The facts of life in relation to faith

Prefatory Note

This book is practically a sequel to The Fact of Christ (published in 1900), inasmuch as the topics discussed in these chapters — especially the later chapters — and many points raised in their treatment have been suggested mainly through the correspondence which his earlier work brought to the author from varied quarters. He can hardly expect that this volume, dealing as it does with questions chosen just on account of the difficulties they present to many perplexed or inquiring minds, will receive the measure of acceptance so kindly accorded to its predecessor; but if in some degree it helps, it will not altogether fail of its end. The two books are written for persons at somewhat different stages. The writer of the very admirable French translation of The Fact of Christ — Dr. Maurice Dusolier — says in his introduction that in that volume is 'a faith gushing out of the heart' (^une foi jaillie du

vii viii PREFATORY NOTE

coeur^). The present discussions, it is to be feared, are more laboured in their faith. But they are written at a spot further inland on the 'isthmus' of life, to which reference is made in the opening chapter; and travellers at that stage will make allowance for the difficulty of the road. Perhaps the march becomes lighter again further on.

A few sentences in Chapter vi. are reproduced, with little modification, from a contribution by the present writer to a series of lectures on the Creed, published in 1904 under the title of Questions of Faith, but now out of print. The stanzas quoted opposite the beginning of Chapter ill. are taken from a small book, privately printed, entitled, ^Verses by M. T.'; they are by Lady Thomson, and the book is that mentioned in the Life of Lord Kelvin, vol. i. p. 533. For several other quotations and references, the writer is indebted to his friend and late assistant the Rev. J. D. M. Rorke, M.A., who further has given him more than one useful suggestion. P. C. S.

Contents

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THE CREED OF EXPERIENCE .... 3

I

Chapter I

The first and most general problem which arises out of the facts of experience to confront and seemingly contradict faith is just that this world on the face of it, is such a strange and difficult place in which to beheve the gospel. Nature and life seem to tell a very different tale about their Author than that which we are told in church about our Father in heaven.

There is, of course, a prior question as to whether they tell of any Author at all. But life is short and books should not be long; so I must be allowed here to postulate the existence of God. The idea that evolution has made this postulate no longer tenable or necessary is now seen to be an entire fallacy. Not many decades ago orthodox religion was in something of a panic about this. Bishops could hardly go to bed for fear of the apparition (as somebody's humorous pen put it) of 'an extraordinarily intelligent ape or an unusually hairy man,' and divines could not pass a chemist's shop without the apprehensive thought of some atheistically potent atom which might dispense with the Creator. Such alarms do not now perturb the slumbers even of a curate nor the perambulations of the humblest local preacher. We all see now that 'God is not less God, nor the creative energy less creative, because we are led to suppose that a lengthy instead of a sudden method was employed in the production of the Cosmos.'^ Evolution, that is to say — and it is a commonplace to say it — is a process, not a cause; it is a 'history,'^ which needs an Author as much as does the story described in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. For that this cosmos of reason and beauty has been evolved through the chances of an infinite series of molecular vari-

^ J. A. Syraonds's Essays, Speculatwe and Suggestive, p. lo. 2 Huxley's own word for it.

atlons is exactly as credible as that if a box of printer's type were shaken about in the dark for a very long time there might result a Hamlet or a Paradise Lost. The difficulty for faith about the facts of this world is not of this kind — not, at any rate, with straight and sensible minds.

It is a moral rather than a merely logical problem, and may be stated thus. Here is religion, professing to come to us in God's name and telling us what are the things of transcendent importance in faith and life. And here is the world — God's world, surely — which seems utterly indifferent to these things. Nature takes simply no notice of the spiritual and ethical interests which, according to religion, are the supreme things in God and for man. It does not seem to exist in any connection with them. Yet this is the world in which man lives, and this nature he to at least some degree shares. There is an interesting problem here, and one which, in some respects, is a very difficult one. This chapter will merely touch on its more general aspects; its features of special difficulty must be treated more fully in subsequent chapters.

It is well to begin from the beginning, so I shall first state this topic as it arises out of the mere existence of things in the natural world. This is expressed in lively fashion in the following passage from one of Walter Bagehot's stimulating essays : —

'Every one who has religious ideas must have been puzzled by what we may call the irrelevance of creation to his religion. We find ourselves lodged in a vast theatre, in which a ceaseless action, a perpetual shifting of scenes, an unresting life, is going forward; and that life seems physical, immoral, having no relation to what our souls tell us to be great and good, to what religion says is the design of all things. Especially when we see any new objects or scenes or countries we feel this. Look at a great tropical plant, with large leaves stretching everywhere, and great stalks branching out on all sides; with a big beetle on a leaf and a humming-bird on a branch, and an ugly lizard just below. What has such an object to do with us, with anything we can conceive or hope or imagine ? What could it be created for, If creation has a moral end and object? Or go Into a gravel-pit or stonequarry; you see there a vast accumulation of dull matter, yellow or grey, and you ask, involuntarily and of necessity, why is all this waste, and irrelevant production, as it would seem, of material? Can anything seem more stupid than a big stone as a big stone, than gravel for gravel's sake? What is the use of such cumbrous, inexpressive objects in a world where there are minds to be filled, imaginations to be aroused, and souls to be saved ?'^

I have quoted this at length because It would be a pity to break In on Bagehot's vivacious sentences; but the problem It presents Is one we need not feel too gravely. After all, where Is this 'Irrelevant world' of 'Inexpressive objects' which has nothing to do 'with us' or 'with anything we can conceive or hope or Imagine' ? It exists only In the mind of the doctrinaire. The real world has everything to do with us and with what we can conceive and hope and Imagine. What but this Is the meaning of science and of art? Surely things are shot through with reason, and often with beauty too. 'How exquisitely,' as Wordsworth says,

*the external world is fitted to the mind."^

'^Literary Studies, iii. (essay on 'The Ignorance of Man'). 2 The Excursion: preface.

In short, there is no such thing as 'dull matter.' There may be dull men. There is something 'more stupid than a big stone as a big stone,' and that is the mind of Peter Bell, to whom a big stone exists only as a big stone and 'nothing more.' Tennyson's lines, addressed to not anything so important as 'a great tropical plant' but merely to a 'little flower,' are nearer to the truth of things: —

'Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, In my hand, Little flower — but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all In all, I should know what God and man is,'

There is more philosophy here than in asking 'What has such an object to do with usT I do not think that I need to dwell on this. I trust that, despite tropical plants, however great their stalks, despite humming-birds and even beetles, despite pits and quarries, yea, despite gravel itself, we may yet hold fast the faith. The problem, however, is more real, and must be treated more seriously when we look at the operations of the natural world. It is indeed not easy to perceive there any law or order which proceeds from the God of whose character Christian faith tells us in Christ. This is a rational world, but it is not plainly a moral world — still less a world illustrating the high ethical and spiritual laws of the gospel. The processes of nature seem to have nothing to do with considerations of morality, while its whole dominating principle of evolution through a struggle for existence is apparently the very negation of the great spiritual principle of self-sacrifice. It is well known how emphatically Huxley asserted this in a notable Romanes lecture. 'It is impossible,' he said, 'to look the world in the face, and bring the course of nature into harmony with even the elementary requirements of the ethical ideal of the just and the good.' Indeed, 'the cosmic process,' he goes on to declare, 'has no kind of relation to moral ends.'^ There is a problem here which must be patent to every observant mind.

^E'uolution and Ethics (in Collected Essays by Tt H. Huxley, ix. ii.).

It is generally admitted that Huxley's statement of it is too one-sided. There is even in the struggle for existence another side, in which are developed the altruistic qualities of 'the love of mates, parental sacrifice, filial affection, the kindliness of kindred, gregariousness, sociality, co-operation, mutual aid, and altruism generally.'^ The business of evolution is love as well as hunger, and calls out self-sacrifice as well as self-preservation. The exaggeration of such a statement as that 'the cosmic process has no kind of relation to moral ends' is further apparent from the very fact that we are considering this problem at all. For who or what is it that thus condemns the morality of nature? It is man, who is himself a product of nature and the crown of its evolution. Surely we cannot call that process altogether immoral which culminates in a protest in the name of morality. How does a non-moral system evolve a moral product? How — to put it more personally — did a non-ethical cosmic process develop so ethically sensitive a Romanes lecturer?

1 Darivinism and Human Life, by J. Arthur Thomson, p. 88.

So this sweeping arraignment of nature must be taken with some qualification. It Is really an arraignment of nature with part left out, and that part, In the end. Its full and final development In man. But if nature Is to be judged it must be judged as a whole, and further, its lower stages interpreted in terms of the later and higher. The whole of nature Includes morality In germ from an early stage, and certainly, in Its later stage. Includes human morality as really as the law of gravitation or the positively Immoral struggle for existence. Viewing thus nature as a whole, we find not simply that it is non-moral, and certainly not that it has 'no kind of relation to moral ends,' which is palpably not the fact, but that It is in part non-moral and In part moral. This, of course, Huxley admits — though he calls only the non-moral part 'nature' and, for no apparent reason, calls morality 'an artificial world' which man has built up within the other — and it is the opposition between them which Is his problem. In which he finds 'the roots of pessimism.' Now certainly If the non-moral part of nature which we see so largely in the physical world and the moral part of It which wc see in man are merely set against one another, and the one part held to have no relation to the other, a dualism is declared which it is hard for faith to meet — not merely Christian faith, but faith of any kind in a rational and moral cosmos; moreover, since man's resistance to the physical powers of the universe is futile, it would seem the only creed is an unhoping stoicism. But are we driven to this dualism and this pessimism? Is it not possible to discern a deeper unity which reconciles the difference and relieves the despair?

Let us try to answer this question not so much by abstract philosophy about the world — really one can philosophise In an abstract way about the world to any conclusion — as by that appeal to experience of which so much was said In the opening chapter. Each of us finds the problem In miniature In the area of his own life. We are all denizens of this dual world — a world, on the one hand, of moral principles and Ideals, and, on the other, of conditions and forces about us which are Indifferent and hostile to these spiritual elements. Is this, in actual experience, merely a dualism, the one part of which has no relation to the other but that of indifference or alienation? I think we have only to look at the making of human character to see an answer to that question. The moral character of man is the unity which is deeper than this difference, and to it both aspects of this dual world contribute. For such character is the fruit not simply of spiritual instincts and ideals, or of these operating in an ethical vacuum; it is the fruit of these rising up out of and maintaining themselves against the neutrality and even the antagonism of a non-moral world. Whatever morality may mean for other beings and in other spheres, of which we know nothing, certainly 'for beings such as we are and in such a world as this' (to use Butler's phraseology) the moral life means a moral choice and a moral conflict. And a moral choice means a morally neutral world in which to choose, and a moral conflict means even a hostile element in the world against which the moral ideal is to be asserted. So the ethical indifference of the natural world and even its unethical processes simply mean that nature will not bribe or coerce man's moral choice, and further, will test it. Consider how moral character would be practically meaningless if it were otherwise. If nature were insistently and immediately moral, we should not be. Let us imagine a world whose natural laws and processes were made palpably and invariably subject to moral canons, and observe the result. If the rain fell on the land only of the virtuous farmer, if calamity should depend on character, if gravitation should involve the sinner but exempt the saint from injury, then virtue would be prudential rather than moral, and goodness the saving less of the soul than of the skin. Morality, I repeat, is morality for man, only if it be a choice and a conflict; and the function of the non-moral and. In places, anti-moral processes of nature is just that, in face of these, the moral consciousness may choose and may contend even against odds, and so be worthy of the name of moral.

Thus If we view nature as a whole, Including therein the moral life of man, and Interpret Its lower stages In the light of Its higher, we find we must revise our characterisation of It as having no relation to moral ends. And to Interpret the lower In connection with the higher Is surely the only right way. Life — the life of nature as a whole or of any organism In nature — Is a unity. Its meaning Is to be found In a synthesis, not merely In the analysis of sections taken separately. And the synthesis is not found in the incomplete but in the more complete — in the flower, not in the seed. Therefore it is no fond anthropocentric egotism but a true principle for either science or philosophy to find the key to all the problems of nature — and certainly its deeper and more spiritual enigmas, such as this now before us — in the moral self-consciousness of man which is the crown of nature. When we do this we find 'nature' even In Its limited physical sense to be part of the stuff from which man's moral life is made. The cosmic process is not ethical, but it is used for ethical ends. It is not the theatre only but also the needful, though unconscious, minister of the making of the moral life.

All this is not merely of speculative interest; it is also of practical concern. If our doctrine of the world be that nature is hopelessly and finally non-ethical, and that it has 'no kind of relation^ to man's moral life, then it is impossible not to be chilled in all our moral outlook and endeavour. We must feel that man has been placed in the wrong world for his spiritual ideals. Even when this does not lead us to give up the moral ideal altogether — as, perhaps, logically it should — certainly it discourages anything like a vigorous and victorious moral faith. We fall into the view of life in relation to nature pictured in Matthew Arnold's Empedocles in Etna, where man's aims and efforts are met at every turn by an indifferent and ever opposing world which goes straight on with its life regardless of his, and the conclusion is that we must not seek too much, though, since some 'moderate bliss' is attainable, we need not wholly despair. It is of happiness the poet is speaking, but the conclusion is still more easily reached as regards the spiritual ambition and endeavour. But this is not the wrong world for man's highest life. Just because it is a difficult world for his spiritual ideals, it is the very world for moral choice and moral conflict and moral character. Poets more virile than Arnold — who seemed to be able to get good from nature only in certain kinds of weather — know this; Browning and still more George Meredith know it is through this antagonism that 'flesh unto spirit must grow.' And so I say again man is not in the wrong world for his spiritual ideals. He is in a world demanding moral choice and moral conflict, and that is the very world for moral character. 'Rephan' — the sphere void of effort and antagonism — is a poorer home for us than earth with all its struggles.^ To sum it up in a word, the moral life for us must be whatought'tO'he differentiated from and maintained against the what-is; and thus nature — the great what'is — has its place, and its necessary place,

1 Vide Browning's poem with this title in Asolando, in the ethical scheme of the life which is moral just because it is something more than natural. Let us then not see in the contradiction between the moral ideal within and the non-moral actual without merely (as Huxley does in the lecture already mentioned) 'the roots of pessimism;' let us find rather the conditions of morality itself.

Hitherto I have been speaking only of the physical world of nature. But there is also round about us a spiritual world, by which I do not in the least mean here anything which theology may mean by that (or the Psychical Society may mean) , but only that we live amid a system of forces operating upon life and character and destiny other than merely the play of winds and waves. There are powers round about human life environing man with circumstance, meeting him with hap, following up his acts with consequences, in the end sealing his character and fate. What are we to think of this world in which our lives work out their lot? Is it, too, not a non-moral system in which it is impossible to read anything but chance and fate — a chance and fate far removed Indeed from the moral providence and fatherhood of the God revealed In Jesus Christ? This subject we shall discuss In the subsequent chapters of the book; and — for reasons I shall give presently before closing this chapter — I propose to discuss it not generally but rather by taking up specific aspects of life where the problem is most distinct and acute. Meanwhile I shall make one general remark, and Illustrate It with a brief reference to the witness of the greatest name in literature. The general remark is that, just as we have seen that nature must not In every phenomenon remind us of moral laws and insist upon our obedience of them, so life must not do so in every incident. Therefore it is not any valid argument against the moral order of life if we find when we look at Isolated incidents (as most works of fiction do) that there is little moral purpose to be seen, but only hap and fate. It is, however, different when we look at long stretches of life and at experience as a whole. This difference Is apparent even

In literature. Nothing Is more noticeable in modern literature than that it is the greatest writers, and those who treat life at length and on the grand scale, who most of all at least leave room in their presentation for deeper thoughts than that of our existence as meaningless and vain. As an example of this I name Tolstoy, not in his hortatory tracts — ^which, to me at least, are unconvincing and tiresome — but in such complete and superb canvases as Anna Karenina or War and Peace, But let us, without discussing modern writers, turn to the only greatest.

The unique and incomparable authority of Shakespere for our present purpose arises not merely from his supreme pre-eminence on any matter of human life and character (except, it must be said, the life and character which are distinctively Christian), but also and particularly because he is so absolutely free from any preconceived moral or theological theory of life. He is the perfect secularist, simply seeing what men do and are, and setting down the facts of life. It is not for nothing that we cannot tell what Shakespere's religion was, or if he had any;^ if we could, *the less Shakespere he.' As has been said of him by the most critically just and the most morally discerning of his modern interpreters: —

*He looked at this '^secular" world most Intently and seriously; and he painted it, we cannot but conclude, with entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his own, and, in essential, without regard to any one's hopes, fears, or beliefs. His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary power; and If, as a private person, he had a religious faith, his tragic view can hardly have been In contradiction with this faith, but must have been included in it, and supplemented, not abolished, by additional ideas.' ^

What then is Shakespere's 'tragic view' — his view, that Is to say, of human hap and fate in especially the darker aspects of life? No more carefully weighed and yet also more profoundly sympathetic answer to this question has been given than in the book from which

^ Nothing can be more futile than the attempt to build up a theory of Shakespere's personal faith from sayings of the characters of his plays.

2 A. C. Bradley's Shakesperian Tragedy, p. 25.

I have just quoted. I shall do better to quote from it further than attempt any statement of my own. Mr. Bradley finds Shakespere's tragic world to be, on the one hand, 'something piteous, fearful, and mysterious ;' yet, on the other, 'it does not leave us crushed, rebellious, or desperate.' From this it seems that the ultimate power revealed therein is not a moral power in the sense of one always just or benevolent; yet neither is it 'a face, whether malicious or cruel, or blind or indifferent to human happiness or goodness,' and it is certainly not a fate in the sense of 'a blank necessity, totally regardless alike of human weal and of the difference between right and wrong.' It shows other characteristics 'which would lead us to describe it as a moral order and its necessity as a moral necessity.' It shows itself 'akin to good and alien from evil.' It traces suffering and death to sin. It makes evil to work out everywhere 'as something negative, barren, weakening, destructive, a principle of death.' And when there comes tragic calamity, 'the suffering and death arise from collision, not with a fate or blank power, but with a moral power.' With all this there is — what Shakespere again and again impresses on us, but not more often or more deeply than life itself does — an appalling 'waste' of good. Of this, which is the very essence of the tragic view of life, no solution is offered, unless by the suggestion, undefined but irresistible, at the close of the greatest tragedies — Hamlet and King Lear — that this tragic world is no final or complete reality, and that even its victims vanish (as Mr. Bradley finely puts it) 'not into nothingness but into freedom.'^

Such then, in the fewest words, is the 'tragic' world of human life as seen by the sanest, surest, and most searching eyes ever bent upon its multiplex mystery. Some readers of the foregoing paragraph may wonder that I have made so much of this. But any one who has not merely read Shakespere's plays or analysed his dramatis persona, but tried, in some degree, to grasp as a whole the hardly less

^ Shakesperian Tragedy, pp. 25, 26, 30, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38. Also, on the last point, pp. 322-7, which are pages worthy of their topic.

than Infallibly just vision of life in the dramatist's mind which Is so remarkably detached from all Its dramatic work yet surely also so deeply in it all, will understand that it is by no means an unimportant or Irrelevant thing to consider what Shakespere found In the world of life to be — the world In which we are asked to believe the gospel. Certainly he did not find it a world which declared the gospel; the world is not meant to do that. But he did not find it a world so morally dead and meaningless as practically to make a gospel impossible. This, I repeat, is not an irrelevant thing for faith to know. It permits us at least to listen whether there be not a gospel.

This so-called 'indifferent world' then belies Its title. It is not so indifferent as It seems. Its physical phenomena are shot through with reason; Its moral neutrality Is the school of human character; Its life-order adumbrates a moral order even in its tragedy.

I do not propose to discuss further the general question of the relation to faith of the world we live in; not that what has been said

Is a complete argument, but because I believe that the real difficulties which most people feel on this subject are not about life and nature in general but arise out of certain things in the world. To these particular things, then, I shall now turn. They are old problems, and perhaps there is little or nothing new to say upon them. But they present themselves afresh to every thinking mind and call always for reconsideration. It Is true that the way of modern thinkers Is to pass over these definite questions and to give us disquisitions at large about life and a principle of the universe. I know that exponents of such modern thinkers as Dr. Eucken and M. Bergson regard the discussion of 'the time-worn problems of destiny, freedom, and the mystery of pain and evil' as an out-of-date survival of that 'Intellectualism' from which the conceptions of activism and creative evolution have liberated the mind/ Well, we have all been stimulated by these attractive and Invigorating writers, and particularly with the brilliant suggestiveness of the

^ Eucken and Bergson, by E. Hermann, p. 1:42.

idea of devolution creatrice (the value of which as a reaction against a mechanical and materialistic evolutionary doctrine is very highly to be estimated even by those who find some difficulty in M. Bergson's writings in knowing where seductive metaphor ends and solid data begin) ; but, for my humble part, I find, after reading these general philosophical systems, that the difficulties which seem to contradict my faith in the gospel — the real and nameable and concrete difficulties of life — are exactly where they were. Indeed, I often feel that the systematic philosopher knows little of doubt in the real and deadly sense. The truth is — though in saying this I mean no kind of disrespect to the works of philosophical system — it is so easy to generalise. And there is nothing about which to generalise is so easy as just the universe. It is easier to philosophise about the universe than to face this or that difficult thing in it, jut as it is easier to make sapient observations about human nature than justly to judge the character of this or that man or woman. Therefore in these pages I am going to turn again to these definite 'time-worn problems,' because I am sure it is in these, and not in the world at large, that most men find their faith most really challenged. I give notice of this in order that the reader who prefers to discuss the general philosophy of the universe may at this point — if indeed he has not done it already — throw this book away.