What kind of a world is that? Is comfort the keynote of it? Does it provide the hero with an assured income and an easy life? Does it guarantee him a pension for any heroism he displays? Does it ask of its heroes only a limited term of service, and then superannuate them at an early age, exposing them to peril for a short time and after that withdrawing dangers from their path and surrounding them with the safeguards of a protected respectability?
No; what these arrangements provide for is not the life of heroism, but its death. Give the hero a world like that and what will he say? "This world," he will say, "is not fit for me to live in. It spells extinction to all that makes life worth living to me. It is the flat opposite to what I desire. It lacks everything that makes the world divine. No God can dwell within it. No Christ will ever visit its melancholy shores."
And yet, is it not something like this that many of us have had in mind of late when we have been talking of "A world fit for heroes to live in"? Have we not conceived it as a world where heroism is a mere incident, almost an accident, which comes in brief patches and spells, and when the rest of life is given over to the middling virtues and to prearranged satisfactions? There are people who cry out for this; there is something within us all that cries out for it; but the noblest part of us scorns it; the heroic spirit would not have it at any price.
When the hero asks for a world fit for him to live in he is thinking of something wholly different. He desires no satisfaction save that which is the direct fruit of his own loyalty and self-devotion. He wants continuous employment on the level of his highest self, where love never sleeps at her task, and where the voices of faith and hope, whispering of new worlds to conquer, are never silent. A divine universe is, for him, just that; it breeds ideals for great souls to pursue; gives them incentives to the pursuit; shares with them in the perils of it; suffers with them in their failures and triumphs with them in their victories. Is the Soul of the World at one with us in these great endeavours? Does it meet us on that high level with the companionship of a Spirit akin to ours, not only asking for our loyalty, but giving it in return? If so, God exists; the universe is divine; and the world is fit for heroes to live in. Hallelujah, for the Lord reigneth!
This is the side of our nature which Christianity brought to light, in all its splendour and power, when it revealed us to ourselves in the person of Christ—that, in all of us, which stands above the perplexities of life and is more than a match for them; which sees evil with the clearest eye, and at the same time overcomes it with the deepest love. At home in the bright hours of life, which grow brighter under the radiance it pours into them, the Christ within is always ready when the dark ones arrive. "I am equal to that," it cries. "Through the power that is given me, through the fellowship I have with the heart of a Divine universe, I can turn that evil into good, and transfigure that sorrow into joy, and draw the stream of a deeper life from the very thing that threatens to slay me. Now is the time, here is the place, to show my Divine Creator that he has not made me for nothing! For this cause was I born and for this hour came I into the world."
On the surface of things there is discord, confusion and want of adaptation; but dig down, first to the centre of the world, and then to the centre of your own nature, and you will find a most wonderful correspondence, a most beautiful harmony, between the two—the world made for the hero and the hero made for the world.
Whoever embarks on the task of religious inquiry, which is tantamount to inquiry into the meaning of his life—a question he would have no interest in asking unless he were fundamentally a religious being,—whoever embarks on this task will find the ground encumbered with a multitude of preconceptions which warp the mind at every point and render independent judgment extremely difficult. Unless the inquirer keeps a watch upon himself his mind will run in a groove from the outset. And when he has followed his groove as far as it goes and found nothing at the end of it, he will conclude that religion has broken down. But in nine cases out of ten he will perceive, if he reflects on what has happened, that the groove which has led to this result was cut by minds not primarily interested in religion but bent on protecting some quite alien interest, possibly a vested interest, institutional or political, to which religion had proved itself serviceable.
The most obstinate of these misconceptions, and the deepest of the grooves in which they run, are those connected with the term "God."
There is no worldly interest which has not been anxious to secure God for an ally. In all ages the attempt has been made to domesticate the idea of God to the secular purposes of individuals and of groups. If we examine the current forms of the idea we may observe the marks of this domesticating process at many points. For example, the idea of God as the sovereign potentate, governing the universe under a system of iron law, the legislator of nature and the taskmaster of the soul, the rewarder of them that obey and the punisher of them that disobey, is plainly an idea borrowed from politics, the form of the idea most convenient to those who need God as an ally in the maintenance of law and order as they conceive them.
This does not prove the idea untrue to reality; it may conceivably be used as a strong argument to the contrary. At the same time it puts us on our guard, warning us to look out for other forms of "domestication" which may be less in accord with essential truth than the one I have just mentioned. Certainly it is extremely difficult to find any form of the idea of God which has retained a purely spiritual or religious character throughout the entire course of its history. Between the conception of Deity implied in the teachings of Jesus and the conception as it appears in "God save the King" the distance is immense; and few theologians I imagine would be so hardy or so patriotic as to affirm that the latter conception is nearer to the Divine Reality.