RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 LEANOR HARRIS ROWLAND 
 
 
THE EIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
THE EIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 BY 
 
 ELEANOR HARRIS ROWLAND, Pn.D. 
 
 INSTRUCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY 
 IN MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 re$ Cambridge 
 1909 
 

 COPYRIGHT, IQOQ, BY ELEANOR HARRIS ROWLAND 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published September IQOQ 
 
TO MY FATHER 
 LYMAN SIBLEY ROWLAND, D.D. 
 
 TO WHOSE CRITICISM AND APPROVAL 
 
 I WOULD SO GLADLY SUBMIT 
 
 THIS BOOK 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 I. THE NECESSITY FOR A BELIEF ... 1 
 
 II. DOES GOD EXIST ? 16 
 
 III. THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN . . 56 
 
 IV. THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST .... 105 
 V. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 140 
 
 VI. PRAYER 169 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 IN these days of many books, the appearance 
 of a new volume seems to demand from its 
 author a justification of his right to foist 
 more print on an already over-burdened public. 
 This explanation is the more necessary, if his 
 book treats of subjects in a field which is not 
 his own ; for specialized knowledge has come 
 to be the one requisite of all serious authorship; 
 and in order to put some brakes on too ready 
 pens, we demand that every man shall stick to 
 his trade. Yet with all this, there exists a cer- 
 tain reverence for facts, whether their ex- 
 ploiter has run across them by chance or by 
 intention. An astronomer has the right to 
 make by-observations on the flights of birds, 
 even though his telescope be pointed at the 
 moon ; nothing need prevent a man from ob- 
 serving plant heredity even though his pro- 
 fession be that of a cloistered monk ; and if a 
 teacher of psychology has happened upon some 
 religious facts may he not express them, 
 granted that they are facts ? 
 
 My profession is one that naturally gives 
 
x INTRODUCTION 
 
 rise to questions, and its members are ex- 
 pected to give answers on subjects and in 
 terms that scarcely lie within the field of their 
 special knowledge. It is also true, that among 
 the thinking public of America, philosophical 
 problems present themselves, as a rule, in a re- 
 ligious guise, and that, when any one asks of a 
 philosophically minded person the solution of 
 such a problem, he wants an answer in his own 
 terms, not in a vocabulary to which he is not 
 used, and which either confuses or chills him 
 by its strangeness. 
 
 The facts, then, are these. I have happened to 
 engage in discussion with some twenty persons, 
 whose minds were more or less at sea in re- 
 ligious matters ; and while their starting-points 
 were different, their difficulties fell into some- 
 what well-defined types. The method which 
 I suggested for answering certain of these 
 questions was an apparent help in enough 
 cases to justify me in thinking it could stand 
 the test of a wider audience. To any criticism 
 of the book (and there may be many) I can 
 always reply : It has answered the questions 
 of a dozen people. I claim for it nothing 
 more. 
 
 There are four types of doubter to which 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 I am accustomed. The first is the ordinary 
 student of college grade who wishes to believe 
 in religious truth, but is troubled by the ne- 
 cessary readjustment of his old beliefs. The 
 second is the professional thinker who is es- 
 pecially trained in philosophical thought and 
 language, and who, if he has any prejudice, 
 is likely to have it rather against the ordinary 
 formulas of religion than for them. These 
 two classes share, however, certain respect 
 for authority, the one for the orthodox reli- 
 gion, the other for recognized philosophical 
 systems ; and they have a background of ac- 
 quaintance with standard questions and an- 
 swers. The third type is the business man, 
 who is untrained in school thinking, but who 
 possesses a large share of the logic of com- 
 merce, and who recognizes the social and civic 
 importance of religious institutions. He is apt 
 to feel an interest in religious matters, if for 
 no other reason, because of his church-going 
 friends, and because as a citizen he is called 
 upon to support parish expenses. He sees that 
 religion is a powerful motive with many 
 people, and would like to know what it is all 
 about. He is curious and conscientious, but he 
 feels that the time for any emotional expres- 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 sion is past for him, and since sermons do not 
 appeal to his common sense, he leaves them to 
 his family, and only airs his doubts and opin- 
 ions when he is sure that he can do so without 
 hurting feelings which he respects but does not 
 understand. Lastly, there is the man I class 
 broadly as "heathen," because he frankly 
 considers himself in that light! So far as 
 knowledge of creeds, respect for authority, 
 reverence for any conceivable thing, or care 
 for his own or other souls is concerned, he can 
 be classed un der no other head. Without pre j u- 
 dice for or against any belief, but taking a 
 lively interest in the discussion of all of them, 
 he is ready to embrace brahminism or faith- 
 healing with equal blitheness. In a certain 
 sense he is the most impartial thinker of any, 
 being equally disposed toward any creed or 
 none ; and he possesses a certain honesty and 
 good nature, which represent practically the 
 only virtues for which he has a shadow of re- 
 spect. 
 
 While I am more familiar with the first two 
 classes in point of numbers, my discussions 
 with a few of the latter were so much more 
 thorough (since they took nothing for 
 granted), that I feel that as examples they 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii , 
 
 have a value in intensiveness which they lack 
 in extent. 
 
 That there are many other classes of people 
 who grope for religious light, and demand it 
 in a more emotional form, is doubtless true. 
 They would be untouched by this sort of dis- 
 cussion. But I can only repeat that, with a 
 certain number of people in private conversa- 
 tion, the same questions and the same answers 
 have developed naturally. Their questions all 
 imply an initial interest in religion from what- 
 ever motive, and a demand for a rational belief, 
 and for fearlessness in its statement, which to 
 others might be disconcerting. 
 
 o o 
 
 It has seemed to me that religion, to be of 
 real use in a modern world, should be capable 
 of experimental treatment, and of unfettered 
 discussion, which for the sake of a more com- 
 plete final belief takes for the time being no- 
 thing for granted, and holds nothing sacred. 
 The reverential attitude which is natural and 
 proper for certain types of believers is un- 
 natural and artificial for a large majority of 
 the world, and this other class demands a 
 meeting on its own ground, and a calm reason 
 given in its own terms, before it will listen 
 further. 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 This is said to forestall the possible com- 
 ment, that great truths are handled in the fol- 
 lowing pages with a briskness that is not in 
 harmony with their significance. But it has 
 always been my observation, that a great 
 truth, like a great man, cannot be made 
 mean by the cut of its clothes. The atmos- 
 phere of these discussions is the one in which 
 my questioners found it easiest to move ; I 
 give it as they gave it to me, and hasten to 
 assure my reader that their attitude, while al- 
 ways critical and often humorous, was never 
 flippant, and was prompted always by an hon- 
 est desire for the truth. 
 
 There will probably be some in my audience 
 who will recognize in the following discus- 
 sions recastings of old arguments, which 
 would seem to demand some mention of their 
 original voicer. The book, in fact, shows the 
 influence of so many thinkers, past and pres- 
 ent, that any indication of sources would be 
 impossible. The author often does not know 
 whether she is plagiarizing or not, so entirely 
 have certain habits of thought become her 
 
 O 
 
 own, and she acknowledges herself a debtor 
 to any thinking person who has crossed her 
 path ! 
 
INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 Any to whom these discussions seem un- 
 necessary must not read the book. Those to 
 whom no questions occur can afford to leave 
 them unanswered ; but those minds haunted 
 by an unresting criticism of the world they 
 live in have no choice but to question. 
 
 E. H. R. 
 
 September, 1909. 
 
I > J 
 
 . 
 
 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 THE NECESSITY FOR A BELIEF 
 
 THERE must always be a common starting-point 
 for fellow travelers, no matter how far afield 
 their several journeys may end, some mutual 
 solid spot of ground, however airy the subse- 
 quent flight ; and on this meeting-place we 
 must agree, if we are to understand one an- 
 other. 
 
 To be as thorough as possible, then, let us 
 begin by doubting every shred of religious be- 
 lief. Some of us, perhaps, do not really find 
 ourselves in such an extremity; on the other 
 hand, many of us do, and in order to start to- 
 gether we must try to strip ourselves of every 
 creed, and face the situation of one who not 
 only doubts, but sincerely disbelieves every re- 
 ligious tenet with which he is acquainted. 
 
 If we have found difficulties with religion, 
 if we can live easily without it, why not throw 
 it overboard at once, and live a quiet life with- 
 out ? This is the method we employ with other 
 
2 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 outgrown ideas. We believed in Santa Glaus, 
 we had difficulties in making him square with 
 the rest of experience, so we abandoned him 
 altogether. We had primitive notions of various 
 sciences, which we outgrew without a pang, 
 and have not felt the slightest responsibility 
 toward them since. Why, then, should we not 
 take the same attitude toward religious truth? 
 
 o 
 
 If we find a belief in God, in immortality, in 
 Christ, in prayer, difficult and irrational, what 
 possible compunction need we have in drop- 
 ping the subject forever? 
 
 Surely this question cannot be answered by 
 saying that we owe it to God to believe in Him, 
 because as yet we do not believe that He exists. 
 The commands of the Bible are without weight, 
 since we have no belief in its authority; and 
 that we are adjured to believe by certain de- 
 votees need have no more weight than any 
 other unjustified demand. Why, then, do we 
 concern ourselves at all in the matter? If 
 there were not some vitality in these questions, 
 they would have died a natural death long ago ; 
 and while we maintain our right not to be in- 
 terested in the subject, the fact remains that 
 we are interesting ourselves with it, at this 
 very moment ; and why are we doing it ? 
 
THE NECESSITY FOR A BELIEF 3 
 
 Probably the reasons why we have not 
 dropped our belief in religion without a strug- 
 gle, or the reasons why, though we are without 
 belief, religion still possesses a certain interest 
 for us in spite of its irrationality, are some- 
 what similar. One reason is that, in spite of in- 
 dividual differences in our training and tem- 
 perament, religious questions are so interwoven 
 with our whole social life that an absolute ignor- 
 ing of them is impossible. Every Sunday we 
 see the astonishing spectacle of crowds of peo- 
 ple going to church, addressing prayers to an 
 unseen Presence, and taking upon themselves 
 the expounding of his character. Public cere- 
 monies are opened with prayer, it is considered 
 fitting to christen children with prayer, and we 
 feel a poetry in this exercise for the old, as 
 well. Moreover, since constant decisions must 
 be made between two courses, one of which we 
 call right, the other wrong, we are obliged to 
 ask ourselves whether the distinction is a valid 
 one, and whether we are not fools for our 
 pains, if we sacrifice an advantage to an ideal 
 which we cannot defend. Or if we call our- 
 selves outside the pale of all this religious and 
 moral activity, the very fact that we do so 
 constantly drives home the fact that we are 
 
4 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 in some important respect different from the 
 rest of the world, and we wonder if they can 
 explain their position as well as we explain 
 ours. Further than all this, when we outgrow 
 the Santa Glaus superstition and childish scien- 
 tific notions, we feel no regrets, because we 
 have replaced them by something broader and 
 more satisfying, and we can afford to smile at 
 them in the light of a more extensive know- 
 ledge. But if we have lost our religious belief, 
 nothing entirely takes its place. Philosophy 
 is frankly unable to supply a substitute. Like 
 science it simply leaves the way open for a man 
 to accept certain views if he chooses, and does 
 not pretend to supply the vigorous belief in 
 unseen things that religion holds as its special 
 trust. If this indifferent state of mind is wholly 
 satisfying to a man in regard to the matter; 
 if he is content to be out of it and allow these 
 religious questions to remain unanswered, what 
 shall we say? As a free being, he has the right 
 to choose what he will accept and what he will 
 ignore, but as a thinking being he must do it 
 with his eyes open. He must not suppose that 
 his ignoring a religious belief is a proof of its 
 falsity, any more than the reiterations of a be- 
 liever are proofs of its truth. There were three 
 
THE NECESSITY FOR A BELIEF 5 
 
 simple and apparently obvious Laws of Thought 
 expounded by Aristotle, the third of which is 
 called the " Law of Excluded Middle." The 
 substance of this axiom is " A thing must either 
 be or not be "; and while its statement seems 
 obvious to the point of flatness, we ignore its 
 truth during a large part of our lives. This 
 rule means simply that in the case of two contra- 
 dictory statements, one or the other must be 
 true. There are but two alternatives to face, 
 with any belief- -religious or otherwise: 
 either it is true, or it is not true; there is no 
 middle ground. 
 
 Therefore a logical man who abandons one 
 
 o 
 
 side of the controversy because it is not sup- 
 ported by facts, must not remain on the other 
 unless that is adequately proved ; but at the 
 same time he cannot avoid being on one side 
 or the other. The difficulty here arises, that the 
 contradictory proposition may be as unproved 
 as the first, and yet logically one or the other 
 must be true, a third possibility is excluded. 
 In any such situation as this, if the second 
 proposition can be satisfactorily proved, the 
 doubter finds rest and goes no further; but 
 the fact of the matter is, that belief in unbelief 
 is as difficult to support as belief in religious 
 
6 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 truths, and the logical man, who demands a 
 reason, is thereby tossed back and forth on the 
 horns of the dilemma until he lands in the an- 
 nihilation of utter skepticism toward both sides. 
 If it were possible, one might leave him here in 
 peace. But these questions as a rule only stay 
 in the dark for a season, to return again ; while 
 if they are dulled forever, the resulting calm 
 is as irrational and as unjustified by logic as 
 the wildest superstition. It is, indeed, the super- 
 stition of unproved disbelief. 
 
 We will count out of our audience, then, 
 the religious enthusiast and the unbelieving 
 enthusiast, who demand no reasons, and will 
 consider the case of those who are still asking 
 for proof of either position. In my experience, 
 both sides are usually in a similarly weak situa- 
 tion logically. The ordinary man is not compre- 
 hensively logical, be he religious or otherwise ; 
 most of us are subject to fallacy, and if our 
 destiny depended on our ability to give an 
 accurate statement of our views about it, a 
 large majority of us would be in a sad case. 
 But granting this human tendency to error, 
 which side can give the most convincing argu- 
 ment ? If neither side is convincing, what is 
 the next thing to be done ? 
 
THE NECESSITY FOR A BELIEF 7 
 
 The obvious answer seems to be, if neither 
 belief nor unbelief can support itself by proof, 
 hold your judgment in suspense, and do not 
 act in the matter until you get more light. 
 This is our way of treating other rival theories. 
 Two or more hypotheses may be stated in a 
 text-book, and the student is advised not to 
 commit himself absolutely to either. This is 
 quite admissible in the case of theories of 
 geological formation, of color vision, or of so- 
 cial questions where one is not required to act 
 on the matter immediately. But the peculiarity 
 of religious beliefs is that they demand action 
 at once, one way or the other. While you are 
 waiting for further proof in this debate, either 
 you are praying, or you are not ; you are accept- 
 ing a responsibility to a Higher Being, or you 
 are not ; you are teaching your children reli- 
 gious truth, or you are not. In other words, 
 the Law of Excluded Middle seems to hold as 
 well in action as in thought, and however long 
 a time you may take to make up your rational 
 conclusions, your active life waits not for an 
 answer, but is proceeding on one hypothesis 
 or the other. It is, then, quite obvious that 
 however the cautious thinker may hope to hold 
 suspended judgment in his life of reason, his 
 
8 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 life of action in the mean time is proceeding 
 as if he believed one way or the other. 
 
 Perhaps this last statement is not strictly 
 true in life as we find it. The usual life of a 
 man in this position is apt to be colored by 
 both beliefs. At one moment he acts as if he 
 believed, and is perhaps shamefaced, knowing 
 that he cannot justify it ; while again he re- 
 stores the balance by actions proceeding from 
 the opposite conviction. But this shifting of 
 motive power is as illogical as any, and is a 
 damper to any sort of vigorous output. The 
 situation is like that of a child who cannot de- 
 cide whether he wants to go walking with his 
 father or with his mother, and runs back and 
 forth from one to the other, until at last he falls 
 to crying halfway between them. He may not 
 really love his father better than his mother, 
 but for the time being he must prefer one of 
 them, if he wants to go walking ! Now we, as 
 living human beings, are obliged " to go walk- 
 ing" somewhere, and the question is whether 
 it is not better to walk in a given direction 
 with one opinion or the other, than to take 
 our promenade between them, turning our 
 back one moment on what we had embraced 
 the moment previous. Granting, then, that we 
 
THE NECESSITY FOR A BELIEF 9 
 
 want to commit ourselves to one or the other 
 side entirely, and not halt between two opin- 
 ions, which is the safer side to use as an act- 
 ing hypothesis until we have proved our posi- 
 tion? It will take most of us some time to 
 answer the difficulties on either side ; and since 
 we must act in the mean time, which is more 
 likely to give us satisfaction and least likely 
 to get us into trouble ? " If the trumpet give 
 an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself 
 to battle ? ' A divided mind is a weariness, a 
 hindrance to action, and at the same time it 
 is wholly illogical. A single purpose is at least 
 rational itself, and since we must take our 
 chances on the result in either case, which is 
 the safer road to travel ? 
 
 I do not pretend, of course, that I have not 
 a conviction toward one opinion or the other, 
 but I am trying to answer this difficulty as an 
 outsider, simply on the testimony of the dif- 
 ferent people who have raised the question 
 with me. Certainly the most obvious conclu- 
 sion I draw from them is that religious belief 
 
 o 
 
 is more satisfactory than religious unbelief to 
 the person concerned. My interlocutors, if not 
 always worried, were usually at least pensive 
 about what they had ceased to believe, and 
 
10 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 envied the situation of one who could believe 
 and yet keep his countenance. Some of them 
 had no regrets for what they did not believe, 
 but were equally apathetic about their skep- 
 ticism. In fact, the phrase I have used above, 
 of "unbelieving enthusiast," while logically 
 correct, fits no person of my acquaintance. The 
 nearest approach to enthusiasm in these unbe- 
 lievers was a certain warmth in pointing out 
 the weakness of the other side ; but in no case 
 was their own situation described in glowing 
 terms. On the other hand, I have never met 
 any one with regrets over his beliefs. Since 
 the religious situation of every thinking man 
 varies with his training and the progress of 
 his development, each man as a rule has varied 
 shreds of belief clinging to him, even though 
 in the main he is an unbeliever. Apparently 
 these shreds do not worry him, but, on the 
 contrary, give him a certain satisfaction, so 
 that he is not trying to shake them off as he 
 is his doubts. If religious belief is more satis- 
 factory than unbelief, it has then one impor- 
 tant fact in its favor as a working hypothesis. 
 That religious faith, if acted upon, often 
 leads to tremendous sacrifice and hardship, I 
 do not deny. But I am not following all pos- 
 
THE NECESSITY FOR A BELIEF 11 
 
 sible resultant actions to their end. Both be- 
 lief and unbelief have had their martyrs, as 
 any extremes may have them; but that a cer- 
 tian profound satisfaction and enthusiasm, 
 even in misfortune, pervade the religious man, 
 and are absent in the unbeliever, seems un- 
 deniably true in all history. 
 
 I have spoken of religious belief in a gen- 
 eral way, as if it needed no definition ; but I 
 must indicate a little more fully what we shall 
 mean by the term. I do not mean all the pos- 
 sible beliefs that one finds stated in orthodox 
 creeds, as if they were of equal importance. 
 Some standard church beliefs can apparently 
 be shaken off with no feeling of loss to the 
 doubter, while others seem most essential. It 
 is these more important conceptions which give 
 life and meaning to the whole, that I have in 
 mind when I use the term " belief." I have 
 arbitrarily selected what beliefs in my observa- 
 tion cannot be lost without a wrench, and shall 
 not consider those which have apparently 
 caused no especial anxiety to my questioners. 
 
 mean then by Religion, a belief in the ex- 
 istence of God, the authority of Christ as 
 exponent of God's nature, the responsibility 
 of man, the value of prayer, and the immor- 
 
12 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 tality of the soul. Perhaps the inspiration of the 
 Bible, especially with regard to miracles, is a 
 source of difficulty to all, although a lif e-and- 
 death interest in this question is not so common. 
 I think it is not a perverted optimism in even 
 a religious person to consider a certain honest 
 doubt a healthy sign in society. So long as 
 a man vigorously doubts, he is alive, and in 
 a much more hopeful state than a careless as- 
 senter or a rigid unbeliever. Doubt at least 
 implies a leaning of the mind in two directions; 
 and while more illogical than a thoroughgoing 
 belief in either side, it at least is better for 
 life-purposes than complete unbelief. No one 
 bothers to doubt the authorship of newspaper 
 poetry, because no one cares who wrote it; 
 while the authorship of the Iliad, of Shake- 
 speare's plays, and of the Fourth Gospel ex- 
 cites endless discussion, because we care very 
 much who wrote them. 
 
 So it is with religious creeds. If society 
 were willing to dismiss them to historians, and 
 remark, "Oh yes, I dare say this is all true," 
 it would be in a more serious state than when 
 it finds them so important that honest criti- 
 cism compels it to doubt them. In my opinion, 
 there is no duty imposed on any man to accept 
 
THE NECESSITY FOR A BELIEF 13 
 
 anything against which his reason rebels. The 
 first virtue for thought is absolute honesty, 
 and the cloaking of irrationality in virtuous 
 garb is entirely uncalled for. Religious faith 
 needs no crutch, and a rational man should 
 accept it with his eyes and intellect open. He 
 must demand proof in such cases as those in 
 which he demands proof in the rest of his ra- 
 tional life; he must not demand it where he 
 does not demand it in his other rational life. 
 To sum up our position as far as we have 
 gone : granting that we have lost religious 
 faith because of honest doubt and perhaps 
 positive disbelief, we cannot go from one 
 unproved position to another : we must prove 
 our disbelief as well. In other words, we must 
 be on the defensive and prove that there is no 
 God, that Christ has no authority, that the 
 soul is not immortal, and that man is not a 
 free agent. Let there be no misunderstanding. 
 Eventually, as rational beings, we must accept 
 one position or the other. These religious 
 statements are true or they are false. But in 
 the mean time, we must doubt and criticise 
 both sides impartially. We must hold both 
 opinions as real possibilities, in order to dis- 
 cuss them. Logically we are not yet ready to 
 
14 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 make up our minds, but actively we are as if 
 we had decided one way or the other. 
 
 As a practical position, then, at the start, 
 it would seem as if, since religion gives more 
 satisfaction than the lack of it, since it lends 
 more significance to life to conceive our ex- 
 istence as immortal, and since there is at least 
 an equal chance that a prayer to an Unseen 
 Being is heard and meets with some kind of 
 response, belief is the safer principle to adopt. 
 A positive exercise of this sort can be dropped 
 if we change our minds, but is not so easily 
 learned by a mind unused to it. It is almost 
 always easier to forget a technique than to 
 acquire it; and since nothing in unbelief has 
 been lost in the mean time (that is, no exer- 
 cise the opposite of prayer, no action we must 
 hasten to perform in case we are not to live 
 eternally), surely nothing has been lost, and 
 half a chance of something has been gained. 
 
 I cannot see how a perfectly candid, logical 
 soul could argue otherwise. The reason why 
 we do not act on this simple basis of accept- 
 ing for the time being the richer of two un- 
 proved possibilities is that we are not so calmly 
 rational as we think. The fear of being ridi- 
 culous, a certain indolence, a timidity, a pride 
 
THE NECESSITY FOR A BELIEF 15 
 
 in spiritual poor health, if not a sin of graver 
 character, makes us rather, as before indi- 
 cated, half - choose the possibilities on both 
 sides, and, having exerted enough energy to 
 think ourselves into trouble, decline to think 
 ourselves out again. Since, as assumed at the 
 outset, it was a rational difficulty that shook 
 our faith, certainly this abandonment of rea- 
 son is the most contradictory and vicious pro- 
 ceeding If we can leave logic alone, and 
 emotionally accept the larger and more signi- 
 ficant life with the rest of the world, well and 
 good. If, on the other hand, we have chosen 
 rigid thinking as our guide, let us stick to it, 
 whichever way it leads us, acting in the mean 
 time on the larger chance, as we would do in 
 any less important matter, where there was 
 everything to gain and nothing to lose. The 
 third course, that of accepting a thorough un- 
 belief, emotionally and enthusiastically, is pos- 
 sible in theory, but you have not done it, or / 
 you would not be reading this. f 
 
II 
 
 DOES GOD EXIST? 
 
 WE have agreed on our first proposition, 
 that a thinking man must believe in some- 
 thing, since every statement must be true or 
 false, and it remains for us to marshal our 
 doubted beliefs, our faiths that have ceased to 
 deserve the name, and investigate the grounds 
 on which they rest. 
 
 We will beffin with the most fundamental 
 
 C5 
 
 question of all religions, does God exist or 
 does He not ?- -because on its answer depends 
 all that is to follow. If there is no God, eth- 
 ical questions may still remain, but religion 
 strictly speaking has ceased to exist, and re- 
 ligious observance is a meaningless ceremony. 
 We may approach this question directly or by 
 a more roundabout road, and in such a dis- 
 cussion as this, the latter is the more obvious 
 way. That is, instead of considering first the 
 proof of His existence, we will criticise the 
 evidence usually advanced for His non-exist- 
 ence, and later can judge on which side we 
 have more convincing data. 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 17 
 
 We must place ourselves at the outset in a 
 state of impartial doubt, that is, we must ad- 
 mit the possibility that He is, or that He is not, 
 or, in other words, doubt His non-existence as 
 well as the opposite. 
 
 The first reason usually given for disbelief 
 in a God is, that we must accept the evidence 
 of the senses, and since we do not see, feel, 
 or hear God, why should we assume that 
 there is one? It is an unwarrantable super- 
 stition, with no experimental basis. A second 
 reason is that the qualities that inhere in the 
 concept of Godhead are so incomprehensible 
 that the mind reels before them, and that any- 
 thing which is so confessedly beyond being 
 understood, becomes a meaningless string of 
 phrases with no savor of reality. The moment 
 God becomes a clearly explained credible being, 
 there is no use for Him in the world. As in- 
 comprehensible He does not exist, as compre- 
 hended He is not a God ; hence the concept is 
 a contradiction, and the economy of thought 
 demands that we shall not introduce Him into 
 a world that is more easily explained without 
 Him. A third reason against belief in Him is 
 that the characteristic of goodness is always 
 attached to God, and since evil is so universal 
 
18 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 in the world, no good being could have created 
 it. 
 
 It will be seen that only the first two types 
 of objectors strike a direct blow at God's exist- 
 ence. These disbelievers pin their faith to 
 scientific proof, or to logical statement, and 
 they therefore choose to accept only that which 
 of its nature admits of experimental or log- 
 ical handling. Since the Deity cannot be ex- 
 pounded in this way, the question lies outside 
 the pale of science, and what lies outside the 
 range of science or of logic is untrue. 
 
 These classes have valid enough reasons for 
 objection, if they carry them to their conclu- 
 sion, and will agree to disbelieve anything 
 which does not admit of scientific proof or of 
 logical definition. If, on the other hand, they 
 do not demand the same grounds for belief in 
 other accepted truths, they must not do so 
 here. 
 
 The third class denies the existence not of 
 a God, but of a good God, because there is so 
 much evil (and logically, I suppose, of a bad 
 God because there is so much good) ; and 
 since His character is assumed to be consist- 
 ent if anything, and the world is not so, the 
 existence of such a God and such a world is 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 19 
 
 found incompatible, and belief is dropped. If 
 they could be shown either that the world is 
 consistent one way or the other, or that God 
 need not be consistent, they must abandon 
 their position. 
 
 Do we, then, make scientific proof and the 
 evidence of the senses a basis for belief in 
 other matters ? In many cases we undoubtedly 
 do up to a certain point. The senses are the 
 usual guides for our information, and we are 
 not able to build up our most complex imagi- 
 nations without sense symbols of some kind. 
 Not only this, but we have become accustomed 
 to give certain senses more credence than 
 others. The eye has come to be accepted as our 
 more reliable informant. The cavity which my 
 tooth once filled feels large to my tongue and 
 looks small to my eye, - therefore, which is 
 it? Since we see more things to compare with 
 it than we feel with our tongue, we arbitra- 
 rily decide, small. I hear a voice but see no 
 speaker, therefore I decide I did not hear it, 
 but only thought I did. Thus the different 
 senses are continually correcting one another, 
 and vision, since it has developed with us a 
 wider range and more acute discrimination, 
 casts in most cases the final vote. If we lose 
 
20 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 our vision, we shift our faith to hearing or 
 touch, and if we lose all our avenues of sensa- 
 tion-approach, what happens ? Certainly I do 
 not cease to exist for my own consciousness 
 because you cannot see, hear, or feel me, and 
 because I am lost to yours. My non-existence 
 to you because of your incapacity for sensa- 
 tion proves nothing whatever about my exist- 
 ence to other consciousness or to my own. So 
 we might say, " Because you cannot see, hear, 
 or feel God, nothing whatever is proved as to 
 His being or non-being." The natural reply 
 to this is, of course, that you are not alone in 
 this ansesthesia, if we may so call it. All the 
 world unites in not seeing or hearing Him ; 
 and if no one has had this sensation, it is a 
 world-experience, not an individual one, and 
 as such we must accept it as true. 
 
 Even here, however, the point is not proved. 
 There are many things that we accept, and 
 yet no one has ever seen them or ever will. 
 Grant that the current proof of a stone's ex- 
 istence is that we see and feel it, the reality 
 of the law of gravitation, in which we equally 
 believe, we neither see nor feel. You may in- 
 spect the stone ever so carefully and you find 
 no law, nor will you find one in the earth, 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 21 
 
 toward which it falls. That is, certain exist- 
 ences are of their nature unapproachable by 
 sensation, and far from disbelieving in them 
 because of that, you make no demands that 
 evidence of their reality shall be presented in 
 such terms. The falling stone you see, the 
 law governing its fall you never do, and yet 
 you give one as hearty credence as the other, 
 because the law of gravitation is the most 
 orderly and satisfactory way of explaining the 
 phenomena of falling bodies. 
 
 If an existence is of its very nature unap- 
 proachable by sensation, there is no point in 
 demanding such a proof of its existence. Sup- 
 pose, then, that it be admitted that abstract 
 laws are beyond such experience, and the same 
 is true of certain material substances, such as 
 atoms or ether. Still, it might be contended 
 that in the case of personality (which is the 
 religious conception of God) we do demand 
 the witness of sensation. We only believe in a 
 person when we see him or believe him pos- 
 sible of being seen by some one, and a person 
 without some tangible evidence of his existence 
 is the same as if he were not. Here w r e must 
 go very carefully. As was suggested above, 
 the situation is perhaps different in the case 
 
22 THE EIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 of consciousness from what it is with material 
 objects. Granting that to be real a being 
 must exist somehow for some consciousness, 
 it cannot be denied that a personality can 
 exist for its own consciousness, even if others 
 are blind to it ; and no amount of disbelief 
 by other minds can put it out of existence for 
 itself. Thus logically we cannot deny the pos- 
 sible existence of any number of invisible, in- 
 tangible beings, of whom, because of the limi- 
 tations of our sense-organs (which after all 
 respond to a very small fraction of the vibra- 
 tions in the material world), we are uncon- 
 scious, and whom we customarily dismiss as 
 unreal. This apparently opens the door to the 
 wildest fancy, to the possibility of not one 
 God, but many, and this real possibility is 
 all I ask at this point. 
 
 The doubter who has put unhesitating con- 
 fidence in any personality that expresses itself 
 to him through sensations, must admit the 
 real logical possibility that a personality might 
 exist appealing to no sensation of his what- 
 ever, and yet exist just as really for itself. We 
 can even go a step further. By no possibility 
 would a scientific man believe in God any more 
 than he does now, if there were an appeal to 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 23 
 
 every one of his senses. Suppose he saw a 
 manifestation of some sort which called itself 
 God, if he alone saw it, he would call it an 
 hallucination ; if all the world saw it, it would 
 be classified as a visual phenomenon, more or 
 less extraordinary as it was rarely or often 
 seen. Men have always been hearing voices, 
 which, however they might themselves con- 
 sider them, have been labeled as nervous af- 
 
 s 
 
 fections by the rest of the world ; and in one 
 celebrated instance, where a voice was heard 
 by several, the rest of the company declared 
 it had but thundered. 
 
 In these cases I cannot see that any blame 
 attaches to a non-believer. The lack of cre- 
 dence given to a sensation-stimulus of possible 
 divine origin proceeds from the tacit admis- 
 sion, on the part of us all, that this is not the 
 basis of approach to the kind of personality we 
 conceive as God. Whatever may be His nature, 
 which we shall try to define later, we agree 
 more or less consciously on the idea that a 
 Godlike personality not only does not depend 
 on sensation as proof of His existence, but by 
 no sensation-proof that we can think of would 
 the scientific thinker be forced to believe in 
 Him. I do not mean that it follows from the 
 
24 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 foregoing that God could not make a sensation- 
 approach of some kind, but simply that such 
 a sensation would prove nothing whatever as 
 to its origin. 
 
 Our first objector is in the situation of 
 asserting, " I will not believe in God if I 
 cannot reach Him through sensation, and I 
 will not believe in Him if I can reach Him 
 through sensation ! ' His existence has then 
 ceased to be a real possibility, and the doubt 
 is no longer an impartial one. 
 
 We must therefore make a readjustment of 
 our point of view. There is no sense surely in 
 demanding a sensation-proof of God's exist- 
 ence, if we would not believe in it if produced. 
 If the question is to remain an open one, we 
 must make some other demand, the fulfillment 
 of which will be considered a sufficient ground 
 for belief. A large amount of discussion goes 
 on, in any department of knowledge, from 
 the simple fact that the disputants do not 
 know when they have finished. Since they 
 have never distinctly formulated to themselves 
 what must be proved to gain their point, and 
 what counter-proofs mean their own discom- 
 fiture, they go on and on, neither side discov- 
 ering whether it has gained or lost. 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 25 
 
 We must try to avoid this human failing, 
 by continually asking, " Is this question still 
 an open one? Are both hypotheses really 
 alive? ' If one hypothesis is not alive, that is, 
 if we can conceive no possible system of evi- 
 dence that would be accepted as proof of it, it 
 is absolutely without point to discuss the ques- 
 tion further. As we said at the beginning, we 
 must doubt both hypotheses impartially, and if 
 our position is such that we say, " By no pos- 
 sible evidence could you prove your hypothe- 
 sis there is no conceivable testimony I would 
 accept," we have put ourselves out of the game. 
 This is entirely different from saying, " Such 
 and such evidence I would accept, but I know 
 you can never get it." This is a fair enough 
 remark for any one to make. But the other 
 position is equivalent to demanding a proof 
 for something we have put outside the range 
 of possible evidence, and as such it is not a 
 fit subject for argument. We should then be 
 in the class excluded from our audience, of 
 irrational believers in unbelief. 
 
 I am insisting rather strongly on this point, 
 because it is where the argument with the first 
 type of objector is likely to stop. He has de- 
 manded a type of proof which he sees he does 
 
26 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 not want, and being prepared with no other 
 demand whose fulfillment will convince him, 
 one must begin over again on a more con- 
 structive basis, showing him what he ought to 
 accept as proof, and then producing the evi- 
 dence if possible. 
 
 Our second type of objector did not go so 
 far as to demand sensation-testimony for God. 
 He would be willing to accept God as he ac- 
 cepts an abstract law, if the formulation of 
 the idea of God were clear enough to satisfy 
 his reason. But he recognizes that logical 
 statement can be only in known and defin- 
 able terms; and since the conception of God 
 is confessedly too great for complete under- 
 standing, it is therefore outside the range of 
 thought. Here we must have recourse to the 
 Law of Excluded Middle again. A thing must 
 either be or not be ; and if both its being 
 and its non-being are concepts too far beyond 
 the range of experience for complete demon- 
 stration and understanding, it still remains 
 that one or the other must be true, whether 
 we understand it or not. To illustrate this, it 
 is only necessary to state some of the Kantian 
 Antinomies, that is, mutually contradictory 
 theories, each one being as incapable of demon- 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 27 
 
 stration as the other, and each, I would add, as 
 incapable of complete comprehension. For ex- 
 ample, either the universe is limited in space 
 or it is not. That is, either beyond the far- 
 thest fixed star, and as far beyond as you like, 
 there is a limit fixed to the bounds of the 
 universe, or there is not. I cannot comprehend 
 it as limited, for that implies nothingness be- 
 yond the limits, and that I cannot conceive. 
 Neither can I conceive it as extending infi- 
 nitely without limits. Therefore both possi- 
 bilities are inconceivable, and yet, since a 
 thing; must either be or not be, one or the 
 
 O ' 
 
 other is true. The same situation holds with 
 the question of divisibility of matter. Either 
 it can be infinitely divided into smaller and 
 smaller parts, or there comes a point where it 
 cannot be divided further. Both possibilities 
 are inconceivable, and yet one must be the final 
 theoretical concept if we hold strictly to our 
 law. 
 
 In fact, without going so far afield, there 
 are plenty of mathematical facts, such as the 
 fourth dimension, square roots of certain quan- 
 tities, etc., which are valid enough truths, but 
 cannot be clearly conceived. 
 
 All this shows that, logically, all thought 
 
28 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 must proceed on certain unproved and incon- 
 ceivable assumptions, and that the fact that 
 they are unproved and inconceivable argues 
 nothing whatever as to their truth or falsity. 
 For all relative matters, that is, for all finite 
 ideas that can be grouped under a larger con- 
 cept, we demand clear definition and lucid 
 comprehension. In any debate, for instance, 
 the meaning of each term must be understood 
 by both sides ; each term must be clearly de- 
 fined in terms of something else. This is one 
 of the first rules of logic : " A definition can- 
 
 o 
 
 not contain the name of the word defined." 
 Thus, the definition of a pen as "an instru- 
 ment for the purpose of writing," or some 
 similar phrase, is valid logically ; but the defi- 
 nition of a pen as " a pen for the purpose of 
 writing," is no definition at all. We can define 
 a pen accurately enough, for the very reason 
 that it can be grouped under the larger con- 
 cept of " instrument," "article of wood, metal, 
 or india-rubber," or what not ; and only be- 
 cause of this possibility of statement in terms 
 of something else, is it a valid object for log- 
 ical definition. But when large concepts are 
 pushed further and further back, we come 
 finally to a point where the idea or the object 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 29 
 
 does not admit of statement in terms of any- 
 thing else. It is what we call sui generis, and 
 such general concepts as Consciousness, Mat- 
 ter, and God belong to this class of indefin- 
 ables. We see that they are indefinable solely 
 because there is no higher class under which 
 
 o 
 
 we may group them, and we cannot express 
 their nature in other than their own terms ; 
 but this does not bear the slightest reference 
 to their truth or validity. If we try to define 
 what we mean by human consciousness, how 
 do we succeed? Consciousness is conscious- 
 ness ; it is the sum of mental states ; it is the 
 realm of mind, and here we are using the 
 same undefined terms in every definition, and 
 making ourselves no clearer than before. Of 
 course the reason that this does not bewilder 
 us, as do the similar attempts at a definition of 
 Godhead, is that we feel we all have an inti- 
 mate firsthand consciousness of what conscious- 
 ness is. The very act of doubting our mental 
 life or attempting to define it is in itself a 
 mental state ; and while the extraordinary in- 
 conceivability of our consciousness must have 
 struck every thinking person, the facts of 
 memory, of imagination, the ceaseless stream 
 of ideas that chase through our minds, con- 
 
30 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 nected with our body and yet totally differ- 
 ent in nature from their physical substratum, 
 in spite of all this, I say, we do not doubt 
 the existence of consciousness, because we 
 have it. If a logical definition of it were pos- 
 sible (but it is not, by the nature of the case), 
 the real essence of mental states would be no 
 more evident to us than it is already. All this 
 latter argument, as with our first type of ob- 
 jector, proves nothing whatever of a positive 
 nature about the evidence of God. In both 
 cases, we have simply shown that the argu- 
 ments for God's non-existence are logically 
 untenable. They have not been the arguments, 
 as they supposed, on which the doubters base 
 their beliefs in other matters of life-experience. 
 In fact, contrary to their first conviction, they 
 believe nothing so heartily as certain facts 
 which from their nature can never be experi- 
 enced by sensation, or logically defined. They 
 admit further that sense-experience and logi- 
 cal definition are by their very nature incapable 
 of giving proof either of God's existence or of 
 the reverse. 
 
 We are now apparently in the identical 
 position from which we started. Nothing is 
 proved, and we are prepared as before to be- 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 31 
 
 lieve one hypothesis as easily as the other. 
 Only two points have been gained : we shall 
 not look to the senses for evidence of God's 
 existence, and we shall not look in the field of 
 pure logic to prove a proposition confessedly 
 outside its realm. 
 
 We say we are in our first situation, but 
 at first glance it seems even worse ! If we have 
 put the conception of God outside the realm 
 of sense and logic, have we not put it out of 
 all possible range of thought ? The most com- 
 plex and abstract theories of science must have 
 an experimental basis of some kind, and if we 
 have relegated the evidence of God's existence 
 from both science and logical proof, what is 
 there left but a realm of unreason where we 
 refuse to tread ? 
 
 I will agree at once that we have undoubt- 
 edly put the question of God's existence out- 
 side the range of any proof whatever. I will 
 not say put it there, but found it there, as 
 this has been no juggling with words, but the 
 simple discovery of an eternal fact. 
 
 The word " proof ' belongs to science and 
 logic. It means, either that enough data have 
 been gathered, with similar effects following 
 fixed precedents, to justify the scientist in 
 
32 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 assuming a quantitative causal law connecting 
 them. This is inductive proof. Or it means 
 that, granted certain logical premises, certain 
 conclusions must follow. This is deductive 
 proof. There are strictly none but these two 
 kinds. Unless, then, we can formulate our 
 subject-matter so that it falls into these modes 
 of thinking, it is outside their range, and the 
 word proof does not and cannot apply. 
 
 Since we have said that the idea of God 
 was too great to be defined in other terms, 
 or brought under logical premises, and sensa- 
 tion-evidence there was none, we are in this 
 matter absolutely shut out from the close 
 circle of scientific thought, and must proceed 
 on a new basis. 
 
 Moreover, instead of losing anything by the 
 change of ground, we have infinitely gained. 
 Since science cannot prove anything for us, 
 neither can it disprove, and we no longer fear 
 it. We are not afraid of any possible develop- 
 ments of the evolutionary theory. We need 
 not fear any disclosures in chemistry as to 
 the spontaneous generation of matter, any 
 researches in history that inform us that Abra- 
 ham was a myth, or in geology, that the world- 
 formation is not accurately described in Gene- 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 33 
 
 sis. We need not worry if astronomy leaves 
 no tract for a material heaven, or if psycho- 
 logy refuses to speak of souls and shakes its 
 head over immortality. As scientists we are 
 profoundly interested in what science discloses, 
 and look forward to years of as brilliant 
 achievement and readjustments of theory as 
 have gone before. But as religious thinkers 
 we cannot use one of its discoveries to prove 
 our beliefs, neither can it use any to disprove 
 them. We are free. We are running on sep- 
 arate tracks and cannot collide, and moreover 
 we can build up our belief with no timid fears 
 that the next scientific monthly may shatter 
 the structure about our ears. At first this free- 
 dom is not perhaps wholly welcome. Like a 
 reluctant swimmer, who is for the first time 
 set free from the trainer's hand, we are more 
 conscious of our lack of support than of our 
 liberty. If we cannot depend on ordinary 
 means of conviction, what shall be our guide? 
 But here our case is simpler than we fear. It 
 is exactly by our ordinary means of conviction 
 in certain instances, I believe, that we must 
 become aware of God's existence; and these 
 every-day means are not as universally scien- 
 tific or logical as we imagine. I do not mean 
 
34 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 by this that we are often irrational (although 
 this is also true enough), but that there are 
 many propositions which are as incapable of 
 scientific proof as the one in hand ; we tacitly 
 admit it. and act toward them on other grounds 
 
 ' O 
 
 altogether. These unprovable propositions are, 
 moreover, the most important in our whole 
 experience. 
 
 Take, for example, the very simple proposi- 
 tion that our friends exist, that other person- 
 alities are real, and live a mental life similar 
 in kind to our own . Can this possibly be proved ? 
 We see, hear, and feel them, it is true, 
 but the senses are very illusory after all, and 
 there is no possible proof that they report an 
 outward stimulus, rather than that they func- 
 tion because of a stimulus in our own brains. 
 When you talk with a friend, psychologically 
 speaking, your own speech answers your own 
 sound and sight sensations of him; yours are the 
 motor impulses, and yours are the resulting 
 sensations ; so that you could just as literally 
 say you are holding a conversation with your- 
 self. A certain brand of philosophy called 
 Solipsism acknowledges itself driven to this 
 point of view, and says we are all of us in a 
 lonely world of our own, peopled with our own 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 35 
 
 sensations, which maybe nothing but hallucina- 
 tions, in the sense that there is no possible way 
 of proving that they arise from any stimulus 
 outside of ourselves. We call a man insane 
 when he addresses presences whom the rest of 
 us cannot see ; but so far as any proof is con- 
 cerned, we may be all of us in the same situation, 
 with the simple difference that most of us seem 
 to agree on certain hallucinations. I cannot 
 know, then, that any but my own consciousness 
 exists; but, nevertheless, I believe firmly that 
 others do. Apparently my only reason for this 
 is that I prefer to do so ! Since I cannot prove 
 either one or the other, I choose the possibil- 
 ity that gives a richer, more significant life. 
 I do not want to be the only creature in the 
 universe, I can remember the horror of this 
 possibility as it came over me sometimes in 
 childhood; and though one might say, so long 
 as these apparent existences are amusing and 
 satisfactory in themselves, why mind whether 
 they are separate personalities or tricks of your 
 own fancy ? still, we feel a wide difference, and 
 demand that their existence shall be a real one, 
 and separate from ours. If you do not feel 
 this difference, if you do not feel any shock to 
 your life in thinking that your friends are simply 
 
36 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 clusters of your own self-stimulated sensations, 
 you are welcome to hold with the solipsists 
 the other view. You have as good a right, so 
 far as proof is concerned, and not a whit better, 
 to believe your way as mine. As for me, I pre- 
 fer the other road. Most of the world prefers the 
 other road, too, and what is more, it has never 
 occurred to them that there was any choice. 
 They have felt that their friends' separate ex- 
 istence was as assured a fact as their own per- 
 sonality, and that nothing could be a truth 
 less in need of proof. In one sense they are 
 right. Their own existence and that of others 
 are in similar case ; but instead of both being 
 proved, both are alike unprovable ! 
 
 If I turn my gaze inward to my own mental 
 life, to discover just what I mean by "myself " at 
 all, I shall find a tide of thoughts and sensa- 
 tions flowing after one another in a ceaseless 
 stream. At present, there is the fixed attention 
 on what I am writing, the sound of rain, the 
 feeling of warmth, the odor of varnish, and 
 many other concomitant sensations ; but where 
 in the meantime am I? These thoughts and 
 
 o 
 
 sensations chase themselves along, sometimes 
 under control of attention and sometimes not; 
 and even if I call my attention the real 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 37 
 
 " I," it apparently bears no special relation to 
 what I was attending to yesterday. It seems 
 in any case to go on in a certain sense of it- 
 self now shifting, now refusing to grasp 
 anything, and now spurting off again. In vain 
 do I try to separate myself from this torrent 
 of ideas. If I call the whole conglomerate of 
 my conscious states me, then I am never the 
 same person two minutes in succession ; if I call 
 my memories me, then I am losing parts of my- 
 self every instant ; my attention is not myself, 
 for it will not be controlled ; and certainly my 
 desire to control it cannot be the real I, as 
 that implies that I am possessed by a mental 
 factor stronger than myself, and that I do not 
 myself know what I am attending to, but only 
 that I want to attend. I do not know what or 
 where the real I is situated in me, or in fact if 
 there is one part of my consciousness more my- 
 self than another. 
 
 Why, then, do I believe that there is an I 
 which stands for a more fixed soul in myself 
 than I am able at any time to designate? Is 
 anything in fact more impossible to prove than 
 this? Are we not driven with the material- 
 ists to say, "There is no Self. There is simply 
 a tide of ideas aroused by fixed associational 
 
38 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 and sensational laws, which flow on as rest- 
 lessly and uncontrollably as a mountain brook. 
 You do not govern your ideas, or exist as a 
 Soul apart from them, and your being as a real 
 ego is pure fiction. ' We are not driven to 
 this position, because the materialist is in like 
 evil case with us. He cannot prove that an ego 
 does not exist, that certain phases of conscious- 
 ness are not more significant and rightfully 
 called Soul than others, and we cannot prove 
 the reverse. What, then, are we to do? We 
 must choose the alternative that suits better 
 with the rest of our thinking. He may keep 
 his point of view, if he is so enamored of his 
 habit of classifying organisms in the lower 
 world that, for the sake of consistency, he would 
 prefer to class himself with them and sacrifice 
 the possibility of having a soul. That is, he 
 would rather run the chance in that direction 
 in the mean time, and keep his world-classifica- 
 tions neat and simple. We, on the other hand, 
 would rather take our chances the other way, 
 and, at the expense of a uniform classifica- 
 tion, say that perhaps man is an exception to 
 the lower organisms, and that in spite of the 
 inconsequent stream of ideas which make up 
 the only ego he can discover, since he has gone 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 39 
 
 beyond the animals in thinking he has a self, 
 he may have gone beyond them and have one 
 (always providing they are without souls, which 
 we can also never prove). 
 
 Indeed, our doubter will have no more dif- 
 ficult task than the one of proving that he has 
 or is a personality in any more real sense than 
 is any of the lower animals ; and, on the other 
 hand, the materialists cannot disprove the wide- 
 spread conviction that man's higher activities 
 of mind are expressions of a self that exists 
 parallel with but apart from his animal nature. 
 The two alternatives are of their nature out- 
 side the region of proof. The most naive be- 
 liever in his soul would hardly assign it a 
 definite position in space, either inside or out- 
 side of his body; and if he refuses to place it, 
 how can it be located, either to be trium- 
 phantly exploited by himself, or hunted for 
 and found absent by his opponent? 
 
 The situation is this. We find a difference 
 in quality between our ideas and certain 
 thoughts and actions that we call more signi- 
 ficant, more profound, more far-reaching than 
 others ; and we say, " I will call these my soul." 
 The materialist observes these same differences, 
 and says, " I will not call these or any other 
 
40 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 ideas my soul." Both of us are arbitrary, and 
 doing equally what we choose. Whether we 
 choose one way or the other depends largely 
 on our temperament, that is, on whether the 
 notion of being real personalities is very dear 
 to us or not. We may have the desire to sim- 
 plify the world at any cost, and make our point 
 of view toward man's mentality coincide with 
 that for other organisms. If we are of this 
 mind, and the desire for personality is not a 
 strong demand, we are cheerful materialists. 
 If, on the other hand, our temperament clashes 
 with our habits of scientific classification, we 
 are melancholy materialists, or timid spiritual- 
 ists, as the case may be. The rational course 
 is to choose the richer alternative with our 
 eyes open, and take the view which gives the 
 widest possibility with the least sacrifice. In 
 giving up materialism we sacrifice only a sim- 
 plicity of outlook (which is indeed restful for 
 the mind at times); but because so much simpler 
 than the phenomena with which it deals, it is 
 perhaps somewhat suspicious. By adopting the 
 other view we gain a real dignity in human 
 achievement, a meaning to right and wrong, 
 and an incentive to duty, and we sacrifice no- 
 thing, but only complicate our scientific theory. 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 41 
 
 Why, then, should we not be as free and 
 happy as possible ? We have at least half a 
 chance of being right. The vigor of our ac- 
 ceptance of either theory will be proportionate, 
 not to any force of logical conviction, of which 
 there can be none, but to the force of our 
 desire for the possibility ive have chosen. 
 If we must have one alternative or the other 
 to fit in with our other ideals, our acceptance 
 will be a passionate one ; if we are indifferent 
 to the outcome, our adherence will be luke- 
 warm and will depend largely on the atmos- 
 phere we are in at any given discussion of the 
 matter. 
 
 It is plain now where we are being led by 
 our argument. Our acceptance of God's ex- 
 istence depends, as does the belief in the real 
 personalities of others and of our self, on our 
 desire to so believe where proof is impossible. 
 If it were only a case of debate, we could call 
 it " adoption, for the sake of argument, of an 
 unproved premise." That is, while the argu- 
 ment was in progress, we would agree to act 
 as if the premise were true. But there is more 
 than an argument in question here. On our 
 decision depends the course of our whole life ; 
 so, in the phraseology of Kant, our Practical 
 
42 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 Reason must function in a region where Pure 
 Reason ceases to have a place, or in the lan- 
 guage of religion we must live by faith. 
 
 In any case we must live by faith there 
 is no avoiding it. We live either by a faith 
 that God does exist, or by an equally unproved 
 faith that He does not ; but live by one faith 
 or the other, we must. 
 
 " Now faith is the substance of things hoped 
 for, the evidence of things not seen," and the 
 crux of the whole situation is, " What do we 
 hope for ? ' We can hope for the existence of 
 a God, and thereby act as members of a uni- 
 verse created by Him, or we can hope for a 
 world without Him, and live as if not respon- 
 sible to Him. It is because of these two alter- 
 natives, I believe, that Paul in his famous 
 chapter on love ardent advocate of faith as 
 he was puts love above it, and above hope, 
 as the primal necessity of life. Unless we have 
 a real and vigorous longing for a God, a love 
 for the idea of His existence, we shall not hope 
 for Him, and unless we hope for Him there 
 is no reason why we should believe in Him. 
 We should otherwise naturally hope for an 
 easy Godless world that makes no demands on 
 us, and as naturally believe in one. 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 43 
 
 Then the important question for every 
 doubter to ask himself is, " Do I really want 
 a God ? ' If he honestly wants one, he may 
 proceed with us to expound the character of 
 the kind of God he wants, and to ask what 
 kind of evidence of his existence he wants 
 since he does not want the evidence he de- 
 manded at first. If he honestly does not want 
 a God, he need go with us no further, as he 
 is not of our audience. 
 
 There is a curious tendency in one conscien- 
 tious type of disbeliever to feel, that in this 
 situation, where the choice lies between two 
 faiths, it is more honest, more praiseworthy, 
 to choose the thing feared, than to choose the 
 thing hoped for. The doubter hopes for a 
 God, but fears the other possibility, and con- 
 siders it a taunt if accused of believing in a 
 God simply because he wants to. What better 
 reason could there be ? Surely nothing could 
 be more uncalled for than to believe the op- 
 posite unproved proposition, because he did 
 not want to ! I hope I have indicated clearly 
 enough that no scientific discovery could pos- 
 sibly force him to choose the undesirable faith, 
 and that if he thinks in so doing- he is more 
 
 o 
 
 scientific than in following his inclinations, 
 
44 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 he is mistaken. Pie is like a man so firmly de- 
 termined to stand straight that he falls over 
 
 o 
 
 backward. 
 
 Is there then no possible factor outside of 
 our hope that can indicate the road we are to 
 travel ? Do the balances hang absolutely even 
 between belief in God and belief in His non- 
 existence, with nothing but the added weight 
 of desire on one side? 
 
 Evidence of certain kinds we can find in 
 both directions, but it must be judged as we 
 judge evidence in other questions of the same 
 character. We must take into consideration 
 the reliability of the witnesses, and consider 
 whether the intrinsic worth of few witnesses 
 is of greater or less value than numbers of 
 lesser ones. That is, we must decide whether 
 quantitative or qualitative evidence is what we 
 are after. 
 
 In psychology there are no values put on 
 different mental states. Psychology, like any 
 science, must look upon its facts with an im- 
 partial eye, and a sensation of a sweet taste 
 or the resolve to die for one's country must be 
 analyzed with equal scrutiny. Although one is 
 more complicated than the other, they are 
 both mere phenomena to be observed with 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 45 
 
 equal interest and attention. From this point 
 of view, the prevalent idea that each human 
 mind is a responsible being, and not a mere 
 reflex mechanism like the lower animals, is 
 only another idea along with the rest, to be 
 noticed with interest as a mental character- 
 istic of man, but it carries scientifically no 
 weight whatever. That is, as a psychologist, 
 a man refuses to be interested in the ultimate 
 truth of this conviction of moral responsibility, 
 but interests himself in it simply as a convic- 
 tion, along with many others. 
 
 So the botanist, as a botanist, is not con- 
 cerned with whether a rose is more beautiful 
 than a weed. As an artist, he may have his 
 convictions about it, but for the time being, 
 all floral growth is his field, beautiful or ugly, 
 and he refuses to enter into a discussion as to 
 the relative beauty of his specimens. It does 
 not interest him. 
 
 But this difference between mental states 
 does interest us. This, for the time, is just our 
 field, and we choose to call some ideas more 
 significant than others, and some men more 
 valuable witnesses than others, because they 
 share more largely in these ideas. 
 
 If we try to define what we call ourself, in 
 
46 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 each case we shall doubtless specify certain 
 factors in our mental make-up which we con- 
 sider more significant. We perform more ha- 
 bitual automatic acts than we make great 
 decisions, the proportion is in point of quan- 
 tity overwhelmingly in their favor, and yet 
 we feel ourselves as personalities in the latter 
 situations, however few they may be, much 
 more than in the former. Nathan Hale, for 
 instance, had lived twenty years or so of eat- 
 ing and drinking, walking, breathing, and con- 
 versation. He died once for his country, and 
 yet that one experience, that one choice, seems 
 to us all, and undoubtedly seemed to him, 
 more like himself speaking, like his real ego 
 experiencing itself, than did the thousand and 
 one lesser matters of his life. 
 
 Now it is undeniably true that, just as 
 there is a widespread conviction that the hu- 
 man race has a life of real moral responsibil- 
 ity, that is, is a race of personalities and not 
 mechanisms, so there is and has been for many 
 centuries a conviction that there is a God. 
 Moreover, it is true that the periods in which 
 men have become most certain of their own 
 personalities as moral and responsible beings, 
 in which they have viewed their fellow men 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 47 
 
 most as persons and not as things these 
 have been the times when God's existence has 
 seemed most probable. I use the terms man as 
 a personality and man as a moral being inter- 
 changeably, because the two imply each other. 
 I I am not a person, I am not responsible for 
 what I do ; if I am a person, I can be called to 
 account for my actions. It is the moral world 
 which drives home the question whether we 
 are persons or not. When we are at work, 
 taking physical exercise, or engaged in esthetic 
 enjoyment, the question of personality does 
 not arise, and if no moral questions had crossed 
 our path, it might never have arisen. But 
 when confronted with a duty, the whole course 
 of activity depends on the question, " Am I a 
 responsible being or am I not ? ' and then we 
 are driven back to ask ourself (if we have a 
 self) the question. 
 
 In point of numbers, then, our innumerable 
 actions of a reflex and mechanical order seem 
 to ally us with the lower orders of beings, and 
 make us non-personal, natural automatons. In 
 point of significance, however, our moments 
 of choice between important alternatives, our 
 moments of self-sacrifice, or of creative thought, 
 seem, in spite of their scarcity, to indicate the 
 
48 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 existence of a real self, which, dormant though 
 it may often be, occasionally rouses itself to 
 action, and we choose to call those actions 
 more truly ours than the more frequent and 
 trivial ones. We judge our friends' personal- 
 ities on the same basis, and onsider certain 
 traits more important, more their real self, 
 than others. 
 
 Now why do we not apply the same princi- 
 ples naturally and without hesitation to the be- 
 lief in God's existence ? The world has always 
 had the idea of a God, and believed in Him 
 with more or less intensity. We cannot prove 
 that such a universal conviction points to an 
 external existence, any more than that our sen- 
 sations do the same. But if we can make any 
 distinction between the value of our different 
 mental states, the moments when we feel most 
 convinced of God's existence seem always of a 
 higher order than those when we deny Him ; 
 and if we want Him sufficiently, it will no 
 more occur to us to refuse to communicate 
 with Him on an unproved probability, than to 
 cut off intercourse with human beings because 
 it is unproved that they exist. 
 
 The most ardent solipsist states his views to 
 the audience whose existence he calls in ques- 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 49 
 
 tion, and if the doubter in a similar manner 
 kept up a continual communication with a God 
 whose existence he half believed, the practical 
 situation would be the normal, natural one. The 
 philosopher may ask with good reason, " Do 
 these sense-stimulations indicate an external 
 reality, or am I alone in my world of self -stimu- 
 lated ideas ? ' But in the mean time, until he 
 settles the matter, or indeed no matter how he 
 settles it, he does talk to his friends, he acts 
 as a good parent and citizen, and his friends 
 look upon his doubts with a cheerful indiffer- 
 ence. They do not care what he thinks, so long 
 as he acts as if he thought they and he were 
 human beings in the same world. 
 
 Let it not be understood that we are putting 
 the slightest undervaluation on the necessity 
 of rigidly scientific thought. We simply insist 
 that where logic and science cannot touch the 
 problem, we can only call the man sane who 
 acts on the richer possibility. 
 
 If our solipsist acted on his fears instead of 
 his hopes, if he ignored his fellow beings be- 
 cause he was not convinced that they existed 
 outside of his imagination, we should call him 
 eccentric, not to say mad. Or if a scientist 
 doubted his own personality, and, giving up 
 
50 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 what he considered a meaningless struggle to- 
 ward certain ends, relapsed to a natural ani- 
 rnal life, it would be necessary to shut him up. 
 His neighbor would have the right to say, 
 " Doubt what you like, but you must act as if 
 you were a person and as if I were." 
 
 Now our doubters are in the situation of 
 men who, having a defensible doubt, act on the 
 lesser possibility, when it is a question of God's 
 existence, while they very rationally act on 
 the larger chance toward themselves and their 
 friends. On the arising of doubt (and doubt 
 is a healthy period of mental development) 
 they cut off communication with God, if they 
 ever had any, and the longer they are out of 
 connection the more unreal He becomes. They 
 commit themselves without reserve to the other 
 point of view, forgetting that it is equally un- 
 founded. 
 
 Suppose I follow a similar method with my 
 friends. I begin by refusing to speak; I pass 
 them without recognition. Every argument 
 that might point to their reality I label as un- 
 sound, because it is prompted mainly by my 
 hope and desire to escape from loneliness. 
 What would be the result of this? Would it 
 take many weeks for the conviction to deepen 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 51 
 
 that they were actually unreal, for their voices 
 to come like meaningless dreams which I would 
 
 o 
 
 never answer ? They in turn would leave me 
 more or less sadly alone, and not trouble the 
 solitude with which I had chosen to surround 
 myself. What I saw of them would pass like a 
 panorama before my eye, hardly distinguished 
 from my imagination, which would have been 
 growing more and more vivid, thrown back, as 
 it were, upon itself. This would be a kind of 
 anti-social mania, thoroughly unhealthy and 
 untenable, and yet just as well founded on logic 
 as the normal human attitude, and the exact 
 situation in which the doubter of God's reality 
 finds himself. 
 
 The best men throughout the ages have 
 been convinced that there was a God, or have 
 been profoundly unhappy because they were 
 not so convinced. The best moments of our 
 life are when we consider His existence the 
 most probable, and we have the witness of the 
 higfh moments of others as well as of ourselves. 
 
 o 
 
 We have the testimony of many men, on the 
 other hand, that they have had no such God- 
 experience, and we have had our own moments 
 of certainty that God is an impossible concep- 
 tion. In numbers it may be that the latter 
 
52 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 moments have been most frequent ; in quality, 
 which are of the higher order? In quality, tak- 
 ing the broadest view possible, which has been 
 the higher type of man? There have been 
 many noble men who disbelieved in God, but 
 they seldom recommended their position or 
 sought to make converts. Their own attitude 
 to their convictions is a sufficient criticism. 
 Further, on general principles a positive witness 
 is worth more than a negative. If a sufficient 
 number of healthy normal men assert, " I have 
 seen," " I have felt," their evidence is worth 
 more than that of the same number of normal, 
 but withal dissatisfied men who say, " I have 
 not felt," " I do not know." 
 
 If one says, " I am convinced that God ex- 
 ists ; I speak with Him daily ; certain states of 
 mind seem like responses from another person- 
 ality, and not like my own untouched conscious- 
 ness," who can contradict him, provided his 
 normality in other directions gives him a right 
 to be an accredited witness to anything? If 
 another man says, "I do not have any belief 
 in God's existence, I never speak with Him, 
 or He to me," it is a confession that he has 
 put himself out of the range of a God-influ- 
 ence as much as possible. He could not be ex- 
 
DOES GOD EXIST? 53 
 
 pected to know it i there were a God, any 
 more than he would have an acquaintance 
 with any one whose existence he did his best 
 to ignore. 
 
 Are we, then, to open the door wide to any 
 beliefs that the world wants? Are supersti- 
 tions and fancies, ghosts and goblins, to be 
 admitted to supply chance demands, since no 
 one can touch them with proofs ? If a child 
 has convinced herself by constant conversation 
 with her doll that it has a soul, is she justified 
 in her standpoint? 
 
 We must of course use common sense, but 
 the danger is not half so great of our being 
 foolish, as of our being timid. Why not say 
 unhesitatingly, " Of any two unprovable alter- 
 natives in regard to the existence or nature of 
 a possible fact, that alternative is most ration- 
 ally believed which satisfies the highest demand 
 of the highest type of normal human beings ; 
 and, being accepted, only that life is rational 
 which lives absolutely as if that alternative 
 were true"? We need not be afraid of the 
 demands of the human race. As a whole they 
 do not want to believe in hobgoblins, and 
 never will. There have been higher orders 
 of mind in every generation, who demanded, 
 
54 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 and taught others to demand, the same type 
 of God we want to-day. We need not fear that 
 we shall be forced by numbers to an irrational 
 contradictory belief. There have always been 
 seven thousand who have preferred not to bow 
 the knee to Baal, and there is a certain amount 
 of conceit in the scientific mind which is afraid 
 to commit itself to any belief that exemplifies 
 a world-hope. Man as a whole is to be trusted. 
 As a trained mind, he goes as far as science 
 will take him ; then he chafes at the limits of 
 a scientific habit of thought that confesses it- 
 self unable to decide ultimate alternatives. 
 One or the other ultimate is true. Can he not 
 trust his hopes ? What better reason has he 
 to trust his fears ? If a man is just, can he not 
 be trusted to live by his larger faith, and not 
 by a foolish or fragmentary one ? If the body 
 of just men as a whole has united in one 
 great hope, that of itself puts it beyond the 
 ranore of the foolish or the irrational. The 
 
 o 
 
 world as a whole knows what it wants. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 
 
 So far we have been discussing the question 
 of God's existence, without once asking the 
 very natural questions, " What do we mean by 
 God? What means have we of knowing what 
 kind of a personality He is, granting that He 
 exists at all ? ' 
 
 At least we have got started on our road, 
 if we remember the conclusion of the last dis- 
 cussion, namely, that we have a right other 
 things being equal to believe what we hope. 
 We must begin, then, by carefully deciding 
 what we hope, - that idea must be very clear, 
 before we can go further, and then we will 
 decide whether other things are equal. Do we 
 have at least enough of possible evidence on 
 our side to justify our indulging in a hearty 
 and satisfying belief in what we wish should 
 be true? 
 
 In a certain sense all of us do know what 
 we mean by God. We know well enough what 
 we have meant by the word, to make the dis- 
 
56 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 cussion possible up to this point without any 
 further definition. But now we must become 
 more explicit. Our third type of objector, the 
 man who desired a good God, but was unable 
 to believe in Him because of a bad world, has 
 received but little attention so far, because his 
 doubts were founded more on God's nature 
 than on His existence. Was he right? Are 
 we forced to believe in a bad God if any, or 
 is that a contradiction ? And what shall be 
 our basis of decision: the outside world, or 
 our own minds ; the good in the world, or its 
 evil ? Is there any conception large enough to 
 include them all? 
 
 We will begin, however, in the simplest 
 possible way. Whether we can have it or not, 
 whether the evidence is for or against, we will 
 ask, "What do we want?' That seemed a 
 reliable guide in the previous discussion, and 
 perhaps it will be so again. The attributes 
 that the world has apparently wanted to ascribe 
 to its God have been power, grandeur, and an 
 interest in man and his affairs, which implies 
 a consciousness of a somewhat similar nature 
 to man's, although of a higher order. This 
 higher order consists in a wider span of know- 
 ledge than is given to the human mind, and a 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 57 
 
 supreme capacity for bringing about its own 
 wide-reaching plans. I suppose all religions 
 have agreed on so much in the nature of God, 
 whether they called Him an evil spirit or a 
 good one, whether they considered that His 
 interest in man consisted merely of vengeance 
 on His actions, or of sympathy with His con- 
 cerns. But if we are to make any distinctions 
 between our witnesses, certainly the higher 
 orders of men and of religions have given fur- 
 ther attributes to God's nature. He was not 
 only a majestic and powerful person, but His 
 interest in man was of a noble character. It 
 consisted not only of an abstract observation 
 of the creatures He had made, but of a devo- 
 tion to them as much greater than human love 
 as God was greater than man in other respects. 
 They have given no spatial character to God's 
 person. One cannot say that He is here or 
 there, that He has a body like ours, or indeed 
 has any material dimensions whatever. But 
 just as we have accepted the mystery of our 
 own personality, and, while vaguely calling it 
 connected somehow with our body, can find 
 no resting-place for a soul from our heads to 
 our feet, so they have accepted the difficult 
 concept of a spirit without a body, as being 
 
58 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 at least no harder to conceive than a spirit 
 with a body, and they have called God such 
 a person. This conception of God has always 
 aroused certain criticisms. In the old Greek 
 philosophy, Xenophanes remarked, " So would 
 an ox conceive of God as a greater ox, and a 
 lion conceive of him as a greater lion " ; and 
 such critics call this idea of God anthropo- 
 morphic, that is, just an inflation of man's 
 character to as large a size as possible, and 
 then a naming of the result, God. 
 
 It never pays, however, to be fearful. If 
 this is actually the best thing we can do, if 
 only by personifying the noblest characteris- 
 tics that we know anything about (namely, the 
 most highly developed mental, moral, and spir- 
 itual life of man), can we get any clear idea of 
 a Deity, then we must not be afraid of being 
 called anthropomorphic, or of being labeled 
 in any other possible fashion. 
 
 Suppose we try to do anything else. If we 
 say, " God is too great to be like man in any 
 respect. Personality means limitation, which 
 He cannot have; He cannot have what we 
 call knowledge, for that is made up of ideas 
 and sensations dependent on brain states, which 
 He does not possess; He cannot have emo- 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 59 
 
 tions, for they are bodily affairs as well; He 
 cannot bring 1 certain effects about, for cause 
 
 O 7 
 
 and effect are separated by time, but God 
 lives in a timeless universe where these have 
 no meaning." In our anxiety to do the con- 
 cept of God full justice, therefore, we formu- 
 late a series of attributes more and more ab- 
 stract and shadowy, until it is equivalent to 
 saying, " God's nature must be such that man 
 cannot really form the remotest conception of 
 what He is like"; and we fall into a pitfall 
 much more dangerous than anthropomorphism, 
 for it seems to remove God absolutely out of 
 reach. 
 
 That there is a certain justification for such 
 a process of skeptical criticism, we must admit. 
 Certainly in our experience of men, sensations, 
 emotions, reasoning, and all the rest of our 
 mental or spiritual life are apparently always 
 in connection with brain states, and personal- 
 ity gains its significant quality always by cer- 
 tain limitations. I mean by this, that you are 
 you because you are certain things, and are 
 not certain others. You have a sense of hu- 
 mor, you are musical, you do not enjoy danc- 
 ing, you do not like chemistry, you have blue 
 eyes, you are not six feet tall, you are an 
 
60 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 American, you are not a Swede. Thus the 
 sum total of the things you are not, do not, 
 and have not, as well as what you are, do, and 
 have, makes up what we call you, and is your 
 personality for the rest of society. Supposing 
 now that you had no limitations, that you 
 were all things, knew all things, were beyond 
 all limits of bodily shape, or of nervous mani- 
 festations, in sensation, emotion, will, would 
 there then be any personality whatever ? More- 
 over, since our whole mental life depends so 
 absolutely on brain and nervous states, how 
 can any consciousness in any way akin to our 
 own be conceivable without a kindred body ? 
 As to the latter consideration, which we see is 
 the same as the question, "Can we ourselves 
 be immortal ? ' the state of the case is this : 
 it is true that mental life and bodily existence 
 appear always together in our experience, but 
 it is also true that the link between the mind 
 and the body is exactly as much of a mystery 
 as the possibility of a mind's existence with- 
 out a body. 
 
 I hope it will not seem as if we were sys- 
 tematically trying to befuddle ourselves, and 
 make puzzles and problems out of what had 
 before seemed simple matters enough. Our 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 61 
 
 only insistence is upon an impartiality in 
 mysteries. If we can take the possibility of 
 God's consciousness without a body as simply 
 and naturally as we accept our own with one, 
 well and good. No further discussion is neces- 
 sary. But if we begin to call one inconceivable 
 and the other easily understood, we are one- 
 sided in our view. From one point of view, 
 both are commonplace, and from another both 
 are profoundly beyond comprehension. It is a 
 commonplace that when I look at an English 
 violet I get a purple light-sensation and a deli- 
 cately fragrant odor. No one would question 
 it, and on the other hand no one can explain 
 it. Let no respectful layman think that a psy- 
 chologist can explain it, for he is absolutely 
 unable so to do. We can trace the light-waves 
 into the eye, we can imagine the resulting 
 chemical disturbance in the retinal coat at the 
 back of the eye, we can fancy an observer 
 with the most refined instruments following 
 the nervous current along the optic nerve, 
 until it makes connection with cells in the vis- 
 ual tract of the brain, and measuring the ner- 
 vous discharge there and in the smell-region 
 of the brain, where cells have been excited at 
 the same time. All this your psychologist can 
 
62 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 conceivably watch ; but could he see the purple 
 sensation you have been experiencing, could 
 he smell the same fragrant odor that you smell 
 as the cells in your brain become active? He 
 most certainly could not. The moment con- 
 
 v""^ 
 
 sciousness of sensations is aroused in you, you 
 have them and you alone. You do not have 
 the experience as nerve-currents, or as dis- 
 charge of cells in your brain. Your experience 
 is purpleness and fragrance, which, hunt as 
 he may in your brain, no observer from the 
 outside can discover; and what possible con- 
 nection there is between cell-discharge in the 
 
 O 
 
 back of your brain and color-experience, cell- 
 discharge at the side of your brain and odors, 
 who of us can say? If we approached this 
 phenomenon from the outside, we should 
 doubtless say, "Impossible, inconceivable! 
 There can be no connection between sensa- 
 tion, emotion, reasoning, and a pound or so 
 of gray tissue which decomposes and rebuilds 
 again like muscles or even vegetables. It is 
 quite out of the question that the peculiar 
 existences we call ideas should be linked with 
 such a disagreeable mass of gray matter." 
 We seem forced to admit, nevertheless, that 
 there is such a connection, although, if one 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 63 
 
 really faces the issue and understands the 
 problem, this seems as incomprehensible as is 
 a consciousness freed from connection with a 
 brain which apparently hinders it full as much 
 as it helps it. 
 
 But some one will naturally object to this : 
 66 Don't give us any more mysteries than we 
 are obliged to have. We grant that an em- 
 bodied spirit is as difficult to explain as a dis- 
 embodied one, but we are forced to accept the 
 former. The tyranny of experience demands 
 that we stretch our intelligence to include the 
 
 o 
 
 first ; but since we are not obliged to include 
 the latter in our science, let us be thankful 
 that we have one problem less to wrestle with." 
 This is, I think, the usual attitude of the 
 unbelieving but thoughtful scientific man. He 
 has faced both problems squarely enough to 
 see that they are equally difficult; but a cer- 
 tain economy of attention leads him to fasten 
 on the questions that he feels must be answered 
 for a thorough scientific explanation of the 
 world, and he leaves the others as not having 
 enough forced prominence in experience to de- 
 mand attention if he does not choose to give 
 it. He cannot escape having mental life with 
 certain features prominent in it, and he can- 
 
64 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 not fail to notice that he has a body. There- 
 fore, the connection between the two is an 
 obvious question, and demands attention. He 
 also cannot fail to notice that a large fraction 
 of the world has a belief in a God, but he does 
 not observe that he has any such belief him- 
 self. Perhaps he remembers that at one time 
 he had certain unusual feelings that might have 
 arisen from contact with a Divinity if there 
 were one, but he does not have them now, 
 neither does he want them. He finds it sim- 
 pler, in a world with so many questions wait- 
 ing for solution, to sweep them all carefully 
 up, before allowing any more to blow in ; and 
 since what experience he may have had of a 
 God does not interest him, he shuts the doors 
 to any possible recurrence of it. In other 
 words, he does not hope for a God, therefore 
 he does not try to put himself in a position 
 for contact with Him. Since he has no contact 
 with Him, naturally God plays no part in his 
 experience, and naturally again, since this is 
 the case, the problem of His existence is more 
 easily set aside as inconceivable, than is the 
 problem of his own mind and body, which is 
 a part of his experience, and for which, more- 
 over, he has a certain fondness. 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 65 
 
 If previously a God-experience had become 
 as much a part of his life as red color-sensa- 
 tions, or if the habit of speech with Him were 
 as ingrained as speech with his other friends, 
 the problem of disembodied consciousness 
 would, it is true, not be simpler, but at least 
 it would demand an acceptance as a tyrannous 
 fact of experience, however inconceivable it 
 might be. The religious men of all times have 
 been in just this position. They have not al- 
 ways been unscientific men ; indeed, they have 
 accepted the facts of their religious life as de- 
 manding the belief in a God, just as a scien- 
 tific man accepts certain phenomena when he 
 is obliged to, however difficult they are to 
 comprehend. The religious man says, " I have 
 certain sensations and emotions when physically 
 stimulated, so evidently my mind and my 
 body have connection. I don't know what that 
 connection is. I have also a consciousness at 
 times of God's presence. I have an affection 
 for Him. I feel that certain things are possi- 
 ble only if He exists. I am never conscious of 
 Him as a body. I cannot believe that He has 
 one, or how could I come in contact with Him 
 as I know I do ? Therefore I believe that God 
 exists without a body, although I don't know 
 
66 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 how." The unbeliever starts with the same 
 reasoning as the religious man, but continues 
 in another fashion. " I do not understand the 
 connection between mind and body, it is true, 
 but I am forced to believe that there is one; 
 I am not forced by any fact in my experience 
 to believe there is a God, since I do not feel 
 Him ; and because minds and bodies have al- 
 ways come together in my experience, I shall 
 assume that they always do, until I have rea- 
 son to think something else. That minds might 
 exist without bodies, as do bodies without 
 minds, is theoretically possible, but practically 
 no data force me to admit the probability." 
 
 And so we might conceive an interested 
 mind without a body joining the controversy 
 and saying, with a wag of his head, " It is 
 difficult to conceive how I am existing with no 
 material limits, but it is evident that I do, so 
 I must accept the facts. I am informed that 
 certain minds consider themselves attached to 
 a mass of gray substance in a bony and fleshy 
 structure. They say that, whenever the gray 
 substance is excited, they are ; and paradox- 
 ically enough, if it is too much excited, they 
 sometimes cease to exist altogether for certain 
 periods, or conduct themselves oddly. There 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 67 
 
 may be something in it, but any possible con- 
 nection between a mind and any such sub- 
 stance is so difficult to comprehend, that I am 
 inclined to doubt the validity of their convic- 
 tion." If this mind were interested in us, if he 
 wanted to make our acquaintance, he would 
 look us up a little further. If he was contented 
 with his universe as it was, he would natu- 
 rally dismiss us from his attention altogether. 
 Such a dismissal would not, however, aff ect the 
 question of our existence in the least. 
 
 We then, who hope for a God, need not be 
 deterred from a belief in Him because of too 
 great a difficulty in the conception of a mind 
 without bodily limitations. Must we also be- 
 lieve Him above all mental and spiritual limi- 
 tations? And if we so believe, are we not 
 sacrificing all meaning in personality ? Is there 
 any formulation of God's nature possible, 
 which shall be comprehensible enough to be 
 real, and yet great enough to be more than 
 man, that is, great enough to be real Di- 
 vinity ? It is almost a paradoxical situation . An 
 absolutely ununderstandable God could be no 
 part of our experience, and a God who could 
 be thoroughly apprehended would have be- 
 come a finite thing and no God at all. But we 
 
68 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 have discovered paradoxes everywhere, and 
 have found that they are not made an excuse 
 for disbelief by those who hope for any issue. 
 
 If we are to have what we hope for, what 
 do we want our God to be? What would be 
 possible evidence of such a nature ? Is there 
 such evidence? These are our first questions, 
 and to answer them adequately would require 
 a spiritual and poetic imagination to which I 
 lay no claim. I shall simply try to define 
 what most ordinary men and women want 
 when they desire or have become possessed of 
 some religious life. 
 
 Which demand shall have expression first 
 depends largely on the individual. It would 
 be a natural consequence of his previous ex- 
 perience whether he asked first for comfort, 
 relief from loneliness, stimulation for better 
 living, or optimistic courage for the future. 
 Since we, however, have started our inquiries, 
 spurred on by intellectual doubt, our first ques- 
 tion must be an intellectual one, our first de- 
 mand will be for a rationalizing of our uni- 
 verse. This, in point of fact, is the question 
 we hear asked on all sides : " What is it all 
 about? Why are we here going through cer- 
 tain motions in an unsatisfactory world? Grant- 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 69 
 
 ing that there is a God, what possible reason 
 could He have had in setting the universe 
 whirling through its endless and apparently 
 meaningless cycles ? ' For such questioners, 
 it is absolutely essential that God, whatever 
 else He mayor may not do, should express Him- 
 self rationally. His nature and man's must have 
 this in common, that both are governed by 
 motive, by meaning, by a certain high sense. 
 Only that character can have dignity which 
 carries out some kind of motive, and we would 
 rather believe the reason for our existence to 
 be almost anything, than believe it to be with- 
 out reason at all. A God with no reason, with 
 no motive whatever in His creations, would be 
 more difficult of comprehension than any other 
 God, or no God ; and certainly rather than ac- 
 cept such a God (for we would never hope for 
 Him), we should believe that He did not exist. 
 Clashing with this demand are two other 
 classic attributes which have been given to 
 God-head for many generations. These are the 
 characteristics of omniscience and omnipotence. 
 These are ascribed to God, not so much be- 
 cause we hope for them, perhaps, as because 
 we feel that they are necessary characteristics 
 of a suitable Divinity. The questioner says 
 
70 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 rather wearily, "I suppose God has got to know 
 everything, past, present, and future, because 
 He made it; and if He knows everything that 
 is coming afterwards, what possible point can 
 there be in watching it roll itself interminably 
 out?' This is the depressing atmosphere of 
 fatalism, of predestination, of a complete fore- 
 ordination, an atmosphere which we breathe 
 only because we conscientiously feel we ought. 
 We feel we must go in for a complete God, 
 if any. If He knows anything, He must of 
 course know everything; if He made anything, 
 He made it all ; and for some inexplicable rea- 
 son He derives a satisfaction from watching 
 His plans work out to their inevitable conclu- 
 sion. 
 
 With Earth's first clay He did the last man knead, 
 And there of the last Harvest sowed the Seed : 
 And the first Morning of Creation wrote 
 What the last Dawn of Reckoning shall read. 
 
 Yesterday this Day's Madness did prepare ; 
 To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair ; 
 Drink ! for you know not whence you came, nor why ; 
 Drink ! for you know not why you go, nor where. 
 
 The natural outcome of this view of an 
 omnipotent God is a total loss of responsi- 
 bility on the part of man. A God who can do 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 71 
 
 everything He wills, and who willed my actions 
 down to my latest mistake, has got what He 
 wanted. He surely cannot hold me to account 
 for what I have done, since I could not oppose 
 Him if I would. 
 
 But helpless pieces of the game He plays 
 Upon this checquer-board of Nights and Days ; 
 Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays, 
 And one by one back in the Closet lays. 
 
 The Ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes, 
 But here or there, as strikes the Player, goes, 
 And He that tossed you down into the field, 
 He knows about it all, He knows, He knows ! 
 
 What ! from His helpless Creature be repaid 
 Pure Gold for what He lent him dross allayed ! 
 Sue for a debt he never did contract, 
 And cannot answer Oh the sorry trade ! 
 
 It would seem, then, that the ascription of 
 omnipotence and omniscience to our idea of 
 God's existence is not exactly what we would 
 
 choose if left to ourselves. If our first demand 
 
 
 
 for motive in the creation of the world and of 
 us is to be satisfied, the second demand for 
 all-power and all-knowledge would have to be 
 curtailed. An omnipotence that is able to 
 make puppets of men, and that made the evil 
 as well as the good ; an omniscience that knows 
 
72 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 to its minutest detail every future event, be- 
 comes at once to our understanding devoid of 
 motive. What conceivable reason for watch- 
 ing the play ? 
 
 It might be that God could do anything, 
 but does not choose to; that human beings 
 might have been created with only the auto- 
 matic reactions of the lower animals, but have 
 been allowed to exercise their own will, which 
 God respects. This voluntary abridgment of 
 His own power would make omnipotence a 
 rational possibility, otherwise not. 
 
 Since we are embarked on a voyage of 
 freedom, and have thereby lost all the advan- 
 tages of authority and tradition, let us at least 
 not embrace their disadvantages. If we do 
 not want a God whose hand creates every- 
 
 & 
 
 thing, even our own actions, and if an entire 
 knowledge of future development seems to 
 deprive creation of motive and makes us ask, 
 " Why such a long time about a world in which 
 novelty is impossible ? " if we do not want 
 all this, let us by all means not have it. Let 
 us not feel obliged to say All-Creator, All- 
 Knower, if such ascriptions do not arise from 
 a profound desire of our soul. We would 
 choose that God should have had a real reason 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 73 
 
 for the creation of the universe, a reason that 
 somehow includes us. We would choose that 
 His personality should not only respect ours 
 and allow it to make real choices, but that it 
 should love us and help us to make them. 
 His power would then not be the absolute 
 control of an inventor over his machines, but 
 the influence of a stronger personality over 
 weaker ones, an influence which has its limits, 
 and which could be ignored if the weaker per- 
 son chose to ignore the greater. We clutch, 
 somehow, at the right to disbelieve in God if 
 we choose. We have a childish satisfaction 
 which is nevertheless a real one, in believing 
 that even a God cannot make us have faith 
 where we will not, and that, whereas God in 
 His infinite sympathy will not overlook us, we 
 can if we choose overlook Him. The possi- 
 bility of disbelief must be as real as that of 
 belief, and whether it abridges God's power 
 or not, we insist on this freedom. We choose, 
 moreover, that some kind of communication 
 be possible between God and ourselves, that 
 His presence may be invoked by some kind of 
 exercise on our part. He is not omnipresent 
 in the sense that He is always communing 
 with us, or that we can always evoke the same 
 
74 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 consciousness of His presence. In fact, if He 
 is an unwelcome guest, He can be more and 
 more completely shut out from our universe, 
 until we can be almost certain that He will 
 not speak to us again. We can be without 
 hope, and without God in the world, if we 
 choose. It would seem, by way of parenthesis, 
 that these " all "-attributes have been ascribed 
 more from a literary and aesthetic demand 
 than from a religious one. Surely the Bible 
 gives us to understand that there are stub- 
 born wills, which God, if He will respect 
 them as persons, cannot bend ; that there are 
 outcomes which He watches rather than di- 
 rects, and that there are dark places of the 
 human soul where God is not present. But 
 the Bible aside, for we have for the present 
 cut loose from authority, God's nature only 
 has meaning for us if we limit its scope. That 
 is, however it all might have been created 
 otherwise, since the fact remains that we as 
 human beings do exist in the universe as we 
 find it, the only motive for it all must be an 
 end to which we contribute something, and 
 which could not be brought about perfectly 
 without us. We are not chess-men, but col- 
 laborators. 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 75 
 
 We must assume, moreover, if we are to 
 consider the subject any further, that it is 
 possible for us to comprehend to some degree 
 this motive for creation. To say that we de- 
 mand a God with a motive, and then not to 
 seek for this motive, or at least not formulate 
 a motive that would satisfy us if it were His, 
 would be a very incomplete treatment of the 
 subject. We have presumably been hunting 
 for a motive for creation and have not found 
 one, or perhaps have seemed to find too many. 
 Sometimes the motive seems to be cruelty, 
 sometimes a mere observation of development 
 as such, with no end, or sometimes even a 
 high amusement over man's absurdities. None 
 of these reasons which do not involve a final- 
 ity, an end wished for which is good in itself, 
 are very satisfactory, and we are fatigued with 
 our hunt. The data of the universe seem to 
 point in all directions and to many possible 
 motives. We shall therefore give up our search 
 and begin the analysis of our real wishes. If 
 we can decide what would be a supremely satis- 
 fying motive, and what would be the means of 
 such a will's expression, we may find such an 
 expression at hand, and find, too, that we have 
 a better right to hope for it than for any other. 
 
76 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 Suppose we apply ourselves without timidity 
 to the colossal task of trying to imagine our- 
 selves as a God on the eve of Creation. This 
 is surely a daring undertaking for finite minds. 
 " Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth 
 it, What makest thou?' But when this very 
 question was asked, the prophet, stern and 
 contemptuous though he was of the presump- 
 tion of weak humanity in addressing questions 
 to its Creator, was obliged to admit that man 
 had a right to inquire, and he trumpeted forth 
 the Lord's answer : " I have not spoken in 
 secret, in a dark place of the earth : I said not 
 unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain : I, 
 the Lord, speak righteousness, I declare things 
 that are right." 
 
 If, then, God has not spoken in secret but 
 in open places, and He must have so spoken 
 if we are to understand his nature in any de- 
 gree, - -what is the plan, the motive, the rea- 
 son, that would prompt and justify a universe 
 like ours? 
 
 This is a question to be worked out in a 
 great epic and not in the simplest of prose. A 
 poem might be written which should probe 
 further back than " Paradise Lost," or even 
 Paradise Created, to expound the emotions 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 77 
 
 of a solitary Divinity choosing to create at all. 
 We might very fitly acknowledge at once that 
 the question is too deep for us. But if we are 
 determined to think through all possibilities 
 without reserve, we must ask ourselves, " What 
 could have been the reason ? ' As we review 
 the over-powering spectacle of the evolution 
 of countless ages, the slow development of 
 new forms and their apparent culmination in 
 man, we are stupefied at the immensity of it 
 all. Perhaps nothing is more astounding than 
 that man who so plainly is the outgrowth of 
 lower forms, and whose organism bears the 
 traces of the journey which it has traveled 
 suddenly turns his back on his past, and an- 
 nounces to the rest of creation, " I am like you, 
 you have helped to make me, but I am not of 
 you. We are akin, but you are not my creator. 
 Your society is not enough, I must talk with 
 my God." If we were watching the process 
 of evolution from the outside, perhaps nothing 
 would astonish us more than this. Where did 
 man get this idea? How does he dare to make 
 such an assertion, which his more humble for- 
 bears did not dream of ? It would almost seem 
 as if this were the moment for which God had 
 been waiting. What could be a more valid 
 
78 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 reason for the long work of making a world 
 of men, than that finally the world should turn 
 and assert its own divinity, and provide not a 
 problem alone, but a companion. 
 
 Is this anthropomorphic ? It is, and what 
 of it ? Any Divine motive must be of the same 
 order as a human motive to be in the faintest 
 degree comprehensible to us, and therefore 
 we must fall into either anthropomorphism 
 or agnosticism. There is no alternative, and 
 it is as much an unproved creed to assert that 
 God's motives cannot be fathomed, as to affirm 
 that they can. Let us once more assure fear- 
 ful souls that they are living no more by an 
 unproved faith when they say, " I believe that 
 God is a Person, who has made the world with 
 its culmination in man, for the purpose of com- 
 panionship with Himself," than if they say, 
 " There is no God, and if there were I could not 
 follow His motives." Some state of the case for 
 or against must be true, and we are no more su- 
 perstitious to believe what we hope than what 
 we fear. Moreover, while we may say, "I am 
 impartial, I believe absolutely nothing about 
 the matter," we must live, and we must think 
 as if one or the other were true, if we are to 
 live and think at all. And as rational beings 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 79 
 
 we prefer thought, even upon unproved prem- 
 ises, to either bodily or mental suicide. We 
 could just as reasonably and as zealously de- 
 vote ourselves to making rational the non-exist- 
 
 o 
 
 ence of a God, or the absence of His beneficent 
 motives, if that were the issue for which we 
 hoped. To any one who calls us superstitious 
 both in our desire for a God and in our high 
 valuation of man, we can but answer : " We 
 prefer this to the equal superstition of a desire 
 for a mechanical world without God, and a 
 lesser opinion of man's value. Let our oppo- 
 nent make his case rational and we will attempt 
 to make ours so." 
 
 Suppose then that a God wants the compan- 
 ionship of persons. That would be an adequate 
 reason for any amount of world-making, for 
 an infinite patience and an unbounded inter- 
 est in the developing of His plans. It would 
 also imply that a freedom to converse with Him 
 or not to do so must be present in these per- 
 sons to make their friendship of any value, and 
 that, however different they might be from 
 their Great Companion, they must have cer- 
 tain important characteristics in common. We 
 are assuming for the nature of God only the 
 
 o J 
 
 attributes we must have, only those we long 
 
80 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 for ; and we will not adopt any others, how- 
 ever classic, unless we want them. We do not 
 longfor an omnipotence that forces our choices; 
 for an omnipresence which makes us say, "God 
 is in even the evil desires of our hearts " ; for we 
 prefer to assume even the blackest responsibil- 
 ity for them rather than to say that God is part 
 of them. Even an omniscience that makes every 
 detail of the game a foregone conclusion seems 
 an oppressive possession ; so we do not admit it 
 as harmonious with the highest reasonableness. 
 We reserve the possibility for the emotions of 
 joy or of disappointment in the Deity we are 
 hoping for, and like to think that we can be 
 even better than was expected of us, as well as 
 worse. We do desire a power that can influence 
 other personalities, as great characters can al- 
 ways influence their kind without depriving 
 them of freedom. Abraham Lincoln was not 
 the only free man among his contemporaries ; 
 yet certainly their actions would have been 
 different if he had not existed. Napoleon was 
 not the only person in Europe, nor did Paul 
 deprive all his followers of their wills because 
 he exerted his influence powerfully in one di- 
 rection. An energy radiates from great per- 
 sonalities, which makes their admirers want to 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 81 
 
 follow them, just as it makes their opponents 
 want to defy them ; and God's power shall be 
 of their character, though of an extent and a 
 might surpassing human examples. He must 
 be always present, in the sense that no spatial 
 limits divide the human soul from His, and 
 that a human being can always call upon Him 
 when he will. On the other hand, the human 
 soul can preserve its own limitations and refuse 
 to admit, not only His presence, but His exist- 
 ence. Sometimes the greater personality insists 
 on certain periods of recognition, as when 
 Saul of Tarsus was arrested unwillingly on 
 his way to Damascus. Sometimes the greater 
 waits for the summons of the less. As in any 
 other matter, long habit makes intercourse 
 either more easy or more difficult, so that a 
 man may atrophy his power to commune with 
 God if he chooses. Perhaps no one would hope 
 that such a lack of opportunity to commune 
 with His human creatures would atrophy God's 
 power or His willingness to answer a human 
 call. 
 
 Our list of attributes does not need to be 
 long. A Divine personality that, for some de- 
 sire of His own nature, causes a race of men 
 to work itself out through a long stage of de- 
 
82 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 velopment, to be companions of Himself and 
 the objects of His supreme devotion, is a sim- 
 ple conception. That this nature shall be su- 
 premely good we demand ; this we must have. 
 That His goodness shall include both justice 
 and sympathy, we also demand, and a power 
 and presence wide enough to give every man 
 an opportunity to guess, in some slight man- 
 ner at least, His character. That our actions 
 make a real difference in the world's history 
 and that we are to be not simply moved, but 
 watched with an interest in the issue only 
 greater in degree than our own, this we also 
 demand, to give a dignity to human living. 
 Who can say how far he would want this fore- 
 sight to extend ? I do not feel myself less free 
 because my friend knows I will not murder 
 him. or because he feels certain I will not set 
 the house on fire. Neither am I less free be- 
 cause he knows that in all likelihood I shall 
 sometimes lose my temper, or that I may for- 
 get my appointments. He knows it because 
 he knows me, but his knowing it does not 
 make it happen. That an Infinite Personality, 
 who has a peculiar access to all minds, which 
 is not given to us, should have a knowledge 
 of events to come, is highly probable, and I 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 83 
 
 think we should wish it; for however little 
 meaning the words Past and Future have 
 
 o 
 
 to a timeless Being, if He understands the 
 universe He has made, He undestands the 
 significance these terms have for us. That 
 this fore-knowledge should be complete we 
 certainly do not crave ; and since an interest 
 in world development seems more rational 
 with some issues uncertain, and since we are 
 at present dogmatic, we shall say His fore- 
 knowledge is not complete. 
 
 This, then, is our God, and this is the reason 
 that we have been created. Why just this line 
 of development was chosen, why we are al- 
 lowed to suffer, why God does not manifest 
 Himself more clearly, we shall consider later. 
 We are interested now simply in finding a 
 reason why a God should want a world with 
 men in it, what a God would want His men to 
 be, and what in turn men want their God to 
 be. 
 
 It would certainly be essential that the 
 most important point in God's character should 
 be the one most easily comprehended by man. 
 That is, if the prime feature of His nature 
 were the extent of His knowledge, we should 
 have even more difficulty than we do now in 
 
84 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 deciding how much we believe. The fact of 
 the matter is, however, that we do not care so 
 much about how much He knows, as we do 
 about His goodness and His love for us. If 
 we should have reason to think that some- 
 times God did not know what would be the 
 issue of a given struggle, we should not be 
 so much disturbed as if we believed that He 
 occasionally indulged in lapses from goodness. 
 That we could not endure. Rather no God 
 than one who is not wholly good. The good 
 character of God is for us all the essential fact 
 of God's character, and, arguing from ana- 
 logy, very probably it is the first demand He 
 makes of us. However much we may yearn 
 for the love of our Creator, I suppose the 
 most despairing religious penitent would be 
 less revolted by the scorn and wrath of a good 
 God, than by the love of a bad one. The 
 beauty of holiness has at least this charm for 
 us all, that whether we believe it to exist in 
 God or in man, if a God exists at all, that 
 must be His eternal attribute. It would seem 
 almost as if this were of itself enough of a 
 character with which to endow our Divinity; 
 but at any rate we should expect this, the 
 most essential and yet the most easily under- 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 85 
 
 stood trait of the Divine character, to be the 
 form in which His invitations and His revela- 
 tions to man would be couched. It is perhaps 
 the only feature of the Divine nature which 
 He can demand of us to share with Him. We 
 are speaking for the present age of course. 
 A million years from now, who shall say? 
 Perhaps man can be more of a companion for 
 his Maker in other respects as well. 
 
 We must emphasize the importance of the 
 moral world as our real bond with God, as 
 our common language, because we find, low 
 in the scale of holiness as we feel ourselves to 
 be, that it represents the one claim we have 
 to any universal advance over the lower ani- 
 mals. Some of us, to be sure, have achieved 
 great things in art, most of us have not. Some 
 of us know a great deal, but most of us know 
 very little. I stand with my dog before St. 
 Mark's in Venice ; we look together at it, and 
 I realize that I could no more have made it 
 than he. We listen to a Wagnerian opera, 
 and I know I could as little have created it as 
 I could a world. We sit together on the steps 
 of the Parthenon, and look out over the groves 
 of Plato, the Lyceum of Aristotle, the prison 
 of Socrates, and the Mars Hill of Paul, and I 
 
86 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 feel that, so far as wisdom is concerned, my 
 dog is more my brother than they. If my sal- 
 vation depended on my genius for thought 
 or creation, I should be in sorry case. That 
 Michael Angelo could paint a ceiling proves 
 nothing about me, and that he would be a fit 
 companion for a beauty -loving God would 
 prove, if it proved anything, tltat I could never 
 be. We cannot group the human race in this 
 fashion, and say that we are all stupendous 
 creatures, because some of our species built 
 cathedrals or wrote epics. We know that we 
 are not all of that timber, and that any God 
 who could be revealed only through the life 
 of beauty or of wisdom must be an unknown 
 quantity, not only to us, but to thousands 
 who are even less gifted than we are. That 
 God could reveal Himself in any channel, and 
 that He has so done, is doubtless true; but 
 a just God must make His avenue of approach 
 one easy enough to understand, that the way- 
 faring man, though a fool, may not err therein. 
 It may be a blow to our self-love to relinquish 
 any share in these brilliant human achieve- 
 ments, and to admit that they are no more 
 our doing than as if their creators had not 
 happened to be of the same genus as we. But 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 87 
 
 we always gain by any such sacrifice. Every 
 loss means a certain freedom; and just as I 
 am not related to the achievements of a Leo- 
 nardo simply because we are both classed 
 physiologically as human, so I am not related 
 to the defects of the animal world because I 
 share a back-bone with my dog, and have a 
 nervous system akin to the frog's. If there 
 were a God-communion possible for a Leo- 
 nardo, simply through the avenue of art, or 
 one for Kant only through his metaphysics, 
 there would be no such communion possible 
 for the rest of us just because we and these 
 great ones were cousins. So, vice versa, if 
 there is no God-communication possible for 
 the lower animals, we as human beings are 
 not necessarily without a God-language be- 
 cause we too are cousins. The thing that binds 
 us, the humblest of us, with human genius 
 and with God, is our moral likeness, our abil- 
 ity to see an ethical issue, and to choose duty 
 for its own sake. This is our common lan- 
 guage; this is the characteristic of God we 
 can understand, however over-powering His 
 knowledge and His power may be. 
 
 The biologist may insist, " What folly to 
 consider man as so different from the or^an- 
 
 o 
 
88 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 isms from which he has sprung. We are all 
 protoplasm together, and how can one branch 
 of the family be called children of God, and 
 the others children of matter?' No doubt it 
 is an astonishing fact that man has reared his 
 head and announced his connection with an 
 invisible Almighty; but the fact that he has 
 done so entitles him to consideration. It all 
 depends on the question whether we find our 
 differences from the animals below us more 
 significant, even if not more numerous, than 
 our likenesses to them. That our kinship with 
 them and our common root with them affect 
 in the remotest degree our possible commu- 
 nication with God, or our destiny as planned 
 by Him, it is difficult to see. Suppose a man 
 surrounds himself with enough steak, pota- 
 toes, and water, to last him, say, seven years. 
 At the end of that time, his entire body will 
 be made over. Each cell of his bony and fleshy 
 tissue has been renewed by these three in- 
 gredients and the air he has breathed, so that 
 strictly nothing is left of him of the period 
 before he began this diet. Would he thereby 
 consider that he had lost his birthright? 
 Would he be crushed by the sense of being 
 beefsteak or a potato ? So far as intimacy of 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 89 
 
 connection is concerned, and a recreation of 
 each of his cells made possible through theirs, 
 he cannot deny a certain sonship. But he is 
 not of their kin, and he knows it. 
 
 Armiincr in the same manner (for while the 
 
 O O V 
 
 foregoing analogy is not perfect, it may be 
 suggestive), though our kinship with the 
 other animals were more evident than it is ; 
 even if we still went on all fours, or lived in 
 trees, as soon as we felt the impulsion of an 
 inward voice of conscience, and chose to talk 
 with our God as well as with our fellows, our 
 difference from the rest of creation would be 
 more profound than our likeness. We should 
 have become to some extent companions of 
 the Deity. 
 
 We shall assume, then, that God's motive 
 in creation was to make possible a race of 
 beings who should yearn for Him, and should 
 create an imas'e of Him in their souls, as He 
 
 O ' 
 
 had created them out of a kindred desire for 
 their existence. It is this supreme alternative 
 of mutual love or of mutual annihilation that 
 makes man to some extent God's equal. 
 
 Granted that this is the most reasonable 
 motive, and perhaps the only motive at once 
 reasonable and sympathetic, that we can con- 
 
90 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 ceive for our creation, how could a God com- 
 municate with such beings when they were 
 finally evolved, and ready for Him? We can 
 understand that a forced communion with us 
 would have defeated His own end of a volun- 
 tary companionship, and that our devotion, if 
 it did not arise from a desire of our own na- 
 ture, would be too little godlike to be worth 
 the having. On the other hand, was not this 
 freedom to ignore Him a dangerous gift? 
 Did He not with this very dignity of relation 
 between us run the risk of not being able to 
 communicate with us at all? From even a 
 cursory glance at history or present-day so- 
 ciety, this seems undoubtedly to be the case. 
 Surely humanity, for long periods and over 
 wide areas, has enjoyed its own society exclu- 
 sively, with no yearning for the Divine pres- 
 ence ; and while doubtless many we know not 
 of have always kept an altar-fire burning, it 
 has not always reflected much light on society 
 at large. Can we fathom to any degree what 
 must have been the effect of such exclusion 
 on the mind of God? What would be the 
 emotion of a Creator in seeing the failure of 
 His ripest work, the indifference of His dear- 
 est children? What extra means of com- 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 91 
 
 munion would He strive to establish? and 
 would there be a point where even a God 
 must say, " I can do no more " ? 
 
 So far as we know, even the lowest orders 
 of savages have some kind of conception of 
 Deity. However incomplete may be their es- 
 timate of Him, and however detached they 
 are from daily communion, to say nothing of 
 friendship with Him, still the existence of an 
 invisible Power seems a possible conception 
 to all human minds. We shall not try to probe 
 too far into the thoughts of historic man, 
 since that involves an ethnological knowledge 
 of which we cannot be certain. But at least 
 this common capacity for conceiving an in- 
 visible God, to whom man is under some kind 
 of obligation, seems a universal gift. Just as 
 primitive man talked with his fellows and 
 entered into ceremonials with his kind, he 
 talked and made obeisance before his God. 
 But this was not enough. Certain men who 
 had the sense of communion with God more 
 vividly than others became convinced that 
 God was not simply a power, but a power for 
 righteousness. 
 
 This was a further revelation for those who 
 had a desire for something higher ; but, just as 
 
92 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 before some had doubtless believed and some 
 disbelieved in any God, so now some wanted 
 a good God, and some did not. With certain 
 men God had succeeded, and with others He 
 had failed. Can we not imagine God saying, 
 as indeed He has been interpreted by the 
 prophets, " Wherefore do ye spend money for 
 that which is not bread? and your labour for 
 that which satisfieth not?'' or, to translate it 
 into prose, " Is it possible that these men can- 
 not see that goodness is better than sin, that it 
 is folly to ignore a God whom they may have 
 for the asking, only to torment themselves 
 with other godless men who demand a high 
 price for their companionship?' Through 
 those who had come to understand Him, He 
 sent His message, " Incline your ear, and come 
 unto me ; hear and your soul shall live "; and 
 periodically in the world's history, because of 
 these special appeals from men who had a more 
 intimate knowledge of God than they, some 
 have inclined their ear and have come, and 
 some have not. 
 
 If, then, an inborn tendency to speak to God 
 was not enough to make men believe in Him, 
 if the messages and eloquence of gifted seers 
 did not always open communication, what 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 93 
 
 could ? What was there left to try ? No appeal 
 to the sensations in the way of visions, voices, 
 touches, feelings of presence, trances, stigmata, 
 or speaking in strange tongues, could make 
 a very widespread impression. If we are to be- 
 lieve records, everv one of these methods was 
 
 i/ 
 
 attempted, to arrest the attention of mankind ; 
 but the very fact that we seldom believe such 
 reports is evidence enough that we make it 
 impossible for God to speak to us in that way. 
 It is a curious fact that the humblest man may 
 assure us that he exists by speaking to us aloud; 
 but nowadays (whatever may have been the 
 case formerly), even if we admit the theoretic 
 possibility that a God could produce auditory 
 sensations in our minds, few of us consider 
 such a voice convincing:. A man who hears an 
 
 o 
 
 unseen speaker nowadays does not answer, but 
 goes to a nerve specialist; and if we all heard 
 voices, we should consider ourselves mad, but 
 not religious. I am only re-insisting on this 
 point, to indicate how we limit the avenues 
 of communication with a possible God. It is 
 surely an advance to a more spiritual concep- 
 tion of Divinity when we do not depend on 
 sense-stimulation, always provided we do not 
 at the same time disbelieve in Him for not ex- 
 
94 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 pressing Himself in a way we should not credit 
 if He did. In the asres when men believed in 
 
 o 
 
 voices, they heard them ; when they disbelieve 
 in them they hear them as heavenly voices no 
 more. The test of validity in any case has always 
 been the effect on the moral life of the in- 
 dividual. If he is no better than before, if no 
 great resolve results from the interview whether 
 of voices or of thoughts, we question the actu- 
 ality of his communion. If he becomes a Paul, 
 we are less likely to question the reality of his 
 experience on the road to Damascus. 
 
 Let me say right here, that any sharp dis- 
 tinction between God's speaking to our ears 
 and His speaking to our minds is, on closer 
 scrutiny, a meaningless one. What happens 
 when I hear a spoken word ? What happens 
 when I think a spoken word but do not hear 
 it? When I hear a word spoken, it means that 
 air- waves have been set in vibration ; they strike 
 against my ear-drum, they are communicated 
 through little bones to my inner ear, whence 
 they are taken up by nerve-endings spread out 
 in the cochlea, and from thence transmitted 
 along the auditory nerve to my brain. There 
 is a particular area of my brain, just behind 
 my temples, devoted to the reception of sound- 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 95 
 
 stimuli, and if this area were destroyed, I should 
 be as unable to hear as if my ear-drum were 
 gone or my auditory nerve paralyzed. This, 
 then, is the circuit for sound vibrations to make 
 before I can hear a spoken word. If, on the 
 other hand, I merely think a spoken word, but 
 do not hear it, it means that this same brain-area 
 is active, but without the aid of stimuli com- 
 ing from the outside. The auditory brain-cen- 
 tre has been excited, not by vibrations from 
 outside, but by stimulations from other centres 
 in the brain itself. If this auditory area were 
 destroyed, we could not only not hear sounds, 
 but we could not remember or imagine them. 
 The only difference, then, between the two 
 situations is, that in one case the excitement 
 comes to the auditory area through the ear, 
 and in the other case from another part of the 
 brain. Any idea you may have - - scientifically 
 speaking is just as causally brought about, 
 whether its stimulus happens to come by way 
 of an ear-drum, or, say, by way of the visual 
 centre in the back of your brain. We must 
 understand this very clearly, so that we may 
 not profess toward any one possible God-mani- 
 festation a scorn that we do not toward any 
 other. We cannot in reason sneer against the 
 
 o 
 
96 THE EIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 voice that Samuel heard, and yet believe in the 
 voice of conscience that we have ourselves. 
 Both are accompanied by brain-excitement of 
 some kind, one by way of the auditory nerve, and 
 one by way of the association-centres perhaps ; 
 but in any case both have nervous accompani- 
 ment of some kind, and the brain is not a whit 
 more ethereal or spiritual in its essence than 
 the auditory nerve. It is quite plain that, scien- 
 tifically speaking, there is no room for God 
 anywhere on this nervous circuit. If He is not 
 a material force, He cannot set air-waves in mo- 
 tion to strike against our tympanum without 
 tearing a hole in conservation of energy, - 
 which seems to be one of His universal laws. 
 Just as little could He set up a nervous excite- 
 ment in our brain and bring an idea into our 
 minds, that would not have followed previous 
 causes. If God put one nervous thrill into a 
 brain-cell, and thereby roused up a cortical 
 stimulation not related to other nervous causes, 
 it would be as much of a break in causal laws, 
 and as unbelievable a miracle, as if He thun- 
 dered sermons from all the stones. We are, 
 then, much misled if we have taken refuge 
 behind the scientific possibility of convers- 
 ing with our God in mind, but not in voice. 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 97 
 
 The possibility of either stands or falls with 
 the other, and it is only by their fruits we 
 shall know them. Our desire for food is physi- 
 cally a matter of certain brain-stimulation and 
 nervous excitement in the throat and stomach ; 
 our determination to risk our life for a friend 
 is also accompanied by certain brain excite- 
 ment, and our affection for our parents has 
 no less nervous stimulation than our desire to 
 go to sleep. We may make as much distinction 
 as we like between the value of these different 
 experiences, but one is no more apart from 
 brain-excitement than the other, and our desire 
 for God neither more nor less than they. 
 
 Where, then, in this closed circuit of physi- 
 cal stimulation, which is transmitted along ner- 
 vous tissue, is there the slightest place for God? 
 Grant that He exists, and that He wants to 
 speak with us, how, from our heights of scien- 
 tific logic, can we allow Him to? Our nervous 
 systems accompany (Heaven knows why !) every 
 slightest thought or sensation we have with 
 physical, that is, nervous excitement, and how 
 by any possibility can a spiritual God interpose 
 His influence without shattering this closely 
 knit chain of physical cause and effect w r hich 
 He apparently willed, and which we have with 
 
98 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 so much pains discovered? After creating His 
 world, is He not confronted with the fact that 
 to converse with His chosen ones is not only 
 difficult, but of its nature impossible? 
 
 There is plainly no room for God in the 
 causal universe He has made ; and curiously 
 enough there is no room for us either! God's 
 mind and ours have got to walk off the scene 
 together, there is no nook or cranny for either 
 of us! For the case of our own mentality is 
 as impossible of explanation as God's, and the 
 possibility of knowing, myself, what is in my 
 own mind, is as inexplicable as God's know- 
 ing it. 
 
 o 
 
 If this does not seem a real problem to any 
 reader, I advise him to omit the discussion al- 
 together. It is likely to be a real issue only to 
 those trained to respect the universality of the 
 law of conservation of energy, and to whom 
 it is a point of honor not to abandon this posi- 
 tion at any cost. 
 
 We are of this loyal band (though here, 
 again, conservation of energy is as much a 
 matter of faith as religion, as no experiment 
 has ever absolutely proved it), and we are not 
 willing to allow our causal universe to be shot 
 through with holes where non-material forces 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 99 
 
 have brought material results to pass. We are 
 confronted with the following situation as re- 
 
 o 
 
 gards our own mental life, and to a scientist 
 who loves above all things a neat array of well- 
 adjusted facts, it is indeed a trying case. We 
 have a perfect physical and nervous connec- 
 tion between outward stimuli and muscular or 
 nervous reaction. The moth flies past my eye, 
 and my eye winks; or in a more complicated 
 situation, the visual stimulus arouses associated 
 brain-cells, finally the motor area is excited, 
 and my hand grasps the moth. In any case, 
 and no matter how complex the experience be- 
 comes, brain-cell excites brain-cell, incoming 
 energy goes over into outgoing, and mean- 
 while what is our mind about ? What conceiv- 
 able connection is there between such nervous 
 processes and a mind ? The processes cannot 
 cause the mind and the mind cannot cause the 
 processes ; and if they are simply galloping in 
 harness, why are they doing it? Moreover, if 
 we grant that a mind at any present instant 
 knows what is in itself, how can we explain 
 its memories ? I have not been thinking what 
 my name is until this moment, yet I had not 
 forgotten it. It was simply out of my mind and 
 now it is in it; and we say, psychologically 
 
100 THE RIGHT TO RELIEVE 
 
 speaking, that certain cells corresponding to 
 niy name have become stimulated in the speech- 
 centres of my brain. That such stimulation 
 take place we will grant, and yet we might 
 analyze this nervous discharge ever so care- 
 fully and still we should find no name in it, 
 and since the name was not in my mind either, 
 where was it? What does knowing consist of 
 in this mental realm? It is not an explanation 
 of this question to say anything at all about 
 the brain or nervous system. We will admit at 
 once that every thought, whether of concrete 
 objects or of God, has a physical brain-state 
 lumbering along beside it, that prayer as well 
 as reflex action has nervous analogues from 
 which it does not part. But the mystery of 
 the mind rushing on, clinging to or dropping 
 its memories, unlocalized, creating a constant 
 illusion that it is affecting the constitution of 
 material things (though as sturdy scientists we 
 will not admit that it does), is so inconceivable, 
 that if we were not forced to acknowledge it, 
 we certainly never should. There is absolutely 
 no room for a mind in a causal universe, and 
 the ardent logician would gladly give his up if 
 he could, to prove his point. For this reason 
 psychology has its incessant recourse to physio- 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 101 
 
 logy. It cannot keep its balance in the surging 
 currents of mental life, without standing on 
 the firm ground of its physiological accompani- 
 ments. It first of all tries to link a mental fact 
 to a nervous one ; then with a breath of relief 
 goes on talking about the nervous substructure, 
 because mind of itself is so hard to manage. 
 
 o 
 
 The point of all this digression on the profound 
 mystery of a mind keeping itself distinct from 
 other minds, and clinging to one nervous sys- 
 tem with which it has no conceivable connec- 
 tion, is just this: while it has been taken for 
 granted that a healthy nervous system is a very 
 effective means of allowing; us to come into 
 
 o 
 
 contact with our neighbors, it could just as 
 well be said that any nervous system at all is 
 a perfect device for keeping all our minds apart ! 
 Because my mind is weighted with a running 
 mate that occasionally goes astray, or too fast, 
 or too slow, and because your team has simi- 
 lar peculiarities, just for this reason you are 
 you, and I am I. If all our organisms were iden- 
 tical we could approach a one-ness of sensations, 
 of emotion, of sympathy, such as we can now 
 experience only in what we call our highest 
 moments, when we come nearest together in a 
 common cause. As it is, not only geographical 
 
102 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 difference, but every bias of habit and heredity, 
 grafts into our nervous make-up a disparity 
 that makes us able to be of one mind with but 
 few human beings. We can say that such va- 
 riety is what makes life interesting, but per- 
 haps we shall see later that the one-ness of har- 
 monious minds does not mean a real loss of 
 individuality, and that the highest attainment 
 of a person is to forget that he is one. 
 
 Now suppose a mind not linked with any 
 nervous system (and we have seen that theo- 
 retically it is even more reasonable than the 
 opposite case), what is to prevent its linking 
 itself with the nervous system of any mind 
 that asks it ? 
 
 Everything that passes through the human 
 mind is that mind's own property, so far as 
 other human minds are concerned. The im- 
 pedimenta of other minds prevent their pene- 
 trating to ours. But supposing the mind of 
 God mingled with the stream of our own con- 
 sciousness, using our tools, adapting itself to 
 our limited capacities, and becoming for the 
 time being part of our mind, is not that 
 really what we mean by communion with God, 
 and is it any more inconceivable than com- 
 munion with myself? 
 
THE NATURE OF GOD AND OF MAN 103 
 
 Even here God cannot force a way. Just as 
 with an articulated message from God, we 
 could always affirm that it thundered, that the 
 wind was blowing, that it was the sound of 
 rushing water, so with a God-consciousness 
 mingling with ours we can say, we were ex- 
 cited, it was suggestion, the result of emotional 
 fatigue, etc., etc. ; and if we do not hope for a 
 God, we need not credit Him. We may always 
 call all our thought our own. Who shall judge 
 but ourselves? But if we will not admit the 
 possibility of a God speaking to us, it is equiva- 
 lent to saying, " If there were a God, by no 
 possibility through endless ages could He speak 
 with the men He has created"; and by such 
 a conclusion we make any conceivable God 
 weaker than we are ourselves. 
 
 God if He exists planned our development. 
 The only reason we can conceive for such a 
 creation is the desire to communicate with us ; 
 the only way even a God can speak with man 
 is through man's mind, and the duty remain- 
 ing for a man is that of listening. 
 
 It is a difficult piece of work for a child to 
 beodn to talk or to understand, but he learns 
 
 O ' 
 
 because he wants to. If he did not want to, 
 he could live his life in silence. It is a hard 
 
104 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 matter at first to distinguish the mind of God 
 from our own. If we want to, however, we 
 shall learn both to speak and to understand. 
 If we do not want to, we shall not learn ; and 
 in time, if we are careful to practice indiffer- 
 ence, in all probability God will not trouble us 
 further. It is our privilege to create such a 
 God as we have done in our universe, or not 
 to do so, as it was His to create or not create 
 us in His. 
 
IV 
 
 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 IF my readers are at all like the usual specula- 
 tor on religious problems, they are by this time 
 exceedingly restive. Some one is doubtless say- 
 ing, " What I wanted was a conclusive proof 
 that God exists all that I have is an even 
 chance. I am entitled to believe, if I choose, 
 what has just fifty per cent of a chance of be- 
 ing a falsehood, and that is no basis for a 
 faith." We can only reiterate two things. First, 
 you do not want a convincing proof. A 
 thorough proof means that God would be within 
 the range of science or logic, that is, a measur- 
 able finite quantity, and hence no God. Second, 
 we are coming to see that the chances are more 
 than half in favor of a God. We have tried 
 to start from the most meagre allowance of 
 faith and knowledge that any one who had 
 enough intelligence to ask the question at all 
 could have, but we must now take a wider 
 view. We are still assuming that we want a 
 God, and that we want to know His nature 
 more thoroughly. Are there not degrees of 
 
106 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 probability, which point more decidedly in one 
 direction than another, even though they do 
 not prove the issue absolutely ? 
 
 Suppose that an extraordinary invention has 
 appeared on the market, and there is some 
 doubt as to who is its author. The man who 
 could have devised such a thing has just died, 
 so that we cannot get a direct answer from 
 him, and we can only decide the matter by pro- 
 babilities. A good many scientists had been 
 working along the same lines, and the ques- 
 tion is, "Is this particular machine his or 
 theirs ? ' Our decision must rest upon our esti- 
 mate of the invention and of the man. If it 
 is considered sufficiently extraordinary we say 
 the great man must have made it. If, on the 
 other hand, we do not think it is very remark- 
 able, we decide that the other men may have 
 done so. Even witnesses' testimony would not 
 weigh against this decision by estimate. If the 
 invention is too wonderful for a small man to 
 have made, we will not believe him, no matter 
 how often he assures us that he was its author ; 
 if, on the other hand, it is commonplace, no 
 one is interested to deny the authorship of any 
 one who cares to claim it. Any one would have 
 a right to call us stubborn if we refused to 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 107 
 
 admit that a great inventor had probably been 
 the contriver of some unique device, even 
 though from the nature of the case, no one 
 
 o 
 
 could prove it. It all depends on whether we 
 consider the invention too great to have been 
 made by any but the most able scientist, no 
 matter how many lesser men may assert the 
 contrary. 
 
 If, moreover, the invention was something 
 we wanted very much and had been looking 
 for, and if we had reason to believe that the 
 absent inventor would have had special inter- 
 est in this kind of a thing more than all others, 
 we should loyally feel it to be much safer to 
 erect a monument to him in token of our ap- 
 preciation, than to leave him unrecognized be- 
 cause we could not prove our point. Not only 
 the point would not be proved, but nothing 
 could prove it. The man is gone, his laboratory 
 and papers were burned, and voices from the 
 dead, angels in the sky, or any cataclysm one's 
 imagination can devise would not prove the 
 point further than this : that the thing bespoke 
 the authorship of the only man who could have 
 made it. 
 
 We can see at once that most of our ordi- 
 nary decisions in life are not based on proofs 
 
108 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 at all, but on likelihood, plus inclination, plus 
 a certain capacity in the most able of us to 
 tell at a glance the significance of certain ear- 
 marks of truth. We call a man unreasonable 
 or eccentric if he does not accept the prob- 
 able explanation of a thing, even though he 
 may never get access to a proof. It is to our 
 credit that we regard the matter of our re- 
 ligious life as demanding a more serious treat- 
 ment than the decision as to who took our 
 umbrella. But this seriousness becomes mis- 
 taken, when we set ourselves to demand a 
 proof that we do not want, or refuse to accept 
 an evidence that we find fulfills every demand 
 that we can honestly make. 
 
 The question of Christ's divinity depends 
 essentially on the same sort of evidence; and 
 if we are to argue in the same fashion that we 
 are obliged to in ordinary matters, we must 
 admit that the chances are rather more than 
 half in favor of His being a special revela- 
 tion. 
 
 But some one may object that in our illus- 
 tration one thing was taken for granted, that 
 in the religious question is not so certain. We 
 were then sure that there had been an in- 
 ventor, while we are not certain enough even 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 109 
 
 now that God exists, to permit such conclu- 
 sions as to His probable handiwork. Of course, 
 if we are to progress in any argument, we 
 must, simply for the sake of the discussion if 
 nothing more, consider a point settled for the 
 time being, and pass on to another. We are 
 now convinced that it is essential for life and 
 for logic to believe something, to hold one of 
 two opposite alternatives, and we know that 
 we have as good a right, and a reasonable in- 
 clination, to choose the alternative we prefer. 
 We will assume, then, in the present chapter 
 that we have chosen to believe in such a God 
 as we have described, and that the hypothe- 
 sis of God's existence shall be considered as 
 firmly established as possible. Our concern 
 now is only this: granting such a God, is 
 there any reason to believe that Christ is His 
 especial manifestation? Are our chances here 
 only half and half as before, or has our ac- 
 ceptance of the first tenet made the second 
 more necessary? Once on the path of one al- 
 ternative, are we to have an easier time of it ? 
 It seems to me decidedly that we are. 
 Granting our God, a Christ seems more highly 
 probable than otherwise ; and granting a 
 Christ, we are equally driven to belief in a 
 
110 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 God. We have granted our God, so we must 
 try to find the absolute reasonableness of such 
 a manifestation of Himself. 
 
 There are two types of difficulty which one 
 faces in considering this question. One man 
 finds it impossible to conceive how a human 
 being could exist with the peculiar connec- 
 tion with God which believers find in Christ. 
 Others, granting the possibility, fail to find 
 evidence in Christ Himself of such a connec- 
 tion. These difficulties are exactly the same in 
 character as those which we met in our search 
 for evidences of God. Some of us could not 
 conceive how such a Being could exist at all^ 
 while others failed to find convincing proof 
 of His existence, granted its conceivability. 
 Or, in the words of our illustration, some of 
 us find the invention too astonishing and too 
 intricate to be real; while others of us, ad- 
 mitting that the stories of this mechanism are 
 correct, do not consider it remarkable enough 
 to point to a very distinguished inventor. 
 
 Is it, then, conceivable that God should at 
 some time have taken complete possession of 
 a human frame, instead of partial possession ? 
 Can we mean anything different from this 
 when we say the Divinity of Christ? And if 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 111 
 
 a man acts in every way through his life as 
 we are bound to admit that God, in our high- 
 est ideal of Him, would act in a similar posi- 
 tion, are we not forced to say that he is the 
 expression of God's own person? If the per- 
 fection of a man's life would not convince us 
 that he was in a certain sense set apart from 
 the rest of us as a God-man, is there any con- 
 ceivable trait of mind, body, estate, that would 
 offer sufficient proof of it? Or is our attitude 
 this : "I will grant that God if He chose 
 
 o 
 
 might take full possession of a human frame, 
 and that if He did so, I would call such a per- 
 son Divine in character ; but no possible traits 
 of character would convince me that any man 
 had such a nature. Nothing conceivable would 
 
 o 
 
 ever make me think that any man was a 
 Christ." 
 
 This position is plainly illogical. Either a 
 hypothesis is alive or it is dead. We are not 
 making the possibility of God's expression of 
 Himself in human form a live hypothesis, un- 
 less we will accept some thinkable kind of 
 evidence as sufficient to substantiate it one 
 way or the other. Either I must say, "I will 
 accept any man as an entire expression of 
 God who is perfectly wise, or perfectly beauti- 
 
112 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 f ul, or perfectly good/' or admit any other 
 characteristics, or group of them, as sufficient 
 ground for acceptance; or else I must say, 
 "It is impossible that any man could be an 
 expression of God " ; and we have thereby 
 killed this hypothesis, and must support 
 another one, giving reasons for an opposite 
 conviction. But we must not, in our case, say 
 that the Divine man is a dead possibility, be- 
 cause we have already admitted that if God 
 can at any time, and for the shortest duration, 
 take partial possession of a human mind, and 
 thereby of his body, He can theoretically 
 occupy the body and be absolutely identified 
 with the mind of a man throughout his whole 
 life. This is as possible as that any mind can 
 occupy any body. A Christ is then conceiv- 
 able, and the only question left is whether we 
 have such a Christ or must look for another. 
 
 In the first place, do we want a Christ at 
 all? If not, nothing obliges us to pursue the 
 subject further. Moreover, would such a God 
 as we have formed for our ideal want a Christ ? 
 Is there a high reasonableness that, after the 
 revelations of Himself in human minds, after 
 some special revelations through men more 
 spiritually gifted than others, after a long 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 113 
 
 world-history where virtue had come to gain 
 a certain value, after man had groped for a 
 God and many had found Him with only these 
 first means, is it reasonable that God should 
 say, "I will give them myself not only as a 
 Conscience, as a Law, as a World, as a Deity, 
 but as a Man ? Is there anything more that I 
 can do?" And is there anything else think- 
 able that He could have done? So far as I 
 know, although many have found the evidence 
 for what God has done insufficient to prove 
 that He did it, no one has offered a suggestion 
 as to what would be accepted as a proof of 
 His authorship if it were produced. No one 
 who finds Christ's appearance an unreasonable 
 demonstration of a Deity has told us what 
 would be more reasonable ; and until any one 
 can do so, we must accept what seems to us 
 the most fit. That it had seemed a reasonable 
 expectation to some men is certain, in that long 
 before Christ's birth the coming of a Messiah 
 was looked for. They did not picture Him 
 exactly as He was. Because of His very absence 
 they could not know the kind of a God that He 
 declared His Father to be, and hence could not 
 know exactly how such a God would express 
 Himself. But their conception of a Messiah 
 
114 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 at least kept pace with their idea of a God, 
 and that God would some time appear on 
 earth they confidently hoped. There is per- 
 haps no more impressive line of figures in the 
 great Sistine ceiling than those seated groups 
 of shadowed forms, quietly and solemnly look- 
 ing forward to their hoped-for Saviour. These 
 figures are often overlooked, for the more 
 striking portrayals of the Creation and the 
 Fall; but there they sit, unconcerned, with 
 the glory about them, eternally looking into 
 the distance for the Messiah who shall be 
 born. That mighty painter who did not hesi- 
 tate to attempt the form of God as well as of 
 men, might have added another picture in 
 which the Creator Himself should gaze past 
 His earlier work to the great manifestation of 
 Himself which was to be, and as much long- 
 ing would have been in His expression for this 
 last possible link between Himself and His 
 children, as we see already in the faces of 
 those patient watchers. 
 
 It is reasonable, then, that God should plan 
 such a revelation ; and since we have already 
 decided that perfect knowledge, beauty of 
 form, size, power, and all the other attributes 
 already named are not essential to our idea of 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 115 
 
 God, it follows naturally that the form His 
 incarnation would have to take would be 
 simply perfect goodness, nothing more and 
 nothing less. A man with unlimited know- 
 ledge would impress us mightily, but not as 
 being divine. Such men have currently been 
 supposed in league with the Evil One rather 
 than with God, if their wisdom was too ex- 
 tensive to be canny. Handsome men, long- 
 lived men, powerful men, gifted men, in fact, 
 every sort of man has existed or may conceiv- 
 ably exist without impressing us as especially 
 related to a God; but a good man, and above 
 all a perfectly good man, must give us pause. 
 Since this is above all the characteristic we 
 demanded in God, since this, in fact, was the 
 only aspect of the ordinary man that made 
 him essentially different from the animals, we 
 should expect that this would be the para- 
 mount feature of the man in whom God should 
 perfectly express Himself. There have been 
 good men always, there always will be. The 
 only difference between the divine man and 
 the good man is that one is perfectly good, 
 and the other is not, and this is all the differ- 
 ence in the world. 
 
 Nothing is ever gained by suppression of 
 
116 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 our honest conviction, and some of us must 
 admit at once that goodness does not impress 
 us as very striking. We are conscious of a 
 distinct feeling of disappointment when we 
 think that perfection of goodness is all that 
 we are to find in our Divine Man. Certainly 
 Christ's contemporaries felt this disappoint- 
 ment, and many of them refused to believe 
 that such a simple affair as perfection of vir- 
 tue was enough to assert divinity. With them 
 as with us, however, there is considerable con- 
 fusion when we try to formulate what else we 
 want if goodness is not enough. No one, so 
 far as I know, has been able to state what 
 other trait of character he would wish added ; 
 but we all have perhaps a vague desire for 
 tempests and earthquakes rather than for a 
 still small voice. This we must admit is rather 
 childish, and a demand that will not survive a 
 close analysis. Whatever our irrational desire 
 for more dazzling characteristics, we must ad- 
 mit that, after all, goodness is sufficient unto 
 itself, so long as it is perfect. But here rises 
 another objection : How are we to know that 
 Christ was perfect ? There have been many 
 good men ; we have known some ourselves in 
 whose characters we could discover no flaw, 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 117 
 
 and yet neither we nor they considered them 
 divine. 
 
 Here I believe we find the crux of the 
 whole matter. Good men men even so good 
 that we do not venture to find any evil in 
 them are noticeable for the fact that they 
 do not consider themselves perfect. Far from 
 that, their very goodness makes them sensitive 
 to certain defects in their own nature which 
 we cannot see, and which perhaps we are too 
 dull to notice in ourselves. They do not call 
 themselves perfect, or if they do, our enthu- 
 siasm for them cools, and we consider that 
 their very satisfaction is a blemish, even 
 though it may be the only one. If we really 
 think the matter through we see that the final 
 judge of a man's perfection of character must 
 be himself after all. There comes a certain 
 point of outward goodness of fulfillment of 
 every obligation of kindness, generosity, and 
 self-sacrifice where an outsider must admit 
 he can point to no duty unperformed, no grace 
 of character visibly lacking, and only the man 
 himself can know whether he has really ex- 
 pressed God's will entirely and is become a 
 perfect embodiment of divinity. If a man 
 makes such an assertion, and we feel that he 
 
118 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 has no ri<rht to consider his life such a stand- 
 
 o 
 
 ard of virtue, we are shocked and disgusted 
 with him more than we should be if he had 
 committed some more dangerous sin. We are 
 careful of our ideals. We resent a pretense of 
 virtue more than an actual vice, because if our 
 standard becomes confused, what is our guide ? 
 With an open sinner we know how to deal. 
 
 The situation is this. When a man says that 
 he expresses divine perfection, his statement 
 is either blasphemous, insane, or it is true. All 
 of these interpretations were put upon the as- 
 sumption of Christ. When He quietly affirmed 
 before Pilate and the priests that He was the 
 Christ, the Son of the Blessed, the high priest 
 rent his clothes and asked what further wit- 
 ness of His blasphemy was necessary. Others 
 considered Him a madman, and still others be- 
 lieved His testimony. There seems to be no 
 other course to take. Either He spoke the 
 truth, or He did not ; and if not, His assertion 
 was a voluntary misstatement, or it arose from 
 an uncontrollable aberration of mind. If they 
 did not believe Him, it was more reasonable 
 to take this offense seriously than to let it pass 
 with indifference. It would indeed be a more 
 serious state of affairs than it is in the world, 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 119 
 
 if it were considered a light matter for a man 
 to assert his absolute oneness with God. 
 
 We all consider Paul a good man, who died 
 with the assurance that he had fought the 
 good fight ; and yet Paul could never free him- 
 self from the conviction of his own sin. Ste- 
 phen was a good man, but he died with a 
 vision of Christ in glory, and not with a reve- 
 lation of himself as returning to his native 
 sphere. Good men ever since the world began 
 have lived and died with a more or less tri- 
 umphant conviction that they have finished 
 the work that was given them to do, but never 
 do we tolerate the assumption that they have 
 been wholly what God would have been in 
 their place ; and indeed such assumptions are 
 conspicuously absent from the noblest char- 
 acters. Their feeling of imperfection is in di- 
 rect ratio to their spiritual life, with the excep- 
 tion of Christ. He used His own name and 
 the name of His Father interchangeably, and 
 affirmed that no one knew the real nature of 
 God but Himself and those who learned of the 
 Father through Him. Do we feel the same 
 distrust of such an assumption that we should 
 feel if Paul had said, " Come unto me, Paul, 
 and I will give you eternal life " ? Should we 
 
120 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 honor the noble martyrdom of Stephen if he 
 had called out to his persecutors, " Hereafter 
 shall ye see Stephen sitting on the right hand of 
 power, and coming in the clouds of Heaven " ? 
 No, most of us feel a right, a fitness in Christ's 
 making such statements, which we deny to 
 the best of good men. Or if we do not feel 
 such a right (and many nurtured in other 
 creeds doubtless do not), why do we not ? Let 
 some one who calls this man blasphemous or 
 mad, instead of God-like, tell us what trait 
 He lacks, what fault He showed, what kind of 
 a man God incarnate must be if we are to be- 
 lieve His testimony ! If Christ were the expres- 
 sion of God, He must not only have known 
 it, but He must necessarily have said so. We 
 believe the verdict of good men on themselves, 
 we believe the testimony of a righteous wit- 
 ness ; or if we disbelieve, we must produce a 
 reason for it, as we should expect the world 
 to give a valid reason for disbelieving us. We 
 have no right to call Christ insane for no 
 other reason than that He made such state- 
 ments concerning Himself, if His life was 
 otherwise normal, and if the statement is not 
 in itself unthinkable. We have found that 
 such an expression of God was not only think- 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 121 
 
 able, but to be expected. Moreover, it had 
 been expected, and we must have some other 
 reason for disbelief when He comes, than sim- 
 ply the stupendous nature of an assertion 
 which if it were true must be stupendous, and 
 which must be asserted by the man Himself. 
 On one occasion Christ seemed to deny 
 His own goodness. A man came to Him say- 
 ing, " Good master, what good thing shall 
 I do that I may have eternal life ? ' thereby 
 taking a casuistic view, as if one good deed 
 added to another would bring a total that 
 should entitle the doer to a suitable reward. He 
 asked Christ as a man who had done enough 
 good deeds to enable Him to give advice, and 
 Christ repudiated such a view of Himself, and 
 refused to be called good. His goodness con- 
 sisted of His Father speaking through Him, 
 not of this, that, or the other thing he might 
 have done. But neither here nor in any other 
 record of Jesus, do we find a hint of regret 
 for any of His deeds. There is no feeling of 
 imperfection, no longing for a more complete 
 spiritual life, a state of affairs unprecedented 
 in the case of any man so sensitive to sin and 
 so simple in his whole life as He. If He spoke 
 an untruth in claiming to be one with God, 
 
122 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 the greatest prophet in the world was mad or 
 a hypocrite. Moreover, He must have been 
 mistaken on the most essential point of all, 
 His own relation with the God whom He was 
 interpreting. Is it easier to believe this, or 
 to believe that what He said was true, and 
 that the Messiah for whom the world had been 
 looking had really come ? 
 
 This is, however, not quite enough to say 
 concerning the assumption of Christ. Since 
 any expression of God in the visible world 
 must take on the limitations of time and space, 
 it comes thereby within the domain of history ; 
 and while that gives an additional evidence, it 
 brings an additional burden. So long as an 
 acquaintance with God is simply a matter of 
 my own experience, no one but myself can 
 affirm or deny it, and I have the advantage 
 and the disadvantage of its being unassailable 
 by outside influence. If, however, this expres- 
 sion of God has become an historical fact, 
 I have the advantage of its tangibility, the 
 support of many minds, but also the diffi- 
 culty that some one may say the history is 
 incorrect or the interpretation has been false. 
 We cannot be certain of history as we can be 
 sure of experience; and if any one calls in 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 123 
 
 question the data, the facts, the authenticity 
 of the record, we cannot answer in just the 
 same manner that we could for a denial of the 
 laws of logic. We have here vividly impressed 
 upon us what earlier in our discussion we 
 found it difficult to believe, namely, that a 
 God-expression which we can see and touch 
 presents difficulties for belief, that the most 
 ineffable idea of Him does not. We thought 
 we wanted a God who would appeal to us 
 through a sense - experience ; finally one is 
 given to us, and we are more troubled than be- 
 fore. No one was more conscious of this than 
 Christ. He said Himself, " A prophet is with- 
 out honor in his own country " ; and since 
 God by His very human expression has become 
 in a certain sense one of our countrymen, we 
 find the same difficulty in accepting Him that 
 was found by His own neighbors. The records 
 may be incorrect, perhaps He did not make 
 these assertions about Himself,- -certain words 
 have been interpolated by His followers ; 
 He was not mad Himself, but His followers 
 were misguided, undeveloped, too anxious to 
 found a new creed, et cetera, and what we 
 really have left is only the record of another 
 good man too highly prized by certain con- 
 
124 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 temporaries, as He was too little prized by 
 others. 
 
 All this is the weakness to which any his- 
 torical record is liable, and we must base our 
 belief, not on the reliability of this or that 
 manuscript, on the latest reading of this or 
 that clause, but on the supreme reasonable- 
 ness of the character as presented, and the 
 question whether a nature of this quality could 
 have been invented by any one, much less by 
 the humble followers with whom Christ began 
 His ministry. If we decide that this nature is 
 too great for human contrivance, that it really 
 must have existed, no matter whether one man 
 or another wrote the texts ; if the character 
 as pictured is a harmonious whole as it stands, 
 and if this whole has a certain quality too 
 great for other authors, we shall say God was 
 its author, as Christ said of Himself. I think 
 the criterion of the whole matter is, Do 
 we actually think Christ's nature as pre- 
 sented, is very wonderful? Do we find it fits 
 in so well with our conception of God that it 
 is positively easier for us to believe His asser- 
 tions as they stand, than to question their 
 authenticity? Ease of one alternative or the 
 other is after all our usual guide. The sun 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 125 
 
 apparently moves around the earth, and that 
 visible course seems to some minds a more 
 conclusive argument for such a path than any- 
 thing we can say to the contrary. We, on the 
 other hand, have so many correlated facts for 
 the other hypothesis, that it is easier to deny 
 the evidence of our eyes than to deny these 
 facts. The difference between the two sides 
 is that one puts a higher valuation on one line 
 of evidence than the other. All of us have 
 certain demands that must be satisfied in any 
 argument, and we should prefer to call a 
 matter unexplained, than to accept an expla- 
 nation that left this demand unsettled. Sup- 
 pose we return to the illustration of the in- 
 vention. Some one finds in my possession a 
 perfectly constructed flying-machine, which I 
 assure him I made myself. Three comments 
 are open to him : he may say, " I believe it," 
 or " I don't believe it," or " What of it ! " 
 That is, either he accepts it, or he does not 
 accept it, or he is indifferent to the whole 
 matter. If he does not think it very extraor- 
 dinary, he may believe that I was the con- 
 structor. But in proportion as he realizes its 
 remarkable perfection, and in proportion as 
 he knows me, he will become more and more 
 
126 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 incredulous, and he will end by saying that it 
 is evident that some one who knows more of 
 mechanics than I do must have been its cre- 
 ator. But I assure him that I must have done 
 it. Any one can tell him that no one else has 
 been on the premises ; it is not so remarkable 
 as to be outside my powers, and I may be 
 even deluded into believing what I say. But 
 if he is sufficiently convinced that the machine 
 is a wonderful one, he will answer, " I do not 
 know who made it ; its presence here is mys- 
 terious, and you think you are telling the 
 truth. But I know you too well. You are 
 absolutely incapable of making a flying-ma- 
 chine, and it is easier for me to believe that 
 it came from any other source in the world, 
 than that you were the inventor or the con- 
 structor." 
 
 It is always open to a man to be unim- 
 pressed with anything, however unusual it 
 may be. A man has the right to blink indiffer- 
 ently at a whole galaxy of flying-machines 
 careering through the landscape, and refuse 
 to consider the matter worth a second look ; 
 but we at least are not of this class. Either 
 we are so struck with the sublimity of Christ's 
 character, and His absolute satisfactoriness as 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 127 
 
 a revelation of God's nature, that to believe 
 in Him seems easier than to credit His crea- 
 tion to a few uneducated fishermen, or even 
 to a great theologian ; or we are not so 
 impressed, in which case the latter possibility 
 seems more reasonable. 
 
 Now, provided that we can detect no flaw in 
 Christ's character, and that we cannot suggest 
 any virtue or mark of nobility which we would 
 add to make it our ideal, we must admit that it 
 is not alone that we are not impressed with 
 Christ's goodness, but that we are not impressed 
 very mightily with goodness in general ! Un- 
 less we can imagine something higher that we 
 want, we must confess that this is the highest, 
 but that the highest is no great matter after 
 all. If we say this, we are striking our blow at 
 God's character, and not alone at Christ's ; and 
 this is a very serious dilemma into which we 
 have allowed ourselves to drift. A thing must 
 be the best if it is all that we can conceivably 
 want ; and if we have the best and do not 
 want it, we are like aliens who have wan- 
 dered into Paradise, and find it not to their 
 taste. 
 
 There was a parable spoken once about the 
 lord of a vineyard who sent messengers to 
 
128 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 inspect his domain and collect the fruit of 
 it. The messengers were badly treated, and he 
 said, " I will send my son ! surely they will 
 reverence him." They did not reverence the 
 son, and why not? Because they did not 
 reverence the father. 
 
 The case would have been different if they 
 had reverenced the father, and yet had doubted 
 whether this messenger were the son as he 
 announced himself to be. They would have 
 respected any one from the lord of the vine- 
 yard, whether he were his son or not; and 
 though the son would have regretted their 
 doubt of him, yet if their love for his father 
 were great, he would not have been too hard 
 on their disrespect. Since the Son of Man 
 appeared in a world of time and sense, and 
 since religion must not depend on such an 
 expression, He acknowledges that the convic- 
 tion of God is the most essential. A knowledge 
 of Christ depends on historical information. If 
 that were all-important, the uninformed, the 
 misinformed, and those who were born too 
 soon, would be irretrievably robbed of the 
 necessity of their souls, and surely that could 
 not be just. But even if the unbelieving 
 workers in the vineyard who still loved the 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 129 
 
 lord were to be forgiven for their doubt, were 
 they losing anything by it ? 
 
 Was Christ's coming simply another revela- 
 tion, or a different one? Is there a progression 
 in God's expression of Himself, so that if one 
 loses the last, one loses not only a part, but 
 the greatest ? Moreover, is there a satisfaction 
 
 to be derived from a religion with Christ in 
 
 & 
 
 it, that one cannot find in a religion without 
 Him ? To this latter question at least there 
 can hardly be two answers. The Christian 
 religion has stood for a joyous view of life, a 
 serenity of disposition, as no other creed has 
 ever done. The Jewish religion, from which it 
 sprang, was dignified, noble, and possessed of 
 a high imaginative fire which the Christian 
 also appropriates to himself. But its greatest 
 teachers were always looking forward with a 
 passionate eagerness to the fuller revelation 
 that was to be. Their God was just and terrible. 
 His vengeance on their sins was more real 
 than His love, and there was a division of 
 feeling among themselves as to immortality. 
 Their ideal of righteousness was stern, lofty, 
 and unattainable ; but that the sorrowful man 
 should be comforted, or the solitary man find 
 a friend in God, hardly crossed their minds. 
 
130 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 They needed comfort and companionship as 
 much as any other men, but when, like Job, 
 they lifted up their voices to ask why the 
 world should be as it is, they were too over- 
 come by the inscrutability of Jehovah to hope 
 to find an answer. Can we not imagine God 
 
 o 
 
 as saying, " Can they not see what I am ? 
 Can they not read my tenderness as well as 
 my anger?' And to answer the eternal ques- 
 tion for whose answer the best men of all 
 ages had been searching, Jehovah humbled 
 Himself, to show them that the important 
 element of His nature was not His power, 
 which men could not achieve, but His good- 
 ness, which they might. 
 
 It is nothing against His revelation, that 
 other men had had visions of the same ideal. 
 In fact, there seems a special fitness that it 
 should have come to pass after the mighty 
 Jewish prophets and those Greek giants of 
 thought had done their best but had missed 
 the whole. No one who reads of the lives of 
 Plato and Socrates, their noble ideals, their 
 glimpses of a divine love, can fail to be struck 
 with their nearness to the Christian religion. 
 
 o 
 
 Far from weakening the Christian message 
 when it conies, it is an added support to it 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 131 
 
 that the highest strivings of the human mind 
 all pointed in one direction, and that Christ 
 came not to destroy but to fulfill. Who would 
 believe in a religion that ran counter to the 
 ideals of all good men who had lived before, 
 and what more could a God do than quietly 
 to set His seal upon the best, and live it 
 before our eyes ? 
 
 Man had hoped before that God understood 
 him, he had wondered if Pie did, and now he 
 finds that it is an assured fact. If there is to 
 be an assurance of God's absolute understand- 
 ing of every man, He must have experienced 
 triumphantly all that a man must face. He 
 must be poor, for most men are poor ; He must 
 live an obscure life with no striking opportu- 
 nities, for most men live such a life. He must 
 be unappreciated and misunderstood, He must 
 suffer as only a few men are called upon to 
 suffer, and He must even pass through that 
 horror which perhaps all men with a great 
 mission have faced, when they have almost 
 doubted themselves and have called out as 
 Christ did, " My God, why hast Thou forsaken 
 me ? ' Some men are burdened with such a 
 temperament that they cannot see God clearly, 
 no matter how they try; and even they have 
 
132 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 a sympathizer in Christ, who passed through 
 the same darkness. 
 
 Is it possible that there exists any one who 
 would not be comforted to feel that the God 
 of the whole earth knew as a man knows, his 
 sorrow over the death of a friend, his discour- 
 agement over unappreciated work, his restive- 
 ness in a youth of forced inactivity, his solitude 
 amid men of another temper? That this is 
 what men do want is shown plainly enough 
 by the comfort that believers get from their 
 convictions, and that it is what men wanted 
 from all time, one has only to read the fifty- 
 third chapter of Isaiah to see. 
 
 To any who say, "You believe this only 
 because you want to," we can answer boldly, 
 " You believe the opposite because you want 
 to." If they deny this, and say, " We do not 
 believe the opposite because we want to, but 
 because we cannot do otherwise; we would 
 gladly share your richer faith, but we are un- 
 able to," the matter stands differently. There 
 was a time when John the Baptist, that voice 
 crying in the wilderness that the Messiah had 
 come, doubted the authenticity of Christ's 
 mission. He had seen the divine character of 
 Christ before any one else had seen it, and had 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 133 
 
 affirmed it when others doubted. He had been 
 imprisoned for his passionate preaching, and 
 now in the gloom of prison he sends messen- 
 gers to Christ and says, " Art thou He that 
 should come, or do we look for another?' 
 There is perhaps not a more humanly pathetic 
 touch in the whole Bible than this. The doubt 
 was so plainly the result of fatigue and of 
 disappointment ; or perhaps, more than all, it 
 was the reaction that comes to every intense 
 nature after declaring itself ; the tendency to 
 doubt what it has most vehemently believed. 
 The situation is so natural, so human, and the 
 nobility of both characters is so touching. 
 John doubted the reality of Christ's mission, 
 and whom did he ask to dissipate his doubt, 
 but Christ Himself? He knew no other way 
 to turn for an answer. And Christ understood 
 him so perfectly that He entered into no dis- 
 cussion of the matter. He sent word to the 
 prisoner that the same works were being per- 
 formed, it was all just as it was before, only 
 he in prison had forgotten it. Who of us be- 
 lieves that John was not reassured? Who of 
 us believes that real faith depends on the ups 
 and downs of emotional buoyancy? 
 
 The feeling of certainty is a detachable one. 
 
134 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 Some of us are without it altogether, and, 
 though we might stake our lives on an issue, 
 would never feel certain of it ; while others of 
 us always feel certain of one thing or its op- 
 posite, even where our reason tells us we have 
 no right to do so. We cannot all feel certainty 
 to the same degree, and we must not demand 
 it of ourselves. But any man, no matter how 
 unfortunate his emotional endowment, if he 
 persistently asked Christ for the removal of 
 his doubt, as John did, while he might never 
 attain the triumphant faith which is given to 
 more sanguine minds, might feel that by this 
 very lack he was entering more deeply into 
 the greatest of human experiences, that long- 
 ing which hopes where it sees nothing. Per- 
 haps he has a deeper vision of Christ's own 
 sorrow, and by his own blindness understands 
 Christ's last agony, better than we. 
 
 Does this make God too common? If He 
 has been human, and has lived on earth in 
 complete control of one nature, instead of in 
 fragmentary control of our several ones, do 
 we find our Ideal of a great God has suffered ? 
 I think not. It is noticeable in every-day life, 
 that the nobler the character, the simpler it 
 becomes ; and its simplicity, far from detract- 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 135 
 
 ing from its grandeur, accents it. We are 
 embarrassed by the chief of police, and we 
 quail before a " sales-lady/' but we are at home 
 immediately with a great man. That such a 
 man dresses as other men do, that he eats and 
 sleeps, we sometimes think would shock us, 
 would make him seem too small ; but in reality 
 it does nothing of the kind. Clothes, even 
 mean clothes, cannot belittle a great spirit; 
 they rather take on a certain grandeur from 
 the form which carries them. 
 
 If we are disturbed by such simplicity, if 
 we are more impressed by strangeness and 
 a wild eye, by an ermine robe or a prancing 
 steed, it bespeaks our own littleness. Christ 
 Himself asked the same question of those who 
 were apparently startled by His normality; 
 " What went ye out for to see? A reed shaken 
 by the wind, or a man clothed in soft rai- 
 ment ? ' And elsewhere He comments on such 
 people, and says how impossible they were to 
 satisfy. They, like some of us, were offended 
 when a man deported himself like John, and 
 in the vehemence of his enthusiasm laid him- 
 self open to the charge of madness. And 
 again, when one lived simply and normally 
 with his fellow men, as did Christ, they found 
 
136 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 Him too natural for their taste. They, like 
 some of us, did not know what they wanted, 
 and were afraid that neither normality nor 
 abnormality befitted God's expression. Since, 
 however, most men, from the very nature of 
 the word, are normal, Christ must be so too, 
 in every respect but the unprecedented char- 
 acter of His Spirit. 
 
 He Himself put no great emphasis on His 
 miracles. He told His disciples that they would 
 work greater wonders than He had done, and 
 He admitted that the Pharisees and their 
 children cast out devils as well as He. Certain 
 wonder works had been common through all 
 history, sometimes performed by good men, 
 and sometimes by bad. Aaron cast his rod 
 before Pharaoh and it became a serpent; 
 Pharaoh's magicians did as much, and we can 
 hardly blame the monarch that he was not 
 impressed. Sometimes a prophet performed 
 a mighty deed, and sometimes a witch. The 
 situation is in nowise different to-day, and we 
 are quite right when we refuse to accept an 
 unusual power of this kind as a divine mani- 
 festation. Christ placed no more emphasis upon 
 such phenomena than any man need do to-day. 
 He never called them miracles, in the sense 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 137 
 
 that they transcended any natural law; and 
 no one is obliged to, or indeed should have any 
 disposition so to do. If one does, in fact, it 
 seems to put an emphasis upon them which 
 they do not deserve, and diverts the attention 
 from the more important traits of His charac- 
 ter. It obliges us to consider as divine mes- 
 sengers ah 1 who perform the same acts, instead 
 of seeing God in those who reflect His charac- 
 ter. We should be in sorry case if all who 
 healed the sick, noble as that calling may be, 
 must be accepted as nearer the Deity than 
 those who do not. 
 
 It is sometimes urged that Christ called 
 Himself the Son of Man more than He did the 
 Son of God, and that He meant thereby that 
 His nature must not be over-rated. But it 
 seems rather to point in the other direction. 
 Why should any human being emphasize the 
 fact that he is a son of man ? What else 
 should he be ? Surely nothing could be more 
 meaningless than that a man, who is obviously 
 a son of man, should say so. The only point 
 in such reiteration of His kinship with man is 
 that He felt His kinship with God as so much 
 more striking, more apparent, that if anything 
 were likely to be forgotten, it would be His 
 
138 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 human nature. His mission was not to impress 
 man over again, that God was God, and that 
 man was man. That the world knew already. 
 His message was that God could be a man, 
 and that men might be divine. He came to 
 tell us not so much that He was the Son of 
 God as that we are sons of God, and for that 
 reason He calls Himself the Son of Man and 
 us the sous of God. 
 
 Does not this assertion carry many other 
 things with it? Can we even ask whether we 
 are immortal or not, after such a revelation ? 
 Has God gone through this long period of 
 development to make us, only to lose us 
 again ? Can any nature that has linked itself 
 with the Divine be lost, unless God Himself is 
 finite? As to the immortality of those who 
 have lost connection with Divinity what shall 
 we say ? Do they want immortality, or do 
 they prefer to be without it ? Here is a field 
 into which I cannot enter from lack of testi- 
 mony. In my experience, just so far as people 
 have been irreligious they have not been 
 interested in their own eternal Nature. An 
 existence of the sort they have at present, 
 they could not have, and do not want. Neither 
 does existence of any other kind, with or with- 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 139 
 
 out a God, appeal to them. Whether such a 
 state of mind can eventually effect its own 
 suicide, its own annihilation, who shall say? 
 Logically, if a man may have faith, other 
 things being equal, in what he hopes for, we 
 may leave such a possibility to those who so 
 hope. 
 
 To those whose imaginations are fascinated 
 and tormented by the thought of other worlds 
 and systems extending to the farthest fixed 
 star and beyond, the conviction that the God 
 of them all lived thirty-three years of His 
 eternity on this dust that we call our earth, is 
 an awful but an unspeakable comfort. Only 
 thus can they face the universe with courage. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 IT will seem an astonishing statement to 
 those whose minds are burdened with the 
 misery of this world, with its crime, its inno- 
 cent suffering, and sudden death, to say that 
 after all we have what we want ! They will 
 protest, "We do not want the innocent to 
 suffer, we do not want man to sin, we do not 
 want to die," and we can only answer as em- 
 phatically, " Yes, you do." 
 
 This may seem little less than madness, but 
 we must carefully analyze this situation as we 
 have the others. We must picture our world 
 without punishment falling on innocent as 
 well as guilty, without the possibility of sin, 
 and without death, and see if such a world 
 is one in which we should care to live. Our 
 view must be a broad one. It is not a case for 
 complaining of individual instances. We can- 
 not point to this case where a child was 
 injured by a drunken father, or to that where 
 an only son was killed in war, or to another 
 where a moral weakness has been discovered 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 141 
 
 in a man hitherto supposed upright. We must 
 investigate principles instead. If we refuse to 
 admit these injustices and weaknesses as har- 
 monizing with an idea of a just God, do we 
 mean by that, that parents should not have 
 any real responsibility over their children, and 
 that society should not have the capacity to 
 kill its members, or to over-tempt them, if 
 society so chooses? That society does so 
 choose and so act is an evidence that the 
 world in general is getting what it wants, 
 granted that some of its own by-products are 
 bitter even to itself. 
 
 If we admit, then, that the world in gen- 
 eral is suited with its lot (otherwise it would 
 change it in certain important respects), is it 
 possible for the individual in such a world 
 ever to be happy ? Is there any connection 
 whatever between the individual and the over- 
 individual will of society ? Must we all partake 
 of one another's desires and achievements, 
 of one another's virtues, and one another's 
 sins ? 
 
 It would certainly seem that there is such a 
 connection, and that the world was planned 
 to run on the basis of each personality forget- 
 ting itself in the greater whole. Because we 
 
142 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 do not so forget ourselves, and because we 
 insist instead on a certain separateness instead 
 of brotherhood, result all the hitches, the 
 differences, the disasters which we deplore. 
 Yet here as always we are illogical. If we 
 really want this isolated personality, why do 
 we regret its normal consequence ? If we do 
 not want this isolation, but a community of 
 interest with other natures as well as with our 
 own, why do we not live it ? That some of us 
 do and some of us do not, illustrates the con- 
 fusion that always results when a house is 
 divided against itself. 
 
 It may seem at first as if we were con- 
 tradicting what we have already said about 
 personality. We have been insisting that we 
 were created that we might each of us be a 
 separate addition to the world. Each of us is 
 being trained to be a companion of God, and 
 as such we are not God, and we are not 
 each other, but always very definitely ourselves. 
 But this truth like many others has expanded 
 under our scrutiny, and we are forced to ask 
 the question, " Am I really most myself when 
 I am most conscious of it ? Am I not really 
 more of a person when I have apparently lost 
 my identity altogether in a cause, or in an 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 143 
 
 experience of aesthetic ecstasy, or in religious 
 communion? Is Self-Consciousness desirable, 
 or is it to be gained only to forget ? ' We can 
 illustrate this question and its answer, entirely 
 within the limits of a single person's experi- 
 ence. To begin with, we all have had difficulty 
 in learning to manage our own body. We 
 could not walk without thinking, " now this 
 leg and this arm so, now balance until the 
 others can be brought into position." We 
 learned our language in the same way, and 
 every time we study a new one we go through 
 the same painful process : " I must sound gut- 
 turals so, and this must be nasal and that 
 must be sibilant" ; and all our muscles and 
 ideas are as separate as possible, only to be 
 forced into harness with the greatest difficulty. 
 When we are learning more complex affairs, 
 the separation of our organism is even more 
 apparent. To play this piece on the piano re- 
 quires a right hand in one melody, and with 
 a three-beat rhythm, a left hand in another 
 melody with a two-beat rhythm; one foot stays 
 on the loud pedal for periods in no way 
 related to either rhythm, or to the left foot, 
 which presses the soft pedal with discretion. 
 As if this were not enough, one melody must 
 
144 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 sometimes come to the front and then the 
 other ; your fourth finger cannot bring out as 
 much tone as your third, and must be forced 
 to, and your little finger must diverge from 
 your thumb enough to reach to or surpass an 
 octave. You might feel after such an exercise 
 of your powers, " Now I am really a man ! 
 I can have hand, arm, finger, foot, melody, 
 rhythm-consciousness all at once." Each of 
 these organs or ideas might plume itself on 
 living unto itself, and the thumb for instance 
 rejoice that it was as consciously a factor in 
 the process as the melody, or the emotion, 
 which the whole piece expressed. The fact of 
 the matter is, of course, that this period of the 
 separateness of all the component parts of the 
 playing process is very fatiguing and unsatis- 
 factory, and until a person has got beyond 
 it, and has felt the emotion but forgotten 
 his thumb, he can hardly be said to play the 
 piano. Or, if we could impersonate this little 
 member, we might say to it, "It is all very 
 well for you to think of yourself, and say 
 you are as important a part of the piece as 
 anything else. So you are; but until you for- 
 get it, and let the player forget it, there is not 
 any piece at all ! ' 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 145 
 
 Even the performer may be a little bewil- 
 dered at the discovery that when he was the 
 most conscious of himself in all his members 
 he was a failure, and no person at all, and 
 only when he forgot that he was any one and 
 lost himself in his interest, did he find that he 
 was an artist, but such is the case. The real 
 personality in any situation is the man who 
 f cruets that he is one, as much as is consistent 
 
 O ' 
 
 with other men doing the same. And our re- 
 spect for his character dwindles if we realize 
 more and more that a studied self-conscious- 
 ness directs all his activities. 
 
 We must admit, then, that even within the 
 individual character, the different activities, 
 while they are acquired as separate affairs 
 become useful only as they lose that separate 
 identity, and allow themselves to be forgotten. 
 And, moreover, the combination of them all 
 which makes up what we call our separate per- 
 sonality, only comes to its fullest realization 
 when it can lose itself in an interest, or if it 
 does not possess such a capacity in every direc- 
 tion, it is only really strong and powerful in the 
 lines where it can so do. If I have not got be- 
 yond the separate foot and finger stage at the 
 piano, yet can swim with no thought beside 
 
146 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 the idea of the boat I am heading for, then 
 I am a swimmer, but I am no player. If when 
 I say a prayer I am conscious of a great 
 many disconnected ideas, that I am in an un- 
 comfortable position, and that I wonder why 
 I am doing it, whereas it is enough simply to 
 hear dance-music at a party, to go through 
 the necessary movements, then I am a dancer, 
 but I cannot pray. Where I am so conscious 
 of the details of technique that each one 
 stands by itself, I am not as yet a success ; 
 but where I have mastered the technique 
 enough to forget it, I am a master. 
 
 All that we have said about the relation of 
 a person to his work or to his art must be said 
 with equal emphasis about persons in their 
 relations to one another. If we all of us continue 
 to feel that we are separate affairs (for we 
 must begin this way, just as each muscle must 
 acquire its own local sign), and if we do not 
 lose our own separate entity in the life of the 
 whole, we are not artists at living. This sep- 
 arateness of aim makes trouble in the world, 
 because society at large is made, just as each 
 bodily organism is made, that the whole should 
 work together, and that only in so doing 
 should it live a complete life. Continual 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 147 
 
 thought on one detail of the whole social 
 person makes a hitch in proceedings, just as 
 the thought, "How are my lips moving as I 
 talk ? ' will dampen the spirits of any conver- 
 sationalist, no matter how well his lips may 
 function if let alone. Moreover, this life of 
 common personality is not forced upon us. 
 We like it. The hardest thing for most people 
 to bear is complete isolation. They would 
 rather be over-worked, be too important to 
 their family and neighborhood, than feel that 
 their opinion is of no consequence to any one, 
 and that they can neither help nor hinder, 
 nor be so influenced themselves, by any one in 
 the world. 
 
 If the matter had been laid before us, at 
 the creation of the world, how should we have 
 answered the following questions? Shall we 
 allow one man to influence another man by 
 speech, by action, by physical heredity ? Shall 
 we allow one to influence another for evil as 
 well as for good ? Shall we make the conse- 
 quences of sin always fall in exact measure 
 on the head of the criminal and on no one 
 else ? Shall we always visit the consequences 
 of sin on the man himself, within a given time, 
 so that all the world may learn from his ex- 
 
148 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 ample ? How soon shall retribution take place ? 
 What visitation would you suggest that shall 
 affect no one but the criminal ? Shall ignorance 
 be punished as summarily as sin ? If not, how 
 shall it be treated? Shall ignorance prosper 
 as well as wisdom? How far-reaching shall 
 the effects of both sin and ignorance be ? If 
 they do not stop with the man himself, shall 
 they affect his family, his country, his age, or 
 shall their limits be undefined ? Shall human 
 beings always remain on the earth, or shall 
 they die? If they do not die, shall they remain 
 young, or middle-aged, or old ? What activi- 
 ties will engross them on earth for an eternity? 
 If, on the other hand, they die, shall it be 
 always at a given age, or can other men in- 
 fluence this date, and hasten or retard it? 
 Will it be kinder, if they do not want to live 
 forever on such an earth as has been given 
 them, to soften their regret at leaving it? 
 Would it not be better to make men want to 
 die, and make their friends face their departure 
 with composure? Would it not make life 
 easier if the after life were no mystery, but 
 any man knew his future as well as his past ? 
 Why keep men in a world they do not enjoy, 
 by a fear of the next world, whose essence 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 149 
 
 they do not know? Such are a few of the 
 questions that might have been put to us, and 
 which in fact are now put to us, and which we 
 must consider for a little. If we find that our 
 solutions of the difficulty are no way different 
 from those already existent in the world, we 
 must decide that we have already what we 
 want. If we, on the other hand, will have 
 something altered, we must specify how it is 
 to be changed. 
 
 In any given evil situation we can feel the 
 tragedy and the sorrow of it ; but should we 
 want it changed in principle? Should we want 
 human beings unable to choose the wrong 
 because of any other force than their own good 
 habits? Should we prefer total impassivity to 
 our real grief? And do we really want not to 
 die ? Perhaps nothing would bring the matter 
 more vividly before us than to imagine con- 
 ditions the reverse of those already obtaining 
 in the world. 
 
 Let us then protest at once. The guilty 
 alone shall suffer for their evil deeds, and the 
 innocent shall start with a clean page. Each 
 man shall have a just punishment in the na- 
 ture of things, and not suffer as much for an 
 impulsive moment as another man does for 
 
150 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 long contemplated crime. Ignorance shall not 
 meet the same fate as sin, and man shall not 
 die. If he does, it shall simply be at the nat- 
 ural end of his life and without loss of powers, 
 only with a loss of the will to live. All this is 
 a legitimate wish if we really want it ; but if 
 we choose such a course of things we must 
 face all its consequences. 
 
 This demand springs at bottom from the 
 desire that men should be separate individuals, 
 and not be of a common family. It arises 
 from the protest against one person's having 
 a better chance than another ; against a child's 
 being 1 burdened with the frailties of his father 
 
 s> 
 
 or of his society ; against a man at one corner 
 of the earth suffering because of the deficiencies 
 of another man at an opposite corner. " Why 
 should I be deprived of the use of my arm, 
 because a drunken conductor ran my car off the 
 track? Why should I be an invalid because of 
 my great-grandfather's mistakes ? Why should 
 a burglar have the power to shoot my son ? ' 
 It is natural enough to say in our heat that 
 the conductor, the great-grandfather, and the 
 burglar should have the capacity to kill them- 
 selves but not us, that in the nature of things 
 it ought to be impossible for their lives to hurt 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 151 
 
 ours. But implying, as this does, an isolation 
 of individual influence to one's own person 
 alone, do we really mean what we say ? Sup- 
 pose that what we say we want, is actually 
 the case. The constitution of things has been 
 altered to suit us, and all is the reverse of 
 what it was. At first we feel a great freedom 
 from responsibility. It is glorious to know that 
 I have no obligations to any one, nor any one 
 to me, and there is a certainty about results 
 which was never possible in the old way. I 
 know in every decision that my goodness will 
 be appreciated by a waiting world at its exact 
 worth, and since my punishment is my own 
 business, I need refrain from nothing because 
 of its possible effect on my friends, my children, 
 my contemporaries, or posterity. They will 
 start free, exactly as if I had not existed at 
 all. I am an isolated unit, wholly sufficient or 
 deficient unto myself, with a clean slate, on 
 which no one can make a mark but myself. 
 
 As it is in the world at present, while we 
 feel that virtue gets its reward in the individual 
 conscience by its sense of duty done, we know 
 that it is not always adequately recognized and 
 applauded by the public. There is some hesi- 
 tation, when embarking in a new enterprise, 
 
152 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 as to whether it will be understood, whether 
 our motives will be considered pure, and, in 
 fact, whether it will turn out to be the best 
 thing after all. But in this new scheme there 
 will be not the slightest difficulty in dividing 
 the sheep from the goats. If a man is unhappy, 
 we need not sympathize with him, for he is 
 getting what he expected, and what he chose 
 with his eyes open. And the virtuous are not 
 to be commended, for they are getting the 
 best of the bargain, and are being amply re- 
 warded for any inconvenience it may have 
 cost them. Indeed, he is only a fool who 
 chooses to sin, when prosperity and good 
 health attend him on his virtuous path. 
 
 This conception of the nature of things is 
 not a new one in history. The old Jewish 
 notion was rather frankly based on the profit 
 and loss aspect of the godly life. The righteous 
 man spread himself like a green bay tree, and 
 the wicked man was caught in his own net. 
 Moreover, from any point of view, the right- 
 eous life has been found to pay in the long 
 run, from the peace it brings the soul, and the 
 respect from the most high-minded portion of 
 society. But it has not always paid, in the 
 sense that it has brought health, an easy life, 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 153 
 
 or the appreciation of the majority. On the 
 contrary, it has more often than otherwise led 
 to a serious sacrifice of pleasure, ambition, 
 and even of life. This is the risk that the 
 righteous man has had to run. It has been 
 
 o 
 
 something of a leap in the dark, where the 
 reward has become a less and less prominent 
 part of the consideration, as the nature was 
 noble and the situation a serious one. These 
 two changes in the nature of things certain 
 reward and punishment for the innocent and 
 guilty respectively, and the impossibility of 
 evil (and therefore of good) influence would 
 assuredly alter our attitude to many situations, 
 and with its greater justice bring a lack of 
 savor to certain virtues. 
 
 For instance, there has been a satisfaction in 
 the family hitherto, as the parents saw their 
 children respond to the good things they had 
 struggled to provide for them, even though 
 they sighed to see their own shortcomings 
 reproduced in their offspring. But now the 
 father may be as dissipated, and the mother 
 as deceitful as she chooses. They know they 
 have no influence on their children, and, in 
 fact, are brought up standing with the fact 
 that they are not their children at all ! They 
 
154 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 are simply children as such, with no depend- 
 ence on any one for good or evil, and the 
 parents, with their freedom from responsi- 
 bility, have lost their parenthood. 
 
 In business, the same freedom brings the 
 same isolation. Let the railroad employees, 
 the bridge - builders, the meat -packers, the 
 teachers, the doctors, the chauffeurs, and the 
 nursemaids be as careless as they choose. The 
 engineers and the chauffeurs will kill them- 
 selves, and such of their load of passengers as 
 deserve it. The nursemaid may abandon her 
 charges, and the doctor prescribe quack doses ; 
 for surely it is not just, that an innocent baby 
 should suffer lasting injury from a careless 
 maid, and why should a doctor have the ca- 
 pacity to poison our systems? Whatever we 
 may say nowadays about the separation of 
 classes, we are in reality most manifoldly bound 
 up with one another. We commit ourselves a 
 hundred times a day with trusting confidence 
 to our unknown brethren, from the milkman 
 to the subway architects, though we know that 
 they can kill us, and sometimes they do. A 
 king is not safe from his valet or his cook, 
 and the cook or the valet is not safe from the 
 king, except as each respects the bond that 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 155 
 
 unites them. Occasionally they do not respect 
 it, and as the distance becomes wider and 
 wider between a man and his possible victim, 
 the bond has less and less strength, until most 
 of us can endure with comparative ease the 
 murder of our brethren if they are sufficiently 
 removed from sight. In the new state of af- 
 
 o 
 
 fairs, however, the milkman poisons only 
 himself, and since this means that his action 
 must bring pain to no innocent person, his 
 family and society must have ceased to care 
 anything about him. In fact, it is absolutely 
 essential that all affection shall be restricted 
 to the perfect man in this new regime, since 
 sympathy with the unjust man in his certain 
 destruction will only bring an uncalled-for 
 pain upon ourselves. If my friend sins then, 
 I am at once indifferent to him, for he must 
 arouse no pangs in my innocent breast. 
 
 This whole supposition demands a satiric 
 treatment, which only a master of prose could 
 give it. If we have sighed hitherto for the Mil- 
 tonic imagination to picture divine emotions, 
 we need now the irony of Swift to picture our 
 world as it would be if this ideal isolated jus- 
 tice obtained in it. The meaning of patriotism 
 would be curiously changed if every good 
 
156 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 soldier knew that no enemy's bullet could 
 touch him, while the unworthy man, who must 
 expect death, would assuredly keep away. 
 Love and sympathy would be a different matter 
 if they were immediately outgrown when their 
 object was found unworthy, and a mother 
 would face the death of her sinful child with- 
 out interest or emotion. This must, of course, 
 happen if a good woman is not to suffer for 
 
 another's sin. The eve must watch the hand 
 
 */ 
 
 in flames without winking, and the mouth 
 bear witness against the body with equanim- 
 ity, for why should an eye suffer for a hand ? 
 "As it is written, an eye for an eye, and a 
 tooth for a tooth.' 3 
 
 Swift has indeed come to our aid in his 
 terrible portrayal of endless human life upon 
 earth. Certainly no death and no future tor- 
 ment could exceed the horror of that imagined 
 survival of the earthly life, and we can hardly 
 say either that he has exaggerated the facts. 
 Those who have read his voyage to Laputa, 
 which succeeds the famous sojourn with the 
 Brobdingnags, will remember the unfortunate 
 immortals, who show at birth, by the spot 
 upon their temples, that death can never be 
 their portion. Mr. Gulliver, upon hearing of 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 157 
 
 these deathless ones, is carried away with en- 
 thusiasm over their lot, an enthusiasm which 
 he observes is not shared by their countrymen. 
 On closer acquaintance with them, he finds 
 that their future is not one for congratulation. 
 In order that the next generation shall have 
 an equal chance, and one set of undying per- 
 sons be not allowed to monopolize the fruits 
 of the earth, they are regarded as dead by 
 the law after a certain age ; indeed, their own 
 exhaustion of the resources of earth interest 
 makes them clamor for death as other men 
 have clamored for life. 
 
 This kind of a nightmare, of course, does 
 no one any good except to give one pause, as 
 it did Mr. Gulliver, who remarked, "From 
 what I had heard and seen, my keen appetite 
 for perpetuity of life was much abated. I grew 
 heartily ashamed of the pleasing visions I 
 had formed ; and thought no tyrant could in- 
 vent a death into which I would not run with 
 pleasure from such a life." 
 
 One of Swift's critics made this comment, 
 which we must admit is perfectly true : " The 
 sis:ht of such an 'immortal' would no other- 
 
 o 
 
 wise arm men against the fear of death, who 
 have no hope beyond it, than a man is armed 
 
158 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 against the fear of breaking his limbs, who 
 jumps out of a window when his house is on 
 fire." In other words, a choice that lies simply 
 between the devil and the deep sea will not 
 rouse hope in either direction, but a fear in 
 both. So a man who has no hope in death 
 must admit that he has none in life either, 
 and the case is at least equal. We can turn 
 drearily from one alternative to another, and say 
 that at least one situation is no worse than the 
 other, even though neither brings comfort 
 with it. 
 
 This kind of an issue is, however, not what 
 we are looking for. We must accept the con- 
 stitution of this world as good, unless we can 
 suggest another better, but not quarrel with 
 it if our modifications only bring about another 
 condition just as bad. 
 
 It may be, then, that we are willing to ad- 
 mit all the foregoing supposition as reduction 
 to an absurdity, but still protest that the dif- 
 ficulty lies in the existence of evil at all. If 
 men can sin, their children, their friends, and 
 their countrymen must suffer more or less 
 with them. We admit that the ties of family 
 and of affection are too vital to be thrown over, 
 simply to obtain the immunity from suffering 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 159 
 
 possible only in such unsocial isolation as we 
 have described. We will then grant that the 
 burden of our ability to make the innocent 
 suffer is a restraint, a bond of family tie, as 
 is the responsibility that comes with it of 
 passing on good gifts, as undeserved as the 
 evil ones. I have to suffer for financial panics 
 that are not my fault, and I enjoy national 
 prosperity which is also none of my doing. 
 The wisdom of this general principle perhaps 
 some of us will allow, but we nevertheless con- 
 tend, "Why have financial panics? Why are 
 men allowed to be criminally negligent so that 
 their cigars set forest fires, and their flimsy 
 architecture allows theatres to collapse?' In 
 other words, is this freedom to do evil any 
 real freedom at all? Is it not a bondage into 
 which we are born, rather than liberty, and 
 should we not all be freer men, if we could 
 not do evil if we would ? 
 
 There is some truth in this, it must be ad- 
 mitted at once. We are really more free with 
 some voluntary restraint, or as Kant said, 
 " The good will is the only one that is free." 
 Here are two men of middle age, one of them 
 a slave to the habit of drink, and the other 
 with years of upright living behind him. In 
 
160 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 one sense, is he not a slave as well as the 
 other? Is not one as much in bondage to his 
 good habits as the other to his bad, so that it 
 would be as impossible for him to spend his 
 days in the saloon as it is for the other man 
 to keep out of it ? Most of us are more or less 
 slaves to the non-killing habit, so that it 
 would be difficult, not to say impossible, for 
 us to shoot a man for his watch. Some men 
 could perform this feat easily; are they not 
 then more free than we? Most of us feel that 
 this is leading us too far. Our incapacity to 
 kill is only a fetter if we want to kill. Since 
 in point of fact we do not want to, and do 
 not want to want to, this background of an 
 opposite habit is a support and not a drag to 
 us. The reason that the drink habit is a bond- 
 ao-e, is that the man is divided against himself. 
 
 O ' *-* 
 
 He wants to drink, but he does not want to 
 want to, and hence the will that contradicts 
 itself is not free. It is the opposition of itself 
 to itself that makes a will a slave, not the op- 
 position of outside factors to it, hence it is 
 only the good will which never contradicts 
 itself. In this sense Christ in chains was a 
 freer personality than the hesitating Pilate. 
 Our duty is, then, to develop a greater and 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 161 
 
 greater bondage to good habits. If we tell 
 lies easily at ten years of age, at twenty it 
 should be more difficult, and at fifty impos- 
 sible. Our life should be spent in losing our 
 liberty to do evil, just as our sense of person- 
 ality was acquired only to lose it as soon as 
 possible, in the life of the whole. 
 
 If all this is true, are we not contradicting 
 what we have been affirming ever since we 
 started? We have spoken of the ability to 
 sin as if it were a certain patent of superiority 
 of freedom. We affirmed that our right to 
 reject God if we choose was the human capa- 
 city that made us God-like, while here we say 
 that any evil will in the course of time is 
 bound to contradict itself, and is therefore not 
 a free agent. Our whole system of education 
 seems to be on the plan of depriving children 
 of the freedom to do evil. We shield young 
 children from even the knowledge of some 
 sins, and certainly from all opportunity to 
 commit them, thereby forcing as much alle- 
 giance to the good life as possible, so that 
 they may not even have the risk of choice. 
 We all acknowledge that this is wise ; why 
 should we not carry it further? The wonders 
 of hypnotism we are only beginning to under- 
 
162 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 stand. A man under its influence can be cured 
 of many an evil habit. The physician says 
 to him in hypnosis, " When the impulse to 
 take morphine begins to attack you next 
 time, you will not submit to it," and under 
 the influence of this post-hypnotic suggestion, 
 the patient is deprived of the will to take the 
 drug and becomes in time a cured man. 
 
 Why should not this device be employed 
 with all the rising generation, before it gets 
 so deep in bad habits of all kinds? We use 
 good influences, why not good hypnotic sug- 
 gestion? We put children under helpful 
 teachers who suggest things to them in a nor- 
 mal fashion, why not strain a point and have 
 these suggestions so imperative in hypnosis 
 that they cannot be resisted, and hence avoid 
 much later suffering? 
 
 Here again we begin to feel that we are 
 driven into a position we do not care to hold. 
 We realize that all the time while we are giv- 
 ing suggestions and helpful environment, 
 while we are keeping certain phases of life in 
 the background and emphasizing others, we 
 are regarding our children not wholly as per- 
 sons, but as persons to be. They are not yet 
 quite individual, but they are, in so far as our 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 1G3 
 
 will chooses for them, " things ' which shall 
 some day be men. After a certain amount o 
 modeling in the hands of the potter, they are 
 sent forth with a dower of memories, of use- 
 ful habits and tendencies, and told to fend for 
 themselves. These good habits do not make 
 them slaves, for we see all too often how eas- 
 ily they are outgrown, but they merely help 
 the will to an equal chance. There are so 
 many attractions dragging a life in all direc- 
 tions, that for a will to hold a single course of 
 goodness among various paths of contradic- 
 tion, it must have some help to make the game 
 an even one. Nevertheless, after we are ma- 
 ture, we feel that it is better for us to have 
 our choice even at the risk of having our fin- 
 gers scorched, than to live forever in safety 
 under the guidance of some one else. 
 
 The situation, then, seems to be this. The 
 freedom to do evil must be a real one, in that 
 a man is prevented from doing it only by 
 himself. The more he makes the evil impos- 
 sible for himself by his own choice, by his 
 deliberate habits, by the position in society 
 where he chooses to put himself, the more 
 not the less- -he becomes free, because his 
 will is still attaining what it wants. Whatever 
 
164 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 bondage to the good he puts himself under is 
 not bondage, but freedom, yet he must have 
 had the chance to choose the other slavery 
 which really deserves its name. Just as the 
 essence of the divine in us is our capacity to 
 assert our God-head or deny it, so the essence 
 of our will is that it can choose its free path, 
 or can choose to deprive itself of ah 1 free- 
 dom by bondage to the evil. We can even 
 choose to keep out of reach of certain temp- 
 tations, and by so doing (other things being 
 equal) we have overcome them, for there is 
 no virtue in the mere expenditure of energy 
 in struggle. But we now see that no matter 
 how much we deplore the evil wills in the 
 world, the wills that frustrate themselves as 
 well as us, and bring desolation with them, 
 nevertheless, we prefer to live in a world of 
 men who have had their chance. It remains 
 for us to lock them up and treat them as dan- 
 gerous things, if they become insupportable, 
 or more important still, to treat them as pre- 
 cious things a little longer and more thor- 
 oughly in their youth, so that they start their 
 real life with a better equipment. That we do 
 not so care for our weaker brethren shows 
 that we are not so much concerned over the 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 1G5 
 
 evil in the world as we pretend to be in our 
 quiet moments. 
 
 All that we have said in this chapter about 
 the will proves of course nothing about its 
 final essence. Whether we are in the last anal- 
 ysis anything more than moving machines can- 
 not be proved, because there is no possible 
 system of proof that will convince an impar- 
 tial mind one way or the other. If we are 
 only automatons, we must give up such a God 
 as we have described, or indeed any God who 
 can demand anything whatever of us. We 
 must also give up our notion of real virtue or 
 sin or blame. In short, our whole conception 
 of personality goes with it, and so far as log- 
 ical proof is concerned, this is all as possible 
 as the reverse. But if we have chosen to walk 
 the path along which our hope rather than 
 our dread leads us, this mechanical point of 
 view is forever impossible. 
 
 We have found that our Eden can never be 
 complete without a tree of forbidden fruit in 
 its midst. Happy are we if we choose not to 
 eat of it. Society is the more content if we 
 nibble only the more inconspicuous apples, 
 though for our own souls it does not much 
 matter which one we pick, if we taste at all. 
 
166 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 Our spiritual health depends in its weakest 
 stages on our not willing even the evil we may 
 want, but we are hardly robust until what we 
 will and what we want have come into har- 
 mony. The path of virtue leads at last to this 
 harmony of will desire, even though on the 
 way the will is sometimes divided against it- 
 self ; whereas the evil will must eventually con- 
 tradict itself, no matter how deceptively har- 
 monious it is at first. 
 
 We shall not go into any ethical theories 
 here. Our only effort has been to convince 
 some of our counsel for the complaint, that if 
 the evil world is ail the charge they have 
 against the Creator, they must withdraw their 
 suit. They must admit that they really have 
 in principle what they want, however badly 
 the details work themselves out through their 
 
 o 
 
 own misuse of freedom. 
 
 As we look over our questions with which 
 we began the discussion we find ourselves say- 
 ing, " We are all brothers, and bound up with 
 one another. We prefer to be persons, though 
 that allows us to deny our will, our God, and 
 our brotherhood, if we choose. We must in- 
 fluence one another infinitely, though that 
 implies that evil shall be passed on as well as 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 167 
 
 good, and that the innocent and the unworthy 
 will get both more and less than they deserve." 
 Ignorance must not prosper, and virtue must 
 not seek its ideal because of certain reward. 
 We do not care to live here forever. All 
 friends cannot die at once, leaving no rup- 
 tured ties, and those who are left do not 
 want to give up their grief for anything less 
 than an infinite faith. A complete knowledge 
 of where they or we are going would not 
 help us, except as we have a right to believe 
 we shall be safe with a good God. Sensation 
 contact with them, although we miss it, is not 
 what we really desire, any more than we wish 
 such contact with God. We want to be actu- 
 ally with them, with no reservations, and we 
 hope that we shall be, therefore we believe. 
 We have a dread of death, but we want this 
 very dread. Without it, the temptation to die 
 would be too hard to fight, and we should 
 leave our work unfinished. We find ourselves, 
 after all the efforts of our imagination, in just 
 such a world as we have always lived in ! 
 We began with this : 
 
 Oh Love, could you and I with Him conspire 
 To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, 
 Would we not shatter it to bits and then 
 Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's desire ? 
 
168 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 But we find upon thinking out each opposite 
 possibility to its conclusion, that we have our 
 heart's desire already ! It is the individual case 
 which we deplore, and not the principle. We 
 have chosen the law ourselves, but we are 
 unstable enough to quarrel with its natural 
 outcome. This clash of will is also human, 
 therefore we love it! We would not be such 
 fatalists as to sink into a nerveless apathy, or 
 such pessimists as to have no choice but to 
 curse God and die. Nor indeed would we be 
 possessed of a philosophic calm, which could 
 be moved by neither indignation nor pity. 
 
 We are human, therefore we struggle, but 
 there is enough of the divine in all of us to 
 
 o 
 
 look upon creation as a whole and say, " Be- 
 hold, it is very good." 
 
VI 
 
 PRAYER 
 
 WE are now out of the woods of theory, in 
 the open field of experimental facts. There is 
 no need to begin on a philosophy of prayer, 
 because by our definition of God we know 
 that prayer is not only natural but necessary, 
 and the relation of all others that the Creator 
 would have established between Himself and 
 His children. The question is now rather, 
 "How does one pray ?' : If we had not already 
 defined the kind of God we choose to believe 
 in, we should have a right to ask such ques- 
 tions as these: "Is it reasonable to pray? Is 
 there a God to hear, and is it possible for Him 
 to answer? ' but coming as far as we already 
 have, these questions have answered them- 
 selves. We accept the possibility of prayer 
 and of answer on exactly the same basis as 
 that on which we have believed in our God. 
 We believe in the efficacy of prayer because 
 we must either believe in it or its opposite, 
 and the hoped-for alternative is always our 
 choice. 
 
170 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 The question before us is therefore a differ- 
 ent one. We want no theories nor assump- 
 tions, but experimental testimony as to how 
 one actually prays ; and although the question 
 might seem easier to answer than some queries 
 we have already advanced, this is by no means 
 the case. 
 
 If we were asked what we meant by prayer, 
 most of us would give an answer like the fol- 
 lowing : " It is the addressing of petitions to a 
 Being whom we do not see, but whom we be- 
 lieve to exist." Most of us, at some time of 
 our life at least, have prayed ; that is, we 
 have addressed petitions in thought or words 
 to such a supposed Being ; and yet many of 
 us feel, at the same time, that in spite of this 
 exercise we have never really prayed. We feel 
 that it did not amount to anything, that no 
 results came from it, and we have either out- 
 grown the habit, or continue to indulge in 
 public or private prayer only because it seems 
 somehow the thing to do. Although most peo- 
 ple feel a certain sentimental attachment to 
 the practice of prayer, children should be 
 taught it, a devout old lady is more attractive 
 than the reverse, there is certainly a wide 
 discontinuance of its exercise in any serious 
 
PRAYER 171 
 
 and regular way, and I believe this is largely 
 due, with would-be religious people, to the 
 fact that they actually do not know its tech- 
 nique. It can be said in a certain sense that 
 all the world prays, but in another that prayer 
 is an art attained by very few. 
 
 We all of us know what we mean when we 
 say pole-vaulting, or singing operatic music, 
 or driving a four-in-hand, but how many of 
 us can do these things, and do them well? 
 Some of us try spasmodically to do all of them, 
 but we seldom get so that their performance 
 is easy or satisfactory, and as we grow older, 
 we give up the struggle. While we admire the 
 feats performed by those who have been more 
 persistent, we confess that such attainments are 
 not for us. Now these exercises need training, 
 they are the result of delicate adjustment and of 
 long patience, and there are few artists in these 
 or any other callings. Prayer is an exercise, on 
 the religious side, an intercourse with one's 
 God, but on the mental side an exercise which 
 is sometimes difficult and often fatiguing, 
 and can no more be learned to perfection 
 in a few trials than can the arts of lesser sig- 
 nificance. It is all very well to say, and it is 
 in a sense true, that any man can pray if he 
 
172 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 only will. His desire is the main thing, and 
 the performance is of less account. But every 
 man who begins to pray after long disuse of 
 the practice, knows very well that he cannot 
 pray as he wishes to. He either has never had 
 the art, or he has lost it, and while he derives 
 some comfort from the little he is able to re- 
 gain, he will not know how to pray until he 
 has learned the art over again. 
 
 There has been much scientific interest of 
 late years on all sides in the matters of reli- 
 gion, prayer, conversion, and revival. Psy- 
 chologists and philosophers have devoted 
 themselves to the investigation of these phe- 
 nomena as they had formerly done to other 
 normal or abnormal activities of the mind. 
 They have tried to collect data from many 
 sources on how men pray, their emotions after 
 prayer, their reasons for praying, and many 
 other related questions ; and the resulting mass 
 of material, though often undigested, has re- 
 vealed the fact that many men were actually 
 praying and deriving satisfaction from so 
 doing. The main difficulty with this kind of 
 investigation is that the compiler of the sta- 
 tistics takes so often a detached point of view, 
 and is so apt to be a non-praying man, that 
 
PRAYER 173 
 
 what is usually the richest source of any such 
 observation namely, the observer himself 
 is conspicuously lacking. It is not usual, I 
 think, for a deaf man to undertake experiments 
 on sound, although with care this might be 
 managed. The work of any psychologist on 
 the emotions is apt to be weak, if he does not 
 have an inkling of what it is all about from 
 his own emotional life. Of course he has a 
 right to compile statistics from what his 
 subjects tell him, but he cannot look at the 
 matter with the sympathetic understanding of 
 one who has also had an emotion. His discrimi- 
 nation cannot be keen, and his suggestions 
 are not valuable. Few investigators choose to 
 work in aesthetics, if they have no feeling 
 for the beautiful. Some doubtless do so, and 
 record what others tell them of their delight 
 
 o 
 
 in music, or of the difference in their appreci- 
 ation of prose and poetry. But no one is apt 
 to be a success in this field who cannot use 
 himself as his own best subject. The whole 
 matter does not branch in his mind, criticisms 
 do not suggest themselves, and while the 
 records of other people's comments may be 
 faithful and exact, his own contributions must 
 necessarily be of a slight order. The situation 
 
174 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 in the religious field seems to stand in this 
 
 o 
 
 predicament. The men who pray do not tell 
 how they do it, as a general thing ; and also, 
 as a general thing, the psychologists who tell 
 us how it is done, do not do it themselves. 
 Each side is a trifle suspicions of the other. 
 The psychologist interested to observe but 
 not to practice, and the praying man deter- 
 mined to practice and equally determined not 
 to be material for any psychologist, are not 
 likely to draw each other's confidence. The 
 general public takes it for granted that an 
 interest in the human mind is likely to dimin- 
 ish respect for its higher functions, and while 
 advanced work in literature is compatible with 
 piety, and one may be a Greek archaeologist 
 with impunity, a religious psychologist is not 
 expected ; and if he prays, it draws a side- 
 long glance. I give this as the current opin- 
 ion with which I am familiar, although it may 
 not hold in all localities. I simply say that I 
 am accustomed to see students approach their 
 Latin, their art, and their history with a 
 cheerful carelessness, while they darkly brood 
 over approaching psychology, and their pa- 
 rents are apt to shake their heads until that 
 crisis is passed. There is usually some basis 
 
PRAYER 175 
 
 for public opinion, and it may be that the 
 habit of observing one's own mind at work 
 
 O 
 
 hinders the working, just as we have observed 
 that thinking about one's separate movements 
 in crossing a room does not tend to make one 
 more graceful. But if we already have a habit 
 of prayer firmly established, this period of 
 self-consciousness will not affect it any more 
 than the question whether the outside world 
 really exists makes us cut our friends. The 
 social method in which a philosophic seminar 
 manages the question of the reality of the 
 world outside one's own consciousness has 
 nothing of this paralyzing effect. As we have 
 already observed, the students embark briskly 
 on the problem together ; they read papers to 
 the listening ears of the world whose existence 
 they are disproving, and they contradict the 
 statements of their opponents with as much 
 heat as if they were not phantoms of the 
 imagination. You see them dispersing from 
 the class by twos and threes, assuring their 
 friends that they are not there, and enjoying 
 the society of one another's nonentities. It is 
 just because the discussion has not affected 
 their normal life in any way but to make it 
 more thoughtful, that all is as it should be. 
 
176 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 But if, on the other hand, this skeptical ques- 
 tion cast a cloud upon the class, if from their 
 very doubt they gave up arguing as a useless 
 exercise, and took to discoursing with them- 
 selves or to silence, the situation would be a 
 critical one. Moreover, if they did not have 
 a habit of social intercourse well fixed upon 
 them, if they had become tired of speech and 
 were looking for an excuse for eternal silence, 
 here would be their chance. They would shake 
 off the habit of social conversation as easily as 
 they now dispense with their daily prayers. 
 
 If prayer is considered from its formal side, 
 as the recitation of certain devotional words 
 which other men have written, the difficulty 
 at once presents itself, of making one's own 
 desires, one's own mood, fit in with another's 
 phraseology. If, on the other hand, a man is 
 left to himself to pray, he often does not 
 know what to pray about. He actually does 
 not know what to say. After asking for one 
 or two things, his mind refuses to work, and 
 he betakes himself regretfully to something 
 else, feeling quite certain that his praying was 
 not done well, but not knowing how to remedy 
 matters. Any such discussion of the mechanics, 
 the technique of prayer may seem irreverent 
 
PRAYER 177 
 
 to some, but I believe that to be a false rever- 
 ence which keeps any one from facing the 
 facts. The situation is just this, that in 
 places of public worship, where a large num- 
 ber of people are gathered together presumably 
 engaged in prayer, a very large fraction of 
 them in reality are not praying at all. Perhaps 
 the minister is, and perhaps not. A certain 
 class, we will assume, feel an actual communion 
 with the Person whom they are addressing. 
 Certain others want to do so, but cannot keep 
 their minds on the matter. Their ideas go 
 trailing off on affairs of ordinary routine, only 
 to be dragged back occasionally by a violent 
 jerk ; and even when they are thinking about 
 what is being said, they are still very possibly 
 not praying. With the class which makes no 
 pretense of paying any attention to what is 
 intended to be prayer, we are not interested 
 although it is a large one. We belong to 
 the class of those who would pray, but who 
 do not know how, and our real state of mind, 
 which we divulge to no one, hardly even to 
 ourselves, is sometimes like this. The leader 
 of the meeting has asked the participants to 
 engage in silent prayer. We are in usual 
 health, with ordinary prospects. Our friends 
 
178 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 are well, we have no anxiety on our minds, 
 and we do not know what to pray for. We 
 have no idea what to think about. The prayer- 
 book conies to mind at such a time, and we 
 endeavor to repeat a prayer, and when it is 
 said, we do not know what to do next. Shall 
 we repeat the same thing over and over 
 that is, is there a virtue in mere recital ? In 
 short, is there anything in prayer that differs 
 essentially from thought, and when we have 
 thought a prayer, have we prayed ? Certainly 
 the testimony of every one would be against 
 any such hypothesis. The recital has been 
 most unsatisfactory ; it has left us where we 
 started, and we know that we have not yet 
 struck the root of the matter. If we state our 
 difficulty to some one more gifted in the ex- 
 ercise, he replies that we must think as if 
 speaking to some one. The essence of the 
 matter, he says, is that what we have thought 
 has been listened to, and if we have a vivid 
 realization of the presence of the listener, the 
 exercise will not be such a barren, one-sided 
 affair. To this suggestion we reply, that in 
 ordinary conversation the interlocutor makes 
 audible answers, so that a man knows that he 
 is being listened to. If this response ends, 
 
PRAYER 179 
 
 and he has no indication that his remarks are 
 being heard, he stops talking, whereas one 
 must pray on, without any response whatever. 
 We are then advised to pause in the act of 
 praying, to give a chance for response to be 
 heard. But again our restive mind takes ad- 
 vantage of the pause, and races off on its own 
 concerns without waiting for reply. We are 
 made sadly conscious that we do not know 
 how, and that though we are willing to give 
 the matter an experimental trial, we have not 
 the technique which makes the exercise a 
 satisfactory one. 
 
 There have been giants in all the varied 
 activities of the human mind, and there have 
 been among them giants of prayer. We know 
 that St. Paul and Martin Luther, St. Francis 
 and Thomas a Kempis, were able to pray, not 
 in the one and two minute periods which we 
 can compass, but for hours together, and 
 Jesus Christ, that master of the art, prayed 
 for days and nights, an achievement before 
 which we stand speechless. 
 
 I venture to say that even though we were 
 convinced that the suffering of the world 
 would actually cease, if we prayed to that end 
 for twenty-four hours, not one of us would be 
 
180 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 capable of such a feat ! True, the Bible, our 
 text-book of prayer, informs us that we shall 
 not be heard for our much speaking ; never- 
 theless, the saints of history have spoken much. 
 They spoke not for the sake of the speaking, 
 but because they had an abundance to say, 
 and because they had an abundance to say, 
 their prayer was really prayer, and their names 
 are placed among those of the world's great 
 men. 
 
 All the relations between the human and 
 the divine mind, or between the human and 
 divine aspects of the mind of man alone, have 
 to be considered from the view-points both of 
 their significance and of their psychology. It 
 is nothing against a motive of self-sacrificing 
 patriotism to say that it is a psychological 
 fact. Its value for life does not lie in this as- 
 pect of it, but its value for psychology, though 
 this is of lesser worth in the general scheme 
 of things, is as real, and has as much right to 
 be considered. In the same way, prayer in its 
 perfect exercise, though from one standpoint 
 a high communion, is from another a mental 
 fact like any other, and some of the criteria 
 of other mental facts can be applied to it. 
 Prayer, for instance, as an attentive state is 
 
PRAYER 181 
 
 subject to all the laws of attention ; as an 
 emotional state, it expresses itself as do other 
 emotions; and as thought in general, it de- 
 pends upon memory, mental imagery, and the 
 association of ideas. One must not attempt to 
 do in prayer what one could never do in any 
 other line of mental activity. One must not 
 brave Providence by flying in the face of 
 mental law, any more than one must leap 
 from a cliff and expect angels to catch him. 
 A law is a law, whether of mind or of matter, 
 and there are, I believe, certain ways in which 
 a man cannot pray, however good his will, 
 just as there are ways in which he cannot set 
 a broken leg, no matter how much his sym- 
 pathy goes out to the sufferer. 
 
 It is, nevertheless, one thing to make the 
 foregoing statement and another to instruct 
 in the art, and this indicates exactly where 
 lies the weakness of all such discussion. Other 
 matters are decided experimentally. The prob- 
 lem is taken to the laboratory and worked 
 over by an investigator and many observers. 
 They expect to arrive at results, and they do 
 sooner or later, so that any one else who wants 
 the facts of such phenomena has but to look 
 up their data, and he has the whole story. 
 
182 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 Not only in matters of psychology, but even 
 more strikingly in the other sciences, a prob- 
 lem means experiment, experiment means re- 
 sults, and results mean invention. I can 
 remember distinctly my first visit to New 
 York from my country home, and how I was 
 taken to the window to see a wagon go past 
 without steam, rails, or horses. This my first 
 motor-car would hardly be a novelty now to 
 a savage in the jungle. Certainly motors to- 
 day go past the house where I once lived, with 
 all too great frequency, and yet it was not so 
 very long ago that I made my first visit to 
 New York. Flying-machines will be upon us 
 shortly, and one has but to suggest a possible 
 device for which the human race might have 
 a whim, to be tolerably certain that it will be 
 produced without much waste of time. This 
 rapidity of progress is alarming to those of 
 quiet tastes, but to most young people the 
 prospect is full of charm. Where shall we be 
 in twenty years ? What new wonder will have 
 become a commonplace ? We long to be in the 
 onward march, and to utilize forces which to 
 our forefathers were yet undreamed of. There 
 is progress in general education, too, as well 
 as in invention. We all start nowadays with 
 
PRAYER 183 
 
 certain theories as a background, which to a 
 previous generation meant the climax, or the 
 destruction, of all their previous knowledge. 
 The standard of ordinary intelligence is stead- 
 ily rising, and many can now understand sub- 
 jects which were formerly the privilege of the 
 few. But how does it stand in religious mat- 
 ters ? Are we on a higher plane in religious 
 practice than we have ever been before, or do 
 we pray as poorly as mankind has always 
 prayed, perhaps worse ? 
 
 Even if a man were not at all interested in 
 prayer through belief in its value, but observed 
 it solely from the view-point of a phenomenon, 
 how could he fail to notice that this human 
 function is apparently at a standstill? Day 
 after day, Sunday after Sunday, the same 
 kind of thing being said, the same average 
 amount of time spent in doing it, and the 
 same wayward attention and uneasy sense of 
 unsatisfactoriness when it is over, in a large 
 proportion of the congregation, if indeed 
 there has been any attention at all. I cannot 
 think of any more striking spectacle than an 
 assembly of people in the conventional atti- 
 tude of prayer, but manifestly not praying. 
 Many of them are conscientious about trying, 
 
184 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 but they have not the art, and the proportion 
 of those who are succeeding is probably about 
 the same as it was in Puritan days, in the 
 Middle Ages, in the beginning of the Chris- 
 tian era, and in the days of Israel's wander- 
 ings ! We know more about science than they, 
 we even know more about religion, but I 
 doubt if any one now living could give Moses 
 or Elijah any suggestions about prayer. 
 
 I am insisting on this point simply for this 
 reason. The current discussions of prayer 
 approach it from a theoretical or from a 
 statistical standpoint, and not from an experi- 
 mental one. We ask whether prayer can con- 
 ceivably change matters, whether there is actu- 
 ally anything in it of value, and the question 
 is apt to be left as one of theory rather than 
 of experiment. Is a different method of paper- 
 making, of shipbuilding, of ventilation, of sub- 
 terranean locomotion, of telegraphy, of heal- 
 ing the sick possible ? " Try it and see" is the 
 answer we get to such questions, and we do 
 try, if we are interested in the matter, until 
 we have proved that our hope can be realized, 
 and our imagined possibilities can be substan- 
 tiated. " Can prayer accomplish anything ? 
 Is it an art that can be raised to a higher 
 
PRAYER 185 
 
 standard of excellence than the feeble exer- 
 cise of it to which we are accustomed? Can 
 we become real 'pray-ers' in any sense like 
 the great pray-ers of history who have wrought 
 great changes in the world, and who them- 
 selves attributed their power to this habit? 
 Can we progress in this art, so that the old- 
 time formulas will not be sufficient, and we 
 must develop a new spiritual language, as we 
 have a new scientific vocabulary ? ' All this 
 is a matter for experiment. "Try it and see' 
 is the only valid answer, and the only reason 
 why we do not try it and see is because we do 
 not want to ! Here is an exact test for every 
 man. "Do you know how to pray?' "Not 
 very well." "Why not?' "Because I never 
 have learned how." Again, "Why not?' 
 " Because I do not care enough about it to try 
 very hard." This is a frank answer, and states 
 the difficulty accurately. 
 
 We all play the piano somewhat when we 
 are young, and in the press of other matters 
 we drop our practice, and leave concerts to 
 professionals. We leave off singing, we drop 
 our sketching, we lay aside this and that ac- 
 tivity in which, in our more exuberant days, 
 we felt convinced we should be proficient, 
 
186 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 because we have not the patience to work hard 
 at them and have lost our ambition to excel. 
 This is really the essence of growing old, 
 the weariness that settles upon us in face of 
 a variety of activities, and the frequency with 
 which we admit that certain subjects are not 
 in our line. In childhood all the world is in 
 our line, and praying is accepted with the 
 same cheerful attention as our meals. We all 
 plan great things, and in twenty years how 
 few of us are remarkable in the lines we have 
 chosen, any more than in those we have 
 dropped ! As some one has remarked, " We 
 all begin as originals, and most of us end as 
 
 imitations.' 
 
 If we are at all interested to bring about a 
 different state of affairs, what is the best way 
 to begin ? We are all of us better educated 
 than our forefathers, but are we any more 
 efficient? We have greater social opportuni- 
 ties, more travel, more work, more variety, but 
 are we more forceful personalities ? Does the 
 human race grow more impressive as it be- 
 comes more complex in its organization ? No, 
 our impressiveness and our force do not seem 
 to keep pace with our culture. There is an 
 ingrowing tendency to learning, and a rest- 
 
PRAYER 187 
 
 less side of activity which prevents most of 
 us from being human specimens who in any 
 sense deserve the title grand. 
 
 Why may it not be possible that this very 
 lack in human personality, this failure to ful- 
 fill its early promise, is due to the universal 
 disuse, or insufficient use, of the exercise of 
 prayer? I say this as a scientific suggestion, 
 which might be made by any one, whether he 
 was a praying man or not. The situation is 
 this. Praying men men who not only re- 
 peated prayers, but who by the judgment of 
 their contemporaries really prayed have al- 
 ways been marked personalities. Should we 
 not expect them to be, if prayer means a real 
 companionship with such a God as we have 
 described ? It is quite possible that many of us 
 cannot number such a person among our 
 acquaintances, but if we can, there is a cer- 
 tain efficiency of character, entirely aside from 
 talent, which is noticeably present, whether 
 causally connected or not. I have known sev- 
 eral people who were raised from common- 
 placeness by apparently no other character- 
 istic than this. They were not gifted, they 
 were not subtle, they were not noted for their 
 mental capacity, but there emanated from 
 
188 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 them a certain force, which is conspicuously 
 lacking in many more intellectual men. In- 
 deed, intellectual men are by no means nec- 
 essarily forceful. Any one who has been 
 thrown with large numbers of students, 
 whether their goal was a bachelor's or a doc- 
 tor's degree, any one who is acquainted with 
 a wide range of teachers even in higher insti- 
 tutions of learning, knows that they are not 
 all influential men. In fact, the current social 
 opinion is that they are apt to be the reverse. 
 Students in general, I believe, look upon their 
 instructors with some pity, and all too often 
 have I heard such comments as, "He is an 
 awfully interesting man in spite of being so 
 learned," or " Such an instructor is really very 
 nice outside of lectures, you would never know 
 that he knew a thing ! ' No, the highly edu- 
 cated class is not as impressive as it sometimes 
 fondly supposes. Now I venture to suggest 
 that with all the chemists and engineers, the 
 preachers and the doctors that are graduated 
 every year, there are being turned out very 
 few " pray-ers," if we can use the term in such 
 a professional sense. I mean by that, I doubt 
 whether any educated man, if indeed he prays 
 at all, would be willing to do anything else 
 
PRAYER 189 
 
 so feebly ; and if he could pray as well as he 
 could bind up a wound, or construct a bridge, 
 I believe he would be a more forceful charac- 
 ter than he is at present. This force is difficult 
 to analyze. It surely would imply nothing in 
 the way of a public exhibition of his talent. 
 But I am certain that we all see well enough 
 what I mean, so that if two men of equal pro- 
 fessional ability were together, one being 
 noted for his strong religious nature, and the 
 other not, we should take a second look at the 
 former, and expect him to conduct himself in 
 some marked fashion. This is not a fashion- 
 able point of view at present. The tendency 
 to-day is to cut off all useless exercises, and 
 praying is regarded as one of them. Whether 
 it is or not can only be tested, in my opinion, 
 by practice ; and since non-praying, weak, and 
 intermittent praying, formal praying, and 
 shamefaced praying have been given a good 
 chance through a reasonable number of cen- 
 
 o 
 
 turies, it is not impartial or scientific to give 
 up the other alternative without a try. More- 
 over, it ought to be tried not only by the un- 
 thinking mass of people who pray from habit 
 and training, but by the same class of scien- 
 tists who decide other matters for us. 
 
190 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 To some, no doubt, this would mean a dismal 
 future. They do not want to pray, they do 
 not enjoy even contemplating the possibility, 
 and the society of praying men would honestly 
 bore them. Such individual prepossessions are 
 bound to be present in every experimental in- 
 vestigation, and every human being has as 
 much right to choose his own religious, as his 
 scientific habits. These non-praying men would 
 come into such a test only as the background 
 against which the contrary minded could be 
 even more clearly denned. That is, every one 
 would have to serve as either a positive or a 
 negative illustration of the effects of prayer 
 on personal living. 
 
 The situation is one of absolute lucidity. 
 Either there is something in prayer, or there 
 is not. If there is anything at all to be gained 
 from it, it will in all likelihood be valuable 
 exactly in proportion as the praying is vigor- 
 ous, well sustained, and " effectual." There 
 are probably limits to the good effects of its 
 duration at any one time, just as muscular 
 exercise may be in too long or too short periods 
 to do any good. But as in general a man is a 
 better walker if he can go four hours instead 
 of one, so a man will be a better pray-er if, 
 
PRAYER 191 
 
 when he wants anything, he knows how to 
 pray until he gets it. The limits of this ex- 
 ercise could be approximately determined by 
 practice. The difficulty that few men want 
 anything enough to be able to pray for it any 
 length of time would perhaps be overcome by 
 exercise ; that is, a greater desire for the spir- 
 itual life might come with the asking. "Lord, 
 I believe, help thou mine unbelief," is not an 
 uncommon state of mind, and prayer might 
 relieve it. 
 
 The men who really pray, and who are 
 willing to state their method in concrete terms, 
 might tell whether they think in visual, audi- 
 tory, or muscular terms ; whether a certain 
 amount of strained attention is a necessary 
 adjunct, or whether prayer can be consistent 
 with relaxation. Is it more effectual to con- 
 ceive ourselves as addressing an actual Mind 
 within our own, or one invisible but outside 
 ourselves ? Is it feasible to hold the mind in 
 suspense and to wait for real response ? How 
 can this be done, since, psychologically speak- 
 ing, it is impossible to think of nothing, and 
 there must be some mental content even while 
 one is waiting for possible answer ? How much 
 repetition is justifiable? Is a certain emotional 
 
192 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 state to be brought about only by repetition 
 of prayer phrases? Is this emotion valuable 
 for itself, or entirely beside the point ? How 
 should we characterize the states of mind and 
 body when we can pray, and those when we 
 cannot ? That is, sometimes we certainly feel 
 more like praying than at others ; are these 
 times when we are rested or tired, busy or 
 idle, when we have done well or done ill, when 
 we have eaten or fasted ? In short, there are 
 endless questions which a prayer pedagogy 
 might raise and possibly answer, but they will 
 not be answered by looking up treatises on 
 the philosophy of it, and writing the questions 
 in a note-book, they will be answered only by 
 the experimental prayer of every student. No 
 man was ever yet a vigorous thinker on any 
 subject who depended wholly on the authority 
 of other people; he will not be here. If it 
 turns out that prayer justifies its existence, 
 then the art should be passed on with the ac- 
 cumulated wisdom of this scientific generation. 
 Twenty years from now, a man should know 
 whether he can or cannot pray better con- 
 tinuously or intermittently, better with cer- 
 tain personal habits or without them, better 
 with active attention or in passive reverie, 
 
PRAYER 193 
 
 better with repetitions or with the phraseology 
 of usual speech. 
 
 All this is a matter of opinion already, just 
 as the world knew something about mental 
 life from simple emotional expressions and the 
 instability of attention to the more complex 
 subconscious processes and hypnotism, long be- 
 fore psychology as a science was ever heard 
 of. We do not need to take courses in logic to 
 know sound reasoning from fallacy, neither is 
 it essential to study English merely to talk it, 
 or hygiene in order to go in when it rains. 
 Nevertheless, systematic experiment in science 
 does tell us some things that common obser- 
 vation does not, and one generation is able to 
 advance farther from its parent, when the 
 heritage is an exact science, than when it 
 comes merely in the form of tradition or cur- 
 rent opinion. 
 
 To those who protest that such a systematic 
 study of prayer is impossible, that you strike 
 at the roots of devotion when you analyze it, 
 I can only say that that too is a matter for ob- 
 servation, and not for a priori decision. Cer- 
 tainly if there is any analogy between prayer 
 and the other arts, this criticism would not hold 
 good. We have all felt the difference between 
 
194 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 the appreciative attitude of an artist and that 
 of the untrained but emotional public. In a 
 picture gallery, the enthusiastic but ignorant 
 give vent to such phrases as " heavenly," " un- 
 analyzable charm/' " exquisite temperament/' 
 "poetry of imagination/' etc., all of which 
 are good enough in their way, but which serve 
 rather as outlets for feeling than as intelligible 
 comments. The artists, on the other hand, speak 
 in concrete terms of right and wrong colors, 
 of accurate drawing, of composition, of treat- 
 ment of light and shadows ; evincing less in- 
 articulateness of feeling and more specific ob- 
 servation than their non - technical friends. 
 There is a certain college lecturer on Shake- 
 speare who practices this principle in his classes. 
 His attention is fastened always upon the 
 meanings of words, the philological differ- 
 ences between our usage and that of the Eliz- 
 abethan period, and his argument is, that if 
 a student actually understands the text in all 
 the shades of thought which language mirrors, 
 the poetry speaks for itself. If a student wholly 
 understanding Shakespeare's language does 
 not enjoy it, he never will, no matter how 
 much he is assured that it is enjoyable. There- 
 fore when a fine passage stands explained be- 
 
PRAYER 195 
 
 fore his audience, and the interested visitor is 
 disappointed that nothing happens but, " There 
 you have it, I will not insult your intelligence 
 by comment," he sometimes asserts that the 
 feeling behind that sentence is too cold. His 
 
 o 
 
 students understand him better. 
 
 I have seen many concert audiences, and I am 
 especially familiar with an American audience 
 of girls whose pleasure in the music is often 
 expressed by attitudes more or less dreamy or 
 ecstatic. It has also been my privilege to fre- 
 quent more sophisticated music-halls, where 
 old concert tasters have taken their programme 
 as one of the necessities of life. I have never 
 forgotten one experience of a string-quartette 
 concert, when my seat was in the midst of the 
 other members of the orchestra, who, with me, 
 were listening to their brethren's performance. 
 
 No mystic attitudes here, but the most alert 
 interest in the treatment of rhythm, of tempo, 
 of shading, and of technique, and enthusiastic 
 appreciation when these matters were well man- 
 aged. It might be contended that the unin- 
 
 o o 
 
 structed girl gets more out of her experience 
 emotionally than they, but even that I will not 
 grant. With an emotional temperament and 
 intelligence one certainly gets more from any 
 
196 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 art than with intelligence alone, but granted 
 enough temperamental background to insure 
 any interest at all, intelligence increases the 
 interest rather than the reverse. Twenty years 
 from now, the girls who knew something about 
 music and wanted to know more will be the 
 ones who support church choirs, local musi- 
 cians, and strain a point to give their children 
 lessons. The girls who repudiated intelligence 
 as too cold a matter were in reality enjoying 
 their own emotion rather than the music, and 
 the test of time will show it. That the other 
 alternative is true, that is, that intelligence 
 alone is not enough for artistic appreciation, 
 is obvious enough. As a certain museum offi- 
 
 o 
 
 cial once remarked to me, " Women's clubs 
 know everything about pictures nowadays ; 
 their dates, their first and second manners, 
 and their development. They do everything, 
 in fact, but look at them," and I have even 
 heard of what seems to me the final absurd- 
 ity, music lovers for whom the material 
 sound is too crude, and who prefer to listen 
 in total silence, while an open music score 
 "pipes to the spirit ditties of no tone!' 
 Such a refinement is beyond any to which 
 poor old Beethoven ever attained, who was 
 
PRAYER 197 
 
 never resigned to his deafness, but who in 
 spite of a vivid auditory imagination longed 
 for his own harmonies to come back to him 
 by way of his auditory nerves. 
 
 That intelligence in religious matters is use- 
 less without feeling is obvious enough from 
 its barren results, and further from its final 
 impossibility. One can never know the reality 
 of the religious life unless he has had it, any 
 more than a man born blind knows anything 
 of color. Moreover, one will never know any- 
 thing from his own experience about religion 
 unless he has certain hopes rather than others, 
 and these hopes indicate a feeling. 
 
 We therefore must presuppose that any 
 would-be religious man must have some feel- 
 ing, some promptings to choose this way 
 rather than the other, or the subject would 
 not interest him to begin with. Is it equally 
 essential that he should have intelligence? 
 We must candidly admit that it is not. There 
 is more real religion in an untutored but con- 
 scientious man than in an intellectual man, 
 who does not hope for a God. But is the re- 
 lioious man more religious because he is un- 
 
 O O 
 
 thinking, or simply in spite of it ? Would it 
 not be better for him, and for the world, if, 
 
198 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 keeping his religion, he brought intelligence 
 to bear upon it ? It has been a more healthy 
 state of society where parents have loved their 
 children even though they unknowingly gave 
 them the wrong food and air, than one (if 
 any has ever existed) where their state of 
 mind was indifferent and they coldly gave 
 the children their due in hygienic doses. In 
 the long run, the feeling instinct has kept 
 more children alive, I believe, than the purely 
 scientific attitude would have done, for in 
 the latter case there would be no motive. 
 But it would be absurd to say that any woman 
 was a less feeling mother because she at- 
 tended to the hygiene of her child with scien- 
 tific accuracy. A good doctor is not less 
 sympathetic because he can operate without 
 fainting ; why, then, should a praying man be 
 less religious if he can tell the rest of us how 
 to pray, not in vague terms, but in the most 
 concrete fashion possible ? It seems as if all 
 vigorous practice led to greater naivete. 
 When men painted, they talked about grind- 
 ing colors, and mixing them with water or 
 eggs; those of us who cannot paint must 
 needs grow sentimental or obscure. 
 
 Christ, that Master of Prayer, said de- 
 
PRAYER 199 
 
 finitely : Do not pray on the street-corners to 
 be seen and admired of men ; Do not say the 
 same thing over and over for the sake of 
 speaking ; Go thou into a room, and shut the 
 door, and pray thus and so, and He gave the 
 great prayer formula which all of us know. 
 He did not pretend to exhaust this subject, 
 or, in fact, any other. That was not His 
 way, for His time was short. His definite 
 charge to His disciples was that they should 
 do greater things than He had done, preach 
 to more people, heal more sick, see more of the 
 world, and among other things, why not 
 give more definite instructions than He had 
 ever done on the technique of prayer ? There 
 must be a self-conscious period in acquiring 
 the mechanism of any art. With a genius this 
 is short, with most of us it is very long. Any 
 one who does not have to attend to his tech- 
 nique, because he is an artist without it, is a 
 happy man ; but any one who refuses to at- 
 tend to it, for fear his emotional life will not 
 stand the shock, has an emotion sadly in need 
 of props. If there is anything in prayer, we 
 ought all of us learn it, and practice it, and 
 teach it better than we have been taught. If 
 
 o 
 
 there is not, we ought to stop it after a fair 
 
200 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 trial, and leave it behind us as another out- 
 grown superstition. 
 
 There is a final objection, which may 
 naturally arise out of the very argument we 
 have been advancing. Granted that praying 
 may be a fine art with the spiritually gifted, 
 we are plain people and cannot aspire to its 
 perfect practice. The shoemaker must stick to 
 his last, and those of us who must build and 
 barter, sew and sweep, have enough to do to 
 manage that, without attempting what would 
 be beyond us. If praying is an art like writ- 
 ing poetry, like poetry we must let it alone ! 
 
 To some extent this may be true. There 
 are doubtless diversities of gifts, and some of 
 us will inevitably fall into the Martha class. 
 Nevertheless, we must not be compared with 
 others, but with what we ourselves can develop 
 from our own material, however poor. If we 
 take singing lessons, we may not sing like Jenny 
 Lind, but we shall sing better than we could 
 without training. Moreover, however the arts 
 and labors of daily life may become divided, 
 so that one man does our cobbling, while we 
 do his building, this division of labor has its 
 limits. A man may do your tailoring, but he 
 cannot do your eating ; he may do your plumb- 
 
PRAYER 201 
 
 ing, but your praying you must do primarily 
 for yourself. We are parts of a social self, 
 where in a perfect state every man would 
 regard another equal to himself, and in which 
 one man would no more rob his brother than 
 his hand would snatch food from his own 
 mouth. But we are also individuals, and some 
 of our living, and all of our dying, must be 
 done alone. You may affirm that the fine arts 
 are not in your line, and while you live an 
 impoverished life without them, you still live. 
 You say morality is not in your line, and so- 
 ciety, the rest of your larger self, shuts you 
 up or wants to. You say religion and prayer 
 are not in your line, and while you do not 
 cut yourself off from men, if you still treat 
 them fairly, you cut yourself off from some- 
 thing, and the only something that can bridge 
 the ulf to the eternal solitude where lives 
 
 o 
 
 your soul. 
 
 If you do not hope for the bridging of this 
 gulf, you have not read this book. If a more 
 than human companionship and hence a prayer 
 communion is, however, the substance of 
 your hope, you have as good a right to be- 
 lieve in its possibility as in the reverse, and 
 believe you must, one way or the other. 
 
202 THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE 
 
 If this higher possibility is worth anything 
 at all, is it not worth more than our life would 
 indicate, and is it too late for a new prophet 
 to show us more clearly the way to its attain- 
 ment? 
 

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