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Page 35
But the religious man knows that it does exist and that while he is
not wholly responsible for it, yet he is essentially so and that,
alas, in spite of that fact, he alone cannot bridge it. So he cries,
"Wretched man that I am, what shall I do to be saved?" Here is the
feeling of uneasiness, the sense of something being wrong about us
as we naturally stand, of which James speaks. In that sense of
responsibility is the confession of sin and in the confession of sin
is the acknowledgment of the impotence of the sinner.
"The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on
Nor all your wit nor all your tears, can wash a line of it."
Man cannot, unaided, make his connection with this higher power. The
world is at fault, yes, but we are at fault, something both within and
without dreadfully needs explaining. So man is subdued and troubled by
the infinite mystery; and he cannot accept the place in which he finds
himself in that mystery; he is ashamed of it.
Vivid, then, is his sense of helplessness! It makes him resent the
humanist, who bids him, unaided, solve his fate and be a man. That is
giving him stones when he asks for bread. He knows that advice makes
an inhuman demand upon the will; it assumes a reasonableness, an
insight and a moral power, which for him do not exist; it ignores
or it denies the reality and the meaning of this inner gulf. It is
important to note that even as philosophy and art and literature soon
parted company with the naturalist, so, to a large degree, they part
company with the humanist, too. They do not know very much of an
harmonious and triumphant universe. Few of the world's creative
spirits have ever denied that inner chasm or minimized its tragic
consequences to mankind. Isaiah and Paul and John and Augustine and
Luther are wrung with the consciousness of it. Indeed, the antithesis
between flesh and spirit is too familiar in religious literature to
need any recounting. It is more vividly brought home to us from
the nonprofessional, the disinterested and involuntary testimony of
secular writing. Was there ever such a cry of revolt on the part of
the trapped spirit against the net and slough of natural values and
natural desires as runs through the sonnets of William Shakespeare? We
remember the 104th:
"Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Foiled by these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth,
Painting thine outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss
And let that pine to aggravate thy store,
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross
Within be fed, without be rich no more--"
Or turn to our contemporary poet, James Stephens:
"Good and bad are in my heart
But I cannot tell to you
For they never are apart
Which is the better of the two.
I am this: I am the other
And the devil is my brother
And my father he is God
And my mother is the sod,
Therefore I am safe, you see
Owing to my pedigree.
So I cherish love and hate
Like twin brothers in a nest
Lest I find when it's too late
That the other was the best."[28]
Here, then, we find the next thing which grows out of man's sense
of separation both from nature and from his own best self. It is his
moral judgment on himself as well as on the world outside, and that
power to judge shows that he is greater than either. As Dr. Gordon
says, "Every honest man lives under the shadow of his own rebuke." We
can go far with the humanist in acknowledging the failures that are
due to environment, to incompleteness, to ignorance; we do not forget
the helpless multitude who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death;
and we agree with the scientist that their helplessness foredooms
them and that their fate cannot be laid to their charge. But we go far
beyond where scientist and humanist stop. For we know that the deepest
cause of human misery is not inheritance, is not environment, is not
ignorance, is not incompleteness; it is the informed but the perverse
human will. Just as unhappiness is the consciousness of the divided
mind, so guilt is this sense of the deliberately divided will.
Jonathan Swift knew that; on every yearly recurrence of the hour in
which he came into the world, he cried lamentably, "Let the day perish
wherein I was born."
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