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Page 40
Again, this law that the truth is found in the balance of the
antinomies appears in man's equal passion for continuity and
permanency and for variety and change. The book of Revelation tells
us that the redeemed, before the great white throne, standing upon the
sea of glass, sing the song of Moses and the Lamb. What has the one
to do with the other? Here is the savage, triumphant chant of the far
dawn of Israel's history, joined with the furthest and latest possible
events and words. Well, it at least suggests the continuity of the
ageless struggle of mankind, showing that the past has its place
in the present, relieving man's horror of the impermanence, the
disjointed character of existence. He wants something orderly and
static. But, like the jet of water in the fountain, his life is
forever collapsing and collapsing, falling in upon itself, its
apparent permanence nothing but a rapid and glittering succession of
impermanences. The dread of growing old is chiefly that, as years
come on, life changes more and faster, becomes a continual process of
readjustment. Therefore we want something fixed; like the sailor with
his compass, we must have some needle, even if a tremulous one, always
pointing toward a changeless star. Yet this is but one half of the
picture. Does man desire continuity?--quite as much does he wish for
variety, cessation of old ways, change and fresh beginnings. The
most terrible figure which the subtle imagination of the Middle Ages
conjured up was that of the Wandering Jew, the man who could not die!
Here, then, we arrive at knowledge, the genuine values of experience,
by this same balancing of opposites. Continuity alone kills; perpetual
change strips life of significance; man must have both.
Now, it is in the religious field that this interests us most. We have
seen that what we have been doing there of late has been to ignore the
fact that reality is found only through this balancing of the law of
difference and identity, contrast and likeness. We have been absorbed
in one half of reality, identifying man with nature, prating of his
self-sufficiency, seeing divinity almost exclusively as immanent in
the phenomenal world. Thus we have not merely been dealing with only
one half of the truth, but that, to use a solecism, the lesser half.
For doubtless men do desire in religion a recognition of the real
values of their physical nature. And they want rules of conduct, a
guide for practical affairs, a scale of values for this world. This
satisfies the craving for temporal adjustment, the sense of the
goodness and worth of what our instinct transmits to us. But it does
nothing to meet that profound dissatisfaction with this world and that
sense of the encumbrances of the flesh which is also a part of reality
and, to the religious man, perhaps the greater part. He wants to turn
away from all these present things and be kept secretly in a pavilion
from the strife of tongues. Here he has no continuing city. Always
while we dwell here we have a dim and restless sense that we are in an
unreal country and we know, in our still moments, that we shall only
come to ourselves when we return to the house of our Father. Hence
men have never been satisfied with religious leaders who chiefly
interpreted this world to them.
And indeed, since July, 1914, and down to and including this very
hour, this idealizing of time, which we had almost accepted as our
office, has had a ghastly exposure. Because there has come upon us all
one of these irrevocable and irremediable disasters, for which time
has no word of hope, to which Nature is totally indifferent, for which
the God of the outgoings and incomings of the morning is too small.
For millions of living and suffering men and women all temporal
and mortal values have been wiped out. They have been caught in a
catastrophe so ruthless and dreadful that it has strewed their bodies
in heaps over the fields and valleys of many nations. Today central
and south and northeastern Europe and western Asia are filled with
idle and hungry and desperate men and women. They have been deprived
of peace, of security, of bread, of enlightenment alike. Something
more than temporal salvation and human words of hope are needed
here. Something more than ethical reform and social readjustment and
economic alleviation, admirable though these are! Something there must
be in human nature that eclipses human nature, if it is to endure so
much! What has the God of this world to give for youth, deprived of
their physical immortality and all their sweet and inalienable human
rights, who are lying now beneath the acre upon acre of tottering
wooden crosses in their soldier's graves? Is there anything in this
world sufficient now for the widow, the orphan, the cripple, the
starving, the disillusioned and the desperate? What Europe wants to
know is why and for what purpose this holocaust--is there anything
beyond, was there anything before it? A civilization dedicated to
speed and power and utility and mere intelligence cannot answer these
questions. Neither can a religion resolved into naught but the ethics
of Jesus answer them. "If in this world only," cries today the voice
of our humanity, "we have hope, then we are of all men the most
miserable!" When one sees our American society of this moment
returning so easily to the physical and the obvious and the practical
things of life; when one sees the church immersed in programs, and
moralizing, and hospitals, and campaigns, and membership drives, and
statistics, and money getting, one is constrained to ask, "What shall
be said of the human spirit that it can forget so soon?"
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