Social meanings of religious experiences

Front matter

M^v^^Vv

MEAN INC ^

: OF

Contents

I. The Affections as Social Energies

II. Economics and Religion ....

III. The Leadership of Social Faith .

I. The Affections As Social Energies

Gen. XXII. i, 2.

Picture a household in which the mysteries of life are made plain, and its commonplaces transfigured in the light which is shed from those four poems in Luke's Gospel. Given the home of a Jewish carpenter, poor but not pinched, in sunny, flowery, free Galilee, with its synagogues, its Sabbath, its Scriptures, its annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, its saturation to the point of precipitation with the ideas and sentiments which these institutions have been fostering for centuries. Give this family as its prime consciousness, no matter how come by, a conviction, perhaps not rare among pious households in that day, that it had in its bosom Him who was to fulfil the expectation of Israel; and let this conviction find its specific modes of conception in the shape of this maternal song now ascribed to Mary, this paternal song ascribed to Zacharias, this heart-song of the shepherds ascribed to the angels, and the sage words ascribed to the aged Simeon. Let the daily life be lived, the weekly Sabbath spent, the Scriptures repeated, the visits to Jerusalem made, and all these things find their interpretation, at least to the heart of yearning and brooding motherhood, in the terms of such poems as these, and what an atmosphere must have been generated in that home! The very presence of the Hebrew spirit, in its most religious and sacredest manifestation, as " the spirit of the holy gods," of the Holy One of Israel, the Holy Spirit, must have reigned in that home, nurturing the messianic character, and preparing a basis for the messianic consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth. — John P. Coyle, in *'The Spirit in Literature and Life."

The wings of the soul lose their plumes ; the leaves of the flower fast fall off and wither ; and of this fountain of love there remain but a few drops. We still call these few drops love ; but it is no longer the clear, fresh, all-abounding child-love. It is love with anxiety and trouble, a consuming flame, a burning passion; love which wastes itself like raindrops upon the hot sand ; love which is a longing, not a sacrifice ; love which says, "Wilt thou be mine?" not love which says, "I must be thine." It is a most selfish, vacillating love. And this is the love which poets sing, and in which young men and maidens believe ; a fire which burns up and down, yet does not warm, and leaves nothing behind but smoke and ashes. — Max Mullery in " Memories."

SOCIAL MEANINGS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES.

I.

THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL ENERGIES.

And it came to pass after these things, that God did prove Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham; and he said, Here am I. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah ; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee. — Gen. xxii. i, 2.

In the literature of national and religious beginnings, the most interesting and effective figure is that of Abraham. Whatever the scholars may decide as to dates and facts, we are sure that we have a true outline of the patriarch's life. The story is so artlessly beautiful, so divinely without design, that its lessons win and delight the moral reason. His

II life does not belong to the heroic or Homeric type, but rather to the idyllic, which is greater. The character of Abraham is too simple and natural, too true and morally majestic, to form an epic. He was not a perfect man ; he sinned, sometimes, and blundered. But he looms above his times, which were full of both hideous decay and vast potency, as the best offering that humanity for long ages could make to God.

Abraham does not seem to have been interested in any particular form of religion, or to have cared at all for religion as such ; his interest was in human life and its relations. Over life's meaning and problems, its resources and destiny, he was always brooding. Being the man he was, he could do little else at such a time. An old and wonderful civilization, about the power and triumphs of which the records of books and bricks give us only hints, was passing away ; and Abraham felt himself both called and driven to begin somewhere a new order of things. He was pursued by some sort of a social ideal, and dreamed of a holy national life. His call never allowed him to be satisfied with what he had done, or with himself ; he must always be seeking some better thing. Whenever he was overcome by suggestions to adjust his faiths and ideals to the seeming facts and forces of his life and environment, then the elements of moral tragedy and endless suffering entered his career. We read lightly the story of the sending away of Hagar into the wilderness, if we do not see in Abraham a terrible and helpless sufferer. His was the matchless suffering of needing to make another suffer, and that other the mother of his own child, for that which was in no sense her sin, but which was the guilt of his own hesitancy and unbelief. Worse than that, the sin and sorrow both came through her whose bidding he had in weakness obeyed in order that he might have peace. So every attempt to trust the fulfilment of his soul's promises to what our scientific age would call the facts of his life, rather than to the divine risk of that moral adventure which will follow no star but its own ideal, resulted in tragedy and failure.

But there were few such failures in Abraham's life. One trial of his faith nerved him for a greater. Each proof of his obedience strengthened him for another. He was a domestic man, loving his kinsmen and native country. But when, probably after years of increasing discontent with the existing Chaldean conditions of society, he was moved by that mighty and concluding impulse to get away into a distant country he had never seen, and there found a new nation, Abraham obeyed and entered upon the divine adventure. This was one of those commanding impulses which the Hebrew so simply and accurately called the word of God ; which men have never been able to disobey without the loss of vision and spiritual reason, — the problems of life henceforth being figured out rather than seen through. God gave Abraham great possessions. But when a dispute arose between Lot's herdmen and Abraham's herdmen as to land and water rights, Abraham at once surrendered the fairest of his lands to one who had no just claim upon them. He was more sensitive to the social honor and peace than to his own rights; more anxious to keep the social faith, to preserve the brotherhood, than to keep his possessions. When his ungracious and selfish nephew was carried away captive by a marauding king, Abraham immediately gathered his friends, and marched to Lot's rescue. On the eve of Sodom's destruction we find him pleading with God for the salvation of his sinning neighbors. Perhaps without knowing it, Abraham treated his whole life as a social function, to be used of God for all sorts and conditions of men. His life is rich in ethical romance, his career full of social chivalry. He was so unfailingly the friend of man, that he came to be known among neighboring tribes and nations as the friend of God. So vital and familiar was his fellowship with God, so strong and faithful his search for what was good for man, that God delighted to be Abraham's guest, to come in and sup with him, and confide to him the future. Through all his long pastoral life, increasing in sweet moral dignity and social value with each new experience, adversity and prosperity alike prepared him for whatever God might ask, and gave him a purer view of things to come. Like Isaiah and Socrates, with many of the good and wise men of the more anxious centuries that were to follow him, Abraham saw Christ's day and was glad; just as we may see the perfected humanity and rejoice. When the call came to offer Isaac, Abraham was responsive to the call, long years of training in the school of obedience having prepared him to make this supreme sacrifice.

There came a time, so the story reads, when God would make proof of Abraham. The command is so worded that it becomes a sort of moral vivisection : " Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and offer him for a burnt offering." This was the son whom God had given him as one from the dead, after years of praying and patient waiting, as the beginning of a new and better people, whose numbers were to be as the sands of the sea. There must be both an immediate and an eternal worth to the lesson which God would teach Abraham through the agony and surrender, the triumph and peace, of such an experience. For we must keep in mind it was really Abraham, not Isaac, who was to be sacrificed ; Abraham, not Isaac, who was to make the surrender of will, and the offering of life. We should also consider that it is not the soul unused to sorrow that feels a sorrow most keenly, as we are apt to think, but the soul that has been attuned to songs of grief by deep experience ; sorrow alone prepares the heart to apprehend sorrow in the reality and fruitfulness of its meaning. Abraham's previous experiences could only sharpen the anguish of this strongest demand upon his faith. Yet Abraham walked trustfully to the altar upon which he was to offer his son to God. He did not seek to delay or evade strict obedience. He did not trifle with what he understood to be his duty; he juggled not with his conscience.

He did not tell Sarah, in order that she might dissuade him from his sacrificial pilgrimage, as she doubtless would have tried to do. His preparatory struggle lasted but a single night, and then he prepared to act ; not with sullen resignation, but with trustful and triumphant obedience. Isaac was already slain in Abraham's heart before he left his tents at Beersheba for the land of Moriah. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews suggests that Abraham accounted God able to raise Isaac from the dead, if such should be necessary to the fulfilment of the divine promise that Isaac should be the firstborn of a new nation. But it is not likely that the patriarch had any such thought, even after Isaac had already been offered in his heart. There is no indication that Abraham expected Isaac's restoration, or the provision of some substitutional sacrifice. Abraham was not playing hide and seek with God. His sacrifice was real, offered in the great faith that the righteousness which he could not then define, and could but vaguely understand, would some time be made intelligible to his moral sense.

The students of this event have already shown that the literal sacrifice and burning of Isaac's body need not have been a violation of Abraham's conscience. Human sacrifices were at that day the climacteric feature of the tribal and national religions. The chiefs and kings all about Abraham were accustomed to offer human beings as sacrifices to appease the wrath and gain the favor of their deities. From offering slaves and captives taken in war, they had come to offer their first-born sons — following the growth of the idea that the more valuable the sacrifice the better pleased was the deity. Of course Abraham could sacrifice as dearly to the God of all the earth as the chieftains and kings to their tribal deities, whatever the grief and cost, however long he must wait to know the righteousness of the sacrifice.

But God was able to enlarge Abraham's life, to light up both the retrospect and prospect of the Hebrew chieftain's career, without the taking of Isaac's body. I think it is Dean Stanley who states that the staying of Abraham's uplifted hand was forever afterward regarded by the Hebrew people as a protest against human sacrifice. We know that among ancient peoples the Hebrews are distinguished for their sense of the sacredness of human life. Frederick Robertson, with all his holy earnestness, protests against the common treatment of the story as though Isaac were actually slain by his father upon the altar. Yet these miss the lesson of the sacrifice. The physical life or death of Isaac was quite an incidental matter, and should not so much exercise our religious concern. It was Abraham, not Isaac, who was being sacrificed ; Abraham's life, not Isaac's body, that God was after. God did not avert, but accomplished, the sacrifice by the staying of Abraham's hand.

There was nothing arbitrary, even in the best possible sense in which that word may be used, in God's command to offer Isaac ; no mere testing of the moral stuff of Abraham's life. The sacrifice was not a divine deceit, but was virtually made ; not a trial and experiment, but a process and accomplishment ; not a seeing if something could be done, but a doing of something. God does not do things because he can; nor does he try men to see what they are made of, as we often say. Trial is not fundamentally a probation, but an educative process, uniting man with his brothers and with God. It is not because God wants his own way that he leads us into the knowledge of his will along paths we walk with bleeding feet, through deeps of suffering, under billows of flame ; but because only through his way can human life become social, and hence eternal. God calls for no sacrifice from man that he himself does not make for man ; asks obedience to no moral law which does not organize his own activity ; speaks nothing as truth for man that is not already truth in himself. The command to offer Isaac was given out of the fulness of God's faith in Abraham. It is an expression of both the delight and hope of God in our evolving and ascending human life ; an expression of the joy which every growing man is to the heart of God. When Abraham offered Isaac in the faith that God was not only power, but that he would prove himself a righteous power, God not only gave him back a new Isaac, but a purer and vaster faith. In the course of this experience, Abraham dimly saw the Lamb eternally slain in the heart of God ; that is, he saw, what the world yet scarcely dreams, that power is not merely righteous, but that power is love, and that righteousness is simply love realizing itself through sacrifice. Abraham came back from his adventure with a better future for the world on his hands, commissioned anew to care for the world's fundamental and final interests. The life of Israel, springing from Abraham, began with messianic impulses and a world movement stirring in its blood. On this parental tree grew the characters of Joseph, David, Elijah, Daniel, and the envisioned prophets. The character of Jesus is, in part, the fruitage of Abraham's faith. Jesus was the evolution of Hebrew national life and history, and without Abraham could not have been.

We get little of the lesson of Abraham's sacrifice from the empty exegesis of mere criticism, which lacks the prophetic sense and moral imagination, the vivid insight and historic spirit, essential to true interpretation. We are ethically degraded by the inane pietisms that are the staple of the religious commentaries ; the most commonly relished of these pious comments on Abraham's sacrifice are not only immoral in substance, but socially vicious in application.

In general, the pietistic interpretations put God in the attitude of trying an experiment to see whether Abraham really loved him better than his son Isaac. Of course the idea always is, that Abraham was in danger of an idolatrous love for Isaac, and that he had to be shown this danger through the proposed sacrifice in order that he might give God the greater love. But the God of Abraham and Isaac, of Jesus and Paul, of Mazzini and Lincoln, is not the individualistic and unethical God he is pietistically conceived to be. God is not jealous of the love that unites human beings, but carries the cross in his heart to draw all men into eternal habitations of love. Love is the home of the normal man ; it is the Father's house, the natural social order, from which we have wandered prodigal, wasteful of life in our efforts to set up independent housekeepings. There was no balancing of quantities of love, to weigh out just how much Abraham should give to God and how much to Isaac. God was not trying an experiment, or anxiously trying to get a man to love him more than his son, but was evolving a character and commissioning a life.

The danger was not that Abraham should love Isaac too much, but that he should love him too little. The vast peril before Abraham, and before the purpose of God, was that Abraham's love for his son should dwindle into a mere individual and hence suicidal delight, and that both father and son should fall from the social function of their lives. The time had come when God would clearly show Abraham the difference between making Isaac an individualistic joy and the founder of a family, and making his life a function in the development of a redemptive history. The whole storyturns about the sacrifice of Isaac in service, rather than in mere happiness or mere death. This was the meaning of Abraham's sacrifice of himself in the offering of his son Isaac ; this the new revelation that came to Abraham. These two men were sent upon a divine errand. Their consciousness was not of an individual self to be gratified and delighted, but of a human organism of which they were vital and sustaining members. They saw a human history to be made, a human destiny to be wrought out, in which they were to be God's organs. God was teaching Abraham the lesson the world is slowly learning from Jesus and his cross, — the lesson that he that saveth his life shall lose it, while he that loseth his independent life to make it a function of the common life finds it eternally. When Abraham was so wrought upon that he would surely train his son to be an organ through which God should work out a universal good, so wrought upon that he could divinely risk his son as an offering to God upon the altar of human need, then God could indeed say that he had a trustworthy friend in the man who withheld not his only son.

Speaking fundamentally, it is not science, but feeling, that makes for social evolution ; and the affections are the social energies which are working out the unity and harmony of human life. Hence, before all else, the individual affections must be socially consecrated. The experiences of life are to teach us that love is social law, and not private property to be held for the gratification of one's self. Individual love is fulfilled only through becoming a social element. The individualization of love is a social disintegration, and is either the murder or suicide of love itself ; the socialization of love is its life and growth, and is the ground upon which we are promised immortality. Delight in any human relation or affection chiefly for the happiness it brings to one's self is a perversion of love, and a reversion of the force that is working out the social evolution. Humanity is one body, of which each individual life is a function ; human society is one development, of which each individual is God's organ; human history has one goal, to the reaching of which each individual is consciously to consecrate himself as a living member of the social body ; human life has one immortality, which is to be gained through each individual affection becomins: at last a social energy. Only by lifting all human life into the light and warmth, the power and fellowship, of one's highest and holiest love can that love be sanctified and immortalized. He is no true lover who is not willing to make his love the moral property and social good of the race ; and, just as God does not want to be loved apart from man, no righteous soul will want to be loved apart from God and human life.

He who cares for a friend chiefly because he can make that friend's life a continuous contribution to his own enjoyment is not only base and selfish ; he is a traitor to his friend. The exclusiveness of the affections is of the devil, and issues in the works of the devil, through the withdrawal of the richest and strongest social forces from the sphere of their work. The best there is of us is social property, belonging to man as well as God ; rather, belonging to God by belonging to man. Our affections, in every relationship of life, are Christian only as they are redemptive energies in the world. The loves of our hearts are pure only when they glorify humanity in our eyes. Our love for those with whom we hold the closest fellowship is unrighteous until we make it a power of God unto the social salvation. We dare isolate in thought no singularly noble soul, making the common life seem of low worth in the light that should make it glorious ; for the glory of a great white soul is in the fact that it is a revelation of our one human life. Unless our affections are lifting us to the things that are above the delight of self, and are a power lifting the whole human life to the righteousness of Jesus, they but deepen the shadows of selfishness which so long hide the face of God from man.

The love which regards its nearest object as a social agent is the opposite of the feeling that searches for its object the ways of moral ease and physical comfort. There is much that shows the form and speaks the language of love that is without love's substance; much that passes for unselfishness that is really the crudest selfishness — crudest because it is the selfishness of weakness. In family, church, and state, w^e are easy with what we know to be wrong, with what is expedient or relatively right ; we fail of the living and unceasing sacrifice of upholding the divine ideals. What we are devoutly regarding as a love for others is a love of self, and a regard for our own moral ease. It makes us hypocrites towards our neighbors without their knowing it, and makes us the deceivers of our own selves.

The failure to discern between the love of self and the love of others is a mistake which Dr. Gladden makes in a recent discussion of *' The Law of the Kingdom." ''There are many parents in these days," he says, ''whose altruism is carried to a dangerous excess. They love their children so much more than they love themselves that they humiliate and degrade themselves — weakening their authority, destroying their influence, and thus depriving themselves of all power to do any really good thing for their children." ^ Few men see as clearly, or speak as nobly and wisely, as Dr. Gladden. Yet what he calls a dangerous excess of love on the part of parents for their children is not parental love, but exactly the lack of love ; it is one of the most dangerous forms of selfishness, growing out of the worst and weakest self-love. The degrading fact with these parents is that they do not love their children; they are making their children the mere functions of parental self-gratification, and the victims of parental moral indolence, instead of educating them for the social service. Such parents regard their own comfort of body and ease of mind, their pride and complacency, more than either the well-being of their children or the social good. There was once a mother whose child was caught for a number

1 " The Church and The Kingdom/'* p. 68.

THE AFFECTIONS AS SOCIAL EAERGIES. 3 1

of hours in a cold rain, causing rheumatism which threatened to cripple the child for life. The physician, by every sort of persuasion and command, made the mother understand that unless she would often move the limbs and work the joints of the child, he would soon become rigid and helpless. After a few feeble attempts, the mother would not do, nor would she permit the nurse to do, as the physician had ordered. Her constant and pathetic plea was that she loved her child so much she could not bear to have him suffer the pain that came from obeying the physician's commands. The child became a cripple, and then, after two or three years of terrible suffering, died. Now, it was not her child the mother loved, but herself. She was guilty of the most miserable self-love, and was actuated by an inordinate regard for her own feelings rather than a regard for her child. In the ethical and social world, precisely the same sort of self-deceit and hypocrisy are masquerading as love. The selfish affection we are apt to call love is separative and disintegrating, exclusive and lustful, deadly and tyrannous, because it is love fallen from its true estate.

This perversion and apostasy of love, so current in modern social life, is sending from our homes, churches, and schools, young men and women untrained in even the first principles of social right and wrong. Even the most religious of us are without ethical sense regarding human relations. The want of such a quality of love in the home, and such a knowledge of Jesus' teachings in the pulpit, as will make our young men and women ethically intelligent, so that they may know social right in distinction from social wrong, is the most foreboding feature of American life and religion. Parents who suffer their children to grow up in social ambition, dominated by the principles that make a virtue of covetousness and glorify a career of absorbing self-interest, should be taught that they are the destroyers of their children, and social traitors as well. The affections are not private property, but social energies. The social responsibility of the affections can be unknown or ignored only at the peril of both giver and receiver. Yet with nothing — not with material gains — are we so selfish and perverse, so individualistic and suicidal, so destructive to human life, as with our affections.

This has its sequence in the wretched fraudulency that parades itself in the political arena as patriotism and party fealty; or, again, in the religious self-deceit which so anxiously exhibits itself as loyalty to the church, but which is in effect the subtlest and wickedest treason to the church. He who ought to know the evil in his household, his country, his church, and yet chooses to ignore it, making not his life a vicarious sacrifice to bear it away, may think that love is the principle of his imagined good-will. But this good-will of his is the mask of a cruel hypocrisy, which God strips off before his nobler brothers at the judgment day of some great crisis. When one fails to commit himself to the highest ideal of right he knows, out of regard for the physical, social, or religious comfort of those he loves, he is at that moment false to those to whom he seems to be true. Frederick Robertson well said that, *^he who prefers his dearest friend to the call of duty, will soon show that he prefers himself to his dearest friend."

The social responsibility of love cancels aiiy warrant for limiting our relations. The new religious experience which the social conscience is giving us will deliver love from ascetic abandonments, as well as individualistic perversion by the pursuit of happiness. That love endures and grows only through fulfilling a social mission, and hence bearing within itself a vicarious sorrow, is only a recreant's reason for not loving. Not less, but more unselfish, love is the remedy for the evils of self-seeking affection. To limit and sever our human fellowships, rather than bear their responsibilities, is weakness and infidelity. As sons of God, it is of our moral errantry to accept human faiths and affections, with all the accumulating responsibilities and sacred sorrows they bring, and make them the power by which we shall be crucified to self; then we may rise with those we love into the social glory of the kingdom of Christ. Abiding in his quality of love, in the secret places of the Father's heart, where flows eternally the cleansing blood, there we may have given us all power in heaven and on earth to keep his commandment to love one another as he loved his friends. This love will see in every human life a brother, an eternal child of the heavenly Father, and will be intent upon presenting all whom it infolds white and whole for the redeemed society. It will express itself in a passion of service for the unloved and the unloving, and be as free from every impurity as the breath of angels. For itself it will not speak ; nor seek its own joy ; nor be tainted with the bitterness of loss ; nor murmur at what God may give against desire ; nor grow weary in waiting for the gates of life to open ; nor feel baffled at work amidst unrequiting selfishness, knowing that it obeys the law by which all selfishness shall at last be overcome.