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Page 8
But while all these views are correct in their affirmations, it is
perilous to exalt one element in religious experience lest we slight
others of equal moment. There is danger in being fractionally religious.
No man really finds God until he seeks Him with his whole nature. Some
persons are sentimentally believers and mentally skeptics; they stand at
the door of the sanctuary with their hearts in and their heads out.
Writing as an old man, Coleridge said of his youth, "My head was with
Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John." An
unreasoning faith is sure to end in folly; it is a mind all fire without
fuel. A true religious experience, like a coral island, requires both
warmth and light in which to rise. An unintelligent belief is in
constant danger of being shattered. Hardy, in sketching the character of
Alec D'Uberville, explains the eclipse of his faith by saying, "Reason
had had nothing to do with his conversion, and the drop of logic that
Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its
effervescence to stagnation."
Others, at the opposite extreme, are merely convinced without being
converted. They are appealed to by the idea of God, rather than led into
actual fellowship of life with Him. A striking instance is the
historian, Edward Gibbon, who, at the age of sixteen, unaided by the
arguments of a priest and without the �sthetic enticements of the Mass,
was brought by his reading to embrace Roman Catholicism, and had himself
baptized by a Jesuit father in June, 1753. By Christmas of 1754 he had
as thoughtfully read himself out of all sympathy with Rome. He was
undoubtedly sincere throughout, but his belief and subsequent unbelief
were purely matters of judgment. The bases of our faith lie deeper than
our intelligence. We reach God by a passionate compulsion. We seek Him
with our reason only because we have already been found of Him in our
intuitions.
Still others use their brains busily in their religion, but confine them
within carefully restricted limits. Outside these their faith is an
unreasoning assumption. Their mental activity spends itself on the
details of doctrine, while they never try to make clear to themselves
the foundations of their faith. They have keen eyes for theological
niceties, but wear orthodox blinders that shut out all disturbing facts.
Cardinal Newman, for example, declared that dogma was the essential
ingredient of his faith, and that religion as a mere sentiment is a
dream and a mockery. But he was so afraid of "the all-corroding,
all-dissolving skepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries" that
he placed the safeguard of faith in "a right state of heart," and
refused to trust his mind to think its way through to God. Martineau
justly complained that "his certainties are on the surface, and his
uncertainties below." We are only safe as believers when, besides
keeping the heart clean, we
press bold to the tether's end
Allotted to this life's intelligence.
Those, again, who insist that in religion the willingness is all, forget
that it seems no more in our power to believe than it is to love. We
apparently "fall into" the one as we do into the other; we do not choose
to believe, we cannot help believing. And unless a man's mind is
satisfied with the reasonableness of faith, he cannot "make believe."
Romanes, who certainly wished for fellowship with the Christian God as
ardently as any man, confessed: "Even the simplest act of will in regard
to religion--that of prayer--has not been performed by me for at least a
quarter of a century, simply because it has seemed so impossible to
pray, as it were, hypothetically, that much as I have always desired to
be able to pray, I cannot will the attempt." Christianity has ever laid
stress upon its intellectual appeal. By the manifestation of the truth
its missionaries have, from Paul's day, tried to commend themselves. We
do not hear of "Evidence Societies" among non-Christian faiths. When the
Emperor Julian attempted to restore the ancient paganism, he did not
argue for its superior credibility, but contented himself with abusing
the creed of Christians and extolling the beauty of the rituals of the
religion it had supplanted. But the propaganda of the gospel of Jesus is
invariably one of persuasion, convincing and confirming men's minds with
its truth.
It would be as false, however, to neglect the part a man's willingness
has in his faith. To believe in the Christian God demands a severe moral
effort. It can never be an easy thing to rely on love as the ultimate
wisdom and power in the universe. "The will to believe," if not
everything, is all but everything, in predisposing us to listen to the
arguments of the faith and in rendering us inflammable to its kindling
emotions.
But no man can be truly religious who is not in communion with God with
"as much as in him is." Somebody has finely said that it does not take
much of a man to be a Christian, but it takes all there is of him. An
early African Christian, Arnobius, tells us that we must "cling to God
with all our senses, so to speak." And Thomas Carlyle gave us a picture
of the ideal believer when he wrote of his father that "he was religious
with the consent of his whole faculties." It is faith's ability to
engross a man's entire self, going down to the very roots of his being,
that renders it indestructible. It can say of those who seek to
undermine it, as Hamlet said of his enemies:
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