We understand when we read such words why this collection of Psalms has held its place in the religious life of the world. It contains the living, throbbing experience of great souls, who cared absolutely for one thing—to find God and to enjoy Him, and who, having found their one precious jewel, could do without all else, and by this inner experience could stand the world.
II
THE NEW AND LIVING WAY
The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews declares that Christ has introduced into the world “a new and living way” to God. The concrete problems confronting this writer to a Jewish circle of the first century were very different from our own problems to-day, but he so succeeded in seizing an eternal aspect of the issue that his word about the new and living way is as vital now as it was then.
His “new and living way,” as the tenth chapter shows, is the way of personal consecration as a substitute for the old way of sacrifice. The manner of his exposition may seem to us now a little artificial, but there can be no question of the religious significance of the conclusion. Following his usual line of interpretation, he begins by treating the great national system of sacrifices as a “shadow,” i.e. a parable, or a figure, or a symbol, of a true and higher reality. Then he goes on boldly to declare that “sacrifices” have become empty performances—it is impossible, he says, that the blood of bulls and goats works any real change in the nature or the attitude of the soul. Next he buttresses his radical conclusion with a citation of Scripture to the effect that God has never taken pleasure in burnt offerings and ritual sacrifices, and on this Scripture text from the Psalms he rises to his new insight, that Christ has come not to do the sacrificial work of a priest, not to satisfy God by a sacrifice, but to reveal the personal power of a life of consecration: “Then said I, lo, I come to do thy will, O God.” This way of dedication to the divine will, this complete consecration of self out of love for the will of God, the writer calls “the new and living way.”
Two very important conclusions are inherently bound up with this transition from a religion of sacrifices to a religion of dedication. First, if carries a wholly new conception of God and secondly, it involves a complete reinterpretation of human ministry. If God does not take any pleasure in sacrifice, then the whole idea that He is a Being to be appeased by gifts, by offerings, by incense, by blood, or by self-inflicted suffering of any sort, falls to the ground. These things are not shadows or symbols; they are blunders and mistakes. The God for whom they are intended needs and asks for no such form of approach. That has always been the contention of the supreme prophets of the race, and Christ in His unveiling of God has made the fact sun-clear that God is not rightly conceived when He is thought of as needing any kind of sacrifice or any inducement to make Him forgiving or loving. Love is His nature. The new and living way leads first of all to this new revelation of God.
But no less certainly it leads to a new type of minister. The priest was conceived as an expert in ways of satisfying God and of appeasing Him. He was supposed to know what God required and how to perform the things required. He was indispensable, because only an expert, duly ordained, could do the work that was necessary for bringing God and man into relation with each other. Under “the new and living way,” however, the priest has lost his occupation and the minister becomes an expert in ways of expanding human life and in bringing men to a dedication of themselves to the will of God and to the spiritual tasks of the world. In accordance with this new insight, everything that concerns religion must in some way attach to life. It must promote, or advance life, increase life, add to its height and depth, or, in some manner, make life richer and more joyous. The minister of the new and living way may be called, as he no doubt will be called, to make many sacrifices of things that are precious, and surrenders of things as dear as life itself, but there will be no inherent magic in these sacrifices. They will not be efficacious as a satisfaction to God. They will be only means toward some larger end of life, as was the case with Christ’s surrenders and sacrifices. The ascetic temper will be left forever behind. Whatever is cut off, or plucked out, will be removed only for the sake of increasing the quality of life and the dynamic of it. The final test is always to be sought in the expansion of capacity, in the increase of talents, in the formation of personality, in dedication to the task of widening the area of life.
The true minister will, like the great apostle, present his body, his entire being, in living dedication. He will be satisfied with nothing short of a holy and acceptable service—acceptable, because Christlike—he will endeavor to make all his service “reasonable service”; that is, intelligent service, and he will strive earnestly not to become set into the mold of the world or into any deadening groove of habit, but to be transformed by a steady increase of life and a renewing of spiritual insight, so that he can prove what is the perfect will of God and so that he can minister to the growing life of the world.
III
AN APOSTLE OF THE INNER WAY
It is always a foolish blunder to take half when it is just as easy to have a whole, but the tendency to dichotomize all realities into halves and to assume that we are shut up to an either-or selection, is an ancient tendency and one that very often keeps us from winning the full richness of the life that is possible for us. Human history is strewn with dualistic formulations which have sorted men into either-or groups. Now it is “spirit” and “flesh” that are sharply antagonistic and men are called upon to settle which of these two halves of man’s life is to have their loyalty. Again, it is “this world” and “the next world”—the here and the yonder—that bid for our heart’s suffrage. “The Church” and “the world”; “faith” and “reason”; “the sacred” and “the secular” are other twin pairs that call for a sharp decision of allegiance. So, too, it has been customary to cut apart the outer life and the inner life and, with a stern either-or, to put them into rivalry with one another. One camp insists that religion is to be sought in deeds and effects; the other camp asserts that religion is an inward condition of life—to be is more important than to do. But this method of cutting is like that which the unnatural mother asked Solomon to perform upon the living child. It sunders what was alive and throbbing into two dead fragments, neither of which is a real half of the united living whole. In place of all the either-or formulations that force a choice between the halves of great spiritual realities I should put the living and undivided whole. Instead of selecting either-or, I prefer to take both. There is no line that splits the outer life and the inner life into two compartments. Nobody can do without being and nobody can be without doing. Personality is the most complete unity in the universe and it binds forever into an indissoluble and integral whole the outer and the inner, the spirit and the deed.
But at the same time it is interesting to see what a supremely great and many-sided soul like St. Paul has to say of the inwardness and interior depth of religion. That he was a man of action is plain enough to be seen and nobody can easily miss his clarion call to arm cap-a-pie for the positive, moral battles of life. He was ethical in the noblest sense of the word, but there was an inner core of religious experience in him which is as unique and wonderful as is his athletic ethical purpose or his imperial spirit of moral conquest.