The Meaning of Faith Part 16

Because when the Hebrews wrote the Bible their thoughts of G.o.d, their deep experience of him, were interwoven with their early science, Christians, through the centuries, have thought that faith in G.o.d stood or fell with early Hebrew science and that the Hebrew view of the physical universe must last forever. In the seventeenth century, Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: "Heaven and earth, center and circ.u.mference, were created all together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water.... This work took place and man was created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B. C., at nine o'clock in the morning." Of what tragedy has this identification of science with religion been the cause!

When _astronomy_ began to revolutionize man's idea of the solar universe, when for the first time in man's imagination the flat earth grew round and the stable earth began moving through s.p.a.ce seventy-five times faster than a cannon-ball, Pope Paul V solemnly rendered a decree, that "the doctrine of the double motion of the earth about its axis and about the sun is false and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture." When _geology_ began to show from the rocks'

unimpeachable testimony the long leisureliness of G.o.d, laying the foundations of the world, a Christian leader declared geology "not a subject of lawful inquiry," "a dark art," "dangerous and disreputable,"

"a forbidden province," "an awful evasion of the testimony of revelation." This tragic record of theology's vain conflict with science is the most pitiable part of the Church's story. How needless it was! For now when we face our universe of magnificent distances and regal laws has religion really suffered? Has a flat and stationary earth proved essential to Christianity, as Protestants and Catholics alike declared? Rather the Psalmist could not guess the sweep of our meaning when now we say, "The heavens declare the glory of G.o.d and the firmament showeth his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1).

In the last generation the idea of _evolution_ was the occasion of a struggle like that which attended the introduction of the new astronomy. How was the world made? asked the ancient Hebrew, and he answered, By the word of G.o.d at a stroke. That was his scientific answer, and his religious answer too. When, therefore, the evolving universe was disclosed by modern science, when men read in fossil and in living biological structure the undeniable evidence of a long history of gradually changing forms of life, until the world was seen _not made like a box but growing like a tree_, many men of religion thought the faith destroyed. They identified the Christian Gospel with early Hebrew science! Today, however, when the general idea of evolution is taken for granted as gravitation is, how false this identification obviously appears! Says Professor Bowne, "An Eastern king was seated in a garden, and one of his counselors was speaking of the wonderful works of G.o.d. 'Show me a sign,' said the king, 'and I will believe.' 'Here are four acorns,' said the counselor; 'will your Majesty plant them in the ground, and then stoop down and look into this clear pool of water?' The king did so. 'Now,' said the other, 'Look up.' The king looked up and saw four oak trees where he had planted the acorns. 'Wonderful!' he exclaimed; 'this is indeed the work of G.o.d.' 'How long were you looking into the water?' asked the counselor. 'Only a second,' said the king. 'Eighty years have pa.s.sed as a second,' said the other. The king looked at his garments; they were threadbare. He looked at his reflection in the water; he had become an old man. 'There is no miracle here, then,' he said angrily.

'Yes,' said the other; 'it is G.o.d's work whether he do it in one second or in eighty years.'"

Such an att.i.tude as this is now a commonplace with Christian folk. A vast and growing universe through which sweep the purposes of G.o.d is by far the most magnificent outlook for faith that man has ever had.

The Gospel and Hebrew science are _not_ identical; the Gospel is not indissolubly bound to any science ancient or modern; for science and religion have separable domains.

"A fire-mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian, And caves where cave men dwell.

Then a sense of Love and Duty And a face turned from the clod, Some call it Evolution And others--call it G.o.d."

The same story of needless antagonism is now being written about religion and _natural law_. When science began plotting nature's laws, the control of the world seemed to be s.n.a.t.c.hed from the hands of deity and given over to a system of impersonal rules. G.o.d, whose action had been defined in terms of miracle, was forced from one realm after another by the discovery of laws, until at last even comets were found to be not whimsical but as regular in their law-abiding courses as the planets, and G.o.d seemed to be escorted to the edge of the universe and bowed out. When Newton first formulated the law of gravitation, the artillery of many an earnest pulpit was let loose against him. One said that Newton took "from G.o.d that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism" and that he "subst.i.tuted gravitation for Providence." But now, when science has so plainly won her case, in her own proper field; when we know to our glory and profit so many laws by which the world is governed, and use our knowledge as the most splendid engine of personal purpose and freedom which man ever had, we see how great our gain has been. _Nor is it more a practical than a religious gain._ G.o.d once was thought of chiefly in terms of miraculous action; he came into his world now and again, like the _deus-ex-machina_ of a Greek tragedy, to solve a critical dilemma in the plot. Now all the laws we know and many more are his regular ways of action, and through them all continuously his purpose is being wrought. As Henry Drummond exclaimed, "If G.o.d appears periodically, he disappears periodically.

If he comes upon the scene at special crises, he is absent from the scene in the intervals. Whether is all-G.o.d or occasional G.o.d the n.o.bler theory?"

Nothing, therefore, can be more pathetic than the self-styled "defenders of the faith" who withstand the purpose of reverent students to give scientific answers to scientific questions. Such men are not really defending the faith. They are doing exactly what Father Inchofer did when he said, "The opinion that the earth moves is of all heresies the most abominable"; what Mr. Gosse did when he maintained, in explanation of geology's discoveries, that G.o.d by the use of stratified rock and fossils deliberately gave the earth the _appearance_ of development through long ages, while really he made it in six days; what Mr. Southall did when, in the face of established anthropology, he claimed that the "Egyptians had no Stone age and were born civilized"; what the Dean of Chichester did when he preached that "those who refuse to accept the history of the creation of our first parents according to its obvious literal intention, and are for subst.i.tuting the modern dream of evolution in its place, cause the entire scheme of man's salvation to collapse." These were not defending the faith; they were making it ridiculous in the eyes of intelligent men and were embroiling religion in controversies where she did not belong and where, out of her proper realm, she was foredoomed to defeat. _For scientific problems are not a matter for faith; they are a matter for investigation._ No one can settle by faith the movements of the planets, the method of the earth's formation, the age of mankind, the explanation of comets. These lie in science's realm, not in religion's, and religious faith demeans herself when she tries to settle them. Let science be the grammarian of the world to observe its parts of speech and their relations!

Religion deals with the soul of the world, its deepest source, its spiritual meaning, its divine purpose.

IV

Science, however, has not always been content with the grammarian's task. When we have frankly confessed religion's sins in trespa.s.sing on scientific territory, we must note that _science has her guilty share in the needless conflict_. Today one suspects that the Church's vain endeavor by ecclesiastical authority to force religious solutions on scientific problems is almost over. But the attempt of many scientists to claim the whole field of reality as theirs and to force their solutions on every sort of problem is not yet finished.

This, too, is a vain endeavor. To suppose that the process of scientific observation and inference can exhaust the truth of life is like supposing that there is no more meaning in Westminster Abbey than is expressed in Baedeker.

Scientists, for example, sometimes claim domains which are not theirs by _spelling abstract nouns with capitals, by positing Law or Evolution as the makers and builders of the world_. But law never did anything; law is only man's statement of the way, according to his observation, in which things are done. To explain the universe as the creation of Law is on a par with explaining homes as the creation of Matrimony. Abstract nouns do not create anything and the capitalizing of a process never can explain it. So, too, Evolution does nothing to the world; it is the way in which whoever makes the world is making it. As well explain the difference between an acorn and an oak by saying that Growth did it, as to explain the progress of creation from stardust to civilization by changing e to E. Science may describe the process as evolutionary, but its source, its moving power, and its destiny are utterly beyond her ken.

For another thing, scientists often invade realms which are not theirs, _by stretching the working theories of some special science to the proportions of a complete philosophy of life_. A generation ago, when geology and biology were in their "green and salad days," the enthusiasm inspired by the splendid results of their hypotheses went to strange lengths. One professor of geology seriously explained the pyramids of Egypt to be the remains of volcanic eruption which had forced its way upwards by slow and stately motion. The hieroglyphs were crystalline formations and the shaft of the great pyramid was the airhole of a volcano. Scientists are human like all men; their specialties loom large; the ideas that work in their limited areas seem omnipotent. So a student of the influence of sunlight on life thinks reactions to the sun explain everything. "Heliotropism," he says, "doubtless wrote Hamlet." A specialist on the influence of geography on human nature interprets everything as the reaction of man to seas, mountains, plains, and deserts, and Lombroso even thinks the revolutionary temperament especially native to men who live on limestone formations! Specialists in economic history are sure that man is little more than an animated nucleus of hunger and that all life is explicable as a search for food. And psychologists, charmed by the neatness of description which causal connections introduce into our inner life, leap to the conclusion, which lies outside their realm, that personality is an illusion, freedom a myth and our mental life the rattling of a causal chain forged and set in motion when the universe began. _All this is not science; it is making hypotheses from a limited field of facts masquerade as a total philosophy of life._

The underlying reason why science, when she regards her province as covering everything, inevitably clashes with the interests of religion, is that _she starts her view of the world from the sub-human side_. The typical sciences are physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, biology, and the view of the universe which they present is the basis on which all other sciences proceed. But this foundation is sub-human; the master ideas involved in it are all obtained with the life of man left out of account. Such an approach presents a world-machine, immense and regular, and when, later, psychology and sociology arise, how easy it is to call the human life which they study a by-product of the sub-human world, an exudation arising from the activities of matter.

Religion, on the contrary, _starts with human life_. Fall down in awe, Science cries, before this vast sub-human world! And the religious man answers: What world is this I am to bow before? Is it not the universe which my mind knows and whose laws my intellect has grasped? This universe, so far as it exists at all for me, is apprehended by my vision, penetrated by my thought, encompa.s.sed by my interpretations. _What is really great and wonderful here, is not the world which I understand, but the mind that understands it--not the sub-human but the human._ Man himself is the supreme Fact, and all the world that man could bow before, man's mind must first of all contain. The master truth is not that my mind exists within a physical universe, but that the physical universe is encompa.s.sed by my mind.

Therefore, when I interpret life, I will start with man, and not with what lies below him.

Romanes, the English scientist, ill.u.s.trates in his experience the difference which these two approaches make. When, returning from agnosticism to Christianity, he explained his lapse, he said, "I did not sufficiently appreciate the immense importance of _human_ nature, as distinguished from physical nature, in any inquiry touching theism.... Human nature is the most important part of nature as a whole whereby to investigate the theory of theism. This I ought to have antic.i.p.ated on merely _a priori_ grounds, had I not been too much immersed in merely physical research." Of how many now does this same explanation hold! They segregate man from the rest of the universe, and endeavor an interpretation of the unhuman remainder.

They forget that man is part and parcel of the universe, bone of its bone, as imperative an expression of its substantial nature as are rocks and stars, and that _any philosophy which interprets the world minus man has not interpreted the world_.

Here is the difference between a Haeckel and a Phillips Brooks. All the dominant ideas of the one are drawn from existence minus man; all the controlling convictions of the other are drawn from the heights and depths of man's own life. The first approach inevitably leads to irreligion, for Spirit cannot reveal itself except in spirit and until one has found G.o.d in man he will not find him in nature. The second as certainly leads to religion, for, as Augustine said, "If you dig deep enough in every man you find divinity." Over against the testimony of the sub-human that there is a mechanistic aspect to the world, stands the unalterable testimony of the human that there is as well an ideal, purposive, and spiritual aspect to the world. Surely the latter brings us nearer to the heart of truth. _We never understand anything except in terms of its highest expression and man is the summit of nature._

Could religion find a voice, therefore, she would wish to speak not in terms of apology but of challenge, when science, a.s.suming all of reality for its field, grows arrogant. Describe the aspect of the world that belongs to you, she would say. I have learned my lesson; your field is yours, and no interference at my hands shall trouble you again. But remember the limitations of your domain--to observe and describe phenomena and to plot their laws. That is an immense task and inexpressibly useful. But when you have completed it, the total result will be as unlike the real world as a medical manikin with his wire nerves and painted muscles is unlike a real man. The manikin is sufficiently correct; everything is truly pictured there--_except life_. So things are as science sees them, but things are more than science sees. Plot then the mechanistic aspect of the world, but do not suppose that you have caught all of truth in that wide-meshed net!

When you have said your last word on facts observed and laws induced, man rises up to ask imperious questions with which you cannot deal, to present urgent problems for which no solution ever has been found save Augustine's, "I seek for G.o.d in order that my soul may _live_."

V

Our thought so ended, however, would leave science and religion jealously guarding their boundaries, not cooperating as allies. _Such suspicious recognition of each other's realms does not exhaust the possibilities._ When once the separate functions each by the other have been granted, we are free to turn our thought to the inestimable service which each is rendering. Consider the usefulness of science to the ideal causes of which religion is the chief! Science has given us the _new universe_, not more marvelous in its vastness than in its unity. For the spectroscope has shown that everywhere through immeasurable s.p.a.ce the same chemical properties and laws obtain; the telescope has revealed with what mathematical precision the orbits in the heavens are traced and how unwaveringly here or among the stars gravitation maintains its hold. Man never had so immense and various and yet so single and unified a world before. Polytheism once was possible, but science has banished it forever. Whatever may be the source of the universe, it is _one_ Source, and whoever the creator, he is more glorious in man's imagination than he could ever have been before. Science also has put at the disposal of the ideal causes _such instruments as by themselves they would never have possessed_. We are hoping for a new world-brotherhood, and we pray for it in Christian churches as the Father's will. But the instruments by which the inter-racial fellows.h.i.+p must be maintained and without which it would be unthinkable are science's gift. Railroads, steams.h.i.+ps, telegraphs, telephones, wireless--these are the shuttles by which the ideal faiths in man's fraternity may be woven into fact. When Christian physicians heal the sick or stamp out plagues that for ages have been man's curse and his despair, when social maladjustments are corrected by Christian philanthropy, and saner, happier ways of living are made possible; when comforts that once were luxuries are brought within the reach of all, and man's life is relieved of crus.h.i.+ng handicaps; when old superst.i.tions that had filled man's life with dread for ages are driven like fogs before science's illumination, and religious faith is freed of their inc.u.mbrance; when great causes of relief have at their disposal the unimaginable wealth which our modern economic system has created--can anyone do sufficient justice to man's debt to science?

And once more science has done religion an inestimable service in establis.h.i.+ng as a point of honor the ambition _to see straight and to report exactly_. The tireless patience, the inexorable honesty, the sacrificial heroism of scientists, pursuing truth, is a gift of incalculable magnitude. Huxley is typical of science at its best when he writes in his journal his ideal--"To smite all humbugs however big; to give a n.o.bler tone to science; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal controversies and of toleration for everything but lying; to be indifferent as to whether the work is recognized as mine or not, so long as it is done." Countless obscurantisms and bigotries, shams and sophistries have been driven from the churches by this scientific spirit and more are yet to go. Science has shown intellectual dishonesty to be a sin of the first rank. Christianity never can be thankful enough for science; on our knees we should be grateful for her as one of G.o.d's most indispensable gifts. Nor should the fact that many a scientist whose contributions we rejoice in was not certain about G.o.d defer our grat.i.tude. Cyrus, the Persian, is not the only one to whom the Eternal has said, "I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me" (Isa. 45:5).

When, however, science has done her necessary work, she needs her great ally, religion. Without the insight and hope which faith alone can bring, we learn a little about the world, our minds enclosed in boundaries beyond which is dark, unfathomable mystery. We rejoice in nature's beauty and in friends.h.i.+p, suffer much with broken bodies and more with broken family ties, until we die as we were born--the sp.a.w.n of mindless, soulless powers that never purposed us and never cared.

And the whole universe is purposeless, engaged with blind hands, that have no mind behind them, on tasks that mean nothing and are never done. Science and religion should not be antagonists; they are mutually indispensable allies in the understanding and mastery of life.

[4] J. G. Holland.

CHAPTER VIII

Faith and Moods

DAILY READINGS

The relations.h.i.+p of faith to feeling, rather than faith's relations.h.i.+p to mind, is with many people the more vital interest. The emotional results of faith are rightfully of intense concern to everyone, for our feelings put the sense of value into life. To see a sunset without being stirred by its beauty is to miss seeing the sunset; to have friends without feeling love for them is not to have friends; and to possess life without feeling it to be gloriously worth while is to miss living. Now, in this regard, the att.i.tude of faith stands sharply opposed to its direct contrary--the att.i.tude of fear. Faith and fear are the two emotional climates, in one or the other of which everyone tends habitually to live. To the comparison of these we set ourselves in the daily readings.

Eighth Week, First Day

=Give ear to my prayer, O G.o.d; And hide not thyself from my supplication.

Attend unto me, and answer me: I am restless in my complaint, and moan, Because of the voice of the enemy, Because of the oppression of the wicked; For they cast iniquity upon me, And in anger they persecute me.

My heart is sore pained within me: And the terrors of death are fallen upon me.

Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, And horror hath overwhelmed me.

And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove!

Then would I fly away, and be at rest.

Lo, then would I wander far off, I would lodge in the wilderness.=

=--Psalm 55:1-7.=

How many people are slaves to the mood from which this psalmist suffered! "Fearfulness and trembling" are their habitual att.i.tude toward life. They fear to die and just as much they fear to live; before every vexatious problem, before every opposing obstacle, even before the common tasks and responsibilities of daily living, they stand in dread; and every piece of work is done by them at least three times--in previous worry, in anxious performance, and in regretful retrospect. Such fear _imprisons_ the soul. No two men really live in the same world; for while the outward geography may be identical, the real environment of each soul is created by our moods, tempers, and habits of thought. Fear builds a prison about the man, and bars him in with dreads, anxieties, and timid doubts. And the man will live forever in that prison unless faith sets him free. _Faith is the great liberator._ The psalmist who found himself a prisoner of "fearfulness and trembling" obtained his liberty and became a "soul in peace" (v. 18); and the secret of his freedom he revealed in the closing words of his psalm--"But I will trust in Thee." Faith of some sort is the only power that ever sets men free from the bondage of their timidities and dreads. If a man is the slave of fearfulness, there is no substance in his claim to be a man of faith; a man who has vital faith is not habitually fearful. And as Emerson said, "He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear."

_O G.o.d, we remember with sadness our want of faith in Thee. What might have been a garden we have turned into a desert by our sin and wilfulness. This beautiful life which Thou hast given us we have wasted in futile worries and vain regrets and empty fears. Instead of opening our eyes to the joy of life, the joy that s.h.i.+nes in the leaf, the flower, the face of an innocent child, and rejoicing in it as in a sacrament, we have sunk back into the complainings of our narrow and blinded souls. O deliver us from the bondage of unchastened desires and unwholesome thoughts. Help us to conquer hopeless brooding and faithless reflection, and the impatience of irritable weakness. To this end, increase our faith, O Lord. Fill us with a completer trust in Thee, and the desire for a more whole-hearted surrender to Thy will. Then every sorrow will become a joy. Then shall we say to the mountains that lie heavy on our souls, "Remove and be cast hence" and they shall remove, and nothing shall be impossible unto us. Then shall we renew our strength, and mount up with wings as eagles; we shall run and not be weary; we shall walk and not faint. We offer this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen._--Samuel McComb.

Eighth Week, Second Day

Not only is it true that fear imprisons while faith liberates; fear _paralyzes_ and faith _empowers_. The only att.i.tude in which a man has command of his faculties and is at his best, is the att.i.tude of faith; while fear bewilders the mind and paralyzes the will. The physical effects of fear are deadly; it positively inhibits any useful thinking; and in the spiritual life its results are utterly demoralizing. Fear is the panic of a soul. Consider such an estate as the author of Deuteronomy presents:

=And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, and there shall be no rest for the sole of thy foot: but Jehovah will give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and pining of soul; and thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have no a.s.surance of thy life. In the morning thou shalt say, Would it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would it were morning! for the fear of thy heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.--Deut. 28:65-67.=

Such a situation oppresses every vital power, and the conquest of such a situation must always be inward before it can be outward; _the man must pa.s.s from fear to faith_. Let even a little faith arise in him, and power begins to return. Men fear that they cannot overcome evil habits, that they cannot successfully meet difficult situations, that they cannot hold out in the Christian life, and that great causes cannot be fought through to victory--and the weakness which appalls them is the creation of their own misgiving.

"Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt."

But faith is tonic; the results which follow a change of heart from fear to faith are miraculous; spiritual dwarfs grow to giants and achieve successes that before would have been unbelievable. No verse in Scripture has behind it a greater ma.s.s of verifiable experience than: "This is the victory that hath overcome the world, even our faith" (I John 5:4).

_Gracious Father, Thou hast invited us, unworthy as we are, to pray for all sorts and conditions of men.... We pray for all who are in bondage to fear, unable to face the tasks of life or bear the thought of death with peace and dignity. Free them from the tyranny of these dark dreads. Let the inspiration of a great faith or hope seize their souls, and lift them above their fruitless worry and idle torments, into a region of joy and peace and blessedness. We pray for the victims of evil habits, the slaves of alcohol or morphine, or any other pretended redeemer of the soul from weariness and pain. Great is the power of these degrading temptations; but greater still is the saving energy of Thy Spirit. So let Thy Spirit enter the hearts of these unhappy children of Thine, that their will may be made strong to resist, and that the burning heat of high thoughts may consume the grosser desires of the flesh. We pray for souls bound beneath self-imposed burdens, vexed by miseries of their own making; for the children of melancholy, who have lost their way and grope without a light; for those who do their work with no enthusiasm, and, when night falls, can find no sleep though they search for it as for hidden treasure. Let Thy light pierce through their gloom and s.h.i.+ne upon their path...._

_Unite us to Jesus Christ, Thy perfect Son, in the bonds of a living trust, so that sustained by His example, and sanctified by His Spirit, we may grow more and more into the image of His likeness.