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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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-

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

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

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."

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 ;

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

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.

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

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.

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

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."

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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-

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

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.

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

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-

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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