"This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. He who is most sensitive to beauty and prizes it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardent in the world's service, feels most constantly this power which enfolds him in its hidden infinity; he is overwhelmed by it: and how should gratitude for such varied and constant and exhaustless good fail to become a part of the daily life of his spirit, deepening with every hour in which the value, the power and sweetness of life, is made more plain? Yet at the same instant another and almost contrary mood is twin-born with this thankfulness,—the feeling of helplessness. Though the secret and inscrutable power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly felt,—
'Closer is He than breathing and nearer than
hands and feet,'—
though in moments of life's triumphs it evokes this natural burst of happy gratitude, yet who can free himself from mortal fear, or dispense with human hope, however firm and irremovable may be his confidence in the beneficent order of God? And especially in the more strenuous trials of later ages for Christian perfection in a world not Christian, and under the mysterious dispensation of nature, even the youth has lived little, and that shallowly, who does not crave companionship, guidance, protection. Dependent as he feels himself to be for all he is and all he may become, the means of help—self-help even—and the law of it must be from that same power, whose efficient working he has recognized with a thankful heart. Where else shall he look except to that experience of exaltation during whose continuance he plucked a natural trust for the future, a reasonable belief in Providence, and a humble readiness to accept the partial ills of life? In life's valleys, then, as on its summits, in the darkness as in the light, he may retain that once confided trust; not that he looks for miracle, or any specific and particularizing care, it may be, but that in the normal course of things he believes in the natural alliance of that arm of infinite power with himself. In depression, in trouble, in struggle, such as all life exhibits, he will be no more solitary than in his hours of blessing. Thus, through helplessness also, he establishes a direct relation with God, which is also a reality of experience, as vital in the cry for aid as in the offering of thanks. The gratitude of the soul may be likened to that morning prayer of the race which was little more than praise with uplifted hands; the helplessness of man is rather the evening prayer of the Christian age, which with bowed head implores the grace of God to shield him through the night. These two, in all times, among all races, under ten thousand divinities, have been the voices of the heart.
"There is a third mood of direct experience by which one approaches the religious life. Surely no man in our civilization can grow far in years without finding out that, in the effort to live a life obeying his desires and worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with Christ's commands; and he knows that the promises of Christ, so far as they relate to the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself day by day; he can escape neither the ideal that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ in respect to the working of that ideal on others and within himself. He perceives the evil of the world, and desires to share in its redemption; its sufferings, and would remove them; its injustice, and would abolish it. He is, by the mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, a humanitarian. But he is more than this in such a life. If he be sincere, he has not lived long before he knows in himself such default of duty that he recognizes it as the soul's betrayal; its times and occasions, its degrees of responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty or of an evil will, its greater or less offence, are indifferent matters; for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels a stain as a wound, and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the purest souls. It is death that is dull, it is life that is quick. It may well be, in the world's history in our time, that the suffering caused in the good by slight defections from virtue far overbalances the general remorse felt for definite and habitual crime. Thus none—those least who are most hearts of conscience—escapes this emotion, known in the language of religion as conviction of sin. It is the earliest moral crisis of the soul; it is widely felt,—such is the nature and such the circumstances of men; and, as a man meets it in that hour, as he then begins to form the habit of dealing with his failures sure to come, so runs his life to the end save for some great change. If then some restoring power enters in, some saving force, whether it be from the memory and words of Christ, or from the example of those lives that were lived in the spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love and more tender affection enforcing the supremacy of duty and the hope of struggle,—in whatever way that healing comes, it is well; and, just as the man of honest mind has recognized the identity of his virtue with Christ's rule, and has verified in practice the wisdom of its original statement, so now he knows that this moral recovery, and its method, is what has been known on the lips of saint and sinner as the life of the Spirit in man, and even more specially he cannot discriminate it from what the servants of Christ call the life of Christ in them. He has become more than a humanitarian through this experience; he is now himself one of those whom in the mass he pities and would help; he has entered into that communion with his kind and kin which is the earthly seal of Christian faith.
"Yet it seems to me a profound error in life to concentrate attention upon the moral experience here described; it is but initial; and, though repeated, it remains only a beginning; as the vast force of nature is put forth through health, and its curative power is an incident and subordinate, so the spiritual energy of life is made manifest, in the main, in the joy of the soul in so far as it has been made whole. A narrow insistence on the fact of sin distorts life, and saddens it both in one's own conscience and in his love for others. Sin is but a part of life, and it is far better to fix our eyes on the measureless good achieved in those lines of human effort which have either never been deflected from right aims, or have been brought back to the paths of advance, which I believe to be the greater part, both in individual lives of noble intention, and in the Christian nations. Sin loses half its dismaying power, and evil is stripped of its terrors, if one recognizes how far ideal motives enter with controlling influence into personal life, and to what a degree ideal destinies are already incarnate in the spirit of great nations.
"However this may be, I find on examination of man's common experience these three things, which establish, it seems to me, a direct relation between him and God: this spontaneous gratitude, this trustful dependence, this noble practice, which is, historically, the Christian life, and is characterized by its distinctive experiences. They are simple elements: a faith in God's being which has not cared further to define the modes of that being; a hope which has not grown to specify even a Resurrection; a love that has not concentrated itself through limitation upon any instrumental conversion of the world; but, inchoate as they are, they remain faith, hope, love—these three. Are they not sufficient to be the beginnings of the religious life in the young? To theological learning, traditional creeds, and conventional worship they may seem primitive, slight in substance, meagre in apparel; but one who is seeking, not things to believe, but things to live, desires the elementary. In setting forth first principles, the elaboration of a more highly organized knowledge may be felt as an obscuration of truth, an impediment to certainty, a hindrance in the effort to touch and handle the essential matter; and for this reason a teacher dispenses with much in his exposition, just as in talking to a child a grown man abandons nine-tenths of his vocabulary. In the same way, learning as a child, seeking in the life of the soul with God what is normal, vital, and universal, the beginner need not feel poor and balked, because he does not avail himself as yet of resources that belong to length of life, breadth of scholarship, intellectual power, the saint's ardour, the seer's insight.
"The spiritual life here defined, elementary as it is, appears inevitable, part and parcel of our natural being. Why should this be surprising? Surely if there be a revelation of the divine at all, it must be one independent of external things; one that comes to all by virtue of their human nature; one that is direct, and not mediately given through others. Faith that is vital is not the fruit of things told of, but of things experienced. It follows that religion may be essentially free from any admixture of the past in its communication to the soul. It cannot depend on events of a long-past time now disputable, or on books of a far-off and now alien age. These things are the tradition and history of the spiritual life, but not the life. To the mass of men religion derived from such sources would be a belief in other men's experience, and for most of them would rest on proofs they cannot scrutinize. It would be a religion of authority, not of personal and intimate conviction. Just as creation may be felt, not as some far-off event, but a continuing act, revelation itself is a present reality. Do not the heavens still declare the glory of God as when they spoke to the Psalmist? and has the light that lighteth every man who is born into the world ceased to burn in the spirit since the first candle was lit on a Christian altar? If the revelation of glory and mercy be an everlasting thing, and inextinguishable save in the life itself, then only is that direct relation of man with God, this vital certainty in living truth,—living in us,—this personal religion, possible.
"What has reform in religion ever been other than the demolition of the interfering barriers, the deposit of the past, between man and God? The theory of the office of the Holy Spirit in the Church expresses man's need of direct contact with the divine; the doctrine of transubstantiation symbolizes it; and what is Puritanism in all ages, affirming the pure spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of man in his loneliness, seeking God face to face? what is its iconoclasm of image and altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the Councils and the Fathers, but the assertion of the noble dignity in each individual soul by virtue of which it demands a freeman's right of audience, a son's right of presence with his father, and believes that such is God's way with his own? This immediacy of the religious life, being once accepted as the substance of vitality in it, relieves man at once of the greater mass of that burden in which scepticism thrives and labours. The theories of the past respecting God's government, no longer possible in a humaner and Christianized age, the impaired genuineness of the Scriptures and all questions of their text and accuracy, even the great doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital consequence. A man may approach divine truth without them. Simple and bare as the spiritual life here presented is, it is not open to such sceptical attack, being the fundamental revelation of God bound up in the very nature of man which has been recognized at so many critical times, in so many places and ages, as the inward light. We may safely leave dogma and historical criticism and scientific discovery on one side; it is not in them that man finds this inward wisdom, but in the religious emotions as they naturally arise under the influence of life.
"This view is supported rather than weakened by such records of the spiritual life in man as we possess. Man's nature is one; and, just as it is interpreted and illuminated by the poets from whom we derive direction in our general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated by saintly men and holy women in the special sphere of the soul's life with God. Our nature is one with theirs; but as there are differences in the aptitudes, sensibilities, and fates of all men, so is it with spiritual faculties and their growth; and, from time to time, men have arisen of such intense nature, so sensitive to religious emotions, so developed in religious experience, through instinct, circumstance, and power, that they can aid us by the example and precept of their lives. To them belongs a respect similar to that paid to poets and thinkers. Yet it is because they tell us what they have seen and touched, not what they have heard,—what they have lived and shown forth in acts that bear testimony to their words, that they have this power. Such were St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas à Kempis, and many a humbler name whose life's story has come into our hands; such were the Apostles, and, preeminently, Christ. It is the reality of the life in them, personal, direct, fundamental, that preserves their influence in other lives. They help us by opening and directing the spiritual powers we have in common; and beyond our own experience we believe in their counsels as leading to what we in our turn may somewhat attain to in the life they followed. It is not what they believed of God, but what God accomplished in them, that holds our attention; and we interpret it only by what ourselves have known of his dealing with us. It is life, and the revelation of God there contained, that in others or ourselves is the root of the matter—God in us. This is the corner stone."