The Conquest of Fear Part 4

G.o.d AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION

I

It will be clear from what I have said already that I see no fundamental conquest of fear that is not based in G.o.d. There may be knacks by which fear can be nipped and expedients by which it may be outwitted, but its extermination can be brought about, it seems to me, only in one way.

According to our capacity and our individual needs we must know G.o.d; and knowing G.o.d is not as difficult as the Caucasian mind is apt to think.

It stands to reason that if knowing G.o.d, in the senses in which it is possible to know Him, is so essential to mankind it could not be difficult. The making it difficult is part of the dust the Caucasian throws in his own eyes.

We know G.o.d through His Self-Expression, and His Self-Expression is round about us in every form. Except through His Self-Expression there is no way of our knowing Him. No speculation or theory will teach us to know Him. It must be His own revelation of Himself, or nothing.

II

Such little knowledge of Him as has come to me came much more freely when I began to look for that revelation not alone in solemn mysteries, or through the mediums.h.i.+p of prophets, apostles, and ancient scriptures, but in the sights and sounds and happenings of every day. Here I must ask not to be misunderstood. The solemn mysteries have their place, but it is one of climax. The mediums.h.i.+p of prophets, apostles, and ancient scriptures is of unreckonable value, after I have done something for myself. By this I do not mean that all cannot work together simultaneously, but rather that it is useless for the soul to strike only at the more advanced, having ignored the elementary.

As I write I look out on a street full of the touches of spring. The rain-washed gra.s.s is of bright new green. The elms are in tenderest leaf, the hawthorn bursting into flower. Here and there a yellow clump of forsythia is like a spot of suns.h.i.+ne. Tulips are opening their variegated cups, and daffodils line the walls. Dogs are capering about, a collie, a setter, a Boston terrier. Birds are carrying straws or bits of string to weave into their nests--or singing--or flying--or perching on boughs. Children are playing--boys on bicycles eagerly racing nowhere--little girls with arms round each others' waists, prattling after their kind. Overhead is a sky of that peculiar blue for which the Chinese have a word which means "the blue of the sky after rain," a hue which only these masters in colour have, to my knowledge, specially observed.

How can I help seeing so much beauty and sweetness as the manifestation of G.o.d? How could He show Himself to me more smilingly? How can I talk of not seeing G.o.d when I see _this_? True, it may be no more than the tip of the fringe of the hem of the robe in which His Being is arrayed; but at least it must be that. True, also, that beautiful as these things appear to physical eyes they must be still more beautiful to spiritual eyes--the eyes of those who have pa.s.sed on, for instance--to say nothing of the delight which G.o.d must have in them Himself. But even with my imperfect mortal vision they are rapturously good, a veritable glimpse of the Divine.

This is what I mean by the elementary--the common, primary thing, the thing I look at every day and hardly ever accredit to its source. I am not speaking pantheistically here, any more than when I spoke of light.

These things are not G.o.d, or part of G.o.d. They are expressions of G.o.d.

If I speak of seeing G.o.d in them I mean that in them, as well as in many other simple things, we see Him as nearly as is possible to such comprehension as ours. "No human eye," writes St. John, "has ever seen G.o.d: the only Son, who is in the Father's bosom--He has made Him known."[8] He made Him known in His own Person; but He appealed also to the everyday sights and sounds, the lily of the field, the blowing wind, the sparrow falling, the children at their mothers' knees, for the evidence to declare Him. As expressions of Him they may be misinterpreted by the error in my physical senses, or distorted by my limitations of spiritual perception; but even then they bring Him near to me in the kind of radiance which I can catch.

[8] Most of the quotations from the New Testament are taken from a recent translation, "The New Testament in Modern Speech," by R.F.

Weymouth and E. Hampden-Cook.

III

In order to banish fear I think it necessary to train the thought to seeing G.o.d as expressing Himself in all the good and pleasant and enjoyable things that come to us. This means forming a habit. It means saying to oneself daily, hourly, "This is G.o.d," "That is G.o.d," of incidents, persons, and things we have rarely thought of in that relation. To do this is not as easy as it would be if our race-mind worked that way; but unfortunately it does not. In general we take our good things for granted, complaining that they are not better. The things we lack are more vivid to us, as a rule, than those we have acquired. Having hung, as it were, a cloud about ourselves we disregard the uncountable ways in which G.o.d persists in s.h.i.+ning through, in spite of our efforts to shut Him out.

To try to enumerate the uncountable would be folly. You cannot reckon the good which comes to every one of us through such channels as family, home, friends.h.i.+p, income, business, amus.e.m.e.nts, studies, holidays, journeys, sports, books, pictures, music, and the other hardly noticed pleasures of any single day. We are used to them. To ascribe them specially to G.o.d would seem to us far-fetched. That is, theoretically we may ascribe them to G.o.d, but practically we dissociate Him from them.

Few of us, I think, ever pause to remember that through them He is making Himself known to us before doing it in any other way.

And yet, it seems to me, this is the beginning of our recognition of the Divine. I have little hesitation in saying that this is what parents should teach children before they teach them to lisp prayers. The prayers have hardly any meaning to the baby-mind, and not much more than a sentimental influence on the later life, if they have as much as that.

But any child, from the very budding of the intelligence, could grasp the idea of a great, loving Super-Father, who was making Himself visible through gifts and care. If he prayed to Him later he would know to whom he was praying. As it is, the later prayers are neglected, or definitely given up, oftener than not, because this is precisely what the child does _not_ know. He does not know it because he was never taught it; and he was never taught it because his parents have probably not been aware of it themselves.

IV

I myself was never taught it. Notwithstanding all for which I am truly grateful, I regret most deeply that so many years of my life went by before I was led to the fact. I am willing to believe that the lack of understanding was my own fault, but a lack of understanding there was. I got the impression that G.o.d, so far from making Himself known to me, was hiding away from me, and that I must have faith to believe in One of whom I had no more than hearsay evidence. If I could do this violence to such measure of reason as I possessed I could count on a reward in some other world than this, though on little or nothing here.

Faith I saw as of the nature of a _tour de force_. You took it as you took a leap. It was spiritually acrobatic. You didn't understand but you _believed_. The less you understood the more credit your belief became to you. The more hidden and difficult and mysterious and unintelligible G.o.d made Himself the greater your merit in having faith in spite of everything. I am far from saying that this is the common understanding of Christians, or from holding others responsible for my misconceptions.

I speak of these misconceptions only because they were mine, and it was I who had to work away from them.

For this reason, too, I speak of my reaching the idea of a G.o.d who had been visibly smiling at me all my life while I had never seen Him, as a "discovery." To me it _was_ a discovery; and it came at a moment when I sorely needed something of the kind.

V

It was perhaps three or four years after the turning-point at Versailles. The intervening time had been one of what I may call spiritual ups and downs. It had not all been straight progress by any means. I had got hold of what for me was a great idea, round which other great ideas grouped themselves; but I grasped them waveringly or intermittently. Nevertheless, during seasons in Boston, Nice, Cannes, Munich, London, and Berlin, life on the whole went hopefully. The malady I have already mentioned tended to grow better rather than worse; the advancing blindness became definitely arrested. I worked easily, happily, successfully. Returning to the New England city which had become my adopted home, I bought a house and settled down to American life once more.

I mention these facts only because they help me to make myself clearer.

For all at once my affairs, like the chariots of Pharaoh in crossing the Red Sea, began to drive heavily. Trust in an all-conquering life-principle which had meant much to me for a time no longer seemed effective. Difficulties ma.s.sed themselves. Business misunderstandings sprang up. Friends.h.i.+ps on which I had counted suddenly grew cold. Worse than all, the working impulse gave out. There were two whole years in which I slaved at producing little more than what had to be thrown away.

My active life had apparently come to another deadening full stop.

I reached the decision that there was but one thing to do--give up the pretence at working, sell the house to which I had grown attached, and resume once more the life of aimless, but at that time inexpensive, European wandering. There came a day when I actually offered my house for sale.

And yet that day proved to be another turning-point. On the very morning when I had put my house in the market the chain of small events which we commonly call accidents brought me into touch with a man I had never seen before. During a first meeting, as well as in several that followed, he made certain matters clear to me which changed my course not only then but ever since. These explanations came under three distinct headings, to each of which I should like to give a little s.p.a.ce.

VI

Of these the one I put first is probably familiar to most of my readers, but to me, I confess, it was new.

G.o.d among His other functions must be a tireless activity working towards an end. Everything He calls into being works toward that end, I myself with the rest. I am not a purposeless bit of jetsam flung out on the ocean of time to be tossed about helplessly. G.o.d couldn't so will an existence. It would not be in keeping with His economy to have any ent.i.ty wasted. As Our Lord puts it, the sparrow cannot fall without Him; without Him the lilies are not decked; the knowledge possessed by His infinite intelligence is so minute that the very hairs of the head are numbered. My life, my work, myself--all are as much a necessary part of His design as the thread the weaver weaves into the pattern in a carpet.

In other words, I am not a free agent. I am His agent. Not only am I responsible to him, but He is responsible for me. His responsibility for me will be seen as soon as I give up being responsible for myself.

It was upon this last point that I seized with most avidity. I was tired of trying to steer a course for myself, with no compa.s.s to go by. I was tired of incessantly travelling along roads which seemed to lead to nothing but blind-ends. To change the figure to one I used not infrequently at that time, my life seemed pitchforked, first in one way and then in another, no way bringing me anywhere. It had no even tenor.

It was a series of seismic pulls and jerks.

But in the light of what my new friend told me I saw I had been too busily engaged in directing my life for myself. I was like a child who hopes to make a smoothly working machine go still more smoothly by prodding it. I couldn't leave it alone. It had not occurred to me that the course of that life was G.o.d's own business, and that if I could follow the psalmist's advice and "commit my way unto him he would bring it to pa.s.s." It had seemed to me that nothing would be brought to pa.s.s unless I worried and fretted over it myself, whereas the same wise old psalmist says, in words which our generation would do well to lay to heart, _"fret not thyself_ else shall thou be moved to do evil."

"Trust in the Lord and do good," he goes on; "so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart."

This was nothing new; it was only new to me. To feel that I could give up being responsible for results and devote myself to my work was in itself a relief. If I tried to "trust in the Lord and do good"--by which I suppose is meant doing my duty to the best of my small ability--He would look after the rest. My position was somewhat that of a trusted subordinate given a free hand, but having over him a supreme authority taking charge of all consequences. I was not working on what our modern idiom neatly summarises as "my own." _I was His agent_.

Thus it might be said to be to His interest to see that as His agent I was sheltered, clothed, fed, and in every way kept in such condition as to be up to the highest standard of His work. This provision would naturally include those dependent on me, and without whose well-being I could not have peace of mind. I need worry about them no more than about myself. They, too, were His agents. In certain conditions He might provide for them through me, or in certain conditions He might provide for me through them; but in all conditions He would provide for all of us.

VII

The second point was this: those with whom I had had misunderstandings were equally His agents. They might not be more aware of the fact than I; but this in no way disqualified them as His trusted subordinates given a free hand. Their work with me and mine with them, whatever its nature, wrought one of the infinite number of blends going to make up the vast complexity of His design.