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fcfje itlerricb lecture* (or 1011-12, QeUbereb at 
 tfje <Dfjio Btolepan Wniberaitp, flpril 21-26, 1912 
 
 The Increase of Faith 
 
 Some Present-Day Aids to Belief 
 
 BY 
 FRANCIS JOHN IV/IcCONNELL 
 
 Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church and Ex-President 
 
 of DePauw University 
 
 NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
 CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 
 
Copyright, 1912, by 
 FRANCIS J. McCONNELL 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE MERRICK LECTURES 5 
 
 INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 I. THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 9 
 
 II. THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 48 
 
 III. SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 89 
 
 IV. THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 128 
 
 V. THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 169 
 
 VI. THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST. . . . 204 
 
 3 
 281630 
 
THE MEREICK LECTURES 
 
 BY the gift of the late Frederick Merrick, 
 M.D., D.D., LL.D., for fifty-one years a mem- 
 ber of the Faculty, and for thirteen of those 
 years President of Ohio Wesleyan University, 
 a fund was established providing an annual 
 income for the purpose of securing lectures 
 within the general field of Experimental and 
 Practical Religion. The following courses 
 have previously been given on this foundation : 
 
 Daniel Curry, D.D. Christian Education. 
 
 President James McCosh, D.D., LL.D. 
 Tests of the Various Kinds of Truth. 
 
 Bishop Randolph S. Foster, D.D., LL.D. 
 The Philosophy of Christian Experience. 
 
 Professor James Stalker, D.D. The 
 Preacher and His Models. 
 
 John W. Butler, D.D. Mission Work in 
 Mexico. 
 
 Professor George Adam Smith, D.D., LL.D. 
 Christ in the Old Testament. 
 
 Bishop James W. Bashford, Ph.D., D.D., 
 
 LL.D. The Science of Religion. 
 
 5 
 
THE MERRICK LECTURES 
 
 James M. Buckley, D.D., LL.D. The Natu- 
 ral and Spiritual Orders and Their Relations. 
 
 John R. Mott, M.A., F.R.G.S., LL.D. The 
 Pastor and Modern Missions. 
 
 Bishop Elijah E. Hoss, D.D., LL.D.; Pro- 
 fessor Doremus A. Hayes, Ph.D., S.T.D., 
 LL.D.; Charles E. Jefferson, D.D., LL.D.; 
 Bishop William F. McDowell, D.D., LL.D.; 
 Bishop Edwin H. Hughes, D.D. The New 
 Age and Its Creed. 
 
 Robert E. Speer, M.A.^ The Marks of a 
 Man; or, The Essentials of Christian Charac- 
 ter. 
 
 The Rev. Charles Stelzle, Miss Jane Ad- 
 dams, Commissioner of Labor Charles P. 
 Neill, Ph.D., Professor Graham Taylor, and 
 the Rev. George P. Eckman, D.D. The So- 
 cial Application of Religion. 
 
 The Rev. George Jackson, M.A. Some Old 
 Testament Problems. 
 
 Professor Walter Rauschenbusch, D.D. 
 Christianizing the Social Order. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE lectures which make up this volume 
 constitute a distinct addition to the litera- 
 ture of the Merrick Lecture Course. They 
 embody a conception of religion and of life 
 which is greatly worth w r hile. 
 
 The thesis which Bishop McConnell has 
 set forth in his earlier works on "The Diviner 
 Immanence," and "Beligious Certainty" re- 
 appears here in new and charming form. 
 With his penetrative mind he has bored into 
 a great central and ruling principle, which 
 dictates his message to our day. While his 
 thought is so comprehensive that it cannot be 
 caught in a phrase, this governing principle 
 may roughly be described as this religion 
 the full and glad response of a complete hu- 
 manity to a Christian Deity. In its applica- 
 tion this principle, of course, touches the 
 whole manhood in all its potentialities, intel- 
 lectual and moral, aesthetic and social. It 
 deals with all phases of life and thought and 
 presents a vision of good times, great men, 
 
 7 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 and a conquering God. It affords a sure basis 
 for faith, and sets aspiration free. 
 
 The thought is vitalizing, and should bring 
 to other religious teachers and learners (as it 
 has already brought to many) something of 
 the calm power which marks the author him- 
 self. HERBERT WELCH. 
 
 Delaware, Ohio. 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 BEFORE we begin a discussion of the various 
 factors in present-day life which make for the 
 increase of faith it may be well for us to ask 
 the question, What is faith? 
 
 Many answers are at hand. The upholder 
 of creed declares that faith is assent to the 
 articles of belief. Yet assent must be more 
 than intellectual. Sometimes the fundamen- 
 tal propositions of Christianity are stated as 
 if they were mathematical axioms. Assent to 
 mathematical axioms does not require any 
 moral virtue. The devils might well assent 
 to intellectual propositions. Another defini- 
 tion would turn around the thought that faith 
 is the enjoyment of an inner experience. This 
 definition is good except for the danger of 
 suggesting that the experience is so wholly a 
 matter of feeling that it has no room what- 
 soever for faith in the sense of trust. Still 
 another would have us believe that faith is a 
 keeping of Commandments, which also is good 
 
 9 
 
THE INCREASE OP FAITH 
 
 if Commandments are not conceived of in a 
 mechanical or artificial fashion. 
 
 All that is true in these definitions can be 
 preserved, and all that is harmful avoided, if 
 we say that Christian faith is Christian life. 
 Every activity of the Christian bases itself 
 upon trust trust in the Christian idea of 
 God, trust in the Christian idea of man, trust 
 in the possibility of interaction between God 
 and man. Out of such trust the life unfolds 
 in certain practical activities, which lead to 
 certain insights, which culminate in a general 
 feeling of spiritual satisfaction. At the cen- 
 ter of all is the will to do the will of God, 
 and out of this comes knowledge which is 
 more than merely intellectual, and experience 
 which is more than the flow of superficially 
 emotional states. It is the purpose of these 
 lectures to show that various great factors in 
 modern times are working to aid, at least in 
 a general way, the progress of Christian faith. 
 
 The first factor we are to discuss is the 
 scientific spirit of our day. It is part of 
 present-day good fortune that we have passed 
 beyond the era of so-called conflicts between 
 science and religion. We can easily see how 
 these conflicts arose. The latter part of the 
 nineteenth century was a period of unparal- 
 
 10 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 leled scientific advance. The advance was so 
 real and so unlike anything that the world 
 had ever before known that science came 
 quickly to an immense prestige. The glory of 
 the actual discoveries, the charm of the evolu- 
 tionary hypothesis, the practical benefits to 
 be realized at once from scientific conquest, 
 drew more minds to the consideration of 
 scientific problems than had ever been drawn 
 before in a similar period of time. Just think 
 for a moment of the increase of the number of 
 students of the sciences since the date of the 
 announcement of the theory of natural selec- 
 tion, of the increase too of the means of scien- 
 tific advance. With science practically tri- 
 umphant in sphere after sphere, and with 
 students turning toward science by hundreds, 
 it is not to be wondered at that the first inter- 
 pretations of the new heavens and the new 
 earth were in the direction of atheism. With 
 matter apparently doing so much on its own 
 account, it was put in the chief place with 
 confident expectation on the part of the new 
 science that matter would soon explain every- 
 thing. One who was a student in a biological 
 laboratory in those days has told us that he 
 had in his laboratory what might be called a 
 veritable experience of materialism. He 
 
 11 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 watched through the microscope certain bac- 
 teriological developments. Suddenly the im- 
 pression seized him that this was all that 
 the philosophers and poets and prophets were 
 wrong, and that spirit was nothing. The ex- 
 perience was as definite as a religious con- 
 version. To instance such an experience is to 
 suggest how far we have gone from the credu- 
 lous, uncritical scientific procedure of those 
 early days. 
 
 Some of the conflicts of those days came 
 out of the overpowering of the imagination 
 by the long flights of time which the scientists, 
 and especially the evolutionists, felt to be 
 necessary for their theories. True, the length 
 of eternity used to be a favorite theme with 
 old-time preachers, whether to frighten sin- 
 ners or to comfort saints. But the moment 
 the geologist and the biologist began to speak 
 of processes running through millions of years 
 the effect seemed appalling to religious 
 thought. The reason now seems to have been 
 not so much the conflict with the biblical reve- 
 lation as the crude question as to where God 
 was during the periods. The thought that 
 God was in the periods did not find ready ac- 
 ceptance. After a while, though, thoughtful 
 men began to see that the crisis brought on 
 
 12 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 by the evolutionary hypothesis was by no 
 means the most serious through which Chris- 
 tian belief had passed. Far more serious had 
 been the announcement and the acceptance of 
 the Copernican system. The acceptance of 
 the idea that the world is round was at one 
 time a deadly heresy. That diagram on the 
 first page of the school geographies to illus- 
 trate the sphericity of the earth, the ship ap- 
 pearing on the horizon with her masts first 
 visible to the observer on shore this is the 
 costliest diagram in existence, judging by the 
 suffering required to make men accept the 
 truth it conveyed. But men not only ac- 
 cepted the idea of the earth as a globe, but they 
 accepted also the vast distances which the Co- 
 pernican system called for and found these 
 not incompatible with Christian faith. The 
 late Goldwin Smith used to urge somewhat 
 peevishly that dogmatic theology should have 
 died with the announcement of the Coper- 
 nican theories, that it would die sooner or 
 later because its head had been crushed by 
 that announcement. Still theologies of one 
 sort or another live on. If they are to die, it 
 will take something more than Copernicanism 
 or Darwinism to kill them, for Christianity 
 can adjust itself easily both to practically in- 
 
 13 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 finite stretches of space and practically infi- 
 nite stretches of time. Thinkers of all schools 
 have virtually agreed upon this. 
 
 Moreover, conflicts between science and re- 
 ligion have in our day been seen not to be 
 conflicts between science and religion so much 
 as between scientists and scientists and be- 
 tween different schools of religion. It would 
 be very easy to make quite a showing of con- 
 flict between science and religion by picking 
 out all the progressive utterances of scien- 
 tists and by putting them over against a mass 
 of utterances of belated theologians. But if 
 we were to take the utterances of scientists as 
 a whole and the utterances of theologians as a 
 whole, we should quite likely find that there 
 have been progressive scientists and progres- 
 sive theologians, conservative scientists and 
 conservative theologians. Quite as bitter in- 
 vective has been heaped upon progressive 
 scientists by reactionary scientists as upon 
 progressive scientists by conservative theo- 
 logians. The battle is really between the 
 spirit of progress and the spirit of conser- 
 vatism. When a doctrine, whether scientific 
 or theological, has organized itself into a 
 system, it partakes of the over-conservatism 
 which is a part of the original sin of institu- 
 
 14 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 tions. The Church is not the only institu- 
 tion which suffers from conservatism. It is 
 not fair, taking the whole Church into the 
 account, to say that the Church suffers more 
 from conservatism than do the political or in- 
 dustrial or educational or social institutions. 
 Our modern knowledge of institutions will 
 hardly permit us to speak very seriously of 
 conflicts between science and religion. The 
 conflict is really the age-old, world-wide con- 
 test between the spirit of progress and the 
 spirit of conservatism. 
 
 And, again, certain victories by scientific 
 thinkers over some arguments for Christianity 
 have not been victories over Christianity, but 
 over these particular arguments. For ex- 
 ample, much has been made of the practical 
 surrender by theists to-day of the old-fashioned 
 design argument which had been thought po- 
 tent since the days of Paley. The more de- 
 termined of the earlier apologists would pick 
 out some fact, preferably from the organic 
 realm, and would show that the evidence of 
 design in the fact pointed to the existence of 
 a Creator working with a plan in mind. We 
 cannot help feeling that these old-fashioned 
 arguments still have a value that modern 
 thinkers seem unwilling to concede to them, 
 
 15 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 but there is a sort of offensive cocksureness 
 about them, and they often start more ques- 
 tions than they answer. When an ambitious 
 reasoner of this type declares that he can 
 prove the existence of God from the design 
 shown in a mosquito's wing, the question in- 
 evitably arises as to why the mosquito should 
 exist at all which suggests the difficulty 
 which arises through picking out some one 
 fact and looking at it alone. In our day we 
 feel that design must apply to the system as 
 a whole. We seek for signs of plan not so 
 much in details as in the entire sweep and 
 outcome of the vast cosmic process. This 
 type of thinking has its pitfalls as truly as the 
 other, but it is in the fashion just at present. 
 In any case, we can see how little the mere 
 change of emphasis in our argument can 
 really affect the foundations of faith. 
 
 To come closer to the heart of our ques- 
 tion, however, we must ask not only whether 
 this or that body of organized scientific re- 
 sults makes against faith, but whether the 
 scientific temper or scientific spirit makes 
 against faith. Through the positive scientific 
 advances of the past fifty years, through the 
 discussion of these even in the newspapers, 
 through the familiarization of the public with 
 
 16 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 scientific processes, there has come and does 
 come increasingly into our own life a scien- 
 tific spirit which we can recognize even though 
 we may not be able to define it. For the pur- 
 poses of this discussion a formal definition is 
 not necessary. 
 
 Our first main proposition is that there is 
 nothing in the scientific spirit prohibitive of 
 theistic or Christian belief. We shall have 
 something to say later of the decline of the 
 dogmatic spirit in theology. We must say 
 here that, remarkable as has been the decline 
 of the dogmatic spirit in theology, the de- 
 cline of the dogmatic spirit among those who 
 are looked upon as the real leaders of science 
 is more remarkable still. In the later seven- 
 ties and early eighties it was not so. Scien- 
 tists then had a great deal to say about what 
 could not be. Grant that the scientist to-day 
 may so often say, "I do not know," that he 
 may get himself into a chronic state of agnos- 
 ticism, still this scientific agnosticism is better 
 than the scientific dogmatism which denies 
 outright the value of religious belief. 
 
 Among the real achievements of science in 
 recent decades none is of more real value 
 than the recognition of the limitations of 
 science by every man of real scientific spirit. 
 
 17 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 In fact, there is question as to whether a 
 student can lay claim to the scientific spirit if 
 he is not willing to recognize the limitations 
 of scientific procedure. There is nothing more 
 unscientific than to strive to build up a scien- 
 tific orthodoxy which arrogates to itself the 
 right to pass judgment in all fields. In a 
 general way even popular thinking to-day 
 recognizes the truth that it is the function of 
 science to describe processes and the function 
 of philosophy and religion to give them their 
 final interpretation. What we call ultimate 
 problems lie out beyond the reach of technical 
 scientific processes. Suppose the discoveries 
 of science to do away with matter as we think 
 of it. Suppose we accept the modern scien- 
 tific view that matter is, after all, but a mani- 
 festation of Force or forces. What this Force 
 or these forces are, whether personal or im- 
 personal, and what the fundamental purpose 
 of the Force is if it is personal, is not a prob- 
 lem on which the scientist is finally the au- 
 thority. 
 
 But science not only has certain limitations 
 in the nature of the case. It also has limita- 
 tions growing out of its own imperfections. 
 Its instruments are not yet fine enough to 
 make it the real authority in some realms. 
 
 18 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 Take the problem of human immortality. 
 Many scientists have dogmatically affirmed 
 that the life of a soul after death is impos- 
 sible. But how can a scientist of real scien- 
 tific spirit pronounce thus dogmatically? The 
 scientist would probably answer that con- 
 scious life is the accompaniment of certain 
 forms of nerve structure, that the material 
 conditions on this earth are the only condi- 
 tions which make such delicate structures 
 possible, that with the destruction of the tissue 
 there is no reason to think that the life makes 
 any other material adjustment. All of this, 
 however, is assumption. No necessary con- 
 nection has ever been shown between nerve 
 structure as we know it and conscious activity. 
 On the one side is nerve and on the other is 
 consciousness, but there is just as much of a 
 chasm between consciousness and nerve as 
 there is between consciousness and stone, ex- 
 cept that, as a matter of fact, certain forms of 
 consciousness and nerve structure are found 
 together. For the dogmatic scientist this fact 
 of being found together will be enough, but 
 the more reflective scientist will not be so 
 sure. This latter observer has learned to dis- 
 trust the mere fact of mutual accompaniment 
 as of final significance. We cannot always 
 
 19 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 judge consciousness by the company it keeps. 
 If we lived in a world of just one language, 
 the dogmatist might readily conclude that 
 there is a necessary and inevitable connection 
 between the characters l-o-v-e and the senti- 
 ment which we know that these characters put 
 together as a word express. We are held back 
 from this dogmatic absurdity, however, by the 
 fact that there are many languages, and that 
 while a sentiment may be the same it may be 
 expressed in writing by any one of many dif- 
 ferent arbitrary symbols. The connection be- 
 tween consciousness and matter, as we know 
 it, may likewise be just one of many possible 
 adjustments, or it is conceivable that con- 
 sciousness may get along without any material 
 accompaniment whatever. Our universe may 
 be penetrated and interpenetrated by other 
 universes which the instruments of our uni- 
 verse may not be able to detect. In other 
 words, a scientific spirit that understands it- 
 self can say nothing prohibitive of a belief in 
 immortality. 
 
 Nor can science say anything prohibitive of 
 a belief in freedom. The scientist may object 
 that the reign of law prohibits the belief in 
 freedom. Every deed that occurs must bo 
 caught up into the web of law, to be sure, but 
 
 20 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 there are laws and laws, and there is nothing 
 which a truly scientific spirit can find irra- 
 tional in the thought of a choice between dif- 
 ferent laws. If virtue is chosen, the path will 
 be upward toward heroism or saintliness. If 
 vice is chosen, the path will be downward 
 toward sluggishness and degradation. But 
 the struggle uphill and the rush down are both 
 in accordance with laws. There is no way of 
 escape from law, but we can escape some laws. 
 Of course a man may break out that it is im- 
 possible to show scientifically that we are not 
 puppets jerked by unseen wires. But it is 
 equally impossible to prove that we are. Sci- 
 ence leaves the door open to belief in freedom. 
 We have already said that proof of the non- 
 existence of God is scientifically out of the 
 question. The scientist comes down at last to 
 forces as they manifest themselves in the 
 world of space and time. He is not, indeed, 
 able to say from a study of the forces them- 
 selves that there is a God back of them, but 
 he is even less able to say that there is not. 
 Indeed, it is really easier to say that there is 
 than that there is not easier to declare for a 
 God whose presence would account for the 
 play and interplay of the forces than to stop 
 with the forces themselves. 
 
 21 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 From the proposition that the scientific 
 spirit is not prohibitive of belief we advance 
 to the proposition that the scientific spirit is 
 largely friendly to belief. We admit at the 
 outset that we do not hope to establish this 
 proposition by any supposed revelations from 
 any particular facts. The aid is largely in- 
 direct, but really all the more potent on that 
 account. 
 
 We call attention to the fact that scientific 
 inquiry is more and more human in its pur- 
 pose and outcome. That is to say, the aim is 
 to fit the facts of the universe more and more 
 to the needs of the bodies and minds of men. 
 In a later paragraph we shall give emphasis 
 to the need of knowledge for the sake of knowl- 
 edge itself, which is much the same as saying 
 knowledge for the sake of the minds of men. 
 Here we say that a large part of scientific ad- 
 vance has come from a desire to relieve the 
 pressing physical needs of men. No matter 
 how much we admire the pursuit of knowl- 
 edge for its own sake, we make mental reser- 
 vations after all. We grow impatient with 
 the search for facts which clearly have no 
 human reference. We may sneer at the prac- 
 tical aim in the pursuit of knowledge, but we 
 qualify our scorn by reference to the lower 
 
 22 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 order of practical. We do not wish a scien- 
 tist to work with so practical an aim as money- 
 making, but if his work is bacteriological in- 
 vestigation, for example, we do not object to 
 his being practical enough to search for and 
 trace out the life history of a deadly disease 
 germ whose annihilation means the deliver- 
 ance of the race from a plague rather than to 
 track down a harmless germ whose life and 
 death are devoid of significance to human be- 
 ings. If we are to commend scientists for 
 their devotion to science, we are a little more 
 likely to choose as hero the man who died ex- 
 perimenting with means of fighting yellow 
 fever than the man who wore himself out de- 
 ciphering prehistoric inscriptions. 
 
 Apart altogether from our scientific ideals 
 on this point, great advances to-day are being 
 made by those who bring the human purpose 
 into their researches. And in the past the 
 aid of science toward the growth of faith has 
 been along the line of making conditions of 
 human life really human. Full and rich hu- 
 man insight is bound to result as science 
 makes the burdens of life less heavy. Science, 
 of course, makes possible a materialistic view 
 of the universe. But there is another mate- 
 rialism that of sluggish and inert half-alive- 
 
 23 
 
THE INCREASE OP FAITH 
 
 ness, where the body is forced into chief con- 
 sideration by the burdens placed upon it. 
 With the removal of these burdens some men 
 begin to think in wrong channels indeed, but 
 better have them do this than not think at all. 
 The flourishing of materialism in times of 
 scientific advance is a flourishing of thought 
 that in times before science came to the aid of 
 man was not thought at all, but a dull heavy 
 sense of pain. 
 
 A recent traveler in China has told of the 
 life of the chair-bearer, even when the bearer 
 has employment which pays him as much as 
 he asks the heavy load, the dull monotony of 
 the journey, the thin garments which afford 
 no protection against the rain, the utter weari- 
 ness when the day closes, the wretched relief 
 of the opium pipe. Here is a picture of a 
 comparatively fortunate laborer in a land 
 where science has not yet been permitted to 
 lend its aid for the relief of human misery. 
 In such lands the higher faculties have practi- 
 cally no chance. Beliefs do indeed grow in 
 such lands, but they but accentuate the misery 
 of the people. They are but reflections of the 
 low vitality of the nation. Now, when it 
 comes to estimate the value of science for be- 
 lief we must not forget this indirect service of 
 
 24 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 aid to the conditions out of which belief 
 comes. The shortening of the hours and the 
 lightening of the burden of labor, the relief of 
 communities from dread of widespread hor- 
 rors like conflagrations and plagues, the pro- 
 vision for leisure on the part of larger masses 
 of men all this is a help to belief. 
 
 In all of this we do not forget the danger 
 of the control over material things which 
 comes with the advance of science. Prosperity 
 is often harder to endure than adversity. The 
 psalmist said of old that the people who had 
 no changes forgot God. We know the power 
 of adversity to lead men to prayer, and we 
 know how widespread distresses will lead to 
 revivals of religion. We know too that when 
 men lose hope in earth they turn toward 
 heaven; but our contention holds good that 
 unless we have the material conditions for a 
 human life we cannot have a really human 
 life, and that unless we have really human life 
 belief which, on the whole, comes out of life 
 at its brightest and best, is not apt greatly to 
 flourish. We can readily see that a scientific 
 control of the earth might be too lavishly com- 
 plete for men at their present state of moral 
 development, but there must be some control. 
 A man can hardly think rightly about God if 
 
 25 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 he has no leisure to think at all. No religious 
 advance worth mentioning came, outside the 
 pastoral and desert peoples who had long op- 
 portunities for brooding, until society got 
 enough goods ahead to secure to religious 
 leaders at least a measure of freedom from 
 manual burdens. When science makes it pos- 
 sible for the masses to have large leisure, multi- 
 tudes may, indeed, waste their leisure in idle- 
 ness or worse, but multitudes of others will 
 lay hold on higher beliefs than they have ever 
 known. Many of our beliefs to-day still carry 
 with them much of the hardness of a bitter 
 time. The idea of God as a taskmaster, the 
 emphasis on the virtue of chastening, the sense 
 of tragedy in much religion all this is a repe- 
 tition of days that were poor and bitter. The 
 highest type of saintliness is not that which 
 can get along without material things, but 
 that which can control and rightly use ma- 
 terial things. Sweet indeed are the uses of 
 adversity, but the uses of prosperity are 
 sweeter still. The meek are to inherit the 
 earth and the saints are to judge the world. 
 Modern science is to help the meek to their 
 throne and the saints to their judgment seat. 
 If the meek can remain meek when they come 
 to their inheritance, and the saints can re- 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 main saintly while seated on a throne of judg- 
 ment, the triumph of grace will be complete, 
 and out of the triumph of grace will come a 
 vision of the truth which will be complete. 
 In a large sense science prepares the way for 
 faith. 
 
 We return now for a moment to the con- 
 ception of science as a system of knowledge 
 on its own account. Not only has science 
 made a way for faith in its utilization and 
 control of material forces, but the habits of 
 mind, the intellectual temper and outlook, 
 which are part of the scientific spirit, have 
 been an aid to faith. The scientists have 
 moved through the fields of belief with keen 
 blades cutting down the weeds. In any realm 
 which has to do with religious belief it is very 
 easy for the mind to run off into superstition ; 
 and while superstition comes often out of the 
 religious side of our nature, superstition is the 
 foe of religion. William James used to say 
 that the best way to deal with superstitions 
 is to ventilate them, to break them open 
 and let the northwest wind of science roar 
 through them. So the northwest wind of 
 science has actually blown away ghosts and 
 goblins and witches and demons which used 
 to infest the realm of religious thinking. 
 
 27 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 Understand now, this has not been achieved 
 by the discovery of this or that scientific fact. 
 Quite an argument might be made out for all 
 these ghost folk, but the scientific temper 
 brushes the argument aside. Let us not for- 
 get this when we are tempted to cry out 
 against the scientific spirit as a despoiler in 
 the realm of religious feeling. Undoubtedly 
 that spirit may be a despoiler. We have only 
 to notice some of the wild things done in edu- 
 cational realms to see what can happen if an 
 overzealous scientific spirit gets out of its own 
 realm the dissection of a great literary 
 classic, for example, from the standpoint of 
 minute philological technicalities which miss 
 the spirit of the author. But while the atmos- 
 phere of the laboratory may sometimes prove 
 poisonous in the library or the studio or the 
 cloister, still that atmosphere is more deadly 
 to hobgoblins than it is to angels. Unless we 
 have large familiarity with the thought of 
 earlier ages we cannot imagine how fortunate 
 we are in being free from blighting supersti- 
 tion in religion. 
 
 Moreover, there are other types of supersti- 
 tion which the scientific spirit does much to 
 banish. Men accept inaccurate and inade- 
 quate generalizations which get themselves ex- 
 
 28 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 pressed in wise saws and which are then al- 
 most worshiped as a part of a sort of ortho- 
 doxy. To take one or two simple illustrations 
 of no particular moral application, think of 
 the old-fashioned fear of night air, especially 
 in sick-rooms. Or, in another realm, that 
 old saw, "Slow but sure." When it occurs to 
 some statistical investigator to examine thou- 
 sands of cases of "slow" people he finds that 
 they are not at all likely to be sure, nor does 
 he find that the "sure" persons are likely to 
 be slow. In religious thinking we have ac- 
 cepted misunderstandings of the laws of he- 
 redity, mighty as those laws are, until they 
 have become veritable superstitions. Simi- 
 larly with notions about depravity, or about 
 the possibility of saying that men and things 
 are either in one religious class or another. 
 This "either-or" superstition is very preva- 
 lent. When men set themselves to look at the 
 actual facts of this world in a scientific spirit 
 they find both men and things to be pretty 
 much "both-and" pretty well mixed and 
 tangled and complicated; so that hasty gen- 
 eralizations, even if they have the dignity of 
 long tradition behind them and enjoy the 
 attractiveness of epigrammatic form, may be 
 nothing but superstitions after all. The 
 
 29 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 matter-of-factness of the scientific spirit is 
 sometimes too matter-of-fact, but, after all, 
 we live in a world of matters-of-fact. So long 
 as we live in this sort of world it is well to 
 approach matters-of-fact in a matter-of-fact 
 spirit. A large part of the religious life is of 
 this matter-of-fact nature. Science aids us 
 here in a right approach. 
 
 Of still further value for the increase of 
 faith has been the scientific emphasis upon 
 system and law. The late Francis A. Walker 
 used to speak of certain psychological by- 
 products of modern commercial institutions 
 as of nearly equal value with the direct out- 
 put of the institutions. He used to speak of 
 a bank as a manufactory of punctuality, of 
 great importance to multitudes of men in 
 holding before them unescapable obligations 
 which must be met at particular times. The 
 bank does away with the old loose verbal 
 agreement to be fulfilled any time more or 
 less near another time, and also makes even 
 the written instrument more binding. This 
 educational effect is of immense value to the 
 community. Now, it would simply be impos- 
 sible to estimate the influence for good of the 
 ideas of system and law as these are enforced 
 by modern science. We all know the damag- 
 
 30 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 ing effect which is wrought by the conception 
 of law when that binds down the mind by iron 
 regulations. We know how easily the system 
 may become hostile to religion, but it is of 
 vast value to have the ideas of law and system 
 held before the minds of men. Modern science 
 is not the only force which has worked in this 
 direction, and the later scientific emphasis is 
 not more marked than the emphasis of the 
 early scientists; but in our time the sheer 
 abundance of the emphasis has become a com- 
 pelling factor. Law has been familiar to men 
 from the dawn of civilization, and there were 
 worthy scientists in the earliest days, but the 
 stress on law and system has never before 
 been made so much a part of the common con- 
 sciousness as now. On the whole, this is for 
 good. It introduces system and regularity 
 into belief. If belief is to be worth while, it 
 must be sane, and the emphasis on the great 
 regularities makes for sanity. In these ad- 
 dresses it must be remembered that by the in- 
 crease of faith we mean the increase of faith 
 which is really worth while, not the rank 
 abundance of all sorts and conditions of be- 
 liefs. 
 
 All this, however, is somewhat indirect. 
 Science has been of direct aid to faith in plac- 
 
 31 
 
THE INCREASE OP FAITH 
 
 ing in the hands of faith the scientific method 
 which can be used mightily in religious effort. 
 Just as religion uses the material instruments 
 of modern civilization as an aid in building 
 her church edifices, just as she uses the instru- 
 ments of medicine and surgery to carry on her 
 works of relief, just as she uses printing 
 presses and express trains to send the gospel 
 over the world, just so she uses the instru- 
 ments of the scientific method to approach 
 anew the facts which are the center of the 
 Christian system. Truly scientific method, 
 as illustrated in the hands of the great mas- 
 ters, is a wonderful tool, even more wonderful 
 than any material tool which has come of 
 scientific study. The patience which can ex- 
 amine huge heaps of details and sort them 
 into order, the self-control which can suspend 
 judgment until an adequate conclusion ap- 
 pears, the discernment which can sift out es- 
 sentials from nonessentials, the intuition 
 which can finally seize and state a law this, 
 which in part describes the scientific method 
 of our day, is a valuable instrument in the aid 
 of faith. To refer again to a fact mentioned a 
 moment ago, the Church appropriates more 
 and more the appliances of modern physical 
 and industrial and social relief for the bring- 
 
 32 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 ing in of the kingdom of God. She shows an 
 increasing willingness to listen to scientific 
 scrutiny of her own claims and her own faults. 
 She is willing more and more, if we are to 
 judge by the utterances of many of her leaders, 
 to surrender claims of artificial authority of 
 one sort or another if she can have the power 
 that comes from righteous influence. 
 
 Again, the Church shows more and more 
 willingness to allow the Scriptures to be sub- 
 jected to the test of the scrutiny of the scien- 
 tific method, or, rather, she seems more and 
 more willing to accept the results of such 
 study. We trust that we do not err from the 
 way of strict truth when we voice our opinion 
 that whatever harm has come through the 
 scientific handling of the Scriptures has come, 
 not from those who have been too scientific, 
 but, rather, from those who have not been 
 enough scientific. Dogmatism is not scien- 
 tific. Too often the approach of the theologian 
 toward the Bible has been with the announced 
 predetermination that certain teachings must 
 be found there. Too often the approach of the 
 scientific critic has been with the predetermi- 
 nation that these teachings must not be found 
 there. Of course all thinking must have its 
 assumptions and presuppositions, but it is not 
 
 33 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 the part of the scientific spirit to blind the 
 eyes to facts for the sake of the presupposi- 
 tions. 
 
 At the hands of men of true scientific spirit 
 the Scriptures have been made new in our day 
 with effects like that which must have at- 
 tended their translation out of dead language 
 into living language. The fact that the Scrip- 
 tures were written in a prescientific age does 
 not prevent our getting great good from look- 
 ing at them through the scientific atmosphere. 
 Thus viewed they have become new. Parts of 
 Scripture once enigmatic have become clear; 
 parts misplaced have found their true setting, 
 and the foundations have been laid on a firmer 
 basis. Even very radical New Testament 
 study has found a basis for claim that some 
 portions of New Testament writing go back 
 much further toward the times of Christ than 
 we had previously supposed, and radical study 
 in its attempt to separate the Jesus of history 
 from the Christ of faith has failed to come 
 upon a time when the Christian writers did 
 not view Christ essentially as we view him to- 
 day. Looking at the facts of religious history 
 as facts their significance becomes more and 
 more important. The fact of the Scriptures 
 and their influence, the fact of Christ and his 
 
 34 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 power, the fact of prayer and its effects for 
 good, whether we call these effects reflex or 
 not all these come to new thrones when we 
 approach them in the scientific spirit. 
 
 We have said that in the scientific spirit of 
 our time there is nothing hostile to a proper 
 religious spirit and that in many ways there 
 is aid to religion in the scientific spirit. It 
 remains for us to say that even where the facts 
 of the world seem darkest for the spirit of 
 faith the scientific spirit furnishes a challenge 
 and an incentive to the religious spirit^ For the 
 scientific spirit is also a spirit of faith. Science 
 proceeds upon the most daring assumptions. 
 We may not call the faiths of science faiths : 
 we call them hypotheses; but hypothesis is a 
 form of faith. If we were to write an eleventh 
 chapter of Hebrews for men of science, it 
 would have to be a chronicle of the mighty 
 deeds made possible through the spirit of faith. 
 The scientist does not win his victories by 
 going into a laboratory and by staring. He 
 is animated by a mighty belief, and in that 
 belief seeks for light. Columbus sailed west in 
 obedience to a theory, and his quest was one of 
 faith. There is a splendid daring about such 
 faith to-day. Whether it be in the assumption 
 that by invention we can navigate the air, or 
 
 35 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 in the assumption that we can drive tubercu- 
 losis out of the world, or in the assumption 
 that we can find out whether there are Mar- 
 tians or not, the daring is the daring of faith. 
 There is a faith of science, even more truly 
 than there is a science of faith. 
 
 It will be observed that we have nowhere 
 picked out any facts which specifically make 
 for belief. We have been speaking of the scien- 
 tific spirit and the scientific temper. We now 
 admit the existence of many facts which at 
 first seem irreconcilable with belief. We in- 
 sist, however, that the approach of religion to 
 these facts should be with the same daring as 
 that with which the scientific spirit approaches 
 them. For example, it is said that the very 
 size of the universe is against the spirit of 
 faith, that it may have been well enough to 
 believe in the fundamentals of Christianity 
 back in the days when this earth was con- 
 ceived of as the center of the physical system. 
 To-day science has shown that the earth is so 
 small as to be of little account in a solar 
 system in which it is a mere fragment. It 
 was all well enough to believe in Christianity 
 at a time when men did not think that man 
 had been on the earth more than a few thou- 
 sand years. But since Copernicanism and 
 
 36 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 Darwinism how changed from all this! How 
 can Christianity survive the changes? 
 
 One reassuring feature about scientific dis- 
 covery is that, no matter how big the universe 
 is, and no matter how long it has been run- 
 ning, it seems to be composed throughout of 
 the same elements that we find in our world. 
 If a chemist could be transported from the 
 earth to the sun, and could live there, he would 
 not have to unlearn much of the earthly chem- 
 istry. The same elements that we know here 
 are in existence there. If the geologist could 
 go back to the ages before man, he would find 
 the same forces at work which we find at work 
 to-day. Air and water and heat working 
 through long periods have wrought the great 
 changes. If he could go back and live in the 
 carboniferous era, he would probably find the 
 situation there just what he might have ex- 
 pected before starting. Now, these common 
 everyday forces take on a new dignity when 
 they are given field and time in which to act. 
 Running water is not great taken on a few 
 feet of river bed and for a few seconds of time, 
 but give room enough and time enough, and a 
 Grand Canyon is the result. It really re- 
 quired some effort for science to see the im- 
 portance of these everyday forces, and belief 
 
 37 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 in their power was at first an act of faith. En- 
 larging conceptions of religious life act simi- 
 larly for Christian belief. They give the com- 
 mon forces space and time through which to 
 act. Of course the larger world presents a 
 larger challenge to Christian faith than does 
 a smaller ; but is faith to be outdone by science 
 in the boldness of its conceptions? If science 
 can believe that comparatively insignificant 
 forces around us can be the shaping tools of 
 the planets, why cannot faith believe that the 
 hopes and prayers of men are of vast spiritual 
 significance? The very fact that man's abode 
 is not the center of the universe makes, of 
 course, a larger challenge to faith. Dare we 
 believe that spiritual forces manifested in an 
 out-of-the-way planet are the key to the under- 
 lying forces of the universe? Dare we believe 
 that righteousness and love wherever found 
 are above all things else? Shall we be im- 
 posed upon by the mere bigness and age of 
 things? The larger universe which science 
 reveals thus challenges us. The spirit of 
 really scientific inquiry challenges us not to 
 be lacking in a spirit of faith. Both science 
 and religion must rely upon faith. 
 
 A still more perplexed doubter points out 
 our helplessness in the presence of the great 
 
 38 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 fixities of nature. After all, how can we be 
 sure that anything was made for our benefit? 
 Some things in the world are usable by us, but 
 what is there to assure us that these things 
 were made for us? The stones were made by 
 the slow geologic processes. We pave our 
 streets or build our homes with them. It 
 seems a little absurd to say that these stones 
 were designed for us. We found the stones 
 here and we used them. Similarly with the 
 control of the forces of nature. We can direct 
 the current a little, but we cannot radically 
 change its course. We can control others and 
 ourselves only by studying the streams of our 
 lives, by immersing ourselves in them, and by 
 slightly deflecting the flow here and there 
 while swimming with the stream. Or, to 
 change the figure, we are like children in 
 whose hands the reins which guide the steed 
 have fallen for a few blissful seconds, and 
 even in our bliss we suspect that this privilege 
 is allowed us because the horse can be trusted 
 to go aright for at least a few rods. 
 
 We are perfectly willing to admit all this, 
 perfectly willing to allow the argument to be 
 stated even more strongly. It does look 
 absurd to say that the physical universe was 
 made just for us. It may have other uses than 
 
 39 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 just those which suit us. As a matter of fact, 
 however, we can use the universe, and use it 
 to good advantage. As a matter of fact, we 
 shall use it to the full for our purposes, no 
 matter what the absurdities in our assump- 
 tion of our own importance. If there is any 
 fact of the universe worth knowing, the scien- 
 tist assumes the right to know that fact. If 
 the universe can be put to any sort of use for 
 human beings, we assume that it is the human 
 beings, and not the material universe, which 
 have the right of way. The great fixities of 
 nature remain fixed, to be sure, but that not 
 because we recognize in them especial sacred- 
 ness. Just so far as we can we will change 
 them, if we can do so to better human inter- 
 ests. The old type of piety which detected an 
 irreverent spirit in changing the course of 
 streams, or in controlling electricity as in- 
 terfering with the works of God, is dead and 
 gone. We admit that we are powerless in the 
 presence of some facts, but we are not power- 
 less to protest against the facts. That old 
 scoffer who said that if he had been present 
 when the human eye was created he might 
 have made some valuable suggestions may 
 have been blasphemous in spirit; but men who 
 are not blasphemous Actually do make im- 
 
 -40 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 provements in eyes. What we are insisting 
 upon, however, is not our success in dealing 
 with nature, for that is little enough. We do 
 insist upon the significance of the daring as- 
 sumption that underlies our battle with na- 
 ture. Let the world be thought of as ever so 
 big. The magnificent distances may seem to 
 correct and chasten the spirit of faith both in 
 science and religion, but the discovery of any 
 new world is a mighty "dare" both to science 
 and religion. Science responds with the as- 
 sumption that the new facts can be fitted into 
 our system of knowledge, and religion re- 
 sponds with the assumption that the new 
 facts can be made serviceable to belief. 
 The spirit of faith both in its scientific and its 
 religious aspect survives and increases as new 
 problems are set by the unfolding of the uni- 
 verse. 
 
 But think of the limitations of our knowl- 
 edge! Think of the insoluble problems! 
 Well, suppose we do think of them. We find 
 them hard enough. Every increase of knowl- 
 edge is, as of old, an increase of sorrow, but, 
 after all, the sorrow is not the sorrow of those 
 who have no hope. We repeat that bad as are 
 the facts of the physical universe, they are 
 not prohibitive of faith; rather are they a 
 
 41 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 challenge and an appeal to faith. Insoluble 
 though they may be to us, they are not neces- 
 sarily insoluble to a higher intelligence, or to 
 our own intelligence under more enlightened 
 circumstances. That is to say, there is noth- 
 ing inherently self-contradictory or self-evi- 
 dently absurd in these facts, hard as they are. 
 Are we distressed by the vast immensities of 
 the universe and by their apparent meaning- 
 lessness? On earth the wastes of desert and 
 water and ice ! Throughout space the blazing 
 suns and dead moons ! We admit that we do 
 not understand, but is that a sign that these 
 facts are beyond the reach of all intelligence? 
 Are they such contradictions as the prop- 
 osition that things which are equal to the 
 same thing are not equal to each other? 
 Admittedly we do not understand, but con- 
 ceivably we may understand. The problem 
 is not clearly beyond the reach of all intelli- 
 gence. 
 
 Or are we distressed by the fact of physical 
 pain in the world? Even before we come to 
 man there is pain enough. How can we recon- 
 cile the presence of animal suffering with the 
 assumption that God is good? If there were 
 to be some moral outcome of animal suffer- 
 ing, the situation might be different; but, tak- 
 
 42 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 ing animal life just as we see it, the problem is 
 rather dark. 
 
 The problem is rather dark ; but let us not 
 make it darker than it is. Above all let us 
 strive to avoid the error of thinking that the 
 animals suffer as we would suffer if we were 
 in the place of the animals. The tender 
 mercies of nature are no doubt cruel enough, 
 but animals are not men, after all. If we 
 could abstract from our pain all that the 
 power of looking before and after puts into 
 it, and could divest pain of all the terrors that 
 many times come w r ith our understanding of 
 its deadly significance, the pain itself might 
 be notably diminished, though a toothache, 
 for example, would still be its own wretched 
 self. Still, let us make the fact of animal 
 suffering as dreadful as we can. Let nature, 
 red in tooth and claw with ravin, shriek ever 
 so loudly against our creed. If the creed is at 
 all vital, it can hope on in spite of the shrieks. 
 
 The problem of human suffering apart 
 from the problem of moral evil, which does 
 not fall within the scope of this lecture is 
 likewise not an insuperable barrier to faith. 
 Here, again, we must be careful not to make 
 the problem worse than it is. A favorite de- 
 vice of pessimists is to imagine a sort of lump 
 
 43 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 sum of human woe constantly added to by the 
 sufferings of man until it reaches one awful 
 total. The total of human sufferings from the 
 beginning is, indeed, awful enough, but this 
 lump sum is a fiction of the imagination. 
 There has been much sickness from the begin- 
 ning, but, on the whole, as a shrewd observer 
 has said, "the race has been in tolerable 
 health." In spite of inequalities of social 
 order pain gets pretty well distributed. Then 
 there might be an increase of pain which 
 would be a sign and result of material prog- 
 ress. It is a well-known fact that the great 
 losses in the human race are due to deaths in 
 infancy. Suppose now, that science finds 
 methods of increasing the chances of a child's 
 living, so that for two who now die in infancy 
 one would under the new order survive to ma- 
 turity. Evidently, the survivor must die at 
 maturity or beyond. This means, statistically, 
 an increase in deaths from disorders of adult 
 life, and might be made to seem very terrify- 
 ing on paper. Again, in such case the death 
 in maturity, because of the full development 
 of consciousness and the possibility of looking 
 ahead, and because too of the more numerous 
 lines of connection with other human beings, 
 would probably cause more conscious suffer- 
 
 44 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 ing to the person himself and to others than 
 would have been possible if the person had 
 died in infancy. Yet we are not willing to 
 have the work of the diminution of infant 
 mortality stop on this account. 
 
 We have no desire to make the problem of 
 human suffering less than it really is. The 
 fact that most of the people that have lived 
 up to the present time have had no properly 
 human existence, the probable fact that most 
 of the persons on the face of the earth now 
 have gone to sleep in the last twenty-four 
 hours hungry, the fact of unspeakable hard- 
 ship in the lot of individuals everywhere all 
 these are indeed facts. They are facts which 
 throw many good people out of sympathy with 
 the universe. Many look upon the universe as 
 one long tragedy. They cannot find any clue 
 to the meanings of nature or any insight into 
 her moods. 
 
 Nevertheless, in spite of all this faith lives 
 on. Belief undertakes one explanation after 
 another and all alike fall short. In spite of 
 the shortcomings of the explanations belief 
 survives. Looking at the fact of faith in a 
 scientific spirit, we must ask for some reason 
 for the persistence of the faith. Of course 
 the Christian will answer that it is God him- 
 
 45 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 self who is prompting men to believe in him in 
 spite of all temptations to the contrary. Our 
 problem just now, however, is not as to the 
 doctrine that God works, but as to how he 
 works through the modern scientific spirit. 
 Our answer is that the modern scientific spirit 
 furnishes neither the glare of the noonday or 
 the deep darkness of the midnight. It is, 
 rather, a twilight atmosphere and, no matter 
 how far it goes, it must always be twilight. 
 Where everything is sun-clear and admitted 
 fact there is not faith, as we understand faith. 
 Where there is dense darkness there cannot be 
 faith. For a race whose beliefs are to come 
 out of a moral venture we must not know too 
 much and we must not know too little. So 
 we say that the modern scientific atmosphere 
 does not prohibit belief. It in a measure 
 aids belief, but it does not compel belief. It 
 puts the facts of the universe before us in 
 such a way that they make appeal to faith as 
 to an heroic quality in men. Some day, it 
 may be, we shall have the full light; but who- 
 ever or whatever has that full light, science 
 has it not. Science moves in twilight. But 
 in a measure she furnishes men with tools and 
 a spirit to move on in the twilight. And the 
 twilight gives us light enough to take the next 
 
 46 
 
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT 
 
 step. As moral beings under human condi- 
 tions that is all we need. What the moral re- 
 sponsibilities of angels or other celestial in- 
 telligences may be in the blaze of the full light 
 there is no call for us to consider. Our busi- 
 ness is not with angels, but with men striving 
 by moral endeavor to find God. For men we 
 may express a confidence that this world of 
 twilight furnishes the challenge and the test 
 by which faith shows its heroic quality and 
 by which it grows from more to more. For 
 some purposes twilight is better than noon- 
 day. 
 
 47 
 
II 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 A FAMILIAR characterization of the progress 
 of human history would have us believe that 
 progress is never forward along a plane or 
 straight up an incline, but that it is, rather, 
 through the upward windings of a spiral with 
 the gaze downward upon old and familiar 
 facts seen ever from newer and higher alti- 
 tudes. This characterization has especial 
 force as applied to the history of philosophy. 
 The charge is often made that philosophy is 
 but a threshing of the same old straw, or a 
 manipulation of the same old puzzles. The 
 figure of the spiral is much truer. The prob- 
 lems are, indeed, the same old problems, be- 
 cause the problems are the great fundamentals 
 of human experience. These problems are 
 forever being seen, however, from a loftier 
 height and in a wider circle. 
 
 Within the memory of persons not yet past 
 middle life the study of philosophy has made 
 practically a complete turn in its spiral as- 
 
 48 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 cent. The problems of matter, of mind, of 
 personality, of truth are to-day viewed from 
 a standpoint more favorable to faith than 
 they were twenty-five years ago. 
 
 It is commonly said to-day that materialism 
 is no longer a living force in philosophy. This 
 would seem to be an overstatement. Material- 
 ism of the old fashion, with matter, force, and 
 motion as they were conceived of in the early 
 seventies, is not in vogue, but materialism 
 which, while recognizing mind, nevertheless 
 puts material processes so completely in the 
 first place as to make mind dependent on 
 matter, is still a factor to be reckoned with. 
 There is reason to believe that the sympathies 
 of agnosticism to-day are very close to essen- 
 tial materialism. To be sure, the agnostic re- 
 sents the title "materialist," but too often 
 agnosticism, apparently well meant and sin- 
 cere, is a cover from which materialism 
 emerges for a sort of guerrilla warfare and to 
 which it retreats when at all seriously pur- 
 sued. At least we may say that the camp of 
 the agnostic does not hold many believers in 
 the primacy of the mind. A mind which be- 
 lieves in its own primacy will not long profess 
 agnosticism. 
 
 In discussing the passage away from the 
 
 49 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 emphasis on the older, more outspoken mate- 
 rialism we must not forget the great lasting 
 benefit which came from that discussion. In 
 that discussion the theory of evolution as an 
 ascent by natural processes took more and 
 more hold of the thinking of the time, all types 
 of mind and all realms of study feeling its 
 power. The theory was more than scientific 
 in the strict sense of the term. It became a 
 full philosophy with application to all phases 
 of thinking. Now, any theory of ascent 
 through struggle fits in so naturally with the 
 spirit of aggressive Christianity, and this 
 theory was so attractive, that, in spite of the 
 avowed materialism of many of its first ad- 
 herents, evolution was seized upon as express- 
 ing an essentially Christian theory of the uni- 
 verse. Considered simply as historic fact, the 
 theory of evolution, at least in those stages in 
 which Christian thinking had become at all 
 adjusted to it, must be looked upon as one of 
 the real forces making for an increase of faith. 
 Even when we come to look at the theory of 
 ascent through natural processes from the 
 more critical standpoint of the present day we 
 find much in it that lends comfort to belief. 
 In the previous lecture we tried to show how 
 chary we must be in professing to find direct 
 
 50 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 revelations from any realm of nature, but, 
 nevertheless, the thought of natural processes 
 as moving in accordance with a law which 
 sweeps them upward is in accordance with a 
 theistic and Christian view of the world. Ad- 
 mitting that there is to-day no substantial 
 agreement in the schools of the evolutionists 
 upon a satisfactory definition of evolution, ad- 
 mitting that there is some disagreement as to 
 the relative importance of the various factors 
 at work, admitting also that there is am- 
 biguity in the use of the terminology of the 
 evolutionists, as, for example, the oscillation 
 back and forth between the survival of the fit 
 as the survival of the merely fit to survive and 
 the survival of the ethically fit, admitting that 
 many facts which make against the theory are 
 ignored or slurred over, still the truth remains 
 that the present-day emphasis on upward 
 movement described in evolutionary terms is 
 a help to the view of the universe which faith 
 holds. 
 
 On the whole, too, the advance which has 
 come out of the discussion of the evolutionary 
 philosophy has been on the side of faith. The 
 old-fashioned materialism which saw in the 
 evolutionary processes merely the play and 
 interplay of material factors with mental proc- 
 
 51 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 esses as the shadowy and powerless accom- 
 paniment of the material processes had, some- 
 how, to meet the objection that, after all, 
 the evolutionary theory itself is, on such a 
 hypothesis, a shadowy attendant of no vital 
 significance. It had to meet the objection that 
 it is mind which has discovered and read off 
 the process. If the most significant philo- 
 sophical theory culminates in the contention 
 as to the powerlessness of mind, the fact must 
 remain that mind has been powerful enough 
 to discover its own powerlessness. 
 
 This, however, the thoroughgoing material- 
 ist would reject as a quibble, though on his 
 theory even quibbles must point to some fact 
 in the physical system. An objection that the 
 materialistic evolutionist could not wave aside 
 was the objection out of which came the dis- 
 tinction generally recognized to-day between 
 evolution as a description of processes and 
 evolution as a theory of causes. In the former 
 evolution may be just the method by which 
 Creative Intelligence proceeds. In the latter 
 we have Evolution capitalized and going of 
 itself, the real factors, of course, being ma- 
 terialistic. Then we have the puzzle as to how 
 that which is only matter can ever evolve into 
 anything else than matter. If we start with 
 
 2 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 matter, we must end with matter unless some- 
 thing is introduced along the line. Of course 
 the impotence of the theory of materialistic 
 evolution in this respect was clear to discern- 
 ing students from the outset, but to-day there 
 is pretty widespread recognition of the weak- 
 ness. The distance between such a work as 
 Bergson's Creative Evolution and the early 
 statements of evolutionary theory is clear at 
 a glance; but, apart from the utterances of 
 philosophers like Bergson, evolutionary the- 
 ory which denies power to mind is offensive 
 in a day which lays great stress on intellectual 
 force, especially on that high form of intellec- 
 tual force which we call administrative ability. 
 In the practical life of to-day administrative 
 skill is so rare as to win the highest prizes. 
 The power to make things come together so as 
 to reach any sort of right outcome is just the 
 power which the man on the street feels must 
 be put into an evolutionary process to get 
 from it anything worth while. The ordinary 
 man feels that if things are left to themselves, 
 they fall to pieces or run downhill. Now, 
 this language is fairly insolent to the philo- 
 sophical materialist, but it does express an 
 objection which comes naturally to the sur- 
 face when we see the infinitely complex 
 
 53 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 threads of the universe so managed as to come 
 to a measurably intelligible result. 
 
 How serious a problem this is for the 
 philosophical materialist appears also from 
 the fact of his insistence upon certain simplici- 
 ties like cells and molecules and atoms and 
 ions as the fundamental facts of the universe. 
 If these are the fundamentals, all that we see 
 is arrangement. Now, even though we abjure 
 altogether the old-and-fast design arguments, 
 we cannot get away from the suggestions of 
 mental activity in the presence of arrange- 
 ment. If it is urged that the arrangement is, 
 after all, only in the mind, and is really illu- 
 sion, we have to ask if the physical universe is 
 such that its processes bring forth illusions. 
 If the reply is that the illusion is born of 
 mind, the reflection arises that mind must be 
 rather powerful to beget such an illusion as 
 that cells are arranged into plants and ani- 
 mals. 
 
 It is really on this question of mind that 
 all theories of materialism go to pieces. The 
 recognition of the activity of mind is another 
 of those great recognitions which make for 
 faith. Materialists of all sorts have aban- 
 doned the crude notion that the brain secretes 
 thought. In their emphasis upon mental proc- 
 
 54 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 esses as the accompaniment of physical proc- 
 esses the materialists are unable to make the 
 connection more than coincidence. Their 
 statement cannot provide a theory of knowl- 
 edge. We cannot have a real theory of knowl- 
 edge until we reach some provision for 
 activity of consciousness. We have no desire 
 to quarrel about terms. Whether we call the 
 activity that of a soul, or a self, or a conscious- 
 ness, or a stream of consciousness, we can 
 have knowledge only as an agent of some sort 
 reads off a meaning or builds up a picture. 
 Suppose we were to hold that the outside 
 world is reported to the mind by being photo- 
 graphed there. A photograph is in itself a 
 creation in space with every point lying out- 
 side of every other point. It becomes a 
 photograph only as a mind sees it, and the 
 mind sees by building up the picture through 
 a mental process of incredible activity and 
 subtlety. 
 
 And this begins to lead us off toward a dis- 
 cussion of idealism as one of the contributing 
 factors making for faith. Before we enter 
 upon this phase of the discussion, however, 
 we call attention to the truth that the empha- 
 sis upon evolution and naturalistic processes 
 makes an atmosphere in which the old sub- 
 
 55 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 jective idealism does not thrive. Whether the 
 universe lies outside of all thought or not, 
 we are certainly most in harmony with the in- 
 tellectual temper of to-day in insisting that 
 the universe has its reality outside of our 
 thought in the sense that we did not create it. 
 The student of the evolutionary process is not 
 likely to allow himself to be persuaded that 
 the process is a process simply in his own 
 mind. To say that the universe is grounded 
 in thought is one thing. To say that it is 
 grounded in our thought is quite another. It 
 is this latter conception that is hardly likely 
 to thrive in the mind of one who knows geol- 
 ogy and biology and bacteriology. In ad- 
 dition to the favorable atmosphere which the 
 discussion of evolution has begotten for faith, 
 we must see in the stubborn facts of material- 
 ism a correction for faith. No one can tell 
 what absurdity the spirit of faith might foster 
 to-day if the barrier of a great objective order 
 were not in the way. 
 
 As we have indicated, we need not pay 
 much attention to subjective idealism. Still, 
 there is a current form of idealism which is 
 of mighty meaning. It starts from the fact 
 which we have mentioned above the consti- 
 tutive activity of the mind in knowing. When 
 
 56 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 one has really seen this another truth dawns 
 upon one, namely, that nothing which mind 
 cannot seize can ever be known. To be seized 
 by mind the object must be penetrated by re- 
 lationships which reach the inmost essence; 
 that is to say, the object must be constituted 
 throughout by thought. Here is the great con- 
 tribution of idealism to the spirit of faith. 
 Nothing knoicable can exist save as the ex- 
 pression of intelligence. Here is the very 
 heart of the modern argument for theism. 
 Things must either come within thought or go 
 out of existence. Any sort of hard-and-fast 
 stuff apart from thought is out of the ques- 
 tion. To affirm that any such sort of stuff 
 exists is to bring it within thought relation- 
 ships. So far as our minds are concerned, it 
 would be too great a strain on a theory to 
 make us, finite intelligences, responsible for 
 the creation of the thought system in the midst 
 of which we live. But we cannot understand 
 the world until we affirm that whoever laid its 
 foundations laid them in thought. A knowa- 
 ble universe is one of the great supports of 
 theism. 
 
 No sooner, however, had philosophy fixed 
 on the constitutive processes of the mind as 
 essential than it forgot the individual minds 
 
 67 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 whose activities had furnished a clue to the 
 problem and began to speak of thought itself 
 as the controlling force. The philosophers 
 did not say "Thinkers" or "Thinker"; they 
 said "Thought." Thought, at least by impli- 
 cation impersonal, was the great source and 
 center of all things. The study of the move- 
 ment away from this position, like the study 
 of the movement away from the early state- 
 ments of naturalism, is full of instruction. 
 The contribution of this idealism to theistic 
 thinking is, in all likelihood, an immortal one, 
 but the clarifications which have come with 
 the effective criticism of the system as a 
 system are hardly less important. The ideal- 
 ist of the type we are now considering thought 
 of the universe as the unfolding of a system of 
 logical implications. In the Hegelian lan- 
 guage the movement was thesis, as when an 
 affirmation is made, antithesis, as when the 
 contradictory is developed, synthesis, as when 
 a ground of reconciliation is reached between 
 a proposition and its contradictory. The uni- 
 verse is here conceived of as an evolution in 
 logic. The evolution as set forth by the Hege- 
 lian school was profoundly impressive, as im- 
 pressive in its way as the materialistic evolu- 
 tion of the early Darwinians. At one point 
 
 58 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 the same criticism is to be passed upon the 
 Hegelian evolution as was passed upon ma- 
 terialistic evolution. In both systems it was 
 impossible on the basis of the system itself to 
 get more out of the system than the adherents 
 started with. If matter is all, there is no use 
 searching for anything but matter in the out- 
 come. If impersonal thought is all, imper- 
 sonal thought is the outcome. In any strict 
 logical procedure we cannot get more into the 
 conclusion than there is in the premises. If 
 the universe is the expression of the thought 
 of a Living Mind, we can see how the evolu- 
 tionary process moves from lower to higher 
 it moves as new factors are continuously in- 
 troduced. If the universe is the expression of 
 a Living Mind moving according to logic, that 
 Mind must move as ours do to get anything 
 like progress it must introduce factors which 
 are really outside of and above the strict logi- 
 cal chain. Acute thinkers have maintained 
 that even in the strictest mathematical reason- 
 ing there is this introduction of factors from 
 without the strict line of reasoning. But ideal- 
 ism which turns around impersonalism is not 
 entitled to put anything but strict logic in, 
 and therefore can get nothing out but the 
 premises with which the reasoning began. For 
 
 59 
 
THE INCREASE OP FAITH 
 
 religious purposes there is not much choice be- 
 tween impersonal matter and impersonal 
 reason. 
 
 A further difficulty with the idealistic 
 systems of the impersonal type is that there 
 is really no way of getting any movement into 
 them. We speak, indeed, of logical move- 
 ments, but the movement is not in the logic. 
 Logic does not move. Something else moves 
 according to logic. Logic is simply the 
 statement of the rule of procedure. We can 
 see how this illusion arises. In the world 
 around us events do seem to progress accord- 
 ing to an inner logic. We speak of the logic 
 of a movement or of a situation. We say that 
 the logic of the case forbids a man or a cause 
 to stop at a particular place. There is a logi- 
 cal necessity for going on. Or the expression 
 of a proposition by one party does make neces- 
 sary the expression of the contrary by the 
 opposition, and the conflict between the two 
 must finally be reconciled. But in all of this 
 the movement is not in any system of imper- 
 sonal logic. The movement is in men and in 
 events. Sooner or later this is apt to dawn on 
 the believer in impersonal idealism, and then 
 he feels prone to dismiss the world of move- 
 ment as appearance, perhaps as illusion. The 
 
 60 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 final reality becomes the universe of fixed 
 logical relationships. This universe, on the 
 impersonalist theory, is not the vision before 
 the eyes of a living God whose mental life is 
 forever at the full. It is not a beatific vision 
 which might be worth while for religious re- 
 flection. It is impersonal a framework from 
 which everything of living significance has 
 been left out. We do not even have a "ballet 
 of bloodless categories." The categories are 
 indeed bloodless enough, but there is no pro- 
 vision for the movement of a ballet. In spite 
 of what we have said about the logic by which 
 men and events often seem to move, we must 
 now say that this movement is not possible to 
 pure logic after all. Life comes first and logic 
 afterward, with the driving power in life. 
 Now, however it may be with the highly de- 
 veloped logical tastes of the strict intellec- 
 tualist, the practical exclusion of the world 
 of movement from life as appearance or illu- 
 sion is not a result especially satisfactory 
 from the religious point of view. 
 
 A further objection to impersonal idealism 
 is its inability to furnish any sort of ground 
 for moral distinctions. The idealist would in- 
 sist most strenuously that logical necessity is 
 stronger even than the physical necessity of 
 
 61 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 materialism. But while there might con- 
 ceivably be inequalities of pressure in a sys- 
 tem of mechanical stresses and strains there 
 can hardly be such inequalities in logical ne- 
 cessity. There the necessity is distributed over 
 all parts alike. In a necessity of this sort 
 there is no justification for words like "free- 
 dom" and "good" and "bad" in the moral 
 sense. All things that are, are : that is the be- 
 ginning and the end. Good, bad, and indif- 
 ferent are morally all alike. All we can say 
 is that the feeling for the good in us is part of 
 the logical system, that the feeling toward the 
 bad is produced by the same system, that the 
 conflict between the two is produced by the 
 underlying logic, that the "give-and-take" of 
 all conflicts is the expression of logical neces- 
 sity. The emphasis on the reconciliation in 
 the final synthesis does not help much. The 
 question is as to how the differences ever 
 started. Moreover, reconciliation morally 
 takes place as each side is willing to give up 
 something in concession. Whither in such 
 case do the dropped-out elements of the con- 
 troversy go? If they are aliens, how did they 
 ever get in? The way to get around all such 
 questions is, of course, to ignore them. Under- 
 stand, now, we are not discussing these ques- 
 
 62 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 tions primarily with a philosophic motive. 
 We are interested chiefly in religious values, 
 and we have to record our feeling that there 
 is not much aid and comfort for religion in a 
 theory which by logical necessity puts all 
 moral conceptions on the same plane. 
 
 By this time the purely verbal character of 
 impersonal idealism ought to be clear to us. 
 The reconciliations of contradictions are 
 largely verbal. Everything is pasted together 
 under one term like the "Absolute" or "All." 
 Of course nothing is done to things themselves 
 in thus giving them a name. By the way, it 
 is worth while remembering that much of the 
 skepticism of religious fundamentals which has 
 come out of the Hegelian camp is really verbal. 
 How can the absolute ever take up relations 
 to the purely relative? How can the infinite 
 come into contact with the finite without ceas- 
 ing to be infinite? All this is empty. Re- 
 ligion is not concerned to maintain an Abso- 
 lute of this purely verbal nature. The passion 
 for unity is entirely intelligible in its aim and 
 purpose, but it is hard to see how so imperious 
 a passion can be satisfied with so meager an 
 outcome as throwing all things together and 
 calling them "All." And while the way to- 
 ward this abstraction is easy enough, the way 
 
 63 
 
THE INCREASE OP FAITH 
 
 back is sorely beset. We can get an "All" by 
 calling all things all, but even with the most 
 potent logic it is not possible to deduce the 
 world of concrete things as we see them by 
 looking upon the All. Admitting that every- 
 thing in the conclusion must be in the prem- 
 ises, and stocking these premises with all 
 the possibilities of the concrete world, we find 
 ourselves unable to deduce a single concrete 
 item from our philosophy. We are told that 
 logic reigns in all things, but we cannot de- 
 duce a single thing. And taking the world of 
 things inductively, we cannot tell why any- 
 thing is after we find it. We cannot tell why 
 any particular thing should be as it is and not 
 otherwise. All this would not distress us so 
 much if we were admittedly living in a world 
 where logic played but little part; but in a 
 world where logic is professedly everything it 
 is embarrassing not to be able to make more 
 use of logic. 
 
 Among the most concrete facts in our con- 
 crete world is the individual person. Just 
 how to get this world of persons out of a 
 system of impersonal thought is a hopeless 
 puzzle. By what processes of thesis, antith- 
 esis, and synthesis can we make the in- 
 dividuals whom we know fit into a system? 
 
 64 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 The last thing we can do with the men 
 and women and children whom we know 
 is to deduce them. If logic is lame in 
 trying to deduce a material universe, what 
 can we say of it in connection with a universe 
 of persons? The fact is that in all utterances 
 about persons as deductions or specifications 
 or generalizations of impersonal thought the 
 thinker has his reasonings curiously reversed. 
 Thinkers are really first and thoughts are 
 second. But some thought was in the uni- 
 verse before we in particular arrived, and 
 hence it is easy for the mind to hide behind its 
 own product, spelling Thought with a capital 
 and making the thinker the product of 
 Thought. Of course no thinker would be 
 guilty of saying that he himself is the product 
 of his own thinking, but it is easy for anyone 
 to think of himself as the product of Thought 
 which antedated himself thence the conclu- 
 sion becomes possible that Thought antedates 
 all thinkers. 
 
 Some suspicion of the difficulty at this 
 point seems to haunt the theories of all abso- 
 lute idealists. The only meeting of the diffi- 
 culty, however, is no meeting at all, but, 
 rather, an avoidance of it. An ambiguous 
 term like "Reason" is used. At one moment 
 
 65 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 Reason is impersonal thought. At another 
 moment Reason is a Reasoner. At one mo- 
 ment Intelligence is impersonal thought. At 
 another it is an active mind. Some idealists 
 come out openly with the avowal that they do 
 not believe in absolute idealism as an imper- 
 sonal system of thought. They believe in 
 Eternal Consciousness which wells up in in- 
 dividuals. All men are parts of the Eternal 
 Consciousness. Persons melt and fuse into 
 one another or, rather, into an all-embracing 
 Consciousness. This view has two considera- 
 tions in its favor. First is the historic fact 
 of the persistence of the view itself. It has 
 probably been held over wider reaches of space 
 and time than any other serious philosophical 
 construction of the universe, not in the Hege- 
 lian form indeed, but in various forms which 
 show Oriental or semi-Oriental influences. 
 Second, there is something in some phases of 
 conscious experience which seems to support 
 the conception. In moments of surpassing 
 friendship it is possible for one heart to enter 
 into such sympathy with another that two 
 personalities seem at least for the instant to 
 be fused. Or in transports of feeling which 
 sweep over men in groups the individual seems 
 lost in the mob, or crowd, or group, or national 
 
 66 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 consciousness. This suggests the possibility 
 of like emotional approach to an Eternal Con- 
 sciousness above and including what we look 
 upon as finite consciousness. 
 
 But the philosophical objections come back 
 with even greater vigor, especially the problem 
 of evil. It is bad enough if all the evils in the 
 world are deductions or specifications of our 
 impersonal system of thought. It is worse, 
 for religious values at least, if individual sin- 
 ners are parts of an Eternal Consciousness. 
 The desire of the sinner for his sin and his 
 joy in his sin are not merely reflections of a 
 desire and joy on the part of the Eternal Con- 
 sciousness : they are directly and immediately 
 the desire and joy of the Eternal Conscious- 
 ness. The Eternal Consciousness is Eternal 
 Saint and Eternal Sinner in one. Then there 
 is the difficulty of getting the individual con- 
 sciousness as we know it into any sort of re- 
 lation to the Eternal Consciousness. The mis- 
 leading expression "Stream of Consciousness" 
 has played a harmful influence here. Streams 
 can be diverted from the main channel and 
 can be run through sluiceways even down to 
 capillary proportions. But consciousness is 
 not a stream, except by figure of speech. It is 
 an active and indivisible unity. Suppose we 
 
 67 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 drop the word "consciousness" and ask as to 
 the possibility of so dealing with a man as to 
 run him off into sluiceways which become 
 other men! If we think of the Eternal Con- 
 sciousness as a Creative Will we can say that 
 the finite men are creations of that will, but 
 one will cannot be part of another will. 
 
 And so we are back again to the finite wills 
 which make up the world of persons. The 
 mind refuses to yield to materialism on the 
 one hand or to absolute idealism on the other. 
 The way out is through personalism, the recog- 
 nition of the living individualities around us 
 as the points from which our thinking must 
 start. We find ourselves in communication 
 with other minds, and as we reflect upon the 
 possibility of such communication we see 
 clearly that the communication must have 
 come about through the possibility of using 
 the world as an instrument and medium for 
 the communication of thought. But the 
 world clearly is independent of our thinking. 
 Back of it there must be a Thinker greater 
 than ourselves. In attributing personality to 
 the Cause of the universe we do not mean per- 
 sonality with the limitations of human con- 
 ditions. We seize upon personality as the 
 very highest power we know, and think of 
 
 68 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 the Cause of all things in terms of personal 
 life. 
 
 The objection to the personality of God 
 once took the form of emphasis upon the limi- 
 tations of personality, whereas God must be 
 thought of as the absolute and unlimited. 
 Much of the discussion on the point was pure- 
 ly verbal, but the point itself seemed to be 
 valid. To-day there is a rather strongly 
 marked protest against such absolutism in the 
 thought of God. A God who is infinite in the 
 sense that he is above all relations to the 
 finite, absolute in the sense that he cannot 
 touch the relative, eternal in the sense that 
 all that happens in time is illusion for him, 
 is not a God of the highest value religiously. 
 
 Two attempts to deliver the Power back of 
 all things from the emptiness of absolutism 
 are worthy of note. Professor William James 
 gave the last years of his life to the doctrine 
 of a finite God. It is fairly difficult to make 
 much of a system out of anything that James 
 did. James's whole soul seemed to be in a 
 state of chronic revolt against any suggestion 
 of system. At one time he seemed to be sym- 
 pathetic with the philosophy of Mill and Bain 
 and Spencer. At another he lent direct aid 
 and encouragement to the most orthodox Chris- 
 
 69 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 tianity. In a private letter to a friend he de- 
 clared that in his belief of the reality of the 
 play of spiritual forces upon the individual 
 life he could out-Methodist the Methodists. 
 It is clear that while James would have scru- 
 ples over such a term as "theist" he was, 
 nevertheless, a believer in God. But for him 
 God is a limited person among other persons. 
 James carried belief in pluralism to great 
 lengths. He saw no objection to believing 
 that the individual finite soul will exist for- 
 ever, and quite likely would have been willing 
 to hold a belief that the individual souls have 
 existed forever. Among these lives, or streams 
 of consciousness, God is the greatest. Just 
 how to provide for unity in such a scheme 
 James would not have cared. Quite likely he 
 would have been willing to hold that time and 
 space are a vast theater on which God and 
 angels and men play their several parts. In 
 all this James would have said that he was 
 serving religious interests that he was con- 
 tending not for a barren abstraction but for 
 the living God, the God of Abraham and Isaac 
 and Jacob. The philosophical objections to 
 the theory are apparent at a glance. But the 
 religious value is by no means slight. James 
 would bring God within reach, even though 
 
 70 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 he had to resort to dubious theological expe- 
 dients to accomplish the result. 
 
 The other attempt is by Bergson. Berg- 
 son's interest does not seem to be especially 
 religious. For God in the ordinary sense of 
 the word he would have no place at all. But 
 he does speak of God as Life, Freedom, Move- 
 ment unfolding in new and altogether unpre- 
 dictable manifestations. Life is spelled with 
 a capital and is responsible for the forward 
 push which means progress. There is all the 
 difference in the world between evolution as 
 conceived of by Bergson and evolution as con- 
 ceived of by the Spencerians. Spencerianism, 
 and even Darwinism, for that matter, is no- 
 where subjected to more searching criticism 
 than in Bergson's Creative Evolution. Life 
 is conceived of after the analogy of conscious- 
 ness to such an extent that matter itself seems 
 at times to be a product of consciousness. Yet 
 consciousness is not the formal intellectual 
 life as we know it. We can hardly tell just 
 what Bergson conceives consciousness to be, 
 but his suggestions point to intuition and feel- 
 ing as nearer the heart of reality than is the 
 speculative intellect. Bergson overlooks the 
 truth that the concrete facts with which we 
 have to do are just the individual lives. He 
 
 71 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 throws a blanket-term, "Life," over all these. 
 There is no way of getting from "Life" to 
 lives. There is no attempt at answering the 
 score of questions that crowd upon us when 
 we try to come to close quarters with the sys- 
 tem. But Bergson's view does have this great 
 virtue it is alive and it does provide for a 
 real struggle with a growing reality. What- 
 ever God Bergson would admit at all is him- 
 self in the movement. God is himself move- 
 ment and struggle and development. Just 
 where Bergson would find anything to stand 
 across the flow of life and measure the flow, or 
 even discern the flow, is nowhere told us, but 
 the impression Bergson produces is whole- 
 some. We are in the presence of real forces 
 engaged in real movement. Whatever God 
 there is, is not afar off in the heavens, but is 
 here now. God is not satisfactory from the 
 standpoint of speculative intellect, but the 
 speculative intellect is not itself satisfac- 
 tory. The deep life-needs must be satisfied. 
 If we are willing to put the critical under- 
 standing to one side and resolve not to ask 
 questions, there is much in Bergson's book 
 that is stimulating and even bracing. His God 
 too, if he has one, is a God of the living. 
 But works like those of James and Bergson 
 
 72 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 have their chief value as protests, and as pro- 
 tests their value is great. It is the conviction 
 of the present writer that religious thinking 
 has suffered harm from the systematic theo- 
 logians who have laid such stress on the meta- 
 physical perfections of God that his value as 
 an object to be sought for worship and com- 
 panionship has been seriously impaired. To 
 take a single illustration, the establishment 
 of the doctrine of the ideality of time is a great 
 philosophical achievement. It is to be doubted 
 whether in the history of philosophy there has 
 been more profound reasoning than that which 
 has gone to show that time is essentially a 
 mental form under which the mind works, 
 that a man's present is in a sense equivalent 
 to the range of his mental activity, that with 
 the Supreme Intelligence there may be a grasp 
 which makes all things present. Now, while 
 this doctrine is clear enough to the metaphy- 
 sician, it may be so stated as to harm religious 
 life. It may be so interpreted as to mean that 
 with God everything of life and movement is 
 of slight consequence. Or it may be taken to 
 mean that with God everything is jumbled 
 .into a confused happening together. The 
 most serious result, however, is that which 
 would make change mean nothing for God. 
 
 73 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 God is changeless in what sense? In the sense 
 that his own development is forever at the full, 
 but not in the sense that the changes on earth 
 and in men mean nothing to him. A satisfac- 
 tory construction of the reality of change for 
 God may be beyond us, but in that case we 
 would better leave the question of construc- 
 tion open rather than close it with a philos- 
 ophy that does harm to the religious needs of 
 the human heart. While we must not give 
 ourselves up to contradictions of logic, we 
 must follow James and Bergson in putting 
 the claims of life above those of the strictly 
 speculative intellect. 
 
 So then we accept the challenge of the 
 modern protests against the absolute and the 
 infinite and declare for certain limitations in 
 a God who is to be a living force with men. 
 It may appear later that these limitations are 
 in part self-assumed and in part the expres- 
 sions of moral fullness of life, but in any case 
 we must get God near to men. It is worth 
 while to make the Almighty mighty. 
 
 In the first place, a Creator of the universe 
 is bound by the creations which he makes. We 
 have spoken of the universe as founded in 
 thought. If there is nothing in existence 
 apart from thought, and the universe is a vast 
 
 74 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 set of activities expressing thought, the 
 thought must move according to a divine 
 grammar and syntax and rhetoric if it is to 
 be of service for men. Men must not be dis- 
 mayed if they cannot understand all of the 
 language, but they may expect to understand 
 some of it. The universe may not be intelli- 
 gible, but it must be more than a set of inco- 
 herent ejaculations. This requirement would 
 rule out arbitrary whim and caprice. Now, 
 thus far there would seem to be no limitation 
 upon the divine beyond the requirement that 
 every utterance be rational, which is, of 
 course, not to be thought of as a limitation. 
 But when we think of the universe as a system 
 we must think of the Creator as tied up to the 
 demands of that system. That is to say, if 
 there is to be system, the Creator cannot 
 thereafter treat a particular part as if it stood 
 by itself alone. He might treat it otherwise 
 than he does if it stood alone, or if it were part 
 of a smaller system, or if it were in a different 
 system. Some thinkers have gone so far as 
 to seek for an explanation of the problem of 
 evil in the conflicts which may arise between 
 the good of the parts of the system and the 
 good of the whole of the system. Without 
 subscribing to such extreme doctrine we may 
 
 75 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 all admit that the carrying on of a finite 
 system puts limitations on the Cause back of 
 it. These limitations come to even clearer 
 light when we think of the relations between 
 the Cause and Ground of all things and the 
 individual souls as we know them. Espe- 
 cially is this true if we are to think of the in- 
 dividuals as free. How to establish freedom 
 speculatively we do not pretend to say, but 
 the objections to freedom have usually been in 
 the name of an Absolute or Infinite for whom 
 or for which freedom of men would be a dis- 
 turbing factor. If the world is Absolute Mat- 
 ter or Absolute Idea, freedom for the individ- 
 ual seems out of the question. If the World- 
 Cause is a Person whose sovereignty must not 
 be divided with any other will whatsoever, the 
 freedom of the individual must be given up. 
 But, on the other hand, freedom at least seems 
 to be here as a throbbing fact in the life of the 
 individual. We are all forced to admit the 
 real limitations upon this freedom. It may 
 be that many of our choices even when we 
 seem to ourselves most free are the play and 
 interplay of underlying necessities, but after 
 every such admission we have to come back 
 to the conviction of the fact of freedom in the 
 individual. Over against this is the neces- 
 
 76 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 sity of some limitation for the Back-Lying 
 Power. Why not accept the limitation? If 
 an individual is free, the Cause and Ground 
 of things must accept limitations upon him- 
 self as a consequence of that freedom. The 
 old picture of the master leading a servant is 
 in place here. The chain binds the servant, 
 but it also limits the master. How much more 
 real is the limitation if the servant is rebel- 
 lious or sulky? This is only a poor illustra- 
 tion, to be sure, but it has at least a sugges- 
 tive value. If there are free individuals in the 
 world, their wills must be taken into account 
 in physical and mental and moral spheres. 
 There is the possibility of conflict between the 
 souls of men and the soul of God, or there is 
 the possibility of cooperation. Even in the 
 latter case, however, there is limitation for 
 God. The best human will may be so slow as 
 to impose delay upon a divine will. All this 
 is at times obscured by the fact that after a 
 clearly evil course has been chosen by human 
 wills good seems to result in the end which, 
 of course, can mean only that a Higher Intelli- 
 gence has made the best possible of a bad 
 situation. 
 
 Furthermore, we can see that there must be 
 limitation for God in any special work of 
 
 77 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 revelation which he wills to undertake. If the 
 movement is to show itself through a national 
 development, the laws which govern national 
 life must be observed. Now, it has long been 
 the special claim of Christianity that God has 
 for his glory that he is willing to take upon 
 himself limitations for the sake of reaching 
 men. One of the great attractions of the doc- 
 trine of incarnation for men has been the 
 thought that in the incarnation the gift of God 
 has really meant cost to God. The Christian 
 thinker has always maintained that the will- 
 ingness of God to assume limitations has come 
 out of the moral fullness of the divine life. 
 One of the encouraging signs of present-day 
 religious thinking is the movement away from 
 the God of the abstract to the God of the con- 
 crete, in spite of the fact that connection with 
 the concrete means limitation. 
 
 But what becomes of the modern doctrine 
 of the divine immanence if such considera- 
 tions as those just adduced are allowed to 
 have sway? Has not the doctrine of imma- 
 nence as held to-day been a help to faith in 
 bringing God near? Undoubtedly it has, but 
 undoubtedly also it has wrought some confu- 
 sion to faith. God is in all things in one sense, 
 but not in all senses. There are degrees of 
 
 78 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 nearness. God is in the world in the sense 
 that the world is the expression of his thought 
 and activity. But all thoughts are not the 
 same thoughts. We have to keep away from 
 that old fallacy of "Thought" spelled with a 
 capital. The world is not so much Thought as 
 thoughts. The value of the doctrine of imma- 
 nence is that it does away with the idea of any 
 sort of mechanical existence with laws of its 
 own which God must break in order to reach 
 men. This, however, merely furnishes a start- 
 ing point. The thought of God in a particular 
 situation can be determined only from a study 
 of that situation. God is in the lives of men, 
 but not in the lives of all men alike. He is in 
 the lives of bad men. In him even the worst 
 of men live and move and have their being. 
 But in what sense is God in the life of a bad 
 man? In the sense that he is giving the gift 
 of life even to a bad man, and seeking to work 
 through the life of the man to lift him out of 
 evil. But God is not in the bad man in the 
 same sense that he is in the good man. In one 
 sense God is near all men alike. In another 
 sense everything depends upon the man. 
 There really have to be about as many phras- 
 ings of the doctrine of divine nearness as 
 there are different men. 
 
 79 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 But all this seems to leave us at amazingly 
 loose ends. We have not a system of the kind 
 to which we have been used. No, we have not, 
 but we have an open world before us. We 
 have finite lives which can come progressively 
 nearer to God. 
 
 And here we reach at last a final question. 
 We have seen the movement away from the 
 old materialism, through absolute idealism to 
 personalism. It is in the lives of persons that 
 we are to seek for fuller revelations of divine 
 life. But what, after all, in the lives of these 
 persons is to give us the clue to the truth for 
 which we seek? 
 
 There is an answer ready at hand in a popu- 
 lar movement which is called pragmatism. It 
 may be well to approach this final question 
 through some suggestions thrown out by this 
 present-day system of philosophical thinking. 
 Pragmatism is the affirmation that beliefs are 
 to be tested by their consequences in the life of 
 the believers. There is really nothing new in 
 the system except the brilliancy of the treat- 
 ment of men like James and the extraordinary 
 vogue which the system, if it can be called 
 a system, has reached through falling in with 
 the urgent demands of the time for emphasis 
 upon practical results and actual contacts 
 
 80 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 with the life which we are now living. All 
 that is important in the system reaches back 
 to Kant. It will be remembered that Kant 
 showed that formal proof of the existence of 
 God and of the facts of freedom and immortal 
 life is impossible. He did, however, insist that 
 these ideas are the postulates of the practical 
 reason. While we cannot formally prove them 
 to be true, we, nevertheless, hold fast to them 
 for their practical value. While they are not 
 constitutive principles of the reason, they are 
 in a profound sense regulative principles not 
 only for reason but for life. The line of phil- 
 osophical development, however, did not fol- 
 low from Kant's emphasis on the practical 
 reason. It went through Fichte to Hegel and 
 the absolute idealist. Then came Ritschl in 
 protest against the absolute idealists with his 
 denial of any considerable place in theology 
 for speculative methods of the metaphysical 
 sort. For him religious ideas were "value- 
 judgments" showing their worth by their value 
 in life. 
 
 There is not much sign that the pragmatists 
 of to-day know the Eitschlian system. There 
 is nothing German about present-day prag- 
 matism. It is impatient of that systemization 
 which we think of as characteristically Ger- 
 
 81 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 man. And pragmatism is not in the slightest 
 degree theological in its origin. James him- 
 self began his work with studies in physiology. 
 It was only in quite late years that his reli- 
 gious interest became outspoken. Moreover, 
 pragmatism is quite ambitious. It would ask 
 us to accept a criterion for truth in all realms. 
 Like the believers in all new systems, the be- 
 lievers in the all-sufficiency of pragmatism 
 carry their claims to great extremes. And all 
 sorts and conditions of men claim to be prag- 
 matists. In some puttings of the belief it 
 would seem that pragmatism would allow a 
 man to believe all that works well with him, 
 or that agrees with him, or that he fancies. A 
 man might preach the doctrine of the brother- 
 hood of man, or he might be a follower of 
 Nietzsche, and still be a pragmatist. He might 
 be an individualist or a socialist, a theist or 
 a pantheist, or a polytheist or a pluralist or an 
 absolutist. As a matter of historic truth the 
 pressure of real or fancied life-needs has been 
 back of all these beliefs. When we hear that 
 a man is a pragmatist the next question may 
 well be as to what else he is. Accepting prag- 
 matism may mean that the door is open to ac- 
 cepting anything or everything else. 
 
 The man who first hears of pragmatism 
 82 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 may feel that at last the way is open for him 
 to believe anything or everything or nothing, 
 just as he pleases. A teacher in ethics has 
 pointed out that one hearing the principles of 
 Epicurus for the first time might imagine 
 that at last the doors are open to all manner 
 of pleasure-seeking with the sanction of 
 ethical precept, but that such a one will find 
 as soon as he comes close to his problem that, 
 after all, many doors are closed. So with 
 pragmatism, for pragmatism with its doctrine 
 of consequences as the test of truth must 
 recognize : 
 
 1. The existence of an objective order. The 
 consequences must be the consequences of the 
 long run. A man might declare that the con- 
 sequences are best for him in denying the 
 existence of a material world, and he might 
 get on comfortably with the belief for a while, 
 but not for long. 
 
 2. The pragmatist must make some conces- 
 sion to logic, else there would be no sense in 
 reasoning. It would seem rather absurd to 
 try to find a system with no reliance upon 
 logic. Of course some pragmatists go so far 
 as to make even mathematical axioms prac- 
 tical postulates, virtually denying the mind 
 any power of insight on its own account. 
 
 83 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 3. The pragmatist must concede the exis- 
 tence of others besides himself, but with this 
 concession there must be a social as well as an 
 individual set of consequences for beliefs, and 
 the two sets will often come into conflict. 
 There is no relief here on the pragmatist basis. 
 
 4. The pragmatist must yield to the au- 
 thority of consequences as these have revealed 
 themselves in great individuals. 
 
 5. The pragmatist must take into account 
 inner as well as outer consequences, else the 
 system will sink into a low order of utilita- 
 rianism. The most practical consequences are 
 not necessarily outer. 
 
 Thus we might go on. Still, after we have 
 said all this we must say further that the 
 preaching of the pragmatic philosophy does 
 pave the way for the preaching of an essen- 
 tially Christian doctrine. The Founder of 
 Christianity taught that discipleship means 
 the doing of the deeds of the kingdom, that he 
 that heareth the words and doeth them is the 
 one who gets the rock foundation, that he 
 that doeth the will of God shall know the doc- 
 trine of God. Christ came that men might 
 have life, but life has deeper roots than specu- 
 lation. Life flowers out into Christian con- 
 sciousness and Christian consciousness in 
 
 84 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 turn sends new powers back into the root and 
 tree and branch. 
 
 Our long discussion comes to this that the 
 movements of modern philosophy are not 
 away from faith, but, rather, in the direction 
 of faith. Nothing in philosophy itself can 
 establish the Christian standpoint; but noth- 
 ing in philosophy can block the way of Chris- 
 tian revelation, and much can aid that revela- 
 tion. There are no mechanical or idealistic 
 systems which, standing in their own light, 
 are a barrier to the demands of Christian life. 
 
 The demands of Christian life ! Life shows 
 itself in its power to make demands and to 
 seize what it requires to satisfy those demands. 
 The Christian conception needs the idea of a 
 material universe in which God shows at least 
 a measure of this thought. While we might 
 never suspect the presence of God in the world 
 from an inductive scrutiny alone, we do find 
 signs of his presence when we search for the 
 plan which we feel must be there. We need 
 the idea of a vast spiritual organism, a body 
 of God, which is to set forth the immensity of 
 the divine Life, and as we work with this de- 
 mand in mind we find a satisfaction which 
 we believe is an indication that we are on the 
 path to the truth. We feel the need of the 
 
 85 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 presence of God in the life of the individual, 
 and we hold fast to the idea of prayer, not for 
 extraordinary answers here and there, but for 
 the increasing life in him who prays. 
 
 It may seem to some that we have made out 
 a rather fragmentary and broken plight for 
 current philosophic thinking. This is just 
 the advantage which confronts the student to- 
 day. The tight systems are broken up. The 
 windows and the doors are open. It is per- 
 missible for us to believe that the divine Spirit 
 is near enough to us to find us and to help us 
 on and up. Whatever seems to be on and up 
 we shall reach after. And if we find ourselves 
 moving on and up, we shall feel that we are 
 on the right path. 
 
 Of course truth is truth and finally stands 
 in its own right. But the final truth which 
 thus stands in its own right is not the truth 
 of speculative statement, but the truth of life. 
 A life, a moral person this is the good on its 
 own account. If this is the good-in-itself, we 
 have to consider speculative statements in 
 somewhat of an instrumental capacity. They 
 are the tools by which the mind takes its direc- 
 tion and surveys its path. A belief may be 
 useful for one time and not for another. Or, 
 to make the matter more vital still, the belief 
 
 86 
 
THE PHILOSOPHIC OUTLOOK 
 
 is the food or part of the food on which the 
 life feeds. The final test is the test of life. 
 And thus the life moves on toward God. The 
 world is open; the sky is free. Whatever the 
 life finds necessary for its growth it will take. 
 It cannot make itself at home in the world hy 
 denying the facts of science, or the truths of 
 logic, or the foundations of social order. It 
 will search for the truth in any system which 
 has presented itself or which will present it- 
 self. It will live upon the truth of the system 
 so far as it can and will throw away the error. 
 If some object that this is unsystematic 
 eclecticism, the only reply is that life is al- 
 ways eclectic. The living organism lays hold 
 on air and sunshine and water and food in 
 large variety for the sake of preserving and 
 propagating itself. The great revelation is 
 through the organism which we may call the 
 body of the Spirit of God the family of be- 
 lievers in God. Formal statements are the 
 outputs of the vitality of this organism. The 
 statements must not be so held as to smother 
 or crush the life of the organism itself. For 
 that life itself is the center around which all 
 else should turn. A revealing God must limit 
 himself to the persons through whom he 
 works, but through the lives obedient to him 
 
 87 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 he makes an increasingly large and significant 
 revelation of himself. The life of a good man 
 stands in its own right because paradoxical 
 as the words seem it points beyond itself to 
 the life of God. 
 
 88 
 
Ill 
 
 SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 IT is the aim of this lecture to show that the 
 widening of the social horizon works in aid 
 of faith by bringing into prominence the great 
 human ideals. Anything which lays stress on 
 what we may call essential humanity works 
 for faith. It may be that the upholders of 
 ideals of human rights in political and indus- 
 trial and social realms are not themselves 
 adherents of religious beliefs. Agitators and 
 propagandists of doctrines which work for 
 lofty human ideals may themselves be agnos- 
 tics or skeptics so far as religious beliefs are 
 concerned, and yet, all unconsciously to them- 
 selves, may be working for the increase of re- 
 ligious faith. Anything which exalts our con- 
 ception of what human life ought to be is a 
 veritable revealer of God. We cannot enrich 
 a human ideal without at the same time en- 
 riching our idea of God. 
 
 At the very outset of such a discussion we 
 are met by the urgent insistence of those who 
 
 89 
 
THE INCBEASE OF FAITH 
 
 hold to the doctrine of the economic interpre- 
 tation of history, that the effective force in 
 setting human ideals high in the thinking of 
 men has not been the perception of those 
 ideals themselves. Physical necessities have 
 been the great driving powers, we are told. 
 Hunger, the demand for better houses and 
 costlier raiment these are the compelling 
 forces. We do not feel any need to discuss 
 this claim at length. We may, however, ven- 
 ture one or two remarks. 
 
 First, if the theory is true it is rather an 
 odd fact that these physical forces reach their 
 highest effectiveness when baptized with a 
 moral and ideal name. No one denies that 
 hunger is a driving force in the life of society. 
 Men who are working for human rights may 
 frankly say that they are trying to get more 
 bread for hungry mouths. But before the 
 agitation is complete the movement takes on 
 the form of a moral appeal. The cynic may 
 say that all this is hypocrisy, but, neverthe- 
 less, lifting the appeal to the moral realm 
 gives it added power. But even this is some- 
 what aside from the present purpose ; we shall 
 return to it later. 
 
 We pass now to a second remark, namely, 
 that we are not especially concerned with the 
 
 90 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 order in which ideals emerge in the conscious- 
 ness of men. It may be that the economic im- 
 pulse comes first and the moral impulse arises 
 as an afterthought. We are not thinking 
 especially of before and after. It may be that 
 men do not see the full significance of moral 
 ideals until economic issues have been settled. 
 To use the common expression, as long as 
 there is money in a particular course the 
 moral aspect may not have a chance to reveal 
 itself. This economic view, with all its truth, 
 is in these days much overemphasized, but, we 
 repeat, we are not especially concerned with 
 the sequence in which ideals emerge. The fact 
 is that the ideals do emerge, and that they 
 seem to us to make for faith. There is con- 
 stant need of care against that old fallacy that 
 we can judge the worth of an idea wholly by 
 noticing the circumstances of its origin. 
 Holders of evolutionary theory often fancy 
 that they can get at the worth of an idea by 
 determining its place in the evolutionary pro- 
 cession. The main feature of a human ideal 
 is not so much the path by which it has come 
 as the direction in which it points. The ideal 
 may arise from the earth, but if it arises to- 
 ward God it is worth our study. 
 
 Perhaps the best start for our general pur- 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 pose can be found in some illustrations from 
 American history. It will be understood that 
 there is no attempt here to trace a movement 
 through history as a technically trained his- 
 torical student would trace such a movement. 
 We are, of course, dependent upon others for 
 the facts here presented. All that we claim is 
 that the facts point in the direction of an en- 
 larging human ideal, and that they tend to in- 
 crease our respect for men and humanity. 
 
 As a first illustration of a movement which 
 would tend to increase our respect for hu- 
 manity, and especially for democracy, we take 
 the period of the American Civil War and the 
 years which immediately followed the con- 
 flict. We can imagine the gasp of astonish- 
 ment with which some will greet the proposal 
 to show from democracy's conduct in war a 
 reason for faith in humanity and for respect 
 for humanity. We trust that we shall not be 
 supposed to suggest that there is anything 
 ennobling or refining in war. It is just be- 
 cause war in itself is hideous that we use the 
 illustration. It may increase our trust in de- 
 mocracy to see how it carries itself in seasons 
 of grievous trial. We submit democracy to 
 the test of severest conditions. It had long 
 been said before the Civil War that the test 
 
 92 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 of democracy would come in time of war. The 
 fact that democracy stood the test well is an 
 item to be set down to humanity's credit. Of 
 course it will not be understood that we are 
 committing so palpable an error as to identify 
 humanity and democracy, but, surely, no 
 greater promise for humanity could be found 
 than to find a democracy of some twenty mil- 
 lions of people acquitting itself with surpass- 
 ing credit in time of strain. 
 
 To begin at a plane which is decidedly 
 lower than the moral aspects we hope later to 
 discuss, discerning critics have said that even 
 in its military aspects the conduct of the war 
 was a great item to be set down to democracy's 
 credit. Spenser Wilkinson, a foremost Eng- 
 lish military authority, has used the American 
 Civil War as an illustrative commentary on 
 the remark of the great Prussian whose work 
 on war did so much to make modern Germany 
 possible, the remark of Clausewitz that when a 
 whole people go to war, animated to the last 
 man with a common purpose, the war, while it 
 may be hesitating in its first policy, will 
 finally take on as distinct and definite and 
 true a form as if it were being conducted by a 
 dictator by a vast military genius with pro- 
 fessional soldiers obedient to his will. The 
 
 93 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 only difference will be that it may conceiva- 
 bly require a longer time for a nation in arms 
 to get itself into effective action than for 
 the dictator. Spenser Wilkinson applies this 
 remark, as we have said, to the Civil War. 
 Taking the whole four years together, the war 
 may be looked upon as one battle on a large 
 scale. The history of the war thus becomes 
 quite simple. It will not suffice to say that 
 the North won by sheer weight of numbers. 
 The weight of numbers had to be skillfully ap- 
 plied. The North won by turning the left 
 flank of the Confederacy as a whole. One 
 blow struck the Confederacy in twain along 
 the line of the Mississippi. Another broke it 
 from Chattanooga to Atlanta. Then while 
 the head and front of the Confederate resist- 
 ance was held fast in the East, the Northern 
 armies moved east to the sea from Atlanta 
 and thence north, piercing the vitals of the 
 Confederacy in all directions. The contention 
 of Wilkinson is that this plan is as simple and 
 direct and as effective as if conceived by the 
 mind of a Napoleon. It will not avail against 
 this contention to say that, after all, the work 
 was done by professional generals. In the 
 beginning it was true that the soldiers of the 
 democracy thought that one man was as likely 
 
 94 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 to be a good captain as another man, 
 and sought to fill official positions by ballot. 
 As the war progressed, however, all this 
 changed and the conduct of the war passed 
 into hands trained to war. But the people 
 themselves were responsible for this change, 
 and the generals, after all, acted only in re- 
 sponse to a popular demand. Grant, the gen- 
 eral w r ho cared least for the pressure of public 
 opinion, on more than one occasion refused to 
 turn back because the people were looking for 
 advance in a particular direction and would 
 interpret any sort of a backward step as a 
 defeat. The plan, as a whole, reflected the 
 will of the people. If it be objected that in a 
 war between contestants who were practi- 
 cally two peoples the Prussian theory would 
 call for like unity and simplicity of plan on 
 the other side, the answer must be that the 
 other side was essentially on the defensive 
 and had to adapt its plans to the plans of the 
 offensive. 
 
 Now, all this may seem rather far-fetched, 
 but Wilkinson has this much on his side 
 that, on the w r hole, the progress of the North 
 was a miracle of victory, and would seem to 
 indicate that even in the intellectual insights 
 required in a highly technical field a whole 
 
 95 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 people, under the stress of a great crisis, can 
 come to an understanding which in a single 
 individual would be superlative genius and to 
 a force of will which in an individual would 
 be entirely titanic. The significance of figures 
 like Lincoln and Grant is partly in this, that 
 Lincoln on the political side and Grant on the 
 military side were incarnations of the good 
 sense of the people. In the words of Lincoln 
 the people heard their own thought and in the 
 blows of Grant saw their own deeds. Neither 
 was a man standing apart from his time. 
 Each had his meaning in the democracy of 
 which he was an expression and an agent. 
 
 But great as is the credit to be given de- 
 mocracy on the more intellectual side at the 
 time of crisis, the credit to be given on the 
 moral side is greater still. Bad as is war in 
 any case, this war was undertaken on both 
 sides in the name of an ideal. We may say 
 all we please about the pressure of economic 
 forces and about the irreconcilable conflict be- 
 tween two hostile industrial systems. We are 
 willing to grant that the conflict was one be- 
 tween corn and cotton as to which should be 
 king, but that was not all of the meaning. On 
 the one side was the broad appeal to human 
 rights, and on the other the rights of certain 
 
 96 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 States to rule themselves. Each side claimed 
 to be fighting for an ideal of human liberty. 
 One side may have been wholly right and the 
 other wholly wrong, or both sides may have 
 been partly right and partly wrong, with one 
 side more predominantly right than the other. 
 The essential fact is that the underlying, over- 
 powering motives did not come to full force 
 until they had been given a moral statement. 
 Now, it is simply out of the question to say 
 that the masses on one side or the other were 
 playing the part of hypocrites. Human ideals 
 seemed to be at stake, and this gave the con- 
 test its desperate fury. No matter what we 
 may say about the conspiracies and insinceri- 
 ties of leaders, it is impossible to maintain 
 that the people on either side thought they 
 were fighting for other than a moral ideal. 
 The progress of time has shown that the ideals 
 of humanity for which the North stood meant 
 more for the race, that the right of the people 
 to rule was more closely bound up with the 
 cause of the Union, that the final platform of 
 the Union was for the broader charter of hu- 
 man rights. It may seem strange to us that 
 any man could invoke the aid of God in try- 
 ing to secure bread earned by the sweat of 
 another man's brow, but we would do well to 
 
 97 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 heed the statesman's word that in this we 
 judge not that we be not judged. 
 
 The war too was carried through in as hu- 
 mane a fashion as possible. Atrocities com- 
 mitted in prisons here and there, for which 
 the scarcity of provisions and the desperate 
 nature of the conflict itself furnished some ex- 
 cuse, ought not to obscure our eyes to the truth 
 that in spite of bloodshed beyond all parallel 
 the warfare did not brutalize or vulgarize the 
 mass of the soldiers. Outrages and rapacity 
 there were in plenty, but when we reflect that 
 with the war at its height a million of men 
 were engaged on one side, the wonder is that 
 barbarities were so few. When the conflict 
 had ceased there was, indeed, some clamor for 
 revenge, but the victor's hands were not 
 stained with the blood of political prisoners. 
 And when the armies were disbanded wonder 
 of wonders! they went back quietly to the 
 pursuits of peace. Now, we protest that we 
 would not say one word in glorification of 
 war, but the manner in which democracy went 
 through this period of strain with so little of 
 moral damage tends to increase our confi- 
 dence in the loyalty of masses of men to high 
 ideals. The period of reconstruction, horrible 
 as it was, was amazingly brief for a period in 
 
 98 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 the life of a nation, and was partly the out- 
 come of a real, though partly doctrinaire, de- 
 votion to a human ideal. The conceptions 
 which philanthropists held of the freedman in 
 those days seem very humorous to us as we 
 look back, but the conceptions were a credit to 
 the men who held them. Longfellow repre- 
 sented the Negro's dream as carrying him back 
 to Africa, where "once more a king he strode." 
 The poet evidently knew very little about the 
 dreams of the actual slave, but the misconcep- 
 tion was really a tribute to Longfellow. The 
 Negro problem is hard enough for us after 
 nearly fifty years of experiment. There is 
 little excuse for harshness in criticism of the 
 failures of the first experiments. The idealists 
 of the day lacked knowledge in a realm where 
 there were no precedents. And they had to 
 cope with outrageous adventurers and with the 
 national reaction after four years of tremen- 
 dous emotional upheaval, a reaction showing 
 itself in indifference on the part of many as to 
 how the nation should discharge its responsi- 
 bilities. But, on the whole, considering the 
 lack of detailed and accurate data on the 
 working of social institutions in untried 
 hands, the wonder is that so little damage was 
 done. The working of popular thought, 
 
 99 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 through the whole period, tends to deepen our 
 respect for the people's respect for humanity. 
 Passing from a period which is to all prac- 
 tical intents and purposes closed, to one in the 
 midst of which we are now moving, we call 
 attention to the significance for American so- 
 ciety of the passing away of the American 
 frontier. Professor Frederic J. Turner has 
 written with profound instructiveness on this 
 theme. He even sets a date to mark the time 
 when the nation passed out of one stage and 
 into another. This he finds to have been the 
 year 1890, when, according to the census, it 
 had become no longer possible, at least in any 
 considerable part of the country, to secure 
 land free from all cost except just the cost of 
 appropriating it. To be sure, there are still 
 many parts of the country where essentially 
 frontier conditions prevail, but these are be- 
 coming fewer and smaller. The situation is 
 somewhat as if a continent-wide stream which 
 was moving easily toward the West had at 
 last reached a check and had come to a stand- 
 still or to eddying currents. So far as the 
 exceedingly difficult problems are concerned, 
 the real frontiers of to-day are the cities. The 
 movement to-day is toward the cities, and the 
 new problems are city problems. 
 
 100 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 Professor Turner thinks that the passing 
 away of the frontier will bring in indeed, has 
 already brought in a new type of democracy, 
 a type in which social elements are bound to 
 predominate more largely than in the individu- 
 alistic type of the frontier. In the old days 
 of the frontier a settler was not likely to live 
 near enough to his neighbor to be disturbed 
 by him; there was room enough to allow the 
 most quarrelsome neighbors to get along with- 
 out too frequent clash. If the neighbor be- 
 came intolerable, it was possible for the ag- 
 grieved or disturbed man to move on to other 
 lands to be had for the taking. That day has 
 long since gone. It is now nearer the fact to 
 say that our problem is to get along with the 
 neighbor whether we like him or not. At 
 most, all we can hope for by change is a change 
 of neighbors. The neighbor is bound to us 
 henceforth. 
 
 There is no denying that with the passing of 
 the individualistic type of democrat we have 
 lost much. There was a romance in the 
 independence of the pioneer which is very de- 
 lightful to read about. There was a resource- 
 fulness, too, that never ceases to amaze us. 
 There was an inner moral strength altogether 
 surprising. But there was another side. The 
 101 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 life was barren. In spite of the fact that some 
 men can rejoice in solitude and can even be- 
 come philosophers and poets in the solitude, 
 life in the solitude is for most men barren. 
 Pioneer conditions were frequently too hard 
 to allow any real rest, and what spare time 
 there was went to loafing and dozing. The 
 pleasures of the frontier were often coarse and 
 gross. There grew up a false sense of honor at 
 times a quickness for resenting insult that 
 often left no chance for an explanation that 
 might save a friendship and perhaps a life. 
 Along with this went a development of a demo- 
 cratic doctrine from which we have not yet re- 
 covered that every man is as good as every 
 other man in every particular. The Civil War 
 did much to show the fallacy of this idea 
 through the mistakes which came with the 
 notion that one man is as good as another in 
 the leading of troops, but the idea still per- 
 sists. The fallacy was partly responsible for 
 the "spoils system" which appropriately 
 enough was made potent by that king of 
 frontiersmen, Andrew Jackson. While we of 
 to-day have seen little of the pioneer, many of 
 the pioneer's ideas descend to us as a heritage 
 not altogether blessed. The worst legacy is 
 just the idea that democracy is not an organi- 
 
 102 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 zation but an assembly of units, each of which 
 is what it is on its own account, and each of 
 which maintains that it can do as it pleases. 
 The fact that at one time such a conception 
 was useful, and even indispensable, should not 
 prevent our seeing the limitations of the con- 
 ception for a later time. 
 
 The conception which we are fast approach- 
 ing is the conception of democracy as an or- 
 ganism. Of course this doctrine is as old as 
 political theorizing itself, but it is to-day re- 
 ceiving a setting forth on a scale the like of 
 which the world has not before known. We 
 have to adjust our life to that of our neigh- 
 bors. Now, the latter type of democracy 
 makes possible evils which cannot be found 
 with the individualistic type, but the likelier 
 possibility is that the ideal of human life will 
 be enriched with the realization of democracy 
 as an organism. In the next lecture we shall 
 attempt some analysis of the content of the 
 ethical ideal to which men are advancing in 
 the present-day emphasis on social values. 
 Here it will suffice to say that the ideal is, or 
 at least can be, richer and fuller under the 
 new conditions. Two persons living and 
 working together can think of more things 
 than either can alone, and the things are more 
 
 103 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 apt to be good things than evil things. When 
 numbers of persons move on into evil together 
 the outcome is indeed apt to be more tragic 
 than when they move as individuals. Groups 
 of evildoers may occasionally debase the hu- 
 man ideal worse than individuals following 
 out their desires as individuals, but the groups 
 are apt to be held back by some considerations 
 of morality and sanity which may not weigh 
 with an individual. In a healthy community 
 the streams of life which reach down even to 
 the least part of the organism are apt to be 
 healthier than the private circulatory system 
 of an individual. If we must believe that the 
 normal life is the social life, it must follow 
 that the ideals which come out of the social 
 life are healthier than those which come out 
 of the individualistic order. There is some- 
 times safety in numbers for human ideals. 
 
 It may be objected that the great moral and 
 religious insights have always started with 
 some individual who has withdrawn from the 
 life of the community and has brooded in 
 solitude and silence until a revelation has 
 burst upon him. Abraham leaves the city for 
 the desert and John the Baptist grows up in 
 the wilderness. But Abraham, according to 
 the'Story, was seeking a city, and John finally 
 
 104 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 drew to himself all Jerusalem and Judaea. 
 Before a prophet becomes a positive force he 
 must voice an insight or a need which the 
 people have at least half felt or half seen. 
 From what has been said in a previous ad- 
 dress it will be remembered that we do not 
 minimize the individual. The moral person 
 is an end in himself, the only end we recog- 
 nize. When we speak of the social organism 
 we do not delude ourselves with the fancy that 
 our language is scientifically exact, any more 
 than the language is scientific in exactness 
 when we speak of the individualistic theory as 
 atomistic. Both terms are descriptive only in 
 a figurative sense. The figure of society as 
 an organism is true enough for our present 
 purpose. The expression "social conscious- 
 ness" does not mean that there is a conscious- 
 ness apart from the consciousness of indivi- 
 duals. We are uttering only commonplace in 
 saying that society is nothing apart from the 
 individuals that compose it, and we are will- 
 ing to declare that the great result of the 
 social activities is in the benefit of the in- 
 dividual, but we insist that the individual 
 comes to the largest life when he is so 
 closely connected with others that he may 
 be spoken of a.s a part of a social organ- 
 
 105 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 ism. The fact, however, must not be lost sight 
 of that while in a biological organism the 
 parts exist predominantly for the good of the 
 whole, in a social organism the worthy func- 
 tion of the whole is the good of the parts. It 
 is with this understanding that we speak of 
 the social organism. 
 
 The transition from the individualistic to 
 the more social form of democracy is deter- 
 minative of our social problems and of the 
 restless agitation that so generally prevails. 
 If it be maintained that present-day agita- 
 tion is world-wide, and that the difficulties 
 come through the introduction into America 
 of social ideals from Europe, the ready answer 
 is that American conditions have begun to 
 approach European conditions closely enough 
 to make plausible the suggestion that Euro- 
 pean ideas should be adopted here. Nobody 
 can foresee the outcome of the present-day 
 movements toward emphasis on social values 
 and social control, but some general forces 
 make for the atmosphere in which faith 
 flourishes. 
 
 First among these forces which aid faith 
 we mention the demand for PUBLICITY. Under- 
 neath this demand is the assumption, none the 
 less real because half-conscious or uncon- 
 
 106 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 scions, that the people can understand and 
 that they have a right to know. In the light 
 of publicity faith is apt to flourish. We real- 
 ize that the modern democratic movement 
 drags out into the light many things that 
 would better be kept hidden, things trivial or 
 harmful, but every year shows improvement. 
 In the main, the modern democratic tendency 
 is increasing the importance of that principle 
 of discussion which Walter Bagehot found so 
 significant for the advance of civilization. 
 Though there are aspects of faith which are 
 not best dealt with in public debate and of 
 these we shall speak in a later lecture the 
 broad foundations of the faith are served by 
 the freest discussion. In the realm of faith 
 much may happen in the secret depths of the 
 soul, but faith does not thrive best when con- 
 fined in a corner. The worst impression to 
 give people concerning faith is that faith is a 
 sort of secret for the initiated few. Let there 
 be the fullest discussion. Let any man who 
 has any theory about the Church or the Bible 
 or religious experience feel free to publish. 
 Nothing so quickly kills error as free discus- 
 sion, and nothing so firmly establishes truth. 
 The quickest way to deal with some forms of 
 skepticism is to bring them to utterance. 
 
 107 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 Some doctrines are so fragile that they break 
 with the very attempt to give them articulate 
 statement. Some are seen through as soon as 
 they are expressed. 
 
 If we may indulge in what seems like a 
 digression, we may call attention to the faith 
 in the people manifested in the publication 
 of the Bible in English three hundred years 
 ago. It would be hard to find a parallel for 
 this event as a revelation of sheer confidence 
 in and reliance upon the mind of the masses 
 as well as upon the content of the Book itself. 
 When we consider the illiteracy of the people 
 of the time, their natural proneness to mistake 
 the letter of a revelation for its spirit, the pos- 
 sibility of misunderstanding through the na- 
 ture of the Book, we can only wonder at the 
 boldness which could scatter the precious seed 
 of the gospel on such a field. The result was 
 not due merely to the particular type of people 
 for whom the translation was made. The re- 
 sult has been similar with all sorts and con- 
 ditions of men and communities and races 
 whenever a like venture has been made. 
 It is worth while to trust religious reve- 
 lations to the people. There may for a season 
 be misunderstanding and turmoil and ship- 
 wreck, but in the end the result is favor- 
 
 108 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 able to faith. One test of the worth of 
 a new religious doctrine, or method of 
 study, or form of organization is to get it 
 before the people for discussion. Light de- 
 stroys some growths and quickens others. 
 Modern discussion is light for faith not the 
 blaze of noonday, indeed, but light enough to 
 reveal what is adapted to minister to the deep 
 human needs and to set on high the great hu- 
 man ideals. The moral factor is by no means 
 slight in the modern popular demand for 
 publicity. 
 
 A second great demand coming out of the 
 democratic impulse is the demand for SIM- 
 PLICITY simplicity in action and expression. 
 The people are much too busy to give them- 
 selves over to elaborate intricacies. The de- 
 mand on institutions of all sorts is that the 
 truth for which the institution stands be 
 brought at last to such simplicity that it can 
 be grasped for popular use. Of course this 
 demand may run into absurdity. Justice 
 Charles E. Hughes has called attention to the 
 danger for democracy in democratic impa- 
 tience with expert opinion. But the impa- 
 tience becomes less year by year, partly be- 
 cause the experts themselves show more skill 
 in reducing their revelations, at least in the 
 
 109 
 
THE INCREASE OP FAITH 
 
 practical phases, to simplicity. For example, 
 the fight of the modern scientist against the 
 world-old plague of cholera is based upon the 
 knowledge obtained from minutely technical 
 processes. Cultures and staining agents and 
 microscopes and the whole modern bacte- 
 riological theory and technique are necessary 
 for the immense victory of our day. But the 
 final message to the people in danger of the 
 plague is quite simple. It is, for the most 
 part, just an exhortation that they keep clean, 
 eat only cooked food, and boil the drinking 
 water. It would be interesting to reflect upon 
 the good wrought for the formulation and 
 perhaps even for the advance of scientific doc- 
 trines by the need of meeting the popular de- 
 mand that the practical statement of the truth 
 be simple. 
 
 There is a manifestation of this same desire 
 too in the current call for more direct methods 
 of government or for a more direct instrument 
 for the governmental expression of the popular 
 will. How far some of these demands can 
 safely be heeded is a problem for the expert 
 in political institutions. Representative gov- 
 ernment would seem to have behind it a long 
 historic development suggesting its estab- 
 lished usefulness as an instrument of de- 
 
 110 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 mocracy. How far this system can be modified 
 in favor of more direct government by the peo- 
 ple is, indeed, a serious question. It is not 
 difficult, however, to discern the moral spring 
 back of the demand for direct government. 
 There is always a possibility of evils creeping 
 in when the path is too tortuous. When we 
 must be too long in learning how legislation is 
 achieved we are apt to become suspicious, just 
 as we feel a tendency to suspicion when it 
 takes a money-maker too long to tell us how 
 he makes his money. A like demand for sim- 
 plicity is seen in the popular protest against 
 legal and judicial procedure. We all know 
 the value of some set of checks in public move- 
 ment. Public sentiment sometimes runs into 
 a fever, and the courts serve the people by 
 acting as a cooling and steadying factor. But 
 the protest against courts is not so much 
 against a system of brakes in a democracy as 
 against the intricacy and lack of simplicity in 
 procedures. When mere processes and de- 
 cisions become overtechnical there is fear on 
 the part of the people that mischief lieth at 
 the door. 
 
 Now, all of this movement toward sim- 
 plicity is both an indirect and a direct aid to 
 faith. Just as faith thrives on the demand for 
 
 in 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 publicity, so it thrives also on a demand for 
 simplicity. The demand for simplicity enables 
 the believer to put the nonessentials to one 
 side and to fasten his thoughts upon the fac- 
 tors supremely worth while. The people 
 quickly weary of the too elaborate in religious 
 doctrine and ritual and organization. It is 
 well for faith that this is so. Faith thrives on 
 the demand for the simple. The higher and 
 more important the truth, the easier to state 
 that truth simply. 
 
 The third demand is that which we have 
 already mentioned so often, the increased note 
 of emphasis on HUMANITY in modern demo- 
 cratic movements. No doubt this emphasis 
 has its economic side. The movement away 
 from the individualism of the frontier has its 
 economic phase. The drawing force in the life 
 of the pioneer was free land. The exhaustion 
 of the free lands would inevitably call for 
 profound economic readjustment. But what- 
 ever the cause which has worked for the bring- 
 ing of people into closer relationship, the very 
 fact that they are thrown thus together makes 
 for a larger mutual understanding. While the 
 economic movement is exceedingly important 
 in itself, it often best shows its importance by 
 accentuating the emphasis on humanity as a 
 
 112 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 standard and test of institutions. Increasing 
 stress is put on the question as to what kind 
 of men are produced by the institutions of to- 
 day. No institution escapes the searching in- 
 quiry. Even the Church must not be looked 
 upon as an end in itself. No claims for divine 
 authority will long support the Church if it 
 does not generate right influences for the up- 
 building of men. What kind of man is pro- 
 duced by the Church, or the ideal, or the social 
 institution? This is the critical inquiry. 
 
 The transition from individualistic to social 
 democracy is marked by the changing man- 
 ners of democracy in the bearing of men to- 
 ward one another. Elijah Pogram, of Dick- 
 ens's Martin Chuzzlewit, may have been and 
 perhaps was a caricature, but the sting 
 of the caricature was in its truth. Part 
 of the swagger had passed out of American 
 manners fifty years ago, but somewhat of an 
 overbearing spirit lingered on till later. The 
 very fact that men have to be in closer mutual 
 contact than formerly makes for larger mu- 
 tual consideration. And in the deeper sense 
 the accent on the most truly human ideals 
 marks the spirit of to-day. Men seem quite 
 willing to endure inequality of distribution of 
 wealth. That inequality always has been, and 
 
 113 
 
THE INCREASE OP FAITH 
 
 quite likely always will be, though contrasts 
 may become less glaring. But resentment 
 against any show of arrogance on the part of 
 the owner of wealth is abundant. Even vul- 
 garity of display is keenly resented. 
 
 When we reach the more directly indus- 
 trial problem of our day we find the same 
 emphasis on the demands of humanity. The 
 growth of huge business combinations is an 
 illustration of the form in which the mon- 
 archical principle persists in democratic sur- 
 roundings. No kingly leadership has ever 
 been more striking than the leadership of 
 some who have made themselves the heads of 
 vast industrial concerns. Democracy has 
 much to gain from conserving the monarchical 
 principle, at least in the sense of furnishing 
 scope for kingly abilities, but must stand 
 against any tendencies of the monarchical 
 principle in modern industrialism to inter- 
 fere with popular welfare. A great deal of 
 useful discussion has gone, on in recent years 
 showing the violations of law by which some 
 industrial kings came to their power. Evil 
 doings there have no doubt been, but it will 
 tend to a more complete understanding to say 
 that when these great movements of concen- 
 tration and consolidation began the social con- 
 
 114 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 sequences had not been thought out or worked 
 out. Now that the social consequences have 
 become apparent, the worthy aim is that the 
 consequences be such as to be in the full sense 
 harmonious with the demands of humanity re- 
 gardless of the effect on the industrial institu- 
 tions as institutions. 
 
 In all the more radical movements of social 
 reform the same stress on human rights gives 
 the movements their power. If we regard 
 these movements as dangerous in their ten- 
 dency, it will not suffice for us to point out 
 the inadequacies of their logic. The inade- 
 quacy of the logic may make the doctrines 
 dangerous, but what gives the power is the 
 emphasis upon certain human needs. Kevolu- 
 tionary and extreme socialism, for example, 
 may be very dangerous to the community, but 
 the wise man will not think he has done his 
 whole duty in pointing out the danger. This 
 is as if a man should call out that a car dash- 
 ing along a particular road will plunge over a 
 precipice. What we need is not merely to 
 know whither the logic leads but to under- 
 stand how to control the power which drives 
 the theory. We may, if we so choose, call all 
 these theories philosophies of failure, but fail- 
 ure itself is so much a tragedy for human life 
 
 115 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 that there is a protest against failure. We 
 call for the most searching inquiry into the 
 cause of failure, to determine whether such 
 a large percentage of disaster is necessary. 
 One significant feature of modern social pro- 
 test is that it has arisen, in this country at 
 least, in a period of comparative prosperity. 
 Outside of the mere cost of living, which 
 though serious is not necessarily calamitous, 
 the times during which the current protest has 
 come to power have not been crises of indus- 
 trial depression. The facts which have called 
 forth the protests have been just the facts 
 which could be found at times which are called 
 prosperous. And the protests have come not 
 wholly from the men who have been them- 
 selves under the burden of oppression. The 
 recruits for revolution have come from all 
 classes and especially from those who have had 
 ample opportunity to study the structure of 
 society. The spectacle of the mass of human 
 failure has got not only on the nerves but on 
 the consciences of many who are not them- 
 selves failures. And the revolutionary the- 
 ories, dangerous as we may think them, are 
 red lights showing the disasters into which we 
 may come if the underlying humanities are not 
 heeded. The humanities have the right of way. 
 
 116 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 It requires hardly more than a glance to 
 detect the presence of the human ideal as the 
 criterion of social institutions. Of course the 
 evil-hearted are with us always, as are also 
 those who delight to tinker with social machin- 
 ery, and as are also those who have the itch for 
 the new. But after we have made allowance 
 for all these, the criticism which gets a hearing 
 with the people is that which has behind it a 
 genuinely human motive. To take a single 
 instance, note the growing impatience with 
 that protest against the education of women 
 and the opening of the doors of economic op- 
 portunity to women which gravely informs 
 us that the true sphere of women is the home 
 and that women were intended to be wives 
 and mothers! As if educated women could 
 not be as good wives and mothers as the un- 
 educated. The more the doors are opened to 
 women in the field of economic opportunity, 
 the fewer the marriages likely to come from 
 motives predominantly economic. If a woman 
 is not to marry, we ought to rejoice in the con- 
 ditions which to-day fill the single life with 
 increasing opportunity for culture and service. 
 If a woman is to marry, the increased oppor- 
 tunities outside of married life make it pos- 
 sible for marriage to be more and more a free 
 
 117 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 choice. The ideal human elements come more 
 largely into play and the compulsory elements 
 drop into the secondary place. 
 
 It remains to speak briefly of the extent to 
 which the strictly human ideals are playing 
 their part in international relationship. Here, 
 again, we would not at all minimize the sig- 
 nificance of the economic forces. Interna- 
 tional commercial considerations were never 
 more effective than to-day in bringing the ends 
 of the earth together, but when once the ends 
 have been brought together considerations 
 other than the economic begin to rise into first 
 place. We may be permitted to mention three 
 phases of international activity as showing 
 the increasing emphasis by the people on hu- 
 man considerations : the immigration question 
 in our own country, the problem of the Chris- 
 tianization of non-Christian nations, the in- 
 ternational movement against war. 
 
 In immigration the effective force against 
 legislative restriction has always been the 
 thought of America as the refuge of the op- 
 pressed. America has been thought to spell 
 opportunity, and the effective obstacle against 
 restriction has been a lofty ideal. But of late 
 years we have come to see that the motive of 
 desire for relief from civil or religious oppres- 
 
 118 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 sion is not so effective in bringing the aliens 
 to us as we had once imagined. The fact that 
 there are worthy political or religious refu- 
 gees does not blind our eyes to the fact that 
 the motive with the masses of immigrants to- 
 day is economic. Of course an economic op- 
 portunity is a moral boon to men, and even 
 when men sought America for political and re- 
 ligious freedom they were not unmindful of 
 the material chances here. But the class of 
 men now responding to the lure of America is 
 not the same as in other days. A great mass 
 come to us who tend to lower the standard of 
 living for American workmen. The "stand- 
 ard of living" means much to us. It means 
 more than difference between the grade of fish 
 and meat and vegetables consumed by native 
 Americans and that consumed by laborers 
 from abroad. It is said that carp from the 
 Illinois Kiver are shipped in immense num- 
 bers to the immigrants in New York, but that 
 the American laborer will not touch such 
 coarse food. The difference in standard, how- 
 ever, is not to be measured by a difference of 
 attitude toward carp. The standard of living 
 means almost anything and everything for the 
 outlook on life. It means that there shall or 
 shall not be books and pictures and schooling 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 and recreation and the opportunities for the 
 fullness of life. 
 
 We insist that it is its essentially human 
 aspect which gives the immigration question 
 seriousness in the minds of all thinking Ameri- 
 cans. The spectacle of thousands of men 
 brought from abroad to work in the mills is 
 in itself bad enough, but the spectacle becomes 
 worse when we stop to think that these force 
 others who desire higher standards of living 
 to accept a paltry wage. In the face of this 
 outcome there are investigators who would 
 restrict immigration very rigidly. If the 
 argument is put to such students that they 
 would force human beings, who now look to 
 our country as the land of hope, back upon 
 hopeless conditions in their own land, the re- 
 ply is forthcoming that the very best way for 
 America to serve the world is to maintain her 
 ideals at every cost. If some immigrants who 
 would with worthy motives come to us are 
 kept out by any exclusion laws, this is, in- 
 deed, a misfortune to those thus excluded and 
 to us also, but this is an item of the cost which 
 must be paid for the maintenance of human 
 ideals. America cannot afford to cease to be 
 an object lesson to the world as to what can 
 be done when the right sort of civic and social 
 
 120 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 ideals get a chance. It might well be that 
 forcing immigrants back into their own lands 
 and thus closing the vent from those lands 
 outward toward our land would through the 
 congestion and pressure in those lands work 
 for reforms there. If there is oppressive hard- 
 ship back of immigration, it might be that the 
 restriction and confinement of the peoples to 
 their home lands would blow the tops off some 
 ancient evils. There are more students, of 
 course, who think that the public schools and 
 the standard of American life so promptly in- 
 fluence, if not the newcomers themselves, at 
 least the second generation of immigrants, 
 that American ideals can be looked upon as 
 safe. The point, however, upon which we in- 
 sist is that there is growing impatience with 
 any discussion of immigration which talks 
 almost in impersonal terms of labor supply 
 and ignores the effect on human ideals from 
 the forced adoption of low standards of living. 
 In the view of the world which comes with 
 the modern outlook upon man a new respon- 
 sibility falls on the Christian nations for hold- 
 ing before the whole world the human ideals 
 which make up the Christian thought of man. 
 The existence of millions of human beings in 
 so-called heathen lands under conditions which 
 
 121 
 
THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 
 
 hardly permit human life from one point of 
 view makes for pessimism. To frame a the- 
 ory which will account for the hard plight of 
 millions of men is beyond us. Truly the non- 
 Christian nations sit in darkness, being bound 
 in affliction and iron. But without attempt- 
 ing to fathom the purposes of Providence in 
 the history of nations, the truth seems to be 
 increasingly manifest that the only power 
 which will lift the heathen nations out of 
 their plight is Christianity with that ideal of 
 human life which is so essential to the Chris- 
 tian system. 
 
 Suppose we glance at a land like China. It 
 is customary for a certain type of traveler to 
 tell us that the fundamental trouble with 
 China is economic, that the pressure of the 
 large masses of population on the land is in- 
 tense beyond calculation, that it is the pres- 
 sure which has stripped the hillsides of trees, 
 and that has exhausted the vitality of the peo- 
 ple till, as Bagehot says, the nation has been 
 caked over with a hard crust of custom which 
 is imperviously obstinate. Now, we avow 
 again that we do not underestimate the power 
 of the economic forces, but we insist that 
 economic and psychological factors act re- 
 ciprocally upon one another and together upon 
 
 122 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 the total situation. What is back of the fact 
 of overpopulation in China? The demand for 
 sons. What is back of the demand for men? 
 The demand for earthly service to be rendered 
 by sons to fathers after the fathers shall have 
 passed on to the company of the ancestors. 
 In other words, China thinks more of a dead 
 man than of a live man. In any civilization 
 at all Christian this earth belongs by right of 
 eminent domain to the people now living. But 
 in China a false religious view gives rise to a 
 false relation between the land and the people. 
 Polygamy, concubinage, and promiscuity in 
 sexual relations are encouraged, w r ith the re- 
 sult that perhaps five generations are pro- 
 duced in a length of time through which only 
 four should be born. The strain on the soil 
 becomes terrific. Nature falls back on those 
 rough and merciless instruments which 
 Malthus so effectively describes famine, 
 flood, and pestilence. The people hang on to 
 existence by so flimsy a fringe that a crop 
 failure means death to thousands. They 
 crowd down into the river valleys so close to 
 the embankments that a breach brings wide- 
 spread disaster. They live so close together 
 that the plague mows down its victims by en- 
 tire communities. Nor must we allow our- 
 
 123 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 selves to be misled by the fact that people 
 living in such conditions develop a marvelous 
 power of endurance. We must not accept it 
 as a tribute to the people that they can live on 
 next to nothing. Professor Boss has shown 
 that a peculiarity of the Chinese is that they 
 have demonstrated what a large part of the 
 race can do under unfavorable conditions. 
 This, however, is just a reason why the whole 
 system should be changed. The race is not 
 on the planet for the purpose of showing what 
 can be done under unfavorable conditions. 
 The conditions must be made favorable for 
 the sake of the large human result which is 
 to come. 
 
 So that the justification, from the social 
 standpoint, of the attempt to Christianize the 
 non-Christian nations is in the large ideal of 
 humanity which is at the heart of Christianity. 
 The aims of evangelism must be more than 
 remedial. Suppose the resources of Western 
 civilization are used to better the merely ma- 
 terial situation in lands like China. It seems 
 cold-blooded to say so, but these resources 
 would only make the result worse, apart from 
 the introduction of the Christian ideal which 
 sets a higher value on human life. Polygamy, 
 concubinage, and promiscuity must be done 
 
 124 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 away. Life must be made more sacred. The 
 birth rate must be lowered from animal to 
 human proportions. This does not mean the 
 Westernization of the Orient. It means the 
 humanization and Christianization of the 
 Orient. To say that such a chasm must al- 
 ways yawn between the East and the West 
 that an essential Christianity can never be 
 introduced which will give the millions of peo- 
 ple a chance at life on human terms is really 
 to despair of the race. 
 
 We mention briefly the crusade against in- 
 ternational war as a closing illustration of 
 emphasis on the claims of humanity. A great 
 change has come over the thinking of the 
 world in respect to wars in the last half-cen- 
 tury. A war which should be frankly and 
 openly commercial and materialistic would 
 hardly be tolerated to-day. The economic ele- 
 ment is, of course, a force in every war, but to 
 put the appeal squarely down upon a business 
 basis would condemn the war hopelessly. To- 
 day the cost in human terms is being urged 
 more and more. Important as might be the 
 world-wide disturbance of capital through a 
 war or number of wars, the disturbance to the 
 happiness of the plain people who have to do 
 the fighting and the suffering is more im- 
 
 125 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 portant still. In this connection let us be 
 thankful for those international labor move- 
 ments which stand against war. It has always 
 been necessary to consult the men who were 
 to furnish the financial sinews before going to 
 war. Let us rejoice that the human sinews- 
 more and more insist on being consulted. If 
 there is to be war, let the men who are to do 
 the dying be consulted before the war breaks 
 out. 
 
 But the telling factor against war is just 
 its inhumanities. Of course there are inhu- 
 manities of peace, and sometimes in a choice 
 between inhumanities war must be chosen as 
 less inhuman. But such crises are becoming 
 less and less likely. The essential inhumanity 
 of men's killing one another by wholesale is 
 becoming more and more apparent. Note the 
 impatience with which men meet the old plea 
 that war must be relied on as a sort of moral 
 tonic for the nations. The argument would 
 have us believe that we must resort to inhu- 
 man means to make men human. 
 
 We come to the end of this long and per- 
 haps tedious discussion. The connection be- 
 tween the working of the various forces at 
 which we have looked and the increase of faith 
 may not have been immediately clear. .We 
 
 126 
 
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 
 
 must remember, however, that we are think- 
 ing of life at its fullest and best, and that 
 whatever makes for full and good life makes 
 for faith. It does not require the detailed in- 
 formation or the technical skill of the expert 
 to detect the growing emphasis on human con- 
 siderations in modern social movement, and 
 this emphasis counts for faith. If it seems 
 that all our stress has been on the thought of 
 human values and none on divine values, we 
 have to reply that the clearest insight we can 
 get into divine life is through high human 
 development. Believing in a system which 
 teaches that man is made in the image of God, 
 a system which places the incarnation at its 
 center as its most essential article of faith, 
 which depends upon a Bible which teaches 
 social duty throughout, which builds a Church 
 which aims at a redeemed humanity, we need 
 not apologize for seeing in real humanness the 
 sign of the coming of the kingdom of God. 
 We are not now concerned with the progress of 
 formal creeds. God is a Spirit, and they that 
 worship him must worship him in spirit. If 
 there is anything in modern life which re- 
 veals a larger spirit toward men it is not too 
 much to claim that that larger spirit has a 
 divine source. 
 
 127 
 
IV 
 THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 THERE is a widespread feeling to-day that 
 the past twenty-five years have seen a marked 
 advance in the moral spirit of Christian lands. 
 In our own country especially it has been said 
 that ethical change has been very pronounced, 
 at some periods making strides ahead with 
 a force which might almost be called the force 
 of an ethical revivalism. We would do well 
 to be on our guard against any such sweeping 
 claims. Man for man and group for group, 
 we may well ask ourselves if we are really any 
 better than were our fathers. To use the old 
 expression, if we are to be as good as our 
 fathers, we must be better. We are under the 
 obligation to increase with every possible de- 
 velopment. Considering the forces that make 
 for material and intellectual betterment, we 
 have to ask ourselves if the moral forces which 
 work in us and through us are keeping pace 
 with these material anl intellectual forces. 
 Are we making the advance in moral life in 
 our time that our fathers made in theirs? 
 
 128 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 This essay does not pretend to be a discus- 
 sion in moral philosophy. It aims simply at 
 showing the stress in general thought to-day 
 upon some phases of ethical spirit which in- 
 dicate progress. Especially does it aim at 
 calling up the elements in our ethical thinking 
 which seem to make for faith in religious be- 
 liefs. 
 
 It is cause for congratulation that there is 
 at present both in philosophical and popular 
 ethical thinking such substantial agreement 
 on what constitutes the chief good. The chief 
 good has been discussed ever since men began 
 to discuss ethics, and the results have been 
 confused and confusing. One school has 
 found the chief good in pleasure, another in 
 the pursuit of duty for its own sake, another 
 in self-realization, another in self-renuncia- 
 tion. The definitions of terms like "pleasure," 
 "duty," "realization," "renunciation" have 
 themselves been numerous and various. To- 
 day, however, there is rather remarkable agree- 
 ment that a vast deal of such discussion is 
 barren and unfruitful. The term we hear 
 most often in ethical discussion is "life." Our 
 preceding essays have insisted that in modern 
 philosophical and social theories the accent 
 is put upon life as having an inherent right of 
 
 129 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 way. But life is a broad and general term, 
 and we must come down to "lives." The indi- 
 vidual lives of men and women and children 
 are the goods which stand in their own right 
 and the chief good is these lives living out 
 their highest and best possibilities. Of course 
 when we use the term "highest and best" the 
 debate begins to rage again, but it is some- 
 thing to have discerned that the good in this 
 world is that which is good for human lives, 
 and not something which exists in and for 
 itself in abstraction from the concrete lives 
 around us. The good is a good life not 
 virtue for its own sake or happiness or any- 
 thing abstract. A good man is an end in 
 himself. 
 
 Further, there is a fairly universal agree- 
 ment to-day that the good man does not be- 
 come a good man by just trying to be good. 
 He does not become good by making goodness 
 an object in itself or by pursuing an abstract 
 righteousness. He does not reach the highest 
 and best by thinking about himself. He, 
 rather, finds life himself by trying to find 
 life for others. The thought and purpose must 
 be outward. A man's own righteousness is a 
 sort of reflex or by-product which comes out 
 of his attempt to help others. The social or- 
 
 130 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 ganism is not a thing in itself, but it is a 
 mighty instrument in helping the individuals 
 who compose it to be good in themselves. The 
 growth of what we call the social conscious- 
 ness has helped us to this insight into the 
 method by which life comes to us. 
 
 Still further, we can be thankful for the 
 fact that we hear such emphasis upon con- 
 science as the very heart of moral life. Much 
 popular teaching upon fundamental moral 
 issues is off the track and some even seems 
 perverted ; but all, or almost all, teaching is in 
 the name of conscience. Conscience is claimed 
 for some queer, aberrant conduct, but it is at 
 least significant that the word "conscience" is 
 in all quarters claimed as the vital and signifi- 
 cant word. He would be a hardy ethical 
 teacher who would arise and declare that men 
 ought to disregard and flout behests of con- 
 science. A teacher might well say that the 
 uninstructed conscience, or the morbid con- 
 science, or the popular conscience, or the con- 
 ventional conscience ought to be disregarded, 
 but he would hardly dare teach that a man 
 ought to turn deliberately against his own 
 mature thought of what is right. Conscience 
 is, indeed, used in most unconscientious ways, 
 but we can hardly think that a moral school 
 
 131 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 teaching the open disregard of conscience 
 would win many converts. 
 
 As we look at some present-day demands 
 upon that inner spirit which is the heart of 
 the moral life we repeat that we are not espe- 
 cially concerned as to how these demands 
 have come about. We certainly do not think 
 that in all cases the new sense of obligation 
 springs up within the heart of the obligated 
 man of its own movement. In one man the 
 assumption of obligation may thus mark the 
 spontaneous development of the moral life. 
 In another man the obligation may be more 
 like a demand from without or a law imposed 
 by an external authority. But the new sense 
 of obligation is in somebody's mind, and the 
 somebodies are numerous, numerous enough 
 to give the public moral spirit of our day a 
 well-defined stamp. Whether individuals ac- 
 cept these obligations willingly or unwillingly, 
 the obligations are here. They are here as the 
 expression of real conscience and they voice 
 real moral insight. 
 
 We begin by calling attention to the vigor- 
 ous sense of the obligations of power to-day. 
 A doctrine more and more generally accepted 
 is that the possession of power imposes obli- 
 gations on the possessor. We might in a sense 
 
 132 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 call the struggle to get this doctrine into the 
 popular consciousness a sort of continuation 
 of the struggle against the divine right of 
 kings. The slightest acquaintance with his- 
 tory helps us to realize that the fight against 
 the divine right came because of the unwill- 
 ingness of rulers to admit that their power 
 carried with it any real responsibility. The 
 king felt at liberty to follow out any whim 
 that might come into his mind. The succes- 
 sive movements toward popular government 
 have not come just because the people have 
 been enamored of the dream of democracy. 
 The movements have come because the people 
 have felt that the kings have not ruled with 
 a sense of responsibility. If the kings had 
 ruled well, it is not likely that there would 
 have been movements toward democracy so 
 early in the course of history. There does not 
 seem to be anything inherently repellent to 
 the human mind in the thought of monarchy. 
 Let the king take his work with a sense of re- 
 sponsibility, and in some quarters even to-day 
 the kingdom seems to stand fast. But the 
 real question is as to whether any man can 
 have a sense of obligation to his people strong 
 enough to entitle him to a kingship. If a man 
 is to be a king, his sense of obligation must 
 
 133 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 be unspeakably strong. The very fact that 
 the powers are in his hand puts obligation 
 upon him beyond all possibility of estimate. 
 Even in these days of limited monarchy the 
 question, we repeat, is as to whether any man 
 can adequately feel these obligations or dis- 
 charge them if he does feel them. The objec- 
 tion to kings in our day might be put into the 
 form of a statement that the obligations are 
 so heavy that we cannot think of asking any 
 single human being to assume them. 
 
 We get further illustration of the force of 
 this same emphasis on the sense of obligation 
 when we think of the responsibilities that a 
 military leader would have to assume even in 
 a democracy going to war. In a previous 
 essay we spoke of the triumphs of our democ- 
 racy in the strain of a terrible war, but such 
 triumph means that sooner or later vast re- 
 sponsibilities must be placed in the hands of 
 individual generals. Of course when a pop- 
 ular government votes for a war the underly- 
 ing responsibility is with the voters, but the 
 responsibilities on the generals are stupen- 
 dous. Possibly the darkest single charge ever 
 made against Napoleon was that which de- 
 clared that he once ordered a perfectly useless 
 assault just to satisfy the desire of a party of 
 
 134 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 friends to see a little of actual war. Whether 
 Napoleon was guilty or not we do not pretend 
 to say. We can, however, understand the re- 
 morselessness of the criticism of those who 
 believe the charge to be true. Anything more 
 cynically base than such an order would be 
 hard to conceive. We can understand also 
 the criticism passed on that other leader who 
 was reported to have said that he was going 
 forth to war with a light heart. Think of the 
 obligations that the leader of hundreds of 
 thousands of soldiers must assume! His 
 slightest moves mean death to scores and per- 
 haps to hundreds. One objection raised 
 against kingship can likewise be raised 
 against war. If a great war is to be success- 
 ful, it must come into the hands of a single 
 man. Unity of command is essential to suc- 
 cess. But how rare must be the man who can 
 feel the obligations of such leadership ! Here, 
 again, the question is as to whether any such 
 man could be found. In any case, modern 
 thought has taken all the lightheartedness out 
 of our attitude toward war. The great hero 
 of war has to be the general and his heroism 
 has to be the devotion to obligations so heavy 
 that we may well ask if any man should be 
 allowed to assume them. 
 
 135 
 
THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 
 
 But the political power to-day has passed 
 away from the kings to the citizens. We hear 
 as never before the responsibility of the ordi- 
 nary voter, for the vote means power and power 
 carries with it obligation. Accordingly, we 
 hear that more than a merely property or edu- 
 cational test is necessary if a man is to be a 
 good citizen. Of course the man who has 
 property is apt to have achieved some 
 moral strength in the gaining of the property, 
 and the man who knows enough to read is 
 likely to know more about moral distinctions 
 than the illiterate man, but, after all, the 
 urgent stress to-day is upon the need of the 
 sense of obligation. We hear much about the 
 man who will sell his vote, but such men are, 
 when the large number of voters are taken 
 into account, very rare. Such men can be 
 dealt with by the police and by the courts. 
 The man whom we need to keep constantly be- 
 fore us is the man who takes into his hand so 
 mighty an instrument as the ballot and uses it 
 without proper sense of obligation. We have 
 had many good things to say of democracy, 
 and our faith in the people is not small, but 
 the danger in democracy is that power will be 
 used without proper sense of obligation. We 
 do not have to believe that there is any neces- 
 
 136 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 sary and inherent right of the people to rule 
 before we can regard ourselves as good demo- 
 crats. We have only to believe that the people 
 can rule better than can individuals to be 
 democrats. We believe that the people can 
 thus rule, but we may well be glad that we 
 hear so often that rule by the people is only 
 an experiment, after all. The people must 
 rule with a sense of responsibility if they are 
 to rule successfully. They must be willing to 
 assume the obligations of power as well as 
 the power itself. Among these obligations 
 must always be included the duty of looking 
 facts squarely in the face, of distrusting great 
 outbursts of emotionalism, of standing for the 
 doctrine that a thing is not settled until it is 
 settled aright. In the midst of all present-day 
 signs of restlessness which now and again seem 
 to point toward revolution it is well for us to 
 remember that, on the whole, the people seem 
 to have a wholesome regard for the checks 
 upon popular excitement. Very few popular 
 assemblies will ignore the simpler and clearer 
 rules of parliamentary procedure; very few 
 will violate the requirements of fair play ; very 
 few will trample upon the rights of a minority. 
 By the way, one of the clearest indications of 
 a healthy moral spirit in society is this re- 
 is? 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 spect for the rights of the minority. A mi- 
 nority is even being looked upon as essential 
 to the proper movement of a democracy. The 
 old doctrine that government exists for the 
 sake of whatever majority happens to win is 
 about gone. There is even less emphasis than 
 there once was on the doctrine of the greatest 
 good to the greatest number. More and more 
 we hear that the proper aim of government is 
 the best, under the circumstances, for all. And 
 this means an increasing sense of obligation 
 on the part of the people. When the "ins" 
 have their way they have only the advantage 
 of certain strategic positions. The "outs" are 
 not out in the sense that they are out of the 
 game. Even when they are out they are an 
 essential element. There is to-day a growing 
 popular recognition of the truth that victory 
 for a majority does not dispose of the minority 
 which loses. The minority is not a foe which 
 is to be annihilated or taken prisoner. The mi- 
 nority is for the moment just the weaker of two 
 forces which, working upon each other, bring 
 about a certain resultant. Advances of popu- 
 lar thought are seldom straight forward in a 
 direct path. The advance of a majority can- 
 not be stopped or turned back upon itself by 
 the action of a minority, but it can be de- 
 
 138 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 fleeted far to one side of the course which it 
 might otherwise have taken. It is the recogni- 
 tion of mutual duties by "ins" and "outs" 
 which is one of the encouraging signs as we 
 think of the immense power which the ballot 
 puts in the hands of the voters. 
 
 But, after all, the monarchical principle 
 comes back upon us, even after we have given 
 the vote to the individual citizen. The citizen 
 to-day is, indeed, a ruler of mighty force, but 
 the monarchical principle is illustrated on a 
 vast scale in the industrial realm. We have 
 to deal with real kings in the realm of industry 
 railroad kings, corn kings, corporation 
 kings. It was once said of a railroad magnate 
 that he had conquered more territory with a 
 coupling pin than Julius Caesar had won with 
 the sword. The days when these kings could 
 act according to their own sweet will a will 
 which often proved bitter enough to those who 
 stood in their way are fast disappearing. So 
 much power must necessarily be lodged in the 
 hands of such leaders that the doctrine of the 
 obligations of power are preached to them 
 with urgent insistence. In the old days days 
 not so very far in the past a railroad king 
 could set up or pull down a community or a 
 city with a stroke of his pen through a schedule 
 
 139 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 of freight rates. He could divert the currents 
 of trade from their accustomed channels. He 
 could stop the mill wheels and literally make 
 the grass grow in the streets of the cities. 
 Without military resources he could really 
 levy tribute from millions of people as truly 
 as if he had started armies to marching to- 
 ward them. He could rebate a city into deso- 
 lation almost as effectively as a general could 
 starve it by siege. Now, all this power is just 
 as truly in the hands of the railroads to-day, 
 but it will never be exercised as in the past. 
 Laws will do their part, commissions will do 
 their part, public opinion will do its part. We 
 may be permitted to believe, however, that by 
 no means the least effective force in bringing 
 about the result has been and will be the grow- 
 ing adoption of the doctrine that power means 
 obligation, and that the power belongs only 
 to those whose development in conscience has 
 kept pace with their development in skill over 
 materials and men. 
 
 Even the possession of money since money 
 is power brings with it responsibilities em- 
 phasized to-day with new force. Money is a 
 tool and must be used as a tool. Professor 
 Carver has suggested that the meaning of the 
 parable of Jesus about the talents is to be 
 
 140 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 understood from the viewpoint of wealth as an 
 instrument. If the talents were mere good 
 things to be enjoyed, we can understand the 
 protest when the talent was taken from the 
 man who had only one talent and given to the 
 man who had ten. If, however, the talents 
 were to be regarded as instruments, there was 
 only justice in taking the instrument from the 
 hands of him who could not use it and giving 
 it to him who could. Of course wealth is an 
 end to a certain extent, but only to a certain 
 extent. For the most part, it is an instru- 
 ment to be used with a sense of obligation for 
 the best things; and the best things, as we 
 have tried to show, are human lives. There is 
 a growing protest against a rich man's leaving 
 money at his death to those who are apt to use 
 it as an end in itself. Assuming that the prin- 
 cipal of a great estate is to be kept intact, there 
 is a growing objection to its being so disposed 
 of by the legacy of its owner that the interest 
 is to go to those who will enjoy money as an 
 end in itself. Back of the objection is this 
 realization of wealth as an instrument. The 
 wealth is more likely to be used as an instru- 
 ment in the hands of the trustees of a school 
 or a hospital or an orphange than in the hands 
 of those who are thinking of enjoyment. By a 
 
 i 
 
 141 
 
THE INCBEASE OF FAITH 
 
 right as of eminent domain wealth belongs 
 properly in the hands of those who can devote 
 it to the most productive use. All this has 
 been known from the beginning, but we are 
 insisting to-day upon such definition of the ex- 
 pression "productive use" as shall include the 
 highest and best welfare of the lives that the 
 money touches either in the making or the 
 spending. The tools of modern industrial life 
 are so powerful for good or for evil that we 
 must allow them to get only into the hands of 
 men who will use them with a sense of obliga- 
 tion. Industrial forces are set to work by the 
 slightest pulls on triggers or levers. Con- 
 scienceless fingers must not touch the triggers. 
 This sense of obligation is going still further. 
 There are some qualifications of men in the 
 way of inborn talents which are really mo- 
 nopoly powers. No one else has such talents 
 it may be and the talents are not to be al- 
 lowed to go to waste. Possibilities of influenc- 
 ing one's fellow men, capabilities for unusual 
 work, even artistic skill all these are gifts 
 which partake of the nature of monopolies. 
 A monopoly even of this kind carries its obli- 
 gations. There must be serious consideration 
 of how the talent can be best developed and 
 best used after it is developed. This too has 
 
 142 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 been known from the beginning, but the obliga- 
 tion is receiving new emphasis. The placing 
 of the life is as important as the development. 
 If we may use an expression from political 
 economy, a man is under obligation not to 
 work too much against the law of diminishing 
 returns. "The law of diminishing returns" 
 means that after a certain point the returns 
 from effort are not commensurate with the 
 effort put forth to obtain them. Then, if there 
 are other fields where the same amount of 
 effort will bring a larger return, the obliga- 
 tion is to cultivate those fields. We are not 
 at present directly concerned with missionary 
 enterprises, but, for the sake of illustration, 
 we may ask as to the wisdom of sending one 
 hundred teachers into America when the one 
 hundred can do but little more than ninety 
 could ; the extra ten could accomplish as much 
 in China just now as the ninety can here. We 
 do not pretend to pick our figures with mathe- 
 matical care, but the question is suggestive. 
 Jesus once raised the issue as to the morality 
 of refusing to place a candle where its light 
 would do the most good. In our day we see 
 the obligation of paying our way and of so 
 placing our lives that they will pay the largest 
 return. 
 
 143 
 
THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 
 
 This modern spirit does away at once with 
 the old heresy that a man's life is his own 
 affair, and that he can make his choices as he 
 pleases. More and more we see that the obli- 
 gation to society reaches into the inner depths. 
 If a man will not be conscientious even in 
 those things which do not at first seem to 
 affect the welfare of society, we speedily find 
 ways of trying to establish a connection be- 
 tween his conduct and the welfare of society. 
 If a man could withdraw to some Kobinson 
 Crusoe island, making no drafts on society 
 and living out of all communication with men, 
 we might find something to say in justification 
 of letting him go to the devil in his own style. 
 But the ethical spirit of to-day will not hear 
 of a man's going to the devil through indul- 
 gence in vice with the plea that vice is a pri- 
 vate affair. Opium-smoking is a distinctly 
 private vice, but we have seen it nearly ruin a 
 nation. The simple obligation to pay one's 
 way means more with the increase of moral 
 understanding. Every man whose working 
 efficiency is impaired below a certain point is 
 a charge on other men. Such a man must be 
 shouldered and carried, or some one else must 
 pull his weight or pay his fare. In a world 
 where struggle for life is hard enough at the 
 
 144 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 easiest, moral sense rebels at the injustice 
 wrought through the failure of individuals to 
 play their part as men. Being a man means 
 keeping off the shoulders of other men. And 
 as to going to the devil in one's own way, even 
 if all the expenses are paid by the one who 
 thus goes, even if there is no loss to anyone but 
 the man himself, and the man's going is a 
 good riddance, still the spectacle of man's go- 
 ing to the devil is not helpful, for long before 
 he has gone from this world the devil is in 
 such complete possession as to affect the on- 
 lookers. The presence of evil in a human life 
 is not socially profitable. Even when evil men 
 can be pointed to as examples of the outwork- 
 ing of moral law the exhibition costs more 
 than it is worth. Social obligation reaches to 
 the innermost realms of individual life. 
 
 We have spoken of to-day's attitude toward 
 the obligations of power. We may find further 
 illustration of the same spirit in the emphasis 
 on the obligations of knowledge. Knowledge 
 itself is a power. 
 
 We all know the obligation on the man who 
 can see farther than his fellows or can grasp 
 an ideal with firmer certainty than can his 
 fellows. The emphasis upon the obligation of 
 such a man to live up to the highest light is 
 
 145 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 not new, but it is well for us to remember that 
 the opportunities for heroism of this sort are 
 as actual to-day as ever, though possibly less 
 spectacular. The opportunities come in the 
 minor social groups industrial, political, 
 ecclesiastical. The reason why the heroism 
 does not attract great attention is to be found 
 in the thought that if a man cannot get along 
 comfortably in one of these groups, he can go 
 out. There is plenty of room outside. But 
 this is very easy to say. Here is a man who 
 has trained himself to a particular task. He 
 is known to hold and to advocate views which 
 are not agreeable to the company for which 
 he works. He is an official of a transportation 
 company, it may be, and a campaign is on 
 against the saloon forces in a city through 
 which this transportation company runs. The 
 official receives a hint from headquarters that 
 while he is free to vote as he pleases the com- 
 pany does not expect its officials to take active 
 part against the saloon. If the official speaks 
 out after such a hint, he does so at more of a 
 risk than that run by all the agitators in the 
 town. The official is qualified to do a particu- 
 lar kind of work. He may not be able to find 
 work of just that kind anywhere else than in 
 the employ of that particular company. Too 
 
 146 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 much honor cannot be given under such cir- 
 cumstances to the man of superior insight into 
 the worth of an ideal who realizes and acts 
 upon the obligations which the insight puts 
 upon him. Or, to take a further illustration : 
 here is a minister or a teacher enlisted in the 
 ranks of one of the great ecclesiastical de- 
 nominations. He feels that he must advocate 
 improvements in doctrinal statement or church 
 polity. Some leader advises him that his place 
 is outside. If the change which he advocates 
 is subversive of the aims for which the de- 
 nomination stands, or if it is hostile to the 
 essential spirit of that body, the man's place is 
 outside. But if the change is one called for by 
 the development of the body itself, the obliga- 
 tion is upon the servant of the Church to stay 
 in and speak his mind. If he does stay he 
 runs a risk. He may incur the disfavor of 
 church leaders, either ecclesiastical or lay, and 
 his own advancement may suffer. The most 
 carefully guarded and moderate statement 
 from such a man may mean more than the 
 most radical utterances of the man outside or 
 of the member of the professedly radical com- 
 munions. We need liberal bodies of believers, 
 but there is no reason for calling the liberal 
 utterances of bands of liberals especially 
 
 147 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 heroic. If a man cares to be heroic with radi- 
 cals, let him preach conservatism to them. We 
 mention these illustrations simply to bring 
 out the truth that there is abundant oppor- 
 tunity to assume to-day the obligations which 
 go with the knowledge of high ideals. And 
 we speak with knowledge of fact and not out 
 of merely enthusiastic optimism when we say 
 that in the industrial and ecclesiastical and 
 political groups there appears to be increas- 
 ing willingness to assume the obligations 
 which go with knowledge of commanding 
 ideals. 
 
 But there is increasingly general recogni- 
 tion also of the obligations imposed by the 
 possession of more matter-of-fact and prosaic 
 knowledge than the knowledge of high ideals. 
 We have spoken elsewhere of the demands 
 upon the possessor of scientific knowledge. 
 Of course some treatment of the owner of 
 great ideas to-day is little short of outrageous. 
 Property in almost everything else is recog- 
 nized and protected better than property in 
 ideas. But even though this is lamentably 
 true the scientific ideal is that beneficial facts 
 become at discovery the property of humanity. 
 If a scientist could discover some inevitably 
 certain method of dealing directly with the 
 
 148 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 germs of typhoid or tuberculosis, all right- 
 thinking men would agree that such a dis- 
 coverer should be suitably rewarded, but all 
 scientists would recognize the duty of making 
 the facts public property as soon as possible. 
 There can be no question as to the obligation 
 here. 
 
 Moreover, society in general is taking upon 
 itself more and more cheerfully the responsi- 
 bility for the discharge of obligations which 
 come with increasing knowledge. The use of 
 the scientific method has revealed to us the 
 laws by which even moral evils get their foot- 
 hold in the world. We have come to a new 
 conviction as to the remediableness of moral 
 situations, but the remedies lie more and more 
 in the field of prevention. The urgency with 
 which preventive measures are pushed upon 
 the public to-day and the increasing readiness 
 with which the new view is accepted are mar- 
 velous. There is nothing spectacular about a 
 work of prevention. Here is a village in 
 danger through the use of wells placed too 
 near the dwelling houses. It may be that 
 there never has been an epidemic of typhoid in 
 that village. On the chance that there may be 
 an epidemic the wells are abandoned and an 
 expensive water system is installed. It is 
 
 149 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 always possible for the reactionary to say that 
 nothing would have happened if the old wells 
 had been kept open. Now, in less material 
 manifestations this new spirit is abroad in the 
 land. There is more and more general re- 
 sponse to the obligations which come with the 
 very knowledge of the ways in which moral 
 disorders may be prevented. The protests 
 against the overcrowding of houses and the 
 overstrain of weak wills and against all ma- 
 terial and spiritual conditions which practi- 
 cally rob the human will of its freedom are 
 instances in point. Now that public opinion 
 is aware of the causes of some evils, there is 
 increasing restlessness in the continued ex- 
 istence of the evils. The knowledge increases 
 that sorrow which cannot be abated till the 
 obligation which comes with the knowledge is 
 satisfied. 
 
 Under all this is the sense of obligation 
 which arises from the knowledge that what 
 might be called constitutional morality is 
 woven into the very texture of the universe. 
 That is to say, the laws which pick up the evil 
 deed and carry it out to endless consequences 
 are seen to be remorseless in their ongoings. 
 There are laws which work for the relief of 
 the evildoer who sets himself to work with 
 
 150 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 them, but these laws never completely undo 
 an evil deed. Bodies are scarred and souls are 
 marked with the evil. Great achievements no 
 doubt are possible to the life which has for- 
 saken sin, but present-day moral insight will 
 not tolerate the doctrine that the soul which 
 has sinned can be as good as if it had never 
 sinned. Modern morality is increasingly im- 
 patient with any doctrine which obscures the 
 deadliness of sin. The growing realization of 
 this means increasing civilization. The po- 
 litical economist tells us that civilization ad- 
 vances as men "learn to discount the future 
 at a low rate of interest" as they learn to 
 put some far-off morrow on about the same 
 plane as to-day. We are learning anew that 
 though God may not always pay on Saturday, 
 he nevertheless pays. There is no healthier 
 moral realization than just this, especially 
 when the obligation which comes with the 
 realization is assumed. The laws do not slip 
 and they do not forget. 
 
 Lest, however, we may seem to have painted 
 a system of unrelenting sternness, we call at- 
 tention to the fact that the increasing knowl- 
 edge of actual situations is bringing a chari- 
 tableness into moral judgments which is of 
 significance. In a sense, our knowledge of 
 
 151 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 men has increased. We see more clearly the 
 springs of moral action. Irrevocable as are the 
 laws of the universe, they are not to be con- 
 ceived of as working in the same fashion upon 
 the unintentional evildoer as upon the delib- 
 erate transgressor. If the effects of evildoing 
 were chiefly and primarily upon the body it 
 would be true that an evil done in ignorance 
 would receive the same penalty as wrong com- 
 mitted intentionally. The laws of the body 
 carry on the results of sincere mistakes and 
 deliberate sins alike. We are not thinking 
 especially, however, of the physical evils. 
 These are the most easily remedied. We are 
 thinking of sins of the spirit rejections of 
 the truth and choices of the evil. It is here 
 that sin is most deadly. The mind which turns 
 against the light loses its power to know the 
 light. In this inner realm, however, we feel 
 more and more the need of charity. We are 
 learning that the moral task for the human 
 life is to make the passage over from the 
 merely natural to the spiritual, or, rather, to 
 lift the natural up to the plane of the spiritual 
 by informing it with a right purpose. And so 
 we find many lives in many stages of transi- 
 tion some having attained quite nearly to 
 sainthood and others making the first attempts 
 
 152 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 to rationalize and spiritualize their impulses. 
 That deliberate choice of evil and cynical joy 
 in evil are too common we all know, but the 
 more closely we study human life the more 
 clearly we see that much which seems like evil 
 is not purposely and intentionally such. Per- 
 fect intentions may mark even imperfect lives. 
 And so the increasing contact with men to- 
 day and the increasing knowledge of them 
 puts on us the obligation to profound charity. 
 Hence it comes about that the attitude toward 
 the moral problem to-day has this double as- 
 pect: insistence upon the inevitableness of 
 penalty under the law and charitableness to- 
 ward the vast mass of men who are striving to 
 bring the moral spirit into their lives. The 
 knowledge of the actual condition of men puts 
 on us the obligation to charitableness. 
 
 Not only are there obligations of power and 
 of knowledge, but there are obligations of sym- 
 pathy emphasized in the moral messages of to- 
 day. Any man who can sympathize at all 
 must feel himself in these days under the obli- 
 gation to come into some sort of personal touch 
 with persons who are in distress. Of course 
 any man's range of personal contacts is lim- 
 ited, but there is good cheer in any movement 
 away from impersonalism. One of the almost 
 
 153 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 inevitable vices of our time has been a sort of 
 wholesaleism in the treatment of men. The 
 wholesaleism perhaps took its start in indus- 
 trial developments. The modern stress on 
 large-scale production has tended to obscure 
 the worth and meaning of the individual man. 
 The tendency has been to get away from the 
 thought of the individual laborer to the consid- 
 eration of labor in the mass. In such a system 
 a laborer is fortunate if he is known even by 
 number. Out of the success of modern indus- 
 trialism has come a copying of some of the 
 features of industrialism in realms where they 
 have no right. The demand has been that edu- 
 cational and charitable and industrial institu- 
 tions be handled with business methods. 
 While any sensible person can see the advan- 
 tages of business methods in any of these ac- 
 tivities, there comes a point where business 
 methods break down in dealing with the great 
 human relationships. A philanthropic institu- 
 tion may get on well enough in dealing by 
 wholesale with the bodies of men, though there 
 is some question even about this. The physi- 
 cian at work upon an unconscious patient 
 does not think of the individuality of the pa- 
 tient, but as soon as consciousness returns, 
 and the task of nursing begins, the limitations 
 
 154 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 of wholesale and card-case methods become 
 apparent. So likewise with educational and 
 ecclesiastical wholesaleism. Business methods 
 in these fields have revealed their weakness. 
 And so in these later days there is a swing 
 back in the other direction. The personal 
 touch is emphasized. In the schools the 
 classes are broken into small groups that the 
 individual student may be reached. Personal 
 contact is more and more preached in the 
 work of the Church. It is high time for this 
 change, for inipersonalism tends to a sort of 
 dehumanization. With the swing of the pen- 
 dulum in the other direction the old virtues 
 which come out of warm human sympathy 
 come to the old-time regard. This makes for 
 faith. The gospel deals in large terms, but 
 not in wholesale terms. It lays stress upon 
 sympathy. We are under obligations to help 
 men with material things and with whatever 
 knowledge may be at our disposal, but we are 
 under obligations also to give of ourselves. 
 While a moral command to 'sympathize with 
 men, given in a mechanical fashion, would 
 miss the mark, the obligation is to take such 
 attitude toward men that we shall sympathize 
 with them. Hence the condemnation on the 
 man who in giving to a cause simply flings his 
 
 155 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 money into the box. More is called for 
 knowledge of the situation which demands re- 
 lief, imagination, which can make another's 
 suffering real to oneself. Much of the appeal 
 to imagination to-day is forced and crude, but 
 the appeal is made and with great effect. Life 
 as we know it is inevitably an affair of the 
 sensibility. There may be beings in some 
 other sphere whose life moves on without rela- 
 tion to sensibility. Life for them may be effec- 
 tive will-exercise with no accompaniment of 
 feeling whatever. Or it may be a colorless 
 knowing without any sort of thrill in its ex- 
 pectancy or discovery. Such is not life as we 
 know it. For us a great word is happiness; 
 and happiness has no meaning apart from sen- 
 sibility. Now the higher the meaning put 
 into happiness the more closely we come to the 
 realm of personal communion. The greatest 
 gift a man can give is real sympathy. Like- 
 wise, the greatest gift a man can receive is a 
 sympathy which shows that others are doing 
 and thinking and feeling with him. The moral 
 consciousness to-day recognizes and enforces 
 this truth. 
 
 We must say a word about another obliga- 
 tion which is more and more forcing itself 
 upon the moral consciousness. We refer to 
 
 156 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 the extent to which the obligations of belief 
 are coming into ethical consideration. There 
 is in modern thinking a very decided trend 
 away from the idea that religious belief is not 
 a matter of grave moral consequence. We 
 once heard much of the doctrine that it makes 
 little difference to anyone else what any par- 
 ticular man believes. Belief has so much to 
 do with other-world destiny that if a man is 
 willing to take the risks of the hereafter in 
 any belief, the risk is entirely of the man's 
 own concern. After that we heard of the 
 doctrine that anyone should be allowed the 
 liberty to believe whatever might agree with 
 him. But this easy-going liberalism has not 
 to-day the hold it once had. The emphasis on 
 the social consequences of belief has made a 
 difference. In some spheres society assumes 
 a great deal of authority, not, indeed, as to 
 what a man believes, but as to what he pub- 
 lishes and puts into action. There are to-day 
 various beliefs as to government, for example. 
 Public opinion will not sit quietly by and 
 allow beliefs subversive of all government to 
 be proclaimed without protest. And when 
 anarchy proceeds to act itself out into prac- 
 tical expression the police take a hand in the 
 argument. The plea of personal sincerity will 
 
 157 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 not avail to establish a right to proclaim 
 anarchy. While no one could ever justify him- 
 self in an argument for a return to censorship 
 of religious beliefs by authority, public opin- 
 ion is recognizing that it makes a vast differ- 
 ence to society as to what sort of religious be- 
 liefs are proclaimed. It is being discovered 
 that belief itself is apt to make for fuller life 
 than skepticism, and that the larger beliefs 
 make for the larger life. The better the belief 
 the better the believer is apt to be. Moreover, 
 there are distinct social consequences of par- 
 ticular beliefs. Take the great catholic ut- 
 terances of the creeds as to the nature of God 
 and the dignity of human life. There may 
 legitimately be all variety of interpretation of 
 these utterances. The objectors may urge that 
 the Church which has held to these doctrines 
 many times has stood in the way of human 
 progress, and may urge also that it has been 
 hard to separate the truths from doubtful ac- 
 companiments. But the large good sense of 
 constantly increasing numbers is seeing that 
 in the main and on the whole these fundamen- 
 tal beliefs are mighty bulwarks of human 
 order and progress. Hence it comes about 
 that a skeptic or an atheist will support a 
 church because it is good for the community, 
 
 158 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 and that an agnostic like the late Goldwin 
 Smith will, while avowing that it is disloyalty 
 to the truth for a man like Cardinal Newman 
 to declare assent to propositions because of 
 the consequences of believing them, deplore 
 the dawning of the day when disbelief in im- 
 mortality will make the members of society 
 struggle all the more bitterly for the things 
 of the present. Now, it is hard to see how any 
 man of intellectual integrity would not sooner 
 know the truth no matter how unpleasant it 
 might prove than to hold to a false belief just 
 because of consequences pleasant for a time; 
 but the confidence of the normal man in reason 
 is such that he feels that in a realm where we 
 cannot have positive demonstration one way 
 or the other the fact that the social conse- 
 quences of a belief are beneficial must be an 
 indication that the belief lays hold of the 
 springs of reality. And when once these so- 
 cial consequences are seen streaming from be- 
 lief as effects from a cause the social con- 
 science of our time inclines charitably toward 
 the belief. It is hard to see how a man who 
 professes great sympathy for his fellow men, 
 and who knows that those fellow men do not 
 and cannot live by bread alone, can overlook 
 the social importance of the catholic beliefs. 
 
 159 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 It is hard to see how such a man, having once 
 seen these consequences, can avoid the moral 
 responsibility of at least examining the be- 
 liefs, and examining them with charitable pre- 
 suppositions. 
 
 We may properly close this lecture with a 
 brief suggestion as to the more direct bearing 
 of the obligation to belief on the form which 
 some Christian beliefs should take. First, we 
 urge the duty of laying hold on the best be- 
 liefs. We can have any beliefs we choose. We 
 are not in the realm of strict demonstration. 
 The question is not as to whether A or B can 
 be proved by demonstration to be an objective 
 fact, or whether the formal processes of rea- 
 soning will yield a result thus or so. If there 
 is in fact or reason nothing against belief, and 
 the great needs of life call for belief, then be- 
 lief becomes not only a demand of reason but 
 a behest of duty. And with the field of belief 
 open the obligation is to seek the best beliefs. 
 One belief is not by any means necessarily as 
 good as another. One belief is larger than 
 another, or finer than another, or in closer 
 touch with the facts of history or experience 
 than another, or more in harmony with the 
 total spiritual nature than another. If be- 
 liefs are instruments for the upbuilding of the 
 
 160 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 life, the wise man searches for the best instru- 
 ment. The truth of belief is like the truth of 
 an instrument; an instrument is true when it 
 is made of the finest obtainable material, when 
 the workmanship on it is honest and sincere, 
 when it comes nearest perfection in accom- 
 plishing its proper work. Or, more clearly 
 still, the truth of a belief is like what we might 
 call the truth of a food. A food could be 
 called true if it is really a product containing 
 the great elements on which the body depends, 
 and when it is so prepared as to nourish life. 
 The body is a part of the physical universe. It 
 thrives on the foods which most deeply con- 
 nect it with the universe. The soul is a part 
 of the spiritual universe. If it thrives on be- 
 liefs, it must do so because these beliefs con- 
 tain the elements out of which the spiritual 
 universe is constituted. But there are foods 
 and foods and beliefs and beliefs. Some foods 
 and some beliefs are clearly more truly of the 
 basic materials of the universe than are others 
 and some are more wisely prepared than 
 others. A moral imperative lies back of the 
 search for the best beliefs. 
 
 Furthermore, in the search for the best be- 
 liefs the demands of the moral life are to be 
 used as the guiding light. If we are to have 
 
 161 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 beliefs, we must have the best beliefs, and by 
 best beliefs we mean the morally best. It is in 
 obedience to a sure moral insight that the his- 
 tory of theology is a story of the progressive 
 moralization of theology. As soon as men 
 have attained to a fresh moral insight they 
 have dared to attribute this to the Divine 
 Being as a part of his character. They have 
 believed that these insights are in a profound 
 sense a part of the self-revelation of God to 
 men. The story of the progress of moral think- 
 ing is in any case interesting, but, as we have 
 so often said, we are not especially concerned 
 with the precise steps by which the insights 
 come. If they come because growing material 
 needs or advancing material prosperity make 
 demand for a fuller thought of God, well and 
 good, if only the insight stands in its own 
 right after it does come. The guiding rule of 
 religious thinking might well be phrased as an 
 assumption that nothing is too good to believe 
 about God. 
 
 We must be careful as we follow out this 
 leading of increasing moral insight lest we be- 
 come uncharitable toward beliefs of an earlier 
 day. It is easy for us to speak of ourselves 
 as the people and to fancy that moral under- 
 standing will die with us. We must remem- 
 
 162 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 ber that a good man is a good man in whatever 
 age he lives, that the central element in a 
 moral character is a good will, and that the 
 larger knowledge of ethical values comes out 
 of following the dictates of good will toward 
 the larger interpretations of increasing knowl- 
 edge. There should never be any reflection on 
 the ancient saints in our speech about growing 
 moral insight. The problem is similar to that 
 of our relation to the wise men of other times. 
 We know more than Plato, but it would 
 hardly be a mark of superior wisdom to say 
 that we are wiser than Plato. We may know 
 more truth than he knew, but we are not apt 
 to be greater lovers of the truth than he. 
 With this caution before us we pass to some 
 consideration of the progressive moralization 
 of the idea of God. 
 
 Take, now, the thought of the increasing 
 sense of obligation which obtains in our day 
 and see how this is being applied to our con- 
 ception of God. We have spoken of the obliga- 
 tions of power. We are coming to emphasize 
 the obligations which must be upon one who 
 holds in his hands the forces of the universe. 
 We preach the obligations of possession. The 
 man who has control of the industrial forces 
 of a time has vast obligations, but what are 
 
 163 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 these obligations as compared to the obliga- 
 tions of control of a world? We insist upon 
 the obligations of leadership of armies or of 
 States, but what are these responsibilities com- 
 pared to the responsibilities of creatorship? 
 Human beings are not in this world by their 
 own choice. None of us had a vote on the ques- 
 tion as to whether he would come or not. And 
 when we awake to consciousness here we find 
 ourselves in rather a difficult plight. We are 
 not creatures endowed with merely passive 
 sensibilities, nor are we able outright to shape 
 our destinies. We have, however, enough 
 freedom to make shipwreck possible. We are 
 confronted by the most grievous inequalities 
 of fortune between persons and between dif- 
 ferent periods of our own careers. And just 
 about the moment we feel ourselves in position 
 to accomplish something worth while we are 
 called from earth. Say all we please about 
 human responsibility, the divine responsibility 
 is greater still. God must be looked upon, in 
 the light of our increasing understanding of 
 obligation, as the most obligated Being in the 
 universe. If he has not the power to control 
 for moral purposes the forces of the universe, 
 he must stand condemned by moral reason for 
 ever having undertaken such an enterprise as 
 
 164 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 the universe. If he has the power, he must use 
 it. The history of religious thinking shows 
 that the moral insight of the race has always 
 recognized this obligation, each age express- 
 ing it in the language of its own time. Accord- 
 ingly, the Almighty has been conceived of as 
 discharging faithfully the obligations which 
 are upon him through the possession of power. 
 If men ever thought of the devil as robbed of 
 his due by what God had done for men, they 
 thought of God himself as discharging what- 
 ever obligation was due the devil. If God was 
 thought of as a feudal Lord whose dignity had 
 been affronted beyond the power of mankind 
 to make reparation, God himself must make 
 reparation. If any sort of a substitute must 
 pay a penalty for sin because of the inade- 
 quacy of any offering which man might make, 
 God must provide the substitute. If a tribute 
 must be paid to the dignity of the government 
 of the universe by some one worthier than 
 man, the problem must be solved by God him- 
 self. If moral influences are to be set at work 
 for men by some force higher than the human, 
 God must set the forces to work. It all comes 
 down to this, in a word, that God is under 
 obligation to exert every means in his power 
 to help men use aright the boon of: freedom 
 
 .165 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 which has been compulsorily bestowed upon 
 them. 
 
 Then there are the obligations of knowledge 
 which we look upon as binding upon God. 
 While we insist strenuously that there must 
 be no abatement of the moral law, the increase 
 of our moral insight leads us to larger charity 
 in our attitude toward men. We do not min- 
 imize the ill desert of the evil will, but the more 
 we know of men the more we are inclined to 
 charity. The dependence of choices upon en- 
 vironmental conditions and upon hereditary 
 tendencies and upon the physical condition, 
 the limitations which come with inadequate 
 knowledge or deficient imagination all these 
 deter us from hasty judgment, especially as 
 to the motives of men. Likewise we insist 
 that the judgment of God must rest down 
 upon full knowledge, that his attitude can 
 never be determined by anything other than 
 the full light. Hence we hold ourselves in 
 readiness to see many earthly judgments re- 
 vised and many verdicts set aside. The doc- 
 trine that has in any other than a merely prac- 
 tical sense put judgment in the hands of men 
 is looked upon as little short of blasphemy. 
 The final destiny of men is in the hands of 
 the God who knows, and he must act out 
 
 166 
 
THE ETHICAL ADVANCE 
 
 the responsibilities which come with knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 Finally, there must be upon God the obliga- 
 tion to sympathy. If we are to cast ourselves 
 with self-abandonment into the work of up- 
 lifting men, much more must he. There 
 is no room in the moral universe for a 
 merely philanthropic God. God cannot be 
 looked upon merely as a Benefactor. He 
 must come to men himself. If he gives 
 gifts, he must be in the gifts. If we are not to 
 fall into the evil of impersonalism, he must 
 not fall into that evil. He must not look at 
 men as "masses," or "humanity," or "man- 
 kind." He must stand toward men in the re- 
 lation of "Father" and "Friend." He must 
 be interested in men, not for what he is to get 
 out of them, but for what they are in them- 
 selves. If an obligation of this sort is upon 
 us, it is much more upon God. He must fill 
 human life to the full with his sympathy. 
 
 It is from the standpoint of this manifold 
 obligation that we must approach the moral 
 basis of the incarnation. The glory of the doc- 
 trine of the incarnation is that God has freely 
 taken the burden of human life upon his own 
 heart. But it does not detract from this glory 
 to teach that this free gift of love bases down 
 
 167 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 upon moral obligations. God has with love 
 and with passionate enthusiasm come as 
 deeply into men's lives as it is possible for him 
 to come. He has discharged and does dis- 
 charge with solemn joy the moral obligations 
 of creatorship and fatherhood. He is the 
 leader of all in self-sacrifice; this is the glory 
 of the cross. We can easily lose ourselves in 
 theological intricacies when we attempt the- 
 ories of Christology and atonement, but we 
 must not lose sight of the clear moral aim 
 which the framers of the theories in so far 
 as they have met any widespread demand at 
 all have had at heart. They have been anx- 
 ious to show that God is moral above all 
 others, that, having placed heavy responsibili- 
 ties upon men, he takes the heaviest responsi- 
 bilities upon himself, that in Christ and the 
 cross he has laid bare his inner thought to 
 show men that in the realest and profoundest 
 sense he is with men. 
 
 168 
 
V 
 
 THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTEINE 
 
 IN the old days a wise Christian leader 
 counseled his followers to adorn the doctrine 
 of the Lord Jesus. Throughout the centuries 
 there has been a real, though for the most part 
 half-conscious, tendency to act out the impulse 
 back of the apostle's advice. The aesthetic or 
 artistic impulse has led to most notable crea- 
 tions in the manifestation of religious spirit. 
 We have only to instance the subjects of many 
 of the world's greatest paintings and orations 
 to prove this statement, and both church 
 architecture and church ritual bear witness 
 to the force of the same impulse. 
 
 We are liable to grave misunderstanding 
 when we speak of the significance of an in- 
 crease of a discernment of right form or of a 
 sense of beauty for religious insights. . Still, 
 the growth and improvement of what might be 
 called the artistic impulse really make for 
 the betterment of theological statement. Ta 
 begin with a consideration which is. _ not 
 
 169 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 directly artistic, the progress of mechanical 
 invention helps us to see the need of right 
 form, not, indeed, for purposes of aesthetic 
 gratification merely, but for the sake of in- 
 creasing effectiveness. Quite often the curve 
 of greatest beauty proves to be the curve of 
 greatest strength. But even from the stand- 
 point of effectiveness alone it is essential that 
 an inventor work toward an effective form. 
 The inventor may have before him two pieces 
 of glass of precisely the same quality. One is 
 plain glass and the other is the lens of a tele- 
 scope. The lens is a lens simply because it has 
 been given a certain form. Its curve has been 
 fashioned with mathematical exactness. Prop- 
 erly mounted and turned toward the sky, it 
 will reveal to the observer something worth 
 seeing. A recent book of three hundred pages 
 describing inventors at work gives over half 
 its space simply to this consideration that 
 the process of invention has to do not so much 
 with an attempt at creating new materials, or 
 even new combinations of materials, as with 
 the change in the form of old and familiar ma- 
 terials. 
 
 As it is in the realm of material invention 
 so is it also in the realm of literary invention. 
 In fact, a production can hardly be called 
 
 170 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 literary until the material has been thrown 
 into the right form. A scientist may make a 
 great and far-reaching discovery, but his dis- 
 covery does not become effective in shaping 
 the thinking of the people until, as in the case 
 of Darwin's Origin of Species, for example, it 
 is stated with some degree of literary skill. In 
 the realm of social investigation we have at 
 our hand to-day masses of facts terrifically 
 dynamic in their possible power to arouse 
 public attention, or even to start revolution. 
 But these facts lie in unshaped masses in gov- 
 ernment reports, in papers read before learned 
 societies, in articles published in technical 
 journals. What is needed is the appearance of 
 some artist who can shape the material into 
 effective form. Now, the progress of theolog- 
 ical thinking in our time is somewhat a 
 progress in the shaping of material. We have 
 not discovered much that is altogether new. 
 We have, however, learned how to change em- 
 phasis and how to omit altogether, and how to 
 cast aside the nonessentials, and how to fash- 
 ion the essentials toward a statement with a 
 cutting edge. The call of the preacher espe- 
 cially is not so much to be an original au- 
 thority in scientific, or philosophic, or social, 
 or even theological investigation. The au- 
 
 171 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 thorities in these various spheres are more apt 
 to be the men of the schools; but the men of 
 the schools are not apt to be conspicuously suc- 
 cessful as masters of effective popular state- 
 ment. It remains for the preacher to take the 
 masses of fresh material which are delivered 
 to him almost daily and to shape these into 
 effectiveness. To do this work as it ought to 
 be done will quite likely be enough of a task 
 for any man called to the pulpit. Intellectual 
 ability shows itself not more in the discovery 
 of truth than in the cogent and well-balanced 
 statement of the truth. 
 
 Lest we appear to lay too much stress on a 
 phase of religious effort which may seem to 
 have to do merely with the technic of the 
 preacher's work, we hasten to call attention to 
 the fact that the obligation here is not merelj 
 professional and artistic but moral as well. 
 We hear a vast deal to-day about the honesty 
 of religious teachers. We are told of the obli- 
 gation upon the religious teacher to be honest 
 with himself. We urge again what we have 
 said in a previous lecture about the need of the 
 leader's being honest to his followers. To be 
 honest to the follower implies a willingness to 
 fashion and refashion a statement of truth till 
 it cannot fail of a true effect. The material in 
 
 172 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 the statement may be true: the form of the 
 statement may be such as to produce only 
 falsity in the impression. From this point of 
 view it might fairly be said that some men 
 whose utterances are always true in their 
 matter are always untrue in their form. The 
 insignificant truth is made untrue when it is 
 treated with as much emphasis as the im- 
 portant truth. Putting truths all on the same 
 plane comes in the end to positive distortion. 
 Yet the distortion may come not from pur- 
 posive desire but from indifference to perspec- 
 tive and proportion. Among the religious 
 thinkers of an earlier generation there used 
 to be considerable debate as to the conditions 
 of salvation. There was much support of the 
 doctrine that no man could be summarily cast 
 out of the kingdom who had never heard Christ 
 preached. This was obviously a provision in 
 behalf of the heathen. As soon, however, as 
 an expedient of this sort was resorted to in 
 behalf of the heathen the question arose as to 
 what others had not heard Christ preached. 
 Some took the ground that even faithful at- 
 tendants at churches had not heard Christ 
 preached. We need not revive this ancient 
 debate to see the force of such a contention. 
 A religious teacher might draw a portrait of 
 
 173 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 Christ in lines every one of which might be 
 true. Yet the lines might be so put together 
 or so not put together as to result in 
 caricature rather than in portraiture. 
 
 All this, however, may make theological 
 statement seem more of an artificial creation 
 than true statements are. Keal revelations 
 grow after the manner of organisms. The 
 supreme beauty in this world is the beauty of 
 a growing life. If the life within be full and 
 free, the outward expression is apt to take on 
 beauty of form to correspond. If the inner 
 life is cramped or scantily nourished, the out- 
 ward expression is distorted or deformed. 
 The organs of a growing life make a twofold 
 appeal to us an appeal because of their effec- 
 tiveness and an appeal because of their own 
 inherent beauty. The erect body, for example, 
 is stronger than the bent body. There is more 
 chance to breathe, better distribution of the 
 weight to be carried, an opportunity for the 
 sight to range ahead and on both sides. The 
 impoverished organism, on the other hand, 
 has not strength enough to hold itself erect, 
 and through this lack of strength it loses the 
 chance to gain more strength. In a sense 
 beauty may be said to belong to the very life 
 of a growing religious organism. Beauty of 
 
 174 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 form is the natural expression of a living re- 
 ligious insight. 
 
 In the second place, the beauty of a state- 
 ment its correctness of form and its exact- 
 ness of symmetry makes an effective appeal 
 on its own account. Quite apart from the fact 
 that statements of truth can be put in effective 
 form simply for the sake of effectiveness as 
 statements, they should be given correct form 
 for the sake of the appeal which the beauty 
 itself makes. The masters of theological state- 
 ment have always known how to put this 
 impress of beauty upon their work. We some- 
 times wonder how it has come about that sys- 
 tems of philosophy have lasted beyond their 
 day into times in which they are not altogether 
 useful. We sometimes speak of succeeding 
 generations as under the spell of systems of an 
 earlier day. We speak more wisely than we 
 realize. The spell is the spell cast by a genius 
 for construction. The thinker has thrown his 
 thought into form that makes it unescapably 
 imposing. There is a unity about the system 
 and a symmetry in its development which 
 make men turn back to gaze. We can no more 
 escape the charm of some of these systems 
 than we can escape the charm of the Pyramids 
 or the Parthenon. 
 
 175 
 
THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 
 
 The recognition of this truth is ever before 
 the higher order of religious prophet. He 
 strives to adorn his doctrine. He knows, of 
 course, that adornment is not something put 
 on from without; it is the movement from 
 within of a living principle. The prophet 
 knows that when the principle comes to high- 
 est expression it will minister to the highest 
 in men. We have said that present-day philos- 
 ophy seems to be moving on the sound prin- 
 ciple that in our quest for truth we are to 
 follow the lead of the highest and best in our- 
 selves. We may justly feel that the craving 
 for the highest and best will not be satisfied 
 until the truth which in itself seems highest 
 and best has been joined to highest and best 
 statement. 
 
 Prominent among the factors which to-day 
 are making for the adornment of doctrine is 
 the growth of a sense of restraint. We share 
 with others the alarm at the falling off in re- 
 ligious activities. We do not feel alarm, how- 
 ever, at the falling off of some forms of re- 
 ligious expression. It is sometimes claimed 
 that the religious spirit shows itself in an 
 utter abandonment of the life of the believer 
 to complete expression. This is true if by ex- 
 pression we are thinking of deeds of self- 
 
 176 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 sacrifice. Yet even here there are limitations 
 imposed by the sense of the fitness of things. 
 When we are thinking of religious expression 
 as taking the form of literary statement we 
 must give large part to the limitations im- 
 posed by the fitness of things. 
 
 There is to-day a growing sense of restraint 
 which tends to magnify the importance of the 
 normal and healthy in religious expression and 
 to prevent overemphasis on the morbid and 
 unhealthy. While there is truth in the claim 
 that art should be followed for art's own sake, 
 there is even deeper truth in the further claim 
 that nothing can be truly artistic which does 
 not have back of it a normal and healthy pur- 
 pose. It would be very hard for even a gifted 
 artist to make much of a subject which all the 
 world knew to be sickly or diseased. Certain 
 processes in nature are called morbid when 
 considered in relation to their bearing on hu- 
 man welfare. Certain dangerous growths, for 
 example, take place in the human organism 
 and in the end bring the organism to death. 
 The actual processes of these growths, when 
 viewed by the scientist, may move according 
 to the same bacteriological or physiological 
 laws as do the healthy processes. The micro- 
 scopic forms produced may be just as beau- 
 
 177 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 tiful in their tiny lines and as symmetrical 
 in their proportions as the forms which make 
 for health. If, however, an artist should try 
 to give expression to what he might call the 
 inherent beauty of a morbid growth, he would 
 find himself in difficulty the moment he tried 
 to secure an audience. Of course it may seem 
 that judging the aesthetic quality of a fact in 
 nature by its relation to human needs is arrant 
 egotism, but the world thus judges, neverthe- 
 less. If our contention be just in this illus- 
 tration, much more must it be just in the realm 
 of religious expression. The world will not 
 finally tolerate emphasis upon the unnatural 
 or the unhealthy in religious utterance. 
 
 Discerning critics have more than once 
 called attention to the element of restraint in 
 the gospel narratives. Think for a moment of 
 the story of the crucifixion as told by the evan- 
 gelists. Here was every opportunity for mor- 
 bid and harrowing treatment of ghastly de- 
 tails, an opportunity which later ages did not 
 fail to improve. In the gospel narratives the 
 dreadful event is passed over as quickly as 
 possible. Moreover, the few touches, swift as 
 they are, set before us not the horrible aspects 
 of the story but the spiritual significance. 
 This part of the gospels, by the way, is but 
 
 178 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 little short of a literary miracle. The writers 
 very likely knew nothing about Greek re- 
 straint, but they had the spirit of restraint, 
 nevertheless. The glory about the cross of 
 Christ is a normal and healthy glory, the reve- 
 lation of that spirit of love which is forever at 
 the heart of things. The writers so brush 
 away the dreadful as to leave the love of Christ 
 streaming forth unmistakably. 
 
 The movement away from the unhealthy 
 must bring about better spiritual conditions 
 both for society and for the individual. It is 
 to these back-lying conditions that we must 
 look as we think of the religious expression of 
 a particular time. We can best see this im- 
 provement by contrasting our own century 
 with some earlier centuries. How much 
 chance would monasticism, for example, have 
 of taking root in our time? We would not 
 disparage the good of monasticism. Many 
 benefits came forth from the system which 
 have been of lasting good to humanity. Quite 
 likely we could date many productive prin- 
 ciples of modern agriculturalism back to the 
 gardens of the monks. It was though of 
 course in much later times to Mendel the 
 monk that the world owed the long series of 
 experiments which resulted in the scientific 
 
 179 
 
THE INCBEASE OF FAITH 
 
 formulation of the biological law of heredity. 
 But advantages like this are largely incidental. 
 We may at least say that in our day monasti- 
 cism on a large scale would be looked upon as 
 aberrant and unnatural. Here and there an 
 individual who has taken the vows of celibacy, 
 or who has even consecrated himself to the 
 life of a hermit, may give utterance to loftiest 
 religious expression; but, on the whole, cir- 
 cumstances which lie apart from the main 
 current of normal human life cannot be pro- 
 ductive of best religious statement. 
 
 As it is in the lives of communities so also is 
 it in the life of the individual. It may cause 
 almost a smile to say that our age has turned 
 away from habits of spiritual introspection. 
 This would seem to put the present-day con- 
 dition very mildly. It may cause astonish- 
 ment when a professedly religious teacher 
 declares that there is danger in religious intro- 
 spection. The danger does not seem to be 
 especially imminent in our time. But while 
 the movement away from introspection to-day 
 may be just an expression of indifference, 
 such a movement may rise from true religious 
 instinct. The needs of the individual soul 
 must certainly not be neglected. It is very 
 easy, however, for the devout believer to carry 
 
 180 
 
THE ADORNMENT OP DOCTRINE 
 
 introspection to an unhealthy excess. The 
 more devout the believer the greater the 
 danger. Suppose a man should ask himself 
 at the close of each day's religious effort 
 whether during that day he had done all he 
 could for the advance of the kingdom. Ordi- 
 narily, this question is wholesome. It is very 
 easy to see, however, that the question might 
 be too frequently repeated. And too fre- 
 quently repeated, the question might easily 
 lead to morbidness. This danger is especially 
 imminent when the mind is given to self- 
 scrutiny as to its own sincerity, or as to the 
 signs of the presence of the divine within it- 
 self. Utterances born out of an unhealthy 
 mental state violate that sense of fitness which 
 should mark religious utterance. If we do 
 not directly discourage the habit of overmuch 
 religious introspection to-day, we at least favor 
 reticence in speech about such introspection. 
 
 The adornment of doctrine implies likewise 
 a restraint from any degree of exaggeration. 
 In a previous lecture we spoke of the increas- 
 ing emphasis upon simplicity of statement. 
 There we were emphasizing the need of sim- 
 plicity in statements addressed to the under- 
 standing of the vast masses of the people. It 
 is in order in the present connection to insist 
 
 181 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 that simplicity of statement must characterize 
 religious utterance if that utterance is to min- 
 ister to the finest feelings of men. In the su- 
 preme crises of experience the great minds 
 seem by a certain innate perception to move 
 toward simplicity of expression. There is no 
 room in such minds at such times for anything 
 exaggerated or gaudy or spectacular. Mr. 
 Charles Francis Adams has a fine passage 
 concerning the bearing of Grant and Lee at 
 Appomattox. Mr. Adams points out that not 
 a single word was spoken by either actor in 
 the scene to detract from a quiet simplicity 
 which marked all the details of the momentous 
 transaction. When we think of the vast mean- 
 ing of the event we might at first glance feel 
 something of a craving for at least a touch of 
 the dramatic in the final scene. An immense 
 war had been fought through to an immense 
 victory on the one side and an immense defeat 
 on the other. The people of the North had 
 fought with the conviction that the destinies 
 of democracy were involved in the right issues 
 of the campaign. The people of the South had 
 sustained themselves through unparalleled 
 privations with the belief that they were fight- 
 ing for the sacred cause of liberty. The meet- 
 ing between the chief actors might well have 
 
 182 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 been regarded as one upon which the after ages 
 would delight to look. Considerations like 
 these might have prompted the ordinary leader 
 to a little self-conscious posing. But there was 
 no posing. The reason was that the actual 
 leaders were far from ordinary. Without 
 purposely doing so they instinctively did what 
 the real fitness of things called for. 
 
 A passage in the Old Testament instructs 
 us that on the day of atonement the priests 
 laid aside their lavishly embroidered robes 
 and clad themselves in simple white. Some- 
 thing of the same restraint is becoming in ex- 
 pression which aims to deal with the highest 
 religious ideas. There are, indeed, splendid 
 flights of oratory and magnificent poems in 
 the Scriptures. But even in these the quality 
 of restraint is marked. If we were searching 
 for indications of inspiration in the Scrip- 
 tures, we might find that inspiration revealing 
 itself in a contrast between our Scriptures and 
 other scriptures written at substantially the 
 same times. Not only are the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures healthier in moral tone than the others, 
 but there is a dignified restraint about the 
 former in contrast with the abandonment of 
 at least parts of the other. Abandonment has 
 its place in a Christian system, but the aban- 
 
 183 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 donment is never that of wantonness or reck- 
 lessness. 
 
 Insight into the true demands of the re- 
 ligious spirit also has a tendency to keep us 
 from the curious and artificial. Religion is 
 in a sense profoundly natural. It is the out- 
 come of really primal feelings. Like every- 
 thing else, it has its merely curious phases, 
 and, like everything else also, it lends itself 
 to artificiality. But religion in its highest 
 reaches has very little place either for the 
 curious or the artificial. It may be that 
 a half-conscious perception of this truth 
 underlies present-day impatience with fine- 
 spun theological theories. In looking back 
 to the period of scholasticism, for example, 
 we are sorely tried at the over-systematiza- 
 tion of doctrinal statements. The teachers of 
 that day dwelt much on essences and sub- 
 stances and processions in dealing with the 
 divine nature. Each of these terms has very 
 likely something of vital meaning even for 
 present-day theology. But in medieval days 
 the terms were handled with an overelab- 
 oration which practically put them out of 
 touch with anything real in heaven or on earth, 
 though perhaps we would better say that such 
 expressions would suggest nothing real to us 
 
 184 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 to-day. Scholasticism did great work in show- 
 ing the futility of overcarefulness and punctil- 
 iousness in doctrinal exposition. The student 
 of philosophy will give all credit to the scho- 
 lastics for working out a terminology some of 
 which is lasting in value, and for fashioning 
 some philosophic tools whose usefulness we 
 have not yet outgrown ; but the curse of scho- 
 lasticism was and is its artificiality. 
 
 Many theological dogmas fall into disfavor 
 through being too complete. The very fact of 
 their completeness suggests the artificial. We 
 have no doubt that the so-called evangelical 
 churches would insist quite as strongly in 
 1912 as ever upon the religious truth which 
 must lie at the heart of the doctrine of the 
 Trinity. There is in this doctrine a suggestion 
 of fullness of moral life in the Divine which 
 the churches would not give up without a 
 struggle, or even after a struggle. But in 
 every church there is increasing unwillingness 
 to hear doctrines of the Trinity which are 
 overelaborate. We will not listen as com- 
 placently as did our fathers to discussions as 
 to just what the word "Person" means when 
 applied to the Persons of the Holy Trinity. 
 We Avould protest, on the one hand, against 
 any interpretation of the doctrine which would 
 
 185 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 empty it of vital significance; on the other 
 hand, we would turn away from a too com- 
 plete discussion, for example, of what the 
 different functions of the Persons of the 
 Trinity may be. No doubt very many logical 
 arguments may be adduced in discussions of 
 this kind. But the more logical the arguments 
 the more restless the listeners. To be over- 
 complete in such a field of theological discus- 
 sion jars upon our sense of what is really be- 
 coming and fitting. The celebrated divine 
 who fifteen or twenty years ago in discussing 
 the divinity of Christ established three main 
 propositions, namely, pleromatic divinity, 
 pleromatic humanity, and hypostatic union, 
 might be just as cogent in his logic now as 
 then, but he would hardly get much of a hear- 
 ing to-day. Thinkers of his kind might pro- 
 claim that this is because of the increasing in- 
 difference of our day to theological discussion. 
 But the objection to this sort of discussion 
 does not come from the indifferent. The in- 
 different are too indifferent even to object. 
 The protest comes from those who are really 
 interested in the statement of the religious 
 truth, but who instinctively shrink from a too 
 clearly artificial exposition of what at least 
 ought to be profoundly natural. 
 
 186 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 The sense of restraint also is keeping us 
 back from some of the rougher and cruder ut- 
 terances of early days. We do not speak thus 
 with any desire to belittle the religious phrase- 
 ology of our fathers. We would give much if 
 we could put into some of our more refined ex- 
 pressions the mighty energy that rushed forth 
 from the speech of our fathers. So far as our 
 Methodist branch of the Church is concerned, 
 the fathers had little time for the refinements. 
 Methodism was born at a time when only the 
 most vigorous shaking could arouse the Eng- 
 lish nation from its lethargy. The sins of the 
 nation were drunkenness and licentiousness 
 and theft and murder; these were the evils 
 against which Methodism launched itself. In 
 assault on such sins there was scant room for 
 the niceties of religious speech. When Meth- 
 odism was transported to our country it made 
 its chief conquest in pioneer conditions. The 
 pioneer life is not a parlor life. Out of the 
 roughness of pioneer conditions came a rough- 
 ness of speech that was exactly fitted to the 
 time and place it was intended to serve. The 
 pioneer sins were apt to be rough sins, like 
 brawling and fist-fighting. The success of 
 men like Peter Cartwright lay in the fact that 
 they could attack pioneer conditions with in- 
 
 187 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 struments which reached and transformed the 
 pioneer. In the journal of Francis Asbury 
 are repeated references to his conviction that 
 he must be "dreadfully loud and alarming." 
 Quite likely he succeeded in being both. And 
 very surely the preaching that lacked the loud 
 and alarming quality would have been futile. 
 We must not forget that preaching is, after all, 
 an instrumental statement of the truth. In 
 estimating its success we must judge it by the 
 effect it produces. The glory of Methodism 
 has been the energy with which it pushed its 
 conquests on the frontiers. The leader in 
 these conquests was the pioneer preacher. 
 For him plainness of speech amounting to 
 roughness was an absolute necessity. The 
 roughness was not assumed. It was sincere, 
 coming out of a toughness of fiber begotten in 
 him by the conditions of which he was a part. 
 
 In what we say about this rough vigor we 
 do not mean to imply that there is not room 
 in modern preaching for such plainness of 
 speech. Thousands upon thousands of men 
 cannot understand anything else. Thousands 
 of men to-day are in sins as gross as any which 
 John Wesley saw. We are not to be classed 
 among those sensitive souls who shrink back 
 in horror when a preacher uses language which 
 
 188 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 may seem to the conventional to be very sensa- 
 tional. The success of some sensational 
 preachers arises out of the fact that what to 
 some persons seems sensationalism may meet 
 a real need. There are men in all ranks of 
 society whose real thinking is in essentially 
 coarse terms. The question which the evan- 
 gelistic preacher has to consider in presenting 
 the gospel to such minds is how to speak a 
 language which such men will understand. 
 The alternative is to throw out this rough 
 hempen rope or to let the men go down. In 
 the presence of such an alternative we can 
 even bring ourselves to endure a crudeness and 
 slanginess of speech, if this is the only speech 
 that the men to whom it is addressed can 
 understand. But there are limits here which 
 regard for the fitness of things and some meas- 
 ure of good sense ought to impose. 
 
 In Zion's Songster, a Collection of Hymns 
 and Spiritual Songs Usually Sung at Camp 
 Meetings and Also in Revivals of Religion, 
 published by J. and J. Harper in New York 
 in 1831, is the following hymn : 
 
 When the fierce north wind, with his airy forces, 
 Rears up the Baltic to a roaring fury, 
 And the red lightning with a storm of hail comes 
 Rushing amain down; 
 189 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 Now the poor sailors stand amazed and tremble, 
 While the hoarse thunder like a bloody trumpet, 
 Roars a loud onset to the gaping waters, 
 Quick to devour them. 
 
 Such shall the noise be, and the wild disorder, 
 If things eternal may be like these earthly; 
 Such the dire terror when the great archangel 
 Shakes the creation; 
 
 Tears the strong pillars of the vault of heaven. 
 Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes: 
 See the graves open and the bones arising! 
 Flames all around them! 
 
 Hark! the shrill outcries of the guilty wretches; 
 Lively bright horror and amazing anguish 
 Stare through their eyeballs, while the living worm lies 
 Gnawing within them. 
 
 Thoughts like old vultures prey upon their heartstrings, 
 And the smart twinges, when the eye beholds the 
 Lofty Judge frowning, and a flood of vengeance 
 Rolling before him. 
 
 Hopeless immortals, how they scream and shiver! 
 While devils push them to the pit wide-yawning, 
 Hideous and gloomy, to receive them headlong 
 Down to the center. 
 
 Stop here, my fancy (all away, ye horrid, 
 Doleful ideas!), come, arise to Jesus: 
 How he sits Godlike, and the saints around him 
 Throned, yet adoring! 
 
 Oh, may I sit there, when he comes triumphant, 
 Dooming the nations! then ascend to glory, 
 While our hosannas all along the passage 
 Shout the Redeemer. 
 190 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 We do not know how large use was made 
 of this particular hymn; and it is fair to say 
 that this is not a sample of the phraseology or 
 imagery of the entire collection. Many of the 
 hymns in the book are the great hymns, which 
 will probably be used through the centuries. 
 Moreover, we recognize a rugged force in this 
 hymn, and we can feel something of the power 
 that it must have had with a congregation 
 eighty years ago. We recognize also the eter- 
 nal truth which is embodied in the hymn. 
 Apart, however, from the presence or absence 
 of poetic quality we could hardly think of this 
 hymn as likely to endure through any but a 
 special period of the Church's life. No matter 
 what the effectiveness of the stanzas may have 
 been in other days, we should hardly expect 
 much effectiveness from such style of compo- 
 sition to-day. In spite of all the extravagance 
 and exaggeration and crudeness of utterance 
 in the time in which we live, the most effec- 
 tive statement is apt to be restrained. Merely 
 for rhetorical purposes understatement is apt 
 to be quite as powerful as overstatement. The 
 passage which suggests by a touch here and 
 there is quite as productive of the right im- 
 pression as the passage which comes forth in 
 attempt at complete expression. When such 
 
 191 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 completeness is aimed at the impression finally 
 left is one of crudeness. 
 
 And all this leads up to the unwillingness 
 of some very worthy religious thinkers to at- 
 tempt to put some insights into speech at all. 
 Some truths are better suggested than defi- 
 nitely declared. We ask indulgence for re- 
 peated harking back to the principle of effec- 
 tiveness in a discussion which professedly aims 
 at emphasis on the fitness of things in itself, 
 but the fit expression is, after all, the effective 
 expression. Some truths or facts are too great 
 to be described. We lack as yet the speech 
 instruments for their description. The best 
 we can do is to point a learner toward the 
 mood in which the significance of the truth can 
 be sensed rather than declared. One of the 
 sublimest passages in Victor Hugo is his de- 
 scription of the battle of Waterloo in Les 
 Miserables. The description is an attempt at 
 definite and measurably complete setting 
 forth of the battle. Upon one type of reader 
 the effect is no doubt overwhelming. But an- 
 other reader feels, after all, the incompleteness 
 of the labored attempt at completeness. A 
 student of Thackeray has somewhere remarked 
 that perhaps quite as effective an impression 
 of the greatness of Napoleon is to be obtained 
 
 192 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 from the few references to Napoleon on the 
 pages of Vanity Fair as from any direct de- 
 scription by other writers of the battles of Na- 
 poleon. The significance of Waterloo is al- 
 most as clearly seen by Thackeray's story of 
 what was passing in Brussels on the day of the 
 battle as by the direct statement of the prog- 
 ress of the battle itself. Yet Thackeray's 
 chapter has its force merely in suggestion. 
 From some incidents of confusion on the 
 streets of Brussels incidents that could be 
 fully described we can imagine that tumult 
 and shouting of the captains at the front which 
 could never be described. 
 
 Likewise in the realm of religious life there 
 are some experiences which are beyond de- 
 scription. There are some truths which can- 
 not be compassed in theoretical statement. 
 Take, for example, that final setting forth of 
 the love of God which we have in the cross of 
 Christ. Why is it that we feel so uncertain 
 about theories of atonement? Is it because we 
 are indifferent to the love of God obviously 
 set on high in the cross of Christ? Very likely 
 the cross means more to-day to devout believ- 
 ers than it has ever meant. Just because it 
 means more there is distrust of theory. No 
 one theory is adequate, and after all the the- 
 
 193 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 ories have been added together and the good 
 of each accepted at its highest value we still 
 feel that the formulations are inadequate. We 
 look upon each theory as the attempt of a par- 
 ticular age to phrase that age's best thought 
 of God in the highest and best utterance. But 
 the voice of no one age is complete, and the 
 voices of all the Christian centuries are not 
 complete. And beyond all this anything which 
 is a theory of the cross cannot in the nature 
 of things be complete, for the cross is more 
 than theory. Anything which has to do with 
 divine moral passion is more than theory. So 
 while we frame for ourselves attempts at scien- 
 tific formulation of the doctrine of the cross, 
 we do so with the inner reservation that these 
 formulations must be taken as mere sugges- 
 tions or adumbrations of a truth which we 
 cannot express. The greater part is the unex- 
 pressed part. The sense of fitness prevents us 
 from trying to express the truth too com- 
 pletely. There is a vast realm here which is 
 to be explored by reverent and reticent senti- 
 ment rather than by scientific and logical ex- 
 pertness. In this realm there is something 
 almost irreverent, something almost imperti- 
 nent about too definite a statement. Henri 
 Bergson in his Creative Evolution makes the 
 
 194 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 point that as soon as we harden a living ex- 
 perience down into articulate logical state- 
 ment we have moved away from the peculiarly 
 living quality of the experience itself. Berg- 
 son finds fullness of life only in the actual 
 moment of living. As soon as we get far 
 enough away from the experience to talk about 
 it we have taken a step away from life, and by 
 the time we have reached logical articulation 
 the living quality is almost gone. However 
 this may be as concerns life in general, Berg- 
 son is on the path toward a truth as concerns 
 religious life. The language cannot keep 
 pace with the life. 
 
 This truth becomes all the more apparent 
 when we think of the relation of the indi- 
 vidual soul to God. There is always need 
 of testimony to the presence of God from 
 lips touched by the power of God. There is 
 need of fuller public confession of sin on the 
 part of many who profess to be disciples. It 
 would do the world good to have fuller glimp- 
 ses into the inner life of the saints. The or- 
 dinary man would be helped if he could open 
 the closet door of the saint and see the saint 
 upon his knees. Vast benefit would accrue to 
 believers everywhere if they could know how 
 widespread is the fact of communion between 
 
 ids 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 the greatest lives and the Divine Life. But 
 there is in these experiences themselves an ele- 
 ment that transcends speech, though we are 
 not now referring to experiences that are 
 transcendently mystical. There are some ex- 
 periences which are common to all; any intel- 
 ligent Christian can understand them; but 
 there are other experiences which are peculiar 
 to the individual. These experiences partake 
 of the nature of confidences between the finite 
 soul and the Infinite Soul. They have a sacred- 
 ness like the sacredness of the intercourse be- 
 tween two friends of high and refined feeling 
 who respect each the confidences of the other. 
 We may well be thankful for the emphasis 
 upon the need of friendship with God. We 
 hear much about the love of God, but love in 
 the sense of mutual affection is possible be- 
 tween two persons who may not be able to 
 commune together in the full sense possible to 
 friends. We hear much about men as children 
 of God in the sense that men are the little chil- 
 dren of God. We should be grateful for the 
 growing emphasis on that conception of men as 
 the sons of God which implies the possibility 
 of that maturer companionship which we think 
 of as holding between friends. Now, friend- 
 ship does not show itself altogether in out- 
 
 196 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 right utterance. Understanding between two 
 friends may be so complete that frequent 
 speech is not necessary. Two friends may be 
 separated by the width of the globe, with no 
 communication passing between them, and yet 
 each may feel at every instant that he thor- 
 oughly understands and sympathizes with the 
 other. While we believe that God is always 
 near us, there are times when in a sense he 
 seems to be at a distance. He may for the 
 moment seem to hide himself, or his ways may 
 be past finding out; still, there is possible for 
 the saint even at such moments an unshaken 
 trust which is like the trust which holds be- 
 tween friends. These experiences cannot well 
 be talked about, but the very fact that there 
 are such experiences, and, we believe, such ex- 
 periences in increasing number, makes an 
 atmosphere in which restrained and dignified 
 religious expression seems more and more 
 satisfyingly beautiful. 
 
 We have made much use of the term "re- 
 straint." We would rather, after all, insist 
 that as we stand in the presence of what is fine 
 in itself the very fineness may make us realize 
 the impotence and futility of our expression. 
 Suppose we stand before a great picture. Any 
 attempt to describe the picture will fall short 
 
 197 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 of the picture itself. We have all noticed the 
 silence that prevails in art galleries. The 
 silence is fitting. Loudness and volubility are 
 out of place in the presence of a surpassing 
 work of art. So with any manifestation of 
 transcendent genius. A celebrated American 
 man of letters has told of the evening when 
 with a companion he went over from Cam- 
 bridge to Boston to hear Edgar Allan Poe read 
 a new poem. Poe appeared before the au- 
 dience and announced that he would not read 
 a new poem, but one with which his hearers 
 were already familiar. There was at first a 
 rustle of disappointment in the audience, but 
 all became quiet as Poe started to read. For 
 the auditors perceived at once that Poe was 
 in the creative mood out of which the poem 
 had come. As Poe read on through the stanzas 
 his hearers realized that they were hearing a 
 genius at the very top of his power. When 
 the reading finished, the audience dispersed 
 with hardly any man speaking to his neighbor. 
 The two friends who had come over from Cam- 
 bridge walked back across the Charles without 
 the utterance of a word until they had reached 
 their home. The reason was not that any 
 mystic spell had been cast over the audience, 
 but, rather, that each appreciated so fully the 
 
 198 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 surpassing manifestation of genius that he 
 felt that any word would be out of place. 
 
 What, now, is a manifestation of literary 
 genius compared with a manifestation of a 
 spirit of nobility or of self-sacrifice in its 
 power to chain the attention of the world by 
 the very fineness of the deed itself? If we were 
 to drop out of literature and song the inspira- 
 tion which has come from the contemplation 
 of deeds fine in themselves, we would have 
 very little left. The traditions of armies and 
 navies which nations most fondly cherish are 
 not altogether those of splendid equipment or 
 of excellence in drill or of effectiveness of 
 onslaught on the field of battle. The mind of 
 the nation singles out some scene of outstand- 
 ing valor, some moment when a leader has 
 forgotten his own peril in the glory of aban- 
 donment to his cause, some instant when a 
 hero leaps to inevitable death for the sake of 
 his flag. These are the eternal moments and 
 the eternal scenes in the sense that they have 
 about them the quality of eternity. Or some 
 man gives his life for his fellows in time of 
 plague or surrenders his place to another in 
 the lifeboat of a sinking ship. These are the 
 fine things, but they are fine beyond all de- 
 scription or expression. 
 
 199 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 The world is coming more and more to see 
 the fineness of the kingdom of God as a thing 
 in itself. Even on the theoretical and specu- 
 lative side there is an element of protest 
 against atheism, for example, which is deeper 
 than logic. Our sense of balance presses for 
 a fuller universe than the atheist would give 
 us. We feel that the material must be bal- 
 anced by the spiritual. We feel that things 
 must not be left at loose ends, that there must 
 be Some One for whom and by whom the loose 
 ends are gathered up into some significant 
 meaning. We crave a universe with a fineness 
 of symmetry on its own account. We wish 
 for individual lives an opportunity to come to 
 fullness of proportion. We feel that the 
 quality of the universe must be protected by a 
 force that will give it an inherent nobility. 
 Especially do we crave some power in human 
 lives to make them really worthy ends in them- 
 selves. 
 
 As we read through the Gospels we find 
 abundant indications that Christ was think- 
 ing of his kingdom as a kingdom of ends in 
 themselves. He valued men not as invest- 
 ments, not as instruments altogether, but as 
 ends in themselves. He would have men serv- 
 ants of God, but after the men have done all 
 
 200 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 they can do as mere servants they are un- 
 profitable servants. Men come to themselves 
 when they come to be sons of God. Men have 
 value in the sight of God not because of what 
 they can do for God so much as because of the 
 fact that they can enter into appreciative com- 
 panionship with God. When we think of the 
 kingdom of heaven as an existence hereafter 
 we dream of a realm where things stand in 
 their own right and on their own account. In 
 our earthly sphere the instrumental phases of 
 existence necessarily engross our attention. 
 We are putting this and that together so as to 
 get something else. This, however, cannot be 
 the final phase. We long for a realm where 
 the fine things are valued simply for their own 
 fineness. 
 
 The words of Jesus are fine on their own 
 account. His life was a life fine on its own 
 account. Both his teaching and his life come 
 to their climax in the cross, and the spirit of 
 the cross is fine on its own account. A dis- 
 tinguished philosopher once said that Chris- 
 tianity may be only a beautiful dream, but 
 that if so, it is the most beautiful dream that 
 has ever come to the minds of men. We be- 
 lieve that Christianity is more than a dream. 
 The insistent pressure that would make Chris- 
 
 201 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 tianity more truly actual is a craving for the 
 fitness of things. We cannot be permanently 
 satisfied with times that are out of joint. 
 Somewhere we must reach unity and consist- 
 ency and symmetry and fineness. The idea of 
 God as set before us in Christianity is a beau- 
 tiful idea and reaches the height of its beauty 
 in the revelation of Christ. 
 
 Jesus once spoke of the kingdom of heaven 
 as like unto a merchantman seeking goodly 
 pearls. We are glad that Jesus spoke of his 
 kingdom as pearl. He used other figures of 
 speech to set forth the predominantly useful 
 aspects of the kingdom. He is the Physician 
 who will heal sick souls. He is the Bread of 
 Life upon whom all may feed. The kingdom 
 of the Cross is medicine for disease and bread 
 for the hungry. But it is pearl also. When 
 we think of pearl we lose sight of the more 
 practical orders of usefulness. The pearl min- 
 isters not to disease and not to hunger, except 
 to that nobler hunger for what is fine in itself. 
 The teaching of Jesus, the cross of Christ, the 
 revelation of God all this is pearl. We shall 
 always need the presentation of the cross as 
 redemption from sin and as sustenance for 
 laboring, struggling souls. Out of the doctrine 
 of the cross as redemption and nourishment 
 
 202 
 
THE ADORNMENT OF DOCTRINE 
 
 there will come increasingly forceful puttings 
 of the doctrine of the kingdom. All these put- 
 tings, however, will be inadequate if there is 
 not also some realization of the pearl-like 
 beauty of the gospel. The man who sees this 
 beauty may not be as outspoken as the prophet 
 who would bring the gospel to sick souls, or as 
 the leader who would minister to the massive 
 material needs of men. But he will be no less 
 effective than they. He will bring to men an 
 atmosphere of appreciation of the beauty of 
 the gospel, an atmosphere which will inevi- 
 tably mellow and chasten the hardness and 
 barrenness of much doctrinal statement. 
 
 To conclude: anything which begets a real 
 sense for and appreciation of the beautiful 
 will make for the increase of faith. The crav- 
 ing for beauty is so much a part of us that it 
 must come from the divine source of beauty. 
 Men will not long allow the good and the true 
 and the beautiful to stand in separate spheres. 
 The beautiful is so closely linked to the good 
 and true that if the beautiful is given a chance 
 to reveal itself, it will reveal also something of 
 the true and good. 
 
VI 
 THE DEMAND FOE CHRIST 
 
 ONE of the striking features of theological 
 discussion during the past fifty years has been 
 the renewed prominence given to Christ. The 
 biblical studies have as their net result the 
 teaching that all parts of the Scriptures are 
 to be judged by the spirit of Christ as the test 
 and standard of their final worth. The Church 
 in present-day theory has its value as an in- 
 strument for getting the Christ spirit and the 
 Christ thought and the Christ life into effective 
 working relationship with the forces of the 
 world. Any theory or system which aims at 
 the uplift of the world takes on new power 
 when it can claim for itself the sanction of 
 the Christian spirit or can baptize itself with 
 the name of Christ. 
 
 This prominence of Christ must be due to 
 the satisfaction of demands arising out of hu- 
 man needs. We cannot feel that Christ has 
 in any artificial fashion been pushed to the 
 front. His doctrine and deed and spirit must 
 
 204 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 minister to the needs of to-day and must 
 satisfy some imperious demands. What are 
 some of these demands, and how do preaching 
 and teaching Christ satisfy them? 
 
 In the first place, Christ satisfies the de- 
 mand for some final fixity, at least of mean- 
 ing, in the unceasing flow and transformation 
 of the universe. An impression which we 
 bring back from scientific study is that in the 
 natural world all is movement and change. 
 In our own bodies we live through an inces- 
 sant storm of change. Organs which seem 
 part of our very selves are renewed day by day. 
 All organic nature sweeps along from change 
 to change with incredible swiftness. Even 
 classifications of forms which we yesterday 
 looked upon as hard-and-fast are now seen to 
 be merely provisional and temporary. If we 
 think we can find fixity even in the inorganic 
 realm, we find that we must correct our expec- 
 tations. The physicist tells us that the most 
 inert masses beneath our feet are throbbing 
 with energies which constantly change their 
 direction, and the chemist smiles when we ex- 
 press our naive belief that the elements are 
 necessarily final and must remain as they now 
 are forever. 
 
 We are aware that this is no new problem. 
 
 205 
 
THE INCREASE OP FAITH 
 
 The Greeks wrestled with the puzzle of change 
 and fixity. But the problem is really vaster 
 for us to-day than for the Greeks. The ma- 
 terial universe is much more overwhelming. 
 The distances are longer and the stretches of 
 time are measured in terms which would have 
 staggered the Greeks. We must give up the 
 attempt to find any really fixed point in the 
 physical system itself. What seems to us to 
 be permanent is only activity repeated accord- 
 ing to a law which calls for repetition. The 
 permanence of any phase of the physical sys- 
 tem is like the permanence of a flame which 
 may stand for a time at a given height and 
 burn with a given intensity, but which, never- 
 theless, is in constant movement. The slight- 
 est change in any one of a dozen forces work- 
 ing through the flame will modify its intensity 
 or its color, or extinguish it altogether. The 
 apparent solidity even of a mountain is, when 
 viewed across the stretch of a geological 
 period, largely illusive, depending upon the 
 steadiness of forces which race along with 
 vast speed. Somewhere, we know, there must 
 be a relatively permanent factor standing 
 across this flow of things. Else we never 
 could become aware that there is a flow. 
 Existence would be sliced into inconceiv- 
 
 206 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CfiftlST 
 
 ably thin sections, each of which would 
 perish as soon as it was born. Familiarity 
 with the problem of knowledge shows us 
 that the permanent factor must be in the 
 realm of spirit. Without entering into the 
 metaphysics of psychological existence, we 
 know that there must be within ourselves some 
 power to abide from moment to moment, some 
 power to weave complexity into unity, some 
 memory to gather up the past and make it 
 live in consciousness. We do find in the very 
 act of knowing some ability in ourselves to 
 stand across the stream of change and to know 
 the stream as a stream. 
 
 But this does not help us much. To begin 
 with, change enters into the very heart of our 
 inmost life. We are the same that we were 
 when we were children, and yet we are not the 
 same. Our spiritual powers rise to strength 
 and sink to decay. More significant still, our 
 ideals know both increase and loss. The social 
 institutions of mankind, the ideas which fash- 
 ion man's companionships with his fellows, 
 his conceptions of religion all these are sub- 
 ject to influences which lift them up and cast 
 them down. Both the realm of nature and 
 the inner life of individuals and communities 
 offer little in the way of a permanent resist- 
 
 207 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 ance to the stream of changes in the midst of 
 which we live. 
 
 It is in Christianity that we find any meas- 
 ure of relief from the dizziness of contemplat- 
 ing the world of change. The relief is spir- 
 itual. We come at last upon an idea of God 
 and an idea of man which brings at least a 
 measure of meaning into the vast procession 
 upon which we gaze. The theistic metaphy- 
 sician arrives at the end of his reasonings at 
 the idea of a God who founds change without 
 himself being involved in change. The theist 
 holds that God is above change, not in the 
 sense that change means nothing to him, but 
 in the sense that change brings nothing to 
 him of either increase or loss of power. Men 
 are above change in the sense that they are 
 able to hold in consciousness the varying in- 
 stants of the stream long enough to under- 
 stand the meaning of the movement, but men 
 are in change in the sense that they are under 
 the law of development and are dependent 
 upon the changes of the universe for the at- 
 tainment of their own fullest life. While 
 carrying forward the changes of the uni- 
 verse, God is above change in the sense 
 of possessing power to keep the entire stream 
 before his mind and to withstand any suction 
 
 208 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 of the stream which would draw him into its 
 current. We are not, however, so much con- 
 cerned at this juncture with the God of the 
 mere theist as with the God of the Christian. 
 Christ set before men an ideal of an unvary- 
 ing love at the heart of the universe. He did 
 not pretend to construe this love in terms of 
 theoretical statement. He simply told of the 
 love of the Father in heaven, whose love fail- 
 eth not, and he set this love on high in his own 
 life and death. There is a sense in which even 
 this ideal of Christ changes, but it changes in 
 a fixed direction. It changes in the sense 
 that men understand it better as the years 
 go by. The love of God knows no change, 
 but the heart of man reaches after and 
 attains unto that love by rhythmic pulsings. 
 God is Love. God is the Father of men. 
 Christ's ideal is that men should come to such 
 purity of heart that they can enter into com- 
 panionship with God forever. Our thought of 
 God and of Christ and of man is under the law 
 of change, but the change is in a fixed direc- 
 tion from glory to glory. 
 
 Again, there is a real though perhaps uncon 
 scious demand for Christ to-day that is to 
 say, for the thought and deed and spirit of 
 Christ set before us in the New Testament 
 
 209 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 as a supplement and corrective for the results 
 of the scientific method in the study of the 
 Scriptures. We are not likely to overempha- 
 size the importance of modern biblical study 
 for the better understanding of the Bible. 
 These studies have given the Book new vital- 
 ity. They have helped us to discern a new 
 permanence in both the Old and New Testa- 
 ments and to cast out the incidental and non- 
 essential. We see as never before the trend of 
 the old national life of the Jews toward Christ, 
 the satisfaction of their hopes and of the hopes 
 of the world in Christ, and the mighty mo- 
 mentum of the early apostolic enthusiasm. 
 One of the greatest achievements of modern 
 science is the success which has followed the 
 application of the scientific method to scrip- 
 tural study. Even where the students of the 
 Scriptures have been somewhat hostile to the 
 claims of orthodox Christianity the final re- 
 sults have been good. The most hostile critic 
 has often brought forth a theory worthy of 
 consideration, and the discussion of the theory 
 has put the Church on the path of a truth 
 whose existence the hostile critic may not of 
 himself have suspected. 
 
 Very little harm has been done by the hos- 
 tile critic of the Scriptures. Some harm is 
 
 210 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 continually wrought by the student who is an 
 exponent of the scientific method and is noth- 
 ing else. Such a student is apt to look upon 
 the Scriptures merely as an intellectually con- 
 trived mechanism. He does not sense the 
 vividness and warmth of the life which plays 
 across the pages of the Scriptures; nor does 
 he often enough reflect that the Scriptures 
 were written by human beings. Dealing with 
 the Book thus as a merely intellectual contri- 
 vance, he may reach all manner of astounding 
 conclusions. If he finds passages in a scrip- 
 tural book which seem to him to be contradic- 
 tory to each other, he will have it that the 
 passages must have come from different 
 periods of history or have been written by 
 different hands. If he discovers analogies be- 
 tween scriptural accounts and accounts in 
 other literatures which are evidently solar 
 myths, he is apt to conclude at once that the 
 scriptural narratives are largely solar myths. 
 He forgets that it is perfectly possible to move 
 even through current history and resolve 
 many of the men of our own time into solar 
 myths! Students of the curious in literature 
 will remember that an acute Frenchman once 
 wrote a satire to prove that Napoleon Bona- 
 parte was a sun myth. Napoleon had been 
 
 211 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 dead only a few years when the satire was 
 written, but the author proved conclusively 
 that the Corsican was a myth. Napoleon, for 
 example, prevailed in the south, as in Egypt, 
 and lost in the north, as in the Russian cam- 
 paign. The sun likewise prevails in the south 
 and loses strength in the north. This argu- 
 ment is fully as conclusive as the argument 
 that Jacob must be regarded as a sun myth 
 because on one occasion the sun rose upon 
 him ! We would not deny the worth of scien- 
 tific study which proceeds upon the principle 
 of analogy, but we would insist that scientific 
 study must be supplemented and corrected by 
 an understanding of the motives and proc- 
 esses of real life. The method of the division 
 and reassignment of scriptural documents be- 
 cause of differences discovered in passages 
 which we have thought of as constituting a 
 unified whole is fruitful. But the differences 
 must be really significant. If we find side by 
 side allusions to customs of a particular time 
 and allusions to customs of two centuries 
 later, we know that the document cannot have 
 been written at the period of the earlier cus- 
 toms. Or, if the ideas in the different parts 
 of a single document are widely divergent 
 from each other, the parts must clearly have 
 
 212 
 
THE DEMAND FOE CHRIST 
 
 come from differing periods. But so far as 
 minor differences are concerned, these can 
 easily be found in the works of a single author. 
 Men speak now with one set of phrases and 
 now with another. They become possessed of 
 certain ideas which hold them for a time, and 
 then they are captivated by another set. We 
 would not have to go far into the authenticated 
 reports of speeches delivered in this year of 
 nineteen hundred and twelve to discover the 
 most glaring contradictions in the utterances 
 of this or that public leader. A merely in- 
 tellectualistic critic could on the basis of these 
 utterances split more than one public char- 
 acter to-day into at least a dozen characters. 
 
 All this is true of biblical study in general. 
 When we come to the study of the Gospels we 
 must be careful to supplement the scientific 
 method with genuine appreciation of the spirit 
 of Christianity. Some students in our own 
 day have made a good deal of stir by profess- 
 ing to have proved that Jesus never existed. 
 The reasoning may seem very conclusive to 
 readers of a certain type. The best corrective 
 against such excess is in an attempt to seize 
 the spirit of the gospel narrative concerning 
 Jesus to take the portrait just as it stands 
 and try to realize the spiritual content, to 
 
 213 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 attempt to understand the implications of 
 Christ's doctrine of God and of man. When 
 the Gospels are approached thus we have a 
 sense as of having come into touch with some- 
 thing actual and real. If the Scripture is 
 studied by a man who is trying to order his 
 life according to the spirit of the New Testa- 
 ment, such a man has a corrective against the 
 excesses of the purely scientific method like 
 the corrective which contact with real life 
 always affords. 
 
 The scientific student becomes very im- 
 patient with the popular indifference to some 
 of his theories concerning the beginnings of 
 Christianity. He wonders that even intelli- 
 gent Christians do not seem to appreciate the 
 results of his investigation. The popular im- 
 patience is not with the scientific method as 
 such. People in general recognize the virtue 
 of that method. The indifference arises out 
 of the fact that there is on the part of the 
 Church as a whole a general knowledge of 
 Christ and a general demand for him. In 
 specific items this knowledge and demand need 
 correction, but likewise the specific findings 
 of the scientific student need correction by a 
 general appreciation of Christ's thought of 
 Go<J and of man and of his setting on high of 
 
 214 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 that thought in his own life and death. The 
 real dangers in the scientific study of the 
 Scriptures are the dangers of scientific study 
 anywhere, the dangers which beset the special- 
 ists. If it is true that the specialist in me- 
 chanics or medicine or law is safe only as he 
 is familiar with the general and fundamental 
 truths which lie at the base of his science in 
 common with other kindred sciences, so it is 
 also true that the scientific student of the 
 Scriptures is likely to lose himself and lead 
 others astray if he has not that power to see 
 truth steadily and to see it whole which should 
 mark the thinking of the Christian disciple. 
 
 Lest all this may seem critical of biblical 
 students, we again profess our admiration for 
 the results of biblical study. We have said 
 that we do not fear the hostile critic of Chris- 
 tianity. May we be permitted also to say that 
 we do not much fear even the too technical, 
 over-specialized critic? For the general im- 
 pression which the Christ life as a whole makes 
 upon modern life as a whole, and the general 
 satisfaction of modern life with that impres- 
 sion, is a corrective and safeguard against any 
 evils likely to come from scientific biblical re- 
 search. The very extremeness of the utter- 
 ances of some biblical students has made a 
 
 215 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 fresh demand for the presentation of the 
 Christ-life and teaching in their large and 
 fundamental outlines. As a reaction from 
 overemphasis on microscopic detail there is 
 renewed demand to-day for emphasis on the 
 outline ideas of Christian teaching. After 
 minute study of the trees men are again call- 
 ing for a survey of the sweep and majesty of 
 the forest. 
 
 In our second lecture we sketched the prog- 
 ress of modern philosophy from materialism 
 through idealism to personalism and pragma- 
 tism. We here note the impulse which pre- 
 vails in practically all schools of philosophy 
 to attempt to connect philosophic systems 
 with the teaching and spirit of Christ. All the 
 world knows how Christian thinking has of 
 late been friendly to the evolutionary hy- 
 pothesis, and how welcome this hospitality on 
 the part of Christianity has been to the large 
 body of evolutionists themselves. The reason 
 is not merely that philosophic critics have 
 drawn a distinction between evolution as an 
 order of progress and evolution as a theory of 
 causation, and have pointed out that there is 
 nothing hostile to Christianity in evolution as 
 an order of progress. The scientific thinkers 
 realize the hold which Christ has on the life of 
 
 216 
 
THE DEMAND FOE CHRIST 
 
 the world. If such scientists are not them- 
 selves materialistically inclined they feel that 
 this grasp of Christ is one of the great cosmic 
 forces, and they feel also that evolution has 
 not come to its final statement so long as it 
 does not take account of this grasp. More- 
 over, the evolutionary process by itself pre- 
 sents rather a grim spectacle. We cannot 
 help being impressed with the enormity of the 
 cost with which the evolutionary factors do 
 their work. Many evolutionists, indeed, teach 
 that there is another aspect beyond mere strug- 
 gle for survival, namely, the struggle for the 
 life of others. But the emphasis on the strug- 
 gle for the life of others can hardly be effective 
 without reference to the teaching and spirit of 
 Christ. The evolutionary procession itself 
 raises many questions. From where to where 
 is the procession moving? Who is leading the 
 procession? What is the aim of the proces- 
 sion? Why should there be a procession? 
 Who gives it marching orders and sets its 
 pace? Has the procession any halting place? 
 All these problems clamor for an answer. 
 There is no answer simply from contemplat- 
 ing the procession itself. Hence there is a 
 rather general agreement to-day that prin- 
 ciples at least measurably Christian must be 
 
 217 
 
THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 
 
 called in before we can make much of evo- 
 lution. 
 
 Another student may choose to remain an 
 idealist in spite of the modern movement away 
 from idealism of the stricter sort. But any 
 really serious-minded person soon feels that 
 idealism is rather barren if there cannot be an 
 answer to the question as to whose ideas or 
 what ideas are constitutive of reality. There 
 are ideas and ideas. All ideas are not on the 
 same plane. Hence it is not surprising that 
 the more morally and spiritually minded ideal- 
 ists find delight in the prologue to the fourth 
 Gospel. They turn to Christ as the Word that 
 really utters the universe as the Keason, 
 which, immanent in the universe, comes to 
 personal expression in human terms. The doc- 
 trine of the Logos is especially attractive to 
 members of the Hegelian school. The Hege- 
 lians also seem willing to use such terms as 
 Incarnation and Atonement. True, they do 
 not ordinarily use these terms in the orthodox 
 sense, but the very use of the terms shows the 
 ready willingness of this school of philosophy 
 to reach out a hand almost of supplication to- 
 ward Christianity. 
 
 Those who have broken away from idealism 
 and have become personalists likewise feel the 
 
 218 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CTIRIST 
 
 need of some exemplar or leader who shall 
 really interpret the meaning of personal ex- 
 istence. Suppose that we grant for the mo- 
 ment the extreme claims of some personalists 
 that all individual souls have existed in their 
 individuality from eternity. Even with this 
 admission we must be impressed with the dif- 
 ference in persons. If there is to be develop- 
 ment in persons, the most thoroughgoing in- 
 dividualist would have the worst persons catch 
 something of the spirit of the better persons. 
 We cannot find a suitable ideal in ourselves or 
 in our neighbors or in the mass of mankind. 
 Almost any fair-minded student will admit 
 that, without regard to the historical and 
 critical issues involved in the study of the 
 Gospels, the acceptance of the portrait of 
 Jesus substantially as that portrait is put be- 
 fore us in the New Testament is the most im- 
 perative duty for any doctrine of personalism. 
 The doctrine of personalism must stand or 
 fall with the type of person the theory accepts 
 as standard. If personalism is to mean the 
 wild lunging about of selfish individuals, each 
 acting out the lower impulses of his own life, 
 we have anarchy ; and any system which leads 
 to anarchy must be cast out. If the normal in 
 human life is put above the actual or the aver- 
 
 219 
 
THE INCREASE OP FAITH 
 
 age state of men, we must find the normal 
 most adequately set forth in the great individ- 
 uals of human history. The personal moun- 
 tain peaks must give direction to the move- 
 ment of men through their earthly pilgrimage ; 
 all of which makes a demand for human per- 
 sonality interpreted in terms of Christ as the 
 Supreme Norm and Standard. 
 
 If personalism must finally turn toward 
 Christ, so also must pragmatism. We have 
 already enumerated some conditions which 
 pragmatism must meet in order to satisfy the 
 largest human demands. Too many pragma- 
 tists speak as if their creed means that a man 
 may believe whatever happens to agree with 
 him. Before we accept such a statement we 
 must know what the word "agree" means. 
 The doctrine that a man may believe whatever 
 agrees with him is not much more intelligent 
 than the doctrine that a man may eat whatever 
 agrees with him. "Agree" ought certainly to 
 mean more than to taste pleasant. Some 
 foods taste pleasant, but are poisonous or in- 
 nutritious or unsubstantial. A man may, in- 
 deed, eat whatever agrees with him, but if he is 
 a normal man the food must partake of the 
 fundamental elements which nourish and build 
 up the body. Likewise a man may believe 
 
 220 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 whatever agrees with him, but his belief ought 
 to nourish and build up his entire life. Here, 
 again, we need a norm and a standard. Chris- 
 tianity uses the pragmatic method, but finds 
 the norm and standard in Christ. Without sub- 
 scribing to the doctrine that pragmatism has 
 other than merely instrumental value, we may 
 say that pragmatism does seem wonderfully 
 fitted to be a useful tool for Christianity. 
 Every man that willeth to do the will of God 
 comes into sympathy at least with the spirit 
 of Christ. But Christianity brings elements 
 into pragmatism that may not be acceptable to 
 the philosophical adherents of the system. 
 Christianity accepts the truth that we learn 
 by doing and that the final tests are the tests 
 of life. In real life by which we mean life 
 at its highest and best cross-bearing plays a 
 part. Not by accident did the Master say that 
 any man who would be his disciple must take 
 up a cross daily. Now, the objection to cross- 
 bearing is that it seems to ask us to believe 
 and do what does not promise to agree with us. 
 We come again upon the age-old paradox of 
 Christianity that a man who would save his 
 life must lose it. The danger with pragmatism 
 is that it tends to become too easy. In the 
 presence of hard philosophic problems it may 
 
 221 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 turn away from a rugged wrestling on the 
 ground that rugged wrestling is too hard. So 
 in the presence of the cross. The pragma tist 
 may, like Peter of old, glimpse a truth which 
 means the highest and fullest life, and yet in 
 the next instant deserve a rebuke for an un- 
 willingness to master the implications of the 
 truth in cross-bearing. If pragmatism is to 
 remain respectable as the statement of a philo- 
 sophic method, it needs something or some one 
 to keep it in the straight and narrow path. 
 The temptation of pragmatism is to slip over 
 to the broad way. There are many pragma- 
 tists in the broad way. Pragmatism needs to 
 be kept difficult. Before it can be discipline 
 even for human minds it must exact some- 
 thing of the steadiness of mental effort which 
 the great idealistic systems require. Before 
 pragmatism can be a discipline for the entire 
 life it must see and lay stress upon the signi- 
 ficance of cross-bearing for the attainment of 
 spiritual insight. Much learning, indeed, 
 comes out of reflective brooding; much out of 
 vigorous and persistent doing ; much out of un- 
 selfish suffering. Bearing the cross does not 
 imply asceticism; against asceticism or any 
 other unnatural abnormality we strenuously 
 protest. Christianity does not enjoin need- 
 
 222 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 less suffering. It does not even exalt the spirit 
 which would seek after suffering, but it does 
 compel men to accept and walk in the straight 
 and narrow way which leads to life. If prag- 
 matism ever attains to great power, it will 
 have to heed the world's demand for considera- 
 tion of that cross which represents the divine 
 willingness to bear burdens for the sake of 
 others. Upon one occasion Jesus told his dis- 
 ciples to rejoice when men persecuted them 
 and said all manner of evil against them 
 falsely for the sake of truth, "for so persecuted 
 they the prophets which were before you." 
 The words would seem to give us some hint 
 as to a method of coming to an understanding 
 of the prophets. There might conceivably be 
 many ways of studying the life of a prophet. 
 One might read, mark, and inwardly digest all 
 the words of a prophet. Then one might visit 
 the scenes of the prophet's life and attempt 
 to reproduce in imagination the great events 
 which the force of the prophet had brought to 
 pass. In other words, one might learn some- 
 thing of a prophet by looking backward at the 
 prophet himself. But one could learn more 
 by looking around upon conditions like those 
 which made the prophet burn with wrath and 
 then by casting oneself against the evils which 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 call for a prophet's fire. When one had met 
 something of the resistant force of evil after 
 attacking that evil, when one had been perse- 
 cuted for the sake of the truth, then, indeed, 
 one might begin to understand the prophets of 
 old. The best way to study Elijah is to rebuke 
 evils like those which Elijah rebuked. What- 
 ever the real prophet does he does not follow 
 the line of least resistance. He cuts new 
 channels even if he has to receive upon him- 
 self all the shock which comes to the cutting 
 edge. Pragmatism as method of learning the 
 truths supremely worth while must keep off 
 the line of least resistance. Whatever else 
 Christ may or may not do as a leader of men, 
 he will not lead them along the lines of least 
 resistance. 
 
 The modern social movements also make a 
 demand for a vigorous statement and restate- 
 ment of the thought and spirit of Christ. 
 Such a statement is clearly needed to help us 
 keep our balance between the swing toward 
 masses which would submerge the individual 
 and the opposite swing toward individuals 
 which would ignore the organic dependence of 
 individuals on each other. We may say, on 
 the one hand, that Christ discovered the in- 
 dividual or, rather, that he discovers individ- 
 
 224 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 uals and, on the other hand, that he gave 
 new force to the social relationships of in- 
 dividuals. There is little in the words of Jesus 
 to suggest such terms as "masses," or "hu- 
 manity," or "mankind." If he wishes to speak 
 of mankind he says "all men." Yet even the 
 prayer which the Master holds up as a model 
 is predominantly social. "Our Father," "our 
 daily bread," "forgive us our trespasses as we 
 forgive," "lead us not into temptation" ex- 
 pressions like these do not suggest unrelated 
 individuals. They suggest an organism which, 
 in the thought of the Founder of Christianity, 
 is to be coextensive with humanity. Yet Jesus 
 does not suggest the term "organism" or "hu- 
 manity." He suggests the idea of men as mem- 
 bers of a family. 
 
 The contribution of Jesus to the social move- 
 ment is the force which he has put into the 
 thought of men as members of a family. Bio- 
 logical terms like "social organism," mechani- 
 cal and artificial terms which abound in many 
 theories of the state as a deliberate creation, 
 legal expressions like "rights" and "implied 
 contracts" these do not have the force of the 
 emphasis of Jesus on men as members of a 
 family. Social theories depend for much of 
 their force on the religious ideas back of them 
 
 225 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 or implied in them. It is hardly too much to 
 claim that no social theory becomes really 
 dynamic or vital until it has taken on a re- 
 ligious form, or has been incorporated with 
 some religious theory, or has, at least, been 
 touched with religious fervor. Christ's 
 thought of the brotherhood of man is joined 
 to his thought of the Fatherhood of God. God 
 is the Head of the family. The service of our 
 brothers is at the same time a service of the 
 Father. Most social theories, however, which 
 speak of masses and humanity have as their 
 religious presupposition a sort of pantheistic 
 notion of Humanity as itself God. Many ad- 
 herents of such pantheism wax very eloquent 
 in their advocacy of Humanity as the sole and 
 sufficient object of religious effort. But such 
 social enthusiasm can be kept up only as it is 
 heated so high that any coolness of reflection 
 is out of the question, for such reflection shows 
 that Humanity, after all, is but a class term. 
 The concrete facts are men, women, and chil- 
 dren in various relationships to one another. 
 In the Christian view we find an adequate mo- 
 tive for devotion to the help of men in the fact 
 of what they are. They are children of the 
 Father in heaven. We show our worshipful 
 spirit toward God by devotion to men, but we 
 
 226 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 do not find in the men themselves a full object 
 of worship. What is Humanity? Humanity 
 is human beings present, past, and to come. 
 But human beings of to-day do not give us a 
 God that we can worship, no matter how pan- 
 theistic our theory may be. Human beings of 
 the past were probably not much better, and 
 posterity has not yet arrived. There is not 
 sufficient force in the duty of working for pos- 
 terity to make the duty altogether self-impel- 
 ling. We ourselves are the posterity of those 
 who have gone before, and our posterity may 
 not be very greatly different from ourselves. 
 We can, however, be very patient with the 
 frailties of actual people if we can think of 
 them as objects of the Divine Love. Enthu- 
 siasm for brotherhood which does not in some 
 way connect itself with the idea of the divine 
 Fatherhood is apt to lack staying qualities. 
 The social workers who cut themselves away 
 from Christian teaching as to the divine 
 Fatherhood find sooner or later that they have 
 cut themselves away from a center of power. 
 Social movements which aim at bringing in 
 the universal brotherhood are apt in the end 
 to create, or at least to reenforce, the idea of 
 God as Father. 
 
 The Christian doctrine of men as members 
 
 227 
 
THE INCEEASE OF FAITH 
 
 of a vast family gives too a correction of some 
 doctrines of human equality which are sadly 
 needed. The mere theorist is apt to come for- 
 ward with some statement of the doctrine of 
 equality which makes all men alike equal in 
 all things ; and such statements, wide of reality 
 in themselves, lead to a practical result which 
 is wide of reality. In the Christian thought 
 all men are equal in the sense that all are born 
 into the divine family. All are equal in the 
 sense that all are alike the objects of the Divine 
 Love. But all are not equal in the sense that 
 all have equal ability. Anyone who sees what 
 Christianity aims at will do all he can to re- 
 lieve men of the artificial inequalities in which 
 the present order abounds ; but some inequali- 
 ties are deep-seated. Much of the talk about 
 equality rests on the fancy that human char- 
 acteristics are commensurable, as if there were 
 any way of showing that the ability of the 
 butcher is equal to that of the baker, or that of 
 the general equal to that of the inventor, or 
 that of the painter equal to that of the novelist. 
 Moreover, though all are children of the divine 
 Father, all are not equally responsive to the 
 Father's love. All of which would seem to be 
 self-evident, but much of which lacks recogni- 
 tion by social theorists. On the whole, how- 
 
 228 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 ever, there is increasing demand for the Chris- 
 tian conception as best fitted to the facts of 
 society. 
 
 There is growing demand also for the Chris- 
 tian method in social reform. That method is 
 one of radicalism, but not the radicalism of the 
 ax. In one of his parables Jesus tells of the 
 tree cumbering the ground. A radical with an 
 ax proposed to cut the tree down, but another 
 radical with a spade proposed to dig about the 
 roots and give them a chance. Radicalism 
 deals with roots. The man who waters roots 
 may be as truly a radical as the man who grubs 
 up roots. Some social institutions have not yet 
 had a chance. They are good enough in them- 
 selves, but their roots lack water. Much bitter 
 attack on industrial, political, ecclesiastical, 
 educational, and other institutions is the radi- 
 calism of the ax, while what is needed is the 
 radicalism of the spade. And this in the end 
 comes down to the improvement of the persons 
 who make up the social body. As an extreme 
 illustration take the furious attacks on mar- 
 riage and the family to which extreme radicals 
 continually give utterance. Improvements in 
 marriage are improvements in the relations of 
 married persons, and this in turn means im- 
 provements in the persons themselves. Per- 
 
 229 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 sons marry from wrong motive, or in ignorance 
 of the character of the future partner, or with 
 no adequate sense of the responsibilities in- 
 volved in the marriage relation. Much in- 
 justice results and many innocent suffer. 
 Marriage laws no doubt need improvement, 
 but the fundamental need is an improvement 
 of persons. So with many other institutions. 
 As the readers of an earlier chapter will recall, 
 we hold no brief for industrial institutions, 
 but even in our campaigns against institutions 
 most open to question we must remember that 
 we must in the end reach persons. We must 
 so deal with institutions as to reduce tempta- 
 tion to evil-doing to the minimum. Some in- 
 stitutions to-day put before men temptations 
 which only the strongest wills can withstand. 
 The institutions must, therefore, be modified 
 or abolished. But the final welfare of society 
 cannot depend on abolishing institutions. 
 Men must be brought to the place where they 
 are above using a social institution for mere 
 personal profit, and other men must develop 
 the power to withstand the temptations inevi- 
 table in any system. For illustration, think 
 of the precaution taken to-day to guard the 
 ballot. Not so very long ago election frauds 
 by wholesale were possible. It was easy to put 
 
 230 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 a ballot in a man's hand and see that he put 
 the vote in the box. It was easy to vote a man 
 more than once. The Australian system did 
 away with the first possibility, and thus re- 
 duced the chances of election bribery. Regis- 
 tration systems have practically done away 
 with the second possibility. But do the Aus- 
 tralian ballot and registration make democ- 
 racy safe? The only safety is in the character 
 of the man inside the voting booth. Democ- 
 racy depends for its virtue on the goodness of 
 good men. If the example of Christ means 
 anything, it means that the radical method of 
 social reform is the deep spiritual appeal 
 which touches men in the depths. Christ re- 
 fused to appeal to men by turning stones into 
 bread. That was not radical enough. He re- 
 fused to astonish them into submission by 
 marvels. That was not radical enough. He 
 refused to make political alliances. They were 
 not radical enough. He chose, rather, to strike 
 to the invisible center with an appeal for love 
 of God and man which sweeps all the life into 
 its current. 
 
 We have seen that the great word in current 
 ethical life is obligation. The teaching of 
 Christ aids the ethical life not so much by 
 giving a new set of duties as by giving new 
 
 231 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 force to the ideas which condition ethical de- 
 velopment. Christianity does not advance new 
 ethical notions. It is possible to find the 
 ethical precepts of Christ in the Old Testa- 
 ment, or even in non-Christian systems. The 
 difference is in the religious ideas which place 
 a sky over the earth which the ethical teachers 
 give us. We have seen that the ethical em- 
 phasis to-day has a mighty influence on the 
 shaping of religious ideas. The religious ideas 
 in turn repay the debt by giving new force to 
 the moral ideas. There are some persons who 
 declare that they can do the right for the 
 right's own sake without any thought of re- 
 ligious presuppositions, and these persons are 
 at times inclined to sneer at those who demand 
 religious presuppositions. Kant's thought of 
 God, freedom, and immortality as implications 
 of the moral nature does not seem to some who 
 profess to worship right for right's own sake 
 to be especially worthy. But those who feel 
 the need of the implications feel that need not 
 because of any less loyalty to right for right's 
 sake. They think so much of the right that 
 they are not willing that the universe should 
 be such a universe as to make morality only 
 the affair of fleeting mortals. Man must be 
 free so as to be capable of real morality. Im- 
 
 232 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 mortality must give scope for morality. At the 
 center must be a God who is himself bound by 
 the demands of the moral law. Right for 
 right's own sake may become rather empty 
 unless we are in a universe where we can say 
 at least something of man for man's own sake 
 and worship God for God's own sake. Upon 
 our doctrine of man and God our ethics will 
 in the end depend for its force. 
 
 The ethical demand for Christ, therefore, is 
 the demand for a moral dynamic. That 
 dynamic is found in the doctrine of man and 
 the doctrine of God. On Christ's teaching that 
 the deep human claims have the right of way 
 we need not dwell. It is sufficient to say that 
 in his view the deep and base sins are sins 
 against the ideal of humanity. Even an insti- 
 tution which his contemporaries regarded as 
 transcendently sacred had to meet his declara- 
 tion that the Sabbath was made for man and 
 not man for the Sabbath. Even more force- 
 ful, however, has been the demand for Christ 
 because of the Christian doctrine of God. The 
 struggle for moral life in this world is so in- 
 tense, the inducements to quit the struggle are 
 so many, the sense of failure is at times so 
 overwhelming that the soul cries out asJdng 
 whether there is a moral God or not, and if 
 
THE INCKEASE OF FAITH 
 
 there is, can we think of him as interested in 
 our battle? The moral battlefield is a grim 
 place. Where is God and what is he doing? 
 Is he contemplating the scene from afar or is 
 he at hand? Is he the God of the scientist 
 merely, most interested in the law of gravita- 
 tion, or is he interested in moral law? The 
 answer of Jesus is clear. God is at hand. He 
 is more truly in the moral struggle than we 
 can be ourselves. Our success or failure means 
 more to him than to us. Obligations are more 
 truly binding upon him than on us. When we 
 enter the really moral life we come close to 
 him, and the more moral we become the more 
 we become like him. The pure in heart see 
 God. The seeker after morality seeks the real 
 kingdom. He lives among the real persons. 
 He attains to the real life. No matter what 
 the appearance may be, the real universe is 
 moral. Moral law is constitutional. When a 
 man sets his will to do right, the stars and the 
 God who made the stars are fighting for him. 
 
 There is another factor in the power which 
 Christ contributes to men engaged in the 
 struggle for moral life. We have spoken of 
 the sense of failure which attends the moral 
 struggle. We arise in the morning and think 
 that we shall reach our moral ideal by sunset, 
 
 234 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 but at sunset the ideal mocks us from the dis- 
 tance. Conscience lays upon us tasks which 
 we feel we can never discharge. In addition 
 to this we have lapses which burden us with a 
 consciousness of personal guilt. We cry out 
 for forgiveness and for a second chance, and 
 for a third, and so on indefinitely. Here the 
 Christian revelation comes in again to help us. 
 The cross of Christ sets on high a holiness and 
 love which reestablish and reenforce us. In the 
 name of a holiness which we can never reach, 
 but which w r e would reach if we could, we seek 
 for forgiveness ; and in the name of a love for 
 which we can find no adequate expression we 
 go forth again to the battle. We grieve over 
 our blunders, but rest in the consolation that 
 the God of moral love, after all, takes our in- 
 tention for the deed. So if we fall, we rise 
 again. We are poor travelers, but we get 
 ahead. Now, the present writer is not espe- 
 cially concerned as to the theological terms in 
 which the Holy love of God as set forth in the 
 cross of Christ is stated, but we must not lose 
 sight of the significance of the fact itself as a 
 center of moral power. Right for right's own 
 sake, with no thought of aid from religious con- 
 ceptions, may suffice in ordinary and comfort- 
 able circumstances, but is apt to lack power 
 
 235 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 when deadly temptation appears. And when 
 we are dealing with the man who is down, the 
 bare contemplation of moral precepts, no mat- 
 ter how correct these may be, is hardly enough 
 to get him again upon his feet. 
 
 We have said before that the great word in 
 all our thought of man's mastery of the forces 
 of the universe is the word "control." Now 
 control is not a making over of a force or a 
 turning it back upon itself. Control recog- 
 nizes the force and then seeks to utilize 
 it. Control is the rudder of the ship. The 
 emphasis upon control would seem to be 
 an essentially Christian conception. Chris- 
 tianity looks upon the vast forces as in a sense 
 sacred sacred, at least, as presenting a divine 
 opportunity. Forces in ourselves are sacred 
 in the sense that they can be given a divine 
 direction. We are not to try to make our- 
 selves something other than we are, or to turn 
 our streaming forces back upon themselves. 
 We are to accept ourselves as what we are and 
 then to direct our lives aright. So with the 
 social and all other forces. Rudders are to be 
 put into them. They are not to be condemned 
 and halted. They are not to be allowed to 
 drift. They are to be steered to a goal. 
 
 The truth of the Christian system as aiming 
 
 236 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 at control in this sense is being more and more 
 recognized, and is creating renewed demand 
 for Christianity. There have been Christians 
 who have declared that all the forces in this 
 world, both inside ourselves and outside, are 
 to be resisted as of the devil. The aim of these 
 disciples has usually been good, but their 
 method has not always been wise. Worldliness 
 is of the inner spirit. The man who has least of 
 worldly power may be most worldly in spirit, 
 and the man who has most of worldly power 
 may be unworldly in aim. Other Christians 
 have declared that this world and its forces 
 are to be allowed to drift whither they will, 
 that they have little meaning for the kingdom 
 of God. The true Christian conception would 
 seem to be that the forces are to be neither 
 resisted nor allowed to drift, but to be con- 
 trolled. Hence the feeling both inside the 
 Church and outside is that we must look to 
 the teaching of Jesus for an understanding of 
 the forces and to his spirit for a power which 
 will control the forces. 
 
 We do not mean that there is any demand 
 to-day for a slavish imitation of Christ. Per- 
 haps we would do better not to use the word 
 "imitation" at all. There is demand for ap- 
 propriation of the teaching and spirit of 
 
 237 
 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 Christ. But appropriation means not me- 
 chanical imitation, but absorption and assimi- 
 lation. The way of advance lies not through 
 attempt to make a detailed code of ethics of 
 the teaching of Jesus valid for all times, but 
 through working Christ's thought of God and 
 of man and of life into the life of to-day. And 
 the spirit of Christ, while it cannot be de- 
 scribed, is readily discernible. With that spirit 
 we can contrive to get along with imperfectly 
 working institutions or forces; and without 
 that spirit we are helpless, no matter how 
 worthy the institution or force in itself. In 
 our relation to the great natural forces our 
 question is as to who is running the machines 
 and with what spirit. The answer of Chris- 
 tianity is that God is the center and source of 
 the forces, and that he is using them with the 
 spirit that is revealed in Christ. In regard 
 to all forces which can be brought under hu- 
 man control, the function of Christianity is to 
 animate these forces with the spirit of Christ. 
 
 One of the most remarkable phenomena in 
 history is the fact of what might be called the 
 repeated return of Christ. After all attempts 
 to explain him away, Christ returns to the 
 thinking of men, and returns more powerful 
 than before. We say that this is because of 
 
 238 
 
THE DEMAND FOR CHRIST 
 
 his ability to minister to the deeper needs of 
 men. Those needs become urgent and clam- 
 orous and make demands upon thought sys- 
 tems which only the teachings of Christ can 
 satisfy and demands upon heart and will- 
 forces which only the spirit of Christ can meet. 
 It is part of the glory of our time that the 
 Church of to-day is making everything turn 
 around the thought and spirit of Christ. In 
 her thought of the Scriptures, and of religious 
 experience, and in her thought of herself as an 
 instrument, the question which the Church 
 raises is as to how to beget in men the spirit of 
 Christ. Raising the question does not answer 
 it, of course, but the future of the Church is 
 never brighter than in the days when she 
 clearly discerns the demand of the individual 
 and of society for the spirit which is in Christ. 
 
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