Letters to Sunday-school teachers on the great truths of our Christian faith

Letter I Some Underlying Principles

Letters to Sunday-school Teachers

h,etter One

SOME UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES

1 WRITE especially to the younger teachers ; and I want in these letters simply to try to say to you some of those things that I should like to say if I could sit down with you individually and we were to talk frankly and earnestly of your deeper difficulties, of those questions which, after all, actually concern us more than all else. I am not to aim at saying novel things; but we are to try to find our way together, as I have repeatedly said to my own Sunday Bible Class, into clear and deep and abiding convictions concerning the great fundamental Christian truths; to see that they are — and I do not choose my words here at random — real, rational, vital. Real — as real as business and housework and books and music and friends and home ; rational — as knit up indissolubly with your best thinking in every other sphere ; vital — as springing out of your own life, laying commands on life, adding zest to life, and giving great, undying motives for life. You cannot finally be satisfied with less.

If these great fundamental Christian truths come to mean to you what Christ intended they should mean, they will help you to do the two only really great things one [4]

man can do for another : to bring to your pupils the contagion of a high and noble life, and to bear honest, effective testimony of your own best vision — that in which and by which you most live. This is a large undertaking ; and if it is at the end in any fair measure accomplished, you must do even more in the matter than I, You must do some earnest thinking ; and, even more than that, you must furnish that deepening experience, through the truth wrought out, that can alone lead you still more deeply into the truth. Simply to replace old phrases by new phrases is poor and futile business enough, and not worth the time of either you or me. And this leads me at once to the first of those preliminary things, those underlying principles, of which I [5]

wanted to speak briefly in this first letter.

I . No one can simply hand over to you a ready-made creed, however clear and convincing his reasoning, however just and comprehensive his view, because, in the first place, if your creed is to be worth anything, it must be in truth what we call it, a confession of faith — something in which you can honestly express your own belief; something that grows in some vital way out of your own experience ; in a word, a true putting of real convictions. Now convictions cannot be handed over from man to man. No man can ever be sure of absolutely transferring his full thought, even, to another mind ; still less can convictions be so easily handed over. The most I can possibly do for any of you is simply to [6]

tell you honestly the truths that mean most to me, the surpassing significance that Christ seems to me to have, and how these deepest things best come home to me. The rest is for you and God. If by time and thought and attention and personal commitment you give God opportunity with you through the truth and through his supreme revelation in Christ, the certainty of God and the truth of God shall be wrought in you. So and only so can come real convictions. It is serious business, therefore, upon which we enter together in these apparently simple letters. The great Christian convictions cannot be simply laid on you like so many garments, or even so many geometrical proofs or scientific propositions. These spiritual convictions are deeply connected with your inner spirit and life, and they involve your personal relation to God. We greatly degrade Christian doctrine when we regard it as simply a series of more or less provable propositions. Your real inner creed is a vital growth out of your personal experience.

2. Tou cannot come in any way into any deep convictions of the truth all at once. This is not at all to say that there may not be significant crises in your lives. I could even hope that some of these letters might bring such a significant crisis for some of you. But even our deepest and most striking experiences have been long preparing, and their full significance comes out only as we try to live by them. Mighty convictions are no growth of an hour or a day ; they root deep in living, [8]

in the influence of close personal associations, in honest putting of the truth into act. You will not therefore expect in this most difficult sphere of moral and spiritual convictions, that you can make some happy leap that shall land you at once in the center of all truth. We are coming to believe that no truth, of whatever kind, gets real hold of us so. Even mathematical truths we need to work out in multiplied problems ; and for appreciation of scientific truth we require the work in the laboratory. How much more must the appreciation of these vital truths come out only as they are put into act ! The creed that is to be deeply yours, you must have lived out, not merely thought out. The full significance, therefore, of some of the things I shall say may come to

[9] , you only after the months and years have given you the vital experience that unlocks for you the inner secrets of the truth. It is one of the joys of living, that one may look forward to ever-deepening vision of the truth through simple, honest living. *' If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching.'' And you are seeking truth, not simply for yourselves, but as teachers of others, so that you need to see that —

3. No one can teach in the moral and spiritual realm with greatest effectiveness that which he does not himself believe with depth of conviction. You cannot kindle another by rote. That which does not greatly move you will scarcely greatly move another through you. This simply means that our effective teaching is necessarily confined to what is vitally [10]

real to us — to our real inner creed. For just this reason " complete and systematic '' presentation of religious subjects often contains much that is mere filling. Only those parts have any kindling power that have the fire of personal conviction in them. We must learn, as teachers, not to be afraid of even very fragmentary teaching, if that is all we can make real. Even fragments that are real are better than masses that are unreal ; but we want the fullest reality possible. For the very sake, therefore, of both the breadth and the effectiveness of one's teaching, one must seek to deepen and to extend his convictions ; for there is no cheap way to become a good teacher of spiritual things. The ultimate aim, then, of this effort we are to make together is absolutely vital to any true success in the high work of the Sunday-school teacher. I am to try, with your own cooperation, to help you to real convictions at some points where perhaps now vou have none, and to enlarge and to deepen the convictions that are already yours. If even in small degree this could be done, it would be worth all our united pains.

4. But this does not 77iea7i that xve are to seek for each a unifor?n outco7?ie. That would be utterly impossible in any case ; for even those who thought they perfectly agreed with such statements as I shall make of the great Christian truths would quite certainly not take them in precisely the way I meant them. But even if such absolute uniformity of conviction and statement were possible, it would still be undesirable. For [12]

we seek not the unity of monotonous uniformity, but the organic unity that arises from the truth of each supplementing the truths of all the rest. And, what is more important, the infinite truth of God is too large for any single finite reflection of it. We approximate it, even, only by bringing together the varied individual reflections. We are unique individuals with our own peculiar temperaments and special adaptations, to each of whom, we have the right to believe, it is given to present a kind of personalized and individual setting forth of the great truth of God in Christ, that has its own unique value, which cannot be wholly replaced by any other. I distinctly, therefore, do not seek to reproduce in you my thoughts. Each one of you has his own unique [13]

personality through which God desires to speak in the peculiar voice of that personality ; each of you is a member of the body of Christ, and each member has his office. What I hope for my putting to you of Christian truths, therefore, is not that my thought may simply override or replace yours, but rather may quicken and bring out your own individual thinking. I could wish that my thought might be in your minds seeds and germs of truth that in their growth in your minds should reflect the peculiar nature of the mind in which they are planted, and so attain an individual living power of their own. To some extent this is quite certain to be the case ; and yet it is worth while to make it clear to ourselves that we seek nothing else, and that the [14]

mechanical uniformity is not even to be desired.

In my next letter I want to speak of some of the reasons why the spiritual life often seems unreal.

Letter II The Seeming Unreality Of The Spiritual Life

L,etter Two

THE SEEMING UNREALITY OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

I CAN hardly help asking you in this letter to face with me another preliminary question that is of the first importance, before I go on in later letters to take up singly the great Christian truths.

Why do not the facts of the spiritual world seem as real to us as the facts of the material world ? Why is the fact of such a God as Christ reveals, and of our relations to him, not as indubitable, for example, as the existence of other persons and our relations to them ? In a word, why does the spiritual life often seem so unreal ? Why is [ 19]

the conviction of it a wavering one, with its constant ups and downs? These are questions that press upon us from the start in every thoroughgoing discussion of the reality of a spiritual view and of a spiritual life. Can something be done now to meet this constant difficulty of the seeming unreality of the spiritual life? Can we see the reason for this seeming unreality?

I have space to speak of only three causes, and of these most briefly. I must ask you to think further than I say. These three causes are : mistaken conceptions of the character of the spiritual life itself; the inevitable fluctuations of our natures; and the intended obscurity required for our moral

training.

I. As to mistaken conceptions. We begin with the misconceptions which arise from mistaking the nature of the spiritual Hfe itself, as a life of strain, or a life of imitation or repetition of others' experiences, or a life of magical inheritance, or, finally, a life of rules laid on from without.

I. First, the spiritual life is not a life of strain^ either in the sense of putting pressure upon the mind to hold certain beliefs, or in the sense of keeping a certain continuous stress of attention. It is a real struggle, a continuing conflict, a life of steady facing of duty ; but still it should not be, in any hysterical sense, a life of strain.

This means, in the first place, that the man who wishes to have the spiritual life a reality to him will not bring any pressure upon his mind to hold certain beliefs. He will rather see clearly that his sole responsibility is simply to put himself face to face with the great realities, and to make an honest response to them. Nor, in the second place, does the spiritual life call for the keeping up of a certain stress of feeling or of attention. There is need of clear discrimination at this point. The spiritual life does look, of course, to a persistent, dominant purpose of righteousness, a real surrender of the will to God ; but this does not and cannot mean the unchanged continuance of some particular thought or object fixed in the attention, or the steady maintenance of some special state of feeling.

2. It is equally important for us to remember, if the spiritual life is to be real to us, that the spiritual life is not a life of the i^nitation or repetition of the experiences of others. That we need others here, as elsewhere, is clear. That we come into most that is of value to us through introduction by some other, is also plain. Nevertheless, if the spiritual world is to have the fullest reality for us, the reality it ought to have for a mind awakened to mature selfconsciousness, we must have some experience in the spiritual that is genuinely our own, not a hollow echo of something we have heard from others. This is not easy. Men naturally shrink from it. It is far easier to satisfy oneself with a very shallow dealing with the problem of our life, and then to catch up the traditional language of religious experience from others. [23]

3. Again, the spiritual life is not a life of magical inheritance of results. If the results in the spiritual life are conceived as coming without clear conditions, in a kind of merely magical way, that life unavoidably takes on for most men to-day a decided aspect of unreality. It has no intelligible connection with the rest of their life, and there seems to be nothing they can do with it. This simply means that we must recognize fully that there are laws and conditions in the spiritual world.

4. On the other hand, the spiritual life is not a life of rules laid on

from without. Counsels to be heeded there certainly are in the religious life, and valuable habits to be formed. Nevertheless, the heart of the life with God can never be contained in any prescribed routine [24]

of rules and regulations. We are called to a real life^ with its own spontaneous growth and varied expressions, and we are called to liberty, Christ seems to have been concerned not to give rules for holyliving or for holy dying, but to trust all to the dynamic of the single motive of love to his person. His disciples are simply asked to be in truth disciples, doing only what loving loyalty to him would suggest.

II. But the sense of unreality passes over upon the spiritual life not only because of mistaken conceptions of it, but also because of the inevitable fluctuations of our natures,

I . With all possible care of bodily conditions we cannot preserve an unvarying state of body ; and changing bodily conditions tinge in- [25]

evitably our mental states. So, too, the psychical conditions are constantly changing. And with this constant change, however produced, we have always to reckon. That nothing in life should seem always the same to us, is the inevitable result. We are to expect, therefore, from both physical and psychical conditions, changing vital feelings, alternation of moods, altering power of attention, and some consequent ebb and flow in conviction and in the sense of reality. We are creatures of moods. So long as feeling enters necessarily so much into our sense of the reality of all things, the things of the spirit especially, which do not force themselves upon us, will vary for us in their clearness and reality.

2. But in all this, let it be ob- [26]

served, we have nothing that is peculiar to the religious life. It holds for all spheres of value, and, indeed, in every sphere of life where feeling enters at all. This really implies that wherever we are not living a merely fragmentary life, this ebb and tide must be reckoned with ; it is involved in our very natures as finite and feeling beings. Moreover, the life of the rejection of all ideals and the life of unbelief have their fluctuations, too. It is not merely the conviction of the highest which varies. The lower life, too, has its inevitable misgivings. We are creatures of two worlds — an animal and a spiritual ; and both make themselves felt in some degree. Unbelief has its questionings as well as belief. We may not choose whether our feeling shall [27]

vary or not. We can only choose the dominant moods.

3. This leads us to emphasize the important principle that when we find fluctuations in our convictions concerning the reality of anything, we must ask for the witness of our consciously best hours, physically, intellectually, and morally. If religious conviction does tend to go up and down with our moral attitude, and the ethical has any real justification, then our religious convictions are just so far confirmed. And with reference to the entire man, it behooves us to ask. When does the spiritual world seem most real to us ? in our best or our worst moments ? when we are consciously most in possession of ourselves in every way, or when we are consciously below our best ? So Tyn- [28]

dall, for example, tested the doctrine of material atomism : " I have. noticed/' he said, " during years of self-observation, that it is not in the hours of clearness and vigor that this doctrine commends itself to my mind." We need, thus, constantly to take account of our necessary finite limitations and the inevitable fluctuations of our life, if we are to keep our religious faith clear and strong.

The very fact that these causes of the sense of the unreality of the spiritual life are to be found in our natural constitution suggests that it may not be intended that the spiritual life should always seem to us real and commanding. And if we press the inquiry, Why should this be intended ? it seems possible to suggest but one answer consonant [29]

with a genuine religious faith : it must be needed as a part of our moral training. We are brought, thus, to consider the last of the causes of the seeming unreality of the spiritual life.

III. T^he seeming unreality is a part of our moral training. For the sake, then, of our moral training, for the sake of deepening the spiritual life itself, into which the moral is so inextricably woven, there is a purposed seeming unreality in spiritual things. If there is a God at all who really means to bring us into the highest life, we may confidently expect that the conditions of our life will be so shaped as to call out in us the persistent ethical will.

I . x\bove all else, this means that the conditions must be such that the religious life must be a man's own, [30]

voluntarily chosen and voluntarily kept. If this is to be true, a sacred reverence for the human personality must he a controlling principle in all God' s dealing with us. This implies that, in the nature of the case, it is impossible that there should be any forcing of God and the spiritual life upon a man.

2. And if there is to be no forcing of God and the spiritual world upon a man, this would mean, further, that we can expect no absolutely incontrovertible evidences^ no overpowering signs. A choice will be left, some room for our own attitude of will to have its effect.

3. But even more than this is to be said. Our moral need seems plainly to require, also, that there shall be no domination of the human personality by God' s personality. Not only will God not thrust the fact of his existence upon us in resistless fashion, but in his personal relation to us, even after we have voluntarily and gladly recognized it, he will still sacredly respect our own moral initiative and our own individuality. The very possibility of unmistakably genuine character in finite beings seems to depend upon the fact that God should thus, in at least the preliminary stages of their training, scrupulously remain the indemonstrable, the invisible, the hidden, the unobtrusive God, showing such a reverence for the personality of his children as men never show for one another. We may expect, then, that God's relation to us will be an unobtrusive one.

These, then, seem to me to be some of the chief reasons for the [32]

seeming unreality of the spiritual life that we needed to consider if we were to have the way cleared for a positive putting of the great Christian truths. I fear that I have made rather severe demands upon your attention in this letter ; but I trust the considerations urged may be seen to mean more and more to you, as the years go on.

Letter Three THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS CHRIST

YOU count yourselves, first and foremost, disciples of Jesus Christ, and the supreme aim of your teaching is to bring others into the same discipleship. This must mean, if either your living or your teaching is undertaken with full thoughtfulness, that you call yourselves Christians and have become teachers of the Christian faith because you believe that he from whom you take your name is the most significant person of history. You believe that Christ's life and teaching have more light than any other fact of history to [37l throw upon God, upon man, upon all the varied relations of God and man, and so upon the practical problem of daily living in its deepest aspects. That is, you see God, men, and all of life through Christ.

The first step, therefore, toward fundamental Christian truth must be some understanding of Christ himself. I am to ask you, therefore, to consider with me in this letter the very basis of our Christian faith. Who is Jesus Christ ? What does he mean ? How does he reveal God ? What right have we to give him so supreme a place in the mastery of our thinking and living ? And I can only answer these questions by telling you what Jesus Christ seems to me to mean, and so giving you a kind of personal confession of my own faith in him. In doing [38]

this, I can hardly avoid repeating in substance what I have elsewhere said on this most fundamental of all Christian themes. Each point deserves much more elaboration than I can give it in this brief letter. Tryto think them out fully for yourselves. I. First, then, Christ seems to me to be the greatest in the greatest sphere y that of the moral and spiritual. It is hardly too much to say that this place is given him by the common consensus of all thoughtful men who really know his spirit and teaching. He sees the problem of living more broadly and more deeply than any other. No other has so grasped the full meaning of life. No other shows such delicate skill in applying moral and spiritual principles. If we have anywhere one who may be said to speak with full authority in [39]

the moral and spiritual world, that person, assuredly, is Jesus Christ.

It is perhaps only to put the same thing in different form, when one says with Fairbairn that Christ is transcendent among founders of religion, " and to be transcendent here is to be transcendent everywhere, for religion is the supreme factor in the organizing and regulating of our personal and collective life.'' Try to make clear to yourselves how tremendous and all-permeating the influence of a founder of a religion is. He makes the very light and atmosphere in which thousands, and perhaps millions, of his fellow beings see the whole of their life. And among these transcendent leaders of the race, Jesus himself is transcendent. The last forty years have been characterized by such a [40]

Study of the religions of the world as has never been seen before. And yet it seems to me hardly open to doubt that the result of this study is not to make the figure of Christ less, but more significant. At the most, we can hardly do more than bring any other religious teacher into comparison with Christ at certain points. No religious founder will bear comparison with him in the full scope of either his life or his teaching.

So really is Christ greatest in this sphere of the moral and spiritual that he becomes for men truly a kind of " personalized conscience." One may well be challenged to suggest a higher moral test for a man than that which is afforded by the spirit of Jesus, as concretely shown in his life and teaching. [41]

2. Jesus is also the sinless and nonpenitent one. No other, certainly, ever intelligently claimed to be sinless ; for no other has the claim ever been intelligently made. The great historian, von Ranke, carries the common judgment of men with him when he says : " More guiltless and more powerful, more exalted and more holy, has naught ever been on earth than his conduct, his life, and his death ; the human race knows nothing that could be brought, even afar off, in comparison with it." If Christ's unusual moral insight is granted at all, if he were not sinless, he could neither make the claim nor allow the claim to be made. The keener his moral consciousness, the less likely was he to make any claim that was not true. But in one of the surest of all the bits of autobi- [42]

ography that we have from Christ, he tells the story of his own struggle with the most fundamental temptations of his life without the slightest hint of moral failure.

And the claim of the sinlessness of Christ, it should be noted, is not made so much because of any special statements, as because of the fact of what Dr. Bushnell has called his "impenitent piety," which seems to lie upon the very surface of the records. There is no indication anywhere that he includes himself with others in the confession of sin. He does not count himself thus with other men as needing redemption, but as himself clearly able to redeem them. And by this fact of nonpenitence he is marked off definitely from all good men. In the face of it he cannot simply be called the [43]

best of good men. In the case of all other good men, as they go forward in the life of righteousness with growing ideals, their own consciousness of failure becomes also more clear. Let one contrast, for example, the spirit of Jesus here with that of perhaps the best of all his followers — whom many seem willing to make a spiritual authority side by side with Christ — the apostle Paul. The sense of sin and of debt to Christ for deliverance from sin are both most marked in him, and there seems to be in his latest letters even an increasing sense of his sin in his early rejection of Christ. The fact that Christ is '* the only religious character that disowns repentance" is justly to be regarded as an absolutely unique phenomenon among men of real moral consciousness. [44]

3. With the highest of all ideals^ Christ consciously rises to that ideal, and " compels us to admit that he rises to it J" Christ's ideal involves absolute trust in God, and the spirit of absolute love toward God and men. And it is to the full measure of this ideal that he consciously rises. It would be much that men should be compelled to admit that a man rose to the full measure of any reasonable ideal. But that one who sees more clearly than any other in the moral and spiritual realm, and cherishes the highest ideal that it is possible for a man to cherish, should consciously rise to that ideal, and compel us to admit that he so rises to it, is a fact unparalleled in the history of the world. This is far more than mere sinlessness. It bears witness to a positiveness of moral achieve- [45]

ment that dwarfs all other human attainment.

4. Jesus has such a character that we can transfer it feature by feature to God, without any sense of blasphemy and without any sense of lack, I am not now raising with you any metaphysical theory of the person of Christ. I only ask you to notice that the most enlightened nations of the world to-day owe their ideal of God to Jesus Christ, — not merely to what he said, but to what he was. The significant thing is that there has been one among us men, the circumstances of whose life we in large measure know, concerning whose character we can say. That is what I mean by the character of \ God. One may well ask himself what he could add to the character of God in imagination which has not [46]

already been set forth, not merely in the words of Jesus, but in his actual concrete life. Fairbairn is fully justified in saying that Jesus is " the first being who had realized for man the idea of the Divine." What language can compass such a fact as that ?