In quest of life's meaning; hints toward a Christian philosophy of life for students

Front matter

23 oe

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HINTS TOWARD A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOP

CHAPTER I. Way RELIGION

II. THe ConpDITIONS OF THE QUEST

III. Tue Autuor or Lire—Gop .

IV. THe Master or LIFE—JEsus

V. OBSTACLES TO BELIEF—EvIL

NESS .

VII. Power ror LirE—FELLowsSHIP WITH Gop VIII. Power ror Lire—PraverR .

IX. Power ror LirE—SErVICE

X. Erernat LIFE

XI. BIBLIOGRAPHY .

PAGE

108 133 145

PREFACE

The material in this little book was originally prepared for a series of very informal vesper services at the Ozark Mountain Student Conference, June, 1926. Since then it has been revised and somewhat expanded, but the personal and conversational style has, for the most part, been retained. |

It will be apparent that these studies were intended for students from a rather conservative religious background, equipped with very little scientific and philosophical training; but it is my conviction that such truth as the argument contains will stand the test of the critical, even though it be phrased in the language of the unsophisttcated. No profession is made of a finished philosophy of the Christian life, but rather a few hints from one still early in the pathway of Christian experience, hints which may prove helpful to fellow questors.

I cannot fail to express my gratitude to two of those to whom the book has been dedicated who have read the entire manuscript with great care and to whose suggestions it owes much. The debt to other writers is indicated in the frequent quotations and in the Bibliography at the end. Far greater is the debt to a host of American students who have shared with me their problems, their difficulties, their hopes; for whatever merit the book may have is due to the fact that it is not primarily the product of one person’s reading or thinking, but springs out of the living experience of young men and young women.

| BOY Se ale 8

Osterville, Mass., August, 1926.

Preface To The Revised Edition

The publication of a second edition has given opportunity for a thorough revision. The outline and framework of the book are unchanged but errors have been corrected and a number of minor changes effected in accordance with helpful criticisms. The bibliography has been completely revised.

be Bap ai

Union Theological Seminary, New York, April, 1930.

Introduction

CHAPTER I

WHY RELIGION?

When we begin to consider the matter of religion, especially if we approach it with reflective and speculative minds, the question which often presses in upon us is not “What kind of religion shall we have?” or “What can we believe about religion?” but a prior question, “Why religion anyhow?” Here we are, setting ourselves to spend some little time, possibly several hours, in reading a book dealing primarily with religion. But why should we be interested in religion at all? Is there anything in this business which men call religion—anything really important, essential? What difference does it make to life whether religion be true or not? It is that question, I suspect, which most people are really asking about religion today.” It is that question which we shall seek to answer first; for, be very sure, religion never becomes real and, therefore, of any value to a man until he has given a satisfactory answer to that prior question, until he has discovered what, if any, essential place there is for this thing, religion, in the business of living.

*“Pure materialism and atheism are uncommon; they are found among scientists, but rarely those of the first rank, among halfbaked philosophers, and among the rebel sons of Plymouth brethren. The vast majority regard religion as a sort of hobby—harmless but unessential. This indifferent class suffers not so much from crooked thinking as from no thinking at all”’—Crighton Miller, “The New Psychology and the Preacher.”

There is only one place where we can look for the answer to that question. If religion is what many of us have always thought it to be, something added on to life to make it more beautiful or more comforting or more happy, or, it may be, more exacting, more rigid, more difficult—like the tint of a landscape or, possibly, like the regulations of the schoolhouse; if religion is some fifth wheel which men have stuck onto life for good or ill, then religion can have no hold on you and me, for we are not much interested in fifth wheels. Unless we discover that religion proceeds right out of the heart of life itself, that in a sense it is life or, at least, such an essential part of life that we can no more dispense with it than we can cut out the heart or the lungs and have a whole and living body, then we shan’t bother with it. This much is certain—either religion is the organic center of what we call life, or it is nothing at all. People often ask whether religion is important. Well, either it is the one supremely important thing in life because in a very real sense it is life itself, or it is worthless. Let us be sure of those alternatives at the outset.

We shall seek for an answer to our question, therefore, in the one place where you and I could honestly accept an answer—in the facts and experiences of our own lives. That is what we shall be thinking and talking about—iife. That is the word which will run like a thread through all we say. We shall examine life. We shall try to understand life. We shall try to answer some of the questions concerning life which are deeply ingrained in our minds. We shall seek to discover the true meaning of life for ourselves, to work out together what men call “a philosophy of life.” We shall presuppose nothing except our own earnestness and an eager desire within each of us to

WHY RELIGION? 5 find fuller life. We are really setting out on a quest for life’s meaning.

When we take these lives of ours and examine them under the one condition which I have suggested—an inner urge to higher living—we discover within each of us two great and ineradicable desires.

I. Our minds crave some explanation of the Universe and of life. Just as surely as these bodies of ours when they are alive reach out instinctively for the things they need for their health—food, air, water, exercise—just exactly so our minds when they are in any true sense alive reach out for some explanation, some interpretation of life. |

You and I, supposedly, are intelligent animals. And to the man who thinks at all, this life of ours is a perplexing business. Probably it did not use to be so. Through childhood years and through boyhood, we asked no questions of life because it seemed to ask no questions of us. We went through year after year unthinkingly, enjoying it all, it may be revelling in it all, but questioning it not at all. It is only lately that insistent questionings have begun to come upon us. We are awaking to the fact that we are placed here on the outer fringes of a Universe which is full of mystery, and at the heart of a throbbing society which is full of problems.

_ In the first place, our college courses and, far more, the general knowledge which unconsciously has become a part of us have made us realize that we are an infinitesimal part of that Universe. It may be that we go out on a clear summer night and, taking a glance upward, let our imaginations play with what smattering of astronomy we possess on what we see there. The light from that star left it something over a hundred thousand years ago, has been travelling at the rate of 186,000 miles a second ever since, and has just reached the earth. For all we know, that star may have ceased to exist thousands of years before our first ancestor appeared on the earth, but its light is just coming to us. And yet that star, visible to the naked eye, is on the hither fringes of the Universe; a telescope would reveal millions on millions of stars unseen by us, stretching ten times as far again into space. But the most powerful telescope is significant not so much for what it discovers as for the hints it gives us of Universes yet undiscovered. Here are you and I, imperceptible minutiz on an infinitesimal dust spot in a far-off corner of an ocean of space. What do you make of it all?

But that is only part of the story. Eighteen or twenty or twenty-two years lie behind each of us. Fifty, even sixty, years may lie ahead. But behind our birth there stretches a range of time which no human mind can grasp—2,000,000 years, at least, the biologists tell us, this human species of ours has existed—and, ahead, time of equal length. Here is our life, sixty or seventy or eighty years which seem to us to hold infinite significance, placed at a point in that long stream of existence—somewhat less than the wink of an eye in an eternity of time. What do you make of it all? The mind which does not ask some explanation is unintelligent.

But it may be that we have not yet been gripped by the mystery of the Universe. It may be that some glorious view of nature for the first time reveals to us the inner meaning of beauty. Possibly we “discover” poetry for the first time and awake to the realization that there are ranges on ranges of experience hitherto unknown to us. Or the life of the world about us may seem suddenly to

WHY RELIGION? 7 have become incredibly more complex, a maze of relations and movements and conflicting motives, impossible to understand or to influence. And before it all a sense of loneliness and wonder steals over us. To become conscious of all this is to have rise in the mind the questions, “Where do they come from—this Universe, life? Where are they going to? What does it all mean?”

‘It is not only the world without which is growing daily more complex and confusing. We fool ourselves if we think that is the real trouble. We look out through the lenses of our own experience upon a landscape which seems topsy-turvy. It appears so, partly at least, because the lenses are out of focus. It is the life within which is becoming infinitely more complex and confusing. It is more difficult than it used to be to understand ourselves. It is more difficult to manage ourselves. It is more difficult to know what we believe. It is more difficult to be certain where we fit into the whole business. And there begins to creep into our thinking a questioning which is likely to increase as the next few years come on—what is the purpose and meaning of our life anyhow? Our minds are seeking an interpretation.

It may be that all of this is Greek to you, outside the range of your present experience. “Jf our minds are alive’”—ah, that’s it! The human mind, when it is alive, when it is set free to follow its own highest impulses in a Universe of mystery and a world of confusion, seeks some understanding of itself and of the environment in which it finds itself. If these questions and their like do not relentlessly press upon you, it is because your mind is not yet really alive. For the questions “Whence? What? Whither? How? Why?” must always be the basic and ultimate questions of life—not because the philosophers have ruled it so but because they are rooted deep in man’s instinctive mentality. They demand an answer. Life which is real is a unity. We cannot be whole human beings and go on living our practical day-by-day life while there go unanswered the great queries which would make life intelligent. Our life cannot be full and healthy, let alone consistent, while that part of it which should give it direction goes unsatisfied. And so, while religion never begins or ends in intellectual inquiry, no living and active mind can be satisfied until it rests in an adequate explanation of life’s meaning.

2. But there is something more than the craving of the mind for interpretation; that is less than half the story. Indeed, when we examine these lives of ours, we discover that that is only the mind’s part in the dissatisfaction of the whole life, the craving of the whole life for completion. ‘That dissatisfaction, if we are truly alive, every one of us has felt. That is really the meaning of the restlessness which is unquestionably the most outstanding charac- — teristic of the younger generation today and which, to a greater or less degree, has affected the life of every one of us. It is a dissatisfaction with life as it is—with the old shibboleths and the old objectives and the old conventions. The cry is for a number of things—for reality, for freedom, for self-expression, for self-realization. It is, really, a sensing that there is more in life than we have yet laid hold of, than people today are laying hold of. It is a craving for something which we call by this same name— life—although we do not know exactly what we mean. We cannot describe it and we cannot define it; but we are certain it is there, and we are sure we shall recognize it when we meet it. It is the inarticulate reaching out of all

WHY RELIGION? 9 that is best within us for that “something more.” Youth’s restlessness today is life’s instinctive desire for completion.

It comes to us in many different ways—this craving for completion. With a few, it is the sense of solitude of spirit of which we spoke above. With some, it is more nearly a sense of aimlessness ; possibly the final determination of our lifework approaches and we are uncertain where we fit in; we sense no particular meaning in life. With some, it is the realization of powerlessness; defeat in moral battles, possibly ; the inability to handle our own lives. To some of us, a large factor in it has been the discovery that we could not help one or two desperately needy friends. With many, it is a gradual realization that our lives are stunted and poor, that those who live fully possess a richness and a depth and a joy unknown to us. It is an awakening to a consciousness of destiny—that life was made for something great and full and triumphant, and that it is not really life at all until that is attained.

That is the deeper meaning of our search for explanation. What our lives crave is not so much an interpretation of life to which the mind can give a confident assent (although we want that) as a program for life which can bring to it fullness and meaning. Intellectual explanation alone never wholly satisfies. Life’s deepest need is not explanation, but power. Life’s most urgent question is not “What?” but “How?” We often think we want to know what we should be and do; really, we want to know show we can be and do what we know we ought to.

The mind’s desire for explanation, the life’s desire for completion—these, then, are the two basic facts of life.” Light on the mystery of life, power for the mastery of life—these are what we want. It is precisely these two

IO IN QUEST OF LIFE’S MEANING things which men through the centuries have sought of religion. For religion is not a sense of beauty, as when one sees a gorgeous sunset or hears great music or is awed by the contemplation of the heavens. Religion is not an emotional experience, a certain inner feeling of peace or joy or exaltation which comes at moments of high inspiration. Religion is not absorption in a task, whatever it may be, as when we say of a man, “His work is his religion” or “Golf is his religion.” Religion is not friendship, an intimate and inspiring companionship with others. Religion is no subscription to a creed or formula, no membership in an organization. Religion is not even good intentions, high moral purpose, a kindly spirit. Religion is the reaching out of one’s whole life—mind, body, spirit, emotions, intuitions, affections, will—for completion, for inner unity, for true relation with those about it, for true relation to the Universe in which one lives. Religion is life, a certain kind of life, a life of harmony within and true adjustment without—true adjustment, therefore, with the life of God Himself.

Do you see that, if this interpretation of religion be correct, at least three things inevitably follow?

1. Religion 1s by the very nature of life imstinctive, intuitive. We are religious because we cannot help ourselves. Interest in religion, then, is no impersonal, academic discussion, artificially stimulated and sustained. It is the rising to the surface of inextinguishable desires inherent in life itself. The experience of religion is no fifth wheel, no plastering onto life of a creed or form or unreal experience. It is the coming of life to its own fulfillment, as natural and inevitable as the leafing of the trees in spring or the cry of a new-born child for food.

WHY RELIGION? II

2. Religion is the central concern of life, because religion is the fulfillment of life. Some answer to the religious questions, both in the realm of our thinking and in the realm of our living, we must have. Religion may be untrue; it may be dangerously false. But, whatever else you may say about it, religion is not unimportant; it is the most important problem of life.

3. Religion is concerned primarily not with our minds but with the whole of life. For our “philosophy of life” is our interpretation of the whole of our experience, and that whole is a multifold thing to which every aspect of our beings contributes. Religion, therefore, is no arid intellectual matter but an active, vital thing into which our wills enter—involving our response to all the experience life brings to us. In our whole inquiry, the theoretical and the practical must be inextricably intermixed. If we find God, we must find Him with our whole beings. And the conception of Him and the conception of the good life which our minds formulate must be the conceptions to which our whole experience leads us.

There is a homely old proverb, ‘“Turn a horse loose and he will return to his stall; turn a man’s soul loose and it will return home, it will return to God.” The great spirits down the centuries have sensed that. Two of the greatest have made it the summation of their own experience of life: “God that made the world and all things therein has -made of one blood all nations of men that they should seek Him if by chance they might feel after Him and find Him.’? “God has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him.’”*

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THE MEANING OF LIFE

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Chapter II

It is a fundamental principle for the discovery of truth in any realm whatsoever that there are certain prior conditions to be met. This is true in science. The chemist who is searching out some new discovery must first set up an apparatus which may require days for its assembling. He must possess what we sometimes call background, a thorough knowledge of what pathfinders who have preceded him have discovered and of all that is now to be known in the field of his experimentation. Then he must create the particular conditions of his own hypothesis—the precise mixture of chemicals, the exact temperature, the required atmospheric conditions, and whatever else is necessary. Finally, in many and many a case, certain faculties which we are inclined to regard as the antithesis of scientific— imagination, intuition, etc.,—have pioneered the way long before his experiment began. Someone has said that scientific discovery is a process in which imagination, intuition, and faith leap far ahead of the facts and grasp truth; then a foundation of facts to support the hypothesis is gradually erected.» We sometimes talk glibly as though truth lay about like stray shells on a sandy beach, to be picked up for the seeking. But truth, like anything of value, is dearly bought. She admits to the vision of her presence only those who have fulfilled to the last iota the

- 1See, for example, Poincaré, “Science et Méthode,” Chap. 3.

conditions she herself has laid down for entrance—conditions not only of mind or of skill but also of character— toil, patience, courage, consecration, faith.

Indeed, a large part of the discovery of truth itself is the discovery and fulfilling of these prior conditions. A few years ago, announcement was made of, an invention which revolutionized the radio industry and which has made possible the present popularization of radio. The inventor, a quiet, diffident little man, who for twenty years had eked out a scanty existence as professor in an eastern technical school, became a multimillionaire overnight. The story of his invention is not known. He experimented with no apparatus to achieve it. For days and weeks and months, he sat quietly over a writing pad, filling sheet after sheet with figures, scratching, correcting, tearing up, and starting afresh. When his mathematical formula was finally completed, the apparatus was set up. It worked perfectly at once. He had discovered and fulfilled the prior conditions; the truth was immediately revealed.

In no sphere of truth is this principle so important as in the ultimate truths about life. How inevitable that is! For here we are dealing with the most delicate and important of all types of truth, that which in a sense includes and yet transcends all the others. If only we had common sense to see ourselves in perspective, how ridiculous many of our assumptions would appear—the assumption, for instance, that the great truths about life should be so obvious that anyone at any time could read them. As a matter of fact, many of our intellectual difficulties and most of our practical difficulties about life arise just here—we never fulfill the conditions through which alone truth could certainly appear to us. I recall a girl in a college in Kansas who had committed some terrible offense against her own conscience, something so horrible to her that she could tell it to no one. She had made no confession of it, no effort to clear her own mind about it, yet she was complaining, “I have waited and waited to have God become a reality to me. Why doesn’t He make Himself real to me?” Many of us more or less echo that same complaint. “God isn’t real to me. This business of religion is all Greek to me,” we say. How could it be otherwise? We have not fulfilled the conditions under which any living Spirit of Love could make itself felt in our lives.

But that is to state it negatively only. I want to state positively the belief that, if we discover and fulfill the inevitable conditions of our quest, truth will in the end of the day reveal itself to us with unmistakable certainty. It will be no clear and unwavering vision. Truth is always difficult to hold. We must fight ever for our vision of it; that, indeed, is one of the conditions of possessing it. God has not written Himself across the face of the Universe so that he who runs may read. But neither is He playing a capricious hide-and-seek with those who earnestly search for Him. And I believe that, granting the fluctuations and uncertainties which are not absent from the experience of the best of men, even Jesus himself, truth does eventually and satisfyingly appear to those who so fit themselves to see it.

What, then, are the conditions for the discovery of the truth about life, for the discovery of God, and the coming into intimate relationship with Him?

1. The first is that which must apply to every field of discovery—a knowledge and equipment adequate to the task. This is as true for the seeker after God as it is for the chemist. Yet people think they can embark on this preeminently difficult and delicate task with no equipment save good intentions, and find the truth they seek. As Dr. Douglas Adam has said, “With some, doubt is an attitude of intellectual adventure, with quite inadequate mental equipment for the experiment.” * In this realm, since it is a philosophy of life we are seeking, the knowledge needed, the material for our work, is an adequate experi- | ence of life—an experience won through our own lives or through intimate acquaintance with the experience of others. I remember my own intellectual difficulties about religion when I was an undergraduate. I realize now that there was not enough knowledge of life there to have intellectual difficulties about. They were theoretical, unreal, childish. It is only in the face of the facts of life in all their cruelty and mystery that true doubt comes. Too often in the field of religious thought, the seeker is like a child trying to construct the Brooklyn Bridge with his toy blocks, or searching out the secrets of the heavens with a magnifying glass.

And in this realm equipment adequate to the task is a mind able and sufficiently trained to grapple with the intricate problems involved. This does not mean that only the intellectually acute can understand life or discover its secrets, for it is of the very essence of spiritual truth that it reveals itself to the humble and the simple minded. It does mean that only those who possess the needed equipment had best dally with the intellectual and philosophical problems of religion.

2. A second condition which follows closely was referred to in the first chapter—the recognition that truth is not

* John Douglas Adam, “Under the Highest Leadership,” p. 4.

the discovery of the mind alone, but of the whole personality. For truth concerns the whole of life and the whole of life is a unity. Truth, therefore, must be our best interpretation of the evidence and experience which all of life brings. We must realize that all the organs of our nature when they are functioning fully are feeling after truth and leading toward truth—that mysterious and baffling faculty which we call intuition; our emotions at their highest; the sense of beauty; our wills; most of all, our sense of right and wrong, our moral valuations, the way our natures react to definite issues and choices which present themselves.

Here is one reason why religion 1s so unreal to many people. They are seeking God with their minds alone. How unreasonable that is! If the mind were the final means of discovering God, then religion would become the prerogative of the intellectually gifted.* And that would be blasphemy against God Himself. As Bushnell once said, ““The geometer might as well expect to solve his problems by the function of smell as a responsible soul to find God by the understanding alone.” “ Yet many of us persist in attempting just that. And this tendency to seek God with the mind alone is a characteristically modern trait. In this day when we are ridding ourselves of fragmented conceptions of life and when the great cry is, “Life is a unity; it cannot be parcelled out into mind, body, spirit, etc.,” we still try to search with only our minds in this field of truth-seeking which so preeminently involves life as a whole. Truth never comes to us fully that way.

*“Tf the mind were the final means of apprehending God, we should be reduced at once to the position of Cicero with reference to the Roman religion—that only the intellectually gifted can be saved.” Henry B. Wright, “The Will of God and a Man’s Lifework,” p. 124

* Horace Bushnell, “The New Life,” p. 182.

There is one further fact to be recognized about the nature of truth itself. Not only is it to be found only by the whole personality; it is of the very nature of truth that it reveals itself one step at a time, and the second step never appears until the first has been taken. That does not suit us. We want to know the whole story before we begin. We want to see the end of the path before we start. This is especially true with regard to our careers. We say in effect, “Show me precisely where this path will land me, and I'll tell you whether I'll take it. Tell me beforehand what You expect me to do if I agree to do Your will, and I’ll tell You whether I'll agree to do it.” Truth does not work that way. There is great insight in that line of John Henry Newman’s Lead, Kindly Light, “T do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me.” If truth seems a puzzling blur to you, ask yourself the question, “Have I taken the few steps of duty already clear to me?” The light you seek may wait for that; for the quest of truth is an adventure, an adventure in which we move forward step by step. Remember, too, that to face truth or duty and dodge tt, to see a step and fail to take tt, 1s never to see that step quite so clearly again.

3. Further, no discovery of truth is possible without the determination to push through to an answer at whatever cost. The search for truth is a struggle; no one has a right to embark on it unless he is determined to see his search through to the end, cost what it may. “God’s way with life from the amceba to man has never been to fulfill desire but to tempt to effort. From the dawn of history God’s way with man has not been to instruct but to tempt to discovery. We should not expect the most important of all truth spread out like an advertisement, but hidden - as a treasure.” ° There is no room for intellectual dillydallying here. This is the condition of mental earnestness.