Now, it will be clear from these illustrations, which might be multiplied indefinitely, that the classic philosophy, the philosophy of idealism properly so called, which underlies all religion, whether Platonic or Christian, has been regarded by most thinking men from ancient times to the present day as a conservative, or at least as a regulative, force in society. But thinking men have differed profoundly in their valuation of such a force. Those who hold this philosophy to be true are naturally undivided in their opinion that its social function is beneficial; but those sceptically and materialistically inclined, to whom the spiritual world of Plato and St. Augustine is merely an insubstantial fabric wrought out of the discontent of mankind with the actualities of life, have been divided in their attitude. By some this dream of the unseen, though a deception, has been accepted as necessary for the ordered welfare of society; the enlightened few might indulge their superiority of doubt, but without the restraining content born of superstition the turbulent desires of the masses would throw the world into anarchy and barbarism and universal misery. That was the prevalent attitude of ancient rationalism; and it is still common enough to-day among those who have a condescending respect for the church as a useful ally of the police court. To others, a rapidly growing number, it seems that the spirit of content engendered by religion, if based on a falsehood, must be detrimental to the progress of mankind. Or perhaps their position might be expressed more accurately by reversing the terms. They would not say that religious content is false and therefore must be detrimental; but, rather, religious content is inimical to progress and therefore must be false.
I am not here before you to-day to determine the truth or falsehood of the ideal philosophy which supports religious institutions; that is a question which for the present we may waive. We will not discriminate between those who hold this philosophy to be true and those who regard it as an illusion, but an illusion necessary for the preservation of society. The line for us is drawn between those who, for whatever reason, cling to a religious philosophy of the unseen and those who denounce such a philosophy as a check to the progress and prosperity of the race. And you will see at once that the issue between these two classes has been sharpened for us of the present day by the intrusion into sociology of a new theory of existence—new at least in its scope and claims. I mean the great and all-devouring doctrine of evolution.
Now the evolutionary philosophy, by which we have become accustomed, rather prematurely perhaps, to test all problems of truth and utility, has many aspects and follows various lines of argument. What it means to the working scientist is one thing, and what it means to the metaphysician may be quite another thing; but when it intrudes into the field of sociology, and more specifically when it lays its grasping hand upon that part of sociology which attempts to weigh the value of religious belief, you will find it almost inevitably taking the note so clearly defined in pages of Mr. Dewey’s typical book. Evolution is identified with progress, progress is measured by increased power to satisfy physical wants, and the effort to increase this power is conditioned on dissatisfaction with material conditions. Oh, I know that many evolutionary sociologists will demur against the reduction of their theories to a crudely materialistic formula; but many of them will not, and I am sure the formula does not misrepresent the real conclusions of their doctrine. It comes down to this: Physical progress has its source in physical discontent, and, by an extension of terms, social progress has its source in social discontent; and any doctrine which dulls the edge of this discontent is thereby an obstacle in the path of individual and racial welfare. Discontent is motion and the striving for better things, it is life; content is just stagnation and death. And here lies the charge against religion. By drawing off the mind to the contemplation of those so-called eternal things that are not visible to the bodily eyes or palpable to these fleshly hands, by injecting spiritual values into this present life and raising hopes of other-worldly happiness, religion, together with the whole range of illusory philosophy on which it is nurtured, throws the feelings of physical discomfort out of the centre into the further margin of the field of vision, into the penumbra, so to speak, of insignificance, while it imposes a stillness of content upon the naturally restless soul of man. In such a mood the past, out of which the oracles of faith seem to sound by some miracle of memory, acquires a tender sanctity, and the institutions of tradition are often invested with a reverence and awe which easily flow into vested rights. If the religious mood were really to prevail, they say, then society would sink into the slothful decay described by old Mandeville in his “Fable of the Bees,” that terrible poem which the modern humanitarian would abhor as a black parody of his doctrine, but which in good sooth told the facts of a materialistic sociology once for all:
All Arts and Crafts neglected lie;
Content, the Bane of Industry,
Makes ’em admire their homely Store,
And neither seek nor covet more.
What shall be said of these contrasted views? I think first of all we must say that the issue is confused by an ambiguity lurking in the terms employed. And this is no new thing. It is, in fact, one of the curiosities of our human warfare that the most bitter disputes on the most fundamental questions often go round about in a circle because the two parties to the dispute do not see that the same word may be used in different senses. So it is certainly of content and discontent; and a man’s attitude may very well be determined by his understanding or misunderstanding of the double meaning of these words. Cardinal Newman, perhaps the keenest psychological analyst of the past century, has insisted on this distinction in one of his sermons:
To be out of conceit with our lot in life is no high feeling—it is discontent or ambition; but to be out of conceit with the ordinary way of viewing our lot, with the ordinary thoughts and feelings of mankind is nothing but to be a Christian. This is the difference between worldly ambition and heavenly. It is a heavenly ambition which prompts us to soar above the vulgar and ordinary motives and tastes of the world, the while we abide in our calling; like our Saviour who, though the Son of God and partaking of His Father’s fulness, yet all His youth long was obedient to His earthly parents, and learned a humble trade. But it is a sordid, narrow, miserable ambition to attempt to leave our earthly lot; to be wearied or ashamed of what we are, to hanker after greatness of station, or novelty of life. However, the multitude of men go neither in the one way nor the other; they neither have the high ambition nor the low ambition.
If that sounds oversubtle, or if the preacher’s assumptions seem to beg the question, let us drop the pulpit jargon and look at the distinction as it works out practically in the lives of two highly useful members of society, the plumber and the college president. Suppose a plumber is called into your house on a raw day of January to tinker up a disordered pipe in the cellar. Probably that plumber is discontented; indeed, I cannot imagine how a plumber can be anything but discontented. Nevertheless, his discontent may be either one of two very different sorts. He may be grumbling to himself because he has to work at a cold and dirty job, while you are enjoying your newspaper up-stairs over a warm and cosey fire. In that case his discontent may take itself out in slighting his task and wasting your time and lengthening his bill. These things are said to happen. And he may even carry his discontent into a view of the organization of society which expresses itself in very hardy politics. But suppose now that his discontent takes another form. Imagine him content with his lot as a plumber, even proud of it, but dissatisfied with the common reproach of slackness and extortion, ambitious to excel in his profession. I do not cite such a plumber as a probability; but all things are possible in a Bross lecture. At any rate, such a paragon would be worthy of succeeding to that famous chair of the Harvard faculty once occupied by a gentleman whom the trustees hired as the [a]Plumber] professor of Christianity, but whom the undergraduates irreverently dubbed the Christian professor of plumbing.
And so the other end of the scale, the college president. He too is said sometimes to be discontented; and again his discontent may assume either one of two forms. He may be ambitious of size and réclame for his institution, and may measure his dignity by the number of students over whom he presides. His alumni are likely to encourage him in this, and I have myself known the head of an ancient university in the East who used to scan the catalogues of the great Western institutions year by year with bitter jealousy and heart-burning as their register of students gradually approached his own, and then shot beyond it. Inevitably such discontent leads to a lowering of standards, mitigated by the pious belief that that form of education is noblest which is desired by, and accessible to, the largest number of paying candidates. Thus a debasement of education becomes identified in his mind with social service. But one can imagine another kind of discontent, which should pursue just the opposite course. Its standard would be qualitative, not quantitative, and it would fear the temptation of size, not the murmurs of ambitious alumni. It would look for its reward not in a swelling registration or spreading houses or additional courses of study, but to its success in attracting the better minds and the stronger characters and in directing these in the narrow and tried paths. It might even go so far—though this is confessedly a fairy-tale—as to lay a rough, restraining hand on that most corrupting nurse of materialism in our schools, professional athletics.
However it may be with the plumber and the college president, clearly these words, content and discontent, are replete with ambiguity; they are consequences rather than motives of conduct, and we cannot safely argue upon them until we lave looked more closely into the springs of action which control respectively the religious and the natural life. And here I must beg you to indulge me in a bit of pedantry. Our English speech, with all its practical efficiency, has never developed a very precise ethical terminology, and so to get at the distinction I have in mind I am going to ask you to consider two rather outlandish-sounding Greek words which were much in use among the early moralists of our era. One of them is tapeinophrosynê, the other is pleonexia.
Tapeinophrosynê is a compound word, meaning primarily lowness of mind; it embraces the idea of humility and meekness, but neither of these conveys its full significance. St. Paul uses it in the Epistle to the Ephesians, where it is translated specifically “lowliness,” but its force really runs through the whole passage: “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness (tapeinophrosynê) and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Paul had in mind the saying of Christ recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, where an equivalent phrase is rendered “lowly in heart”: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” And the first of the Beatitudes contains the same idea in slightly different language: “Blessed are the poor in spirit (i.e., the lowly in heart), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” This, then, is the virtue, or, rather, as Chrysostom calls it, the mother of the virtues, which was upheld by the fathers, without exception one might almost say, as the basis of Christian character and the motive of religious living—tapeinophrosynê. And the result of such a virtue, as it works itself out through character into content and discontent, is readily seen. It lays the axe at the very root of that restlessness, that uneasy ambition, that natural instinct of jealousy, that covetousness forbidden in the Tenth Commandment. It goes even further than that. You may have observed that the blessing bestowed in Matthew on the “poor in spirit,” in Luke is directed simply to the “poor,” or “beggars,” as the word might be translated. Now Luke, it is fair to say, introduced a disturbing element into religion by his habit of giving this materialistic turn to spiritual graces. But it remains true, nevertheless, that this glorification—the word is scarcely too strong—of poverty, or at least of the freedom from material possessions, as in itself a state of blessedness, is a note not only of all the Gospels but of most of the other great religious books that have moved the world. Always Chrysostom, to refer again to the model Christian preacher, connects humility with the twin virtue of charity. And charity, as he commends it, is not so much an act of giving out of sympathy for the sufferings of the needy and downtrodden—though this feeling is not absent—as it is a voluntary act of surrendering our worldly possessions in the belief that in themselves they may be a snare to the spirit. For Chrysostom, in a very literal sense of the word, it was more blessed to give than to receive. If religion suffered discontent to abide in the heart of a man, it would not be because he owned too few of this world’s goods, or felt humiliated by his relative rank in society, but because the world was too much with him. For true content he should look to treasures laid up elsewhere and to riches that the eye of the flesh could not count.