III
Let us now attempt, in a somewhat loose and elastic order, a short allocation and estimate of the facts in past and present religion which mainly concern the question of Religion and Progress.
We West Europeans have apparently again reached the fruitful stage when man is not simply alive to this or that physical or psychic need, nor even to the practical interest and advantage of this or that Art, Science, Sociology, Politics, Ethics; but when he awakens further to the question as to why and how these several activities, all so costly where at all effectual, can deserve all this sacrifice—can be based in anything sufficiently abiding and objective. The history of all the past efforts, and indeed all really adequate richness of immediate outlook, combine, I think, to answer that only the experience and the conviction of an Objective Reality distinct from, and more than, man, or indeed than the whole of the world apprehended by man as less than, or as equal to, man himself, can furnish sufficiently deep and tenacious roots for our sense and need of an objective supreme Beauty, Truth, and Goodness—of a living Reality already overflowing that which, in lesser degrees and ways, we small realities cannot altogether cease from desiring to become. It is Religion which, from first to last, but with increasing purity and power, brings with it this evidence and conviction. Its sense of the Objective, Full Reality of God, and its need of Adoration are quite essential to Religion, although considerable systems, which are largely satisfactory in the more immediate questions raised by Aesthetics and even by Ethics, and which are sincerely anxious to do justice also to the religious sense, are fully at work to explain away these essential characteristics of all wideawake Religion. Paul Natorp, the distinguished Plato-scholar in Germany, the short-lived pathetically eloquent M. Guyau in France, and, above all, Benedetto Croce, the large encyclopaedic mind in Italy, have influenced or led much of this movement, which, in questions of Religion, has assuredly not reached the deepest and most tenacious teachings of life.
The intimations as to this deepest Reality certainly arise within my own mind, emotion, will; and these my faculties cannot, upon the whole, be constrained by my fellow mortals; indeed, as men grow more manysidedly awake, all attempts at any such constraint only arrest or deflect the growth of these intimations. Yet the dispositions necessary for the sufficient apprehension of these religious intimations—sincerity, conscientiousness, docility—are not, even collectively, already Religion, any more than they are Science or Philosophy. With these dispositions on our part, objective facts and living Reality can reach us—and, even so, these facts reach us practically always, at first, through human teachers already experienced in these things. The need of such facts and such persons to teach them are, in the first years of every man, and for long ages in the history of mankind, far more pressing than any question of toleration. Even vigorous persecution or keen exclusiveness of feeling have—pace Lord Acton—saved for mankind, at certain crises of its difficult development, convictions of priceless worth—as in the Deuteronomic Reform and the Johannine Writings. In proportion as men become more manysidedly awake, they acquire at least the capacity for greater sensitiveness concerning the laws and forces intrinsic to the various ranges and levels of life; and, where such sensitiveness is really at work, it can advantageously replace, by means of the spontaneous acceptance of such objective realities, the constraints of past ages—constraints which now, in any case, have become directly mischievous for such minds. None the less will men, after this change as before, require the corporate experience and manifestation of religion as, in varying degrees and ways, a permanent necessity for the vigorous life of religion. Indeed, such corporate tradition operates strongly even where men's spiritual sense seems most individual, or where, with the retention of some ethical nobility of outlook, they most keenly combat all and every religious institution. So with George Fox's doctrine of the Divine Enlightenment of every soul separately and without mediation of any kind, a doctrine derived by him from that highly ecclesiastical document, the Gospel of St. John; and with many a Jacobin's fierce proclamation of the rights of Man, never far away from reminiscences of St. Paul.
This permanent necessity of Religious Institutions is primarily a need for men to teach and exemplify, not simply Natural, This-World Morality, but a Supernatural, Other-World Ethic; and not simply that abstraction, Religion in General or a Religious Hypothesis, but that rich concretion, this or that Historical Religion. In proportion as such an Historical Religion is deep and delicate, it will doubtless contain affinities with all that is wholesome and real within the other extant historical religions. Nevertheless, all religions are effectual through their special developments, where these developments remain true at all. As well deprive a flower of its 'mere details' of pistil, stamen, pollen, or an insect of its 'superfluous' antennae, as simplify any Historical Religion down to the sorry stump labelled 'the religion of every honest man'. We shall escape all bigotry, without lapsing into such most unjust indifferentism, if we vigorously hold and unceasingly apply the doctrine of such a Church theologian as Juan de Lugo. De Lugo (a.d. 1583-1660), Spaniard, post-Reformation Roman Catholic, Jesuit, Theological Professor, and a Cardinal writing in Rome under the eyes of Pope Urban VIII, teaches that the members of the various Christian sects, of the Jewish and Mohammedan communions, and of the heathen religions and philosophical schools, who achieve their salvation, do so, ordinarily, simply through the aid afforded by God's grace to their good faith in its instinctive concentration upon, and in its practice of, those elements in their respective community's worship and teaching, which are true and good and originally revealed by God.[51] Thus we escape all undue individualism and all unjust equalization of the (very variously valuable) religious and philosophical bodies; and yet we clearly hold the profound importance of the single soul's good faith and religious instinct, and of the worship or school, be they ever so elementary and imperfect, which environ such a soul.
A man's religion, in proportion to its depth, will move in a Concrete Time which becomes more and more a Partial Simultaneity. And these his depths then more and more testify to, and contrast with, the Fully Simultaneous, God. Because man thus lives, not in an ever-equal chain of mutually exclusive moments, in Clock Time, but in Duration, with its variously close interpenetrations of the successive parts; and because these interpenetrations are close in proportion to the richness and fruitfulness of the durations he lives through; he can, indeed he must, conceive absolutely perfect life as absolutely simultaneous. God is thus not Unending, but Eternal; the very fullness of His life leaves no room or reason for succession and our poor need of it. Dr. F. C. S. Schiller has admirably drawn out this grand doctrine, with the aid of Aristotle's Unmoving Action, in Humanism, 1903, pp. 204-27. We need only persistently apprehend this Simultaneity as essential to God, and Succession as varyingly essential to all creatures, and there remains no difficulty—at least as regards the Time-element—in the doctrine of Creation. For only with the existence of creatures does Time thus arise at all—it exists only in and through them. And assuredly all finite things, that we know at all, bear traces of a history involving a beginning and an end. Professor Bernardino Varisco, in his great Know Thyself, has noble pages on this large theme.[52] In any case we must beware of all more or less Pantheistic conceptions of the simultaneous life of God and the successive life of creatures as but essential and necessary elements of one single Divine-Creaturely existence, in the manner, e.g., of Professor Josiah Royce, in his powerful work The World and the Individual, 2nd series, 1901. All such schemes break down under an adequate realization of those dread facts error and evil. A certain real independence must have been left by God to reasonable creatures. And let it be noted carefully: the great difficulty against all Theism lies in the terrible reality of Evil; and the deepest adequacy of this same Theism, especially of Christianity, consists in its practical attitude towards, and success against, this most real Evil. But Pantheism increases, whilst seeming to surmount, the theoretical difficulty, since the world as it stands, and not an Ultimate Reality behind it, is held to be perfect; and it entirely fails really to transmute Evil in practice. Theism, no more than any other outlook, really explains Evil; but it alone, in its fullest, Jewish-Christian forms, has done more, and better, than explain Evil: it has fully faced, it has indeed greatly intensified, the problem, by its noble insistence upon the reality and heinousness of Sin; and it has then overcome all this Evil, not indeed in theory, but in practice, by actually producing in the midst of deep suffering, through a still deeper faith and love, souls the living expression of the deepest beatitude and peace.
The fully Simultaneous Reality awakens and satisfies man's deepest, most nearly simultaneous life, by a certain adaptation of its own intrinsic life to these human spirits. In such varyingly 'incarnational' acts or action the non-successive God Himself condescends to a certain successiveness; but this, in order to help His creatures to achieve as much simultaneity as is compatible with their several ranks and calls. We must not wonder if, in the religious literature, these condescensions of God largely appear as though they themselves were more or less non-successive; nor, again, if the deepest religious consciousness tends usually to conceive God's outward action, if future, then as proximate, and, if present, then as strictly instantaneous. For God in Himself is indeed Simultaneous; and if we try to picture Simultaneity by means of temporal images at all, then the instant, and not any period long or short, is certainly nearest to the truth—as regards the form and vehicle of the experience.
The greater acts of Divine Condescension and Self-Revelation, our Religious Accessions, have mostly occurred at considerable intervals, each from the other, in our human history. After they have actually occurred, these several acts can be compared and arranged, according to their chief characteristics, and even in a series of (upon the whole) growing content and worth—hence the Science of Religion. Yet such Science gives us no power to produce, or even to foresee, any further acts. These great Accessions of Spiritual Knowledge and Experience are not the simple result of the conditions obtaining previously in the other levels of life, or even in that of religion itself; they often much anticipate, they sometimes greatly lag behind, the rise or decline of the other kinds of life. And where (as with the great Jewish Prophets, and, in some degree, with John the Baptist and Our Lord) these Accessions do occur at times of national stress, these several crises are, at most, the occasion for the demand, not the cause of the supply.
The mostly long gaps between these Accessions have been more or less filled up, amongst the peoples concerned, by varyingly vigorous and valuable attempts to articulate and systematize, to apply in practice, and rightly to place (within the other ranges of man's total life) these great, closely-packed masses of spiritual fact; or to elude, to deflect, or directly to combat them, or some of their interpretations or applications. Now fairly steady improvement is possible, desirable, and largely actual, in the critical sifting and appraisement, as to the dates and the actual reality, of the historical documents and details of these Accessions; in the philosophical articulation of their doctrinal and evidential content; in the finer understanding and wider application of their ethical demands; and in the greater adequacy (both as to firmness and comprehensiveness) of the institutional organs and incorporations special to these same Accessions. All this can and does progress, but mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent paroxysms of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with one-sidedness, travesties, and—worst of all—with worldly indifference and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the Simultaneous Richness are here also always necessary; nor can these things ever really progress except through a deep religious sense—all mere scepticism and all levelling down are simply so much waste. Still, we can speak of progress in the Science of Religion more appropriately than we can of progress in the Knowledge of Religion.
The Crusades, the Renaissance, the Revolution, no doubt exercised, in the long run, so potent a secularizing influence, because men's minds had become too largely other-worldly—had lost a sufficient interest in this wonderful world; and hence all those new, apparently boundless outlooks and problems were taken up largely as a revolt and escape from what looked like a prison-house—religion. Yet through all these violent oscillations there persisted, in human life, the supernatural need and call. In this God is the great central interest, love and care of the soul. We must look to it that both these interests and Ethics are kept awake, strong and distinct within a costingly rich totality of life: the Ethic of the honourable citizen, merchant, lawyer—of Confucius and Socrates; and the Ethic of the Jewish Prophets at their deepest, of the Suffering Servant, of our Lord's Beatitudes, of St. Paul's great eulogy of love, of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia, of Father Damian's voluntarily dying a leper amidst the lepers. The Church is the born incorporation of this pole, as the State is of the other. The Church indeed should, at its lower limit, also encourage the This-world Stage; the State, at its higher limit, can, more or less consciously, prepare us for the Other-World Stage. Both spring from the same God, at two levels of His action; both concern the same men, at two stages of their response and need. Yet the primary duty of the State is turned to this life; the primary care of the Church, to that life—to life in its deepest depths.
Will men, after this great war, more largely again apprehend, love, and practise this double polarity of their lives? Only thus will the truest progress be possible in the understanding, the application, and the fruitfulness of Religion, with its great central origin and object, God, the beginning and end of all our true progress, precisely because He Himself already possesses immeasurably more than all He helps us to become,—He Who, even now already, is our Peace in Action, our Joy even in the Cross.