The world within

Front matter

«<Tm World W thin

Rufus M.Jones i'v

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Introduction

There is a fine passage in one of Keats's Letters in which the poet says that our world is created primarily as a place for making souls ■ — in his phrase it is " a vale of soul-making."

We are just now so absorbed with external tasks and so occupied with the solution of problems in our outside world that most of us hardly have time to consider whether we have any souls or not. We allow that question to await its turn for an answer. But there are some questions — and this is precisely one of them — which cannot be postponed while outer issues are being settled. In fact all outer issues are intricately tied up with just this inner one. It turns out to be forever true that the inner aspect which we call morale is the main factor even in contests which are supposed to be only external. Those impalpable things which we name faith and vision and spirit and nerve are greater elements in the determination even of outside victories than are miraculous long-distance guns. The conviction that our funvi INTRODUCTION

damental aims are righteous is an unspeakable asset. Moreover, it appears as clearly evident now as it was two thousand years ago in Syria that it is of no use or profit to win the whole world if the inner life and self-respect are lost in the process; that houses and lands, territory and spheres of influence, are a poor substitute for that intangible thing which we call the souL

Some day, near or remote, this war will be over. These unparalleled armies will demobilize and these multitudes of young men who have been living under most unwonted human conditions and have been facing death every day in appalling shapes will return to the pursuits which they have intermitted for this vast business of Armageddon. The new tasks of reorganization, rehabilitation and reconstruction awaiting them and us will be fully as unparalleled as the modes and magnitude of the warfare have been. And beyond any question the most important preparation for this immense work of rebuilding the wrecked and shattered world will be the clarification and fortification of the soul. There will be, no doubt, enormous economic issues to be settled. We shall be confronted with a wholly novel group of political problems. It will be a world charged with unusual dynamic social aspirations which must be

INTRODUCTION vii

dealt with. But still deeper than all other issues will be the issues of the soul.

We cannot build this new world of ours out of material stuff alone. It will not be a matter solely of iron and coal and foodstuffs. It will, as always, be a matter of creative faith, of spiritual vision — in a word, the ultimate issue will turn upon the quality and character of the soul of those of us who are to do the building. We must be on our guard against low and miserable material aims which would put the holiest hopes of our age again in imminent peril. We must restore trust and confidence in a living God who is not off beyond and above the storm and stress of life, but in the very pulse and flow of it all, and whose will for a good world is the deepest reality of our universe. We shall certainly care less than we once did for non-essentials in religion, for the external counters, for the time-worn survivals of bitter controversies, but we shall, if we are wise, care more than ever for the central realities by which men live. St. Augustine was right when he said: '' My life shall now be a real life, being wholly full of Thee." Variations in external matters will become — are .already becoming — unimportant and negligible. The things which form and fashion the soul and set it on '^ the path viii ' INTRODUCTION

to that which is Best " will be the abiding things and the only ones of any permanent value for vital religion.

We do not want a religion which meets the needs of experts alone and moves in a region beyond the reach of common men and women who have no taste for the intricacies of theology. If religion is, as I profoundly believe, the essential way to the full realization of life, we, who claim to know about it, ought to interpret it so that its meaning stands out plain and clear to those who most need it to live by. I have always believed and maintained that the apparent lack of popular interest in it is largely due to the awkward and blundering way in which it has been presented to the mind and heart of those who all the time carry deep within themselves inner hungers and thirsts which nothing but God can satisfy. I do not want to write or print a line which does not at least bear the mark and seal of reality — and which will not make some genuine fact of life more plain and sure.

The struggle for a conquering Inner faith has In these strenuous days been laid upon us all. The easy, inherited, second-hand faith will not do for any of us now. We cannot stand the stern issues of life and death with any feeble, formal

INTRODUCTION ix

creed. We demand something real enough and deep enough to answer the human cry of our soul to-day. We need to be assured that we do not in the last resort fall back on the play of molecules but that underneath us are everlasting Arms. We want to know not only that there is law and order but that a genuine Heart of Love touches our heart and brings us calm and confidence.

Robert Louis Stevenson has somewhere told of ^ an experience that happened once to his grandfather. He was on a vessel that was caught by a terrific storm and was carried irresistibly toward a rocky shore where complete destruction was imminent. When the storm and danger were at the height he crept up on deck to look around and face the worst. He saw the pilot lashed to the wheel, with all his might and nerve holding the vessel off the rocks and steering it inch by inch into safer water. While he stood watching, the pilot looked up at him and smiled. It was little enough but it completely reassured him. He went back to his room below with new confidence, saying to himself, ''We shall come through; I saw the pilot smile ! " If we could only in some way catch sight of a smile on the face of the great Pilot in this strange rough sea in which we are sailing, we, too, could do our work and carry our

X INTRODUCTION

burdens with confidence, perhaps with joy. I wish this little book might help some readers to be convinced that even in the dark and the storm there is a smile of hope and victory on the Pilot's face and that He is saying as the great Galilean said : " Be of good cheer, I am winning the victory over the world.''

Chapter I The Deeper Universe Where Love Breaks Through

We do well to make strenuous exertions to meet the threatening food-famine and to cultivate efficiently all the acres that are available for increasing the food-supply of the world. But there is another kind of famine which is threatening and ominous, and which has not yet received anything like adequate attention. I mean the spiritual famine of our stricken world. Multitudes of men are daily facing danger and death. Vast numbers are weighted with loss, suffering and agony. The deeper problems of life rest heavily upon all of us. The old religious phrases are inadequate. Human hearts everywhere are longing for fresh and vital assurance that in this time of the world's greatest spiritual need the everlasting Arms of divine love are underneath us, and that one like unto the Son of Man is walking with us in the midst of the fire. Where shall we look for this assurance?

We know much more about the universe than the ancient world knew, but the more we know about it the harder it becomes for our spirits to accept the visible universe as the ultimate and final reality. The cold and pitiless forces of nature are not less cold and pitiless when we succeed in discovering their laws and habits. One comes back from his study of the march of suns, and planets, and the spiral movements of world-making nebulae with very little to comfort the longings of the heart. He sees that these curves are all irrevocable and inevitable and that each event unfolds out of the one which preceded. It is a wonderful and amazing system, but it offers no tenderness, no love, no balm for the wounds of the spirit. It rolls mercilessly on, and he may be thankful if its wheels do not ride over him — the midget of an hour, riding on one of the flying globes of this mechanical system.

It is useless to expect tenderness and love and balm in a system of mechanical forces. That kind of world can reveal gravitation and electricity, attraction and repulsion; it can show us matter moving under law; it can exhibit the transformation of one form of energy into some other form; but from the nature of the case it cannot manifest a heart of tenderness or a spirit of love. Those traits belong only to a person, and a mechanical system can never reveal a person. Physics and chemistry, geology and astronomy do discover a revelation of God, but it is necessarily a revelation limited to the possibilities of their field. The testtube and the air-pump help to demonstrate the fact that the universe is a realm of purpose, of order, and of inexhaustible energy, but they must not be expected to show us a divine face or a heart of love. God puts no more of himself into chemistry or physics or astronomy than chemistry or physics or astronomy will hold !

Even this external universe with its law and order, its forces and energies, can not be as cold and pitiless as it appears when it is mistakenly sundered and cut away from the deeper and more spiritual reality working endlessly through it and forever preparing for a higher stage to succeed and transcend a lower stage. Physical nature is always more than the bare mechanical fragment with which the descriptive sciences deal. '' That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual." Our life can not be completely sundered from the physical universe. We are in some way organic with it and of it, and the God we seek can show at least some aspects of himself through it. He uses it steadily toward spiritual ends, though under obvious limits. It is a realm of mighty moral discipline and, fragment though it is by itself, it points all serious souls to the larger whole, the completer reality which supplements and fulfills it.

If the universe is deeper than physics and astronomy can reveal, if there is some greater reality than can be expressed in terms of energy and law, how could this deeper reality reveal itself? Where could the veil be lifted? Such a revelation could be made to humanity only through a person. Mountain peaks and stars can not embody love and sympathy — they can embody only energy. Love and sympathy, tenderness and patience, forgiveness and grace are traits of character, attitudes of a personal spirit. If they are ever to be revealed, they must be revealed in the life of a person.

Now, once there was a Person who felt that his life was a genuine exhibition of the divine in the human, the eternal in the midst of time. He lived and died in the consciousness that through his life he was showing God to men ; that his love

Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE S

was a revelation of the real nature and character of God; that his sympathy for the weary, heavyladen, sin-distressed, heart-hungry people of the earth was a true unveiling of the heart of the universe; that his suffering over sin, his grace and patience made the Father's character visible and vocal in the world. He felt this, and consecrated his life to this deeper revelation of God. Some have doubted and some have been perplexed, but there have always been some — and It is a growing number — who profoundly believe that here in him is the personal character of God revealed to us. However leaden and pitiless the march of the universe may be at other points, at this one point, at least, love and tenderness break through and enwrap us. This God who is unveiled in Christ is the God our world needs to-day. Not a God of abstract metaphysics, not a God apart in solitary bliss and perfection, but the God and Father of Jesus Christ, revealing himself to us in the closest intimacy of fellowship with us, and suffering like ourselves in the travail and tragedy of the world's suffering — •*' A God who lives in the perpetual giving of himself." The Jesus whom Peter confessed and Mary loved can become the Christ of the world, and through him can come afresh to us the God whom our chemistry and astronomy were too limited to reveal — we can see him in the face of Jesus Christ.

II

UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE REALITIES *^ That which is not brings to naught that which is.*'

St. Paul's saying is not quite a paradox. It is rather a vivid and forceful way of saying what he often says, namely, that unseen and intangible realities build and shape the things we see. Indiscernibles are mighty factors. An invisible world is behind and within the visible one. We recognize this truth now in a multitude of ways. In the fine peroration of his great message on *' The Leadership of Educated Men " — given at Brown University in 1882 — George William Curtis very impressively referred to the invisible force of gravitation which holds the world together and controls all its movements. He said :

" In the cloudless midsummer sky serenely shines the moon, while the tumultuous ocean rolls and murmurs beneath, the type of illimitable and unbridled power; but resistlessly marshaled by celestial laws all the wild waters, heaving from pole to pole, rise and recede obedient to that mild queen of heaven."

We have slowly come to realize, as science has piled up its inferences and conclusions, that our visible world is only a fragment of a larger universe and swims in a vast invisible world which has no known or conceivable bounds. Out of this inexhaustible sea of energy come the forces which build our visible world — forces which we name and use but do not understand. Gravitation, cohesion, attraction, magnetism, electricity, molecular energy, ether-waves are a few of the words which stand for mighty forces. We say the words and look wise, as though our finger were on a secret. We know, however, no more about the real nature of these forces which build our world than Aladdin knew about the jinnee that reared his palace when he rubbed his lamp. We know little more than that the visible comes out of the invisible, and that we can learn how these invisible forces work and how to direct them for our practical ends.

Everywhere and always the invisible is the builder of the visible. Michelangelo saw the dome of St. Peter's in the viewless realm of his own soul before he raised it into visible beauty above the groined arches of the cathedral. Every creation of art is an instance of the same truth. The form of beauty which comes forth into visible shape for the many to see and admire has first been an inner possession, growing into perfection in the spaceless soul of the creator, where only one could see it.

Plotinus used to hold that it is much truer to say that the body is in the soul than that the soul is in the body. And strange as it may sound, there is much to be said for this view of the ancient Greek philosopher. There are many good evidences to prove that some invisible reality — which we may just as well call soul as anything else, at least until we get a word that means more — that some invisible reality builds and vivifies and directs this visible, corporeal bulk of ours. There is, for example, a tiny speech-center in the left hemisphere of the human brain, so complicated that all the telegraphic instruments in the United States, combined and worked from one central key, would make a very simple instrument compared with it. When a baby arrives here on his hazardous venture his speech-center is not yet organized. Even if he knew all the wonders of the world he has left behind he could tell nothing about it -. — any more than Beethoven could have rendered a symphony without musical instruments. It looks as though the expanding mind of the child slowly organized and builded this marvelous center, which was only fleshy pulp before the organization was wrought out in it. There is, at any rate, no way to account in terms of matter for the transcendent meanings which burst into consciousness at the sound of words, nor for the way in which conscious effort and attentive purpose build the little bridges between the cells of the brain and make of it an instrument for the spirit.

We are, once more, all familiar with the way an invisible ideal holds and controls and dominates and constructs a life. It is one of the most notable features of our strange human experience. That which is not yet — for an ideal plainly is what ought to be but is not — works like a mighty energy. It upholds the spirit in hours of defeat. It makes one oblivious to pain. It conquers all opposition. It carries the will, contrary to all laws of mechanics, along the line of greatest resistance. It turns obstacles and hindrances into chariots of victory. It does the impossible. In PauPs great words, '^ the things which are not bring to naught the things which are ! " What cannon of unwonted caliber, pounding at the battle-lines of men, can not do, the impalpable ideas and ideals of the common people may after all accomplish. Dreams and visions and hopes are not so empty and useless as they often seem.

lo THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I

Suddenly they find a potent voice, they grow mighty, they gather volume, and they do what cannon could not do.

^* One man with a dream, at pleasure Shall go forth and conquer a crown ;

And three with a new song's measure Can trample a kingdom down.

** We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing

And Babel itself with our mirth;

" And overthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world's worth ;

For each age is a dream that is dying Or one that is coming to birth." ^

The religious books of ancient Persia say that when the soul of a good man arrives at the river of death a beautiful, shining, radiant figure meets it and says to it: ''I am your true self, your best self, your real self. I am the image of your ideals, your strivings, your resolves, your determined purposes. I am you. Henceforth we merge together into one harmonious life." The parable is a genuine one. We are forever what our ideals make us.

Ch. I] THE DEEPER UNIVERSE ii

But deeper and surer than all other invisible realities is that divine Spirit, not seen, but felt, who is the ground of our real being, the source of our longings, the inspirer of our larger hopes, the inner energy by which we live. Some persons think he must be dead or asleep or on a journey. They see such stalking evils, such collapses of civilization, such ugly shadows over the fair world, that they cannot hold their thin clew of faith any longer. It has snapped and left them standing alone in their dark cave. But he is there all the same, though they see him not nor know him. He does not vanish in the dark or in the storm. There is much love working still in these hard, dark days. Grace abounds, often unsuspected, even though sin seems so potent. Courage and heroism never broke through and showed their greatness more clearly than now. Sacrifice, which is woven in the same warp with love, is moving like a radiant light everywhere through the storm. Faith in something still holds men and women to their hard tasks of endurance. All that Christ was and is still attracts the soul that sees it. If an eclipse dims or veils the sight of him for the moment, we may be sure that this warm, healing Sun of our life has not set. He is still there, and some of us continue to feel our hearts burn with his presence, which is as indubitable a reality as is the rock-ribbed earth upon which we tread. What he needs is better organs to reveal himself through, richer, truer, holier lives to show his love through, more finely organized personalities for his grace to break through into the world. He cannot do his work without us. He cannot preach without our lips, comfort without our help, heal without our hands, carry the truth without our feet, remove the shadow without our faith and effort. The invisible works through the visible, the unseen and eternal operates through little instruments like us!

Ill

THE WORLD WE FORM WITHIN

We have had many illustrations in these solemn months of the momentous character of responsible decisions. Many lives hang upon one man's judgment concerning a course of action, and even the fate of a nation is involved in the conclusion to which a single individual arrives. If the responsible man blunders, dire consequences follow; if he is wise, large advantages accrue. National disasters are generally no accidents.

7. ^ They attach to inadequate planning or to inefficient management of affairs.

What is true of the large outer world is true also — inevitably true — in the smaller inner world which the schoolmen used to call the microcosm, that is, in the soul of man. Here also a person blunders at his peril. Here, too, consequences attach to decisions and deeds, and the quality of the reaping is determined by the character of the sowing. This is a profound and fundamental feature of Christ's teaching. Always and everywhere in his message the beyond is within, destiny is bound up with inner attitudes, with heart and mind and will. The secret of heaven and hell has not yet been fully explored. We have added little, in these later years of excessive question-asking, to our scanty knowledge of the regions beyond the margin of this life. '^ We should listen,'' as a wise man has told us, " on our knees to any one who by stricter obedience had brought his thoughts into parallelism with celestial currents and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstances of the newly parted soul."

But while our ignorance about the Great Beyond is still as vast as that of Europe was about the western hemisphere before Columbus sailed in the Pinta, we have been making steady progress in our explorations of this inner world of ours — this microcosm. We know much about that viewless realm we call the soul. And the mor^^ we know about it the more wonderful do the words of Christ appear concerning this strange world within. John was surely right when he said, '' He knew what was in man! "

One of the most fruitful of all our modern discoveries is that which for the want of a better term we call the '' subconscious," the submerged life below the threshold of consciousness. Some wild things have been said and written about this inside underworld, and the abnormal phenomena of the subliminal have perhaps come too much to the front, but the fact remains that the normal processes of the world below the threshold are as important for the microcosm as the battlefields of Europe are for the great world. It is in here that destiny is settled and the hereafter is built.

We all begin life with certain instinctive functions which are admirably adapted to ends. These instincts carry the tiny individual unerringly forward. They build his future and make his wider career possible. How he got them and came by them he never asks. They are so much a part of himself that he never thinks to investigate the mystery. It turns out, however, that they are the inherited deposit of racial experience and habit, the contribution of practical wisdom which the immemorial past makes to the present. The slow gains of the ages are woven into the fiber of the newcomer and he pushes safely out for his venturous voyage on the accumulated inheritance which was piled up before he arrived.

Not less momentous and important are the accumulations of his own growing emotions and thoughts and decisions. He is forever weaving, for better or for worse, the indestructible stuff of his inner subconscious life, which, at a later time, without any thought about it on his part, will steer and direct him as certainly as his inherited instincts did in the baby stage. Every effort of will, every struggle of attention, every battle with temptation leaves its slender trace in the structure of the subconscious world which he is building, and it will be heard from again in some day of crisis or In some emergency of action. Nothing Is lost, nothing is uncounted, nothing is negligible. The tiny becomes big with importance and the Indlscernibly little grows Into the Immense. Every feat of skill Is the product of patient practice, every case of unerring judgment has behind it a multitude of careful decisions.

i6 THE WORLD WITHIN [Ch. I

every revelation of grace in manner or disposition is the slow fruit of pains and effort. The saint is no accidental mutation. Moral dexterity of soul and beauty of character are the result of human effort and of cooperation with God, as surely as physical health is the result of correspondence with the conditions of life.

An ancient psalmist prayed for truth in his inward parts. It is a beautiful aspiration. But the way to get truth in the inward parts is to practice truth-telling as an unvarying habit. If one tells the truth and thinks the truth yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, hates falsehood, abhors lying, and sincerely conforms to reality — he need not worry about the outcome. Truth is thus woven into the structure of the soul. The subconscious life is builded toward truth-telling and truth-living, and the inward self inclines to truth as streams flow to the sea. It is no accident that at last when Christ's servants see his face his name shall be on their foreheads. There is no caprice about that; for, after all, the heavenly life is the life formed by the transformation of our poor, feeble, limited, imperfect, sin-defiled selves into something approaching a likeness of that holy, perfect life of his. How it comes we cannot altogether tell. There are mystery and miracle in it. But it does not " come " without our cooperation. It is not thrust upon us without our choice and decision. Here again .the weaving of the character and the writing of the name on the forehead are the result of saying '' Yes " to God and of patient conformity to eternal laws of life.

Chapter II The Way Of Faith And Love I

THE CENTRAL ACT OF RELIGION

Religion is too rich and complex to be reduced to any one act or attitude or aspect of life. In so far as our religion is real and genuine, it will touch, heighten, and transform every feature of our lives, and, if that is so, we must not expect that we can pick out one feature and say here or nowhere the consummate blossom of religion is to be seen. But there is one act of life which does bring us in a special and peculiar way into the holy of holies of religion — a central act without which any person's religion will always remain dwarfed and unfulfilled. This central act is worship. By worship I mean the act of rising to a personal, experimental consciousness of the real presence of God which floods the soul with joy and bathes the whole inward spirit with refreshing streams of life. Never to have felt that,

i8 never to have opened the life to these incoming divine tides, never to have experienced the joy of personal fellowship with God, is surely to have missed the richest privilege and the highest beatitude of religion. Almost all of our modern forms of Christianity make too little of this central act, and, with some truth, it has been called '' the lost art of worship." The main reason for the decline of worship is the excessive desire, so common to-day, to have something always happening or, as we often say, to have something *' doing." Hush, waiting, meditation, concentration of spirit, are just the reverse of our busy, driving, modern temper. The person who meditates, we are apt to think, will lose an opportunity to do something; while he muses, the procession will go on and leave him behind. We hear all the time of the vast human tasks that are to be done; we are crowded with practical problems, and some of us are ready to identify religion with service; we would like to turn the church into a souphouse, or at least into an institution for ministering to the wants of the neighborhood.