The Deeper Faith 
 
 By 
 
 Carlos Wuppermann 
 
 \\ 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 New York and London 
 
 Ube Imicfeerbocfcer press 
 1921
 
 Copyright, 1921 
 
 by 
 J. W. Wuppermann 
 
 Printed in the United Slates of America
 
 SO 
 J. I. C.
 
 It fortifies my soul to know 
 That, though I perish, Truth is so: 
 That, howsoe'er I stray and range, 
 Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. 
 I steadier step when I recall 
 That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall. 
 
 A. H. CLOUGH.
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 THE following pages of collected notes 
 for they can lay claim to no more dig- 
 nified title are not to be taken as an attempt, 
 carefully to formulate and logically to develop 
 an exigent creed of life. They are rather to 
 be viewed as the stray musings of one who, 
 whatever his failings and limitations, has 
 brought to the pursuit of truth the earnest- 
 ness born of deep and enduring joy. Such 
 unity as this little book possesses will be 
 found to lie in the attitude toward life under- 
 lying it as a whole an attitude, one might 
 say, as old as the human race, and which is 
 continually and forcibly reasserting itself, in 
 spite of the instinctive and oftentimes violent 
 opposition of the masses of men.
 
 The Deeper Faith
 
 The Deeper Faith 
 
 THIS universe is certainly not the best 
 universe which we can imagine to exist 
 it is much better than that. Truth is 
 sweeter than the sweetest song the lips of the 
 poet have molded ; it is not only stranger but 
 also more admirable than fiction. Far be- 
 yond the noblest vision of prophet and of 
 saint, beyond the echo of the celestial har- 
 monies, is the dwelling place of Reality, and 
 our ideals are but the gossamer filaments 
 which unite us to an unimaginable Beauty, 
 transcending the creations of mind and heart. 
 Every true philosopher foresees his ultimate 
 failure ere ever he begins his task. He knows 
 who so well as he that no system of 
 human thought can adequately express the 
 Glory that is beyond the stars. "Expand 
 your vision as you will," says to him a secret 
 3
 
 4 The Deeper Faith 
 
 voice, "purify it, free it from all that seems 
 to you gross and earthy, pour into it all that 
 is truest in your soul, yet will it remain at the 
 last but a scratched and clouded mirror, 
 which distorts, even while it dimly reflects, 
 the splendor of Reality." 
 
 II 
 
 In these days of dying creeds and of "new 
 religions," of quack doctors of the soul and 
 their impossible panaceas in these days of 
 mental confusion and consequent spiritual 
 corwardice, it is well to remember that no true 
 child of Beauty can ever perish, and that 
 nothing which is not beautiful is immortal. 
 If this thing be of God, if it have in it the life- 
 giving breath of Beauty, it will endure, 
 mauger all the syllogisms which logic may 
 marshal against it. For a beautiful dream is 
 invulnerable save only in the face of a more 
 beautiful dream. In the spiritual realm 
 there are only pleasant surprises. Zeus over-
 
 The Deeper Faith 5 
 
 throws Cronos, and Jehovah Zeus ; and always 
 man's conscience approves the victory. Al- 
 ways the fittest God survives, and always the 
 fittest is the best. Idea clashes with idea, 
 system with system, but in the end emerges 
 Beauty, chaste, serene, her garments unsoiled 
 by the dust of conflict. 
 
 Ill 
 
 If we will but open our eyes we shall see 
 that there is no such thing as disillusionment. 
 Smiling and unafraid we shall welcome each 
 new discovery in the realm of scientific and 
 philosophic thought ; for we shall understand 
 that nothing can become true until it has first 
 become beautiful. For Truth is the expres- 
 sion of fact in terms of Beauty ; and there is 
 no fact which is incapable of being thus 
 apotheosized. Therefore it behooves us to 
 remain undisturbed in the face of the most 
 threatening fact which the future may hold in 
 store ; since it is but for us to remember that
 
 6 The Deeper Faith 
 
 the fact which to-day seems most inimical to 
 the peace of our souls, to-morrow either will 
 have ceased to be or will have been trans- 
 muted into a truth even more consoling than 
 that to which we now cling with all the ardor 
 of our deepest desires. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is not possible that we should be too 
 confident of the future. We know the worst 
 of life, but "the best is still to be." It is not 
 from too great sorrow that the gods deem it 
 necessary to protect us ; it is from the light of 
 a too intense happiness that they have shaded 
 our eyes with their merciful wings. Man may 
 look upon hell with unfaltering determina- 
 tion, but the glory of heaven is not for mortal 
 vision. The pure white light of Truth must 
 be broken into a thousand lesser rays by the 
 prism of our illusions ere it can serve for the 
 strengthening of our eyes and the nourishing 
 of our souls. Evil stares us in the face, a
 
 The Deeper Faith 7 
 
 naked, shameless fact; but Goodness is 
 modest beyond all the dwellers on Olympus. 
 She is a virgin who veils her countenance from 
 the gaze of her too ardent lover. She knows 
 well the madness of desire which one glance 
 at her unveiled loveliness would arouse in his 
 soul. And she is merciful : she will not mad- 
 den him with the vision of the unattainable. 
 Only for a favored few, whose spiritual sight 
 has been strengthened by self-discipline, has 
 she consented to draw aside a little corner of 
 the veil; that they might glimpse, as in a 
 dream, a fragment of her shining self. And 
 they remain her slaves. These are the saints 
 and heroes of humanity, in whose eyes is a 
 reflection of the light that never was on land 
 or sea. But for us is only the silver wonder of 
 our dreams, and a tremor of awe at thought of 
 that which lies beyond with steadfast grop- 
 ing on and on from truth to greater truth. 
 And at the last is the Vision a seeing face to 
 face. But not now. Now we must be content 
 with a mystic beauty, dim and elusive; for if 
 we should, even for an instant, behold Reality
 
 8 The Deeper Faith 
 
 in its pure, crystal splendor, our hearts would 
 break with joy. 
 
 In writing of Stevenson, Mr. Chesterton 
 says: "It is quite inappropriate to judge 
 The Teller of Tales by the particular novels 
 he wrote, as one would judge Mr. George 
 Moore by Esther Waters. These novels were 
 only the two or three of his soul's adventures 
 that he happened to tell. But he died with a 
 thousand stories in his heart." Perhaps were 
 these thousand untold stories the best of all 
 Stevenson's stories. Perhaps what is most 
 worth while in each of us is that which we 
 cannot express in words, even to our dearest 
 friend. It seems that the divine in us can 
 never receive adequate expression in this 
 life, that the highest faculties of our souls 
 have no relation to the souls of others. It 
 seems that we are doomed from birth to a 
 sublime isolation, and that peace can be 
 found only in accepting the decree of destiny
 
 The Deeper Faith 9 
 
 that we should live in large measure lonely 
 lives. 
 
 Herein lies the inadequacy of utilitarianism, 
 that it overlooks the uselessness, from a social 
 standpoint, of much that is noblest in the hu- 
 man heart. What the individual is to society 
 is only a fraction of his real worth sometimes, 
 indeed, there is no relation between the two. 
 Many immoral men have been of the greatest 
 use to society (as witness, Napoleon) while the 
 life of the saint seems to us often wasted. 
 
 What we are to ourselves is the measure of 
 our true worth; for the mark of character is 
 the ability to live alone. Solitude is the 
 crucible in which the metal of our souls is 
 tested. Only the happiness that has passed 
 unscathed through the wilderness of spiritual 
 isolation, can be called genuine and enduring. 
 
 VI 
 
 What is the essential difference between 
 the Greek and the Christian views of life?
 
 io The Deeper Faith 
 
 It seems to me to lie in the absence in Greek 
 thought of the Christian's sense of a certain 
 inconsistency between the subjective and the 
 objective worlds. The inner life was to the 
 Greek adequately expressed by external 
 achievements; the inner life to the Christian 
 transcends all objective expression. The 
 Greek had no concept of the Inexpressible, 
 that concept which lends so much poignancy 
 to Christian thought. . 
 
 " All I could never be, 
 All men ignored in me, 
 This I was worth to God," 
 
 Such a sentiment is quite alien to Hellenic 
 thought. The individual and the social were 
 to the Greek perfectly equated, and that is 
 perhaps why his concept of immortality was 
 so shadowy. He had no knowledge of powers 
 of the individual soul which cannot find 
 adequate embodiment in the life of earth. 
 
 From this point of view it is easy to under- 
 stand the perfect balance and harmony of 
 Greek art. The Hellenic artist attained ex-
 
 The Deeper Faith n 
 
 haustive expression of his conscious self in his 
 works, and for this reason his art lacks a sense 
 of mystery. Greek art triumphs by what it 
 expresses; Christian art by what it suggests. 
 This is easily demonstrated by comparing the 
 Parthenon with a Gothic cathedral. 
 
 VII 
 
 There are many Hellenists among us to- 
 day ; and they have an important part to play 
 in the regeneration of our civilization. In 
 fact it is to them rather than to the Christians 
 that we must look for the great social leaders 
 who shall bring us out of the wilderness of 
 social wrong into which we have strayed. 
 For the danger of the Christian point of view 
 lies in this : that while it emphasizes the dis- 
 cord between the individual and the world, 
 it places its hope in the personal development 
 of the isolated soul rather than in the ever 
 more adequate expression of the inner life of 
 the soul in the common life of earth ; and thus
 
 12 The Deeper Faith 
 
 it tends to make its adherents indifferent to 
 social progress. However, it is only in at- 
 tempting to mold the world to the fashion 
 of our dreams that we strengthen our dreams 
 so that they can transcend the world. The 
 loftier the things which we learn adequately 
 to express, the loftier becomes our concept 
 of the Inexpressible that concept which is 
 the ultimate source of all our spiritual 
 strength. 
 
 VIII 
 
 In the last analysis all love is the love of the 
 Unknown. If to know all is to forgive all, it is 
 perhaps because to know all is to become 
 indifferent; and it is so easy to forgive when 
 one does not care. Life may be defined as the 
 presence of the Unknown; and every living 
 being is simply the incarnation of a mystery. 
 The more life we have, the more incompre- 
 hensible we become; that is why Jesus was 
 misunderstood and crucified.
 
 The Deeper Faith 13 
 
 IX 
 
 Perhaps it is not too much to say that there 
 is in each one of us something which God 
 Himself does not understand. Otherwise 
 how could He love us as He surely does? If 
 man yearns with all his heart to understand 
 God, it is not at all impossible that God may 
 be yearning no less fervently to understand 
 man. Perhaps this mutual yearning con- 
 stitutes what we call prayer. And since God 
 and man are both infinite there is no danger 
 that they will ever reach that complete mu- 
 tual understanding which means the death of 
 love. 
 
 X 
 
 But if we love only the Unknown why do 
 we strive so mightily after knowledge? In 
 our quest of knowledge are we not disobedient 
 to the voice of love? Should we not rather 
 take ignorance as our ideal? Not so. Only 
 through knowledge do we enter into relation
 
 14 The Deeper Faith 
 
 with the Unknown. He who knows nothing 
 is ignorant even of the existence of the Un- 
 known. On the other hand, every new truth 
 is a window opening upon the infinite beyond. 
 The realm of the Unknown is so constituted 
 that the more of it man conquers and subdues 
 to his service the more remains to be con- 
 quered. For every apple we pluck from the 
 tree of knowledge there immediately grow 
 two others. 
 
 Men are to be judged according to their 
 relatively greater or less appreciation of this 
 truth. Some there are who have filled their 
 days to overflowing with its smiles and fra- 
 grance, to whom every moment is an awful 
 moment. These are the mystics or divine 
 lovers. 
 
 XI 
 
 Humanity may be divided into two great 
 classes : those who pray to live ; and those who 
 live to pray. It is to the second class that 
 belong the saints and mystics whose lives are
 
 The Deeper Faith 15 
 
 torches kindled at the altar of love to light 
 men through the caverns of doubt and the 
 valley of the shadow into the splendor of 
 God's eternal presence. These are they who, 
 beholding all the joys which earth can offer, 
 count them as nothing when compared to the 
 ecstasy of spiritual union with the Beauty 
 that is beyond the stars. They come to God 
 not in the fond hope that in so doing they 
 shall escape misfortune, defeat, and pain, and 
 whatever other ills the flesh is heir to, but as 
 to a Friend whose love more than compen- 
 sates for all the suffering which existence 
 upon this earth inevitably entails upon every 
 son of man. They know that in the world 
 they shall have tribulation, but they know 
 also that divine peace has overcome the world. 
 Far from praying that they be released from 
 the bonds of pain, their only petition is that 
 they may be allowed to suffer with their 
 Master ; that they may have the courage and 
 the strength to take up their cross and follow 
 him. And if the cross be not sent them from 
 on high they hew it from the wormwood of
 
 16 The Deeper Faith 
 
 their consequent grief. They inflict needless 
 suffering on themselves; since love must 
 suffer for the beloved or die. And they ask 
 of God no reward but the joy of His presence, 
 and the light of His countenance. ' ' Well hast 
 thou written of me, Thomas," spake to the an- 
 gelic doctor the voice from the crucifix, "what 
 reward wouldst thou have ? ' ' And swift came 
 back the answer : ' ' None other than thyself, 
 Lord." 
 
 XII 
 
 It is scarcely to be denied that the religious 
 attitude is not confined to religion. We are 
 all religious about something in life ; for to be 
 religious about an object is simply to treat 
 that object as the ultimate good to the attain- 
 ment of which every other desire is to be 
 subordinated. Some of us have a religion of 
 money; others of fame and power; others of 
 art; others still of morality. May we not say 
 that the mystic is unique in that he is religious 
 about God ? To be at one with God, that is,
 
 The Deeper Faith 17 
 
 ideally at least, the motive of his every 
 thought and deed. Even morality is but the 
 means of a closer union with the Eternal; 
 the good is the unblemished marble from 
 which are hewn the steps that lead to the 
 throne of the Spirit. We must climb the 
 steps, but only as the preliminary to seeing 
 God face to face. For contemplation is the 
 highest form of activity; and the hour of 
 prayer more to be honored than the day of 
 labor. It is for this reason that the Catholic 
 Church ranks the passive virtues above the 
 active. She teaches her children to work 
 better that they may pray better; and all the 
 other activities of the Catholic life are by her 
 directed to adoration as a final end. 
 
 XIII 
 
 This is the distinction between supersti- 
 tion and true religion: that whereas the 
 former seeks to enlist the aid of supernatural 
 agencies in man's behalf in his struggle to
 
 i8 The Deeper Faith 
 
 survive, the latter raises man himself above 
 the consideration of his personal welfare into 
 the shining realm of spiritual values where 
 abides the peace that passeth human under- 
 standing. The one degrades the gods into 
 hirelings of man's pleasure, making them sub- 
 servient to his cupidity and lust for power; 
 the other, crushing every selfish desire, trans- 
 forms man into the son of God, an inheritor 
 of the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 XIV 
 
 No man may count himself free of super- 
 stitition who has not fully accepted the truth 
 that "it is only when the soul is simply up- 
 lifted on high that prayer can be beautiful." 
 Conversely, to make that truth one's own, 
 to try the virtue of one's prayer by the fire of 
 an ideal so pure, is to rise above the dust and 
 turmoil of earthly living, and to find the peace 
 of home in that super-personal heaven where 
 alone the bird of human happiness sings, and
 
 The Deeper Faith 19 
 
 nests, and multiplies. It is to be loosed from 
 the bonds of nameless fears, the haggard off- 
 spring of superstition. It is to declare truce 
 between those ancient enemies, science and 
 religion; to evaluate each in the light of the 
 whole of existence; to recognize, in science 
 the mistress of earth, in religion the sealer of 
 the skies. Finally, it is to feel the discords 
 of being resolve into exquisite harmonies, to 
 hear in the hush of the daybreak the morning 
 stars singing together. 
 
 XV 
 
 There are some people who assert that 
 they never pray ; and it is among these people 
 that one frequently finds many of the nobler 
 forms of prayer most highly developed. I 
 have come to believe that the artist in the 
 hour of completing his masterpiece, the 
 mother pressing her new-born baby to her 
 heart with sobs of joy, the lover looking si- 
 lently into the eyes of his beloved, two friends
 
 20 The Deeper Faith 
 
 clasping hands after a long absence I have 
 come to believe that all these, and many 
 more, do indeed utter prayers as beautiful as 
 any which have sprung from the devotions of 
 the mystic and the saint. For even as that is 
 no prayer which does not lift the soul above 
 the consideration of its own welfare, so con- 
 versely every form of adoration which induces 
 self-forgetfulness contains the elements of 
 true prayer. Since there is nothing above us 
 but God, to be lifted above oneself is always 
 in some measure to be lifted into God, and to 
 forget oneself is to remember Him. Thus it 
 happens that many who do not know Him 
 with their conscious minds, worship Him 
 unconsciously in the works of His creation. 
 And perhaps is this the best and surest way of 
 worshiping Him, the one least likely to mis- 
 lead us into the penumbra of superstition. 
 It is not easy to mistake a sunset, a dog, or 
 even a man, for God ; it is far easier to accept 
 the image of the Eternal in our minds for the 
 transcendent Reality it vainly strives ade- 
 quately to express.
 
 The Deeper Faith 21 
 
 XVI 
 
 There is in the lowest being wearing human 
 shape, in the criminal, the drunkard, the 
 prostitute, and nameless creatures infinitely 
 beneath these there is in each one something 
 higher than our highest conception of God. 
 And with this Something every true prayer 
 brings us into communion. It is "the Un- 
 seen behind the Seen; the Unknown behind 
 the Observed." Jesus, dogmatizes the ra- 
 tionalist, Jesus was after all a mere man. 
 Let us not tremble at the insinuation; it is 
 not true. No man is a mere man not Jesus 
 nor another. 
 
 XVII 
 
 This, I suppose, is the essence of Chris- 
 tianity, as it is of all true religion ; that things 
 are more than they seem, and that about 
 every human head there is a halo, a reflection 
 of the central Light, had we but eyes to 
 see! But we are blind; we see only a moun-
 
 22 The Deeper Faith 
 
 tain, a star, a man, not the glory they were 
 intended to reveal. Too often it is with us 
 as it was with Hellriegel in Und Pippa Tanzt; 
 we must be blinded to the beauty of the 
 material world before we can see the palace of 
 the Spirit and "the great, golden steps" 
 leading thereto. 
 
 And yet there is surely for each of us, some- 
 where in this narrow little world of ours, a 
 holy place, a shrine made glad with flowers, 
 where we can bow the knee and beautifully 
 adore. For each of us there exists a threshold 
 which we dare not cross except we loose the 
 sandals from our feet. Perhaps it is more 
 often the threshold of a heart than of a church ; 
 perhaps it is rather in the kiss of the beloved 
 than in the absolution of the priest that God's 
 forgiveness is poured out upon us. In either 
 case the simplest, most commonplace word 
 we utter in the shadow of the sanctuary is in 
 reality a prayer, beautiful and pure. Brother, 
 go thou into thy temple, and I will go into 
 mine; and though thine be built of precious 
 stone and costly metal, and mine of the in-
 
 The Deeper Faith 23 
 
 nocent laughter of a little child and the sacred 
 depths of his mother's soul, yet will our 
 prayers be common prayer. We shall be 
 nearer one another than if we were kneeling 
 side by side at the altar of a Church to which 
 we were both strangers. Our prayers shall 
 meet before the throne of God, and know each 
 other, and kiss, and bow hand in hand before 
 the Father. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 It does not matter to whom we pray, nor 
 what words we use; what matters is the mo- 
 tive. The peasant woman whose worship of 
 the Blessed Virgin is, in part at least, the ex- 
 pression of sincere admiration for the divine 
 purity of the maiden called Mary, is far less 
 superstitious than the rationalizing Protes- 
 tant philosopher who, scorning intermediaries, 
 petitions God the Father for success in the 
 daily affairs of life. 
 
 There is finally but one form of idolatry: 
 that which makes of man's intercourse with
 
 24 The Deeper Faith 
 
 the divine a means rather than an end. All 
 sincere worship, even if it be but the worship 
 of a god of stone, is accepted of the Spirit. 
 
 XIX 
 
 It may be that we are moving toward 
 unity in religion ; but it is surely not the unity 
 of explicit agreement. It is unity in diversity ; 
 the unity which is always present when two 
 or three seekers after truth are gathered to- 
 gether in a spirit of perfect tolerance. 
 
 The old phrases, the ancient formulas, 
 which have so long and faithfully served the 
 spiritual interests of the mass of humanity, 
 are proving less and less efficient. They are 
 loyal servants, grown feeble with age, whose 
 willing feet are no longer able to bear them on 
 their master's errands. So long as man de- 
 sires it so long will they strive to do his bid- 
 ding ; even though many, unable to reach their 
 destination, stagger and fall exhausted by the 
 wayside. Were it not better to retire them
 
 The Deeper Faith 25 
 
 from service? A new generation is at hand; 
 let us welcome them, unafraid. See, there 
 are many enough for all. And they are 
 stronger and swifter than the old. 
 
 XX 
 
 Truly the time seems at hand when each of 
 us must give vent to the insatiable mysticism 
 within him in words of his own choosing. 
 Some also there will be who will find words 
 themselves inadequate, and who will embody 
 the ineffable longing of their souls in a kiss or 
 a silent tear. And every kiss that is more 
 than passion, and every tear that is other than 
 self-pity, is a true prayer. Was it not, ac- 
 cording to the legend and the legends are 
 the great truths gleaned from the facts of 
 history was it not by a kiss that the Virgin 
 Mary, whom we may well call the spirit of 
 prayer incarnate, was immaculately con- 
 ceived? And every child is potentially a 
 prayer incarnate even the children of the 
 imagination that exist only in our souls.
 
 26 The Deeper Faith 
 
 XXI 
 
 One summer evening I was walking along 
 the shore of the Atlantic. The great moon 
 was rising from the waters, and as she began 
 her majestical ascent she deigned to send a 
 greeting to me, lonely wanderer on the shores 
 of earth a single silver ray that floated on 
 the dark waves like a fairy ladder woven of 
 the locks of naiads and sea maidens. I 
 wandered on; and still the ladder followed 
 me; up and down, backward and forward, I 
 could not escape its insistent, luring glory. 
 And it came to me that for every human being 
 there is a ladder to the moon ; though all are 
 hidden from my sight save this which gracious 
 heaven has given to be mine. But in the sky 
 the ladders melt into a perfect orb. 
 
 XXII 
 
 We all, like Cyrano, are homesick for the 
 moon. Earth with its glories that endure for 
 a day can never satisfy us, lonely exiles from
 
 The Deeper Faith 27 
 
 the kingdom of the Eternal. All the fruits 
 of the garden of pleasure will not still the 
 hunger of the soul. In vain have we striven 
 to drown the still, small voice of the Spirit in 
 the roar of the whirling torrents of the active 
 life. In vain have we wrested from the earth 
 the hidden treasures of her wealth; in vain 
 have we bridled the forces of nature and made 
 them obedient to our desires; in vain all our 
 industrial enterprise, our material success. 
 In the twilight hour of silence and rest come 
 the words of our condemnation: "To be is 
 more than to do and does more." 
 
 XXIII 
 
 As a people we have chosen prosperity as 
 our ideal; and by thrift and industry, the 
 virtues which man shares with the ant and 
 the bee, we have in large measure attained 
 the desired ends. We are prosperous, we are 
 successful. And what, in effect, has pros- 
 perity brought us? Greater happiness? Is
 
 28 The Deeper Faith 
 
 the American millionaire happier than the Ital- 
 ian peasant? Has he attained a deeper, surer 
 peace of soul ? Does he offer greater reverence 
 to the trinity of goodness, beauty, and truth? 
 I wonder if it is not high time that we 
 closed our Franklins and opened our Emer- 
 sons; that we turned from the multitudinous 
 volumes on how to succeed with which our 
 bookshelves are laden to the rare master- 
 pieces of literature, which teach us how to 
 fail. It is so much easier to succeed than to 
 fail! And the time cries aloud for men with 
 the courage to snap their fingers in the face 
 of fortune, and to embrace poverty and pain, 
 and the contempt of their fellowmen, for a 
 dream's sake and the love of their persecutors. 
 
 XXIV 
 
 Nature is one great struggle, the blunder- 
 ing incarnation of the will to live; and the 
 natural man is still in all his acts under the 
 spell of the domineering mistress. To free 
 him from that anachronistic spell is the pur-
 
 The Deeper Faith 29 
 
 pose of all true religion. This alone is re- 
 demption; this is joy; to be able to say, "I 
 have done with the struggle for mere exist- 
 ence; I care not to live, but only to live well; 
 beyond all change is that which abides, and 
 that alone is Reality to me." 
 
 But how far from this spirit of other- 
 worldliness have not our modern religions 
 wandered! Those who should be spiritual 
 leaders have grown impatient ; they have 
 come down from the lonely peaks, from the 
 rarefied atmosphere of the ideal, to make 
 truce with the unaspiring multitude in the 
 valleys. They have come down; and they 
 have left the ancient beacon lights to be 
 extinguished. They waited so long for hu- 
 manity to mount to them! Nevertheless 
 they should have remained on the heights. 
 They were nearer the stars. 
 
 XXV 
 
 And yet, though few in number, they are 
 with us to-day, as they always have been
 
 30 The Deeper Faith 
 
 with us the saints and the martyrs. Si- 
 lently, without ostentation, they pursue the 
 path of renunciation, and we are scarcely 
 conscious of their presence until they are 
 taken from us. Then, indeed, it seems that a 
 certain glory has passed from the earth; and 
 we cannot understand how the departure of 
 one whom the world long ago proclaimed a 
 failure could affect us so deeply. Is it per- 
 haps that the useless things are the most 
 divine? Or that greater than the man who 
 teaches us how to use the resources of the 
 world and nature for our aggrandizement is 
 he who proves to us of how little value they 
 are in solving the problems of human exist- 
 ence? It may be indeed that the man who 
 demonstrates to us that we can attain the 
 highest happiness without wealth is a greater 
 genius than the inventor of innumerable 
 machines for the production of wealth; and 
 that in the firmament of human greatness the 
 star of Emerson outshines that of Edison. 
 
 Socrates, Jesus, Saint Francis, Giordano 
 Bruno, Karl Marx the great failures! It is
 
 The Deeper Faith 3 1 
 
 to them that humanity builds its loftiest 
 monuments in marble and song ! 
 
 XXVI 
 
 Lord, grant us the will to fail ! Be that our 
 morning, and our evening, prayer. Grant us 
 to be accounted knaves, so but Thy Goodness 
 be brought a little nearer earth ; grant us to 
 be accounted fools, so but Thy wisdom find a 
 haven in men's hearts; grant us to be ac- 
 counted outcasts, so but Thy beauty brighten 
 the days of the humble ; grant us to suffer all 
 things and to die, so but Thy kingdom come. 
 
 XXVII 
 
 The will to fail is it not after all but 
 another name for love? And in using the 
 word love I am thinking not only of that 
 larger, cosmic emotion which teaches us to 
 stretch out our arms to the universe to em-
 
 32 The Deeper Faith 
 
 brace it, but also of that individualized, per- 
 sonal affection to which we turn for comfort 
 in the night of discouragement when the 
 stars seem more than usually remote. Surely 
 there were hours in the public career of Jesus 
 of Nazareth when even the inveterate con- 
 sciousness of his exalted mission would have 
 proved insufficient protection against the 
 barbed shafts of multitudinous indifference 
 and hate, without the warm, fragrant smiles 
 and thrilling handclasps of Peter and John 
 and Mary of Magdala. And even at the last 
 when, apparently deserted by all his followers, 
 he was left alone with God and his own soul, 
 perhaps it was the memory of one supremely 
 glorious Sabbath on which he walked amid 
 the yellow fields of ripening corn with the 
 disciples whom he loved, and the sun shone 
 as never before, and the birds sang to the 
 listening heart, perhaps it was some such 
 memory as much as the expectation of ap- 
 proaching triumph in heaven, that saved from 
 surrender his strained and staggering will. 
 In that wonderful silence before Caiaphas, the
 
 The Deeper Faith 33 
 
 most eloquent silence in the world's history, 
 who shall say that it was not the remembered 
 warmth of a mother's kisses on his boyhood 
 lips that kept those lips inviolate from the 
 staining words of anger or reproach! 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 Somewhere in one of Ellen Key's remark- 
 able books there occurs a lengthy discussion 
 of that universal, all-embracing love which 
 is the ideal and the way of Buddhism and of 
 Christianity. Ellen Key finds such a love 
 impracticable, and in any case undesirable, 
 since its triumph in the hearts of men would 
 in her opinion spell the destruction of that 
 individualized, personal, affection which is 
 indeed the very crown of human life. Is it 
 not better, she seems to ask us, to love one 
 than all? implying by the query that the 
 two forms of love, the universal and the in- 
 dividual, are mutually exclusive. Nay, the 
 very nature of love itself makes any command
 
 34 The Deeper Faith 
 
 to love all men indiscriminately meaningless 
 and absurd. Love is an instinctive choosing 
 of one from among many ; and to attempt to 
 spread it over the many is simply to dilute 
 it into good-natured indifference. Further- 
 more, love is based upon contrast; to love 
 certain people is to hate others. 
 
 Such is the argument; and it may be 
 that it has sufficient plausibility to de- 
 ceive the more casual reader, even though 
 it is based upon a fallacy that must be 
 quite obvious to the thoughtful critic. I 
 mean the fallacy of attempting to measure 
 the possibilities of so infinite a spiritual force 
 as love by the inconsequent deductions of 
 logic. 
 
 For there is no limit to be set to the possible 
 development of love; its future is as un- 
 bounded as that of the universe itself; and 
 the higher the starting point the nearer 
 heaven shall we be at the sunset hour. Let us 
 begin with the universal love of humanity, 
 the charity of Saint Paul. Is it impossible to 
 build beyond that ? By no means. Universal
 
 The Deeper Faith 35 
 
 charity is the foundation upon which is to be 
 built the glorious superstructure of individual 
 affection; and the firmer and broader the 
 foundation the more enduring will be the 
 superstructure. If I love all men as brothers 
 I shall love my brother with more than a 
 brother's affection. If I learn to honor and 
 respect all women, even the fallen and de- 
 graded, by so much shall I increase the honor 
 and respect which I cherish for my mother, 
 my sister, my wife. There is no antithesis 
 between universal and individual love; on 
 the contrary, they rise and fall together. The 
 nobler our love for all humanity becomes, the 
 nobler becomes likewise our love for the few 
 whom we call our friends. Thus it was that 
 Jesus, who loved humanity with a love so 
 profound and all-consuming that after nine- 
 teen centuries it shines on as the light 
 of the world with undiminished intensity 
 and grandeur, loved Lazarus and Mary 
 and John with an individualized affection 
 no less exceptionally beautiful and en- 
 during.
 
 36 The Deeper Faith 
 
 XXIX 
 
 He who would increase his love for the 
 noble can best accomplish that purpose by 
 learning to love the ignoble. Try to admire 
 the sinner if you would broaden and beautify 
 your worship of the saint. The problem of 
 enriching the life of the soul is the .problem of 
 finding God in the lowest. When you have 
 discovered the divinity that hides in the heart 
 of a rose do you think that you are less likely 
 to see God in the eyes of a friend? Do you 
 hesitate to love the Magdalene lest in so doing 
 you make less beautiful your worship of the 
 Virgin Mary? It is a vain and foolish fear; 
 for there is no love which does not render the 
 heart more capable of beautiful worship. 
 
 XXX 
 
 It may be that contrast is of the essence of 
 love ; but it is not the contrast between love 
 and hate, it is at most the contrast between 
 love and love. In the heart of the mystic
 
 The Deeper Faith 37 
 
 there is no room for hate. He does not hate 
 the sinner for he sees in him an undeveloped 
 saint ; he does not hate the evil, for it is just 
 good in the making. 
 
 XXXI 
 
 Of course in all this I am thinking of an 
 idealized personal affection far removed from 
 the selfish passion which so often to-day 
 passes current as love in the sexes. " Is it not 
 strange," said a friend to me not long ago, 
 "is it not strange that so often as a man and 
 a woman learn to love each other they be- 
 come daily more self -centered and indifferent 
 to others? They seem to lose all sense of 
 obligation to parents, to friends, to the suffer- 
 ing, struggling world of men, and to think 
 only of the attainment of their desire in 
 mutual exclusive possession." It is not 
 strange when one considers how important a 
 part selfish passion still plays in the love of 
 man and woman for each other. For this is 
 the difference between passion and love, that
 
 38 The Deeper Faith 
 
 the former weakens the sentiment of uni- 
 versal charity in the human heart, the latter 
 strengthens it. He who truly loves a woman 
 will love all women for her sweet sake; yes, 
 all life will seem sacred to him because she 
 has smiled upon it. He will find new wonder 
 in. the sunset and a strange melody in the 
 running brook. The stars will shine with an 
 unforeseen tenderness, and the children open 
 their hearts to reveal secret treasures of good- 
 ness and beauty. And all this independent of 
 whether his beloved returns his affection, or 
 not. But he whose love is just passion will be 
 blinded to all the splendors of God's universe, 
 and see only the one woman for the posses- 
 sion of whom he will fight as a beast for its 
 prey, selfishly, without pity. And should he 
 fail to win her, then will life itself lose all 
 meaning for him. 
 
 XXXII 
 
 "It seems to me," said one day a woman 
 who is of the pure in heart that have seen
 
 The Deeper Faith 39 
 
 God, "that the tragedy of many marriages 
 arises from the fact that whereas a woman's 
 love grows ever stronger and more wonderful, 
 a man's love too often ceases to develop after 
 marriage, or even diminishes and dies away, 
 as a tide that has reached its flood." It is 
 because woman's love is usually built upon a 
 surer foundation, a broader spirit of charity, 
 an instinctive understanding of sorrow. So 
 it happens that a woman's love is seldom an 
 unhappy love, for whether or not she pos- 
 sesses the man she loves, her love itself will be 
 a light and a comfort to her. It will glorify all 
 her life. This is doubtless what Byron meant 
 when he said that love was woman's whole 
 existence. It is not that she has greater need of 
 the man than he of her, but that she lives more 
 constantly in the presence of her love. She 
 takes it with her to her daily tasks and allows 
 its splendor to transfigure all the little relation- 
 ships of common life. Her love becomes so 
 great and pure that it overflows the capacity 
 of the man she loves, and she stretches out 
 her arms to the whole universe to embrace it.
 
 40 The Deeper Faith 
 
 XXXIII 
 
 In that splendid epic of modern American 
 life and love, Robert Herrick's Together, there 
 is portrayed a woman in whose heart burns 
 the fire of the highest love. Margaret and 
 Robert, predestined lovers, have snatched 
 from fate a few days' supreme happiness, but 
 are now forced to part, each to return to the 
 path of stern and unrelenting duty. And 
 the woman speaks: " . . . . It can never 
 be as it was before for you or me. We shall 
 carry away something from our feast to feed 
 on all our lives. We shall have enough to 
 give others. Love makes you rich so rich! 
 We must give it away all our lives. We shall, 
 dearest, never fear." And again: "My 
 children, my children," she murmured, "I 
 love them more I can do for them more. 
 And for dear Mother Pole and even for him. 
 I shall be gentler I shall understand. . . . 
 Love was set before me. I have taken it, and 
 it has made me strong. I will be glad and love 
 the world, all of it, for your sake, because you
 
 The Deeper Faith 4 1 
 
 have blessed me. . . . Ours is not the fire 
 that turns inward and feeds upon itself." 
 
 " Love makes you rich so rich ! We must 
 give it away all our lives." So speaks the 
 highest love, burning away forever the false 
 antithesis between individual and universal, 
 and rising through the passionate yearning 
 for at-onement with the beloved to the 
 mysticial desire for union with the Spirit in 
 all created things. 
 
 XXXIV 
 
 It is in the realm of spiritual values that 
 every true marriage takes place, for it is there 
 that human souls approach nearest one an- 
 other. It is there that, lifted above ourselves, 
 we are most ourselves. It is there that the 
 pearl of purity which lies buried in every 
 human heart is brought to light ; the pearl of 
 great price which one dare not cast before 
 swine. It is there, on the heights of the spirit, 
 in the face of God's heaven, not in the dark
 
 42 The Deeper Faith 
 
 valley of passion, that every child should be 
 conceived. 
 
 XXXV 
 
 The period of courtship is usually one of 
 pure idealism; but how often marriage, in- 
 stead of being the fulfillment of love, spells its 
 destruction ! How often beneath the words of 
 the priestly benediction lurks the unspoken 
 venomous curse of fate ! It seems indeed that 
 the physical element which enters at marriage 
 is destructive of all but the highest love, and 
 that the first embrace of the bridal night will 
 prove disastrous to every affection that was 
 born in passion. Let but the suggestion of 
 selfish indulgence intrude itself and find a 
 moment's welcome, and immediately the 
 spell is broken. Immediately the physical 
 loses its symbolic, sacramental efficacy, and 
 becomes, instead of an instrument of the 
 spirit, a flaming barrier from which the timid 
 soul recoils in terror.
 
 The Deeper Faith 43 
 
 It is vain to prate of a lawful indulgence of 
 passion; since there are no lawful indulgences. 
 The physical for its own sake is always sin; 
 and to lust after one's own wife is as bad as, 
 perhaps worse than, to covet the wife of one's 
 neighbor. "They would have her go," says 
 Guido, the husband of Monna Vanna, "they 
 would have her go and yield up to him that 
 body which no man ever dared to think on 
 with so much as a passing breath of desire, so 
 virginal did it appear; from which I, her hus- 
 band, ventured not to draw the veils but with 
 a charge to my hands, my eyes, to keep per- 
 fect reverence, lest I should sully it by one 
 ill-governed thought." 
 
 XXXVI 
 
 There is a kiss which blinds and degrades; 
 it is the kiss of passion. But there is another 
 kiss which is just the expression of the long- 
 ing of two personalities to become one ; a kiss 
 which illumines life and draws the soul nearer
 
 44 The Deeper Faith 
 
 the invisible loveliness which is at the heart of 
 things. It is the kiss of the highest love. 
 
 Again, and yet again! and here and here. 
 Let me with kisses burn this body away, 
 That our two souls may dart together free. 
 I fret at intervention of the flesh, 
 And I would clasp you you that but inhabit 
 This lovely house. 
 
 So speaks the voice of the highest love, to 
 which every desire has value only as the path 
 to something beyond itself. Passion is transi- 
 tory and finite; it seeks its own satisfaction, 
 and no sooner has it attained its desire than 
 it begins to wane. It is as a runner who, 
 breasting the tape victorious, in the moment 
 of triumph staggers and falls dead. But the 
 highest love is infinite, never finally satis- 
 fied; since it seeks only to give and still to 
 give, and in giving grows stronger and more 
 beautiful day by day. This is the love which 
 is born in the realm of spiritual values. And 
 this love is eternal and ever patient; fearing 
 not bodily separation nor death ; knowing not 
 jealousy nor deceit.
 
 The Deeper Faith 45 
 
 XXXVII 
 
 The entrance of the intellectual element 
 into love, through the emancipation of 
 woman, is destined to play an important part 
 in the ennobling of love in the sexes. It is 
 not possible to lust after a woman with whom 
 one has shared the loftiest beliefs of one's 
 heart ; and a degrading passion can exist only 
 between two beings that have never looked 
 into each other's soul. 
 
 XXXVIII 
 
 As long as woman was intellectually a 
 child, she was content to be loved as a child ; 
 but now that she has been allowed to grow 
 into the full stature of a human being, now 
 that her personality has been granted the 
 inalienable privilege of self-development, 
 she will demand of love not only spirit- 
 ual and physical, but also intellectual satis- 
 faction.
 
 46 The Deeper Faith 
 
 "First of all," says Ibsen's Nora, "I am a 
 human being like you," and in those burning 
 words of sudden, lightning-like conviction is 
 voiced the credo of the modern woman. 
 Deeper than masculine and feminine is the 
 human, and on this common ground must 
 man and woman meet if their relationship is 
 to be beautiful and enduring. The portal to 
 every personality is the intellect ; and woman, 
 as a developed personality, may be ap- 
 proached only through her intellect. Great 
 and pure thoughts stand sentinel at the out- 
 posts of her soul, and if one would gain 
 entrance to the inner sanctuary one must 
 know the passwords. One must be able to 
 answer her questioning eyes ere one presumes 
 to ask of her the spiritual treasures that lie 
 hidden in the depths of her being. If you 
 cannot enter into the thoughts of the woman 
 you love, all your devotion and sacrifice will 
 be in vain; you will never win her deepest 
 affection. Once, when woman was only feel- 
 ing, it might have been possible; but it is no 
 longer so.
 
 The Deeper Faith 47 
 xxxix 
 
 Let us not fear that in becoming more 
 intellectual love will lose its emotional in- 
 tensity. There is nothing so emotional as 
 thought, and an ideal is more ravishing than 
 the most beautiful goddess. In this connec- 
 tion one may recall the anecdote related of 
 Gounod, how one day, on having the Coper- 
 nican system explained to him by a friend, 
 he burst into tears and cried, "How beauti- 
 ful!" Because Wagner was the most intel- 
 lectual, he was also the most emotional of 
 composers. In his Niebelungen Ring he set 
 metaphysics to music, and produced a work 
 so freighted with intensity of feeling that it 
 almost oversteps the boundaries of art. 
 Beside this how pallid seem the efforts of the 
 Italian composers, dealing as they do with the 
 petty passions of men and women who do not 
 understand life ! Wagner is not content with 
 arousing our sympathies for this man or that 
 woman, he wishes to make us feel for the 
 common aspirations of all humanity, nay, of
 
 48 The Deeper Faith 
 
 the whole universe; and as the universe 
 transcends the individual being it contains, so 
 does Wagner's sympathy transcend that of a 
 mere opera composer. The emotion which 
 springs from a great thought is always more 
 profound than the emotion which is simply 
 the reflection of a perceived emotion or the 
 answer to the stimulus of a sense impression. 
 Great as is my admiration for the physical 
 beauty of the woman I love it is as nothing 
 compared to my admiration for the ideal of 
 beauty which she cherishes in her soul; nay, 
 it is primarily as an expression of the inner 
 ideal that her physical loveliness has value. 
 
 XL 
 
 Consider, also, that there is no beautiful 
 thought which does not become more beauti- 
 ful the moment it is shared with a woman. 
 I bring to the woman I love all my purest 
 thoughts, my most cherished dreams; and 
 she has no sooner smiled upon them than they
 
 The Deeper Faith 49 
 
 begin to shine with a new radiance. It 
 seems, indeed, that a woman's smile is like 
 the magic diamond in The Blue Bird; it makes 
 visible the essence of things, which is Beauty. 
 I never knew how beautiful were my ideals 
 until one day I saw them shining in the 
 depths of a pure woman's soul. Then indeed 
 it was revealed to me ; and I have never since 
 doubted that the highest privilege a human 
 being may possess is the privilege of living 
 and dying for a dream. 
 
 XLI 
 
 Once it was deemed that true love must be 
 unchanging; now, however, we begin to see 
 that the highest love changes constantly. It 
 gains in depth and compass with the addition 
 of every new ideal. Day by day it reveals 
 fresh wonders to us; day by day our dreams 
 become more beautiful as we learn to share 
 them with the being we adore ; day by day our 
 love itself grows purer, since there is nothing
 
 50 The Deeper Faith 
 
 more fatal to unworthy passion than a com- 
 mon fund of ideals. Every thought that you 
 share with your beloved is a bond of union 
 stronger than a thousand kisses. Should 
 death separate you from her to-night do you 
 think it would be the memory of an embrace 
 which would be of greatest comfort to you in 
 your lonely life beyond the grave? Would it 
 not rather be a beautiful ideal which a few 
 chance words of hers revealed to you one 
 evening as you walked side by side beneath 
 the stars? 
 
 XLII 
 
 We hear much, in life and in art, of the 
 conflict between love and duty. How many 
 of the great tragedies has not the putative 
 clash of these two forces in the hearts of men 
 and women brought forth? Corneille, it 
 seems, could think of nothing else. And yet, 
 as one attains a deeper insight into the na- 
 tures of love and of duty, one realizes that any 
 real conflict between them is impossible, that
 
 The Deeper Faith 5 1 
 
 what seems so must be illusory, or at most a 
 conflict between greater love and less. If in 
 order to possess the woman I love I disobey 
 the clear dictates of conscience, I am sinning 
 perhaps not so much against duty as against 
 love. I have made my love less beautiful 
 than it might have been; I have placed be- 
 tween my soul and the soul of the woman I 
 adore the accusing body of a slain ideal. 
 There are thus people who say that they love 
 each other, whose souls are in reality sepa- 
 rated by an impassable field of carnage, 
 whereon are the mangled forms of dead and 
 dying dreams and aspirations. 
 
 XLIII 
 
 Every time I obey the voice of duty I am 
 brought one step nearer the woman whom I 
 love. It may be that duty has forbidden me 
 ever to see her again; it does not matter; our 
 souls are approaching each other day by day. 
 I know that she is watching me with the eyes
 
 52 The Deeper Faith 
 
 of the soul; that she sees every step, that she 
 smiles upon me when I am strong, that she 
 encourages me when I falter, that she com- 
 forts me and helps me to rise when I have 
 stumbled and fallen. 
 
 XLIV 
 
 Have you never, in an hour of spiritual 
 depression, experienced a sudden, mysterious 
 tremor of joy that stirred your torpid blood 
 into a new ecstasy? You do not know what 
 it is nor why it visits you, this healing ray 
 from an invisible sun of gladness ; but it may 
 be a secret messenger of the Spirit who comes 
 to tell you that someone you love has just 
 accomplished a noble act of self-sacrifice, or 
 has given voice to a divine truth, or has gazed 
 reverently upon beauty. 
 
 XLV 
 
 We hear it often asserted that love justi- 
 fies everything, and we are asked to sympa-
 
 The Deeper Faith 53 
 
 thize with those who for their love's sake have 
 sacrificed honor, faith, ideals. But there is 
 only one thing that love can justify, and that 
 is goodness. It is the absence of love that 
 excuses, if it does not justify, the commission 
 of an evil deed. He who has never known the 
 joy of a supreme love, he is at a disadvantage 
 in his struggle to live nobly, purely. We 
 must judge him more leniently than his 
 brother to whom has been granted the un- 
 shaken flame of the lamp of personal love by 
 which to guide his footsteps through the 
 Daedalian grottoes of human existence. The 
 highest love brings responsibilities, not priv- 
 ileges ; and he who truly loves knows himself 
 under special obligation to live the faithful 
 warrior of divine virtue. 
 
 XLVI 
 
 There is no compelling reason why a man 
 and a woman who love each other should live
 
 54 The Deeper Faith 
 
 together. The right to cohabit is dependent 
 upon many other considerations besides the 
 existence of a mutual affection, and it is only 
 in heeding the injunctions of the social con- 
 science that love remains love. Physical 
 separation cannot kill love; infidelity to the 
 ideal of duty can and does. Sometimes the 
 only way a man and a woman can remain true 
 to each other is by parting. 
 
 This willingness to surrender the beloved 
 at the first summons from the clarion voice of 
 duty is the supreme test of the worth of a 
 love. He who remains with the woman he 
 adores after conscience has bade him depart, 
 is a traitor to the highest love. If you cannot 
 live without your beloved, you may be sure 
 that your affection is still of an inferior 
 quality. If in loving her you have not 
 learned to love life more, if the divinest 
 of passions have not awakened in your 
 soul a realization of its own powers of 
 blessedness independent of every external 
 support, then you have not yet reached the 
 inner sanctuary.
 
 The Deeper Faith 55 
 
 XLVII 
 
 He who could not live without God doss 
 not love God as He surely desires to be loved. 
 What he loves is not God but the sense of 
 personal security with which the belief in the 
 existence of God inspires him. Too often the 
 fear of the misfortunes which we imagine 
 would immediately overwhelm us were we 
 obliged to live without the help of our God 
 induces us to cling to an outgrown, unworthy 
 conception of God; such a conception, for 
 example, as that of a God who makes belief 
 in His existence requisite to man's salvation; 
 since only a God who knew that His con- 
 tinued existence was dependent on man's 
 belief in Him could attach so much impor- 
 tance to that belief. 
 
 XLVIII 
 
 Is it not the fear of never finding Truth, 
 and of the consequent dispiriting sense of
 
 56 The Deeper Faith 
 
 failure and disillusionment, which urges so 
 many philosophers to accept as ultimate 
 Truth some meticulous creation of their over- 
 wrought brains? "Eureka," they cry; "I 
 have found it!" And the greater is their 
 fear of being mistaken the louder do they 
 shout; as a child, terrified by the darkness, 
 tries to reassure itself by the sound of its own 
 voice. 
 
 This is the lust of the intellect which is but 
 another name for fear; the single deep- 
 grounded selfishness of the human heart, the 
 essential egotism whose poisonous tendrils 
 are so entangled with the roots of our con- 
 scious spiritual life that it sometimes seems 
 as though we could not extirpate the evil 
 without blighting the good, that we must 
 allow wheat and tares to grow side by 
 side unto some far-off, uncertain harvest. 
 Nevertheless it is possible to purify the 
 garden of life; as the great and good 
 men of all ages have amply proven. It 
 is but necessary that we have courage and 
 patience.
 
 The Deeper Faith 57 
 
 XLIX 
 
 Let us compare for a moment two modern 
 thinkers who illustrate the antithesis between 
 love and lust in the world of philosophy. 
 
 Maeterlinck is free of lust, as of fear. He 
 is the most chaste of modern -thinkers. His 
 love of Truth is purged of selfish motives, 
 lofty and enduring ; for he has learned to live 
 without Truth, to clear his vision and purify 
 his heart, in awaiting the gift of the gods, and 
 to find in these very processes the quiet 
 strength of soul sufficient for a beautiful and 
 happy existence. 
 
 There is something majestic about Maeter- 
 linck's progress toward Truth: he moves with 
 the royal tread of one who knows himself 
 supreme ruler of the noblest of kingdoms 
 his own soul ! Looking back over the way he 
 has trodden, as indicated by the successive 
 works that bear his name, one is struck by 
 the absence of dust as far as the eye can see 
 the road stretches away smooth and undis- 
 turbed. He travels always on foot and so
 
 58 The Deeper Faith 
 
 quietly that he disturbs nothing; even the 
 birds do not cease singing at his approach. 
 There is naught of interest on the journey 
 that escapes his notice, not a flower whose 
 joy he has not shared; and yet, if he does not 
 hurry neither does he delay, nor will he think 
 of resting till he has reached the far horizon. 
 
 Contrast with this the headlong, vertigi- 
 nous rush of Nietzsche's imagination, posting 
 with wanton haste from mistress to mistress, 
 and embracing each new illusion with the 
 same greedy, relentless passion, until madness 
 mercifully ends the pitiful debauchery of a 
 gifted intellect. Nietzsche is the Don Juan 
 of modern philosophers, Maeterlinck the 
 Saint Francis of Assisi. And it is to Saint 
 Francis that we go for Truth. 
 
 There is a kind of slavery from the evil 
 influence of which few indeed can boast ex- 
 emption: it is the slavery to an ideal. And
 
 The Deeper Faith 59 
 
 just because an ideal is more ravishing than 
 the most beautiful of goddesses it is expedient 
 that we be emancipated from this last form 
 of bondage. For, as history amply demon- 
 strates, slavery to an ideal gives birth to 
 many of the most despicable passions of 
 which human nature is capable, fanaticism 
 and hatred, and their concomitant cruelties. 
 We have but to recall the religious persecu- 
 tions with which the pages of European 
 history are stained to realize the dire and nec- 
 essary outcome of the enslavement of the 
 human mind to an ideal in this case that of 
 theological conformity. And this dire out- 
 come is inevitable however noble in itself the 
 enslaving ideal may be. 
 
 Maeterlinck desires to free us from bond- 
 age to our ideals. He urges us to open the win- 
 dows of our souls that the free air of heaven 
 may sweep through them, making all things 
 sweet and radiant. He calls us out of our- 
 selves, out of our dreams and aspirations, to 
 breathe a while the purer if rarer atmosphere 
 of the Unknown. He shows us that our loft-
 
 6o The Deeper Faith 
 
 iest ideals are less lofty than eternity, that 
 beyond Beauty and Goodness and Truth 
 lies the mystery that transcends all things, 
 and that in this mystery our souls may find 
 certain refuge when every other source of 
 comfort seems to fail. 
 
 LI 
 
 Does this mean that in finding peace of 
 soul to be independent of the realization of 
 our ideals we shall love these ideals less, shall 
 strive less earnestly for their attainment? 
 By no means. I have written all in vain if I 
 have not shown that freedom from slavery 
 to our ideals means before all else freedom to 
 love them with a love more profound, endur- 
 ing, and beautiful a love in which there is no 
 admixture of selfish fear of failure. We begin 
 now to love them solely for what they are in 
 themselves, and not for any benefit which we 
 may expect to receive from their realization. 
 We love them although we cannot be sure
 
 The Deeper Faith 61 
 
 that we shall ever attain them. "Those who 
 fight only for victory," says George Tyrrell, 
 ' ' grow slack when victory is hopeless. Those 
 who fight for hate or love will fight till they 
 drop." We can lust after the attainable; but 
 we cannot lust after the unattainable we 
 can only love it. Perhaps it is in the service 
 of a God of whose very existence we are not 
 sure that our souls become conscious of their 
 deepest possibilities, of a nobility and beauty 
 grounded in the Infinite. 
 
 LII 
 
 As the soul of man develops, the number of 
 things which he deems necessary to his wel- 
 fare diminishes, until finally the entire objec- 
 tive universe, with all it contains of wonder 
 and beauty, is seen to be after all a luxury. 
 To the fully enlightened man the only neces- 
 sity is his own soul. The Eastern mystic's 
 contempt of the phenomenal world is perhaps 
 simply the revolt of the spiritually minded 
 against every form of waste and extravagance
 
 62 The Deeper Faith 
 
 carried to its logical conclusion. The Bud- 
 dhist initiate objects to the world process of 
 birth, growth, and decay, because it is un- 
 necessary. Since Brahm is eternally, why 
 have we need of time and its illusions ? 
 
 We have no need. But what the Brahmin 
 seems to forget (in theory if not in practice) 
 is that the useless things are the most divine. 
 It is precisely because life is like a play with- 
 out deeper significance than its own joyous- 
 ness that we can accept it without injury to 
 our souls. But in order to enter the kingdom 
 of heaven we must become as children, who, 
 without overestimating the larger significance 
 of their activity, or constructing a cosmic phi- 
 losophy from the elements of baseball, take 
 endless delight in playing the game for its own 
 sake. 
 
 LIII 
 
 One great truth, however, we moderns 
 have still to learn from the ascetic: that the 
 only path to the free joyousness of the play-
 
 The Deeper Faith 63 
 
 attitude toward life is the path of renuncia- 
 tion. Not until we have learned to live 
 without the world should we begin to enjoy the 
 world. True other- worldliness is not hostile 
 to the natural joy of living; on the contrary 
 it alone produces that inner freedom which is 
 the prerequisite of all innocent appreciation 
 of the good and fair things of earth. It is 
 Saint Francis, not Don Juan, who under- 
 stands and loves the glad melody of bird song 
 and the awful beauty of the rose of dawn. 
 Renounce the world in order to enjoy the 
 universe: you have no sooner done so than 
 you rediscover the world in its proper 
 place in the cosmic order. Thus only does 
 the world become beautiful to the spirit; for 
 the beauty of an object is revealed only to the 
 heart that senses the relation of the object 
 to the Whole. 
 
 LIV 
 
 Let us return now to a consideration of 
 personal love and see if these few and neces-
 
 64 The Deeper Faith 
 
 sarily somewhat vague philosophical reflec- 
 tions will cast any new light on the spiritual 
 value of such love. If in order to enjoy the 
 world without endangering our inner freedom 
 we must be capable of renouncing the world, 
 this will be no less true if we substitute for 
 the world, the people whom we love. "I 
 shall never marry," said a woman with pride, 
 "I shall never marry unless I meet a man 
 whom I believe to be absolutely necessary to 
 my existence." But this is precisely the man 
 she should under no circumstances marry; 
 for in marrying him she will become not his 
 wife, but his slave. Not until she knows 
 herself capable of living wisely and beautifully 
 apart from him should she consent to live 
 with him. 
 
 LV 
 
 If there is anywhere in the world a being 
 whose presence is necessary to the peace of 
 your soul you are as much in a state of bond- 
 age as the meanest slave of an oriental despot.
 
 The Deeper Faith 65 
 
 However, love comes to free us, not to en- 
 slave us; and he may not boast the highest 
 love who does not know the mystic joy of 
 solitude. The test of the depth and value of 
 your affection is not whether you are happy 
 when you are with your beloved, but whether 
 you are happy when you are alone. 
 
 LVI 
 
 There is profound spiritual significance in 
 the fact that we reserve the glorious title 
 "free love" for that love which is of all, the 
 most in bondage to blind passion. It seems 
 we have not yet learned that in disregarding 
 the social welfare for the sake of love we 
 prove, not that our love is free, but that we 
 are slaves. 
 
 LVII 
 
 There were two men who loved a woman. 
 And when the first man learned that his love 
 was not returned, he went out in despair, and
 
 66 The Deeper Faith 
 
 hanged himself. But the other said to the 
 woman : ' ' Do you know what I shall do now 
 that I know you do not love me? I shall 
 think more beautiful thoughts, I shall dream 
 more beautiful dreams, I shall do greater 
 deeds because I have known you. And then, 
 perhaps I shall some day awaken in you the 
 love that understands. For I begin to believe 
 that it is my fault that you do not love me, 
 that it is always our fault if those about us 
 do not love us as we desire to be loved. And 
 even if fate should decree that I should never 
 see you again, I should still find life sweet; 
 I shall cling mightily to existence, for exist- 
 ence would mean to me before all else the 
 thought of you." 
 
 Which of these two men, therefore, loved 
 with the greater love? 
 
 LVIII 
 
 By the gift of happiness which it bears in 
 its arms, tenderly as a mother her babe, may
 
 The Deeper Faith 67 
 
 we judge the spiritual value of the love that 
 
 is knocking at the door of our hearts. We 
 i 
 
 must open only to the goddess who ap- 
 proaches smiling. Or if there be tears in her 
 eyes they must be peaceful tears, unstained 
 by bitterness or regret, tears that reflect and 
 crystally enhance the beauty of the soul which 
 gives them birth, even as the dewdrop mingles 
 in its depths the azure of heaven, and the 
 softer blue of its patron violet, enriching 
 both. 
 
 LIX 
 
 "She is capable of a wonderful happiness," 
 wrote to me a friend in reference to a woman 
 whom we both loved. This was indeed high 
 praise, for it would be difficult to conceive 
 a loftier ideal for the individual than this of 
 making himself worthy of a wonderful happi- 
 ness. A truly sublime happiness is attained 
 only by the cherishing and developing of all 
 that is purest and best in the soul. It is a 
 royal guest to whom one dare not offer an
 
 68 The Deeper Faith 
 
 unswept and ungarnished chamber lest he 
 take offence and hurriedly depart. 
 
 "It is happiness that ennobles," says Ib- 
 sen's Rosmer. Christianity has been prone 
 to overemphasize the value of misfortune and 
 suffering in the purification of the soul. It is 
 not always in the dark hours of personal grief 
 that the surest faith in an Unseen Power is 
 born. It is not always when one is weary of 
 earth and its passing pleasures that one ex- 
 periences the prof oundest yearning for heaven 
 and its divine peace. There is a happiness so 
 great that it snaps the chains which confine 
 it to earth and rises toward the sky and the 
 Beauty that is beyond the stars. There are 
 times when the soul is uplifted on the wings of 
 importunate ecstasy, when nothing seems too 
 good to be true, and one stretches out one's 
 arms to the whole universe to embrace it. 
 Perhaps is the faith in life born of such an 
 hour of sunshine a more beautiful and 
 enduring thing than the faith conceived 
 and brought forth in the night of personal 
 grief.
 
 The Deeper Faith 69 
 
 I say "personal grief," for there is an im- 
 personal sorrow which is no less beneficent 
 than a wonderful happiness. It seems, in- 
 deed, that the nobler and loftier happiness 
 and sorrow become, the nearer do they ap- 
 proach each other; until at last one may no 
 longer distinguish between them, and it is 
 not possible to say whether a smile or a tear 
 is fraught with greater comfort to the soul. 
 
 LX 
 
 What is most shocking in the spiritual 
 condition of the masses of men is their in- 
 ability to sympathize with a happiness that 
 is not closely identified with their personal 
 welfare. Their joys and sorrows are no 
 greater than themselves. In short, they are 
 incapable of a wonderful happiness ; and that 
 is the substance of their condemnation. This 
 is the fault of the present economic structure 
 of society, which encourages man to concern 
 himself primarily with his fate as an in-
 
 7 The Deeper Faith 
 
 dividual, to degrade those sublime words, 
 happiness and unhappiness, to the service of 
 so petty a matter as his personal fortune. 
 There are, of course, those who defend the 
 present system of brute selfishness with the 
 specious plea that it is in the struggle for 
 personal supremacy that man develops the 
 best of his powers. But we need not waste 
 words in refuting an argument the mere 
 statement of which is sufficient to discredit 
 it in the eyes of every unprejudiced student 
 of life. Lust and greed and criminal hate, 
 these are the too obvious products of man's 
 acquiescence in that blind struggle for exist- 
 ence which was nature's makeshift method of 
 progress before she conceived intelligence and 
 brought forth the free human soul. Those 
 who deny the inapplicability of a crude law 
 of animal survival to man in the fullness 
 of his divine stature, deny at once and 
 the same time the primary posit of every 
 true religion and the collective testimony 
 of the noblest beings that have walked this 
 earth.
 
 The Deeper Faith 71 
 
 LXI 
 
 One says truly that suffering purifies the 
 soul; but let us not deceive ourselves, the 
 question here is of spiritual, not of physical, 
 suffering. It is they that hunger and thirst 
 after righteousness who are blessed. A heart 
 hungering for love, not an empty stomach, 
 is the proper receptacle for the bread of life. 
 The fear of the Lord, not the fear of starva- 
 tion, is the beginning of wisdom. 
 
 LXII 
 
 Not in the struggle for existence, but in the 
 struggle for life eternal life, is the soul of 
 man made beautiful. Was it in the process of 
 earning his daily bread that Shelley rose to 
 the sublime genius of Prometheus ? Was it in 
 the sweat of his brow, toiling at the bench of a 
 carpenter, that Jesus of Nazareth revealed the 
 all-embracing fire of his love ? Or was it rather 
 in the useless and beautiful tears which he shed 
 over Jerusalem, the slayer of the prophets?
 
 72 The Deeper Faith 
 
 LXIII 
 
 The new ideal of social justice, which al- 
 ready to-day shines as a guiding star on the 
 hearts of millions of awakened men and 
 women, aims at giving to the toiling masses 
 of humanity their due share of a wonderful 
 happiness. True, one cannot bestow happi- 
 ness upon another. Happiness is an inner 
 state born of the individual soul. But one 
 can bestow leisure; and it is in the hour of 
 rest that the soul labors. 
 
 LXIV 
 
 There are those who assure us that enforced 
 toil is a blessing, that it develops character 
 by strengthening the will. History gives 
 them the lie. Primitive man was of necessity 
 far more industrious than are we ; yet his soul 
 slumbered within him. Strictly speaking he 
 had no character; he was moved by forces 
 outside his will. It was not until he could
 
 The Deeper Faith 73 
 
 afford to be less industrious, until he was the 
 possessor of periods of time in which he could 
 do what he willed to do, that he became in 
 any real sense a moral being. In those first 
 divine hours when, freed from economic 
 necessity, he grew conscious of deeper forces 
 within him seeking expression, he began the 
 construction of his masterpieces: religion, 
 philosophy, art. The Spirit at last awakened 
 from the sleep of centuries, and started on the 
 long journey upwards to the sunlit heights of 
 freedom and happiness. Man, no longer mere 
 animal, walked upright and faced the heavens 
 with eager, questioning eyes. Had the race 
 been compelled to depend permanently upon 
 enforced industry for progress we should to- 
 day be savages roaming the forest wilds with 
 no loftier desires than for food and shelter. 
 
 LXV 
 
 Social justice means the equable distribu- 
 tion not so much of wealth, as of leisure. No
 
 74 The Deeper Faith 
 
 doubt there will always be a certain amount of 
 enforced work for each of us. But let us not 
 dissemble the truth : enforced work is a curse, 
 not a blessing, and our aim should be the 
 reduction of it to a minimum for all men. 
 The ideal of social justice is born of a belief 
 in man, in the divine in him, which needs 
 freedom from every form of external compul- 
 sion adequately to express itself. 
 
 Of course there will be those to whom free- 
 dom will mean license. There are doubtless 
 those to-day who are not vicious simply be- 
 cause they have not time to be. But their 
 numbers are small in comparison with those 
 whom overwork drives to all forms of excesses, 
 and cruel pleasures. Besides, virtue born of 
 necessity is not genuine virtue. Only the free 
 choice of goodness for its own sake has moral 
 value. Suppose that from this moment to 
 the end of your life every moment were your 
 own absolutely, to do with as you liked, what 
 use would you make of the gift? By your 
 answer to that question will I read your 
 spiritual horoscope !
 
 The Deeper Faith 75 
 
 When men are free we shall at last be able 
 to distinguish essential goodness, the good- 
 ness of the soul, from the artificial, apparent 
 goodness which is dependent for its continu- 
 ance upon external, unwelcome circumstances. 
 The sheep will be separated from the goats 
 without the assistance of a mechanical Judg- 
 ment Day, and in a few generations there will 
 be no more goats. 
 
 LXVI 
 
 Freedom will not necessarily make men 
 happier. Leisure produces its Schopenhauers 
 as well as its Goethes. Doubtless the amount 
 of sorrow will be as great as that which exists 
 to-day, but it will be a lofty sorrow, so lofty 
 that it will seem, as I have said, indistinguish- 
 able from happiness. It will be a sorrow that 
 springs not from personal misfortune but from 
 sympathy with the eternal travail of the 
 universe. It will be a sorrow far worthier of 
 men than the trivial pleasures with which
 
 76 The Deeper Faith 
 
 to-day the masses must content themselves. 
 The barriers of selfishness will be burned 
 away by the pure flame of mysticism, and 
 soul rush to soul, and love, and grow beauti- 
 ful. And whether it be a common sorrow or a 
 common joy that unites two souls what does 
 it matter, so but their union be productive of 
 beauty ! 
 
 LXVII 
 
 No one in recent times has more clearly 
 perceived the supreme end of human exist- 
 ence than Guyau: as the following quotation 
 from Ulrreligion de L'Avenir will demon- 
 strate : 
 
 "One day when I was seated at my desk 
 my wife came up to me and exclaimed: 'How 
 melancholy you look! What is the matter 
 with you? Tears, mon Dieu! Is it anything 
 that I have done?' 'Of course not; it is 
 never anything that you have done. I was 
 weeping over a bit of abstract thought, of 
 speculation on the world and the destiny of
 
 The Deeper Faith 77 
 
 things. Is there not enough misery in the 
 world to justify an aimless tear? And of 
 joy to justify an aimless smile?' The great 
 totality of things in which man lives may well 
 demand a smile or a tear from him, and it is 
 his conscious solidarity with the universe, the 
 impersonal joy and pain that he is capable of 
 experiencing, the faculty, so to speak, of im- 
 personalizing himself, that is the most durable 
 element in religion and philosophy. To 
 sympathize with the whole universe, to wish 
 to contribute to its amelioration, to overpass 
 the limits of our egoism and live the life of 
 the universe, is the distinguishing pursuit of 
 humanity." 
 
 LXVIII 
 
 The history of humanity is indeed the 
 history of the struggle of eternity with time. 
 The human soul is the battleground upon 
 which these two ancient cosmic enemies come 
 to a desperate and determined grapple.
 
 78 The Deeper Faith 
 
 There is no hope of parley: the duel is to the 
 death. 
 
 LXIX 
 
 We are intended to be the channels of the 
 Eternal, and it is through us that the Beauty 
 that is beyond the stars seeks to express itself 
 upon earth. We were created for the service 
 of a queen whose face we may not look upon ; 
 only in fighting her battles do we fulfill our 
 destiny, and though we turn traitor and enlist 
 under the gaudier banners of time yet will 
 our defection bring us only pain and weariness 
 of spirit, and we shall find no peace till we 
 return to the arms of our long-suffering 
 mother. 
 
 LXX 
 
 We are alone in our vision of a Truth that 
 endures. No other being on this earth knows 
 what we know, can read what we read in the 
 cryptic messages of the intuitional soul. All 
 are blinded by the light of the physical sun,
 
 The Deeper Faith 79 
 
 all are in the service of things that pass away. 
 We stand in spiritual isolation; in the midst 
 of a world of growth and decay we have 
 dreamed of a Kingdom where change shall be 
 no more. And it is this dream alone which 
 separates us forever from the rest of nature. 
 Intelligence we share in varying degrees with 
 other animals; morality, too, is not exclu- 
 sively a human possession; but what living 
 creature besides man has produced a mystic ? 
 
 LXXI 
 
 Happiness for us is dependent upon our 
 rising above the sharp barrier that separates 
 one moment from the next, so that "life may 
 no more jolt nor jar but glide." "Eschew the 
 pleasure of the moment, that is, the pleasure 
 which can exist only in a temporal order of 
 things," so speaks to us the voice of our 
 deepest convictions. There is a joy that has 
 no reference to time and place; this is the joy 
 toward which we must yearn with all our
 
 8o The Deeper Faith 
 
 hearts. This is the joy that lives only in the 
 innermost recesses of our being, at the meet- 
 ing point of the soul and the Unseen Reality. 
 This is the joy which accompanies the highest 
 love, whether individual or universal. 
 
 LXXII 
 
 It is of contrast that the pleasures of the 
 moment are woven. Abundance spells sa- 
 tiety. Were there no past pain with which to 
 compare it our present pleasure would lose 
 much of its intensity. But the happiness of 
 the Eternal is incomparably unique; there is 
 nothing with which one may contrast it. 
 Furthermore the capacity of the soul is 
 limitless. One can never have too much of the 
 peace born of communion with the Beauty 
 that is beyond the stars. 
 
 LXXIII 
 
 I have said: "It seems indeed that the 
 nobler and loftier happiness and sorrow be-
 
 The Deeper Faith 81 
 
 come, the nearer do they approach each 
 other." Is this not true of all our experience ? 
 As we strive to ennoble the individual hours 
 of life we find that they tend to grow more and 
 more alike, as people that live together are 
 wont to do, until it is with difficulty that we 
 can distinguish between them. Finally they 
 will merge and become part of a timeless, 
 transcendent Reality. Then there will re- 
 main neither past nor future; but only a 
 limitless present which is as a window through 
 which the benign rays of the Eternal pour in 
 unsullied glory. This is the Nirvana of Bud- 
 dhism, perhaps, after all, the noblest creation 
 of the religious faculty. 
 
 LXXIV 
 
 Man achieves immortality, then, by the 
 deliberate choice of his conscious will. So- 
 crates was right in his assertion that to know 
 the good is to do the good; he was wrong in 
 limiting knowledge to the realm of the intel-
 
 82 The Deeper Faith 
 
 lect. Truth is a matter of the whole man, and 
 it is only in developing all our powers that we 
 clarify our vision of Reality. Mere intellec- 
 tual assent to a proposition is not knowledge ; 
 nor until we have felt and willed the good 
 which our intellect perceives, do we know it to 
 exist. 
 
 LXXV 
 
 By the renunciation of temporal goods, 
 under the influence of the highest love, man 
 enters into Eternal Life, which is simply life 
 lived in the conscious presence of the Eternal 
 Values. His salvation consists in the realiza- 
 tion of himself as the organ of these Eternal 
 Values, as part of a divine and infinite Un- 
 known ; and social progress is to be measured 
 by the extent to which the mass of men have 
 attained to such self-realization. 
 
 LXXVI 
 
 Judged by this standard the existent social 
 order has little to recommend it. A small
 
 The Deeper Faith 83 
 
 minority of the living, more favored of for- 
 tune than their fellows, have succeeded in 
 partially extricating themselves from the 
 whirlpool of selfishness which we call civiliza- 
 tion. They have attained to a certain meas- 
 ure of self-realization, and know the peace of 
 soul which the world cannot give. But into 
 the sordid lives of the trodden masses such 
 blessedness can find no entrance. Brutalized 
 by the pitiless struggle with their fellows for 
 the means of subsistence, and dwarfed in body 
 and mind by the insistent weight of enforced 
 joyless labor, they live and die with no vision 
 of a happiness deeper and more enduring 
 than the fleeting, selfish pleasures with which 
 they blindly seek to console themselves for the 
 keener pangs of existence. Their religion is 
 purely formal, for they have no time to exper- 
 ience spiritually the truths in which they pro- 
 fess to believe. Art and philosophy are 
 abracadabra, the mere foam of words, pale 
 and without substance. So they live and so 
 they perish, full in the clutch of time who 
 mumbles them for his sport.
 
 84 The Deeper Faith 
 LXXVII 
 
 What is to be the remedy ? How are we to 
 bring to the mass of men that consciousness 
 of their high destiny which is happiness? I 
 have said before, we cannot bestow happiness 
 upon another. Happiness is born of the 
 individual soul, and the happiness of each 
 soul is unique. What the masses need is not 
 reformation nor education, both in their 
 present forms the social weapons of the snob 
 and the egotist, nor religious creeds nor 
 pseudo-philosophic jargon, but simply leis- 
 ure. They need to be left alone, they need 
 the healing influence of solitude without 
 which the soul of man cannot develop in 
 harmony and beauty. They need the gift 
 of free time; for it takes time to overcome 
 time. 
 
 LXXVIII 
 
 The trouble with the reformer is that he has 
 completely forgotten the presence in human-
 
 The Deeper Faith 85 
 
 ity of the Unknown. He goes about the edu- 
 cation of the masses with the confidence of 
 the omniscient. Why should he hesitate? 
 He knows the things that satisfy his nature; 
 he sees the mass of men deprived of and even 
 indifferent to, these things. He follows the 
 dictates of a too obvious logic. He becomes 
 scientific; which is the final stage of human 
 degradation. For what clearer evidence of 
 total spiritual blindness could one give than 
 the resolve to treat man, the incarnation of 
 mystery, with the impersonal exactitude of 
 science? 
 
 LXXIX 
 
 Let us remember always that the final value 
 of knowledge is as a window to the Unknown. 
 Education is simply the development of the 
 sense of wonder. The value of a civiliza- 
 tion is to be measured by the extent to which 
 it permits the entrance into human life of a 
 supernatural, or at least superterrestrial, 
 radiance ; and every Utopia is foredoomed to
 
 86 The Deeper Faith 
 
 failure that does not take Into account the 
 fact that man is "incurably religious." 
 
 LXXX 
 
 When shall we learn to respect the un- 
 known god who resides in every human being ? 
 Not until we have come into communion with 
 the god in our own hearts. Then we shall 
 understand that what our less fortunate 
 brothers demand of us is not so much food 
 and clothing and shelter, or education, or 
 any manifestation of brotherly concern and 
 affection, but the simple gift of leisure, free 
 hours sufficient for self-realization, the cup of 
 solitude into which alone God pours the wine 
 of life. 
 
 LXXXI 
 
 This, then, is the problem that society 
 has to solve : the more equable distribution of 
 those leisure hours which are breath of life
 
 The Deeper Faith 87 
 
 to the soul. Industry must be so organized 
 that to each man there shall be a goodly 
 portion of free time in which to seek the self- 
 realization which is peace. This can be only 
 achieved by the elimination of the waste of 
 competition, by the substitution of the ideal 
 of cooperation as the most efficient method of 
 industrial production, and by the simplifi- 
 cation of the standards of living, that human 
 labor may no longer be prostituted to the 
 production of worthless and harmful luxuries. 
 
 LXXXII 
 
 But however much he may desire the com- 
 ing of justice, for the enlightened man there 
 can be no weapon of warfare but persuasion, 
 there is no victory but the victory of bringing 
 light to another soul. He who wholly and 
 heartily believes in the omnipotence of the 
 divine will inevitably disparage the use, either 
 by the individual or by society, of any form 
 of restraint in dealing with the evil-doer.
 
 88 The Deeper Faith 
 
 After all, law exists not by reason of its inher- 
 ent merit as a means of combating evil but 
 solely because of the good man's cowardice, 
 his lack of faith. Arbitrary punishment is 
 always baneful in its influence, for it fosters 
 in the social consciousness the idea that good- 
 ness is not attractive enough to win men with- 
 out extraneous sanctions. Every time we 
 punish a crime we make it so much harder for 
 those tempted to commit this crime to con- 
 quer their desire; for we are nourishing the 
 conviction that crime in itself is so attractive 
 and remuneratory that only by inflicting the 
 severest penalties for its commission can we 
 dissuade men from constantly resorting to 
 murder, robbery, and so forth. 
 
 If a thief steals my purse and I have him 
 sent to prison I am fostering in his mind the 
 conviction that my purse is a very valuable 
 thing, and he will be tempted to try to steal 
 it again should he have the opportunity. If, 
 however, I turn to him and say with a smile, 
 "Who steals my purse steals trash! You are 
 welcome to it. Worldly goods are of no ac-
 
 The Deeper Faith 89 
 
 count," he will begin to have his doubts 
 about the advantages of theft. 
 
 This is the attitude which society should 
 take an attitude of utter fearlessness, the 
 attitude of heroic souls. 
 
 LXXXIII 
 
 It was the principle of non-resistance, as 
 exemplified in the lives of the saints and the 
 martyrs, which brought about the triumph of 
 the Christian religion in the centuries after 
 Christ. When the Church renounced that 
 doctrine, took up arms and became a world 
 power, her doom was sealed. For the ser- 
 mon on the mount is not the impossibly ideal 
 moral code of a fanatic; it is the only sane 
 and practical program of enduring reform. 
 
 LXXXIV 
 
 We have thrown about the teaching of 
 Jesus the same forbidding glory that sur-
 
 90 The Deeper Faith 
 
 rounds his person. The unique deification of 
 Jesus by Christians relieved them of the 
 obligation to live as their master lived. To 
 make Christ God is the easiest way of weaken- 
 ing the exigent beauty of his personality. 
 It thus becomes impossible to cite to a Chris- 
 tian, as an example of what man should be, 
 the life of the prophet of Nazareth. He will 
 shake his head wisely and murmur, "Ah, but 
 Jesus was God, we are only men." By mak- 
 ing their heroes more than human men dis- 
 creetly free themselves from the necessity of 
 living great and good lives. 
 
 LXXXV 
 
 God punishes evil-doers by the fact of His 
 existence, and that is the only punishment He 
 needs to employ. That the good is and that 
 it is destined to triumph, persuade the wicked 
 man of this and you have at one and the same 
 time punished and reformed him. Persuade 
 him of this by demonstrating your own utter
 
 The Deeper Faith 9 1 
 
 faith in Right and its ultimate triumph, which 
 does not need bars and gyves or the guillotine 
 to accomplish its ends. Instead of that you 
 kill or imprison him, thus proving to his 
 entire satisfaction that he was right in believ- 
 ing that there is nothing between evil doing 
 and success but physical force the force of 
 the cowardly majority of "good" men. 
 
 LXXXVI 
 
 But must we not at least protect the weak 
 from the brutalities of the strong and wicked? 
 Shall we stand by idly, without protest, while 
 evil triumphs and the heathen rage? The 
 good need no protection but the conscious- 
 ness of their own goodness ; and the better a 
 man becomes, the more emphatically will he 
 decry the use of force in his defense. Jesus 
 rebuked Peter grasping the sword ; at no other 
 moment of his career did he evidence more 
 clearly his utter faith in the omnipotence of 
 Goodness.
 
 92 The Deeper Faith 
 
 LXXXVII 
 
 It does not matter if good men perish: 
 Goodness endures. It is at the heart of things, 
 it is the universe. The triumph of Truth is 
 not dependent on our feeble efforts: Truth 
 triumphs eternally; It is, though worlds de- 
 cay. We do not need to build the kingdom of 
 heaven, we have only to open our eyes and 
 find it perfect, complete, as it has been from 
 all eternity, as it shall be forever. It does not 
 need us, but we need it. Our one duty is to 
 save ourselves, to discover the divinity that 
 resides within us, that our souls may be free 
 of every external compulsion. 
 
 LXXXVIII 
 
 It is not the good who need to be protected 
 from the cruelty of the wicked, it is the wicked 
 who need to be protected from the cowardice 
 of the good; for it is cowardice that blurs 
 man's spiritual vision and makes him incap-
 
 The Deeper Faith 93 
 
 able of seeing things in their true proportions. 
 The cowardly good stand between the wicked 
 and the regenerating light of Truth. How 
 can we expect the wicked to believe in Good- 
 ness if the faith of the good is so weak that it 
 is afraid of suffering and death ? 
 
 LXXXIX 
 
 Says Mr. Paul Elmer More: "It would be 
 hard to exaggerate the importance of this 
 discovery, made so many years ago in the 
 forest of India, that the eternal and infinite 
 expectation of the soul is not to be sought in 
 submission to an incomprehensible and in- 
 human force impelling the world, nor yet in 
 obedience to a personal God, but is already 
 within us awaiting revelation, is in fact our 
 very Self of Self." This is the Truth that 
 saves, the knowledge that God is within us, 
 that every sin is a sin against Self. How are 
 we to persuade men of this truth? By relin- 
 quishing every form of arbitrary punishment,
 
 94 The Deeper Faith 
 
 by leaving the wicked to the vengeance of the 
 divinity in their own hearts. For every time 
 we punish a human being^we make it so much 
 harder for the voice of conscience to speak to 
 him ; but every sin that we forgive is an exi- 
 gent summons to tjie Unknown God that 
 slumbers in the heart of the offender. Let us 
 show the evil-doer that what stands between 
 him and success is not the revengeful power of 
 just men but the more potent sorrow of his 
 own outraged soul. 
 
 XC 
 
 The only legitimate function of social 
 organization is the production of enlightened 
 human beings. Now the salient feature of 
 enlightenment is self-sufficiency. This is the 
 Rome to which all roads of spiritual endea- 
 vor lead. And he who arrives at the goal 
 finds himself freed of fear and of every de- 
 sire to punish. "No one can harm me but 
 myself."
 
 The Deeper Faith 95 
 
 XCI 
 
 It is not an easy doctrine, this of non- 
 resistance, nor one likely to find wide accept- 
 ance in our hesitant age of efficiency, when 
 waste is the one unpardonable sin. Of our 
 spiritual leaders, as of our men of affairs, we 
 demand immediate results; and no prophet 
 may hope for a hearing among us who cannot 
 first of all convince us that he is a practical 
 man. And to be a practical man means 
 neither more nor less than to be driven by the 
 fear of remaining personally ineffectual to 
 the adoption of compromise as a method of 
 achieving reform. 
 
 XCII 
 
 There is no subtler, and consequently more 
 dangerous, form of egotism than that which 
 leads us to confuse the success or failure of the 
 ideals for which we stand with our personal 
 success or failure. Once let a man become
 
 96 The Deeper Faith 
 
 convinced that the ideal which he loves can 
 never become effectual among men save 
 through his personal efforts, and there is no 
 foreseeing to what depths of trickery and 
 base compromise he may descend to achieve 
 his purpose. And the more passionately he 
 loves his ideal the greater will be the tempta- 
 tion to sacrifice everything to its attainment. 
 
 XCIII 
 
 It is this very sense of false responsibility 
 that has so much to do with the overwhelm- 
 ing fear of failure which is the curse of mod- 
 ern life. From this foul stalk springs the 
 terrible carrion-flower of international jeal- 
 ousy and hate. Thus we Americans have 
 convinced ourselves that we are the divinely 
 appointed guardians of political liberty and 
 that were America, the land of the free, to 
 perish in the struggle for existence, the ideal 
 of political liberty would perish with her. 
 So we reinforce our natural egotism by the
 
 The Deeper Faith 97 
 
 assumption of a moral purpose, and in the 
 name of liberty prepare to defend ourselves 
 against the attack of a foreign enemy. Thus, 
 also, England, under the guise of assuming 
 "the white man's burden" of educating in- 
 ferior races to the broad intellectual outlook 
 of British Philistinism, has felt called upon 
 by the voice of God to subjugate and rule 
 every portion of the inhabitable globe on 
 which she can successfully lay the heavy hand 
 of empire. 
 
 And as it is with nations, so also with 
 individuals. Do we not know men in public 
 life who have used every means, however 
 vile, to further their own advance, on the 
 plea that it was necessary for them to attain 
 to political prominence before they could 
 carry out the reforms which lay so near their 
 hearts? Do we not behold similar instances 
 in our industrial world ? How often is it not 
 urged in extenuation of some financial giant 
 that though the means he used to attain his 
 position of control may not always have been 
 above suspicion yet the use which he has
 
 98 The Deeper Faith 
 
 made of his power is ample justification for 
 whatever in his past will not bear a too close 
 scrutiny. Is not our civilization poisoned at 
 the very source by the fetid doctrine of exped- 
 iency? 
 
 XCIV 
 
 The means justifies the end! So they 
 have ever argued, who love life and success 
 more than the Eternal Values. And it seems 
 we have not yet realized the absurdity of a 
 theory which divides existence into two dis- 
 junctive entities, which does not see that 
 every means is itself an end, that Eternal Life 
 is above all a question of this present moment. 
 Now and again some prophet of God's truth 
 raises his warning voice against the cowardly 
 temporizing so characteristic of our genera- 
 tion, but deafened by the insistent sophistries 
 of our practical reformers, we cannot hear, 
 we cannot understand.
 
 The Deeper Faith 99 
 
 xcv 
 
 And yet, were we to study the lives of the 
 great and good men of all ages, we should 
 surely learn that there is but one way to live 
 for an ideal, namely, to live as though that 
 ideal were already a reality. Act as you 
 would act were the world of which you dream 
 the real world; so speaks the voice of the 
 Spirit. Is it not true that the reality of our 
 ideals is in large measure dependent upon 
 ourselves, that we create the environment in 
 which we live? If I believe in justice it is not 
 necessary that I should wait until all men 
 accept that ideal before making it a reality 
 in my life. It is necessary only that I should 
 be just, it is necessary that I should not 
 compromise with injustice. If, however, in 
 order to reach a position of power in which I 
 may make justice accepted of all men I des- 
 cend to the accomplishment of one act of in- 
 justice I have nullified in advance the effect 
 of all my efforts.
 
 ioo The Deeper Faith 
 xcvi 
 
 Let us live always in the highest world 
 which we can conceive to exist ; it is the most 
 effectual way of helping others as well as 
 ourselves. The highest is still the best; and 
 there is no fear that our most beautiful 
 dreams can ever exhaust Reality. Let us 
 refuse to descend into a lower sphere in order 
 to attain a greater degree of efficiency. All 
 the lower levels of vision are more plentifully 
 inhabited than ours, and the higher we climb 
 the fewer are our companions. Nevertheless 
 we must not waver. If we succumb to the 
 cold of the summits, others, stronger and no 
 less determined, will follow. . . . And we 
 shall at least have lived our deepest lives. 
 
 XCVII 
 
 Compromise is essentially a living down to 
 the public a thing to be shunned as pesti- 
 lence by all to whom the art of noble living is
 
 The Deeper Faith 101 
 
 a holy and enduring joy. So thought Jesus 
 when he gave himself to be crucified rather 
 than compromise with the authorities, so 
 thought Luther, and Shelley, and Karl Marx. 
 So thought our own Sidney Lanier, when after 
 having endured years of penury rather than 
 for one moment prostitute the high gift of 
 poetry that was in him he penned those sub- 
 lime words: "It is of little consequence 
 whether I fail ; the I in the matter is a small 
 business: 'Que mon nom soit fletri, que la 
 France soit libre !' quoth Danton ; which is to 
 say, interpreted by my environment : Let my 
 name perish the poetry is good poetry and 
 the music good music, and beauty dieth not, 
 and the heart that needs it will find it." 
 
 XCVIII 
 
 There is an argument in favor of compro- 
 mise not infrequently employed in these latter 
 days even by men of spiritual insight, an 
 argument the more dangerous because it
 
 102 The Deeper Faith 
 
 makes its appeal to one of the finest moral 
 attributes, the spirit of tolerance. It begins 
 with the universally acknowledged postulate 
 that human beings are weak and erring 
 creatures, passing from this to the conclusion 
 that it is not just to demand too much of 
 their undeveloped spiritual powers. One 
 must be willing to meet them half way. One 
 must allow for the fact that man is still in his 
 childhood, that he has not attained to the 
 self-control and balance of maturity. One 
 must not expect him to aspire to the unat- 
 tainable. 
 
 Now in so far as this course of reasoning 
 tends to make us more charitable toward our 
 neighbor, his shortcomings and inconsisten- 
 cies of conduct, his failure to attain the ideal, 
 it is wholly salutary in its influence. We 
 cannot be too tolerant of one another; we 
 cannot be too ready to forgive and to forget. 
 The growth of the spirit of universal tolerance 
 is surely one of the most inspiring facts of the 
 modern era. Nothing is more certain than 
 that every attempt on our part to pass moral
 
 The Deeper Faith 103 
 
 judgment upon the act of another is impertin- 
 ent and absurd ; for not until we know all the 
 antecedents of an act can we judge as to its 
 moral value, and granted such omniscience 
 we should doubtless find that there was 
 nothing to forgive. 
 
 We must be tolerant even of ourselves. It 
 is not always easy to forgive others their 
 trespasses against us; but it is more difficult 
 to forgive ourselves. And yet one is perhaps 
 not truly good until one has forgiven oneself 
 everything. Indeed it is possible that for- 
 giveness of others is somewhat of hypocrisy 
 in him who has not yet learned to for- 
 give himself. Is not remorse, after all, 
 only a subtle form of vengeance? And 
 if I cannot learn to forgive a sin in my- 
 self how shall I forgive the same sin in 
 another? 
 
 But when it is urged, as it often is, that 
 because man is morally frail therefore we 
 must lower our ideals to fit the exigencies of 
 human nature, the plea becomes at once 
 specious and entirely harmful in its influence.
 
 104 The Deeper Faith 
 
 For while it is impossible that we should be 
 too tolerant in regard to the shortcomings of 
 men, their failure to realize their ideals in 
 their daily lives, it is no less impossible that 
 we should be too exacting in demanding of 
 men the very highest ideals of which they 
 are capable. We must indeed be tolerant of 
 the failings of actual humanity, we dare not 
 and must not be tolerant of any blemish in 
 that glorified humanity which should exist 
 as an ideal in the soul of every man and 
 woman. We must not make our heaven less 
 beautiful in order to make it more attainable. 
 For by so much as we lower our ideals by so 
 much do we lower the real ; and conversely to 
 ennoble our ideals is to ennoble in like meas- 
 ure the course of our daily lives. The distance 
 between the ideal and the real remains ever 
 constant; they move on different planes but 
 they never vary their relative positions. 
 "Be ye perfect," said Jesus to his disciples, 
 knowing well that they could not fulfill his 
 injunction. They did not become perfect, 
 doubtless, Peter, and James and John, and
 
 The Deeper Faith 105 
 
 the rest; but they approached nearer perfec- 
 tion than they could have done had their 
 Master offered them an ideal less lofty, a goal 
 within reach of their attainment. 
 
 XCIX 
 
 Are we not justified, then, in assuming that 
 only in uncompromising fidelity to the high- 
 est ideal which we can conceive do we fulfill 
 our destiny? This alone is happiness, this 
 alone is success, that one should have utter 
 confidence in the impulses of the soul, follow- 
 ing them gladly and freely whether they lead 
 to the scaffold or to the throne. And as for 
 efficiency and achievement, who shall judge 
 of these things? Or why should one be 
 greatly troubled by such considerations, 
 bred as they are of an unworthy fear 
 of failure, since in trusting the soul one 
 knows oneself in harmony with the Unseen 
 Reality in which is neither impotence nor 
 defeat ?
 
 io6 The Deeper Faith 
 
 Finally, let us remember that it is always 
 possible to die. Death has been too often 
 regarded as the enemy of man, the cruel 
 destroyer who drags us from the feast of life 
 just when the merriment has reached its 
 height. In reality, death is the kindest and 
 most loyal of all our friends. He is the de- 
 fender of things virtuous, he is the eternal 
 guardian of the inner freedom. To the good 
 man he is the source of courage in the battle, 
 of new hope in the hour of defeat ; through the 
 agony of the torture chamber the martyr 
 glimpses the approaching form of the last 
 liberator and steels himself to bear what yet 
 remains of his portion of earthly suffering. 
 Were man not mortal the triumph of evil 
 upon earth would be complete ; for who of us 
 could boast the will to defy the ungodly and 
 bear an eternity of unmitigated torture for 
 the sake of an ideal, however beautiful? It 
 is the knowledge that the power of the wicked, 
 and of the foolish, also, is limited by the
 
 The Deeper Faith 107 
 
 boundaries of the kingdom of the dead, it is 
 this divine knowledge alone that can imbue 
 us with the unfaltering passion for the highest 
 in life, with the determination to give our- 
 selves in all things to the service of the 
 Eternal Values. 
 
 CI 
 
 And, again, Death is the unfailing reminder 
 to us of the existence of the Unknown. Im- 
 mersed in the petty cares and pleasures of 
 daily living we are prone to forget the mys- 
 tery that surrounds our souls as the atmo- 
 sphere surrounds our bodies. We grow sordid 
 and selfish and unheeding of the things that 
 abide; the lamp of the deeper faith flickers 
 painfully in the fetid atmosphere of spiritual 
 stagnation. Then it is Death who takes pity 
 of us, it is Death who with the swift cruelty 
 of love startles us from our torpor and re- 
 vivifies the languid sinews of the soul. Kneel- 
 ing beside the dead body of one whom he has 
 loved, every man is a mystic.
 
 io8 The Deeper Faith 
 
 CII 
 
 If it were not for Death it would be far 
 more difficult to believe in God. We should 
 perhaps accept the conclusions of a false 
 science and see in the life of earth, in the 
 behests of Nature, in the meaningless struggle 
 to survive, the complete explanation of our 
 complex spiritual selves. But so long as 
 Death is, so long shall we know by the in- 
 vincible logic of the heart that there is a 
 Beauty beyond the stars in which and for 
 which we live, that there is a Love that 
 transcends time and that cares for us. For, 
 as Hauptmann has said, "Death is the 
 masterpiece of Eternal Love." 
 
 cm 
 
 So with the glory of Life and the tenderness 
 of Death as eternal witnesses of the inex- 
 haustible goodness of the universe there is 
 no reason why we should hesitate to live the
 
 The Deeper Faith 109 
 
 i 
 
 highest life of which we are capable. All 
 things speak to the soul urging it upward. 
 
 He who thus throws himself blindly, con- 
 fidingly, upon the Unseen Breast, renouncing 
 every appeal to human law and sanction, 
 trusting implicitly in the Spirit to do all 
 things well, he finds the freedom and the 
 peace which the world cannot give. In him 
 is fulfilled the synthesis which is perhaps the 
 goal of our present search; the merging of 
 the mystic and the humanitarian. He will 
 have great pity of the sorrows of men, and 
 greater pity of the inner blindness which 
 alone lends sorrow its bitter sting. He will 
 be no idle dreamer ; he will do his share toward 
 making the world a nobler, fairer dwelling 
 place. But he will never forget that in order 
 to enjoy the world, one must be ready at 
 a moment to renounce all things and die, 
 should the spirit so ordain. He will respect 
 the free personalities of men; he will strive, 
 not to save others, but only to give them the 
 opportunity of saving themselves. He will 
 know how to honor woman, and in the eyes of
 
 no The Deeper Faith 
 
 a child will read strange, glad tidings. And 
 ever in and beyond created things he will 
 feel the presence of the Unknown, Source of 
 all being and its ultimate desire.
 
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