The papers of John Pererin

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Preface

“The Papers of John Pererin” appeared first— over the space of nearly a year—in the Universalist Leader, They are now gathered together in permanent form in order that they may continue whatever ministry they are capable of serving.

They are an attempt to express the modern re¬ ligious spirit, the spirit in which worship and freedom and knowledge each has its place, and which is chiefly a faith, a search, a hope, and an expectation, rather than a fixed and polarized attitude of soul. They are not meant to be theological, though from the nature of the case they can not altogether escape being so. They are purely the varied phases of one man’s reaction to the Universe, to God and to Life, in an age of religious tran¬ sition.

As for the man himself, he is not of any importance so far as this book is concerned. For the curious it may be added concerning him that racially he is a complex of Welsh, Irish, and Huguenot strains. He preaches and writes a good deal—but (he fears) rather indifferently. He is deeply interested in mysticism and in modern science, that is, in the inward and outward revelation of God. He finds the mind of God in to-day’s literature as well as in ancient Scriptures; and he believes strongly in the essential identity and continuity of the Christian life under all the forms of its manifestation. These are some of the things he has tried to write about in this book, and his dearest hope is that he may help to make articulate some of the vague and as yet formless hopes that are being kindled to-day in the hearts of all men and women of good-will, in terms not of conventional piety but of the modern scientific spirit.

ON MAKING A FRESH START

An old Puritan writer, speaking of the Dying Thief, says that God has given us one instance of an eleventh hour repentance: one, lest any man should despair, but only one, lest any man should presume. The only time about which we can surely say that it is neither too late nor too early to make a fresh start is now. This is the accepted, or, as we should say in our modern jargon, the psychological moment.

Sentiment of a quite legitimate and healthy kind has invested the turn of the year with a peculiar fitness for this business of new beginnings. It has assumed that a milestone is a good place to stop at—to look back over the road that one has traveled, to recover one’s breath, and to brace oneself up for the next mile. This is a very good reading of human nature. For the passing of the milestone inevitably suggests a review of the record, a casting of accounts, a summing up of the log-book of the journey; and, for any soul still retaining a touch of sincerity, this is always a painful process. Indeed, a man has to acquire the complete anesthesia of a perfect self-complacency, if his record is not at this point or at that to move him to shame or to tears. Who lacks time to mourn, says the old proverb, lacks time to mend, and the man who is not mortified by the remembrance of failure, who is not shamed by the memory of ignoble surrenders, who is not humbled by the haunting recollection of stupid mistakes, of base compromises, of the days when he lowered his flag, when his baser self beat down his better and he consented—that man is a lost soul. I have large reason to thank God if I can still feel the shame and humiliation of my defeats and my failures, for I am still in the land of the living. I once heard a sermon on ‘The Gospel of the Second Chance,^' but it should have been “The Gospel of Still Another Chance.'' Most of us had our second chance long ago; and it is old forgotten history by now. We have had a good many chances since; and we shouldn't be here to tell the tale if at least we had not tried to take some of them. I do not know how many chances God is prepared to give. Jesus tells us that we should give another chance to the other man, up to seventy times seven; and I like to think that God will be not less patient with us than He requires us to be. But it is plain that there is a point of patience beyond which even His love can not stretch. “This year also . . . and if it bear fruit, well; but if not, then thou shalt cut it down." That is love's ultimatum, the soul's last chance. One never can tell, of course, when the last chance comes; per¬ haps it has come to-day for some of us. And the

wise soul will take it now.

* *

This gospel of the new beginning is a cheering and encouraging doctrine, and it is good sound biology as well. For life is full of new beginnings; it is the genius of life to make fresh starts. It makes even of death a new birth; and the history of the race is punctuated with renewals, revivals, renascences of

ON MAKING A FRESH START many kinds. Like the Phoenix, life is forever rising out of its own ashes. And as it is on the large scale of nature and society, so it is in the soul. This is what the Puritan perceived and said, in a saying that I love—“The Perseverance of the Saints,that is, their continuance in a state of grace, “is an endless series of new beginnings.'' The spirit droops and revives; the will sags and then stiffens. In my youth, I used to go out on cross-country runs; and those of you who have done the same thing remember how the first mile or two used to punish you, and then you slacked off for a spell—^until you got your “second wind." And then you were off again. And in the race that is set before the spirit, there is also a blessed ‘‘second wind” and it comes to us not once or twice but as often as we need it, so long as we keep on the track.

One may make a new start whensoever one wills; and every day that dawns is none too often to begin anew. Truly we may be born anew every morning, if we will. But it is a matter of some consequence whither we start. For here the goal is of more conse¬ quence than the starting point. Any old place will do to start from. “Just as I am, without one plea"— one may begin just there. The great matter is the objective we set before us; and that we must needs define with some care. Yet there should be no great difficulty in stating the point. What I want to do this year, and to start out doing here and now, is to help God to realize the utmost for His Kingdom on what He has invested in me. He has dowered me with life, health, strength; He has given mie a measure of capacity; He has helped me to acquire experience and knowledge; He has surrounded me with love and friendship. So many talents has He entrusted to me; then, with these talents let me go out and trade, the best I know how. I dedicate myself, all that I have, all that I am and hope to be, to this holy commerce; and from now on, I mean to put into it all my life. And as sure as I do in all sincerity mean this and send out to God a hailing thought to tell Him so, then I shall have an answering signal in my heart, a renewed im¬ pulse, a fresh accession of strength, reinforcement of mind and will. So I shall swing out toward the next milestone in good heart, light of foot and strong in hope.

0 Thou God of New Beginnings, grant to Thy children a new hope and a new strength at this time. We suffer from the burden and the heat of the day; often we become wearied and fall by the way. And amid ike disappointments and sorrows of life, our hearts grow faint. Touch us with Thy Hand of Grace, so that, with the young year, our youth may be renewed like the eagle’s. Amen,

THE INNOVATOR

The Scriptures open with the drama of creation^ the spectacle of God making a new thing. They end with this word of self-revelation: Behold, I make all things new. The God whom we worship is a God of making and remaking, of innovation and renovation. This is His peculiar character; it is His genius to create and recreate. The frequency with which the word ‘'new’^ appears in the New Testament is notable— new commandment, new creature, new covenant, new song, new Jerusalem, new heavens and a new earth. It is a great panorama of things new and things re¬ newed. The Providence of God is an endless process of construction and reconstruction.

It is this message that the turn of the year should bring us. We have passed through a fiery furnace; and our souls are scarred and seared. We have seen a civilization crumbling down in ruin and sorrow be¬ fore our eyes; and we have realized that, beneath the outer crust of prosperity and relative ease, the very foundation of our common life was rotten and under¬ mined.

And while the war was still on, we confidently descried through the smoke and the tumult a fairer, juster, kindlier world. But the war is over; and that new world has not arrived—and it looks as far away as ever.

We are living in a foohs paradise if we suppose that this new world will come of itself, drop down upon us ready-made from the clouds. It is true that in the Apocalypse the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven from God; but it comes down to a place prepared for it. There will be new heavens only as there is a new earth; and the new earth will have to be made—made by you and me, by our toil and tears, mayhap in blood and sorrow. Its foundations must be laid in our sacrifice, its walls raised by our devotion and cemented by our patience. And we shall have just as much of a new world as we make up our minds to get and are prepared to pay the price for. For the world, new or old, is, after all, just ourselves. It is the most foolish thing in the world to suppose that we can go on living in the old way, working on the old ac¬ ceptances in commerce and industry and other human relationships, still governing our conduct by the tra¬ ditions of a day that is dead—and that the walls of a new world will go up all the same. There will be no new world at all except it be a world of new men and new women.

And so before any other word can be spoken, let this word be said: Look to yourselves. It is one of our pathetic weaknesses to have an unbounded faith in the efficacy of impersonal things, like institutions and movements and abstract ideas of all sorts. I lately read a book which told me on every page what the Church did, could do, would do, and repeated these things to the point of weariness, as though the Church were a sort of super-personal power capable of countervailing human vagaries and of carrying through a program in spite of all our delinquencies and

THE INNOVATOR

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derelictions. In modern times we have had the same kind of feeling about the State. The State, we say, should do this, or do that; and at the present moment, we are expecting the State to be up and doing about this business of reconstruction. But we are the State; and there is no other State than that which is so consti¬ tuted, made up of men and women. The State will be and do just what we mean it to be and do, just that and no more.

And—^in the same spirit and with the same blind¬ ness—we hail movements of various kinds as containing the sure key of salvation. We set a movement afoot; and lo (we say), the Kingdom of God is at hand! But it isn't. I am not saying that movements do not em¬ body genuine human impulses and legitimate human aims—they do; but their story is that after a time* they lose the warm human enthusiasm of their beget¬ ters, and become things of offices and bureaus and card-indexes; and in their arteries instead of red blood is black ink. There are scores of dead move¬ ments, movements that have ceased to move, cum¬ bering the earth to-day. I am not sure that it would not be wise to create a national high day for quick and effectual interment. The air would at once become perceptibly clearer. Anyway, the value of' any movement depends upon the amount of warm human quality that it possesses, upon how much of' the very stuff of their life men and women put into it^, not upon its list of presidents or the volume of sub¬ scriptions, for these may be but empty forms and an easy substitute for personal service, the only thing that really matters. It will do none of us any harm to cultivate* a healthy scepticism concerning the validity of mere mass-action—whether by Church or State or any move¬ ment. Not indeed that there is no value in common human action, in living co-operation; but that is a different thing. Pronouncements by the Church, enactments by the State, the fine declarations of this movement or that, are mere windy rhetoric unless they are validated by the personal surrender and the patient active labor of the men and women in whose name the word is spoken. It is men and women that count, their quality, their character, their energy, their sacrifice. And the new world must be conceived in terms of personality, dedicated to the ends of per¬ sonality, and the labor which creates it must be the personal labor of common folk like you and me.

So then, let us look to ourselves. I do not know whether you, my reader, feel the lure of this splendid adventure. Have the sorrow and anguish of these past years bitten so deeply into your souls that you feel that you can give what God leaves you yet of life to nothing but to the toil of making a world which can not again be turned into a hell? Or have you perchance seen a vision of the city of God, its white towers gleaming in the gold of a distant dawn, and the streets thereof full of children playing —a vision which has captured your heart so that you have said, I am no longer my own; I belong to that? Have you felt the pull of this thing? God grant there be among us no poor souls who would go back to the old easy life on a sleeping volcano, asking no more than to play the old game on the market place, to follow the old roimd of huckstering and stealing a march on the other

THE INNOVATOR fellow, feeling nothing still but the squalid and vulgar pull of the dollar. This hour has neither need nor room for the mean-spirited and the base and the selfish; it is the day of the high-minded and the great¬ hearted, of the freeman and the seer—a day not for mannikins but for men. And we have all been manni¬ kins, living little lives in a little way, seeing small things and doing them; but to-day the world is calling aloud for the broad sweep of great vision, for incon¬ ceivable courage in thought and action, not for the peddling policies of ward politicians, or the timid gestures of statesmen who would be idealists but are not. The vultures are already hovering over the carcass of Europe: the chauvinist and the jingo are busy at their old game—all the old polite diabolical camouflage for the game of grab. And there are also forces of life afoot which threaten to become forces of death if they are not guided into channels of construc¬ tive action. There are promises turning into menaces, resurgent life becoming insurgent—making for insur¬ rection where there should be splendid resurrection; and it is only great wisdom and great courage that can save the day. This is the wild heaving world into which we have come. Are we big enough for it? Wise enough? Good enough? Brave enough to stand in this tremendous hour?

And the answer simply is that we are not. Yet it is we who have to face this thing, to become the proph¬ ets of a new order of life, to become the builders of the future. And if we have any doubts about our capacity, let us remember God. We do not go into this warfare at our own charges; for it is essentially His campaign. To-day, at the watershed of the ages, with a world seething in the melting pot, this word comes down to us with a certain terrible directness, with a challenge that is not to be evaded: *'Beholdy I make all things new.” Does it come with a personal meaning to you and me? For God will not, nay He can not, make all things new in spite of us or without us. He will just let us have' the things we want or deserve to have. It is so ordained in His plan that we must work with Him; and with Him there is no limit to what we can do but the limits of His own power. This surely is the peculiar privilege of this great time, that we may, with a more assured sense of reality, with a more vivid consciousness of the urgency of a great, hardly intelligible responsibility, than ever before, give ourselves to God unreservedly for any task, for any adventure to which His Spirit and His grace may in these great days be calling us.

Grant us, 0 Lord our God, as we stand upon the threshold of a new year, a baptism of Thine own unchanging newness. Let us put on the new man, being renewed in mind and heart and will, so that we may look out upon the world with a new hope and with unwavering confi¬ dence that Thou wilt bring Thy purpose to pass. Make us sharers with Thee in the enterprise of rebuilding a ruined world and of turning this wilderness into a garden of God,

Whenever I chanced to think of Abraham leaving Ur of the Chaldees, I always supposed that Ur was some outlandish little hole-and-corner place, and that Abraham had left it much as any man of spirit would leave that kind of place and fare out into the great world to try his fortune. But a little time ago I found —in a book picked up by chance in a friend^s house— that Ur was by no means a little backwoods township; and subsequently the Encyclopedia furnished me with the information that Ur was the New York or Boston or Montreal of its time—a great seaport, a city of some pretensions to culture, where the arts were patronized, a city of considerable political and industrial impor¬ tance, and perhaps even the wealthiest city of that day. It was not from a decayed village that Abraham went out, but from the metropolis, from the capital city, from the hub of the universe—which gives Abraham^s adventure a new complexion. It seems to be a much more modern affair than I had supposed.

Further, in the course of my inquiry into the matter, I found that there was an old Jewish tradition that Abraham was a man of noble birth and that he was pre-eminent in wisdom, that is, he was something of a scholar. This evidently was not the case of a man who had been a failure in his own town going away to try his luck elsewhere. He apparently be¬ longed to the upper circles of Ur; and if the tradition be true, he ought not to have lacked any of those comforts and amenities which go to give a man a good time. Abraham’s subsequent history suggests that he was a man of a religious turn of mind; and even on that score there was much to be said for Ur. It was a sacred city, whither the devout brought their dead for burial; it was even a city of churches, for among its ruins is the evidence of the existence of a number of temples. Culture, business, wealth, re¬ ligion—they were all to be found in Ur. And what more could a man want? Yet one day, Abraham and his family packed up their traps and left the city —going out into an unfamiliar world, seeking some¬ thing which they themselves probably could not have described.

After they had gone, the gossips in the club dis¬ cussed the matter. “V/ell,” they said, “Abraham was rather a queer fellow. There was a curious streak in the family, in fact. A restless dissatisfied lot, always reaching out for the moon.” Then some one recalled how, in the midst of a political discussion or a business conversation, Abraham v/ould become distrait and absent-minded, and withdraw into his shell, with a curious abstracted look in his eye. “Oh,” said another, “Abraham was always a dreamer; and you never can tell what those fellows will do.” Another opinion was that he was one of those unpractical idealists who are apt to turn up now and again. The upshot of it all was that they agreed that Abraham was a bit mad, that only a lunatic would burn his boats in that way. So Abraham stepped out of the life of Ur and was soon forgotten there; but on that same day he stepped into the everlasting light of history. Ur itself is to-day

a mere collection of mounds; the story of Abraham

seems somehow to be a live issue still.

* *

Now, the reason why Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees was probably something very simple. There is no reason to suppose that he was driven out by economic stringency, by persecution, by lack of oppor¬ tunity; and it is unthinkable that he should have gone out of the mere love of adventure. All that we know of him suggests that he was a man of great sagacity and personal power, and that when he acted, he acted deliberately. He left Ur because Ur was not giving him something that he needed; his life seemed to be missing fire; Ur left him hungry and thirsty for some¬ thing—that thing without which all the wealth and culture of Ur was so much empty show, that one thing which, the desire of it once kindled, must be had at any cost. And this was not to be found in Ur; perhaps indeed Ur was preventing Abraham from find¬ ing it. And the sense of hunger became so intolerable that at length he had to burn his boats and go out in search of that ultimate thing without which no man may say that he lives. So Abraham set out on the great adventure of finding—what?

What? Can you give it a name? Perhaps; but Abraham himself could not. The churches in Ur professed to tell him all about it; but somehow it did not seem to Abraham that the churches had anything very real or vital to offer him. They seemed to be living on their past; and the tides of life had gone by them.

Yet now and again there was to be heard even in the churches a hint of something—something that sounded as though it were the thing he was looking for. But never more than a tantalizing hint, a teasing ^'false dawn.^^ Now it is easy to say that Abraham was seeking God; but what do we mean—do we in¬ deed mean by this anything at all that we ourselves can rationally describe? Have we ourselves so surely found this thing that we say Abraham was looking for, that we are entitled to speak so confidently about it? For my part, I prefer—for the moment, at least—to say that Abraham was looking for what I am looking for, that he went out to seek the one thing I am aware I want most of all; and I can only describe it as fulness of life.

Let me put it in this way, very simply. I am only aware of my life in its relations; and the quality, the richness, the abundance of my life depends upon the range and the nature of its relations. The quality of my bodily life depends, for instance, upon the char¬ acter of its contacts with the physical world—upon the amount and nature of the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the exercise I take. In the same way, my mental life depends upon its relation to other minds, to friends, to books, to pictures, to music, and what not.

Now, I may have all and more than all my body needs; I may have all and more than all that my mind needs; and I have no doubt that Abraham had all this in Ur of the Chaldees. But when all this need is provided for, there is left over something that is not satisfied; when I have health and strength of body.

when my mind has all the riches of culture, intellec¬ tual and esthetic—yet through it all there is a crying voice, some unsatisfied instinct, some depth unfilled. We have not established all the relations that we need for the perfection of life; we have not completed the contacts that bring the full reality of living. And there are moments when we know that all we have is but mere peripheral embroidery, decorative but not nutritive, until these last contacts are made that fill the central vacuum of the soul.

Now of the truth of this, we are all aware. Even in the busiest lives there are moments of quiet when we become conscious of this unfilled emptiness. Some¬ times it takes the form of a numb unhappiness, a de¬ pression of spirit of which we can give no satisfying account, a formless longing, a malaise, a nostalgia for some unidentified home. But we are also aware that the contacts, the relations by which this unrealized life is fulfilled, are of a different sort from those by which the body and the mind are satisfied. I know where to go for the things that my body needs; I know how to get the things that my intellectual and esthetic nature craves for. But for this more radical need—why, I do not know of myself the first thing about how or where to establish those relations upon which its satisfaction depends. All I know is that it is not in any world that I have experience of, and I go out rather blindly into the unknown seeking what I know not. And that was how Abraham went out of Ur—going, as the writer of Hebrews says, not know¬ ing whither he went, looking for something he did not know. All he knew was that he had failed to find it in Ur—v»dth all its wealth, its commerce, its culture,

and that he must go somewhere else to look for it.

* *

But does that mean that we have to leave the old home town in order to find this thing? Perhaps som^e of us may. Mr. Ralph Adams Cram insists— in a series of books—that the very salvation of the world depends upon comipanies of us leaving New York and Boston and others of these wens of civilization and going out to live lives of simplicity and devoutness in somxe desert place apart. There is no doubt that the mxonastic ideal has played a great and—in its early stages—a fruitful part in human affairs; but I confess to an inability to see how we can save civilization by quitting it. We might perchance save our own souls alive; but even that I doubt. This retiring from the v/orld seems to me to be a form of pessimism whicli is atheism. Nevertheless, the complications of life in the gi'eat miodern city do not give much chance to the soul to find itself. Sometimes a young fellow who has gone wrong is sent to some new place to make a fresh start; and there is sound psychology in this. The breach with old associations at least makes a new start more possible, even if it does not make it sure. But merely to change one^s place does not constitute a new start; and leaving Boston does not ensure the finding of one's soul. Yet the very stress of business, the countless entanglements of the day's work, the ceaseless preoccupation with affairs, the care of prop¬ erty—all this may leave one with neither the leisure nor the inclination to seek out those things that be¬ long to our peace. Perhaps that was the trouble at Ur.

In Ur Abraham foimd himself to be too busy to attend to the crying affairs of his soul; and he had to leave it all—his prosperous business, his fine house, his social connections, his worthy philanthropies—in order to find himself and to find the needed provender for his hungry soul. Perhaps some of us may have to do likewise; yes, and when the hunger of the soul has gone past the point of endurance, some of us surely will— at least awhile.