THERE is a famous myth in Plato’s Symposium told to explain the origin of love. This myth says that primitive man was round, and had four hands and four feet, and one head with two faces looking opposite ways. He could walk on his legs if he liked, but he also could roll over and over with great speed if he wished to go anywhere very fast.

Because of their fleetness and skill these “Round people” were dangerous rivals in power to Zeus himself and he adopted the plan of weakening them by cutting each one of them in two. In remembrance of the original undivided state each half, ever since unsatisfied and alone, seeks eagerly for the other half. Each human being is thus a half—a tally—and love is the longing to be united. The two halves are seeking to be joined again in the original whole. Such in briefest compass is the myth.

But as the dialogue advances love is traced to a higher source. It is discovered to be a passion for the eternal, a passion which rises in the soul at the sight of an object which suggests the eternal, from which the soul has come into the temporal. The soul is alien here and its chief joy in the midst of the shows of sense is joy at the sight of something which reminds it of its old divine home. Thus, again, Plato tells us that love has its birth in the division of what was once a whole. We yearn for that from which we have come.

We may ignorantly stop at some mid-way good and miss the homeward path, but our real search, our master passion, is for that divine Other to whom we belong. So at last Plato poetizes.

We have discovered through other lips, what he could not tell us, that the search is a double search. We have learned that the Divine Other whom we seek is also seeking us. The myth, told at the beginning, is more suggestive than it seemed. It may perhaps do for a parable of the finite and the Infinite, the soul and its Father. May they not once have been in union? May not our birth in time be a drawing away into individuality from the Divine whole? And then may not the goal of the entire drama of personal life be the restoration of that union on a higher spiritual level? May it not be, that we are never again to fuse the skirts of self and merge into a union of oblivion, but rather that we are to rise to a love-union in which His will becomes our will—a union of conscious co-operation? So at any rate I believe. But this little book is not a book of speculation. It is not written to urge some fond belief.

We have learned, I say, that life reveals a double search. Man’s search for God is as plain a fact as his search for food. He has, beyond question, blundered at it and frequently missed the trail, but that man in all lands and in all times has maintained some kind of search for an invisible Companion is a momentous fact.

The other half of the story is, I think, still more momentous. It is full of pathos and tragedy, but laden with the prophecy of final triumph. I have tried to tell again this story, surely an old, old story, but always needing to be retold in the current language and the prevailing conceptions of the time. The main feature of this book is its insistence on the facts of experience. Its terms are not those of theology, but those of life, or if I have used theological words I have endeavored to re-vitalize them. I shall assume that my readers are familiar with the idea of the conjunct life which I have expounded at length in a former book.[1] It is now well known that “isolated” personality is impossible. He who is to enjoy the rights and privileges of personality must be conjunct with others. He must be an organic member in a social group, and share himself with his fellows, while at the same time he receives contributions from them. This principle of the conjunct life reaches beyond the finite social fellowship in which a man forms and expresses his personality. God and man are conjunct. The ground for this position will not be gone over here. It has been sufficiently presented elsewhere.

I believe, however, that no psychological discovery has ever thrown so much light upon the meaning of atonement and prayer as this fact of the conjunct life does, and I hope that many others may come to feel the freshness and reality of these deepest religious truths as I have felt them.

In touching these two subjects we are touching the very pillars of religion. If atonement—God’s search for us—and prayer—our search for Him—are not real, then religion has no permanent ground of reality. But there can be no question that our age has witnessed a serious weakening of faith in both these central aspects of religion. The doctrine of the atonement does not grip men as it did once, and there are persons all about us who are perplexed about the place and efficacy of prayer. It is no frivolous questioning. It is not the result of a lazy attitude of mind. It is stern and serious. There is only one way to change this condition. We must make men feel again the reality of the atonement and the reality of prayer. That is the task which lies before those of us who believe. The day for dogmatic assertion is past. It rolls off most minds now as water rolls from oiled silk. The truths which march with power are the truths which are verified by, and buttressed with, facts. We must, then, learn how to carry the laboratory method into our religious teaching and ground our message in actual reality.

This slender book is an attempt to approach these two subjects—atonement and prayer—in this spirit and by this method. We can never get the telescope or microscope turned upon the objects of spiritual experience and we cannot use the mathematical method which has worked such wonders in the physical realm. There will always be some who cannot see the evidence. But it is worth while to show that these two pillars of religion do rest—not on air—but on experience which can be verified and tested; that they rest in fact on the elemental basis of life, upon which we live our common social life together.

I trust it will help some to find the trail, and that it will convince some perplexed, though honest, readers that however their own quest has fared there is another search beside their own,—the quest of a Divine Companion who spares no pain or cost to bring us all into a fellowship with Him.

Haverford, Pennsylvania,
New Year 1906.