The atoning life

Front matter

THE ATONING LIFE HENRY SYLVESTER NASH

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Preface

Tus little book has some faults whereof its author is keenly aware, and others that he cannot know. But the reader is asked to remember that it does not set out to become a chapter in systematic theology. Its aim is to make clear the lines of approach to the Atonement. One of the pressing needs of minister and layman alike is a vital theology that springs from life and, returning quickly to the life out of which it sprang, gives form and clarity to experience. The hope that this little book may help some of his brethren toward that goal gives the author the courage to publish it.

[ vii].

O God, our great Companion, lead us, day by day, deeper into the mystery of life, and make us interpreters of life to our fellows, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

f viii ]

OHAP,

Contents

THE SPRINGHEAD OF WONDER THe Provinc-GrRounp oF REALITY DivInE AND Human FREEDOM

THE SOVEREIGN WILL CALLED FartTH .

Law THE Finau PRoBLEM oF LIFE

Chapter I

HEN we have gone deep into life and when, \ \ our youthful] illusions about ourselves and our world having been shattered, the hand of Christ lifts us out of the mire, sets our feet on the rock, and orders our goings, we find within our own being a spring of wonder and self-enjoyment whose flow all the forces of the world cannot stop. The follower of Jesus, as a man redeemed, finds God in his heart, God in his plenitude of power and grace. His soul trembles in the presence of the Almighty. The infinitude of the divine being so overpowers him that his mind almost swoons. The beauty of God fills him with ecstasy and awe.

But he does not lose himself in the divine presence. B [1]

The divine infinitude does not swallow him up, nor rob him of his self-possession. The nearer he draws to God, the surer becomes his hold upon himself. Intimacy with the Almighty gives body to his individual powers. Friendship with the All-knowing One kindles and strengthens his little candle of knowledge. And in this union of the deepening sense of the divine majesty with the clearer consciousness of self the fountain of self-renewing joy in life breaks forth from the everlasting hills.

The man redeemed does not delude himself regarding his own capacity or the make of the society of which he forms a part. He strives to see life steadily and to see it whole. Life’s burdens and disappointments, — he thanks God that he has his full share of them. His own sin tortures him. He wrestles with a single fault for many years, and, whenever he reports the conflict truly, finds his adversary still strong. His work, if he dares look at it, terrifies him with its imperfections. To be on good terms with himself, to know himself intimately and to continue to enjoy himself, — how may that be? [2]

He does not for a moment separate himself from society. In his searchings after self-knowledge and self-mastery, every step takes him deeper into fellowship. All the world’s good is his. And all the world’s evil is his. He cannot pretend to know Christ and dream himself into some little heaven whither no sound of the world’s evil and sorrow and shame can come. Full salvation, the sense of the Saviour’s mastery over the evil in himself and his fellows, comes to him in the world or comes to him nowhere. If he finds it hard to endure himself, much more to enjoy himself when he lives with himself, what shall he do when he takes himself as a single cell within the vast organism of human life? He dare not turn monk. That were too easy. ‘The apparent nobility of such a choice covers over the ignobleness of an awful postponement. To turn monk would be to put off the final question. He will stand fast in his place and seek the saving knowledge of the Lord.

Standing there, the God and Father of Jesus Christ seeks him and finds him. He learns that the deepest fact of experience is the intimacy between God and himself. God the Almighty! God the Eternal! and he the creature of a day, with feeble power and a knowledge that goes just far enough to discover an overwhelming ignorance. Yet the joy and the wonder of salvation! He and God are inseparable. He cannot live without God. But God will not live without him. The infinitude of God is not a fathomless gulf into which he looks and shudders. God is light. And the infinitude of God lives within his weakness and limitations even as the might and majesty of the sun live within the flickering candle. God’s presence safeguards his right to be himself, and his right to know and master himself.

The religious drift of our time, its easy and instinctive motion, is towards Pantheism. For increasing numbers of people the traditional definitions and conceptions of Christian theology have lost power and appeal. At the same time the Universe in its vastness is pressing hard upon the mind. The age of our mother-earth makes time, for the imagination, infinite. The scientific knowledge of the heavens makes space practically infinite. Within the working infinite of [4]

time and space men are as bare specks or dots. To use Pope’s lines, ‘* As bubbles on the sea of matter born, They rise, they break, and to that sea return.”

Now Pantheism is like the sick lion in the Fable. He sent out invitations to all his subjects to visit him in his cave, having a deep desire to look on their faces and to exchange courtesies. But the fox refused to go, observing that all the tracks turned one way. Of all those who went to pay their respects to his sick majesty, none returned. So is it with Pantheism. The promise of individuality within us, seeking for its kith and kin in the unseen universe and driven into religion to avoid brain-sickness and _heart-sickness, goes to see the Absolute and is devoured.

But in the Christian view of the world individuality is the whole stake and prize. The Christian conscious- ‘ness reconciles the infinitude of God and the personality of man. Or, putting it in a better way, in the Christian consciousness the individuality of man is discovered and interpreted as the medium through which the divine infinitude is appreciated and understood. To the people, called Christians, who have taken Christ for their souls’ Captain, the measureless spaces and forces of the Universe, pressing irresistibly upon the mind, do but deepen the wonder of their life.

In the glory of the stars, in the might of the tides, God comes near to the Christian. The nearer God comes to him, the surer is his hold on himself. His awe of God gives splendid promise to his self-knowledge. He discovers the ground of his individuality to be as deep as God’s own being. In his own heart the divine majesty reveals itself as the safeguard of his rights. For all his rights, in other words all his claims on life, reduce to a single right, namely, the right to grow in the knowledge and mastery of self. And the God and Father of Jesus Christ, taking up into Himself the attributes with which the visible Universe is clothed, reveals Himself to the redeemed man as one who puts His entire being and power and plan in pledge, to the end that man may grow to full stature. It is not the lines of Pope, but the lines of

Sidney Lanier that express the truth. [6]

“ As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,

Behold, I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.” The Christian’s individuality grows upon the divine being, is not absorbed by it. His relation to God is not a vague, though ecstatic, relation to the Absolute, but a personal relation to an infinite, holy, and creative will which is at work within his nature, building him up in the divine likeness. His will to be his fullest self gains edge and temper from growing intimacy with the divine perfection. He refuses the tempting pathos of the view which regards him as “a bit of morning cloud in the infinite azure of the past.” The pith and marrow of him is a strong and masterful will. He flinches from nothing that life can yield of terror and toil and pain. But through his friendship with the Eternal he joins sweetness to strength. His kinship to God is his title-deed to a radiant and heroic manhood, into which no touch of pathos can enter, and which at the same time kindles in him a cleansing fire of shame and longing, a fire that searches his nature and purpose through and through. While he lives, he lives mightily. And when he dies, he crosses the great divide with a serene and steadfast hope of closer intimacy with God.

So his knowledge of God and. his knowledge of self become inseparable. Together they widen. Together they are clarified. Self-knowledge is the key to all. Through it he wins entrance into the being and purpose of the Eternal. He does not, then, do honor to the true God by sacrificing clarity of self-knowledge to the joys of mystic communion. 'To lose himself were to lose the true God. Through the sanctity and clarity of self-knowledge his knowledge of God becomes penetrating. God’s Word becomes a two-edged sword, cleaving through all illusion and half-truths. His awe of God and his love of God become a single and indivisible emotion.

The contemplation of the divine attributes opens to him a profound enjoyment of self. ‘The divine omnipresence means that all things in their several beings and values are real to God. The contemplation of the divine omnipresence puts the spur upon his powers and faculties. It is enough for him that he is being made.

in God’s image. Little by little he masters his vanity and his fear, and climbs to the clear and untroubled vision of things as they are.

The contemplation of the divine omnipotence does not discourage and paralyze him; it rather gives him heart and hope. It is true that he is the creature of an hour. His strength counts for as little as the sand on the seashore, the bit of floating cloud in the sky. It is true that he has nothing of his own. All he has belongs to God. But herein lies his greatness. He works out his own salvation with fear and trembling because it is God that works in him to will and to do of His own good pleasure. This is commonly called the paradox of the spiritual life. But the word is wholly out of place. There is no paradox. The Apostle Paul describes two sides of a single experience. When the soul feels and knows the true God, all is God’s and everything is one’s own. Salvation is one’s own achievement, because salvation is God’s achievement wrought out within the working and struggling will of man. The contemplation of the divine omnipotence fills the Christian with fear and trembling. But it is the fear and trembling of one who for the first time stands in the presence of a supremely beautiful object, like the Yellowstone. His heart throbs. His being expands. ‘The omnipotence of God has become man’s title-deed to measureless and illimitable growth.

His knowledge of things, when he views the universe as it is in itself, tempts him to suicide. He knows just enough to make his ignorance terrifying. His knowledge is like a candle burning in a little clearing within the forest primeval. Every stir of wind threatens it with extinction. Its flickering is incessant. Rarely does it burn clear. And the feeble circle of light surrounding it makes visible the immeasurable darkness concealing powers which he cannot measure and cannot name. But let him gain personal knowledge of God, and then his ignorance becomes his inspiration.

God is the teacher and he the pupil.

“What delights can equal those That stir the spirit’s inmost deeps, When one that loves and knows not, reaps From one who loves and knows.”

It is true that the more penetrating his knowledge of life becomes, the deeper is his consciousness of ignorance. It is true that the clearer is his analysis of knowledge, the wider stand the gates through which things unknown assail him. But he loves to have it so. He knows nothing. But God knows all. And the pains of ignorance that pierce him through and through, what are they but the price he pays for the privilege of kinship to the Omniscient? His ignorance and his knowledge blend into a single mental action. And through it the majesty and the splendor of the mind of God dawn upon him with a beauty that is as intimate as it is compelling.

If the Christian were asked to give his impression of God in a single phrase, he would say, God’s restraint. He knows, to his shame he knows, that his own growth in knowledge and power is not attended by an equivalent growth in restraint. His knowledge, if it comes to be large and imposing, imperils the mental freedom of other men. If he has much to impart and has the gift of expression in large measure, he is fairly sure to talk other people down. He dominates the minds of others, does not create individuality in them. And as to his power, his inbred tendency is to assert it to its limit.

That is the instinctive tendency of all human power. Thus the man in the automobile, with a wonderful instrument obedient to his hand, uses the power of his machine to the utmost, forgetting the rights of other people. The same thing holds true of political power. The tendency to despotism is ingrained. The object of all constitutional government is to furnish power with checks and balances, imposing upon it limits which it dare not pass over. ‘The most serious struggle of civilization is to keep the law from becoming, in Solon’s terrible phrase, like the net which holds the little fish, while the big fish break through. This inbred tendency of human power masters us even in the holiest places. ‘The head of the family becomes a despot from whose loving tyranny there is no escape. The teacher turns his sceptre into a rod or a spear. The friend destroys the bloom and fragrance of friendship by overbearing the one he loves.

God, as the Christian knows Him, has a restraint as strong as His omnipotence. His power is infinite, His knowledge illimitable. If a man were God, then woe to his fellow-men. His very goodness would become their bane. He would establish a tyranny swallowing the individuality of men, in order to keep them from sin. But how wonderful is our God. His attributes of omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience do not imperil man’s right to be his fullest self. They safeguard and insure that right. And while the friend of God admires Him for many things, this is the summit of his admiration. God’s restraint is as deep as His being and His power.

Here, then, is the springhead of wonder. To the man who has found himself in Christ, the old things have passed away. All things become new. The follower of Jesus, the friend of God, when life presses him hard, drinks from the brook that flows by the road and lifts up his head with unconquerable hope.

CHAPTER II HEN the Christian finds himself in God, he

\ \ is not alone. He finds his Neighbor close beside him. God, as He is known in

Christ and in His Word, is not the Absolute, the unrelated Infinite, prisoner of His own infinitude, but the All-related One. God’s deepest difference from us lies in His capacity for relationships, infinite in number and each one of them going as deep as His nature. The relationships into which God enters are not relationships which He can put on or put off at will. They are part and parcel of His own eternal nature and purpose. When the follower of Jesus knows himself in God, he knows a being who has no spiritual meaning or value apart from his Neighbor. The mystic would fain see God as He is in Himself.

To obtain the beatific vision, he will even turn monk.

If need be, he will sacrifice his relationships with other men, assessing them as matters of secondary reality. The relationship of his soul to God he takes to be the primary reality. To reach that reality he subjects himself to a splendid discipline, a superb self-denial. One by one he puts away the social bonds that hold him fast within the mutual obligations that constitute the common life. He seeks to become a pure spiritual essence, the soul, in order that he may reach the saving contemplation of the pure divine reality. But the God of the mystic is not the God and Father of Jesus Christ. | The true God, whose method of self-revelation is recorded and attested in the Scriptures, discloses His . inmost secrets only to people living in families and constituting the nation.

The mystic does not reach the full-grown Christian conception of divine and human reality. In order to enjoy the ecstasy of union. with God, he throws his individuality into the divine abyss. But in ‘the Christian view of the universe, individuality is the whole stake and issue. How to conceive of God so that the nearer man comes to God, the more does he abound in the human sense, the more individual does he become — that is the issue between the Christian view of reality and other religious views. The divine abyss is found only in the heart of man. The deeper the Christian’s life with God, the more deeply does he enter into the common lot, and the more seriously does he take his relationships with his fellows.

The final law of life is given in the words of Jesus: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” The Christian’s God, the Christian’s self, the Christian’s Neighbor, — here are the three component elements of ultimate reality. They may not be disentangled. Not one of the three can be fully known or appreciated without the others. If the Christian takes his own soul to be a more solid reality than his relation to his neighbor, if he thinks away his social obligations in order to reach divine reality, he loses all.

His Neighbor and he are codrdinate realities. Only in their common substance and value can the true God be known as He knows Himself.

Here, then, is the proving-ground of reality. And not only the proving-ground of reality for human beings putting themselves to hard labor for their nation and their race, but the proving-ground of the reality that is real for God. God can be known only in the degree and measure of His self-revelation. He clearly reveals Himself nowhere save in the deep of human fellowship. The Christian view is perfectly expressed in the First Epistle of St. John. God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. There is nothing in God that holds itself aloof, refuses to enter into relationship with men. In the inmost recess of ultimate reality there is concealed nothing that will oppose itself to man’s longing for personal and social perfection. And man, once redeemed, cannot think of himself save in the midst of his fellows. Human fellowship and partnership and commerce, based upon and issuing from man’s fellowship with God, —that is the pith and marrow of saving truth.

Revelation and fellowship are, therefore, as insepac ay} rable as the concave and convex sides of a circle. Neither of them is possible, in high degree, without the other. The perfecting of one involves the completion of the other. If we say that we love God and love not our Neighbor, we lie and do not speak the truth. If I seek, in mystic vision, to see God face to face and, soaring from some mountain-top of contemplation, take wing into the Infinite Being, I deceive myself, and sooner or later bring upon myself a fall into hideous unrealities. My Neighbor is as real to me as I am to myself. His being and my being, interknitting, give to God the only medium of revelation commensurate with His nature. To those who are greatly individual and whose individuality stands deep in social obligation, He speaks a gladdening and saving message. Between Him and them passes a living Word that gives unity and meaning to our existence, sweetness and strength to our joy in life.

~My Neighbor’s will and mine, interlocking, give to God the one means whereby His holy will and saving plan can grip history and hold it fast, guiding and directing it towards its final goal. The end of history [18]

is the imposing of moral form on the raw material of human life. All culture aims to make raw material submit itself to form. A noble woman’s voice, through years of tireless training, blends art with nature into an indivisible force that lifts us out of ourselves. A great poet blends sound and rhythm and sense and imagination into poetry of the grand style, and the world is enriched. The sculptor weds his idea to marble and to bronze, and there comes to light a form of manly dignity or womanly beauty that invites us to eternize ourselves. In the measure that we transmute existence into life by means of culture, we impose form on raw material.

But moral form and culture is of all forms the highest and most difficult. How shall we moralize human nature so that every human being shall be, and be valued as a thing of infinite worth? Lust and passion and ambition surge through us like a tide. At our best, we are not so far away from the brute that we dare boast about our gains. And at our worst we are far below the brutes. Our reason makes us capable of falling into depths of cruelty and vileness which it were an outrage on justice to call bestial. The beasts have never tortured the conquered as have the Assyrians and the Iroquois. The beasts never used the thumbscrew and the rack and the stake in honor of the powers higher than themselves. And the beasts have never made lust the conscious end of existence. When man is at his worst, he is immeasurably worse than the beasts.

The monk in us bids us give up the attempt to moralize the vast mass of human lust and cruelty and inertness. Let us go apart with those of like mind and seek moral and spiritual perfection. So alone may we hope to achieve sainthood. But the genius of Christianity, when we take it rightly and largely, forbids this step. We will stand fast in our place. We will be in the world but not of the world. With the help of the Great Companion, we will impose moral form upon this vast mass of human nature and motive. My Neighbor and I will knit our wills into a common will and cast our hopes in the mould of a common hope, so that, through our corporate hope and purpose, God may give moral culture and value to the life of man.

The proving-ground of reality is also the proving-ground of knowledge. So far as the Christian’s experience is concerned, the searching questions regarding the nature of knowledge and the source of certainty are unanswerable on purely philosophic grounds. His knowledge of God, the ultimate reality, carries him just far enough to know that he is known. The process of his knowing goes just deep enough to discover that God’s revelation underpins his reasoning. And the logic of Christian experience shuts him up within the bounds of fellowship, as the only place where God clearly reveals Himself. There alone can a saving word regarding human life and motive be spoken. There or nowhere is the proving-ground of knowledge.

Where shall the ultimate reality be found? And when I have found it, how shall I know that I know it? Only when I have gone deep into my relationships with my fellows of every degree and kind, when I have learned to take my Neighbor’s wishes and longings and choices as equally real with my own. Then, having grown out of the crude and narrow self into the true and abiding self, I shall have acquired in some degree that high art of putting and pressing final questions, [21]

which is the pith of wisdom. There are certain questions, searching and cleansing, about the meaning and value of life. To the follower of Jesus, possessed of His secret, there is but one place where such questions can be sanely and hopefully asked. When my Neighbor’s being and my being interknit, and when his will and mine interlock to create and maintain a living corporate being and purpose, then, within that living corporate consciousness and longing, Revelation wells up, the living God speaks home to our hearts and brings our restless reason to rest.

How shall I know that I know the innermost nature and meaning of things? How shall I become possessed of a knowledge from which reality does not shrink away, leaving it brain-sick and heart-sick? Reason alone cannot bring it to me. Reason and will must join and interfuse in an act of saving faith. I must find myself within a supreme plan and purpose regarding history, concerning human nature as a whole. This means that my views of things, if they are to acquire and maintain moralizing power, must work up into a creative attitude towards life. It is at this [ 22 ]

point that the Christian begins to understand the ground and worth of his belief in creation. Science can say nothing to him regarding the creation of the world. And when Science ventures to speak about it, she forgets herself and transcends her function. Even pure Philosophy labors in vain to attain it. The belief in the creation of the world is an organic part of a larger whole; it is part and parcel of the creative attitude towards life taken in its entirety. Only by believing in the creative power of God can we, when once we have seen human life in its full scope, live the creative life in the midst of our fellows. God reveals Himself to us as a power and purpose high and lifted up and holy. The man who is redeemed from his narrow and vulgar self, resting upon the creative will and being of the Great Commander, takes and steadily maintains a creative attitude towards society, towards his nation and his race. The belief in the creative life of God and man, while science and philosophy fall silent, forces itself on the heart of the people whom Christ hath redeemed, as a necessary, an inevitable act of faith. [ 23]

A cheap and self-indulgent pessimism will say to the creative will in us, ‘‘ Life is a poor player

«That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.’

«We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.’ ”

But the Christian has found the sacramental meeting-place where God cheers and strengthens His sons and daughters. The gladness of the creative life is theirs. It is given to few to be creative in the field of literature and art. But in that matter which is the main concern of us all, the great business of being human, it is within the reach of all.

, Having met God and been saved by God working through Christ, our deepest desire is to know our fellows and to know God in them. We pass through two periods of longing after knowledge. At first we long to know things. As we walk through the stack [24]

of a great library, every book becomes a challenge. And when, that challenge ringing in our ears, we go forth to measure our knowledge with the universe, our own minds become a purgatory, so keen and piercing is the pain of our ignorance. But by and by, through closer fellowship with our race and a widening comprehension of our task, another longing comes upon us like a strong man armed. The great library still stirs and challenges and inspires us. But far more deeply are we stirred by a crowd or even a mob of our fellows. ‘To make our neighbors real to ourselves and to shape our life to our knowledge, this becomes our passion. We know so few. And those few we know so poorly. Perhaps, shrinking from soiling contact with the mob, we draw apart, and end by making our books our luxury. But not so does the Christian know Christ. From the library he goes to the city slum, where humanity becomes an open sore. There he finds his greatest task and his highest privilege. He longs to know all sorts and conditions of men and to know them well. And if ever he envies God His omniscience, it is when he realizes the narrowness of his own sympathies and the resulting impoverishment that robs his goodness of its penetrative and redeeming power. God’s saving Word to man comes to men only when they have taken on themselves a complete personal and social obligation. It is revealed through the corporate will of redeemed spirits. It is published in terms of human fellowship. And it comes at our hearts as the Winged Victory in the Louvre comes at the lover of beauty mounting the stairs. Nothing in him can withstand the conviction which it brings. With the Word of God as a two-edged sword, he goes forth into the world conquering and to conquer.