Outlines of social theology

II Glass Book

Copyright N°.

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

OUTLINES OF SOCIAL THEOLOGY

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OUTLINES

OF

BY

PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND LONDON

1895 All rights reserved

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Copyright, 1895, By MACMILLAN AND CO.

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Narfoooti -press :

J. S. Gushing- & Co. — Berwick & Smith.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

Preface

Idealism and theology, originally joined together in "the Gospel according to St. John," were put asunder through the estrangement of the Greek and Latin churches. The Greek church put a metaphysic in the place of religion, and paid the penalty in spiritual sterility. The Latin church put authority in the place of reason, and paid the penalty in intellectual barrenness. Protestantism has inherited the Greek formulas without the philosophy which gave them meaning, and the Latin distrust of reason without the authority which made dogmatism effective. The remedy lies in a reunion of vital religion with rational theology.

The time has not come for writing this new theology. The returns from psychology and sociology, on which it will depend, are not yet in. A man however may blaze a path, even though he lacks the materials and the capacity to build a road. This little book aims to point out the logical relations in which the doctrines of theology will stand to each other when the time shall come vi PREFACE

again for seeing Christian truth in the light of reason and Christian life as the embodiment of love.

I have called it Social Theology, because the Christianity of Christ and his disciples was preeminently a social movement, and because we are looking at everything to-day from the social rather than the individualistic point of view. In ethics, in economics, in sociology, in politics, we no longer treat man as capable of isolation. Units homo, nullus homo. Man is what he is by virtue of his relations to that which he is not. In these special sciences we try to solve the problem of the individual by putting him into right relations with the forces and persons about him. Christ came to place man in right relations with God, with nature, and with his fellow-men. The modern man translates the Greek tyvxv Dv n ^ e rather than soul. The preservation and enrichment of life, not the mere insuring and saving of the soul, is the function of religion which appeals to men to-day. And at this period of transition the adjective "social" serves to call attention to the shifting of emphasis from the abstract and formal relation of the isolated individual to an external Ruler, over to man's concrete and essential relations to the Divine Life manifested in nature, history, and human society.

PREFACE vii

A few paragraphs of this book, amounting to twenty or thirty pages, have appeared in published sermons and addresses, and in articles in the Andover Review, the Outlook, the Century, and the Forum. The greater part, the relation of parts to each other, and the interpretation of each part in the light of the whole, is entirely new.

For valuable suggestions and criticisms upon the proofs, my thanks are due to Professor Egbert

C. Smyth, of Andover Seminary ; Professor George H. Palmer, of Harvard University ; and Professor

D. Collin Wells, of Dartmouth College.

With the exception of the first and last chapters I have avoided the technical philosophical discussion which theology always invites. In dealing with the grounds of belief in God, in the first chapter, I have found it impossible to treat the subject at all without assuming some familiarity with the results of metaphysical inquiry. And yet the presentation there made is the merest summary of the idealistic position. In the last chapter also I have introduced a summary of the idealistic objections to asceticism, hedonism, socialism, and promiscuous charity. The general reader is advised to skip both these chapters. Yet it was impossible to omit them from the book viii PREFACE

without leaving" it logically very incomplete. For after all metaphysics must be the Alpha, and ethics the Omega, of any theology which is rooted in reason and fruitful in life.

WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE.

Chapter I The World And The Self The Father

There are three stages in the spiritual development of man. The first stage is world-consciousness ; in which he is engrossed by the stream of sensations which come pouring in from the great world without. The second stage is self-consciousness; in which he goes forth with eager ambition to subject this outward world of men and things to the forms of his understanding and the service of his will. The third stage is God-consciousness ; in which, unsatisfied with self and the world, he devotes the matured powers of reflection and selfdetermination to the unselfish service of objective and universal ends. The first stage is the state of nature. The second is the plane of science, art, business, politics, and culture. The third is the sphere of religion.

These stages are not mutually exclusive. They are rather distinguishable aspects, different degrees of maturity, of the one indivisible life of man. The higher include the lower. The later take up into themselves the significance of all that has gone before. Science and art fare ill if they ignore the solid ground of sensuous fact. Religion degenerates into an empty form, a useless and mischievous superstition, if it fails to make close connection with the science and art and business and culture of the age.

The first of these stages need not detain us long. Psychology tells us there is no pure sensation in adult life. Sensations are mere signs which we at once work up into perceptions. Sensations are only the raw material of the world our thought constructs. The world pure and simple, apart from the unity and coherence which it receives from the mind which thinks it, is no world at all. It is a chaos, not a cosmos. It is, as Professor James says of the object of the baby's consciousness, u one big, blooming, buzzing Confusion."

The notion that there is a world unrelated to our intelligence, which yet makes impressions on the blank white paper of a passive intellect and drops ready-made ideas into the previously empty cabinet of a merely receptive mind, is a relic of philosophical superstition which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has demolished ; and the last vestiges of which modern psychology has swept away. The world we know and talk about, the only world we can conceive and think, is a world which the mind creates for itself out of the materials which sensation brings. One might as well say that the cloth which comes out of a factory is the exclusive product of the bales of cotton that are dumped into the picker-room, as to claim that the world as we know it is the exclusive product of sensation. What the card and the jenny and the loom do to the raw cotton, that the forms and categories of the understanding do to the raw material of sensation. As the cloth is the joint product of the material and the machinery, so knowledge is the joint product of sensation and' the mind which reacts on it and works it over. The world of mere sensation, therefore, is not the ultimate reality.

No less disastrous than the effort of the mind to treat the world as ultimate reality is the practical attempt to make it the object of our devotion. At some time or other, we all try the experiment. We go out into the world expecting to find there, ready-made and fitted to our forms, the happiness we crave. But, like the prodigal, we soon discover that perpetual feasting ends in feeding swine. The world was not made to order to gratify our wants Of itself, it will not even supply our physical necessities. Nor do our fellowmen stand waiting to receive and execute our orders. " And he began to be in want ; and no man gave unto him," is the pitiful plight in which Nature leaves those who cast themselves blindly upon her bounty. We cannot be satisfied with the husks, which give such perfect satisfaction to the swine. The reason is that we are more than they. It was " when he came to himself," that the prodigal determined to return from the far country. As Carlyle has explained it, " Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness ; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the finite. Will the whole finance ministers and upholsterers and confectioners of modern Europe undertake in joint-stock company to make one shoeblack happy ? They cannot accomplish it above an hour or two ; for the shoeblack also has a soul quite other than his stomach ; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more, no less ; God's infinite universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every

THEOLOGICAL J

wish as fast as it rose. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine ; it is even, as I said, the shadow of ourselves." Carlyle's shoeblack and Jesus's prodigal are brought up at the same point ; the unsatisfied, infinite self.

This incapacity of the finite and fleeting world without to satisfy the spirit within, is the halftruth of pessimism and the secret of its charm.

"We demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power ; Ah, yes ; and they benumb us at our call ! Yet still from time to time, vague and forlorn. From the soul's subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day. 11

The quest of pleasure in outward things defeats itself. Cyrenaicism teaches suicide. If man's ultimate relation is to blind and unconscious nature, then Schopenhauer is right when he exclaims : " Desires are limitless, claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives rise to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its longings, set a goal to its infinite cravings, and fill the bottomless abyss of the heart. Happiness always lies in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud which the wind drives over the sunny plain ; before and behind it all is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. The present is therefore always insufficient ; but the future is uncertain, and the past irrevocable. Nothing at all is worth our striving, our efforts and struggles, all good things are vanity, the world is bankrupt at all ends, and life is a business which does not pay expenses."

Neither intellectually nor practically can we rest in mere world-consciousness, and accept the world as the ultimate reality. We must turn next to ourselves. Intra te quaere deurn.

The world within the mind of man, the world as thought makes it, the world of human science and art and history and politics, is throughout an ordered world. All things are firmly bound together by indissoluble laws ; so that a change at one point involves a compensating change in everything even remotely connected with it. Every act that takes place here implies corresponding reaction everywhere. What I do now is at once the product of all my past, and a determining element, however slight, in all my future. This oak tree now before me, owes its size and shape to thousands of oaks and acorns that have gone before ; to the soil that feeds its roots ; to the upheaval, denudation, vegetation, and decay, which formed that soil ; to sunshine and storm ; to measureless cycles of clashing meteors and diffused fire mist and glowing earth and cooling crust out of which sunshine and storm were born. This man upon the street derives his present being from countless generations of men and women who bridged for him the gulf between the savage and the civilized estate ; to numberless animal forms which in the struggle for existence won the right of his superior structure to survive ; to liberties secured on ancient battlefields and institutions inherited from unremembered days ; to parents, friends, teachers, books, influences, ideals, inextricably blended in the seamless robe which we all wear and call environment.

This world of our thought is one. All things in it stand to each other in reciprocal relations. Each thing must take its definite place by the side of other things in space; each event must take its precise position before and after other events in time ; each quality must be bound up with and dependent upon other qualities under the conception of substance which we put upon groups of qualities in order to hold them together in our minds ; each change must be the correlate

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of other changes according to the law of cause and effect, whereby we maintain for our thought the identity of the world in the midst of its unceasing transformation.

Thus the world of our own thought, which in fact is the only world we know and can talk about, proves to be a world built up by the activity of our own minds, which reduce the uncoordinated data of sensation to unity and order by imposing upon them forms of perception and laws of relation which are inherent, not as formulated propositions, but as modes of operation, in the rational nature of the mind itself. That the world of our thought is one ; that it is an ordered world ; that it is a coherent system of rational and reciprocal relations ; and that this unity and rationality of the world we think is due, not to the raw material of sensation dumped into a passive and receptive mind, but to the reaction of an active intelligence which contributes out of its own nature the forms and categories by which it reduces the manifold of sensation to the unity of reason, — this, in briefest possible form, is the positive outcome of the Critique of Kant.

The order and rationality we find in nature, then, is not material, but mental : it is not im-

THEOLOGICAL I I

printed on our senses from without, but is imposed upon sensation from within. And, we must recognize, even at this preliminary stage in the discussion, that, as Herbert Spencer has said, "This necessity we are under to think of the external energy in terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a materialistic aspect to the Universe." The world is the great mirror in which our reason sees itself reflected. Of so much Kant makes us sure. Is that all? Can we stop here? Is the intelligence by which we interpret the world simply our intelligence ? Can we rest satisfied in a merely subjective idealism ?

The raw material, the sensations themselves, we certainly did not create. Kant had to admit an external source from which these sensations come. He, however, placed this source of sensation in "things in themselves," out of all possible relation to the mind of man, which can merely receive sensations, but is unable to go behind the immediate returns sensations give. Kant thus prepared the way for the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer. And when Mr. Spencer tells us that " amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that man is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed " ; and then adds that, " The power manifested throughout the Universe distinguished as material, is the same power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness " ; and then, having gone so far, stops short with the declaration that we can know absolutely nothing of this Power of whose existence we are sure, he is simply translating Kant's inaccessible source of phenomena into his own Unknowable Background of the universe.

Kant and Spencer leave us with a world which is essentially mental ; a world which our own minds alone cannot explain ; and the certainty that there is something beyond which does explain this world with its " spiritualistic rather than materialistic aspect."

If the source of phenomena merely gave us sensations and nothing more ; if one mind could interpret these sensations in oneway, and another could interpret them in another ; if there were no reason in the world except that which the individual minds of men impose upon it ; if there were no such thing as verification of the opinion of man by the objective witness of nature ; if there were no objective standard to which all finite minds are compelled to conform ; if there were no valid and immutable distinction between truth and falsehood, between science and fancy, between proved theory and probable hypothesis, — then indeed the position in which Kant and Spencer leave us would be final and ultimate.

These very things, however, it is the peculiar achievement of modern science to have established. We can verify our subjective notions by appealing to the test of objective experiment. We make predictions ; and nature fulfils our expectations to the minute. We recognize an established body of scientific truth which we have discovered, not created ; and which no man may deny without thereby banishing himself from the society of the intelligent. We accept a standard of objective truth ; we acknowledge that there is one system of thoughtrelations, common to all thinking minds ; and we judge a given proposition to be true or false according as it falls within or falls without this one system of rational relations.

In the crises of development, when new truths are declared and new standards of duty are proclaimed, this divine background of truth comes to the front. When Copernicus declares in opposition to the unanimous opinion of mankind that the earth moves around the sun, what gives him confidence in the truth of his assertion ? If it is merely his opinion, it cannot maintain itself against the opinion of mankind. If the opinions of finite minds are the ultimate source of truth, then neither the opinion of Copernicus nor that of his opponents is certainly true. Both are merely probable. And of the two theirs is more probable than his. The ground of the astronomer's confidence is that there is a rational relation of things, as infinite reason, in which the revolution of the earth around the sun always was, is now, and always will be, an inseparable and undeniable element. Into that thought Copernicus has entered. He is prepared to show that with his doctrine of the revolution of the earth, all other astronomical facts fall into harmony ; without this doctrine, all other facts remain in confusion and contradiction. As Copernicus said : " By a close and long observation I have at length found that, if the motions of the rest of the planets be compared w T ith the circulation of the earth, and be computed for the revolution of each, not only their phenomena will follow, but it will so connect the orders and magnitudes of the planets and all the orbs, and even heaven itself, that nothing in any part of it could be transposed without the confusion of the rest of the parts, and of the whole universe." This thought, which is common to him and to his opponents ; this thought, which is common both to the minds of all thinking men and to the forms of the external order ; this rational and universal relation of things, which is the basis of the ultimate agreement of all candid minds with each other, and the guarantee that their united judgment is in agreement with the facts, — this is the only rational ground of the confidence which the scientific discoverer has in the new truth which he declares. If there were two natural orders, he might be talking of one, and his opponents of the other. If there were no objective rational order, both he and they might be amusing themselves with fancies equally true because equally subjective; but equally false because nothing could be found to which either could be proved to correspond.

The facts which we have been considering demand some explanation. The fixed relations in which all objects of our thought stand to each other are not of our own making. ' This coherence of all the forces in the world, in such a way that we cannot think of a change in one element or member without thinking corresponding and compensating changes in the whole, is no device of the subjective mind of the individual beholder. This unity of all the forces and facts of the world in an organic whole of reason we discover, but do not create. The universality of law, the verification of hypothesis, the fulfilment of prediction, the established body of science, the objective validity of truth and its distinction from error, the necessity of all finite minds to think alike on all subjects which, like mathematics and demonstrated science, admit of perfect clearness and distinctness, — these facts require for their explanation a common ground of unity between nature and the mind of man ; a bond and basis of intelligibility between different minds ; a supreme source and standard of truth authoritative over all finite minds. Such a ground of unity, and bond of intelligibility, and source and standard of truth can be found in nothing short of the Absolute Thought, the Infinite Spirit, or God.

As the uniform order of physical events, and science which is its mental equivalent and correlate, reveals the Absolute Mind ; so the developing order of human society, and morality which is its subjective counterpart, reveals the Universal Will.

When Socrates preaches moral doctrine contrary to the conventional Athenian tradition, why.

should he die rather than renounce his vocation ? If it is a mere question of individual preference, all Athens is more likely to be right than a single individual. Socrates affirms that it is not his private opinion which he is setting forth, but an absolute and eternal right of which he is the mouthpiece. How does he know this ? Because with his doctrine he can see the facts of the moral life, as one harmonious whole. Without it he sees that these facts contradict each other ; and he is prepared to manifest these contradictions to any one who will consent to answer his questions on these points. It was because of his confidence in a right not of his own making or choosing, that he refused to abandon his teaching. Hence his boldness. " If you say to me, Socrates, this time we will let you off, but upon one condition, that you are not to inquire and speculate in this way any more, and that if you are caught doing this again you shall die, — if this was the condition on which you let me go, I should reply : 'Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and breath I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy.' For I do believe that there are gods, and in a far c

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higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them."

At first sight the customs and institutions of different ages, races, and nations seem as conflicting and chaotic as the forces of nature seem to the unscientific mind. Yet while the specific customs and institutions of society are undergoing perpetual change, the great purpose at which these seemingly inconsistent and actually conflicting principles and practices are aiming is constant and unvarying. That purpose is such an adjustment of the several members of society to each other that out of their united action there may result a harmonious social order in which each individual shall be at once the servant and the lord of all. In the beginnings of society this purpose is indeed hidden underneath intolerable burdens of usurpation and tyranny ; and the course of social evolution is marked by oppression, corruption, and the betrayal of the common interest by those whom inheritance, or power, or wealth, or popular election have constituted its guardians and defenders. And yet the fact that we recognize these things as wrong, and the fact that by revolution and rebellion, by agitation and reform, society has succeeded in correcting these abuses and dethroning these usurpers, shows that underneath all the injustices and wrongs it has endured there has been ever present, as the silent judge and the omnipotent avenger, the social ideal of a society in which each individual is at once end and means to every other.

And if we turn from the outward social ideal to the inner moral standard, or conscience, we find even clearer evidence of the presence of a Will higher than our own. Morality is something far deeper than the prudential regulation of personal conduct for private advantage, although such prudence is an important and essential element of morality. In the deeper moral experience we come face to face with a "categorical imperative." We recognize that the doing of duty is what makes us men. We feel that to be false to duty is to violate our inmost nature, and to be unworthy of a place in the world in which we live. This sense of responsibility for conduct is the fundamental instinct of the race.

Now the contents of this moral ideal are drawn from and correspond to the requirements of the social order of which we form a part. To be a good member of society, and to have a clear conscience, are the outer and inner aspects of one and the selfsame thing. You can distinguish these two aspects in thought, but you can no more separate them in fact than you can separate the convexity of the outside from the concavity of the inside of a circle. And yet, while drawn from and dependent upon the outer social order, the moral ideal is always transcending this order. The good individual owes all his goodness to the society in which he has been reared ; and yet he feels called upon to give back to that social order services and standards which tend to make it better. In a word, while the ideal of human life is embodied and preserved in society, it is developed in the consciences and advanced by the efforts of individuals.

This constant correlation of the outer order of society and the inner ideal of conduct requires some common ground as its explanation. As the correlation of physical facts with human science involves an Absolute Mind expressed in nature and progressively unfolding himself to the advancing science of man ; so this correlation of the social order and the moral ideal involves a Universal Will embodied in the progressive evolution of the social order, and revealed in the ever-expanding ideal of the moral life. And as the impulse toward scientific discovery rests on the belief that the science which we know is only a fragment of the infinite science as it exists in the Absolute Mind ;

so the impulse to moral reform springs from an implicit faith that the social institutions and moral standards prevalent at a given time are but arcs of the infinite circle, stages in the eternal process by which the Universal Will is realizing his purpose in society, and reproducing his likeness in the hearts of men.

Again, just as the possibility of error is proof positive of the reality of truth, and of an absolute basis of truth in the Infinite Mind ; so the consciousness of wrong is the infallible witness of the reality of right, and of its eternal ground in the Universal Will that makes for righteousness. If I were the only being in the universe, then my private caprice and fancy would be supreme. To be sure, one impulse of mine even then might come into conflict with another, and I should discover that this isolated self is more than the sum of its particular states. But whatever should give me permanent satisfaction would therefore justify itself as right ; because by hypothesis there would be no other interests with which it could conflict. Why is it then that I am dissatisfied, ashamed, conscious of guilt, when I have done something which seems to perfectly promote my interests as an individual ? Because I am more than an individual, and am conscious of the claims of other beings upon me. But how comes it to pass that these other beings, and society which is the organization of the interests of these other beings, have a claim upon me ? To be sure, they, and society as their agent, may punish me if I offend them. But this guilt and shame and sense of ill-desert, though historically originating in experience of actual punishment, has come to be a far deeper sentiment than mere fear of external penalty accounts for ; and there are many wrongs I can commit against society of which neither the law nor public sentiment will ever take the slightest notice. And yet I feel condemned. I feel that these other beings and their interests belong to me and are part of my own proper interest. This consciousness of wrong, this sense of guilt, is the persistent witness to the fact that in our inmost being we are one with those whose rights we have disregarded, and a member of that social order whose laws we have disobeyed. The consciousness of a limit is the knowledge of that which transcends the limit. The confession of guilt is the acknowledgment of obligation. The insufficiency of the private self is the revelation of the identification of self with society.