial language such as angels speak, as the very pin- 
 nacle of religion. It is not so, these great words 
 tell them. One may attain that goal, achieve that 
 state, and still be only like " a noisy gong " that 
 attracts attention. Nor again is religion to be 
 found in a signal acquisition of knowledge. One 
 may understand the mysteries and unravel the se- 
 crets of nature and yet fail to arrive anywhere. 
 He may be able to extend his powers of vision by 
 aid of microscope and telescope; he may invent 
 engines which add unsuspected powers of speed 
 to his legs; he may construct mechanisms that 
 carry his voice with amazing quickness across 
 wide spaces; he may fly faster and farther than 
 any bird. And yet all this may bring no incre- 
 ment to his soul. With all his added range of 
 knowledge, he himself, in all that really concerns 
 life, may be a zero — " nothing.'' 
 
 Religion is not found then, is not revealed, in 
 an isolated and separable aspect of life. It is a 
 way of living which affects the whole of life, inner 
 and outer, in all its attitudes and relationships. 
 If one word is to be found which gathers up and 
 expresses this complete spiritualization of life, the 
 best word for it is St. Paul's untranslatable agape, 
 which means a living power flowing through all 
 the activities of daily life, touching every aspect, 
 
Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 31 
 
 transforming every relationship, and bringing a 
 vital strength into every cooperative effort. We 
 translate it as " love," but we must not think of 
 it as " a soft and cooing " thing, an emotional 
 state, or sentimental gush. It is primarily power. 
 It is energy expressing itself in action. 
 
 In fact, the only way to grasp its meaning ade- 
 quately is to turn to the supreme exhibition of it 
 and that is in Christ crucified, where the power of 
 God making men saved comes to full revelation. 
 One typical race looked for God in rare and spec- 
 tacular events, in signs and wonders. Another 
 group expected to find him through speculation 
 and dialectic, and thrilled over the construction of 
 vast intellectual systems. But no external " sign " 
 can reveal God's character. No system of knowl- 
 edge can bring to light the inner nature of the 
 Eternal Heart. Only experience will suffice for 
 that, and an experience of it is possible only if 
 God himself breaks through somewhere in the 
 universe and reveals the heart we seek in a life 
 we can appreciate and interpret. Christ is the 
 place in the universe where God himself breaks 
 through and shows the power of love in full oper- 
 ation. Not as storm and thunder, not as fire and 
 earthquake, but as love, that suffers long and is 
 kind and will not let go, does God come to seek 
 
32 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 
 
 us and find us and save us. We could go on in 
 our sin and stand anything but that. When that 
 love is clearly seen and felt and known, it con- 
 quers, and it more than conquers. It becomes the 
 most dynamic moral force in the universe. It 
 saves, it renews, it transforms, it vitalizes, it spir- 
 itualizes. It works the one real miracle which 
 proves that God has come. It makes out of men 
 like us persons who can exhibit and transmit the 
 same love which saved us. We discover how to 
 become living epistles of the thirteenth of First 
 Corinthians ! 
 
 IV 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF GOD WITH US 
 
 In one of the most wonderful passages ever 
 written by anybody (2 Cor. III. 5), St. Paul con- 
 trasts the two types of religion, one of which he 
 calls " the ministry of condemnation," and the 
 other " the ministry of righteousness "; one " the 
 ministry of the letter," the other " the ministry of 
 the spirit"; one "the ministry of the old cove- 
 nant," which is passing away, the other " the min- 
 istry of the new covenant," which remains. The 
 primary difference between the two types of reli- 
 gion lies for him in the fact that the " old," as 
 
Ch. II] FAITH AxND LOVE 33 
 
 he calls it, is external. It is a legal system writ- 
 ten in graven letters — imposed from without by 
 a lawgiver and to be followed in detail under the 
 expectation of death as the penalty of disobedi- 
 ence. The mark and badge of it, he says, is al- 
 ways slavery, and, in spite of the fact that the 
 system is " obeyed," the heart behind the veil re- 
 mains all the time unchanged and untransformed. 
 The " new," on the other hand, is fundamen- 
 tally inward and of the spirit. Instead of a law- 
 giver who fulminates commands, with terror of 
 condemnation, the God of all mercy and tender- 
 ness " shines into our hearts to give the light of 
 his glorious knowledge in the face of Jesus 
 Christ." And his revelation of light and grace 
 and glory and righteousness does not remain out- 
 side us as something foreign and external, but it 
 becomes a formative life and power in us and 
 makes us a living letter, or epistle, of Jesus Christ, 
 with the new ministry of glory written in the 
 inmost substance of our being, so that the Chris- 
 tian himself, and not a written document, is the 
 exhibition of the message or covenant — the be- 
 liever himself is the document. But, unlike the 
 " old " written code, the new document undergoes 
 change and is capable of progress, for as the be- 
 liever — the living epistle — lives unveiled in the 
 
34 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 
 
 presence of the luminous Christ, he is changed into 
 an ever-growing likeness by the working of the 
 Spirit within him. He goes from glory to glory 
 in an ever-heightening transformation of spirit, 
 until men see in him the marks of the Lord Jesus. 
 But there is no slavery here, for where the spirit 
 of the Lord is there are liberty and inward free- 
 dom, and obedience becomes a thing of joy. 
 
 Once you enter upon this ministry of the new 
 covenant — the ministry which liberates and 
 which changes the minister himself into an epistle 
 of Jesus Christ — you no longer " faint" in the 
 presence of difficulties and misunderstandings: 
 " having obtained this ministry we faint not." It 
 is possible now to be " pressed on every side, yet 
 not straitened; to be perplexed, but not unto de- 
 spair; to be smitten down, yet not destroyed, al- 
 ways bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, 
 so that the life also of Jesus is manifested in our 
 bodies ! " That is the supreme boldness of St. 
 Paul's wonderful message, that the life of Jesus 
 can be so written in us that we can manifest it 
 11 in our mortal bodies " ; that the dying of the 
 Lord Jesus can be "borne about" in our lives 
 as we live among men. 
 
 Suddenly he rises to a new height, as though 
 at that point a fresh inspiration swept over him, 
 
Ch. II] FAITH AND LOVE 35 
 
 like a new sun risen on mid-noon. He now real- 
 izes, apparently for the first time, that this new 
 inward man, this hidden unseen self which the 
 Spirit forms in us in likeness to the image and 
 glory of Christ, will be a permanent and eternal 
 self, capable of surviving " the decaying of our 
 outward man." If that is so, then the " dissolv- 
 ing of our outward tent," the fleshly body, is a 
 matter of no special concern, for we shall not be 
 " naked," or " uncovered," when that is gone, 
 since by this inward spiritual process God has 
 been constructing in us an immortal, eternal, heav- 
 enly house or habitation, so that, even with the 
 body gone, we shall be " clothed " with our heav- 
 enly house. God made us for this very thing, 
 that mortality might be swallowed up of life, and 
 in so far as we are changed into the divine image 
 we have formed a permanent and ever-enduring 
 inward self, which is always " at home with the 
 Lord." 
 
 That is St. Paul's new ministry, which, he 
 rightly claims, " far exceeds in glory " the old 
 ministry of the letter. It is certainly bold and 
 daring, and it is still far beyond the slow faith 
 and vision of most of us, who easily hark back to 
 the literal, the tangible, and the external. We 
 are still too unbelieving for " the light of the gos- 
 
36 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. II 
 
 pel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of 
 God, to dawn in us." We talk of our new the- 
 ologies and our old theologies, but these party- 
 lines, these middle walls of partition, would all 
 fall away and vanish if we could rise to this gospel 
 of the new covenant — which is the transforma- 
 tion of a man like us into a living document which 
 manifests Christ, and into an immortal self which 
 in any world will be " at home with the Lord." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE WAY OF DEDICATION 
 
 I 
 
 THE INNER COMPULSION 
 
 No life amounts to anything until it becomes 
 absorbed in some aim which carries it out of and 
 beyond itself. The man who is occupied in con- 
 suming three meals a day, in dressing his body, 
 and in giving it its due quota of comfortable sleep 
 is superior to the oyster only in corporeal size; 
 they are both biological specimens, only one is 
 larger and more complicated than the other, and, 
 because of his larger power, one of them can eat 
 the other! Now, if this biological man is ever 
 to rise above the biological level and be something 
 more, he must discover a way of living which 
 delivers him from the mere play of natural forces 
 — the mere pursuit of materials for the animal 
 life — and this lays upon him an inner compul- 
 sion to devote himself to an ideal; that is, to an 
 unselfish and spiritual cause, a cause for the pro- 
 
 37 
 
38 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 motion and advancement of interests other than 
 his own. Nobody gets out of the biological or- 
 der of life until in some degree he has learned to 
 say: " For their sakes I consecrate myself." 
 
 There are, of course, many degrees and scales 
 of this struggle for the life of others, this conse- 
 cration to unselfish causes, this way of living for 
 aims that are enlarging and spiritual. Many a 
 person finds that his occupation not only supplies 
 him with food and clothing, but also gives him 
 opportunities for the consecrated life. The shoe- 
 maker who makes an absolutely honest shoe, not 
 merely because he wants his wages, but still more 
 because he wants the little unknown child that is 
 to wear it to have a solid and durable shoe, who 
 therefore pegs and stitches his own spirit of hon- 
 esty into his piece of work — that man has risen 
 above the biological scale and has found a way 
 of living a life which has a touch of consecration 
 upon it. 
 
 The sweeper of city streets is, often enough, no 
 doubt, a dull, stupid man who goes to his work 
 with hardly more enthusiasm than the mule shows, 
 and sweeps because he would starve if he did not 
 work. But every now and then there is a sweeper 
 of another type — a real " white angel " who 
 knows that city dust is laden with deadly germs 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 39 
 
 and disease, and that unless this dust is well and 
 carefully swept away it will endanger the lives of 
 the city; and he knows, too, that in sweeping it he 
 is risking his own life. In spite of that, he sweeps 
 in the dark corners even when no inspector watches 
 him, and forgets his own life in consecration to 
 the safety of others. He belongs somewhere in 
 the order of those unselfish and spiritual knights 
 who have lost themselves to find themselves. 
 " Telephone girls " do not usually impress us as 
 consecrated, but when, as happened a few years 
 ago in a terrible crisis which threatened two towns 
 with annihilation, two of these exchange girls 
 stayed at their post and risked their own lives to 
 warn the citizens to flee before the oncoming wall 
 of water, we must feel that they had formed and 
 cultivated a way of living which took them out of 
 self and consecrated them to unselfish aims. 
 
 We stand almost appalled at the bald selfish- 
 ness which is wrecking so many American homes. 
 The number of cases in which the decree of di- 
 vorce follows hard after the words, " until death 
 do us part," has become ominous and staggering. 
 But we must not overlook nor forget the millions 
 of happy homes in which men and women are con- 
 secrated through love; in which husband and wife 
 toil and sacrifice for each other and for their chil- 
 
4 o THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 dren in radiant joy, and in which, through sick- 
 ness and death, through poverty and privation, 
 through loss and sorrow, as well as in sunshine and 
 prosperity, two persons have ceased to be two 
 " units " and are devoted to each other in self- 
 forgetful love. Here, again, is consecration of 
 no mean order. 
 
 It is almost nineteen hundred years since a little 
 band of men who heard " words of life " from the 
 lips of a wonderful Teacher forsook their nets 
 and boats and fishing-tackle to follow him and, 
 through consecration to him and his cause, found 
 themselves on a new spiritual level. Sometimes 
 the Church has failed to realize its mission and has 
 been content to appeal to the self-side in men and 
 to offer them an easy means of passage from a 
 world of woe to a haven of refuge and a scene 
 of peace and joy; and it may be that even now the 
 Church is too much commercialized and permeated 
 with a spirit of refined self-seeking; but still, as 
 of old on the shores of Gennesaret, men, when they 
 hear this Christ call, leave all with joy and follow 
 him. There are plenty of Christians, no doubt, 
 whose religion is formal and traditional and with- 
 out much insight; many who blindly hold truths 
 for which nobler men have suffered and died; but, 
 nevertheless, there is a goodly number of men and 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 41 
 
 women who are Christians by first-hand experi- 
 ence, Christians who through Christ have found 
 God and have consecrated themselves with joy to 
 do his will and to lose themselves that they may 
 find themselves in him. 
 
 II 
 
 THE ALL FOR THE ALL 
 
 Religion — above all, Christ's religion — is 
 not something which can thrive on a " fifty-fifty " 
 basis. That simple Brother of the Common Life, 
 Thomas a Kempis, was profoundly right when he 
 said four hundred years ago, " We must give the 
 all for the All." The great religious leaders, the 
 persons who have started a new line of march, 
 have always known that truth, and it was their 
 practice of it which more than anything else made 
 them religious leaders. The Laodicean, neither 
 hot nor cold, economical of spiritual zeal and exer- 
 cising no more faith than is absolutely required 
 for conventional religious purposes, with one eye 
 on the main chance here below and the other 
 turned feebly on the celestial gate, is a well-known 
 type of Christian. But, however common the 
 type may be, it is a pitiable, miserable failure. 
 
42 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 " Surely they see not God, I know, 
 
 Nor all the chivalry of His, 
 The soldier saints who, row on row, 
 
 Burn upward each to his point of bliss — 
 Since, the end of life being manifest, 
 
 He had cut his way through the world to this." 
 
 Nowhere does this virile, all-for-All way of 
 life find such striking emphasis and illustration as 
 in the sayings and in the practice of the great 
 Galilean. Religion for him is not an unneces- 
 sary luxury; it is the staff of life, the bread and 
 water by which men live. The " whole world " 
 set over against this indispensable life of the soul 
 weighs nothing. Even the eye that hinders the 
 soul is to be bored out and the hand that inter- 
 feres with the central life is to be hacked off and 
 flung away, because there is only one focal thing 
 in the universe that matters and toward which all 
 energies must bend. Two very simple, yet very 
 profound, parables are told by the Master to illus- 
 trate this principle of giving the all for the All. 
 A man casually digging in a field hits upon a 
 buried treasure which in some earlier time of war 
 had been hastily hidden in the ground as the 
 owner fled before the invading enemy. The 
 finder, thrilling with joy over his happy discovery, 
 goes and sells all that he possesses and invests 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 43 
 
 everything in the field which contains his treasure. 
 Another man, watching the pearl-divers come into 
 port laden with their " finds," sees with his trained 
 eye, among the many ordinary pearls, one price- 
 less pearl. He hurries home, disposes of all his 
 stock of goods, sells his shop and bit of land, and 
 goes back to the divers and buys that lustrous 
 pearl of great price which is worth all other pos- 
 sessions. Those are Christ's figures to illustrate 
 the true attitude of the soul toward the kingdom 
 of God, the highest vision and ideal of life. It 
 must not take its place alongside of other things 
 and stand on a competitive level with them. It 
 must rise high over all and become the absorbing 
 goal and central pursuit of the soul. That is, be- 
 yond question, the secret of spiritual power. The 
 religion that costs nothing, that demands no hard 
 sacrifices of other things, that does not lift the life 
 out of low-level motives, is worth little and makes 
 little difference to the life. The type of religion, 
 on the other hand, which costs the all, which makes 
 the cross the central fact that dominates the life as 
 its one driving power, becomes an incalculable 
 force and turns many to salvation. We have been 
 trying to get on with the " fifty-fifty " scheme. 
 We have endeavored to take over ease with our 
 comfortable religious faith. We have scaled 
 
44 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 down the demands to attract the economically 
 minded. But it is now, as always, a false trail 
 and an abortive undertaking. We must return 
 to Thomas a Kempis's principle and learn to give 
 the all for the All. We must go back still farther 
 to the way set forth by a greater than the Brother 
 of the Common Life and make everything else in 
 the universe yield to the central call of the king- 
 dom of God. 
 
 Sacrifice for its own sake is asceticism. Sur- 
 render, mortification, crucifixion as a dumb nega- 
 tion of life cannot be recommended. It is always 
 better to live in the yea than to live in the nay, 
 where the yea is possible. But when a clear col- 
 lision comes, when life forces a choice between the 
 soul's true destiny and all else, then there must be 
 a surrender of everything which tends to anchor 
 the soul to its inland harbor when it should be 
 sailing the open sea with God — the all must go 
 for the sake of the All ! This higher way of life, 
 this capacity to see real value, to let the bird in 
 the hand go for the sake of catching the two in 
 the bush, this power to live by the unseen and to 
 insist on having God or nothing — that is what 
 we mean by " faith. " 
 
 That it " works " there can be no doubt. That 
 it produces a new quality of soul must be admitted. 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 45 
 
 The spiritual experts have one testimony to give. 
 For a sample opinion let us take the account of a 
 little-known eighteenth-century saint, Thomas 
 Story: 
 
 " He called for my life and I offered it at His foot- 
 stool; but He gave it me as a prey, with unspeakable ad- 
 dition. He called for my will, and I resigned it at 
 His call, but he returned me His own in token of His 
 love. He called for the world and I laid it at His feet, 
 with the crowns thereof; I withheld them not at the 
 beckoning of His hand. But mark the benefit of ex- 
 change ! For he gave me, instead of the earth, a kingdom 
 of eternal peace, and in lieu of the crowns of vanity 
 a crown of joy. . . . He gave me joy which no tongue 
 can express and peace which passeth understanding. My 
 heart was melted with the height of comfort; my soul 
 was immersed in the depth of joy; my eyes overflowed 
 with tears of greatest pleasure. ... I begged Himself 
 and He gave All." 
 
 Ill 
 
 HABAKKUKEANS 
 
 In a charming essay written several years ago 
 Dr. William Osier — now Sir William — dealt 
 with two groups of people whom he called, respec- 
 tively, Gallionians and Salomics. The Gallio- 
 nians, named from Gallio in Corinth, who " cared 
 for none of these things," are, in the famous doc- 
 
46 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 tor's essay, persons who are too busy with the 
 affairs of this world to give any time or thought to 
 spiritual issues. There are surely many Gallio- 
 nians among us still! The Salomics, named after 
 Salome, supposed to be the mother of the sons of 
 Zebedee, who asked Jesus to give the highest com- 
 missions in his gift to her sons, are those persons 
 who look upon religion as a way of promoting 
 themselves, of advancing their position. Salome 
 meant well. She loved the boys she had borne 
 and brought up and she wanted to do as well as 
 she could for them. She believed, as so many 
 mothers since her day have believed, that the 
 great thing to pray for and push for in this world 
 is visible success. She knew of nothing better or 
 more to be desired than position, place, and 
 power. She had dreamed, ever since she was a 
 little girl, of a coming great king who would break 
 the yoke of Rome, make Jerusalem a free, holy 
 city, a center of the new age — who would be a 
 world-ruler, with a splendid court on Mount Zion. 
 What glory to have two sons in that court ! Could 
 a mother aspire to any loftier triumph than to 
 have her boys sit on either side of the throne of 
 this Messianic king! What a prospect for two 
 fishermen of the Galilean lake ! 
 
 It took some courage to come out with her re- 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 47 
 
 quest, but she had carried it for weeks on her 
 heart and, at last when the opportunity favored, 
 it slipped oti her lips, and the word was spoken: 
 " Lord, grant that my two sons may sit one on thy 
 right hand and the other on thy left, when thou 
 comest into thy kingdom." 
 
 " That is not the right thing to ask," is the 
 solemn answer. " It shows ignorance of the real 
 nature of the kingdom. He who aspires to enter 
 my kingdom must not expect places, but suffer- 
 ing; not honors, but opportunities to sacrifice; not 
 rewards, but hard baptisms. Are thy two sons 
 able to suffer with me? " 
 
 The world has never learned the lesson which 
 this ambitious mother's experience ought to teach. 
 There is still much Salomic religion in all churches. 
 The stress is laid on rewards; the ambition is for 
 the glory of place. The old ignorance of the real 
 nature of the kingdom is living on. 
 
 We cannot expect to have a religion of power 
 until we get beyond a religion of selfishness and 
 of self-seeking. The person who is " saved " by 
 an appeal to some selfish interest will need to be 
 " saved " again, and the saving process will have 
 to be repeated until he is saved from himself. 
 " Ye are not seeking the right thing " would be 
 spoken to many of us if the Master were among 
 
48 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 us as of old. He would ask if we were ready for 
 our share of toil and pain, ready for the cup and 
 the baptism; ready to see the ambition for easy 
 glory blighted completely; ready to see everything 
 go but the spirit of love and consecration. Sa- 
 lomic religion dies hard; it is rooted deep in our 
 instincts. Men have all along been seeking for 
 harps and robes and crowns. They have dreamed 
 of golden streets and blissful mansions. They 
 are praying for rest and ease. Are they the right 
 things to ask? Is it not Salome's blunder over 
 again? 
 
 There is still a third type of persons which Dr. 
 Osier did not mention in his essay. I shall call 
 them Habakkukeans. I am sorry to use such a 
 barbaric-looking and sounding word, but it names 
 a very real type and one which we greatly need to 
 have increased. Through some hard and tremen- 
 dous experience this ancient prophet, Habakkuk, 
 had discovered that the only thing which matters 
 after all is finding God and being in close fellow- 
 ship with him. Everything else may go — if he 
 abides sure. Listen to his great declaration of 
 faith: " Although the fig-tree may not blossom, 
 neither shall there be any fruit in the vines; the 
 labor of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall 
 yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 49 
 
 fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet 
 I will rejoice in the Lord and joy in the God of 
 my salvation — and I will walk in my high 
 places! " Here at last selfishness is washed out. 
 Religion is no longer a successful system of dou- 
 ble-entry bookkeeping. God is loved now for 
 his own sake, and the soul triumphs whether the 
 bank-account prospers or not. Satan's sneer in 
 the book of Job — that pious people never serve 
 God for naught, but have an eye out for returns — 
 is well answered. Here is a stalwart man whose 
 known biography could be written on a thumb-nail 
 but whose faith shines like a beacon across the 
 dead centuries. He flung out that great word, 
 which furnished both St. Paul and Martin Luther 
 with a watchword : " The righteous man shall 
 live by his faith." Everything else can be dis- 
 pensed with if only faith in God remains, for a 
 man can live by that! 
 
 The white soul, the purified inner nature, the 
 heart aflame with love for God, the whole self 
 consecrated to service — these are the things to 
 seek. To have attained that spirit is to be a 
 Habakkukean ! 
 
50 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 IV 
 
 CONSECRATION TO SERVICE 
 
 Almost all Paul's Epistles divide into two well- 
 defined parts: the second part in each case being 
 introduced by a therefore, which marks a kind of 
 watershed of the Epistle. What goes before this 
 momentous therefore is devoted in the main to an 
 illumination of the Divine plan and purpose — an 
 unfolding of the Grace of God as the dynamic to 
 salvation. What comes after the watershed 
 therefore is an appeal for action, a call to human 
 consecration and devotion — in a word is the prac- 
 tical application of the message about God and 
 his Grace: "I beseech you therefore, brethren, 
 by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a 
 living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, as an in- 
 telligent service. And be not fashioned accord- 
 ing to this world, but be transformed by the re- 
 newing of your mind, that ye may prove what is 
 the good and acceptable and perfect will of God " 
 (Rom. XII. 1-2). 
 
 The self-revealing nature of God, his self- 
 sacrificing, self-giving love is the moral dynamic 
 of the gospel, the virtue-making power; but noth- 
 ing defeats religion more effectively than to turn 
 
Ch. HI] DEDICATION 51 
 
 this living fact into doctrine and dogma as though 
 it were the sum and the end of religion. The 
 great teachers of the New Testament always 
 put the final emphasis on deed, on action, on 
 life, on character. " He that heareth these say- 
 ings of mine and doeth them " is the rock-man. 
 " Not every one that sayeth, Lord, Lord, shall 
 enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth 
 the will of my Father." In fact the very condi- 
 tion of the revelation of truth is obedient action: 
 " He that doeth the will shall know of the doc- 
 trine." This same pragmatic method runs 
 through all the Epistles. The Apostle James, 
 who seems sometimes rather pious and legal than 
 profoundly religious, has nevertheless given us a 
 great piece of psychological insight, as fresh and 
 modern as though it were written by his unapos- 
 tolic namesake Professor James. He says that 
 " if any one is a hearer of the divine word and not 
 a doer of it, he is like a man who sees his natural 
 face in a mirror, for he looks at himself, and then 
 goes away and quickly forgets how he looked." 
 It is a notorious fact that none of us can visualize 
 our own faces from memory. We see ourselves 
 often enough, but the image fades out at once and 
 leaves us only a vague blur. Just the same way 
 goodness which is only thought about and not 
 
52 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 translated into motor effect, — emotions over the 
 love of God which never drive us into personal 
 actions of love, — quickly fade away and leave us 
 as though they had not been, or rather leave us 
 weaker and worse for the fruitless evaporation. 
 Paul's Epistles ring everywhere with trumpet- 
 calls to action, and even the casual reader must be 
 impressed with the athletic temper of these great 
 spiritual documents. One hears him call to his 
 young friend, Timothy, as though from the side 
 lines, " Exercise thyself unto godliness; fight the 
 good fight of faith " ; and nobody can forget the 
 picture of the ideal Christian cap-a-pie with his 
 face set for knightly action. " Stand, therefore, 
 having girded your loins with truth, and having 
 put on the breastplate of righteousness, and hav- 
 ing shod your feet with the preparation of the 
 gospel of peace; withal taking the shield of faith; 
 and take the helmet of salvation and the sword 
 of the Spirit" (Eph. VI. 14-17). John's mes- 
 sage, throbbing as it is with the memory of the 
 Word of Life, which his hands have handled, and 
 glorified as it is by its upward look to God, who at 
 last is known as Love, is as practical and prag- 
 matic as the rest, with its reiterated test of religion 
 in practical love : " Hereby shall we know that 
 we are born of God, if we love" And finally the 
 
Ch. HI] DEDICATION 53 
 
 Apocalypse closes the New Testament with a re- 
 frain on overcoming, which to this writer means 
 not an easy flight from the world, but the subordi- 
 nation of the lower appetites and desires to higher 
 ends, and a dedication of the will to goodness, out 
 of love for him who has loved us with a redeem- 
 ing love. This great prophetic book ends with 
 the followers of Christ, united in a relation to 
 him (which in beautiful figurative language is 
 called a bridal relation), and joining with the in- 
 visible Spirit in the unending work of bringing 
 men to God — "the Spirit and the Bride say 
 come! " 
 
 I have in the briefest possible way tried to 
 show that the stress of the New Testament is on 
 action, not on dogma, on the dedication of the 
 whole self to goodness, not on beatific vision. 
 The Gospel message culminates in its compelling 
 appeal to follow Christ, in its constraint of love 
 to live as he lived — "He loved me and gave 
 himself for me, therefore the life I now live in 
 the flesh I live in the faith of the Son." 
 
 Consecration in some degree is involved in any 
 sane or rational life. It is only the person who 
 can forget himself, and become absorbed in some 
 large aim or end of life, that can enter into the 
 joy of living; and it is only the person who can 
 
54 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 thus forget himself in his work that can do any- 
 thing well. " If I lose myself I find myself," was 
 Galahad's preparation for finding the Holy Grail, 
 and it is a first law of life for anybody who wishes 
 to make his life count. It is a great mistake to 
 suppose that " consecration " is a word which be- 
 longs only in the religious vocabulary. It is the 
 secret of everybody's power. All work of every 
 sort that has a touch of genius in it has come out 
 of consecration, and it has come from somebody 
 that forgot himself in his work. 
 
 Seven times over, in our Gospel records, Christ 
 says, " He that saves his life shall lose it, and he 
 that loses his life shall find it." It is a law of life 
 at least as elemental and universal as " survival of 
 the fittest," and there are few tragedies greater 
 than the tragedy we see so often repeated, of per- 
 sons who with intense passion have pursued pleas- 
 ure, and have stormed the citadels of success, and 
 have come to the end of life with their lean hands 
 empty, and their hearts burned out to dull ash, 
 with no hope and no faith in any larger good to 
 be, because they have never lost themselves in any 
 noble task or service and so have never found 
 themselves ! The happy people in the world are 
 not the persons of large leisure, whose loins are 
 ungirt, whose lamps are unlit and who have no 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 55 
 
 work to do except occasionally to shake the bread- 
 fruit tree. The happy people are toilers, conse- 
 crated to difficult tasks, absorbed in doing things, 
 finding their lives by sinking them in the world's 
 work and the world's problems. 
 
 I want to keep continually in the foreground 
 the fact that consecration must not be a mere emo- 
 tional giving of life to causes. The things that 
 matter most are ( i ) What you put your life into, 
 and (2) What kind of a life you put in. The 
 reason that it matters so much what you put your 
 life into is that some things are so much more 
 worth doing than other things are, that is, they 
 forward the welfare of the race better than other 
 things do. The man who can teach men has no 
 right to raise turnips. Then, too, we all have 
 special gifts and aptitudes which peculiarly fit us 
 for some tasks rather than for other tasks. The 
 very possession of a marked aptitude or gift is in 
 itself a divine call, and carries with it a summons 
 to service — a noblesse oblige. 
 
 But it is of vastly more importance what kind 
 of life you put in. Emerson says that the Gulf- 
 stream will run through a straw if it is parallel to 
 the current, — and so it will, — that is, a little of 
 it will, but a great deal more of it will run through 
 a ten-foot pipe. A life of a single candle-power 
 
56 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 and of a single horse-power will do something if 
 it is consecrated to a definite mission, but the hun- 
 dred-power life is much more economic! It uses 
 no more raw material, while its impact on the race, 
 its circle of dynamic influence, is vastly greater, 
 and it gathers power as it goes, like a falling stone. 
 The first concern, then, of any one who is eager 
 to live a consecrated life should be to become as 
 much of a person as may be. Culture and conse- 
 cration ought never to be separated. They are 
 when cut apart like the two blades of the scissors 
 with the rivet gone. Culture alone is cold and 
 thin. Consecration alone is weak and empty. 
 " For their sakes I sanctify myself," was the great 
 word of the Master: " for their sakes I put myself 
 at my best " ought to be the aim of us all. The 
 doctor who has a passion for saving life fulfills his 
 mission best, not by hurrying into it unequipped 
 and untrained, but by taking years of his precious 
 life in learning how to do it. The life-saver is 
 consecrated to no purpose if he cannot row in the 
 storm and swim in the breaking sea. The mother 
 may be ever so consecrated to the interests of her 
 child, but she must as well know how little lives are 
 rightly developed, and she must know the relative 
 value of spanking and sugar-plums. The social 
 worker may be as consecrated as St. Francis, and 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 57 
 
 yet may waste his life if he is unsound in sociology 
 and awry in economic theory. Self-enlargement 
 and self-giving are the two indissoluble traits of 
 a good life. 
 
 It perhaps needs hardly to be said (it is so evi- 
 dent) that true consecration can never be reached 
 by artificial methods, or by sheer effort. The life 
 must be kindled by an inward passion for an end 
 that is large enough and high enough to feed the 
 life and draw it on. The moment we discover 
 that a person is " doing good " for selfish ends and 
 with a view to utilitarian results, we despise his 
 good deeds and will have none of them, for, in the 
 last analysis, it is the life that we appreciate, and 
 not the " things." In fact the highest consecra- 
 tion is, like genius, unconscious of itself. The 
 person who is gloriously consecrated is so com- 
 pletely absorbed in the task he has to do, so inter- 
 ested working out the end of goodness which he 
 has in view, that he is hardly aware that he is sac- 
 rificing his life to it. Grace Darling could never 
 understand why her heroic act stirred England so 
 powerfully: in artless simplicity she used to say, 
 " I did what everybody else would have done." 
 There is a fine naivete in words which Christ puts 
 in the mouths of the blessed ones on his right hand : 
 " When did we do all these things for which we 
 
58 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 are commended?" What a great word that is 
 which the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews uses 
 to utter the very essence of Christ's sublime sacri- 
 fice: " Who for the joy that was set before him 
 endured the Cross! " 
 
 V3 
 
 POURED OUT 
 
 In the annals of David's life there is a very fine 
 story of heroic daring, and of the way David by 
 a sudden inspiration turned the splendid bravery 
 of his men into a religious sacrament. In the 
 midst of hard battle, David expressed a longing 
 for a drink of water out of the well at the gate of 
 Bethlehem, at a time when Bethlehem was held 
 by the army of the Philistines. Three of the 
 most valiant of David's " mighty men " at once 
 volunteered to break through the enemies' line and 
 get the water for their king. At the risk of their 
 lives they got through to the well and brought the 
 skin of hard-won water back to David. If he 
 had done the usual thing and had drunk the water 
 which his brave men had got for him, we should 
 never have heard the story, but he did not drink 
 it. It seemed to him too precious, too deeply 
 tinged with the blood-red spirit of risk and sacri- 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 59 
 
 fice, to be put to common, ordinary uses, and, up- 
 lifted by the beauty of the deed, David poured the 
 water out unto the Lord. 
 
 What a waste ! What a way to treat his brave 
 men! is the comment of dull common-sense. 
 What a pity for the dry sand to drink up the water 
 that had been got at such a venture ! is the philis- 
 tine view of the matter. But to those who have 
 eyes for the inner meaning of deeds, this act of 
 David's brings to light the fascinating, attractive 
 quality of character which has made the first king 
 of Judah with all his faults an immortal figure. 
 He does the sublime and unexpected thing. He 
 will not turn to personal, selfish uses the gift 
 which comes to him deeply colored with the sac- 
 rificial daring of his men. The wine-skin holds 
 for him not water to be drunk, but the precious 
 life-blood of brave men to be offered to the Lord 
 as a sacrament of love. There is a parallel story 
 in the New Testament that is still finer and more 
 moving. A woman who has suddenly found a 
 new life, a new hope, a new power through the un- 
 expected gentleness and tenderness of Christ and 
 through his extraordinary faith in her comes in at 
 a dinner where he is and, in a moment of over- 
 mastering love and gratitude at the memory of 
 the past, she breaks a costly alabaster vase of 
 
60 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 priceless perfume and pours it recklessly out upon 
 the Saviour's feet. The common-sense observers 
 cry out against the waste, and the economically 
 minded figure out how much could have been pur- 
 chased with this spilled ointment, but Christ sees 
 further. He instantly catches the deeper mean- 
 ing. For him, it is the revelation of a spirit, a 
 devotion, a passion that loves and that cannot stop 
 to figure and calculate. He sees that there is at 
 least one person in the world who understands 
 him, who has discovered his way, and who feels 
 the absolute worth of love. She has not sold her 
 perfume to inaugurate some paltry charity that 
 would bring her cheap fame; she has instead, with- 
 out any calculation, made an undying sacrament 
 of it. 
 
 The world is full of chances for this kind of 
 sacramental service. There is hardly anything 
 which touches our higher life that is not blood-red 
 with the sacrifices that won it for us. The privi- 
 leges that have become our common heritage have 
 all cost an untold amount of venture and daring 
 and suffering and death. We too often take 
 these things as a matter of course. We use them 
 as we do the air and sunlight as though they were 
 ours by right of birth and we do not have the high 
 quality of poetry and religion in our nature that 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 61 
 
 makes us able to raise them to a sacramental ser- 
 vice as we should. 
 
 The Cross itself has again and again been 
 thought of and used as a symbol of security: " He 
 paid the price"; "He died that we might be 
 safe." It is seized upon as a way of relief. 
 Everything has been done for us without us. 
 Our title is now clear to mansions in the skies. 
 Surely not thus should we accept the sacrifice. If 
 it is what the most devout souls have believed it to 
 be, then all life henceforth must be colored and 
 altered by this unparalleled act of love and sacri- 
 fice. Instead of bringing us the seal of perpetual 
 security, instead of being meant for our own selfish 
 relief, it is a call to us to pour out the life that has 
 been given to us in the highest way of sacramental 
 service to which we can raise our vision. If re- 
 demption has come to us in this way of uncalculat- 
 ing love, then we can never live again in the poor, 
 thin, common, plodding way of old; the love of 
 Christ " constrains us " to live the bold and dar- 
 ing way of faith and love that ventures all and 
 keeps back nothing. 
 
 The tremendous cost of freedom and of self- 
 government makes the word " country " mean 
 something new when we see it colored with un- 
 stinted sacrifice. But here again we cannot 
 
62 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. Ill 
 
 calmly drink the precious water to quench our own 
 private thirst. We cannot settle down in security 
 and enjoy in peace the treasures which others have 
 won for us. Noblesse oblige. We are bound as 
 patriotic sons of noble fathers to make their sac- 
 rificial gains genuine sacraments of life. We can 
 do this best by risking all that freedom means to 
 us, all that country stands for in our vision, in a 
 brave effort to bring forth and secure for our 
 children a still greater freedom and a still loftier 
 country. Patriotic service is made the truest sac- 
 rament when it is devoted to the task of raising 
 patriotism itself to its higher meaning. " The 
 greatest legacy the hero leaves his race is — to 
 have been a hero." 
 
 Our own religion, born in heroic endeavor and 
 baptized in unstinted suffering, bravely borne, has 
 not seldom been quietly accepted as a way of ease 
 and security. The water brought at such risk has 
 been drunk in shelter and in peace. We have 
 often felt that we were doing enough if we en- 
 joyed our privileges and passed them on, but 
 slightly shrunken, to the next generation. Our 
 ideal has been " preservation." We have aimed 
 to guard and keep, to have and to hold. 
 
 It will not do. It is a miserable ambition. It 
 is time for us to discover the sacramental way of 
 
Ch. Ill] DEDICATION 63 
 
 treating this precious water which our ancestors 
 drew for us. We cannot use it for our private 
 enjoyment, we cannot save it for our children, we 
 cannot treat it as ours, we must pour it out in un- 
 calculating, self-forgetful devotion. It is better 
 that we should lose it than that we should merely 
 succeed in saving it for our own ends. It is too 
 sacred, too red with the life-blood of heroes, to be 
 used in the dull, common way of commonplace 
 men. It must be poured out like the Bethlehem 
 water, like the Bethany perfume, like the life of 
 Christ, poured out without counting the cost or 
 calculating the results, and made a real sacrament 
 of life, a spontaneous bestowal of love for love's 
 sake. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 
 
 I 
 
 THE PLUMB-LINE 
 
 One of the most vivid pictures in the Old 
 Testament is that which the prophet Amos gives 
 us of the Lord standing in the midst of Israel and 
 holding a plumb-line in his hand. 
 
 The popular idea of a prophet conceives him 
 to be a strange-looking man, wild-eyed, highly 
 wrought, given to fanciful visions and, in the main, 
 a mysterious fore-teller of remote events. In real 
 fact he was strikingly unlike that crude sketch. 
 The distinctive prophet was a person of rare san- 
 ity and balance, a man who could look straight at 
 facts and with clairvoyant insight could see 
 through them and discover what they involved. 
 He could tell from the lines and curves of move- 
 ments and events and motives how they would 
 necessarily fulfill themselves as they unfolded with 
 
 the process of time. In the proper sense of the 
 
 64 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 65 
 
 word, he was not primarily a fore-teller, he was a 
 revealer of the deeper meaning of present existing 
 conditions. He possessed an unerring sense of 
 the direction in which deeds were carrying on the 
 doer of them, as unerring as the artist's sense of 
 harmony or of beauty. It was this power of 
 moral insight that made the prophets the states- 
 men of their epochs. They saw and proclaimed 
 the trend and drift of policies. They looked on 
 through and announced in advance where a given 
 course would finally terminate. They were in- 
 tense patriots, but their supreme loyalty and devo- 
 tion was to the ideal country, the country as it 
 ought to be, and they judged all policies and ex- 
 pedients in the light of their clear insight. 
 
 Amos, a keeper of sheep and a dresser of vine- 
 yards, in the country about Tekoa, was the first of 
 the literary prophets and one of the profoundest 
 moral revealers of any age. He was not afraid 
 of " the face of clay." He dared to say before 
 any man, or any group of men, what he actually 
 thought. He understood the movements going on 
 around him as clearly as he understood the habits 
 of his sheep. 
 
 " He read each wound, each weakness clear, 
 
 He struck his finger on the place; 
 
 And said : ' Thou ailest here, and here.' ' 
 
66 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 But the great thing after all which he announces 
 in his plumb-line figure is the fact of an un- 
 escapable, inexorable, pervasive law of moral 
 gravitation in the universe. There is no caprice 
 about moral results. You cannot hoodwink the 
 forces which fulfill events. As fire burns your 
 hand, if you play with it carelessly, as gravity will 
 tumble you over the precipice, if you step falsely 
 on the narrow ledge, so, too, the swing of inevit- 
 able moral consequences will follow as a doom the 
 deeds of men and of nations. " By no clever 
 trickery," wrote one of our sound present-day 
 teachers, " can profligacy or low living come into 
 possession of the beatitudes." There hangs the 
 plumb-line, dropped as from the hand of God and 
 by it every deed is tested. There is no favoritism, 
 no wheedling, no capricious exception. If the life 
 is unplumb, if the deeds and policies of it swing 
 away from a line of rectitude, nothing can save 
 the structure from collapse — nothing but a re- 
 building of it in conformity with the moral laws 
 of gravitation. 
 
 This deeper prophecy which lays bare the 
 eternal nature of things and which announces days 
 of judgment as always coming is a characteristic 
 not only of Amos and the other rugged prophets 
 of Israel and Judah, but it is as well an inherent 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 67 
 
 feature of the work of all the greatest interpreters 
 of life. Euripides saw the plumb-line as clearly 
 as Amos did. He will not believe in the popular, 
 capricious, immoral gods — " gods who do aught 
 base are not gods at all." But he does believe, 
 with all the virility of his great soul, in the moral 
 purpose of that eternal nature of things, 
 
 " Whom veils enfold 
 
 Of light, of dark night flecked with gleams of gold, 
 
 Of star-hosts dancing round thee without end." 
 
 He — that unerring moral will — guides all 
 things in accordance with truth and goodness. 
 
 Socrates is another prophet who knew, with 
 clear insight, that the foundations of the universe 
 rest upon immovable pillars of righteousness. A 
 man can always swing boldly out and trust the 
 moral nature of the universe. The only evil thing 
 in the world, he thinks, is to do evil. To suffer 
 injustice for a brief span is no great hardship, but 
 to*be attached by act of will to a course of injustice 
 is the one thing that can have no happy outcome — 
 " I know," he declares, and in most particulars he 
 professed to know very little, " I know that injus- 
 tice and disobedience to a better is always evil and 
 dishonorable." " Think not of life and children 
 first and of justice afterwards, but of justice first. 
 
68 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 If you go about returning evil for evil, and injury 
 for injury, breaking covenants and agreements, 
 wronging those whom you ought not to wrong, the 
 laws of the invisible world will treat you as an 
 enemy.' ' 
 
 The greatest of the poets bear witness to this 
 fact of the plumb-line. Dante is not mainly con- 
 cerned with a supernal world beyond the stars or 
 with a dire region of doom under the earth. He 
 is merely telling us of the inevitable recoil of deeds 
 and choices. Every man is building the house 
 which he is going to inhabit, and is now creating 
 the climate and atmosphere that will inevitably 
 bring him an environment of joy or woe. 
 
 Nobody can ever forget the scene in Hamlet, 
 where Shakespeare gives us, as he so often does in 
 this and other plays, his announcement of this law 
 of the plumb-line. The wicked king is trying to 
 pray — but he cannot find any form of prayer 
 that can be efficacious until he changes his moral 
 attitude and gets a new purpose of heart. 
 
 " What form of prayer 
 Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder? 
 That cannot be; since I am still possessed 
 Of those effects for which I did the murder, 
 My crown, mine own ambition and my queen. 
 May one be pardoned, and retain th 1 offense? 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 69 
 
 In the corrupted currents of this world 
 Offense's gilded hand may shove by justice; 
 And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself 
 Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above; 
 There is no shuffling, — there the action lies 
 In its true nature." , 
 
 Among our more modern prophets, Emerson 
 has given as robust expression to the law of moral 
 gravitation as any have given, especially in his 
 great Essay on " Compensation." His finest 
 short statement of the truth is, however, to be 
 found in his Address on Abraham Lincoln, in 
 w r hich he says: 
 
 " There is a serene Providence which rules the fate of 
 nations, which makes little account of time, little of one 
 generation Or race, makes no account of disasters, con- 
 quers alike by what is called defeat or by what is called 
 victory, thrusts aside enemy and obstruction, crushes 
 everything immoral as inhuman, and obtains the ultimate 
 triumph of the best race by the sacrifice of everything 
 that resists the moral laws of the world." 
 
 The question remains to be asked, whether this 
 is merely a theory of certain idealists and dream- 
 ers, whom we name " prophets," or whether it is 
 indeed so; i. e., a real truth of the eternal nature 
 of things. Nobody ever can " prove '' such a 
 mighty assertion about our universe. It is impos- 
 
70 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 sible to demonstrate that every deed carries its 
 inevitable nemesis in itself and that moral conse- 
 quences are as unvarying as the law of gravitation 
 or the swing of planetary orbits. But everything 
 we know about habit and character tends to verify 
 this law of the prophets. The man himself, as 
 William James says, may not " count " his wrong 
 deed, " and a kind heaven may not count it; but it 
 is being counted none the less. Down among his 
 nerve-cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, 
 registering it and storing it up to be used against 
 him when the next temptation comes." Apparent 
 " success " and a seeming " efficiency " that brings 
 coveted " results " are poor substitutes for a 
 rightly fashioned life. The world with its crasser 
 judgments may approve the men who seem to hit 
 the desired goals, but the triumph is dearly bought 
 if it has been won by the sacrifice of the growth of 
 the soul itself. 
 
 Whether the moral law is cosmic, i. e., whether 
 the entire universe in all its processes is working 
 out a moral purpose, and every least movement of 
 evolving matter is cooperant to a moral end, is 
 too large a question for us to answer. There are 
 certainly many facts which challenge such a faith. 
 But it is hard to see how anything can be moving 
 to no purpose, how any cosmos can come by acci- 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 71 
 
 dent; how, again, some things can be steered to 
 intelligent purpose and others be only random hap- 
 penings. It is certain that some regions of the 
 universe reveal a moral law of gravitation, that 
 in some areas the eternal plumb-line is set up and 
 operates inevitably. It may be that it does every- 
 where. It is the safest guess. In his famous 
 Romanes Lecture of 1893 — "Evolution and 
 Ethics " — Huxley comes face to face with the 
 immense ground swell of ethical purpose and 
 moral process in the world and he tries to discover 
 its source and origin. He thinks that it cannot be 
 cosmic; it cannot belong to the nature of things. 
 It must have come in afterwards ; it must be super- 
 posed upon a non-moral " nature." But this con- 
 clusion of the perplexed naturalist will hardly do. 
 The cosmic records need to be more closely and 
 carefully searched again. It may be after all that 
 the prophets are right, and that the plumb-line 
 which Amos saw is fixed in the very cosmic nature 
 of things. 
 
 II 
 
 THE FACT OF MUST 
 
 Must is one of the easiest verbs in the English 
 language to conjugate. It is gloriously defective, 
 
72 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 with its one mood and one tense. But if ever a 
 word weighed a ton it is this same little defective 
 verb. We meet it at all ages and on all levels of 
 life, and it holds us like a tested line of trench. 
 We very early discover that all mathematical 
 facts not only are what they are but that they 
 must be so. When we have once learned the mul- 
 tiplication table, we come to realize that it is good 
 not only for the local latitude and longitude where 
 we happen to live, but it holds for all lands and for 
 all possible worlds. When we once find that the 
 shortest distance between two points is a straight 
 line we instantly see that it must be so everywhere 
 and that if angels wish to take the shortest way 
 home, they must fly in straight lines. When we 
 prove that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 
 equal to two right angles, we see that it must 
 always and everywhere be so — even in a triangle 
 with its apex at Arcturus and its base across the 
 earth's orbit around the sun. All our sciences 
 write must into all their laws, for a law is not a 
 law until it carries must into all the facts with 
 which it deals. And yet no person ever sees this 
 fact of " must be so " with his eyes nor can he find 
 it with any one of his senses. The only thing we 
 can find with our senses is what actually happens, 
 what is there now. We can never perceive what 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 73 
 
 must happen. Senses can deal only with facts, 
 only with is, not with must be. Must belongs in 
 a deeper, invisible world where mind works and 
 not eyes. For ages men wondered what held the 
 earth up in space. They always looked for some 
 visible support. It was a giant like Atlas who 
 held it on his back, or it was a huge tortoise, or it 
 was an elephant standing on another elephant, with 
 elephants all the way down! But it turns out 
 that nothing visible or tangible is there. The dis- 
 coverers of the North and South poles found no 
 real " poles " that ran into grooves on which the 
 earth spun round. There was nothing to see. 
 The cable which holds the earth in space and 
 swings it on its mighty annual curve is invisible 
 to all eyes and yet it holds irresistibly, for the must 
 of a universal law is woven into it, and the mind 
 can find it though the eyes cannot. 
 
 There is another, and a higher, kind of must 
 which holds men as that force of gravitation holds 
 worlds. It was one of the most august events of 
 modern history when a man in the light of his own 
 conscience challenged the councils and traditions 
 of the Church, refused to alter the truth which his 
 soul saw, and boldly declared, " Here I stand, I 
 cannot do otherwise." This is a strange thing, 
 this inner " must," this adamantine " I cannot do 
 
74 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 otherwise." It reveals a new kind of gravitation 
 toward a new kind of center, and it implies the 
 existence of another sort of invisible universe in 
 which we live. It often carries a person straight 
 against his wishes, into hard conflict with his incli- 
 nations, and it may take him up to that perilous 
 edge where life itself is put at hazard. 
 
 " Though love repine and reason chafe, 
 
 I heard a voice without reply; 
 'Tis man's perdition to be safe 
 
 When for the truth he ought to die." 
 
 Some persons do not feel this irresistible pull as 
 powerfully as others do, but probably nobody, who 
 can be called a person, altogether escapes it. A 
 little boy, in the first stages of collision between 
 instinct and duty, said naively to his mother: 
 " I've got something inside me I can't do what I 
 want to with! " This is exactly the truth about 
 it. It holds, it says must, like the other invisible 
 realities that build the universe. 
 
 Different individuals feel this inner pull in dif- 
 ferent ways. They read off their call to duty in 
 different terms. Their must confronts them in 
 unique fashion, but whenever it comes and how- 
 ever it comes, it is august and moving. We no 
 doubt mix some of our cruder self in it and perhaps 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 75 
 
 we color it with the hue of our human habits, but 
 at its truest and its best, it is the most glorious 
 thing in our structure and it closely allies us to a 
 Higher than ourselves. 
 
 " So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to man, 
 When duty whispers low, ' Thou must,' 
 
 The youth replies, ' I can.' " 
 
 III 
 WHERE ARGUMENTS FAIL 
 
 There are some matters, and they are just the 
 most vital ones, which lie too deeply embedded in 
 the sub-soil of life itself to be settled by debate. 
 Coleridge was in the main right when he made the 
 distinction, so famous in his religious prose writ- 
 ings, between reason and understanding, or, as it 
 might be put, between reason and reasoning, i. e., 
 logical argument. A position may be grounded 
 and established in reason and yet at the same time 
 lie beyond the sphere of argumentative debate. 
 The range of logical proof is notoriously limited. 
 One explanation of this situation is that " think- 
 ing," " reasoning," " speculation " is a late-born 
 faculty and capacity. There was a time when 
 there was no need for it. Instinct served every 
 
76 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 purpose. Life was simple and of all things prac- 
 tical. Action was the all-important thing, and 
 primitive man was organized, in fact pre-organ- 
 ized, to act. Thinking was a useless luxury, as 
 unnecessary for the function of living as a steamer- 
 trunk would have been, or a grand-square piano. 
 When thinking by the use of abstract concepts did 
 come into fashion, after life had gone on a long 
 time without such a luxury, it helped solve some 
 problems, but it worked successfully only for prob- 
 lems of a limited scope. 
 
 Long before thinking or speculation had 
 achieved any marked successes, long before man 
 had learned to argue for the mere fun and fascina- 
 tion of the thing, that other strange trait of human 
 life had flowered out — the tendency, I mean, to 
 feel the worth of things, the power to appreciate 
 values. This is even more distinctive of man, a 
 more fundamental trait of personality, than think- 
 ing or reasoning is. It was born when man was 
 born — it is as immemorial as smiling or weep- 
 ing. It is rooted and grounded in reason but it is 
 not due to reasoning. 
 
 By the worth or value of a deed, I mean its sig- 
 nificance for the realization of the highest good of 
 life. It is a sense of appreciation of what ought 
 to be in order to bring life on toward its fulfillment. 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 77 
 
 In a complex life, like ours, a person will obviously 
 have many ends to live for and many scales of 
 value, but gradually lesser and lower ones will fall 
 into place under wider and higher ones and thus 
 we form a kind of hierarchical scale of values, 
 with some over-topping end of supreme worth 
 dominating our life and creating our loyalties. 
 We discover for instance that life is more than 
 meat or body than raiment, that mere survival 
 yields to struggle for the life of others, and that 
 sometimes life must be given for something worth 
 more than life. 
 
 But, as I have said, this sense of worth is not a 
 product of reasoning. It attaches rather to the 
 great instinctive and emotional springs which 
 gradually become organized through experience, 
 life and action. It works as a deep-lying inner 
 ground-swell, pushing in a definite forward direc- 
 tion, rather than as a logically conceived plan 
 which can be settled and verified by argument. 
 " I see my way as birds their trackless way." 
 The first and most fundamental law of con- 
 sciousness in its primitive stage, whether in that 
 of the child or the race, is the inveterate tendency 
 to organize activity. This principle operates be- 
 fore the child begins to think or to aim at con- 
 ceived ends. At the very first, instincts are defi- 
 
78 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 nite, simple ways of acting for definite simple ends. 
 Then unconsciously, but with momentous results, 
 the child begins to group impulses and instincts 
 into systems of interest, little empires which now 
 direct action. Simple functions converge into 
 organizations or systems of instinct and emotion, 
 or purposeful efforts. Little by little these pri- 
 mary systems of action widen out, expand, enrich, 
 and become informed by experience and ever after 
 lie deep down at the roots or springs of will and of 
 personality. From first to last our life values, our 
 sense of worth, are formed and shaped in this 
 deeper region below the level of conscious reflec- 
 tions and reasoning. They are always operating, 
 they are always playing the main part or role in 
 the active drama of our life, but they seldom 
 appear as actors. The sentiments, again, are only 
 wider systems or groups of these springs of in- 
 stinct and emotion, more or less profoundly ration- 
 alized through experience, the experience of the 
 individual and the race. They are among the 
 most positive forces within us which move to 
 action, but they lie too deeply embedded in the 
 fundaments of our being to be easily recast. Per- 
 sons of a certain type often sneer at " sentiment," 
 and at what they call " sentimental " attitudes. 
 They probably refer to excessive emotional tones 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 79 
 
 and seeming lack of rational basis. It is true no 
 doubt that sentiment is sometimes thin and " gush- 
 ing." But the great sentiments which more or 
 less rule our lives are immense realities to be reck- 
 oned with. They are the widest and most inclu- 
 sive organized systems of action operative in our 
 lives. They furnish us with our supreme values. 
 They move, like great subterranean ocean currents, 
 through all the activities of our being. In them 
 all our loyalties are born and by them are en- 
 larged and enriched. Love, patriotism, devotion 
 to truth, aesthetic appreciation, passion for good- 
 ness, religion in all its range and heights, are such 
 sentiments. They represent the organization of 
 many instincts, emotions and attitudes, unified, 
 fused together and sublimated by reason. They 
 give meaning and value to things we care for. 
 They determine our pursuits. They kindle our 
 loyalty. They gird us and carry us forward to 
 our various goals. Arguments change our intel- 
 lectual conclusions and affect our decisions in many 
 spheres, but they do not often reach this more cen- 
 tral region where we live and have our being. 
 The great loyalties are only slightly touched by 
 logic. They lie deeper down in the slowly formed 
 systems of instinct, emotion and will, where our 
 estimates of values are created. We do not expect 
 
80 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 to be asked why we love our child, we do not rise 
 to explain why we are ready to suffer for truth, we 
 do not give any rationalistic account of devotion 
 to country or of dedication to God. They seem 
 to us inevitable and self-explanatory. 
 
 What will eventually rise to the apex of a per- 
 son's hierarchy of values cannot well be predicted. 
 Here men differ. There is no absolute arbiter of 
 values. Should Galileo put devotion to truth 
 above loyalty to his Church or not? Does one's 
 moral obligation outrank the requirements of 
 love? How do the claims of country take grade 
 with the soul's interior conviction of what is due 
 to God? The answers vary. But one's course 
 here is not settled by debate. Some overtopping 
 loyalty rises in us and holds us as invisible gravita- 
 tion holds the earth in its orbit. Our ideals, our 
 convictions, our elemental faiths root back into 
 the lives of ancestors and martyrs. They were 
 builded into our lives along with the alphabet. 
 They have silently grown and twined into the in- 
 most fiber of our being, and out of these deep roots 
 of life one's supreme loyalty flowers forth. It is 
 very solemn and sacred business. In the hour of 
 crisis the sincere, honest person feels as he makes 
 his choice, amid the conflicting issues, that he can- 
 not do otherwise. To make a different decision, 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 81 
 
 he would need not a new argument, but a change 
 of personality, an alteration of all the values of 
 life. 
 
 IV 
 
 THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 
 
 One of the ultimate problems of ethics is the 
 problem of moral authority. From whence comes 
 the moral imperative? What is the origin of that 
 august thing we call "obligation"? Who lays 
 upon us the unescapable " thou must," or " I can- 
 not do otherwise "? 
 
 In the early stages of the moral life, wmether in 
 the case of the child or of the race, duty seems to 
 come from beyond, from outside. It is something 
 imposed by a foreign will. It is not yet something 
 self-chosen, or loved for its own sake; it is some- 
 thing stern and harsh and forbidding which lies 
 like a specter across one's path, asking to be done, 
 and it is backed and buttressed by a sense of fear. 
 The will that enjoins it has the dread power to 
 enforce it, and dire results will follow if one runs 
 away from duty or takes a shun-pike around it. 
 This is the legalistic stage of ethics, which has had 
 an enormous part to play in the discipline of the 
 child and of the race, and which lingers on as a 
 
82 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 relic or survival in the maturer life of multitudes 
 of people. Duty at this stage is always character- 
 istically negative in its form. It limits, restrains, 
 and restricts. It confronts individual impulse 
 with an authoritative command which says: 
 " Thou shalt not." It is a stage of life which di- 
 vides persons into two absolutely sundered classes 
 — the sheep and the goats, i.e., those who say 
 " yes," and those who say " no " to the enjoined 
 law of righteousness. 
 
 But however important this moral stage of life 
 is, it is not yet the goal of ethical personal good- 
 ness. No person is good, in the highest and rich- 
 est sense, until he chooses to perform his deed be- 
 cause he feels its inherent worth as an aim of life, 
 and selects it because he knows that it is a good 
 act to put a life into. It is thus self-chosen, no 
 longer a thing of foreign compulsion, and yet the 
 compulsion and the authority remain as real and 
 as august as ever. 
 
 The slow and gradual heightening of the ethical 
 life, as it passes over from external authority, to 
 internal, from negation to affirmation, from fear 
 to joy, is one of the most splendid stories of human 
 life. Little by little one discovers, as he lives and 
 sees deeper into the meaning of things, that a life 
 of duty is a life of largeness and freedom. 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 83 
 
 There would be no richness, no content, to a life 
 that answered no calls of duty, a life that remained 
 shut up in its own self. The only way to fulfill 
 one's life is to forget about it and become absorbed 
 in something beyond it, to take up a task which 
 thrusts itself in the way, and to do it. After each 
 such deed the doer discovers that, without aiming 
 for this result, he himself has been enlarged and 
 enriched by it. He has been more than conqueror. 
 He is now himself plus the deed he has done. In 
 doing his duty he has found himself. In the path 
 of duty and in the way of obligation lies the road 
 to the true realization of life and of its meaning, 
 and in this vision love casts out fear, and joy sup- 
 plants dread. 
 
 But if duty is not now imposed as an external 
 law and is not laid on us by a foreign will which we 
 must obey or take the dread consequences, where 
 does the call come from, and why is it so august, 
 compelling and authoritative? What, in a word, 
 makes duty duty and why do we follow its call 
 as though we could not do otherwise? 
 
 The answer, as I see the matter, is this: A 
 mature moral man's duty rests for him on a clear 
 personal insight, or vision, of the course which 
 fits his life. It will be of necessity an action for 
 the sake of an ideal, for action along the line of 
 
84 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 instinct, i. e., along a line of least resistance, would 
 not be called duty. It will not be an action for the 
 sake of pleasure, nor will it be taken in order to 
 forward self-interest, for acts of that nature are 
 acts which do not bear the brand and mark of obli- 
 gation. All our obligations are born out of our 
 relationship with others. The very word obliga- 
 tion means " tied-in " or " tied together." As 
 soon as we realize what fellowship means we 
 awake to duties and we discover that we cannot 
 follow any easy primrose path that ends in self. 
 Duty is always done for a larger whole than one's 
 own me; it therefore always does come from be- 
 yond, and it seems, thus, even in its highest reaches, 
 to be laid upon one from without. 
 
 We are for purposes of life, bound in, not only 
 with those who now live and who form our visible 
 society, but we are bound in as well with those who 
 were before us and with those who will be after 
 us. Our lives are never isolated, except in mental 
 abstraction, but we are in living fact conjunct with 
 a vast social environment which shapes all our 
 action and from which we draw all our ideals. 
 
 We catch our visions of life in a very especial 
 way from the persons who are our heroes and 
 models, or the persons who have in some way won 
 in our thought a prestige and for that reason get 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 85 
 
 from us unconscious and joyous imitation. Living 
 in admiration, as we do, of Christ, and loving him 
 as we must, if we see what he was and what he 
 did for us, we cannot help coming into life-contact 
 and relationship with him, and in some sense his 
 ideals become ours and his outlook on the world 
 and his desire for an altered humanity possess us 
 and control us and unite us in one larger whole 
 with him, till we believe in his belief and leap in 
 some measure to his height of living. 
 
 When in this intimate and inner way he be- 
 comes our leader we are no longer our mere selves. 
 We cannot live now for pleasure or for gain or 
 for self. His will becomes in some degree our 
 will, and we go his way — not because somebody 
 or some book forbids us to do otherwise, but be- 
 cause love constrains us and a higher vision of an 
 ideal world compels us. This attitude, which 
 holds one fast as adamant to hard and difficult 
 duty, is not irrational but, when life is conceived 
 in its wholeness, is gloriously rational. It is 
 an attitude, however, which often perhaps is 
 not arrived at by clear and linked steps of 
 reasoning. 
 
 But though not articulately reasoned out, in- 
 sights of this moral type may be as rational as 
 the clearest logic. No one probably ever comes 
 
86 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. IV 
 
 to a decision to sacrifice his life for a cause or for 
 a truth by the mere persuasion of logic. The 
 heroes who died at Thermopylae could not have 
 " explained " the grounds of their decision. They 
 followed an insight which was born out of their 
 relation to a country and they could not do other- 
 wise. If instead of having Sparta for their loved 
 cause they had been bound into life with the 
 Founder of the Kingdom of God their whole atti- 
 tude would have altered. They would have 
 leaped to the sacrifice with the same eager joy, but 
 it would now have been a sacrifice of self to pre- 
 serve and guard the principle on which the king- 
 dom exists and grows — the principle of love, and 
 that would be as rational as the other act actually 
 was. 
 
 Sacrifice of self is a feature of all rich and pur- 
 poseful life. The moment a person cares in- 
 tensely for ideals he has started on a way of life 
 that makes great demands and yet it is also a way 
 of great joy. Nobody who knows would ever 
 prefer the way of ease and quick reward. The 
 law of the survival of the fittest throws no light 
 here. " The will to live," or " the will to power," 
 goes only a little way as an explanation of the 
 processes of life. From somewhere a loyalty to 
 
Ch. IV] THINGS BY WHICH WE LIVE 87 
 
 ends that are not of self has got into our human 
 fiber, and we cannot live without obeying that 
 loyalty to the ideal even though it cost all we have 
 and all we are. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE GREAT VENTURE 
 
 I 
 
 CONCERNING IMMORTALITY 
 
 We have heard very much of the problems con- 
 cerning prayer during these years — how long 
 they seem ! ■ — ■ since the war broke in upon our old 
 arrangements, and another problem has become 
 perhaps still more pressing — that of immortality. 
 
 The awed spirit holds its breath 
 Blown over by a wind of death. 
 
 We have been living face to face with stagger- 
 ing conditions, and we have been closer neighbors 
 to death than has ever been the case before since 
 there were men. We have been forced to ask 
 over again the immemorial questions of the human 
 race and more urgently than ever the question 
 which sooner or later every man asks of himself, 
 " Do my loved and lost still live in another sphere ; 
 shall we find each other again, and will there be a 
 real fulfillment and consummation of this incom- 
 
 88 
 
Ch. V] THE GREAT VENTURE 89 
 
 plete and fragmentary earthly career?" No 
 absolute answer can yet be given to that palpitat- 
 ing human question, though some genuine illumi- 
 nation relieves the otherwise appalling darkness. 
 For many — in fact, for multitudes — the Easter 
 message of the gospel is all that is needed. It is 
 a pillar of hope and a ground of faith. It closes 
 the issue and settles all doubt. 
 
 But in a world which has proved to be in the 
 main rationally ordered and marvelously suscept- 
 ible to scientific treatment, we should expect to 
 find in the natural order of things some sort of 
 rational evidence that the highest moral and 
 spiritual values of life are conserved. Those of 
 us who have been accustomed to knock at the doors 
 of the universe for answers to our earnest ques- 
 tions can hardly help expecting nature to respond 
 in some adequate way to this most urgent quest of 
 ours. It is this rational quest of which I propose 
 saying a few words. 
 
 There have been in the past, and there still are, 
 two quite different ways of approaching the ques- 
 tion of survival on rational grounds. We can 
 pursue the method which is usually called empiri- 
 cal, or we can follow out the implications of the 
 ethical life. The first method deals with the 
 observable facts on which belief in survival rests. 
 
go THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. V 
 
 In the primitive and rudimentary stage of the race 
 dream experiences had important influence on the 
 formation of man's ideas about the unseen world. 
 In his sleep he saw again those who had vanished 
 from his sight. His dead father appeared to 
 him, talked with him, and even joined him in the 
 chase. It was, however, a world quite different 
 from the world of his waking senses. It was not 
 a world which he could show to his neighbor, nor 
 did it have the same rigid, solid, verifiable char- 
 acteristics as did his outer world. It was a 
 ghostly world with shadelike inhabitants. It was 
 not a radiant and sunlit realm; it was dull and un- 
 lovely. But in any case most races reacting on 
 dreams, and probably on even more impressive 
 psychic experiences, arrived at a settled convic- 
 tion that life of some sort went on in some kind 
 of other world. The mythologies of the poetic 
 races are full of pictures and stories expanded out 
 of racial experiences. These psychic experiences 
 have continued through all human history, and a 
 large body of facts has slowly accumulated. In 
 recent years the automatic writing and the auto- 
 matic speaking of psychically endowed persons 
 have furnished a mass of interesting material 
 which can be dealt with systematically and scien- 
 tifically. 
 
Ch. V] THE GREAT VENTURE 91 
 
 It is too soon, however, to build any definite 
 hopes on this empirical evidence. There can be 
 no question that some of the reports which come 
 from these " sensitives " — these psychically en- 
 dowed persons — appear, to an unskeptically 
 minded reader of them, to be real communications 
 from persons in another world or, at least, in an- 
 other part of our world. This is nevertheless a 
 hasty conclusion. It may be true, but it is not the 
 only possible conclusion that can be drawn from 
 the facts. It is a mistake at this stage of our 
 knowledge to talk of " scientific " evidence of 
 survival. All that we are warranted in saying is 
 that there are many cumulative facts which may 
 eventually furnish solid empirical evidence that 
 what we call death does not end personal life. 
 But at its best the empirical approach seems to me 
 an unsatisfactory way to deal with this problem. 
 I should feel the same way about empirical tests 
 of prayer. They do not meet the case. The real 
 issue reaches deeper. We shall, of course, wel- 
 come everything which adds to our assurance, but 
 I, for one, prefer to rest my faith on other grounds 
 than these empirical ones. 
 
 Far back in the history of the race prophets ap- 
 peared who inaugurated a new way of solving 
 human problems. They discovered that man's 
 
92 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. V 
 
 life is vastly greater and richer than he usually 
 knows. There is something in him which he can- 
 not explain nor account for, something which over- 
 flows and transcends his practical, utilitarian needs 
 and requirements. He feels himself allied with a 
 greater than himself, and his thoughts range be- 
 yond all finite margins. Eternity seems to belong 
 to his nature. He cannot adjust himself to limits 
 either of time or of space. These prophets of the 
 soul's deeper nature, especially those in Greece, 
 Socrates and Plato for instance, insisted that there 
 must be a world of transcending reality which fits 
 this depth of life in us. The moral and spiritual 
 nature of man is itself prophetic of a larger realm 
 of life which corresponds with this inexhaustible 
 creative inner life. With this moral insight, im- 
 mortality took on new meaning and new value. 
 The life after death was no longer thought of as 
 a dim, shadowy, ghostlike thing, to be dreaded 
 rather than desired. It was now thought of as 
 the real life for which this life was only a prepara- 
 tory stage. Steadily this view of the great ethical 
 prophets has gained its place in the thought of 
 men, and the mythology based on dreams and 
 psychical experiences has in measure lost its hold 
 on those who think deeply. 
 
 It seems impossible to consider life — life in its 
 
Ch. V] THE GREAT VENTURE 93 
 
 highest ranges in the form of ethical and spiritual 
 personality — as a rational and significant affair 
 unless it is an endlessly unfolding thing which con- 
 serves its gains and carries them cumulatively for- 
 ward to ever-increasing issues. A universe which 
 squanders persons, who have hopes and faiths and 
 aspirations like ours, as it squanders its midges and 
 its sea-spawn cannot be an ethical universe, what- 
 ever else it may be. It must have some larger 
 sphere for us, it must guard this most precious 
 thing for which the rest of the universe seems to 
 be made. The answer to the question rests in the 
 last resort in a still deeper question. Is there a 
 Person or a Superperson at the heart of things, 
 who really cares, who is pledged to make the uni- 
 verse come out right, who wills forevermore the 
 triumph of goodness — in short, who guards and 
 guarantees the rationality and moral significance of 
 the universe? If there is such a Person, immor- 
 tality seems to me assured. If there is not — 
 well, then the whole stupendous pile of atoms is 
 11 an insane sandheap." That way madness lies. 
 It simply is not thinkable. 
 
 But from the nature of the case these supreme 
 truths of our spiritual life and of our deeper uni- 
 verse cannot be proved as we prove the facts of 
 sense or the mathematical relations of space. 
 
94 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. V 
 
 The moral and spiritual person must always go 
 out to his life-issues as Abraham went out from 
 Ur of the Chaldees, without " knowing" whither 
 he is going. The moral discipline, the spiritual 
 training of the soul, seems to demand venture, 
 risk, the will to obey the lead of vision, faith in the 
 prophetic nature of the inner self, confidence in 
 " the soul's invincible surmise." I, for one, pre- 
 fer the venture to empirical certainty. I should 
 rather risk my soul on my inner faith than to have 
 the kind of proof of survival that is available. 
 What we have is so great, so precious, so loaded 
 with prophecy of fulfillment, that I am ready to 
 join the father of those who live by faith and to 
 swing out on that last momentous voyage, not 
 knowing altogether whither I am going, but sure 
 of God and convinced that 
 
 What is excellent, as God lives, 
 Is permanent. 
 
 II 
 
 THE MIRACLE AGAIN 
 
 There are many things in this world, crowded 
 with mysteries as it is, which impress us with awe 
 and wonder. 
 
Ch. V] THE GREAT VENTURE 95 
 
 Luther, at one of the most trying and discourag- 
 ing periods of his life, wrote to a friend: 
 
 " I have recently seen two miracles. The first was 
 that, as I looked out of my window, I saw the stars 
 and the sky and the whole vault of heaven, with no pillars 
 to support it; and yet the sky did not fall, and the vault 
 remained fast. But there are some who want to see the 
 pillars and would like to clasp and feel them. And when 
 they are unable to do so they fidget and tremble as if the 
 sky would certainly fall in. . . . Again, I saw great, 
 thick clouds roll above us, so heavy that they looked like 
 great seas, and I saw no ground on which they could rest 
 nor any barrels to hold them, and yet they fell not on 
 us, but threatened us and floated on. When they had 
 passed by, the rainbow shone forth, the rainbow which 
 was the floor that held them up. It is such a weak and 
 thin little floor and roof that it was almost lost in the 
 clouds, and looked more like a ray coming through a 
 stained glass window than like a strong floor, so that it 
 was as marvelous as the weight of the clouds. It actually 
 happened that this seemingly frail shadow held up the 
 weight of water and protected us. But some people look 
 at the thickness of the cloud and the thinness of the ray, 
 and they fear and worry." 
 
 Another great man who lived more than two 
 hundred years after Luther, Immanuel Kant, used 
 to say: "Two things fill me with unutterable 
 awe, the silent stars above me and the moral law 
 within me " ; and most thoughtful persons must 
 
96 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. V 
 
 have felt this speechless awe, I am sure, as they 
 have looked up and looked within. But there is 
 one thing which fills me with profounder wonder 
 than Luther's rainbow bridge or Kant's silent stars, 
 and that is the reawakening of the world in spring- 
 time. It seems some of these mornings almost as 
 though we might hear the sons of God once more 
 shouting for joy as they behold the new miracle 
 of re-creation going on. If we were not dulled 
 by habit and made callous by seeing the miracle 
 repeated, we should look upon this new stream of 
 life with those large eyes of wonder with which 
 the first Adam saw his fresh-made world. I am 
 not surprised that men in all ages have taken this 
 rebirth of the world in spring as a parable of a 
 deeper rebirth. Long before there was a Chris- 
 tian Easter, with its symbols of flowers and eggs, 
 men celebrated the opening of the flowers and the 
 hatching of the eggs because they saw in these 
 events a gateway into a deeper mystery and were 
 touched with wonder as to whether the soul might 
 not also have its reawakening and its new career 
 of life. That Power that guides the unfolding of 
 the acorn and pushes up the oak, that Mind that 
 brings the gorgeous butterfly out of the dull 
 cocoon and raises it to its new and winged career, 
 may well know how to " swallow up mortality 
 
Ch. V] THE GREAT VENTURE 97 
 
 with life " and bring us and ours to a higher stage 
 of being. This new and greater miracle of an- 
 other life beyond does not stagger us much after 
 we have fully entered into the wonder of the 
 spring. It is no more difficult to carry a soul 
 safely over the bridge of death into the light and 
 joy of a new world than it is to make a spring 
 dandelion out of one of those strange winged seeds 
 which a child carelessly blew away last summer. 
 But here is the dandelion. It is " common " 
 enough. We hardly stop to look down into its 
 yellow face or to meditate on the wonder of its 
 arrival over the narrow bridge of that flying seed. 
 But if we could penetrate all its mysteries, could 
 know it root and all and all in all, we could see 
 through all the mysteries there are, and we should 
 find it easy to say: " I believe in the resurrection 
 from the dead, and in the life everlasting." 
 
 As far as we are able to discover, the soul pos- 
 sesses infinite capacity. A blossom may reach its 
 perfection in a day, but no one has fathomed the 
 possibilities of a human heart. Eternity is not 
 too vast for a soul to grow in, if the soul wills to 
 grow. Why, then, should such a being come and 
 learn the meaning of duty, loyalty, sympathy, 
 trust, and the other spiritual qualities, only to pass 
 as a shadow? My answer is the one Browning 
 
98 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. V 
 
 has given, that " life is just a stuff to try the soul's 
 strength on." 
 
 "If a man die, shall he live again?" Our 
 heart as well as our head seeks an answer. Know- 
 ing that such a hope is reasonable is not enough; 
 we wish to feel that it is true. Here again God 
 meets us, not only with an outward promise, or 
 through the voices of nature, but with an inward 
 conviction born of acquaintance with himself. 
 We hear the answer when we first find him, but it 
 grows as we learn to know him better. This is 
 the apostle's assurance: " I know whom I have 
 believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to 
 keep that which I have committed unto him 
 against that day." " Learn of me," said the Mas- 
 ter, " and ye shall find rest unto your souls." 
 Yes, in this experience we even cease questioning. 
 We know him and we trust. On his love we rest. 
 Why should we reckon with the grave? Our 
 Father this side shall be our Father beyond. We 
 are trusting him here ; we can trust him there. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 
 
 I 
 
 PRAYER AS AN ENERGY OF LIFE 
 
 Clement of Alexandria many centuries ago 
 thought of prayer as " a mutual and reciprocal 
 correspondence " or " inward converse with God." 
 For this great Christian teacher prayer was not a 
 solitary, one-sided act. It was a two-sided inter- 
 course, a reciprocal correspondence, a real respon- 
 sive relationship. This two-sided aspect has been 
 recognized through all the centuries as an essen- 
 tial characteristic of genuine prayer. William 
 James is expressing what most serious-minded men 
 think when he says that religion would turn out to 
 be illusory if there were no such thing as real, 
 mutual, active intercourse between the human soul 
 and God; if, as he declares, the intercourse be not 
 effective; " if it be not a give and take relation; if 
 nothing be really transacted while it lasts; if the 
 world is in no whit different for its having taken 
 
 99 
 
ioo THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 place." * In dealing for the present in this chap- 
 ter with the psychological fact that prayer is dyna- 
 mic, i. e., an interior heightening energy, I do not 
 want any reader to assume that I am surrendering 
 that other fact, equally essential to all real prayer, 
 namely, that it is a mutual, two-sided correspond- 
 ence. 
 
 It must, too, be taken for granted that prayer, 
 true effectual prayer, has a range of influence far 
 beyond the personal life of the one who prays. 
 No person is ever isolated, unrelated and alone. 
 He is bound in with the lives of a living group, 
 an inseparable member of an organic fellowship. 
 No man liveth unto himself, no man dieth unto 
 himself and no man prays resultfully for himself 
 alone. What we are and what we do flow out and 
 help to determine what others shall be and shall 
 do, and even so in the highest spiritual operations 
 and activities of the soul we contribute some part 
 toward the formation of the spiritual atmosphere 
 in which others are to live and we help to release 
 currents of spiritual energy for others than our- 
 selves. If we belong, as I believe we do, in a real 
 kingdom of God — an organic fellowship of inter- 
 related lives — prayer should be as effective a 
 force in this inter-related social world of ours as 
 
 1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 465. 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE, ioi 
 
 gravitation is in the world of matter. Personal 
 spirits experience spiritual gravitation, soul 
 reaches after soul, hearts draw toward each other. 
 We are no longer in the net of blind fate, in the 
 realm of impersonal force — we are in a love- 
 system where the aspiration of one member height- 
 ens the entire group, and the need of one — even 
 the least — draws upon the resources of the whole 
 — even the Infinite. We are in actual Divine- 
 human fellowship. 
 
 The only obstacle to effectual praying, in this 
 world of spiritual fellowship, would be individual 
 selfishness. To want to get just for one's own 
 self, to ask for something which brings loss and 
 injury to others, would be to sever one's self from 
 the source of blessings, and to lose not only the 
 thing sought, but to lose, as well, one's very self. 
 This principle is true anywhere, even in ordi- 
 nary human friendship. It is true, too, in art and 
 in music. The artist may not force some personal 
 caprice into his creation. He must make himself 
 the organ of a universal reality which is beautiful, 
 not simply for this man or that, but for man as 
 man. If there is, as I believe, an inner kingdom 
 of spirit, a kingdom of love and fellowship, then 
 it is a fact that a tiny being like one of us can 
 impress and influence the Divine Heart, and we 
 
102 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 can make our personal contribution to the Will of 
 the universe, but we can do it only by wanting what 
 everybody can share, and by seeking blessings 
 which have a universal implication. 
 
 I am dealing, it must be remembered, with the 
 dynamic aspect of prayer. Prayer releases energy 
 as certainly as the closing of an electric circuit 
 does. It heightens all human capacities. It 
 refreshes and quickens life. It unlocks reservoirs 
 of power. It opens invisible doors into new 
 storehouses of spiritual force for the person to live 
 by, and, as I believe, for others to live by as well. 
 It is effective and operative as surely as are the 
 forces of steam and gravitation. 
 
 The recent important psychological studies of 
 prayer all agree in this one point, that most per- 
 sons while engaged in earnest, sincere prayer feel 
 an inflow or invasion of greater power than they 
 were conscious of before they prayed, and Chris- 
 tians of all types and communions, of all lands and 
 of all periods, unite in bearing testimony to this 
 truth. " Energy," as William James says, 
 " which but for prayer would be bound, is by 
 prayer set free and operates." 
 
 Frederick Myers was drawing upon his own ex- 
 perience when he wrote : " Our spirits are sup- 
 ported by a perpetual indrawal of energy and the 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 103 
 
 vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing. 
 . . . Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much 
 spiritual life as possible and we must place our 
 minds in any attitude which experience shows to 
 be favorable to such indrawal. Prayer is the gen- 
 eral name for that attitude of open and earnest 
 expectancy." 
 
 There can be no question that all effective 
 dynamic prayer rises out of living faith. A person 
 cannot let himself go and pour out his soul as he 
 knocks at the great doors of the divine world un- 
 less he believes that there is a divine world that 
 will be reached by his cry of need. We hear much 
 talk in these days of the subjective character of 
 prayer, but you cannot cut the subjective aspect of 
 prayer away from the objective aspect and keep 
 the former a thing of value and power by itself 
 any more than you can cut the convex side of a 
 curve away from the concave side and keep either 
 a reality by itself alone. In order to have subjec- 
 tive results there must be live faith in an objec- 
 tive reality. A person cannot in this present 
 world of gravitation lift himself by his belt or by 
 his boot-straps, nor can he any more easily, in the 
 inner world of spiritual facts, lift himself or others 
 out of sin or sorrow or loneliness or failure or lit- 
 tleness by subjective strivings which attach to no 
 
104 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 objective support beyond the margin of his own 
 personal area. The moment the objective side 
 drops out or is assumed to be illusory, the mo- 
 ment we convince ourselves that our Great Com- 
 panion is only a dream of our own, we immediately 
 fail to get dynamic effects from our subjective 
 strivings. Brother Lawrence was right when he 
 said: " It is into the soul permeated with living 
 faith that God pours his graces and his favors 
 plenteously. Into the soul they flow like an im- 
 petuous torrent, when it finds a passage for its pent 
 up flood after being dammed back from its ordi- 
 nary course by some obstacle." 
 
 We cannot live constructively toward any end 
 of life as our operative goal or ideal until we can 
 make that goal or ideal seem real to ourselves. 
 It must not be vain or illusory if it is to hold us 
 fixed and pointed toward it. It must not seem to 
 us a will-o'-the-wisp, a mirage, if it is to control 
 us and steer us forward through the storms and 
 waterspouts of life. We build our lives by visions 
 of real goals that are worth our venture and only 
 so can we rise above the level of instinct, the dull 
 bread-and-butter life. But what is true here in 
 the field of ethics is also true in the realm of 
 prayer. We must have faith in the Beyond. We 
 need not wait until we can demonstrate the cer- 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 105 
 
 tainty of what the far-reaching tentacles of our 
 heart feel to be real, but at least we must have a 
 soul's vision of a More Than Ourselves to whom 
 we turn, on whom we rely and from whom we 
 expect what we need for ourselves and others to 
 live by. The wonderful praying of the great mys- 
 tics is due to their wonderful faith. They get 
 what they seek because they expect to get it. 
 They absolutely trust the far-flung tentacles of 
 their soul. One of our American poets who was 
 himself a mystic has well expressed this venture of 
 " the soul's filament," the flinging forth of " the 
 ductile anchor." 
 
 " A noiseless, patient spider, 
 
 I mark'd, where, on a little promontory, it stood isolated ; 
 Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, 
 It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of 
 
 itself. 
 Ever unreeling them — ever tirelessly speeding them. 
 
 " And you, O my Soul, where you stand, 
 Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, 
 Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, — seeking the 
 
 spheres to connect them ; 
 Till the bridge you will need, be form'd — till the ductile 
 
 anchor hold ; 
 Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O 
 
 my Soul." 
 
io6 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 Saint Teresa in a multitude of passages describ- 
 ing her experience of the effect of prayer always 
 ascribes the reflex power to her own consciousness 
 or feeling of the presence of God upon whom she 
 throws herself. " I could," she says, " in no wise 
 doubt, either that he was in me or that I was 
 absorbed in him." I kept full of the thought of 
 the presence of God, she says in substance. I la- 
 bored to remove every thought of bodily objects 
 and set myself to be recollected before him. I 
 feel, she continues, a very deep conviction that 
 God is with me when I pray and I see, too, that I 
 grow stronger and better thereby. 
 
 Our surface life of effort and conscious striving 
 is split up into many fragmentary aims and into 
 many conflicting activities. We are carried about 
 by shifting winds and by the drive of cross-cur- 
 rents. When we " return home," as the mystics 
 say, to our deeper self and enter into our inner 
 sanctuary we are borne along and unified by one 
 great ground-swell longing for the life that is Life. 
 We fall away from and lose our little self — our 
 selfish self — and find a deep-lying conjunct or 
 comprehensive self that is always more than we. 
 In these truest moments of prayer a man comes 
 upon that rock-bottom experience which a great 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 107 
 
 ancient soul had met when he said: "Under- 
 neath are the everlasting arms." 
 
 The unification of the usually scattered forces 
 of our inner self, the concentration of all our pow- 
 ers toward one perfect end, the focussing of the 
 soul's aspiration and loyalty upon one central real- 
 ity that is adequate for us, the surrender of our 
 own will to a holier and mightier will, produce just 
 the inner conditions that are essential for the 
 flooding in of spiritual energy, and for the release 
 of it for others who are in need of it. Everybody 
 knows what it is suddenly to lose all fears and 
 fear-thoughts that have obsessed one and to rise 
 up with courage to face the tasks that are waiting 
 to be done. We have all some time seen the shad- 
 ows flee away or we have seen them pierced by a 
 light that obliterated the shadow and left us in 
 possession of insight and a forward looking atti- 
 tude which conquered the difficulty in advance. 
 The literature of conversion is full of records of 
 men and women, beaten and defeated, suddenly 
 lifted to new levels of experience, put in reach of 
 transforming forces, flooded with transfiguring 
 light, convinced of new possibilities and becoming 
 in the strength of the experience " twice-born '' 
 persons. When I speak of " unification r and 
 
io8 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 " concentration " I do not mean that they are the 
 result of conscious effort. Quite the opposite is 
 generally the case. There is no thought of what 
 is happening to one's self in genuine prayer. The 
 worshiper is utterly absorbed with God and with 
 the joy and wonder of his Presence, and thus the 
 usual strain and tension of thought fall away as 
 they do also in the presence of an object of perfect 
 beauty or when one is listening to great music. 
 Just that cessation of conscious direction, that 
 absence of conscious effort is probably the best 
 way to secure the release of hidden energies within 
 the subconscious life. Even the physical attitude 
 of prayer, the release of all muscle strain in the 
 eyes, the momentary exclusion of the whole sensi- 
 ble universe from the field of consciousness assist 
 the worshiper to relax, to let go of time and space 
 and to break through into the region where fresh 
 currents of life are stored and circulate. Richard 
 Cabot is undoubtedly right when he says in his 
 splendid book, What Men Live By, that prayer 
 fulfills what play and art and love attempt. It 
 heightens, as those other higher attitudes and ac- 
 tivities of life do, all our forces ; it fortifies and re- 
 integrates the self, restores the depleted energies, 
 orientates us when we are lost, confused, or per- 
 plexed and it renews and heartens the soul, as sleep 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 109 
 
 does the body. Prayer is beyond question an 
 energy-releasing function of life. It is as impor- 
 tant for the health of the soul as exercise is for 
 the body or as the fresh search after truth is for 
 the mind. 
 
 One of the most interesting and valuable testi- 
 monies to the dynamic and curative character of 
 the prayer of faith is that given by Dr. Theodore 
 Hyslop, a specialist of great reputation in the 
 treatment of mental diseases. Speaking at the 
 annual meeting of the British Medical Association 
 in 1905, he said: — 
 
 " As an alienist and one whose whole life has been 
 concerned with the sufferings of the mind, I would state 
 that of all hygienic measures to counteract disturbed 
 sleep, depressed spirits, and all the miserable sequels of 
 a distressed mind, I would undoubtedly give the first 
 place to the simple habit of prayer. . . . Let there but 
 be a habit of nightly communion, not as a mendicant or 
 repeater of words more adapted to the tongue of a sage, 
 but as a humble individual who submerges or asserts his 
 individuality as an integral part of a greater whole. 
 Such a habit does more to clean the spirit and strengthen 
 the soul to overcome mere incidental emotionalism than 
 any other therapeutic agent known to me. ... I 
 believe it to be our object, as teachers and physicians, 
 to fight against all those influences which tend to produce 
 either religious intemperance or indifference, and to 
 subscribe, as best we may, to that form of religious belief, 
 
no THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 so far as we can find it practically embodied or effective, 
 which believes in ' the larger hope.' " 
 
 This is undoubtedly the case and it would not 
 be difficult to gather a very large amount of con- 
 crete testimony to the reflex power of prayer upon 
 the person praying. One of Professor James B. 
 Pratt's correspondents declares that, although he 
 is predominantly skeptical, at rare intervals he 
 " stops fighting " and " relies on assistance," and 
 he adds that at such moments he experiences 
 " something like a movement of God " toward 
 him. He feels " an immediate response." The 
 result is " immediate quieting of the nerves " and 
 the mental result is a reenforcement of courage. 
 An anonymous writer in the New York " Out- 
 look " a few years ago gave an impressive account 
 of his own personal experience. He tells how 
 again and again in moments of supreme doubt, 
 disappointment, discouragement, or unhappiness 
 a prayer uttered in faith has been followed by 
 " quick and astonishing relief." He says: 
 
 " Sometimes doubt has been transformed into confident 
 assurance, mental weakness utterly routed by strength, 
 self-distrust changed into self-confidence, fear into 
 courage, dismay into confident and brightest hope. 
 
 " These transitions have sometimes come by degrees 
 — « in the course, let us say, of an hour or two ; at other 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE in 
 
 times they have been instantaneous, flashing up in brain 
 and heart as if a powerful electric stroke had cleared the 
 air, even as a lightning flash will dispel the darkness of 
 densest midnight, or clear away grandly the murkiness of 
 sultry August debilitation. 
 
 11 These experiences have been marked in the very 
 ratio of the emergency which occasioned the utterance 
 of the prayer. Over and over again, they have come 
 with such unexpected quickness and power that in jus- 
 tice to myself I could but rush to transcribe them, that 
 in future times of distress I should have them to recur to. 
 So marked have they been at times that I could simply 
 say to myself, in a tumult of gladness, ' The age of 
 miracles has by no means passed.' They have been fol- 
 lowed often by a new outward buoyancy of spirit, even 
 in those critical hours in which outwardly there was the 
 greatest cause for a very different frame of mind. They 
 have helped me through periods of bodily sickness, coming 
 like great, glad breaths of fresh air after the smothering 
 influence of an atmosphere charged with what was nox- 
 ious." 
 
 The actual " law " by which such things happen 
 so far escapes us. We know that there are reser- 
 voirs of energy waiting to be tapped and drawn 
 upon, but for the most part we trudge our dusty 
 highway and do not unlock the hidden door. We 
 sometimes seal up the door and live on almost 
 entirely forgetful and utterly unconscious of how 
 near we are to help. " There are," as James 
 
ii2 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 forcibly says, " in every one potential forms of 
 activity that are shunted out from use. Part of 
 the imperfect vitality under which we labor can 
 thus be easily explained. One part of our mind 
 dams up — even damns up ! — the other parts." 
 But to most of us who pray the door does some- 
 times open into larger, divine life and the strength 
 floods back into us. Our judgment is clarified, 
 our power to endure " the thorn in the flesh," or 
 the crushing loss or the terrible separation is im- 
 mensely enlarged, our resistance to subtle tempta- 
 tions is backed by unexpected aid, our conquest of 
 pettiness and irritation becomes an easy matter 
 and all our more ideal traits, for the time being, 
 get their chance to come into full play. Ex- 
 hausted, gone stale, fatigued with the strain and 
 stress of standing the " weary weight of all this 
 unintelligible world " we suddenly feel " the 
 voiceless powers " of life flowing round our tired 
 soul, reinforcements arriving to augment us and 
 peace and love coming to blossom as though the 
 climate of a divine world had flooded us with its 
 spring. 
 
 " How entered, by what secret stair 
 
 I know not, knowing only He is there." 
 
 And what I have said of the inner transformation 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 113 
 
 through prayer is also true of the intercessory 
 effect of prayer. In this world of inter-related 
 lives one of us can " send his soul out " for the 
 sake of others and the far-reaching results of 
 such prayer are beyond question. 
 
 Pentecost is not a thing of the almanac. It is 
 not alone an event of antiquity in an upper room 
 in Jerusalem. It is the high-tide experience of 
 this consciousness of inrushing life and power. 
 Something like it has happened often to men who 
 were not apostles. These men " of one accord 
 in one place " pushed back a door and the flood 
 swept in — "the Holy Ghost fell upon them." 
 So, too, in all ages streams from the Beyond flow 
 in when the door is really flung open, and men 
 say even to-day that the Holy Ghost is an experi- 
 ence. 
 
 Prayer, real prayer, does " make a difference." 
 Power to live by comes through this immemorial 
 act of the soul. The discovery that we are in a 
 world of law does not alter the fact. The irre- 
 sistible evidence that the realm of nature is a realm 
 where causation holds sway need not disturb us. 
 Law and causation no more interfere with prayer 
 than they do with love or with beauty. James 
 Martineau has finely dealt with this point and 
 his words are appropriate here. He says — 
 
ii 4 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 " God's rule of action in nature we have every reason 
 to regard as unalterable; established as an inflexible and 
 faithful basis of expectation; and, for that reason, not 
 open to perpetual variation on the suggestion of occa- 
 sional moral contingencies. God, however, is infinite, 
 and the laws of nature do not exhaust his agency. There 
 is a boundless residue of disengaged faculty beyond. Be- 
 hind and amid all these punctualities of law abides, in 
 infinite remainder, the^ living and unpledged spirit. 
 Here he has made no rule but the everlasting rule of 
 holiness, and written no pledge but the pledge of in- 
 extinguishable love; hence, without violated rule, he can 
 individualize his regards; enter with gentle help; and 
 while keeping faith with the universe, knock at the gate of 
 every lonely heart." 
 
 There is no solid hindrance to prayer except 
 ourselves. We ourselves raise the barriers and 
 set up the obstacles. Still as of old the soul 
 finds what it undividedly seeks, it gets what it 
 persistently asks for, it brings open the door at 
 which it unremittingly knocks. Everywhere in 
 the universe the soul may have what it wants. 
 If it hungers and thirsts for God, it will be fed 
 with the bread of life and supplied with the wa- 
 ter that satisfies. The difficulty is not objective; 
 it is subjective. We so often do not really pray. 
 We only say over words and call it " prayer." 
 Let us instead learn to pray. 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 115 
 
 " I that still pray at morning and at eve, 
 Loving those roots that feed us from the past, 
 And prizing more than Plato things I learned 
 At that best Academe, a mother's knee, 
 Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed, 
 Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have felt 
 That perfect disenthralment which is God." 
 
 II 
 PRAYER AND REFLECTION 
 
 There are multitudes of life functions which 
 are simple enough and easy and natural, until we 
 ask how or why we do them. They go on all 
 right until reflection upsets them! I imagine the 
 bird's homing instinct would be palsied if the 
 bird reflected. 
 
 Not long ago, just at evening dusk, I heard a 
 " honk-honk " in the air almost over my head. I 
 knew at once what it meant — the wild geese fly- 
 ing by. Old memories came rushing back and 
 with the enthusiasm of a child I ran out into the 
 field to see the well-known V, with its leader at 
 the angle, wheeling south. The thin fringes of 
 ice on the northern lakes had warned them of 
 coming trouble, and obedient to instinct they had 
 started for the warmer lands. They did not know 
 the way. They never would have started if they 
 
n6 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 had " reflected " on the difficulties of finding a 
 path across fifteen states. They felt the strong 
 push of infallible instinct. They obeyed its 
 thrust and soon they were swimming on the warm 
 waters of the sunny Florida lakes ! 
 
 " The centipede was happy, quite, 
 
 Until the toad for fun 
 
 Said, ' pray, which leg comes after which? ' 
 
 This worked her mind to such a pitch 
 
 She lay distracted in a ditch, 
 
 Considering how to run." 
 
 Zeno of Elis, in the early days of reflection, 
 very successfully proved by an irresistible mathe- 
 matically-sound argument that it is impossible to 
 walk across a room. Diogenes solved the re- 
 flective dilemma by getting up and walking. Ever 
 since this simple, practical experiment the world 
 has cherished the proverb: " solvitur ambulando." 
 
 Many problems which reflection has forced 
 upon us can be solved by a bold return to concrete 
 experience and to spontaneous unanalyzed action, 
 such as occurs under sudden inspiration. Adven- 
 ture precedes knowledge in the order of our ex- 
 perience and a return to adventure often saves 
 us from the perplexities into which excessive re- 
 flection has brought us. " To trust the soul's 
 invincible surmise " and to go forward, like Abra- 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 117 
 
 ham, even without knowing the way or the coun- 
 try at the end of it, is one of the surest methods 
 of conquering intellectual difficulties. Donald 
 Hankey is emphasizing this aspect of adventure in 
 life's highest concerns when he declares that " Re- 
 ligion is betting your life that there is a God " 
 — risking neck and everything else on the high 
 faith that " God will make the heavenly period 
 perfect the earthen." " The spiritual life," as 
 Professor Coe has somewhere said, " is strongest 
 when it is most akin to habit and instinct." When 
 one takes it apart and looks at it, it is hard to 
 get it together again. 
 
 Worship is, I believe, as spontaneous and nat- 
 ural a function of the soul as is appreciation of 
 love or enjoyment of beauty. It fulfills what play 
 and art and music and love attempt. It brings 
 joy, fortification and power. Worship is the 
 joyous discovery of something very real and very 
 near, which meets all the soul's deepest needs and 
 which brings a spontaneous dedication of self to 
 what seems the Highest. It is creative, refresh- 
 ing, vivifying, quickening, dynamic, just because 
 it is correspondence with the divine, energizing, 
 recreative Spirit. William James is undoubtedly 
 right when he says that prayerful communion " ac- 
 tually exerts an influence, raises our center of en- 
 
n8 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 ergy and produces effects not attainable in other 
 ways." 
 
 Our main question, of course, is how to keep 
 the way open and previous to this immense re- 
 source. So long as religious faith is alive, ex- 
 pectant and unopposed by intellectual inhibitions, 
 times of worship are times of great joy. It is 
 an experience which brings enlargement of life, 
 spaciousness of mind, new dimension to the soul, 
 a sense of breaking through the limits and of 
 finding room for the soul; what a friend of mine 
 has called " a hole in the sky." Times of com- 
 munion with God are times when life comes to its 
 full bloom and flower. Worship is the very crown 
 of life. It is attainment. The soul for the 
 moment has arrived. It has found the Kingdom 
 of God. But our main problem here is with 
 the intellectual inhibitions which blight or kill 
 faith and so damp worship and make the way im- 
 pervious to these great resources of the soul. 
 
 Long ago St. Augustine said: " One journey- 
 eth to God not in ships, nor in chariots, nor on 
 foot; for to journey thither to God, nay even 
 to arrive there, is nothing else but to will to go ! ' 
 If that is so the difficulty is with the will. But we 
 now know that " willing " means the dominating 
 prevalence of a live idea, its power to command 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 119 
 
 attention, its impulsion and coerciveness in the oc- 
 cupancy of the focus of consciousness. Let the 
 thought of God as a personal presence once fill 
 the mind with its warmth and intimacy of reality, 
 let no rival ideas disintegrate this faith, this reign- 
 ing system in consciousness, and worship, with all 
 its constructive results, follows, as action follows 
 any idea which dominates the focus of conscious- 
 ness. Worship fails, however, as soon as the 
 thought of God ceases to be a live, dynamic idea, 
 as soon as the reality of a personal God in relation 
 with our personal selves loses its power to com- 
 mand attention — ceases to make the will propul- 
 sive. We cannot live constructively toward any 
 goal of life until we can make that goal seem real, 
 vital and important to ourselves. 
 
 In this particular field, the field of worship, 
 we inhibit our spontaneous instinctive tendencies 
 to seek communion and fellowship with God by 
 taking up reflective, intellectual theories of the 
 universe, or of God, or of self, which banish God 
 and make him unreal, remote, — no longer a 
 live dynamic idea in consciousness. The fetters 
 of the intellect become as strong as adamant, 
 and as a consequence worship becomes difficult. 
 These intellectual inhibitions are of many sorts 
 and varieties, but in the main they come as by- 
 
120 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 products of scientific conclusions or of inadequate 
 epistemology, i. e., hampering theories of knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 Science deals with the universe as though it 
 were a complete, self-sufficient reality by itself. 
 Cut apart from mind and reduced as it is to exact 
 description and causal explanation it offers no 
 scope for free events and it reveals no doors 
 through which God could come into this world of 
 law and mathematical order. Psychology, too, 
 brings no relief. It studies the mind as a con- 
 geries of describable states and as completely a 
 causal system as is the external world. Made 
 rigidly scientific it leaves scope for no realities 
 that are essential to the spiritual life of man. 
 
 Much of the current psychology tends to carry 
 the limitation of knowledge still farther. Mind, 
 according to this scientific theory, is nothing but 
 an empirical product of natural process and is 
 merely an efficient organ slowly evolved for re- 
 cording sense-experience and arranging for im- 
 mediate or remote behavior. We have no way of 
 finding God — we are products of the earth's 
 crust. The most we can do is to fool ourselves 
 with a subjective idea of our own make! The 
 fundamental mistake of all this pseudo-knowledge 
 consists in supposing that the world which science 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 121 
 
 gives us is the actual concrete world, or that 
 the mind which psychology describes is ever our 
 concrete, active, inner life with its riches of ex- 
 perience, its creative power, and its deeps and 
 heights, which no scientific category can handle. 
 Science gives us in both these fields, as it must 
 give us, an immensely reduced and transformed 
 reality, fitted to categories of description, with 
 all aspects omitted which cannot be dealt with in 
 exact, ordered and universal ways. But the grav- 
 est difficulty comes ( 1 ) from the tendency to 
 treat the fragment of a world cut apart from 
 mind, reduced to mechanism, a world of causal 
 equations, as though it were a complete whole; 
 or again (2) the tendency to set up an abstract 
 ego, " alone with its states," sundered from ac- 
 tive commerce with the environment in which it 
 lives, as though this psychic abstraction were the 
 reality of the soul. 
 
 Nature in all these schemes is treated as though 
 it were a complete system in itself which man 
 views as a spectator ab extra. This course in- 
 volves a fundamental fallacy — it produces a 
 world as unreal as the " grin without a face v 
 which Alice saw in Wonderland! It is like a 
 convex side of a curve without any concave side ! 
 The most important step back into life and into 
 
122 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VI 
 
 faith and into living worship is the recovery or 
 discovery of a spiritual conception of the universe. 
 The way out is not by an attack on science or by 
 a revolt from it, but by seeing that the real world 
 in which we live is vastly more than the mechanism 
 of matter and motion that submits to science. 
 The real world is essentially organic with mind 
 and mind with it, completing itself in man and 
 revealing its significance through him. The only 
 world we know concretely is this rich world of 
 life and purpose and beauty and truth which is 
 always a mutual fit with our minds and through 
 the inter-relation of which both are revealed. 
 There is thus no world sundered from mind and 
 there is no mind that is not bound up with a world 
 in the heart of which our consciousness is set. 
 Well, this mind of ours with its inherent relations 
 to the universe of nature, with its creative appre- 
 ciation of beauty, sublimity and purpose, with its 
 capacity to transcend the factual, and to live for 
 what ought to be, with its sense of imperfection 
 and its intimations of eternity, is not the abstract 
 psyche which we study in psychology — i.e., a 
 mere collection of states. Each finite self always 
 involves and manifests an immanent principle 
 which transcends the finite. We are plainly over- 
 finite as we are over-individual. We each pre- 
 
Ch. VI] THE SOUL'S CONVERSE 123 
 
 sent a unique focalization of a spiritual world, 
 and something of the larger whole is revealed in 
 the individual part, but full divine reality is ade- 
 quately revealed only in the complete organic 
 whole. " The open secret of the universe," as 
 Professor Pringle-Pattison has recently said, " is 
 a God who lives in the perpetual giving of him- 
 self, who shares the life of his finite creatures, 
 bearing in and with them the whole burden of 
 their finitude, their sinful wanderings and sorrows 
 and the suffering without which they cannot be 
 made perfect." In our highest moments we feel 
 the significance of the whole organic reality, and 
 we come into some sort of contact-relation with 
 the Spirit of the whole, and we feel then as a child 
 lost in a crowd feels when it finds its father. Un- 
 til we have fathomed the deeps of the soul, then, 
 have tracked its origin to this evolving dust-wreath 
 of matter, have " proved " that it is only an em- 
 pirical aggregation of states, with no power on its 
 own acts or on the world and possessed of no in- 
 ner way to God, we may well go on worshiping 
 and drawing upon sources of spiritual life. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 CHRIST'S INNER WAY TO THE 
 KINGDOM 
 
 " FROM ABOVE " 
 
 It is a favorite idea of the author of the Fourth 
 Gospel and the first epistle of John that one does 
 not come into full possession of himself nor par- 
 ticipate in an adequate way in the life of the king- 
 dom of God until he has been " twice born." 
 In the famous Nicodemus passage (John III. 3), 
 which has figured more prominently in theology 
 than almost any other passage ever written, the 
 essential word is extremely difficult to translate. 
 It is avtofov, which may mean " again," " anew," 
 or it may mean " from above." The context 
 would imply the meaning to be " again " or 
 " anew," but throughout the first epistle by the 
 same author the recurrent phrase is " born of 
 God," i. e., born from above the natural order. 
 In John I. 13 "the children of God" are de- 
 
 124 
 
Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 125 
 
 scribed as persons who are " born not of blood nor 
 of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of men, 
 but of God," i. e., they are not merely natural, 
 empirical beings, they participate in a higher order 
 of life; they are born from above. This writer, 
 in every part of his interpretation of spiritual, or 
 eternal life, takes it as settled that something from 
 beyond the man himself, as an addition of grace, 
 must " come " or be " received," before one can 
 attain the type and quality of life which Christ has 
 inaugurated. 
 
 It is plain, without the suggestion of any theo- 
 logical theory, that the bundle of egoistical in- 
 stincts and passions with which the once-born child 
 is furnished when he arrives does not " fit " him 
 for the kingdom of God, if the kingdom is to be 
 thought of as a cooperative social group-life, of 
 mutual interrelated service, whose spring and mo- 
 tive and power are love. That kind of world 
 is not built out of beings who live by self-seeking, 
 or self-regarding, impulses. From somewhere 
 something " new " must come into play, something 
 " higher " than ego-forces must emerge, if a 
 " kingdom " is ever even to dawn. We must ad- 
 mit that something higher than these self-regard- 
 ing impulses does " emerge ' in the growing 
 child. He begins at an early date in his unfolding 
 
126 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 
 
 life — long before he is consciously religious — 
 to reveal a capacity for love and to show signs of 
 self-forgetfulness, of restraint and sacrifice, and 
 of love, at least en crepuscule. And as life goes 
 on unfolding in relationship with others, the signs 
 of " other-regarding " interests and sympathies 
 multiply. There is an immense amount of unself- 
 ishness in this human world of ours; and with 
 all its evils, its positive sin, and its depravity, there 
 is much that is sublime and glorified with love 
 and tenderness. Where do these " higher " traits 
 come from? Are they "natural" or are they 
 "from above" and u of God"? 
 
 In asking this question in that form of hard 
 and fast dilemma, we are making the answer to 
 it more difficult than we need to make it. This 
 is one of those situations in which instead of choos- 
 ing " either — or," we may take " both." There 
 is surely something " natural " about the highest 
 spiritual life and there is also something transcen- 
 dent about it, something " from above," something 
 " of God," something which is most properly 
 called " grace." First let us consider the natural 
 aspect. In the synoptic gospels Christ with the 
 utmost simplicity speaks of the life of the king- 
 dom as though it were as natural as breathing. 
 He calls his followers to live free, easy, natural, 
 
Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 127 
 
 spontaneous, undisturbed lives, like that of the 
 lily or the bird, each of which corresponds, with- 
 out strain or effort, with its true environment and 
 so grows by normal, natural increments into full- 
 ness of beauty and completeness of function. He 
 says that the little child, uncalculating, trustful, 
 and natural, is the consummate type of the king- 
 dom, and that without this likeness no one can ever 
 be in the kingdom. He puts the emphasis con- 
 stantly on the part which the will plays in human 
 salvation. When asked if many are saved, his 
 significant answer is, " Strive to enter in." He 
 keeps saying that in the spiritual sphere one gets 
 what he persistently seeks and knocks for and 
 asks for. The eager, determined, importunate 
 will to have the highest is a main factor in achiev- 
 ing it. The parable of the talents, again, brings 
 out forcibly the value of cultivating, occupying, 
 expanding one's native capacities. Nothing is 
 more amazing in the immortal story of the prodi- 
 gal than the simple statement that he came to 
 himself and said, " I will arise and go to my fa- 
 ther," as though it were the most natural thing 
 to do. All the beatitudes attach to elemental, 
 common, familiar traits of human nature. There 
 is in the highest beatitude no leap from this world 
 to some other world. Each of them starts with 
 
128 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 
 
 an every-day quality of life. We do not need to 
 wait for new heavens and a new earth before we 
 begin to aspire after righteousness, or before we 
 have a sense of poverty and failure and humility, 
 or before we practice the ministry of peace and 
 reconciliation. His fine figure from an older 
 prophet, " A bruised reed will he not break, and 
 a feebly burning wick he will not snuff out," seems 
 to mean that nothing in our human lives is so 
 small, or weak, or insignificant that he despairs 
 of it, nothing but can be made a channel of use 
 and power. 
 
 But all the time we have been calling these 
 traits and qualities " natural " we have been smug- 
 gling in and implying the presence and influence of 
 something which can never be explained or defined 
 or accounted for in terms of matter, or in terms of 
 purely natural, causal sequences, such as mathe- 
 matical science deals with. Wherever unselfish, 
 uncalculating love is in evidence, something from 
 above has come in, something of God is there. 
 Wherever ideals operate in a life and control 
 lower instincts and carry the will straight against 
 a course of least resistance, something not of the 
 naturalistic order is revealed. Aristotle long ago 
 insisted that the higher stages of thought and of 
 the spiritual life cannot be explained OvpaOcv — 
 
Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 129 
 
 i. e., by outside forces, or by naturalistic processes. 
 They must have their source and origin in spirit 
 and not in matter. And psychology to-day, if it 
 were frank, would confess that brain-currents and 
 molecular vibrations give no explanation of mental 
 processes and give no clew to the real facts that 
 concern us. In the last resort there is no explana- 
 tion of any spiritual trait except in the light of 
 spirit and in terms of spiritual influence. If some- 
 thing divine appears in the unfolding life of a child 
 it is because " something from above," " some- 
 thing of God," has come, however silently and un- 
 consciously it may have come. 
 
 Once we supposed that God and man were 
 sundered and separated by a wide chasm — that 
 God was " yonder " and we, alas, " here," in an 
 undivine world. On that theory he could reach 
 us and assist us only by miraculous intervention. 
 On that supposition the natural was set sharply 
 against the supernatural, which were insulated 
 from one another. The traits of character which 
 were mediated to the child through the group-life 
 of the family, by imitation and contagion of in- 
 fluence, by impartation of ideas and ideals — all 
 this was natural. " Grace," which brought salva- 
 tion to the child, was wholly " supernatural." 
 
 It is much truer to hold that God is always here, 
 
i 3 o THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 
 
 is always imparting " grace," is always ministering 
 spiritual assistance to our lives, even in the most 
 normal processes of it and where we built no altar 
 to commemorate his presence. And where any 
 soul reveals unconsciously the marks of grace, or 
 has crossed the great divide without knowing it, or 
 bears a shining face and wists not of it, there God 
 has been working and something from above is 
 present. 
 
 But there is still something more to say. There 
 is another way to cross the great divide. Some 
 cross it and know that they are crossing it. 
 Some receive grace and recognize it as grace. 
 Some feel invasions, are aware of a higher life 
 which floods into themselves from beyond the mar- 
 gins of their personal area. They find themselves 
 met and challenged by a voice not of their own 
 lips. They are called out, as surely as the net- 
 menders were, to follow the Christ whose love 
 reaches them as a present fact. They seem to 
 pass, by his help, from death to life, from dark- 
 ness to light. Everything alters, the whole 
 world seems changed and made new. They 
 enter a new stage of existence and they seem to 
 have emerged by a new birth into a higher way 
 of living. Something of God, something from 
 above, seems to have been added to their natural 
 
Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 131 
 
 self — and so, indeed, it has been. These are 
 consciously " twice-born " souls. Are they of a 
 higher spiritual order than the souls who cross the 
 great divide and do not know it? Not necessarily 
 so. They are probably more intense, more dy- 
 namic, more convicting in their influence — but 
 not more completely saved and not, I surmise, any 
 more precious to the heavenly Father. Any way 
 that makes a soul Christlike, Godlike, is a good 
 way, and therefore is orthodox. Some souls leap 
 from one level of life to another; others go the 
 slow, spiral way up. But none goes from sin to 
 glory without God and his grace; and when any- 
 one arrives there, with the new name and the 
 shining mark on his forehead, he will be met with 
 the joyful words: "My son was dead and is 
 alive again, he was lost and is found." And that 
 is enough. 
 
 II 
 
 LIKE LITTLE CHILDREN 
 
 Christ makes " becoming like little children " a 
 condition of entering the kingdom of God. It is 
 certainly a strange and challenging statement. 
 He cannot surely mean that a child is better than 
 a man, that there is no gain in progress, that we 
 
i 3 2 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 
 
 are nearer the goal of life when we start than 
 when we end ! 
 
 It seems fairly clear as a principle that we do 
 not increase the worth of life by reverting to its 
 beginnings. It is our destiny to go forward, not 
 to turn backward. The time-series is not in any 
 case reversible. Space can be traversed in either 
 direction, but time runs only one way — onward. 
 We cannot go back if we would. Few of us, 
 however, would go back if we could. We have 
 caught the idea that life is a cumulative affair as 
 it advances. It gathers up and preserves its 
 gains. It grows richer and more expansive as it 
 goes on. Not in childhood, surely, is life truly 
 revealed. Innocence is not to be compared with 
 holiness; negative virtue is far beneath tried and 
 tested character which has faced temptation and 
 triumphed. We do not expect now to find Edens 
 and golden ages by going backward; we seek them 
 rather in the future. They are the achievements 
 of the race, not the starting-points. We have 
 come to see that we cannot get a perfect Church 
 and ideal conditions of Christianity by attempts 
 to revive or restore primitive, apostolic Christi- 
 anity. It cannot be " restored." We must go 
 on and build the ideal Church. We must advance 
 and achieve a Christianity which will spiritualize 
 
Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 133 
 
 the race and be adequate for the needs of human- 
 ity. No mere restoration of the Galilean condi- 
 tions or the Corinthian type would do it. So, too, 
 with our individual life, we cannot save it or make 
 it fit for the kingdom by a return to primitive con- 
 ditions, by a reversion to innocence, by a process 
 of emptying the gains of life. St. Paul is no 
 doubt right in declaring with satisfaction and with 
 a sense of progress: " When I became a man I 
 put away childish things." No one can ever miss 
 the fact that this great apostle is always pressing 
 forward, looking onward, not backward; leveling 
 up, not leveling down. 
 
 What, then, do the great words mean, that 
 " becoming like a child " is a condition of fitness 
 for the kingdom? In the first place, it must be 
 understood that " becoming like a child " is very 
 different from being a child. We are not asked 
 to revert to a past state; we are called upon to 
 experience a transformation which proves to be 
 a genuine advance. There are certain traits in 
 the nature of the child which can be taken up by 
 the mature person, reinterpreted through the 
 gains of experience, and relived on a far higher 
 level than was possible in actual primitive infancy. 
 Napoleon, on the island of St. Helena, might have 
 become in his spirit like a child, but even so he 
 
134 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 
 
 would have been vastly different from the inno- 
 cent child who grew up on the other island of 
 Corsica. Any childlike quality which appears in 
 a full-grown person will necessarily be reset and 
 transformed because it will be taken up into a 
 richer and more expanded consciousness than is 
 possible in the mere child. Memory, too, re- 
 floods everything with new colors, and no state 
 can ever be the same after memory comes that it 
 was before it came. 
 
 One of the beautiful things about the little 
 child is his simple, natural sense of the reality of 
 God. He seems to have a kind of homing in- 
 stinct which takes him naturally back to the Fa- 
 ther, to the great Spirit from whom he has come. 
 It is more than poetry to say that we come " from 
 God who is our home." Child-minded George 
 Macdonald has caught and expressed with genu- 
 ine insight the child's feeling of wonder, awe, 
 mystery, and divine reality : 
 
 " I am a little child and I 
 
 Am ignorant and weak; 
 I gaze into the starry sky 
 
 And then I cannot speak. 
 For all behind the starry sky, 
 
 Behind the world so broad ; 
 Behind men's hearts and souls doth lie 
 
 The infinite of God." 
 
Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 135 
 
 Some such haunting, enwrapping sense of real- 
 ity as that is a normal part of a child's experience. 
 He may lose this native trust and confidence when 
 reflection crowds out instinct. He may in later 
 life learn to question and to doubt, but once his 
 " east window of divine surprise " lay wide open 
 toward God. To get that native sense of God 
 back again, to feel the joy and wonder of untrou- 
 bled, unclouded fellowship with the Great Com- 
 panion is a tremendous gain. To stand once 
 more at the doorway of the infinite is a heavenly 
 experience. It is, however, not a "return"; it 
 is an immense advance, for it glorifies the entire 
 content of life and multiplies all the gains of the 
 long journey. 
 
 Another beautiful trait of the child is the ab- 
 sence of introspection, self-conscjousness. He is 
 in the hands of larger powers than himself and 
 his little aims of life are realized without worry 
 or fret. Great instincts, far older than himself, 
 carry him forward, he knows not how, to the ends 
 which he seeks. To become like a child would be 
 to attain the humble accuracy of instinct, to pass 
 beyond the stage of fret and worry, of painful 
 effort and reflective consciousness, and to reach 
 the aims of goodness by a spontaneous, unerring, 
 and uncalculating insight of life. The highest 
 
i 3 6 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 
 
 stage of goodness is attained when the trail of the 
 self no longer lies over our deeds, when we no 
 longer bungle them through self-consciousness, 
 when we hit the mark by a kind of second nature 
 as unstudied and unconscious as the child's instinct 
 is. But this attainment, this formed second na- 
 ture, which is as accurate as instinct, can come only- 
 through process and achievement and effort. It 
 is like a little child, but it is an advance, not a 
 return. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THE INNER ISSUE IN GETHSEMANE 
 
 The secret of the cross is kept from age, to 
 age. Sermons are preached on it. Books are 
 written about it. The church is built upon it. 
 But it remains in good part a mystery still. Its 
 meaning baffles us. It has a depth which we can- 
 not fathom. Our theologies do not explain it. 
 Our religious interpretations do not exhaust it. 
 Something always remains over, which we do not 
 succeed in putting into words or even into thoughts. 
 The cross is our most common religious symbol, 
 and yet we do not penetrate very far behind the 
 symbol. It has been interpreted more often than 
 any other Christian symbol has been, and yet we 
 
Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 137 
 
 wait for an interpretation which will satisfy us. 
 
 What we really want is the inner meaning. We 
 seek for a revelation of what was in Christ's mind 
 as he faced the issue and accepted the cross. 
 Theories about it often seem artificial and con- 
 structed to explain away an intellectual difficulty. 
 For him it was a vital fact, not a theory. He 
 went forward to the cross because he saw that it 
 was necessarily involved in the life which he was 
 living. We should need to understand his mind 
 and in some measure feel what he felt with that 
 pain and stigma and defeat close in front of him 
 and with no way around it. 
 
 " Have in you," St. Paul says, " the mind 
 which was in Christ Jesus . . . who became 
 obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross " 
 (Phil. II. 5-8). That "mind" is exactly what 
 we are seeking for. We are trying to catch the 
 secret and to find out what was in his mind as 
 he prayed in Gethsemane and walked under his 
 wooden beams to Calvary and felt the nails pierce 
 his flesh. Not a syllable is spoken which under- 
 takes to say in plain words for wayfaring men 
 what the deep experience meant. But perhaps 
 we can come close to the heart of its meaning if we 
 try to live our way into the agonizing utterances 
 which break out and reveal at least dimly what 
 
i 3 8 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 
 
 he was feeling as he went steadily on with his 
 supreme venture of love. 
 
 Mark's wonderful words are most vivid and 
 significant: "And they were on the way, going 
 up to Jerusalem; and Jesus was going on before 
 them: and they were amazed; and they that fol- 
 lowed were afraid" (Mk. X. 32). Here are 
 no words from him at all, but something new is 
 in his face which all the followers have noted. 
 They plainly see that this is not a mere stage in 
 an itinerary. It is a crisis in his resolution, a 
 turning point in his life. His mind is made up. 
 He has counted the cost. Each step forward now 
 is toward the cross and he outdistances the scared 
 disciples who timidly follow on behind him in 
 wonder and immense fear. Later on the way, 
 he asks his most intimate and inner circle of 
 friends if they can drink his cup and be baptized 
 with his baptism. They think they can endure 
 it and go through with it, though they evidently 
 had only a vague and dim idea what it meant in 
 spite of the ominous signs, for they were plainly 
 meditating on glory and triumph. He, on the 
 other hand, was altogether concerned with the 
 supreme law of the spiritual life which his whole 
 teaching and practice in Galilee had expressed and 
 illustrated: " He that loses his life, the same 
 
Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 139 
 
 shall save it." " What shall it profit a man if 
 he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? ' 
 i. e., the very thing that makes life life. If thy 
 hand or thy eye hinder thee in the pursuit of thy 
 spiritual goal, cut the one off and bore the other 
 out and fling them away. It is better to enter life 
 maimed and mutilated than to be " safe " and 
 miss it. " The Son of man came to minister and 
 to give his life for others." At no point did 
 Christ reverse popular opinion more completely 
 than in his insistence upon self-sacrifice as the 
 principle of human redemption, of spiritual deliv- 
 erance. It had been assumed too easily that the 
 Messiah was to be a world-ruler, a greater David, 
 who should break the yoke of the foreign oppres- 
 sor by his power and restore the kingdom to 
 Israel. All men were looking for a splendid and 
 irresistible king of the Jews. The consternation 
 of the disciples as the catastrophe came on and 
 the jeer of the mob — " Himself he could not 
 save " — reveal clearly how the tide of thought 
 was running. 
 
 The issue, then, in the mind of Christ is sharply 
 drawn between the popular expectation and the 
 fulfillment of the principle of redemption which 
 his own life embodied and incarnated. Geth- 
 semane is, thus, the scene of the world's greatest 
 
i 4 o THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 
 
 battle, though it is an inner battle. Two ways 
 of life, as different as light and darkness, are here 
 in conflict. If Christ shall decide to save him- 
 self from his hour, shall choose to escape from 
 the agony which attaches to redeeming love and 
 shall emerge from his struggles with his de- 
 cision made to be the kind of Messiah the people 
 want, then divine purpose, eternal love, and spir- 
 itual hopes for man will have been defeated. He 
 feels that he could call down twelve legions of 
 angels to deliver him from the cross, but that 
 way of escape would not be victory — it would be 
 a new triumph for the forces of evil. And yet the 
 bloody sweat, the groans and cries of a soul in 
 deepest agony show how real the temptation was, 
 how unspeakably hard was the lonely testing. 
 
 On the other side of the issue the case stands 
 clear. There was no way to save men from sin 
 and selfishness without the appeal of the uttermost 
 self-sacrifice, without the boundless cost of un- 
 calculating love. The only way to win men, to 
 redeem them, to lift them out of the lethargy and 
 unconcern of worldliness, or out of the black depth 
 of willful sin, is to make them see the tragic cost 
 of sin, to create in their souls a passion for God 
 and for holiness and purity of life. And only 
 one thing will do that for a man — the discovery 
 
Ch. VII] CHRIST'S INNER WAY 141 
 
 that some one understands him, appreciates his 
 condition, feels his defeat and still believes in him, 
 suffers with him and loves him, just as though he 
 deserved such grace. The way in fact to beget 
 love in the soul of a person is to begin by loving 
 the person and suffering with him and for him. 
 
 We can almost hear Christ saying in the dark 
 of the garden, as he did say in the light of 
 Pilate's palace, " For this cause was I born and 
 to this end came I into the world." To turn away 
 from that divine mission for any other goal was 
 to accomplish defeat both for himself and for 
 the race forever. Most like us he seems when 
 the torn heart cries: " Let this cup pass, if pos- 
 sible." " Save me from this hour." Most di- 
 vine he seems when he calmly says: " For this 
 very cause came I unto this hour." " Thy will be 
 done." He emerges from the crisis with the 
 cross inevitable but with the victory clearly won. 
 As at the beginning, so at the end of his ministry 
 he has met the most subtle temptation to take an 
 easier way to seeming victory and success, and 
 instead he takes the road to Golgotha and risks 
 his whole mission on the venture of suffering, 
 sacrificial love, freely, uncalculatingly poured out. 
 
 There is one more single moment when the 
 strain and agony sweep over him with insuffer- 
 
i 4 2 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VII 
 
 able, overwhelming power and force from his 
 lips the cry of anguish, " My God, my God, why 
 hast Thou forsaken me? " But it is only for a 
 moment. The great loving soul immediately 
 comes into full possession of itself and of its spir- 
 itual resources, and calmly recognizes that love 
 abides unsundered and eternal: "Into thy 
 hands, O my Father, I commit my spirit." 
 
 Here, then, is love, not that we love him, but 
 that he loved us, stood at the most critical parting 
 of the ways of life, faced the deepest issues in the 
 universe and gave himself in unswerving faith 
 that love would conquer. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 JESUS CHRIST AND THE INNER LIFE 
 
 I 
 
 IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 
 
 It is a good sign of spiritual progress that our 
 generation has become deeply, genuinely inter- 
 ested in the interior aspect of religion. We do 
 not feel as certain as Christian thinkers in other 
 epochs have felt that we can expound the entire 
 nature of God and man and the cosmos from texts 
 of Scripture. We are not optimistic in our ex- 
 pectations that we can explore all regions of the 
 universe with our logic and bridge all the dizzy 
 chasms of speculation with syllogisms. We mod- 
 estly tend to return home and to explore our own 
 inner domain. We are eager to discover the pri- 
 mary facts of our interior life and to follow out 
 the clews and implications of our own indubitable 
 experience. The laboratory method has carried 
 us so far in other fields and has enabled us to 
 speak with such coercive authority that we are 
 
 143 
 
144, THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 naturally ambitious to apply a kindred method to 
 religious life, and to find some central truths of 
 the soul which can stand all probings and all tests, 
 and which carry a similar conviction to that which 
 the demonstration of experiment carries. We 
 cannot perhaps expect to travel very far yet in 
 the religious field with the slower, surer method 
 of experiment and experience. We shall hardly 
 be able to match with our method of experience 
 those daring feats of logic which marked the great 
 epochs of theology, but we may nevertheless ac- 
 complish a few simple and essential things which 
 logic seemed always to miss. Emerson's Fable 
 of " the mountain " and " the squirrel " may be 
 appropriately applied to stand for grandly-swell- 
 ing logic on the one hand and for humble inner 
 experience on the other. 
 
 " The mountain and the squirrel 
 
 Had a quarrel, 
 
 And the former called the latter ' Little Prig ' ; 
 
 Bun replied, 
 
 ' You are doubtless very big ; 
 
 But all sorts of things and weather 
 
 Must be taken in together, 
 
 To make up a year 
 
 And a sphere. 
 
 And I think it no disgrace 
 
 To occupy my place. 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 145 
 
 If I'm not so large as you, 
 
 You are not so small as I, 
 
 And not half so spry. 
 
 I'll not deny you make 
 
 A very pretty squirrel track; 
 
 Talents differ; all is well and wisely put; 
 
 If I cannot carry forests on my back, 
 
 Neither can you crack a nut.' " 
 
 The foundation fact for this experimental way 
 is the fact of an immediate inward revelation of 
 God within the sphere of personal experience. 
 The person himself undergoing this experience 
 feels as though the Fountain of Life itself had 
 somehow burst into the rivulet of his own con- 
 sciousness and was flooding him with the elemen- 
 tal energies of a world more real than the one 
 we see. This experience, which those who have it 
 call " the experience of finding God," is extraordi- 
 narily dynamic. It is attended by a release of 
 energy, by the opening out of new dimensions of 
 life, by a greatly heightened elan of joy, by the 
 discovery of unusual power to endure hardship 
 and suffering, by an increase of insight and wis- 
 dom and by a sudden increment of love and grace. 
 There is of course no way to appreciate the full 
 value of an experience like that except to have it. 
 Like the feel of one's own hat on his head, or like 
 
146 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 the rapture of seeing the Grand Canyon, it cannot 
 be completely translated into the categories of 
 description or turned into the coinage of com- 
 municable thought. As flowers can give poets 
 thoughts that do lie too deep for tears, so, too, 
 there are events within our own souls that cannot 
 be put into the patois of any human speech. And 
 yet if these inner events are real and transforming 
 we should certainly be able to speak intelligently 
 about them as in all ages men have succeeded in 
 speaking of love and beauty and other similar 
 realities which exist only for appreciative spirits. 
 The New Testament which is the supreme source 
 for many other aspects of Christianity is also the 
 richest source of material for the study of this 
 first-hand religion; this religion of the experience 
 of God; this religion which is concerned with the 
 formation of the inner life. But the religion of 
 the New Testament is too rich and many-sided to 
 be reduced to one single type. It is profoundly 
 inward and mystical, but it is at the same time out- 
 reaching and social. It brings enlarged vision 
 and it stirs the deepest emotions, but it also moves 
 the will to action. It calls all the aspects of per- 
 sonality into full function and it is the spiritual 
 activity of the whole life of a whole man. 
 
 The gospel of Jesus everywhere puts a very 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 147 
 
 strong emphasis upon " wholeness of life," as the 
 normal result of the attitude of faith. It seems 
 certain that this was a prominent note of the primi- 
 tive teaching and a positive feature of the early 
 Christian experience. " Art thou desiring to be 
 made whole? " can be taken as a fundamental 
 question of Christ to men. " Fear not she shall 
 be made whole," is addressed not to one solitary 
 case of need; it is the message of the gospel to 
 everybody. Christ is always concerned to quiet 
 strained nerves, to allay fear, to remove preju- 
 dice and suspicion, fret and worry, strain and 
 anxiety. But he also goes farther. He regards 
 health of body and buoyancy of spirit as the true 
 normal condition of life, and he called men to a 
 way of living which produced these results. 
 Pythagoras taught the novel idea, many centuries 
 before, that the various elements of the body 
 could, through the attitude and disposition of the 
 mind, be put into such relation or balance with 
 one another that the body in its right form would 
 reveal a harmony, like that of the musical scale, 
 or even like that of the harmony of the planetary 
 spheres. It is from this theory that we get our 
 word tonic as that which puts the body into tone, 
 or harmony. 
 
 Christ naturally, spontaneously, assumes that 
 
148 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 men are to live in health and tone and efficient 
 power of life. His gospel is in this fundamental 
 sense tonic. It aims at nothing less than an inte- 
 gral wholeness of life, a harmony of outer and 
 inner self, a freedom from all physical hindrances 
 except those which are a necessary part of finite 
 and limited existence and a complete possession of 
 the potential powers of personality. That way 
 of living seems to have been the normal course 
 with him, and one of the most striking effects of 
 his relationship and fellowship with men was 
 this fundamental tonic effect upon them. He or- 
 ganized their potential powers. He liberated 
 the forces of which they had been unconscious. 
 He made them whole. He gave them health. 
 He actually produced what Clement of Alexan- 
 dria, two centuries later, called " harmonized 
 men." 
 
 The more intimately and adequately we study 
 the sayings of Jesus and the more deeply we pene- 
 trate the heart of his message, the more clearly 
 we see that the Kingdom of God which he pro- 
 claimed cannot be exhaustively conceived in po- 
 litical terms, or social terms, or economic terms, 
 or ethical terms, any more than it can be in terms 
 of eschatology. The " sermon on the mount " 
 is not truly comprehended when it is called " a 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 149 
 
 new law " or when it is treated as a collection of 
 ethical injunctions. All his sayings can, of 
 course, be taken at different levels. It is possible 
 to find what look like legalistic commands and to 
 pick out words that seem to justify a definite social 
 and economic scheme, as it is also possible to sort 
 out an eschatological strand. But as soon as one 
 begins to sound the real depths of his message 
 in sermon or parable or conversation it becomes 
 clear and plain that he is dealing primarily with 
 those things which lie at the root and basis of 
 personal religion, the fundamental disposition of 
 the soul, the elemental conditions which have to 
 do with the formation of the inner life. No 
 change of dynasty, no acts of legislation, no 
 scheme for the redistribution of property and in- 
 come, no proclamation of social panaceas, no 
 translation even from this world to another world, 
 can bring the Kingdom of which he persistently 
 speaks. It begins, and it must begin, first of all 
 as a spirit, as an attitude of soul, as an inner ex- 
 perience of God. The Kingdom of God in its 
 first intention is a certain kind of inner life — 
 " the Kingdom of God is within you." It presup- 
 poses the recognition of a higher will than our 
 own with w T hich we desire to cooperate; it implies 
 the discovery of a spiritual realm of Life which is 
 
150 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 engaged to fulfill for us the incompleteness and 
 failure of this world where we toil and suffer, and 
 it means, too, that we know already enough about 
 this higher realm of Life to say, " Abba," when it 
 surges into our souls, and to live in a joyous Fa- 
 ther-son relationship to the perfect will of the 
 deeper universe. 
 
 Every step and stage of Christ's life, every act 
 and declaration of his, gives us the impression 
 that he is in personal relationship with this deeper 
 universe. It comes out not merely in the synop- 
 tics' reports of striking auditions on momentous 
 occasions — at the baptism and transfiguration, 
 for example — when he seemed to hear the words 
 of approval, " this is my beloved son." It ap- 
 pears, again, not merely in that confident convic- 
 tion which he felt in Gethsemane that he might, 
 if he would, summon twelve legions of angels to 
 save himself from his hard path of suffering. 
 It is in the very atmosphere and color of the whole 
 gospel narrative. His consciousness, so far as we 
 can sound it through these wonderful words of 
 our accounts, always reveals the Abba-experience, 
 the Father-son relationship. The world in which 
 Christ lives is never confined to the hills and sky 
 of Palestine, to the walls and streets of Jerusalem, 
 to the policies and the armies of the Roman Em- 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 151 
 
 pire — in short, to any aggregations of outward 
 and visible realities. His world always includes 
 a realm of spiritual facts which are more certain 
 than any outward things, and the most certain fact 
 of that inward realm is the near access of the 
 Father-God who is the source and ground and sub- 
 stance of his life. His simplest words are loaded 
 with a power of life that comes and can come only 
 from experience of God. Everything he says is 
 reenforced by the vast background of experience 
 out of which it springs. We are moved as we 
 listen, not alone by the "authority" and the 
 " grace " of these sayings, but still more by the 
 interior depth of the personal life from which the 
 words come. His life floods through all his 
 words. The energy of his will and his unalter- 
 able purpose to stake the inauguration of his 
 Kingdom absolutely on the conquering power of 
 love and suffering and sacrifice give us an over- 
 mastering sense of his inward conjunction with 
 the Father who can be revealed only in this love- 
 way. His method of prayer as refreshment, re- 
 enforcement and vital correspondence, like an 
 open window, allows us to form a very clear im- 
 pression of that interior fellowship with God upon 
 which and by which he lived. Whether the 
 prayer-experience is attended by radiations of 
 
152 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 light, as at the transfiguration, or whether it is 
 marked by an agony of bloody sweat as in Geth- 
 semane; in both cases the central fact which breaks 
 through is his calm reliance on invisible forces 
 and his unfaltering assurance of intercourse and 
 communion with One who loves and cares and 
 knows and works and whose way of life repro- 
 duced in men is the Kingdom of God. 
 
 The Beatitudes of the Gospel furnish us with 
 a window, which looks in upon the possible inner 
 palace of the soul which Christ means to build 
 there. No words were ever simpler than these 
 " sayings," and yet no words were ever more pro- 
 found and wonderful. This inner palace, like 
 Aladdin's, is built out of invisible and viewless 
 material. The whole mighty thing consists of 
 nothing but qualities of character, attitudes of 
 will, traits of disposition, aspirations of heart, the 
 set and trend of inner currents. Salvation, in this 
 brief account of it, is not thought of as admission 
 to some celestial city, or arrival at some peaceful 
 Avilion of the soul, 
 
 " Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
 Nor ever wind blows loudly." 
 
 It is rather the formation of an inner self of such 
 a sort that blessedness inherently and automati- 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 153 
 
 cally attaches to it. Consciousness of insufficiency 
 and need; childlike dependence on higher wisdom; 
 trust and confidence in the love and power of 
 God; willingness to suffer wrong and to endure 
 seeming defeat rather than to take short-cuts to 
 easy success; the spirit of meekness, patience and 
 mercy; hunger and endless aspiration for fullness 
 and beauty of life; sensitiveness of heart to the 
 environing, invading Life of God, passion of soul 
 to share in the service of peace-making love and 
 to take up the burden of the world's suffering, and, 
 finally, quiet endurance of misunderstanding and 
 abuse with unstinted forgiveness of spirit — these 
 things form for Christ the stuff and material of 
 the life which is of the Kingdom and in the King- 
 dom and which has the blessedness of heaven now 
 and the potentiality of infinite expansion. 
 
 We do not discover the full richness of the 
 inner life as Christ reveals it until we take the 
 measure of it in terms of the love which he expects 
 of us. " You are to love," he says, " even as I 
 have loved you." There are no other words of 
 his quite so tremendously costly in their demands 
 of consecration upon us as these, and at the same 
 time no words which reveal such immense faith in 
 the inner possibilities of men like us. We are not 
 merely expected to do as we would be done by. 
 
154 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 However golden that rule of conduct may be, it 
 is not the full Christian measure of life. For our 
 true way of life we look, not at our own feeble 
 imaginings of what we should like done to our- 
 selves, we look at this inexhaustible inner wealth 
 of sympathy, and insight of understanding, and 
 appreciation, and tenderness, and uncalculating 
 love and readiness for the uttermost sacrifice to 
 make love effective — this is the way, and this is 
 the full measure of the length and breadth and 
 depth and height. Even this is expected of us. 
 
 One cannot too strongly emphasize the part 
 which Jesus assigns in his " sayings " to the ener- 
 getic will in the formation of the inner life. It is 
 the strenuous man, strenuous even as the con- 
 queror of cities, who takes the Kingdom by siege. 
 The soul can always have what it wants, many 
 11 sayings " tell us, but the want must be single, 
 unintermittent, unyielding, and washed clean of 
 all indecision and wavering. The man who sets 
 out on this aim at complete spiritual life, life that 
 is perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect, must 
 be ready to surrender absolutely everything that 
 threatens to hamper him in the pursuit of the 
 soul's fixed goal. It cannot be attained on any 
 fifty-fifty scheme — half of the life set upon the 
 world and half of it focussed on God and the life 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 155 
 
 rich in God. The all must be given for the all. 
 There is a fine phrase in the brief account of 
 Brother Lawrence, the Flemish quietist of the 
 seventeenth century. The passage to which I re- 
 fer says that the brotherhood noticed in this sim- 
 ple unlearned man " an extraordinary spacious- 
 ness of mind." " Spaciousness of mind," or what 
 William James called " a new dimension of life," 
 is one of the most impressive effects produced upon 
 the soul by the discovery of Christ. The handi- 
 caps and limitations that usually beset fall away, 
 
 " The heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world 
 Is lightened," 
 
 a door in the universe somewhere seems to push 
 back, and widen out the area of inner space where 
 the soul lives. It is, in some real sense, an ex- 
 perience of God and it always brings, when it 
 comes, an expansion of joy. Christ's disciples 
 obviously had this experience in high degree. It 
 is Luke who dwells upon this trait most. For 
 him, the gospel is essentially " tidings of great 
 joy." All heaven thrills with joy when a lost soul 
 is found and restored. It is like the joy of the 
 shepherd when he finds his lost sheep, or that of 
 a woman when she recovers a coin, lost in the dirt 
 
156 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 and rubbish of her oriental house, or, better still, 
 it is like the triumphant joy of a father's heart 
 when a child, lost by his own willful and stupid 
 folly, comes to himself, makes the great venture 
 of trusting his father's love and comes home. 
 The joy, however, is not merely in the heavenly 
 region — in the Father's heart — but there is a 
 joy and enlargement of soul as well in the one 
 who is " found." He knows that he was " dead " 
 and now he is " alive again " ! He was " lost " 
 and now he is " found " ! The broken alabaster 
 box is the everlasting " memorial " of an inner 
 transformation which opens out the sky, and 
 makes " new heavens and a new earth " for a poor 
 sinner when the love of Christ finds and saves her 
 from herself. The tears that washed the blessed 
 feet in the home of critical Simon were not tears 
 of hard sorrow. They were the flooding forth of 
 a new found soul that had burst its iron prison 
 and had found the sun and life and love again and 
 was saved through the creation of a redeemed 
 inner self that delivered her from the old self of 
 sin and death. 
 
 Strangest of all, Luke tells us that the disciples, 
 after they had seen the visible Christ vanish for- 
 ever from their sight, returned from Bethany 
 " with great joy." Something had happened to 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 157 
 
 them under that open sky which gave them an 
 enlarged spaciousness, a new dimension. They 
 had lost, but they had found. Some kind of 
 energy to live by had come into them and pos- 
 sessed them. Luke's narrative in The Acts con- 
 tinues the thrilling story of their liberated and en- 
 larged inner life. The great spiritual fact of 
 Pentecost was the consciousness, in this little band 
 of believers, of the upwelling, inrushing of the di- 
 vine Spirit. It was the epoch-moment when the 
 first Christian group passed over from a visible 
 Master and personal Teacher to an invisible and 
 indwelling, but not the less real, Presence. It was 
 a transforming event, not so much on account of 
 the novel tongue-speaking and the visible phe- 
 nomena, as because something dynamic and ex- 
 panding came into their souls, as has happened 
 many times since in the history of the Church, and 
 prepared them for dangers and sufferings and 
 labors in the midst of a hard and difficult world. 
 They spoke the word now with boldness ; they said 
 with faith to the mountain of obstacles in front 
 of them, " be removed and be cast into the sea, u 
 and it obeyed; they rose to a miracle-working spir-i 
 itual life and, as always in the power of this en- 
 larged area of life, they thrilled with joy, eating 
 their meals together in gladness and sharing, with 
 
158 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 inner happiness, all they had, for the sake of those 
 who lacked, while their joy culminated in a simple 
 agape, or love-meal, partaken in the exuberant 
 consciousness of fellowship with the living though 
 unseen Lord of their lives. 
 
 II 
 
 IN THE WRITINGS OF ST. PAUL 
 
 Still more wonderful was the dynamic effect of 
 the discovery of Christ upon the inner life of 
 Saul of Tarsus. It is, I think, the top miracle of 
 Christian history. It has become almost a mod- 
 ern truism that St. Paul's Christianity cannot be 
 reduced to a system of theology. The most im- 
 portant feature of it is that vital, personal, auto- 
 biographic strand of his " gospel," as he calls it, 
 which is primarily experience, " knowledge of 
 acquaintance " rather than " knowledge about." 
 There are no doctrines in his Epistles which are 
 not, first of all, flooded and saturated with a life- 
 experience, and therefore nobody ever can under- 
 stand this spiritual conqueror of the Roman Em- 
 pire who does not succeed in some degree in en- 
 tering and appreciating his rich and abundant 
 inner life. 
 
 It was St. Paul who first expressed for all Chris- 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 159 
 
 tendom the basic idea of our religion that the Per- 
 son who had been for a definite historical period a 
 visible, tangible revelation of God in the center of 
 the little Galilean group has now become for us 
 forever an invisible Life, an immanent Reality, 
 the self-giving, endlessly revealing Spirit — "The 
 Lord is the Spirit." St. Paul looks to this inward, 
 resident Spirit as the supreme dynamic for moral 
 and spiritual life. The " flesh," the stubborn 
 hindrance to all goodness, can be conquered, even 
 more than conquered, by the power of the Spirit 
 of Christ working within the man and forming in 
 him the character-fruits of Spirit. " The law of 
 sin and death," i. e., the drag and the dominion 
 of the sinful nature in us, can be completely 
 broken, and full deliverance can be won, through 
 inward cooperation with the law of the Spirit of 
 Life in Christ Jesus, as a fact within (Rom. VIII. 
 2). The central "mystery" which has been 
 brought to light by the gospel is, he insists, the 
 " mystery " of Christ in men — " Christ in you " 
 (Col. I. 27). Life, in the light of this, takes on 
 new and wonderful meaning, for it is nothing 
 short of re-living Christ — " for me to live is 
 Christ" (Phil. I. 21). 
 
 He has given us in Chapters III-V of 2 Corinth- 
 ians an extraordinary interpretation of this " new 
 
160 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 life," which is a wholly different biological stage 
 from that of the " old life," i. e., the Adam-life. 
 He contrasts it first with the life of the old legal, 
 or Mosaic, dispensation. That was imposed 
 from without upon the person. It always re- 
 mained foreign and external to him. The motive 
 was fear, fear of consequences, and the most 
 which this system could do was to create a con- 
 sciousness of failure, a conviction of sin and a 
 desperate sense of the need of higher help. The 
 glory of the new method, a far excelling glory, is 
 this, that now the creative power is a vital, per- 
 sonal Spirit working within the believer and trans- 
 forming him into a living embodiment and ex- 
 pression of the Christ-Life, so that wherever he 
 goes he is an epistle of Christ in which everybody 
 can read, clearly or dimly, the lines and the char- 
 acter of the Christ who is in him. He no longer 
 needs to point to an external law as his standard, 
 he does not find it necessary to carry a written 
 tablet as a passport of his faith. His standard, 
 his law, his ideal, his goal of life, is more or less 
 revealed in his spirit, in his deeds, in his face, in 
 his personality. As William Dell put it in the 
 seventeenth century: " The true religion of 
 Christ is written in the soul and spirit of man by 
 the Spirit of God; and the believer is the only 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 161 
 
 book in which God himself writes his New Tes- 
 tament." The process of writing " the epistle of 
 Christ," the New Testament in terms of person- 
 ality, St. Paul says, is a double process, working 
 both outwardly and inwardly. It is a transfor- 
 mation, ever increasing in glory and radiance, 
 wrought out in the life of man as he lives respon- 
 sively in the contagious presence of Christ, with 
 all veils of prejudice lifted from the soul and with 
 all the wrappings of contracting custom removed. 
 The power of unconscious imitation changes, we 
 know, even the animal into visible likeness to its 
 environment. It transmits into the inner life of 
 the mobile child the emotions and ideas, the 
 speech and the manners of the family-group. It 
 changes, too, St. Paul says, the beholder of Christ 
 into the same image as that which he beholds, 
 from glory to glory, while the Spirit of Christ 
 working invisibly within pushes like a mighty tidal 
 force toward the same end — " that Christ may be 
 made manifest in our mortal bodies." In fact, by 
 this process of the Spirit an inner man is built up 
 which can not only stand the afflictions and tribu- 
 lations of this present time, but can even defy 
 death itself. In some way, perhaps no more 
 mysterious than any other process of life, a per- 
 manent inside self — an inner man — is being 
 
162 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 woven by the Spirit which will abide when the 
 tent of the body falls away and dissolves — a cov- 
 ering so that the soul will not be " naked," a house 
 of God not made with hands, but made of the in- 
 corruptible, indissoluble material of the heavenly 
 realms of Spirit; and thus death becomes the com- 
 plete liberation of our personal selves into real 
 life — " mortality is swallowed up into life." 
 
 Now all this truth of Christianity which I have 
 sketched as briefly and compactly as possible, rests 
 for St. Paul, not upon the testimony of books, not 
 upon the transmitted tradition of the primitive 
 Galilean group. " I did not receive it," he de- 
 clares, " from men," " neither was I taught it " 
 (Gal. I. 12). It came to him as " revelation." 
 It was a thing primarily of experience. His en- 
 tire eternal hope rests upon " the earnest, or fore- 
 taste, of the Spirit " (2 Cor. V. 5). 
 
 The Stoic conception of God as Soul or Spirit 
 of the Universe may unconsciously have influenced 
 him. So, too, the experiences and practices of 
 the mystery-religions may have had their sugges- 
 tive influence upon him. But after all, the thing 
 that counted most was his own undoubted personal 
 experience of the invasion of God, the insurging 
 of a divine Spirit which he identified with that 
 Life that was personalized in Jesus Christ. 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 163 
 
 " God who said let there be light," he tells us, in 
 his personal account of the " new creation," " has 
 shined into our hearts to give the light of the 
 knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
 Jesus Christ" (2 Cor. IV. 6) ; or, again, " It is 
 no longer / that live but Christ liveth in me " 
 (Gal. II. 20). 
 
 His whole system of ethical life grows out of 
 the " new creation," produced within by the Spirit 
 of Christ in the inner man. Evil is to be over- 
 come by the inner forces of a triumphant good- 
 ness (Rom. XII. 21). Love, as the highest 
 "gift," is formed within by the work of the Spirit 
 and becomes the creative power not only of a new 
 individual but of a new society as well. It over- 
 tops tongues and miracles, it surpasses prophecy 
 and mysteries, it outdistances even faith and 
 knowledge. It is the very inner substance of 
 " the new world " which Christ is building out of 
 men. Being rooted and grounded in love, Chris- 
 tian believers can comprehend together the 
 breadth and length and depth and height and 
 know the love of Christ which passes knowledge 
 and be filled with all the fullness of God ( 1 Cor. 
 XIII. andEph. IV. 17-19)- 
 
 It is, again, with St. Paul as with the Galilean 
 group, an experience which brings expansion in 
 
164 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 every direction. The spaciousness of mind which 
 came to this tent-maker, when Christ came into 
 him, has no adequate parallel. His soul burst 
 out into new dimensions. He lived ever after 
 under a vastly opened sky. He became so tri- 
 umphantly radiant and joyous that neither beasts 
 at Ephesus nor Judaizers in Jerusalem nor dun- 
 geons in Nero's Rome could hide the rainbow 
 which overarched his life. " I can do all things 
 through Christ, my strengthener "(Phil. IV. 13). 
 " God always causeth us to triumph in Christ " 
 (2 Cor. II. 14). " Rejoice always and again re- 
 joice " (Phil. IV. 4). " All things work together 
 toward good," and " The whole creation is wait- 
 ing for the unveiling of sons of God" (Rom. 
 VIII. 19 and 28). This is Paul's iEgean gos- 
 pel, the gospel as it was interpreted in the cities 
 around the shores of the iEgean Sea, and finally, 
 a half century later, this truth was raised to its 
 full glory in the fourth Gospel, which is also 
 ^Egean. It is once morenhe gospel of the Spirit. 
 
 Ill 
 
 IN THE WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN 
 
 This gospel, like that of Paul's, rests upon the 
 central faith that God is an essentially self-reveal- 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 165 
 
 ing Being, flooding out as Light, coming into per- 
 sonal relation with us as Spirit, bringing into play 
 new vital forces as Life and offering us the su- 
 preme moral dynamic as Love. Here in this cul- 
 minating message of the New Testament the en- 
 tire purpose of the incarnation is thought of as 
 increase and expansion of Life: "I am come 
 that men might have life and have it in abundant 
 measure" (John X. 10). Here the synoptic 
 concept of the Kingdom gives place to a new goal 
 of lif e — a kind of life in its nature inexhaustible, 
 divine in its origin and endlessly expansive in its 
 possibilities. This is now called eternal life. It 
 does not refer to a far away place or to a remote 
 age. It is a quality of life beginning here and 
 now, a way of living for any world. It comes 
 into the soul from above. It is " of God." It 
 has a divine origin. It is like another " birth ' 
 that inaugurates life on a totally new level, as dif- 
 ferent from Adam-life as that is from plant life. 
 But it forever attaches to the soul's response to 
 Christ. It is bound up with the attitude of faith: 
 " As many as received him to them gave he 
 power to become sons of God, even to them that 
 believe on his name " (John I. 12). 
 
 This, again, is not theory; it is not theology. 
 It is experience. Whoever "John" was — and 
 
1 66 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 I presume we shall never solve the mystery — he 
 had seen with his eyes, had heard with his ears, 
 and had handled with his hands the Word of Life. 
 Either outwardly or inwardly he had lain " breast 
 to breast with God." " Of his fullness " he had 
 " received " and " grace upon grace." His own 
 life had " received " incomes from beyond the 
 margin of himself and had leaped to the new level. 
 Eternal life was already a fact and no more 
 needed proving than the iEgean sunshine did. 
 " He that believeth is already begotten of God." 
 " Faith is the victory." " He that believeth hath 
 eternal life." " He that believeth hath the wit- 
 ness in himself." 
 
 Salvation, in the Johannine interpretation, is 
 the realization of a divine-human life. " To be 
 saved " means " to be of God." It is not merely 
 a heightened natural life; not a life that has be- 
 come refined and improved by the weeding away 
 of the coarse and gross qualities. It is rather 
 conceived as an inward, spiritual process, moving 
 in two directions; God imparting himself, and 
 man appropriating him. The discovery of God, 
 or better our consciousness that he has come to us 
 and is giving his life to us, is our opportunity of 
 " birth," and the conscious opening of our life 
 to his life fj the birth. In a natural birth there 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 167 
 
 is no choosing, no willing. We are pushed into 
 life. But no spiritual step can be of that sort. 
 A spiritual " birth " involves a choice. There 
 must be a voluntary opening of the life to God. 
 The human self does not and cannot realize all it 
 means. He knows at the moment of his birth- 
 choice hardly more of the potential riches of the 
 spiritual life in God than the new-born child knows 
 of the significance and depth of mother-love when 
 he smiles his first smile back in response to her 
 joyous face bent over him. But both have passed 
 a crisis in which there has been the hatching of 
 a new self, capable now of unlimited expansion. 
 It would be impossible from the nature of the case, 
 to describe the " birth from above," for it is not 
 a describable event. No free choice in a human 
 life can be described. The things that can be 
 described belong to an organized natural system, 
 and we need not look there for the free or the 
 spiritual. They simply cannot be there. They 
 are " events " that can be known only as inward, 
 private experiences, to be told only in symbol, 
 or suggested in typical language. " The wind 
 bloweth where it listeth," " so is every one born 
 of the Spirit." This symbol of the wind is sig- 
 nificant, for the wind is peculiarly that which is 
 free and indescribable, and when the words were 
 
1 68 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 used the wind was supposed to be of all physical 
 things most free and unpredictable. 
 
 His own figure of " the Door " is doubly sig- 
 nificant. It is a door that swings both ways. 
 Through it God comes to men; through it 
 men go to God. John's " Way " to the divine 
 life, his method of a divine-human life, cannot be 
 clearly grasped unless we first realize that for 
 him Christ is God humanly manifested, a Person 
 in whom Divine Life expressed itself. Christ 
 makes real the supreme fact that Divinity and 
 humanity belong together, and he shows them 
 together, not in a " double personality " but in a 
 single harmonious self-conscious life. The ques- 
 tion of human salvation on this level is merely 
 the question of partaking of Christ and so of 
 God. There is manifestly a " divine giving," 
 but there can be no effectual salvation, no spir- 
 itually new nature until there is a " human tak- 
 ing." It involves no loss of personality, no aban- 
 donment of selfhood; that is to say, the self is not 
 merged into a nameless absolute, " fusing all the 
 skirts of self," nor does a foreign will invade one's 
 domain of inner life. Personality remains, but it 
 is a personality conscious of its divine environ- 
 ment, conscious that its life is in God, and a per- 
 sonality that chooses to will the divine will. It 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 169 
 
 is as though there were a conscious Ocean with 
 conscious inlets opening out of it. The inlet may 
 have its defined self-life, but it may open its sea- 
 side to the Ocean with its infinite currents. The 
 fresh water of the land may flow out toward the 
 deep sea and the tides of a measureless water may 
 sweep in to sweeten this shallow inlet. The inlet 
 is in the Ocean and the Ocean is in the inlet ! But 
 one is blundering when he attempts to illustrate 
 by physical things a spiritual condition. It can 
 be done only in parabolic fashion so that a spir- 
 itual insight catches the suggestion. 
 
 This method has been followed, in a most pro- 
 found way, in the Vine-passage (John XV. 1-10). 
 The illustration points first of all to a necessity 
 for a vital relationship between Christ and the 
 individual. The branch is a branch only because 
 it is in the vine. It is not merely in a close ap- 
 proximation to the vine-stock. Its life is in the 
 vine. It shares the vine-life. They are, in short, 
 not two things but one. The vine is a vine be- 
 cause it has branches, and the branches are 
 branches because they are in a vine. The same 
 sap is in them all. Their life is a common life. 
 Branch and vine are organic to each other. In- 
 corporation is here made the condition of spiritual 
 living, and the condition as well of the manifesta- 
 
170 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 tion of the fruits of the spiritual life. But the 
 figure carries us far beyond the mere fact of a 
 vital union between solitary individuals and the 
 Divine Life-source. It takes us over into an or- 
 ganic spiritual society, which is the ultimate goal 
 of the divine-human life both for Paul and John. 
 This organic society is implicated in the very na- 
 ture of the spiritual life as it is presented in the 
 Fourth Gospel. It is a life of giving and receiv- 
 ing, a life of inter-relation, a life of incorporation, 
 so that finally the believer partakes of God and 
 is himself in God. But the moment there are two 
 such believers the two lives have immediate spir- 
 itual relationship; they are two branches in the 
 same vine. We slide, in the original narrative, 
 almost unconsciously out of the figurative lan- 
 guage into the direct " commandment," " that ye 
 love one another as I have loved you." Love 
 here and everywhere is the realized union of spir- 
 itual beings in an organic society. The two com- 
 mandments are after all only one: "abide in 
 Christ," and " love." By doing either, one does 
 both. 
 
 But the very heart of the teaching on the divine- 
 human organic society is reached in Christ's 
 prayer (John XVII). One may note how far 
 he has traveled beyond the selfish and competitive 
 
Ch. VIII] THE INNER LIFE 171 
 
 basis of human society in the words: " all mine 
 are thine, and thine are mine " (vs. 10) . But the 
 sacred refrain of the prayer is, " that they all may 
 be one." The oneness here sought is made defi- 
 nite in character by the words, " even as we are 
 one." There could be no more definite statement 
 than this that Christ, as John reports him, out- 
 lines for his followers a divine-human life like his 
 own. "I in them, thou in me" — that is the 
 ultimate spiritual attainment for an individual; 
 but the prayer draws the wider results which, from 
 the nature of the case, flow out of such an attain- 
 ment, viz., " that they may be made perfect in 
 one " (vs. 23) . This is the Divine event to which 
 the entire Christ-revelation moves. 
 
 Dante, at the summit of his celestial journey, 
 sees the saints of all centuries, as the petals of a 
 mighty rose, forming one consummate flower with 
 God himself for center. Nothing could better 
 express the truth of the cooperative, organic spir- 
 itual life. It is union of differentiated selves, and 
 a differentiation in realized unity, and it is a union 
 which is formed by a divine life-relationship — 
 " I in them; thou in me; one in us." 
 
 This chapter deals only with one short period 
 of Christian life. If it were possible to review 
 other periods of high-tide experience, we should 
 
172 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. VIII 
 
 find similar results — expansion of personality, re- 
 lease of energy, heightened joy, increased spa- 
 ciousness of mind, intensified love and new march- 
 ing power. It turns out always that inner life 
 cannot be severed from outer life. There can be 
 no great interior life, with its deeps and heights, 
 without a losing of self in the tasks of a needy 
 human world, and there can be no great human 
 service which does not flow out of an inner life 
 that has Alpine heights and deeps to it. Christ 
 ministers to both the outer and the inner, because 
 he is King of a Kingdom in which both the indi- 
 vidual and the social group are essential elements 
 and without the perfection of both factors neither 
 one can reach its goal. 
 
 It is profoundly true, as the aged Simeon finely 
 foresaw, that in him " the thoughts of many 
 hearts " have been revealed. He of a truth 
 knew what was in man! He opens our inner 
 lives and discovers them to ourselves, and he is 
 the dynamic through which we can become an ef- 
 fective creative force in the making of the world 
 that is to be. 
 
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