From the question of the support which Christian faith and doctrine give to the social consciousness, we turn now to the second part of our inquiry: How does this growing social consciousness, not by any means always consciously religious, naturally react upon and affect our conceptions of religion and of theological doctrines?

In this inquiry, we cannot always be sure historically of the exact connection, and, for our present purpose, this is not of prime importance. But we can see, for example, in this second division of our theme, the relations of religion and the social consciousness, and how religion must be conceived if the social consciousness is fully warranted; and this is the main question.

If the definition of theology which has been suggested be adopted—the thoughtful and unified expression of what religion means to us—then it is obvious that any change in conception or emphasis in religion will necessarily affect theological statement. Our inquiry as to the influence of the social consciousness, therefore, naturally begins with religion.

The discussions of this division, moreover, will really include all that part of theological doctrine which has to do with the growth into the life with God.

The natural influence of the social consciousness upon the conception of religion may be, perhaps, summed up in four points, which form the subjects of the four succeeding chapters: (1) The social consciousness tends to draw religion away from the falsely mystical; (2) it tends to emphasize the personal relation in religion, and so keeps the truly mystical; (3) it tends to emphasize the ethical in religion; (4) it tends to emphasize the concretely historically Christian in religion.

CHAPTER V
THE OPPOSITION OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS TO
THE FALSELY MYSTICAL

I. WHAT IS THE FALSELY MYSTICAL?

Two very clear answers made from different points of view deserve attention.

1. Nash's Definition.—In trying to set forth the "main mood and motives of religious speculation" in the early Christian centuries, Professor Nash takes, as perhaps the two strongest influences in determining the type of man to whom Christian apologetics had then to appeal, Philo and Plotinus, and says: "By what road shall the mind enter into a deep and intimate knowledge of God? That is the decisive question. Plotinus the Gentile and Philo the Jew are at one in their answer. The reason must rise above reasoning. It must pass into a state that is half a swoon and half an ecstasy before it can truly know God. Philo gave up for the sake of his theory, the position of the prophets. Plotinus, for the same theory, forsook the position of Plato and Aristotle. The prophets conceived the inmost essence of things, the being and will of God, as a creative and redemptive force that guided and revealed itself through the career of a great national community. Plato and Aristotle conceived the essence of life as a labor of reason; and, for them, the labors of reason found their sufficient refreshment and inspiration in those moments of clear synthesis which are the reward of patient analysis. Revelation came to the prophet through his experience of history. To the philosopher it came through hard and steady thinking. But Philo and Plotinus together declared these roads to be no thoroughfares. The Greek and the Jew met on the common ground of a mysticism that sacrificed the needs of sober reason and the needs of the nation to the necessities of the monk."[29] Mysticism is here conceived as unethical, unhistorical, and unrational.

2. Herrmann's Definition.—Herrmann's definition of mysticism is the second one to which attention is directed. He says: "When the influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an inward experience of the individual; when certain excitements of the emotions are taken, with no further question, as evidence that the soul is possessed by God; when, at the same time, nothing external to the soul is consciously and clearly perceived and firmly grasped; when no thoughts that elevate the spiritual life are aroused by the positive contents of an idea that rules the soul—then that is the piety of mysticism. He who seeks in this wise that for the sake of which he is ready to abandon all beside, has stepped beyond the pale of Christian piety. He leaves Christ and Christ's Kingdom altogether behind him when he enters that sphere of experience which seems to him to be the highest."[30] The marks of mysticism for Herrmann, then, are: that it is purely subjective; that it is merely emotional and unethical; and hence that it has no clear object, and is abstract, unrational, unhistorical, and so unchristian.

II. THE OBJECTIONS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
TO THE FALSELY MYSTICAL

Against this neo-platonic, falsely mystical conception of religion, the social consciousness seems to be clearly arrayed, and, so far as the social consciousness influences religion, it will certainly tend to draw it away from this falsely mystical idea.

1. Unethical.—For, in the first place, this neo-platonic conception of religion has nothing distinctly ethical in it. The ethical is manifestly not made the test of true religious experience, as it is in the New Testament. The social consciousness, on the other hand, is predominantly and emphatically ethical, and can have nothing to do with a religion in which ethics is either omitted or is wholly subordinate. At this point, therefore, the pressure of the social consciousness is strongly against a neo-platonic mysticism.

2. Does not Give a Real Personal God.—In the second place, the social consciousness cannot get along with the falsely mystical, because it does not give a real personal God. Let us be clear upon this point. Is not Herrmann right when he says that all that can be said of the God of this mysticism is "that he is not the world? Now that is precisely all that mysticism has ever been able to say of God as it conceives him. Plainly, the world and the conception of it are all that moves the soul while it thinks thus of God. Only disappointment can ensue to the soul whose yearning for God in such case keeps on insisting that God must be something utterly different from the world. If such a soul will reflect awhile on the nature of the God thus reached, the fact must inevitably come to the surface that its whole consciousness is occupied with the world now as it was before, for evidently it has grasped no positive ideas—nothing but negative ideas—about anything else. Mysticism frequently passes into pantheism for this very reason, even in men of the highest religious energy; they refuse to be satisfied with the mere longing after God, or to remain on the way to him, but determine to reach the goal itself, and rest with God himself."[31]

Now we have already seen that the social consciousness can find adequate support and power and motive only in faith that its purpose is God's purpose, that the deepest thing in the universe is an ethical purpose, conceivable only in a personal God; and, therefore, neither an empty negation nor pantheism can ever satisfy it.

3. Belittles the Personal in Man.—The false mysticism, moreover, belittles the personal in man as well as in God; for it does not treat with real reverence either the personality, the ethical freedom, the sense of obligation, or the reason of man. This whole thought of "a state that is half a swoon and half an ecstasy" is a sort of swamping of clear self-consciousness and definite moral initiative, in which the very reality of man's personality consists. It is a heathen, not a Christian, idea of inspiration which demands the suppression of the human, whether in consciousness, in will, in reason, or by belittling the sense of obligation to others. But mysticism has at least tended toward failure in all these respects.

And yet, from the time that Paul argued with the Corinthians against their immense overestimation of the gift of speaking with tongues, this fascination of the merely mystical has been felt in Christianity. (1) The very mystery and unintelligibility of the experience, (2) its ecstatic emotion, (3) its sense of being controlled by a power beyond one's self, and (4) its contrast with ordinary life—all these elements make the mystical experience seem to most all the more divine, although in so judging they are applying a pagan, not a Christian, standard. So far as these experiences have value, it is probably due to the strong and realistic sense which they give of being in the presence of an overpowering being. If thoroughly permeated and dominated with other elements, this sense is not without its value.

But it is interesting to notice that, although Paul does not deny the legitimacy of the gift of speaking with tongues, he nevertheless absolutely subordinates it, and insists that the most ecstatic religious emotions are completely worthless without love. Evidently the considerations which weighed most with the Corinthians in valuing the gift of unintelligible ecstatic utterance weighed little with Paul; and one can see how Paul implicitly argues against each of those considerations: (1) God is not an unknown, mystic force, but the definite, concrete God of character, shown in Christ. (2) He speaks to reason and will as well as to feeling, and he best speaks to feeling when he speaks to the whole man. True religious emotion must have a rational basis and must move to duty. (3) Religion, he would urge, is a self-controlled and voluntary surrender to a personal God of character, not a passive being swept away by an unknown emotion. (4) God has most to give, be assured, he would have added, in the common ways of life.

Now, in every one of these protests, the social consciousness instinctively joins. It cannot rest in a conception of religion that belittles the personal in God or man; for it is itself an emphatic insistence upon the fully personal. And it can, least of all, get on with the mystical ignoring of the rational and the ethical, for it holds that the social evolution moves steadily on to a rational like-mindedness, and to a definitely ethical civilization. Giddings puts the sociological conclusion in a sentence: "It is the rational, ethical consciousness that maintains social cohesion in a progressive democracy."[32] Now that which is clearly recognized as the goal in the relations of man to man will not be set aside as unwarranted or subordinate in the relations of man to God. And we may depend upon it.

4. Leaves the Historically, Concretely Christian.—Once more, the social consciousness cannot approve of the mystical conception of religion in its ignoring, in its highest state, the historically and concretely Christian. With mysticism's subjective, emotional, and abstract conception of the highest communion with God, and of the way thereto, the historical and concrete at best can be to it only subordinate means, more or less mysteriously connected with the attainment of the goal, and left behind when once the goal is reached.

The social consciousness, on the other hand, requires historical justification, and definitely builds on the facts of the historical social evolution.

In the case of the prophets and psalmists, for example, who alone in the ancient world most fully anticipated the modern social feeling, the social consciousness plainly arose in the face of the concrete historical life of a people. No result of modern Old Testament criticism is more certain. So that, speaking of "the religious aspects of the social struggle in Israel," McCurdy can use this strong language: "It is not too much to say that this conflict, intense, uninterrupted, and prolonged, is the very heart of the religion of the Old Testament, its most regenerative and propulsive movement. To the personal life of the soul, the only basis of a potential, world-moving religion, it gave energy and depth, assurance and hopefulness, repose and self-control, with an outlook clear and eternal."[33] But it was this standpoint of the prophets that the falsely mystical conception of religion abandoned. We may well take to heart, in our estimate of mysticism, the gradual but steady elimination of ecstasy in the development of Israel, and its practically total absence in those we count in the highest sense prophets.[34]

The social consciousness, moreover, has almost entirely to do with men, and hence naturally must lay stress on human history, rather than on nature, as a source of religious ideas. Indeed, it will have no doubt that what nature is made to mean religiously will be chiefly determined by the prevalent social ideals. It can, therefore, least of all ignore the historical in Christianity.

The social consciousness recognizes increasingly, too, with the clearing of its own ideals and with the deepening study of the teaching of Jesus, that it really is only demanding, in the concrete, and in detailed application to particular problems, and to all of them, the spirit shown in its fullness only in Christ, as Professor Peabody's eminently sane treatment of the social teaching of Jesus seems to me fairly to have proven. The social consciousness, therefore, cannot help becoming more and more consciously and emphatically Christian.

In a single sentence, because of the steps of its own long evolution, the social consciousness instinctively distrusts the highly emotional, unless it is manifestly under equally strong rational control, and unless it has equal ethical insight and power, and is historically justified. It tends, therefore, necessarily to draw away from the falsely mystical in religion, which is lacking in all these respects.

And the same reasons, which array the social consciousness against the falsely mystical in religion, lead it into natural sympathy with a positive emphasis upon the personal, the ethical, and the historically concretely Christian in religion.

CHAPTER VI
THE EMPHASIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS UPON
THE PERSONAL RELATION IN RELIGION, AND
SO UPON THE TRULY MYSTICAL

I. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS TENDS POSITIVELY TO EMPHASIZE
THE PERSONAL RELATION IN RELIGION

1. Emphasizes Everywhere the Personal.—The social consciousness sees man as preËminently the social animal, made for personal relations, irrevocably and essentially knit up with other persons. It deepens everywhere our sense of persons and of personal relations. It may be itself almost defined as the sense of the fully personal.

Religion, then, if it is to be most real to men of the social consciousness, must be personally conceived, that is, must be distinctly seen to be a personal relation of man to God. And this conception, as the highest we can reach, is to be followed fearlessly to the end; only guarding it against wrong inferences from the simple transference to God of finite conditions, and recognizing exactly in what respects the personal relation to God is unique.[35]

The social consciousness, moreover, as we have seen, must have a conception of religion that can really justify the social consciousness, and, therefore, must do justice to the fully personal in God and man; and this need also leads the social consciousness naturally to the conception of religion as a personal relation.

2. Requires the Laws of a Deepening Friendship in Religion.—When this conception is carried out, it is found that growth in the religious life, in communion with God, follows the laws of a deepening friendship.[36] These laws can, therefore, be known and studied and formulated; and religion, at the same time, ceases to be unintelligible and ceases to be isolated—cut off from the rest of life, and becomes rather that one great fundamental relation which gives being and meaning and value to all the rest. In absolute harmony, then, with the genesis of the social consciousness, religion, in this conception, is bound up with the whole of life; and we catch a glimpse of the real and final unity of life in true love, the relation to God and the relation to man each helping everywhere the other. If religion is truly a personal relation, and its laws are those of a deepening friendship, then every human relation, heartily and truly fulfilled, becomes a new outlook on God, a revelation of new possibilities in the religious life. And, on the other hand, in that mutual self-revelation and answering trust upon which every growing personal relation is built, every fresh revelation of God is an enlarging of our ideal for our relations to others. Even biblical literature, perhaps, furnishes no more perfect example of the interplay of the human and divine relations than Hosea's account of his own providential leading through the human relation into the divine, and back again from the divine to a still better human.

3. Requires the Ideal Conditions of the Richest Life in Religion.—And if religion is to be justified in its supreme claims by the social consciousness, it must be felt to offer, besides, the ideal conditions of the richest life. As a personal relation to God, religion need not shrink from this test. Our great needs are character and happiness. Psychology seems to me to point to two great means and to two accompanying conditions of both character and happiness. The means are association and work; the corresponding conditions are reverence for personality, and objectivity—the mood of both love and work. The great essentials, therefore, to the richest life are (1) association in which personality is respected, and (2) work in which one can lose himself. Now, when would these conditions become ideal? On the one hand, as to association, when the association is with him who is of the highest character and of the infinitely richest life, and relation to whom is fundamental to every other personal relation; when, secondly, God is made concrete and real to us in an adequate personal revelation of his character, and of his love toward us; and when, third, the association is individualized for each one, who throws himself open to God, in God's spiritual presence in us, constantly and intimately, and yet unobtrusively, coÖperating with us. And, on the other hand, as to work, when the work is God-given work, to which one is set apart, and in which he may lose himself with joy. These are the ideal conditions of the richest life. Just these ideal conditions Jesus declared actualities. For the fulfilment of just these, in the case of his disciples, he prayed in his double petition,—"Keep them," "Sanctify them," "Keep them in thy name," that is, through the divine association. "Sanctify them"—set them apart unto their God-given work. "As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world." Such a conception of religion can fairly claim to meet, broadly and deeply, the most exacting demands of the social consciousness for emphasis upon the personal relation in religion.

II. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS THUS KEEPS THE TRULY MYSTICAL

I have no predilection for the term mystical, and would gladly confine it to what I have termed the neo-platonic or falsely mystical, were it not that, in spite of the dictionaries and the histories of philosophy and the histories of doctrine, the term is used in two quite different senses. Many, it seems to me, are defending what they call the mystical in religion, who have no idea of defending what Herrmann and Nash call mystical. And many, on the other hand, are defending and teaching the falsely mystical through an undefined fear that else they will lose the truly mystical. Theology and religion both greatly need a clear discrimination of terms here. Many are involved, in both living and thinking, in a self-contradiction, which they feel but cannot state; and are urging with themselves and with others a means of religious life and a corresponding method of conception, which really contradict their highest convictions in other lines of life and thought. Can we find our way out of this confusion?

If one studies carefully the historical representatives of mysticism, and especially such a strong type as Jacob BÖhme, whom Erdmann calls the "culmination of mysticism," and still keeps his head, certain dangers in mysticism, it would seem, must become apparent. And it may be worth while to attempt a brief, but definite, analysis of the justifiable and unjustifiable elements in these mystical movements.

1. The Justifiable and Unjustifiable Elements in Mysticism.—(1) The first danger in mysticism seems to me to be the tendency to make simple emotion the supreme test of the religious state. Whether this emotion is thought of as ecstatic—such as some of the old mystics called "being drunk with God," or, as quietistic—in which imperturbability, passionlessness, become the highest good—is comparatively indifferent. The justifiable element here is the insistence that religion is real and is life; for feeling is perhaps the most powerful element in the sense of reality. So James says: "Speaking generally, the more a conceived object excites us, the more reality it has."[37] The unjustifiable element is the perilous subjection of the rational and ethical. Such a view must always lack any positive and adequate conception of our active life and vocation in the world.

(2) A second closely connected danger in mysticism is the tendency toward mere subjectivism. There is here a justifiable element in the emphasis on one's own personal conviction and faith; an unjustifiable element in the tendency to underrate anything but the purely subjective, to ignore all correcting influences from others, from the church, and from the Scriptures.

(3) A third danger follows from this: the marked tendency to underestimate the historical. The justifiable element here is, again, the emphasis on personal conviction and faith; the unjustifiable element is the tendency toward the greatest one-sidedness, and toward emptiness, especially of ethical content. Advising our young people simply to "listen to God," without the strongest insistence upon the historical revelation of God at the same time, is exposing them to the great danger of mistaking for an indubitable, divine revelation the veriest vagary that may chance in their empty-mindedness next to come into their thought. With the reason in supposed abeyance, the door is thus thrown open to the grossest superstitions. Honest attempts to deepen the religious life may thus become dangerous assaults upon true religion.

(4) A fourth danger in mysticism is so strong a tendency toward vagueness, that the common mind is not without warrant in identifying mysticism and mistiness. The justifiable element here is in the real difficulty of expressing the full content of the entire religious experience; the unjustifiable element is, once more, the slighting of the historical, the ethical, and the rational, especially in talking much of the contradictions of reason, and of what is above reason. Mysticism naturally lacks positive content.

(5) Another danger—the tendency toward pantheism—comes in partly, as Herrmann has suggested, as a meeting of this lack of content, and partly as the logical outcome of such an insistence upon losing oneself in God as amounts to a being swept out of one's self—a loss of clear and rational self-consciousness, which is next interpreted speculatively as a real absorption in God, and is then made the goal. This is the familiar road of Indian and neo-platonic mysticism, and its phenomena are real enough, but probably of only the slightest religious significance. Tennyson tells somewhere of the immense sense of illumination that came to him once from simply repeating monotonously his own name—"Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson." This may be as effective as looking at the end of one's nose and ceaselessly reiterating "Om," as does the Hindu ascetic. A still shorter and more certain method is through nitrous-oxide-gas intoxication, of which Professor James says: "With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the key-note of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity, to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand." "The immense emotional sense of reconciliation," he felt to be the characteristic mood. "It is impossible to convey," he says, "an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience."[38]

Now it is not safe to ignore such facts, when we are seriously trying to estimate the religious significance of intense emotional experiences, the reality of which we need not at all question. The vital question is, not that of the reality of the experiences, but that of the real cause of the experiences; and the only possible test of this is rational and ethical. But from this test, mysticism tends from the start to shut itself off, and so, assuming the experience to be truly religious, ends often in virtual pantheism. The justifiable element in this insistence upon absorption in God is the necessary moral relation of complete surrender to God. The unjustifiable element is in belittling the personal in both God and man, and in making essentially religious an experience that has almost nothing of the rational and ethical in it, and that, on that very account, fosters the irreverent familiarity with Christ so deplored by more than one careful student of mysticism. A natural and common and most dangerous accompaniment of such an intense emotional experience is the tendency afterward, to excuse sin in oneself. In the case of the most conscientious, it is worth noting, such an emphasis upon intense experiences tends to lead them to distrust the reality of the normal Christian experience if they have not had these intense emotions, or if they have had them, tends to bring them into despair when they find these marked experiences actually proving less powerful in effects upon life than they had expected.

(6) The last danger in mysticism, to which reference will be made, is the tendency to extravagant symbolism. This is closely connected with "the immense emotional sense of reconciliation," and is much stronger by nature in some than in others. The born mystic finds his own subjective views symbolized everywhere, and is in grave danger of being led into an ingenious, practically unconscious intellectual dishonesty. The justifiable element here is that sense of the unity and worth of things which is the most fundamental conviction of our minds. The unjustifiable element has been sufficiently indicated.

The justifiable elements in mysticism, then, may be said to include: the insistence on the legitimate place of feeling in religion as a real and vital experience; the emphasis on one's own conviction and faith; the real difficulty of expressing the full meaning of the religious experience; the demand for a complete ethical surrender to God; and the faith in the real unity and worth of the world in God. Now if one tries to bring together these justifiable elements in mysticism, the truly mystical may all be summed up as simply a protest in favor of the whole man—the entire personality. It says that men can experience and live and feel and do much more than they can logically formulate, define, explain, or even fully express. Living is more than thinking. 2. The Protest in Favor of the Whole Man.—The element to which mysticism has tried most to do justice is feeling, and so it has been liable to a new and dangerous one-sidedness. But the truly mystical must be a protest alike against a narrow juiceless intellectualism, against a narrow moralistic rigorism, and against a blind and spineless sentimentalism. It is a protest particularly against making the mathematico-mechanical view of the world the only view; against making logical consistency the sole test of truth or reality; against ignoring all data, except those which come through the intellect alone; that is, against trying to make a part, not the whole, of man the standard; in other words, against ignoring the data which come through feeling and will—emotional, Æsthetic, ethical, and religious data, as well as those judgments of worth which underlie reason's theoretical determinations.

Man stands, in fact, everywhere face to face with an actual world of great complexity, that seems to him at first what James says the baby's world is, "one big blooming buzzing confusion;" "and the universe of all of us is still to a great extent such a confusion, potentially resolvable, and demanding to be resolved, but not yet actually resolved, into parts."[39] In one sense, man's whole task is to think unity and order into this confusion. The problem really becomes that of thinking the universe through in several kinds of terms, and then finally bringing all together into one comprehensive view. All these are alike ideals which the mind sets before itself. The easiest of these problems is the attempt to think the world through, in mathematico-mechanical terms. But the attempt to think the world through in Æsthetic or ethical or religious terms is equally legitimate, though it is more difficult. Not only, then, is the mathematico-mechanical view not the sole justifiable view, but it really has its justification in an ideal, and success in this attempt affords just encouragement for the hope of success in the other more difficult problems.[40]

The truly mystical holds, then, that the narrow intellectualism is unwarranted, because natural science, the mechanical view of the world, is itself an ideal—the "child of duties," as MÜnsterberg calls it—and so cannot legitimately rule out other ideals; because we have just as immediate a conviction concerning the worth, as concerning the logical consistency of the world; because a narrow intellectualism would make conscious life but a "barren rehearsal" of the outer world, without significance; because if we can trust the indications of our intellect, we ought to be able to trust the indications of the rest of our nature; and because, thus, the only possible key and standard of truth and reality are in ourselves—the whole self, and "necessities of thought" become necessities of a reason which means loyally to take account of all the data of the entire man.

And the same point may be thus stated. We use the word rational in two quite distinct senses: in the narrow sense, as meaning simply the intellectual; in the broad sense, as indicating the demands of the entire man. The true mysticism stands for the broadly rational.

So, too, we speak of the necessary fundamental assumption of the honesty or sincerity of the world; but this includes two quite distinct propositions: one, that the world must be thinkable, conceivable, construable, a logically consistent whole, a sphere for rational thinking,—where the test is consistency; the other, that the world must be worth while, must not mock our highest ideals and aspirations, must in some true and genuine sense satisfy the whole man, be a sphere for rational living,—where the test is worth. All our arguments go forward upon these two assumptions. Now, a true mysticism contends that the second principle is as rational as the first, though it must be freely granted that it is not as easy to employ it for detailed conclusions, and it is consequently much more liable to abuse. The true mysticism wishes to be not less, but more, rational. It knows no shorthand substitute for the hard and steady thinking of the philosopher, or for the historical experience of the prophet; it needs and uses both.

In all this, it is plain that the truly mystical is a legitimate outgrowth of the emphasis of the social consciousness upon recognition of the entire personality. Phillips Brooks finds just this in the intellectual life of Jesus. "The great fact concerning it is this," he says, "that in him the intellect never works alone. You never can separate its workings from the complete operation of the entire nature. He never simply knows, but always loves and resolves at the same time."[41] 3. The Self-Controlled Recognition of Emotion.—Moreover, it probably may be fairly claimed that all of the mystical recognition of the emotional which is valuable or even legitimate, is preserved, and far more safely and sanely conceived, in a strictly personal conception of religion. It may well be doubted, if it is possible in any other way, both to do justice to feeling in religion, and at the same time to keep feeling in its proper place. Is it possible briefly to indicate both the recognition of emotion and the control of emotion in religion?

The true mysticism recognizes that the supreme joy is "joy in personal life"—joy in entering into the revelation of a person; and it believes with reason that a growing acquaintance with God must have such heights and depths of meaning as no other personal relation can have. It is not, therefore, afraid or distrustful of true emotion—of joy or peace, of intense longing or of keen satisfaction—in the religious life.

But the true mysticism knows at the same time that deep revelation of a person is made only to the reverent, that the conditions are in the highest degree ethical, and above all must be recognized to be so in religion. It does view, then, with deep distrust an emotional emphasis in religion that ignores the ethical. It cannot forget that Christ thought that everything must be tested by its fruits in life. Paul, too, insisted on applying the test of an active ministering love to the highly valued emotional experiences of the Corinthians; and writes to the Galatians that there is but one infallible proof of the working of the Spirit in them—a righteous life: "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance."

And a true mysticism knows that the spirit, reverent of personality, leads to a self-restraint that does not seek the emotional experience simply as such on any conditions; but, knowing the supreme psychological conditions of happiness and character and influence, it loses itself in an unselfish love and in absorbing work, and understands that it must simply let the experiences come. It will have nothing, therefore, to do with strained emotion, or with the working up of feeling for its own sake. It seeks health, not merely the signs of health. It prizes, therefore, the joy that simply proclaims itself as the sign of the normal life and so positively strengthens and cheers, but it will have nothing of the strain of emotion which is drain.

It is interesting to notice that it is exactly this true psychological attitude concerning the emotional life that Phillips Brooks believed that he found perfectly reflected in Jesus. "The sensitiveness of Jesus to pain and joy," he says, "never leads him for a moment to try to be sad or happy with direct endeavor; nor, is there any sign that he ever judges the real character of himself or any other man by the sadness or the happiness that for the moment covers his life. He simply lives, and joy and sorrow issue from his living, and cast their brightness and their gloominess back upon his life; but there is no sorrow and no joy that he ever sought for itself, and he always kept a self-knowledge underneath the joy or sorrow, undisturbed by the moment's happiness or unhappiness."[42]

How far from this objectivity and this healthful emotional life is the atmosphere of most of our devotional books, and, one might say, of all the manuals of ordinary mysticism! That this difficulty should confront us in devotional literature is very natural; for such writing commonly aims to give the emotional sense of reality in religion; and is, therefore, particularly under the temptation to show and to produce a straining after the emotion, as for its own sake. Moreover, the very introspection, almost inevitably involved in the reading and writing of devotional books, tends to bring about an artificial change in the religious experience, and so to introduce into it the abnormal.

But the social consciousness, so far as it affects religion, not only tends to draw away from the falsely mystical, and to emphasize the personal, and so to keep the truly mystical, but it is even more plain that it must tend to insist upon the ethical in religion.

CHAPTER VII
THE THOROUGH ETHICIZING OF RELIGION

I. THE PRESSURE OF THE PROBLEM

The social consciousness looks to the thorough ethicizing of religion. If the social consciousness is to be regarded as historically justified, it must believe that this growing sense of brotherhood and consequent obligation is simply our response to the on-working of God's own plan, God's own will expressing itself in us. The purpose to recognize the will of God, thus necessarily involves the recognition of human relations, since, as soon as conscience is strongly stirred in any direction, religion can but feel, in this demand of conscience, the demand of God, and, therefore, must bring the convictions of the social consciousness into religion. Indeed, it may be well believed that Kaftan is right in his insistence that it is exactly through the practical, that is, in the realm of the ethical, that knowledge arises from faith.[43] In any case, it is evident that the old problem of faith and works, of religion and ethics, of the first and second commandments, meets us here in a way not to be put aside. With an ethical demand so insistent as that of the social consciousness no religion can be at peace that is not with equal insistence ethical. We are bound, then, to show how communion with God, the supreme desire to find God, necessarily carries with it active love for men. We must show how we truly commune with God in such active service. The social consciousness, thus, positively thrusts upon every religious man, who believes in it, the problem of the thorough ethicizing of religion. Or, to put the matter in a slightly different way, if the sense of the value and the sacredness of the person is one of the two greatest moral convictions of our time, then religion must be clearly seen to hold this conviction, or lose its connection with what is most real and vital to us. This is the problem.

II. THE STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

All will probably agree that religion is communion with God. We have seen why the social consciousness cannot accept a falsely mystical view of that communion. For similar reasons, it must make absolutely subordinate all non-ethical and simply mysterious means which make no appeal to the conscience and to the reason—the falsely sacramental. Only the person is truly sacramental. Much else may be of value, but the touch of personal life is the only absolute essential in religion. We have seen, also, why the social consciousness tends to regard religion as a strictly personal relation.

Our problem thus becomes: How does the desire for personal relation with God, the desire for God himself, lead directly into the ethical life—into the full and practical recognition of the ethical demands of the social consciousness?

To guard against any possible misconception, it is, perhaps, well to say at the start that the desire for a personal relation with God has no purpose of returning by another route to the false position of mysticism, in the claim of special private revelations that are exclusively for it. It expects, rather, personal conviction of that great revelation that is common to all, and, moreover, it knows well that no personal relation is essentially sensuous, and it certainly looks for no sensuous relation to God. It may be worth while, too, to reverse our question for a moment, and ask how morality necessarily involves religion. The true moral life is the fulfilment of all personal relations, and as such can least of all omit the greatest and most fundamental relation which gives being and meaning and value to all the rest—the relation to God. The fully moral life, therefore, must include religion. The unity of the two may be thus seen.

But the present inquiry looks at the matter from the other side, and seeks a careful and thoroughgoing answer to the question: Why is the Christian religion, as a personal relation to God, necessarily ethical?

III. THE ANSWER

1. Involved in Relation to Christ.—In the first place, then, it probably may be safely claimed that there is no test of the moral life of a man so certain as his attitude toward Christ. Setting aside, now, any special religious claims of Christ altogether, and recognizing him only as earth's highest character, the supreme artist in living, who knows the secret of the moral life more surely and more perfectly than any other, he becomes even so the surest touch-stone of character; and the iron filings will not be more certainly attracted to the magnet than will the men of highest character be attracted to Christ when he is really seen as he is. There is no test of character so certain as the test of one's personal relation to the best persons. The personal attitude toward Christ is the supreme test. In receiving him, in becoming his disciples in a completer sense than we own ourselves the disciples of any other, we make the supreme moral choice of our lives; and, if no more is true than has been already said, we so accept as a matter of fact the fullest historical revelation of God at the same time. The ethical and religious here fall absolutely together. And all the subsequent choices of our Christian life, if true to Christ, are necessarily moral.

2. The Divine Will Felt in the Ethical Command.—In the second place, the sense of the presence of God, of the divine will laid upon us, if we have the religious feeling at all, comes to us nowhere in our common life so certainly and so persistently as in a sense of obligation which we cannot shake off, a sense of facing a clear duty. To run away from this, we are made to feel, is plainly to run away from God. Is this not a simply true interpretation of the common consciousness? Here, then, the religious experience is in the very sphere of the ethical, and identical with it.

3. Involved in the Nature of God's Gifts.—Again, God's gifts in religion are of such a kind that they simply cannot be given to the unwilling soul; just to receive them, therefore, implies willingness to use them; and faith becomes inevitably both "a gift and an activity." However one names God's gifts in religion, so long as the relation is kept a spiritual one at all, receiving the gift requires a real ethical attitude in the recipient. A real forgiveness, for example, involves personal reconciliation, restored personal relations; and reconciliation is mutual. One cannot, then, be said in any true sense to accept forgiveness from God who is not himself in an attitude of reconciliation with God, of harmony of will with him. In the same way, peace with God, the gift of the Spirit, life, God's own life, cannot be really given to any man without an ethical response on his part in a definite attitude of will. Anything arbitrary here is, therefore, necessarily shut out. God's gifts in religion are of such a kind that they simply cannot be given to the unwilling soul. They are not things to be mechanically poured out on men. We have no need, consequently, to guard our religious statements in this respect. We cannot even receive from God the spiritual gifts of the religious relation without the active will. Here, too, religion is certainly ethical.

4. Communion with God, through Harmony with His Ethical Will.—Or, one may say, desire for real communion with God seeks God himself, not things, or some experience merely. But the very center of personality is the will; any genuine seeking of God himself, therefore, to commune with him, requires unity with his ethical will. The deepest religious motive is at the same time, thus, an impulse to character.

5. The Vision of God for the Pure in Heart.—Christ's own statement—"Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God"—suggests another aspect of this essential unity of the religious and the ethical. The connection in the beatitude is no chance one. The highest and completest revelation of personality, human or divine, can be made only to the reverent. God reveals himself to the reverent soul, and most of all to the pure—to those souls that are reverent of personality throughout and under the severest pressure. Therefore, the pure in heart shall see God. "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him."[44] The vision of God requires the spirit that is reverent of personality, and this spirit is the abiding source of the finest ethical living.

6. Sharing the Life of God.—But perhaps the clearest and most satisfactory putting of the relation is this. The very meaning of religion is sharing the life of God. As soon, now, as God is conceived as essentially holy and loving, a God of character, a living will and not a substance—and Christianity to be true to itself, must always so conceive him—so soon religion and morality are indissolubly united. God's life, according to Christ's teaching, is the life of constant and perfect self-giving. To share the life of God, therefore, to share his single purpose, is to come into the life of loving service. The two fall together from the point of view of the social consciousness. And we are "saved," we come into the real religious life, only in the proportion in which we have really learned to love. "Everyone that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God."[45] The old separation of religion and character is impossible from this point of view.

7. Christ, as Satisfying Our Highest Claims on Life.—But we may still profitably press the question: Is the Christian religion—the special faith in the revelation of God in Christ, the best way to righteousness? does it necessarily, most naturally, most spontaneously, and most joyfully carry righteousness of life with it? If this is to be true, Christian faith, in Herrmann's language, "must give men the power to submit with joy to the claims of duty."[46] It may be doubted whether any one has dealt with this question as satisfactorily as Herrmann himself, and a few sentences may well be quoted from his discussion. "We know that the ordinary instinctive way in which men seek the satisfaction of all the needs of life makes it impossible to submit honestly to the demands of duty, and we see, also, the falsity of the childish idea of the mystics that this instinct should be extirpated; it follows, then, that we can only seek moral deliverance in a true and perfect satisfaction of our craving for life.... Now just such a feeling of perfect inner contentment is possible to the Christian, and he has it just in proportion as he understands that God turns to him in Christ.... This is redemption, that Christ creates within us a living joy, whose brightness beams even from the eye of sorrow, and tells the world of a power it cannot comprehend. And the power that works redemption is the fact that in our world there is a Man whose appearance can at any moment be to us the mighty Word of God, snatching us out of our troubles and making us to feel that he desires to have us for his own, and so setting us free from the world and from our own instinctive nature."[47]

Christ, that is, has no desire to withdraw himself from the test of the largest life. He is able to satisfy the highest demands for life. He courts the trial. He claims to offer life, the largest life. "I came," he says, "that they may have life, and may have it abundantly."[48] His way of deliverance is not negative but positive, not limiting but fulfilling. He is able to give such largeness of life in himself, such inner satisfaction of the craving for life, as makes a lower life lose its power over us, the larger and higher life driving out the meaner and lower. This is positive victory, supplanting the lower with the higher; just as in literature, in music, in friendship, and in love, we expect the best to break down the taste for the lower.

8. The Vision of the Riches of the Life of Christ, Ethically Conditioned.—But the thought of Christ's satisfying our highest claim on life deserves to be carried further, if it is to be saved from vagueness and to have its full power with us. The highest value in the world is a personal life. So Christ has made us feel. It is finally the only value, for all other so-called values borrow their value from persons. The highest joy conceivable is entering into the riches of another's personal life through his willing self-revelation. Now it is no fine fancy that the supremely rich life of the world's history is Christ's. God can only be known, if we are not to fall back into the vagaries of mysticism, in his concrete manifestation; and God opens out in Christ, the New Testament believes, the inexhaustible wealth of his own personal life. It is God's highest gift, the gift of himself. "No one knoweth the Son save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth to reveal him."[49] "This is life eternal, that they should know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou didst send."[50] So it seemed to Paul: "Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ."[51] Do we not here catch a glimpse of what the depth of that satisfaction with the inner life of God in Christ may be?

Only the riches of a personal life can satisfy our claim on life, our desire for life; and, ultimately, we can be fully satisfied only with God's own life in the fullest revelation he can make of it to us men. Only this can be "the unspeakable gift." The thirst for God, for the living God, is a simply true expression of the human heart when it comes to real self-knowledge.

But the riches of the personal life of Christ are necessarily hidden to one who does not come into the sharing of Christ's purpose. The condition of the vision is ethical. The very satisfaction, therefore, of our craving for life constantly impels to a more perfect union with the will of Christ; for such complete entering into the life of another with joy implies profound agreement. The desire for life, therefore, for God's own life, for communion with God, itself impels to character. Faith does here give "the power to submit with joy to the claims of duty," and religion is ethical in the very heart of it.

9. The Moral Law, as a Revelation of the Love of God.—The same unity of the religious and ethical life is helpfully seen, if we put the matter in one further and slightly different way. Only the Christian religion, faith in God as Father revealed in Christ, enables us to welcome the stern demands of duty and so gives us inner deliverance, joy, and liberty in the moral life; for now the moral demand is seen, not as task only, but as opportunity. For Christ, the law of God is a revelation of the love of God; it is a gracious indication—a secret whispered to us—of the lines along which we are to find our largest and richest life; it is not a limitation of life, but a way to larger life. Not, then, the avoidance, as far as possible, of the law of God, but the completest fulfilment of it is the road to life—following the hint of the law into the remotest ramifications, and into the inmost spirit, of the life. The other attitude which assumes that the law is a hindrance to life is a distinct denial of the love of God. It implies that God lays upon us demands which are not for our good. It refuses to accept as reality Christ's manifestation of God as Father. Real belief in the love of God, on the other hand, must take the fearful out of his commands. To be "freed from the law," now, has quite a different meaning: not the taking off from us of the moral demand, but the inner deliverance, that would not have the command removed, but finds life in it, and obeys it freely and joyfully. Only a thoroughgoing and fundamental faith in the Fatherhood of God can bring such inner deliverance, even as we have seen that only such a faith can really ground the social consciousness. And such a faith only Christ has proved adequate to bring.

With this light, now, we feel, in every demand of duty, the presence of God, and in this presence of God the pledge of life, not a limitation of life. The religious life desires God, and it finds God never so certainly as in the purpose fully to face duty. Every one of the relations of life is, thus, turned to with joy by the religious man, as sure to be a further channel of the revelation of God. The thirst for God drives to the faithful fulfilment of the human relation. Religion becomes joyfully ethical.

Nor is there any possibility of abandonment to the will of God in general, as the mystic seems often to feel. God's will means particulars all along the way of our life; and there is no communion with God except in this ethical will in particulars. At no point, therefore, can the religious life withdraw itself from the daily duty and maintain its own existence. The constant inevitable condition of the religious communion is the ethical will. Our providential place is God's place to find us. Where God has put us, just there he will best find us. This is further seen in the fact that the true Christian experience is a constant paradox: God ever satisfying, and yet ever impelling—never allowing us to remain where we are, but holding up to us the always higher ideal beyond; the law is ever, "Of his fulness we all received, and grace in place of grace."[52] The deepening communion with God is only through a constantly deepening moral life.

Such a thoroughgoing ethicizing of religion as the social consciousness demands, we need not hesitate, therefore, to believe is possible. The truer religion is to its own great aspiration after God, the more certainly is it ethical.

But the social consciousness, so far as it influences religion, not only tends to draw away from the falsely mystical, and to emphasize the personal and the ethical, it also tends to emphasize in religion the concretely, historically Christian.

CHAPTER VIII
THE EMPHASIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS UPON
THE HISTORICALLY CHRISTIAN IN RELIGION

The fact that the social consciousness tends to emphasize in religion the concretely historically Christian, has been so inevitably involved in the preceding discussions, that it can be treated very briefly.

I. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS NEEDS HISTORICAL JUSTIFICATION

The justification of the social consciousness, we have seen,[53] must be preËminently from history. Neither nature nor speculation can satisfy it. It needs to be able to believe in a living God who is in living relation to living men. It needs just such a justification as historical Christianity, and only historical Christianity, can give; it needs the assurance of an objective divine will in the world, definitely working in the line of its own ideals. It needs also to be able to give such definite content to the thought of God as shall be able to satisfy its own strong insistence upon the rational and the ethical as historical.

II. CHRISTIANITY'S RESPONSE TO THIS NEED

If religion is to be a reality to the social consciousness, then, there must be a real revelation of a real God in the real world, in actual human history, not an imaginary God, nor a dream God, nor a God of mystic contemplation. This discernment of God in the real world, in actual history, is the glory even of the Old Testament; and it came, as we have seen, along the line of the social consciousness. And it is such a real revelation of the real God that Christianity finds preËminently in Christ. It can say to the social consciousness: Make no effort to believe, but simply put yourself in the presence of a concrete, definite, actual, historical fact, with its perennial ethical appeal; put yourself in the presence of Christ—the greatest and realest of the facts of history,—and let that fact make its own legitimate impression, work its own natural work; that fact alone, of all the facts of history, gives you full and ample warrant for your own being. If this be true, it can hardly be doubted that, so far as the social consciousness understands itself and influences religion at all, it will tend to emphasize, not to underestimate, the concretely, historically Christian.

The natural influence of the social consciousness upon religion, then, may be said to be fourfold: it tends to draw away from the falsely mystical; it tends to emphasize the personal in religion, and so to keep the truly mystical; it tends to emphasize the ethical in religion; and it needs the concretely, historically Christian.