Personal creeds

Front matter

HOW TO FORM A WORKING-THEORY OF LIFE

"V

NEWMAN SMYTH

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. MORAL BEGINNINGS , . 3

II. IN PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHRIST ... 29

I. Moral Beginnings

But him that is loeak in faith receive ye, yet not to doubtful disputations. — Romans xiv. 1.

I.

MOEAL BEGINNrnGS.

HOW to form a personal creed? I do not have in mind the formulation of a church creed. One whole denomination, indeed, is now engaged with that question ; for the Divine Providence — nothing less than Providence — has finally brought the Presbyterian Church in this country to earnest and truthful dealing with its Confession, and the religious problem now before that denomination is the revision of its creed. It is not, however, concerning the formation or the reformation of the creed of a denomination of Christians of which I wish now to speak ; rather, I am thinking of the way in which a man may seek to grow into some faith which shall be his real personal creed.

Neither Avill my subject permit me to be directly concerned with that other providential task which is gaining i^cognition in all chiu'ches among thoughtful Cluistian men ; viz., how shall our different confessions be so thoroughly sifted and ^vinnowed that there may be left as the pure result some general or ecumenical creed for all the Protestant communions? Xot long since, a conference between certain eminent chiuThmen and non-conformists was held in England for this puipose of finding out and stating simply and clearly in what amcles of faith they agreed^ and in what they disagreed. But I would turn, in these chscoui^es, fi^om tliis large, distant prospect of church unity, or only glance at moments A\dstfiilly away towards it, while I concentrate our attention mainly upon this near, pei^onal concern, how can one of us form his personal creed for life and death ?

Tliis subject should l>e discriminated, also, from another matter ^^ith wliich it is too often confused, but which is quite different, although it lies not far from it ; viz., how can a man gain coiTect religious opinions, or become the possessor of an enlight-

MORAL BEGIKNIKGS. 5

enecl theological intelligence ? To one who reverences Biblical scholarship, and whose reading has carried him largely outside of any provincial theology, there may come at times the temj)tation to speak some severe things concerning the theological ignorance, mounting often to intolerance, of such dogmatists as are happily characterized in these words of an apostle : "- Desiring to be teachers of the law, though they understand neither what they say, nor whereof they confidently affirm." But leaving such words as better unsaid, or reserving them only for occasions when regard for the rights and liberties of the faith of others makes it the Christian thing to speak them, I would seek in these sermons to direct our thoughts to this matter of immediate and vital importance to any man of us : How, amid the diversities of beliefs and unbeliefs in the world, shall I gain a living, personal creed ? how shall I form my working-theory of life ?

There are two classes of people in our congregations who may welcome any practical suggestions or help in this vital matter. The first are some elderly people. The , latter class comprises almost all young people of thoughtfulness or sincerity. There are some of the older people in our congregations, who, years ago, when they were in the -formative period of their religious life, fell between the different teachings by which the churches were then divided. Educated in the midst of great doctrinal discussions, they came to no definite religious confession. They grew up devout at heart and conformists to some local church in practice, but comparatively creedless. "In my early life," so in substance said one representative of this class of persons to me lately, ''when I was young, each church had its complete set of doctrines ; and I used to hear them preached, and the doctrines of other churches preached against. I listened to both sides, and I could not see why one might not be as true as the othqr. I wanted my children to believe something, and was glad when they did; but I could not seem to come myself to much belief in anj^thing. T suppose it is the way I was made." Possibly such was, in a measure, the way that person was made : for some of us are born interrogation-points ; other people are born exclamation-points ; and but few have the restfulness of a full, finished sentence in their natures; but possibly also that was the way in which overmuch doctrinal discussion has made and left some persons in our congregations. At all events, we find among us some exemplary people who in their old age are still asking that vital question, which one must become as a little child to answer. How shall I trust ?

Unlike these persons, both in the conditions under which their lives are forming and in their temper of mind, are the younger men and women, who have in these seething times to settle for themselves their practical, working-creeds of life. In our churches generally there is now little or no catechism imposed upon the young, and they do not have to listen to overmuch doctrinal preaching from our pulpits. But the atmosphere which they breathe is electrical. New sciences bring fresh surprises to their knowledge ; and it seems at times as though the floods had broken loose, all ancient things were cast adrift, and they themselves afloat without anchor or chart. Christian doctrine itself appears to some minds to have dissolved almost into a state of universal fluidity, and many Avould honestly like to know what to think and to believe. All this is providential, and therefore hopeful; — because this is God's world, and not the devil's, it is always an interesting and hopeful world; — but, these things being so, they bring new duties also to the pulpit and the church. And this first obligation of gaining for one's self a good and sufficient working-theory of life is one not now lightly to be put aside by any man of us.

Yet as I begin to preach on this subject, I am conscious beforehand that what I have in mind to say may seem at first somewhat disappointing to some of you who need most, and who would most willingly receive any suggestion of help or word of light in this matter. For I shall speak of some very simple and elemental things. I shall suggest only some famil-

MOKAL BEGIXXIXGS. 9

iar duties. I shall ask 5'ou to go back and see once more the face of your real self m the mirror of some early, clear spring of your life. Yet these simple things are the vital things ; and if ^Ye do not begin with them, all else shall surely prove mistaken. Here, for instance, is this human body with its complicated tissues, its system within system of organic functions — common matter becoming almost etherealized in the marvellous intricacies of the brain. Yet the body is built up of the simplest vital cells. The micro scope can hardly distinguish the particles within these transparent circles of elemen= tal being. Chemistry stops there, and cannot search behind these primal cells into the secret of life. When we have to do with vital things, we find always the simplest things. This is as true in the moral order and the spiritual sphere as it is in the physical.

Some verses, for example, in the Gospel of John are so simply divine that you can only repeat them, and can hardly preach from them or teach them, except by hokiing them up and looking at them, and lettmg men see what they are. Everywhere the truest, divmest things are the simplest, — the first and the last, the beginning and the end of our knowledge and our faith, — as God is the Alpha and the Omega of his creation.

Hence when a man has to form a creed for himself, if it is to be a real and vital creed, he may be sure that in its beginnings it will be something very simple. The initial truths of it will be like the vital cells which the biologist finds, of which all the tissues are woven. You must see, therefore, that the first thing for us to do in forming a creed for ourselves is to get down to something elemental, to begin with something so transparently simple, perhaps, that one might think it without significance. Yet that simple truth, if one will trust it, may prove the living element of tlie whole vigorous and healthful tissue of a man's faith.

One comes and asks. How am I to believe anything? and emphasizes very likely his question by plunging the next moment into some discussion concerning the Bible, its authorship, its discrepancies, or its inspiration, about which the last magazine article he has glanced through may have enabled him to argue a little ; his mind tumbles into a heap of confusion over some hard doctrine, or his reason ventures all liis faith-power, and loses it, on the chance of guessing correctly some enigma of Providence. Now my point right here is that, however reasonable, or interesting, many of these questions may be in their own place and time, we have little to do with them when the first thing that we need to be about, if we really wish to win a creed for ourselves, is to go and hunt through our experience until we come to something, however simple, before which we must and do say, " I see that to be true ; I believe that ; I can trust in that." And this, I insist, is the first thing for a man in search of a real creed to do : to find something, somewhere, which he does believe. Not to believe in everything, but to find something, hoAvever elemental, which his own life has proved to be true to him. And is it too much to say that some such point for faith to begin at can be found in the experience of any ordinary man ?

In the initial part of the process of gaining a personal faith, it matters not so much what the particular thing is which a man may find to believe ; the first, essential thing for any man who wishes to live a strong life and to do a man's work in the world, is to find something somewhere in his experience of which he can say with all his mind and heart, " That I must believe, or deny my own soul ! Whatever else is shapeless, this is rock beneath my feet ! That is true as life to me ! " For it is of vital importance for us to get hold at some point of the moral reality of things. A young man cannot begin to be a true man until at some point his life takes firm root in the moral realities. There is no solid genuineness in character until one has found a point of crystallization for his life around something which he believes, and which he knows it would be personal disintegration for him to give up. This is

MOKAL BEGINNINGS. 13

the last difference between those men who are worth somethmg as men in the world, and those who are w orthless : the former have taken firm root somewhere in the moral law, and have held on by that faith ; the latter have taken root nowhere, and hence have no true life in them. The worthless men, the men who count for nothing, the mere society men whom Pope described as passing from ''•a youth of frolics to an old age of cards," are men who never have really believed in anything, who have never fastened their lives with a strong grasp upon any moral reality. Believing in nothing, they are nothing. Trusting in no one, they are themselves not trustworthy. If a man has no deep faith in right or virtue, if he believes in no one, not even with a pure love in his own mother, he can be himself but the creature of circumstance, the slave of chance, a prey for all the devils. It cannot be put too strongly, this absolute necessity for a man's life to take root somewhere in the moral order. Without this, character becomes a mere leaf in the wind; it is nothing more fixed and firm than a piece of seaweed floating with the tide. We must as men find something to reverence, to trust, and to obey, or we shall lose the spirit of a man, and become ourselves nothing. Hence any habit which makes virtue herself a joke on a young man's lips, or any course of life which turns truth into a lie in an old man's heart, is virulent poison that has power to kill the soul. A dead branch, fit only for the burning, is the plain Biblical symbol — and it is true to the life — of the man whose hold has been broken on the strong moral order of the universe.

In this it is not yet said at what points, or by what faiths, a man may plant himself in moral truth ; my present insistence is in general that we must find something, however simple or elemental, in which we can believe, or our souls will wilt and die. The first thing to be done in forming a living creed is by some such real faith to get into personal contact, if it be only at some single sensitive point, with the whole realm of moral and spiritual truth. Because if we do not get some touch with reality at the simple beginning of our faith, we shall never come to it at the end of our creeds* If a man, in other words, does not begin somewhere by saying, " That is true ; I see that ; I believe that, and cannot do otherwise ; it would be mental suicide and moral dishonor for me not to hold to that," — if a man does not begin in this simple and real way with his creed, though he may afterwards spin it out into a whole series of articles of belief, his creed is all the way through empty of reality, a deception to himself, and a vanity before the world.

Now, then, let us seek for some of these simple vital things in which a man's creed may find its real beginnings. Some of these, I say; for the immediate points of possible attachment of men's lives to the moral reality and whole spiritual order of God's universe, are very many, some of them near every one of us, if we will put forth honest hands and grasp them.

A passage in the biography of a rarely gifted modern believer will furnish a helpful example of the way a true man's creed must first fasten upon some elemental, moral reality, and then how it ma}^ grow from that, and blossom, and bear at length whole clusters of the fruits of the Spirit. "It must be right to do right" ; so Frederick W. Robertson, at one time in his religious history, got down to that simple beginning of faith. He had inherited a creed, — the whole articulated creed which he found in the pulpit of the Church of England. I will not pause to quote the words by which, in an address to workingmen, he has described that "awful moment when the soul begins to find that the props on which it has blindly rested so long are, many of them, rotten, and begins to suspect them all ; when it begins to feel the nothingness of many of the traditionary opinions which have been received with implicit confidence, and in that horrible insecurity begins also to doubt whether there be any thing to believe at all." Rather let me quote these words in which that soul, cast adrift in the darkness, found the point where it could touch reality, and in touching firm moral truth became sound and strong again. ''In the darkest hour," so he wrote, tearhig the leaf from the experience of his own heart, ''in the darkest hour through which a human soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful, this at least is certain. If there be no God and no future state, yet even then, it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be true than false, better to be brave than to be a coward. . . . Thrice blessed is he who, — when all is drear and cheerless within and without, when his teachers terrify him, and his friends shrink from him, — has obstinately clung to moral good. Thrice blessed, because Ids night shall pass into clear, bright day."

Reflect a moment on the logic of the Spirit in that passage of a human life. I admit that it may not have followed any formal logic of the understanding. I admit that between this proposition, " It is better to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be true than false, better to be brave than a cowarcl,'' — and this other proposition, There is a God and a future life, — there are several intervening steps for reason carefully to take, or. boldly to jump. But whatever may be our formal arguments or painstaking logic in the effort of the understanding to reach belief in the existence of God and in the future life, there is no doubt what was the actual, vital growth upwards of that man's faith from that deep moral root. Once firmly planted in this moral reality which underlies all true life, Robertson's belief soon grew by its own vitality into religious fruitfulness. The logic of the Spirit in the inward but most real processes of his life carried the man from faith in doing right to trust in the God of righteousness. The man in the darkness who had grasped the sure faith that it is better to be braA^e than a coward, was already far on the way towards an ennobling and illuminating faith in his God, who is light, and in whom there is no darkness at all. Here, then, is a firm place for any man to begin to build his personal creed. Let but this conviction become his formative principle of life, which it Avoukl be personal dishonor for him to doubt, that it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be brave than a coward.

Let a man once get real and firm hold of only so much moral truth as this ; let him believe that if in the presence of danger he should flinch from duty, his soul would become afterward its own flaming hell to him; that if at the word of command to leap forward, though death blazed from a whole battery before him to be taken, he could hesitate and fail, his memory of cowardice would become an everlasting torment to him ; that if a chivalrous w^ord ought to be spoken and his lips should remain closed, if a Avrong should appeal to him to be made right, and his arm hang limp by his side, if ever the thought of money, reputation, position, influence, or reward should bribe his tongue to silence, or tempt him to hide his soul in prudence when it ought to stand forth simply brave, then the recollection of such base denial Avould make him ashamed of himself forever, unless indeed he could expiate his cowardice in some trial of fire and come forth a brave soul again ; — let a man, I say, thus grasp with all his heart and his whole strength this single sure truth that it is better to be generous than to be selfish, better to be brave than to be a coward, and then see how this truth, to which the man has given himself up wholly, will become as a chariot to his soul, — a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, like the chariot in which Elijah went up as by a whirlwind into heaven. So that moral faith bore Robertson's spirit up into the heavenly places. So an entire committal of a soul even to a single moral truth will in the processes of the Spirit lift it up, and it will carry it sometimes almost as with a whirlwind into the highest realms of spiritual reality and light.

Robertson's truth, from which his life revived, and his creed grew again, — his own and not another's, — represents only one of the many possible points of contact which men may find between themselves and the moral law and spiritual verities.

MORAL BEGIXXIXGS. 21

I am not saying that always men will grow, or advance at once from such beginnings of real faith into a full, rich creed, or into clear Christian assurance. But my insistence is, that always we must begin with some simple thing, some near, present truth, if it be only a belief in right, or as a man's trust in his mother. We must always begin with something which we can and do believe with all our minds and hearts, or we never shall come to any high and large faith worthy a man's confessing ; and further, when thus in solemn sincerity we have begun with something real to form our personal creed, experience shows that in all probability we shall be led on and on, and other, farther, diviner truths will erelong become ours. Let a man knock resolutely at any door of moral truth until it be opened to him, and he will pass into a whole realm of truths. Through whatever particular gateway or Avindow, or over whatever wall of difficulty a man once gets fairly into the moral world, all things in the moral universe become his.

22 PEKSONAL CREEDS.

There is no truth, however lowly, which, if a man obeys it, does not have further revelations in it, and that may not lead him from grace to grace and from strength to strength.

In the old Biblical story, if Abraham had not run from Ms tent-door to meet the three men who stood in some mystery of their coming before him, and if he had not exercised towards them a simple and sincere hospitality, he never w^ould have received the further revelation from the Lord, with which, as his angels, they had been sent. And there is truth for us, if we will take it, in this Biblical story of the ^asit of the angel of the Lord to the patriarch. If we wall w^elcome the truth which seems to stand over against us at the door, if we will treat it as it becomes us, children b}^ nature of some divine promise, to treat any truths that may appear before us, it will surely have some further word of the Lord for us ; and we shall receive more than we may have thought W'hen w^e did the simple duty of the moment, or were ready to own and welcome the first appearances of truth to us.

In fact, it is astonishing, and greatly encouraging, to observe how near in the experiences of men the divinest truths come to the humblest duties ; how often, when a man does some single true thing, it will seem to throw open a window^ for him out into the whole light of life. The distance is not so great as it sometimes seems between things human and divine. It is not so far along the way of the Spirit between faith in goodness and trust in God. There lies no astronomic space between conscience in man and God in heaven. A right deed lays hand of trust directly on the Eternal Righteousness. The understanding may falter, logic may travel after in its slow way ; but a generous spirit leaps to the thought of love's endless, deathless life ; a brave soul lives in the courage of its immortality ; the highest is closest to the lowest ; God exists always just beyond duty ; immortality is pledged in true life and love.

I shall have to speak further and more explicitly of these ultimate points of human history and divine revelation — these primal facts of our lives, unresolvable into anything simpler — these first and final and permanent truths of being and of revelation, which men may seize and hold with a living faith ; and I shall need also to indicate how, in touch and contact with these, we may expand, enrich, and fructify our personal creed until it shall yield us truth enough to live by and to die by.

What I have been thus far saying may possibly seem to some of you not to contain much belief, or to go very far; but who of us does not need every now and then to begin again at the beginning ? And these words point, at least, towards the moral springs of any Christian faith which shall have in it power to keep itself pure, and to freshen life for others. I think in going back and up to these primal moral sources and first human springs of faith, we are doing that which Jesus must often have been thinking of when he put the beginning of his whole Gospel into these general and exceedingly simple words,

MORAL BEGIKNINGS. 25

"repent and believe." These are moral verbs, signifying certain initial energies and actions of men's lives. And the first of these verbs was left both by John the Baptist and by Jesus without any specific object, for each and every man to make specific in the particulars of his own sins. To repent with a real and particular repentance, to repent of anything false, unworthy, impure, cowardly, is to go back, and at that particular point of repentance to get into direct soul-touch with all God's moral being. A man repents of some selfish thing; by that act he again comes into contact with the eternal truth of love. A man repents of a false, mean word; at that point of his repentance he touches everlasting truth. A man repents of any lust ; by that way he goes straight out towards all the moral sovereignty and holiness that there is in the universe. And naturally, as day follows night, the word believe follows the word repent, A man is left believing in something true, good, beneficent, whenever he repents of anything evil, false, unloving. So these two words which were first in Jesus' preacliing of liis Gospel, must . still be first in our work of laying the foundations of a creed for life. And it were better to lay now'^these foundations, though the workman fail before he dies to build the whole Christian house of faith upon them; it were better to build upon this rock of moral truth, repenting until one gets down to it, and believing as far as one can build upon it, than to put together a whole Christian confession, spacious and pretentious, with nothing but the sands at the foundation of it.

n.

IN PERSONAL TOUCH WITH CHRIST.

He saitli unto them^ But who say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, l^hou art the Christy the Son of the living God. — Matt. xvi. is, 16.

II. In Persokal Touch With Cheist

IT was urged in the preceding sermon that a man must himself first take root somewhere in moral reality, if he is to grow into a fruitful faith. I wish to follow further the same method of forming a personal creed, as I shall seek for some points of personal contact with the Christian doctrines.

In" our effort to gain a Christian creed for life we read the Bible, go to church, are taught the doctrines, and then very likely fall erelong into perplexity. There are many religious doctrines, and they extend over wide ranges of possible truth. The churches are not altogether agreed concerning the doctrines of Christianity, and the Bible itself leaves unanswered many questions which it raises. It might even be said that it raises more questions than it answers. Christianity is the great interrogation of history ; — Who do men say that I, the Son of man, am ? Who do ye say that I am ?

We need first of all to gain some real contact with the life of Christ, to come into some personal touch with the Son of man, or all his teachings will be but as words in the air to us. And if we would bring to the faith any man who has no settled Christian belief, unless we can succeed in leading him to a Christian creed in this living way, we shall only make another scribe or Pharisee of him ; and the world has already enough of such, and no use for more of them.

I have taken a text from a passage of Scripture Avhich shows how the multitude thought and talked about Christ, and also the way in which the disciples had come to know him. This difference between the people's way of apprehending Christ and the disciples' way, may help u.s in our present desire to find the right method foi gaining a personal Christian creed. The text contains the first distinctively Christian confession ever made by a disciple. And you notice how short it was, "And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Ah, Peter, you couldn't come to the communion-table of some of our churches with only that creed. Unless you added some further " memorandum " of belief, you would not do for a missionary to the heathen with a confession so immature as that. '^ Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah"; — who was it that said this of Peter and his short Christian creed ? The Lord was ready instantly to found his Church, as upon a rock, on the man who had made that first simple confession, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." To the man of this simple creed the Lord gave the power of the keys in his Church. And possibly the time is near Avhen we shall take off all other complicated locks of our modern invention, and leave only that simple latch of Peter's on the door of the Lord's house.