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GIFT OF 
 
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RELIGION AND THE 
 MODERN MIND 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 IN MODERNISM 
 
 BY 
 FRANK CARLETON DOAN 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 
 1909 
 
Copyright 1909 
 SHERMAN, FRENCH &* COMPANY 
 
 
 ;|v .vi^u 
 
TO 
 
 MY FATHER 
 
 fflCKSITE QUAKER 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE iii 
 
 I. RELIGION AND THE MODERN 
 
 MIND 1 
 
 II. GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME . 53 
 
 III. LIFE EVERLASTING: ITS CON- 
 
 DITION 83 
 
 IV. PRAYER AND THE MODERN 
 
 MIND 117 
 
 V. THE UNKNOWN GOD .... 143 
 
 VI. THE INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF 
 
 GOD 153 
 
 VII. THE PRESENT GOD .... 162 
 
 APPENDIX A 173 
 
 APPENDIX B . ,187 
 
PREFACE 
 
 i 
 
 My good cousin asked me the other day: 
 " For whom is your forthcoming book being 
 written ? " I was obliged to make answer : 
 " That must remain to be seen. We'll have to 
 wait until the book has come forth in fact." 
 Still, as it is being thrown upon the public there 
 is no harm in my declaring by way of preface 
 the good intention of the book. What I intend 
 is to influence you who read me understandingly 
 to clearer and sincerer thinking upon matters 
 which do vastly concern every sober man mat- 
 ters of free religion and a modern spirit. As I 
 have laboriously read the proof-sheets of this, my 
 first-born book, I have remarked many an imper- 
 fection which, alas, it was all too late to correct. 
 I do not ask the critical reader to condone these: 
 they are, I know, inexcusable by any test you 
 may apply. What I do ask is that you along 
 with me should sincerely experiment with the ex- 
 perience of God herein recorded. For, let me 
 assure you, it is an experience. If at any point 
 I have seemed to write for the mere pleasure of 
 the thing, or if for the moment I have seemed 
 to expend my energies in worming out of my 
 inner consciousness a Weltanschauung amazing to 
 the reason merely and not tolerable in terms of 
 life; then and there I beg you to read lightly, 
 iii 
 
iv PREFACE 
 
 But if in places you find me writing unaffectedly 
 and sincerely of matters that do concern me, and 
 may you, most deeply, then I conjure you to read 
 profoundly there; to experiment largely in the 
 Life you glimpse there. 
 
 The essays sewed together in this little volume 
 were delivered on very various occasions. One of 
 them was occasioned by a visitation of certain 
 colleges and universities I was authorized to make 
 as Billings Lecturer for the American Unitarian 
 Association. One or two others were used in the 
 first instance as chapel talks before our students 
 in the theological school, and afterwards printed 
 here and there. The essay on prayer was given 
 in substance as a vesper address before two or 
 three colleges and universities here in the West. 
 The gist of another was used in such places as 
 the University of Wisconsin and Ohio State Uni- 
 verity, where I have had occasional engagements. 
 The essay on Life Everlasting was originally de- 
 livered as the Channing Hall address in Boston. 
 And so on. It doesn't matter much what the 
 precise history of these following papers has 
 been. As they now stand they are much revised ; 
 and, I dare say, anyway, they have been mostly 
 forgotten by those who may have heard or read 
 them in their original form. 
 
 Mostly, but not wholly, I may be permitted 
 to say. For I have in my letter-file a collection 
 of notes from friends, some known and others 
 unknown, who tell me that these thoughts con- 
 
PREFACE v 
 
 cerning the larger Freedom and the larger Life 
 have in marked measure brought them freedom 
 and life. The letters are mostly from men, 
 indeed with two exceptions, come in all cases 
 from men. I confess I find this in itself an en- 
 couragement to try my hand at addressing a 
 larger circle of these men by printing a book. 
 Women have their religion as a matter of course : 
 very tender, sensitive, unspeakable withal, but of 
 course. I have in all my life encountered only 
 one woman-atheist; or is it as many as two? 
 God, it would seem, is congenital with his femi- 
 nine offspring; I cannot hope that my essays will 
 do more than perhaps deepen and intensify a 
 humanism in religion which is already theirs by 
 a sort of divine right. 
 
 But perhaps the experience of God-Man if 
 the name sounds awkward in your ears then 
 choose some other; for the name doesn't in the 
 least matter the experience I am seeking to set 
 forth the experience of Man-God I aim to ex- 
 press here may astonish some men into trying 
 the same experiment in divinity. The point is, 
 to strip your manhood most scrupulously, most 
 painfully bare of all its filthy parts, to lay aside 
 your bestialities and liberate your manhoods, to 
 expose the naked, cold-as-steel soul of you to the 
 eternal tempering energy of the world's fire-dust ; 
 then by reacting to transpierce the universe's self 
 with this pure and strong manhood you bear, and 
 call the resulting experience God, God-Man, 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 Man-God, or by what name soever God may will. 
 That experience is your religion's sole deep con- 
 cern. That experience is you ; it is God. 
 
 Perhaps this will appeal, I say, to men of iron 
 constitution. God grant this. 
 
 n 
 
 How often does one encounter in the history 
 of the human spirit the contemptible argument 
 against this or that vision of the world and God: 
 it is the .vision of youth. There are those, doubt 
 it not, my younger brethren! who will condemn 
 your humanist experience of God on precisely 
 such ground: it is the philosophy of youth, en- 
 thusiastic, breathless, whimsical, shallow. But, 
 mind you, a man's God, whether he be a young 
 enthusiast or an old partisan of his God, does 
 most tantalizingly equal his age, does most pre- 
 cisely and scrupulously fit his own annual nature. 
 If then the God of younger men generally is 
 youthful, buoyant, adolescent; then by the same 
 token your God, my very dear old friends, is pro- 
 portionally aged, level-headed, palsied, senile. It 
 is just a matter of temperament, or of age, so far 
 as I can see. Certainly there is no point in 
 arguing the case. 
 
 Now, it seems to me, jesting and back-biting 
 aside, that we may as well face a vital dilemma, 
 a vital, inner disparity of human temperaments 
 which must be felt, I'm sure, by every man who 
 moves with any sort of conscious and serious pur- 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 pose among his fellows. I mean that immemorial 
 and ineradicable conflict between men who are 
 radically enthusiastic or conservatively partisan 
 in all the deep concerns of this life. This aliena- 
 tion of men of the one temperament from men of 
 the other is after all not much a matter of years, 
 I think. There is no measuring of youthfulness 
 or agedness in such terms. It is rather a matter 
 of temperament, of the degree of freshness in a 
 man's soul of whatever age. On the one hand 
 you may find frank, fresh spontaneity, openness 
 to conviction, an insatiable and voracious appe- 
 tite for living being kept up at any cost through 
 all a man's no matter how many years of life. 
 This freshness, as I have remarked again and 
 again in moving among men, is dead against, or 
 rather most livelily against, that sober, balanced, 
 withered steadiness observable on the other hand in 
 most successful business men and in all religious 
 bigots. Perpetual youth against congenital aged- 
 ness there's where the conflict of man with man 
 is severest and most irrepressible. It is in a 
 very deep sense a conflict of god with god ! For 
 your God, as I have said, accords with and fights 
 on the side of your temperamental age. 
 
 Not that one of the perpetually youthful tem- 
 per would fail to profit by the passing years. 
 For one I hope to change notably in the quarter 
 century ahead of me, the period of service vouch- 
 safed me before I attain that venerable, scholas- 
 tic majority when philosophy teachers are apt to 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 be " retired " as the delightfully frank phrase 
 has it. As Stevenson says somewhere : " To 
 hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty 
 is to have been stupefied for a score of years." I 
 hope, God furthering me ! to view with profound 
 dissatisfaction this first-born book of my soul ere 
 I begin to attain my " majority," my age of 
 retirement. Indeed, I even now, before ever the 
 page-proofs have reached the bindery, remark a 
 plenty of blemishes I would gladly remove from 
 my book's more uncomely parts. But to make 
 such changes in the interest of a clearer and per- 
 haps solemner expression of the deep thing you 
 seek to communicate, to deepen one's life and 
 broaden one's views of it all, to venture beyond 
 the shallows of youth into the deeps of a larger, 
 fuller Life, ever to enlarge one's craft is one 
 thing; to change one's course altogether is quite 
 another. As to altering my present straight 
 course and careening quite elsewhere on life's 
 way; as to believing at, say, sixty or so, what is 
 now to my mind only so much stuff and nonsense, 
 so much monstrous blasphemy of him I here call 
 God I could not endure that without losing 
 my humanity, without breaking my heart, with- 
 out debasing and destroying the very soul of me. 
 As for me then, being as I am, I must follow 
 my own course. In youth or old age, in life or 
 in death, in body or in spirit, I give and dedicate 
 my true self, in all sincerity and simplicity, to 
 him I call God-Man a very God of everlast- 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 ing youth and perpetually buoyant Life. Being 
 so, you see that if I ever do outgrow the experi- 
 ence of God herein made public I am indeed a lost 
 soul; all the sweet juices of my human being will 
 have been bruised out of me upon the altar stone 
 of the world's crushing Reality. In such a state 
 of flat and withered deadness of soul I think I 
 can see the somnolent, conservative, aged world- 
 ground yawning to receive my defeated and 
 juiceless spirit. God forbid that! 
 
 " Sunnyside," Meadville, Pennsylvania. 
 September, 1909. 
 
I 
 
 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 What is the place of religion in modern life? 
 Within the last quarter century this problem has 
 been raised so frequently and from such trifling 
 points of view that its familiarity, I fear, has 
 bred a certain contempt in the mind of the thor- 
 oughly modern man. In his way of thinking 
 these various attempts to establish once more a 
 vital connection between the church anpl human 
 life are all, each in its own way, beside the point. 
 They are too secular; or too apologetic; or too 
 defensive; or, if you please, too practical. The 
 thing needed is a revival of those eternal verities 
 in which all men of whatever culture have always 
 instinctively believed. What men want is the re- 
 establishment of the church as a distributer of the 
 bread of life, of the pulpit as a place of moral 
 and prophetic vision. Of course the practical 
 man doesn't put his case just this way. But put 
 it for him frankly, unaffectedly, above all undog- 
 matically, and he will bow his assent. 
 
 Some months ago certain telling editorials ap- 
 peared in the Wall Street Journal, a periodical 
 hardly to be accused of sentimentality in its inner 
 springs. These editorials called for a reviving of 
 the impulses of religion in our own modern life. 
 1 
 
a RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 I was struck by the absence of cant, the positive 
 ring of sincerity in the tone of these editorial ap- 
 peals. I was myself about to go on a pilgrimage 
 to several of the colleges and universities of the 
 great Northwest. As official lecturer for one of 
 the great religious denominations of the country 
 my object was to commend the ministry to these 
 young men as a manly and commanding pro- 
 fession. I asked Mr. Pratt what I should say to 
 these college and university men. He replied that 
 since religion is the prof oundest instinct, the deep- 
 est concern of human being, to be its sponser be- 
 fore men is indisputably a man's most sacred 
 calling. But the trouble, he said, with the mod- 
 ern minister is that " he preaches the truth as if 
 it were fiction ! " 
 
 Now instead of a simple and passionate em- 
 phasis of eternal truth the modern minister is 
 urged by religion's ill-advised promoters to adopt 
 all sorts of practical, not to say sensational de- 
 vices for reclaiming the modern man. Not long 
 ago several of our leading magazines opened their 
 columns to suggestions of ways whereby the 
 church might be made once more a vital power in 
 the lives of men. The prescriptions were many 
 and radical. The church, for one thing, should 
 abandon mediaeval cathedral architecture and 
 should rather imitate the style of the great, down- 
 town business blocks: men would feel more at 
 home in such surroundings, we were told. The 
 church, for another thing, should become " in- 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 3 
 
 stitutional," aiming to serve the whole man from 
 his head to his feet : " You can't convert a man 
 on an empty stomach," they said ; " nor can you 
 compete with the theaters and such places unless 
 in your church you duplicate in some fashion their 
 more popular attractions." As another measure 
 of self-preservation the church was urged to elab- 
 orate some scheme of Christian Socialism where- 
 with to compromise on the one hand the Chris- 
 tian with the socialist and on the other hand the 
 socialist with the Christian. 
 
 It was about this time that one of our fore- 
 most American psychologists of religion was 
 heard to say in private that, if the church would 
 keep within its portals the independent, thinking 
 men of to-day, the preacher must allow these men 
 to " talk back." The day of priestly hocus- 
 pocus, when the church might exercise an exter- 
 nal authority over the lives of men, has of course 
 gone by. On that we are agreed. My friend, 
 the psychologist, swaying to an opposite extreme, 
 holds that the prophetic and apostolic office of 
 the preacher is itself lost forever! It only re- 
 mains for the church to become a sort of club- 
 house, a conference hall; the minister unfrocked, 
 his exalted function lowered, would, I suppose, 
 serve as a sort of honorary president of this pres- 
 ent century club organized for the exchange of 
 opinion upon the deep and eternal concerns of 
 life! 
 
 The gist of all these inexpert opinions as to 
 
4 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 the tonic best suited to revive moribund churches 
 is after all contained in the recommendation, so 
 often repeated in these days, that the preacher 
 should give his people " practical " sermons. It 
 doesn't much matter, he is told by his worldly 
 counselors, what the theological creed of his church 
 may be : men won't understand that very well any- 
 way. It were better to dispose of it quietly at 
 some point early in the service, then proceed 
 to preach truth as if it were fiction ! 
 
 These remedies, I say, are too external and 
 fumbling; in a word, too practical. They are 
 not heroic and tonic enough. They do not feed 
 men's spirit with the sincere milk of truth. 
 
 One is bound to acknowledge in passing that 
 the " religious " papers have had little to do with 
 these more external specifics for the restoration 
 of religion to a place of influence in modern life. 
 On the whole they have endeavored to rehabilitate 
 the church in more vital directions. But, here 
 again, there is palliation and want of clearness 
 and heroism in the view taken of the church's 
 relation to modern life. Too much of the nervous 
 discussion which in recent years has filled the 
 columns of the religious weeklies has been merely 
 apologetic, guarded and abjectly defensive. 
 Earnest appeals are incessantly made to the su- 
 preme and indisputable place of religion in the 
 civilization of the past. " Surely," we are told, 
 " men cannot yet afford to dispense with the great 
 instruments of fear and faith by which religion 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 5 
 
 through the ages has controlled and developed 
 human civilization ! " But why will these zealous 
 defenders of the faith persist in confusing re- 
 ligion with an institution called the " Church," 
 or for that matter, religion with that particular 
 denominational theory which they happen to pro- 
 fess ? To confuse the eternal impulses of religion 
 fear, faith, love and the like with an institu- 
 tion of whatever sort or age is in itself narrow- 
 ing, misleading and mischievous. 
 
 And then the church as an institution has not 
 been an invariable instrument of civilization, as 
 every historian well knows. In some instances it 
 has dammed the springs of human life to the 
 point of inundation : its institutional interests have 
 clogged and obstructed those very impulses of 
 fear and faith and love upon whose spontaneous 
 and free action the religious life itself depends. 
 
 Least of all can it be claimed that the church 
 by conserving religious dogmas and this sounds 
 curiously like the claim often made these days in 
 defense of the " faith of the fathers " has been 
 the faithful promoter of human rights and pro- 
 gress. In this matter of dogma it has been in- 
 variably her arch-enemies, science and philos- 
 ophy, who have usurped the church's instru- 
 mentalities of civilization and enlightenment. No 
 doubt the church has always been the great con- 
 server; but so often, alas, it has conserved the 
 wrong thing! the shell instead of the kernel, 
 the dogma instead of the living impulse of which 
 
6 KELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 the dogma is but the ill-fitting investment. In 
 all this I would be understood : these defenders of 
 the church intend sincerely enough to revive and 
 reestablish the eternal things for which as an in- 
 stitution the church ideally stands. But always 
 their argument is overshadowed by the spectre 
 of the church as an institution of dogmas long 
 since cast out by men of the modern mind. At- 
 tempts to revive the church in this or that historic 
 form of doctrine are too plainly confuted by the 
 solemn fact that, as an institution of dogma, 
 and that is what the Christian Church, as historic, 
 is, the church is dead. 
 
 n 
 
 It is a mistake in any case to lump all modern 
 men and then attempt to establish some single 
 relation between them and the religious life. In 
 the following pages the discussion aims not at 
 men in general, but rather at a certain type of 
 man, the man with what I have presumed to call 
 the " modern mind." 
 
 For in my intercourse with men I seem to re- 
 mark among them several types of mind. These 
 temperaments of course intercross constantly: no 
 man stands in any perfectly single relation to 
 the church. But on the whole his attitude may 
 be marked as facing predominantly one way or 
 another in religious matters. Among these sev- 
 eral temperaments I have been especially im- 
 pressed with three types of mind. Let me mark 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 7 
 
 these as " indifferent," " confused " and " mod- 
 ern." 
 
 As " indifferent " I describe the man who has 
 simply dropped the services of religion out of 
 his life. He is commonly regarded as the lead- 
 ing type of mind in the modern world of affairs. 
 All his energies seem to have become commer- 
 cialized. He is a practical and, worst of all, an 
 unconscious materialist. His materialism, unlike 
 that of a former period of human history, has 
 no conscious principle in it. It isn't as if he had 
 deliberately rejected idealistic impulses as unreal 
 and unsubstantial. By long process of habitua- 
 tion the commonplace exercises of his daily rounds 
 of affairs have simply displaced the more ideal 
 and poetic passions of life. He has lost the art 
 of aspiring, of poetizing, of enthusing over 
 things unseen and inestimable. In all these re- 
 gions of finer impalpable culture he is a stranger, 
 awkward, nonplussed and indifferent. 
 
 It is commonly alleged that these indifferents 
 are in the majority in modern life. Certainly 
 their case is most grievous; they are of all men 
 most miserable. But their tribe, as I believe, is 
 very rare indeed. Many men by their habitual 
 silence and by their regular avoidance of religious 
 services appear to belong to this tribe of indif- 
 ferents. But in fact these men of affairs are in 
 countless instances concealing minds that are long- 
 ing for the Eternal. Anyone who feels with 
 sympathetic touch the pulse of our modern life 
 
8 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 will find that life not dull and sluggish at all but 
 deeply alive to the things of the spirit, wearied 
 of the world's practical materialism, sick of all 
 its sad infidelity. The simple fact is now, as it 
 has ever been in periods of desolating materialism, 
 that men on all sides are minded to revolt toward 
 simpler and diviner ways of living their days. I 
 have learned in passing among men that the eter- 
 nal verities are being sought in the most unlikely 
 places and by the most unlikely representatives 
 of our modern life. It is profoundly significant 
 that men of practical mind and of worldly re- 
 sources are quietly joining the ranks of life's 
 idealists, and are wanting somehow to replace the 
 church in its former position of jurisdiction over 
 the lives of men. 
 
 Men's silence then, as they will tell you in 
 hours of unwonted confidence, is owing to no 
 indifference of mind in matters religious but 
 solely to their sense of unfitness to discuss the 
 idealistic impulses fermenting in their lives. They 
 are indifferent, I imagine, to the church's ofttimes 
 sensational or apologetic handling of ideals which 
 in them lie too deep for utterance. In these mat- 
 ters the average layman is often vastly deeper 
 and more serious, alas, than the minister of re- 
 ligion itself. The " indifference of the laity," I 
 must believe, is due in large measure to a simple 
 weariness on the part of serious men with the 
 preacher's timid, or silly, practical tampering with 
 religion's sacred offices. It is pertinent that 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 9 
 
 where there has been honest preaching, simple and 
 abandoned, with nothing concealed or withheld 
 between preacher and people ; where there has been 
 no timidity nor sensational clap-trap, but a free, 
 unafraid and unashamed giving of his whole, 
 honest and solemn person in the preacher's weekly 
 meditation before his people ; where there has been 
 no apology nor nervous self-defense but simple 
 and straight-forward reflection upon the eternal 
 instincts and passions of life in these circum- 
 stances the layman has always listened gladly. 
 For through the preacher's common words he has 
 felt his own silences somehow become vocal with 
 the soul's natural and eternal harmonies. Brooks, 
 Beecher, Hale, Gladden, Savage such giants of 
 God have lived and still do live but never con- 
 front an indifferent laity. 
 
 The instant success of great, yet simple preach- 
 ing is evidence against the claim that the indif- 
 ferents, the unconscious materialists, dominate our 
 modern life. The average layman is spiritually 
 modest ; he does not easily expose the secret places 
 of his inner life. He is spiritually sensitive; he 
 will not subject the really deep problems of his 
 life to the buffoonery and tomfoolery too often 
 exhibited in the modern pulpit. None the less 
 he is desperately in earnest. Great crowds of his 
 kind are awaiting a voice of prophecy in our 
 modern world a prophet who shall command 
 that the gates of the church be lifted up, that 
 the portals of the larger Life be thrown open to 
 
10 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 admit without condition or apology all those who 
 are now suffering for its atmosphere of freedom 
 and peace and joy. 
 
 We need not expect that in the long run this 
 larger and deeper need of the modern mind will 
 be satisfied with the discussion of social and ethical 
 problems now in vogue among many popular 
 preachers. After all the average layman is bet- 
 ter able than the average minister to deal with 
 these more practical problems of life. In an 
 hour's reading of some authoritative book or 
 magazine the layman with his background of 
 worldly knowledge will inform himself more gen- 
 uinely upon questions of social and practical 
 morality than by listening to an inexpert, morn- 
 ing sermon dealing with such matters. A meager 
 week or two of reading and reflection upon the 
 part of the preacher and his sermon is ready! 
 But the inexperience and practical awkwardness 
 of it all shriek at you from every page and 
 paragraph of his labored discourse. With the 
 rare exception of men in the pulpit whose pre- 
 vious experience of life especially entitles them 
 to speak upon " problems of the day " the min- 
 ister is grotesquely ineffectual when dealing with 
 such questions. All his habits of life and 
 thought, all his instincts, if he be indeed an in- 
 stinctive prophet of the larger Life, unfit him to 
 grasp directly the " affairs " of his laymen. They 
 respect him for attempting these matters ; any- 
 thing were better than the traditional and tire- 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 11 
 
 some " doctrinal " sermon ! But they like him 
 best of all when he is discharging his peculiarly 
 ministerial office: saturating their souls with an 
 atmosphere of mystic Manhood such that their 
 practical solutions of the problems of the day 
 will be in fact ideal. This is something mystic 
 and intangible, I grant. But it is the great and 
 lasting thing in all apostolic and prophetic 
 preaching. Anything short of this, anything 
 more practical than this, however excellent and 
 useful it may be in its way, is not in the province 
 of the preacher. To know practically and in de- 
 tail the conditions and problems in the life of 
 the layman is hardly the preacher's business. He 
 cannot hope to " win men " by becoming himself 
 a layman. Not by awkward dealing with prac- 
 tical problems remote from his proper instincts 
 and temperament, but by somehow touching each 
 week, simply and solemnly, the things the layman 
 himself in all his spiritual silence, modesty and 
 sensitiveness is thinking on will the minister of 
 a larger Life serve the modern man in his deeper 
 nature. 
 
 m 
 
 Meanwhile, there are many quiet, unobtrusive 
 ministers over the country who cannot be fairly 
 accused of thus secularizing their pulpits ; a 
 large body of faithful men who, unknown to 
 fame, are yet leading their people along the simple 
 paths of righteousness they and their fathers have 
 trodden. To me there is a certain pathos in the 
 
12 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 transparent consecration of these men. They 
 man the pulpits of their fathers and defend their 
 fathers' faith. By the great test of practice that 
 faith has worked well in their cases. It has 
 made them gentler, honester, more generous in 
 their life with their fellows; it has kept their 
 faces toward the Eternal. They make no skilful 
 apologetic and learned defence of these ancestral 
 traditions. Their argument has in it the deeper 
 ring of a mystic conviction. They are simple, 
 sincere, untutored, unspoiled. They are in the 
 direct line of apostolic succession. Their Chris- 
 tian culture belongs by right to those apostolic 
 and early patristic periods before the Christian 
 experience had been spoiled by " Christian Evi- 
 dences " and " Sacred Oratory." 
 
 By right ; jbut the trouble is that there lurks 
 in the minds of these admirably sincere defenders 
 of the fathers' faith a half-suspected confusion; 
 a confusion of their natural, unspoiled impulses 
 of religion with certain of the outgrown dogmas 
 and symbols in which these great human passions 
 once clothed themselves. They retain the prime 
 passions of religion: a sense of the eternal, the 
 joys of divine companionship, the complete sub- 
 jection of their human life to an eternal law of 
 righteousness; but they confusedly express these 
 deep experiences in terms no longer fitting the 
 present depth and freedom of such great com- 
 munions between the human and the larger Life. 
 
 ( This confusion of mind among modern church- 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 13 
 
 goers is very widespread. The thing which attracts 
 and holds them in regular attendance upon services 
 of the church is clearly not the doctrines therein 
 set forth; it must be rather the transparent and 
 refreshing sincerity of the preacher himself upon 
 whose honor they are glad to stake their own 
 eternal lives. He preaches fiction as if it were 
 truth! for to him it is truth, sacred and everlast- 
 ing. To him and his people your difficulties with 
 this or that dogmatic conception are shallow and 
 impertinent. The deep and pertinent thing, they 
 say, is that the dogmas do work, do fit the life 
 of the world, do sweeten the atmosphere of the 
 home ! Even so, these men believe deep of God, 
 eternity, human destiny and the like things 
 World-wide and race-wide in their value ; but they 
 confuse these eternal things in religion with the 
 transient dogmas and symbolic practices of their 
 historic sect. 
 
 The inevitable result of this endeavor to save 
 and honor outworn dogmas under the shadow of 
 religion's eternal truths is a narrowing and shal- 
 lowing of those eternal values themselves. 
 Thus men of this group I call " confused " be- 
 lieve very practically and deeply in God but only 
 in him as revealed in the Christ. They believe 
 in eternity but only as a region wherein lies the 
 Kingdom of God planned and prepared by his 
 risen Son. They believe in universal salvation 
 but only because every man must eventually adopt 
 the " plan " which their peculiar priest or 
 
14 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 preacher sets forth as " scriptural." They hold 
 that God's revelation of himself is free and uni- 
 versal but the culmination and final form of that 
 revelation is after all contained within the Chris- 
 tian bible as interpreted by the scholars of their 
 persuasion. And so on in an apparently hope- 
 less and endless confusion of the visible dogmas 
 of human history with the invisible realities of 
 the larger Life. 
 
 This confusion of mind and, if I may express 
 a kindly, though frank judgment, this spiritual 
 superficiality is the most conspicuous phenomenon 
 in modern Christian circles. It is all so sincere, 
 in spots so mightily stimulating and helpful! 
 Strong men deliberately pay the price of intel- 
 lectual confusion for the precious freight of prac- 
 tical goods conveyed to them within the old wrap- 
 pings of a former faith. But it is all so super- 
 ficial and misleading! Listen to a few sermons 
 or read a few of the books of the more notable 
 of these sincere apologists of primitive Chris- 
 tianity, these leaders of Christian peoples " back 
 to Christ " ! If your mind be alert in such mat- 
 ters you will easily mark the very paragraph and 
 in some instances the very sentence in which the 
 speaker or writer's thought unconsciously turns 
 the corner from the essential to the unessential, 
 from the spontaneous to the dogmatic, from the 
 inner life to its external forms, from the eternal 
 to the transient things of religion. It all aims 
 at the unspoiled experience of apostolic and early 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 15 
 
 patristic Christianity ; it would delve beneath the 
 debris of dogma in order to reclaim Christianity 
 in its primitive and eternal forms. 
 
 In the hands of the leading exponents of this 
 primitive, pragmatic Christianity, in men trained 
 in the school of the incomparable Ritschl, the mix- 
 ing of essential with unessential elements is in a 
 high degree expert. They are far subtler than 
 the more naive preachers of the fathers' faith. 
 But the confusion in their cases is nevertheless 
 very real and to my mind very grievous. They 
 commend to men an interpretation of Christian 
 culture in the very highest degree plausible and 
 tempting but which clear-thinking men, it may 
 be of the next generation, will be apt to reject as 
 too unscientific and unmystic for their own needs. 
 
 For, notwithstanding denials to the contrary, 
 men must see sooner or later that this appeal to 
 primitive Christianity as a practically final form 
 of religious experience does imply that the aposto- 
 lic and early patristic Christians were peculiar, 
 not to say inspired, in the inner springs of their 
 religious being. This is of course most vigor- 
 ously denied by those who defend the Christian 
 religion as " final". They tell us very clearly 
 indeed that by the " final elements " in Christian 
 experience they do not mean anything peculiar 
 to Paul or his time nor to the early fathers and 
 their times ; that they aim rather to revive in men's 
 minds the eternal values in the religion called 
 Christian. In defending their view of the Chris- 
 
16 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 tian religion against this charge of historic lim- 
 itation they have even gone to the extreme of de- 
 claring that if Jesus of Nazareth, the source of 
 historic Christianity, had never lived, the things 
 they affirm as final in Christianity would still be 
 binding upon men ! 
 
 But at this juncture the clear-minded man al- 
 ways rises to a point of enquiry; nor can he be 
 silenced by the decision that his questions are 
 mere " quibbles ". He asks, for example, in what 
 conceivable sense this " pragmatic " Christianity 
 is a revival of primitive Christianity. " Really 
 now," he says, " if you emasculate historic Chris- 
 tianity, depleting it not merely of its later dogmas 
 every one in these days seems glad to let them 
 go ! but also of all its recorded maxims of 
 conduct and even of its very founder, is this not 
 tantamount to saying that these eternal values are 
 not in any sense whatsoever Christian? Are not 
 these values genuinely eternal? Are they not the 
 birth-right of every age and of every race? Are 
 they not more properly conceived as mystic than 
 as historic ? Would there be by this test any dif- 
 ference between the Christian's essential Chris- 
 tianity and, say, the Buddhist's essential 
 Buddhism?" 
 
 I have some friends of the Hindu race, men of 
 exquisite culture and character. I used to say 
 playfully that they were better " Christians " 
 than I. Would I not have spoken more clearly 
 and genuinely had I said " They are better men 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 17 
 
 than I, living closer to the eternal, expressing bet- 
 ter the larger Life, imitating more fully that mys- 
 tic Man envisaged by all religions as eternally real 
 beyond the confines of historic humanity "? 
 When this complete transcendence by religious ex- 
 perience of all actual or possible historic persons 
 or races, forms or dogmas, is clearly understood 
 the group of minds I have called " confused " will 
 cease to prosper and multiply their kind. 
 
 " But " I have friends who say " all this is 
 beating the air. We've got to call this experience 
 of religion something. We who are Christian by 
 birth and heritage call it by the name which is 
 familiar to us. Let Buddhist, Brahman, Mo- 
 hammedan and the rest denote the same thing, 
 if you will, by terms which are congenital with 
 them. Let's not quibble over words." 
 
 But this refusal to " quibble " may do a vast 
 deal of mischief in the world. Practical mischief, 
 too, if clear and genuine open-mindedness is to 
 be the test. Say what you please to the contrary, 
 the fact is that if you insist upon calling your 
 experience " Christian " then you remove from 
 your inner circle your friend of another race, or 
 perhaps your friend of a broader scientific and 
 philosophic culture whose religious experiences 
 simply have not the historic origin nor the historic 
 simplicity of the experience you insist upon call- 
 ing " Christian ". 
 
 It is all a matter of clearness, you see. And 
 when you consider that in another generation or 
 
18 EELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 two all civilized races by virtue of international 
 wars, councils, peace conferences and the like will 
 have become in matters of secular and ethical cul- 
 ture genuinely acquainted with each other; and 
 that the average man by virtue of education in 
 the cosmos-wide matters of science and philosophy 
 will have broadened his horizon out beyond the 
 historic places and times of humankind when 
 you consider this perhaps remote but nonethe- 
 less approaching state of human society your 
 inability at this time to dispense with historic 
 terms becomes a really practical impediment in 
 the way of human comity. The Christian re- 
 ligion, as Christian, is historic, ethnic. The time 
 is perhaps remote but it approaches when Chris- 
 tianity, as historic, will be classed among " re- 
 ligions of the past ". There will be then a larger 
 race and a more mystic religious experience, an 
 experience of invisible Manhood companioning all 
 the lives of all men. What men of that day will 
 call their religion God only knows. Let us hope 
 it will be so awful and so practically mystic that 
 they will not call it anything. Perhaps its God 
 will be that " nameless " God one encounters here 
 or there in every great religion, that invisible 
 Man one always fronts sooner or later in some 
 hidden path of his own inner life. 
 
 It has already come to pass that one feature 
 of primitive Christianity, long regarded as 
 " final ", is seen to have been based upon a con- 
 fusion of the historic with the eternal in religion. 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 19 
 
 I refer to the alleged experience of the Christ 
 and God as one. It is trying for us of the 
 modern mind to enter into the genius and mean- 
 ing of this unconscious confusion at the source 
 of Christian experience. Back of us are some 
 centuries of " trinitarian " controversy. The 
 ideas of God and the Christ lie so adjacent in the 
 mind of the primitive Christian as to be prac- 
 tically, genuinely indistinguishable: to him God 
 and Christ stood for no disparity of divine ex- 
 perience; they were felt as practically, genuinely 
 " one ". It is as if in the beginning the spirit 
 of Jesus had completely invaded the minds of his 
 followers, transpiercing them with a thought of 
 himself just like his own experience of himself 
 and the Father as one. But in our minds, whether 
 for better or for worse, these two ideas are sund- 
 ered: the idea of God, alas! has come to stand 
 for all that is mighty, majestic, austere and awful 
 in life ; the idea of Christ for all that is friendly, 
 forgiving and sympathetic. The two experiences 
 once well-nigh identical the experience of 
 Christ shading mystically and imperceptibly into 
 the presence of God cannot naturally be 
 brought together and confused in the modern 
 mind. 
 
 And yet this is the express aim of certain mod- 
 ern Christian pragmatists: to reclaim this early 
 experience of God and the Christ as one. Their 
 argument is practical, as they see it. Ritschl 
 somewhere says " The deity of Jesus is a value- 
 
30 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 judgment " : this early confusion of Jesus and 
 God is valid so long as it works; it is true now 
 as then because through this Christing of God 
 men are brought into living touch with the other- 
 wise ineffable being of God; by Christing God 
 and in no other way. Christ is the sole practical 
 point of contact between the human and the 
 divine. All your logical, scientific and phil- 
 osophic difficulties, says Ritschl once more, fail 
 to enter that supernal world, that Kingdom of 
 God, that inner life of the spirit where Christ 
 does actually work as God. 
 
 It is enormously plausible, this attempt to re- 
 store in the modern mind the primitive experience 
 of Christ and God as one. But it is confusing! 
 It really does not work in the type of mind I 
 call " modern ". Its working depends upon the 
 confusion being in his case as unconscious as it 
 was in the primitive experience itself. But to- 
 day men's condition of mind in many instances 
 is such that the confusion is consciously felt. 
 The modern man, moderately well-read as he is 
 in popular philosophy and above all in popular 
 science, means by " God " a heaven-wide energy 
 of being. He has learned something of the in- 
 comparable quantities and qualities of That he 
 now calls God. To him Christ, even granting 
 him to be the type of the divine in the human, 
 is felt not as one with but as at the opposite pole 
 from This he now calls God. 
 
 The difficulty at this point is beginning to be 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 21 
 
 felt by the clearer minded of those who are now 
 celebrating the Christ as a practical force in 
 modern life. To meet the difficulty they have 
 originated or rather revived a, conception 
 of the Christ as " mystic " or " cosmic." That 
 Christ, they say, is not the historic Jesus nor the 
 Messiah of Jewish expectation: as cosmic he ex- 
 isted in the beginning ; he is " wisdom," coeternal 
 with the Father, the eternal Son of God and Com- 
 panion of man, of equal power with God. As 
 cosmic Christ is the God of the modern mind only 
 with an added dimension of practical understand- 
 ing and love. 
 
 But then why not call the cosmic Christ 
 " God " ? Why, once more, this reprehensible 
 process of confusion between an historic term and 
 an eternal meaning? Christ thus becomes gen- 
 uinely universal and mystical. This Christ, this 
 God of mystic oneness can by the modern mind 
 no longer be confused, except consciously and 
 dishonorably, with the Jesus or even the God of 
 historic Christianity. He is rather the One of 
 the ages ; the unseen, unknowable, undefinable, in- 
 comparable source of all divine being; the Pres- 
 ence in conscious science and philosophy; the in- 
 visible Companion of all human life; the Eternal 
 of the modern mind. 
 
 Ritschl says that the " deity of Jesus is a 
 value- j udgment ": it works well to confuse Jesus 
 with God. The modern man, equally pragmatic, 
 says " The deity of man, or the Manhood of 
 
22 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 deity is a value- judgment ! " : it works well to 
 assume an invisible divinity present in every man, 
 an invisible humanity present in every god. Thus 
 without confusion the modern mind does indeed 
 gain all that has eternal value in the Christ-idea 
 and infinitely more; for in its view every man is 
 a potential god, every God a cosmic Man. 
 
 IV 
 
 The " modern " mind, then, as I see it, is by 
 no means the average mind. Most of the men one 
 encounters in a day's j ourney belong to the group 
 of minds we have been considering as " con- 
 fused " : they would pour the new wine of modern 
 culture into the old bottles of Judaic ethics and 
 Christian religion. By " modern " I mean the 
 rare and sincerely open mind, the man conscious 
 of himself in relation to a full modern culture, 
 unbound by historic forms and terms; his open- 
 ness is natural and unaffected ; with his whole per- 
 son and without turning back he faces the 
 prospect ahead; his is a spirit of iron constitu- 
 tion, radical to the very marrow, finding ravishing 
 joy in trying to the heights and valleys of being 
 the wings of his spirit, apt to reject as artificial 
 and restrictive the familiar terms and dogmas of 
 the historic church, eager to follow in the pur- 
 suits of science and philosophy in a word, un- 
 afraid, unashamed and open minded. 
 
 To follow the movements of this unaffectedly 
 open minded man within the last half century is 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 28 
 
 indeed a stimulating and uplifting exercise. Of 
 course he has had in his train a motley following 
 of noisy cynics and sceptics. But he himself is 
 a nobleman clean and pure in his mind ; eager 
 and sensitive in his soul; searching always for a 
 positive and honorable experience of things 
 eternal; wanting and ready at every turn in the 
 spirit path to stand silent and conquered in the 
 presence of That he may yet call God. 
 
 On his honor the modern man cannot accept 
 any historic religion as final, or even as express- 
 ing essentially the height and depth of his modern 
 insight. In his view all institutional religion is 
 heavy, saturated with past forms, myths, un- 
 truths, a dead weight; its terms somehow are 
 restrictive and misleading, apt to damn all spon- 
 taneity of spirit. In any atmosphere of conces- 
 sion to this or that particular form of religious 
 experience our man of iron and radical constitu- 
 tion cannot abide; he feels oppressed somehow by 
 suggestions and meanings he cannot honorably 
 favor. 
 
 All this merely reports a bald fact. It boots 
 not so far as the fact is concerned, to accuse this 
 modern mind of being over-radical; or to com- 
 plain that such a man is in fact ignorant of the 
 eternal values rescued by " criticism " from the 
 dogma-wreckage of historic Christianity. As I 
 have already suggested, these " eternal " elements, 
 in so far as they are genuinely that, are not 
 historic at all but mystically, invisibly universal. 
 
24 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 To hold them, thus final, as peculiarly creditable 
 to any historic person or age is once more 
 " confusing ". 
 
 But one need not repeat the argument now. 
 The fact suffices : the modern man by temperament 
 faces ahead with his whole person. He is a bad 
 historian and critic, if you please; an unloyal 
 child of a long line of culture that bred him 
 " modern." In all this he is no doubt eccentric 
 and radical; but he is true to the marrow. He 
 faces forward bearing in his manner and spirit a 
 wealth of past religious experience; but claiming 
 all this heritage unconsciously, just as a child 
 unwittingly passes on through his person the 
 subtle breath of his fathers. 
 
 Is he then a Christian? My readers will re- 
 call two or three notable heresy trials in which 
 this question was asked of certain offenders who 
 were then in process of becoming " modern ". 
 These men invariably replied that they were be- 
 yond doubt Christian, or even " Baptist ", " Pres- 
 byterian " or Gott weiss was sonst! in the " final ", 
 " primitive ", " permanent " sense though per- 
 haps not in the " sectarian ", " transient ", " in- 
 stitutional " meaning of the word. Now it is 
 hard for the man of the modern mind to under- 
 stand these subtle defenses of the modern heretic 
 and perhaps even harder for him to be patient 
 withal. It is so painfully uncertain what these 
 primitive religions and sects were; and, anyway, 
 so certain that whatever they were they are not 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 25 
 
 now, nor are likely ever to become again! It is 
 too much to expect that any Christian sect or 
 even Christianity itself can ever wholly cancel 
 and disown as spurious the hard and dogmatic 
 features accumulated during the centuries of their 
 past. It is not to be expected and for that mat- 
 ter not to be desired that time will turn backward 
 and make a man a child again even for a night; 
 not to be expected nor desired that the human life 
 will in any important respect return to the child- 
 hood of the race. But just that is substantially 
 what the defense the modern heretic involves and 
 recommends ! the grafting of modern culture 
 upon the apostolic and early patristic stem of 
 Christian culture. 
 
 The man I call modern, whether for good or ill, 
 is a man without a conscious history; he is with- 
 out any religious traditions; 3ike John Stuart 
 Mill, as he describes himself somewhere in his 
 autobiography: whereas most men are in the po- 
 sition of painfully breaking through the shell of 
 religious tradition he is in the peculiar, free-born 
 position of never having had any religion at all; 
 of facing reality with perfect and unconscious 
 freedom ; with no chip of the past hampering even 
 the subconscious parts of his soul. He is a re- 
 ligious outcast who cannot be brought to trial; 
 making no official professions he is not open to 
 question by religion's professors. He has a pro- 
 found respect, perhaps a sincerer appreciation, 
 for the deeper things of that religion called Chris- 
 
26 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 tian; but I imagine that if brought to trial and 
 asked if he were a Christian he would promptly 
 reply "No!" Nor would he be likely to pros- 
 trate his high spirit by explaining his answer be- 
 fore men capable of asking such a question. 
 
 In all this our modern man has endured much 
 hardship and contumely, many weary hours of 
 spiritual loneliness. He has imagined himself cut 
 off from religion not alone in its historic forms 
 but in its deeper contacts as well. Failing to 
 connect with any of the visible gods of human 
 history, deploring all these superstitions of the 
 past, he has missed the invisible, eternal realities. 
 He has in many instances resorted to humanitarian 
 morality and in its gracious atmosphere has found 
 rest for his larger soul. He has fallen back upon 
 himself as a partial and yet faithful expression 
 of a future, ideal humanity. With no sense of 
 divine companionship, with no eternal prospect 
 or perspective for his own person, he has yet 
 sought to work out a happy destiny for his fel- 
 lows-to-be. He has in hot passion conceived a 
 " religion of humanity ". He has become to the 
 core humanitarian in his life's processes. 
 
 In this he has, as it seems to me, found a 
 practical ideal incomparably superior to the dog- 
 mas of fear and false faith too often identified 
 with religion. He has saved as it were the dis- 
 embodied soul of religion, the soul of goodness 
 and love in all things human. Such a man is 
 trustworthy enough; he is a much sweeter and 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 27 
 
 friendlier companion in life's way than the com- 
 monplace bigot in religion. And yet somehow 
 he makes you sad when you join him on his way. 
 He lives in such loneliness of spirit! His hu- 
 manitarian heroism has in it the nobility of tears, 
 the tenderness of a silent and constant sorrow. 
 His Great Father is dead! Standing now alone 
 he would himself vouch for humanity; he would 
 in his small measure restore something of the in- 
 finite righteousness and love lost in the death of 
 humanity's God. The moral law after all is man- 
 made and man-maintained, he says. Has it no 
 sanction of any higher " power not ourselves that 
 makes for righteousness " ? Very well then ac- 
 quit yourselves like men; yea, like very gods! 
 Is the law of love likewise a purely human in- 
 stitution? Very good then; guard all the more 
 jealously the great institution of love and hu- 
 manity builded by the faithfulness and purity of 
 these finer men, risen from the beasts of the field. 
 " The gods are all dead " ? Then put a Man 
 on their high throne. Poor, insane Nietzsche, 
 fugitwus errans, was after all the perfect prophet 
 of this sadder, more heroic humanitarianism. 
 " The gods are all dead ; but, behold, there comes 
 a Man!" 
 
 I would not presume to address these modern 
 minds, did I not belong to their fraternity. With 
 my brethren of the spontaneous, open mind in 
 view I have on some occasions spoken the words 
 now brought together in this little volume. It is 
 
8 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 I 
 
 as it were a personal confession. It has one sole 
 aim: to show, if it may, how a man of radical 
 constitution may yet regain an honorable and 
 positive experience of things eternal ; how he may 
 fully cultivate within his modern mind that sense 
 of eternal, moral companionship which is indeed 
 the invisible genius of every " religion of human- 
 ity ". Take seriously that exquisite structure 
 you call " Man ", my friend ; give your inner 
 vision of him full play; really believe in him; 
 spread his mystic humanity over and beyond the 
 stars up there ! Add to him an infinite dimension, 
 of human things like love and patience and hope- 
 fulness! And you will behold That I call 
 " God ". This is what your religion of humanity 
 unconsciously means, is it not, brethren of the 
 humane mind? God! too unseen to be dogmatic- 
 ally defined or in his fulness revealed in time; 
 yet too human to be comprehended in the de- 
 liberate language of science and philosophy? 
 God, a Man, cosmic and yet friendly? an uni- 
 versal energy unconscious in stones and stars yet 
 conscious in men? divine yet human? God yet a 
 Man? 
 
 v 
 
 Still, as I pen these lines, my spirit is checked 
 by a difficulty which always disturbs the surface 
 of one's deeper experience of his own mystic 
 humanity. It is a difficulty of method and tem- 
 perament. The more hard-headed and dispas- 
 sionate of these religionists of humanity will un- 
 
EELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 29 
 
 derstand and applaud this vision of the God- 
 Man. " But," they will everlastingly remind you, 
 w it is no vision of what is but rather of what is to 
 be. If in your defense of God as human you 
 declare not merely what God would be in such 
 a case but that he is, you are no better than 
 the veriest fanatic and dreamer in religion. What 
 w religion indeed but just this dogmatic or, if 
 you will, mystic creating of gods in the image 
 of men? Some day you too will follow your 
 own God-Man brokenheartedly to that vast cem- 
 etery of the soul where rest men's dream- 
 gods surrounded by all the sacred relics of the 
 past." 
 
 Once I spoke of this invisible humanity of God 
 in the hearing of Felix Adler. In an address 
 following my own he approved what he called the 
 " perfect music " in this service of elevation, this 
 exalting of a purely ideal Man to a level of strict 
 reality. But, he complained, it is not the ideality 
 but just this reality of God that men are ques- 
 tioning in these days. A while ago open-minded 
 men were saying " God is too bad to be true " ; 
 now they are beginning to feel that God is too 
 good to be true ! 
 
 Felix Adler's difficulty, as I understood him, 
 is typical; and I am frank to say, it is insuper- 
 able in the mind which follows in all matters the 
 method of brute fact. " What " modern men 
 are fond of asking " is reality in fact? " " Ob- 
 serve and then report what you see ! " they say. 
 
30 KELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 " Do the heavens in fact declare the glory of 
 God? Are things, as seen, base or ideal? Does 
 the account of reality, as it appears, suggest 
 eternal perfection or blind force as its core and 
 source? " 
 
 This method has always made short work of 
 the affairs of religion. Is God obviously real? 
 does he appear upon the surfaces of things? 
 Well, no. Do the facts justify the soul in its 
 eternal hope? No again, if you test the soul as 
 it appears in some diseased state, say, in idiocy or 
 senility; or if you judge by the almost tangible 
 silence of the grave. Is the Power of things as 
 they are also a God of things as they ought to 
 be? No; positive pain and ill has always op- 
 posed its spectral being in the way of every fancy 
 " solution " of this problem of evil. And so on 
 through a very dreary series of hard-headed and 
 hard-hearted negations. 
 
 For many years the situation was no better 
 than this. On the one side there was the idealist 
 displaying his tiresome, impractical wares in the 
 light of the eternal; by arguments ad horrdnem 
 persuading men to faith in an ideal state of things 
 they practically knew to be unreal. On the other 
 side the realist confounding the mild-eyed and 
 simple-minded idealist across the way with a coun- 
 ter display of hideous facts, brute-forces, mon- 
 strosities, evils on all sides. Idiocy, degeneracy, 
 moral imbecility, the wholesale slaughter of in- 
 nocents, born and yet unborn, and a thousand hor- 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 31 
 
 rifying features wherein the experiment of man- 
 making has most miserably failed. 
 
 This opposition of temperament between 
 idealist and realist is familiar enough. Each in 
 his own way is a dogmatist; each stubbornly fol- 
 lows the method of fact. The one dogmatizes 
 about the surface aspects, the other about the al- 
 leged " absolute " aspects of being. The dogma 
 of the absolute idealist is that at its core the world 
 of facts is ideal ; the dogma of the realist is that 
 there is no core of being at all, but things are 
 just what they seem. To the one life is deeply 
 rational and good; to the other it is throughout 
 irrational and bad. 
 
 But lately a new method has interposed be- 
 tween these arch-temperaments, a method called 
 " pragmatism." In its spirit it disagrees with 
 the dogmatism of idealist and realist alike. It is 
 by no means absolute in its emphasis of ideal 
 things ; yet it faces the appearance of things with 
 the presumption that to act as if things were 
 better than they really are would perhaps bring 
 about a better actual state of affairs. In so 
 far the pragmatist, as I see him, is an idealist: 
 he believes beyond the facts. Again, though he 
 is not abject in his vision of things as they are, 
 yet he sees enough of horror in being to stiffen 
 the souls of men and startle them out of the silly 
 optimism of the absolute idealist. In so far he, 
 as I see him, is a realist: he believes within the 
 facts. 
 
82 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 In all this the new method is in truth the method 
 of life. In all living we assume things to be 
 better, or, alas, worse * than they may actually, 
 be; and somehow in the nature of things as they 
 are the inner assumption does perceptibly alter 
 for better or worse the bare face of the world. 
 This pragmatist then does in truth ring reality 
 much more genuinely than either the realist with 
 his clumsy or the idealist with his vague pulls 
 upon the sources of being. 2 
 
 Now it is the character of religion to pull upon 
 being, to draw substance out of the hidden and 
 unreachable abysses of being, to create gods after 
 the manner of man. The modern mind needs to 
 be reminded of this peculiar property, this 
 creative virtue of religious enthusiasm. Its first 
 step (and an indispensable step too, if it would 
 profess religion of any sort, even a modest religion 
 of humanity ) must be away from the rugged real- 
 ism of its method of brute fact toward a franker 
 and fluenter enthusiasm for the imponderable and 
 
 iThe whole universe, you remember, became "a Hum- 
 bug to those Apes who thought it one!" Just re-read 
 Book III, Chap. Ill of Carlyle's "Past and Present," 
 and see. 
 
 2 Elsewhere I have outlined a philosophy called "cos- 
 mic humanism," which, I imagine, will in some wise be 
 the technical outcome of this fresh method. If there be 
 any of my readers in whose mind this little volume ap- 
 pears rather thin and frothy in its enthusiasm for an un- 
 formed humanity, an invisible God-Man, I may perhaps 
 refer him to the appendix where I have reprinted two of 
 the articles in question. 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 33 
 
 immeasurable facts of being. Thus, if he profess 
 a religion of humanity, let him after the manner 
 of the fanatic declare that there are no facts 
 except Man. Let him grapple with being and 
 bend all its energy along with his own human 
 powers toward this thing he calls " Humanity ". 
 Whenever he looks upon the stars let him see 
 " Man " imaged there in the depths of being. 
 Whenever he visits the plague-spots among men 
 let him divest the moral imbecile he sees there of 
 all his filthy rags and display underneath, once 
 more, a " Man ". All this will profoundly 
 change the face of the heavens and of the earth. 
 And the religion of humanity's blood-sweating 
 faith will not have been vain. For, doubt it not ! 
 there is a region of being what the philosophers 
 call the Unknowable where the facts are un- 
 determined, where your poor human " say so " 
 counts tremendously ! It is the region of " Man " 
 and " God ", the habitation of the " God-Man " 
 of the modern mind. 
 
 When the modern mind has adopted, whole- 
 heartedly and whole-souledly, this method of life 
 it will not ask " Is God" but " Shall he be?" 
 not " What is God?" but "What do we want 
 him to be ? " not " What are the probabilities in 
 his case ? " but " How much in our own human 
 case are we willing to do, how much to risk in the 
 interest of God's possible being?" not "What 
 may we reasonably expect from the alleged God 
 of the ages, if he be?" but "What for God's 
 
34 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 sake can we practically contribute to his enter- 
 prises among us men, granting that he is ? " 
 
 Well then what does the modern mind want 
 God to be? What are a man's lasting wants, his 
 eternal needs? That's the question. Then, dare 
 to convert these eternal wants into resolute pulls 
 upon being's sources! Enter the free region of 
 the Unknowable and stake out your claims ! As- 
 sert your right to find in God what your human 
 life most profoundly needs ! Stake your life upon 
 the trustworthiness of the eternal ! Hold fast to 
 that! Demand what you need of that! Believe 
 in that! And, as God lives, that will come true 
 in the end ! This is the method. 
 
 VI 
 
 As I move among men searching their souls 
 and mine for some one thing which would cover 
 with its principles and privileges all the multi- 
 plex needs of our human lives I come to dwell 
 more and more on men's want of moral compan- 
 ionship in their lives. A present companion here 
 on earth, a moral Presence, this is what men want 
 God to be. This is what he shall be in the in- 
 visible depths of being where things are not what 
 they seem but what they ought to be. Let the 
 surface facts of the world appear as they may, 
 the modern mind must risk its all, must contribute 
 its last drop of energy in promoting this great 
 unknown God, this silent Companion of men, this 
 present Friend of humanity. 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 35 
 
 As it stands, " moral companionship " like any 
 other catch-phrase is a somewhat vague formula. 
 But if we will examine in detail the concrete 
 values of such a belief, I think we shall find them 
 meeting point by point all the deeper wants of 
 the modern mind. 
 
 vn 
 
 For one thing, God, were he real not merely 
 as an unconscious power round about, above and 
 within us but as a conscious energy companioning 
 men in their moral struggles, would fill with 
 superlative joy all the places of moral solitude 
 in the world. 
 
 We have marked the moral loneliness of the 
 modern man. Lacking all sense of overbrooding 
 companionship, finding in the Unknown no evi- 
 dent moral friendliness, wanting in his own life 
 all eternal perspective, the modern man still la- 
 bors heroically for a humanity yet to be. He is 
 a religionist of humanity, the most exquisite ex- 
 ample, so far, of all nature's finer products. In 
 him the " struggle for the life of others " has 
 come to full fruition. He yields his energies 
 completely to the life of the whole he calls " hu- 
 manity ". All his wants, all his needs, center in 
 a future Man. For him he labors, though in the 
 joy and perfection of that ideal Man-to-be he 
 shall have no conscious part. This is his re- 
 ligion; the service of Man its only, holy office; 
 his God is, shall be this Man-to-be. 
 
86 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 It is not with the sects and religions of the 
 past but with this religion of humanity that the 
 modern mind has got to reckon. In point of 
 nobility and in its acual outlook this religion of 
 humanity is in a thousand ways suited to the 
 wants of the open-minded man: it is scientific, 
 sincere, clear-headed and above all humane. It is, 
 moreover, productive: it develops on earth the 
 highest imaginable type of moral manhood. 
 These religionists of humanity (I make no ex- 
 ception) are the best men on earth to-day, the 
 most heroic yet the freest from mock heroics, the 
 purest yet the least pharisaic, the saddest yet the 
 least querulous among the men of their day and 
 generation. 
 
 What, somewhat more precisely is the vision of 
 this religionist of humanity? It is a vision of 
 the human life as a continuous generation of 
 moral personalities but in which no one man has 
 any personal endurance. The man of to-day 
 must serve the man of to-morrow by indirect 
 measures. If he be a father, he must aim to 
 produce in his own children a higher and stronger 
 type than himself. If he be childless he may yet 
 serve humanity though in a subtler and less direct 
 way: he may seek to join the " choir invisible" 
 of those whose deeds of goodness continue even 
 after their own death to broaden and deepen the 
 continuing stream of living, human souls. His 
 ideal is indeed mystical: he has and holds this 
 vision of a future perfected and joyful Son of 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 37 
 
 Man. Only it is a sad vision, a lonely heroism! 
 The religionist of humanity by all means pro- 
 motes a great enterprise of Man-making in the 
 world, but is yet in himself sad and lonely. He 
 sees men of incomparable goodness dying on all 
 sides with no great Companion to close their eyes 
 in peace and with no power on earth to make 
 good the dead loss of their kindly and beneficent 
 souls. The way is weary and the prospect prom- 
 ises nothing to him and his fellows of the on- 
 ward life. Yet he does not complain and whine 
 and whimper. With quiet and very solemn dig- 
 nity this merciful religionist of humanity will tell 
 you that the ultimate Man of his mystic vision is 
 worth the myriads of human souls sacrificed in his 
 making. 
 
 Yes, that Man is worth all the soul-stuff that 
 is going into his beatific being. Any one of us, 
 if he too be a nobleman of this larger Life of 
 humanity, would gladly add his mite of being to 
 the God-Man who is yet to be on this earth. 
 What assurance, then, have we that this ideal 
 Man will some day come to be in very truth? 
 By what right indeed save that of believing and 
 demanding, of staking our lives fanatically upon 
 this Son of Man! The religionist of humanity 
 says " This Man-to-be shall be. It matters not 
 how the facts of brute-being may seem, this 
 superlative Man shall come to be, shall triumph 
 over the grave abysses of being, shall come out 
 of the Unknowable onto the ground of an eternal 
 
88 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 reality, shall prevail and preside over all the 
 powers of the world, informing all things and all 
 men with his own noble impulses and passions of 
 Manhood." 
 
 Now this is in its effect just what I mean by the 
 God of the modern mind: a power of humanity 
 that shall triumph in the ends of life; a humane 
 Life that is becoming ever more conscious of its 
 inner energies and purposes, a world-energy that 
 is now taking hold with men and companioning 
 them along their ways of life. In their effects, 
 I say, these two views are practically identical. 
 A man who believed in either would be a good 
 neighbor, companion and citizen. He would 
 spend his whole being toward an ideal humanity. 
 
 What then is the precise difference between 
 these views ? Why not urge a " religion of hu- 
 manity " as suited to the needs of the whole, mod- 
 ern mind? 
 
 The difference is not easy to express precisely, 
 though as it feels in my mind it is not inconsider- 
 able. Between the humanitarian religion and 
 that I am urging in this little volume, be it 
 understood, there is no least clashing of ideals. 
 They differ rather in the intensity of their faith. 
 The Man-God is ideal with both. But in the 
 one case this ideal is going to be real in some re- 
 mote age and clime; in the other it is real here 
 and now. The Man-ideal which the humanitarian 
 hopes to have realized some day my modern man 
 of ideal yet practical religion feels to be already 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 39 
 
 invisibly and mystically real. What the human- 
 itarian hopes man will become his brother of in- 
 tenser faith says God now is. The companion- 
 ship which the one has only in imagination with 
 a man of a remote future the other by faith has 
 already with a Man of the present. The one 
 hopes to claim and control the energies of the 
 world to serve the needs of this future Man ; the 
 other somehow feels the vast energies of being as 
 already charged with human freight, as already 
 companioning and working with the present man. 
 The humanitarian says " I am a man and nothing 
 human is foreign to me " ; his brother of a larger 
 faith dares to affirm that God is a Man and noth- 
 ing human is foreign to him. 
 
 How to justify the larger, intenser faith? 
 This is perhaps the gravest problem we shall 
 need to face in our treatment of the case of re- 
 ligion in its relation to the modern mind. For 
 I make no doubt that the modern man is realistic 
 rather than idealistic in his apparent tendencies 
 and motives. As we saw a while ago, so much 
 of mummery and dogmatism has been foisted 
 upon him under the guise of a religious idealism 
 that the modern man has become thoroughly sus- 
 picious of the whole method and business of re- 
 ligion. There is even a certain rudeness in the 
 joy with which he has broken away from these 
 older fetters, a certain unnecessary heroism in his 
 espousal of the individual man as godless and 
 mortal in the world. 
 
40 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 Unnecessary, because he himself in his way is 
 just as much an idealist as the man sunken in 
 " dogmatic slumber ". His future Man is ideal. 
 In working for the Man-to-be the humanitarian, 
 just like any other idealist, is believing beyond 
 the facts. And now, a little more of this " be- 
 lieving beyond the facts " and he will have a God 
 fitted to the modern mind a moral conscious- 
 ness growing in the lives of men ; a human Friend 
 already come to be and now adding all his uni- 
 versal powers and practical wisdom to the ends 
 of men, himself a real Man, the realization in 
 substance of the ideal Man of a humanitarian 
 religion. 
 
 The first great want of the modern man would 
 thus be realized by a simple application and in- 
 tensification of his natural humanitarian instincts 
 and passions. In the place then of his present 
 loneliness would appear a mystic Companion, 
 adding to man's poor powers something of a 
 God's immense energies, to man's laboring, sen- 
 suous intelligence something of divine insight, to 
 man's being, ever tottering on the verge of the 
 grave, something of a God's confidence in the 
 reality of things unseen yet hoped for, some- 
 thing of divine determination to draw from the 
 unknown sources of being all that a human soul 
 most deeply needs. All these divine joys are 
 gifts to men out of the heart of the great moral 
 Companion I call God. 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 41 
 
 vni 
 
 A vast deal is implied then in this conviction 
 of God as a moral Companion. The modern 
 man, as I see him, is full of a deep moral en- 
 thusiasm. He is overflowing with philanthropic 
 impulses, rich in humanitarian ideals, conscious 
 of a great humane Man-energy stirring in his 
 invisible depths, amazed and disgusted with any 
 creature in human form who sells this deeper soul 
 of his humanity for that which is shallow and 
 base and mean. 
 
 A goodly wave of this moral enthusiasm swept 
 over the country a few years ago and left its 
 high mark in several of our larger cities. With 
 what splendid indignation did the reformers as- 
 sault the strongholds of vice in these municipal- 
 ities, exposing graft, prosecuting the lawless, 
 cleansing the halls wherein the people's rights and 
 liberties should be held sacred ! It was not child's 
 play either. Men's lives were in danger. Many 
 were threatened, several desperately wounded, and 
 at least one of this resolute company of moral 
 enthusiasts, a man down in Texas, lost his life 
 in the endeavor to bring his fellows to their 
 moral senses. It was all fine, dangerous, heroic! 
 A man's blood still tingles with the fervor of the 
 onslaught. It was a sublime event in American 
 history, nothing less. In this I would want to 
 be counted wholly and unreservedly on the side 
 of these moral " cranks ", as they were not in- 
 
48 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 frequently styled. Who indeed would not gladly 
 lose his good right arm, his own life, even his 
 reputation for " practical common sense " and 
 " worldly j udgment " forsooth ! rather than remit 
 one jot or tittle of those finer and, if you please, 
 impractical things which deepen and dignify the 
 powers of manhood in the world! 
 
 I will not be misunderstood then, if I say that 
 there was in this great wave of moral enthusiasm 
 a certain vagueness and vacuity. Day before 
 yesterday I talked with one of these moral en- 
 thusiasts, a friend of many years standing. 
 Three of the men he convicted of fraud in high 
 places are now in the State's penitentiary. Again 
 and again his life was in jeopardy during the 
 heat of his campaign for decency and righteous- 
 ness. I asked my friend what was the ground 
 of his moral enthusiasm. What was his religion? 
 He replied that many years ago he had given up 
 thinking on such matters. In the years of his 
 young manhood he sought out the church which 
 made the least possible creedal demands upon 
 him (" asked the fewest questions," as he put it), 
 joined that church, and since then has shut all 
 such matters out of his mind! It would seem 
 that in his extraordinary and persistent fight for 
 decency and purity in civic affairs he has drawn 
 wholly upon his own resources with no sense of 
 moral companionship. His is a moral not a 
 divine enthusiasm. 
 
 My friend is still continuing the battle. At 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 43 
 
 this moment he is laboring night and day to ob- 
 struct and destroy a corrupt, political machine 
 operating in his city. But in point of per- 
 sistency and efficiency his case, one must feel, is 
 exceptional. For the most part there is already 
 a remarkable " letting up ", a noticeable relax- 
 ing of the energy with which only a few years 
 ago this mighty project of municipal moraliza- 
 tion was launched. The explanation of this 
 weakening of moral energy is to be found, I think, 
 in the vagueness and vacuity of the modern 
 mind's moral convictions. Men's moral passion 
 was very hot but it didn't burn deep. Men had 
 not the vision of the things they did as concern- 
 ing the world's well-being to its very core, as 
 furthering a larger Life, a mystic humanity, a 
 God-Man, in the utmost deeps of his being. They 
 wrought nobly and valiantly, but all in the in- 
 terest of the immediate law and order. That ac- 
 complished, the vision seems to have disappeared. 
 Soon men will be seen returning to their grafting 
 places and the entire task of moral regeneration 
 will need to be gone over again. This at all 
 events is the judgment of so-called " practical " 
 men. " After all," they are saying, " men are 
 very much alike the world over. You may raise 
 the level of human decency and righteousness to- 
 day, but to-morrow will find men on yesterday's 
 low level again. It is at best a tedious thank- 
 less, hopeless business, this moral Quixotism. It 
 requires leader after leader. One great moral 
 
44 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 genius must be followed by another only a few 
 years or perhaps generations later in order that 
 men may be saved from yielding to their natural 
 moral inertia and drifting back once more into 
 the dark and dirty ditches of their common be- 
 ing." 
 
 This diagnosis with its somewhat gloomy prog- 
 nosis is in the main a correct estimate of the moral 
 weakness of our modern life. But the remedy for 
 this moral anaemia is not to be found, I insist, in 
 any such temporizing tonics as are generally pre- 
 scribed, each generation being left to stimulate its 
 own moral energies, and so on age after age. 
 All this is too vague and vacuous. It is not 
 visionary enough, not tonic enough. " Leader 
 after leader, age after age " you say ? Well, 
 suppose we allow that mankind has had in all 
 times and places of its history a solitary and faith- 
 ful Leader, a very God among men, a God-Man, 
 no less; whose courage and enthusiasm run un- 
 brokenly through human history; whose larger 
 Life is the source of all moral heroisms; whose 
 superabundant energy supplies men at all times 
 and in all places of right endeavor; whose cur- 
 rents of being, flowing deeply and broadly in 
 the way of righteousness, catch up and carry for- 
 ward every drop of human energy spent in its 
 same direction of increasing goodness? In this 
 moral Presence men's vague and vacuous en- 
 thusiasms would take on the fulness and clearness 
 of an eternal vision, would gain the dignity of 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 45 
 
 a world-wide, age-long Life of becoming good- 
 ness. Generosity, honesty, kindliness, lawfulness, 
 all these now somewhat fancy graces of human 
 life would in such a warming Presence push their 
 tender roots down to the very rock-bottom of the 
 world's being. 
 
 This is what the modern man wants God to be. 
 This is what any man gains, practically and cer- 
 tainly, who risks his everlasting life upon this 
 belief in God as an increasing power of right- 
 eousness, a humane Presence ever watchful in the 
 regions of human being, a moral Companion 
 among men. The thing he yesterday did vaguely 
 for man's sake he now does clearly for God's 
 sake! The whole prospect of future things be- 
 comes transfigured in the light of this eternal 
 Companion of men in their ways of life. 
 
 rx 
 
 The supremest gift of this man-wanted God 
 is this Companionship with his humane Life. In 
 the deep matters of morality, for example. The 
 modern man, I was just saying, is vague and 
 vacuous in his moral enthusiasm. This because 
 his moral endeavors seem to him lacking in any 
 eternal duration or value. His is a moral 
 but not a divine enthusiasm. It is morality un- 
 touched by emotion and wanting any lasting sanc- 
 tion. In all this we may observe but another 
 symptom of the modern mind's unconscious revolt 
 from the too dogmatic and idealistic beliefs of the 
 
46 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 past. For a too dogmatic idealism tends always 
 to estrange the Ideal from the Real. In the view 
 of absolute idealism God and his law are inwardly 
 perfect. As transcendent perfection God has been 
 in eternity what man has got to become in time. 
 In all this God is severely remote from the human 
 life, his judgments are necessary and automatic. 
 He is in the strictest sense unmoral, having noth- 
 ing in common with our processes of moral strug- 
 gle. As one of my students recently said, " Ask 
 such a God * How do you do ' and he will 
 answer * I don't do, / am! ' " 
 
 In the view of the modern mind, as it now 
 stands in the world, there exists, whether con- 
 sciously or not, a grievous remoteness of its idea 
 of God from its idea of human righteousness. 
 God is immense, superlative, incomparable; his 
 glory is declared in the heavens ; he is of old and 
 high degree in eternity; his laws are hard and 
 fast; he is a great energy whose deepest char- 
 acteristic is a " taste for engineering " : in their 
 regular courses he holds the stars and planets, 
 with only here and there a comet let loose! He 
 works in men also by the same steady, uncon- 
 cerned, mechanical forces he expends in the 
 spheres above their heads. He is all this and all 
 that, anything and everything save human and 
 personal. Between him and us there is no point 
 of conscious, friendly contact. We are all impa- 
 tience, eager, strenuous, struggling, falling and 
 rising; he is steady, stolid, determined, austere. 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 47 
 
 Our life at its best is expressed in the simple vir- 
 tues of the hearth-stone; his best manifested in 
 the creaking, complicated motions of the celestial 
 spheres. In a single word he is a foreigner on 
 the shores of our human life, his perfection is 
 alien to our imperfection, his superhuman cannot 
 touch our human lives. 
 
 Now I think the world has had enough and to 
 spare of this tiresome emphasis and iteration of 
 God's perfections and infinitudes. That God is 
 immense, that he is powerful and lawful, that his 
 being fills all space and informs all times all 
 these heavy claims for God the modern mind finds 
 credible. Of course God is all that. But " all 
 that " somehow removes him from the precincts 
 of human life. I am told by a former colleague 
 that the modern Mohammedan will frequently 
 curse in the name of " Allah " but never in the 
 name of one of the Saints! Allah is unearthly, 
 superhuman, remote. The saints are earthly, 
 human, present. 
 
 Religion, if it would satisfy the genuine, spir- 
 itual hunger of the modern man, must dwell more 
 and more upon those parts of God's being where- 
 in his character is not thus unearthly and " in- 
 finite " but wherein he is in the deepest, intens- 
 est and noblest sense human and " finite ". Not 
 the being of God of course that is infinite ! 
 but the character of God it is that concerns men 
 deeply and practically in these latter days. 
 There was a day, we may suppose, though I con- 
 
48 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 fess I doubt it, in the life of humanity when the 
 human character depended upon this ponderous 
 belief in God's absolute and invisible perfection. 
 But now at any rate that day is gone. The man 
 of to-day, the man of iron constitution and yet 
 broken heart, has little need to be told of God's 
 awful perfection, his absolute character. He has 
 desperate need to be told and reassured of God's 
 humaneness of being. Once more, not what God 
 transcendently is but what men humanly want him 
 to be is the supreme test of that divine being, that 
 larger Life on which we men must sooner or later 
 stake our human lives. 
 
 What, let us ask then, must be the character of 
 the larger Life in those times and places of its 
 being in which it partakes literally of the human 
 life? when it shares quiveringly in all men's labors 
 and pains, sorrows and tragedies, successes and 
 failures, graces and sins? In this the larger 
 Life is just what the modern man wants God to 
 be the mysterious Companion of his daily life, 
 the invisible realization of all he hopes to be, the 
 ideal Man of his future humanity. God in such 
 a view retains his physical infinitudes: his energy 
 still fills all space and time. But to these harsher 
 infinitudes the modern mind wants its God to add 
 the tenderer infinitudes of a conscious concern 
 with its human life : infinite patience, hopefulness, 
 sinlessness; infinite moral action, infinite com- 
 panionship in all things human this is what we 
 need and want and mean by God's infinity ! This 
 
EELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 49 
 
 is what God must and will and shall be ! At this 
 human call the God of the immensities comes down 
 to earth, enters friendlily, companionably into the 
 region of our human passions. He is no longer 
 remote and unearthly. Blaspheme not! God, 
 as he lives among men, is in strictest truth the 
 present Saint of human life. 
 
 In these human parts of his nature God com- 
 panions men even in ways of sin and evil. Evil, 
 as God lives, is not " good in the making ", not 
 just a partial phase of an eternal perfection, not 
 something wholly unreal in the view of an absolute 
 intelligence. It is real and positive ; of such hor- 
 rible proportion in the human life that the divine 
 struggle against its devastating and death-dealing 
 breath is in principle and in fact uncertain ! Ex- 
 cept the battle be real to men and Gods, there is no 
 glory in the victory. 
 
 The humaner religions, the religions of human- 
 ity, have always solemnly and joyfully maintained 
 this sense of divine Companionship ; they have be- 
 lieved literally that for God as for men sin is 
 horribly positive; they have found consolation in 
 a God tempted even as men are ; they have taught 
 men that their uncleanness counts against God; 
 that the coldness of their death in sin does lower 
 the temperature of the divine life, really reduces 
 God's chances of victory over these powers of evil 
 in the making of humanity. These humane 
 religions have taught that in sadness and pain, 
 in joy and pity, in hope and love in all these 
 
50 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 qualities the great God, just like a man, is soft- 
 ened and humanized in his life. The failure of 
 a human life here or there is just so far the failure 
 of God. The complete and miserable death in 
 sin of a whole humanity would be the complete 
 and miserable death of God! Beside this vast 
 grave of a dead humanity even the great patient 
 and hopeful soul of God would falter and die 
 would die of a broken heart ! Even so does God 
 live and move and have his being in the spirits of 
 men. 
 
 Companionship ! Fellowship with God ! That 
 is what the modern man wants and must somehow 
 secure out of the invisible depths of God's great 
 unknown being. The absolute power and good- 
 ness of God, the inviolability of the moral law 
 all this the modern man has horizon enough to 
 take for granted. What he wants to know is 
 whether God and the law are humanly divine, 
 divinely human. He needs to know that God's 
 goodness, however trustworthy, is yet like his own 
 an achievement, that God's love, however free, 
 is no necessary gift of an unconscious beneficence 
 but is like his own a passionate and spontaneous 
 impulse out of an inwardly and consciously affec- 
 tionate Soul of goodness. 
 
 x 
 
 Thus we may return at last to the practical 
 level on which our discussion began. Religion 
 and the modern mind! If I am right in mj 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 51 
 
 analysis of the mystic needs of the modern mind 
 in matters religious, then, once more, we may 
 mark the inadequacy of the customary restora- 
 tives of religion. The man who desperately needs 
 God as a moral companion is not likely to endure 
 the noise and clatter of the sensational preacher. 
 He is not likely to be permanently satisfied with 
 the " sociological " discourses of the practical 
 preacher. He is certain to reprehend the confu- 
 sion of his mystic experience of God as endlessly 
 human with that revelation of him in a single per- 
 son or race or sect which is urged as " final " by 
 the apologetic preacher. 
 
 The modern man needs a new prophet who shall 
 reveal the mystic humanity of God; a prophet of 
 the universal human life and righteousness of 
 God. He will bring close to man a God whose 
 humane spirit has lived and grown through prac- 
 tically infinite time and over practically infinite 
 space; a spirit which age after age in constant 
 hopefulness and patience has guided the very 
 stars to serve the spirits of men ; a God-Man who 
 through the ages has achieved a goodness, has 
 developed a hopefulness which can never-more 
 give up its experiment of love among men, so long 
 as one, solitary soul continues to live in right af- 
 fectionate relation with his invisibly human Life; 
 a great moral Companion, living and growing 
 with and through the human life; an infinitely 
 human God with all of a Man's mysterious powers 
 and sympathies; a personal Life transcending 
 
52 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 every possible intuition of our earth-bound per- 
 sonalities ; a God whose human being and love are 
 planet-wide and race-wide, yet a God who lives 
 and grows here and now under all the conditions 
 of human passion, affection, aspiration and 
 struggle, only with incomparably more of wisdom, 
 patience, hope and love. This is the God of the 
 Ages, the God we need and want, the One who 
 shall be, upon whom a strong man will risk all 
 his earthly goods, and for whom a righteous man 
 will risk his everlasting life. This is the religion 
 of the modern man, conscious of his deepest needs 
 and powers : a confident belief in the final purity, 
 dignity and goodness, the actual presence of all 
 his human passions in a living God. Man, an 
 infinite god: God, an infinite Man. This is the 
 religion, I tell you! How long, O Man-God, 
 must men of the modern mind await thy prophet? 
 
n 
 
 GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 
 
 i 
 
 Men's reflections upon the end of life, their 
 thoughts of human destiny, have always centered 
 somehow in their own passions, hopes, desires; 
 they have always aimed, and that right passion- 
 ately, at the thing devised for them by the action 
 of their practical reason, their humane intelli- 
 gence. Heaven to men has always been " home," 
 the reflection of their tenderest, most practical 
 endeavors after peace, power and harmony. 
 
 I set it down as a natural principle then, first, 
 that your theory of life's end or destiny shall be 
 native to the human beings it is designed for, 
 and, second, that it shall be attainable. 
 
 n 
 
 This principle, as I see it, at once excludes from 
 our discussion two ponderous theories of life's 
 destiny. The one, the ideal of Hellenic culture, 
 is canceled on the ground that in us it is not 
 native; the other, the conception of German 
 idealism, on the ground that it is not attainable 
 by us human beings. 
 
 The typical Greek in the days when he aimed 
 
 at anything was a hunter of being. To him just 
 
 to be, just to stand forth, to gather to himself 
 
 more and more being, was in itself a sufficient 
 
 53 
 
54 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 and supreme end in life. The perfect athlete, 
 the perfect poet, the perfect philosopher, even the 
 perfectly jolly or cynical man, all these were, 
 each in his proper sphere, " good and beautiful " 
 exhibits of being. Just being, being just, good 
 being, being good to the Greek mind these 
 were in fact simply convertible terms. What- 
 ever is, is good ; not is right, for that implies con- 
 sideration, implies a doubt overcome, but is good 
 inherently, unconsciously, inalienably good. 
 
 A vast deal of solemn literature has been pro- 
 duced to explain this native optimism, this ex- 
 uberant naturalism, of the Greek mind. Some 
 credit it to climate, others to peninsular isola- 
 tion, others again to this or that accident of hu- 
 man history. In any case the fact is clear and 
 indubitable: the Greek optimism was native and 
 natural, a matter of temperament. The cheerful 
 cynic and friendly solipsist, each sublimely un- 
 conscious of the inward contradictoriness of his 
 position, are typical Greeks. To us with our 
 diabolical taste for consistency they are a source 
 of perennial amazement; but then optimism, 
 cheerful cynicism, friendly solipsism and all that 
 are not native in us. In the eyes of the Greek, 
 contrariwise, whatever of inconsistency, ugliness, 
 or evil may for the moment have risen to the sur- 
 face of his naturally rippling life speedily sank 
 of its own dead weight to the pit-bottom of being 
 and was smothered there, a " hardly real " as 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 55 
 
 Plato puts it, a practical non-entity. The 
 Greek synonym for evil, you remember, was *v%/, 
 dead wood! Water-logged, heavy, ponderously 
 inconsiderable. 
 
 Some of the " fathers " of the Christian church 
 made a desperate shift to consecrate this Greek 
 notion of life's end. They said : " God is es- 
 sentially ens re<^lssvmwm, ens perfectissimum; he 
 is absolute being and your own destiny and eter- 
 nal joy must consist in contemplation of, and 
 participation in, his eternal perfection." 
 
 But live Christians have always been frankly 
 negligent of this hybrid conception of God and 
 human destiny ; they have always practically re- 
 pudiated this end of life. They have preferred 
 the more distinctly Christian idea of a specific 
 and concrete heaven as their destination. It was 
 sometimes a pretty ghastly heaven, I grant, but 
 concrete and teeming with active life nevertheless. 
 Christian culture has tended always to aim at a 
 destiny in some wise human, social, home-like in 
 its deeper parts. 
 
 Whether for better or worse the Hellenic tem- 
 perament with its naturalism and optimism is no 
 longer native; it does and can no longer work on 
 this human plane. Even those will admit the 
 fact who most deeply deplore it. Nietzsche, for 
 example, does most scathingly rebuke the Chris- 
 tian for prostituting his strong western nativity 
 before an effeminate oriental form of culture. 
 
56 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 But in all this he does most volubly admit the 
 fact that we are no longer Greeks; we no more 
 aim naturally at being. Our sole aim is not to 
 get fatness whether in point of flesh or in point 
 of spirit. Our ideal, I repeat, is social, humane, 
 philanthropic, sympathetic, communistic. If we 
 theorize at all independently we conceive being 
 not as naturally good, but as becomingly so; not 
 as perfectly wholesome, all evil being so much 
 dead wood, but as painfully divided, evil being so 
 much live passion to be mastered and downed by 
 the cooler passion of sympathetic and socialistic 
 aims. 
 
 I would there were time to compare these two 
 ideals of human destiny ; to compare them odi- 
 ously; to affirm my entire and unreserved sub- 
 scription to the humaner culture of the non-Hel- 
 lenic Europeans. Such declaration of faith in 
 the altruistic impulses and passions of the mod- 
 ern mind might do some good in these days when 
 so much is being written in celebration of Greek 
 ideals. But I must content myself with the sim- 
 ple fact that these Hellenic ideals are no longer 
 native; we simply cannot at least not natu- 
 rally aim at being. Most men of the modern 
 mind would appear as ludicrous clowns if clothed 
 in the ill-fitting modes of the Greeks. 1 
 
 i Perhaps Marathon races are in point. I imagine the 
 shores of Elysium are lined with athletic shades who wit- 
 ness with heavenly laughter our modern performances of 
 that once great and natural event. 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 57 
 
 m 
 
 And I find I have an equal quarrel with the 
 ideal of German romanticism usually taught in 
 the schools as strictly suited to our modern minds ; 
 the ideal, namely, of God as a perfect self . " Ab- 
 solute being is God in truth," these modern school- 
 men assure us, " perhaps not a natural but a 
 supernatural being, perhaps not good here and 
 now but good in eternity; a Life, a Self, a Per- 
 son, an eternal, continuous, smooth, perfect be- 
 ing, is God." You see, unlike the Greek God, 
 whose being was of course infinite and naturally 
 good, this modern God owns an infinity and a 
 perfection most scrupulously thought out, and 
 most laboriously fitted into the structure of our 
 modern dubious life. 
 
 Now if one were obliged to choose between 
 these two conceptions : natural, instinctive, opti- 
 mistic perfectness of being on the one hand, and 
 romantic, self-conscious, thoroughly-cooked and 
 digested, in short philosophic perfection on the 
 other, I should not wonder at the man who fa- 
 vored the natural unconscious belief in being's 
 essential goodness. But nothing can persuade 
 me that this necessity of choice is upon us. The 
 point, as I see it, is that we of the modern mind 
 have seen imperfection so real and present, have 
 been so infernally near to, if not actually in, hell 
 that we are henceforth barred from any choice 
 between this or that kind of perfection. Hence- 
 
68 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 forth the vital consideration is not whether God 
 is perfect in this way or in that ; whether his per- 
 fection is natural and unconscious or rather con- 
 scious and full of eternally fitting purposes. 
 The important thing is to make out whether God 
 is perfect at all or not; to consider whether per- 
 fection applies in any considerable sense to our 
 human life; to determine whether this perfection 
 in God's case is by any means whatsoever attain- 
 able in our human affairs. 
 
 Now the express aim of the following pages is 
 to consider " God " as a human relation, to in- 
 vestigate our human ideals, even the homeliest of 
 them, in the light of a possible larger Life and 
 deeper Sympathy. That this one point of our 
 divine relation may stand out clearly I must set 
 down a few radical principles. Thus: 
 
 A God of eternal perfection of any sort you 
 will has nothing to do with any problem what- 
 soever, least of all with any humanity's problem 
 involving, as it must, a horde of imperfect im- 
 moral beings as its irreducible data. There is no 
 such thing as moral perfection in God's universe 
 if it be God's indeed ! Moral perfection ! 
 listen to that phrase inwardly for a moment. 
 Can't you hear something split? Doesn't the 
 " moral " somehow crash away from the " per- 
 fection " in this beautiful structure of your 
 dreams? Morality carries about it the sweat of 
 the workingman, the stench of his will. Or, if 
 you prefer poet Swinburne's way of putting the 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 59 
 
 case, " the perfume of manhood " issues from a 
 being of such moral power. But does your in 
 any wise perfect God sweat and smell of man- 
 hood? Rather not. 
 
 It needs to sprinkle a little common sense into 
 our discussion at this point; to lay the dust 
 which some absolute idealist always throws in the 
 air whenever you require to see clearly the eternal 
 perfection set forth in his mammoth account of 
 God. I confess that after many years of scrupu- 
 lous consideration I am as much as ever in the 
 dark ; I, stupid that I am, simply cannot see clearly 
 how a thing, though it were a God, can be both 
 itself and its opposite in any sense or in any de- 
 gree whatsoever. Absolute idealism and common 
 sense do leave me always with a perfect mess of 
 irreducible contradictions stewing in my hot 
 brain. Such as these, for example : 
 
 God is perfect ; we imperfect. God whole ; we 
 partial. God an individual of eternal inward 
 harmony; we a society of maladjusted laborers 
 after health, comfort, harmony. God is indis- 
 putably One, of one mind and will ; we raucously 
 many, of many minds and wills. God is fully 
 and healthily That; we hopelessly and incurably 
 This. Idealism and common sense could not eas- 
 ily concoct two more alien beings than God and 
 we! 
 
 And now the silly controversy is on! From 
 the study of the idealist there bursts forth a 
 perfect cloud of dry dust. In the consequent 
 
60 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 confusion the voice of his idealism speaks these 
 doubtfully consolatory and mystifying words: 
 " We are * implicitly ' all that God is * explicitly.' 
 God is we ' in so far ' as we are God. God is 
 perfect in absolute degree, we in the degree in 
 which we are . . . God is * in eternity ' 
 what we are * in time.' God is good, eternally 
 made-good, we are * good in the making.' God 
 is inwardly merely what we outwardly seek to 
 become. God is the fulfilment, we the process. 
 God solves * instantly ' and painlessly all the 
 problems we tackle in the painful experiments of 
 our waking hours." And so on ad nauseam. 
 
 Let him understand such language who can! 
 As for me I am right sick of it all; the dryness 
 and unreality of it all, they suffocate me. It 
 all comes to this. Either: you and I are not 
 really finite but infinite ; not really in time but in 
 eternity; not really imperfect but perfect; not 
 really in a state of social unrest and evil to be 
 overcome manfully with splendid pathos of one 
 soul with another, perhaps of one human soul 
 with another Human Soul; but rather in a 
 solemn and solitary state of eternal harmony 
 wherein any straining of our human persons 
 would be ill-advised and in bad taste. Either 
 this, I say, or else: God, the self of selves, the 
 soul of souls, is not really infinite but finite, not 
 really eternal and fulfilled but temporal and in 
 process, not really perfect but imperfect, not 
 really beyond us in any eternal way but most 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 61 
 
 literally and strictly with us in our human ways. 
 I can neither see nor understand any other 
 alternative. And the facts as common sense 
 is apt to see them oblige one to adopt the 
 latter view of God rather than the former view 
 of man. 
 
 IV 
 
 " If then the Greek ideal of our human destiny 
 is not native and the ideal of German romanticism 
 it not attainable shall we then accept the crass 
 philosophy of the modern * humanist ' so- 
 called?" someone will ask. By all manner of 
 means, yes ! But, first, let us word that humanist 
 philosophy a little more particularly. 
 
 It would discover in the human the essence and 
 aroma of the divine. The difference between 
 your you and your God is in the main a gross 
 quantitative matter. The larger Life is larger 
 than you in very obvious fact but not diviner. 
 The great God himself in all his powers and 
 privileges is not more righteous nor more loving, 
 no diviner, than you would most instinctively 
 be, had you those same great energies and op- 
 portunities. You are infinite, most literally and 
 prosaically infinite, you! You, veriest beast 
 of the earth! in those qualities wherein you do 
 touch the living powers and the divine graces 
 of the world's soul you are infinite, I say ! You 
 are God's maximum as God is your maximum. 
 What becomes you becomes God. Where you are 
 
62 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 there he is! What you are that he is! When 
 you are then he is ! Your purposes, your prob- 
 lems, your questions are most actually his. He 
 does not fulfill nor solve nor answer them one 
 whit more instantly than you. Your solutions 
 are and must be his. You and he together, most 
 intimately and mutually together, become That I 
 have called " Man-God." 
 
 " What is man that God is mindful of him? " 
 you ask. " What is God that thou art mindful 
 of him,? " I retort. Do you dare to debase man? 
 Then I dare to debase God. Nay, you have de- 
 based him; for God is most literally that very 
 Man whom you in your lust for material infini- 
 tude have trampled in the dust. Until you are 
 able and strong-souled enough to go with me 
 into the filthy plague spots of men and see God 
 there, most palpably degraded and besmirched 
 there! I want none of your immaculate infini- 
 tudes drawn, though never so knowingly, from 
 the vaults of heaven; I will have none of your 
 frightful infinitudes wrought in the sullen abysses 
 of the world's ground! I find such a theologic, 
 macrocephalic God parenoeic, unnaturally, in- 
 humanly, morbidly, perfect ; la grandeur! Vulu- 
 sion! grand Dieu! 
 
 We need to lay this matter close to heart. Let 
 me for one be simple and straight at this critical 
 point: I haven't the faintest notion what use 
 future generations may make of such once sacred 
 terms as "infinite," "perfect" and the like; I 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 63 
 
 imagine they will one day be revived and made to 
 serve once more a divine function in the lan- 
 guage and living thoughts of men. But just 
 now I find them pretty well worked out. Take a 
 plain, modern man and insist upon it that God is 
 perfect, infinite and all that ; he will say : " Cer- 
 tainly, of course, sure thing! But what of it? 
 Does that not simply shift onto the shoulders of 
 men, onto them exclusively, the considerable task 
 of overcoming the world's very ponderable im- 
 perfection and finitudes? Is not God, in such a 
 case of perfection and infinitude, m-cased, shut 
 off, removed, inconsiderable, in-himself ? " We 
 need to lay this matter to heart. 
 
 And the best way I know of laying this mat- 
 ter to heart would be to try, seriously, earnestly, 
 devationally to try, the alternative experience of 
 God ; the experience of him, namely, as finite, im- 
 perfect, becoming divine, strictly social, sympa- 
 thetic, human in all his greater Energy and Life. 
 
 There is, one must admit, a subtle and charm- 
 ing perfume of infinitude pervading the per- 
 fect being of God as conceived by men of the 
 past; to one of mystic temperament a perfect 
 God is as a very breath of his nostrils; he lives 
 and, alas, dies by him ; it is a luxury, this belief in 
 God's infinity and perfection, not lightly to be 
 given up. He is so dependable, so luxurious, so 
 ennervatmg, this God of the ages, this God of 
 aged perfection. There is no denying that he is 
 the God of a superfine aristocratic form of human 
 
64 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 culture. He is a God of no social problems or 
 social instincts; invariably he has been the idol 
 of things as they are, the God of the existing 
 order, the God of those who prey upon their 
 weaker fellows. I except the mystics, you see; 
 but the rest of mankind have invariably used the 
 eternally perfect and infinite God as an instru- 
 ment of exploitation, palliation, delay, delusion, 
 enslavement in human affairs. Let a palpably 
 imperfect and finite creature cry out against his 
 intolerable fate and they will throw him the sop 
 of a remote and distant perfection, a foreign 
 shore, where in God he too will eventually find 
 his perfect home provided he complain and 
 curse no more ! " Laissez-faire " that's the 
 solution of human affairs invariably offered by 
 a perfect God and his subscribers. We need to 
 lay this matter to heart. 
 
 Lay it to heart then! Just allow yourself to 
 think unafraid, unashamed and plainly that God 
 is not all this; that he does not tolerate all this 
 exploitation, palliation, arictocratic insolence; 
 that he is most actively and sweatingly human; 
 that his spirit is right poignantly involved in 
 human relations, very strictly present in human 
 being; that he moves in human destinies, writhes 
 in all our human bestialities, ascends in all our 
 human flights of justice and righteousness; that 
 his spirit watches and pushes and pulls in all the 
 efforts of our human race! God almighty, what 
 a God! God all-human, what a God! Cry out, 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 65 
 
 sing, shout for joy! Unto us a God is born! 
 born of human labor! a Son of Man! himself a 
 Man, a great Man-God, an incomparable God- 
 Man, a God with sweating soul! 
 
 Do you ask then whether God is simply the 
 spirit of humanity? I reply that God is es- 
 sentially and simply just that. There are no 
 considerable facts in the universe, in God, that 
 is, save men. God is the ideal harmony of 
 these human selves. As such he is why not? 
 
 a spirit of humanity ; a group spirit of the 
 many conscious human spirits on the face of the 
 world; a God-Man, as I have said. Beyond this 
 is the Great-Beyond, the Vast Unknown into 
 which men of to-day and of future generations, 
 even as passionately faithful men of the past, 
 will project a God of their own inner life; a 
 Man-God, I say. In this the humanist simply 
 demands and exercises the right of his surpas- 
 sing, superabundant Manhood, the right of men 
 who have gone before, the right of passionate 
 faith, the right to pull from out the everlasting 
 white-hot fires of being all that his soul does most 
 genuinely require, the right to create God in his 
 own image, the will to believe that out of the No- 
 where, out of the Great Unknown has arisen, and 
 will rise evermore, a being and living Great Man, 
 
 living and being by the same eternal passions 
 the most lowly man may find in his own soul. 
 
 The off-hand criticism with which your aristo- 
 crat fronts this divine faith I find, I will not 
 
66 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 say refutable but detestable. " How do you 
 know," he asks, " how do you humanists know 
 that the God in your case does really sur- 
 pass a fairly civilized man? A fine old Savage 
 you make of God, forsooth ! " 
 
 " How do we know? " Well, to be plain about 
 it, we don't know that the divine humanity we 
 celebrate surpasses the highest, or for that mat- 
 ter the very meanest type of human life ! But 
 our argument and that we shall reiterate in 
 the face of your smug rationalism, by that we 
 shall everlastingly prevent your pompous digres- 
 sions the argument of human experience is 
 that the God of humanity unlike your God of 
 Reason for which God be thanked ! does not 
 surpass all human types absolutely, does not 
 blindly and stolidly pass by all places of human 
 agony and heroism, does not lose in his great 
 Life all the sweetness and braveness of human 
 life ! That is a simple enough argument ; and 
 upon that and that alone rests the strange case, 
 of the humanist the argument of human ex- 
 perience, the real presence of human things in 
 God! 
 
 For the rest I imagine you should work 
 that word " imagine " thoroughly into your 
 theological vocabulary; it would relieve some of 
 the stiffness of your subject I imagine God 
 as covering all types of human beings rich and 
 poor, high and low, knave and fool, innocent 
 young children and wise old men, human and 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 67 
 
 human. That's all: God knows that's enough! 
 It is a matter of forming and by main force 
 establishing human ideals in the world; of plac- 
 ing God upon ground hallowed by our human 
 feet; of doing God honor by admitting him, 
 human as he is! into the region of our human 
 privacies; of heeding the knocking of his spirit 
 and admitting him to our homes. It happens 
 that the highest living ideal the normal spirit 
 of man has ever formed of God and his own 
 destiny is not comprehended in the idea of God's 
 being and perfection. His stiff being has got 
 to be softened, his diabolical perfection has got 
 to be humanized for men whose chief need is not 
 to marvel and reflect but to live and love. Look 
 down the vista of human history and, if you be 
 not hopelessly blind as one who having eyes re- 
 fuses to see, you will behold along the way the 
 human faces of men's gods; you will see God as 
 King in a kingdom, as Ruler in an ideal city, as 
 Father-spirit in a great world-home; you will 
 see man-like Gods walking in the ways of men. 
 Their divine faces are ofttimes veiled, their names 
 unknown, their hands upon their mouths, their 
 forms fading imperceptibly into the Great Un- 
 known. But men have lived upon these fleeting 
 glimpses they have had of their gods' human 
 parts, have done or refrained from this or that 
 because of the presence they felt of this over- 
 brooding Man-God of the ages. That is what 
 you will see, I say, if you be not brain-blind. 
 
68 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 History alone, cold bare facts, suffice for this 
 argument of human experience, this God of hu- 
 man mien. 
 
 Well then draw your inference and your 
 method from the facts. Take these human ideals 
 full seriously ; vitalize, idealize, transfigure them ; 
 be mystic and humanistic with a right good will ! 
 And you will have the royal truth of the whole 
 matter. Dare to postulate God as the personal 
 conscious growing spirit of human life, an 
 Energy and Spirit of harmony among us human 
 beings, a spirit of militant love, planet-wide and 
 race-wide! This great Man-God is seeking his 
 own. His larger Life is no more fair and just 
 and harmonious than your human life. His Life 
 waits upon, depends upon you, seeks to lead your 
 human in ways of deeper and broader good will 
 and sweet sanity. God I God-Man ! Man-God ! 
 God alive! he lives and moves and has his being 
 in you! man-god! god-man! man-alive! In you! 
 I say. He is even as a father who has his own 
 spiritual problems, all unknown to his son: he is 
 struggling toward a larger Life even in the very 
 hour when his anxious spirit is leading the son in 
 the way wherein his older soul has already moved. 
 All that the Father has painfully wrought in his 
 larger Life may be wrecked and ruined in the 
 son's. Anxiously, full anxiously, does the 
 Father-spirit wait upon us to keep holy and 
 sacred the things of his spirit. 
 
 I conceive the World-Life to be just this: an 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 69 
 
 ever ascending scale of living being, God the in- 
 dwelling spirit of the whole, humanity a ceaseless 
 generation of lives within his larger Life, hence- 
 forth each man of us responsible, not only 
 gifted with life but before God responsible to the 
 very last degree for his part in the Life of the 
 whole, each generation ideally leading on the 
 generation following, God-Man the enduring 
 steady patient and hopeful Leader of this pro- 
 cession of human spirits within his large, gener- 
 ous and courageous Life. 
 
 Ah! the mighty, the almighty courage of it 
 all! 
 
 For years I have accustomed myself to think 
 of my God thus in concrete human terms; to 
 oppose all the abstractions of the perfectionists 
 and idealists with specific cases of God wherein 
 the perfection or, as the case may be, the im- 
 perfection of the universal Life is most humanly 
 evident. Such a method does clear things, 
 does emphasize God tremendously. In all the 
 striking situations of life we may let the pro- 
 cession of humdrum events pass by unnoticed 
 in all the conspicuous and grave phenomena of 
 human history to say and to see " God " : to con- 
 sider whether the God feeling fits there: that is 
 the method. A few instances will make this 
 clearer, I hope. Thus: 
 
70 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 VI 
 
 Once I attended in Oxford a stupendous pub- 
 lic reception. The occasion was strikingly, 06- 
 viously great. The world's scholars were there 
 weltering and sweltering in " academic dress." 
 The Lord Mayor of Oxford was " receiving " ! 
 There he stood silk-stockinged and gartered, 
 knee-breeched, wooden-muscled, solemn-faced, 
 closed-mouthed, circumpressed with lackeys doing 
 this and that right aimlessly, in short proper 
 and magnifique! " My Lord Mayor of Ox- 
 ford!" ... God! 
 
 vn 
 
 But a few months later found me intruded 
 upon another academic occasion of very different 
 atmosphere and intention. It was the time and 
 place where a great American university was con- 
 ferring its honorary degrees. I think it has 
 never yet been given me to witness such quiet, 
 sincere, well-proportioned dignity as invested this 
 occasion. The place was pervaded by the almost 
 tangible power of a great institution; men sat 
 silenced by the magnificent energy of an unseen 
 wisdom. The ceremonies proceeded with the 
 solemn unhurried dignity of a great religious 
 mass; the voice of the university's president, de- 
 liberate, steady, serious and sincere, announced 
 the degrees and their causes to us who had come 
 to listen. The great men thus honored, it seemed 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 71 
 
 as if they grew in very physique under the strong 
 terms of that great time and place. One, I seem 
 to remember, wept like a little child as he felt the 
 degree of honor conferred upon him thus at the 
 end of his long and humane career. " Doctors 
 of Letters," Doctors of Humanity! . . God! 
 
 vin 
 
 Once I sat with a lost soul in an attic over- 
 looking one of the plague spots of this earth. 
 She was unclean and lean like the starving hounds 
 one might see in the alley hard by. Her jowls 
 and teeth were eaten away by a loathsome disease. 
 For the matter of a few pennies she would have 
 groveled and licked my feet: she was so low and 
 hungry and damned. Poor attic hell! Poor 
 damned soul! Sad frayed fabric of humanity! 
 . . . God! 
 
 DC 
 
 There was once a man, an unlicensed doctor of 
 humanity, who spoke to such, healing them and 
 telling them to go their way and sin no more. 
 The meagre reports yet tell us something of the 
 consummate power of the man, the awful dignity 
 of his humanity: he moved unhampered by 
 worldly properties or social conventions, upright ! 
 gigantic ! a soul of iron, a heart of sweet-healing 
 oil, a Man of God ! Christ ! . . . God ! 
 
72 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 So you see the method. God in humanity here 
 and there, genuinely, conspiciously here and 
 there, or as the case may be, alas, not there or 
 here. Why not apply the method on an im- 
 mense scale in order to find a genuinely, 
 immensely real God? 
 
 All these years the expert seekers after God 
 have been star-gazing, deducing God in celestial 
 magnitudes of one sort or another. Do we do 
 some earth-gazing! Mount we together to some 
 mystic height and look down! down upon these 
 habitations of men. See the great spirit of God 
 settling upon people! Lord Mayors, Doctors 
 of Humanity, damned souls, Christs! God 
 drenching with his spirit live passionate people 
 like you and me; God facing humanity, assum- 
 ing human life, becoming increasingly conscious, 
 active, feeling, alive, as his great searching spirit 
 approaches nearer and nearer the homes of men 
 and catches the low murmur of their busy heroic 
 affairs. God alive! . . . God! 
 
 There are those, you know, who would argue 
 upon this mount of humanistic vision. " God," 
 they monotonously recite, " being infinite and 
 perfect, must of course settle equally over the 
 world of human beings ; his spirit is concentrated 
 everywhere, no more here than there, no lesa 
 there than here; infinite, perfect, all-wise, every- 
 where! " But in that there is no vision. Come 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 73 
 
 again up the mount of humanistic vision. Look 
 down, look down! What do you see? Not what 
 do you infer from your monstrously infinite pre- 
 conception of God, but what do you see? You 
 see the spirit of God issuing from the Great Un- 
 known, the great Vault Beyond, and approach- 
 ing the homes of men ; his spirit spreading itself 
 passably and lightly there where men have little 
 need or want of him, lingeringly and passionately 
 here where some great crisis or tragedy of human 
 being demands something worth while of his sup- 
 erabundant Life and Wisdom. The divine spirit 
 most actively concentrated where the need and 
 want are greatest: that's what you see, comrade. 
 God-Man! . . . God! 
 
 XI 
 
 " But the proof, man ! the proof ! " you de- 
 mand. Alas! there is no proof. The thing we 
 are here considering is too worthy to be proved. 
 Wasn't it Tennyson who said somewhere that 
 what is worth proving can't be proved? Well, 
 such is the case here. It is a matter not for prov- 
 ing but for seeing; not for demonstration but 
 for vision. That mount of humanistic vision we 
 were talking about is of course in your own liv- 
 ing soul. Do you see there, do you -find there in 
 your own inner life, your own mystic humanity, 
 the courage and the will to believe in this tri- 
 umphantly and passionately regnant God of 
 humanity? If not, you are blind and, so far, 
 
74 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 lost ! Your own humanity, such as it is, is a lie ! 
 a most stupid, thoughtless, insensible lie ! nothing 
 short of that! For lying, as I see it, is just the 
 cutting off of a tale of human life before it is 
 told, in this instance the choking and murder- 
 ing of your humanity at just the point where it 
 would begin to live eternally. 
 
 This is what I mean by being " divine " : a 
 God-Man not by any manner of means absolute 
 in his being but by all manner of means absolute 
 in his ideals, impulses, passions. In all that is 
 human he must and shall and will be absolute, 
 tenderly, compassionately absolute; absolutely 
 patient, absolutely hopeful, absolutely loving, 
 absolutely brave, absolutely human! 
 
 Now do you ask for evidence? Just open 
 your soul to it; it will overwhelm you, once you 
 see it. Do you mean to say you lack evidence 
 that a spirit of Life larger, deeper, higher than 
 the life we call human is at work in the world? 
 that a great humane world-soul is toiling and 
 sweating with men? that sin is destructive and 
 goodness conservative of that Life? that the prin- 
 ciple of increasing righteousness is regnant and 
 shall perhaps not must but most certainly 
 shall triumph over the lowering lusts and pas- 
 sions of that Life? Who wants evidence of all 
 this, I say, is denying his own humanity, is des- 
 ecrating his own inner place of vision, is lying in 
 the face of Man and in the sight of God ! 
 
 A challenge to faith! Live like a human 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 75 
 
 being! You will engender deep within your 
 human soul a perfect passion of belief in things 
 human, a perfect feeling of companionship with 
 God-Man in all your ways of life, a steady and 
 calm determination to risk all, all your interests, 
 your ambitions, your hopes, your powers, your 
 life, upon the issue and ultimate triumph of 
 humane being, of Man-God ! For you will have 
 seen out there in humanity's unformed future a 
 destiny of human Life toward which and in 
 which your human and God's human being to- 
 gether are working with a right good will. To- 
 gether then! On! On! For humanity's sake, 
 for God's sake, on ! 
 
 That man alone blasphemes who abuses in what 
 way soever this deeper humanity of him; who 
 cheapens his human life and robs himself of his 
 own rightful, creative operations in Life. Man 
 alive! God does most imperatively rest upon 
 your life. Put your shoulder to the wheel! 
 Sweat, bleed, strain, heave, love! Live like a 
 human being ! Live like a God ! 
 
 The whole weight of the universe does rest 
 upon your shoulders and his ; upon you, Man, and 
 upon him, God-Man. Your life in his is mystic- 
 ally clothed in garments incomparably beauti- 
 fuler than these poor rags of humanity now visi- 
 ble to our naked eyes. Who or what can visibly 
 cover the immeasurable breadth and width and 
 depth of humanity's God of firm and patient and 
 hopeful Life? Life increasing and abundant; 
 
76 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 universal Life; a willing and glad symphony of 
 live persons, men, supermen, angels, gods, God ; 
 a harmony of real people, half-human, half- 
 divine, half -men, half -gods; men becoming gods, 
 gods becoming men ; a universal communism of 
 man and God, God-Man, Man-God: that is what 
 one sees and, seeing, puts his shoulder to the 
 wheel, helps move in the energies of the God-Life, 
 participates in the making of God-Man. 
 
 xn 
 
 I have always felt this quality of unconquer- 
 able humanity in Stevenson. Even on his very 
 gravestone, you remember, he would have it chis- 
 eled that he laid him down " with a will." If you 
 can listen to his lines on faith without feeling the 
 sharp sting of them, then go bury thyself in the 
 world ground, out of sight of all living creatures ; 
 for you may know that your soul is insensible, 
 mortified and dead indeed. Thus: 
 
 " God, if this were enough, 
 
 That I see things bare to the buff 
 
 And up to the buttocks in mire; 
 
 That I ask nor hope nor hire, 
 
 Nut in the husk 
 
 Or dawn before the dusk, 
 
 Nor life beyond death ; 
 
 God, if this were faith. 
 
 " Having felt thy wind in my face 
 Spit sorrow and disgrace, 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 77 
 
 Having seen thy evil doom 
 
 In Golgotha and Khartoum, 
 
 And the brutes, the work of thine hands, 
 
 Fill with injustice lands 
 
 And stain with blood the sea; 
 
 If still in my veins the glee 
 
 Of the black night and the sun 
 
 And the lost battle run; 
 
 If, an adept, 
 
 The iniquitous lists I still accept 
 
 With joy, and joy to endure and be withstood, 
 
 And still to battle and perish for a dream of good; 
 
 God, if that were enough. 
 
 " If to feel in the sink of the slough 
 
 And the sink of the mire 
 
 Veins of glory and fire 
 
 Run through and transpierce and transpire, 
 
 And a secret purpose of glory in every part, 
 
 And the answering glory of battle fill my heart, 
 
 To thrill with the joy of girded men, 
 
 To go on forever and fail, and go on again, 
 
 To be mauled to the earth and arise, 
 
 And contend for the shade of a word and a thing 
 
 not seen with the eyes: 
 
 With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night 
 That somehow the right is the right 
 And the smoothe shall bloom from the rough : 
 Lord, if that were enough." 
 
 This is Stevenson: to thrill with the joy of 
 girded men, to go on forever and fail, and go on 
 
78 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 again, to be mauled to the earth and arise, to 
 contend for a thing not seen with the eyes ! This 
 is Stevenson who, tradition says, when a disease 
 of the lungs disabled beyond usefulness his good 
 right arm learned to write with his left ; and who 
 when the disability claimed his left dictated to an 
 amanuensis for hours and days; and who, when 
 at last he could no longer speak for very weakness 
 of his despoiled chest, learned to speak with his 
 still free, though unarmed, fingers the mute lan- 
 guage of the deaf and dumb, that he might yet 
 with his very last drop of energy express in some 
 wise the still buoyant, broken hopes of his trium- 
 phant soul! This was Stevenson, an atheist, 
 some called him ; let us rather crown him suprem- 
 est, bravest man-god of them all; deepest com- 
 muner with the invisible heroisms of human life; 
 prof oundest believer in God-Man ! 
 
 " Lord, if that were enough." Ye men of iron 
 hearts! it is enough and to spare. Grasp it and 
 share it, spread it abroad generously over this 
 great sea of humanity weltering before you into 
 the shoreless regions of eternity, this unconquer- 
 able humanity! The eternal human: the eternal 
 divine; the eternal man: the eternal God; God- 
 Man : Man-God everlasting ! 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 79 
 
 xm 
 
 A myticism of the will, I take it ; and accept 
 it, too. I can fully believe that such mysticism, 
 if need were, would create God; and pull some- 
 thing of a like courage and human conscience 
 from out of the very bowels of hell ! Be a man 
 then, you atheist so-called ; be a man, a full man, 
 scrupulously right and brave, unashamed and un- 
 afraid in all your actions, spewing all vileness 
 from your soul ! Be gigantic ! in your own per- 
 son stand as straight and as high as you are, act 
 as if there were a God; yea, as you were a god! 
 And one of these days, when thus you stand forth 
 there in all your dubiety, yet in all your risen 
 Manhood, you will see God it may be created, 
 awakened, aroused in some measure by your own 
 very strong power of regnant Manhood. As God 
 lives! it shall be even so. And then the aw- 
 fuler power, the deeper understanding, the won- 
 derfuler companionship of your kind of God will 
 be yours forevernwre. Forevermore! does that 
 not mean f orevermore ? 
 
 Be an atheist, friend, if you must in all con- 
 science. But avoid cynicism and indolence of 
 soul as they were the devil's own vices. Be quick 
 and noble, oppose all idleness and scornfulness of 
 spirit; and your weight, atheist though you be, 
 will pull on the diviner scale of the world's pow- 
 ers ; you will, all unwittingly, help God ; you will 
 
80 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 in the end of your life willingly yield to the 
 terful soul of him I call Man-God. 
 
 Let William James speak a word to us in this 
 matter. God knows he is pagan enough: they 
 say he doesn't pray any morel Well, in the 
 words I now quote he prays all unconsciously, yet 
 actually enough to lead us through doubt to a 
 reliable method of faith. Thus : 
 
 " If this be a moral universe ; if by my acts I 
 be a factor of its destinies ; if to believe where I 
 may doubt be itself a moral act analogous to 
 voting for a side not yet sure to win, by what 
 right shall they close in upon me and steadily 
 negate the deepest conceivable function of my be- 
 ing by their preposterous command that I shall 
 stir neither hand or foot, but remain balancing 
 myself in eternal and insoluble doubt? 
 He who commands himself not to be credulous of 
 God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may 
 again and again be indistinguishable from him 
 who dogmatically denies them. Skepticism in 
 moral matters is an active ally of immorality. 
 Who is not for is against. The universe will 
 have no neutrals in these questions. In theory or 
 in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like 
 about a wise scepticism, we are really doing volun- 
 teer service for one side or the other." 
 
 Be credulous of God: that is the method, the 
 way of all life, the way of faith. And if you will 
 thus be credulous of God you may by the same 
 token develop inwardly the most precious creed 
 
GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 81 
 
 your soul can imagine or ask of the great world's 
 soul a full creed in very human truth, a creed- 
 ful of invisible imperatives, of eternal verities, of 
 everlasting humanities. Your ample creed will 
 cover and protect and sanctify all that your hu- 
 man life can want or hope for of comfort, power, 
 efficiency, decency, sanity, bravery in life. 
 
 Among my more intimate documents I have a 
 letter from just such a masterful man. He is 
 dying away out on the " great divide " of the 
 Rocky mountains. His life has staggered under 
 blow after blow of fate. At each turn of the 
 road he has lived dutifully, manfully, naturally 
 and unaffectedly leaving the pleasant prospect he 
 once had seen before him in his life and quietly 
 taking, without even so much as a looking-back 
 or a whimper, terribly rough courses; courses 
 which you and I, my friends, would have shrunk 
 from, I'm afraid. The disease which now carries 
 him off into the Great Unknown, that mysterious 
 " Perhaps " beyond this life, he contracted, I am 
 told, in ministering to a similarly stricken sister. 
 He is to my mind a nobleman of high degree. 
 
 I had written him telling him of my great 
 pride and fondness of him: he had once been my 
 student; and telling him something of the cour- 
 age and wisdom I, the teacher, had found in him, 
 the pupil : how he had taught me great things all 
 unconsciously. He writes to this effect : " Some 
 days I am better, others worse. I am still strong 
 enough to work an hour or so a day in the field. 
 
82 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 This keeps my body and my soul together. 
 When they are no longer together what will befall 
 me I do not know. I can only doubt and hope 
 and love that's all." 
 
 But God knows, my friend, that's enough! 
 With what mare, in God's name, can a man face 
 reality? with what more of character? with what 
 more of Tightness? with what purer garments of 
 humanity, nay, of divinity, can a man clothe him- 
 self ere he go upon his long journey? than 
 modest doubt, strong hope and self-destroying 
 love ? 
 
 Courage, comrade! out there on the great di- 
 vide, out there on the universe's great divide! 
 Listen ! let your soul hearken toward that Silence 
 of Eternity ! What is that articulate, mysterious 
 breath of God saying? " Hasten on with me, 
 thou great strong man, thou child of immaculate 
 soul, thou heart of my Life, thou Man of my 
 Soul. Together, through eternity together, we 
 shall c doubt and hope and love that's all.' " 
 
Ill 
 
 LIFE EVERLASTING: ITS CONDITION 
 
 i 
 
 The spiritual forms on which men have woven 
 their growing lives are, as it has always seemed 
 to me, singularly few and simple. How many 
 things, how many stupidities, do you believe? O, 
 say perhaps a thousand or so. How many things, 
 how many realities, do you need to believe? 
 Well, say about ten, more or less. Is that not the 
 reply of past generations, the judgment of his- 
 tory ? 
 
 Given ten, more or less, flexible and limpid be- 
 liefs, you are equipped for life now and everlast- 
 ing ! Keep the currents of your being spontane- 
 ous and free; flee for dear life from all dog- 
 matisms and their " categories " ; hold your soul's 
 home simple and comfortable with an equipment 
 of, say, ten changeable and yet substantial neces- 
 sities, rules, regulations, beliefs ; you are fixed for 
 all times and places of God's home. Remember 
 the " woes " of that once giant of Nazareth : ut- 
 terly oust from your life all the Scribes and 
 Pharisees, not those merely whom you may en- 
 counter on the street, they are of such sour 
 mien altogether that one easily casts them out 
 but those also whom you may feel operating in 
 the secret places of your soul; the scribal and 
 83 
 
84 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 Pharisaical creatures of your very mind ; the inner 
 tendency to harden and dogmatize ; the inclination 
 to fix the living impulsiveness of your inner lives. 
 The point is, to keep open-minded, spontaneous, 
 free, limpid, flexible, radical in all matters that do 
 genuinely matter. 
 
 Take, for example, that word " eternal " which 
 shall concern us in these following pages. What 
 a ghastly, monstrous thing the scribes and Phari- 
 sees have made of it ! Just think of being impris- 
 oned in that damnably perfect state they describe 
 as eternal! just imagine being held there beyond 
 even the power of death to set you free ! just con- 
 sider your soul, an entity, grinning out its imper- 
 ishable life in sickly eternal beatitude, or else, 
 more's the pity, gnashing its spectral teeth and 
 wailing out its hopelessly eternal life ! Whenever 
 a man tells me his soul is necessarily eternal I want 
 (to reply, " Ay, and by the same token it is hope- 
 lessly eternal; hopeless, whether in heaven or 
 in hell." 
 
 The trouble is that we have in our Christian 
 eschatology (as the technical term has it) an at- 
 tempted confection of two most alien elements, the 
 one Judaic, the other Hellenic. The Jew's con- 
 ception of future things I mean even his idea 
 of his own race's future, granting to the critics 
 what in my uncritical moments I very much 
 doubt; namely, that the Jew had no vision of a 
 future after death his idea of future things, I 
 say, was full of a very concrete and splendid 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 85 
 
 imagery; it was a place of life, a condition of 
 active, progressive righteousness; its only alter- 
 native was not an eternally congealed, passionless 
 heaven nor yet an eternally molten, evenly white- 
 hot hell; the only opposite he could conceive to 
 this natural and faithful Life was Death ! 
 " See, I have set before thee this day life and 
 good, and death and evil." " I have set before 
 you life and death, blessing and cursing: there- 
 fore choose life that both thou and thy seed may 
 live; that thou mayest love the Lord thy God; 
 that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou 
 mayest cleave unto him ; for he is thy life and the 
 strength of thy days." 
 
 Future things looked far otherwise to the 
 Greek. In his view life here is no specially stren- 
 uous affair, no austerely arranged matter of 
 righteousness. The thing is, to live naturally 
 while you live, to follow the natural course of 
 human events, to express your proper genius for 
 the sheer pleasure of the thing itself, to live natu- 
 rally, to die naturally and then enter Elysium 
 naturally. " What is Elysium ? " you ask. 
 Well, it is what you might naturally expect. 
 What could a disembodied, fully expressed soul 
 be but a shade, a ghost, a naturally empty, con- 
 templative sort of soul in that same sort of eter- 
 nal life, a spectral, phantasmal kind of being? 
 To discharge his will and his genius fully here 
 in this life, then to walk contemplatively and so- 
 berly among the shades of Elysium all this 
 
86 -RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 seemed proper, natural, desirable to your typical 
 Greek. 
 
 Now our modern heaven or hell is, as I was 
 just saying, an attempted confection of these two 
 essentially alien elements, one drawn from the 
 genius of Jewish, the other from that of Hellenic 
 culture. As Judaic, heaven and hell are concrete, 
 explicit, filled with fleshly men and women. As 
 Hellenic these mythologic places are static, fixed, 
 full of vague harmless shades of being. In Chris- 
 tian tradition the alternative of Life is no longer 
 imaged as natural death but as unnatural life; 
 life eternally and hopelessly balanced in " sanctifi- 
 cation " with its very proper rewards or in sin 
 with its very hot torments, world without end, 
 world without change; a world most dull and 
 deadening; in heaven every prospect equally rav- 
 ishing, in hell every spot equally hot. 
 
 In such a state, any psychologist will tell you, 
 the psychophysical organism he calls the soul 
 could not endure for long; it must needs die of 
 very dullness ; there is no stimulus, he will explain, 
 in a steadily unremitting pain or pleasure ; no 
 stimulus, no response, no life in the end. The in- 
 evitable outcome of such a psychophysical per- 
 formance as would go on in heaven or hell would 
 be msensibility. 
 
 There are those who will complain that this is 
 a rather shallow caricature of the Christian 
 eschatology. Well, that points my argument: 
 the Christian eschatology, once you clear it of 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 87 
 
 confusing, learned interpretations, is shallow; 
 itself is a caricature of two utterly diverse ideas 
 of future things : Judaic moral vitality and Greek 
 naturalism. The man of militant righteousness, 
 the Jew, actually fighting death and sin ; the 
 Greek, a man of contemplative, healthy-minded- 
 ness, actually living a present life and amusing 
 himself meanwhile with speculations upon pure 
 goodness and pure being these two men do not 
 naturally mix together. Whenever the Jew 
 caught a vision of the future he saw a Jew there, 
 or his race there if you will, busily engaged in 
 the way of righteousness; whenever the Greek 
 had a vision of his future soul he found it a shade 
 moving deliberately and vaguely here and there 
 in a wholly phantasmal, future world. Such di- 
 verse temperaments can unite only superficially. 
 The combination of such disparate world-views 
 into heaven and hell must needs be shallow. 
 
 As for me I prefer the Life-and-Death con- 
 ception in all its original purity. In all sober- 
 ness of mind I declare I would rather die than 
 go to heaven unless it were on the very fron- 
 tier of heaven, on the borderland of hell, in the 
 celestial slums, far from the shades of heaven, the 
 Graeco-Jewish scribes, Pharisees and doctors of 
 eschatology! On the borderland of hell, on the 
 frontier of heaven, where common people are still 
 getting saved, give me endless life there! There 
 is something worth while ! Sweating through the 
 day, then intelligibly resting by night ; spreading 
 
88 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 the spirit of sweet brotherhood abroad to cool the 
 hot lives and cheer the broken hearts of one's 
 fellows; living! freely, limpidly, gloriously liv- 
 ing! verging always upon sorrow, catastrophe, 
 hell ! but keeping spontaneous, courageous, man- 
 ful ! measuring eternity not in years God ! how 
 weary, how deadly dull the years, were they 
 throughout eternity blissful, fulfilled, uneventful, 
 unangered, serene and all that silly dream of idle 
 souls! but in instants, the instantaneous mov- 
 ing out toward Life or Death or God knows what ; 
 with no pusillanimous thought of what, but only 
 with surpassing joy and eagerness for the work 
 and life of the passing time. Is such a Life not 
 eternal in God's world? Then so much the worse 
 for God, I may say. 
 
 n 
 
 We may gather sweet wisdom in this matter out 
 of the mouths of babes and sucklings. How 
 does a child live its days? Well, for one thing, 
 it solves its ultimate problems by the process of 
 living. Have you ever watched a living child 
 at its play? If not, your philosophy can in no 
 wise follow the method of life. In his child's play 
 you may observe in all naked simplicity the proc- 
 ess of living. See him play, then! A problem 
 arises at some point in his otherwise fluent game. 
 What does he do? Does he hesitate? does he con- 
 coct a consistent and completed plan for the fur- 
 ther conducting of his living enterprise? does he 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 89 
 
 ratiocinate? By no means. He simply alters 
 by a hair's breadth, or it may be radically, the 
 original plan of his play. Perhaps the rude 
 thing that does seemingly stand there, an imperti- 
 nence and impediment in his way, he plays is not 
 there; thereby reducing its impedimental propor- 
 tions, if indeed not removing them altogether, 
 root and branch. The child life is, in a word, 
 free, fluent, limpid, uncategorical. And he does 
 in very truth live in a world likewise plastic, fluent, 
 playful. 
 
 It is only since Groos published his books on the 
 Play of Animals and the Play of Man that we 
 have come to a fair understanding of this playing 
 instinct. For it is an instinct, he tells us. As 
 such, it does work ; it does preserve the life of the 
 child-animal and animal-child. The world they 
 inwardly image in play is just the outwardly real 
 world they front in later life. The region of 
 their plays does open out imperceptibly and un- 
 brokenly into the region of their larger and sol- 
 emner concerns in life. 
 
 Perhaps the great world is in very truth a 
 play-ground, a fighting-ground, a real home, a 
 real heaven, a most genuine Valhalla? Perhaps 
 if you play here in all childlike seriousness, you 
 too will find that the world of your inwardly as- 
 sumed beauty and goodness and harmony is just 
 the outwardly real world which your not playful 
 fellows, God pity them ! declare to be ugly, hard, 
 material, godless, devilish? Perhaps if you live 
 
90 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 here and now as if you were an immortal god 
 of a sort you will find that your playing at 
 divinity has in solemn effect prepared you for a 
 real world, a real future divinity you will front 
 after death? Perhaps the region of your play- 
 ing at divinity will shade imperceptibly and un- 
 brokenly into a region of larger, invisibler reali- 
 ties of Life? Well, children anyway find play- 
 ing a good instinct ; they never quite know when 
 the play ceases and the reality begins; they are 
 not conscious where earth knocks off and heaven 
 begins, never quite mindful of the difference be- 
 tween make-believe and reality. Perhaps, as 
 things invisibly and indubitably are, there w no 
 such difference. It is a good instinct, surely, that 
 goes naturally and playfully from childhood to 
 old age. Why not a trustworthy instinct that 
 would go naturally from old age to Death, 
 nay, to Life? 
 
 If you complain that you do not find this argu- 
 ment convincing, I reply that you have misun- 
 derstood me utterly, from beginning to end; for 
 I am not arguing at all. I find arguing in such 
 matters unprofitable and even hateful. I have 
 seen men interpose arguments, protests, realities, 
 cold facts, into the plays of children. I for one 
 am just child enough to doubt whether their 
 alleged realities were cold facts after all; just 
 child enough to hate them for their complacent, 
 solemn, brutal interruption of Life's Game. 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 91 
 
 Your contemptible vender of solid facts is a pub- 
 lic nuisance and should be outlawed on Life's 
 Play-ground. He is a foreigner there, knows not 
 the language of those playing there, nor has he 
 any unspoken understanding of the serious play 
 going forward there. Off with him to the dun- 
 geon! He will be happier there, I think; for 
 in that abyss bottomed with hard facts he and his 
 tribe of fact-collectors may rap this and that 
 solidity to their heart's content, world without 
 end. They won't ever discover that they are not 
 in the real world of God's sunlight and changing 
 seasons; that they are instead in the very pit- 
 bottom of being. Off with them to their dun- 
 geon-heaven, then ! 
 
 In the upper region of God's everlasting sun- 
 light, where flowers may still bear fruit, and men 
 are growing to a fuller stature of Manhood, where 
 things are not solid in fact but subject to the will 
 of man, fluent in the will of God, in that upper 
 world we must become as a little child ; like a little 
 child hoping and believing all things; eternally 
 playing right really, right seriously; knowing 
 nothing except a quick responsiveness to all the 
 swelling processes of Life. In the most literal 
 sense must we leave the rest to God hoping and 
 believing that in his great world-home, in his im- 
 measurable battle-ground will be found fair fields ; 
 everlasting breathing-spaces; goodly instruments 
 of living being innumerable; Life evermore. 
 
92 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 Does God not thus environ us with possibilities of 
 life, life, life! then so much the worse for God, as 
 I have said. 
 
 ni 
 
 When you ask the child on what solid ground 
 his play rests, or what its certain outcome is to 
 be, you spoil the whole business for him. The 
 very soul of it, and of him too, subsists upon in- 
 securities, possibilities ; the very zest of his play- 
 ing and being lies in the power he holds and wields 
 of changing the program; of playing good and 
 bad, good-man and bad-man, God and Devil, with 
 the self -same instruments of life and on the self- 
 same ground of being. A play planned for him 
 in its every detail and enduring, suppose, for even 
 an hour or so is to the natural child a most un- 
 mitigated abomination with no touch of attrac- 
 tiveness in the whole wearisome prospect. He 
 must have range, freedom, prospect of change, 
 power of alteration, risk, or he dies. 
 
 Well, it is even so with men of iron constitu- 
 tion. In this great affair of everlasting life, for 
 example, how they despise and refute your argu- 
 ments and your descriptions ! You begin to coun- 
 sel with them, saying : " Immortality is proved 
 thus and so." But before you have done speak- 
 ing they are off into regions of untried and un- 
 proved possibilities of being. Just essay to de- 
 scribe the " next world " to him ; scrupulously 
 avoid putting into your description any dash of 
 fairy-land where an unheard-of and as it were im- 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 93 
 
 possible thing may happen at any moment, where 
 abysses may open up or false by-ways lead a 
 man to a lower region if he do not watch out 
 describe the " next world " to him with this pain- 
 ful and patient accuracy, I say, and in the end 
 of your efforts you will find him gone in a scep- 
 tical disregard of your pretty exactitudes and with 
 a barbarous immediate joy in the next step, 
 whether into a next world or not, who knows? Is 
 a next world there? So much the better for the 
 man who enters it full-fledged, full-grown. Is a 
 next step not there? " So much the worse for 
 the God of things as they are," he says. What 
 the next world is or even that it is is, as he sees 
 it, a matter beyond the beginning of your knowl- 
 edge and in all regards beyond the ends of your 
 voluble descriptions. 
 
 I have observed that children and natural men 
 do actually live upon mystery. To both, your 
 literalist, your absolutist, your rationalist is of all 
 creatures on God's earth the most pestiferous and 
 preposterous. To them, I mean children and 
 strong men, all life is impulsive, passionate, spon- 
 taneous, free, risky. To him, I mean your cool- 
 headed, cow-eyed rationalist, such natural life is 
 loud, coarse, in bad form, ill-advised, over-heated, 
 childish. I must say that I cannot feel the force 
 of the latter's argument ; it is so ponderous that 
 it does not really hit one; it passes one by like 
 some monstrous opaque body, eclipsing God's sun 
 for a moment but soon lumbering on into that 
 
94 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 shoreless region where float in utter vacuity all 
 such dense, inconsiderable monsters of the world's 
 being. In passing on his way to that monstrous 
 region he condescends to tell you that your life 
 is too passionate ; that you are too impulsive ; that 
 you are a fool to take the risks you do in being; 
 and all that. And all that he calls argument. 
 Why ! it is no more than description. He leaves 
 open the whole question of fact. Is life perhaps 
 not all the better for being just what he describes 
 it to be: impulsive, passionate, childlike? That 
 question, I imagine, will be everlastingly open. 
 You will never know whether or not it had been 
 better to have lived sedately or passionately, 
 agedly or youthfully, conservatively or radically, 
 until indeed you have come to life's end; until 
 Being's Great Decision has been handed down in 
 the world's ultimate Judgment. That is, never. 
 For there is no life's end, there is no ultimate deci- 
 sion, no absolute Judge. I see no help for it: 
 we've just got to take a chance, to follow our own 
 native instinct, our deepest soul in this matter. 
 Live hotly if you be sincerely passionate, calmly 
 if you be incurably anaemic. Be yourself in any 
 case! By that means, or else by no means, you 
 will fit yourself for Death, or for Life. 
 
 A man with any iron in his constitution, with 
 any zest of youth in his no matter how aged veins, 
 will be apt to cast his vote on the side of the great 
 world-soul's passions, the great God-Man's zest 
 in life, the great Man-God's appetite for life ever- 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 95 
 
 lasting. By this I do not mean to celebrate 
 undisciplined souls : yet for the life of me I can- 
 not but recognize in them a certain native strength 
 and health of mind. Thus Whitman, Carlyle, 
 Nietzsche and a plenty of others were of this un- 
 disciplined type. In one way or other they have 
 done a bit of mischief in the world, and no mis- 
 take; mischief, that is, among unbridled, unli- 
 censed, young fools! For that I am sorry 
 enough ; but I can understand why they burst 
 forth, why they so spectacularly and madly broke 
 over their traces. It was because they were irri- 
 tated past enduring by the wooden steadiness, the 
 hauteur, the very hateful complacencies of the 
 world's godly authorities. Not to know even the 
 beginning of lust or life or work, to live in a 
 studied disregard of the sinner's hot body, or of 
 the worker's sweating brow and aching soul, to 
 steadily celebrate a God of your own making 
 whose sole raison d'etre is that he suits you and 
 authorizes your sort of life in all its idle, emas- 
 culated propriety and calm sanity, there is no 
 authority in that. That but breeds passion, re- 
 volt, atheism in strong men, and in children. 
 From such a studied propriety children and strong 
 men always shrink fearfully away. To them 
 your self-conscious arrangement of life's spon- 
 taneous activities is nothing short of life's death 
 and destruction. 
 
 Life, as one should see it, is playfulness, pas- 
 sion, power not abused but mastered, not dissi- 
 
96 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 pated but concentrated; life mastered and con- 
 centrated upon a something eternally unformed 
 and unmastered ; life ever becoming, ever coming 
 to be; life eternally facing a mystery of possible 
 being and power ; life bristling with passions mas- 
 tered, sobered, solemnized, worlds without end; 
 life, a Beyond ever opening out and blooming 
 with the flower of manhood ; eternity, the reckon- 
 ing of this everlastingly unrealized Life! Men 
 of iron constitution, even as children in the mys- 
 terious rites of their play-world, will always ac- 
 cept this mystery of Life's continuously unful- 
 filled Game. For them there is no charm in that 
 fulfilled, eternally doddering, senile Proper-Life 
 portrayed in the world's Book of the Wise; no 
 risk, no life in the categories of your worldly- 
 wise, quite dead authorities. 
 
 The man of iron, if you look down upon him, 
 appears as an enfant terrible, an enfant perdu in 
 fact. " Is he not a child lost in being, making 
 a foolish and terrible game of life ? " This is the 
 perennial query of the world's psychophysical 
 anaemics. The judgment from immemorial time 
 of the lookers-down upon life's places of battle 
 and sin has been that the whole thing, all that ac- 
 tive battling life down there is a foolish, wasteful, 
 over-impulsive, over-passionate business ; " really 
 somewhat vulgar, don't you know." The look- 
 ers-down naturally wonder why these busy, con- 
 tentious workers down there don't look up now 
 and then. "Why don't they look up?" Has 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 97 
 
 it never occurred to you, dear looker-down, what 
 the true reason is? These men's business in life 
 is so vital, so soul-involving, so immediate, instant, 
 quick, that they, unlike you, have no leisure to 
 enjoy the eternal prospect. One glance upward 
 for them! and then they must back and down 
 again into the midst of the world's great spon- 
 taneous, passionate Life. 
 
 " Can it be," you ask, " that these rude, strong, 
 passionate men are indifferent then to the pros- 
 pect of divine things, of future life, and all 
 that ? " No ; if you will but descend from your 
 high place of conventional securities and risk 
 living for a season with these uncouth, pragmatic 
 men, venturing with them upon their own plane 
 of uncertainties and humane risks; you will find 
 them not stolidly indifferent to the prospect of 
 life, even of everlasting life, if only it be viewed 
 from their level of real life. Your plain man 
 does indeed view with a certain contempt and 
 wholesome resentment your frantic attempts to 
 penetrate the mysteries of the future, your nerv- 
 ous endeavor to throw yourself, as it were bodily, 
 over into a region he conceives to be utterly prob- 
 lematic and unknowable. He wants little of your 
 metaphysical arguments and still less of your 
 psychic researches. As a class these robust men 
 are in truth sceptics on the side of their pure rea- 
 son; who indeed is not in such wise sceptical? 
 But you will not find them stubbornly opposed to 
 any vision underlying your arguments and re- 
 
98 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 searches. They protest not against that, but 
 rather against the to them miserable caricature 
 your contentions and evidences make of that in- 
 visible Life-beyond-life they heroically accept 
 without argument and without visible facts to 
 support their case. A man of patient and pas- 
 sionate faithfulness, the man who is ready to risk 
 his everlasting life upon the grand assumption, 
 the great " Perhaps " that the world is in God 
 eternally, inwardly, reliably good, such an one, 
 I say, feels there is danger in all this arguing and 
 whimpering and scurrying about it and about. 
 He has watched you up there on your plane of 
 lofty argument and occult experiment. And he 
 has observed that you have sometimes lost your 
 awareness of eternal life in your desperate battle 
 of words. In his inmost soul your man of iron 
 feels this condition of life itself; the condition, 
 namely, of able-souled fitness for life, of spiritual 
 readiness for any world whatever of living real- 
 ity. Meanwhile in you he sometimes finds this 
 readiness and fitness to live perilously reduced 
 and obscured by all your wasteful conj ectures and 
 experiments in future things. 
 
 You cannot have lived long in the world of real 
 men without having observed this: that your 
 speculative arguments, mystical appeals and sci- 
 entific demonstrations find a response only in 
 souls already in advance of your argument; in 
 lives whose fitness and readiness for the Thing 
 itself, the everlasting thing itself, is already ha- 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 99 
 
 bitual and in need of no argument whatsoever. 
 There are just such men in this present world; 
 men whose own wholesome lives do most prac- 
 tically argue immortality; men whose present 
 purity and sanity of soul is ever in advance of 
 your tedious arguments and evidences of immor- 
 tality; men who by living straight and good- 
 heartedly here and now have most actively, right 
 joyously, quite unconsciously argued their endless 
 right to a place in the eternal good-heart of 
 things. 
 
 And, it would seem, a diseased and cowardly 
 soul argues equally against its immortality 
 most practically and frightfully against its right 
 to an eternal part in the everlasting good soul 
 of the world. His unfitness, his unreadiness for 
 life should cause you to pause a moment in your 
 monotonous recital of arguments from the books ; 
 to pause at least long enough to pity him in his 
 very sorry case. For despite your scholastic ac- 
 count of his soul as entity is his real soul not quite 
 evidently dying? already declining under some 
 incurable disease of the spirit? Can all your 
 arguments and evidences put together again 
 what the real and devilish powers of the world 
 have wrought asunder? Surely, his is a case not 
 for deliberation but for action, not for meta- 
 physical meditations, but for the ministrations of 
 a very vigorous and very healing, very invisible 
 power of Life, if such there be in this world or 
 the next. 
 
100 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 The thing is, not to bandy words ; not to stop 
 to consider any theory of the soul as impeccable 
 or inviolable; not to leave it to its own devices 
 because it is an invincible entity, an indestructible 
 substance, a spiritual atom, or God knows what; 
 but in the presence of the practical, gruesome, ac- 
 complished fact of a soul rotting in its sin-disease 
 to take active measures to relieve and release it, 
 whatever it is, into the free and open air of God's 
 health-giving universe. I imagine I say it in 
 all reverence and silent solemnness of spirit I 
 presume to believe that this is in truth God's 
 method: surely he allows entities, substances and 
 suchlike, if suchlike there be, to care for them- 
 selves whilst his great, humane spirit is engaged 
 most actively, painfully and lovingly in the guid- 
 ing toward eternity, in the healing toward san- 
 ity in perpetuity, of living souls like you and me, 
 and that sinner over there. 
 
 It takes a sinner in fact to try to the depths 
 the power and patience and hopefulness of a 
 living God. He lays a perpetual claim upon the 
 invisible humanity of the larger Life. In his 
 desperate case, seemingly diseased in spirit beyond 
 recovery, with the horrifying consciousness that 
 the very bottom is dropping out of his soul, sin- 
 fainting, such a man never claims immortality 
 as his inalienable right on the ground of your 
 arguments, on the ground of your " entity " 
 (whatever that may be). He feels, if he have a 
 single drop of manhood left in the poor sclerotic 
 
LIFE EVERLASTIG ' 
 
 veins of his soul his pathetic unfitness and un- 
 readiness for any eternal place in the divine order 
 of things. He seems to know, as by a last rem- 
 nant of the still unconquerable instinct of man- 
 hood in him, that for him a future life is no neces- 
 sity and indeed no strictly reasonable hope. 
 Thus with no preposterous arguments and with 
 no cowardly evidences he enters the great Beyond. 
 I think he fronts there no mechanically redeem- 
 ing God-entity, no silent, eternal and icy-cold 
 perfection, but just the eternally patient and 
 hopeful spirit of a living God, the living and pas- 
 sionately hot Life of God, God alive! God al- 
 mighty ! God all human ! Down with you, poor 
 diseased soul! Prostrate before God! God! 
 God! Then, up with you, rich restored soul! 
 Leap for joy before God! God! God! For 
 there in the great Beyond, before your very soul- 
 eyes is no ghostly company of dancing enti- 
 ties ; there is the army of God ! Be patient, peni- 
 tent, strong in your own soul's manhood! And 
 after the furlough granted you by the great Cap- 
 tain, once you are whole and strong and brave 
 again, you too shall join the company of your 
 peers and fight! fight! fight! 
 
 The gift and responsibility of eternal Life; 
 the miracle of rebirth ever making good earth's 
 dead losses ; God's and your own everlasting com- 
 bat with sin; that's what argues immortality. 
 In this manner of arguing even a sinner may lay 
 a perpetual claim upon the patient and hopeful, 
 
102 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 unbroken courage and eternal Life of God. Ar- 
 gue like a man then ! Live like a man now and 
 then! 
 
 IV 
 
 There is a certain unheroism in the doctrine of 
 the soul's necessary immortality and ultimate sal- 
 vation. As if, do what you may or please, the 
 soul is a fixed Thing and must needs gravitate 
 toward a fixed state of salvation! Advisedly I 
 say gravitate, not levitate; for one would most 
 assuredly have to go down, very perceptibly down 
 below the level of the world's fair fighting-ground 
 to be saved in any such secure case as that. Men 
 are never so desperately wounded in God's battles 
 that they want to go down to this soldier's home 
 kind of heaven. They may have to go there for 
 a season in God's providence but not for God's 
 eternity for which God be thanked ! Their 
 release from heaven onto the borderland of hell, 
 the firing line of Life, they shall have, if only 
 they want it; want it deep, deep down in the 
 humane souls of them ! After the horrible gashes 
 of thy fighting finitude have in safe measure 
 healed over, thou brave Man! thou shalt fight 
 again somehow, and on some rough field of being ; 
 shalt fight again, do thou but deeply need and 
 want such extension of thy time of enlistment in 
 God's great invisible army of choice Noblemen! 
 
 But shame upon you, thou coward soul ! to ac- 
 cept salvation and an everlasting furlough! not 
 to win increasing Joy through the accomplish- 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 103 
 
 ments of an heroic life but to claim a soldier's 
 home-heaven as a certified demand upon a me- 
 chanically and thoughtlessly beneficent deity; or, 
 it may be, to find satisfaction in the physical acci- 
 dent of divine birth and settle down in princely 
 splendour and stagnating idleness through an 
 eternity with no sufficient life in you to suffer 
 even ennui; to find joy in the unmerited gifts 
 from a God of undiscriminating " saving grace " 
 rather than in generous and undemanding co- 
 operation with a God of inexorable righteousness 
 and unsearchable Manhood! Shame, I say. 
 There is in all this a fatal taint of unfaithful- 
 ness^ unheroism, pusillanimity! The heaven it 
 describes is in very truth a coward's paradise! 
 the resort of the world's nerveless degenerates ! 
 In this world here and now we do not call such 
 seekers after rest heroes or true princes ; we call 
 them tramps, dependents, defectives, cowards ! 
 We try to be patient with them, but we don't 
 celebrate them. What to them is heaven we call, 
 more plainly, " poor-houses." 
 
 And a poor house heaven would be in such a 
 case: a place where for very idleness men would 
 cultivate in selfish and unprosperous lives an 
 abundant harvest of private and personal sins for 
 the reaping of their grasping and ungenerous 
 hands. There is, I repeat, something unheroic 
 and debilitating in this self-assured optimism 
 prevalent just now among men of a certain kind, 
 nay, of a very uncertain, wavering kind, if the 
 
104 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 truth be told; in this sense of personal security; 
 in this abuse, I should call it, of manhood; this 
 abuse of the instruments of divine love and jus- 
 tice; in this obliging of God to be patient and 
 hopeful because, forsooth, his human instruments 
 are entities, indestructible and doomed to be saved. 
 Have you ever known a person on earth who not 
 theoretically but practically asserted this neces- 
 sary goodness of his soul? who here in this world 
 claimed to have attained that high level of in- 
 violable purity ? who advertised himself as " sanc- 
 tified " (as the theologic phrase has it)? If so, 
 you know what I mean in this point. Such a 
 sanctified person is next to impossible; would he 
 were wholly so ! 
 
 v 
 
 I have said that the soul as an entity is unreal, 
 or in any case inconsiderable " What, then, is 
 the soul? " you may reasonably ask. I'm afraid 
 one cannot say definitely; for, happily, the soul 
 is nothing definite. A man's soul is his real self, 
 we may say. That leaves you margin enough 
 for endless speculations! But what I practi- 
 cally mean is that a man's genuine soul is identi- 
 cal with his relative character, the fugitive vices 
 and virtues, the moving passions and joys of his 
 daily rounds of being; in short, his present self. 
 A soul not unlike a stone is what it does. Let 
 the active qualities of a stone be depressed through 
 constant abrasion by the hard places circumpress- 
 ing it and it becomes less and less. Even so your 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 105 
 
 soul if it be disintegrated by faithless, unresist- 
 ing contact with the storms and cataracts of life, 
 is just so far gone. You see it is a question of 
 resistance and fitness, the ability to overcome and 
 profit by the world's every anstoss, as Fichte 
 would say. Nay, more ; tested naturally the stone 
 is more enduring than a human soul. Of all na- 
 ture's products a spiritual complex and that's 
 what every living soul is : not a simple entity but 
 a complex of vital impulses, passions, instincts, 
 resistances and attractions of all the creatures 
 nature has begotten a spiritual complex, a human 
 soul, I say, is the least stable. How hardly a 
 child of man grows to maturity of self -conscious- 
 ness and self-responsibility and how painfully 
 after such high consummation your son of man 
 persists therein the hard-headed criminologist and 
 alienist are constantly reminding us in their re- 
 ports. No ; for mere brute longevity give me a 
 stone! It is much steadier than a man. The 
 everlasting, lapidic hills are always celebrated in 
 contrast with the vanities of human lif e. If you 
 will seriously consider this point you will see that 
 the soul of man along with its perfect God, as 
 metaphysically construed, is in the stone's case: 
 a lapidic soul-entity, a lapidic deity ; dull, heavy, 
 ponderous, stiff, stark, staring, stony-dead. 
 They, the metaphysician and his God, are dead 
 and have therefore gone to their everlasting rest. 
 I suppose that is an important consideration. 
 But they are dead, most gruesomely, palpably 
 
106 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 petrified. Ask such a petrified God for the bread 
 of life and what can he give you, what can you 
 expect of him, save a stone of a soul? an immortal 
 fossil of a man ? immortal, right enough, but, 
 as I have contended, quite petrified, of frozen 
 splendor ; a monstrous mummy of a one-time good 
 life? a dreadful exhibit of perfect Death? 
 
 I say all this perhaps a bit sharply not that 
 anyone may be put to confusion; that would 
 be a sorry spectacle ; but that anyone who 
 will see clearly, may observe what the soul genu- 
 inely is ; no considerable entity but an organism, 
 quite really living or dying in the process of be- 
 ing; its life like every other of nature's children 
 chastened and lawed by certain necessary condi- 
 tions of life ; a life which is even now generating 
 enduring powers, everlasting adaptabilities, per- 
 petual graces. Yet a little while and your soul, 
 thus armed and fortified, will open the door of 
 death to enter who knows what-then ? May we 
 not in one deep sense ask, " Who cares what- 
 then ? " In no braggart sense, that is ; bragga- 
 docio is the vice of a weak soul and deceives no one 
 except perhaps itself. I mean, " Who cares what- 
 then ? " in a thoroughly considerate sense. Who 
 is there engaged now and here most earnestly in 
 exercising his soul's energies ; in being to his full 
 stature; in feeling rushing through the veins of 
 his spirit the vast energies of the world-spirit's 
 own Life ; who in such a case can possibly care 
 what-then? The demands and joys of the 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 107 
 
 this-now are tingling in every drop of this pres- 
 ent energy. It is no time for studied reflections 
 upon entities, future destinies and such things ; it 
 is a time to live, and having lived, to enter in ful- 
 ness of manhood, to enter who cares what- 
 then? We have tasted of this-now and found it 
 strong, nerve-steadying, ay, splendid! Can 
 that-then be any less ? 
 
 Life begets life, life itself gives assurance of 
 life. When Theodore Parker said in praying to 
 his God, " I am conscious of my immortality," 
 his consciousness was not thrown out wantonly 
 into a settled, petrified, certified eternity ; rather 
 he felt within him a living Real, like molten steel, 
 a living soul durable and changeable, lovable and 
 livable throughout eternity and a day. By its 
 exuberance of growing and fitting life the soul of 
 such a man may even go the metaphysician one 
 better; an entity exists throughout an eternity 
 only, throughout a meagre eternity ; a living soul 
 conscious of its immortality would live for eter- 
 nity and then a day. 
 
 VI 
 
 Enter the stacks of some great library and ex- 
 amine the literature on the soul's origin, function 
 and destiny. You will be amazed to find a mass 
 of works dealing with the soul's destiny out of 
 all conscionable proportion to the mass treating 
 of the soul's origin. Indeed the latter consider- 
 ation you will not meet at all until you come to 
 
108 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 the books of modern psychophysics. In this con- 
 cern of the soul the scholars have been conjectural 
 rather than soberly scientific in their investiga- 
 tions. The result was inevitable : the farther they 
 pushed their conjectures into the future the re- 
 moter their conclusions were from the living thing 
 they set out to save. Take eternity and try to 
 mean by it a literally endless succession of years ; 
 then smatter a human soul over all these years. 
 What result do you get? Precisely the result of 
 the metaphysician : a ghastly, petrified ghost of a 
 soul, a shade in very literal truth. No human 
 being can stand the stain of eternity all at once; 
 one must have breathing-space, endless time in 
 which to be preparing for eternity. And, as I 
 see it, God is in similar case : he, if he be human 
 and if he be not human, who cares what-then? 
 God, no more than we, can stand the pressure 
 and pull of an eternity all at once. Our destiny 
 and his is not to be eternal but to become eternal, 
 not to endure the perfect agony of a clearly per- 
 ceived and eternally unbearable reality-all-at-once 
 but to manfully wrest from an inchoate, un- 
 formed, potential eternity all that we may need 
 for the day's work and purposes; all that, no 
 more, no less ! 
 
 Men, as I have hinted, would have seen this 
 more clearly if they had examined the soul in the 
 light of its origin. For I must insist stubbornly 
 that it did have an origin in time. The soul of 
 each of us here on this planet came to be at about 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 109 
 
 the age of two years. By soul I now most obvi- 
 ously mean no entity, (if it be that, who cares 
 what-then ? ) but that living self I have spoken of ; 
 that conscious organism of self-impulses, pas- 
 sions, instincts; that self-possession-, I suppose 
 one might say. This living soul came to be: 
 that's the point. Now, if you inquire what it was 
 in this plastic source of its being, you will get a 
 vivid sense of what it ought to be in its destiny, its 
 outcome. 
 
 What is it in its origin? Well, I have just said 
 that it is no ghost of a soul; no petrified, fixed, 
 monstrous thing, but an impulsive, spontaneous, 
 limpid soul of life with all the passion and zest 
 and growing masterfulness of a little child. If 
 you don't know what that is, friend, then God 
 pity you ! your case is hopeless. The thing is, to 
 keep your soul in eternity just what it most natu- 
 rally is in childhood full of life ; replete with 
 passionate sorrows and joys ; instinct with action ; 
 its being's currents flowing ever deeper and 
 broader; by all means fluent, limpid, fresh; mov- 
 ing at first ripplingly and at last if you must 
 grow old majestically on toward God only 
 knows what precious and shoreless ocean of being. 
 
 Or dovs God know toward what shore? I hope 
 not. For did he know all this full well, did his 
 insight cover the depths of an infinitely full ocean 
 of being, then he would be a great, silent, im- 
 perturbable Dead Sea into which our little streams 
 of a day are innocently pouring. Rather let him 
 
110 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 be the great tumbling, thundering, livvng ocean- 
 waves! Rather let him come actively and con- 
 sciously to join and further and refresh us as we 
 in our deepest channels of being open out to meet 
 him ; in those broadest and deepest channels, I 
 say, where we are nearest that silent, shoreless 
 ocean in which we and he live and move and have 
 our being. 
 
 The figure is imperfect enough: perhaps the 
 imagery of a great undercurrent spring of life 
 would have fitted better. But you will under- 
 stand me in any case to mean this : ong'mally y and 
 God grant forever! your soul consists in just this 
 exuberant meeting of the natural, necessary con- 
 ditions of life; in just this tumbling, romping, 
 thundering, cutting-in to the world-ground ! Re- 
 move that ground condition of life; the anstoss, 
 the shock of getting born again and again ; the- 
 orize away the powers *that tend to defeat ; con- 
 sider that your channel is eternally established 
 by God and that your only necessity is to flow 
 nicely and peaceably therein with never a bit of 
 coarse-grained evil to be washed away, never so 
 much as a speck of putrefaction to be radically 
 cleansed away! Why! that would remove life 
 itself! Such a channel of life would have in it 
 no slightest smack of reality from its source to 
 its mouth ! 
 
 I can see the soul's case in no other light. A 
 real soul is no ghost of a thing that I can imag- 
 ine. It is a thing in its destiny true to its ori- 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 111 
 
 gin, not seeking to destroy its life's impulses, 
 passions and instincts but aiming to compress 
 these into ever better order ; to channel them more 
 and more deeply, letting them grow strong, noble, 
 virile, even as God, the universal Life, the world's 
 soul, is growing stronger,, viriler, nobler with the 
 on-rolling, in-cutting centuries. 
 
 O! of* course your incurable rationalist will 
 pounce upon and riddle all this beyond all human 
 recognition. He will make my words to mean 
 that when I really mean this. You can depend 
 upon it he will not understand either me or my 
 words. His case is as hopeless as my own! 
 Still I must attempt one more statement of this 
 thing I do most solemnly hold for true: a living 
 God in his becoming perfection is no eternal and 
 compulsory, no instantaneous and spectrally con- 
 scious entity of goodness ; but a persuasive and 
 tender, spontaneous and youthful, yet solemn and 
 commanding spirit of Life himself living or 
 dying daily in the growth or decay of the souls 
 of us, his human kind. In us he came to be, 
 through us he remains to be seen, in us it doth 
 not yet appear what he shall be. We through 
 him and he through us are eternal, provided we 
 and he meet the condition of life ! provided we and 
 hey-overcome ! provided we and he do continuously 
 master the great universe's anstoss, do meet mas- 
 terfully the great world's every shock of disas- 
 ter, defeat, sorrow and disgrace ! provided we and 
 he do gain the victory ! In any other case what- 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 soever, we and he, being perishable in our origin, 
 will surely die the death, will surely subside into 
 the great, the very amorphous, the very cosmic, 
 formless Beast whence we and he arose. And 
 what-then ? the unutterable Silence and Fatu- 
 ity of a metaphysical eternity will set in. Much 
 thus depends upon you, my comrade, and much 
 upon you, my Comrade ! 
 
 vn 
 
 There was a game we used to play, as chil- 
 dren. It was called the " wishing-game." It 
 was a zestful, royal, lively game, perennially 
 stimulating and gratifying. To play it we re- 
 quired only a " fairy." Thereby we were per- 
 mitted to make wishes not one " stingy " wish 
 merely but as many as we wished. I seem to re- 
 member however that the game was conditioned 
 and somewhat solemnized at one point: we must 
 always wish for something noble, of high degree ; 
 we must want to be great Kings or Queens, great 
 leaders of men in all ways of simplicity, found- 
 ers of happy families, defenders of homes, and 
 anything else that was good and great and holy. 
 In these circumstances the wishes were supposed 
 to " come true." 
 
 Well, we used to play thus, as children. Even 
 now I play the game sometimes with two little 
 children of my own heart; even now some- 
 times, when alone, with the great God of my 
 heart! Wish for what you want, now or here- 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 113 
 
 after, of all that is noble, vital, princely, manly ! 
 And somehow out from the invisible, fairlylike 
 being of God's own great and noble humanity it 
 will come true now or hereafter! That's the 
 game. 
 
 As children, we did believe in the fairy of our 
 imaginary game. As grown-ups do we, dare we, 
 believe in the God of our Game of Life? the 
 great God of our spiritual imagination? the 
 mysterious Presence round about us ready for 
 every motion of our human lives? a Presence 
 whose whole soul is presented for the asking? 
 Dare we believe in him? I ask. In manhood's 
 Fairy God? 
 
 It is a simple question to ask : " Do you believe 
 in God? " Men of modern mind, as I have so 
 often remarked, are apt to reply : " Why, of 
 course ; certainly I believe in God." But I don't 
 mean that. Any fool can believe in the God 
 you are thinking of when you say that. " Why 
 of course I believe in God ; " as much as to say 
 " Why of course the sun will rise to-morrow : 
 but what time of day is it now, you condemned 
 man? " 
 
 Once more: Do you belive in God? in him not 
 at all as a matter of course but in him in a 
 practical, playful, childish way ? Do you believe 
 in him thus even though men before they really 
 know the awful depth of what you mean will spit 
 scorn in the face of your passionate utterance, 
 reviling you in your very personal and very con- 
 
114 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 fidential experience of him you call God-Man, 
 calling you all manner of galling and patronizing 
 names, ridiculing you as a new and latest brand 
 of passionate egotist, a sort of harmless, spir- 
 itual libertine? Do you believe that God-Man 
 is ? is, I say, right here, right now, right pres- 
 ent, right human? 
 
 Well, I imagine, you are not quite so sure of 
 that. But so surely as you do not believe just 
 that, just exactly that, no less, you do not fully 
 experience God. You are bowing and scraping 
 before a great monstrous world-idol; a con- 
 venient idol, too ; for he can't enter your count- 
 ing-house and your home to shame your very in- 
 tolerable practices there. Well, that world-idol 
 will grind you to pieces in the end. He is a God- 
 of-course, a Brute-Energy, no more eternal by 
 nature nor by natural right than a Beast-of- 
 course grunting and puffing in his universal wal- 
 low! He will grind you back into star-dust, I 
 tell you! That is his destiny and yours, too, 
 along with him. Just so surely and relentlessly 
 as Fate, your God-of-course is dying, disin- 
 tegrating, being abolished, returning to the 
 pompous, stiff, petrified, dead inanity he set out 
 from ! Go along with him, if you will : you be- 
 lieve in him of course! 
 
 But the better course, the better way, as I see 
 it, would be to conjoin your energies, your man- 
 hoods, with the more romantic, fairy-like, ex- 
 uberantly childlike Energy I now and henceforth 
 
LIFE EVERLASTING 115 
 
 call God, not your God-of-course but an in- 
 visible God whom it requires vision to see and a 
 mighty will to follow; a Reality-of-God not so 
 obvious as your God-of-course but a Life ever 
 pressing on toward mastery and invisible being 
 just as surely and steadily as Matter, the king- 
 dom of your beastly God-of-course, is sinking 
 toward death and destruction. Lend your life to 
 the larger Life, engage yourself to that in a 
 precious eternal alliance and live forever, for- 
 ever! That is the argument, that the condition, 
 that the Life. 
 
 Is it not good to live? to live now and then? 
 
 vm 
 
 In this spirit one may honorably enter what is 
 called " life after death " in this life-after-life 
 spirit. " What shall we be like < over there '? " 
 you ask. I make answer: we shall be like him 
 then if we are like him now; for we shall see 
 him as he is. " Who is this great ' I am '? " you 
 ask. He is the God of the veiled Face, the God 
 of the veiled Manhood. Unveiled, " over there " 
 I hope: but veiled from us over here, hidden 
 from us by all our sensualities, stupidities, 
 bestialities. But even now you may see his great 
 patient, care-worn, brave Face, if you will but 
 unveil yourself; your everlasting pure and holy 
 self; your soul girt for life's and eternity's bat- 
 tles ! just your own homely, splendid, everlasting 
 se lf i j us t that is the God of the unveiled, un- 
 
116 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 searchable human face, the Face of human life, 
 the Face of the universe's Manhood, Man-God, 
 God-Man. 
 
 Is it good to live, to live now and then? Then 
 unveil, O Man ! Unveil, O God ! to live forever ! 
 f orevermore ! forever and a day! 
 
IV 
 
 PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 i 
 
 Most men in these latter days have, as they 
 put the case, broken themselves of the childish 
 habit of prayer and have now ceased to feel its 
 magical strength in their lives. Freed from the 
 errors and dogmatism of their fathers' faith men 
 of the modern mind don't like to pray any more : 
 somehow it is so childlike, so primitive, so useless, 
 this customary praying. It is now past believing 
 in. 
 
 Does this modern man then disbelieve, say, in 
 God ? By no means. He believes in God wholly : 
 somehow a great energy is working its way out 
 in the lives of men. Only a fool can say in his 
 mind " There is no God." God is phenomenal, 
 apparent enough. But as to praying! Who 
 can by that alter one least movement, one slight- 
 est law or purpose of the Great God of things 
 as they have got to be? 
 
 Perhaps some of you, my comrades of the 
 open mind, will recall, as do I, the very night 
 when the communing impulse called prayer began 
 to decrease within you; when the Presence, the 
 mythic Companion of your child- and young 
 man-hood, began slipping away from your inner 
 hearth-stone. Ah! but that was a sorry night, 
 117 
 
118 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 the night when, no longer able to open your 
 grown life sincerely and whole-souledly to the 
 larger Life, you for the first time sought sleep 
 in the awful solitude of a prayerless soul. But: 
 " Oh, well " you say, " that is all over, best for- 
 gotten now. Since that dreadful night I seem 
 to have fared pretty well as things go in this 
 godless world. My life has become more and 
 more self-sufficient, less and less conscious of 
 any dependence upon another Power than my- 
 self. The meaning and spirit of prayer once the 
 source, I grant, of my daily strength and cour- 
 age it somehow no longer sinks deep into my 
 soul. Yes, I fare well enough as things go. I 
 am no coward, no sniffler, I am a Man, godless 
 to be sure but a Man nonetheless." 
 
 A prayerless, modern society ; men with heroic 
 souls bereaved of God; all private approaches to 
 the great Father-spirit cut off by doubt and 
 hesitation ; the soul of God dehumanized, cast out 
 from the habitations of men ; great God ! a 
 stranger in the world, finding never a simple and 
 natural response to the call of his father-spirit 
 in the hearts of his children, for we are yet his 
 children ingrainedly, bone of his bone, flesh of his 
 flesh, soul of his soul. Men in their boasted 
 knowledge of Nature's unchanging laws have 
 turned their faces away from the World-Father. 
 Just last night I was reading a letter from a 
 friend of polytechnic education in which he tells 
 me that once when things were going very ill with 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 119 
 
 him he was constrained to " swear at " this ac- 
 cursed God of physics. This man's science had 
 erected in the place of a once living and friendly 
 God a monstrous deaf and dumb idol of things 
 as they have got to be. It is even so; the ex- 
 perience of a living God is gone in these days 
 of superior knowledge and of desolating doubt. 
 Perhaps never to return? 
 
 Here is what William James says on the point: 
 " Few men of science can pray, I imagine. 
 Few can carry on any living commerce with 
 ' God.' Yet many of us are well aware how much 
 freer in many directions and abler our lives would 
 be, were such important forms of energizing not 
 sealed up." 
 
 n 
 
 " Were such important forms of energizing 
 not sealed up " ! Most of my readers will be 
 familiar with the impediment of science whereby 
 these great springs of human energy have been 
 dammed up and prevented from flowing in their 
 natural course with the deeper currents of being. 
 This modern scepticism of prayer is very unlike 
 the scepticism of a generation or so ago. That 
 doubted the very existence of God: this on the 
 contrary owrbelieves in him! The modern mind 
 believes in God tremendously! Is his great 
 being not obvious on all sides, the Great God of 
 the countless stars? Something like sixty billion 
 of them, we are told, are subject to this God- 
 Power. His energy is present in the world with 
 
120 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 terrific intensity: release it, if only you could, 
 from its potential imprisonment in a single drop 
 of water and, once more we are told, you could 
 move by this released power all the machinery 
 of all the workshops over the civilized world. 
 Great is God! Great and monstrous withal! 
 " Surely " this late septicism of prayer argues 
 " a God of such prowess and majesty is con- 
 cerned chiefly in the machinizmg of his in- 
 finite workshop, in fitting with stars the endless 
 expanse of the heavens. Chiefly in that rather 
 than in the conserving and cherishing of human 
 things like you and me." God only knows how 
 many men in these days have caught this vision 
 of his awful power, majesty and dignity. But 
 I think there are many who have said in their 
 hearts " Oh, God, we acknowledge thee, spirit of 
 the great world and its heavens. Great is thy 
 power, thy majesty how surpassing all our human 
 measurements and imaginations ! Great thou art 
 beyond all the childish beliefs of our fathers. In 
 the rumbling and inexorable rush of thy matchless 
 world-work thou canst not hear nor, hearing, 
 heed the feeble petitions rising from human lips. 
 How small indeed is this human, whirling planet 
 among thy sixty odd billion of such." 
 
 Yes; men in these days believe terrifically in 
 God, acknowledge their hopeless dependence upon 
 him, revere him in his surpassing power, worship 
 his majesty. But they have dumbed in conse- 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 121 
 
 quence the great, infinite heart of tenderness and 
 love they once imaged in God. They can no 
 longer utter the child's cry for help, the simple 
 prayer out of a child's daily needs and trials, 
 errors and sins. We sink our souls in the great 
 on-pushing energy round about us. We hush all 
 our human longings for divine companionship 
 and stand silent and lonely under the star-strewn 
 heavens; looking up in the attitude of prayer, 
 it may be, but with lips stiffened and struck 
 dumb by the vision of power and dignity there 
 above our heads. Even so, in time we forget 
 altogether that hour of evening devotion in 
 which, as children, we were able to pray to God, 
 simply and freely touching the things, the mis- 
 takes, disappointments, passions, sins, of the day 
 just gone by; praying with a full sense of God's 
 Presence; nothing doubting, for was the Pres- 
 ence not there, understanding, strengthening, for- 
 giving, companioning? Yes, he seemed to be 
 there then, but not now. Now, the great Father- 
 Spirit is dead ! The great Father-Spirit is dead, 
 I tell you. Men and women, great pathetic 
 hordes of them are standing in the world hope- 
 less, powerless, prayerless, dumb, like sheep for- 
 saken of their shepherd, mere beasts in the fields 
 of God's world. 
 
 And the proof of all this is at hand, is easily 
 found out. It needs but a simple question. 
 How many of you, comrades of the modern 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 mind, have prayed in the day, or in the year, or 
 in what time soever, just gone by? Not many of 
 you in these latter days, I think. 
 
 ra 
 
 It would be very easy to refute men's argu- 
 ments against prayer; it is in fact a pathetic 
 fallacy that has led them to doubt God because of 
 the very power and being which alone would jus- 
 tify faith in him. What boots your childish 
 belief in God's goodness, sympathy, love and all 
 else human, unless God be indeed? unless his 
 being be in very truth just what your adult 
 science makes it out to be: world-wide, ever- 
 present, mindful? Surely God's bigness does not 
 prevent his goodness and love? We would not 
 judge a dog in that way. It often happens that 
 the larger your dog is, the more watchful and 
 affectionate is he toward those he holds in his care. 
 Can it be then that this God who grips in his 
 care the very dead planets, whose substance holds 
 and feels the fall of the tiniest, fluttering sparrow, 
 is unmindful, un watchful of you and me? of you 
 and me who best of all the creatures of his world 
 can enter into and become a living part of his di- 
 vine life? Surely this is the position of those who 
 have never actively entered the larger Life, who 
 have never worked with God in his world, who do 
 not know God in the way of practice, in the way 
 of life. This thing is, not to demonstrate God: 
 that is easy enough! but to prove him; not to 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 123 
 
 qualify God ponderously but to live him joy- 
 ously; not to chart him as he moves in the dis- 
 tant heavens but to speak him friendlily as he 
 passes in your way of life. 
 
 IV 
 
 Anyway, argument is futile in all such vital 
 cases. Let the logicians and metaphysicians 
 wrangle with the scientist over this matter of 
 praying. My purpose is otherwise. It is 
 merely to impress a fact upon you, friend, in 
 case you have come to this modern mind's prayer- 
 less belief in God: the man who knows God only 
 as external prowess does not really know him. 
 You would know God, as he genuinely and 
 really is, or perhaps ought to be? as you want 
 him to be? as you hope he is in that unseen soul 
 of him beneath all his visible, earthly and heav- 
 enly powers? Then you must mythologize and 
 humanize God! You must feel the great in- 
 visible powers of the universe concentrated upon 
 and in you, God connected in some most vital and 
 inward way with the daily deeds and nightly 
 aspirations of your human life. All argument 
 aside then! The simple fact is that no man can 
 put away from himself this in some sort childlike 
 sense of a God's friendly presence in his own 
 working life without losing in time his very be- 
 lief in God. On this we must be clear: an ex- 
 ternal, prayerless thought of God, though it be 
 in fact never so knowing, is unutterably inferior 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 to a practical, prayerful, mystic belief in him. 
 It is an amazing phenomenon in human history, 
 the attempt of metaphysic and theologic science 
 to keep alive in the great ocean of being a God 
 around whose soul they have hung like mill-stones 
 all their weighty arguments and ponderous in- 
 finitudes. The mythologists, as I have hinted, 
 the humanists, the religionists of humanity, have 
 shown a superior instinct in their experience of 
 God as Man, or of Man as God (whichever you 
 prefer). In any case they have preserved the 
 God of real human life; a God who lives and 
 loves in the region of human being; in whom his 
 awful infinitudes, omniscience, omnipotence, om- 
 nipresence and such, are not methaphysic but 
 practical, not even infinite if by that you mean 
 done, but rather finite and active, once more, in 
 the habitations and souls of men; human, in 
 short. 
 
 v 
 
 After all these wise old metaphysicians and 
 doctors of sacred theology are not really expert 
 in divinity. Those rather are expert, as I take 
 it, who have discovered God to men, who in some 
 very real sense have actually seen God face to 
 face, as Man to man, as Friend to friend. 
 
 In a word those know God most immediately 
 and intimately who in saintliless or in sinfulness 
 have tapped the very sources of his living being. 
 All other knowledge of That we call God is 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 125 
 
 mediate and inferential. In truth divinity is not 
 so much a matter of knowledge as of friendship: 
 we infer the friendliness of our life's closest com- 
 panion, say, the fatherliness of our father, from 
 external marks and gifts, until that solemn 
 moment when through some act of unwonted 
 faithfulness or unfaithfulness on our part we 
 come to feel overwhelmingly the eternal spirit 
 of love out of which through the years all these 
 gifts and expressions of love have poured forth. 
 Then do we really know, and yet not rightly 
 know but rather sense, the deeps of our friend, 
 our father. It is so with scientific and theologic 
 knowledge of God: it is in the main external, 
 inferential, doctoral. There is a plenty of 
 scientists and philosophers who live in an out- 
 wardly friendly relation with the universal energy 
 or spirit they condescend to call God : such a God 
 is universely prolific! a splendid provider! full 
 of rich gifts, unconsciously bestowed! But this 
 external friendship with God becomes internal 
 and remains an eternal demand in that soul only 
 which, having completed its world-wide account 
 of God's powers and beneficences, has at last re- 
 ceived this world-wide spirit of God within the 
 sacred precincts of its own most intimate hopes 
 and longings and aspirations. I have known a 
 few such scientific and yet intimate commun- 
 icants with God : one of them loves a little child ; 
 another grieves for a life removed by sudden and 
 
126 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 tragic death from his hearth-stone; another met 
 God when on his way with his once brilliant son 
 to a neighboring mad-house. 
 
 The God of the hearth-stone, God of the 
 world-home! He is God indeed; the inward 
 source of all human patience, hopefulness, love, 
 righteousness, the exhaustless soul of all human 
 courage and wisdom. The God who cares! 
 whose manna-machine does, it is true, incessantly 
 pour down food for the body from the heavens 
 above infer God from that, you men of know- 
 ing temper! but whose soul of humanity is pour- 
 ing forth here in the homes of men such gifts to 
 the soul as courage, hardihood, tenderness, Man- 
 hood become God in that, you men of mystic 
 temper ! 
 
 The God who cares! He it is who may and 
 must be prayed to. 
 
 May be prayed to, for he is above all else a 
 humane spirit, is God. His world-soul may thus 
 touch ours, his life enter into and renew ours, 
 his purposes become one and whole in ours, his 
 Life live in ours. Place your human against 
 his human, interfuse your life with his; share 
 with him your shame and your sin, your strength 
 and your joy, your goods and your evil; speak 
 him friendlily as his great world-spirit passes 
 your way, I say. Pray ! And, see, your God al- 
 mighty, your inferential infinitudes, will become 
 a living, friendly reality. Henceforth the blow 
 that falls on you falls on him equally; the sin 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 127 
 
 that debases you ruins him equally; the good 
 cheer, courage, manliness, self-expression and 
 self-offering that enter and dignify your life 
 enter equally his and further his own eternal 
 Man-impulses and Man-passions. In you! I say, 
 do I perhaps say it too often and too simply ? 
 for men think you can't talk of God other than 
 ponderously and pompously nay, in you God 
 becomes; in that great humanity that sometimes 
 shrieks out in the night with the very agony of 
 its infinite pain in growing, in that Man beyond 
 yourself, the great God lives and moves and has 
 his being. To this Man-God, though to none 
 other, a man may pray. 
 
 And must pray too. See how intimately per- 
 sonal, mutual, reciprocal, social, friendly this 
 relation of God with man is ! So intimate is it 
 that somehow spirit must make known to spirit 
 the needs and demands and aspirations of each. 
 Communing of spirit with spirit and that is 
 praying essentially and inwardly cannot be 
 one-sided. There would be no touch, no feeling, 
 no understanding, in that. I know of no more 
 presposterous theory of prayer than that which 
 affirms that God knows our needs in an eternity 
 before ever we felt the same. Preposterous, 
 theoretic rww-sense! Why, my friend, those 
 needs didn't even exist, they most certainly were 
 not, until you felt them. Once I read an ac- 
 count of an old woman, a senile dement, who 
 spent her last days ministering to the imaginary 
 
128 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 wants of a senseless, stuffed doll. She was not 
 unlike your God, and you not unlike the limp, 
 dumb lump of a doll, my friend, if you press 
 your theory of prayer too far! Nay, God in 
 his world-old life is still young and spontaneous 
 in his inner springs ; he in his exuberant Life 
 "rejoices as a strong Man to run a race"; he 
 is still growing in humanity, is still in intelligent 
 contact with your human life. The relation be- 
 tween him and you is a live articulate matter. 
 When you stir he stirs ; when you want, he wants ; 
 when you cry, he pauses in his busy way; when 
 you open the flood gates of your soul his in- 
 fluence does most actively come. All this when 
 you pray, when you become in some way articu- 
 late before God; but not sooner, I think. God 
 must and may be prayed to; spirit answering 
 spirit, that is prayer. 
 
 Let us agree upon any explanation you will 
 of this contact between our human and God's 
 human spirit. Call it supersensible, telepathic, 
 subconscious, or by what term soever you choose. 
 Such terms do explain in the right direction: 
 silent, wordless prayer is more efficient than 
 prayers from the mouth. Only don't confuse 
 the principle of communion. Round about and 
 within each of us is a great, indubitable, in- 
 domitable Soul, a consciously, humanly sensitive 
 Spirit, conserving us with all its might, guiding 
 us with all its power, speaking our spirits with 
 the infinite tenderness and pathos of its own 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 129 
 
 soul of triumphing righteousness. And there 
 is only one way in which the human soul may 
 inwardly acknowledge and know that sustaining 
 power, consciously follow that friendly leader- 
 ship, inwardly hear the divine call: the way of 
 wordless prayer. Wordless but not senseless, 
 wordless but not inarticulate is this prayer of 
 the full, human life. In his quiet hours of 
 praying thus the devout man's soul is infinitely 
 expressive: he lays bare before the humane soul 
 of God, as he cannot before any other living 
 soul, the eternal wants of his spirit and feels a 
 Presence passing that way strengthening, com- 
 forting, reassuring; persuading him that these 
 eternal needs, these untiring aspirations of his 
 human soul are infinite, living passions in the 
 very soul of God. He and God move together 
 in prayer; in prayer he and God face together 
 the eternal way. 
 
 Don't say then that a man must not pray over 
 his daily needs, trials and errors and sins ; for 
 whatsoever things concern a man infinitely con- 
 cern the God-Man infinitely, too. We stand 
 facing a world in which our knowledge is per- 
 verted by brute-facts, our lives are altered and 
 cultivated in time by the changing seasons of 
 a world's progress. We grow and are infinite, 
 are majestic, only in that progress, in that push- 
 ing-forth into being, in that entering into an 
 unformed and unknown eternity. But the spirit 
 of God moves and grows infinite and majestic 
 
130 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 in that same world and in that same way of prog- 
 ress: his spirit knows no more than the great 
 world as it now is and is becoming, the great 
 infinitely possible world of real life. 
 
 And so the prayer that asks for more life, 
 more light, more strength is to the very soul of 
 God the signal of life, the motion of a new 
 birth of spirit within his Life, the opening of a 
 new soul to the unending possibilities of becom- 
 ing alive. We men must cease to pray for 
 trifles as if they were the eternal verities of life ; 
 we must consider more and more what are life's 
 lasting dignities ; we must yield graciously to the 
 life and wisdom of a Great Spirit surrounding 
 us, the loving Leader of our lives ; we must learn 
 to labor with this larger Life, to practice the 
 Presence of the Man in us, the God in him; 
 we must believe in the answering love and wis- 
 dom of the Whole. Then after this great dis- 
 cipline of soul a grown man like you and me 
 here may pray to the Spirit of God, each saying 
 in the silence of his soul " I cannot live, I can- 
 not be, I cannot work without this gift of thy 
 love and life. More Light! more Life! more 
 Love ! " And the answer will come in your life ; 
 somehow all the conditions of life will become 
 gracious and blessed and strong; one's soul of 
 prayer will have come to know on earth some- 
 thing of the eternal joy of the spirit's own in- 
 visible world-home out there and in here, be- 
 yond and beneath all the conditions of beastly 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 131 
 
 time and beastly space. This is the principle 
 of prayer: the retirement of the human into the 
 divine spirit, the human into the divine Life; 
 the call of the undisciplined soul of a man to the 
 disciplined yet like soul of God. 
 
 Really to see, really to yield to this living 
 argument of a larger yet like-minded Life, to be 
 unafraid of its Presence, to be unashamed to call 
 it " God " and to stand nobly in his Light, to be 
 frankly mystic, to pray simply yet in the 
 strength of your grown-up manhood that is 
 your supremest vocation, O Man ! " What is God 
 that thou are mindful of him? " you ask. God, 
 believe me, is infinitely more than all-mighty, in- 
 finitely more than all-wise, infinitely more than 
 in-himself ', infinitely more than what qualities 
 soever your tedious and monstrous science of God 
 may picture him to be. God is not divme not 
 in his right arm of avenging power nor yet in 
 his perfect mind of fatal knowledge. God is di- 
 vine in that very heart and centre of him, in 
 those unconditioned affections where even he, as 
 God is! is dependent upon you and me, upon 
 our love and faithfulness and strong manhood, 
 upon our working with him in his great enter- 
 prises of love in the world, laboring with him in 
 his world-wide vineyard, home-making with him 
 in his great world-home. No! God is no chief 
 artificer not that chiefly, I mean; he is no 
 wise One merely, seeing all clearly and ordering 
 all fatally. God is a presence of humanity, a 
 
132 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 spirit of human strength and humane love like 
 you and me, living under all the conditions of 
 human trial and affection ; unlike us only in this : 
 in his age-long, storm-centered Life he has even 
 now gained unspeakably in patience, in courage, 
 in hopefulness and in all those splendid infinities 
 you and I are staggering and working toward. 
 It is only in the opening out in prayer of our 
 human hearts in that way that his spirit and Life 
 of divine bravery and love can enter and chasten, 
 strengthen, stir, comfort and protect our littler 
 lives. 
 
 VI 
 
 This is the method and spirit, you will find, 
 of those who have seen God, the saints and sin- 
 ners who have found* him in life's ways. 
 
 As to the saints. Spending their lives from 
 beginning to end in simple trustfulness, finding 
 God's face as familiar as the stars, his Presence 
 as certain as the everlasting hills, these passion- 
 ately faithful men spend their days in a kind of 
 perpetual communion with God; they fail not 
 for a moment to rest confidingly in the larger 
 Life; they always feel around about and within 
 their human lives the very spirit and presence of 
 a living God. How they prize the friendly walk 
 with God, this constant turning and looking to 
 the Eternal for strength and guidance ! Well, it 
 i* a very wonderful and convincing sense of God's 
 presence; a communion with the Unseen, they 
 tell us, so enduring and withal so practically 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 133 
 
 human that all the hard and dark places of the 
 world, one is sure somehow, are not eternally 
 hard and dark at all: they are just places of 
 trial, it may be even unto death, but out of which 
 every human soul must eventually escape into the 
 light and comfort of God's presence, into the 
 larger Life, into the sweet serenity of the 
 Father's strong soul. This, because they have 
 seen the veiled face of God, they say, and have 
 beheld that time-worn divine countenance all 
 aglow with human sympathies, all firm and 
 patient and hopeful, as if he were determined 
 with a great, divine strength and resolution to 
 prevail over all our human destinies, to bless all 
 our human lives, to put into our faltering human 
 souls something of the force, the resolution, the 
 righteousness, the iron-like love of his own un- 
 conquerable humanity. What wonder that they 
 are glad and confident, these men of prophetic 
 vision and saintly lives ! Do they not walk daily 
 with a great Companion, an incurably human 
 God? 
 
 This is the sort of walk you and I may have 
 with God, if only we too will have the courage 
 to believe in the ever-present reality of God in 
 every place and time of our human life. Thus 
 to know God we must learn yes, learn, for it 
 is not easy at first to pray* to practice the 
 presence of God. This is praying, I think: to 
 pause in the midst of some very practical, some 
 very worldly occupation when perhaps the im- 
 
134? RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 pulse to hastiness, ungenerosity, dishonesty is up- 
 on us, or when some great and lowering passion 
 of the inner life is tearing us asunder to 
 pause, I say, and remember that underlying all 
 the heat and passion of life there is still the 
 great Spirit of the living God. In his friendly, 
 manly presence the narrowing temptation be- 
 comes so frail, the grip upon us of passion so 
 slight that in that solemn moment of wordless 
 prayer we find ourselves once more men! strong 
 in the consciousness of a larger Life manning 
 ours. 
 
 In this wordless prayer, in this simple walk- 
 ing with God even in the heat of one's daily 
 temptations and passions, in this unconscious 
 praying to God from street to street as one 
 mingles with the prayerless crowds of men and 
 women, in this ever-ready spirit of prayer there 
 is a quality unspeakably enduring and purifying. 
 To practice the presence of God ! How it clears 
 one's vision! how it sweetens and deepens one's 
 life! how it infuses into one's daily rounds of 
 business, of trial and error, of successes and fail- 
 ures, a still perpetually chanting joy! In some 
 mysterious way why not by the very spirit of 
 a living God in the world-home of men ? this 
 man's constant vision is contagious! In all its 
 clearness and cleanness and joy that man's sense 
 of God catches in the lives and hearts of all his 
 fellows: they too feel, they know not why, that 
 somehow the world is good, somehow God is! 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 135 
 
 That man, transfigured in the light of a God's 
 humane Presence, is apt to draw all men up to 
 him. 
 
 I like to think that the great throbbing Life 
 round about us is comforted by the presence in its 
 world-soul of such faithful sons and daughters. 
 Natural parts they are of that larger Life : their 
 constant dependence upon, and faithful obedi- 
 ence to the deeper currents of the diviner Life 
 is as simple and steady as God's own soul of 
 goodness and love itself. A perfect, natural 
 communion of the human with the divine Life; 
 man a faithful reflection of God; God a present 
 Companion of man. Even so man discovers 
 God, sees him beyond argument and yet beyond 
 doubt face to face, Man to man, Friend to friend ; 
 an unfailing vision of divine Manhood, a per- 
 fect union of man and God, all life a faithful 
 expression of a great God-Man! Blessed are 
 these pure in heart, for they have seen God. 
 
 vn 
 
 As to sinners. For there are those to whom 
 the divine-human face of the world's soul is not 
 ever present and familiar. They are men 
 blinded and deceived in ways of evil, from whom 
 the humaner face of the world's self is veiled by 
 the shadow of the world's brutalities and mon- 
 strosities. The theologians describe such as 
 " convicted of sin." The more artistic of these 
 sinners have in all ages portrayed hells and devils 
 
136 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 to mar men's more mystic visions of heavens and 
 gods. They in their way have sounded being 
 as deeply as the saints we were just celebrating. 
 Only they have seen things perversely, baldly, 
 unmystically. They too have seen a soul of 
 things face to face, Man to man, Fiend to fiend. 
 There is an oriental vision I once read and 
 have not easily forgotten meanwhile. It is the 
 vision of a man (Arg-una) who is about to enter 
 into a great battle. The outcome of the im- 
 pending fray he knows not. It may well mean 
 his death. So he prays to his God (Vishnu) 
 for a full vision of his divine being, to see his 
 god face to face, ere he should die. Then the 
 vision comes of a great world-beast: a great 
 " swallower of the other gods," " of countless 
 forms possessed of many arms, stomachs, mouths, 
 and eyes on all sides," " having " indeed " a 
 mouth like a blazing fire, and heating the uni- 
 verse with his radiance," " of wonderful and ter- 
 rible form," with " groups of gods entering into 
 him," " with a gaping mouth and with large 
 blazing eyes," revealing a mouth of " terrible, 
 fearful and horrific jaws resembling the fire of 
 destruction " with human heads " smashed " and 
 " stuck in the spaces between the teeth ; " men 
 like moths entering a blazing fire are entering 
 his mouth " to their destruction ; " " swallowing 
 all these people " this God of horrific mien is 
 " licking them over and over again from all sides 
 with blazing mouths ; " a god whose " fierce 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 137 
 
 splendors filling the whole universe with their 
 effulgence are heating it " ; god of " death," the 
 " destroyer of worlds." 
 
 A god of death and destruction indeed! the 
 image of lowered bestial manhood; the very 
 antithesis in all regards of the Man-God vision 
 of the more saintly souls of the world. Such a 
 vision of God with a cosmic hell as his environ- 
 ment is but the enlarged image of many a man's 
 inner soul; a human soul of fierce and self-de- 
 stroying impulses glimpsed on a world-wide scale ; 
 man creating a God-Beast in his own image ; man 
 meeting God face to face, Man to man, Fiend to 
 fiend, as I have said. 
 
 This, or some other of no less horrific mien is 
 the vision encountered sooner or later by men 
 who become depressed by the powers of evil in 
 the world. And such powers are plentiful 
 enough, God knows: disease; anger; unbroth- 
 erliness; idiocy; senility; concupiscence; dis- 
 honesty in high places; men losing their souls 
 through abuses of the body and of the spirit; 
 every man's hand, it would seem, turned against 
 his own soul and that of his brother ; unmanhood 
 and bestiality, in short. 
 
 Men, or their sons and daughters, not in- 
 frequently go mad in these paths of unrighteous- 
 ness. Ignorance, over-work, folly, soul-abuse, 
 these are all forms of immorality; they all are 
 forms of wwvisdom. To avoid them requires not 
 that a man be educated in the schools; they are 
 
138 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 violations merely of a man's natural instincts, his 
 mother-wit, his mother-wisdom in truth. And 
 they have their reward in the modern visions of a 
 psychic hell. Recently I had a letter from an 
 alienist who tells me that practically every case 
 of insanity is brought on by the sin or folly of 
 the deranged soul himself or of some of his fore- 
 bears. 
 
 Folly and sin, these, just as surely as wisdom 
 and righteousness, have their reward: sinners in- 
 wardly beget their hell and its fiend just as surely 
 as saints inwardly catch the vision of heaven and 
 its god. Men's lives pray more practically than 
 their words, their secret thoughts than their open 
 professions. As a man thinketh in his heart so 
 is he ; and even so is his god, too. 
 
 Say what you will, you idealists and aesthetes, 
 you have no closet deep enough to conceal in 
 every part the skeleton of the world's arch- 
 fiend. The Devil is no anatomical monstrosity, I 
 grant. I agree with you in your animadversions 
 against the crude forms in which the primitive 
 man's fears clothed the powers of darkness of the 
 world. Disembody the devil, by all means ! But 
 he remains, invisible, psychic, powerful ; indeed 
 in all his unseen powers closely akin to the god of 
 your idealistic thought. " Strike, strike, in the 
 name of God." Work against these desolating 
 powers, these evils, these sins. Throttle and ut- 
 terly destroy this invisible world-fiend! Else his 
 poison will spread and spread, from father to son, 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 139 
 
 from individual to society, from generation to 
 generation, from planet to planet till the death- 
 power thereof shall enter and madden and destroy 
 the very soul of God ! 
 
 I walked one day in a beautiful way. God 
 seemed there. My heart sang a song in major 
 key. Almost I was persuaded to become an ideal- 
 ist of absolute faith. Evil seemed so powerless, 
 so unreal, so remote withal. But I met an idiot 
 in the way! His deformed, nay, his destroyed 
 manhood, was not " good in the making." He 
 was hell. 
 
 But sinners have been known to escape this hell, 
 to replace with a vision of God the horrific fea- 
 tures of this invisible world-fiend. They have 
 spent indeed long dreary years in prayerless doubt 
 of the very existence of any eternal courage and 
 goodness, and pity and love in the world. But 
 one day they have roused themselves with a mighty 
 oath ! and have struck out against these evil pow- 
 ers and visions ! against them have opposed the 
 simple powers of their own inward Manhood! 
 Man against devil then ! And, behold, the evil 
 things have vanished like the howling winds of 
 the night and the lonely fighter has found himself 
 a very god. 
 
 A very god, I say. Fighting there in the dark- 
 ness was praying in its effect. That sinner-man 
 in his triumphant Manliness finds in himself a 
 beyond-himself. He places his poor frightened, 
 maddened self in the larger and deeper currents 
 
140 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 of God's self, the world's soul; and finds it with 
 him. He prays. Thus praying in action he 
 gropes his way back into the light of the divine 
 face of things. And he sees this goodly face of 
 God with a new and deeper insight born of his 
 awful experience of evil and darkness and mad- 
 ness in the world; he sees something of infinite 
 pity, something of divine patience and sorrow, 
 something of infinite humanity in the time-worn 
 and world-weary face of his God. Praying thus, 
 he sees the God-life all seared and marred and 
 scarred with the battles and wounds of life; he 
 sees the great strong soul of God all sensitive and 
 quivering with the wants and hopes and struggles 
 of humanity's life. Finding this way of prayer 
 he cries, full and glad and triumphant : " I be- 
 hold within, I am, the infinite person and heart of 
 God. O God, I come, I come." And of a cer- 
 tainty God meets him there in the darkness face 
 to face, as Man to man, as Friend to friend. 
 
 vin 
 
 As Friend to friend, that is the point. In 
 hours of failure, in times of soul-weariness after 
 hard and defeated struggle against the influence 
 of the evil powers in his inner life, then even a 
 grown man like you and me may pray, may rest 
 his soul in the comprehending soul of the world, 
 the infinite Father of all earth's humaner religions. 
 So we shall recover courage and strength for the 
 morrow. And then we must once more arise ! and 
 
PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 141 
 
 build ! A practice of prayer that needs no artic- 
 ulate utterance : it sees directly the manly, friendly 
 person of God, its own beyond-self, its own larger 
 Life, the great universe's communism with hu- 
 manity. 
 
 As Man to man, that is the point. In hours 
 of strong and vigorous manhood, but when the 
 way of life is not clear, when your man's deepest 
 searching of his inner soul brings no light and 
 you know not whither stretches the onward road 
 nor where the region of the larger Life; then 
 again this way of prayer is opened. You pray, 
 or call it what you will. You do naturally 
 open your life to the larger Life and somehow 
 the light, the guidance, the vision perfect, clear, 
 unmistakable comes straightway: you know, 
 nay, you are most actually in the deep currents 
 of the universe's own righteousness in this hour, 
 most fittingly called, of prayer. 
 
 Pray then to God! unafraid and unashamed, 
 pray ! Speak to the larger life as naturally and 
 as simply as you would talk to yourself. Pray- 
 ing is that essentially, God is chiefly just that: 
 your deeper self, your larger Life. He is you! 
 Man alive, God is just you! in the making; you! 
 in possession of all the powers of the world and 
 all the experience of the ages. Possess yourself 
 then ! possess yourself of all these beyond-human 
 powers and experiences and go praying and 
 chanting on your way of righteous manhood! 
 By praying so> a strong man may gain all the 
 
142 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 marvelous insights of the larger Life, the God- 
 Life. 
 
 Praying in such wise does secure all the riches 
 of God's own being and love. The God of hu- 
 man life, the great Man-God by a perfect in- 
 stinct, a superlative may I say, telepathic? 
 sensitiveness to all things human, does indeed feel 
 the prayers of men who stand in, most literally vn 
 his Presence girt, ready to receive and obey the 
 commands of this living and friendly and right- 
 eous God. 
 
V 
 
 THE UNKNOWN GOD 
 
 i 
 
 The supremest vocation of the preacher and 
 priest in all ages and in all religions has been 
 to reveal to their people the unknown God under- 
 lying all their speculations and aspirations, to 
 charge with vitality the region of a man's doubts 
 and unholy superstitions. It is profoundly im- 
 pressive to reflect upon the great scriptures of 
 men, the documents in which the ages' geniuses 
 have sought to lift the veil of mystery which sur- 
 rounds the human life. One is moved not so much 
 by the rudeness or, as the case may be, the pathet- 
 ic cleverness with which the human soul has solved 
 its mysteries ; he is challenged rather by the star- 
 tling fact itself that on this borderland of mystery 
 where there is no knowledge to guide the human 
 life the soul of man has been most heroically 
 alive to the eternal verities, most faithfully and 
 splendidly aware of the divine life. It would seem 
 to be the peculiar mystery of this unknowable 
 God surrounding the human spheres that, while 
 he defeats with his everlasting " No " all the con- 
 jectures and hypotheses of logical men, yet with 
 his everlasting " Yes " he receives and confirms 
 all the advances and beliefs of the childlike mind. 
 The same God who seems to stiffen and threaten 
 143 
 
144? RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 under the assaults of men's conceits of knowledge 
 is tenderly attentive to the unconscious wants of 
 the very animals and children of the world. The 
 same God who seems to move relentlessly and ma- 
 jestically in the heavens above dwells in innocency 
 and simplicity within the spirits of the pure in 
 heart. A profound mystery, this! It is surely 
 in the region of God's unseen being that we shall 
 find the point of reconciliation between the mys- 
 tery of God's unthinkable immensity and the mys- 
 tery of his childlike simplicity. 
 
 We must sooner or later face consciously and 
 honorably this region of eternal mystery which 
 has surrounded men in all ages, and within which 
 they have erected their altars to unknown gods. 
 It is in a most profound degree a region of mys- 
 tery and its god in a very real sense a Great Un- 
 known. In the infinite depths out beyond the 
 most distant fixed star there is nothing but mys- 
 tery ! deep within your inmost soul, in the infinite 
 soul-abyss underlying all your daily trials and 
 passions, nothing but mystery! 
 
 n 
 
 One day I witnessed a strange experiment in the 
 laboratory of an expert chemist. He warned me 
 away from a spot near which he was preparing 
 his experiment, but where my inquiring eye could 
 see nothing. Yet he assured me that was the 
 most real and active point in the entire region of 
 his strange experiment. Then he grasped a wire 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOD 145 
 
 of the toughest known metal and thrust it into 
 this region, and instantly it coiled and curled and 
 melted into nothing. And nowadays, when I ob- 
 serve men thrusting their hard and monstrous 
 definitions into the region of God's great, active, 
 unseen white-hot life, I seem to see their inquisi- 
 tive definitions coiling and twisting and melting 
 into sheer nothing. 
 
 Nor is this the complaint of a rude wwbelief in 
 the Unseen. Rather is it the protest of a tender 
 mysticism which, blinded by the intense light from 
 the invisible countenance of God, henceforth 
 shrinks from a too familiar approach to his great 
 white throne. " Canst thou by searching find out 
 God? " " O Lord, I believe: help thou mine un- 
 belief," "Though he slay me, yet will I trust 
 him," " To think that God is as we can think him 
 to be is blasphemy ", these and ten thousand 
 similar cries bespeak a soul which has faced the 
 eternal mystery of God and has returned to life 
 unconceited and undishonored ; for it does not 
 claim to have seen when its eyes were blinded, nor 
 to have heard when its ears were deafened, nor to 
 have understood when its judgment was paralyzed 
 by its direct, instant contact with this infinitely 
 mysterious and unknown God. 
 
 m 
 
 I wonder if we have not touched here the secret 
 of losing one's life in order to find it in God. 
 There are many things men were wont to sacrifice 
 
146 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 on their altars to an unknown God their fruits, 
 their beasts, their sons, daughters, and wives, their 
 own bodies to be burned. But such burnt offer- 
 ings somehow failed to satisfy the needs of their 
 own worshipping souls, nor yet the invisible de- 
 mands of their unknown divinity. Then men 
 came to a nearer insight into the longings of their 
 own souls and into the needs of the divine life. 
 God requires of a man only that he shall love 
 mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with his God; 
 that he sell all that he has and give to the poor; 
 a sacrificing of one's wealth and ambitions, a 
 placing upon the altar an utterly broken spirit 
 and contrite heart. But now as a last and inex- 
 haustible demand of the Great God Beyond it 
 seems that he who would know God must sacrifice 
 on the altar the very instruments of knowledge 
 itself, his very intelligence, his very soul, his very 
 self! so majestic and so infinitely real are the pur- 
 poses and longings of the divine life. Without 
 conceit of knowledge, without dishonor of mind, 
 without pollution of soul, a man must face the 
 Unknown Eternal and cry : " Oh, thou great 
 Unknown, accept now my supreme sacrifice. 
 Longing above all else to know thee, I yet destroy 
 my instruments of knowing. In this supreme 
 hour of self-sacrifice, not knowing thee, I yet 
 yield my life to thine eternity in the simple 
 faith that thou art, and with the insatiable demand 
 that thou shalt be good and brave and beautiful. 
 Soul of my soul, bless now my life." And in this 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOD 147 
 
 hour of supreme soul-sacrifice the life of God, the 
 infinite Good Will, reveals itself in the human life 
 with an overmastering intensity: one is lifted 
 above all his natural longings, above all his daily 
 ends, beyond his practical, knowing self into the 
 invisible home of God. Out beyond the most dis- 
 tant star there is nothing, only mystery, nothing 
 only God! Deep within your own soul-abyss 
 there is nothing, only mystery, nothing only God ! 
 
 rv 
 
 A man's soul thus tested and tempered by the 
 invisible fire on his altar to an unknown God, no 
 longer withers and shrinks when extended in the 
 direction of the hidden God of the ages. Rather 
 does such a soul grow and glow with' something 
 of the everlasting enthusiasm and divine health of 
 God's own unseen life. His poor purposes in 
 some mysterious way gain all the reality and dig- 
 nity of the divine life, his hopes somehow contrib- 
 ute to and are strengthened by the divine hope, 
 his courage by direct ways partakes of the perfect 
 courage with which God himself faces unafraid 
 his own eternal life. All that one can ask of 
 purity of heart and in honesty of mind comes 
 straightway and unasked out of the heart and 
 mind of God into the heart and mind of that man. 
 God appears as the infinite fulfiller of all our own 
 high wishes, the satisfier of all our eternal de- 
 mands. 
 
 There is a subtle argument in a recent play, 
 
148 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 entitled " The Servant in the House," a meaning 
 which, I imagine, exceeds the conscious intention 
 of the author himself. In an early scene the 
 Christ spirit is represented as hovering about a 
 young girl, Mary by name, whose tender and pure 
 life is just ripening into conscious womanhood. 
 The spirit of Christ urges Mary to wish hard for 
 the one thing her life most needs. She replies 
 naturally that she does not believe in such a game 
 of wishing. The Christ replies that she must 
 wish and must believe that her wish will come true. 
 The sole condition of the wishing game is that 
 her wish shall go deep, deep down into her life. 
 In such deep, soul-searching wishing nothing is 
 too good to be true. The soul's disinterested 
 demands upon reality find their fulfilment in very 
 truth. 
 
 Mary agrees to play this game of wishing. 
 Then for the first time in her young life she 
 searches for the thing her soul most needs. Once 
 more the Christ spirit broods over her, and there 
 grows upon her the sense that her life requires 
 most of all a father who shall be good and brave 
 and beautiful. And so she wishes, she demands 
 outright, that her life shall receive this new dimen- 
 sion of father-love, that her deep need shall be 
 fulfilled in a living father who should be in truth 
 brave and good and beautiful. Then the scene 
 changes, and the form of struggling fatherhood 
 appears before her. His face is unclean, his hair 
 unkempt, and his body all knotted and gnarled 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOD 149 
 
 with the toils of life. For years his life has 
 staggered under a secret sorrow: he has been in 
 danger of losing his soul in the agony of his un- 
 spoken loneliness. But the one eternal, infinite 
 thing in his being is his love of his little child 
 and his longing for her presence in his life. 
 This unknown man is in reality Mary's father. 
 She gazes a while into his seemingly unlovely, 
 untrue, unbrave face and discovers his secret grief, 
 his wordless longing for his lost child. She com- 
 forts him and then tells him of her own wish for 
 a father who should be good and true and beauti- 
 ful. Instantly the father spirit rises and responds 
 to this image of goodness, bravery, and beauty 
 as he appears in his child's eye of faith. In the 
 sunlight of this child's high expectation even his 
 fatherliness mysteriously ripens into a deeper 
 dignity. Finally after the scene has changed, the 
 father spirit having resolved to sacrifice his own 
 soul's love and to face his life bravely, manfully, 
 and even without his child's answering presence 
 and love, Mary, gazing into the marred and sub- 
 dued face of this mighty, unknown man, recog- 
 nizes the noble father of her soul-searching wish, 
 a Man strong and brave and beautiful. 
 
 Thus, perhaps unconsciously, does the genius of 
 this strong drama reach the point of contact be- 
 tween the unknown God and the child of his inner 
 longing. There is this answering of soul to soul 
 in the relationship of God and man. The unseen 
 God of the Great Beyond answers from the depths 
 
150 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 within our souls every noble wish, every honorable 
 demand of our human life. The divine character 
 which defies all definition is as sensitive and 
 plastic as the soul of a little child. Our human- 
 ity and God's divinity, our sonship and his f ather- 
 liness are in the deepest and most literal sense 
 mutual. The invisible God, putting forever be- 
 hind himself the perfect peace and silence of eter- 
 nity, takes on our struggling and clamorous 
 humanity, responds patiently, gladly, to all our 
 upward and outward reaching passions. And, 
 in thus finding and furthering you and me, the 
 unknown God finds and furthers his own living 
 soul. Henceforth for all eternity the highest 
 reach of our sonship touches and moves to the 
 quick the deeps of his f atherliness. Each advance 
 we make in the direction of purity and love is met 
 and furthered by an answering wave of divine 
 character and of divine love from within the in- 
 visible soul of the unknown God. Henceforth 
 and for all time you and I fulfil a place in the 
 universal heart and life of the unknown divinity : 
 each of us by his faithfulness may soothe or by 
 his unfaithfulness may intensify the great void of 
 life aching within the divine being. There is 
 within the unsearchable depths of the world's soul 
 a divine uneasiness of spirit: it cannot rest until 
 you and I and all men recognize in that unseen 
 soul beneath and beyond the time-worn face of 
 God all that is brave and good and beautiful. 
 
THE UNKNOWN GOD 151 
 
 The evangelical theology argues that the 
 Father requires a Son to fulfil his nature. In this 
 it builds more wisely than it knows. The sons of 
 God complete his nature in a most literal and in- 
 timate sense. In relieving the exquisite, undefined 
 pain of unrequited love in the divine heart of 
 things we men add to the Father a new dimension 
 of conscious purpose, a purpose of human right- 
 eousness which henceforth transcends all the 
 physical world-creating impulses of God's cosmic 
 life. The hour of your soul sacrifice upon the 
 altar of this unknown God of cosmos is the hour 
 of the Father's soul realization ; the place where 
 your soul finds rest in God is the place where 
 God's soul finds rest in you; the time when your 
 spirit is lost in God's immensity is the time when 
 God's simplicity is found in you. It is the hour 
 and place of perfect atonement and peace; the 
 condition under which the unknown God, invisible 
 in his power and character, faces with and 
 through you all the desert places even beyond the 
 stars and all the waste places in human souls, and 
 causes them to blossom and fructify through all 
 time. The mystery which surrounds the world 
 and human life is God in all simplicity, in all 
 mightiness, in all expectancy: it is all alive with 
 the invisible, divine character and love man and 
 God mutually conscious each in the other. The 
 great beyond is filled with God's invisible patience. 
 
152 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 the untiring hopefulness, the glad braveness, the 
 perfect honorableness and righteousness of spirit 
 in which the divine life inhabits eternity. 
 
 Beyond the most distant star there is nothing 
 save mystery and God and eternity! Within the 
 soul-abysses of human life, underlying all your 
 daily trials and passions and sins nothing save 
 mystery and God and eternity! 
 
VI 
 THE INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF GOD 
 
 i 
 
 There is one conviction of the inner life to 
 which we men of religion must commit our spirits 
 absolutely and unreservedly. It is the sense of 
 God's real presence in our human lives. Men 
 have defined the spirit of God in a thousand 
 ways. A man of science seeks an adequate ex- 
 pression of God in terms of physical majesty: 
 God is the infinite energy present in unthinkable 
 intensity in the great teeming cosmos round 
 about us. The man of philosophy expresses 
 God in terms of spiritual majesty: God is infinite 
 Spirit interpenetrating and transfiguring the ma- 
 chine we call the world. The man of sorrow 
 finds God a spirit acquainted with grief; the 
 man of joy, a spirit of infinite gladness ; the man 
 discouraged by the hard pressure of life upon 
 him finds in God a spirit of infinite restfulness 
 and unconquerable confidence ; the man of unholy 
 passion attains some day in God a life of perfect 
 purity ; the man of impatient spirit, a life of in- 
 finite patience. And so the tender life of God 
 unfolds itself in infinite ways in the lives of us 
 human beings. 
 
 153 
 
154 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 Now, it is the genuineness, the reality and cer- 
 tainty of this divine presence in our human life 
 that I want to make clear in these moments of 
 our meditation together. I have known many 
 wavering men who have felt this world-old call 
 of the divine life in their souls but who have been 
 either too timid or too perplexed to yield to its 
 eternal pressure upon their lives. In their timid- 
 ity of spirit they have seemed to themselves to 
 be unworthy of the divine presence, unable to 
 live every moment unashamed in the sight of 
 God. Or they have been too perplexed by the 
 rudeness and crudeness of the world of men round 
 about them to believe that humanity is indeed 
 and in truth the garment of a great inner di- 
 vinity. 
 
 Yet this timidity and confusion of spirit al- 
 ways fade away in the light of a great experi- 
 ence of God. In meditation upon the presence 
 of God in the human race, in meditation upon 
 the saintly men and women who all through the 
 ages have trusted in God and were not ashamed, 
 in meditation upon the burning, commanding 
 spirit of God discovered by those who have stood 
 upon mounts of vision far above men and worlds 
 of men one cannot doubt that God is 1 Our 
 timidity becomes childish, our perplexity merely 
 a defect of our poor, finite humanity. One may 
 at last overcome this childishness and finiteness 
 
INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF GOD 155 
 
 of his humanity and himself stand forth in the 
 light of the ages, stand forth like a man! In 
 this great experience of the infinite spirit of God 
 a man discovers for the first time and for all 
 eternity that his own human manhood is everlast- 
 ingly justified and dignified by the infinite and 
 invisible Manhood of God. 
 
 We ought to be very quiet and reverent and 
 solemn now, for here we stand in the presence 
 of one of the everlasting mysteries of God. 
 Here we may learn in silent meditation the way 
 of the great overbrooding spirit of God. It is 
 not the way of childish timidities nor of hopeless 
 perplexities of spirit. We must learn, sooner or 
 later, that the great spirit of God cannot yield 
 itself wholly to our human life, cannot wholly 
 put on the perfect humanity for which the in- 
 finite heart of God is eternally crying out until 
 the human spirit at whose portals the divine spirit 
 is ever waiting calls out openly, honestly and 
 manfully " O God, if thou be, enter my life and 
 make it wholly thine; make it infinitely pure, in- 
 finitely alive to that life of triumphant righteous- 
 ness and love in which alone thy divine life can 
 realize its infinite humanity." Lay bare your 
 spirit before this living God, put aside the very 
 sandals of your soul and stand naked in spirit 
 and unashamed in the presence of God and the 
 great spirit of God will surround and invade your 
 being with an almost terrifying certainty. The 
 timidity and perplexity of your earlier search 
 
156 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 for God will remain only as the memory and 
 symbol of your own imperfect humanity. You 
 will have learned for all eternity the invisible, 
 unconquerable humanity of God. 
 
 This, I say, is the eternal mystery of the di- 
 vine life: that in the very hour when the human 
 soul gives itself up absolutely to the awful in- 
 finity of God's being it comes to know something 
 of the infinite humanity of God. In abandoning 
 one's self wholly to the being of God one finds 
 that in an infinitely mysterious way the divine 
 life is human, that the very inmost being of God 
 is reaching out infinitely toward all that is deep- 
 est and intensest and noblest in the life we call 
 human. The soul's communion with God when 
 the spirit of God unobstructed by human hesita- 
 tions and withdrawals completely invades our hu- 
 man life it is the hour when we see our human 
 life in its infinite dimensions, the hour when we 
 know the invisible humanity of God. 
 
 Too often men have supposed that the point 
 of contact between humanity and God is reached 
 by the throwing out of many, magnificent 
 phrases, such as omniscience, omnipotence, omni- 
 presence and the like, when all along the human 
 spirit has stood ready and eager to believe in these 
 immense realities of God if only they could be 
 realized in our poor, human life. Just how is the 
 infinite power, the infinite wisdom, the infinite 
 presence of God to move within the narrow con- 
 
INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF GOD 157 
 
 fines of our finite humanity? Do not the very 
 terms of our deification of God estrange him 
 from the trials and errors and sorrows of our hu- 
 man lives? 
 
 In these quivering questions of poor humanity 
 I always seem to hear the sad voice of a human 
 soul crying out for the living God. " Oh, that 
 I could find God; the living God! I am weary 
 of men's faint descriptions of God. I want God, 
 a patient and hopeful God, a Man-God, whose in- 
 finite being is all alive with the hopes and passions 
 of our human life, whose power and presence are 
 engaged with men in the way of righteousness 
 and love, whose infinite being is daily, hourly put- 
 ting on the garments of Humanity." 
 
 I talked the other day with a noble man who 
 is spending the strong years of his life working 
 in city missions. He is trying to redeem human 
 life at just those points where the divine life is 
 threatened by apparently incurable diseases of sin. 
 He told me of a man whom he had seen arise and 
 fall again and again in a frightful struggle with 
 a degrading appetite of the soul that was assail- 
 ing him. And my friend said to me " I tell you, 
 as I watched the man, and saw the divine fire ap- 
 pear and then fade away, then reappear and 
 again fade away, each reappearance of the spirit 
 finding him a little nearer the infinite light of 
 God, as I watched the awful struggle and de- 
 termination of the spirit of God in this fighting, 
 
158 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 human soul I tell you I could have worshipped 
 the man, I could have fallen on my knees and 
 worshipped." 
 
 Well, don't you see it was God in the Man? 
 If ever there is a God, it is the God who has 
 dedicated his whole eternal life to this struggle 
 of humanity to become divine. The hour in 
 which your human life takes on divinity, the hour 
 in which once for all eternity you resolve in 
 your inmost soul to live always in the presence 
 of an infinite being of holiness and love, the hour 
 in which your human life becomes triumphantly 
 divine is just the hour in which the divine life 
 becomes triumphantly human. 
 
 m 
 
 And genuinely to believe in this invisible hu- 
 manity of God brings into the human life a won- 
 derful sense of perfect communion with God. 
 Do you find the conditions of life hard? They 
 are infinitely harder for God, my friend. Is 
 your spirit clogged by the mass of duties which 
 you wearily face with the dawn of each new day? 
 Ah, think of the world-weariness of God, and be 
 still! Is a man's soul marred by some vice of 
 his inner life? What pollutes man pollutes God. 
 I am looking always for that prophet of the 
 spirit of God who shall burn this world-old truth 
 into the souls of men: God is in very deed bone 
 of their bone, flesh of their flesh, spirit of their 
 
INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF GOD 159 
 
 spirit; God is in truth closer to our human life 
 than breathing, nearer than hands and feet; all 
 the plague-spots in human life, all the houses of 
 sin, all the hours of solitary unfaithfulness and 
 dishonor, are places and times where the precious 
 spirit of God is being debased and ruined for that 
 which is not holy and righteous. Oh! the spirit 
 of man must hide itself in shame, must cry out 
 in heart-broken penitence when once it knows 
 the humiliation and suffering its faithlessness has 
 brought into the sensitive spirit of God. 
 
 Does the glory of man lie in triumphing over 
 these lowering conditions of life? So is it with 
 God. You need not suppose that the perfection 
 of God is for him an eternal, unworked-for 
 beauty of soul. He who thinks he sees in God 
 this placid, unmoved and solitary perfection has 
 placed a poor, human soul in the high place of 
 God a human soul whose face is unmarred by 
 life's imperfections, only because it has al- 
 ways been protected from the winds that blow 
 and the storms that wreck. But the spirit of 
 God has faced the storms and winds of an eter- 
 nity and is still triumphing over a whole world 
 of sins and pains and sorrows. Who then sees 
 the perfection of God sees in infinite number and 
 in infinite directions the lines of Character, the 
 invisible marks of a divine Humanity, whose nobil- 
 ity, whose perfection consists in the simple yet 
 unthinkable sinlessness of the divine being: a di- 
 
160 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 vine life all full of our human impulses and pas- 
 sions, yet never once in all eternity yielding the 
 divine ideal to that which is base and mean. 
 
 IV 
 
 Of this invisible humanity of God there is no 
 visible sign or symbol. Men who ignobly turn 
 from the simple, daily duties and cares of life 
 and cry " Lord, show us a sign," " Lord, Lord 
 what shall we do to be saved " are not ready for 
 the beatific vision. There is no luxury in this 
 experience of God. In this vision there is the 
 peace that passeth understanding but there is 
 in it no ravishing luxury of spirit. The vision 
 is for him who gladly accepts its blessed chal- 
 lenges. It is for him who finds joy only in the 
 way of righteousness, whose spirit leaps out with 
 a great joy into an eternity of life and duty; 
 for him who knows not what the everlasting years 
 may bring of joy or of sorrow into his eternal 
 spirit but who will not doubt that his is God's 
 way, his life God's life, his endless humanity the 
 ever patient and hopeful divinity of God. It is 
 for the man who can find in the ever human and 
 understanding spirit of God the power to recover 
 from some staggering blow of life, the will to 
 feel the tender, wholesome spirit of divine life 
 struggling and conquering day by day in the life 
 of humanity. The vision is for him who for 
 God's sake sees every living creature transfigured 
 in this light of the ages, who sees God fighting in 
 
INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF GOD 161 
 
 the very face of human idiocy and sin, who is 
 able to see in the desolate ruins of human institu- 
 tions and of human lives something of the infinite 
 sorrow of God, something of the marred and de- 
 feated spirit of the Father of mankind. 
 
 And yet, who save God himself may cry " De- 
 feated!" Is it not just the mystery of this di- 
 vine life that it breathes forth an invisible and in- 
 fallible faith in our human lives, that in the very 
 moment when human priests have sadly con- 
 demned a child of God to eternal death, the 
 greater, wiser, patienter spirit of God is there 
 endlessly confident, infinitely faithful, pronounc- 
 ing its everlasting " no ; " reviving the fainting 
 spirit; crooning over the sin-sodden human soul; 
 soothing it to sleep, it may be but to a sleep 
 which shall not end in death ; a sleep, rather, from 
 which the human spirit shall awaken refreshed 
 and re-strengthened to re-enter the life of the 
 world and the life of God? Once more, the mys- 
 tery of God's invisible humanity, the unseen real- 
 ity of a divine life which is genuinely, under- 
 standingly all that our human life from day to 
 day is seeking and hoping to be, a divine life in 
 which weariness, impatience and hopelessness are 
 ever present, seeking to defeat the infinitudes sur- 
 rounding our human life, and yet a spirit of God 
 which, if weary never rests, if impatient never 
 strikes, if hopeless never dies. 
 
vn 
 
 THE PRESENT GOD 
 
 As the theme of our evening's meditation, I 
 have chosen to consider with you the romance 
 of God's invisible humanity, the motion of his 
 unseen spirit on-pressing in the souls of men. 
 This experience of God can be measured only 
 by the instrument of meditation: Silence must 
 underly and master the words with which we shall 
 seek to sound this invisible humanity I call God. 
 The persistent presence of divinity in the race 
 of men! From the first man with his vision of 
 his own invisibly divine image in burning bush 
 and flaming star to the last man with his grasp 
 of God's human spirit regnant and watchful over 
 the star-strewn heavens and the men-strewn earth 
 how consciously, patiently, triumphantly has 
 God's spirit pressed in upon the opening souls of 
 men! God is. The invisible spirit of all hu- 
 manity, God is ! I know not what may be in 
 the infinite reaches of unvisited space and un- 
 transpired time. I only know that by some com- 
 manding passion of his expanseless being, by some 
 tender impulse of his placeless soul a God-Man 
 has come to earth to dwell within men. He has 
 come to dwell evermore in the lives of men, mak- 
 ing his own their trials and errors, their successes 
 162 
 
THE PRESENT GOD 163 
 
 and joys, their goodness and loving kindness. 
 There is some strange, imperative persuasiveness 
 in this faith that men of all times and climes have 
 kept in the living presence of God's image in 
 their souls. It is a direct perception of faith 
 which only a suicidal scepticism has ever defeated. 
 As men's sense of the brutal energy round about 
 them has grown, their spirits have but gained 
 just so much in trustful confidence: this ma- 
 jestic God of the heavens by the 'virtue of his 
 very power is all the more reliably concerned for 
 their life, all the more joyful in the times of their 
 gladness, the more sad in the hours of their sor- 
 row, the more tenderly forgiving in the places of 
 their sin, the more patient in the days of their 
 weakness and unfaithfulness. 
 
 n 
 
 What matters it then that the earliest concern 
 of the divine life was with the blind organizing 
 of the great universe round about men? I dare 
 say the human passions and purposes of the uni- 
 versal Life lay for countless ages concealed and 
 dormant within creation's soul. But now! 
 Who can contemplate the drama of the divine 
 life in the enlarging souls of men and yet miss 
 the vision of a creative Life all revealed and all 
 a-quiver with human power? Why, the faith of 
 men alone in their own eternal value, their vision 
 of themselves under the form of an endless di- 
 vinity must have drawn a response from the all- 
 
164? RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 feeling spirit: the universal Life cannot have 
 missed these throbs of divinity outpouring from 
 the newborn souls of men. How hardly could 
 the great drama of divine faith have enacted it- 
 self in this world-home of men, had not the im- 
 pulses of men's righteousness and love become 
 at once the deepest concern in the heart and being 
 of God himself ! Every act of human righteous- 
 ness, each impulse of human tenderness and af- 
 fection in the world-homes of men are intimations 
 of an unspeakable harmony aimed at hour by 
 hour, world by world, in the heart and being of 
 the universal life of humanity, the God of man- 
 kind. Human temptations, trials, sins are but 
 signs of a passionate Life eternally present yet 
 everlastingly mastered in the divine being, the in- 
 visible Father-spirit of men. 
 
 What if it were not even so? Suppose this 
 drama of the divine in human life were, as some 
 of the positivists would have us believe, enacting 
 itself on a human stage alone ; that this on-push- 
 ing human life were all there is of divinity in the 
 world-life? Would not this divinity triumph 
 none the less? Would it not grow silently, and 
 magically extend its sobering, transforming pas- 
 sion of divine life to all men in all generations? 
 Would not men under the pressure of the di- 
 vinity within acquit themselves as responsible and 
 infallible gods? Nay, would not this perfect pas- 
 sion of us human gods transpierce, chasten and 
 soften the very energies of the heavens? The 
 
THE PRESENT GOD 165 
 
 complaint of the positivist is that men have relied 
 too much upon the God of their magic and super- 
 stition. Meanwhile the pathetic fallacy of pos- 
 itivism is that in its turn it relies too little upon 
 the Man of its humanitarian vision. In him is 
 the very quintessence of divine energy and pas- 
 sion. His belief in the regnancy over all things 
 of righteousness and love is inviolable. No crea- 
 ture is so frail or debased, and no creature so 
 monstrous as not to respond to the touch of un- 
 affected goodness, faithfulness and purity in the 
 world. A single pin-point of divinity, a solitary 
 impulse of natural love in any place or time of 
 the world's being must infallibly master with its 
 divine control all the awful and terrifying powers 
 of the universal life, bringing all heavens and all 
 men within the light and strength of its con- 
 stant life. 
 
 Just so, I believe, the divine life has kept pace 
 with the life within our human souls, inviting, 
 guiding and furthering all our essays in divinity. 
 Of every enlargement of the spirits of men, of 
 every deepening experience in which the race of 
 men has come into a profounder sense of God's 
 presence and into a surer and more intimate com- 
 munion with his world-old Life we may rest 
 assured that the great spirit of God deep down in 
 the souls of men and far out on the horizon of 
 the world's vast being, the great heart of God 
 has known; his invisible spirit has felt and has 
 poured in its answering life and love. Ah, this 
 
166 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 unseen, incomparable humanity of God! How 
 silently and patiently it throbs out its life in this 
 world-home of men. That is God alive! the 
 God who has lived and grown in all humanity, 
 the God who lives and grows in you and in me 
 this night and eternally, the great Companion of 
 our hours of world-loneliness, the great Physician 
 of our nights of soul-sickness, the great God of 
 our souls. 
 
 When will men cease measuring God in cubits? 
 When will we cease esteeming the divine life by 
 the sheer heights and abysses of the world's be- 
 ing? When will men cease worshipping u His 
 Majesty " ? When shall we escape this last form 
 of idolatry, this worshipping of a telescopic im- 
 age of the unknown God? Then, shall we 
 awaken and arise to the true height and tender- 
 ness of God's invisible being ! 
 
 m 
 
 There is only one tragedy in life from which 
 the human soul seems unable to recover, only one 
 derangement of life's natural harmony so fear- 
 some that the broken spirit deliberates longingly 
 upon death eternal. It is the frightful loneli- 
 ness of the soul that has lost faith in the com- 
 panioning love of the divine life and sees only 
 blindness and cruelty in the heart of the sur- 
 rounding world-life. Facing this fearful vision 
 of an untrustworthy universal Life that sets it 
 about, the human soul finds the very majesty that 
 
THE PRESENT GOD 167 
 
 once commanded its confidence an instrument of 
 torment: calamity impends; one blow, and this 
 human life is staggering under an intolerable 
 weight of sorrow and soul-death. 
 
 One night my path crossed that of a lonely 
 woman of the world. I learned that on that 
 very night she harboured in her soul a longing 
 to express her life in a way of sin. Her life 
 cried out against this desecration of her child- 
 hood's innocency and sweet chastity. Yet she 
 would offer all upon the altar of her generous 
 human love. As one whose life is defeated save 
 for its poor, human pulse-beats she told me that 
 her soul would no longer pray. She believed in 
 God; yes, and trembled. The Great Father was 
 dead and her own soul had burned itself on his 
 pyre until death. There seemed to her hence- 
 forth more of companionship and tenderness in 
 the life of sinful affection she contemplated than 
 in the whole being of him she called God, the 
 distant Creator of her ancestral traditions. As 
 I turned silently and solemnly away leaving her 
 there in the night, a solitary figure, type of all 
 the lonely, wandering souls in this great world, I 
 knew she was beyond my human help, lost to the 
 arguments of men. I knew that only the infi- 
 nitely human, patient and hopeful spirit of God 
 could ever recall her soul to his great world- 
 home. 
 
 Some years later I crossed the path of another 
 spirit driven to the verge of madness by this 
 
168 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 same loss of faith in the humane presence of 
 God. She was alone and friendless in the world. 
 In her loneliness of spirit she sought the compan- 
 ionship of God but could not find him. A 
 woman of refinement with no impulses to tempo- 
 rary sin she was able by her culture to find in God 
 all the qualities of divinity save just this one note 
 of infinite humanity. Power, majesty, law, 
 righteousness all these she acknowledged as 
 belonging in the world being; but in all these 
 she found no response to her trembling, human 
 needs, no real presence to companion her in the 
 lonely struggles of her wakeful night-watches. 
 For long she had been desperately struggling 
 against the impulse to give up her search for the 
 divine companionship and to end her life in a 
 last, violent protest against the lovelessness of the 
 circumpressing power she called God. 
 
 The exquisite pain of utter soul-loneliness, 
 when all forms, human and divine, appear as they 
 were phantasmal and unreal t What wonder that 
 the broken soul seeks relief in the painlessness of 
 endless death? It is the tragedy of a soul that 
 has lost for a while humanity's age-long vision 
 of God's own mystic humanity. Is it strange 
 that the tearing away from a human spirit of the 
 silent soul of its humanity, the painfully accu- 
 mulated belief of all human ages in God's sur- 
 passing humanity, should so lacerate and maim 
 that soul that in death it seeks release from the 
 horrible aching at its broken heart? It is as if 
 
THE PRESENT GOD 169 
 
 the very soul of humanity had met a sudden and 
 tragic death, as if the whole soul of God had 
 passed out of this world-home of our human 
 life. 
 
 IV 
 
 But there is in all this a divine compensation. 
 The loss of faith in God's regnant humanity may 
 torture a soul beyond all human endurance. 
 And yet passing thus through this valley of soul- 
 death the human spirit, sooner or later, now or 
 then, will emerge into the sunlight of God's in- 
 visible presence a presence solemnized and 
 brightened in infinite degree by the vision of the 
 soul's black death. Just so, this faith in God's 
 full humanity may in the very hour of deadly 
 darkness enter the life of a man and burn in upon 
 him a mark of divinity so tender and sensitive 
 that no calamity, whether of death or of life, can 
 estrange him from God's endless humanities. 
 His soul has been touched with a live fire from the 
 altar of God's eternal humanity. 
 
 All other ways to God are blind, formal, un- 
 conceiving except this way of mystic, practical 
 confidence in the spaceless, timeless value of hu- 
 man life. God may by external marks reveal 
 the whole body of his divinity and yet his in- 
 visibly human soul remain unseen. It is this un- 
 seen grace of infinite patience, hopefulness and 
 human understanding, transforming all God's 
 visible, physical energies, that sets him at once 
 beyond the range of our physical imagination 
 
170 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 and yet within the range of our divinely human 
 needs. The divine energy of God's invisible hu- 
 manity pours through and beyond us as we come 
 and go upon our human errands of mercy and 
 pity. The divine sorrow, deep yet comprehend- 
 ing beyond the limits of our poor human vision 
 presses in upon our human souls until round 
 about is the perfect peacefulness of the divine 
 companionship. This infinite humanity of God 
 is not to be proved or measured. His divine hu- 
 manity must be touched directly, heart to heart, 
 spirit to spirit. We must let our human life with 
 its faltering courage, nobility and love be filled 
 straightway and abundantly from the divine life 
 with its world-wide courage, its world-old no- 
 bility and love. 
 
 By no other way can a man arrive at a con- 
 viction of God which might not at the very next 
 turn in his human life be shaken by one of life's 
 mysterious calamities. A thousand cases of real 
 life are at hand in every plague-spotted city in 
 the world to show you that your dainty demon- 
 stration of God blinks the facts. God alive ap- 
 pears only to him whose search begins and ends 
 in a pure and brave humanity. Let the purity 
 and heroism disappear from a man's belief in 
 God and he will find himself stolidly worshipping 
 the wooden deity of a schoolman. As there is 
 only one kind of godlessness, so there is only 
 one kind of godliness. The godless man is he 
 who, knowing God by all the clever tricks of the 
 
THE PRESENT GOD 171 
 
 choolman's trade, no longer keeps faith with the 
 righteous humanity of God. The godly man is 
 he who without the conceit of knowledge yet has 
 kept faith with men, has played the divine game 
 of the humanities honorably, tirelessly, unwhim- 
 peringly, and who gladly risks his eternal life 
 upon the belief that righteousness and love are at 
 the heart of things in this world. For insensibly 
 this man with his boundless human vision comes 
 to practice God's invisible humanity, and in prac- 
 ticing this human divinity he learns that the in- 
 finite energy of a schoolman's demonstrated God 
 is one in substance and in spirit with the divine 
 energy that preoccupies all men's meditations 
 and leads them in the way of humanity. 
 
 v 
 
 Even so the race of men has learned to risk 
 its unseen future upon the belief that its age- 
 long vision of an ideal humanity is but the vision 
 of the deepest, intensest and noblest passions in 
 the very soul of God. I sometimes glimpse this 
 vision of humanity's God alive as it appears in 
 the midst of the grey cloud of magic and super- 
 stition obscuring its gracious features. It is a 
 vision of a Man of almightiness and deep wisdom, 
 a Man with soul-sinews like brass and iron, his 
 form and features all marred and scarred by the 
 battles of life, his person all quivering and sen- 
 sitive with the pain and suffering and sorrows of 
 life. A nobleman he is with power and wisdom 
 
RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 checked and controlled in a perfect, constant pa- 
 tience and love. In his everlasting arms he bears 
 and protects a little child. His great strength 
 is held and guarded lest by some accident of his 
 very power he should injure and crush this pre- 
 cious offspring of his love. His great wisdom is 
 bowed down to the level of the simple prattle 
 of the child-life he is bearing, his great body 
 a-tremble with the joy of the responsive caresses 
 with which the child expresses its perfect trust in 
 his great being, its perfect dependence upon his 
 great heart. With infinite gentleness and ten- 
 der firmness he controls and guides the little soul 
 struggling and throbbing in his restraining, en- 
 circling arms. And as this vision of the divine 
 Man grows clearer and clearer in the long course 
 of human history, as his features becoming more 
 and more majestic and world-wide finally disap- 
 pear in the invisible depths of time and space I 
 know that this divine Man is God. And the lit- 
 tle child is Humanity. 
 
APPENDIX A 
 AN OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 1 
 
 In a former paper in this Journal the writer 
 outlined an hypothesis of absolute experience, 
 suggesting here and there a philosophy of " cos- 
 mic humanism " which, if worked out, might re- 
 deem American philosophy from its present level 
 of brute pragmatism and unromantic realism. If 
 only the master pragmatists would suppress their 
 endless essays in defense and definition of their 
 method ! All but the most stiff-necked and unre- 
 generate of the younger English-writing philos- 
 ophers have long ago adopted the pragmatic 
 method, but now stand amazed and dismayed to 
 find their masters indulging themselves in the sin 
 of elaboration and analysis. This abuse of the 
 " method of definition " is the natural vice of ra- 
 tionalism. It were better that the pragmatists 
 applied their energies to cultivating the world- 
 ground which they have already wrested from 
 their hereditary foes. 
 
 The world-ground lies fallow, awaiting the 
 hand and will of an expert. Meanwhile it may be 
 well to offer, as a stimulant and irritant, an out- 
 
 iThe present paper was read before the American 
 Philosophical Association at its meeting in Baltimore, De- 
 cember 29-31, 1908, and is reprinted from the Journal of 
 Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. VI, 
 No. 3. 
 
 173 
 
174 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 line of the world-view which in his former paper 
 the writer described as " cosmic humanism." 
 
 I 
 
 The pragmatist has on his hands a world- 
 ground. What shall he make out of it? There 
 is a certain pusillanimity in the present attitude 
 of pragmatism. The Promethean boldness of 
 rationalism's world-views may well have staggered 
 the gods. But now their divine amazement is 
 tempered with heavenly mirth by the spectacle of 
 a ^//-philosophy which yet does not dare to press 
 beyond the limits of tedious definition and timid, 
 " on-the-whole " hypotheses. The history of 
 earlier pragmatisms with their homo mensura 
 sophisims makes it certain that unless pragmatism 
 produces a man who shall measure the very cos- 
 mos by himself, the movement begun so potently 
 and promisingly a few years ago will prove as 
 evanescent as a passing breeze. The pragmatist 
 theory has never yet been genuinely tested. Such 
 a test would require that the, so far, rather sterile 
 pragmatic philosophy were incubated for a while 
 in the self -same cosmic matrix wherein the seeds 
 of rationalism have hitherto germinated and flour- 
 ished. What sort of world-view is the pragmatic 
 passion likely to breed if it thus germinates and 
 produces its kind on a cosmic scale? 
 
 Its offspring must be in some sense a worlfc 
 view. In this matter the pragmatist must recog- 
 nize the validity and persistency of the human 
 
OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 175 
 
 spirit's search for something universal and eter- 
 nal. Such a search has indubitably had its func- 
 tional value in the growing experience of the race, 
 and must, therefore, by the pragmatic test be rec- 
 ognized as helping to constitute the living truth. 
 What, then, is this perfect passion for universal 
 and eternals? Has it the validity of a world- 
 forming, world-creating principle? Is it merely 
 a passion? Perhaps the passion itself is the one 
 universal thing in the world? Does it connect, 
 or disconnect, the human from the cosmic? Is it 
 the whimpering and wailing of a soul in an incur- 
 able agony of finiteness ? Or is it the terrific will- 
 force of an Ubermensch claiming his birthright 
 as an aristocrat of the universal life? It may 
 well be that a painstaking critique of this old- 
 fashioned passion for the eternal and universal 
 will expose impulses out of which pragmatism 
 itself may organize a view of the world covering 
 in principle the whole ground of reality. 
 
 It is certain that, whatever the eternal is, it is 
 not of the nature of ideas. The prime fallacy 
 of rationalism arises from its failure to distin- 
 guish between the function and the content of an 
 eternal impulse. The region in which the self 
 acknowledges a universal a priori quality in its 
 processes is, as the literature of speculative mysti- 
 cism attests, a region of transempirical conscious- 
 ness. Wherever the mystic experience has di- 
 vulged a content of ideas, these can be shown to 
 be preconceptions subconsciously stored away in 
 
176 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 the mystic's past experience. The pure function 
 of consciousness in this transempirical region has 
 the imperative, eternal, universal quality just be- 
 cause it has no empirical content. It is a pure 
 function; its uncertain content, the irreducible 
 contradiction between ideas and will, has always 
 been regarded by the first-class pessimist as an 
 unmitigated evil. 
 
 It can not be affirmed that this pure function 
 is inwardly diversified into fourteen forms of ex- 
 perience, more or less. Here, again, the evidence 
 of speculative mysticism must be trusted. The 
 persistent characteristic of the pure mystic ex- 
 perience is its spacelessness, timelessness, cause- 
 lessness. For some years the writer has experi- 
 mented in this mystic region, but has been unable 
 to identify in the experience, e. g. y of time, as 
 infinite, any quality that distinguishes it from 
 space, as infinite. The experience in both cases is 
 one of perfect fluency without ideational content. 
 The infinite as well as the infinitesimal space-ex- 
 perience begins to " swim " or " shiver " as con- 
 sciousness verges upon the abysmal. These are 
 the habitual expressions by which my subjects 
 have sought to symbolize the perfect fluency of 
 the universal and eternal quality in the experience 
 of space and time. 
 
 And this which is true of the infinitudes of the 
 pure reason is equally true of the infinitudes of 
 the practical. Who can uncover say, in wis- 
 dom, as infinite, a quality that isolates it from 
 
OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 177 
 
 goodness, as infinite? In the wisdom literature 
 from Plato to Emerson these terms of practical 
 infinitude are constantly interchanged and inter- 
 fused. The eternal goodness is in all points wise : 
 the universal wisdom is in all directions good. In 
 the mystic experience neither goodness nor wis- 
 dom has any ideational content. 
 
 The first principle of cosmic humanism con- 
 fronts us here. Whatever may be in detail the 
 defects of the world-view herein outlined, this first 
 principle I hold to be indefeasible : " infinite " 
 when attached to any substantive whatsoever is 
 the sign of a contentless, formless function of ex- 
 perience. A self-organism, whether human or 
 cosmic, in fundamentally finite on the side of its 
 empirical content. There is no such thing in 
 man or cosmos as an infinite idea. 
 
 The writer's former thesis in cosmic humanism 
 is, therefore, not guilty of begging the question 
 between pragmatism and rationalism in affirming 
 that there must be even in a world-experience a 
 region of absolute subconsciousness the infinity of 
 which is purely functional. We may grant, with 
 philosophers like Leibnitz and Hartmann, the 
 hypothesis of an unending, unconscious fecundity 
 in the world-ground. The cosmic life may be in 
 an incomparable degree teeming with -germinating 
 ideas and wills. We are driven, nevertheless, by 
 the most fundamental structure of our own or- 
 ganisms- of experience to presuppose a formless 
 function underlying all these countless half -con- 
 
178 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 scious impulses, ideas, and passions of the world- 
 ground. 
 
 In its first principle cosmic humanism is thus 
 aligned with speculative mysticism rather than 
 with rationalism. It acknowledges in the world- 
 ground an " infinite tendency " rather than a well- 
 ordered and self -representative structure of eter- 
 nal and universal ideas. 
 
 n 
 
 In its second principle this cosmic application 
 of the pragmatic method must transfer to the 
 world-ground another ingrained feature of the 
 human organism of experience; namely, the in- 
 stinctive coordination of blind impulses into a 
 consistent organism of vital experience. The 
 pure function of consciousness does, in fact, take 
 on a living content; the unconscious does become 
 conscious ; the simple fluency of primal conscious- 
 ness does become dirempted by warring wills and 
 ideas. The prenatal bareness of animal experi- 
 ence does fructify with the passing years. The 
 cosmic function has evolved a cosmos with the 
 passing ages. Now, is this a fructification into 
 consciousness of unconscious idea or of uncon- 
 scious will? 
 
 Here, again, the bias of rationalism must yield 
 under the test of experience. This test has al- 
 ready shown us that the inmost structure of con- 
 sciousness excludes the notion of a divine mind 
 full of an infinite number of infinite ideas and 
 
OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 179 
 
 forms. But rationalism might justly intervene 
 at this point with the sentimental contention with 
 which throughout its history it has gripped the 
 race of men. Putting aside all metaphysical 
 claims with respect to the ideas of the eternal and 
 universal, this pure sentiment of rationality sim- 
 ply claims that at any rate the motives of the 
 cosmic life are always ideational rather than im- 
 pulsive, calm rather than passionate. The sole 
 aim of world-experience is to arrive at an even- 
 tual, inner harmony of its germinating ideas, to 
 subject all wills to this ideal of consistency and 
 smoothness of being. In a word, the prime aim 
 of experience is to become reasonable. 
 
 If this final defense of rationalism is an argu- 
 ment for the primacy of ideas as against impulses, 
 its argument can not claim the support of ex- 
 perience. On the contrary, nothing is more cer- 
 tain than the primacy of the impulsive phase of 
 consciousness. The consciousness of single-celled 
 animals is fundamentally motor; likewise the pre- 
 natal consciousness of the higher animals. In 
 these two cases no idea whatever (except, perhaps, 
 sensations of pressure and warmth) can be present 
 in the organism's inner experience; and yet the 
 very signs are motor by which the psychologists 
 infer that they are conscious at all. Or, again, 
 in idiocy and senile dementia, where consciousness 
 approaches once more its primal state, the last 
 functions that linger above the threshold are not 
 ideational, but motor. In " absolute " idiocy 
 
180 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 there still remains a vegetating activity; in de- 
 mentia the first functions to disappear or become 
 confused are ideational, and in the last stages an 
 impulsive activity continues long after it becomes 
 only too painfully apparent that all control from 
 ideational centers has ceased. 
 
 With scrupulous regard for the structure of 
 known organisms of experience, cosmic humanism 
 is thus able to take a second step in its construc- 
 tion of world-experience. It now conceives that 
 experience to be an infinite, totally subconscious 
 function whose first steps in world-experience are 
 impulsive rather than ideational. No matter how 
 persistently a world-soul may in its present con- 
 stitution be aiming at inward reasonableness, in 
 its beginning it had no idea where or how its 
 activity was coming out. Like every other or- 
 ganism olf experience, it just became, it just grew ! 
 In this matter cosmic experience is again com- 
 parable with the mystic passion which desires an 
 infinite number of things, and yet has no idea 
 what these things are. The cosmic passion may 
 be eternal, the cosmic idea is inherently temporal. 
 
 m 
 
 These initial impulses arising blindly within 
 the formless and fluent infinity of world-con- 
 sciousness have undergone coordinating, organiz- 
 ing, and hardening processes. In the present 
 state of the cosmos the average observer will be 
 very reluctant to accept any doctrine of the pres- 
 
OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 181 
 
 ent plasticity of cosmic stuff. In this matter of 
 plasticity the materialist now has the weight of 
 evidence in his pan of the scales. The patent 
 fact is that, except within very narrow limits in- 
 deed, things are not plastic under our processes 
 of practical reaction. By overdoing its hypothe- 
 sis of the perfect plasticity of the world-ground, 
 humanism might easily fall into the pathetic fal- 
 lacy of absolute idealism. On the clear ground 
 of known experience the humanist may insist (a) 
 that the cosmos conceived as world-experience 
 must be inwardly a pure function, and (b) that 
 in its imtial processes of growth it was an incho- 
 ate matrix of perfectly plastic yet blind impulses- 
 to-be. But it can not be urged on the same 
 ground that world-experience in its present state 
 is thus blindly and perfectly fluent. World-im- 
 pulses, whatever they may be in their inward, 
 primeval character, are now outwardly fixed and 
 hardened. 
 
 Does, then, the structure of cosmic humanism 
 fall to pieces because one can not by taking 
 thought pinch off a cubit of world-stuff and plas- 
 ter it on his own head, nor by praying make the 
 sun stop in its course? There is a certain merit 
 in the criticism of one of pragmatism's doughty 
 opponents who declares that the theory is de- 
 signed solely for the man who needs to get out 
 of a scrape. But the apparent bathos of prag- 
 matism at this point arises solely from a failure 
 to fit the structure of human experience fully into 
 
182 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 the cosmic scheme. For it is true of human ex- 
 perience, not only that it has this inner and ini- 
 tial plasticity, but also that in its adult form it 
 has stiffened and hardened into all sorts of phys- 
 ical fixtures. In our own organisms there exist 
 innumerable physical processes which are only 
 subconsciously felt and are ordinarily wholly un- 
 controlled from higher centers. In both its 
 phylogenetic and ontogenetic origin this human 
 experience began, we may fairly suppose, as a 
 plastic feeling-consciousness of the total organ- 
 ism: the plastic simplicity of the consciousness 
 of the single-celled animal and of the freshly im- 
 pregnated fetus is paralleled in each case by the 
 plasticity and simplicity of the organism itself. 
 But with the inward formation of physical sys- 
 tems each discharging a fixed function in the 
 evolving organism there proceeded likewise on the 
 side of consciousness a certain subconscious hard- 
 ening of physical consciousness ; e. g. y feelings 
 of visceral massiveness, of joint and muscle 
 strains, of physical weight, hardness, and the like. 
 Humanism, disabused of any metaphysical 
 hypothesis of cosmic plasticity, should propose at 
 this point an hypothesis of cosmic, physical sub- 
 consciousness. In brief, two postulates are in- 
 volved in the fundamental structure of physical 
 experience. (1) The physical universe has 
 originated not by the fully conscious control of 
 some eternal intelligence but, rather, through a 
 hardening into objective being of the unconscious, 
 
OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 183 
 
 organic needs of the impulsively evolving cosmos. 
 (2) The physical universe is now felt in the cos- 
 mic life as so much pull and strain and dead 
 weight. 1 In a word, plasticity is no more a char- 
 acteristic of cosmic than of human experience. 
 
 IV 
 
 On the other hand, the humanist metaphysic 
 need not postulate a cosmic experience less plastic 
 than the human. As we have just seen, the phys- 
 ical parts of an organism are felt . They are not 
 inwardly and radically sundered from the region 
 of conscious being ; they are subconscious, but not 
 unconscious. Moreover, within certain limits 
 physical processes are subject to control from the 
 higher motor centers of the organism. Con- 
 sciously controlled heart-beating, accelerated or 
 depressed circulation of the blood, voluntary bi- 
 secting of the viscera, the suggestive therapeutic 
 reduction of inflammation in diseased parts, the 
 psychic treatment of nervous and chronic diseases 
 these are cases in point. The evidence by no 
 means proves the complete plasticity of the human 
 organism under conscious control from higher 
 centers ; it does indicate, however, that there is in 
 
 1 1 need hardly say that this transcription of physical 
 subconsciousness from the human to the cosmic scale 
 should not be carried to an anthropomorphic extreme. 
 In the cosmic life there are, of course, no visceral feel- 
 ings, no muscle and joint strains, and all that. At the 
 most the cosmic physique feels in a universal degree the 
 intracortical strains and the brain fatigue which assail 
 the human life. 
 
184 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 the conscious organism no inherent inability 
 which would prevent the controlling of physical 
 processes from volitional centers of the cosmic 
 life. 
 
 v 
 
 The foregoing conclusions expose the marrow 
 of the divinity within the dry bones of scholas- 
 ticism. The genius of the schoolman is revealed 
 and exhausted by his search for a necessarily per- 
 manent principle underlying and pervading the 
 shifting sands of being. And this is the lasting 
 passion of all seekers after the universal and 
 eternal. 
 
 That such a principle is discoverable we have 
 seen. It is in reality not a system of fixed and 
 well-ordered concepts, but a pressure of conscious 
 activity presupposed in all our processes of ex- 
 perience and felt even in the region of our sub- 
 conscious, organic life. But the very process of 
 analysis which discovers this active principle of 
 all experience does not wholly satisfy the scholas- 
 tic passion for an eternal whose existence is nec- 
 essary. It is conceivable that the function of 
 consciousness even on a cosmic scale should cease 
 to be active. There are cases of known organ- 
 isms wherein the active, organizing principle has 
 practically ceased to work. In absolute idiocy 
 and coma the organism of experience seems to be 
 slipping back into the abyss of totally uncon- 
 scious non-being. Either because of a congenital 
 poverty of impulses-to-be, or through a fatiguing 
 
OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 185 
 
 of these impulses, conscious activity seems about 
 played out. If, now, we apply the norm of hu- 
 man to cosmic experience, we may admit the pos- 
 sibility of defectiveness and fatigue even in the 
 cosmic organism. The persistency of the phys- 
 ical universe in the midst of its ceaseless flux of 
 being must thus be interpreted partly as the natu- 
 ral healthiness of a great cosmic animal * and 
 partly as the conscious resistance of cosmic 
 energy to the deranging forces of mental disease. 2 
 The real existence of universal principles or laws 
 is, therefore, to be regarded not as necessary, but 
 rather as the achievement of a partly conscious 
 and partly subconscious will-to-be in the cosmic 
 life. 
 
 VI 
 
 It remains only to ward off a possible misun- 
 derstanding of the foregoing analysis of the 
 world's absolutely subconscious matrix by ex- 
 plaining that this discussion of the " infinite " 
 has no explicit reference to the tender infinitudes 
 of religious experience. To affirm that the abso- 
 lutely subconscious has in itself a blind character 
 
 iA large part of the living truth is undoubtedly ex- 
 pressed in the cosmic animism of Greek culture. See 
 Plato's description of the world-soul as a "perfect ani- 
 mal," "Timaeus," 31. Cf. Aristotle: "Deity is an animal 
 that is everlasting and most excellent in nature. . . . 
 This constitutes the very essence of God," " Metaphysics," 
 Book XI., 6. 
 
 2 Such resistance appears to fail, as we have seen, on 
 the human plane in cases of idiocy and senile dementia 
 and on the stellar plane in cases of " dying " comets. 
 
186 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 which, as blind and unconscious, is strictly sub- 
 moral, or to consider that this subconscious world- 
 life has arrived at and is now consciously working 
 out in its voluntary centers a personal character, 
 or to submit the ground on which religious ex- 
 perience may justify its antagonism to positivism 
 in claiming that this personal character is cosmic 
 and not merely human these questions the 
 writer hopes to discuss at some future time in a 
 paper dealing with " The Cosmic Character." 
 
APPENDIX B 
 THE COSMIC CHARACTER 1 
 
 In two earlier articles in this Journal the writer 
 worked to grub out the roots of the pragmatic 
 tree of knowledge. The tap-root he found to be 
 a bare function, an universal activity, in its primal 
 nature subpersonal and subconscious. In this 
 paper I presume to deal with the apparent dispar- 
 ity between this God, as blind, subvegetable, 
 metaphysical first cause, and the cosmic character, 
 the God alive, upon which religious experience 
 seems to depend. 
 
 I 
 
 First of all we must disabuse our minds of the 
 notion that the cosmic character is substantial. 
 The function in which life, whether human or cos- 
 mic, has its primal cause is practically universal 
 and eternal ; but only practically. The function 
 is so long as life is ; conscious activity (sum cogi- 
 taw) is indubitable so long as the living doubt 
 continues, but no longer. It is theoretically con- 
 ceivable that all life, cosmic as well as human, 
 should cease to be. In this catastrophic event 
 the allegedly everlasting water-springs would have 
 run dry, the tap-root of being would wither and 
 
 i Reprinted from the Journal of Philotophy, Ptychology 
 and Scientific Method*, Vol. VI., No. 12. 
 187 
 
188 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 dry up into nothing, the world-soul would flicker 
 out in black death. 
 
 But there is in all this no occasion for pausing. 
 Tested pragmatically, death and nothing are un- 
 thinkable concepts. Reflection upon them could 
 not further, but only retard life. Their sole real- 
 ity consists in their devilish power to defeat at 
 every point the lust of rationalism, the senseless 
 passion for absolute certainty. Meanwhile I 
 find no thinkable connection between this absolute 
 certainty and that practical certainty upon which 
 active life depends. 
 
 The cosmic function is indeed conceivably per- 
 ishable. But its decadence into death and noth- 
 ing is practically unthinkable. Just because the 
 cosmic life would in such an event flicker out into 
 nothing, no one could possibly prepare his person 
 for such a catastrophic end. The very last as- 
 sumption with which our practical reason can get 
 on- is that of a functional activity which, as ac- 
 tive, is practically absolute and imperishable ; and 
 this no matter what disease, human or cometary, 
 may assault its universal life. Let one be purely 
 humanitarian in his humanism after the manner 
 of the positivists. Even so, he must assume that 
 energy in one form or another of human activity 
 is unassailable. This is the live nub of the school- 
 man's insistence upon an eternal as existent. 
 There simply must be an aTreipov, he thinks a 
 That in its root impractical, but in its potenti- 
 
THE COSMIC CHARACTER 189 
 
 alities inexhaustible and practically absolute. 1 
 There has got to be an universal energy on 
 which the phenomenal life of God and of men may 
 draw endlessly. Of course men and God may not 
 have this limitless credit in the great vault beyond. 
 There is a certain speculative risk in all life, for 
 that is the condition of life. Our lives, human 
 and cosmic, depend upon taking the cash here and 
 now and letting the credit go on so long as it 
 will. It could only be after God and we were 
 eternally dead and nothing, that the default of 
 universal energy could reduce us to destitution 
 and starvation; i. e., never so long as we know 
 ourselves. 
 
 In action the universal energy does function 
 radically. It sloughs off dead parts from the 
 cosmic organism and renews its withered mem- 
 bers. The cosmic environment here and now is 
 all on the side of health and perpetuity for those 
 who are fit. And this is the first datum of the 
 cosmic character: its inherent ability to preserve 
 itself alive, its practical assumption that the 
 energy within and without is everlastingly real 
 and subject to all the drafts which can possibly 
 be made upon it in the interest of life. 
 
 i Poincar says some clever things of this " something " 
 as it stands in theoretical physics. See his "Science and 
 Hypothesis," e. g., p. 166. 
 
190 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 The implication of this first datum is that the 
 cosmic character is an achievement. The univer- 
 sal energy must be drawn upon. In itself it is 
 in the last degree impersonal, impractical, indif- 
 ferent. The etymologists confirm this in their 
 account of the verb of being. " To be " in its 
 root-meaning is " to stand forth." The world- 
 energy, I dare say, genuinely is only when it 
 stands forth. The root-meaning of life is ex- 
 clamatory, assertive, the will-to-power. I am: 
 that I am. 
 
 Too often cosmic life has been conceived as an 
 energy which must needs function in the form of 
 a phenomenal, universal life : its standing forth is 
 a necessary function of its eternal being. The 
 Eternal thus unconsciously and without effort cre- 
 ates and maintains the best possible world: the 
 world-soul does not actively draw upon, but is 
 poured in upon, by the universal energy. But 
 this postulate of willynilly creative energy goes 
 against the grain of human experience. The fact 
 is that the pouring-in process implies a certain 
 suction on the part of the living organism. The 
 receiving of power from on high or from within 
 implies a will-to-power. The first-class pessimists 
 are wanting in this will ; for them there is agony 
 in the growing-pains of life's processes. They 
 accordingly refuse to suckle themselves at the 
 breast of being. They would sink back into tha 
 
THE COSMIC CHARACTER 191 
 
 tireless, senseless That they set out from. It is 
 not inherently impossible that one should in the 
 end utterly dam the inlets of the universal energy. 
 
 We must remark in this a second datum of the 
 cosmic character. The will-to-power implies a 
 will-to-impotence. This ingrained feature of the 
 human organism must be transcribed into the cos- 
 mic life as well. There is an energy circumpress- 
 ing both within and without. Upon this the cos- 
 mic life draws at all times and places of its even- 
 tual life. The drawing-in process is not neces- 
 sary, but optional. Merely to be, to stand forth, 
 is in itself an unconscious symptom of health and 
 character. For the universal life, like the human 
 in its morbid moods, may genuinely prefer dissolu- 
 tion to further organization, death to life. The 
 world-organism is thus an achievement. The tire- 
 lessness, persistency, and continuity of its being 
 are symptomatic of a certain sanity, a congenital, 
 temperamental healthy-mindedness in the living 
 soul of things. 
 
 There are cases, individual and racial, of ap- 
 parently incurable insanity : the inlets of the uni- 
 versal life with its unconscious sanity seem hope- 
 lessly dammed up. Such evil is radical. Its 
 cure, I imagine, can only be effected, if by any 
 means, by a painful, conscious operation within 
 the universal life itself. Certainly in its case the 
 unconscious remedial agency of the cosmic life 
 has miserably failed. But in any event the exist- 
 ence here and there of diseased parts in the world- 
 
192 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 organism does not argue that the whole is incom- 
 petent or likely to degenerate into the amorphous 
 energy, the cosmic infancy, it set out from. 
 The evidence weighs heavily on the side of the 
 general sanity of the cosmic life. 
 
 A third datum of the cosmic character there- 
 fore, is its animal efficiency and unconscious san- 
 ity. It achieves being, it draws upon the uni- 
 versal energy by a natural instinct-to-be. 
 
 in 
 
 In these prime data, however, the cosmic char- 
 acter is subconscious and subpersonal. So far, 
 the cosmic life is strictly animal ; it grows instinc- 
 tively in the virgin womb of being. The human 
 life is suckled, fortified and sanified within this 
 cosmic animal. 1 
 
 This, too, is religion of a certain type and its 
 proper emotions are in a profound degree the- 
 ophanic. Meanwhile it is arch-pessimism a 
 religion based upon the experience of personal 
 life as a disease of consciousness to be remedied 
 by anesthesis and analgesis, a return to the sub- 
 conscious organism of which personal feeling-will 
 is but an inflamed member. Cosmic character, so 
 the argument goes, is only weakened and diseased 
 by these germs of personality. 
 
 i One feels secure and willing to function naturally 
 within cosmos's great organism. But I wonder if our 
 cosmic emotion at this level is not really comparable with 
 the gratitude we might feel toward a great animal that has 
 instinctively saved our own skin and bones from the grave? 
 
THE COSMIC CHARACTER 193 
 
 The writer agrees that a person is an inflamma- 
 tion of cosmic being. But this disease of person- 
 ality is a condition in which alone such terms as 
 " purpose," " value," " worth," " morality," gain 
 genuine meaning. Religious pessimism has al- 
 ways aimed at so-called unconscious purpose, in- 
 stmctive worth, animal morality. But really 
 these are all contradictions in terms. They would 
 reduce ends to unconscious, instinctive, animal 
 functions, whereas the quintessential meaning of 
 an end requires that it be consciously felt, aimed 
 at, controlled ; in a word, that it prepossess and 
 be consciously acknowledged by some person. I 
 grant that this condition is hard. Each fulfill- 
 ment wherein a conscious purpose becomes a part 
 of the organism's unconscious character is but 
 the progenitor of another newly-felt purpose ; and 
 so on endlessly. But this constitutes conscious 
 as distinguished from unconscious character. In 
 personality there is an indispensable endless chal- 
 lenge to unfulfilled being, a " standing forth " 
 which, on the one hand, will not permit the human 
 life to sink back into the unconscious bliss of 
 animal activity it has risen above, and which, on 
 the other hand, can never raise that human life to 
 a haven of supraconscious rest. Fichte found 
 this inner anstoss a challenge for all time. Car- 
 lyle leapt under it as under a cosmic lash. Poor 
 Nietzsche lost his sanity under the pressure of its 
 ceaseless will-to-power. 
 
 At all events the cosmic life has in us taken on 
 
194 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 a conspicuous personal character. In us its pres- 
 ent ends are genuinely felt. In us its ends are 
 unthinkable, endless, as the pessimists are everlast- 
 ingly reminding us; but they are none-the-less 
 conscious imperatives. We may risk disease, lose 
 the sanity of our pure reason in gaining the san- 
 ity of our practical, but if we turn back we are as 
 salt which has lost its savor: we lose the very 
 flavor and essence of character. In us, then, the 
 blind character of the cosmic impulses has be- 
 come endlessly conscious. Henceforth we must 
 aim at being, we must control our ends even to the 
 point where the abysmal possibilities of being 
 blind us with a new kind of blindness ; the blind- 
 ness of one whose pupils strain to take in the 
 invisible. 
 
 " But this is positivism, pure and simple," some 
 one will say. " This is human character, very 
 good while it lasts ! but it makes out no such case 
 for the universal life. It means merely that a 
 certain animal has evolved into conscious self- 
 possession. Man, so far, sports above his cosmic 
 progenitor. Like positivism, your cosmic hu- 
 manism is really an wngoddmg (Entgottung) of 
 the universal life, a surreptitious deification of 
 human being. Is God, then, merely a * crowd- 
 consciousnes '? " 
 
 To all this cosmic humanism must reply imper- 
 turbably: God, if not merely human, is at any 
 rate essentially just that. Our humanism has 
 practically all its active interests in common with 
 
THE COSMIC CHARACTER 195 
 
 scientific positivism. 1 In its description of the 
 universal life there is no taint of magic religion 
 nor of overleaping metaphysics. The world- 
 ground as the incomparably fecund matrix of the 
 present cosmos is in our view identical with the 
 ether-strains of experimental physics. Cosmos is 
 a system of countless straining relations, a com- 
 plex of Energie-stromen. Psychophysically the 
 cosmic character appears, so far, as an organism 
 of vital activities risen to the level of animal sub- 
 consciousness. In us this cosmic animal has 
 varied to the high level of personal consciousness. 
 But then, the " eternal " of rationalism is an 
 unnecessary hypothesis, if only human character 
 be allowed cosmic application and sweep. If con- 
 scious aiming is now and practically universal in 
 the cosmic life, to say that it has been eternally 
 so adds nothing significant to the present facts 
 and life of the world-soul. The fact is that the 
 hypothesis of an eternal, infinite character uncon- 
 sciously seeks to remedy the one glaring defect in 
 positivism ; namely, its inveterate thinking of man 
 apart from cosmos. But the human organism is 
 continuous with the unthinkably limpid stuff of 
 which the universal life itself is a function. In 
 a most important and literal sense the character 
 of any part of the world-life is in its degree the 
 character of the whole. The universal energy 
 which all life draws upon its practically a per- 
 
 1 1 mean " scientific " as distinguished from the more 
 passionate but shallower ethical positivism. 
 
196 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 feet, limpid fluid. If I tap my desk here with 
 my pen the world-ground is moved gelatinously 
 throughout its whole being. Now, I permit in 
 my person impulses of conscious purpose; these 
 aims are like my pen-taps of a moment ago: 
 whenever they hit the truth in the bull's-eye, they 
 ring their reality into the whole cosmic life; and 
 this by physical necessity, if you please. The 
 cosmic life in us and through us has become in all 
 its physical energies a personal animal. Should 
 it turn back from the endless Person it now aims 
 to become, should it seek to reduce or prevent the 
 inflammation which in us brings it to conscious 
 possession of all its own latent energies, it would 
 surely degenerate into the blind, witless being it 
 once was. 
 
 An infinite appetite for personal being is thus 
 a third datum of the cosmic character. 
 
 IV 
 
 Once we entertain the notion that the cosmic 
 life is moved through and through by the birth of 
 men within its being there remains only the task 
 of ascribing to the cosmic character the ineradi- 
 cable forms and passions of the human organism. 
 For the religion of humanism will turn out to be 
 in the highest degree anthropomorphic and an- 
 thropopathic in its experience of the divine life. 
 
 As to the anthropomorphic character of the 
 cosmic life. The cosmic physique obviously is 
 free from the parts and organs we commonly re- 
 
THE COSMIC CHARACTER 197 
 
 mark in the frames of animals ; it has no systems, 
 circulatory, skeletal, urinogenital, and the like. 
 It has not the blue eyes and fair hair of its Thra- 
 cian idolater, nor the flat nose of the Ethiopian. 
 It is as it were " all eye," " all ear," and " all 
 thought." If it be physical at all, it would seem 
 to have the quality of sensuous experience without 
 the visible end-organs thereof. 
 
 Is, then, the cosmic life completely amorphous? 
 This we can hardly say; for there is in fact a 
 cosmic physique planets, stars, earths, comets, 
 all more or less harmoniously adjusted by this 
 time into a systematic whole. Our thought of the 
 cosmic life may thus in one point be psycho- 
 physical, and anthropomorphic. It is of course 
 a figure to speak of the universal life as " all 
 eye " and " all ear." Regarding its gross anat- 
 omy, one would be nearer the literal truth in 
 thinking of the cosmic physique as all brain. 
 The stellar universe, once more in its gross anat- 
 omy, is not unlike the cellular structure of a hu- 
 man cerebrum. 1 Of all our animal psychophys- 
 ical functions it is the cerebral which the cosmic 
 life most nearly duplicates. 
 
 It would seem that we can dispense with every 
 other form of physique save the nervous. Let 
 idealism operate to remove that and the remain- 
 ing reality is in the last degree unreal and im- 
 
 i If a cerebrum were magnified to be proportionate with 
 the stellar universe, I imagine the individual neurons 
 would present a spectacle not unlike that of the stars and 
 planets of the elliptoid universe. 
 
198 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 practical. Thus the cosmic life like the human, 
 may be conceived as indefinitely changing the 
 form of its neural physique, constantly refining 
 its centers and perhaps generating new (astral) 
 nervous systems ad libitum. But the neural gist 
 must persist if the life, human or cosmic, is to be 
 real and practical in its impulses and ideas. 
 
 Cosmic humanism is thus anthropomorphic in 
 its religious intention. In its essential terms it 
 gratifies men's ingrained passion for human form 
 in the divine life ; i. e., by establishing in the place 
 of the overturned God of hands and feet a real 
 community of cerebral experience between man 
 and the universal life. The physique of the cos- 
 mic life touches the physique of man in his most 
 sensitive organ, the brain. Physical functioning 
 of the highest order (ideal coordinations, associ- 
 ations, intracortical strains, and the like) is the 
 same in both. The fourth datum of the cosmic 
 life is thus brain-character. 
 
 If now we determine what this cerebral function 
 is when void of all the more external organic sen- 
 sations and functions of the human frame, we 
 shall have some sense of the anthropopathic char- 
 acter of the cosmic life. 
 
 v 
 
 The elements left in our conscious processes 
 after the elision of all sensory and organic quali- 
 ties we are permitted to transcribe into the psycho- 
 physical life of the world-soul. We exclude at 
 
THE COSMIC CHARACTER 199 
 
 once all the base constituents of our human ex- 
 perience, all organic and sensory processes. The 
 cosmic brain exposes no lobes ; nor is it attached 
 sympathetically to the " systems " which enliven 
 our human frames. What, then is this pure, cere- 
 bral experience? 
 
 1. There is in our human system a certain 
 grossness of psychophysical experience. But we 
 aim always to submit our muscle and j oint strains, 
 visceral sensations and all that, to the control of 
 our higher, cerebral energies. Now, we may sup- 
 pose that this subordination of lower under higher 
 centers is furthered and affirmed by the cosmic 
 life, for the excellent reason that in the universal 
 life the lower centers are not central and indeed 
 do not exist: all its energies are physically, prac- 
 tically ideal. I dare say, the exquisite energiz- 
 ing of the human organism when the cerebral 
 function is uppermost is due to the fact that its 
 energy is then directly in the stream of the cosmic 
 life's cerebral energy. The human brain dupli- 
 cates in its measure the physical harmonies of the 
 celestial spheres. 
 
 2. Now, if this cosmic life is cerebral, it has 
 more in common with the human than either mys- 
 tic ecstasy or pessimistic coma has yet dreamed 
 of in their philosophies of escape from phenome- 
 nal being. There is a dash of insanity in each 
 of these extremes: mania in the one instance and 
 melancholia with terminal coma in the other. The 
 cosmic character, above all, must be well balanced ; 
 
200 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 
 
 it must not blink the facts of its experience in an 
 unbroken, maniacal ecstasy, nor must it wear 
 itself out in the currents of being till it seeks relief 
 in the unconscious silence in which its articulate 
 purposes are set. 
 
 Just here I think, we uncover the supreme 
 datum of the cosmic character its conscious 
 sanity. The cosmic life on its conscious side may 
 well be assaulted by world-weariness. It is in- 
 deed in the highest degree probable that the 
 energy-strains of the universal life should become 
 fearfully fatiguing. In such an event the plan- 
 ets would continue on their unbroken course just 
 as our neurons remain in their proper places even 
 while wearing themselves out toward weariness and 
 unconsciousness. Cosmic health and sanity is an 
 achievement, as we have already remarked. To 
 balance its world-soul between these extremes of 
 endless, senseless, ecstasy, on the one hand and 
 endless, vegetative subconsciousness, on the other, 
 I conceive to be the supreme achievement of the 
 cosmic character. 
 
 These, then, are the congenital feelings in the 
 cosmic life: strain and haul, now ecstatic and 
 again depressant, but with a practical intelligence 
 that maintains the cosmic sanity. 
 
 3. The emotions in particular which character- 
 ize this balancing process are in the human case 
 the feelings of patience and hopefulness. These 
 melioristic feelings lie just between the extremes 
 of world-pain and world- j oy. In their pure form 
 
THE COSMIC CHARACTER 201 
 
 they are, we may suppose, non-sensuous, intra- 
 cortical. Meanwhile, or perhaps just because 
 they are cerebral, they are emotions which simply 
 reek with character. They alone, I fancy, are 
 the emotions which on second thought our an- 
 thropopathic religion would be willing to tran- 
 scribe into the cosmic character. On first 
 thought we select unbroken joy as the pathetic 
 datum of the divine life. But such a gift, as we 
 have seen, cheapens and indeed cancels all the 
 other virtues of conscious life. Accepting it 
 one's life becomes at once supraconscious and im- 
 practical. The desideratum of conscious, practi- 
 cal life would be to face eternity hopefully and 
 patiently. And now this enduring patience and 
 hopefulness are literal data of the cosmic charac- 
 ter. They are congenital and ineradicable in the 
 well-balanced mind. Sanity is indeed just prac- 
 tical intelligence, buoyancy, rebounding energy 
 in a word patience and hopefulness, the abil- 
 ity to await patiently the returning of life's 
 energies and buoyant confidence in life's outcome. 
 Our postulate of the cosmic sanity involves these 
 emotions as its necessary data. 
 
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