Christianity and Progress

by Harry Emerson Fosdick

II

As we try to discern wherein man's need of religion lies with reference to the scientific control of life, let us start with the proposition that, when we have all the facts which science can discover, we still need a spiritual interpretation of the facts. All our experiences are made up of two elements: first, the outward circumstance, and second, the inward interpretation. On the one side is our environment, the world we live in, the things that befall us, the kaleidoscopic changes of fortune in the scenery of which our lives are set. On the other side are the inward interpretations that we give to this outward circumstance. Experience is compounded of these two elements.

This clearly is true in ordinary living. Two men, let us say, go to their physicians and are told that they have only a few months to live. This is the fact which faces both of them. As we watch them, however, we are at once aware that this fact is not the whole of their experience. One of the men crumples up; he "collapses into a yielding mass of plaintiveness and fear." Thinking of the event which he is facing, he sees nothing there but horror. That is his interpretation of it. The other man so looks upon the event which is coming that his family, far from having to support his spirit, are supported by him. He buoys them up; he carries them along; his faith and courage are contagious; and when he thinks of his death it appears in his eyes a great adventure concerning which the old hymn told the truth:

"It were a well-spent journey
Though seven deaths lay between."

That is his interpretation. As we regard the finished experiences of these two men, we see clearly that, while the same fact lay at the basis of both, it was the inward interpretation that determined the quality of the experience.

This power to transform facts so that they will be no longer merely facts, but facts plus an interpretation, is one of the most distinctive and significant elements in human life. The animals do not possess it. An event befalls a dog and, when the dog is through with it, the event is what it was before. The dog has done nothing to it. But the same event befalls a man and at once something begins to happen to it. It is clothed in the man's thought about it; it is dressed in his appreciation and understanding; it is transformed by his interpretations. The event comes out of that man's life something altogether different from what it was when it went in. The man can do almost anything with that event. For our experiences do not fall into our lives in single lumps, like meteors from a distant sky of fate; our experiences always are made up of the fortunes that befall us and the interpretations that we give to them.

So far as the relative importance of these two factors is concerned, we may see the truth in the application of our thought to happiness. If there is any area in human experience where the outward circumstance might be supposed to control the results, it is the realm of happiness; yet probably nine-tenths of the problem of happiness lies, not in the outward event, but in the inward interpretation. If we could describe those conditions in which the happiest people whom we have known have lived, can any one imagine the diversity of environment that would be represented in our accounts? Let them move in procession before the eyes of our imagination, those happy folk whose friendship has been the benediction of our lives! What a motley company they are! For some are blind, and some are crippled, and some are invalid; not many are rich and fortunate; many are poor—a company of handicapped but radiant spirits whose victorious lives, like the burning bush which Moses saw, have made in a desert a spot of holy ground. If, now, we ask why it is that happiness can be so amazingly independent of outward circumstance, this is the answer: every experience has two factors, the fortune that befalls and the inward interpretation of it; and, while we often cannot control the fortune, we always can help with the interpretation. That is in our power. That is the throne of our sovereignty over our lives.