Humane religion

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE PREPACH 20 0, Ve Soe eee ee 7

Part II

MORE WORD CAG RO are ar Aa 141 J. Ligutine THE GOLDEN Lamp....... 143 Il. In tHe GARDENS OF PLATO........ 160 Ill. In tHe Porcu oF Sarnt PETER’s... 183 IV. In tue House or Kant........... 199 V. By tur Haunts or THE Humanists 220 VI. In ConteEmMPoRARY CHAMBERS...... Q41

PART IT

THE FLAMING TORCH

. Tue Socitat IpEAL oF CHRISTIANITY 269

6 HUMANE RELIGION PAGE II. Tue Curistian FamMiny........... 279 IIT. CuristrAn PATRIOTISM............ 290 IV. CHRISTIANITY AND THE PEACE OF THE Word 0 0 Oe ee 301 V. Curistian EpucaTION............ 312 VI. Tur Curistian APPROACH TO INDUs- TRIAL PROBLEMS) Or. ue Cee 323 VII. Tur Curistian’s LEISURE......... 335 CONCLUSION: OOo Oe sae 344

Preface

THE object of this book may be simply and clearly defined in a sentence. It is to show how inextricably interwoven into the historical, intellectual, and practical pattern of the religion of Jesus is the ethical passion for the sacredness of human life.

The words “ethics” and “ethical”? must be immediately safeguarded, for if we define ethics, as we sometimes do, in a cold-blooded sort of way as the science of values, then it may easily carry so anzmic and pedantic a connotation as to be outside of the character of Jesus altogether. But it need not be loaded down with any such handicap, for Jesus did for ethics what he did for everything else he discussed—he thought it through and humanized it.

The premise from which he approached the consideration of morals was that the whole sweep of man’s dealings with man is the proper field of ethics. Any question became an ethical question with him when it involved human beings. His first intention in any transaction was the humane one. In his thought no question was rightly, and therefore finally, settled until every last human interest involved had been properly safeguarded. He insisted that human values took precedence over all others. That is the supreme contribution which he has made to the consideration of human conduct, and it gives his teaching its own distinction among systems of thought. It is the characteristic emphasis which makes his religion essentially and primarily an ethical adventure.

The trail of this humane emphasis through the story of the evolution of religion among the Jews, the career of Jesus himself, and the history and thought of Christianity since his times, is worth retracing, not only for the richer understanding it will bring us of the background of our faith, but also for the courage it will stir in us to walk more bravely in the paths we ourselves must tread.

FRANK KINGDON.

PART I THE LIVING FLAME

This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.—John 15. 12.

Foreword

WHEN Jesus gave us his new commandment he hung a little lamp over it so that we could not possibly mistake its meaning. He might have said, “This is my commandment, That ye love one another,” and we should have acknowledged the beauty of his word, but in our own minds we should have had to concede that it was a little vague and ill defined. It was characteristic of him not to leave it that way. What he did say was, “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.” That last phrase is a little lamp hung over a great commandment so that we can read its meaning unmistakably. In the light of it we cannot possibly misunderstand what he meant.

This lucid speaking of Jesus is an invaluable asset of Christianity. He never was vague. He never sought to impress his hearers with the profundity of his thought by the obscurity of his language. Rather did he so present the noblest of conceptions that they became human and compatible with the humblest of minds and the most unpretentious of people. He made the common man at home in the most select circles of ideas. He opened for him the gates that led into the choicest preserves of the thinkers. What the common people had before received only from the hands of authority he made it possible for them to discover for themselves. It is no wonder that they heard him gladly.

The method by which he obtained such excellent results was simplicity itself. He took abstract ideas and put them into living pictures that his hearers understood. He spoke to every man in his own vernacular. Never did he preach general principles without a specific application of them to actual living conditions. He shod every message of his with rugged sandals and made it walk in the dusty roads of Galilee. To track that message to its sources and throughout its effects shall be our study here.

Chapter I The Kindling Spark

Ir is so easy for a casual observer to get a merely supernatural religion out of the pages of the Old Testament that we must begin by recognizing that the religion of the Old Testament finds its vitality in passion for human welfare rather than in supernatural experiences. Its striving for an adequate concept of God is so closely bound up with its struggle for human well-being that we are quite justified in saying, that every crisis in its development of an adequate idea of God was associated with the courageous facing of some definite moral problem. The profoundest insights into the nature of God came to those men who lost themselves most completely in some humane effort. Religious understanding came to these Old Testament worthies, not as a result of some capricious playing of favorites on the part of Jehovah, but because they were prepared for divine insights through their sensitiveness to human needs. Definitely awakened and aroused by their passion to correct some human wrong, they were ready for the richer appreciations of the nature of God which they achieved. Progress in the discovery of God kept pace in every man’s life with his devotion to his fellow men, and it proceeded no faster and no slower than his ethical development. We have lost many insights into the Old Testament because we have failed to see with what tenacity it sticks to its insistence on the sacredness of human personality and the primacy of human values over all others. That emphasis sounds so clearly that we are not exaggerating when we say that it is the axis around which all its thinking revolves, and the very center of its interpretation of the character of God. The Old Testament is as clearly the story of man’s progressive discovery of man as it is of his unfolding discovery of God. The two are inseparable in its pages. In this chapter we shall trace the parallel development of the ethical ideal and the concept of God in the Old Testament, trying to think of God in each case as the authors themselves thought of him.

I

Tue PAatTRIARCHS

We do not have to wait long for the consideration of the sacredness of human life to appear in the Old Testament. After its majestic prologue of the creation the book of Genesis immediately passes to the story of Cain and Abel. By the time we reach the fourth chapter of the book we are out of that rare epic atmosphere in which we were contemplating the wonder of the Creator bringing form out of darkness and void, and we are back again in the coarser air of this our world facing a human tragedy.

The story itself is familiar enough. The two boys were of different texture, so that life seemed gracious to Abel and rough to Cain. The profaner man could not look with equanimity upon the gentle happiness of his brother, whom life seemed to treat more tenderly than it did him. Envy possessed him and swept him on to unreasoning anger that spent itself in murder. The whole incident is as sordid as any of yesterday’s crimes recorded in any of this morning’s newspapers.

The telling of it, however, is different, for the writer of Genesis introduces a third party into the story. “And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother?”’ There, right in the beginning of the book, you have the assertion that a human individual is worth so much to the universe that the God, whom but just now we saw busy with his work of creating the world, will stop his activity to inquire for one who is slain. It is a profound ethical insight which makes the author of this ancient book compel the first criminal in his story to face the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This is no chance emphasis slipping into this first story; it is the fundamental recognition of the sacredness of human personality as the foundation principle of moral conduct. Once and for all it asserts that the universe cannot be indifferent when that sacred principle is wronged. God does not deal lightly with those who wrong their fellow men. That is the inner meaning of the story of Cain’s hate.

Even the story of Noah, with its apparently careless waste of human life, fits into the ethical structure of the Old Testament. Its first effect, naturally, is to dramatize the distinction between those who are pleasing in God’s sight and those who are not. It serves as an ancient parable of judgment defining the value of the good life and the lostness of the evil life. That is its main purpose, and we recognize it as such. But it is worthy of note that in the Deluge Noah was saved; that is to say, God cared enough for the good man to save him, though the heavens fell. We must not be so carried away by the spectacular destruction of men that we fail to see the significance of the man who was saved. God does not forget the life that is worthy to be remembered. It is also to be noted that after the Flood the story says that God put the bow in the cloud as a token that never again would he as wantonly destroy men. ‘The rainbow became to the author of this story the symbol of God’s rediscovery of the sacredness of human life, the assurance that never again would even almighty anger be allowed to violate it.

The exaltation of human values becomes even more marked as we move into the stories of the patriarchs. Probably most of us would associate the beginning of the Hebrew religion with the experience of Abraham. He it was who left the land of his fathers and went out with his vision of Jehovah, not knowing whither he went. He began that quest for God which has been the lure and the pride of his descendants down to the present day. All those who walk by faith acknowledge him to be the father of the faithful.

His communion with God, however, did not stop with a mystical ecstasy, for he translated it into moral vision and power. It moved him to more than justice in his dealings with Lot. There is a profound ethical consciousness manifest in his remonstrance with his nephew, *“‘Let there be no strife, . . . between me and thee, . . . for we be brethren.’”’ Such a plea goes to the very core of right dealing between manandman. Again, it was Abraham who confronted his visitors on their way to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah with the sublime question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” His question marked his insistence that man, the moral creature, has a right to expect God to be at least as just as he himself would be. The Creator cannot evade the moral implications of his own creation. It is a swift moral insight that marks Abraham as one of the greatest of the prophets.

The most dramatic incident in his whole career is another which re-enforces the principle of the sacredness of human life. As he traveled among the people of Canaan he found them sacrificing their children to their gods. Such a practice could have but one effect on so religious a spirit as Abraham’s—it challenged his own consecration. He wondered whether he loved Jehovah sufficiently to sacrifice to Him his beloved Isaac, in whom all his hopes centered. He found that he was ready, but in that same moment he understood that God did not desire the offering of human blood to him, that any personality was too precious in his sight for him to desire its destruction. That profound insight into the moral nature of God he fixed once and for all. From that day to this neither the Hebrews nor the Christians have indulged in human sacrifice as a rite of religion.

You cannot adequately understand the character of Abraham until you recognize the grandeur of these moral insights of his and their power in molding his own character. You certainly cannot rightly appraise his contribution to religion without including them.

Isaac is a placid soul without much contribution to make along any line. Yet we cannot pass him by without a reference to the idyllic story of his courtship of Rebecca, which abounds in unconscious acknowledgments of the potential lovelinesses of human love and _ life. There is at least no cheapening of the estimate of man in that sweet story.

Jacob is a different sort of man altogether, so that instead of the placidity of his father you find in him the storm of struggle. His is the story of a moral and spiritual regeneration. Smart and unscrupulous to begin with, he climbed a tortuous road to the eminence of a prince of God. He stands as the prototype of those who come to moral power as a result of inner struggle. Always in him was the wrestling between his meaner and his better self. His contributions to the unfolding conception of God grew directly out of that sore battle within him.

He made two important discoveries. When he left home to run away from Esau he thought that he was leaving his father’s God behind. Like all his neighbors, he had conceived his god to be a tribal deity peculiarly the possession of his own family and confined to their tents. At Bethel he discovered that there were no such limitations to God; that he was not a tribal deity restricted as to time and place but one who went with his children everywhere. To Jacob we owe the discovery that wherever one of his children is, there is the house of God. His other insight came the night before he had to meet Esau again after his fourteen years of absence. He walked the banks of the stream that separated him from his brother, with that brother’s threat of fourteen years before ringing in his ears. He was alone, wrestling with his worry and his fears, when he became conscious that Another wrestled with him and through the night he and this other struggled together with his problem. He won a victory over himself, faced the morning honestly and courageously, and came safely through. In that night’s wrestling Jacob learned that when a man faces a vital problem he need not face it alone, for God will share his struggle. Almost we might call that strange encounter at Penuel the discovery of prayer. Out of it came a new name and a new man; Jacob became Israel. The spiritual experience worked out into clarity of moral vision and experience of moral power.

No account of the patriarchs is true to all the facts in the case which neglects to note that they launched an ethical, not a magical, religion into the world.

II MoskEs AND THE LAW

The intimate linking of the idea of the sacredness of human life with religious insight is still more clearly emphasized in the story of Moses and the development of the Jewish law.

The first fact with which the growing Moses had to grapple was human slavery. That wonderful mother of his undoubtedly burned the fact of his people’s humiliation into his soul during those formative years when she tended him as his nurse in the household of Pharaoh. Throughout the years of his education there was ringing in his ears the clanking of the chains which bound his fellow Hebrews. He pondered upon a world in which the crack of the taskmaster’s whip and the cries of slaves set the tone of his thinking. It was not strange that seeing an Egyptian striking a Hebrew he slew the Egyptian.

When he found himself a man of leisure in the fields and under the skies of Midian, after his flight from Egypt, he was still conscious of the cruel injustice he had left behind. The sun could not shine so fair upon the countryside as to make him forget the black cloud of human suffering he had known. In his heart were anger and resentment against the oppressors of his people. He was a man righteously inflamed against an evil system that prostituted human values and cheapened human life. Something, he knew, ought to be done about it. Something, he grew to feel, must be done about it. Finally came the insistent conviction that he himself must do something about it, and so we have the dramatic story of the burning bush, when, in the presence of flaming beauty, he fought his decision through and turned his face again toward Egypt, returning not as a fugitive but as a man commissioned of God to destroy an inhumane system and to set a captive nation free. Moses became acutely conscious of the comradeship of God in the hour when he forgot his own comfort to lose himself in a crusade for human liberty. The God of Moses was a God of emancipation.

In the subsequent story of the lawgiver there is no attempt to gloss over the weaknesses of people. It is a realistic and not a romantic ee eee —— picture which is painted of the nomadic tribes during their years of wandering. The ethical consciousness, with its clear vision of the high value of human life, does not insist upon false and idealized pictures of humanity but faces men as they are, in all their paradox of strength and weakness, insisting on their supreme value just the same. The Moses of Sinai, out of whose genius came the beginnings of the Law, was one whose eyes had been opened to human nature through many years of leading an ungrateful people through inhospitable territory. He was a realist, toughened by the hard knocks of experience, but one in whom the fires of ethical idealism never were banked. The original lawmaker was no fence-rider; he legislated out of a glowing heart.

The Hebrew Law itself is always solicitous of human well-being. It is not. simply an arbitrary declaration of the will of God, as if he were a Celestial Autocrat, serving notice upon his minions; it is an ethical adventure, a plotting of the way by which men may best enrich each other’s lives and so build a humane society. It is a blue print of the ideal house of humanity, as far as one of Moses’ time could plan it.

The establishment of the Sabbath, for example, was the original recognition of the fact that there is a fatigue point in human labor, and that efficiency and happiness demand that it shall be acknowledged. It was specifically humane and social legislation. In its own way it was also an attempt to direct the proper use of leisure time, providing for cultural and religious activities on that day.

The commandment to honor father and mother was obviously an exaltation of the family with the consequent conservation of those values which are wrapped up in the primary group. Its social importance cannot easily be overestimated, for, along with the commandment to worship only the one God, it has kept the Jewish people alive as a people when a less clannish race would have been absorbed. Its promise has been generously fulfilled, for the days of the Hebrews as Hebrews have unquestionably been lengthened owing to their fine loyalty to home and tradition. It contains in it also provision for old age and for decrepitude. It was definitely a_ safeguarding of human values.

The essential prerogatives of individual personality were safeguarded in the commandments against murder and adultery. Alongside them must be put that infrequently quoted injunction against the bearing of false witness which sought to protect man’s most individual possession, his name, the symbol of all his achievement and character. The gossip has a social value in so far as he helps to maintain social standards, but when he becomes a character assassin he is both unjust and unsocial. This commandment corrects him. By these three commandments protection of the most precious perquisites of personality is put into the very foundations of the Mosaic law.

Think of the moral implications of such a word as this which is taken out of the main body of the law, “Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child.”” That sentence at once fixes the ethical stature of the man who wrote it and of the people who could accept it. Lay it over against our factories, our sweatshops, our sugar-beet fields, our foreign investments, and see what happens to them. There is no escaping the moral temper of this old law.

See how clearly this same body of law outlines righteousness in the conflict between property and personality. “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.” People first, property second is the order of consideration in this ancient code.

Once more, consider the implications of this command, ““Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” The most noble rhetoric of the world has not been able to improve on that old word of — Leviticus. It stands as the clearest statement of that spirit of good will by which alone men can live together successfully. No vengeance, no bearing of grudges, love to one’s neighbor—there is the recipe for a successful society. It sums up that mutual respect which we are trying to say is the very essence of true ethics.

Still another example which will illustrate the way in which the law is dominated by a sense of the sacredness of human life is its forbidding of the cutting of the flesh in worship or the disfiguring of the body in mourning. Among people whose worship rose to a cres-. cendo of ecstasy which caused them to slash their bodies with knives and whose modes of mourning made them harm their own flesh and blood, the Hebrew lawgiver felt a healthy loathing at such practices and insisted that Jehovah had altogether too much respect for men to demand any such revolting rituals from them. There is a fine dignity in the reason given for forbidding them, “for thou art an holy people.’ Contrast that phrase with the old barbaric speech and you realize you are moving on a different ethical plane.

While it is true that the Law is taken up a great deal with discussions of rituals and forms, yet in its essence it responds to a humane motive and is the expression of a religion at once institutional and ethical.

iil

Tue Ports

Music is the rhythm of life made melody. It moves us at the profoundest depths of our being. So it is quite natural that the songs men sing should be the deepest insights we have into the real forces that play deeply in their lives and actually move them to action. That which men feel too profoundly for prosaic utterance they put into poetry and song. We are never nearer to the heart of any religion, therefore, than we are in its hymn book.

This fact at once gives peculiar value to the book of Psalms, the familiar song book of every Hebrew boy and girl. We find there the lyrical cry, not of some exclusive or highbrow group, but of the common worshiper. In it, if anywhere, we shall find the characteristic expressions of this faith.

What we do find is a mixture of emotions growing naturally out of the imperfect lives of the people who felt them. There are some intensely patriotic songs with bitter words of imprecation against enemies. There are petty and provincial prayers made to Jehovah as a tribal deity. There are songs of vengeance that flash with the threat of steel. Such expressions will not surprise us if we treat the book intelligently, for this is the book of the songs of a people who had been harassed by their foes, whose standards of civilization were still low, and whose religion was still evolving. The wonderful fact is that alongside these harsher expressions are some of the most melodious that men’s tongues have ever sung, many of them so superb that all the years between have not been able to improve on them.

The ethical emphasis flashes through the psalms along five rays; insistence on the ethical character of God himself; the necessity of moral preparation for adequate worship; remembrance of the poor and those whom the world forgets; definite recognition of the relation of faith to ethics; and exaltation of brotherhood. We cannot here quote all the passages in these eternal poems which illustrate those moral insights that are at the very heart of the religion of the Old Testament, but we can look at enough of them to establish our point.

Again and again in their ascription of praise to Jehovah the psalmists sang of his holiness. However limited their vision of him might be, they never doubted that he was a righteous God. We continually hear them repeating such words as that which closes the eleventh psalm: “For the righteous Lord loveth righteousness; his countenance doth behold the upright.” In the heart of the nineteenth psalm. a hymn of praise to the Creator, is a majestic recognition of the righteousness of God in his dealings with men: “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever: the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Sometimes one stumbles on such lovely phrasing as that of the ninety-sixth psalm:

‘Honor and majesty are before him: strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.”

They sang, these old poets, of a holy God whose very nature was righteousness and truth.! It was natural that when they contemplated

coming into the presence of the Holy One they should recognize that preparation of heart and mind was necessary, that only such as were clean could abide in his presence. The fifteenth psalm is devoted to emphasizing that the worshiper must come purified into the sanctuary or worship would be incomplete:

“Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbor, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbor. In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoreth them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not. He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against the innocent.”’

Such a man would be considered a good man in any society, but it is refreshing to have so lofty an ethical standard held up as fitting preparation for entrance into the presence of the Most High. A familiar passage in the twentyfourth psalm has the same ideal in it:

“Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.”’

The exhortation to “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” which is written into the twenty-ninth psalm sums up in a single phrase the demand that those who worship God shall be holy even as he is holy. The form of worship never blinded these old poets to the necessity for an ethical character; the motions of the public service could never become a substitute in their eyes for moral achievement and integrity.?

Nothing is more characteristic of the ethical approach to life of which we are thinking than that it emphasizes the importance of the forgotten man. Once the supremacy of human values is definitely established as the central standard of activity, the humble man assumes anew importance. The fate of the insignificant is a major question with one who has decided that no policy is right which does not protect every human interest. It is therefore of the utmost importance in estimating the ethical nature of the Hebrew religion to remind ourselves of how insistent the psalms are on the value of the humblest of men in the sight of God. In the ninth psalm it is written:

“The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble.”

In this apparently impersonal world these religious songs Insist on the value of personality. They exalt God as the champion of men. The one hundred and third psalm sings with tenderness:

“Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust.’