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Page 5
Still another opening in the scientific quarry is _Psychology_. The last
century saw great advances in the investigation of the mind of man,
which revolutionized educational methods, gave new tools to novelists
and historians, and threw new light on every aspect of the human spirit.
Psychologists turned their attention to religion, and have done much to
chart out the movements of man's nature in his response to his highest
inspirations. They have altered methods of Biblical education in our
Sunday Schools, have shown us helpful and harmful ways of presenting
religious appeals, and have given us scientific standards to test the
value of the materials employed in public worship.
We may ascribe the following elements in our Christian thought to them:
(1) The normal character of the religious experience. Faith had been
regarded as the product of deception or as an aberration of the human
spirit; it now is established as a natural element in a fully developed
personality. A psychological literary critic, Sainte Beuve, writes: "You
may not cease to be a skeptic after reading Pascal; but you must cease
to treat believers with contempt." William James has given us a great
quantity of _Varieties of Religious Experience_, and he deals with all
of them respectfully.
(2) The part played by the Will in religious experience. Man "wills to
live," and in his struggle to conserve his life and the things that are
dearer to him than life, he feels the need of assistance higher than any
he can find in his world. He "wills to believe," and discovers an
answer to his faith in the Unseen. This is a reaffirmation of the
definition, "faith is the giving substance to things hoped for, a test
of things not seen." And the student of religious psychology has now
vastly more material on which to work, because the last century opened
up still another quarry for investigation in _Comparative Religion_. An
Eighteenth Century writer usually divided all religions into true and
false; today we are more likely to classify them as more and less
developed. Investigators find in the varied faiths of mankind many
striking resemblances in custom, worship and belief. It is not possible
to draw sharp lines and declare that within one faith alone all is
light, and within the rest all is darkness. Everything that grows out of
man's experience of the Unseen is interesting, and no thought or
practice that has seemed to satisfy the spiritual craving of any human
being is without significance. Our own faith is often clarified by
comparing it with that of some supposedly unrelated religion. Many a
usage and conviction in ethnic cults supplies a suggestive parallel to
something in our Bible. The development of theology or of ritual in
some other religion throws light on similar developments in
Christianity. The widespread sense of the Superhuman confirms our
assurance of the reality of God. "To the philosopher," wrote Max M�ller,
"the existence of God may seem to rest on a syllogism; in the eyes of
the historian it rests on the whole evolution of human thought." Under
varied names, and with very differing success in their relations with
the Unseen, men have had fellowship with the one living God. It was this
unity of religion amid many religions that the Vedic seers were striving
to express when they wrote, "Men call Him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni;
sages name variously Him who is but One."
This study of comparative religion has gained for us:
(1) A much clearer apprehension of what is distinctive in Christianity,
and a much more intelligent understanding of the completeness of its
answer to religious needs which were partially met by other faiths.
(2) A new attitude towards the missionary problem, so that Christians go
not to destroy but to fulfil, to recognize that in the existing
religious experience of any people, however crude, God has already made
some disclosure of Himself, that in the leaders and sages of their faith
He has written a sort of Old Testament to which the Christian Gospel is
to be added, that men may come to their full selves as children of God
in Jesus Christ.
A final quarry, which promises to yield, perhaps, more that is of value
to faith than any of those named, is the _Social Movement_. In the
closing years of the Eighteenth Century social relations were looked on
as voluntary and somewhat questionable productions of individuals, which
had not existed in the original "state of nature" where all men were
supposed to have been free and equal. The closing years of the
Nineteenth Century found men thinking of society as an organism, and
talking of "social evolution." This conception of society altered men's
theories of economics, of history, of government. Nor did these newer
theories remain in the classrooms of universities or the meetings of
scientists; they became the platforms of great political parties, like
the Socialists in Germany and France, and the Labor Party in Britain.
Men are thinking, and what is more _feeling_, today, in social terms;
they are revising legislation, producing plays and novels, and
organizing countless associations in the interest of social advance. We
are still too much in the thick of the movement to estimate its results,
and we can but tentatively appraise its contributions to our Christian
thought.
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