The faith of a middle-aged man, a little book of reassurance for troubled times, by Henry Kingman

Preface

THIS is not a book primarily for scholars or for students of theology, but for plain people — the men and women whom we are meeting daily in our homes and on the streets, preoccupied with innumerable cares. There may chance to be scholars and theologians among them; but, if so, their interest in these chapters will come not from their wisdom but from the elemental heart-hunger that is common to us all, the hunger after a life made satisfying by its hold on God. So it is not a book on theology but on successful living. Not by one who has succeeded, but by one who has been much helped by Him who did succeed and is still bringing wavering followers to a triumphant issue in the face of heavy odds.

Henry Kingman.

SOME OF THE CHAPTERS OF THIS BOOK HAVE APPEARED IN THE BIBLICAL WORLD, AND ARE NOW PUBLISHED WITH THE CONSENT OF THAT PUBLICATION. : : : : :

The Place of the Cross . .

Part II THE OUTLOOK OF FAITH IX The Fact of God 117

X The Divine Outlook on Man . 138

XI The Good Fight 160

XII The Discipline of Pain . . . 186

XIII Overcoming Under Difficulties 203

XIV The Hope of Everlasting Life 225 XV The Unending Fellowship . . 235

Part I THE GROUND OF FAITH

THE FAITH OF A MIDDLE-AGED MAN

CHAPTER I Life's Need of Faith

THERE is no doubt that the characteristic note of our day is not faith but criticism. Yet it is equally certain that there have been few generations so weary at last of the temper that doubteth all things, and so eager for faith if one but knew where to find it. For, after all, a man's faith in God is his most precious possession, for the simple reason that, as a man of great spiritual discernment said long ago, " This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." In persistently fair weather he may not realize how priceless its assistance is; but at a time like this, when the whole world is forced to grope anew for the soul's adequate reassurance in the presence of immeasurable disaster, it is the one unchoked fountain of comfort and courage. It is hard to see how a nation or a man can live nobly without it. For most of us this needs no argument.

Our own experience has forced us to this conclusion. Life, we have been told, is an affair of honor. And so indeed we have found it. It is a trust involving heavy risks. We take it up light-heartedly at first, but as years go by and disillusionments set in we begin to see what manner of enterprise it is we are engaged in, and our attitude toward it grows less confident. We may grow out of humor with it, or dwell reproachfully on the way in which it has failed to keep its early promises; we may lose heart under its burden or sit cowed beneath its blows of evil fortune; we may come to abuse it, or treat it with cynical contempt, or even refuse it altogether. But to go on and on, in spite of all, morning and afternoon and evening, faithfully meeting the call of each new day until, in Stevenson^s phrase, we have " got cleanly off the stage,'' this is indeed an engagement of honor that some of us are hard pressed to keep. We need in it not only all our own inward resources of strength, but every help of faith that eager hearts in days gone by have ever found.

For, as in every affair of honor, there is only one possible course that an honest man can follow; and that is the way of unhesitating fidelity. Anything less than this is unthinkable. No refusal or evasion or compromise, nor any sort of faltering or rec-

Life's Need of Faith reancy, is so much as to be considered. As Louis Pasteur said, simply, when his friend Deville spoke of the danger of his proposed studies of cholera in the South, " What about duty?" That is the last word for men of honest purpose, even though it be a hard one. If courage is demanded, then courage must somehow be found, and resiliency enough to meet every rebuff and partial overthrow. It is by no means enough to win through life with a kind of stoical doggedness — a dour persistency that refuses to be dislodged from the way of duty even though the days are gray with doubt and the future holds no hope of better things. It is possible to go on grimly with the fight in a spirit of prevailing despondency and pessimism. But so long as the world has vividly before it the memory of Jesus, and of his irrepressible confidence and hopefulness through days of evil fortune, and so long as it has with it in every generation his followers, of a like spirit of indomitable good cheer, it will refuse to take the mere acceptance of the inevitable as an adequate discharge of life's obligation. There must be a better success than this. It is victory that men want — the victory of a self-possession undaunted and expectant in the face of every problem and disappointment that the world can yield.

On every side of us, in numbers past counting, are the men and women who have felt the truth of these things and who are fighting the long, arduous fight of life. They have come to the point where the freshness of early hopes is gone and where the tide runs swiftest against them, where cares and fears multiply as life's resources dwindle. They look about them wistfully for help — fresh help for needs more insistent and perplexities more insidious than of old. Where is one to look in this critical doubting age for any adequate reassurance or promise of victory? Our answer is based not only on the accumulated experience of thoughtful men for ages past, but, what is even more convincing, upon our own experience through these latest years that belong to us. Our only chance of winning through successfully is by the way that Jesus found sufficient, so long ago — the way of faith in God. His faith, his teaching and his spirit still afi*ord the only way to such an undiscourageable optimism as was his. As was said of certain poor folk long before the day of Jesus' testing, " They looked unto him and were radiant, and their faces were not ashamed." It is the sight of God that still illumines life's dark places, and gives courage for energetic service. The misgivings and questionings of a critical age, no less than the slings and arrows of

Life's Need of Faith outrageous fortune, may be met in quiet peace if only one believes that Jesus Christ was sent of God that we might know the truth.

The creeds and institutions in which the church has embodied its faith are very old; they bear the marks of centuries of discussion and elaboration, and many in our day tend to shrink away from them just because of their venerable complexity. But faith itself is young and simple and more deeply intrenched in human experience than it has ever been. And it is this fresh living faith, new-born out of the needs and aspirations of our own generation, that will lead us through the entanglements of our sophisticated age, clear through, to the day when some may even hope to hear the words, " Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have be- Heved."

CHAPTER II The Appeal of Middle Age

WHAT has middle age to do with the fight for faith ? Is there anything about this period of life that entitles it to be heard for itself, as though it had a spiritual experience peculiarly its own? Is its faith in any wise different from that of youth or old age, so that it has a message of special savor axid pertinence for those who have reached the early afternoon of the long day of work? It is only necessary to ask the question in this form for the answer to suggest itself. Just because it is the time in life when work bears heaviest, when the freshness of morning has gone and the rest of evening is not in sight, middle age has its own temptations and its own triumphs, out of which there may well come a message, to be won out of no other conditions, timely and heartening for those whose sense of need deepens with each year.

As for old age, it seems as a rule to have come out into quieter waters than those with which most of us are familiar, as though the middle passage were over and one had come again under the lee of the land — the land of the other shore. Assuredly old age has its consolations, even though we feel the pathos of its infirmities and its frequent loneliness. Not only so, but it has almost a literature of its own, froin the days of Cicero down. Many have spoken for its encouragement, and not a few have voiced its triumphs and its visions, since the time of John the Aged.

As for early manhood, never has it been so true as today that " youth will be served." Much of the best of our religious literature is written for the special needs of college men and women, or for those at least who are still in the student period, when they are facing for the first time the critical problems so characteristic of our day. There is no audience so attractive as is this. Thoughtful, eager, responsive, it demands the very best that our generation can afford; and it is no wonder that the ablest writers and thinkers of our time are being largely drawn upon to .meet the needs of this plastic and appealing body of hearers. There is no doubt that the needs and aspirations of life at the spring, when it is fresh and hopeful and full of vigor and determination, will always command the first place in our attention. Always it will have abundance of spokesmen and interpreters, of teachers and helpers and champions, by virtue of its unfailing and irresistible appeal.

But middle age! Is it not something like that unattractive desert of boyhood between the ages of ten and fifteen years, when the early attractiveness has faded out and the maturer dignities of young manhood have not appeared? Men and women of fifty are not supposed to have much to say about the doubts and temptations of which they spoke so freely, and to sympathetic listeners, thirty years before. Indeed, if they spoke of them, they would be hard put to find an audience. They are supposed to have come through the period of storm and stress long ago, and to be engrossed now with their work. They are interesting only as they are earning money, or managing affairs, or caring for their households. It is taken for granted that they are practical men and women, too busy with the serious concerns of life to have either taste or leisure for indulging in the spiritual misgivings or the anxious heartsearchings that seem natural enough for the young girl or the lad standing at life's threshold.

Alas for us who have reached or passed the halfway mark on life's journey! We are supposed to be too sensible and too strong to have much need of counsel, still less of help or comfort. We are the helpers of others. That we should still be having a struggle for our own soul's life, that we should still be panting for a freer air in which we maybreathe more joyously, seems a trifle absurd. It is not to be expected. In any case middle age is not interesting to others. We are too old — or else not old enough. We are out in the hard glare of early afternoon, when the realities of things as they are stand out with merciless distinctness. The long shadows of the morning, or the veiling indistinctness of approaching dusk, are quite wanting. That we, too, should be living in the half-lights, wistfully anxious for clearer vision, full of hopes and fears we dare not utter but which are more pathetically eager than when we were young and strong, that temptations bafilingly new and unexpected should be assailing us, or that we, at middle age, whom our boys and girls think to be so stodgily going on our old-fashioned way of stifi'ened habits and beliefs, are still fighting the old battle for an honest and courageous day's living and for faith enough to keep on cheerily from one day's sunset to the next — who would suspect this to be true.^ Who but a middle-aged man or woman, who knows that it is so, who is living in the very heart of such a fight, and who finds that maturity does not necessarily mean security any more than silence signifies satisfaction ?

If we are silent about our doubts it is because it gives us pain to think of them.

rather than a certain complacency that we once felt, so long ago, when it was an agreeable exercise to discuss the great problems of life and death. If it is not agreeable now, perhaps it is because our happiness is too vitally concerned. Faith is more precious than it was in the days when it did not have to be hardly earned. To be sure, we are more hard-headed and less sentimental than once we were. We are expected to take our disillusionments with the satisfaction that comes with widening knowledge. But it is not all gain, especially if we fear that even the vision splendid begins " to die away, and fade into the light of common day."

One is reminded of that pathetic verse of Thomas Hood's, that must have had a secret stab for innumerable hearts of whom it would never have been suspected:

I remember, I remember

The fir-trees dark and high;

I used to think their slender tops

Were close against the sky.

It was a childish ignorance,

But now 'tis little joy

To know Tm farther off from heaven

Than when I was a boy.

Thirty years of competitive struggle with a selfish world of men, half a lifetime of getting and spending, soon and late, in order to keep up appearances, do not tend of themselves to bring heaven nearer, or to make faith shine more brightly than when we were young. And to most men it is no joy to feel that spiritual realities are growing dim, or to realize, as did Darwin, that some of the nobler capacities of the soul are growing dull and unresponsive through the mere attrition of absorbing work.

Depend upon it, middle age has also its trial of storm and stress to struggle through, as surely as the passionate years of stormy youth. And such faith as it holds or wins is the more significant and very precious. It may well make special claim for a thoughtful hearing and consideration. Whatever limitations it may have, it has at least the quality of reality. It is no longer the faith of inheritance, or of early education, or of inexperience. It is not based upon any external authority, but upon experience of life and its discipline, and of God and his mercies. It has been won out of conflict, in the face of a legion of hostile circumstances, within and without. Probably it is not as complete and symmetrical as the faith we had in earlier years, but it has been tested at all points and has been found to bear the strain of life. We can rest upon it even in the dark and cloudy day, not because others have told us that it is good, but because we have wrestled for it through many days and nights of need, and God has actually come near us through its aid.

It should be clearly understood that in speaking of the faith of middle age we do not mean theological faith alone — the articles of a man's creed — though doubtless these are at the heart of any hopeful outlook upon life. We are speaking of something broader and more inclusive than that, something even more precious and divine. We mean the whole attitude of the soul toward God and his world, that is like that of Jesus in its calm trust in the goodness and power of the Almighty. Faith is the opposite of fear. It stands for an undiscourageable optimism in the face of a world that is full of inexplicable pain and evil. It means the unshakable assurance that God is good, that his thoughts and plans for men are those of love, and that his resources of power and grace are such as will ultimately bring these plans to pass in spite of all our ignorance and infirmity. Fear means doubt and uncertainty and pessimism; it paralyzes the very springs of life. Faith is inseparable from joy and expectancy and service, and knits up our flagging resolution to ever new effort and determination.

So then, the faith of a middle-aged man, built up slowly out of years of baffling experience, of innumerable perplexities and disappointments, is something deeper and more significant than the mere acceptance of certain great doctrines regarding God and the soul. It is the victory of the spirit over the whole blighting power of doubt. It is the triumph of a child of God over all those insidious enemies who would persuade him that he is not a child of God at all, and that the warring world of men, of which for a brief moment he is a part, is not and never can be a kingdom of divine love. It is a wonderful thing to come through all the warping strains of life among men with an unquenchable confidence that God is present in his world and at our side, and that his righteousness and love are the invincible powers that lie behind all the seething chaos of human weakness and social wrong. It does not imply a confidence in one's own future only, but in that of the far-stretching Kingdom of God. And on the other hand it is not a trust in the final victory of that Kingdom alone, but in the joyful outcome of our own brief life-career, as of infinite worth to the Father of the household.

There are not many of us who do not feel, at some time in the long years, the deadly influence of the cynical skepticism that is ever about us like an atmosphere, in literature and in society. There is too often a half-stifled echo in our own hearts to those mocking words that have come down through the centuries:

We are no other than a moving row Of magic Shadow-shapes that come and go Round with this Sun-illumin'd lantern, held In Midnight by the Master of the show.

And that inverted bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder, crawling, coop'd, we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help — for It As impotently rolls as you or I.

It only needs an overwhelming experience of sorrow In our own lives, some sudden and unexpected reversal of the tide of prosperity that we had come to take for granted, for these challenging denials — so powerless to disturb us when the sun shines brightly — to become a cruel menace to our peace.

Faith Is the victory even over these. It Is the characteristic of middle age to have passed In and out of the shadow perhaps once and again; to have confronted these assailing fears in times of depression or weakness when they were at their worst, and even so, In spite of all, to have found the simple faith of Jesus as a rock beneath the feet, on which there was sure standing when many things seemed likely to be swept away. The faith of middle life means the victory of the soul over all such powers of fear and death as lurk in doubts like these. Not complete victory as yet — there may still be quite unsuspected dangers to be passed through — but at the flood-tide of life's cares, when the world presses in relentlessly day by day, it means the peace of the disciple of Jesus, sharing with his great Elder Brother the assurance of a Father's love.

CHAPTER III The Years of Attrition

OXE of the cleverest essays that have appeared in recent years is that by Samuel Crothers on the '' School for Polite Unlearning." It genially depicts the school whose aim — in view of certain regrettable qualities in modern education — is not to add to the store of its pupils' mental possessions, but to disburden them of a store of laboriously acquired information and relieve them early of the useless excess of opinions and beliefs that cannot hope to withstand the test of time. We are all familiar with the numberless institutions, great and small, whose laudable purpose is to store the minds of the rising generation with facts of every kind. But surely there is need, here and there, after years of hasty and careless stuffing with the ideas of many men, of a sort of post-graduate course that shall gently relieve us of all our fancied knowledge of the things that are not so — of all our blunders and prejudices and misconceptions, all our incredulities and assumptions, that would impair our judgment and lessen our influence through life.

This " School for Polite Unlearning " is a parable of the period of these last forty years, through which we of middle age have been passing. If ever unwilling students were forced to enter on an apparently unending course of instruction in the art of unlearning, even of beliefs and acquisitions most highly prized, it has been in the case of the men and women of today who came from the typical homes of a generation now past; not those most cultured or most highly intellectual, but the ordinary God-fearing homes of the common people, where religion was honestly regarded as the most vital concern in life. Such homes were in those days even less likely than now to be in sympathetic touch with the latest phases of religious thought in the world at large, yet they were and are the bulwarks of what is best and strongest in our Christian civilization. You will still find them by the tens of thousands, especially through the South and West, almost untouched in their religious thinking by the modern point of view. Their sons and daughters are in the universities, adjusting themselves to the intellectual movements of the day, but the parents are still living in a world of ideas to which those who have once tasted of modern scholarship never can return. Here is the pathetic tragedy that is still going on in homes rich and poor all about us, as all are aware who know at first hand what the lives of the people are.

But the young people today are none of them wholly unprepared, on leaving home, to meet the modern point of view. It is in the atmosphere we breathe today, even for children; and they are somehow forewarned of what awaits them and are prepared to make the intellectual transition with a minimum of mental disturbance. In most cases they even seem to take it for granted that their home training was out of date, and as a matter of course is to be superseded by the more scientific attitude of the educated man.

Not so was it when we were young. For hundreds of years our forbears, in all their religious thinking, had rested unhesitatingly upon certain religious principles which for them had never been seriously contested, save by those who were more or less open enemies of the faith. They had not even a mind to inquire whether these inherited assumptions should be challenged. There was something irreverent and perilous about giving any entertainment to serious questioning of traditional views, which bore for them the sacredness of the inspired word on whose teachings they were thought to be founded.

Most clearly was this so in the case of the

Bible itself, and that which pertained to it. So long had men been used, for example, to look at the date 4004 B.C- as the year of the creation of the world, that it did not even occur to them to be restive under that singular assertion. The use of proof texts, chosen at random from any section of the Bible as conclusive for the settlement of moral and spiritual problems, was so habitual, so venerable in its historical indorsement, that it seemed to place beyond argument the equal authority of every writing within the Canon. To admit a human element in any portion of the long record, or to suggest, for example, that certain arguments of Paul's owed their curious inconclusiveness for modern minds to his rabbinic training, was to be guilty of a kind of unbelief that was both audacious and sinful.

It is of course true that in scholarly circles the writings of Kant and Schleiermacher and their successors had long before that day invaded and partially overthrown the theological preconceptions that underlay much of the doctrinal teaching of the church. Yet there were few of us who did not start out with the idea that correct belief was the primary requisite for salvation as for church membership. Men in those days could still hear without protest the amazing words, made authoritative by many centuries of unchallenged use, '' Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold th^ Catholic faith .... Which faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly." One does not even like to remember what views were commonly held as to what our Father proposed to do hereafter with all his distressed and scattered children in the wide world everywhere, who had never had the good fortune of hearing the true faith set forth. The religious atmosphere of the orthodox homes of our childhood was, on its intellectual side — for divine love had often made their sympathies outrun their creeds — still that of the Middle Ages. Possibly it even prided itself that it had not advanced beyond Luther or Calvin or Jonathan Edwards.

Our modern-minded children find it hard to sympathize with us who have been compelled in our brief lifetime to bridge over a change of mental attitude toward religious truth that historically is only to be bridged by centuries. The intellectual world had long been preparing for it, as thoughtful men gradually broke away from the rigid scholasticism of an earlier age, but upon us who are the middle-aged men and women in the churches of today the successive demands for the relinquishment of old convictions,

I and readjustment to wholly new conceptions, have been breaking like the waves of a fastrising sea, until it is no wonder that the faith of some has been submerged altogether under a rising tide of doubt.

It is not as though we had been compelled simply to unlearn certain things that no longer can be held as true. The change has been more subtle and more significant than this. No thoughtful man fears the influence upon faith of what he is convinced is truth. It is not as between black and white, true and false, that we have difiiculty in choosing. But the popularity of agnosticism as a creed, the ease of saying " I do not know '^ to all the age-old human hopes that lie beyond the ordinary methods of scientific research and that transcend our common experience, has led many to feel that convictions are no longer to be expected on certain matters of profound spiritual concern. It does not matter that Jesus spoke regarding them with a sublime assurance. The influence of Jesus' words has temporarily been clouded by the obvious fact that science cannot confirm their truth, and by the assumption that, as science has no clear deliverance to offer, it is necessary for cautious thinkers to hold them as unproved.

Of course there is a manifest seduction in this attitude for every lazy or indiff'erent mind, and for every one who would welcome an excuse for doubt on realities that would press in with inconvenient urgency upon his soul. There is nothing that is at once so easy and so respectable as to affirm a regretful ignorance regarding any of the great problems of human responsibility and divine love. It does not seem active disbelief, which might be reprehensible, but merely a state of intellectual suspension — the refusal to affirm. Yet it is sufficient to involve all the great realities of life and death in a nebula of uncertainty that leaves them powerless to control.

There are none of us who have not felt the chilling influence of this omnipresent attitude of doubt — the willingness to leave undetermined and unanswered the supreme questions that Jesus set himself to answer, in words and deeds of comfort that his gospel has continued to repeat, for the joy and inspiration of humanity, through eighteen hundred years. The modern spirit urges us, if not to unlearn them, at least to hold them as beyond the reach of proof and therefore unessential for human living.

We cannot be too often reminded, moreover, that from within the church itself come indirect support and excuse for such an attitude of non-conviction as to truths that once were held as the dearest possessions

I of the soul. The prevailing note in the religious experience of our times is, of course, its reawakening to the social consciousness — its profound recognition of the sociological bearings of the Christian gospel. Christian men today are deeply preoccupied with this social message that for so long a time has been obscured to our inestimable loss. The church is busy everywhere with the thoughts and plans and activities to which this awakening has given rise. Its insistence now is not upon belief, but upon action. And just because of its preoccupation with obligations and duties too long neglected, it is contented to relegate to one side, for the time being, certain momentous matters of faith that are in fact the very foundation of the new social structure it would build. It is not preaching about them because it is not thinking about them. It is preaching and thinking about their social implications. It does not mean to disregard them, still less to deny them, but for a time they have been crowded out of sight, and it is easy for man;^ to hold a non-committal attitude regarding them, as though in a stirring age like this they were not of practical importance. Our fathers put them first — by an immeasurable precedence. But we have come, not to deny that they are first, but to lose any clear sight of them and any ardent loyalty in their support, simply because we are so busy gathering the harvest that they alone make possible.