God's education of man

Preface

HIS book attempts to indicate in a very general way, and also within a single small section to point out in considerable detail, the radical and farreaching change which is taking place in theological conceptions. The general remarks on the theological situation as a whole, and the outline of the larger circle of religious truth, I have placed by itself in the Introduction. This is for clergymen and such laymen as are not afraid of hard reading on fundamental themes. All others are earnestly urged to skip it altogether ; or at least not to assume in advance that the main portion of the book is as dry and barren of practical results as the opening pages of this Introduction will appear to them to be.

By way of a Conclusion, I have added a iv Preface

discussion of two contrasted philosophical conceptions ; in which it is shown, by examples from philosophy, literature, art, politics, and missions, that in these kindred spheres there has ever been manifest that inevitable tendency to pass from abstract and transcendent to concrete and immanent conceptions, of which the position taken in the body of this book with reference to Christian truth and life is simply one more example. This also, though by no means so hard reading as the Introduction, the reader who is economical of effort and intent on edification alone is considerately counseled to omit.

The three central chapters take up in detail, and restate in modern terms, the essential truths which the ancient doctrines of sin, redemption, and sanctification sought to express. So long as God and man were regarded as alien and mutually exclusive entities, the courts of justice afforded the most obvious analogy in which to formulate the relations between them. The new

Preface v

view, which regards God and man as kindred, — related to each other as vine to branch, father to child, — finds its most appropriate analogy in that drawing out of the small into the great, of the imperfect into the perfect, of the dependent into the independent, of the growing organ into the complete life, which we call education. Hence the title — God's Education of Man.

This divine drawing-out of man has three stages : First : Man, the imperfect fragment, the dependent member, impelled by appetite and passion, sets himself up as a complete and self -sufficient end in himself, in defiant disregard of the bonds that bind him to his fellows and to God. This false attitude of self-assertion is sin; and has to be restrained by law, which is the assertion of the relation of the part to the whole, and of the claims of all on each.

Second : The good, healthy organism reclaims the rebellious and unruly member ; God comes after runaway man; in spite vi Preface

of his ill-deserts, offers him a share in his own large, generous life, and willingly takes upon himself the pain and sacrifice essential to fit an imperfect and undeveloped member into place. This winning back of an unworthy and offending member to humble acceptance of his forfeited place in the spiritual world is the province and prerogative of grace.

Third : The member restored to position in the structure must be trained to specific function in the world's spiritual life. This training to specific function, whereby the member becomes partaker in the whole life and joy of the God whom he gladly and freely serves in his specific service of his fellow-men, finds its consummation in the crown of Christian character.

Instead of representing God primarily as judge or ruler, with a majesty to uphold and an authority to vindicate ; and man as a culprit or "probationer," concerned mainly with being punished or pardoned ; I have sought to present God as a wise and

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patient teacher, eager to impart to man lessons which it is good for him to learn ; and man as a dull and stupid, often wayward and wilful, sometimes even fractious and rebellious pupil, whom the great teacher is patiently trying to train for usefulness and honor and blessedness and immortality.

In many respects any attempt to revive an interest in doctrinal theology is a thankless task. Men have grown so weary of the unrevised systems of the past that they have come to doubt whether a new construction, adjusted to modern scientific and philosophical conceptions, is possible or desirable. Hence whoever makes even so slight an attempt at reconstruction as is presented here must expect to be charged with putting new wine into old bottles ; if indeed his product is conceded to be wine at all. Fortunately, fermentation is not the only process in nature from which analogies can be drawn. The thrifty householder brings forth out of his treasure things new viii Preface

and old. Old trunks have been known to put forth new and vigorous shoots; and grafting is sometimes advantageous.

WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE. -

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Me., August i, 1899.

Introduction

THE REORGANIZATION OF THE FAITH

I. The Universal Will of God the Metaphysical and Ethical Basis of Christianity /

II. Christ the Historic Revelation of the Universal Will of God ... 26

III. The Holy Spirit, God in Humanity. The Doctrine of the Trinity the Unessential Formulation of Essential Truths . . .?/

IV. Sin and Atonement 36

V. The Organisation of the Spiritual Life,

The Outlook for the Future . . . 41

VI. The Present Need of Theological Construction. The Function of Dogma . . 46

Chapter I Control By Law

I. Man's Primitive Innocence and Early Fall 59 II. The Universality of Law. The Unique

Character of Hebrew Legislation . 6$

IIL Ceremonial Elements in the Law. The

Ritualism that is Idolatry j2 o6 Contents

IV. The Law concerned chiefly with Right Relations between Persons . . . 74 V. Gratification of Appetite in itself a Good.

Specious Excuses for Sin y6

VI. Answer to the Excuse that Certain Sins are " Natural." The Meanness of

Sin 80

VII. The Responsibility of Wealth . . . 85

VIII. The Test of Pleasure . . . 90

IX. The Moral Law in Politics 96

X. The Pride of the Pharisee and the Conceit

of the Perfectionist. The Inadequacy

of Law 102

Chapter II Conversion By Grace

I. The Priority of Grace. Its Various Manifestations . . . . . . //■?

1 1. Vicarious Sacrifice. The Sacrifice and the Forgiveness of Christ. How to bring Sinners to Repentance . . . . //p

III. Justification by Faith. Its Justice and

Reasonableness ..... 136

IV. Conversion. Time and Manner. The

Pastor's Class 142

V. Regeneration a Gradual Process. Its Universality and Necessity . . .146

VI. The Scriptures the Interpreter of Christ . 150

Contents xi

VII. Prayer not Reflex Action but Vital Communion. Its Answer Inevitable . . 15$ VIII. The Need of Christian Fellowship. The

Dawning Sense of Freedom . . . 157

Chapter III Character Through Service

I. Character the Completion, Service the Expression, of the Work begun by Law and Grace 165

II. Christian Character consists in doing one's

Specific Work well for the Glory of God and the Good of Man . . . • 174

111. The Sense of Proportion and the Art of Subordination Essential to the Highest Character and the Best Service . .184

IV. The Church and its Services a Means, not an End. The Bane of Clericalism and

Sentimentalism 190

V. The Educational Analogy, The Minister's Threefold Task .... 197

Conclusion

I. Plato and Aristotle . . . .2/^ II. Kant and Hegel 218

III. Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning . 224

IV. Garrison and Lincoln .... 229 xii Contents

V. Burne-Jones and fVatis . . . .27/ VI- Foreign Missions. President Nott and Secretary Anderson. Cyrus Hamlin and David Livingstone .... 233 VII. The Practical Difference between the Two Types of Idealists. The Greater Difficulty the Greater Glory .... 245

INTRODUCTION

Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down ; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides ; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, - One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Tennyson : Ulysses.

Not once or twice in our fair island-story The path of duty was the way to glory. He, that ever following her commands, On with toil of heart and knees and hands, Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won His path upward, and prevail'd, Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled Are close upon the shining table-lands To which our God Himself is moon and sun.

Tennyson : Ode on the Death of Wellington.

INTRODUCTION

THE REORGANIZATION OF THE FAITH

I

The Universal Will of God the Metaphysical and Ethical Basis of Christianity

HE current creed of Christendom is a chaos of contradictions. Truths and lies, facts and fancies, intuitions and superstitions, essentials and excrescences are bound in one bundle of tradition which the honest believer finds hard to swallow whole, and which the earnest doubter is equally reluctant in toto to reject. It is high time to attack this chaos, to resolve it into its elements, and to reorganize our faith into a form which shall at the same time command the assent of honest and the devotion of earnest men. This work cannot be done roughly with the broad-axe. The problem is not mechanical, but vital. One cannot chop the creed in two, and say, "This half is true and that is false." We must discover the germ of life in the old and somewhat decrepit body of current tradition, and from that vital germ we must breed the fair and vigorous body of the faith that is to be. The new faith will not be a mechanical fraction of the old, whether large or small. It will be a reproduction of the essential features of the old in fresh, vigorous, functional relationship.

What then is this living germ ? What is the pearl of great price, the one thing needful, the better part which shall not be taken from us, the hidden leaven, the grain of mustard seed, the rock foundation, the oil in the lamp, the sap in the vine, the blood in the veins which makes one mother, sister, brother of the Christ ? The answer to that question lies far back in psychology, deep down in metaphysics, high up in ethics. Hints only can be given within the compass of the first few pages of a single chapter.

Whatever is, is incomplete. As Wordsworth says : —

" Whate'er exists hath properties that spread Beyond itself, communicating good, A simple blessing, or with evil mixed."

Man is no exception. He too is made what he is by virtue of his relations to what he is not. There is no such being as a self-sufficient individual. Unus homo t melius homo. Men independent of social relations are as inconceivable as mountains without valleys. Things in relations, men determined by their social environment; the finite in the infinite, the individual responsible to universal claims, represent ultimate units, within which thought indeed can by abstraction draw distinctions, but into which it can insert no dissecting knife. To cut a man off from his material environment and social relations would be to sever him from himself. The residuum would be zero.

So much, at least, the hardest-headed doubter would not venture to deny. He will admit that a man must have some ground to stand on, some room to turn round in, some environment to react against, some claims to respect, some standards to acknowledge, in order to be a man at all. He dares not cut so near the quick as to exclude all physical environment, all social obligation from what he calls himself. Yet even this concession is fatal to the atheist ; for, though at first he may not see its implications, it will give him no permanent resting-place for the sole of his foot until he finds rest and peace in God. For let him put in his knife as far from his individual heart as he pleases ; let him make his physical environment and social relationships as big as he likes ; he is no better off. Let him make it as large as America : America cannot be cut off from Europe, either historically or geographically. Let him make it as large as the earth : the earth's motions and structure and chemical constitution are inexplicable apart from the solar system. And if he undertakes to define in terms of either time or space the solar system, he must borrow his definitions from innumerable systems of which ours is but one. Whatever object he thinks about at all must be thought in definite relations to all other objects of his thought, must inhere in a single system of rational relations. The same experience awaits him if he asks himself the moral question, " Who is my neighbor?" Duty does not stop with the claims of the man next door, or across the street, or in the same town, or in the same state or nation, or across the ocean, or in the same century. Beings we never heard of and whom we shall never see will be the happier or the more wretched in consequence of what the humblest of us does or fails to do. Wherever there are conscious beings capable of knowing what we do and what we are, there are persons under whose possible praise and blame our conduct falls. Here again the thoughts of these other persons, their praise or blame, are not mutually exclusive, unrelated judgments. They all inhere in and partake of a single system of spiritual obligation and moral judgment, the existence and universality of which is attested by the tendency of all minds, in proportion as they are intellectually and morally developed, to come to an ever closer agreement concerning what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong. This Thought which holds the universe in a single system of rational relations ; this Will which includes the acts and attitudes of all persons toward each other, which is present in all our individual thoughts, implied in all our confidence in our own memories, involved in all our communication with one another, assumed in all argument, asserted in all doubt, affirmed in all denial, — this Absolute Thought and Universal Will is the unescapable reality which the world agrees

The Ethical Basis of Christianity y

to call God. Our belief in him rests on the fact that no knife has ever been found sharp enough, and no surgeon skillful enough, to find the precise point, whether near or far, where the finite stops short, or duty comes to an end, or some things cease to belong to the same system of relations as other things; or we can excuse ourselves from membership in whatever phases of the moral and spiritual order we continue to think of and talk about.

All this, doubtless, seems vague and remote from the point at issue. Fortunately, when we turn from the metaphysical basis to the moral structure of religion, we get a clearer outlook. For there are two sharply contrasted kinds of conduct. One kind of conduct makes the practical assumption that the interests of the individual or of some definite group of individuals, large or small, are the only interests to be considered ; and that the interests of other people are to be subordinated, sacrificed, utilized as mere means to the interests of the individual or of the tribe to which he happens to belong. Such conduct may or may not conform to the moral standards of the community ; it may or may not be beneficial in its direct practical results. All conduct which proceeds from this false individualistic standpoint, whether it happens to be beneficent or injurious, moral or immoral, is fundamentally false and essentially irreligious.

The other kind of conduct recognizes the thoughts and feelings and wills and claims of other beings as of equal reality and worth with those of the individual ; it recognizes that the interests of others and of self are fundamentally one, by virtue of their common inherence in a single moral and social system from which it is impossible that any one of us should be divorced. It respects that system of relations, and the laws and customs through which it finds expression, and seeks primarily to do what is for the interest of all, considered as members of the single system of moral relations, rather than of self conceived as

The Ethical Basis of Christianity g

apart from others and from all. Such conduct, whether its details be well or ill advised, whether it wins the praise or blame of the immediate spectators, whether it actually works immediate good or harm, is fundamentally right and essentially religious.

Historically this consciousness of a universal natural and moral order has emerged in very grotesque, inadequate, and often mischievous and immoral forms. Gods have been conceived as capricious, and to be cajoled; sensitive to slights, and to be appeased; overwhelming in majesty and might, and calling for man's abasement; jealous, and demanding his humiliation; unnatural, and gratified by the suppression of his natural desires ; malevolent, and to be approached with dread; vindictive, and laying up a store of wrath to be vented in the world to come. Different races have emphasized different aspects of these attributes supposed to be divine. The early Hebrews were not without their share of io God's Education of Man

these superstitions. Yet among them — thanks to the prophets — there slowly emerged the consciousness that justice and mercy are the right adjustments of the individual to his social environment ; the true expressions of man's spiritual nature, the supreme demands of the divine will. That insight of the Hebrew prophets tallied with the analysis of the Greek philosophers, and was taken up and made the central principle of Christianity. Jesus saw and felt and knew that this comprehensive spiritual Source and Environment of nature and of man, inasmuch as it includes all attributes and operations of all persons, cannot itself be less than personal ; he gave to it the personal name of Father, and revealed to mankind that the doing of the Father's will to all our fellow-men, his children, is the open secret of the blessed life. This, then, is the answer to the question as to the vital essence of Christianity with which we started out.

Devout acceptance of this will of the

The Ethical Basis of Christianity u

Father and the universal good which it includes, as the principle and substance of one's own thought and action, is the essential element in our Christian faith. The man who makes that will of God the basis of his character and the motive of his conduct carries with him the living germ of Christianity ; for this principle, rightly apprehended, covers the whole of life. The man who has it will be kind and considerate in his home, upright and honest in his work, public spirited in civic and political relations, socially courteous and sincere, sympathetic with the suffering, generous to the poor, helpful to the weak. On the other hand, he will resist oppression, expose hypocrisy, denounce injustice, rebuke fraud, fight for timely and rational reform. He will do these things whether they are profitable or costly, popular or unpopular ; whether they bring thanks or curses, praise or blame; whether men strew his path with palms and hail him with hosannas, or crown him with thorns and nail him to the cross.

The man who has this disposition has God in his life, Christ in his heart, the Holy Spirit in his soul. It matters not whether he got it at the first hour or at the eleventh ; whether through Jewish law or Greek philosophy ; whether in a Catholic cathedral or in a Methodist chapel ; whether the articles of his creed are thirty-nine or none ; whether he succeeds in living up to his aim or perpetually fails; whether he can thank God that he is not like other men, or can simply cry, " Lord, be merciful to me a sinner ! " This disposition to make God's will of love to all mankind his own, in spite of repeated defeats, successive failures, seventy-timesseven wrongdoings repented in a day, if clung to, never despaired of, never at heart abandoned, makes the soul that has it, though it were the soul of a harlot or a publican, the sister and the brother of the Lord. No man or woman to-day holds so crude a creed, or accepts so false a philosophy, or knows so little or so much of science and criticism, or has so bad a record, or so weak a will, or so irritable a temper, or so sensuous a temperament, that he or she need remain for one instant outside the Kingdom of God in consequence. If any such remain outside, it is because their pleasure or their pride, their prejudice or their distrust, keeps them from trying their best, with just the views and record and nature and capacity they have, to do the blessed will of God, and make the situation where he has placed them as holy and happy as they can. For the one thing needful, the germinal principle, the rock foundation, the oil that lights the lamp of life, the sap that makes the branch a member of the vine, the bloodrelationship which constitutes one a brother or sister of the Christ, is the sincere disposition to do the will of God.

The raw material of the religious life is the distinction between right and wrong. He that hath that has the stuff to make a religion out of. He that hath not this distinction, sharp and clear and bright and sensitive, hath not the elements of the religious life. Be true to that distinction ; follow its leadings, accept its conclusions, and the inevitable logic of life draws one into the presence of the living God. Lose it, let it grow dim and dull and blunt, and not all the evidences of all the apologists can make even the existence of a God a credible hypothesis. For to him that hath the moral insight, religious faith shall be given; from him that hath not the moral purpose, the religious assurance that he seemeth to have shall be taken away.

Let us try to follow this logic of the moral life, and see how the purpose to do right widens into the presence and deepens into the peace of God ; how the absence of that purpose narrows the soul and hardens the heart, until the barren negations of a cold and cheerless atheism are all the poor shriveled soul and hollow heart can hold.

Right and wrong are relations. When I do right, I acknowledge that there is a system of relations in which other beings as well as myself are included ; and I take my place as a member of that system of relations. This system of relations is not of my own making ; it is often not exactly to my individual liking. There it is, however; and every right act of mine is a recognition of its presence, a fitting of myself into it. In every right act I become a part of an order of beings, a member of a system of relations, greater than myself. Thus every right act is an enlargement of myself ; a saying to something higher and worthier than myself, "Not my will, but thine be done." What we shall call this larger sphere, what name we shall give to this something which we address in every act of righteousness, need not concern us at present. That there is something greater and higher than ourselves, which we recognize, and address, and obey in every act of conscious and deliberate rectitude, is sure.

Every wrong act, on the contrary, is an attempt to deny that there is any system of relations larger and worthier than myself. Wrong is not altogether successful in this denial, especially at first. For in the form of remorse, shame, condemnation, the violated order is still present with us to avenge its disregarded claims. Yet persistence in wrong-doing succeeds in stifling and deadening the remonstrances of this larger sphere of relations which we have violated; until at last the hardened heart scarce hears the condemning voice, and is left almost alone in waywardness. In so far, then, as wrong is successful and complete, it shuts a man into his own selfish will as the only spiritual reality which he recognizes. All things and all persons and all claims outside himself are treated, not as real and valid and equal or superior to the self, but as mere means to be disregarded and denied and trampled on at the dictates of selfish interest or wanton inclination. To such a person, faith in a spiritual God is absolutely impossible. He hasn't the material to construct such a belief out of. Such a man may have a sneaking dread of

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a great avenger; a cringing fear of what this avenger may do to him in the hereafter. But that is mythology and superstition ; not rational religion or spiritual faith. This man has refused to recognize and respect the elements out of which a spiritual faith must be developed; and consequently he finds himself without a God ; or rather, what is worse, with a magnified image of his own hardness and cruelty and malignity, set up on the throne of his conscience, which was meant for the true God of goodness and love to occupy.

Let us now return to the man who does right. We left this man conscious of a system of relations of which he is a part ; a member of a spiritual order, larger, higher, worthier than himself. Is such recognition of a system of relations, such participation in a spiritual order, equivalent to faith in God? It is the chief element in such a faith. For what is selfhood, or personality, as we know it in ourselves ? Is it not the power to reduce a manifold of impressions to the unity of a single order, and to subordinate a multitude of clashing impulses to the unity of a cherished purpose ? Hence the unified system of relations and the comprehensive moral purpose, which all experience of right conduct brings home to us, is the manifestation in the world without of those very principles of self-consciousness and self-determination which constitute the personality of the self within. Hence, doing right is knowing God. For it is recognizing a thought and will like our own, but vaster, higher, and holier. The man of the pure heart sees God ; for he sees and serves an order and a will like the order and will which organizes his own little world of appetites and desires into a system ; but as much more glorious and grand than the order and will within himself as the movements of stars and planets, the rise and fall of nations, the development and overthrow of institutions, are more grand and glorious than the petty passions that agitate his individual frame.

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So much is sure and incontrovertible. If by belief in God we mean that we are enveloped by a universal system of reason, and upheld by an absolute order of righteousness, then the existence of God is evidenced in every true thought we think and every right act we perform. And every true and righteous man may be as sure of God's existence as he is of his own.

Furthermore, this kernel of faith, hard and cold as it seems when taken by itself, if cast into the warm, rich soil of an earnest moral life, begins to swell and sprout, and take on more vital and attractive forms. Right is formal ; good is substantial. Every growing soul comes to do things less and less from a conscientious regard for what is right, and more and more from a loving devotion to what is good. The best work in the world is not done on the first and lowest plane of conscientious fidelity to the right. Mothers do not nurse and rear their children at the dictates of conscientious scruples. Patriots as a rule do not enlist in the service of their country or die in her behalf at the dictates of their consciences. The mother's love draws her toward the child's good ; the patriot's love impels him toward his country's welfare. Right is the root ; good is the blossom of the spiritual life. When you have worked up through conscientious fidelity to the right, to warm appreciation of the good, then you begin to reap the rewards and benefits, the comforts and consolations, of the spiritual life. He who does the right comes to see the good ; and he who sees the good finds God and blessedness.

To do right out of a tender and loving regard for the persons who are affected by our action ; so to live that no man may be the poorer, no woman may be the sadder, no child may be more wretched for aught that we have done or left undone; so to live that through our words and deeds, men may see the truth, and enjoy the beautiful, and reverence the pure, and honor the noble, and possess the means of material and social satisfaction — that is to share the life and love and blessedness of God. For whoever lives this life, not from mere constraint of duty, but from love of those his life affects, soon discovers that in that life of love he is not alone. The satisfaction and the joy of it attest the fact that this is the life he was meant to live by the Father in whose image he is made ; and he knows that every word and deed of such a life is well-pleasing in his Heavenly Father's sight. Thus the person who has grown up through faithful doing of the right into loving devotion to the good, finds every place a holy place, every bush upon the roadside ablaze with God, every circumstance where duty can be done and good can be accomplished, a gateway to heaven, an approach to the throne of the Most High. He sees God because his heart is pure; he has abundant communion with him because he has some measure of that participation in his holy purposes wherein alone true spiritual communion is found.