Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality

by Harold Begbie

Let all the schools in the Church revise their definition of the word faith, and unity will come of itself. Faith, as Jesus employed that term, meant making use of belief—belief that the spiritual alone is the real. Faith is the action of the soul. It is the working of a power. It is mastery of life.

Let the Church realise that Jesus taught this power of the soul. Let her begin to exercise her own spiritual powers. And then let her understand that she is in the world to teach men, to lead the advance of evolution, to educate humanity in the use of its highest powers.

A knowledge of the sense in which Jesus employed the word Faith is the clue to the recovery of Christian influence.

This is the suggestion which I venture to submit to the Church, at a moment in history when the harsh and brutal spirit of materialism is crushing all faith out of the soul and leaving the body no tenant but its appetites.

I do not think any observant man can deny that the whole "suggestion" of the modern world is of an evil nature, that is to say, of a nature which fastens upon the mind the delusions of the senses, making it believe that what it sees is reality, persuading it that the gratification of those senses is the end and object of existence. The wages of this suggestion is death—the death of the soul.

How far the world is gone from sanity, and how clearly science endorses Christ's teaching, may be seen in the modern craze for unhealthy excitement, and in the medical condemnation of that morbid passion. A well-known doctor in London, Sir Bruce Bruce-Porter, has lately condemned Grand Guignol as intensifying the emotion of fear or anxiety—"Take no heed"—and has declared anger, or any violence of feeling, to be a danger—"Love your enemies"—pointing out that "the experiment of inoculating a guinea-pig with the perspiration taken from the forehead of a man in a violent temper has resulted in the death of the guinea-pig with all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning."

Science is the one voice that condemns in these days the self-destroying madness of a world set on seeking to live habitually in the lower life. Sometimes journalism may light a candle of reason in our darkness, as when The Times recently pointed out in a leading article that the half-humorous interest of the world in the murderer Landru had its rise in a profound instinct of the human spirit, namely, that horror must be laughed at if it is not to be feared—to fear it is to be overwhelmed by it. This instinct is "an unconscious refusal to believe in the ultimate reality of evil; it is the predecessor of the scientific spirit which says that evil is something to be overcome by understanding it."

Out of such a lethargy as that which now holds her captive, I do not think the Church can be roused except by the trumpets of war. Let her, then, consider whether there is not here, in this world of false values, of low ambitions, of mean pleasures, of dark materialism, and of perilous superstitions, a world to be fought, as the doctors fight it, and the best kind of newspapers, if only for the sake of posterity, a world against which it is good to oppose oneself—the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness.

What is the good news of Christianity if it is not the news that "the spiritual alone is the real," that there is freedom for human life and mastery for the human soul, that faith in the spiritual is power over the material? Even in the tentative form which M. Bergson uses to reveal the reality of the spiritual world there is such joy that one of his interpreters can exclaim:

Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the darkness which ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions fail us. Words are useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at their mysterious task like an invisible shiver of running water through the mossy shades of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon myself to the delight of being a pulsing reality. I no longer know whether I see scents, breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I think? The question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete self, each of my attitudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight which is indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have resumed contact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits no form of number.