A Wayfarer's Faith: Aspects of the common basis of religious life

by T. Edmund Harvey

Men who have shown singular devotion to some [p.131] hero saint whom they love may have erred in the past in trying to reproduce his life under altered conditions; and such imitation has sometimes led them all too far from the spirit of the one whom they have sought to follow. St. Francis of Assisi, and in later days John Wycliffe, and George Fox, have each had followers such as these. But there is at least one to whom we may look for this guidance without any of the narrowing influence that other hero worship so often brings. We cannot read about our heroes, look up to them and think of them, without coming under the influence of their personality and without our character growing unconsciously to bear in it some faint trace at least of theirs. Let us then turn thus in the dark hour to Jesus Christ. No matter if for the moment we cannot regard him as we have been taught the Church does. Let us put aside all theories as to his birth; the miracles which puzzle us, even the fact of the Resurrection, and the speculations of theology as to his Divine nature. Not because these are not important matters, and not because we may not have to go on thinking about them, and seeking more light about them; but because for the guidance which most of all we need we can go deeper than all these doubts and speculations. Let us make Christ our teacher as his earliest disciples did, who knew nothing about his birth, and only followed him at first just because they felt he was far better than they and they had need of him and loved him. [p.132] As we do this, and simply endeavour to keep near to his thoughts, to think over the meaning of his words and to act as men who are seeking to follow him, we shall begin to realize that there is in Christ himself a greater miracle than anything recorded of him in the Gospels, and that whatever the correct theory of the Resurrection may be, He is still a living influence working upon our hearts and inspiring us onward to good. When we doubt of God because of the world's evil, we can hear his voice speak of the love which watches even over the fall of the sparrow, and some sense of that love comes to us too, in the midst of our darkness. And when the sense of our own wrong-doing is heavy upon us, we may feel cheered to think that our Teacher never turned from the men of the world and the profligate when they sought his help in honest sorrow, but rather sought them first, and for the disciple who denied him had nothing but a look of love. He knew what it was himself to be discouraged, to spend long hours in prayer, to be misunderstood and to fail. And sometimes there may come to us a glimpse of even deeper depths into which he went for his fellow- men. As we feel all this we may not be able to explain it, but we know ourselves the stronger for it, the better able to face misfortune and temptation and suffering, and to hold manfully to the best that we know, in the midst of doubt. And thus, little by little, we come to feel we have found one who not only makes us realize what failures [p.133] we have been, but is ever calling out the best that is in us, drawing us on to a higher ground and clearer air, where our vision carries further, until at length there may come to us some glimpse of the Divine Love at work in the world and within us, and some sense that Christ has brought to us God's expression of Himself in the terms of humanity, so that we begin to understand a little of the meaning of the words: "This is life eternal, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent."

And meanwhile, let us have faith too for those who cannot yet feel this attractive power as we, perhaps, have known it. In the Fourth Gospel the Master tells his disciples that he has other sheep who are not of this fold; we may picture his thought as going out to far-off lands where men were striving to do their duty or to find the truth without any knowledge of him, without any intellectual knowledge of God perhaps; some legionary guarding the peace of the empire at the gates of the North, some Roman government official upholding the dignity and justice of the law amongst jealous robber tribes and unscrupulous traders, some Greek philosopher seeking to know a yet higher law, and simple men and women practising it unknown to themselves; or, further away in the far-off East, the Buddhist missionary teaching the worth of gentleness and mercy, or the disciple of Confucius learning to reverence the great moral truths he knew, and to apply them [p.134] in all life's relations. Some day all these should hear his voice; already they were his sheep. And so to-day, wherever the lonely thinker spends his hours in seeking, and the servant of science unselfishly gives up all thought of personal advancement and delight in the pursuit of truth, wherever in the politics of towns or peoples men seek to work out a higher form of public life, or in business as in leisure to be faithful not merely to their own interests, but to a wider ideal, we must see the seekers and servants of good, who are God's servants too. Sooner or later for these too will be fulfilled the words: "Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed."

CHAPTER IX.: THE HOUSE OF PEACE.

THE sense of ancient peace, the quiet beauty of the ruined abbeys which Turner and many a lesser artist loved to paint, must often have come home to many who visit them, who have no knowledge of architecture and little thought for history. But, even with these passers by, something of their interest in the old ruin is perhaps due to the thought of the life which was lived there in the days gone by. Less worthy traditions have marred the glory of the earlier days, and dimmed the recollection of the long struggle with nature, the hardships of a simple, self-denying life, the toil of the scholar and the conflicts of the saint, but as we look at the broken pillars and the silent aisles and arches where once the music of men's chanting rose and fell, we feel that it is not only the thought of the vanished greatness that moves us, but the sense that this was a place where prayer was wont to be made. We try to picture to our selves sometimes the life of mediaeval England, and how these ruins were once places living and vibrating with thought and spiritual effort, centres [p.136] from which pulsed out many a good influence to uplift the lives of men.

It is true that the monastic ideal was in some respects narrow and one-sided, that its social and religious life was marred and maimed by an artificial celibacy being put in the place of the natural family life; but granting all this, had not the monastery at its best a noble place in the nation, which is too often lacking to-day, or but imperfectly supplied by other things?

The rule of St. Benedict prescribed that seven hours daily should be given by each disciple to manual labour; it was a far-seeing provision, in which there seems to have been realized the thought that study and prayer alone without active work could not provide a complete and healthy life. The Benedictine and Cistercian Abbeys were, at their best, never self-centred institutions whose members pursued their own spiritual welfare without regard to the needs of the world outside. Their scholars copied manuscripts and wrote books for the instruction of men, they were schoolmasters to rich and poor; their lay brothers laboured in the fields, making waste places smooth. Their intercessions went up for others than themselves. Every now and then guests from the great world came to stay within the abbey walls for rest and refreshment of soul, and now and then to end their days in an atmosphere of prayer and peace. In some ways, as we know, the coming of the Friars marked a stage of higher development, in that they [p.137] shared more fully the life of the people, at least in the simplicity and poverty of the early days of the Franciscan movement. Yet another development again is seen in the communities of Brethren of the common life, and in the béguinages of the Low Countries, which combined something of the possibility of individual home life with a common union for prayer.

It is interesting to be able to see at Ghent and Bruges to-day these quaint communities, where each inmate has her own house, with perfect liberty to come and go, to mix with the outer world, or even to return to it altogether; but with a common chapel, and a common religious bond visibly uniting the whole sisterhood. Is it not possible, if the Reformation of Henry VIII. had not been so largely political in its origin, that the monastic system might have been in some measure adapted to the needs of the world of to-day without those acts of spoliation which gave the new Tudor aristocracy its wealth and left us these piles of ruined buildings?

A famous French novelist who had lived and written as a materialist, turned in his closing years back to the ancient Catholic Church, finding peace and refreshment as a lay guest within the walls of a monastery. Much of his later work may seem exaggerated, and even morbid, in its mysticism, but it was sincere because based upon his own inward experience. In one of these later religious novels he speaks of cloistered convents [p.138] as being "the spiritual lightning conductors of Europe." To him the lives of these poor women, shut off in perpetuity from their fellows, were not wasted, but provided a sacrifice of spiritual struggle on behalf of the erring world outside.

Perhaps Huysmans was not right in thinking that the self-inflicted loneliness of the Poor Clares and Benedictine nuns stood in so high a relation of service to humanity as he pictures; certainly the life of practical prayer lived out by a faithful sister of St. Vincent de Paul amongst the sick poor whom she tends, seems far higher and more Christlike than that of the cloistered ascetic; but still the fact remains that if we are not materialists, but have faith in the effectual working of all true prayer we must hold that the intercessions of the cloister, in so far as they spring from true hearts of faith, are not wasted, but, in some way we cannot understand, flow out for the uplifting of the world.

As we look out at the life of to-day must we not feel that in its rush and hurry, with the thoughtless materialism of its outlook, there is more than ever need for the essential message of the monastery, fellowship in self-surrender and self-control, comradeship in study, work and above all in prayer? Is it not possible for us even now to have in our midst here and there little colonies which will do for our age the work which the best monasteries did for the Middle Ages, and perhaps [p.139] something more even than this, in that we need no longer have their limitations?