Life is another one of those strange mysteries that cannot be explained until we realize that something more than we see is breaking through matter and revealing itself. The living thing is letting through some greater power than itself, something beyond and behind, which is needed to account for what we see moving and acting with invention and purpose. Matter of itself is no explanation of life. The same elemental stuff is very different until it becomes the instrument of something not itself which organizes it, pushes it upward and onward, and reveals itself through it. Something has at length come into view which is more than force and mechanism. Here is intelligent purpose and forward-looking activity and something capable of variation, novelty, and surprise. And when living substance has reached a certain stage of organization, something higher still begins to break through—consciousness appears, and on its higher levels consciousness begins to reveal truth and moral goodness. It is useless to try to explain consciousness—especially truth-bearing consciousness—as a function of the brain, for it cannot be done. That way of explanation no more explains mind than the Ptolemaic theory explains the movements of the heavenly bodies. Once more, something breaks through and reveals itself, as surely as light breaks through a prism and reveals itself in the band of spectral colors. This consciousness of ours, as I have said, is not merely awareness, not only intelligent response; it lays hold of and apprehends, i.e., reveals, truth and goodness. What I think, when I really think, is not just my private “opinion,” or “guess,” or “seeming”; it turns out to have something universal and absolute about it. My multiplication-table is everybody’s multiplication-table. It is true for me and for beyond me. And what is true of my mathematics is also true of other features of my thinking. When I properly organize my experience through rightly formed concepts, I express aspects that are real and true for everybody—I attain to something which can be called truth. The same way in the field of conduct: I can discover not only what is subjectively right, but I can go farther and embody principles which are right not only for me but for every good man. Something more than a petty, tiny, private consciousness is expressing itself through my personality. I am the organ of something more than myself.
Perhaps more wonderful still is the way in which beauty breaks through. It breaks through not only at a few highly organized points, it breaks through almost everywhere. Even the minutest things reveal it as well as do the sublimest things, like the stars. Whatever one sees through the microscope, a bit of mould for example, is charged with beauty. Everything from a dewdrop to Mount Shasta is the bearer of beauty. And yet beauty has no function, no utility. Its value is intrinsic, not extrinsic. It is its own excuse for being. It greases no wheels, it bakes no puddings. It is a gift of sheer grace, a gratuitous largess. It must imply behind things a Spirit that enjoys beauty for its own sake and that floods the world everywhere with it. Wherever it can break through it does break through, and our joy in it shows that we are in some sense kindred to the giver and revealer of it.
Something higher and greater still breaks through and reveals a deeper Reality than any that we see and touch. Love comes through—not everywhere like beauty, but only where rare organization has prepared an organ for it. Some aspects of love appear very widely, are, at least, as universal as truth and moral goodness. But love in its full glory, love in its height of unselfishness and with its passion of self-giving is a rare manifestation. One person—the Galilean—has been a perfect revealing organ of it. In his life it broke through with the same perfect naturalness as the beam of light breaks through the prism of waterdrops and reveals the rainbow. Love that understands, sympathizes, endures, inspires, recreates, and transforms, broke through and revealed itself so impressively that those who see it and feel it are convinced that here at last the real nature of God has come through to us and stands revealed. And St. Paul, who was absolutely convinced of this, went still further. He held, with a faith buttressed in experience, that this same Christ, who had made this demonstration of love, became after his resurrection an invisible presence, a life-giving Spirit who could work and act as a resident power within receptive, responsive, human spirits, and could transform them into a likeness to himself and continue his revelation of love wherever he should find such organs of revelation. If that, or something like it, is true it is a very great truth. It was this that good old William Dell meant when he said: “The believer is the only book in which God himself writes his New Testament.”
II
CONQUERING BY AN INNER FORCE
There are few texts that have been more dynamic in the history of spiritual religion than the one which forms the keynote of the message of the little book of Habakkuk: “The righteous man lives by faith” (2:4). It became the central feature of St. Paul’s message. It was the epoch-making discovery in Luther’s experience, and it has always been the guiding principle of Protestant Christianity.
The profound significance of the words is often missed because the text is so easily turned into a phrase that is supposed just of itself to work a kind of magic spell, and secondly because the meaning of “faith” is so frequently misinterpreted. When we go back to the original experience out of which the famous text was born we can get fresh light upon the heart of its meaning. The little book begins with a searching analysis of the conditions of the time. With an almost unparalleled boldness the prophet challenges God to explain why the times are so badly out of joint, why the social order is so topsy-turvy, and why injustice is allowed to run a long course unchecked. God seems unconcerned with affairs—the moral pilot appears not to be steering things.
Then comes a moment of mental relief. The prophet hits upon the conclusion, arrived at by other prophets also, that God is about to use the Chaldeans as a divine instrument to chastise the wicked element in the nation, to right the wrongs of the disordered world, and to execute judgment. But as he begins to reflect he becomes more perplexed than ever. How can God, who is good, use such a terrible instrument for moral purposes? This people, which is assumed to be an instrument of moral judgment in a disordered world, is itself unspeakably perverse. It is fierce and wolfish. Its only god is might. It cares only for success. It catches men, like fish, in its great dragnet, and “then he sacrificeth unto his net and burneth incense unto his drag.” How can such a pitiless and insolent people, dominated by pride and love of conquest, be used to work out the ends of righteousness and to act for God who is too pure even to look upon that which is evil and wrong? Here the prophet finds himself suddenly up against the ancient problem of the moral government of the universe and the deep mystery of evil in it. He cannot untangle the snarled threads of his skein. No solution of the mystery lies at hand. He decides to climb up into his “watch-tower” and wait for an answer from God. If it does not come at once, he proposes to stay until it does come—“if it tarry, wait for it; it will surely come.” At length the vision comes, so clear that a man running can read it. It is just this famous discovery of the great text that a man cannot hope to get the world-difficulties all straightened out to suit him, he cannot in some easy superficial way justify the ways of God in the course of history; but, at least, he can live unswervingly and victoriously by his own soul’s insight, the insight of faith that God can be trusted to do the right thing for the universe which he is steering. It is beautifully expressed in a well-known stanza of Whittier’s:
“I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift