The Cap and Gown

by Charles Reynolds Brown

As to this faith in the divine integrity no serious, observant man should remain in doubt. It is a faith which rests upon a wide induction of fact, vaster by far than my own experience of his dealings with me. It is like repeating an axiom to say that the creature does not rise above the Creator. If men at any time, anywhere are good, there must be goodness in the Creator of those men, goodness in the force or forces lying back of them, call those forces by what name we may. And if the stream of human goodness has been widening, deepening, flowing more strongly as the ages have come and gone, it points back to character and purpose in the One who created the stream itself. That goodness in man argues goodness in God, while badness in man does not argue badness in God is plain, in that sane men everywhere regard goodness as normal, while badness is abnormal.

And look at the swelling tide of human goodness down through the ages! Look at Livingstone laying down his life to carry light into the dark continent! Look at Cromwell fearing God and none else, neither king nor pope, neither nobles nor bishops, and giving his life that he might win constitutional and religious freedom for the English-speaking race! Look at Lincoln counting not his life dear if he might serve the cause of the Union and the interests of his brothers in bonds! Look at the vast array of human goodness massing itself in saints and seers, in heroes and martyrs, in teachers and mothers, going forth not to be ministered unto, but to minister, giving their lives for the betterment of the world! Look at it all and then ask yourself if you can believe for one moment that all this goodness originated itself, persisted, and increased in opposition to the will of the Creator or in the face of his moral indifference or without creative goodness in him! The claim would be monstrous! This wide induction of fact begets a profound faith in the moral character of God and when we cannot see we trust, because as to the final meaning of many strange experiences we know in part.

Take the matter of prayer and the way it enters into the formation of character and the shaping of events. We know that prayer registers a definite and wholesome influence on many a life. Those who loudly assert that virtue and vice are as purely physical products as sugar and vitriol, that all right action and wrong action can be accounted for on material grounds, have not made out their case, they have not begun to make it out. There is something unseen, mysterious, but real and powerful, which impels certain people to love the unlovely, to make sacrifices for the thoughtless and ungrateful, to stand firm in the path of duty when it is anything but the line of least resistance. The love of right, the sense of obligation, the habit of adherence to principle, all these are as real as granite. But the forces which make them strong are spiritual, and these forces receive constant reenforcement from the habit of prayer.

This part we know. We have seen the hearts of men turned from anger to love, from unholy to holy purpose, from weakness to strong resolve by prayer. We have seen home life made sweeter because once at least in every twenty-four hours the members of the household came together and knelt before God, confessing their faults, asking his guidance and allowing that which was true and right within them to grow by its communion with him who is altogether true and right. Any sensible man would feel that his life, his property, his family were all safer in a community where men prayed, than in one where they only used the name of God profanely. This part we know about prayer.

But as to the ultimate effect of it, the final philosophy of it, the precise way in which the finite spirit becomes a colaborer with the Infinite Spirit in shaping events, I freely confess that there is a great deal which I do not understand. I know in part, but the part I know is so full of blessed and beautiful results that I want my prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom, for the doing of his will on earth, for the gift of bread for the daily need, for forgiveness, and final deliverance from evil—I want that prayer to go up, winging its way to the throne backed by all the faith and hope and love I can put into it. And I am not troubled by the fact that I cannot explain all the grounds of my confidence, for, like Paul, I know in part.

Take the matter of the future life! There is much here we would like to know. What are our loved ones who have gone on doing now? Are they witnesses of the blunders and the failures we make here? Just how is right rewarded and wrong punished when the two are so intricately interwoven? No man is so white a sheep but that there are patches of goat about him here and there. No man is so bad but that there is some good in him if we observingly distil it out. And what of the final outcome—can good people be happily content if the sinful souls they loved are in conscious pain or even if they have been remorselessly wiped off the slate of existence? Is it too much to hope that God’s persuasions to righteousness being infinite may prove irresistible and so at last successful in every case? So men and women who have loved and lost those who passed out of this world without a sign of genuine repentance or of saving faith have queried ever. A child can ask more questions here in five minutes than all the philosophers and theologians on earth can answer in as many years.

We know in part! We cannot measure off the streets of the new Jerusalem in kilometers. We cannot describe its attractions in any kind of Baedeker. We cannot lay out a detailed program of God’s dealings with the good and the bad people of earth in all the unending years. Nor is there any obligation whatsoever upon us to undertake the construction of such a program.

We know in part and the part we know is something like this: I feel a profound confidence that I shall live on after death. The grounds of my hope are many. The mass of unreason and injustice I would have left upon my hands unexplained and unexplainable if I were to undertake to deny the truth of immortality is one. The all but universal and persistent desire of men for future life is another. Somehow the integrity of the universe is such that it does not develop in men normal, wide-spread, and persistent desires unless there is somewhere to be found a corresponding satisfaction for such desires standing over against them. The fact that the clear visions and the bright hopes of the best poets and prophets the world has known have been on the side of immortality means much. The seers have sung and the prophets have uttered their high anticipations by the power of an endless life. The words of the supreme figure in history, Jesus Christ, as to the truth of immortality mean still more. He saw clearly, spoke wisely, lived divinely, and I cannot believe that here he reared his expectations on a fundamental mistake.

It ought to be remembered that for those who affirm and for those who deny the truth of immortality, it is alike a matter of moral faith because no convincing demonstration has been made out either for or against. The men who deny immortality are not opposing knowledge to faith; they are only meeting a positive faith with a negative one. But inasmuch as reason and experience, the best in literature and the One who has taken the moral government of the world upon his shoulders as none other ever did, stand so strongly upon the side of the positive faith, I feel confident of an unbroken life.

As to the final judgment, I know that righteousness and love which are useful and beautiful here will be useful and beautiful always and everywhere; the clearer the light in which they stand the more their glory will be revealed. I know that sin and selfishness are mean and hateful here, and they will be mean and hateful everywhere; the clearer the light in which they stand the more their hatefulness will be manifest. What shall be their final fate I do not undertake to say. We know in part, but the clear prospects of the life to come, where righteousness and love shall have their freer chance to be and to do, where sin and selfishness shall meet with more awful rebuke, are sufficient to stimulate right action and to give warning to those who would identify their destinies with evil. As to the rest, in the incompleteness of our knowledge, we may safely leave it to the wisdom and the justice of God.