The disciplines of liberty; the faith and conduct of the Christian freeman

Preface

THE idea of Liberty, in one form or another, dominates the religious life of the present day. No matter how troubled the waters, the Freeman's spirit points true to this magnetic pole. Given this initial loyalty a man may box the compass of all other religious interests with an approximate fidelity to contemporary fact. These chapters suggest some of the outstanding points of the religious compass at the present time, but the thought of freedom is both their point of departure and their goal. The reader will make due allowance for the deviation due to personal factors and will correct these deviations by his own experience.

I am conscious of the fact that these pages may suggest the cheap and easy device of "scissors and paste." I have yielded, in some measure, to the inevitable seduction of the other man's effective statement of the case half from choice and half from necessity: from deliberate choice, because as a reader of religious literature I find that much of the value of any contemporary book is drawn from the constant intimation of other significant and rewarding books lying to one side or the other of the immediate highway; from necessity, because no man who is thinking and writing to-day can deny the whole premise of his effort — the noble communism of the modern religious mind.

In particular I wish to acknowledge my debt to those who have directly contributed to the making of this book. I fully realize that any freshness and conviction in these pages is very largely due to the two parishes to which I have ministered. The preacher of to-day is made or unmade, spiritually, by his people. They either force him into innocuous conventionality or urge him on to the exercise of his Christian freedom. The lines have fallen to me in more than happy places in these last years, in that I have found myself ministering to men and women who wished the man who preached to them to speak his own mind, irrespective of ortho-

vii

PREFACE

doxies and heresies. Preaching, therefore, has become less and less an exercise of pulpit rhetoric and more and more a certain experimental thinking out loud. What the practice of preaching may have lost as a formal art, under these conditions, it has gained as the personal adventure both of preacher and hearer. If we have indulged in few flights of perfervid oratory in praise of our Christian Liberty, we have sought to think candidly and concretely about various aspects of that Liberty in faith and practice. I must, therefore, acknowledge my indebtedness to a constant sympathetic hearing in my present pastorate in the Central Congregational Church of Boston, and during a previous pastorate in the First Church of Fall River.

I am further indebted to my friend of other days in Oxford, and now my kinsman. Professor Charles A. Bennett of Yale University, for many valuable suggestions as to the matter and style of this particular volume, as for countless hours of comradeship in the common task of turning up the fallow ground of the mind; to Mr. Wilson Follett of New Haven for final appraisal of certain of these chapters; to Miss C. E. Howard, minister's assistant at Central Church, for patient and accurate help in the preparation of the manuscript; to Miss Ruth M. Gordon of the Old South Parsonage, Boston, for aid in reading the proofs ; and to Mr. EUery Sedgvi^ck for leave to reprint as Chapter VIII of this volume a paper which appeared under another caption in the Atlantic Monthly for January, 192 1.

WlLLARD L. SpERRY.

Boston,

February 4, 192 1.

Vlll

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. What is a Christian? i

II. The Historical Jesus and the Problem of Religious

CHAPTER I. What Is a Christian?

THIS question was never more difficult and never more imperative than it is to-day. The latter years have seen radiant flashes of the Christian spirit, like broken lights from the facets of a great gem, shining from the city slums, battlefields, hospitals and prisons. But there are very few of us who are so bold as to identify the total civilization of which we are a part with that Kingdom of God, seen in prophetic vision, to which Jesus gave himself in life and death. And there are very many of us who doubt our moral right as individuals to that bravest of all forms of self-designation — "Christian" — which was first accepted by the disciples at Antioch.

Nothing is more characteristic of the present religious mood than this new humility as to our world and ourselves, this reluctance to claim for ourselves identity with an idealism which never seemed more absolute, and yet which never seemed more necessary. We are living in a world which has all but exhausted the moral possibilities of the dogmas of enlightened self-interest, free competition, paternalism and kindred nostrums; a world which finds itself driven on by this process of moral elimination to the religion of Jesus. The pilgrim soul of us moves on to Christianity as a last resort, an ultimate recognition of that moral necessity which a more discerning discipleship anticipated from the first, "Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life." Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven" is not only the greatest English lyric since the days of the Elizabethans, it is the spiritual epic of contemporary Christendom which has "fled Him down the arches of the years" in vain, only in the end to hear the voice of Christ saying,

I

Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me! Strange, piteous, futile thing!

Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He whom thou seekest!

This drift of the modern mind, this yearning of the deepest heart of our age, is very far from being one more formal apologetic on the part of professional religionists. Since the days of Job it has been hard for the bystander to believe that any man serves God for nought. And even though a tolerant skepticism may concede again and again the existence of the churchman or theologian who has an unmercenary love of truth and a disinterested zeal for the Christian religion, still it scents the presence of some system to which the professional religionist must adapt himself and which he must defend. The world at large sees even the most liberal and emancipated churchman struggling by the devious and morally dubious means of mental reservation and "spiritual" interpretation to conform to hereditary creeds and liturgies. The nobler and freer such a man is, the more he excites the sympathy of the unchurched idealism of the day, and the more his inner efforts to interpret and substantiate his position seem to that world lacking in the liberty and native integrity which are a part of real religion.

"It is a singular infatuation," writes Thoreau in his "Journal," "that leads men to become clergymen in regular or even in irregular standing. In the clergymen of the most liberal sort I see no perfectly independent human nucleus, but I seem to see some indistinct scheme hovering about, to which he has lent himself, to which he belongs. It is a very fine cobweb in the lower stratum of air, which stronger wings do not discover." This obsession of the system is, patently, the greatest spiritual liability of the professional religionist.

We have had in the past quarter of a century many efforts to save the world by substituting a "New Theology" for the "Old Theology." These efforts have relieved here and there the theological tension for scattered individuals, enabling them to conform conscientiously, where conformity is considered the synonym for religion. But no one can claim for these substitutionary doctrines that they have been effective in saving the world. The net result

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

of all these revisions and restatements is the slowly maturing conviction that in attempting to bring in the Kingdom by tinkering with the details of creeds and liturgies we have been working at the wrong end of the problem. For, as those who have carried this process to its logical conclusion have told us, what the modem mind faces to-day is not the prospect of a critically emended and rehabilitated creed, but a candid reexamination of the very word ''Credo". Moreover, that classic manual of Christian faith, the fourth gospel, specifies, not that those who have a credible system may be assured of a vital religion, but rather that those who do the will shall know the doctrine. The initial appeal of religion is always to religious consciousness, not to that stage of religious self-consciousness once removed from life, which is reflected in our creeds, dogmas and liturgies. Canon Bamett, pioneering among the poor of the East End of London, once complained that "the sad thing in all crises is the way in which good people use their strength in trying to restore the old." In those words he passed judgment not only on the political and economic temper of our time, but on its religious temper also. For in so far as even the most liberal and modem apologia for Christianity has about it this suggestion of a system to be upheld rather than a life to be communicated, every such apologia is once removed from the zest of living. It is a detached discussion of life rather than a direct communication of life.

But it is not the flood tide of familiar ecclesiastical apologetic which interests serious-minded men and women to-day, no matter whether they be inside or outside the Church. The significant signs on the religious horizon are those clouds no bigger than a man's hand gathering in imecclesiastical quarters. It is still very hard for the church mind to believe that any good can come out of these Galilees and Nazareths. The theologian scents the minor heresy of the novelist, the dramatist, the radical. He misses their major passion for a new world. George Bernard Shaw is the last of the modems whom we should suspect of being enmeshed in the cobwebs of a dogmatic system or committed to a professional apologia for Christianity, yet this same heretical Irishman says: "I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader; and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas or Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the world's misery but the way which would have been foimd by Christ's will, if he had undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman." Utterances of this sort — and they are multiplying very fast to-day — are far more significant as signs of the religious times than the cumuli of conventional apologetic always piled up in the heavens by the trade winds of habitual ecclesiasticism.

The most notable fact in our present situation is this general turning of the unchurched mind to the religion of Jesus. There is a hopefulness and desire, even a resolute determination in this mind, almost unparalleled in the twenty centuries of Christian history. The effective exponent of the Christian religion to-day is the free lance. H. G. Wells can number the readers of "Mr. Britling" by the thousands where the preachers must count their listeners by the tens, for the simple reason that Mr. Wells cannot be suspected of any ulterior wish to buttress up existing churches and churchmanship. This desire of the modem mind to see Jesus has its origins in no academic or ecclesiastical interest, but in the sorrows, the frustration, the perplexity of the present hour. All of the self-contemplating idealisms which in one form or another have been the driving force in the business, industry and politics of the Anglo-Saxon world of the past half century have served us very ill. Men turn to the gospel of Galilee with a renewed interest because the gospel of Manchester has proved such a shabby substitute. There is left with us as the net result of our experience of enlightened egoism in the terms of mills and guns the deep conviction, as Shaw puts it, that "though we crucified Christ on a stick, he somehow managed to get hold of the right end of it, and that if we were better men we might try his plan." It is out of such vague but deep and real convictions that the present need for a redefinition of Christianity springs.

Any Christianity which is to win and hold the loyalty of the present age and of the immediate future must have a substantial body of intelligible idea. The religion of the last century has been dominated, in the main, by Romanticism. The Romantic movement came into being a hundred and more years ago as the just and inevitable revolt of the human heart against the arid precision and pedantry of the eighteenth century. It is the perennial mood in which

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers, And through the music of the languid hours

They hear like ocean on a western beach The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

This recognition and release of the great ground swell of human feeling and passion was in its own time a right and natural reaction. In theology it led to the redefinition of the religious life, first as the feeling of dependence upon God and ultimately, in the humanism of the mid-nineteenth century, to the definition of religion as a generous fellow feeling for one's human kind.

But no single thesis of life persists indefinitely in history incorruptible and unchallenged. There is a moment in the history of all Romanticism when it begins to putrefy, and that putrefaction ends in Ages of Decadence and Sentimentality. In due time, after Cowper, Wordsworth and Byron, come Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. And then the wholesome prophetic spirit of mankind reasserts itself. George Meredith dips his pen into the acid of a fresh sincerity and writes of his Diarist: "She would have us away with sentimentalism. Sentimental people, in her phrase, 'fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism.' " Leslie Stephen in the cool detachment of his mature old age rebukes the sentimentalism of our times as "Indulgence in emotion for its own sake." Shaw, half Puritan, half Philistine, takes up the cudgels in behalf of a new intellectual and emotional austerity: "Romance is the great heresy to be rooted out from art and life — the root of modem pessimism and the bane of modern self-respect. . . . When the country becomes thoroughly Romantic it will be unbearable for realists. . . . When it comes to that, the force of some strong-minded Bismarckian man of action, impatient of humbug, will combine with the subtlety and spiritual energy of the man of thought whom shams cannot illude or interest." Of these tempers all the challenging figures in modern life are the signs and effects. Indeed, so remote are Romanticism and its bastard child Sentimentalism from the dominant mood of the present moment that the congenial spokesmen for the generation now coming into its own in history are the rebel realists of life and letters, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Tchekoff, Sassoon and their ilk, all cubists, futurists and makers of free verse who are struggling to escape from the enervating and fundamentally vicious influence of a decadent Romanticism. They may find themselves forced into strained and grotesque postures, like the figures of the Laocoon. But no man who understands the deadly peril which they sense to honest thinking, deep feeling and strong willing in the coils of a sinister sentimentalism will think ungenerously of their struggle.

If Sentimentality is bad in art it is even worse in religion. All of the initial energy of emotion in the theology of Romanticism has spent itself. We may no longer conjure with human feeling as the single talisman of the spiritual life. The temper of the age in which we live is that of a candid realism, suspicious of all vague descriptions of religion as emotion barren of idea. We renounce all heat of feeling which is not also a light for the mind. There is a daring and splendid phrase from the sermons of John Tauler, the mediaeval Dominican, which commands the respect of the modern conscience, to the effect that all titillation of the religious emotions for the sake of the immediate and passing gratification of the nobler nature "shall be counted to a man for spiritual unchastity." The religion which is to command the respect and response of this age must be free from all taint of religious sentimentalism, it must be spiritually chaste.

Nor will the familiar and persistent efforts to define Christianity as Practicality suffice. Modem psychology has glorified the human will, and in the face of all doctrines of necessity and determinism, has exalted before every man's eyes the major energy which he controls. This modern worship of the will, leaving to one side both thought and feeling, has been reflected in the popular religion of our time as a passion for service. The rapture of the mystic's transcendent "twenty minutes of reality" and the midnight oil of the thinker have been superseded by the cup of cold water. But the modern world is in danger of forgetting that the cup of cold water is a religious effect and not a religious cause. It follows upon some clearly defined conception of our relation to God and man. Of itself it cannot create the conviction which must always sustain and inspire it. Organized altruism has not plucked the heart out of the secret of perpetual moral motion, but rests in the last analysis upon personal conviction.

The absence of this conviction imperils the whole present inter-

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

pretation of the Christian religion as social service. The sense of vacuity and worthlessness already begins to attend the perfunctory gestures of the servant who has no clear idea whom he serves or why he serves. Ten years ago a B amp ton lecturer stood up in St. Mary's pulpit, Oxford, and pointed out with penetrating insight the contradiction at the heart of the present situation.

"Sometimes a very high degree of practical unselfishness is accompanied by an extreme sense of uselessness and failure. Such external activity for good without conscious enthusiasm, almost without interest, is remarkable; and the account which the actors in the tragedy give of it when questioned is no less remarkable. They explain their perseverance in right action and in the service of others as due, partly to the force of habit, and partly to the imperious need for escaping from brooding thoughts ; but stubbornly deny that it has any moral value, either objectively or to their own character. They maintain that their acts are isolated and meaningless, not springing from any guiding principle within, and in turn not producing that feeling of comfort and power which follows on really moral action. ... I am convinced that the thing is common — far more common, perhaps, than we are inclined to suppose."

Here, in substance, is the old dogma of salvation by works and its consequent religious misery. Modem Protestantism is fast getting back to the slough from which it first escaped through its rediscovery of the central energy of all religion, the doctrine of justification by faith. It matters not who sells the indulgences, whether Tetzel or a modem philanthropy, the error of all doctrines of justification by works lies in the failure to discern the tmth of Emerson's dictum that "Little souls pay the world with what they do, great souls with what they are." The scarcity of great souls in the Christianity of our time must be laid in part to the brood of little souls, who are fretful unless they are "up and doing."

We may well hesitate to disparage, altogether, the wholesome ideal of service which has dominated the life of contemporary Protestantism. This doctrine has saved any number of young men and women from the vices of introspection and of aimless self-indulgence. It has given an escape outward into a world of action from what has been too often in other ages, "the isolated dungeon of my self-consciousness where I rot away unheeded and alone."

It has meant hope and help to hundreds of thousands of the world's neglected and forgotten. But of itself, and apart from the conceptions of God and man which underlie it, this reduction of the content of religion to the terms of social service offers no prospect of permanent spiritual satisfaction. The religious value of the cup of cold water lies not in itself but in all that it "symbolizes. It is the gesture of the believer in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Its permanent worth is measured by the thirst of the human soul which it satisfies. No man, therefore, can take the Christian religion to a fellow human being unless he himself has some initial idea of what that religion is. The small boy in school who ventured the tremendous observation that "it is very difficult to express to other people ideas which one has not oneself" unconsciously put his finger on the central weakness of much of the Christian "service" of our time. For, as Tyrrell says: "When all are sufficiently fed, clothed, housed and tended, the question still remains: What to do with life, a question which they cannot answer to whom philanthropy is the whole of life." And these persons bulk very large in our modem churches. Their definition of Christianity, as Tyrrell pungently concludes, is "Practicality. Circuibat benefaciendo: He went about doing good. 'Doing good' seems to be the whole of the matter; more especially that sort of good that involves 'going about.' "

Because Sentimentality and Practicality of themselves, without a central body of idea, cannot save the world in which we live, our time must reconsecrate itself to the plain task of thinking through the Christian religion once again. We have shirked this task because sentimentalism in religion is pleasanter than hard thought and practicality is easier. But we cannot effectively make Christians of other men unless we know what Christianity is, and we cannot create a Christian civilization unless we have some idea of what its outstanding qualities and characteristics will be. Since the days of Darwin we have consented listlessly and amiably to the hope that a Christian order would evolve automatically out of the immediate facts. The net result of that amiable mood was Hell. In so far as the whole evolutionary theory has any religious suggestion left, its pertinence lies in some conscious control of evolution, wherein a clearly defined body of idea plays its major part.

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

In one of his letters to Kingsley, Thomas Huxley once wrote: "The longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man's life is to say and to feel, 'I believe such and such to be true.' All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act." Such, certainly, is the sobered temper of our own age. The heavy penalties exacted of our time in the latter years had their historical origin in a vicious, semi-theological dogma about the state systematically taught to a nation for fifty years. Without the actual creed of Treitschke and the consenting opinion of a great body of heretical believers, the thing which the world came to recognize as Prussianism would have been neither possible nor dangerous. The years from 19 14 to 19 1 8 give the lie to the cheap current platitude that it does not matter what a man believes. In history, as in character, what men believe is almost the only thing that does matter. And the unhappy consequences of wrong thinking and careless thinking can be overcome only by hard and right thinking. The humble petition of this time is certainly for a heart of flesh instead of the heart of stone. But its sharper cry is also "More brains, O Lord, more brains." It is permanently true of the Christian that

Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind.

The current definitions of Christianity have ranged all the way from an arbitrary and absolute idealism to a nebulous sanction of every native virtue. At the former extreme stands Nietzsche, saying, "There was only one Christian and he died on the cross." At the other extreme stands Donald Hankey pleading for the inarticulate Christianity of the average man. The normal religious mind oscillates between these extremes.

At one moment we feel deeply the loneliness and imiqueness of Jesus who must always say in history, "My time is not yet come." At the next moment we gladly admit the latent native goodness of Christ's unavowed, unrecognized disciples who are not far from the Kingdom of God. The designation which at one time we reserve for Jesus alone, at another time we confer without a single reservation upon countless humble souls who in the fulfillment of their duty go the extra moral mile by which human society is uplifted and the Kingdom of God advanced. If the world is yet in doubt as to what Christianity is, it never is in doubt as to the characteristic Christian act or the distinctive Christian word. Edith Cavell's words in the moment of her death ring true to the forgiving cry of Jesus from the cross, so that qualitatively we sense the identity, and feel no anachronism in defining them as an utterance of the mind of Christ. There is no historical incongruity in this community of spirit. But to isolate these patently Christian episodes and aspects of the life of our time is a far simpler process than to attempt a working definition of the Christian religion in something like its entirety.

In attempting to answer the question, "What is Christianity?" it may well be that the best we can achieve is the simple sum of those human situations, actions and reactions, where the distinctive Christian hall-mark is plainly visible. Beyond this, possibly, our definitions of Christianity should not and cannot aspire. It is worth while remembering that Jesus was content with this method. The mind of the East always moves in a circle. Its total grasp of truth is the sum of impressions received from different angles of vision. Jesus never defined Christianity in so many words. He moved around his central conception, as in the gathered parables of the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, and only suggested by glimpses of its contour the total majesty of his major idea which he never reduced to any geodetic map of the theologian.

The Western mind has sought to improve on the method of the Eastern mind in religion, by moving logically through an idea from premise to conclusion, until the whole hangs together, not as the traveler's many views of the Alps which divide Switzerland and Italy but as a trip through the Simplon tunnel between the two. It is an open question which method casts more light on the central fact! Certainly the pulpit could do no better service to the Christian religion at the present moment than to identify and to exalt in the common mind the countless scattered examples of the Christian spirit which stand out clear and sharply defined in the literature, the history, the biographical incident of modern life. These parables from letters and life bear so clearly the impress of the character of Christ that no one for a moment would confuse them with those other strands which have been woven into the total fabric of contemporary character. They plainly belong to Galilee, not to Athens or to Rome or to Feudalism. Our

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

nearest and simplest answers to the question, "What is Christianity?" might always well be cast in the more informal and less logical pattern of Jesus' teaching. Grant at Appomattox Court House giving back to Lee his sword and to the southern cavalrymen their horses for the farms of the South, Lincoln tempering military justice by the everlasting mercy, John Hay returning the Boxer indemnity money to China, Father Damien among the lepers of Molokai, Tolstoi writing "Where Love is there God is also," Francis Thompson singing, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within You," Edith Cavell standing in eternal granite in Trafalgar Square while the captains and the kings depart — "What is Christianity?" All that is Christianity.

But since our Western mind is as it is, it will never be wholly content with this elusive and parabolic method of defining the Christian idea. If Christianity is to capture the imagination of our time it must be able to give some more coherent account of itself. It must have its contemporary credo, even though it no longer finds self-expression in the traditional creeds.

What the detailed substance of such a statement of the Christian idea must be no one can foresee clearly. Plainly, however, the form in which this idea is stated must be one which is in more or less close accord with the general intellectual temper of the time. The unfitness of the classical Christian creeds as a vehicle for the statement of the idea stuff of contemporary Christianity lies not in the difficulties which inhere in any controverted clauses, but in the general mental temper which begot them.

For creeds are alwaj^s the product of the reflective temper, which spends its energy not in living but in thinking about life. "Man," writes Edward Caird, "is from the first self-conscious. . . . Slow as may be the movement of his advance, the time must at length come when he turns back in thought upon himself, to measure and criticise, to select and to reject, to reconsider and remould by reflexion the immediate products of his own religious life." While we cannot controvert this statement or question the validity of the reflective processes of the religious self-consciousness, we may not identify theological reflection with religious experience. Historically the creeds are simply an item of the theological process as a whole. And theology is not in itself religion. It is merely the science of religion. It bears the same relation to