What and Where is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern Soul

by Richard La Rue Swain

This type of socialism is a scourge, a pest, a bubonic plague. Nevertheless we would not minimize the crime of withholding from men their rights in this life.

Another socialist speaking at a park in my own city said:

"In the past, the capitalist has taken it all, leaving the working man only enough for the food necessary to do his work,—and not always that. But we do not blame him, he had a right to take it because he could;—we should have done the same if we had been in his place. That is what life means; 'the race is to the swift, and the battle to the strong.' Only the fittest have a right to live. But our turn is soon coming when we shall be able to take it all,—and we will."

Now, whoever teaches a theory like that, or acts upon it, is a cancer in the social body. It makes no difference whether or not he is a church member, whether business man, or laborer; such a man is a malignant growth in the body of humanity.

It is just because socialism means anything from the religion of Jesus to this putrid stuff, that the average well-meaning person is cautious about identifying himself with any movement bearing the name of socialism. Yet any religion that stands aloof from social well-being is doomed,—as it ought to be. No man can love God while hating his brother; and whether he loves his brother is proved more by his actions than by his words. To love our brother, as we shall see, is enlightened selfishness as well as altruism.

"God in the soul" has been rather a popular definition of religion. To many minds this definition conveys a rich and ample meaning. To others it conveys gross error, for religious hysteria is often thought to be God in the soul. A mere psychic state, a religious opiate, a mental disease, may be so interpreted. It is a question whether any definition of religion is safe. A description of religion is far preferable to a definition, and has the advantage of being an easier task. When we identify religion with the Kingdom of God, we have a perfectly clear idea. The Kingdom of God is a loving, intelligent family organised around the Father's good-will, living in the universe as His home, using the forces of nature as the instruments of His will, and making all things vocal with His wisdom, love, and power.

This is true religion; this is a desirable socialism; this is right life. For such an end God, man, and the enveloping powers of nature exist. Any loss of this vision, any lack of warmth or enthusiasm for its realization, spells degeneration. Such a state of mind means the perversion of nature, the engendering of rebellion in the Kingdom of God, and the making of prodigals. Religious experience does not mean just any kind of comfortable, private feeling, but a conscious love for the family of God, and conscious interest in the work that God and His children are trying to accomplish in the midst of nature's forces. Religious experience means an active desire to brighten the great world home, and to gladden the great world family. The idea is so simple that a child can understand it; and a child's heart may glow with happiness while helping to brighten the world. To take one's place in the family of God as a member, loving, and beloved, is something infinitely better than cold ethics. Character that does not root itself in friendship is poor character; it bears not the fruit of righteousness, love, and joy. Our debt of friendship to all men is no less binding than our financial obligations. Friendship is the great power for good in the world. "I have called you friends, and such you are." And because they were friends, Jesus revealed to His disciples all the secrets of His soul, and threw over them the spell of His life. By interweaving their lives in some great purpose, or by promoting a common enterprise, friends lift each other into the finest vision. Simple, hearty, and unfeigned friendship for God and men, is religion pure and undefiled. A wise man does not defer friendship until he is perfect, but seeks friendship first to learn what perfection is, that through friendship he may receive strength to be perfect.

The new truths clearly manifest concerning God, man, and nature cause a new heaven to dawn, and a new hell to yawn. Heaven is brighter, and hell is hotter, than we had been thinking. The relation that exists between God, man, and the universe makes it perfectly plain that God does not go ahead of His children to make either heaven or hell. There is no heaven on either side the grave, except that which is made by the coöperation of God and His children. Though there are plenty of heavenly sites in the universe, yet the building of a Holy City is never begun until some of God's children have arrived on the scene. They who organize around the good will of God build a heaven in time and place; out of God's energies in which they live, they make a beautiful home. Heaven is doubtless a place as well as a state, for souls that are in a right state will make a right place in which to live. More than likely there are many heavens in the universe. In my city heaven may be on one floor and hell on another, while the character of the third floor is uncertain. Souls cannot live outside of God's enfolding energies, and therefore they cannot avoid making either heaven or hell out of His infinite powers. Citizens of the Kingdom, under the guiding wisdom of God, make heaven. Those who refuse citizenship, preferring their own way, make hell; but they make it out of the same mighty forces of which heaven is made.

The idea that God, independent of His children, made a pretty place called heaven, and an ugly place called hell, in order that He might put good little people in the one, and push naughty little people off into the other, is the idea of a fool's heaven and a fool's hell;—the facts are much more glorious and awful. There will be just as good a heaven as the Kingdom of God builds, and no better. Likewise there will be just as bad a hell as God's disloyal sons make, and no worse. No dream can picture the paradise that God may make in this universe with the help of His good children. And the hell that His rebellious sons may create is something appalling. Since heaven or hell is simply the shape we give to God's enfolding energies, all of us are unavoidably engaged in constructing the one or the other, and we have been so engaged every moment since our conscious life began. No one dare think that all his work is heaven-building. Altogether, through vice or greed, we have managed to produce of late the hottest Gehenna ever witnessed on earth. It has taken longer to make this sad condition than most of us realize; and many who little suspect their responsibility and guilt have been active agents in creating the fires of war and other fires in which there has been of late so much writhing and gnashing of teeth. And at the moment of the world's greatest anguish, there were those who were trying to get rich out of the state of sorrow into which they had helped to plunge humanity. I refer to all profiteers and crooked dealers, whether they were laborers or capitalists; to those who were willing that additional hundreds of thousands of our boys should go down into the lake of fire, if only they could fill their coffers. These were the devils who stood round the boiling caldron with their flesh hooks, to tear the flesh of innocent boys if they rose to the surface of the boiling liquid. Some of these flesh-hook devils, having refined manners, posed as gentlemen. Others were lewd fellows of various sorts. But the flames which they fed were not hot enough for them. They were getting ready for a fire that will burn much deeper, and they will be sure to find it.

During the war, many found their faith in God staggering before a perdition created by human beings. But their faith should not have been unsettled, because this war was as sure to follow the way the world was living as the wheels of the cart are certain to follow the tread of the ox. Some had the blindness and audacity to blame God for what we have done. God gave us the raw material with which to build a heaven, and we constructed a hell. Through His many prophets and seers God told us what we were doing, but we would not believe Him. Thinking ourselves wise we became fools, and turned His good gifts into instruments of torture. The majority of the people, believing that they could get along without giving much heed to God, took His limitless gifts and made a grand holiday instead of a Holy Day, and then rode in automobiles and yachts to their doom. When a world is bad enough to make war, it needs war. Though I had three sons between my heart and Germany's steel, yet I realized that America had to be hurt for her own salvation, for the salvation of Germany, for the safety of the world, and for the utter destruction of the German intriguers. If the people of the allied nations, however, had been shaping the instruments of their spirits into clean bodies, happy homes, honest business, and good governments, and all of these into the Kingdom of God on earth, Prussia could not have dreamed her dream of world dominance, nor would she have dared to throw down the gauntlet before the world. But seeing our weakness, she scorned our threats. Being under tutorship to the god of power, in spite of her vices, which were equal to those of other nations, Prussia became shrewder and stronger than the nations that were too largely feasting under a bacchanalian god, or softly enjoying themselves under a Santa Claus deity, or were piling up unrighteous gains under no god, or under one that was capable of wicked favoritism. It was clear to the prophets of the Most High that something was due,—and it came. Bad as war is, that state of society which makes war possible is even worse. When society grows its body into a monster, the corrective influence of hell, in some form, is the last hope. This does not, however, exonerate Germany from the crime of launching a ruthless war to gratify her lust for world domination. God surely could not help it, since the human family shaped its body as it did against light and conscience; but if there were no retribution for sin and ignorance He would lose His family utterly. Hell inevitably came when the tools were forged and the devils were trained; but God neither forged the tools nor trained the devils.