This accounts for the title of this chapter. For we are going to ask, not what belongs dogmatically to the Christian doctrine, but what kind of preliminary dispositions are required in the human intellect and will before we can accept and understand the teachings of Christianity. In this sense they are “prolegomena.” If some reader, after going through this chapter, should say that the very substance of Christianity itself lies therein, I shall not disturb him in his conception; for his conception would at any rate do him less harm than the other view, which would declare these preliminaries to be too difficult, or not necessary, for entrance into the church of Christ.
These first steps are quite easily outlined in a few words: first, to regard God as an actual existence and not as a mere philosophical idea of the schools,—and then, in consequence, to fear him alone and to serve him alone—to have no other idols beside him, neither men, nor possessions, nor glory; secondly, to love the men among whom one is placed “as oneself,” as Christ says, in practical words we can understand—not often more than oneself apparently, and as a matter of fact, in most cases less; thirdly, not to devote one’s life to pleasure even of the so-called “noblest” sorts, nor, on the other hand, to suffering, to mere asceticism,—but to surrender oneself to the doing of the will of God, in the firm confidence that this must be practicable, though not through one’s own moral power, yet through the divine help and grace; and, fourthly, if any one should at first doubt whether all this is possible for man, to believe that, so far as concerns himself, the matter lies only in his will, the only thing he can, but must, contribute thereto.
These are the “prolegomena” of Christianity which every one must consider, before he resolves, upon reaching his years of discretion, to make a real entrance into the Christian life, instead of going forward upon the broader way, easier at the first, but sure to be unsatisfactory in the end.
If he does not consider these things, or if he relies upon his own strength in the conduct of life because he trusts in the possibility of an ethical uplifting tendency already present in human nature and does not think he needs any transcendental support, then he is either like the man in the Gospel who built a house upon the sand which stood only as long as the weather was fair, or like that other who began to build a tower which afterward he could not finish.
Or if he finds these demands too high-pitched, then, even under the best conditions, there springs up in him that consumptive, anæmic, half-hearted Christianity which is forever evading the urgings of conscience and is consequently always dissatisfied—that hypocritical and unlovely Christianity which we all know only too well.
It is not necessary to say much in “explanation” of these demands. The requirements of the Christian religion are not usually lacking in clearness; it is the human will that is lacking in the resoluteness to accept them. It much prefers to have them explained away.
Belief in God is naturally the first and the most necessary preliminary stipulation of Christianity, without which it does not exist, or is but an empty dissembling name for an entirely different way of thinking. This is also the case when the word “God” is accepted as a designation for the totality of all things, or the Absolute Being, or, as with most adherents of “deism,” as an expression for a something that exercises no influence upon worldly things, but somehow exists only as the law that in the beginning created the universe, but is now forever unchangeable; where it itself came from and why it no longer continues vital and active, no one can tell.
To be sure, we can not explain a “living” God, as we have often already said. All explanations or so-called proofs of God are defective, both the positive and the negative. It is not worth the trouble to linger over them. God is something that can not be explained, but he is not something that can not be experienced. But he is to be experienced only by those who “keep his laws,” and one may be practically quite sure that those people who will not do this are atheists at bottom, in spite of all their asseverations; just as there are men, on the other hand, whom God probably still regards as his followers, though we have ourselves long given up regarding them as such.
The experience of God expresses itself thus: first, in spiritual tranquillity, satisfaction, quieting of the thirst for truth (as Christ calls it), a sort of strengthening of the spirit and of the inner life such as is vainly to be attained in any other way, whether through philosophy, or through a refusal to think at all about such things; second, in inward serenity which, gained in any other way, is not so long-enduring; and finally, in a general deeper intensity of life, the effective cause of physical and spiritual health and so of the manifold blessing which springs from this belief in God, both for individuals and for nations.
It is this blessing that is showing itself when all one’s circumstances, apparently of their own motion, so shape themselves that what is truly excellent (the furthering of the inner, the protection of the outer life) always prevails, and danger is averted; on the other hand, no travelling in byways, no wrong actions, are attended with good results. The latter is the usual punishment of evil men, whereby they are hardened and kept from turning to a better life. It is also the ever-visible means of distinguishing between the divine blessing and that outwardly similar worldly “good fortune” in which even the shrewdest of men often put an inconceivable and quite groundless confidence, until, some time or other, it leaves them in the midst of dire difficulties; for the most part at the very moment when they believed they had definitely secured it and had attained to the proud summit of their desires. Men are never faithful to the mere “children of fortune,” but only to their fortune; while they can not, if they wanted to, oppose those endowed with the divine blessing.