Part 21

Furthermore, grant that the religious sense of mankind is real, one of the most real things in life,--so real and valuable that the life, the literature, and the art which have it not seem shallow and ephemeral,--a living sense of the Infinite Mystery in which we are embosomed and our constant relation to it,--grant this, I say, and yet our creeds and systems of salvation do not minister to it. They are too legal; they know and explain too much. With them the administration of the universe is as simple and judicial as a police court, save that in human courts of justice there is no deputed sin or atonement. This is a gratuitous, manufactured mystery of the theologians, as are the Trinity and the saving grace of rites and ceremonies.

Science has real mysteries. Catalysis is one. How or why the presence of one body should cause two other bodies to unite chemically without parting with an atom of their own substance--as in several cases in industrial chemistry--is certainly a mystery. On the strength of such and similar facts in chemistry, shall we image or invent a whole category of mysteries which are beyond the reach of verification?

What mystery hovers about all chemical reactions! What a miracle that two invisible gases, such as oxygen and hydrogen, should, when chemically united, produce a body so utterly unlike either as is water! The turning of water into wine is as nothing in comparison, but even that feat we want to see done if we are to believe it.

What a mystery shrouds the whole subject of electricity and electro-magnetism! A sort of disembodied force, working its will upon matter and yet subject to none of the laws of matter. Spirit?--but a spirit we can evoke at will, and make to do our bidding, to run our errands, a spirit more friendly than unfriendly. How prone the common mind is to think that because a thing is mysterious it must be true!

As I have already emphasized, as man is a part of Nature, so are all his creeds and myths, his religions and his philosophies, a part of Nature. What validity does that give them? What support is lent to our creed by the fact that it has been slowly evolved out of the religious experiences of the centuries? Our sense of truth is also an evolution, and varies from age to age. That a thing is a part of Nature does not settle its value. Shadows are a part of Nature; puff-balls, fungi, marsh-gas, disease-germs, and a thousand other undesirable things are a part of Nature.

Although the various religious systems of mankind must have their natural history, I regard them only as so many diverse attempts to clothe the spirit against the cosmic chill of the vast, unhoused, unsanctified, immeasurable out-of-doors of the universe. This they do in varying degrees, and will continue to do, some appealing to one type of mind, or--shall we say?--one stage of development, some to another. The philosopher looks on and smiles, or pities, and is content.

II. THE NATURAL ORDER

Even great thinkers like Mr. Balfour recoil from naturalism and cheerfully embrace supernaturalism. Mr. Balfour finds the key to the fundamental problems of life in the miracle of the Incarnation. He injects into the natural order a theological concept, and the riddle of man’s life is solved. To the naturalist such a conclusion is as impossible as to hope to quench his thirst with the symbols, H_{2}O.

We may say every man born of woman is an incarnation of the Infinite spirit, and the hyperbole may stand, but to affirm that one particular man in the historic period was an incarnation in an entirely other and more significant sense, is to read magic into matters of common sense. It is an imaginary solution. It is an appeal from the natural to the non-natural. It is offering an artificial solution to a natural problem. One might as well attribute a failure of the crops to one of the political parties, or an epidemic of disease to an historical document. The doctrine of the Incarnation is as far outside the realm of natural law as is magic, and to see in this the master key to creation is like ascribing all the sin and misery of the world to Adam’s transgression in the Garden of Eden. The childish plan of salvation of our fathers is as good as any other so long as it holds men up to higher standards of life and of thought; but the day is fast passing when it can do this; natural standards must in the end as surely prevail in religion as in our daily lives.

The nature that we see about us is enough for all forms of life except man; why should he flatter himself that his appearance and life demand something extra, some miracle, something mysterious and incomprehensible? Why not invest the gods we have and know with the extra power demanded, rather than appeal to gods we know not? How the fire warms us, how our food nourishes us, how we sprang from a microscopic germ and grew to be the men we are, are miracles enough. Every living thing is a miracle as wonderful as the Immaculate Conception or the Incarnation, but of a different order. If I knew how the meat and bread which the poet eats is turned into poetry, or how the pond-lily weaves its satin and gold out of the muck and slime of the creek-bottom, I should possess a secret that would make me cease to wonder at the so-called “miracles.” In the face of the marvels we hourly see about us in living Nature, why should we look afar off and invent marvels of a new order? Why should we invent impossible problems, and then invent impossible explanations of them?

The nature gods we know; we live in daily and hourly converse with them; we see and know that we are dependent upon them every moment of our lives. These gods--air, water, fire, earth--and the greater gods whose eyes blink to us in the midnight skies, why not credit them with the gifts that we ascribe to the imaginary gods of the supernatural?

The more we search into the ways of Nature, the more wonderful and potent we find them to be. It may be that if we could penetrate to the true inwardness of matter, we should find the key to the mystery of the soul and the master key to all our problems. But we feel that we must look afar off, we must have recourse to the strange and the miraculous. How the impossible does attract us! Even the fantastic may be made the basis of a religious cult. In Florida, in a remote, secluded place we found a religious sect, embracing men and women of culture and refinement, who upheld the social and civic virtues and cultivated the industrial arts, yet who deemed it essential for their soul’s salvation to disbelieve all our popular astronomy, and hold to the idea that, instead of living on the outside of a globe, we live inside of a hollow sphere, and that the sun, moon, and stars are appendages of this sphere, and not at all what we ordinarily take them to be. The expounders of this faith are not at all disturbed by such facts as a ship at sea dropping below the horizon, or an eclipse of the moon showing the shadow of a round body falling upon it. Such appearances only confirm their theory. These Florida fanatics defy common sense and the exact demonstrations of science. Our supernaturalists superinduce another order above and around the order we call “natural,” and in a theological concept, the Incarnation, link the two together. That they are linked at any other point is not claimed. In the age of miracles they were linked at many points and on many occasions. Any saint could link them together at will, and reverse or hold up the processes of the natural order and substitute those of the supernatural.

Such events as miracles come very easy to the mind imbued with the old theological concepts. Why should not this omnipotent being who made and rules the world and all that it holds, and who has a scheme of his own to carry out with regard to man, step in at any time and annul natural law or link it up with the supernatural? Belief in the theory of such a being cuts many knots, while it ties others that defy all our wits.

Life is so great a mystery that we need not invent others. We have the proof of life always, what proof have we of the Incarnation? We know what destroys life, what favors it, what conserves it, but we do not know its origin. We know something about the stars, and we know the constellations are only imaginary groupings. The historical events upon which our creeds are founded are of the same character. The Trinity is a constellation. The miraculous birth of Christ is a constellation. The fixed stars of man’s moral nature and religious aspirations are alone real. All the mythologies built upon them are as fanciful as Orion and the Big Dipper. All the various religions of the world, with all their supernatural features, are a part of the natural history of man’s religious instincts. Man’s craving for the supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment, and no more significant. The natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it. The understanding becomes sated, and we long for something we cannot understand.

III. LOGIC AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

Of late years I am often moved to say to myself: “Why kick the old theology after it is dead?”--as I have often been tempted to do. It is almost like spurning the bodies of one’s father and mother. The old creeds may be outworn, but they have fathered and mothered us all. They have served and saved untold generations of men. Christianity, mythical and irrational as much of it is, has yet been the salvation of the world for nineteen centuries. Of course it has been a source of evil as well as of good, as all religions are, but the good has greatly predominated. In fact, it is the bed-rock upon which our civilization is founded. It has saved men in this world by inspiring them with the desire to be worthy of a better and future world.

We are saved, I often say, not so much by the truth of what we believe, as by the truth of our belief, by its genuineness, its power over our imaginations, its hold upon our character, its fostering of an incentive to right conduct and noble deeds. Whether it be Catholicism or Calvinism or Methodism or Quakerism or Christian Science or the Japanese ancestor worship or Buddhism, if it holds us to higher ideals and gives sobriety and sincerity to our lives, that is its true function.

In fact, any religion is good which supplies a man or a people with a workable theory of the universe. In practical matters, in dealing with real facts and forces, man is compelled to be logical or he comes to grief--he must keep fire and powder apart. But in his religion and speculations he is bound by no such necessity; he is free to indulge the wildest dreams.

Man does not expect fire or flood or frost or wind or rain to favor him. He does not put fluids in leaky vessels, nor a leaky roof over his head, nor plant his house on a foundation of sand. His carpenter’s level does not lie, nor his plumb-line make a mistake. But in his religion he may be as capricious and fantastic as he pleases; he has a free hand; he may even flog his gods if they displease him, and it is all the same. His creed is a passport to an entirely different world.

The religious sect which I visited in Florida, which held that we live upon the inside of a hollow sphere, treated our astronomy with scorn, yet seemed to live sober, sane lives, and to do honest work. But if they carried out the theory of the hollow sphere in practice, in their navigation, in their clocks and sun-dials, or in anything else, how quickly they would come to grief!

Christianity is a workable hypothesis; it solves the problem of life to vast numbers of persons; but how irrational and puerile its philosophy, founded upon the myth of the fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden! Destroy this myth and you have cut off the tap-root of Christianity. But do we not know, in the light of evolution, that man’s course has been upward and not downward, that his “fall” was, in fact, development into a higher state of being?

Thinking men must find some sort of a solution of the problems of the universe, and feeling men and women must have some tangible, concrete thing that in a measure satisfies their emotional natures. The human heart cannot live on cold philosophical abstractions. The ceremonies and observances and rituals of the Church give one something he can see and feel. For my own part I do not need this sort of thing. Every day is a Sabbath day to me. All pure water is holy water, and this earth is a celestial abode. It has not entered into the mind of any man to see and feel the wonders and the mysteries and the heavenly character of this world.

All religions look away from the earth to some fairer and better abode, quite oblivious of the fact that heaven, wherever we find it, will be of our own making. If we do not find it here, we shall not find it anywhere. But the great mass of struggling, toiling, human kind must be comforted and encouraged by the prospect of emancipation from the grossness and suffering of this world. Goethe acutely said to let those who could not have literature or art or science, have religion.

Think of the many sturdy, God-fearing, church-going, simple folk one has known in his youth--how impossible their creeds, but how worthy their lives! It requires the heroic fiber to accept the creed of Calvinism; it is a proposition that tries a man’s mettle. The current generation is too frivolous and empty to be impressed by it; not one in a thousand is man enough to accept it. The movies suit them better. But what granite stuff went to the making of our Pilgrim fathers!

Cease all Christian effort, all organized Christian charities, all Christian enterprises in the fields of education, social betterment, sanitation, amelioration of the masses, and our civilization would suffer. Then why rail at the old creeds, I say again. They prepared the way for science, and for the religion of nature. Carlyle said to Emerson on that memorable day in 1833 when the two sat down in their walk over the Scottish hills, “Christ died on the tree: that built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together.” The old creeds nursed heroic, God-fearing and God-loving men. True, they sometimes disguised the wolf in sheep’s clothing also, but that is the fault of human nature.

Let us be as faithful to our day and generation as our fathers were to theirs. Wendell Phillips said that to be as good as our fathers were, we must be a good deal better. Shall we rail at our Puritan ancestors for the hardness of their creeds? Although the Pauline plan of salvation seems childish to us, it seemed the foundation of the universe for our fathers. To clinch a nail you need something hard, and the Calvinistic creed has clinched the resolution of many a man.

IV. A CHIP FROM THE OLD BLOCK

It makes me more charitable toward my neighbor’s creed, childish though I think it is, to remember that it came out of his life, or out of the life around him, as truly as did my own. We cannot separate man, and all that revolves around him, from the totality of things. There is no depravity or cruelty or perversion in the world that is not fed by the life of the world. The war that has depopulated and devastated Europe is just as legitimate a part of total Nature as were all the fruits of the ages of peace and prosperity. Everything in the woods is a part of the woods, and bears their stamp; everything in the sea is a part of the sea. The tumor, the ulcer, and the disease, are a part of our bodies, and are fed by its vitality. In our practical lives we are compelled to separate a part from the whole, to accept this and reject that, but when we essay to comprehend the whole we must see that all are but parts, and that our philosophy is lame if it does not see that the so-called good and the so-called bad are fruit of the same tree.