The reasonableness of the religion of Jesus

Contents

Introduction ix

I. The Reasonableness and Necessity of

Growth and Change in Religion . 3

Introduction

I had the honor of knowing Mr. Baldwin, the founder of this lectureship. The first object he had in mind was to aid the religious life of the students of this university ; and it is because I hope to be of some small service to you, young men and women, and not because I have any hope of adding a worthy volume to the valuable apologetic library which this lectureship is, I doubt not, destined in time to produce, that I, with much hesitation, ventured to accept the nomination that the Bishop of the diocese did me the honor to make.

I never was a scholar. I have read somewhat widely. I have seen more of the world, and of the men and women in it, than most clergymen. But such powers of memory as I possessed, always poor, have suffered greatly in latter years, owing to excessive strain and ill health. Thus you see I am unusually poorly x INTRODUCTION

furnished to fill the office of a "learned" lecturer.

Why, then, do I accept? I do so because, while I have no capacity to aid the scholar, I hope still to be of some service to those who, as they are entering on life's more thoughtful stage, find, as I did myself many years ago, the foundations on which youth's rather light-hearted religious structure had been hastily builded, crumbling away beneath their feet. The clearest-eyed among us sees but dimly through life's dark glasses ; but dim as these eyes must be, to those who steadily seek for light, gleams do now and then break through upon our stormy sea. Moments of what we must deem u insight " are given us, when all things around and within us are less opaque. When we travellers, stumbling along life's hard pathway, are sure that we see a light, — no wide-shining illumination, no Bethlehem star even, once again with steady ray pointing to the manger where wisdom learned to worship babyhood, but still a light wide enough and clear enough to help us to

INTRODUCTION xi

order our steps aright — when such visitations come true, then do we rise and gird up our loins. New hope, and purpose, and courage, are ours. We speak to our fellow travellers to cheer them, or we even sing, as I have heard tired soldiers sing, as they made long march in the night.

Well, not to wander too aimlessly and too long, I have had such experiences. I have seen the " gleam " and stumblingly have tried to rise and. follow it, and of such times and efforts I have tried to find some record. I will try to recall what I saw and felt, in the hope that it may be of some service to you, who soon are setting out on the larger, freer life awaiting those whose college days are over.

In my lectures to you I purpose going over old ground. Dealing with old questions which are ever the newest questions of all, — questions that down here, in the shadows and mists of this world life, can never receive a full or satisfactory answer. Yet since each man and woman of us all must, in his heartof hearts, make some sort of tentative answer xii INTRODUCTION

to them, must give some reason to his own soul for the faith or non-faith that is in him, I venture to offer you the poor best that is mine.

I was brought up to believe that on those tremendous doctrines which are commonly known as the fundamentals of our religion, all should entertain a certainty, should at least rejoice in a " sure and certain hope." I cannot claim to have won any such faith. Such hope as I have is far removed from certainty. Nor do I find, among my fellow pilgrims of the road, that their assurances are generally of a higher order than my own.

When we can succeed in breaking through those conventions that so effectively muffle the voices of our hearts, when we try to say to each other what we really feel, — really mean, — at such times Emerson's statement of our human limitations fits us one and all : —

He by false usage pinned about No breath within, no passage out,

Cast wishful glances at the stars,

And wishful saw the ocean stream : —

INTRODUCTION jriii

" Merge me in the brute universe, Or lift to a diviner dream ! "

The divine within us makes surrender to the brute an ultimate torture. The brute within us plucks the pinion feather from our souls' wings as they seek to bear us above the steaming flats and valleys of sense.

Sometimes we are sure our feet are on the king's highway, and the first thing we know we find ourselves fast by the heels in Doubting Castle, and all view of the Delectable Mountains by the dark enclosing walls cut off.

Such is the experience of the majority of men who are thoughtful, and who try to do right. Such has been my experience, at any rate, and as I speak to you, I shall at least try not to profess an order of faith I do not enjoy, or an assurance I do not possess. I shall try to say what I feel and believe, and no more. For I have noticed that few things are more hurtful to the cause of real religion to-day than the habit of exaggeration into which good people sometimes fall as they seek to aid xiv INTRODUCTION

the faith of others by grossly overstating their own.

When circumstances arose which made the apostles of old look fearfully toward an uncertain and dangerous future, their spokesman cried, "Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life." Sure it is that the intervening ages have given no response to that query — if Jesus cannot help us, no one else can. It is a matter of history that Jesus did most wonderfully inspire those men. It is a matter of fact that he can and does comfort, guide, and inspire those who seek him to-day. Of this much I am sure. I believe it with all my heart. I have seen it proved, again and again, in the lives of many people I have been privileged to know intimately.

So I beg you to come with me and see if duty's path may not grow plainer to you, and your life's burden lighter, as you try to set your will to understand and accept his reasonable service.

W. S. Rainsford.

THE REASONABLENESS AND NECESSITY OF GROWTH AND CHANGE IN RELIGION

In ray trouble I have prepared for the house of the Lord an hundred thousand talents of gold ; . . . thou mayest add thereto. — 1 Chron. xxn, 14.

David is delivering his dying charge to Solomon his son. David may be considered the founder of the Israelitish kingdom. Perhaps it is no unfair historic analogy to call him the King Alfred of the Jews. The qualities that have gone to make that imperishable race great were embodied in David, its first great king. Great were David's services to the weak people he championed and led. It is not too much to say that, if he did not make them a nation, he saved the nation from merging, being lost, in the surrounding and conflicting tribes. By constant warfare he won them freedom from enemies — and forced on them a national unity. The extraordinary and unique religious genius of that people found in David one of its earliest and best expressions. With him the richest religious poetry our race has produced began to assume those forms which in the Psalms are immortal. He must have sung some of the first great religious Jewish songs, and though we are unable positively to ascribe to him any of the Psalms as we now have them, we yet know that his commanding personality had so stamped itself on the poetic literature of the race that in after times it was natural to ascribe to the warrior-poet the best of them all.

The true poet of an epoch feels and is swayed by the passions of his time. Those times were cruel ; there was little pity shown from man to man. Men were lustful and unscrupulous, and often cruel, lustful, and unscrupulous was David the king. Yet, in spite of much wrongdoing, the man was saved by that divine quality, so largely possessed by the great Jews of that far-away time — his yearning after God.

He may not have penned those deathless lines — "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?" But doubtless some such longing it was that impelled him to build a temple that should permanently enshrine Jehovah's worship.

Those who are inspired to great aims must have souls stout enough to endure great disappointments. It is not given to the truly great to have here their heart's desire. So runs the story of the painful earth, and David's ambition must be thwarted just when it is wisest and most far-reaching. His political insight taught him that the nation he had organized must have its beliefs and aspirations embodied and made visible in a temple. Such a central meeting-place would cement the still but partially united tribes; would tend to educate and purify the religious instincts of the people ; would serve as a strong defence against encroaching idolatries, and at the same time prove the best possible bulwark for his throne.

His political as well as his religious genius, then, urged on the building of the great temple ; and if he may not accomplish the work he has so nobly planned for, it shall be Solomon's first care. " I in my trouble, in times of war, mid a reign of blood, have ever held before me the one great aim — such provisions I have made. I have done what I can. Thou, Solomon, mayest add thereto. " The long past veils from our eyes that golden temple and its worshipping throngs. What was there said and sung is but a legend to us. But the reality and worth of it are unquestionable. David's foresight and Solomon's magnificence gave shape and expression to Jewish monotheism.

We owe much to the beauty-loving Greeks; we owe much to the law-making Romans ; but more, far more do we owe to the God-loving Jews. Vitalized, purified by the God-desire, round that temple grew a national life whose persistence is the wonder of all history, successfully resisting those forces of disintegration that shattered and scattered nations far mightier than they. A national poetry grew up there, far the best religious poetry the world has ever seen. And a legal code was given to men, embodying social and religious ideals immensely in advance of any other we know of, at least in the Western world. Yes, the more the religious history of the world comes to be known, the greater the debt of mankind to the Jew appears. To him we owe a literature that still may be said to embody the wisdom and hopes of our race. It is but a truism to say that the Jewish religion had in it the capacity to grow, to change, to adapt itself. It took in many things from many peoples (probably the belief in life for man beyond the grave, from the Persians). It assimilated them, and was not assimilated by them. It could and did develop into Christianity. But where lay the secret of this power of growth and development ? "What had this religion, held by these puny tribes, in it that the religions of far greater and more cultivated peoples lacked? I think I am right in pointing out one great vital quality it had that made it a growing religion, a religion that from its very nature would voice itself in new psalms, new poetry, new religious and moral teachings of preacher prophets, who looked out keenly on men and the times, and saw, with a real illumination, what duty for themselves and for their fellows meant.

That one priceless quality possessed by Jewish monotheism was a steadfast determination to explain life in terms of God. The God of David and Solomon, the God of the exiles and of the great Isaiahs, was more than intensely interested in man's life. He was no Jupiter, sitting far aloft, moved only to occasional interest in the struggling life of men. He was with his people, cheering, guiding, chastening, rewarding ; they, as it were, made visible on earth his will ; their success was his glory ; their shame and fall involved humiliation for him. His word was their law; his honor their honor ; he was a God loho cared. Of course so exalted a conception of God was not born in a day. The god of the earliest days was a narrower, more merely tribal god, than the god of later enlightened times. Men never have conceived and never can conceive of God other than as a mighty man. This is one of the well-established limitations of human thought, quite as evident in our latest philosophies as in the discarded ideals of the great men of long ago.

These Jews were cruel. The race meant nothing to them ; their tribe everything. The only god they were therefore capable of worshipping was at times cruel and narrow, and tribal like themselves; was for them and against all others. Yet steadily, wonderfully, their idea of God grew in beauty, purity, and spiritual power, till the merely tribal god vanished, and in his place we see with wonder standing the God of the whole earth ; a god to love as truly as to fear; a god whose high and holy law reached far above the attainments of the best of men. That idea held the Jew to his best. Did he stray from it for a time and fall, then some new poet, some new voice of warning or of prophecy was heard, and true religion was revived again.

Men's thoughts widen with the process of the suns, and so widening, first outgrow, and then cast aside, the older religious ideals that have been produced by them. This process, of course, is evident in the history of Jewish religion. And if the various parts of its matchless literature, which we call the Old Testament, were better arranged than they are at present in the common Bible we read, this gradual discarding of old ideas, and their replacement by new, would be much more evident than it is. Contrasting with the merely tribal god of the Exodus, let me quote a passage that gives us the God of the later Psalms. Leave out one or two lines in this marvellous poem, and not among all the prayers that in all the ages inspired men have raised to God can be found anything more exquisite in its adoration, more beautiful, more inspiring : —

"Whither shall I go from thy spirit ? or whither shall I flee from thy presence ?

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there : if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God ! how great is the sum of them J

Search me, O God, and know my heart ; try me, and know my thoughts :

And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. 1

It is this unique power of growth, of expanding with, and possessing itself of, the widening views of man, which has made the Jewish religion immortal. Nor do I believe that even now its vitality has quite passed away. Modern Judaism may seem to many dry and seedless; capable of producing no new religious ideals, having lost its adaptability. But the extraordinary thing about Judaism is that, speaking generally, it has not given birth to crude and harmful religious movements as have other religions. For a long time its stem may seem dry and lifeless. It has not at least burst forth into evil flower and corrupt fruit. We Christians are too hasty in concluding that that race to whom 1 Ps. cxxxix, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 23, 24.

our religious debt is so unspeakably great has seen its last vision, has given forth its last message. The path of the religious Jew is not our path to-day. Christian orthodoxy still despises him and it. Still, at least, the shadows of the ignorant animosities of long ago cling to him. Once he made a fatal mistake, it is true ; but has Christianity always chosen rightly? Surely few unprejudiced students of history would say as much. In the cult of the Virgin and of the saints, both East and West have widely departed from the religion of Jesus and of the earlier day. Nay, surely the time has come when Protestantism must admit that in claiming for the Bible inerrancy, and making that book the sole test of truth, it has greatly erred.

If, as we must believe, the time approaches (God in his mercy grant it may come soon) when all good men everywhere will recognize the need of subordinating, I do not say eliminating, all creeds, when good men everywhere, feeling their need of God in this world, shall turn towards good men with outstretched hands, may it not then come to pass that the Jew, to whom above all others religion owes its greatest debt in the past, may prove capable and willing to aid effectively in that great getting together which the future has in store for us?

If you have followed me so far, you already see the point I desire to press on you in these lectures that I am to deliver. It is this : The genius and germ of a world religion were present even in early Judaism, because that religion was from the beginning committed to an explanation, first of a small tribe's life, later of man's life, in terms of God. They were but men, these Jews, and so their religious vision often grew dim. They were narrow-minded, — so were all men then, — and their religion might be narrow; a religion depended on a law, a priesthood, or a book. But their monotheism had within it that which was destined to burst through and overpass all the temporary barriers that human ignorance employs to dim the light of

God in the soul. It was to prove itself the mustard seed, least of all seeds, from which man's highest and purest concepts of God have sprung. It made God responsible for the soul of man. It dared to believe that human life was actually a breath of God in its beginning, an honoring and serving of God in its course, and a returning to God at its close. Surely this was high thinking, indeed, for those men of old time. Theirs was a vision far clearer than that given to any other sons of men. Theirs was a mighty faith; and bravely and continuously they looked to God, the God of the life of men, to justify it and to vindicate them. Surely they did not look in vain. Their miraculous survival till to-day is that great faith's best vindication. They gave to mankind Jesus the Christ, and alone among the nations of his time they survive to witness his world-wide victory.

Now it must be apparent that if we can thus think of our religion, then our thinking is fully in accord with the thoughts of men busied in other departments of knowledge and speculation. The order of the universe as it is conceived of to-day is an order of progress and of growth. If religion is not a settled, stablished, changeless thing, but a sense of duty, a vision of the great source of all law and duty, that changes and grows clearer from age to age, then religious thinking fits in admirably with man's modern knowledge and modern methods of adding to this knowledge; and the idea that true science and true religion ever really were or ever can be at war is demonstrably absurd. Their advocates may have fought in the past and they may fight in the future — for the best and most honesthearted of us are at times warped and prejudiced; but the spirit of strife helps no man up the hard high way, by which alone truth may be won.

If we, then, can but see once for all that there are not two ways of winning truth or gaining its great goal, but only one, and that that way is an old way, literally as old as the hills, as old as the old world's order, then surely we have gained something that is well worth while. At best life is often a lonelybusiness ; but we are less lonely on life's pathway for the knowing that many whom we have been taught to think of as in " another camp" than ours are really only in another regiment of the very same great army, and are trying to do just what we know we must keep trying to do, too — namely, add our little of effort or discovery to what is worthy in life's slowly growing heap of things that shall endure.

I said just now that this view of religion is old as the world's order. For what is that order? A fire, mist, a planet, granite, chalk, marl, soil, an age-long process, as the result of which there at last is spread over the cooling surface of our world a thin crust of soil, on which and by which vegetable, animal, and then human life may subsist. So to us the very crust of the earth seems to cry, " Come, man, be a fellow worker with me; for ages and ages I have been preparing myself for you. Now, lord of creation, take up bravely thine own subtler tasks ; see what I have done to prepare myself for thy lordship. I in my trouble have so much wrought; thou may est add thereto."

As we dip into history it is the same story. The past takes voice, the forgotten millions of long ago who have gone the way of " dusty death" seem to cry, " We fought, we bled, we died, to win for you the comparative calm and prosperity of your day. Think of us when you work and are discouraged. Think of us when you plan and are baffled. Think of us when you falter and grow weary. Add thou thereto."

The social spirit makes the same appeal. The people that have come or are coming to us come from many different nations of the earth. They are far from being the least worthy representatives of those peoples. It surely takes no small amount of courage and of energy to break the dear ties of home and fatherland and adventure into new and strange circumstances. We loudly praise, we proudly acknowledge, the heroism of those iron-souled men and women who first sought our shores. But we too often fail to recognize the pluck and self-denial that alone enables the common emigrant of to-day to break away from a past he knows and push his lonely fortune among strange peoples and strange lands.

Believe me, it is not the weaklings of the world who are adding their bloods to ours, who are bringing their muscles and their energy to the solving of our problems and the development of our state. These are tried soldiers. They have the signs and scars of life's battle on them, have these men and women and little children. Honest, charitable, wise hosts to these multitudes we are called to be. Surely to no people did the social spirit ever more clearly appeal than to us. You are the children of the emigrant. More than two hundred and fifty years ago your fathers began to come, when nothing but the broad rich breast of an unexplored continent invited them ; and since those days that strenuous hopeful tide has never ceased to flow, and your comfort and your wealth, your capacity and education to-day are the fruits and results of that flowing. Do your part. It is not the part your fathers played. The wilderness has vanished. The savage is now scarcely more than a name hy which lake, river, or mountain is known. But a vast free country, a highly organized civilization have grown up as if by magic. A great political democracy here opens wide its gate of hope and promise to the world. This is a tremendous thing that we profess to offer. It is for each of us to try to make the promise good.

A Croatian peasant had made his way to an Adriatic port. " Why," said a stranger who happened to speak his language, — " why are you leaving your fatherland and going forth to an alien people, to a land so far across the sea?" "I go," said he, "to see if there is a country where there is justice between man and man." Ah, that is a tremendous thing to ask of any country, in which poor faulty man, but half delivered from the power of the beast within him, lives and rules. Yet such is the unquenchable and growing sense of righteousness in us that we will not be contented with even the poor Croatian's dream, but we must add to it the warming touch of brotherly love that alone makes dear the thought of home or fatherland. Yes, mankind evidently expects much of us. And it is our high calling, our deep religious duty not to disappoint mankind of its hope. But let us not go blindfold towards the future. To make good, all that is best in all of us is likely to be taxed to the very utmost.

The brave pioneers I spoke of, even the fighting men of '61-65, had a task that was simplicity itself compared to the task confronting us. It is when we are thoughtful, when we find ourselves sitting down and trying to do what Jesus advised men to do, — count the cost of things, and try our souls to see if we are ready to play our part, able with our ten thousand to meet him that cometh against us with twenty thousand, — it is, I say, when the healthy mood is on us that we feel our real resting-place is alone found in God ; in God and his order ; that good must win in the end because it is good, and light overcome the darkness because it is light; that greater is He that is with us than all that can be against us ; that the success of the Kingdom of Heaven depends on no movement in races of men, but on the very nature of things.

It fortifies my soul to know- That though I perish, truth is so ; That howsoe'er I stray and range, Whate'er I do, thou dost not change. I steadier step when I recall That, though I slip, thou dost not fall.

Yes, God back of the nature of things makes good. "He that believeth shall not make haste," says the old Book. And the man grasping this strong consolation is not dismayed or disappointed by the slow grinding of God's grist, nor by the at times imperceptible progress of what we call civilization. Civilization rises as the coral islands rise, through dark and unrecorded ages. Gerald Massey, the poet of Chartist days in England, truly said,

"We rise like corals grave by grave That have a pathway sunward.

Down in the dark sea depths the foundations of future life and beauty are slowly laid. Each generation of little toilers lives, builds, dies, and broad and strong the foundations are cemented together. Slowly the adamant building mounts to the upper sunlit waters, till at last the crispy, creamy spray marks where they meet the sun. To all the winds and forces of the upper world the little builders seem to cry, " For ages and ages in the darkness we have toiled and died. Now, add ye to what we have done."

And so the slow-growing debris of ocean comes " and adds thereto," and the sea birds come and " add thereto " — and the grasses and trees come ; and at last comes wandering, careless man, and takes the sea island for his home. At first he lives an almost bestial life, is content merely to exist. The shellfish and the nut sustain him ; the palm leaf or the cave give him shelter. But a day dawns when mysteriously the spirit of the great Whole takes voice within him ; the spirit that bade the coral insect toil in the salt, sunless gulfs of the sea, that made the bird build, and the grass grow — the same spirit is in him, and in him finds a voice.

He begins dimly to see something of the meaning of it all ; the age-long voice of God, first a blind instinct, then slowly shaping in the dim recesses of his mind an idea of law. From the coral beneath his feet, from the palm tree above his head, from the surf's thunder on the reef, from the undiscovered depths of his own soul, the voice comes. " We in our trouble have done what we could. man, Lord of creation, thou who art the explanation and justification of our long travail, add thou thereto" And so for the first time the song of the world becomes articulate ; and he — a son of God, for whom all things have so long waited — gathers his children round him as life's forces fail him, and says, "It is worth while; it is well worth while, my children. It is for you to carry forward the cause of good. Painful ages have spent themselves in preparing the way you are called to walk in. Lives innumerable struggled and died to make it smooth. The very soil you live by is one mighty grave. The very ground you tread on is holy. See, then, that you play your part in building the temple of the Lord."