Part 15

Not we shall pass away, but the present world shall pass away: this is the one great thought which must lift us above all the terrors of uncertainty. The other bright point in this darkness which the understanding alone can not illumine, is the thought that the Lord of all existence, whom we have already learned to know here as a sure friend, must be quite the same for us there also as he was here, only still nearer joined to us and still clearer known.

His voice--and this all know who have once stood near the dark exit-gate of this life--his voice we shall be able to hear at last, when all else has already sunk away behind us. Then, only one step further, and

“I hope to see my pilot face to face, When I have crossed the bar.”

VII. THE PROLEGOMENA OF CHRISTIANITY

VII. THE PROLEGOMENA OF CHRISTIANITY

The cardinal fault of Christianity, which has persisted from generation to generation for centuries, is perhaps this: that Christianity has for long been no genuine, vigorous conviction of all those who bear its name, but only a general notion of somewhat the same meaning as “humanity” or “civilization.” Thus year after year many thousands are received into its formal constituency without ever in their lives receiving a correct idea of its demands, or a firm trust in its promises, or, least of all, any definite resolution and will to hold themselves in duty bound by these demands and promises. The “Christian” nations distinguish themselves from the non-Christian in much the same way as the ancient “Greeks” distinguished themselves from the “Barbarians”; and the Christian faith has grown to be a special confession within the borders of Christendom; while quite other convictions, never shared by Christ and his first confessors, and conceptions of the world which claim an equal right in a “Christian” state, venture to stand opposed to Christianity.

We may leave it undecided whether this is a fate that overtakes every religion which ripens into a “world-religion,” but may nevertheless doubt whether the formation of such a world-religion by means of a great attenuation of all religious demands ever lay in the original meaning and task of Christianity; even if one may grant that, even in this form it has been a magnificent tool of civilization and, in fact, is still such.

Yet it is certain that this course of evolution was dimly felt, even by the first generation of Christians, as an unavoidable though deplorable fate, and that the formal victory of the Christian religion over the heathen cults in the Roman Empire, and the consequent transformation into a Roman state religion, brought into it an element that Christ himself, before Pilate, the Roman governor of Judæa, had disavowed in the most distinct manner. All which has since been called “the Church,” or “the relations between the Church and the State,” and which has taken up so great a space in the thoughts of the nations, has, as an organization, no support in the original records of Christianity; indeed, it often almost seems as though the attainment of a definite goal of human development and the consequent end of the present age of the world were dimly surmised by the early Christians to be nearer than proved possible, in the sequel. The Kingdom of God is wholly founded upon the freedom of the human will, and it depends on that with what speed and intensity Christianity will or can come to realization in an individual, or in a nation, or in an epoch.

It is a serious article of belief with the Protestant group of churches, that not merely in a general way, but for every single individual during his earthly life, Christianity is to be realized through a “church”; this “church” stands for the continuous visible embodiment of Christianity, and accordingly it receives the individual into its constituency as a mere unit in the totality, in order that it may furnish him a safe passage through the judgment that shall finally take place on all the deeds of men. And this does not prevent many men, in all the Christian communions, from believing that membership in these communions is the chief matter; and they busy themselves about the fundamental conditions of such a membership only for a couple of hours on Sundays.

This accounts for the title of this chapter. For we are going to ask, not what belongs dogmatically to the Christian doctrine, but what kind of preliminary dispositions are required in the human intellect and will before we can accept and understand the teachings of Christianity. In this sense they are “prolegomena.” If some reader, after going through this chapter, should say that the very substance of Christianity itself lies therein, I shall not disturb him in his conception; for his conception would at any rate do him less harm than the other view, which would declare these preliminaries to be too difficult, or not necessary, for entrance into the church of Christ.

These first steps are quite easily outlined in a few words: first, to regard God as an actual existence and not as a mere philosophical idea of the schools,--and then, in consequence, to fear him alone and to serve him alone--to have no other idols beside him, neither men, nor possessions, nor glory; secondly, to love the men among whom one is placed “as oneself,” as Christ says, in practical words we can understand--not often more than oneself apparently, and as a matter of fact, in most cases less; thirdly, not to devote one’s life to pleasure even of the so-called “noblest” sorts, nor, on the other hand, to suffering, to mere asceticism,--but to surrender oneself to the doing of the will of God, in the firm confidence that this must be practicable, though not through one’s own moral power, yet through the divine help and grace; and, fourthly, if any one should at first doubt whether all this is possible for man, to believe that, so far as concerns himself, the matter lies only in his will, the only thing he can, but must, contribute thereto.

These are the “prolegomena” of Christianity which every one must consider, before he resolves, upon reaching his years of discretion, to make a real entrance into the Christian life, instead of going forward upon the broader way, easier at the first, but sure to be unsatisfactory in the end.

If he does not consider these things, or if he relies upon his own strength in the conduct of life because he trusts in the possibility of an ethical uplifting tendency already present in human nature and does not think he needs any transcendental support, then he is either like the man in the Gospel who built a house upon the sand which stood only as long as the weather was fair, or like that other who began to build a tower which afterward he could not finish.

Or if he finds these demands too high-pitched, then, even under the best conditions, there springs up in him that consumptive, anæmic, half-hearted Christianity which is forever evading the urgings of conscience and is consequently always dissatisfied--that hypocritical and unlovely Christianity which we all know only too well.

It is not necessary to say much in “explanation” of these demands. The requirements of the Christian religion are not usually lacking in clearness; it is the human will that is lacking in the resoluteness to accept them. It much prefers to have them explained away.

Belief in God is naturally the first and the most necessary preliminary stipulation of Christianity, without which it does not exist, or is but an empty dissembling name for an entirely different way of thinking. This is also the case when the word “God” is accepted as a designation for the totality of all things, or the Absolute Being, or, as with most adherents of “deism,” as an expression for a something that exercises no influence upon worldly things, but somehow exists only as the law that in the beginning created the universe, but is now forever unchangeable; where it itself came from and why it no longer continues vital and active, no one can tell.

To be sure, we can not explain a “living” God, as we have often already said. All explanations or so-called proofs of God are defective, both the positive and the negative. It is not worth the trouble to linger over them. God is something that can not be explained, but he is not something that can not be experienced. But he is to be experienced only by those who “keep his laws,” and one may be practically quite sure that those people who will not do this are atheists at bottom, in spite of all their asseverations; just as there are men, on the other hand, whom God probably still regards as his followers, though we have ourselves long given up regarding them as such.

The experience of God expresses itself thus: first, in spiritual tranquillity, satisfaction, quieting of the thirst for truth (as Christ calls it), a sort of strengthening of the spirit and of the inner life such as is vainly to be attained in any other way, whether through philosophy, or through a refusal to think at all about such things; second, in inward serenity which, gained in any other way, is not so long-enduring; and finally, in a general deeper intensity of life, the effective cause of physical and spiritual health and so of the manifold blessing which springs from this belief in God, both for individuals and for nations.

It is this blessing that is showing itself when all one’s circumstances, apparently of their own motion, so shape themselves that what is truly excellent (the furthering of the inner, the protection of the outer life) always prevails, and danger is averted; on the other hand, no travelling in byways, no wrong actions, are attended with good results. The latter is the usual punishment of evil men, whereby they are hardened and kept from turning to a better life. It is also the ever-visible means of distinguishing between the divine blessing and that outwardly similar worldly “good fortune” in which even the shrewdest of men often put an inconceivable and quite groundless confidence, until, some time or other, it leaves them in the midst of dire difficulties; for the most part at the very moment when they believed they had definitely secured it and had attained to the proud summit of their desires. Men are never faithful to the mere “children of fortune,” but only to their fortune; while they can not, if they wanted to, oppose those endowed with the divine blessing.

On this point the Old Testament contains many positive assurances and many actual examples, and it may in general be said that for the presentation of the Laws of God the New Testament alone would not suffice; nor is that its purpose, for it always implies a knowledge of the Old Testament.

“The man who keepeth my laws shall thereby live,” is the sum of these promises. For these laws are the principle of life itself, and to ignore them is to come within the jurisdiction of death. That may be put to the test, and ought to be put to the test, if it is done with a sincere desire to know what to believe, and if it is not continually repeated after one has once gained a sufficiently clear knowledge. But for those who will not do even that there is nothing left save to make for themselves other gods “to go before them.”

These gods are, as a rule, human beings or the products of their mind in some form,--once again to-day, as in the period of the so-called Renaissance, preëminently in the form of art. Great crudeness of morals and the absence indeed of all ethical conceptions may go hand in hand with the finest and highest culture in this special direction, thus showing that art can not be the highest goal men can strive for and attain. We ought not to have had to experience this for the second time, though it is often to be feared that we are now doing so.

We should never make idols for ourselves of even the dearest and best men, not to speak of those who are highly gifted or hold a high place in the world’s esteem. Not only the New Testament, but even the Old, lays down in a very practical way the proper and easily recognized limit; for they prescribe that we are to love God “above all,” and men “as ourselves,” no more and no less. Even the simplest person can easily compute this; and if in certain exuberant, “heavenly” moments of life it seems too little, yet, taking one’s whole life into account, it is really more than any of us perform, and at any rate is much more salutary for our neighbor.

The opposite quality to “reliance upon men” is (what at first seems unlikely) sympathetic compassion; when reliance departs, compassion enters to heal. This is something quite different from what is ordinarily called “love to men,” and is much more. It is something, too, that does not naturally lie within us; we have to learn it, usually late in life and through troublous paths. But when a man has it, then it is henceforth sure that he is “fit for the Kingdom of God.”

If it is not men and their works, then it is possessions, ambition, or the continuous search for enjoyment that stands most in the way of that sincere union of the human soul with the divine spirit which necessarily forms the foundation of all Christianity;--above all, it is the “deceitfulness of riches,” as the Gospel well calls it, the very common delusion that possession and happiness are identical, a delusion from which the man first awakes when he holds in his hands that for which he was striving and for which he had often sacrificed body and soul; and now for the first he discovers that, looked at closely, it was not, even on the best interpretation, worth all this exertion.

In the Gospel are found these words of Jesus: Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth; ye can not serve God and Mammon; whosoever he be of you that renounces not all that he hath, he can not be my disciple. If I were an adherent of the atheistic Socialism of our day, I would constantly hold up these sayings of their Lord and Master before the sincere followers of Christianity, who are by far the most dangerous opponents of Socialism; for if they should obey these sayings, without any further effort the solution of the social question would follow. But there are many passages of the Bible which are almost divested of their value because of a kind of disqualifying law of customary usage; or they are at least not spoken of in religious circles, because they have little that is “edifying” for many of those present.

If we must admit that such passages designate the goal or ideal toward which we should strive, rather than that to which every one can at once attain, we should, nevertheless, keep our eyes continually upon it and have the earnest will to make our way thither; else all the other messages of the Gospel profit us nothing and are for us as if they were not there.

To speak practically, then, one must never fix his heart upon possessions, nor regard them as the most important thing to be lived and striven for, nor make them the measure of his valuation of men and circumstances, nor be unready or disinclined to diminish them at any time for the sake of God or the common good, and if necessary even to give them up altogether. They who can do this when it is required of them are the only men who are free and worthy of God’s kingdom. At different times in life they will often be put to this test, and if this has never yet happened, it is no good sign for their inner life or for their standing in God’s grace. Often it goes no farther than the testing of their will, and when the will has surrendered, God does not require of them the actual deed, or he lets the trial so shape itself that in the end it is the more easily endurable. Sometimes, however, as with Job, it comes to a real loss of all one’s goods; and not always is there finally a double compensation therefor, but there always is a complete consolation for what one has done, provided one will seek for it and not merely helplessly and weakly bewail. In order always to have the mastery of oneself and to put this to the proof, it may often be a good thing, even before one resolves upon Christianity, to make the test of Polycrates, who cast a much-treasured ring into the sea. Try it once, this surrender of your dearest possession; though, to be sure, the test will in most cases come to you unbidden, if it is your lot to become a free man by God’s grace instead of a slave to Mammon. But no matter how it comes to you, if you have shown yourself able to make this surrender, you will be set free from the strongest fetter with which the spirit of the world keeps man bound; the rest of your possessions will henceforth become more a matter of indifference to you. Of course, in this question of possessions, the concern is rather with the spirit and the will than with the mere deed. One can also “possess as though he possessed not” (though the possibility of deception here is very great), and if one no longer spends anything for mere enjoyment or luxury, but applies everything to useful ends, not counting among such ends the mere senseless heaping up of possessions for heirs and successors down to the remotest ages, then one may believe his actions respond to the real meaning of the words of Christ. We at least will not cast the first stone at those who so comport themselves.