Goodness and Religion

OF all persons who hinder the progress of religious thought, possibly the most effective is the man who is broad-sminded without being deep-minded. It takes an exceptionally gifted man, one of unusual intellectual powers and mentality rarely disciplined, to be ‘broad’ without spiritual deterioration. It has been well said that one’s religion is like a river. When a river breaks over its well-established and ancient banks, unless it is a stream remarkably deep, it will quickly degenerate into an odorous and malarial swamp. Obviously, the best thing to do with ordinary rivers is to keep them within their ancient bounds. An extraordinarily religious soul may break over the banks and hew out new channels successfully. The ordinary man, breaking over the former restraints in an intense desire to be ‘broad,’ usually accomplishes nothing except his own spiritual stagnation and the annoyance of his neighbors.

For a spiritual genius like Phillips Brooks, to take only one example, one can have nothing but admiration; for in breaking over the bounds of conventional religion he did not abandon them. He appreciated their value and sought merely to broaden the old channel. But it is with a very different feeling that one observes the genial gentleman who enlivens an after-dinner smoke with the smiling and patronizing remark to the clergyman present, ‘Well, I’m broad-minded enough to know that one church is as good as another.’ Of course he is broad — swamp-broad, and covered with a rich intellectual scum which prevents his knowing what arrant nonsense he is uttering. He knows that one cigar is not as good as another; that one bar is not the equal of every other bar; that Henry James and Robert Chambers are not equals as novelists; that Beethoven and Irving Berlin are not occupants of the same musical plane. He has very definite opinions as to the moral superiority of either Germany or England, and even of the comparative righteousness and usefulness of Mr. Bryan and Mr. Roosevelt. And yet there he sits, pitying his poor clergyman for being a narrow-minded ass, and saying, ‘One church, one religion, one philosophy is as good as another.’

But even this person is not quite so far away from the broadness of Brooks and Parker and, I may add, Cardinal Newman, as is the man of whom you hear that ‘ he is not connected in any way with religion, but he is a good husband, father, and citizen, and what more can one ask? ’ The sublime complacency of the man who tells you this about himself is beyond remark. The egoist who esteems himself infallible is as nothing to his cousin who deems himself impeccable. What we do fail to perceive, quite often, is that even when the speaker is talking of some one else he is displaying a bit of that careless thinking which is apt to characterize the man who is ‘swampybroad.’ He has confounded morality with religion.

This mistake is so commonly made that it is worthy of some attention. There is, to be sure, a relationship between being good and being religious, but it is not the relationship of identity. It is the relationship of producer and produced, of antecedent and consequent, of cause and effect. It would be foolish to say that a dynamo and an electric light are the same thing; that green apples is a term synonymous with indigestion; that an architect’s plans are the same thing as a completed building; or that sex-attraction is but another name for the social institution called the family. In the same way it is an evidence of muddled thinking to maintain that being good is the same thing as being religious.

No matter what religion you take up, you will find that it is not, in essence, a system of ethics. It is, rather, an agency for strengthening people by means of contacts, real or fancied, with supernatural power, that they may have the courage and the power to fulfill a system of ethics. In other words, the essential thing about religion is its mysticism, the fruit of which is the nerving of men and women up to a system of morality. The purpose of religions, in their origins, will invariably be found to be the imparting to people of supernatural sanctions for, and supernatural power to fulfill, the ethical system deemed necessary by the culture of the worshipers. This, which is true of all religions, can be seen to be true of Christianity in particular if one will examine either the methods of its Founder or the expression which it took upon that Founder’s removal from it of his material Presence.

It is a matter that has often been remarked by disparagers of Jesus of Nazareth that there is nothing new in his ethical teachings, no original contribution to ethical thought. The Golden Rule was not his invention. The principle of universal fraternity was a part of much of Jewish Messianism in the century or two before He came. One can comb the ethical teachings of the Nazarene carefully and find not one whit of moral instruction that had not been uttered elsewhere before He came. He laid little stress upon moral instruction. The Sermon on the Mount is very largely a collection of ancient wise saws commented upon in such a way that the hearers might see their real significance. Indeed, He spoke truth when He said that his function was to fulfill, to round out to completion, the utterances of the Law and of the ancient prophets or preachers of his people.

And when He deals with erring individuals there is no attempt to instruct them in a new system of being good. The Magdalen is taught no new code of sex-morality. The unadorned command to ‘Go and sin no more’ implies that she already knew what she ought to have been. Apparently Levi and Zaccheus were not attracted from their ‘grafting’ habits by lectures on political science or the ethics of government. They felt somehow in Jesus a power sufficient to make them do what they already knew they ought to do. The centurion at the Cross exclaimed, ‘This was the Son of God,’ after hearing but seven brief cries, only the first of which had any connection with ethics, and that an indirect one. The thing about Jesus which attracted people was not especially the newness or beauty of his moral science. It was rather that men and women felt a power flowing from Him which they unhesitatingly deemed the power of God Himself — filling them with a force sufficient to make them deny the world, the flesh, and the selfish Devil, and aspire toward living up to a morality which they already perceived, but which theretofore they had deemed beyond their power of achievement.

That this is true is plain from the early history of Christianity, as it is revealed in the Book of the Acts, the Epistles of St. Paul, and the writings of the early fathers. It is nearly always a matter of astonishment to the rare moderns who take to Bible reading, to find how little ethical instruction there is in the New Testament and how much there is about personal contact with the power of God as revealed in Jesus Christ the living. Very little time is taken writing to converts, or preaching to the heathen, about what they ought to do, while very much is written and preached about how God had visited the earth in Jesus Christ, who was not dead but alive, and had sent the Holy Spirit, the Strengthener and Consoler, to breathe into people the ability to live up to what they knew it was proper for human beings to be.

As the Christian Church developed, it manifested from the beginning certain tendencies which many of our contemporaries deplore. What these critics do not see is that these tendencies were not perversions of Christ’s method, but fulfillments of it. These tendencies were toward Dogmatic Creeds and toward Ritualistic and Sacramental worship. The early creeds, as they have been preserved to us, contain little or nothing of ethical teaching. They are designed to preserve for us certain fundamental facts about the coming, the life, the death, and the continued life of Jesus the Incarnate God, and of the possibility of continued communion with Him through surrender to the Holy Spirit which He sent, and which dwells in the Church of his followers. One sees in this a recognition that Christianity is not primarily a system of ethics but rather a means of attaining power for a system of ethics. Nor is the sacramental system a means of teaching morality. It is rather a means of gaining mystical contact with Jesus. Baptism is the rite of incorporation into Christ of the converted or the newly born. Confirmation is the rite whereby Christians are to receive the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The Mass is the rite of personal communion with the Redeemer. To the development of these sacraments and the surrounding of them with elaborate ceremonial, mystically significant, the Church devoted a very great deal of attention, until all the people understood perfectly that the Christian religion was not nearly so much a morality as it was a coming into contact with Him of whom the evangelist St. John said that He came ‘that they might have life and have it more abundantly.’

The history of the splitting of Christendom into two camps, known generally as Catholic and Protestant, is the story of increasing misunderstanding concerning the relationship of morals and religion. First of all, on the one side there was a growing failure to recognize that religion was designed as a sanction, a handmaid, an inspirer of morality, and a developing regard for it as an end in itself; and then, on the other side, there was by way of reaction a complete repudiation of the mystical essence of religion and a tendency to deny that morality needs sanctions, handmaids, and inspirers. The same two tendencies toward error are in the world to-day, but it seems likely to some observers—and therein lies the hope of a reunited Christendom — that eventually all Catholics will discover, as great numbers of them have, that religion is meaningless when made an end in itself; and that all Protestants will find, as great numbers of them are finding, that morality without mysticism, at least Christian morality without Christian mysticism, is so difficult as to be impossible. Religion, for such a reunited Christendom, will be a thing essentially mystical, a thing of ceremony, of ritual, a thing awe-compelling, a thing which breathes of God Incarnate Glorified, and yet a thing to be used of men primarily in the gaining of God’s strength for the fulfilling of the highest ethics, for the bringing in upon the earth of the Kingdom where the Divine will shall be done as it is in Heaven.

It would be a most unusual soldier who would say from the trenches, ‘I never replenish my cartridge belt, but that does not matter, of course, so long as I continue to shoot my rifle.’ What a sense of astonishment we should feel if Mr. Jones said, after dinner, ‘You know Smith is not a man who eats. Fact is, he never takes a bite of food. But then, you see, that is of no importance because he works so well and so hard all the time.’

And yet no more logical is the position of the man who states that he has substituted morality for religion; who contends that for the performance of that hardest of tasks — being a human being — he has found in the power of his own weakness an adequate substitute for the sustaining power of the Presence of God.