|
[303]
The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical importance with
the analogous difference in character.
We saw, under the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent
confusion and must live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 275
ff.). For others, on the
contrary, superabundance, over-pressure, stimulation, lots of superficial
relations, are indispensable. There
are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their debts,
bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their letters answered
their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled, down to one which
lay on a clean table under their eyes with nothing to interfere with its
immediate performance. A day
stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling.
So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social
recognitions--some of us require amounts of these things which to others
would appear a mass of lying and sophistication.
[304]
In Newman's Lectures on Justification Lecture VIII. Section 6, there is a splendid passage expressive of this
aesthetic way of feeling the Christian scheme.
It is unfortunately too long to quote.
It
is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient empires.
How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when one gives
up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the gold
embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up with a
president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it may be,
from a "home" upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting-room and a
Bible on its centre-table. It
pauperizes the monarchical imagination!
The
strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible, it
seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it
may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many
converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism.
The latter offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy,
has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in
its multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show
to Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy.
The bitter negativity of it is to the Catholic mind incomprehensible.
To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and
practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as
childish as they are to Protestants. But
they are childish in the pleasing sense of "childlike"--innocent
and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped
condition of the dear people's intellects.
To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of
being idiotic falsehoods. He
must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic
to shudder at his literalness. He
appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hard-eyed, numb,
monotonous kind of reptile. The
two will never understand each other--their centres of emotional energy are
too different. Rigorous truth
and human nature's intricacies are always in need of a mutual
interpreter.[305] So much for the aesthetic diversities in the religious
consciousness.
[305]
Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the "meek lover of the
good," alone with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own sakes,
with the elaborate "business" that goes on in Catholic devotion,
and carries with it the social excitement of all more complex businesses.
An essentially worldly-minded Catholic woman can become a visitor of
the sick on purely coquettish principles, with her confessor and director,
her "merit" storing up, her patron saints, her privileged relation
to the Almighty, drawing his attention as a professional devote, her
definite "exercises," and her definitely recognized social pose in
the organization.
In
most books on religion, three things are represented as its most essential
elements. These are Sacrifice,
Confession, and Prayer. I must
say a word in turn of each of these elements, though briefly.
First of Sacrifice.
Sacrifices
to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship; but, as cults have grown
refined, burnt offerings and the blood of he-goats have been superseded by
sacrifices more spiritual in their nature.
Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice; so
does Christianity, save in so far as the notion is preserved in transfigured
form in the mystery of Christ's atonement.
These religions substitute offerings of the heart, renunciations of
the inner self, for all those vain oblations.
In the ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and the older
Christianity encourage we see how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice
of some sort is a religious exercise. In
lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its significance as symbolic of the
sacrifices which life, whenever it is taken strenuously, calls for.[306]
But, as I said my say about those, and as these lectures expressly
avoid earlier religious usages and questions of derivation, I will pass from
the subject of Sacrifice altogether and turn to that of Confession.
[306]
Above, p. 354 ff.
In
regard to Confession I will also be most brief, saying my word about it
psychologically, not historically. Not
nearly as widespread as sacrifice, it corresponds to a more inward and moral
stage of sentiment. It is part
of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one's self
in need of, in order to be in right relations to one's deity. For him who confesses, shams are over and realities have
begun; he has exteriorized his rottenness.
If he has not actually got rid of it, he at least no longer smears it
over with a hypocritical show of virtue--he lives at least upon a basis of
veracity. The complete decay of
the practice of confession in Anglo-Saxon communities is a little hard to
account for. Reaction against
popery is of course the historic explanation, for in popery confession went
with penances and absolution, and other inadmissible practices.
But on the <453> side of the sinner himself it seems as if the
need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of its
satisfaction. One would think
that in more men the shell of secrecy would have had to open, the pent-in
abscess to burst and gain relief, even though the ear that heard the
confession were unworthy. The
Catholic church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted auricular
confession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession.
We English-speaking Protestants, in the general self-reliance and
unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take God alone
into our confidence.[307]
[307]
A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work by
Frank Granger: The Soul of a
Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii.
The
next topic on which I must comment is Prayer--and this time it must be less
briefly. We have heard much
talk of late against prayer, especially against prayers for better weather
and for the recovery of sick people. As
regards prayers for the sick, if any medical fact can be considered to stand
firm, it is that in certain environments prayer may contribute to recovery,
and should be encouraged as a therapeutic measure.
Being a normal factor of moral health in the person, its omission
would be deleterious. The case
of the weather is different. Notwithstanding
the recency of the opposite belief,[308] every one now knows that droughts
and storms follow from physical antecedents, and that moral appeals cannot
avert them. But petitional
prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the
wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with
the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism
leaves it untouched.
[308]
Example: "The minister at
Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in Boston, heard the officiating
clergyman praying for rain. As
soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said 'You Boston
ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church and
pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under water.'" R. W. Emerson: Lectures
and Biographical Sketches, p. 363.
Prayer
in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
"Religion," says a liberal French theologian, "is an
intercourse, a conscious and voluntary relation, entered into by a soul in
distress with the mysterious power upon which it feels itself to depend, and
upon which its fate is contingent. This
intercourse with God is realized by prayer.
Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion.
It is prayer that distinguishes the religious phenomenon from such
similar or neighboring phenomena as purely moral or aesthetic sentiment.
Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire
mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws
its life. This act is prayer,
by which term I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of
certain sacred formula, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting
itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which
it feels the presence--it may be even before it has a name by which to call
it. Wherever this interior
prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this
prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or of
doctrines, we have living religion. One
sees from this why "natural religion, so-called, is not properly a
religion. It cuts man off from
prayer. It leaves him and God
in mutual remoteness, with no intimate commerce, no interior dialogue, no
interchange, no action of God in man, no return of man to God.
At bottom this pretended religion is only a philosophy. Born at epochs of rationalism, of critical investigations, it
never was anything but an abstraction.
An artificial and dead creation, it reveals to its examiner hardly
one of the characters proper to religion."[309]
[309]
Auguste Sabatier: Esquisse
d'une Philosophie de la Religion. 2me ed., 1897, pp. 24-26, abridged.
It
seems to me that the entire series of our lectures proves the truth of M.
Sabatier's contention. The
religious phenomenon, studied as in Inner fact, and apart from
ecclesiastical or theological complications, has shown itself to consist
everywhere, and at all its stages, in the consciousness which individuals
have of an intercourse between themselves and higher powers with which they
feel themselves to be related. This intercourse is realized at the time as
being both active and mutual. If
it be not effective; if it be not a give and take relation; if nothing be
really transacted while it lasts; if the world is in no whit different for
its having taken place; then prayer, taken in this wide meaning of a sense
that SOMETHING IS TRANSACTING, is of course a feeling of what is illusory,
and religion must on the whole be classed, not simply as containing elements
of delusion--these undoubtedly everywhere exist--but as being rooted in
delusion altogether, just as materialists and atheists have always said it
was. At most there might remain, when the direct experiences of
prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential belief that the
whole order of existence must have a divine cause.
But this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless
be to persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators' part
at a play, whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life, we seem
ourselves to be actors, and not in a play, but in a very serious reality.
The
genuineness of religion is thus indissolubly bound up with the question
whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful. The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this
consciousness is the very core of living religion. As to what is transacted, great differences of opinion have
prevailed. The unseen powers
have been supposed, and are yet supposed, to do things which no enlightened
man can nowadays believe in. It
may well prove that the sphere of influence in prayer is subjective
exclusively, and that what is immediately changed is only the mind of the
praying person. But however our
opinion of prayer's effects may come to be limited by criticism, religion,
in the vital sense in which these lectures study it, must stand or fall by
the persuasion that effects of some sort genuinely do occur.
Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in
any other manner come about: energy
which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in
some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts.
This
postulate is strikingly expressed in a letter written by the late Frederic
W. H. Myers to a friend, who allows me to quote from it. It shows how independent the prayer-instinct is of usual
doctrinal complications. Mr.
Myers writes:--
"I
am glad that you have asked me about prayer, because I have rather strong
ideas on the subject. First
consider what are the facts. There
exists around us a spiritual universe, and that universe is in actual
relation with the material. From
the spiritual universe comes the energy which maintains the material; the
energy which makes the life of each individual spirit.
Our spirits are supported by a perpetual indrawal of this energy, and
the vigor of that indrawal is perpetually changing, much as the vigor of our
absorption of material nutriment changes from hour to hour.
"I
call these 'facts' because I think that some scheme of this kind is the only
one consistent with our actual evidence; too complex to summarize here.
How, then, should we ACT on these facts?
Plainly we must endeavor to draw in as much spiritual life as
possible, and we must place our minds in any attitude which experience shows
to be favorable to such indrawal. PRAYER is the general name for that attitude of open and
earnest expectancy. If we then
ask to whom to pray, the answer (strangely enough) must be that THAT does
not much matter. The prayer is
not indeed a purely subjective thing;--it means a real increase in intensity
of absorption of spiritual power or grace;--but we do not know enough of
what takes place in the spiritual world to know how the prayer
operates;--WHO is cognizant of it, or through what channel the grace is
given. Better let children pray
to Christ, who is at any rate the highest individual spirit of whom we have
any knowledge. But it would be rash to say that Christ himself HEARS US;
while to say that GOD hears us is merely to restate the first
principle--that grace flows in from the infinite spiritual world."
Let
us reserve the question of the truth or falsehood of the belief that power
is absorbed until the next lecture, when our dogmatic conclusions, if we
have any, must be reached. Let this lecture still confine itself to the
description of phenomena; and as a concrete example of an extreme sort, of
the way in which the prayerful life may still be led, let me take a case
with which most of you must be acquainted, that of George Muller of Bristol,
who died in 1898. Muller's
prayers were of the crassest petitional order.
Early in life he resolved on taking certain Bible promises in literal
sincerity, and on letting himself be fed, not by his own worldly foresight,
but by the Lord's hand. He had
an extraordinarily active and successful career, among the fruits of which
were the distribution of over two million copies of the Scripture text, in
different languages; the equipment of several hundred missionaries; the
circulation of more than a hundred and eleven million of scriptural books,
pamphlets, and tracts; the building of five large orphanages, and the
keeping and educating of thousands of orphans; finally, the establishment of
schools in which over a hundred and twenty-one thousand youthful and adult
pupils were taught. In the course of this work Mr. Muller received and
administered nearly a million and a half of pounds sterling, and traveled
over two hundred thousand miles of sea and land.[310]
During the sixty-eight years of his ministry, he never owned any
property except his clothes and furniture, and cash in hand; and he left, at
the age of eighty-six, an estate worth only a hundred and sixty pounds.
[310]
My authority for these statistics is the little work on Muller, by Frederic
G. Warne, New York, 1898.
His
method was to let his general wants be publicly known, but not to acquaint
other people with the details of his temporary necessities.
For the relief of the latter, he prayed directly to the Lord,
believing that sooner or later prayers are always answered if one have trust
enough. "When I lose such
a thing as a key," he writes, "I ask the Lord to direct me to it,
and I look for an answer to my prayer; when a person with whom I have made
an appointment does not come, according to the fixed time, and I begin to be
inconvenienced by it, I ask the Lord to be pleased to hasten him to me, and
I look for an answer; when I do not understand a passage of the word of God,
I lift up my heart to the Lord that he would be pleased by his Holy Spirit
to instruct me, and I expect to be taught, though I do not fix the time
when, and the manner how it should be; when I am going to minister in the
Word, I seek help from the Lord, and . . . am not cast down, but of good
cheer because I look for his assistance."
Muller's
custom was to never run up bills, not even for a week.
"As the Lord deals out to us by the day, . . . the week's
payment might become due and we have no money to meet it; and thus those
with whom we deal might be inconvenienced by us, and we be found acting
against the commandment of the Lord: 'Owe
no man anything.' From this day and henceforward whilst the Lord gives to us
our supplies by the day, we purpose to pay at once for every article as it
is purchased, and never to buy anything except we can pay for it at once,
however much it may seem to be needed, and however much those with whom we
deal may wish to be paid only by the week."
The
articles needed of which Muller speaks were the food, fuel, etc., of his
orphanages. Somehow, near as
they often come to going without a meal, they hardly ever seem actually to
have done so. "Greater and
more manifest nearness of the Lord's presence I have never had than when
after breakfast there were no means for dinner for more than a hundred
persons; or when after dinner there were no means for the tea, and yet the
Lord provided the tea; and all this without one single human being having
been informed about our need. . . . Through
Grace my mind is so fully assured of the faithfulness of the Lord, that in
the midst of the greatest need, I am enabled in peace to go about my other
work. Indeed, did not the Lord
give me this, which is the result of trusting in him, I should scarcely be
able to work at all; for it is now comparatively a rare thing that a day
comes when I am not in need for one or another part of the work."[311]
[311]
The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings with George
Muller, New American edition, N. Y., Crowell, pp. 228, 194, 219.
In
building his orphanages simply by prayer and faith, Muller affirms that his
prime motive was "to have something to point to as a visible proof that
our God and Father is the same faithful God that he ever was--as willing as
ever to prove himself the living God, in our day as formerly, to all that
put their trust in him."[312] For
this reason he refused to borrow money for any of his enterprises.
"How does it work when we thus anticipate God by going our own
way? We certainly weaken faith
instead of increasing it; and each time we work thus a deliverance of our
own we find it more and more difficult to trust in God, till at last we give
way entirely to our natural fallen reason and unbelief prevails.
How different if one is enabled to wait God's own time, and to look
alone to him for help and deliverance! When at last help comes, after many
seasons of prayer it may be, how sweet it is, and what a present recompense!
Dear Christian reader, if you have never walked in this path of
obedience before, do so now, and you will then know experimentally the
sweetness of the joy which results from it."[313]
[312]
Ibid., p. 126.
[313]
Op. cit., p. 383, abridged.
When
the supplies came in but slowly, Muller always considered that this was for
the trial of his faith and patience When his faith and patience had been
sufficiently tried, the Lord would send more means. "And thus it has proved,"--I quote from his
diary--"for to-day was given me the sum of 2050 pounds, of which 2000
are for the building fund [of a certain house], and 50 for present
necessities. It is impossible
to describe my joy in God when I received this donation. I was neither excited nor surprised; for I LOOK out for
answers to my prayers. I
BELIEVE THAT GOD HEARS ME. Yet
my heart was so full of joy that I could only SIT before God, and admire
him, like David in 2 Samuel vii. At
last I cast myself flat down upon my face and burst forth in thanksgiving to
God and in surrendering my heart afresh to him for his blessed
service."[314]
[314]
Ibid., p. 323
George
Muller's is a case extreme in every respect, and in no respect more so than
in the extraordinary narrowness of the man's intellectual horizon.
His God was, as he often said, his business partner.
He seems to have been for Muller little more than a sort of
supernatural clergyman interested in the congregation of tradesmen and
others in Bristol who were his saints, and in the orphanages and other
enterprises, but unpossessed of any of those vaster and wilder and more
ideal attributes with which the human imagination elsewhere has invested
him. Muller, in short, was
absolutely unphilosophical. His
intensely private and practical conception of his relations with the Deity
continued the traditions of the most primitive human thought.[315]
When we compare a mind like his with such a mind as, for example,
Emerson's or Phillips Brooks's, we see the range which the religious
consciousness covers.
[315]
I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an even more
primitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arber's English
Garland, vol. vii. p. 440. Robert
Lyde, an English sailor, along with an English boy, being prisoners on a
French ship in 1689, set upon the crew, of seven Frenchmen, killed two, made
the other five prisoners, and brought home the ship.
Lyde thus describes how in this feat he found his God a very present
help in time of trouble:--
"With
the assistance of God I kept my feet when they three and one more did strive
to throw me down. Feeling the
Frenchman which hung about my middle hang very heavy, I said to the boy, 'Go
round the binnacle, and knock down that man that hangeth on my back.'
So the boy did strike him one blow on the head which made him fall. .
. . Then I looked about for a marlin spike or anything else to strike them
withal. But seeing nothing, I
said, 'LORD! what shall I do?' Then
casting up my eye upon my left side, and seeing a marlin spike hanging, I
jerked my right arm and took hold, and struck the point four times about a
quarter of an inch deep into the skull of that man that had hold of my left
arm. [One of the Frenchmen then
hauled the marlin spike away from him.]
But through GOD'S wonderful providence! it either fell out of his
hand, or else he threw it down, and at this time the Almighty GOD gave me
strength enough to take one man in one hand, and throw at the other's head:
and looking about again to see anything to strike them withal, but
seeing nothing, I said, 'LORD! what shall I do now?'
And then it pleased GOD to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of the men had hold of my right arm, yet GOD
Almighty strengthened me so that I put my right hand into my right pocket,
drew out the knife and sheath, . . . put it between my legs and drew it out,
and then cut the man's throat with it that had his back to my breast:
and he immediately dropt down, and scarce ever stirred
after."--I have slightly abridged Lyde's narrative.
There
is an immense literature relating to answers to petitional prayer.
The evangelical journals are filled with such answers, and books are
devoted to the subject,[316] but for us Muller's case will suffice.
[316]
As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by the Bishop of Ripon and others,
London, 1898; Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer,
Harrisburg, Pa., 1898 (?); H. L. Hastings:
The Guiding Hand, or Providential Direction, illustrated by Authentic
Instances, Boston, 1898(?).
A
less sturdy beggar-like fashion of leading the prayerful life is followed by
innumerable other Christians. Persistence
in leaning on the Almighty for support and guidance will, such persons say,
bring with it proofs, palpable but much more subtle, of his presence and
active influence. The following
description of a "led" life, by a German writer whom I have
already quoted, would no doubt appear to countless Christians in every
country as if transcribed from their own personal experience. One finds in this guided sort of life, says Dr. Hilty--
"That
books and words (and sometimes people) come to one's cognizance just at the
very moment in which one needs them; that one glides over great dangers as
if with shut eyes, remaining ignorant of what would have terrified one or
led one astray, until the peril is past--this being especially the case with
temptations to vanity and sensuality; that paths on which one ought not to
wander are, as it were, hedged off with thorns; but that on the other side
great obstacles are suddenly removed; that when the time has come for
something, one suddenly receives a courage that formerly failed, or
perceives the root of a matter that until then was concealed, or discovers
thoughts, talents, yea, even pieces of knowledge and insight, in one's self,
of which it is impossible to say whence they come; finally, that persons
help us or decline to help us, favor us or refuse us, as if they had to do
so against their will, so that often those indifferent or even unfriendly to
us yield us the greatest service and furtherance.
(God takes often their worldly goods, from those whom he leads, at
just the right moment, when they threaten to impede the effort after higher
interests.)
"Besides
all this, other noteworthy things come to pass, of which it is not easy to
give account. There is no doubt
whatever that now one walks continually through 'open doors' and on the
easiest roads, with as little care and trouble as it is possible to imagine.
"Furthermore
one finds one's self settling one's affairs neither too early nor too late,
whereas they were wont to be spoiled by untimeliness, even when the
preparations had been well laid. In addition to this, one does them with
perfect tranquillity of mind, almost as if they were matters of no
consequence, like errands done by us for another person, in which case we
usually act more calmly than when we act in our own concerns.
Again, one finds that one can WAIT for everything patiently, and that
is one of life's great arts. One
finds also that each thing comes duly, one thing after the other, so that
one gains time to make one's footing sure before advancing farther.
And then every thing occurs to us at the right moment, just what we
ought to do, etc., and often in a very striking way, just as if a third
person were keeping watch over those things which we are in easy danger of
forgetting.
"Often,
too, persons are sent to us at the right time, to offer or ask for what is
needed, and what we should never have had the courage or resolution to
undertake of our own accord.
"Through
all these experiences one finds that one is kindly and tolerant of other
people, even of such as are repulsive, negligent, or ill-willed, for they
also are instruments of good in God's hand, and often most efficient ones.
Without these thoughts it would be hard for even the best of us
always to keep our equanimity. But with the consciousness of divine guidance, one sees many
a thing in life quite differently from what would otherwise be possible.
"All
these are things that every human being KNOWS, who has had experience of
them; and of which the most speaking examples could be brought forward.
The highest resources of worldly wisdom are unable to attain that
which, under divine leading, comes to us of its own accord."[317]
[317]
C. Hilty: Gluck, Dritter Theil,
1900, pp. 92 ff.
Such
accounts as this shade away into others where the belief is, not that
particular events are tempered more towardly to us by a superintending
providence, as a reward for our reliance, but that by cultivating the
continuous sense of our connection with the power that made things as they
are, we are tempered more towardly for their reception. The outward face of nature need not alter, but the
expressions of meaning in it alter. It
was dead and is alive again. It is like the difference between looking on a
person without love, or upon the same person with love.
In the latter case intercourse springs into new vitality.
So when one's affections keep in touch with the divinity of the
world's authorship, fear and egotism fall away; and in the equanimity that
follows, one finds in the hours, as they succeed each other, a series of
purely benignant opportunities. It
is as if all doors were opened, and all paths freshly smoothed.
We meet a new world when we meet the old world in the spirit which
this kind of prayer infuses.
Such
a spirit was that of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.[318]
It is that of mind-curers, of the transcendentalists, and of the
so-called "liberal" Christians.
As an expression of it, I will quote a page from one of Martineau's
sermons:--
[318]
"Good Heaven!" says Epictetus, "any one thing in the creation
is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful mind.
The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from milk,
and wool from skins; who formed and planned it?
Ought we not, whether we dig or plough or eat, to sing this hymn to
God? Great is God, who has
supplied us with these instruments to till the ground; great is God, who has
given us hands and instruments of digestion, who has given us to grow
insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These
things we ought forever to celebrate. . . . But because the most of you are
blind and insensible, there must be some one to fill this station, and lead,
in behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for what else can I do, a lame old
man, but sing hymns to God? Were
I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the
part of a swan. But since I am
a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise God . . . and I call on you
to join the same song." Works, book i. ch. xvi., Carter-Higginson
(translation) abridged.
"The
universe, open to the eye to-day, looks as it did a thousand years ago:
and the morning hymn of Milton does but tell the beauty with which
our own familiar sun dressed the earliest fields and gardens of the world.
We see what all our fathers saw.
And if we cannot find God in your house or in mine, upon the roadside
or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day
duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in the
procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and
dropping off; I do not think we should discern him any more on the grass of
Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane.
Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the
soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the
sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach.
The devout feel that wherever God's hand is, THERE is miracle:
and it is simply an indevoutness which imagines that only where
miracle is, can there be the real hand of God.
The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our eyes than
its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired,
than the strange things which he does not love well enough ever to repeat.
And he who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning,
the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent
surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise.
It is no outward change, no shifting in time or place; but only the
loving meditation of the pure in heart, that can reawaken the Eternal from
the sleep within our souls: that can render him a reality again, and reassert for him
once more his ancient name of 'the Living God.'"[319]
[319]
James Martineau: end of the
sermon "Help Thou Mine Unbelief," in Endeavours after a Christian
Life, 2d series. Compare with
this page the extract from Voysey on p. 270, above, and those from Pascal
and Madame Guyon on p. 281.
When
we see all things in God, and refer all things to him, we read in common
matters superior expressions of meaning.
The deadness with which custom invests the familiar vanishes, and
existence as a whole appears transfigured. The state of a mind thus awakened
from torpor is well expressed in these words, which I take from a friend's
letter:--
"If
we occupy ourselves in summing up all the mercies and bounties we are
privileged to have, we are overwhelmed by their number (so great that we can
imagine ourselves unable to give ourselves time even to begin to review the
things we may imagine WE HAVE NOT). We
sum them and realize that WE ARE ACTUALLY KILLED WITH GOD'S KINDNESS; that
we are surrounded by bounties upon bounties, without which all would fall.
Should we not love it; should we not feel buoyed up by the Eternal
Arms?"
Sometimes
this realization that facts are of divine sending, instead of being
habitual, is casual, like a mystical experience.
Father Gratry gives this instance from his youthful melancholy
period:--
"One
day I had a moment of consolation, because I met with something which seemed
to me ideally perfect. It was a
poor drummer beating the tattoo in the streets of Paris. I walked behind him in returning to the school on the evening
of a holiday. His drum gave out the tattoo in such a way that, at that
moment at least, however peevish I were, I could find no pretext for
fault-finding. It was
impossible to conceive more nerve or spirit, better time or measure, more
clearness or richness, than were in this drumming.
Ideal desire could go no farther in that direction.
I was enchanted and consoled; the perfection of this wretched act did
me good. Good is at least
possible, I said. since the ideal can thus sometimes get
embodied."[320]
[320]
Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122.
In
Senancour's novel of Obermann a similar transient lifting of the veil is
recorded. In Paris streets, on
a March day, he comes across a flower in bloom, a jonquil:
"It
was the strongest expression of desire:
it was the first perfume of the year.
I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony
of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete.
I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous.
I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was
that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty. . . .
I shall never inclose in a conception this power, this immensity that
nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a
better world which one feels, but which, it seems, nature has not made
actual."[321]
[321]
Op. cit., Letter XXX.
We
heard in previous lectures of the vivified face of the world as it may
appear to converts after their awakening.[322] As a rule, religious persons
generally assume that whatever natural facts connect themselves in any way
with their destiny are significant of the divine purposes with them. Through
prayer the purpose, often far from obvious, comes home to them, and if it be
"trial," strength to endure the trial is given.
Thus at all stages of the prayerful life we find the persuasion that
in the process of communion energy from on high flows in to meet demand, and
becomes operative within the phenomenal world.
So long as this operativeness is admitted to be real, it makes no
essential difference whether its immediate effects be subjective or
objective. The fundamental religious point is that in prayer, spiritual
energy, which otherwise would slumber, does become active, and spiritual
work of some kind is effected really.
[322]
Above, p. 243 ff. Compare the
withdrawal of expression from the world, in Melancholiacs, p. 148.
So
much for Prayer, taken in the wide sense of any kind of communion.
As the core of religion, we must return to it in the next lecture.
The
last aspect of the religious life which remains for me to touch upon is the
fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with the
subconscious part of our existence. You may remember what I said in my
opening lecture[323] about the prevalence of the psychopathic temperament in
religious biography. You will
in point of fact hardly find a religious leader of any kind in whose life
there is no record of automatisms. I
speak not merely of savage priests and prophets, whose followers regard
automatic utterance and action as by itself tantamount to inspiration, I
speak of leaders of thought and subjects of intellectualized experience.
Saint Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues, small
as was the importance he attached to the latter. The whole array of
Christian saints and heresiarchs, including the greatest, the Barnards, the
Loyolas, the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices,
rapt conditions, guiding impressions, and "openings." They had these things, because they had exalted
sensibility, and to such things persons of exalted sensibility are liable.
In such liability there lie, however, consequences for theology.
Beliefs are strengthened wherever automatisms corroborate them. Incursions from beyond the transmarginal region have a
peculiar power to increase conviction.
The inchoate sense of presence is infinitely stronger than
conception, but strong as it may be, it is seldom equal to the evidence of
hallucination. Saints who
actually see or hear their Saviour reach the acme of assurance.
Motor automatisms, though rarer, are, if possible, even more
convincing than sensations. The
subjects here actually feel themselves played upon by powers beyond their
will. The evidence is dynamic;
the God or spirit moves the very organs of their body.[324]
[323]
Above, pp. 25, 26.
[324]
A friend of mine, a first-rate psychologist, who is a subject of graphic
automatism, tells me that the appearance of independent actuation in the
movements of his arm, when he writes automatically, is so distinct that it
obliges him to abandon a psychophysical theory which he had previously
believed in, the theory, namely, that we have no feeling of the discharge
downwards of our voluntary motor-centres.
We must normally have such a feeling, he thinks, or the SENSE OF AN
ABSENCE would not be so striking as it is in these experiences.
Graphic automatism of a fully developed kind is rare in religious
history, so far as my knowledge goes. Such
statements as Antonia Bourignon's, that "I do nothing but lend my hand
and spirit to another power than mine," is shown by the context to
indicate inspiration rather than directly automatic writing. In some eccentric sects this latter occurs.
The most striking instance of it is probably the bulky volume called,
"Oahspe, a new Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his angel
ambassadors," Boston and London, 1891, written and illustrated
automatically by Dr. Newbrough of New York, whom I understand to be now, or
to have been lately, at the head of the spiritistic community of Shalam in
New Mexico. The latest
automatically written book which has come under my notice is "Zertouhem's
Wisdom of the Ages," by George A. Fuller, Boston, 1901.
The
great field for this sense of being the instrument of a higher power is of
course "inspiration." It
is easy to discriminate between the religious leaders who have been
habitually subject to inspiration and those who have not.
In the teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Saint Paul (apart from
his gift of tongues), of Saint Augustine, of Huss, of Luther, of Wesley,
automatic or semi-automatic composition appears to have been only
occasional. In the Hebrew
prophets, on the contrary, in Mohammed, in some of the Alexandrians, in many
minor Catholic saints, in Fox, in Joseph Smith, something like it appears to
have been frequent, sometimes habitual.
We have distinct professions of being under the direction of a
foreign power, and serving as its mouthpiece.
As regards the Hebrew prophets, it is extraordinary, writes an author
who has made a careful study of them, to see--
"How,
one after another, the same features are reproduced in the prophetic books.
The process is always extremely different from what it would be if
the prophet arrived at his insight into spiritual things by the tentative
efforts of his own genius. There is something sharp and sudden about it.
He can lay his finger, so to speak, on the moment when it came. And it always comes in the form of an overpowering force from
without, against which he struggles, but in vain. Listen, for instance, [to] the opening of the book of
Jeremiah. Read through in like
manner the first two chapters of the prophecy of Ezekiel.
"It
is not, however, only at the beginning of his career that the prophet passes
through a crisis which is clearly not self- caused. Scattered all through the prophetic writings are expressions
which speak of some strong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the
prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time, constraining
his utterance, making his words the vehicle of a higher meaning than their
own. For instance, this of
Isaiah's: 'The Lord spake thus
to me with a strong hand,'--an emphatic phrase which denotes the
overmastering nature of the impulse--'and instructed me that I should not
walk in the way of this people.' . . . Or passages like this from Ezekiel:
'The hand of the Lord God fell upon me,' 'The hand of the Lord was
strong upon me.' The one standing characteristic of the prophet is that he
speaks with the authority of Jehovah himself.
Hence it is that the prophets one and all preface their addresses so
confidently, 'The Word of the Lord,' or 'Thus saith the Lord.' They have
even the audacity to speak in the first person, as if Jehovah himself were
speaking. As in Isaiah:
'Hearken unto me, O Jacob, and Israel my called; I am He, I am the
First, I also am the last,'--and so on.
The personality of the prophet sinks entirely into the background; he
feels himself for the time being the mouthpiece of the Almighty."[325]
[325]
W. Sanday: The Oracles of God,
London, 1892, pp. 49-56, abridged.
"We
need to remember that prophecy was a profession, and that the prophets
formed a professional class. There
were schools of the prophets, in which the gift was regularly cultivated.
A group of young men would gather round some commanding figure--a
Samuel or an Elisha--and would not only record or spread the knowledge of
his sayings and doings, but seek to catch themselves something of his
inspiration. It seems that
music played its part in their exercises. . . .
It is perfectly clear that by no means all of these Sons of the
prophets ever succeeded in acquiring more than a very small share in the
gift which they sought. It was
clearly possible to 'counterfeit' prophecy.
Sometimes this was done deliberately. . . .
But it by no means follows that in all cases where a false message
was given, the giver of it was altogether conscious of what he was
doing.[326]
[326]
Op. cit., p. 91. This author
also cites Moses's and Isaiah's commissions, as given in Exodus, chaps. iii.
and iv., and Isaiah, chap. vi.
Here,
to take another Jewish case, is the way in which Philo of Alexandria
describes his inspiration:--
"Sometimes,
when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly become full; ideas being
in an invisible manner showered upon me, and implanted in me from on high;
so that through the influence of divine inspiration, I have become greatly
excited, and have known neither the place in which I was, nor those who were
present, nor myself, nor what I was saying, nor what I was writing, for then
I have been conscious of a richness of interpretation, an enjoyment of
light, a most penetrating insight, a most manifest energy in all that was to
be done; having such effect on my mind as the clearest ocular demonstration
would have on the eyes."[327]
[327]
Quoted by Augustus Clissold: The
Prophetic Spirit in Genius and Madness, 1870, p. 67. Mr. Clissold is a Swedenborgian.
Swedenborg's case is of course the palmary one of audita et visa,
serving as a basis of religious revelation.
If
we turn to Islam, we find that Mohammed's revelations all came from the
subconscious sphere. To the
question in what way he got them--
"Mohammed
is said to have answered that sometimes he heard a knell as from a bell, and
that this had the strongest effect on him; and when the angel went away, he
had received the revelation. Sometimes
again he held converse with the angel as with a man, so as easily to
understand his words. The later
authorities, however, . . . distinguish still other kinds.
In the Itgan (103) the following are enumerated:
1, revelations with sound of bell, 2, by inspiration of the holy
spirit in M.'s heart, 3, by Gabriel in human form, 4, by God immediately,
either when awake (as in his journey to heaven) or in dream. . . . In
Almawahib alladuniya the kinds are thus given:
1, Dream, 2, Inspiration of Gabriel in the Prophet's heart, 3,
Gabriel taking Dahya's form, 4, with the bell-sound, etc., 5, Gabriel in
propria persona (only twice), 6, revelation in heaven, 7, God appearing in
person, but veiled, 8, God revealing himself immediately without veil.
Others add two other stages, namely:
1, Gabriel in the form of still another man, 2, God showing himself
personally in dream."[328]
[328]
Noldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, 1860, p. 16.
Compare the fuller account in Sir William Muir's:
Life of Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch. iii.
In
none of these cases is the revelation distinctly motor. In the case of
Joseph Smith (who had prophetic revelations innumerable in addition to the
revealed translation of the <472> gold plates which resulted in the
Book of Mormon), although there may have been a motor element, the
inspiration seems to have been predominantly sensorial.
He began his translation by the aid of the "peep-stones"
which he found, or thought or said that he found, with the gold plates
--apparently a case of "crystal gazing."
For some of the other revelations he used the peep-stones, but seems
generally to have asked the Lord for more direct instruction.[329]
[329]
The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations accorded
to the President of the Church and its Apostles.
From an obliging letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I
quote the following extract:--
"It
may be very interesting for you to know that the President [Mr. Snow] of the
Mormon Church claims to have had a number of revelations very recently from
heaven. To explain fully what
these revelations are, it is necessary to know that we, as a people, believe
that the Church of Jesus Christ has again been established through
messengers sent from heaven. This
Church has at its head a prophet seer, and revelator, who gives to man God's
holy will. Revelation is the
means through which the will of God is declared directly and in fullness to
man. These revelations are got
through dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind, by voices without
visional appearance or by actual manifestations of the Holy Presence before
the eye. We believe that God
has come in person and spoken to our prophet and revelator."
Other
revelations are described as "openings"--Fox's, for example, were
evidently of the kind know |
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