The mercy of hell, and other sermons

Front matter

AND OTHER SERMONS

BY

Minister of the City Temple, London

Contents

CHAPTER

I The Mercy of Hell

II The Eternal Religion

II

"What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? " — Micah 6 : 8.

" Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father, is this. To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." — James i : 27.

THERE is much mystery, not to say mystification, about religion, but there is not much mystery in religion — save the mystery of all the great and simple things that make it worth our time to live. Religion, when we get to the essence of it, is very simple — how simple, some of us have never dreamed. There is a philosophy of religion, at times more voluminous than luminous, and it is valuable; but it is not indispensable. We do not have to know the chemistry of cooking to enjoy a good meal, or to endure a poor one. No more do we have to fathom the intricacies of theology in order to be religious in heart and life.

These two texts, familiar but forever memorable, tell us what religion is in its simplest motive and manifestation. It is not this dogma or that rite, but justice, mercy, humihty, and fellowship with God whose Presence inspires and hallows our mortal life. It is benevolence and purity in the sight of God — visiting those in need and keeping ourselves pure in the light of Eternity. Philanthropy, without faith, is feverish and fragile. Fraternity quickly evaporates unless it has the inspiration and consecration of the Unseen. Acts must have motives. Results require causes. We cannot produce a poem by an explosion in a type foundry. Nor can we have an abiding fraternity among men, much less a noble and fruitful social order, without a subduing and exalting sense of a Divine Presence — a vast and benign background to life whence our motives and acts derive their dignity, meaning, and worth.

There is one religion in the world, and one only ; one faith and only one. Religions are many, sometimes sublime, sometimes grotesque, sometimes even terrible. But Religion is one — perhaps we may say one thing, but that One Thing includes everything — the life of God in the soul of man which finds expression in all the shapes which life and love and duty take. Its forms may be myriad, but the spirit that informs all of them is the same. The church has no monopoly of religion, nor did the Bible create it. Instead, it was religion — the natural and simple trust of the soul in a Power above it and within it, and the quest of a right relation to that Power — that created the Bible and the church. The soul of man is greater than all books, deeper than all dogmas, and older than all institutions. Religion is universal, and is as natural to man as song to a bird or color to a flower.

Human life rests upon one mighty faith — the goodness of God, call Him what you will, and the confidence that man may place in Him for life and for death. Theologies are the reasonings, theories, conjectures, systems, and traditions that have gathered about this confidence, often making it clear, sometimes making it obscure. There is no such thing as an atheist in the absolute sense. What we call atheism is seldom more than a revulsion from an unworthy notion of God; often it is the dark side of a loftier faith. He who has a higher conception of God than those about him, and who denies that their conception is God, is nearly always called an atheist by men who are far less believers in God than he. Socrates was accounted an atheist and accordingly put to death. The early Christians, who said the pagan idols were not Gods, were called atheists and suffered a like fate. Not all those who wear the name atheist have a nobler vision of God, but even in the wildest revolt,

" Day by day, unconsciously, Men live by a faith the lips deny, God knoweth why."

By the same token, not every man who says Lord, Lord! is godlike in his mind and spirit. One may believe all the creeds of all the sects and yet be hard of heart and vile of life. One may deny every dogma of every sect and yet do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Nor is religion certain things to be done. No, it is a spirit in which we are to do everything, even the giving of a cup of cold water.

" He who sweeps a room as for Thy will, Makes that and the action fine,"

and his humble labor has the sanctity of a sacrament. One may preach a sermon in an irreligious spirit, and another may plow a field in a mood akin to prayer. Many kinds of life must be lived, and no one kind has a right to arrogate to itself the name religious. Religion and life are one, or neither is anything of worth.

That is to say, religion is another name for mysticism, and every man is at heart a mystic. The difference between any one of us and Francis of Assisi is only a difference of genius and spiritual culture — the difference between a boy whistling a tune and Beethoven writing a sonata. Both are musicians, one a master, the other an amateur. Nevertheless, we love St. Francis because we have within us, potentially at least, the possibility of vision and of victory revealed in him. What was the faith of St. Francis and the secret of his power and joy? Like every great mystic he was led by one vision, made one passionate affirmation — that unity underlies all diversity. This was the basis and goal of his life, a sense of oneness, of the kinship of things, never better stated than by Krishna in the Hindu poem:

"There is true knowledge. It is this: To see one changeless life in all, In the separate, One Inseparable."

Naturally this belief in the unity of things leads to the further faith that while forms are fleeting, the spirit endures; that the ideal is the ultimate real. Also, if this is a universe, if unity lies at the root of things, then man must have some share of the nature of God. Upon this fact of the kinship of man with God all our thinking, whether in science, philosophy, or religion, rests for its validity. Here is the fact which underlies every form of religion, and is the basis of each. If it be false or unstable, not only religion, but all human thought, is a fiction and we know not anything — nor can we ever learn. Since man is akin to God, he is capable of knowing God through what is godlike in his nature, that is, through his soul. Such is the unshakable reality upon which the great thinkers have built from Plato to Emerson, and it can never be moved.

Howbeit, we must know that spiritual knowledge is different from mere intellectual in formation, not only different, but deeper. We know a thing mentally by looking at it from the outside, by comparing it with other things, by analyzing and defining it. Whereas, we can know a thing spiritually only by becoming like it. One may know the theory and philosophy of music, but he does not know music until his soul answers to its appeal of melody. One must love in order to know love, as it is written, " He who loveth is born of God and knozveth God, for God is love." Like is known only to like, and the one condition of the highest knowledge is likeness to, and union with, the object of knowledge. Therefore the ceaseless aspiration of the mystic is to be godlike, that he may know God. As Eckhart said, God and the soul are one in the act of knowing Him.

Why do we love music? What is the secret of that strange, sweet enchantment which music casts over us, lifting us for a brief time out of the fret and jar of life into a free and happy air? Music is unity, harmony, an echo of that infinite harmony we call God — a prophecy of the truth that all discords to one concord lead. That is to say, music is mystical, like love, like beauty, like prayer, like all else that makes our life luminous and free; and mysticism is religion. Everything that brings us into harmony with ourselves, with the true, the beautiful, and the good, is religion. That is why the religious aspiration is the inspiration of all scientific search, which is a search for harmony, all striving for liberty, all virtue and charity — the spirit of all high thought, the motif of all great music, the soul of all great literature. Such a conception of religion shakes the poison out of all our wild flowers, and shows us that in all high endeavor we are seeking union with God :

" For not alone in starry skies

In vastness all abroad, But everywhere in every place

Abides the whole of God.

For God is never so far off

As even to be near.

He is within, our spirit is

What He holds most dear."

Love of God and love of man — that is the one eternal religion in which all men agree. What is the relation of Christianity to this eternal religion ? Most of us were brought up to think that Christianity is the one true religion, and that all others are false. How does it look now ? Is it Christian to think that those vast populations, following each other through millenniums, all of them eager, as we are, to know the truth, sinning and suffering like ourselves, and like ourselves boundlessly aspiring, were left without God and without hope? Wider knowledge of our race, together with the irresistible maturing of the human mind, have made such a notion intolerable alike to heart and mind. Nor are we the first to ask such a question. Chrysostom tells us that the men of his church asked why Christ did not come sooner, and what about the deahng of God with those who lived before He came?

For many it will be surprising to know that the early Christian thinkers held no such narrow notions as we have been taught to hold. Far from it. Justin Martyr held that Socrates was inspired by the " eternal Word " made flesh in Christ, and with this Origen agreed. Augustine said that the Christian faith is that which has been in the world from the beginning, and has not been absent from any age. Erasmus actually came forward with a plea to canonize Socrates and Vergil as saints of the most high God. Such has been the faith and feeling of all the great catholic souls, as witness the words of William Law, which Wesley made his own :

" Perhaps what the best heathens called Reason, and Solomon Wisdom, St. Paul Grace in general, St. John Righteousness or Love, Luther Faith, Fenelon Virtue, may be only different expressions for one and the same blessing, the light of Christ shining in different degrees under different dispensations. Why then so many words, and so little charity exercised among Christians, about the particular term of a blessing experienced more or less by all righteous men ! "

Here are great and true words, worthy to be writ in letters of light, and they rebuke our petty bigotries with their simple insight and the dignity of their golden voice. No; Christianity is not to be set over against other forms of faith as something inserted into human history, but as something growing up out of the universal religion of humanity — the loveliest flov^er in the garden of God. Christ did not come to destroy, but to fulfil — the desire of all nations, the great Musician who gathered up into His sweet voice every wandering human tone, weaving them into one sovereign harmony. And this, so far from being a compromise of our faith, is a vast reinforcement and confirmation of it. Its position becomes more secure in a new way, by the discovery that it is a fulfilment of age-long prophecy — the eternal religion, the crown of all, because the flower and fruit of all.

How unforgetable are the words of William Penn, when he said that all merciful, humble, just, and devout souls are everywhere of one religion, and when death hath taken off the mask, they will know and love each other. Happily we no longer have to wait for death to remove the mask that hides man from his fellow soul! Our age has many faults, but it is great in its sense of the unity of mankind, in its vision of the solidarity of faith and hope. As Mark Rutherford said, we are coming to see that " we are one in the human, the immense orthodoxy which lies beneath our differences," and this makes for a friendship of faiths. The human fellowship with the Eternal, under

2g THE MERCY OF HELL

whatever name, may well hush all words, still more hush debate. If its unity is not recognized, the fault must be, in large part, our own. But given the one great experience, and at last, despite all variations of insight and emphasis, kindred souls will join in the one eternal religion — knowing that, even when they use different phrases, all are trying to tell, each in his own tongue, the truth that is the treasure of all.

Since this is so, since we are partakers of a like precious faith and hope and vision, it ought to be easy for us to love all our fellow-workers in the cause of moral culture and spiritual life. Just because religion is life, it takes many forms in infinite variety, and its myriad colors bespeak its vitality and beauty. Had Confucius, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Plutarch sat on the grass and listened to the Sermon on the Mount, all would have said Amen. In like spirit let us seek to know, to understand, and to love our fellow seekers and finders of the God who is the Father of all, and the Savior of each. Evermore it is the truth that makes us free, and the more truth we know the freer we shall be, building more stately mansions, for the soul till at length we are free indeed. What Longfellow said of Channing may well be the life and labor of every man who loves God and his fellows :

" With reverent feet the earth he trod, Nor banished nature from his plan;

But studied still with deep research To build a universal Church, Lofty as the love of God, And ample as the wants of man."

Ill

THE FIRST TRUTH "In the beginning God." — Gen. i: i.

HERE is the first truth and the last, the greatest thought in the world, the most profound, the most revealing, the most satisfying. History tells us What has happened, science seeks to know How it happened, philosophy tries to tell us Why it happened; but they leave us with one question still in our hearts. What we most want to know is. Who made it happen, Who spread out this far-shining city of the universe and gave us a home and a duty in it ? That is why, after man has studied the earth and the sky, and reviews what he has learned, he finds his heart unsatisfied, and even restless, until one other question is somehow answered. So it has been from the beginning, and so it will be until the end, while human nature is the same.

Therefore it is that the Bible, the wisest and deepest book that broods over the mystery of life, begins its great story at the beginning, and answers the last question first. Nor has all the wit and wisdom of the ages been able to give a better answer. With an insight clear as light the old book goes straight to the heart of the mystery, and time has shown that its answer is in accord with right reason, the verdict of moral sanity, and the testimony of facts when rightly read. The Bible does not argue; it affirms. Its truth is the fruit of religious experience, and its vision of the unity, spirituality and righteousness of God, who is the beginning and the end of all things, is the greatest gift that ever came to the world from any source.

Admit that this truth dawned slowly and dimly upon the human mind, amidst narrow notions, limited and passionate like the people who saw it, the following of that vision becomes the more pathetic and heroic. No matter; it grew as the mind of man was able to grasp it, and the heart was pure enough to hold it. From time to time a radiant man was born who added something of powder and dignity to that which his race revealed, making the truth clearer. Other races, such as Egypt and India, outtopped the Hebrews in intellectual and artistic power, but in the depth and sanity of their religious insight the mighty seers who wrote the Bible have never been equaled. Even to-day we are only beginning to spell out the meaning of the unity of the universe, which they beheld ages ago. Let us never forget that long before science learned to talk about the physical unity of the world, those hoary prophets saw its moral and spiritual vmity in God. For them, He who was God from everlasting, before ever the earth was formed, was the sufficient ground for every possible unity of science and philosophy — so far and so fast did their spiritual insight outrun the intellect of the race.

No one ought ever again to take this text and forget the lines of Alfred Noyes in exposition of it. Some of us heard him read these lines when he was here as our guest, his face aglow with the faith of which he sang, his body swayed by the music of his words. Written at a time when men fancied that they had found the Origin of Life this side of God, the poem takes us back behind the centuries, back of the mire and slime of evolution, back into the darkness before the dawn of creative time, and demands, as a challenge alike to reason and reverence, that men kneel where once they dared to doubt. Hear now an authentic strain of the ancient faith of humanity :

"'In the beginning?' — Slowly grope we back

Along the narrowing track.

Back to the deserts of the world's pale prime,

The mire, the clay, the slime ; And then, what then? Surely something less;

Back, back to Nothingness !

You dare not halt upon that dwindling way!

There is no gulf to stay Your footsteps to the last. Go back you must !

Far, far below the dust, Descend, descend ! Grade by dissolving grade,

We follow, unafraid !

Dissolve, dissolve this moving world of men

Into thin air — and then?

" O pioneers, O warriors of the Light,

In that abysmal night, Will you have courage, then, to rise and tell

Earth of this miracle?

Will you have courage, then, to bow the head,

And say, when all is said — ' Out of this Nothingness arose our thought !

This blank abysmal nought Woke, and brought forth that lighted city street,

" When you have seen those vacant primal skies

Beyond the centuries.

Watched the pale mists across their darkened flow,

As in a lantern-show.

Weaving, by merest ' chance,' out of thin air,

Pageants of praise and prayer; Watched the great hills like clouds arise and set.

And one — named Olivet; When you have seen, as a shadow passing away,

One child clasp hands and pray ; When you have seen emerge from that dark mire

One martyr, ringed with fire ; Or, from that Nothingness, by special grace.

One woman's love-lit face,

" Will you have courage, then, to front that law

(From which your sophists draw Their only right to flout our human creed)

That nothing can proceed — Not even thought, not even love — from less

Than its own nothingness?

The law is yours ! But dare you waive your pride.

And kneel where you denied?

The law is yours ! Dare you re-kindle, then.

One faith for faithless men.

And say you found, on that dark road you trod, ' In the beginning — God ' ? "

An atheist, if he be honest, is worthy of respect, but he ought to be brave enough to follow his logic to its ultimate limit. Few, however, have ever dared to do it. Romanes confessed, when he had lost faith in God, that he was strangely lonely, and that life had lost its soul of loveliness. Dostoevsky, driven by doubt into dark despair, felt that God pursued him even into the shadows and would not let him alone. Of men of refined and sensitive nature, only Nietzsche was heroic enough to face the raw horror at the end of his logic of denial, and the result was obfuscation of intellect and final insanity. How pathetic are his words lamenting his loss of the right to pray! They move like a dirge, with the solemn step of the funeral chant in the music of Chopin, and they tell, as perhaps no other words have told, what atheism means to a heart that feels :

" Never more wilt thou pray, never more worship, never more repose in boundless trust — thou renouncest the privilege of standing before an ultimate wisdom, an ultimate mercy, an ultimate power, and unharnessing thy thoughts — thou hast no constant watcher and friend for thy seven solitudes — thou livest without gazing upon a mountain that hath snow on its head and fire at its heart — there is now no redeemer for thee, no one to promise a better life — there is no more reason in that which happens, no love in that which shall happen to thee — thy heart hath now no resting-place, where it needeth only to find, not to seek; thou refusest any ultimate peace, thou desirest the eternal recurrence of war and peace — man of thy self-denial, wilt thou deny thyself all this? Whence will thou gain the strength?"

Now, remember; my talk to-day is no effort to prove that God is, which would be too much like arguing about the air we breathe, or the light by which we see. Fact is, if there were no God no one would think about Him at all, no one would believe in Him, much less deny Him. Our very doubts bear witness to His reality. H one so far forgets the ancient sanities and sanctities of his race as to argue about God, he must have a care how he does it. In order to argue a man must assume that he has a mind, and if there be no eternal Mind that is a violent assumption. One might perhaps prove, by logic, that there ought to be a God, but he cannot prove God by logic, since logic itself must first be proved valid. No, my thesis is that unless we find God at the beginning of our thought, we cannot hope to find Him at the end, or, indeed, anywhere. Whoso ascends from a godless world will reach only a godless heaven, and will come down empty-hearted.

Nevertheless, let us climb one of the many ladders of logic and see what we shall see. For example, let us say. In the beginning Law. One of the very first lessons of science is that the universe is ruled by law. Atoms and masses, ponderables and imponderables, dew-drops and stars — all are evidently under the reign of law. Not a seed grows, not a leaf opens, not a bud bursts, not a snowflake falls, not a cloud gathers, not a wind blows, not a tide flows, but according to law. These laws are universal, as active in the instant present as in the ancient past. They will be active in the distant future. They rule the far-off orbs, even as they sway our earth in its orbit, securing order everywhere. It is as true there, as here, that light travels in a straight line, that heavenly bodies move in ellipses, that like produces like, and that two bodies attract each other with a force that varies according to the inverse of the square of their separating distance. Everywhere law waves its scepter. Other planets have died. Ours may. In 1866 a star flared up out of the edge of the sky with a brilliancy equaling Sirius or Vega. Soon it began to fade. The spectroscope revealed the red, green and violet lines of hydrogen fires. It was burned to a cinder. If our sun should blaze out like that the earth and all its planets would be converted into gases as quickly as a drop of water turns to vapor in the furnace. Yet still would law prevail, as it prevailed before the earth was born.

Now reason commands us to believe that Law presupposes Design, else it were not law, but chaos. Design is the logical, if not intuitional, inference from the fact of law. We are forced to think so. Socrates used a statue as an illustration, Paley a watch, Fiske a flower. No matter, the result is the same. So the proposition stands : in the beginning Law; in the law, Design. But design presupposes intelligence. The various and intricate designs of natural law are evidence of an intelligence so complex, so beyond the power of man to comprehend, that deist, theist and atheist alike unite to call it Infinite. To be sure, we have not read much in the Book of Nature, only here a word and there a line, and many pages are still dark. But, so far as we can read, its lawful order points to an infinite intelligence. Also, new pages are daily being added to it. Now where are we? In the beginning Law; in law Design; in design Intelligence — in infinite design, Infinite Intelligence. Inevitably, to this result runs the logic of the ages.

Some of us have walked dim paths in days agone, under gray skies, but we never fell into the profound unreason of thinking that man alone has mind. Yet just as certainly is it true that a God who is found at the top of a logical ladder will never satisfy the human mind, much less win the love of the human heart. What we want is not the conclusion of an argument, not a proposition of logic, but the living God in whom we live and by whose grace we may live godlike lives. This too is certain : until we find the Living God — who is not far from any one of us, but with us always, even in our hearts — life is a restless fever, a dull indifference, or a dumb despair.

Therefore, he is wisest who seeks the first truth first, who finds the Hving God in the morning of Hfe, in the laws of reason, in the prophecies of love, in the promptings of conscience — for no imaginable dance of atoms could have evoked the moral sense in man — for he who finds God early will find Him late, and at eventide there will be light all round the sky. By the same token, he it is who finds God along the way, and, walking humbly before Him, is the better able to do justly, to love mercy, and to serve his fellow souls.

In the beginning God — here is the truth that lets light through the long, dark, tragic story of Evolution, and its slow ascending effort. St. Paul saw this gleam centuries ago, in his vision of the birth travail of the universe, the key and prophetic consummation of which he found in Christ; and his insight was as profound as it was true. For him, a universe that could produce Christ became a thing of splendor, despite its tragedy and woe. For him, the fact of Christ became, and rightly so, the foundation of any philosophy of nature, the clue to any explanation of life, and the hope of the victory of righteousness, His spirit a revelation of the purpose of the world and a prophecy of its end. Aye, what a light is here, shining far back down the unreckonable ages, transfiguring even the mud and slime of primeval time; and in its glow the darkness fades away:

" A fire-mist and a planet,

A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian.

And caves where the cave-men dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty,

And a face turned from the clod — Some call it Evolution,

And others call it God."

In the beginning, God — so and only so can we read the mystery of our own hearts, with their strange longings, their aspirations heaven-high, their sorrows fathoms deep, and their thoughts that wander through eternity. Otherwise our minds are like Whitman's Noiseless and Patient Spider, forever spinning threads of thought and throwing them out into the void, and forever hoping that they will catch somewhere. But once we know that at the beginning, at the end, over all, through all, there is a mighty and loving Thinker, whose thoughts evoke our thoughts, whose beauty woos us with its loveliness, whose love begets within us a love that defies death, then our life has dignity and meaning, and religious experience, equally with artistic creation and scientific quest, finds explanation and inspiration. Then, too, we know why there come moments when earth seems too tiny for the thoughts that well up within us, and our fleeting life too frail and brief to achieve the things we dare to dream; those moments of revelation, when