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 GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN 
 
CHAUNCEY WETMORE WELLS 
 
 1872-1933 
 
 This book belonged to Chauncey Wetmore Wells. He taught in 
 Yale College, of which he was a graduate, from 1897 to 1901, and 
 from 1901 to 1933 at this University. 
 
 Chauncey Wells was, essentially, a scholar. The range of his read- 
 ing was wide, the breadth of his literary sympathy as uncommon 
 as the breadth of his human sympathy. He was less concerned 
 with the collection of facts than with meditation upon their sig- 
 nificance. His distinctive power lay in his ability to give to his 
 students a subtle perception of the inner implications of form, 
 of manners, of taste, of the really disciplined and discriminating 
 mind. And this perception appeared not only in his thinking and 
 teaching but also in all his relations with books and with men. 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 A Study of the Address of 
 St Paul at Athens 
 
 CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN 
 
 MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
 
 MILWAUKEE 
 
 A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. 
 
 LONDON 
 
COPTEIQHT BT 
 
 MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
 1920 
 
 IN MEf^ORJAM 
 
 C vx>>00<?\ 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THIS book interprets the great speech of St. Paul 
 at Athens in terms of the ideas about religion 
 most familiar to college students to-day. Developed 
 from addresses at Columbia and Indiana Universities, 
 it is now offered to that wider company of students, in 
 college and out, whose quest for reality is the sign of 
 the new life that is youth at any age, and the promise 
 of reconstruction after war. 
 
 Barnard College, Easter, 1920. C. S. B. 
 
 863687 
 
Men of Athens, I regard you us quite too 
 
 much given to gods, for as I have gone about 
 
 and surveyed your worships I have found 
 
 even an altar inscribed To A GOD UNKNOWN.- 
 
 Acts 17 :22 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. RELIGION IN THE OPEN - - - 1 
 
 II. GREEK AND JEW 16 
 
 III. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION - - 21 
 
 IV. PERSONALITY 33 
 
 V. SYMBOL AND REALITY - - - - 46 
 
I 
 
 RELIGION IN THE OPEN 
 
 THE recurrence of a religious note in the verse 
 inspired by the war, in many of the stories and 
 essays, and especially in soldiers' letters, is due to a 
 closer contact with reality and expresses an enhanced 
 sense of personality. It seems extraordinary only to 
 the spiritually dull. Those who but the other day 
 said that religion was not talked about, except pro- 
 fessionally by propagandists, must have forgotten 
 their youth. Among those for whom life is still an ad- 
 venture no important subject is talked about more. 
 We may count out, of course, that mere repetition of 
 news which is hardly talk at all. Real talk tends 
 toward religion at the rate by which it becomes an 
 exchange of personality with personality. The young 
 in years are eager for this give and take; and the 
 young in spirit thereby renew their youth. Both do, 
 indeed, abhor cant; for they wish not to accept ex- 
 perience, but to explore it. Both are, indeed, chary 
 of sentimental expression ; for they fear lest emotion 
 be diluted. But to assume that religion cannot be 
 
 1 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 talked about . vi1 hout cant or sentiment is quite blind, 
 and impoverishes personal intercourse. 
 
 The ancient world seems to have talked of religion 
 even more freely. Though we are not to assume that 
 the man on the street in Athens conversed after the 
 manner of Plato's Dialogues, he seems to have dis- 
 cussed the same topics of life, death, and immortality, 
 and to have discussed them on the street. Otherwise 
 the topical hits of popular comedy those of Aris- 
 tophanes, for instance, on Socrates would have had 
 no point. The historian of the earliest Christian 
 missions records that "all the Athenians and strangers 
 which were there spent their time in nothing else but 
 either to tell or to hear some new thing" (Acts 17 : 
 21). The context shows that the "new thing" they 
 loved to talk about was a new philosophy or a new 
 religion; for he is telling how a learned Christian 
 Jew debated with the Greeks in the public squares of 
 Athens the eternal topic of how to know God. 
 
 Though such open-air debate was commoner in 
 Athens than in New York or London, the closing 
 speech of the Christian had so extraordinary a sig- 
 nificance that it still stands out in history. In our 
 day of print we have to make an effort of imagination 
 to realize this debate of the first century as an historic 
 battle. When St. Paul stood in the Areopagus at 
 
 2 
 
KELIGIOST IN THE OPEN 
 
 Athens before the curious and lively Greeks, neither 
 he nor they had in mind books or writings. In his 
 habit of thought and in theirs, books came afterward. 
 What came first was the personal, oral expression of 
 the teacher and the manner of life taught and prac- 
 tised, then the transmission of that teaching through 
 disciples by word of mouth, and only after this the 
 fixing of the message in literary form. All these 
 stages are clear in the records of the teaching of 
 Socrates. We know that teaching the more intimately 
 because the literary form in which it was fixed by 
 Plato suggests the vitality of oral discussion, of urgent 
 questions concerning the deepest things. The same 
 stages appear in the earliest records of Christianity ; 
 and stage by stage they reveal the sharp difference, 
 the new and distinctive character, that struck the 
 Athenians as they listened to the missionary of a new 
 religion at the radiant center of ancient philosophy. 
 
 Christianity was talked and lived before it was 
 written. Its earliest propaganda was oral. The 
 earliest documents that we have recovered are notes 
 of teaching on the highways, hymns and hymn-like 
 creeds, and letters to communities already Christian. 
 These show a strikingly new attitude in the quest of 
 God; and the canon, or written material later made 
 authoritative, shows an even more striking difference 
 
 3 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 from any other written vision of life. Platonism 
 may be derived from Plato's writings ; and the prob- 
 lems of its interpretation are ultimately literary. So 
 is the ethic of Confucius or the philosophy of Comte. 
 But Christianity is not primarily the writings of the 
 Christ; and its interpretation is not ultimately liter- 
 ary. No one needs to be told that it is to be found in 
 the New Testament ; but many people need to be told 
 that the New Testament is not so much its sole source 
 as its chief expression in writing. Before and after 
 this expression is its expression in human life. It 
 was first called a way, that is, a way of life, or a 
 religion. The way was not derived from the New 
 Testament, which had not yet been written. Both the 
 way and the writings proclaimed themselves as de- 
 rived directly from "the Way, the Truth, and the 
 Life". Both insisted that the word of God is more 
 than a book. 
 
 The common term, and the most significant, 
 throughout the early stages of the Christian message 
 is lvfe\ and the idea is even more frequent. The 
 earliest missionaries insisted repeatedly that the 
 characteristic of their message was not wisdom, but 
 power. This has been taken to mean that they spoke 
 without wisdom, but with warmth, i. e., simply and 
 with feeling. So to translate it is to do violence both 
 
 4 
 
RELIGION IN THE OPEN 
 
 to their words and to the facts. Simplicity is of 
 course necessary in speaking to the unlettered ; but it 
 does not prove that the speakers too were unlettered, 
 and no one can maintain that St. Luke or St. Paul 
 or St. John were even unliterary. Any such assump- 
 tion is refuted on every page of the Acts, the epistle 
 to the Romans, and the fourth gospel. Simplicity 
 is itself a literary achievement, as any one knows who 
 has sought it ; and that is the only sense in which the 
 New Testament as a whole is simple. No, what the 
 missionaries said was that their religion had some- 
 thing more than style, something beyond words, the 
 direct influence of God. For Christianity is per- 
 sonal in the extraordinary sense that it proposes to 
 deal with personality directly. All its utterances, 
 oral or written, whether simple in the ordinary sense 
 or not and some of them are far from simple 
 assert a directness of communication quite beyond 
 the usual notions of personal influence. 
 
 Christianity did, indeed, spread among unlettered 
 people long and widely before it formulated its 
 philosophy or even compiled its history ; and this has 
 rightly been urged as one of its claims to attention. 
 But the inference, instead of being merely that it was 
 simple, should be that it must have been extraor- 
 dinarily direct, and more generally, that it was, and 
 
 5 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 is, primarily a religion. A philosophy in the wider 
 sense of an animating theory it had always ; and this 
 one, at least, of its earliest missionaries, the Paul who 
 flung it into the talk of Athens, was in every sense 
 of the word a philosopher. When he met the philos- 
 ophers of Greece in the Areopagus he was doubly 
 equipped for battle. He had already debated with 
 the common people on the streets. Now he was fac- 
 ing the more intellectual of that cityful so eager "to 
 tell or to hear some new thing" ; and he knew that 
 the time was pregnant. The battle of Jew and Greek, 
 of religion and philosophy, is historic in the full sense 
 that it is perpetual, ever renewed so long as men 
 think with free wills, so permanently human that it 
 has remained in all times contemporary. It is 
 historic also in the more usual sense that it was 
 dramatically public. The attack of St. Paul on 
 Athens had a great stage. 
 
 "Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit 
 was stirred in him when he saw the city wholly given to 
 idolatry. Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the 
 Jews and with the devout persons, and in the market daily 
 with them that met with him. Then certain philosophers 
 of the Epicureans and of the Stoics encountered him. 
 And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, 
 He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods; because 
 he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection. And 
 
 6 
 
KELIGION IN THE OPEN 
 
 they took him and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, 
 May we know what this new doctrine whereof thou speak- 
 est is? For thou bringest certain strange things to our 
 ears. We would know, therefore, what these things mean. 
 (For all the Athenians and strangers which were there 
 spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear 
 some new thing.) 
 
 "Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' Hill and said, 
 Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too 
 superstitious. For as I passed by and beheld your devo- 
 tions, I found an altar with this inscription, To THE 
 UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, 
 him declare I unto you. 
 
 "God that made the world and all things therein, 
 seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not 
 in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped with 
 men's hands as though he needed anything, seeing he 
 giveth to all life and breath and all things. 
 
 "(And) he hath made of one blood all nations of men 
 for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath deter- 
 mined the times before appointed and the bounds of their 
 habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if haply they 
 might feel after him and find him, though he be not far 
 from every one of us. For in him we live and move and 
 have our being; as certain also of your own poets have 
 said, For we are also his offspring. 
 
 "Forasmuch, then, as we are the offspring of God, we 
 ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto silver or 
 stone graven by art and man's device. And the times of 
 this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all 
 men everywhere to repent; because he hath appointed a 
 day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness 
 by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath 
 
 7 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 given assurance unto all men in that he hath raised him 
 from the dead. 
 
 "And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, 
 some mocked and others said, We will hear thee again of 
 this matter. So Paul departed from among them. How- 
 beit certain men clave unto him and believed, among the 
 which was Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named 
 Damaris and others with them/' * 
 
 The scene kindles imagination as one of the great 
 historic meetings. On the cliff above the St. Law- 
 rence at Quebec stands a plain shaft with this inscrip- 
 tion, WOLFE AND MONTCALM. The generous spirit 
 that joined so simply the two who led the armies of the 
 old world fighting in the new has its fulfilment to-day. 
 Montcalm and Wolfe have just fought side by side in 
 France; and the Canadians who first stemmed the 
 invasion of French soil were of British blood. But 
 the monument remains eloquent of more than chiv- 
 alry. It sums up a long war of colonization and the 
 final clash of political ideals. It marks a turning- 
 point in history. It is a scene in that drama which 
 we must make for ourselves from the historical record 
 if we wish to feel the movement of human life. 
 Imagination has its use in history, not for fanciful 
 decoration, but for realizing, more deeply than we 
 can through abstract generalizations, the human im- 
 
 Acts 17: 16-34. 
 
 8 
 
RELIGION IN THE OPEN 
 
 port. We comprehend history not only by statistics 
 and inference, but by visualizing its dramatic crises. 
 
 So generation after generation has dramatized 
 Canossa, with the Emperor shivering in the snow at 
 the barred door of the Pope. For there, as on the 
 Plains of Abraham, imagination grasps in the persons 
 of Henry and Gregory the significance of opposing 
 ideals. Among such dramatizations of history no 
 scene should be more revealing than that in the Are- 
 opagus when the apostle to the nations faced the 
 philosophers of Athens. His first words are as full of 
 battle as the traditional name of the place: "over- 
 supplied with religions" . . . "worship without 
 knowing" . . . "him declare I unto you." Though 
 the name Areopagus no longer suggested to the 
 Athenians the antiquated god of war, the place be- 
 came on that day a battle-ground between Hellenism 
 and Hebraism, between philosophy and religion, be- 
 tween an old art and a new life, between man creating 
 gods and man created and empowered by God. 
 
 What were the "objects of devotion" challenged by 
 this stranger ? They were the most beautiful temples, 
 the most beautiful statues, of antiquity. Like the 
 Greek masterpieces of literature, like Homer and 
 Sophocles, these Greek masterpieces of architecture 
 and sculpture became the models for the centuries. 
 
 9 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 Who should say they had no vitality? Above the 
 city thus adorned shone the Acropolis with its great 
 temple and its great statue of the maiden goddess 
 Athene, looking out over the blue Aegean of the poets. 
 The city below was a city of schools, some of them set, 
 like Oxford or Indiana University, in gardens and 
 groves. Becoming more and more a city of com- 
 merce, stretching one hand to the Asiatic East and 
 the other to the Roman West, Athens was still a city 
 of learning, a city of thought. Thither resorted for 
 study the youth of the civilized world. Rome her- 
 self learned at the feet of Athens. The streets trod 
 by the apostle were trod by Cicero; and both came 
 to it as to a city of ideas, of discussion, of specula- 
 tion, of intellectual talk. In this aspect its closest 
 modern parallel is a university. To such an audience 
 the unknown Jew cried, "Whom you worship in igno- 
 rance I declare." Among such statues of the calm 
 Olympians he held up his crucifix. 
 
 "WTiat you reverence without grasping, this I de- 
 clare. God" Are these words to the most intellect- 
 ual city of its time, and from an unknown Jew, 
 fanaticism or effrontery? Do they reveal the man 
 of one idea among the men of many ideas; or are 
 they the oratorical trick of shocking an audience to 
 attention ? Neither. The speech is neither fanatical 
 
 10 
 
KELIGION IN THE OPEN 
 
 nor noisy. However else it may be regarded, it will 
 always claim attention as thought. Its depth is of 
 feeling, too; but so much of its consistency as is 
 merely logical may be expressed as a series of proposi- 
 tions about God. 
 
 God is a person, not an idea. 
 
 He is the personality supremely creative, the life- 
 giver. 
 
 He is creative not only in what we call Nature, but 
 in human personality. 
 
 His empowering of human personality is com- 
 pletely personal, the complete giving of himself. 
 
 As he empowers, so he judges, human experience, 
 calling us to develop our manhood through him. 
 
 The hope of humanity is the manhood revealed in 
 the Christ, who is God making himself man to enlarge 
 the bounds of human experience. 
 
 These fundamental ideas have as much challenge 
 now as then, because the scene enacted in Athens two 
 thousand years ago has been reenacted whenever any 
 Christian apostle has summoned any Athens. They 
 survive intact the translation of the scene into terms 
 of one's own Athens, one's own environment of 
 thought and life. Translation into terms of con- 
 temporary Boston, Oxford, or Chicago will revivify 
 dying words ; but it must be safeguarded by expand- 
 
 11 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 ing only in the direction of the whole trend of thought 
 seen in the speaker's other utterances. Such trans- 
 lation, seeking the thought at once through experience 
 and through literary interpretation, will open the 
 way for exploration. 
 
 "While the missionary was waiting for them in 
 Boston on his way to New York, he was cut to the soul 
 to see the city overrun with false religions. So he 
 debated in church with those who had the older relig- 
 ious traditions, and on the Common every day with 
 any one that came along. WTien the Realists and 
 Pragmatists from Harvard fell in with him, some of 
 them said, 'What is this word-monger trying to say ?' 
 and the others replied, 'He is probably a Swami, or 
 a prophet of some other Oriental cult' this because 
 they heard 'incarnation' and 'resurrection'. But they 
 set him before an open meeting of the Discussion 
 Club with the sarcastic introduction : 'May we know 
 just what this new philosophy that you are talking 
 about so much is ? You bring to our attention some- 
 thing shall we say ? exotic. So we wish to know 
 what it really amounts to.' Bostonians, you know, 
 and also the transient intellectuals who are pursuing 
 Boston culture, enjoy nothing so much as hearing and 
 discussing religious novelties. 
 
 "Then the missionary rose and said : 
 12 
 
RELIGION IN THE OPEN 
 
 " 'Ladies and gentlemen of Boston, the thing that 
 strikes me most here is the insatiable appetite for 
 religion. After I had reviewed, as I thought, the 
 whole list of your various worships, I found one more 
 expressed in an altar with this inscription, To GOD 
 UNKNOWN. Now my doctrine is simply the definite 
 proclamation of him whom you do not know. 
 
 " 'God, if you conceive him as creative, as the 
 maker of the world, or rather of the universe, has not 
 come to live with men in the sense that men brought 
 him down by realizing him in their own images, in 
 the sense that he is limited and divided by our various 
 subjective conceptions. Worship, therefore, cannot 
 rightly be the projection of our own imaginations; 
 for that makes God depend on us. 
 
 " 'No, it is of the very essence of God that he gives, 
 that he is the life-giver, the maker of men and of 
 nations, diversifying individual and ethnic life from 
 the common human stock. The common human im- 
 pulse to seek God moves as if we were fumbling after 
 and trying to find him who cannot be far from any 
 one of us, since in him we live and move and are. 
 Your own best poets have said in various ways that 
 we are his offspring. 
 
 " 'But since we are the offspring of God, we may 
 not permit ourselves to worship our own images of 
 
 13 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 God, however beautiful the embodiment of these 
 human conceptions, as if the images were divine. 
 What is really divine can be known ; for it has been 
 fully revealed. In those times and places, indeed, 
 when men could not grasp fully, God has responded 
 to such imperfect worship, such gropings, as yours; 
 but those times are not these, and those earlier seekers 
 after God are not you. Your worship may no longer 
 content itself with the empty beauty of outworn imag- 
 inations, nor your theology with those philosophical 
 speculations which remain abstract because they balk 
 at moral issues. Morality may be the long story of 
 human behavior; but righteousness is divine. The 
 hope of righteousness in the world is that the Creator 
 is the judge. 
 
 " 'God has come to dwell with men in the only way 
 satisfying to the soul, not through our embodying his 
 divinity, but through his embodying our humanity. 
 We need not imagine him; for we can receive him, 
 since he gives himself. This is the final meaning of 
 God as the life-giver. His final revelation is per- 
 sonal; for our final need is the empowering of per- 
 sonality. He has given us, not a larger philosophy 
 nor a higher imaginative conception, but himself. 
 The personal influence of God is not limited by our 
 philosophic or imaginative grasp ; it is not our ideas 
 
 14 
 
KELIGIOIsT IN THE OPEN 
 
 or imaginations ; it is personality working directly on 
 personality. Jesus is not another great man; he is 
 God made man. To receive him is not to accept an- 
 other philosophy or another example; it is to receive 
 God. The eternal life that has been the dream of 
 every great soul and the blind hope of even the small- 
 est has been given completely and really, not partially 
 and symbolically, by being given in the person of the 
 Son of God. Thus the rising of the Son of God from 
 the dead is not the survival of a man, nor the with- 
 drawal of God after a revelation of himself on earth ; 
 it is the proof of the empowering of mankind with 
 eternal life. And the only real worship is the wor- 
 ship of God really present to empower us.' 
 
 "When they heard 'rising from the dead', some 
 openly jeered. Others said, 'We should like to hear 
 you discuss that further.' So the missionary left 
 them, since with him discussion was a means, not an 
 end. But some of them a judge of an old Cam- 
 bridge family and several others, including one 
 woman hung upon him until they received the 
 faith." 
 
 15 
 
II 
 
 GREEK AND JEW 
 
 THE most obvious contrast in the dramatic scene 
 is that between Greek and Jew. In one of his 
 most interesting essays, Hebraism and Hellenism, 
 Matthew Arnold reminds us that the Greek spirit and 
 habit are pleasanter to live with. He does not go so 
 far as to assert that Hellenism is better to live by; 
 and all his praise, however warmly seconded by our 
 own, leaves that doubt. Savonarola must have been 
 very unpleasant in Florence. To read Langland 
 may be very disturbing after the serenity of Chaucer. 
 When we try to be Greeks, the Jews disturb us de- 
 liberately. When we talk of art, they talk of moral- 
 ity; when we seek to enrich life, they insist on 
 religion. What has religion to do with life? That 
 is the essential question ; and no one has answered it 
 more squarely than the missionary in the Areopagus. 
 We need not pause over those bastard modern 
 Hellenisms which have from time to time masked 
 loose thought and base living. The apostle knew the 
 real Hellenism none better. He quotes its poetry ; 
 
 16 
 
GEEEK AND JEW 
 
 he shows his grasp of its philosophy; and if he calls 
 its art idols, that is because he is considering it philo- 
 sophically, as Plato sometimes considers poetry, in the 
 single aspect of its expression of the divine, not be- 
 cause he is a bigot. The word idol, for him and for his 
 hearers, had none of our associations with savages. 
 Nor was he limited for his knowledge of Hellenism 
 to his Greek reading. He knew Greek life. He 
 judged Greek thought by its fruit of manhood and 
 womanhood. We are disconcerted sometimes by a 
 strange moral lack even in Plato, andjjpeflect that even 
 Socrates did not suffice for Alcibiade^j but the apostle 
 knew the perverted life of Corinth. The two epistles 
 to the Corinthians expose in Hellenism an organic 
 weakness, an unsoundness of moral fiber. Even 
 Athens, with all her wealth of tradition, could no 
 longer fortify the Greek soul. It is for manhood 
 that he contends with the Greeks in the sight of their 
 immortal gods. 
 
 As the Athens of that day still stood for the real 
 Hellenism, nobler than perfumed modern imitations, 
 so the unknown Jew stood for the full Hebraism, for 
 the hope of Israel as the hope of the world. His 
 longest and most highly reasoned work, the epistle to 
 the Romans, is a philosophy of history. It unfolds 
 the function of a great race in the universally human 
 
 17 
 
GOD 
 
 quest. He was intensely conscious of the destiny of 
 race in the development of humanity. This, and 
 not a vague sentiment of brotherhood, animates the 
 oft-quoted passage: "He made of one every nation 
 of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, limiting 
 their appointed 'days' and the bounds of their dwell- 
 ing." We can feel its significance keenly to-day by 
 thinking of Russia, more than once subjugated as 
 Judea was then, indignant at alien violation, groping 
 for its destiny, holding in uncertain hands so much 
 of the fate of the world. 
 
 Such a thinker did not undervalue the Greek func- 
 tion of order in thought and beauty in expression. 
 He does not rule it out ; he seeks to lead it on, as he 
 seeks to lead on the Jewish tradition, to fulfilment. 
 He would not reconcile the two by compromise; he 
 feels the full clash; but he is sure of God, who in- 
 spires and shall empower both toward the realization 
 of a larger humanity. \ Hellenism and Hebraism are 
 not logically contradictory ; but they cannot be united 
 by merely mechanical combination, still less by 
 oscillating between the two. When duty has not seen 
 beauty, we have intolerance and fanaticism ; but when 
 beauty has forgotten duty, even Athens is lapsing to 
 decaj,, and the Rome of later centuries, or the ISTew 
 York of to-day, produces Cellinis and Borgias. 
 
 18 
 
GKEEK AOT3 JEW 
 
 If we resent the crucifix among the splendid gods, 
 the warfare of duty on beauty, we are in need of more 
 than a reconciling formula, a philosophic allotment to 
 this and to that; we need personal unity. It is not 
 the Jew who divides our lives; it is the Greek for 
 lack of hold on the divine as organically unifying. 
 The more Athenian I am, the more I worship archi- 
 tecture and sculpture and painting and music and 
 literature and drama and philosophy, the more I feel 
 the distraction of warring claims and the need of a 
 single development of the whole personality. For 
 surely I should add sociology and politics and re- 
 ligion? Since there is doubtless something or some- 
 body in what survives or is rediscovered as religion, I 
 will keep space enough for an altar To GOD UN- 
 KNOWN. But can religion be a part of life ? Must it 
 not be all or nothing ? Those who say that they have 
 not felt the need of religion are thinking of religion as 
 a refuge and solace from facts, or as an aspiration be- 
 yond facts. But if it is rather obedience to truth, it 
 cannot be a part, much less a negligible part ; and if 
 it is the response of man to God, then it may engage 
 the whole personality and give to life an integrating 
 power. 
 
 So the apostle seeks to reunite a life already di- 
 vided, to make life single by turning it from many 
 
 19 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 gods to the one God. There is no real or abiding 
 beauty apart from truth. Life, to be at once true 
 and beautiful, must be centered ; it becomes ugly and 
 false by being dissipated in many worships. This is 
 the meaning of those first challenging words. "Too 
 religious?" thinks the Athenian, ancient or modern. 
 "Most preachers have complained that I am not relig- 
 ious enough." But if he analyzes his life, he will ad- 
 mit that its central weakness is too many worships. 
 God is one, says the Jew to the Greek. Truth is one ; 
 and it is the source of beauty. Have you not learned 
 from Aristotle that all so-called virtues are from one 
 source, radiating from one vitalizing and informing 
 virtue ? Duty is one, behind and beneath all duties. 
 There is one great ought, central and animating, 
 "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Thereby shalt 
 thou know how to love thy neighbor and to harmonize 
 art with sociology. "Seek ye first the kingdom of 
 God", and ye shall open your hearts to all expressions 
 of manhood. For life is one. 
 
 20 
 
T 
 
 Ill 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 
 
 HE Jew tells the Greeks that they must make 
 up their minds about God. He will not let 
 them leave the question of God open by erecting a 
 provisional and empty altar to God Unknown. If 
 they have outgrown earlier conceptions, these must 
 no longer be cherished merely because the expression 
 of them was beautiful. Life cannot fall back on art ; 
 art must express life, or it will weaken and betray. 
 Life demands a real knowledge of God. You must 
 not only seek him, he says, but find him. He is un- 
 known ? Then you must know him ; for, since he is 
 God, you must obey him. The hour strikes here in 
 Areopagus. 
 
 Greek philosophy preferred to leave the question of 
 God open. But some of its latest speculations were 
 its most beautiful because they came nearest to con- 
 clusion and maintained an attitude of expectancy. 
 Socrates as he is dramatized for us in the dialogues 
 of Plato, and Plato himself, as he ranges beyond his 
 master, look for God. The noblest and most thrilling 
 
 21 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 of the Platonic dialogues are more than speculations 
 on immortality; they are aspirations and counsels 
 toward laying hold of the divine life. Such thinking 
 the apostle in the Areopagus does not for a moment 
 disparage. He wishes only to carry it forward. To 
 the question put so humanly he brings the divine 
 answer: "He that seeketh shall find." 
 
 Neither Plato nor any other philosopher gives a 
 moment's tolerance to the cant saying, "It makes no 
 difference what you believe, so long as you do right." 
 Imagine anyone venturing to say that to Socrates! 
 Common as it is, it has no meaning. It expresses the 
 lazy living that comes from lack of thought. For we 
 can do only what we believe. The apostle's insistence 
 on right belief is the insistence of every philosopher, 
 not necessarily on a code, but on a principle of life. 
 Not only may we attain, he says, the knowledge that 
 shall guide our lives, but we must. That cannot 
 remain an open question. 
 
 So the apostle, while he shows full appreciation of 
 all philosophy that is really seeking, rebukes sharply 
 merely philosophizing, the popular use of philosophy 
 for intellectual pastime and display. "All the Athe- 
 nians," says his companion and historian, "and 
 strangers which were there spent their time in nothing 
 else but either to tell or to hear some new thing." 
 
 22 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION 
 
 It is a description of every Athens; it exposes the 
 danger of every intellectual society, the danger of 
 talk for the sake of talking and for the postponement 
 of action. Hardened into habit, he says elsewhere,* 
 such talk is no better than the flightiness of "silly 
 women, following various impulses, always learning 
 and never able to arrive at knowledge of the truth." 
 This is what the man in the street means by asking, 
 "What's the use of philosophy ? it doesn't get you any- 
 where." The saying is rude; but the objection is 
 real. Though it uses the word philosophy in a per- 
 verted sense, the word would not bear that sense if 
 philosophy had not been abused for centuries by those 
 intellectuals who have no desire to get, or to be got, 
 anywhere. Too many Athenians, ancient and modern, 
 have developed what Matthew Arnold calls "openness 
 of mind, quickness and flexibility of intelligence", 
 at the expense of intellectual energy and honesty. In- 
 stead, of becoming producers, such men are content 
 to remain gymnasts. Areopagus needs a missionary. 
 Philosophy becomes sterile by losing touch with life. 
 To keep the mind open may be a habit actively and 
 constructively scientific, or it may be the veriest idle- 
 ness. The Athenian tolerance of religions and our 
 
 *2 Tim. 3: 6. 
 
 23 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 own tolerance may be no more than unwillingness 
 to commit oneself. Free discussion of any religion 
 may mean that the discussers wish to have no religion. 
 Let us consider how differently men have sought God, 
 lest we ourselves should be compelled to find him. 
 But is there not more likeness than difference ; and is 
 not the significant fact that they all sought except 
 you ? Let us contemplate the divisions of Christen- 
 dom to assure ourselves that there is no Christianity. 
 But is not the significant fact the vital persistence in 
 spite of so much division and perversion; and will 
 you seek to reduce the variations to a least common 
 denominator, or rule them all out alike, because you 
 are afraid to choose ? 
 
 The missionary in the Areopagus is not tolerant in 
 the sense of being indifferent. He is for making con- 
 trasts and oppositions, and above all for arriving, for 
 thinking through to an available conclusion. He 
 admits that the finding of God is indirect, meditative, 
 and poetic ; but he insists that it is also direct, prac- 
 ticable, and determinate. "He hath determined the 
 times and the bounds, if haply they might find him, 
 though he be not far." Is not philosophy, then, a 
 journey rather than an arrival ? To the question of 
 God there are only answers, not the answer. This 
 missionary insists on the answer that shall integrate 
 
 24 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION 
 
 all true answers. He insists; that is the annoying 
 habit of missionaries. I am not satisfied with my 
 gods; I am quite willing to consider any others; I 
 have publicly proclaimed my openness of mind by a 
 provisional altar. I am not ready to commit myself. 
 Why may I not remain free ? 
 
 "Certain there be," says Bacon at the opening of 
 his essay on Truth, "that delight in giddiness, and 
 count it a bondage to fix a belief, affecting free will in 
 thinking as well as in acting." It is a grim saying 
 of a great intellect. There is a philosopher's scorn in 
 that word affecting. It brushes away the talkers from 
 the field of real search. To be real, the seeking must 
 be bent on finding, not content with the search itself. 
 The search for God needs more than debate and specu- 
 lation, more even than research; for it is a life ad- 
 venture, like the search for the Northwest Passage. 
 It is the working out of that persistent human desire 
 in which all races of men are of one blood. 
 
 This universal human desire is not satisfied by 
 philosophy. Not only philosophizing, but philosophy 
 in its true sense, may stop short of God. "Canst 
 thou by searching find out God ?" is the question of a 
 poet who is most clearly a philosopher. It discerns in 
 human thinking not so much a defect as a limit. 
 Agnosticism is the name given in the last generation 
 
 25 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 to a philosophy that doubts the intellectual possibility 
 of thinking through to God; and the name contains 
 the very word unknown that the apostle found in- 
 scribed on that Greek altar. Agnosticism may, in- 
 deed, be lazy; but it may be humble and honest. 
 What right, then, has the apostle to say that it must 
 be temporary ? Can we force our thinking through 
 to God? No, the finding on which he insists he 
 presents as more than a logical conclusion. While he 
 bids the Athenians use their reasoning productively, 
 not gymnastically, he tells them that the finding of 
 God is guided by God directly. To know God is 
 more than to reason out a philosophy of life ; it is to 
 reach out with the whole personality for a person ever 
 responsive. Nor is it the achievement of the few 
 who are philosophers; it is the hope of mankind. 
 Most men and women are quite unprepared to reach 
 God by thinking steadily and thinking through ; they 
 are not therefore condemned to live without him. 
 For "he is not far from any one of us." 
 
 The human desire for God, because it is human, is 
 emotional. There was once a philosophy which di- 
 vided feeling from reason almost as if each inhabited 
 separately and exclusively its own lobe of the brain. 
 That division is not tolerated by modern psychology, 
 and it was never tolerated by Christianity. We are 
 
 26 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGIOJST 
 
 not so crudely twofold. The terms feeling and reason 
 are useful only as expressing different directions of 
 the single personality. It is plain that both enter 
 into what we call will, which is the common name for 
 the personality expressing itself in decision and 
 action. We habitually, and as we say instinctively, 
 distrust either without the other. We distrust reason 
 by itself, and we do not usually obey it ; we distrust 
 feeling by itself, and, though we obey it oftener, in- 
 deed too often, we are wont to explain such decisions 
 in terms of reason. An instant decision is not neces- 
 sarily invalid. It may be the response of the whole 
 previous habit of life, the spontaneous reaction of 
 the whole personality, and therefore larger than the 
 reasons that we can immediately formulate. It may 
 be all the sounder for embracing feeling as well as 
 reason; for feeling is part of experience. None the 
 less we do well to test it by reasoning it out ; for the 
 chief practical use of reasoning is to analyze. Feel- 
 ing, in most men, is more constructive, and living is 
 larger than reasoning; but that does not dispense 
 anyone from reasoning as far as he can, nor permit 
 feeling to be unreasonable. In short, feeling and 
 reason are complementary. Instead of regarding one 
 as superior to the other, instead of pretending that 
 we usually act from either "pure reason" or "pure 
 
 27 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 feeling'', we ought to realize that logical progress 
 without emotional progress may be illusory, and that 
 feeling, as well as reason, needs to be educated. For 
 education has little meaning except as the develop- 
 ment of the whole personality. 
 
 The speech in the Areopagus appeals fully by 
 offering a satisfaction at once logical and emotional, 
 a progress of both thinking and feeling in the 
 integrating development of manhood. What the 
 rhetoricians call appeal to feeling is most obvious in 
 the opening challenge and in the reference to Greek 
 poetry. We may read between the lines of the sum- 
 mary report that the apostle appealed to feeling all 
 through the speech, that the appeal to feeling, as in 
 most real oratory, was pervasive; but certainly he 
 appeals none the less to reason. For the speech has 
 a close consecutiveness of ideas from the point that 
 God is the creator, through the point that he is there- 
 fore continuously the empowerer, to the point that he 
 is the liberator of human life. But its consistency 
 is more than logical. It seeks singly to animate the 
 whole personality. While it gives argument it gives 
 vision. 
 
 So each hearer of the message attains the vision oi 
 God not by logic alone nor by emotion alone, but bj 
 a total apprehension through all the ways of his ex 
 
 28 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGIOET 
 
 perience. So also this satisfaction of the whole per- 
 sonality is not merely in philosophy, but in religion. 
 A man's religion has more or less philosophy accord- 
 ing to his intellectual bent and training; but in any 
 case it is more than his philosophy, which is at most 
 his religion formulated. The message from the Are- 
 opagus is that religion is not merely the various quests 
 of man for God; it is God's response. "He that 
 seeketh shall find" because God gives himself. To 
 know God is not merely to expand one's theory of 
 knowledge. Faith, which is the vision of human life 
 fulfilled, discovers not only "that he is", but "that he 
 is the rewarder of them that diligently seek him." 
 We are not to lay aside thinking ; we are to think not 
 less, but more ; we must not shirk ; we must not remain 
 agnostics. But we are to remember that the goal is 
 neither a beautiful symbol nor a working hypothesis. 
 Philosophy attains a reasoned view of truth. That is 
 not the whole answer to the questing soul. The an- 
 swer, says the apostle, is not simply my arrival at a 
 goal of thought, my interpretation of experience ; it is 
 an enlargement of my personality by the answering 
 touch of the supreme personality. As our inmost 
 desire is for more than a principle, so the only ade- 
 quate answer is God himself. 
 
 That is why the conclusion of the Areopagus ad- 
 29 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 dress contains the word most irritating to all Athe- 
 nians, the word repent. Not only by Greek philosophy, 
 but by most other philosophy, repentance is ignored 
 or even rejected. This is the more remarkable since 
 it is generally accepted by unphilosophic mankind as 
 natural and even welcome. It is what I might ex- 
 pect God to say if he answered my whole desire. 
 The word is religious. It almost sums up the im- 
 portant fact that religion answers far more people 
 than can ever comprehend the answers of philosophy. 
 To repent is to prepare oneself for God. It expresses 
 the human experience that to find God is at once 
 larger and more common than to think out a theory 
 of the divine. Men have always found it natural, 
 since the attainment is more than intellectual, that 
 the quest itself should be emotional and moral. Else 
 it would not be the quest of one's whole manhood. 
 And the apostle adds that the response is as large as 
 the desire. To find God is not only to attain, but to 
 receive. It is love answered by love. 
 
 Love always makes us conscious of our defects and 
 eager to make them good. Without that strong de- 
 sire to give and to receive personally we may remain 
 complacent, and even resent reminders of our short- 
 comings ; but our content with morality good enough 
 for the crowd is at once disturbed by the desire for a 
 
 30 
 
PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION 
 
 large and deep personal relation. "I am not good 
 enough for him. I will be better, more worthy of 
 his friendship. I will prepare myself for real com- 
 munion." Every strong personal influence includes 
 this moral awakening of friends, and gives a clue to 
 God's awakening of manhood. Sin is a term now 
 unfashionable. "Miserable sinners" suggests to many 
 people, confident of keeping themselves out of jail, 
 the merest cant. "We are heartily sorry for these our 
 misdoings. The remembrance of them is grievous 
 unto us; the burden of them is intolerable." In- 
 tolerable! On the contrary, I bear it with perfect 
 ease, and am often able to forget it entirely. Why 
 will Christianity still try to put into my mouth 
 phrases so antiquated and exaggerated? Because 
 that prayer is part of the preparation for the presence 
 of God. Until I set out really to approach him, I 
 am but dimly conscious of my untruth, my flinchings 
 and perversions. They are revealed by the thought 
 of him. "In thy light shall we see light." Sin is 
 revealed as untruth to his vision of me and as the bar 
 between us. In order to commune with him, I will 
 try to be my real self. 
 
 So repentance is the Christian enlargement of the 
 philosopher's "Know thyself". To know oneself is 
 rightly made by philosophy a condition of knowing 
 
 31 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 God. It is a necessary road for honest thought. But 
 it demands more than psychological analysis, and it 
 thrives on the purpose to know God. To reach out 
 for what I can be helps me to realize what I am ; and 
 to realize what I am opens the intercourse which shall 
 make me what I can be. Sin is what I do when I am 
 untrue to myself. It is the perversion and interrup- 
 tion of my personality. That I see in the light of the 
 divine personality. I wish to lay hold of God in 
 order to become more and more myself. To find 
 God includes finding myself. To find myself de- 
 mands more than the formulation of my philosophy ; 
 it demands the realization of my religion. The 
 goal of my life is more than formula, more than 
 a principle of living. Righteousness, or personal 
 efficiency, is achieved through obedience to a response 
 made to my whole self. The apostle who preached 
 repentance even to Greek philosophy put it into a 
 great sentence a few years later before a Roman 
 court. The sentence sums up for every age that 
 answer of the human to the divine which is the essence 
 of religion. "I was not disobedient to the heavenly 
 vision." * 
 
 *Acts 26: 19. 
 
 32 
 
IV 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 THUS the personal language of the Areopagus 
 address, however much it may have shocked the 
 Athenians as unphilosophic, is essential. 'Not the 
 divine, but God; not seekers for truth, but offspring 
 of God; and in general not ii, but him; such terms 
 might seem a new sort of poetizing. But the Athe- 
 nian intelligence was quick to perceive that they im- 
 plied a direct answer to the real human question, 
 What has God to do with me ? Indeed, the posing of 
 the question in such terms must itself contribute to 
 the answer if the question be really concerning per- 
 sonality. Is it not? Is not the eternally human 
 concern with philosophy to learn how to enrich and 
 empower human life ? I seek experience and I think 
 it out in order to become more intensely and largely 
 myself. If I listen to poetry, if I hope that the quest 
 of the Holy Grail may be more than a dream, my 
 hope is not merely of respite from life, nor even of 
 the inspiration of a truth larger than logic; it is of 
 some more direct development of my manhood. 
 
 33 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 In the beautiful poem that we all read at school, 
 The Vision of Sir Launfal, Lowell's knight returns 
 from the quest of the Holy Grail disheartened. He 
 has sought in vain. He feels that the Grail must be, 
 as Tennyson's Arthur saw, one of the "wandering 
 fires". Then at home again, at his own gate sharing 
 his pilgrim's crust with the beggar to whom on setting 
 out he had carelessly flung alms, he is illuminated. 
 He grasps emotionally that great saying, "Whoso 
 shall receive one such little child . . . receiveth me." 
 Lowell even formulates his conclusion : 
 
 Who gives himself with his gift feeds three 
 Himself, his hungering brother, and Me. 
 
 Here is the insight of poetry. "Who gives himself" 
 expresses the final desire of every generous soul. 
 What we are trying to do in every work that we love 
 is to give ourselves. All oratory, all teaching, is in 
 its degree the giving of the speaker with the word. 
 And what is love? Every gift of my friend, every 
 word of his to me, is but the sign of the real gift of 
 himself. We all wish to believe that to give ourselves 
 not only enhances the material gift, but makes it 
 abound, that the widow's mite is indeed worth more 
 than its face value nay, that the only real gift is the 
 gift of oneself, the imparting of one's personality. 
 
 34 
 
PEKSOXALITY 
 
 Should God, then, give only gifts, not the great 
 gift? Cannot God give himself? Should not the 
 giving of the supreme personality be perfectly per- 
 sonal? What should be the personal influence of 
 God? Can it be limited by those material means 
 which we ourselves find inadequate, by those words 
 through which the imparting of ourselves is even at 
 best imperfect ? Is the love of God only an idea of 
 mine? To these questions Lowell's answer is very 
 sad. We cannot find the Holy Grail except in our 
 fellow men. We can give to God by giving ourselves 
 to them; but God cannot give himself to us. Here 
 poetry reveals in a flash the bounds of much con- 
 temporary religious thought. Keligion, we have 
 often been told, has learned to turn from other-world- 
 liness to the human cry of our brothers. It has been 
 socialized. It has come out of the churches into the 
 streets. It has turned from prayer to sociology, from 
 worship to education, from saving souls to saving 
 babies. To such work we are to give not only our 
 money, but ourselves. "Who gives himself with his 
 gift feeds three" ; but the question still burns in our 
 hearts, Who shall feed the giver? I can give no 
 more than I am ; and in the face of the human need 
 what am I ? 
 
 "Si jeunesse savait; si vieillesse pouvait" The 
 35 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 wistful French line echoes a dissonance, now pathetic, 
 now tragic, in Greek poetry and philosophy, yes, in 
 all literature. If youth but knew in time; if age, 
 which knows, could do ! Alas ! we have no more than 
 begun before we lose bit by bit the force to carry on. 
 The mightiest feel their work slipping away. Old 
 Charlemagne's last building days are shadowed by 
 the apparition of a pirate ship. Napoleon returns, 
 but not to his first power. The real Barbarossa and 
 the mystic Arthur alike return in dreams. It is a 
 commonplace; but every ardent soul learns it afresh 
 through the hand laid on his own heart ; and humanity 
 would die of despair but for the certitude of youth 
 that the flow and ebb of the physical tide is not the 
 formula of life. Youth believes in immortal life; 
 Christianity offers eternal life. Eternal life is pro- 
 claimed not as the survival of the physical struggle, 
 not as extension but as expansion, not as prolongation 
 but as growth, as the ripening of power with knowl- 
 edge in the development of human personality by 
 personal contact with God. 
 
 The language of the Areopagus speech is personal 
 because its message is life from life, personal life 
 from personal life, eternal life from eternal life. 
 That message may be read in its earliest and simplest 
 written terms as the two letters to the Thessalonians. 
 
 36 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 Most frequently it is iterated by early Christianity 
 in the phrase "sons of God" ; but in other phrases also 
 it pervades the New Testament. "I am come that 
 ye might have life, and that ye might have it more 
 abundantly." The language of gospels and epistles, 
 of the utterly simple letters to the Thessalonians and 
 the cogent essay to the Romans, of the practical wis- 
 dom of St. James and the poetry of St. John, is con- 
 sistently biological. This is even commoner in direct 
 statement than in parable. The sower is a parable, 
 and "the seed is the word of God"; but "the word 
 was God". "How can a man be born again ?" cried 
 the questing rabbi ; but the answer was a reiteration, 
 "so is every one that is born of the spirit". "How 
 can this man give us his flesh to eat?" jeered the 
 materialists ; and the answer bated no jot : "Whoso 
 eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal 
 life." No version of the Holy Grail, not the most 
 highly imaginative, is more concrete. 
 
 If we say that these are figures of speech, our in- 
 quiry is not advanced. Figures of what ? For what 
 do the figures stand, for dreams or for revelation, for 
 human longing or also for divine response, for an 
 aspiration or for a gift and what gift ? We talk of 
 religion too much in figures, clouding or postponing 
 thought ; and we have no right to live by dreams. To 
 
 37 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 seek the end of the rainbow is a pastime hardly toler- 
 able even for children. Let a man set himself to read 
 the opening of the fourth gospel afresh, trying to put 
 away prejudice and other conventional bars, setting 
 himself to scrutinize the intention of the words them- 
 selves as if he had never seen them before. Is it 
 Platonism ? Never mind ; we are not seeking a label. 
 It is poetry; yea, verily, and philosophy too, and 
 therefore is the more likely to be truth. But what 
 does it mean ? Such reading cannot but reflect that 
 the passage "as many as received him, to them gave 
 he power to become the sons of God" speaks the char- 
 acteristic language of Christianity, cannot but dwell 
 on that expression which is most characteristic, not 
 "as many as received it", his doctrine, his philosophy, 
 his example, but "as many as received him". For 
 the New Testament, with all that we can elsewhere 
 gather of the Christian worship and life that it repre- 
 sents, makes Christianity the receiving of the Christ. 
 The assumption that we can receive the Christ only 
 as we receive Plato denies both a persistent human 
 aspiration and the plain meaning of the New Testa- 
 ment. It simply rules out the universally human in- 
 quiry. What is it for me to know God ? If instead 
 of starting with an assumption, we try to explore the 
 meaning of the New Testament as we try to explore 
 
 38 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 the meaning of Dante or Kant, seeking the intention 
 before drawing our inferences, we shall read some 
 startling things concerning personality. For thus we 
 should measure, not ruling them out as figurative, 
 those terms of biology. What is probably the earliest 
 book of the canon is addressed "to the church of the 
 Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus 
 Christ". No more mystic language can be found in 
 the latest. "Herein is my Father glorified, that ye 
 bear much fruit. So shall ye be my disciples." So ? 
 Not, then, primarily by subscribing or embracing or 
 defending or following, but by living as branches of 
 a vine. Certainly this is a figure, a figure of organic 
 life ; but what does it mean concerning human life ? 
 We have at last become thoroughly aware of a de- 
 fect in old measures of efficiency. Brunetiere's La 
 banqueroute de la science rebuked the complacent 
 looseness of our talk of progress a generation before 
 the practise of a false doctrine of efficiency finally 
 goaded the world to arms. Meantime the profession 
 of the engineer has been gradually enriched and ex- 
 panded in proportion as it has learned to measure and 
 to promote efficiency humanly. The complicated and 
 menacing problems of employment are at least 
 summed up, though not yet solved, in the phrase 
 human efficiency. For in spite of all our machinery 
 
 39 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 and all our computations in "units" we have learnecl 
 that not only administrative efficiency, but labor effi- 
 ciency, is the efficiency of persons. Appalled by our 
 frightful human waste, we have set about the con- 
 servation of human energy. The waste of misdirec- 
 tion inspired a wide extension of vocational training. 
 Real progress may be read in our laws restricting 
 child labor, in our preventive medicine and surgery, 
 in our trade schools, in all the scientific philanthropy 
 that seeks to save and develop persons. 
 
 But there is in human efficiency something beyond 
 law and surgery, beyond technical skill and eugenics. 
 Its imperfections cannot always be set down to bad 
 food or bad eyes, bad schools or bad parents; and 
 its improvement is not always accomplished by a 
 prescription of soup, gymnasium, and evening classes. 
 The sum of physical capacity and technical skill may 
 be greater or less than the total human efficiency ; it 
 does not measure a man's effective power in society. 
 The searchings of war have reminded us that human 
 efficiency, operative, executive, administrative, and 
 above all initiative, is in the last analysis moral. 
 Scientific philanthropy has something to learn from 
 the Salvation Army. Those who are offended at the 
 cant use of the word salvation may get a fresh and 
 true conception by pondering what is meant in arid 
 
 40 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 or impoverished districts by the salvation of land. It 
 is commonly called redemption; and it consists in 
 revivifying latent or spent forces by feeding them 
 with new force; it is life awakening and liberating 
 life. While we were studying and classifying 
 juvenile delinquency, and finding laws, reforma- 
 tories, psychiatry, and settlements inadequate, 
 William George had the inspiration to cultivate moral 
 responsibility by trust. Judge Lindsey revolution- 
 ized criminal procedure by making children's courts 
 deal personally with the boy himself. The "Big 
 Brother" movement, sentimental in name, amateur 
 and almost impromptu in origin, leaped to success 
 because, whatever its specific prescription of food or 
 schooling or camp, its method was singly and con- 
 stantly the fortifying of moral fiber through per- 
 sonal contacts. 
 
 Human efficiency is expressed by Christianity in 
 personal terms as being personal in this sense. It is 
 measured by Christianity, not in man-hours, not as 
 labor skilled or unskilled, but as life ; and as life it is 
 to be guarded and promoted. Herein lies the sug- 
 gestiveness of the habitually biological language. The 
 human product is not square yards, barrels, or books ; 
 it is fruit. The figure connotes more than soil and 
 seed; it means growth. Laborers by the hour or 
 
 41 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 the piece, students preoccupied with courses and 
 "points", should look through what they are making, 
 acquiring, or passing to what they are growing. 
 Fruit as a term of growth implies that human pro- 
 duction, as in the figure of the seed or of the vine, 
 may be organic. It is not synonymous with the ordi- 
 nary sense of accomplishment. Both the process and 
 the progress that it suggests are vital, the working 
 out from within of life that shall feed and reproduce. 
 The fruit bears the seed. 
 
 The effort of organic life is toward reproduction. 
 Plant side by side in the laboratory two equal grains 
 of corn. Give one its due supply of moisture and 
 of plant foods while you starve the other. When the 
 second has all but ceased its struggle to grow, feed it 
 as you have fed the thriving first. What will the 
 starveling do ? How will it direct its organic effort ? 
 Will it first spread forth leaves to catch the sun? 
 Will it first insure its own health and stature ? No, 
 lest it should die too soon, it will first focus its vitality 
 on producing fruit. It will bear, however stunted, 
 ears of corn. Human life, in the Christian figure 
 of fruit, is to receive, nourish, and transmit life. 
 "Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much 
 fruit", means that God, as the creative source of life, 
 brings forth the human harvest from men for men 
 
 42 
 
PEKSOJSTALITY 
 
 by empowering men. "So shall je be my disciples" ; 
 not merely by imitating my example, nor by accept- 
 ing my words, but by receiving my life to develop 
 your own. "As many as received him, to them gave 
 he power to become the sons of God". In that fully 
 personal sense "we are his offspring". 
 
 "As many as received him" implies also that per- 
 sonality is worth developing even when it cannot be 
 discerned as exceptional, when it seems quite ordinary 
 human nature. The idea is very democratic; it is 
 exactly opposite to that of the cultivation of the super- 
 man at the expense of his fellows. It is the hope, 
 not of egoists and tyrants, but of the world. Assert- 
 iveness is specifically rebuked by the divine paradox, 
 "He that saveth his life shall lose it." My person- 
 ality is to be developed not that I may have more, 
 but that I may give more. Indeed, I expand by 
 giving, as the plant yields. None the less, rather 
 more and more, that which is developed is myself. 
 Those who fear lest Christianity should violate their 
 personalities discern a truth, but not the whole truth. 
 Christianity does, indeed, thwart many desires, in- 
 hibit many ambitions, make a law of sacrifice; but 
 sacrifice of what? Of getting and having to being 
 and giving. Which counts more in the development 
 of humanity ? What do we mean and desire by per- 
 
 43 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 sonal development ? Christianity says that we should 
 desire much fruit. 
 
 Those who have imagined the Holy Grail out of 
 passionate desire to receive God have sought not only 
 a heavenly vision, but the heavenly food. They have 
 desired the power to do through the power to be. 
 "My soul is athirst for God, for the living God", is 
 more than the rapture of an initiate ; it is the echo of 
 a great human cry. The message from the Are- 
 opagus is that the cry is answered, that to "feel after 
 him and find him" has its complement in "he is not 
 far", that God so loves the world as to give himself. 
 "Offspring of God" had become to the Greeks stale 
 in speech and in art. The apostle seeks to revive the 
 empty symbol by giving to it the personal meaning of 
 "sons of God". Personality is implicit in revelation ; 
 the Old Testament and the New are a progressive 
 revelation of the divine empowering of human life; 
 what the apostle urges as the final revelation is com- 
 pletely personal, the man who is God. 
 
 The Christian incarnation is not God as embodied 
 by man; it is God embodying man. It differs es- 
 sentially from other incarnations, which are conceived 
 as a temporary sharing of human experience, by being 
 final and permanent. God has not only visited us; 
 he abides with us and forever shares our human 
 
 44 
 
PEKSOSTALITY 
 
 nature. It is sharply distinct from divine imma- 
 nence, the idea of God diffused through the universe. 
 Emmanuel, God with us, has always meant to the 
 Jew more than this; and to the Christian it means 
 still more. It means a presence completely personal. 
 "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us." 
 Therefore to know God is to approach nearer and 
 nearer to the Son of God. Christianity constantly 
 urges this as the only way because the word is God. 
 To know God fully is to know him personally; to 
 know him personally is to receive his personality ; to 
 receive his personality is to receive the Son of God 
 who is fully Son of Man. 
 
 45 
 
SYMBOL AND REALITY 
 
 WHAT does Christianity mean by "receiving the 
 Son of God" ? The apostle in the Areopagus 
 proclaims Christianity to the Athenians as the final 
 answer to the universal human question, What is it 
 to know God ? And indeed Christianity is distinctive 
 only in so far as it offers a more direct energizing of 
 human personality by the divine personality. That 
 God is approached in many ways and speaks through 
 many voices the Christian missionary not only ad- 
 mits, but emphasizes. His point, none the less, is 
 that the Son of God has taken our humanity in order 
 to give us, not one more approach to God, but the 
 approach; not a larger conception, but the contact, 
 final because completely personal. Christianity pro- 
 poses that we shall receive power to become sons of 
 God by receiving the Son of God. It presents his 
 incarnation as in some way extended to "all men 
 everywhere". The Christian way can be the way of 
 bringing men to God and God to men only in so far 
 as it extends the incarnation, only in so far as its great 
 
 46 
 
SYMBOL AND KEALITY 
 
 commission, "Do this" and "Go ye", is so exercised 
 as to give men the Christ. The old East, long dream- 
 ing of incarnations, followed a new star and crossed 
 the desert to worship at a manger. The magi "re- 
 joiced with exceeding great joy" at one more in- 
 carnation, as in the sacred child of Thibet? No, 
 says the apostle to the philosophers, at the incarna- 
 tion; not at another vision of God visiting men, but 
 at the final realization of manhood assumed and 
 empowered by God. 
 
 What, then, does a Christian mean by receiving the 
 Christ ? More than one thing, doubtless, as through 
 the ages men have meant more than one thing by 
 knowing God; but what essentially, what as the 
 common Christian conception? What in the Chris- 
 tian experience of life is essentially Christian ? Let 
 a Christian answer from a crisis that searches his life ; 
 let the man be neither a theologian nor an ecclesiastic, 
 but a soldier; and let him answer in action or habit 
 rather than in formula. An American soldier in 
 France wrote to his parents: 
 
 "We are going up to an attack in a short time, 
 and I am going to leave this note to be sent to you 
 in case, by God's will, this is to be my final work. 
 I have made my Communion, and go with a light 
 heart, and a determination to do all that I possibly 
 47 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 can to help in this fight against evil, for God and 
 humanity. I do not think of death or expect it, 
 but I am not afraid of it, and will give my life 
 gladly if it is asked." * 
 
 These last words of Edwin Abbey were found in 
 his soldier's kit after his death in that attack on 
 April 10, 1917. Thousands of young soldiers in this 
 war have felt, and hundreds have expressed, the same 
 singleness of devotion. They have said, "I will give 
 my life gladly", knowing, as they had never known be- 
 fore, that this gift is worth even more than it costs 
 because it is the gift. "Greater love hath no man 
 than this" not only because it costs most, but because 
 it counts most. To give oneself utterly is to give 
 oneself effectively. "He that loseth his life for my 
 sake shall save it." 
 
 Why should he add "I have made my Com- 
 munion" '{ Is it filial remembrance of his parents' 
 pious habits, inserted to comfort them with his ob- 
 servance of their ways ? His letters show him too 
 sincere for that ; and they mention religion elsewhere 
 as naturally as they mention the landscape, or the 
 courtesy of his French peasant hostess. They are all 
 of a piece. Why should such a man before his "final 
 work" make a point of a particular religious symbol ? 
 * Atlantic Monthly, volume 121, page 469 (April 1918). 
 48 
 
SYMBOL AND KEALITY 
 
 Because it is more than a symbol; because he knew 
 "Communion" as a reality; because he was certain 
 that he should give his life for men more effectively 
 by receiving the Savior of mankind. To demonstrate 
 this in his case and in others would be easy, but beside 
 the point. The inquiry is larger; it opens Chris- 
 tianity as a history. Why is the Eucharist, to use 
 the term common to East and West, the central rite 
 of the historic Church ? The answer is largest where 
 it is simplest and most direct. "Then received they 
 their Savior" is the traditional way of expressing the 
 Communion as the personal contact of man with 
 God. Again and again, through centuries, men 
 facing death with life, giving their lives with full 
 Christian consciousness, have desired to give in union 
 with the life once and forever given. Again and 
 again, through centuries divided by war, but united 
 by a corporate Christian feeling, these are the 
 common words, at Tours or at Vienna, in history or 
 in poetry, and on both sides at Agincourt "then 
 received they their Savior". Edwin Abbey is simply 
 the Christian soldier once more. When such men 
 have gathered up their lives and offered them for that 
 new earth in which dwelleth righteousness, they desire 
 at the summoning hour what they desired at every 
 summoning hour of their lives more than clear as- 
 
 49 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 piration of their own, more than the heartening words 
 of their fellow men, however strong or holy, more 
 than the divine words of poetry or revelation, more 
 than any words or thoughts whatever. They want 
 God. 
 
 Does not society want the same thing of the Chris- 
 tian Church? Socially Christianity is the ministry 
 of the Christ by men to men. The distinctive func- 
 tion of the Church in the community has been his- 
 torically the communication of the life of the in- 
 carnate Son of God. Whatever else the Church has 
 been, whatever its variations of place and time, its 
 popularity or persecution, its progress, perversion, or 
 confusion, this is its characteristic function and the 
 constant in its corporate consciousness. The two 
 great words with which it was sent forth, a handful 
 of obscure men from a corner of the Roman Empire, 
 to save the world are "Do this" and "Go ye, preach, 
 baptize". Its history may be comprehended as the 
 development of this ministry. Have not its wander- 
 ings been deviations from this ; its disintegrations for 
 lack of this integration ? The strong and wise have 
 bowed not to its human preaching, but to its divine 
 presence; the weak and ignorant have turned away 
 when they found its altars empty. The history of 
 Christianity is the history of its sacraments. 
 
 50 
 
SYMBOL AKD REALITY 
 
 For men and women have gone to church to meet 
 God. ISTo other motive has been generally and per- 
 manently sufficient. They need not go to think about 
 God or to realize God ; that they may achieve in the 
 forest or by the sea. They may go to meet one an- 
 other, to feel spiritual companionship, to be inspired 
 by preaching, to pray in a religious atmosphere; but 
 these motives are not essential and have not been 
 generally compelling. The Church in any form is, 
 indeed, social; that is implied in the word itself. 
 Any conception of a church implies a social group. 
 But the Christian Church as its character appears in 
 history is social in a larger and different sense. It 
 is social not because men propose to help one another, 
 but because God proposes to redeem society. Its 
 common life is not gathered from within and from 
 around ; it comes from above. 
 
 So, using here also its typically biological language, 
 the Christian Church has called itself an organism, 
 the body of Christ. The New Testament oftener 
 assumes or implies the Church than describes or ex- 
 plains it. It was the fact of Christianity most 
 familiar to the men and women to whom the earliest 
 Christian writings were primarily addressed, and the 
 instrument by which Christianity was made known 
 to the world. All the more strikingly, therefore, the 
 
 51 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 direct references of the 'New Testament to the Church, 
 as well as the implications and allusions, agree in 
 presenting it as a social organism ordained by God to 
 regenerate human society organically by ministering 
 the divine life. The Church called men to turn to 
 God present and living. It baptized them not merely 
 to mark their renunciation of errors and their appre- 
 hension of truth, but to wash away their sins and 
 make them children of God. It made its central rite, 
 "the breaking of bread and the prayers", not merely a 
 reminder of God's love, a communion with one an- 
 other, and an imaginative realization of the Christ's 
 presence, but the answer of praise and prayer to his 
 actual presence and the reception of him in the bread 
 and wine imparting himself. 
 
 This is why the apostle in the Areopagus focuses 
 righteousness, or personal efficiency, in the "man 
 whom God ordained and raised from among the 
 dead". For the incarnation of the Son of God, his 
 embodying of human nature, becomes operative not by 
 being apprehended as an idea, but by being appro- 
 priated as life; and the ministry of the Christian 
 Church is the ministry of this life. Therefore the 
 Christian apostles did more than proclaim the in- 
 carnation and the resurrection; they ministered to 
 men the incarnate living Lord. The earliest recorded 
 
 52 
 
SYMBOL AND KEALITY 
 
 facts of Christianity after Pentecost are Baptism and 
 the Eucharist. Both are alike inexplicable on any 
 theory of propaganda for the extension of either ideas 
 or example. They propose a new personal birth and 
 a new personal life, both to be imparted, not by 
 preaching and acceptance, but by direct personal con- 
 tact. In the earliest of the epistles formulating 
 specific doctrine and practise the apostle of the Are- 
 opagus declares to the Corinthians : * "My word and 
 preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, 
 but in showing forth of spirit and power, that your 
 faith may be not in men's wisdom, but in God's 
 power". More specifically he devotes a whole section 
 of this epistle to setting forth with great care the 
 proper observance of the Eucharist, quoting the very 
 words of its institution. Those words were afterward 
 incorporated in the gospels as history ; but meantime 
 they had been incorporated in the central rite of 
 Christianity as worship and communion. The 
 apostle's care is evidently not to correct a record, but 
 to insure the rite. Why ? "That your faith may be 
 not in men's wisdom, but in God's power." 
 
 That the words instituting the Eucharist have been, 
 and are, explained otherwise is also part of the his- 
 tory of Christianity. "How can this man give us his 
 
 *1 Cor. 2:4. 
 
 S3 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 flesh to eat ?" has been asked again and again. But 
 it has never expressed the real question of the soul 
 praying that God may not remain unknown. That 
 question is less how he gives himself than whether he 
 gives himself, less of the manner than of the fact. 
 "How are the dead raised?" This apostle repeats 
 that question too as typical; but his answer, so elo- 
 quent in the burial service, strikes through it to a 
 larger inquiry. Perhaps he remembered these Athe- 
 nians, who "mocked when they heard of the resurrec- 
 tion". Perhaps he suggests that the how is beside 
 the point or beyond explanation. But certainly the 
 answer is of a deeper question than that of the manner 
 of immortality ; it asserts the expansion of life from 
 life. "Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not 
 quickened except it die ; and that which thou sowest, 
 thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, 
 it may chance of wheat or of some other grain; but 
 God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to 
 every seed his own body." * The dead are raised 
 organically, as seed is raised when the germ bursts 
 its envelope. It is still wheat or barley; remaining 
 itself, it becomes more wheat, more barley, more it- 
 self. So those who said at the beginning, and who 
 have said ever since, "How can this man give us his 
 
 *1 Cor. 15:36. 
 
 54 
 
SYMBOL AND EEALITY 
 
 flesh to eat?" are the scoffers. The seekers after 
 God ask a deeper question, the question of the dis- 
 ciples standing by the Christ before the multitude: 
 "There are loaves here; but what are they among 
 so many?" Is the incarnate life really extended? 
 Will the Christ really feed mankind, not with their 
 own hopes, but with himself? Does he indeed 
 through the bread that we bring give himself to the 
 hungering and thirsting multitude ? What men ask 
 of Christianity is not definition of the manner in 
 which the Christ gives himself sacramentally, but 
 certitude of the fact. What difficulty of explaining 
 the manner in terms of chemistry and physics com- 
 pares with the difficulty of explaining the historical 
 fact that the Church spread over the world with water 
 and bread and wine? But with a ministry of the 
 Christ living and present must it not indeed conquer 
 the world, going with equal certitude to the intellec- 
 tual heights of Athens and the moral depths of 
 Corinth ? 
 
 The worship of God living and present expressed 
 itself artistically in ceremonial, then in architecture, 
 sculpture, painting. In literature it animated the 
 highest of medieval romances, the story of the Holy 
 Grail. That story kept its hold on imagination, 
 spread over Europe, and has been told in various 
 
 55 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 forms down to our own day, because it answers those 
 hearts for whom the real presence is a yearning as well 
 as those for whom it is a faith. Historically the 
 story is an allegory of the Eucharist, springing from 
 the exaltation of the sacrament of the altar. For 
 this is the animating source of the holy grail. That 
 the original grail of folklore was not holy, but magic, 
 probably not religious and almost certainly not Chris- 
 tian, makes the allegory only the more suggestive. 
 Not what the story took, but what it made, is the 
 evidence of its animating spirit, as many a saints' 
 legend, to borrow a witty word, is "a baptized folk- 
 tale". The Grail became the literary symbol of a 
 great historical devotion. Where that devotion has 
 died, or has never been born, the story remains remote 
 or extravagant, or is reshaped into forms to which no 
 skill in music, verse, or color can give life. It is vital 
 only when the symbol is of reality. Else it has only 
 that empty beauty which was all that the Athenians 
 had kept from the elder conception of the maiden 
 goddess "graven in stone" upon the Acropolis. 
 
 Such empty beauty, the symbol of a dead faith, is 
 all that is left in the Christian sacraments themselves 
 for modern Athenians. For them the sacraments 
 are nothing more than expressions of our resolutions 
 and aspirations. For them the incarnation is only 
 
 56 
 
SYMBOL AND BEAUTY 
 
 less antiquated than the Athena Parthenos. It means 
 merely a vision of God's having given himself, not 
 the fact of his giving himself now. Is not the 
 presence of God subjective ? Is it not my realization 
 in philosophy, in sculpture, in poetry, in worship? 
 Yes, says the apostle ; for every human expression of 
 God is divine to the extent that it expresses the uni- 
 versal human quest guided by God. It is an answer 
 of the soul to God, an effort to "grope after him and 
 find him' 7 . But, he goes on, we must not stop there, 
 lest we worship our own images. Religion remains 
 partial and tentative until it embraces not only the 
 soul's answer to God, but also God's answer to the 
 soul. What Edwin Abbey sought with his whole 
 manhood gathered up into his last hour was not reali- 
 zation, but reality, not a sense of God, but God. The 
 presence of God, says the apostle, is not our achieve- 
 ment; it is God's gift of himself; else God ceases to 
 be God. We do not bring him down to us; he lifts 
 us to him. It is not our realization of God, however 
 clear the idea, however beautiful the imaginative con- 
 ception ; it is God come to us. That God "dwelleth 
 not in temples made with hands" means that he is 
 greater than any human definition, conception, or 
 rite; it does not mean that he remains diffused and 
 remote. The apostle cries aloud in Areopagus that 
 
 57 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 he is not remote, that he has come, comes, and will 
 come. His incarnation, the fulfilment of his love for 
 men, the complete and perpetual giving to them of 
 himself, is made present to "all men everywhere". 
 
 God is everywhere immanent, guiding the prehis- 
 toric flow of glaciers, the reflux of sap, the dim quests 
 of savage worship groping after him. But that he 
 is everywhere does not imply that he is nowhere in 
 particular ; else we who live in time and place could 
 indeed never find Him. His response to us is in terms 
 of our human life. That is the significance of those 
 words, so strange in Athens : "defining the established 
 seasons" of nations, "proclaims" repentance, "has 
 set" a day, "the manhood in whom He defined" 
 righteousness. The illimitable personality enters the 
 limits of human personality, has made himself man 
 for us, enters our bounds of time and place, is here 
 and now according to his word. Answering all the 
 honest ways of our seeking, he calls to his own ways 
 of giving. Because he loves "he hath appointed". 
 
 Nomads of the old East sought after God in their 
 ways and found him. God did not withdraw himself 
 from their rudest seeking. But the love of God is 
 more than responsive. He drew mankind to him 
 through an appointed race, in appointed ways, until 
 the kingdom of Israel should be reborn as the kingdom 
 
 58 
 
SYMBOL AND KEALITY 
 
 cf God. "Our fathers," says this apostle, "all ate the 
 same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual 
 drink; for they drank of that spiritual rock that 
 accompanied them, and that rock was the Christ." * 
 Over against the unholy fires of perverted religion 
 shone the Shekinah at the Jewish mercy-seat. The 
 one worship had lost God in its own realizations of 
 "gold and silver and stone graven by art and man's 
 device" ; the other had his real presence. In so far 
 as they ministered in and through that presence, 
 "salvation is of the Jews". The wider world was to 
 be developed and empowered by their ministry to 
 mankind of God with them. For God's love of man- 
 kind has always said not only "Do this", but "Go ye", 
 has always appointed not only ways, but ministers. 
 Through men he has given himself to men. The 
 Church of God is fallible in every human member; 
 but it is holy in his indwelling. "We have this 
 treasure in earthen vessels" ; but the treasure is not 
 earthen. ISTo failure of Levite or priest could impair 
 the gift in his hands. Through the ways and the 
 men of God's appointing men may enter into his 
 presence and receive him. His presence is real with 
 all the reality of human life and with all the deeper 
 reality of his own. "For the reality that we see is 
 
 *1 Cor. 10:3. 
 
 59 
 
GOD UNKNOWN 
 
 limited by time; it is the unseen reality that is 
 eternal." * 
 
 Nothing could be more different from that walk- 
 ing with the gods which we discern in Greek religion. 
 "To the Greek, in so far as he was a Greek, religion 
 was an aspiration to grow like the gods by invoking 
 their companionship, rehearsing their story, feeling 
 vicariously the glow of their splendid prerogatives, 
 and placing them, in the form of beautiful and very 
 human statues, constantly before his eyes." f Idols 
 are embodiments of powers, greater than ourselves, 
 which we call divine. They may be as crude as a 
 painted stick or as glorious as the Athenian art beheld 
 by the apostle ; but so far the difference of idol from 
 idol is merely in civilization, and should not obscure 
 the fact that idols are still made and that they are 
 essentially alike. The philosophic objection to the 
 making of them is that it tends to blur clear thinking. 
 The ethical objection is that they have uniformly 
 become centers of unbalanced, and often of perverted, 
 living. The religious objection finds the root of both 
 tendencies in the fact that they divide and dissipate 
 what should be unified. The horror of the Jew at 
 idols was more than a philosophic objection to poly- 
 
 * 2 Cor. 4: 18. 
 
 f George Santayana, Lucretius. 
 
 60 
 
SYMBOL A:N T D REALITY 
 
 theism; it sprang from his ancestral recollections of 
 the worship of Astarte, from his experience that 
 human life could be integrated only by worshiping 
 one God, and from his conviction that the one true 
 God has revealed and communicated himself. 
 
 So the Christian apostle, looking at the sculpture 
 and remembering the literature of Athens, discerned 
 the whole peril of idols in the light of the incarnation. 
 Men must not embody God; for God has embodied 
 man. They must not rest in symbols of the divine 
 nature ; for God has taken our human nature. They 
 must not feed on fancies; they must feed on the 
 Christ. Can Christianity give them less than the 
 Christ without peril of erecting one more altar To 
 GOD UNKNOWN ? If what I find is after all only 
 myself, I must eat my own heart. 
 
 61 
 
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