Then realizing the vastness of truth, and the limitations of our own powers of apprehending it, we must be willing to recognize that there must be other aspects of truth which we, as individuals or as a religious community, have not yet apprehended, and that the whole truth must needs be too great for any human mind or system to express. This attitude of mind should surely be perfectly compatible with an enthusiastic loyalty to that vision of the truth which has been given to us or our community, and with a desire to share this vision with others. [p.10]
To attempt to surrender our own expression of the Truth as we see it, and replace it by an expression drawn from the vision of others is to make in the inner life an error like that of the school of Bologna in painting. The Caracci and their followers deliberately aimed at acquiring the peculiar excellencies of each of the great masters who preceded them, the harmonies of Raphael, the colour of Titian, the vigour and the grandiose forms of Michael Angelo. They hoped to combine all these and thus achieve a higher perfection than their masters, but in so doing they failed to express themselves in their own way, for they were always painting things as they imagined they ought to see them, and not as they really saw them.
The great artist, like Rembrandt, will honour and admire a Raphael or a Correggio without seeking to imitate them or to borrow their technique. And so while we recognise the vision of truth that comes to men of different views from our own, we must not abandon our own vision, or our attempt to express it faithfully, because we know that we see a part and not the whole.
Every great religious movement has been in its origin or at its highest point universal in its aspiration, claiming to make appeal to all mankind and to become at length the religion of the whole world. And it is this very universal claim which seems to some dispassionate critics so narrow- spirited and fanatical, which bears witness to the force and reality of that deepest religious life [p.11] which underlies all difference of dogma, and finds its expression in all these varying faiths. At the moment of its budding forth, the tiny twig feels within it the expanding life of the whole tree. "I am the true tree, and the tree that is to be." it may be imagined as saying; though the great boughs above it do not stir in the wind that shakes it to and fro. The twig may have within it the possibility of growth to a size exceeding the stem from which it now springs, or it may remain only a twig; but in either case it is a part of the tree, and in a sense it is the tree; its life is the tree's life. So every great religious movement, when at its best and highest, looks forward to world-wide extension; it may be that the flood of life takes new channels and only a tiny sect remains to bear witness to what has been, but yet, when its members were filled with their first enthusiasm, and went forth into the world to win others to their views, they were strong because somehow or other they had come into touch with the eternal; their creed and organisation may have corresponded only to the need of the day, and of a limited number of people, or it may have been of wider application and able to endure for a longer time, but in spite of these limitations, the creed and organisation represent an inner life through which their members came into touch with the source of all life and strength.
Our task then must be to strive to be more conscious of this fact in our own lives, and [p.12] in elaborating our own systems, as well as in dealing with and considering the religious views of others. In discarding the transient elements, the husks of dogma, we have to respect the seed-corn of life within them. The recognition of this will make us more reverent towards even the hoary errors of antiquity, and the methods of thought and life which to us are outworn, but were once living, and still may be living to some.
This surely is the lesson which we may draw from that touching story related by John Cassian of the monk Serapion, which Auguste Sabatier once told to his pupils. In his old age the good monk had suddenly been brought to realise, by the preaching of two missioners, the error which he had committed in thinking of the Eternal as a being like himself, fashioned in human form. His friends gathered round him to thank God for his deliverance from the grievous anthropomorphic heresy, when, in the midst of their prayers, the old man fell in tears to the ground with the pathetic cry: "Woe's me, wretched man that I am! they have taken away my God and I have none to hold to or worship or pray to now."
In our work of thought or of practical endeavour we shall need above all to realise the value of humble reverence for truth for its own sake, and of the recognition that wherever goodness is, there is that which the theist knows as the Divine, which others my speak of as the enduring spiritual [p.13] ideal, but which, by whatever name we call it is the inspiring and illuminating reality which shines through every unselfish deed and thought, and makes our lives of worth.
We are sensible of this uniting force, however much our ethical ideals may differ. We cannot explain the common principles which justify the ideal of a Gordon and that of a Tolstoy, but we must surely feel that those ideals are in some way branches from the same good tree; it may well be that just as in the intellectual world different bents of genius each have their place and justification, so too in the moral have different types of the ethical ideal. The scientific mind, the practical, executive talent of the businessman, the speculative powers of the metaphysician and the creative gifts of the poet and artist, each have their place, and no one human mind can combine them all. So, too, it may be with the moral ideals realised here in our human lives. Because one is good, another is not wholly wrong. There may be varieties of goodness just as there are differences of shape and beauty between flower and flower. But while we recognise this, we surely need too to realise that there must ultimately be some vital connection between these different ideals, although we ourselves may not be able to perceive the unifying influence or principle. Is it not here that the Union of Ethical Societies fails, in that after insisting upon "the supreme importance of the knowledge, love and practice of the Right," [p.14] their manifesto goes on to disclaim "the acceptance of any one ultimate criterion of right" as a condition of ethical fellowship? Yet unless there be some such criterion, can we speak of "the Right" at all? The capital "R" is an unconscious survival of the theistic expression of thought, or rather the expression of the essentially religious spirit of man, which in spite of a creed of intellectual agnosticism, recognises the Divine in life and does obeisance to it under another name. The idea of good and the thought of God are not connected together merely by a similarity of sound; they have but one origin. Thus, if where goodness is, there God is, we must be able to find evidence, even where there may be no intellectual knowledge of God, of the recognition of a unique worth in the good apart from all attempted explanations of its value. And perhaps we cannot do better than take an example from the writings of a master sceptic, to show how in spite even of an apparent intention to make mock of the failure of the good and unselfish man, and of the utterly impracticable nature of his ideal, a kind of homage is yet paid to the ideal and to its votary, and through them to the source of their inspiration.
Readers of Voltaire's "Candide" will recall the figure of the Anabaptist Jacques, the upright and unselfish man who perishes in spite of all his trust in overruling good. Voltaire in picturing his death would appear to be casting scorn upon [p. 15] a complacent view of a universe where such a thing might happen again and again, and as far as any practical teaching goes he would seem merely to point out that righteousness and faith may be not only unavailing to ward off calamity, but may actually bring it upon those who make such a standard their sole guide. And yet, even as you read, you feel how much nobler and better it is to perish like Jacques, with the unswerving faith of a good man, than to live on contentedly digging one's garden and enjoying its fruits in selfish peace. And however much we may be conscious that in the moment of trial, face to face with mortal peril, we ourselves might swerve aside, might hesitate and fail, we yet know that if we could make our choice in a cool hour, reviewing calmly what we ought to do, and what we would do if we could be true to the best that is in us, we should choose the honourable failure of the good man rather than the success of the bad. In itself we know it to be better, apart from all thought of consequence. And in practice we know how in the presence of the loveliness of an unselfish act all lower thoughts of pleasure and of profit fade away! Face to face with the enduring ideal that shines forth from. the good deed, lower ideals shrivel and sink into nothingness. Even truer is this of goodness made real to us in personality, and here it is that those of us who call ourselves Christians may find the keystone to the continual self-revelation of God to man, in that supreme revelation of the Divine [p.16] nature in the unique personality of Jesus, which for the Church is the centre of inspiration and the explanation of the light which shines in all other lives.
If we can unite in reverencing the good and unselfish spirit, wherever it manifests itself in human lives, so too, we need to reverence every- where the search after truth, and the service of Truth for its own sake. Surely one of the most helpful signs our age is found in this increasing recognition of spiritual kinship between seekers after Truth of most divergent creed; not the least of the benefits of the Higher Criticism and the problems with which the minds of men have been confronted through the advance of science has been that in the readjustment of thought and life which is going on all about us, men have grown aware that they are not fighting their battles alone, but that far and near are kindred spirits going through a like struggle, and even that those whom they had fancied foemen were really their allies. This is the beginning of a movement wider and deeper than the so-called religious controversies which embitter the surface of our political life, the prelude to a new and wider Catholicism of the spirit, in which all the servants of Truth and humanity may unite without sacrifice of conviction in a sense of true brotherhood. Something of this underlying unity is recognised both in the supreme moments of our individual lives and in great times of national crisis, such as [p.17 ] come in the birthpangs of a new movement or the brave endeavour to stem some rising tide of evil. Thus it came about that in the great uprising of German democracy of 1848, the colours which symbolised the new hopes of the people were often consecrated by a public religious ceremony in which all faiths united, and in the little Bavarian town of Furth, the Jewish Rabbi, as representing the smallest denomination of the town, was by common consent chosen to perform the ceremony. But we do not need to go so far back or to such a distant place to find instances of the way in which men of varying creed have found themselves uniting with those who are opposed to all forms of religion in defence of some common cause, inspired by some uniting ideal, though but dimly realized. Here, surely, is the truest test of that which is Catholic, the quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, which the dogmas of theology can but imperfectly explain, but which is realized even now by all who seek to serve whole-heartedly the truth, and therefore, too, their fellowmen.