Sometimes—Oh joy! When the inward weather is just right; when selfish impulse has been hushed; when the clouds and shadows, which sin makes, are swept away and genuine love makes the whole inner atmosphere pure and free from haze, then I know that I find a beyond which before was nowhere in sight and might easily not have been suspected. I cannot decide whether this extended range of sight is due to alterations in myself, or whether it is due to some sudden increase of spiritual visibility in the great reality itself. I only know the fact. Before, I was occupied with things; now, I commune with God and am as sure of him as I am of the mountains beyond my lake, which my skeptical visitor has not yet seen.
There can be no adequate world here for us without at least a faith in the reality beyond the line of what we see with our common eyes. We have times when we cannot live by bread alone, or by our increase of stocks; when we lose our interest in cosmic forces and need something more than the slow justice which history weighs out on its great judgment days. We want to feel a real heart beating somewhere through things; we want to discover through the maze a loving will working out a purpose; we want to know that our costly loyalties, our high endeavors, and our sacrifices which make the quivering flesh palpitate with pain, really matter to Someone and fill up what is behind of his great suffering for love’s sake. We can not get on here with substitutes; we must have the reality itself. Religion is an awful farce if it is only a play-scheme, a cinematograph-show, which makes one believe he is seeing reality when he is, in fact, being fooled with a picture. We must at all costs insist on the real things. It is God we want and not another, the real Face and not a picture.
“We needs must love the highest when we see it;
Not Lancelot nor another.”
He is surely there to be seen, like my mountain. Days may pass when we only hope and long and guess. Then the weather comes right, the veil thins away and we see! It is, however, not a rare privilege reserved for a tiny few. It is not a grudged miracle, granted only to saints who have killed out all self. It belongs to the very nature of the soul to see God. It is what makes life really life. It is as normal a function as breathing or digestion. Only one must, of all things, intend to do it!
II
THE PROPHET AND HIS TRAGEDIES
There will always be in the world a vast number of persons who take the most comfortable form of religion which their generation affords. They are not path-breakers; they have nothing in their nature which pushes them into the fields of discovery—they are satisfied with the religion which has come down to them from the past. They accept what others have won and tested, and are thankful that they are saved the struggle and the fire which are involved in first-hand experience and in fresh discovery.
The prophet, on the contrary, in whatever age he comes, can never take this easy course. He cannot rest contented with the forms of religion which are accepted by others. He cannot enjoy the comforts of the calm and settled faith which those around him inherit and adopt. His soul forever hears the divine call to leave the old mountain and go forward, to conquer new fields, to fight new battles, to restate his faith in words that are fresh and vital, in terms of the deepest life of his time. We used to think—many people still think—that a prophet is a foreteller of future events, a kind of magical and miraculous person who speaks as an oracle and who announces, without knowing how or why, far-off, coming occurrences that are communicated to him. To think thus is to miss the deeper truth of the prophet’s mission. He is primarily a religious patriot, a statesman with a moral and spiritual policy for the nation. He is a person who sees what is involved in the eternal nature of things and therefore what the outcome of a course of life is bound to be. He possesses an unerring eye for curves of righteousness or unrighteousness, as the great artist has for lines of beauty and harmony, or as the great mathematician has for the completing lines of a curve, involved in any given arc of it. He is different from others, not in the fact that he has ecstasies and lives in the realm of miracles, but rather that he has a clearer conviction of God than most men have. He has found him as the center of all reality. He reads and interprets all history in the light of the indubitable fact of God, and he estimates life and deeds in terms of moral and spiritual laws, which are as inflexible as the laws of chemical atoms or of electrical forces. He looks for no capricious results. He sees that this is a universe of moral and spiritual order.
If he is an Amos, he will refuse to fall in line with the easy worshipers of his age, who are satisfied with the old-time religion of “burnt offerings” and “meat offerings” and “peace offerings of fat beasts.” His soul will cry out for a religion which makes a new moral and spiritual man, “makes righteousness run down as a mighty stream,” and sets the worshiper into new social relations with his fellows. If he is an Isaiah, he will refuse “to tramp the temple” with the mass of easy worshipers; he will have his own vision of “the Lord high and lifted up,” with his glory filling not only the temple but the whole earth, and he will dedicate himself to the task of preparing a holy people and a holy city for this God who has been revealed to him as a thrice-holy God. If he is a Jeremiah, he will not accept the view that the traditional religion of Jerusalem is adequate for the crisis of the times. He will insist that true religion must be inwardly experienced; that the law of God must be written in the heart, and that the life of a man must be the living fruit of his faith. He will cry out against the idea that the moral wounds and spiritual sores of the daughter of Jerusalem can be healed with easy salves and cheap panaceas.
The supreme example of this refusal to go along the easy line of contemporary religion is that of One who was more than a prophet. His people prided themselves on being the chosen people of the Lord. The scribal leaders had succeeded in drawing up a complete and perfect catalogue of religious performances. They supplied minute directions for one’s religious duty in every detail, real or imaginary, of daily life, and the world has never seen a more elaborate form of religion than this of the Pharisees. But Christ refused to follow the path of custom; he could not and he would not do the things which the scribes prescribed. He broke a new path for the soul, and called men away from legalism and the dead routine of “performances” to a life of individual faith and service, which involves suffering and self-sacrifice, but which brings the soul into personal relation with the living God.