Some outlines of the religion of experience; a book for laymen and the unchurched

Front matter

HORACE J. BRIDGES

Class

Book ' , l 1> i^b

Contents

Page

Introduction ix

Chapter.

Introduction

The period through which we are passing has been characterized with great accuracy and feHcity by Mr. Walter Lippmann as one of simultaneous drift and mastery: mastery of detail, combined with drift in the matter of the paramount interests of life and its direction as a whole. In no way is this state of things more clearly demonstrated than by the contrast between our great and constant advances in scientific knowledge and the control of the world's material resources, and the everincreasing confusion, obscurity and uncertainty in the domain of morals and religion. We know more about the trees than our forebears, and can handle them with unprecedented skill; but of the dimensions of the wood, and of the chances of finding a path through it, we do not know. Indeed, we are tempted to despair of the possibility of knowing. Our impulse is towards agreeing with Auguste Comte in his assertion that metaphysical inquiry is vain, and that we must deliberately limit ourselves to the field of the phenomenal, in which "positive" knowledge and ''positive" results are obtainable.

And yet the soul of man refuses to acquiesce permanently in such a proposal. We cannot remain satisfied with building a roof to our house and calling it the sky. Moreover, a little attention convinces us that we cannot attain to mastery in those departments of life where to-day we are adrift, unless we can discover some sovereign principle whereby to co-ordinate our activities and to orient them towards goals which shall command our

X INTRODUCTION

spontaneous and rational loyalty. Such a principle is not to be found in the phenomenal world. The Positivist maxims of Love, Order and Progress, of devotion to Family, Country and Humanity, are not self-justifying to the post-Nietzschean age, if they ever were before; nor can they be vindicated without overstepping the limit which Comte arbitrarily prescribed to investigation. Agnosticism is, no doubt, a right and wise attitude in regard to many questions, but agnosticism as to the question of the worth of life, as to the essential difference between right and wrong, or as to the quaHties of character which men should strive to develop in themselves, is a fatal disease, paralyzing to the will, and involving ultimately the suicide of the mind. Now the scientific attitude, with its equal and impartial interest in all facts, is bound to be agnostic on these issues, where the supreme interests of life demand clear and confident conviction. We need, then, something in the nature of a religious faith upon which we can all agree. Yet the bare statement of this as a desideratum is calculated to excite ironical laughter. What is easier than to point to the endless differences even among that minority which still adheres to the various organized forms of reHgion, or to remind us that a large majority has turned its back upon them all? To hope for a time when the existing Churches shall have composed their differences and arrived at unity of faith and poHty seems Utopian. In so far as various Churches are co-operating in philanthropic and social work, they are doing so only after carefully stipulating not to discuss the vital principles which inspire them. Moreover, even if we could anticipate that within the next twenty or thirty years the Protestant sects will attain to unity among themselves, what hope

INTRODUCTION xi

would this give us of bridging the gulf that divides Protestants from Catholics, and both from Jews and free thinkers? Yet what we need is a principle which shall bind together all the members of the nation, and, in time, all the nations of the earth.

Our only hope seems to lie in discovering some fresh standpoint from which the doctrines and disciplines of all faiths may be seen in a new light and re-valued. This I have attempted to do by raising the question of the sociological function of religion. My first inquiry is not as to the truth of the creeds, but as to their reason for existence. What are those needs which have urged men into reHgious fellowships, and induced them to elaborate the various inadequate philosophies called theologies, and the numerous systems of worship, prayer and sacrament? Can these needs be isolated and studied apart from the attempts made to satisfy them? If so, may it not be possible to discover means of meeting them upon which there could be the same kind of practical agreement as there is in regard to the findings of physical science?

In seeking to answer these questions, I have availed myself in this volume of the luminous and helpful method of the psychological students of religion. This is the method of distinguishing between experience and its theoretical interpretation. I have ventured to assume that the creeds and doctrines of all the Churches are attempts to precipitate into conceptual form certain experiences of the human spirit, certain demands which it makes upon the universe, and the response of the universe to those demands. Now since the creeds are unverifiable (because their propositions cannot be subjected to experimental investigation), it seemed necessary xii INTRODUCTION

to turn direct to the experience out of which they grew. Moreover, it seems probable that the study of the discipUnary practices of the Churches, — their sacramental and other devices for placing the individual in contact with the sources of spiritual strength, — will bring us directly into the presence of those needs in response to which organized religion has functioned.

This book is thus an attempt to bring to light some of the verifiable factors in reHgion. Its suggestion is that the Churches should concentrate exclusively upon these. To those who are accustomed to find mental rest and satisfaction in the detailed creeds of the older Churches, such a suggestion may sound chilling and disenchanting in the extreme. It will not do, however, to make the wilfulness of a pampered appetite our guide when truth and the other sovereign interests of mankind are at stake. No doubt it might have been possible, in the days of the infancy of science, to construct a much grander and more fascinating view of the universe than was then verifiable, if wilfulness and imagination had been substituted for the slow and plodding method of investigation and experiment. Not only, however, would such an unreal world have been fruitless, but it would also have constituted a most effectual and permanent barrier to the attainment of that truth, transcending in grandeur all possible imaginary constructions, which the slower method has gradually won.

Now, theologies elaborated in the days of alchemy and astrology, and by the same a priori methods as those employed by the alchemist and the astrologer, must needs bear to the undiscovered truth such a relation as alchemy and astrology bear to chemistry and astronomy. And just as, in the process of converting those

INTRODUCTION xiii

romances into our sciences, the first step was to cast overboard all mere speculation and guesswork, and to concentrate upon the tiny fragments of assured truth, so to-day we must begin by denying ourselves the luxury of indulgence in that which is unverifiable. We now stand in religion where the fifteenth century stood in physical science. We are only at the stage of beginning to invent the new instruments and to devise the new methods of inquiry by which we may at last attain to as full a body of ascertained truth in religion as we have won in our knowledge of the physical world.

It is because of an intense conviction that religion is sufi"ering through our failure to recognize the need of new methods and instruments, that I have in these pages given so large a place to the question of intellectual honesty, and of that kind of sincerity which consists in the rigorous separation of what is known from what is merely assumed. Hence my assertion of the claim of Socrates to rank beside Jesus Christ as a Saviour of the world, in the conviction that his method and secret are not only an integral part of any true religion, but a part which, under present circumstances, needs emphasis more than any other factor.

This book, I am aware, can scarcely justify its title. The subject of the Religion of Experience is too vast for adequate treatment within the limits I have imposed upon myself. I am in the dilemma remarked by Seeley in the Preface to his Natural Religion: "An author has always to decide whether he will write short or long; and it is a choice of evils. If he writes long the public will decline to read him; if he writes short they will misunderstand him." My only possible justification is that this book, like several others of recent date, may

XIV INTRODUCTION

supply hints and suggestions which, if worked out by a multitude of other thinkers, will at last lead to the elaboration of the new philosophy, psychology and sociology of rehgion. I am chiefly anxious that the book shall be recognized as an essay towards a basis of peace and co-operation. The day of the warfare between the provisional hypotheses of science and the speculations of theology (which was mistaken for a warfare between science and religion) is over. The time has come to seek peace upon the only possible worthy basis: that of the acceptance of principles recognized as vahd by both belligerents, and the application of those principles to the task of achieving human salvation, by giving to the whole of life a spiritual interpretation and a spiritual orientation that will call forth a devotion at once rational and enthusiastic.

My hope is that this volume may secure the attention of laymen of all denominations, and of those who are not members of any religious organization. To experts in theology and philosophy I fear I have little to offer that is profound enough to merit their consideration. The salvation of religion, however, must come, in my judgment, from the laity, and from those clergy who, by the multiplicity of their tasks, are prevented from becoming speciaHsts in its ultimate problems. Both the clergy and the unchurched laity may, indeed, be weary of the theme. I can but hope that there may be in these pages enough freshness of treatment and suggestion of points of view which have not hitherto been emphasized, to engage their interest. My desire is to set their minds working in fresh directions, rather than to convert them to agreement with my own views on points of detail.

As my colleagues in the Chicago Ethical Society have

INTRODUCTION XV

generously undertaken the distribution of a number of copies of this book, it is due to them to state that these pages contain a frank expression of my own convictions, the censure of which must fall exclusively upon myself. The Ethical Movement is one in which the members are challenged to do their own thinking. The leaders are neither ex-pected to supply a body of dogmas to their congregations nor to submit their own minds to collective coercion. Hence the distribution of this work by my colleagues does not commit them to acceptance of the more debatable positions it sets forth.

My obligations are too extensive for detailed specification. It is this fact, and not any deficiency of gratitude, which deters me from mentioning names here. I cannot, however, deny myself the pleasure of thanking my friend Mr. Arthur Little Hamilton for his constant help and encouragement, and in particular for his practical assistance in reading and criticizing this volume in manuscript and proof.

H. J. B.

Chicago, June, 1916.

SOME OUTLINES OF THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE

SOME OUTLINES OF

Chapter I

There is in many minds a conviction that the day of the Churches is drawing to a close. This is not merely an idea entertained by unsympathetic critics in whom the wish is father to the thought. It is the despairing belief of many who, by antecedents and even by ordination, are identified with the historical tradition and the spiritual mission of the Christian fellowships. Recent periodicals have been full of the question. Has the Church collapsed? and most of the answers, even by ministers or exministers, have incHned towards the affirmative. In many of the Churches the leaders are no longer leading; they have lost the sense of their distinctive task and function. They are groping in a twiHght of intellectual and spiritual uncertainty. Their whole tone is "timid and apologetic," as of men who are uncomfortably doubtful whether they are rendering a service commensurate with their emolument.

This misgiving in some cases has taken a very positive shape. Papers have appeared affirming that the Christian Church is in a state of complete apostasy from the spirit and teaching of its founders, and implying that sincere men should come out of her, lest they become partakers of her plagues. In this sense recently the

Rev. Elvet Lewis (formerly the coadjutor in London of Mr. R. J. Campbell) expressed himself in the Atlantic Monthly. He has abandoned his own pastorate, and apparently despairs of any kind of rehgious organization possible under existing circumstances.

The Century Magazine for February, 191 5, contained a paper by Dr. Edwin Davies Schoonmaker, on the question "Has The Church Collapsed?" The burden of his plaint is that the Christian ecclesia has been false to its mission and purpose, from the very first day that its doctrine and organization began to crystalKze into definite shape in the minds of SS. Paul and Peter. Dr. Schoorunaker's indignation is awakened by the fact that the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral was resented by the world on aesthetic grounds alone. To his mind the majestic beauty of the medieval shrines is itself a thing to be deplored. The cathedral, he thinks, is not the home, but the tomb of the spirit of Christ. It expresses not the triumph of the Church, but the victory of the world over the Church. His argument impKes that Christianity ought always to have remained, what it was in the lifetime of Jesus, a direct spiritual influence of individuals upon individuals, without doctrine or organization, without hierarchy, and without pecuniary endowment. For him the apostasy began with SS. Paul and Peter, the former of whom — so it is impHed — turned the religion of love into a system of unprofitable dogma, while the latter transformed it into a temporal power, destined subsequently to enslave the minds and souls of men.

One cannot but feel the earnestness of purpose which these criticisms express, and it would be wrong not to salute with respect the spirit of Dr. Schoonmaker and

Mr. Lewis. But their reasoning proceeds upon presuppositions which are not congruous with the poor world of actual experience. Organization and intellectual formulation are, by the structure of our minds and the nature of our circumstances, inevitable concomitants, indispensable instruments of every spiritual movement. St. Paul's theology may be as false as you please; and it may be not wholly unjust to blame St. Peter for all the sins and shortcomings of the Roman hierarchy. Yet the patent fact is that, without their work and teaching, the very name of Jesus would have perished in the bogs and sands of oblivion, and to evil and to good been lost for ever. The anarchistic ideas of the critics, — their visions of a sweet and lovely spiritual influence, diffusing and perpetuating itself without any worldly organization or philosophical expression, — are dreams indeed: "dreams out of the ivory gate, and visions before midnight." They owe to the organization and the theology which they condemn, the preservation of that very standard of Christian inwardness by reference to which they condemn them. Without the theology and the missionary labours of St. Paul there never would have arisen those groups of people who demanded information about the life and work of their Lord; and consequently the Gospels would never have been written. Nor, without the development which led to the establishment of Christianity by Constantine, is it conceivable that the Christian fellowship could have survived the avalanche which destroyed the proud fabric of Roman civilization. How, then, can one condemn unreservedly an institution which, amid whatever tyranny and corruption, has preserved the standard by which its own shortcomings are to be judged, and has communicated to Mr. Lewis and

Dr. Schoonmaker that very impulse of unworldly idealism which breathes in their writings?

The Church, to be sure, is corrupt. There is no single branch of it, from the Roman to the Quaker, which is not obnoxious to this censure. But to say this is only to say that the Church is a human institution. If one is so obsessed with transcendentalism that one forgets what complications must needs ensue when the white radiance of eternity is refracted through the atmosphere of the time-world, one may say that the presence of even the slightest degree of corruption must condemn the Church beyond reprieve. But the man who keeps his feet upon the solid earth of the actual, even while he lifts his head among the stars of the ideal, will regard the presence of corruption as a reason not for condemnation, but only for reformation.

It will not do to compare the actual historic Church with some perfect pattern laid up in the clear heavens of the ideal. The only fair comparison is between the Church and other human institutions, all of which in truth must finally be judged as sacramental vehicles of the ideal, media of inward and spiritual graces to mankind. Has the Church been more corrupt relatively than the State, the family, and the school? Have popes and bishops, priests and deacons, been more traitorous to their trust than kings and statesmen? Has the Church done proportionately less good and more harm than so-called secular governments? Granted that among its evil it has done some good, could that good have been better done in its absence?

Those who feel that Christianity has brought upon the world a degree of harm that preponderates over the good it has accomplished, must remember that the fair way of judging the Church is not to compare it with an ideal society that never could have been actualized on earth, or even with the best and most catholic religious fellowship conceivable to-day; but to compare it with any other religious organization possible at the time and under the circumstances in which it sprang into being. Christian doctrine, ritual, and ecclesiastical organization are, broadly speaking, a synthesis of the modernist Judaism of the first century with the paganism of that and later periods. The Christian element is tiny as compared with the entire mass. The question, however, is whether that element was a wholesome leaven, and whether it did beneficently leaven the lump. Suppose that, instead of Christianity, the predominant element in the synthesis had been Mithraism, or Manicha^ism, or Neo-Platonism of the type of Philo or Plotinus. Suppose any phase of the degenerate paganism pictured so vividly in the early books of St. Augustine's City of God had taken in the synthesis the place that was actually taken by the doctrine of Jesus and St. Paul: would the result have been better? Would the pagan hosts that overwhelmed the Empire have been more speedily initiated into the principles of civilization?

Let the despairing critic of the Church place himself imaginatively in the second or the third or the fourth century. Let him obHterate from his consciousness the memory of all that has since transpired, and contemplate the possible alternatives that then were open to the minds of men. Seeing that only a tiny elite could receive the teaching of Seneca, or Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, and that the world then was even less ready for the concretion of pure ethics into a cultus than it is now; seeing that truth must needs be embodied in some tale if it is to enter in at lowly doors; and seeing that, even for the deepest minds (Plato's, for example), myth is an inevitable and indispensable vehicle for the communication of that vision which cannot be conveyed by language: which of the available tales would he have chosen? Which of those revered figures wherein men saw, or dreamed they saw, some incarnation of the spirit of eternal truth and goodness would he have selected as the object of reverence and worship? Can any fair student of history doubt that the choice that was made was the best possible, — that the figure of Christ was the least inadequate S3rtnbol of the God in man that was available?

If, now, it be admitted that the dominance of the Christian element in the religious amalgam which triumphant barbarism took over from Rome was beneficent, the next question is whether the good done to the Western world through the historic working-out of the Christian process was in any degree ascendant over the savageries and ignorances inevitably characteristic of a growth from barbarism into rudimentary civilization. We must keep vividly in mind the realism of the historic situation. That Goths and Huns, Teutons and Saxons, Franks and Vandals, should have been semi-barbarous, lustful, superstitious, ignorant, tyrannical, and dogmatic, was inevitable in the nature of things. That they should suddenly cease to be so through being baptized and called Christians, or ordained and called deacons, priests and bishops, is what nobody but a very superstitious person could for a moment expect. The only triumph of a refining influence that can reasonably be looked for is that they should occasionally have intermitted their savageries, — that once in a while there should be a

Charlemagne, an Alcuin, a John the Scot, capable of better things. Our gratitude is due to the institution which made possible these rare stray gleams of light. Who can measure the contributions to civilization which have directly and indirectly ensued through Ulfilas' translation of the Bible into Gothic? If it be urged that he would have done more good by translating Plato, the answer is that Plato would have been as remote from the understanding of Ulfilas and his contemporaries in Gothic as in the original Greek.

The theology of Tertullian and Augustine, it may be said, was barbarous. So be it. But be it remembered also that any ethical message which is to grip the consciousness and command the allegiance of barbarians must necessarily take to itself a barbaric integument, in order that it may come within their apperceptive range. That is why the Latin rather than the Greek Fathers became the dominant theologians of the West. The comparative humanity and intellectual subtlety of Jerome and Origen placed them outside the mental horizon of the barbarized West, as completely as Emerson and Bergson are beyond the ken of the average patron of the baseball field and the moving-picture show.

For those, then, who, like myself, lay claim to the noble style of free thinkers, I would sum up the argument thus: Do not maintain in one breath that the Church is a human institution, and in the next pass criticisms which imply that it ought to have been superhuman and supernatural.

Another consideration which must impress itself upon anybody who remains aware of facts as they are, as well as of the ideal, is that the Church — using the term in its broadest sense — remains to-day the only possible channel for the communication of ethical ideals and an ethical dynamic to the masses of Europe and of our own country. I do not forget the enormous debt which mankind owes to the heretics, the innovators, and the free thinkers ; but is it not equally true that, in so far as their spirit has acted upon the masses, it has been the Churches which willy-nilly supplied the channel through which it was mediated? Is it not the commonplace of historians of free thought that the Churches have continually been changing, especially during the last hundred years, in the direction of humanity and rationality? If Emerson and Matthew Arnold, Strauss and Renan, Seeley and Darwin, and the rest of the liberators have at all influenced the masses, has it not been chiefly at secondhand, through the teaching of preachers who have drunk directly of their spirit?

It will not do to hug to our souls any optimistic illusions as to the power of self-education and self-direction possessed by the generality. We have, to be sure, our free libraries, and our many cheap editions of the masterworks of human thought; yet the direct influence of these is at best small, and, even at that, is chiefly due to the personal advice of teachers and preachers. Does not every public teacher know that he can create a demand for a certain kind of books by his recommendation and advice? The fact is glaringly obvious that nothing but social organization and the direct influence of the living voice can avail to stem the flood of intellectual darkness and spiritual deficiency which still imperils all the nobler achievements of civilization. Yet, while the individualistic illusion, which in the teeth of the facts maintains the contrary, is still prevalent, one must insist upon the truth, even at the cost of seeming platitudinous. We must not attempt, in the words of Milton, to '' sequester out of the world, into Atlantick and Utopian polities."

We hold, then, these truths to be self-evident: first, that the Church (including under this designation all varieties of Christianity and Judaism) is not destined to disappear; secondly, that, if it were, this would be an unmixedly bad thing for America and Europe, and not less so from the point of view of the free thinker than from that of the rigid authoritarian; thirdly, that if the Churches did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them; fourthly, that to-day there is no machinery capable of replacing them or of doing the practical good which, in spite of all their limitations, they actually do accomplish; fifthly, that if the impossible did happen, and they were to disappear, the new organizations started by free-thinking humanists to replace them would either have to reproduce many of those features of the present Churches to which free thinkers commonly object, or else would necessarily fail of their purpose.

The present volume is accordingly written in a spirit of genuine friendship to the Churches, by one who sincerely desires for them an increasing influence and success; by one who deplores their narrowness, their mistakes and their present comparative inefficiency, only because he is convinced of the reality of the need which they are in part meeting, and which they could and ought to meet far more efTectually.

Doubtless the direct influence of the Church on our modern populations is relatively less extensive than it was in former days. Here in America, according to the latest statistics I have seen, sixty per cent, of us have no Church connection whatever. Some of the Churches barely hold their own; others continue to grow, though lO THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE

slowly. Generally speaking, the rate of increase has decHned, relatively to the increase of population; in some cases almost to the vanishing-point. There is here ample warrant for discouragement. Yet those who feel that discouraging circumstances are less an occasion for apathy and despair than for an unprecedentedly vigorous tackling of the task, will do well to turn their attention to the other side of the shield.

Upon doing so, we note that in the United States to-day there are forty millions of people who are connected with religious bodies, and are to some extent influenced in the conduct of their lives by such ethical standards as the Churches uphold. It may perhaps be counted unfortunate that of these forty millions, no less than thirteen millions must be assigned to the Roman Church, which in practice has been the least ethical and the most anti-intellectual of all the Christian bodies. To be sure, there is no necessary reason why this should continue to be the case. The Roman Church, mthout any change in its hierarchical organization, could become as potent an influence for personal and public morality as any of its actual or possible rivals. Its great difflculty in America is that its priests are in general (by the admission of some of their own body) an ignorant and inferior class of men. No Church suffering from such a handicap can rise to the level of its possibiHties. Those possibiHties, in the case of the Roman Church, are represented by St. Francis and Dante, by Pascal, by Thomas a Kempis, not to say by John Henry Newman and George Tyrrell. The first things needful for the Roman Church are an improvement in the average calibre of its officials, and a change of emphasis from the miraculous and magical to the ethical elements of

THE POSITION AND OUTLOOK OF THE CHURCHES il

its doctrine. It is by right no less the custodian of the humane, rationalistic and etliical spirit of Jesus, than any of the brood of rivals which historically derive from it.

Consider further the fact that the "Protestant Episcopal" Church in the United States now numbers over a million adherents. This, in view of the democratic and Puritan traditions of America, is a surprisingly large measure of success to have been achieved by the Anglican compromise, adapted as it was to the monarchical and aristocratic conditions of sixteenth-century England. It has of course been won by an extension of the compromising spirit; or, rather, by a development in the direction of democracy and comprehensiveness beyond anything that the Church of England has yet attained. There is far more liberty of prophesying in the "Protestant Episcopal" Church of America than in the English Establishment. The discovery of the amount of freedom of thought, speech and action that prevails among the clergy of the Episcopal Church in this country has been to me a most agreeable surprise. It is difficult to over-estimate the influence for good which such a body, inheriting the splendid intellectual, literary and aesthetic traditions of the English Church and utiKzing the liberty which it has here acquired, may exert upon the future development of the nation.