USA > Rhode Island > Providence County > Providence > Two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, held at Moses Brown School, Providence, R.I., sixth month, 24th, 1911 > Part 4
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Religion without expression tends ever to vanish into thin air. It has no means of propagating itself. It has scarcely even power to sustain itself. But let it find its expression,
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and this expression tends ever to become stereotyped. People arise who confound the expression or application with the religion. It has been often the very love of religion which led a man to break away from its forms. But when he does thus break away, he must sooner or later make new forms or lapse into irreligion. When he does thus make new forms he often fore- casts, in a sheer unmeditated insight which seems to belong to great religious experience, the course of ordered thought or rational endeavor which the race at large will actually follow long after the seer has been numbered with the dead.
The most dramatic example is, of course, Jesus Himself. What a tragedy it is that the Man of Spirit par excellence, of all whom humanity has ever seen, the Man who was always at war with Priests, Pharisees and Scribes, the Man who was contin- ually saying, "The words which I speak unto you, they are spirit and life," the Man who cried, "I am come that they might have life," has had His name associated for almost two thousand years with a system and an institution which has been esteemed-which has largely esteemed itself-as having come to give men doctrines, forms, laws, not life directly, but life only in and through and after these! Equally, however, it must be said that the transcendent glory of Jesus' career and influence lies in this, that, in spite of what we have just said, it is the spirit which He manifested, it is the men who have lived and worked and suffered in the spirit which He showed, it is that spirit, despite often its bondage to inadequate forms, by which not only has the Church itself, ever and anon, been purified, but by which also civilization has been furthered and the world advanced.
So that I come back to my proposition. Not only does religion, but so also does the Church itself possess this double face. Not only may religion be thus contemplated, but in justice it must be contemplated from these two opposing points of view. And every great religious genius is in himself in some proportions made up of these two conflicting elements.
There is perhaps no more striking modern example of our principle than George Fox, the heroic figure who stands at the beginning of the history of Quakerism. It was the thought of Fox's marvelous originality, of his epoch-making assertion of a
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few fundamental principles, of his fearless obedience to the Inner Light, which gave me particular impulse to the elaboration of a theme which has long been running in my mind. You have invited me to deliver an address which already, in the sequence of its speakers and subjects, is beoming historic, and which has a peculiar significance for those men and women of thought and faith who have made this institution what it is.
There is, of course, always the possibility of a certain irony in that which Jesus called the building of the tombs of the prophets, in annually putting flowers, or even only flowers of rhetoric, upon those graves. The very context of Jesus' phrase contains a suggestion about the possibility of our doing honor to dead prophets, while we have but stones for living ones. The harking back to the inaugurator of a movement is apt to take place in a moment when the movement is arrested. Yet, if we never did thus pause in veneration for the great who have put us under special obligation, we should show less gratitude than we feel, and manifest less sense of the directive impulse they afforded than we have.
No man's antagonism to the spirit of sectarianism, which was so rife in his time, could have gone farther to guarantee that he, at least, would never be looked upon as the founder of a sect. No man's unfailing emphasis upon the things of the spirit could ever have done more to impress upon those who aspired to be his followers, that that which they were to do in the world was simply to be the bearers of a certain Inner Spirit of Life.
Yet, I repeat that Fox and the early Quaker movement offers a wonderful example of that thing which I am trying to describe, namely, the prophetic quality of real religion, its traits as fore- runner of many of the intellectual and even the practical achieve- ments of mankind, its pioneering aspect, its genius for discovery, its prevision, the service which it has rendered as projector of hypotheses ploddingly verified by the far slower intellect of man, as the surmiser of new worlds, which may have been very slow to swim within men's ken.
Let me speak first of Fox's intuitions or, at least, implications in the realm of doctrine, and then, secondly, of those in respect of institutions and of life. Under doctrines let us first think of his relation to Scripture.
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I.
Of Fox it was said among his contemporaries that if the Bible had been lost, it could in large part have been reproduced from the memory of Fox. If, therefore, he offered upon occasion new and free interpretation, at all events it could not be said of him that his liberal attitude toward the Scriptures had its main source in the fact that he did not know anything about the Scriptures. Of some liberals whom I know it would be true to say, not so much that they use freedom in dealing with these documents, as that they feel, quite obviously, free not to deal with them. They set up speculations about the content or early history of Christianity as if we had no documents, or as if those which we have were worthy of no serious consideration. But Fox lived in an age and in a land of literal Bible worship. He had been bred in a community in which no one opinion in sacred matters would so surely have been regarded as the foun- dation of all others, as this, that the Scriptures were verbal oracles, words of God altogether miraculously communicated for the enlightenment and saving of men.
It has often been deplored that Protestants did thus, in their need of an authority, in their struggle with the Church, go over to a notion of the Book which made of it as much a fetish as others had ever made of the tradition of the Church. Histori- cally, it may be doubted whether they could then have sustained themselves had they done otherwise. But at all events there is no question that this is what they did. Language would fail me to describe the mood of literalist superstition on this subject in which men in that era in England found themselves. "The Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants," said Chillingworth, in one of the few phrases of that once illustrious divine, which modern men are now likely to quote. It was a hundred and twenty-five years before Lessing could say, "Doc- trine is not religion and the Bible is not Christianity." Lessing wrote a language which few Englishmen of his generation under- stood. He wrote in the wake of the rationalist movement which the religious among them would have abhorred. Herder is sometimes confident of his principle. But he too has his lapses. The Deists, the more coherent of them, declared that
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there could not be any such thing as revelation. That opinion was in large part the basis of the contention for the so-called natural religion. Goethe, on the whole, would have agreed with the Deists. Even Kant, despite his touching reverence for his pietistic ancestry, presents the singular spectacle of one who deeply doubts whether there can be such a thing as revela-, tion, because it seemed to him destructive of freedom. Yet Kant put into our hands a theory of knowledge which is the very key to all our modern ideas of Scripture. By it we find ourselves quite able to conceive a revelation which yet conforms to all the laws of the free life of the mind.
It was Coleridge in England, Erskine in Scotland, and Horace Bushnell in America who in anxious and loving toil wrought out and made current for English-speaking peoples a theory of inspiration, rationally grounded, which yet preserved unim- paired the spiritual values of the intuition of men like George Fox, to which utterance had been given almost two centuries before.
I presume that if George Fox had been asked for his theory of Scripture he would have answered, simply. that he did not live much by theory. At least, that is what an acute observer . would have said of him. But if you had pushed him to the wall and forced him to theorize, you would probably have got an abstraction not so widely different from the abstractions which reigned with the other devout souls of his own time. In reality, however, he set his own soul free from the slavery of biblio- laters. He soared above the fanaticisms and bigotries of litera- lists, dogmatists, fifth-monarchy men, and all those other lurid personages. He felt himself different from even so great a man as Cromwell. Cromwell felt him to be different too. When they drew sword and cried, "Thus saith the Lord," he felt no necessity of even having sword or raising voice. He was per- fectly sure that the Lord had spoken to him too. What the Lord had said to him was for him final, no matter what He had said to others, and not even if these others felt they had their revelation, letters and vowel points, ipsissimis verbis, in a holy book.
What I am saying is that, in his whole doctrine of the Inner Light and especially in his application of it to the Bible, his
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real principles upon which he acted with a resolute and limit- less earnestness had as good as no relation to the reflection upon these subjects in which his age or even he himself indulged. They are in all their implications wholly incompatible with any reasoned view current in Fox's day. They are strictly compatible with a view of God and man and their relation, such as has been commonly accepted only in our own time and is not now accepted by vast numbers of people whom we know.
Now, to say that George Fox and his Quakers were somehow proleptically Kantians, that they had dim forecasts of Strauss and the Higher Criticism, would be too preposterous for words. We have not to wonder how they ever guessed at any of the many steps in this long progress of the toiling mind of man. They did not. They jumped to the conclusion without going through the process. They found themselves in the upper story without going up the stairs. The stairs by which the people with less religion get to the same conclusions have been built since their time. The ladder for the solid, irrefragable pro- gression of the reasonings of men has been, later, with vast effort put against the temple to whose pinnacle their souls already soared. If you had asked Fox to prove that what he said was so, he would have been more than embarrassed. The proof, in the ordinary sense of logic, absolutely did not then exist. He might have thought in his humility merely that he did not have it. He did not know enough to know that no man had it. He could not foresee that no man would have it for yet a hundred years. He would have been sore put to it for an argument, unless, possibly, he had be- thought himself of that which Jesus used so effectively: "He that doeth My will shall know of the doctrine." Try it and see. "It finds me," in the Coleridgian phrase. The soul answers, "It cannot but be so."
Shall I speak irreverently if I say that we have exactly this same phenomenon in Jesus? The Nazarene was surely brought up in the notions of the devout among His own people upon all that we should call the theoretical aspects of religious truth. For myself, I have not the shadow of a doubt that if Jesus had been called upon to state His theory of revelation, a doc- trine of the inspiration of the Old Testament, to which writings
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He so obviously attributed in the highest sense Divine quality, He would have said something much like that which the purest souls among the Rabbis of His day were saying. It shows what a definite impression we have of the traits and personality of Jesus, that it is a little remote from us even to imagine Him stating a theory or formulating a dogma. But when we do imagine it, we have to imagine His intellect working much as I said. Paul assuredly was literalist and bibliolater in some of his moods. He loved nothing better than to enunciate dogmas. But Paul's soul-not his mind but his soul-worked just as did that of Jesus and of Fox. The current theory of revelation in Paul's day was what I have called the outward and orac- ular one, which held with definiteness that God spoke some- how literally, miraculously, to Moses and the prophets, and that these then spoke the mind, or rather the literal words, of God. But if this is true, then it is not the less remark- able that we find Jesus in His own wonderful and authorita- tive way saying, "Ye have heard that it liath been said by them of old time, etc., but I say unto you
Jesus nowhere asserts the ancient theory of revelation, although Paul does. Jesus nowhere theoretically criticises it. He nowhere sets up a new one. Theories were not exactly in His line. He simply utters with confidence a religious insight, an intuition which, when it came to be theorized about, reveals itself as having implications which are wholly incom- patible with the postulates of Rabbinism, and equally with the principles of Platonism which have obtained in Chris- tendom almost down to our own time.
Again, let me say that nothing could be further from my mind than to suppose that what we have here in Jesus, what we may find in Paul, despite his Rabbinism, in Origen, despite his belief in oracles, what we have in a mystic of the Middle Ages, as over against the tradition of the Church, or in George Fox and the early Quakers, as against the bibliolatry of Puritans, is a kind of subconscious anticipation of modern idealism. When I state that so crassly everybody feels the ridiculousness of the idea. To think that these ancient prophetic souls had visions of the theories of the Copernicans or of the Evolutionists would be the veriest absurdity. And yet they
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all-Jesus, most of all-say things in sublime moments of religious elevation, which to our minds fit into the modern theories of knowledge and of the world vastly better than they seem to us to have fitted into the contemporary theory, or to any other theories which have obtained from their time to ours. That only emphasizes what we are saying, how different a thing religion is from any theory about religion, and by what amazing intervals religious insight has outrun reflection. It has carried prophetic souls, literally at a bound, centuries and millenniums beyond the best intellectual life of the human race in their own time. It makes the history of the race to present the spectacle of a long, slow, toilsome, painful struggle to overtake and to confirm, in the way of reasoning to establish, that which the soul long since in the moment of divining elevation had declared.
The implications of such a parable as, for example, that of the Prodigal Son are exactly the opposite of the theory of man, as alien to God until there passes on him the miracle of grace as son of God first, then when he has been converted. The implications of it are that man is in the closest relation con- ceivable to God, just in being man at all.
This is true quite independently of the fact or measure of his failure to live up to the ideal which that relation demands. It is this relation which makes the failure so tragic. It is this relation which makes the recovery possible. It is this which explains how it is to himself that a man returns when he comes to God. And yet how completely did the notion of the contrariety of God and man, the mutual exclusiveness of the two conceptions, dominate the ancient world, the medieval Church, and even classical Protestantism as well! How sure were men that whatever was Divine was not human and whatever was human was not Divine, whatever was natural was not supernatural, whatever was of grace was not of nature! Nature was only evil and tended to evil, man was the child of the devil, the virtues of the pagans were only gilded vice, salvation was the conferment of something transcending humanity, not the actualization of the ideal of humanity.
Jesus, if real man, was not God manifest, and if God, was then but the semblance of man. All the major spiritual
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intuitions of Jesus are in contradiction to the first principles of that intellectual system which has yet dominated Chris- tian dogma until far down into the nineteenth century. Or, to put it differently, that system has so overlain Christian thinking that men have only recently discovered what the great intuitions of Jesus were and whither they would lead. A
II.
When we come to the area of the interpretation of religion, not in the doctrinal forms which we have dealt with thus far, but in the sphere of organization and institution, of ritual and practice, we find further interesting illustrations of our same truth. Predecessors of Fox, like Henry Nicholas, had already argued that not merely is the only evidence of sal- vation the right life, but that the right life is itself salvation. Men are saved to goodness and not to an imagined mere external state called heaven. It is to badness, not to an outward hell, that men are lost. So much is the reward of goodness being good, the consequence, inevitable, of being bad the growing worse, that the terms reward and punishment are, on the whole, misleading. The whole drama of sin and of salvation, instead of being the field of predestination of God's sovereign will and His electing grace, of redemption purchased at vicarious cost, or righteousness imputed-all of that vast scheme so dear to Puritans-the whole drama is that of the inevitable working of the inner forces of a man's own life, even God's justice and God's mercy working always and only with and in the inner forces of the life of man himself. Even Milton had a flash of this great truth when, in the midst of naive objectiva- tion of a Paradise Lost and against the background of a more than Dantean Hell, he makes Satan walking through Eden say: "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. For where I am hell is, and where hell is there must I ever be."
In the face of such a sublime conception of the inward and spiritual truth as to religion, all dogmas concerning saving institutions, all assertion of necessary forms of organization, all declarations in new way of the old error as to the powers of priesthood, all emphasis upon saving rites, necessary observances
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as to times and places which alone are sacred-this all shrivelled into nothing. All externalities of religion came to be deprecated and dreaded, all authority of such things repudiated, even the free use of them considered dangerous as tending to lead back again into the old bondage. Freedom had been bought at a price and had daily to be defended at a better cost.
George Fox was not the first man to have discovered that "Presbyter was but another name for Priest writ large." James Stuart had once said that Monarchy agreed with Scot- tish Presbytery about as well as God with the devil. The communities of the Commonwealth were in the way of dis- covering that it agreed quite as little with the liberty of the Christian subject as it did with the monarchy of the King.' The priesthood of all believers had been one of the initial contentions of the Reformation. But seventeenth-century Protestantism, with small areas of exception, knew as little about it as if the phrase had never been heard. Or, if one choose to be ironical, that right seemed to exist mainly in the fanaticism with which every chance man in those days of confusion made of himself not merely priest but Pope, and anathematized and excom- municated all those who differed from himself.
It was in the mystical sects that the sense survived, that this priestliness of the individual is not merely a right to be seized upon. It is a solemn, even an unbearable responsibility in the sight of a merciful and pitying God. We have passed through struggles as to the authority of Church and Scripture and reason since that time. But all the while the responsi- bility of the single soul before its God and as over against any authority which approaches from without, remains just what these mystics said. There is no authority but God. And even God makes Himself felt only through the free motions of the soul.
Implicit in this assertion of unlearned men and women two hundred and fifty years ago, five hundred years, two thousand years ago, is the whole of the theology of an immanent God. But to say that these devout souls knew the argument for their conclusion would be ridiculous. They knew the conclusion. They had against them all the might of that part of the world which never moves but step by step. That means the exclu- 4
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sively intellectual. They had against them all the might of that portion of the world which prefers not to move at all. That is the ecclesiastical. That which has become axiomatic to our generation was axiomatic to them also ten generations ago-but for exactly the opposite reason. We say it is clear because the premises will yield no other conclusion. To them it was clear because, despite the logic which they did not know how to answer, there was no other conclusion in which a soul suffi- ciently religious could find rest.
The literalists of the Scripture made a fetish of the Sabbath. In the midst of furious Sabbatarianism the mystics felt the truth of that which Jesus said-the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. To the man of God all days were alike sacred, though not necessarily all alike. If one were kept sacred in a different fashion from the rest, that was only in order that its being kept in that fashion might serve for the enhance- ment of the sacredness of all the rest. It was no end in itself, but only means to the end of the great sacredness which was to be the whole tenor of life itself, the normal life of man in family and state and world.
Similarly, rites and ceremonies can be but means of the expression and of the deepening of the religious feeling. They may be natural as such expression. They are artificial, dead and deadly when they usurp the place of such feeling. They may lead to simulation and-what happens more commonly -- may foster an illusion. They pass on into superstition. They induce the pathetic state of things in which not alone those may have much of religion who are thought to be without it, but equally those may be quite without it who think that they have most of it.
The bibliolater of the time was as sure, each one for himself, that the form of church government which he approved was the only one Christ designed, as was any Catholic in his way. The Quakers held, in effect, that all organization tended to evil. They shared with the mystics of all ages the instinct which underrated that aspect of religion, in which it is an impulse to the formation of a community. They formed a community. Many of the medieval mystics had utterly refused to do that. The Quakers formed a community. But it had the appearance
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3
of a concession to the existing state of things, the only means of gaining currency and giving permanence to the ideas which were precious to their own souls.
The religious organization is, indeed, such a'means. But it is more than that. It is an expression of one aspect of the very nature of religion itself. The history of Quakerism, even the career of George Fox himself, shows that in any larger way the noblest and most effective ministry is unattainable except as some men and women feel a peculiar call to it and really give themselves to the ministry. With all emphasis upon spon- taneity, surely none have ever given themselves more truly to the habits and practices of the devout life, to the routine and custom of worship, both public and private, than have certain of the Friends. And where they have not thus given themselves to some habit and practice of the devout life, there is nothing in the doctrine of the Inner Light or in the theory of universal near- ness to God to keep men from falling off most lamentably from God and from all the deeper meanings of man's life. It is only a question of the nature and ground of that routine and of the spiritual prudence with which we freely adopt it, rather than of the superstition in which we are subjected to it. The truth is that, as regards all these things against which we sometimes wax zealous in the interest, as we think, of a true and spiritual faith, they do not stand related to one another as in the familiar image of the kernel and husk. The true image is not that of kernel and husk. It is that of body and soul. Important as it is to recognize the perishableness of the body, yet no soul lives and works without its body. Its body is in a way as necessary to it as it is, in turn, to its body.
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