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PRINCIPAL L. P. JACKS

D.D., LL.D., D.LITT.

"THE LEGENDS OF SMOKEOVER," ETC.

"Perplexed, yet not unto despair"

HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED

LONDON

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

The substance of this little book was delivered in the form of two lectures given at the invitation of the Hibbert Trustees in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham during March and April, 1922. On revising the spoken word for the press I have made certain rearrangements which seemed to be required in committing the lectures to the printed form. The first section is wholly new and may be considered as a short introduction to the main theme. Such an introduction is, I think, needed, but the time at my disposal did not allow of its inclusion in the oral delivery of the lectures.

L. P. J.

The first and greatest of religious perplexities, the source of all the rest, arises in the mysterious fact of our existence as individual souls. Our perplexities spring from the very root of life. Why are we here at all?

Did we but know the purpose for which we are present in the world, should we not have in our hands the key to all the questions we raise about God, freedom, duty and immortality? But if we know not why we are here how can we hope to answer these other questions?

Or again, if we were forced to acknowledge that our existence has no purpose at all, would it not be futile to embark on inquiries concerning God, freedom, duty and immortality? What meaning could these terms have for beings who had learnt that their own existence was purposeless?

Why should God need to be glorified, or enjoyed, by you, by me, by anyone? Why should he need anything? If, as some affirm, the universe is the dwelling-place of the All Perfect, what reason can be given for the existence, side by side with that All Perfect one, or within him, of a multitude of imperfect images of his Perfection--like you and me? In the presence of One who has all purposes already fulfilled in himself what purpose can be served by our introduction into the scheme of things? If you and I, and all such, were to be blotted out forthwith and the All Perfect left in sole possession of the universe, where would be the loss? You and I are apparently superfluous.

Philosophers, both ancient and modern, have addressed themselves to this problem, not altogether, I think, without success, and yet not quite successfully. Their arguments have not removed but greatly deepened the mystery of our existence, bringing it to a critical point where we must either accept it or run away from life and its perils--to the point, in fact, where we must choose between life and death. If we choose life we accept the risk that its burden may prove too heavy for us. If death, we escape the perils of life but forfeit our share in its victories.

The former is the heroic choice; the latter the cowardly. As Carlyle was never tired of repeating, the ultimate question which every man has to face and answer for himself is this: "Wilt thou be a hero or a coward?" No philosophy can relieve us from the responsibility of having to make that choice. All that philosophy can do, and it is a great thing to accomplish even this, is to bring us to the point where we see that the choice has to be made. This it does by forcing us to raise the question: "Why am I here? For what end have I been sent into the world?"

But let us inquire more closely what philosophers have done by way of bringing us to this point--the point where a final decision between heroism and cowardice becomes inevitable.

Unable, as every man is, to give a convincing reason why he should be here at all, or why, being here, he should remain here any longer,--unable to prove that it would not be better for the world at large, if all necks, his own included, were wrung five minutes hence--is there not something fundamentally irrational in our determination to continue in existence as long as we possibly can--that universal will-to-live, which forms the basis of all particular volitions, and supplies the motive power to our plans, purposes, preparations and policies for our own or others' good? Challenged to show cause why we should linger here a moment longer, what answer could any of us give that would have the slightest claim to "the universal validity of reason"? Reason cannot be bullied into acquiescence by the importance of individuals in their own eyes. Was there ever a great man whose sudden extinction would not have been hailed with joy by a considerable section of his contemporaries, or a little one who would not have made things pleasanter for somebody by taking himself off?

If we limit the word "rational" to the processes of thought which issue in demonstrations after the manner of mathematical arguments, and if all behaviour is to be termed irrational which involves the taking of a risk, I see no escape from the conclusion that human life is infected with irrationality at its very core. So far as any of us act upon the assumption that it is better for us to exist than not to exist we are assuming what can never be "proved."

But, for my own part, I am not prepared to put these limitations on the word "rational." The traditional logic of the schools, on which this notion of rationality is founded, turns out on examination to cover no more than a departmental activity of the human mind. The type of conclusion to which it leads us is determined in advance by the rules it lays down for its own procedure, in the one department where such procedure is possible. Free activity, which is the essence of self-consciousness, and the life of all creative work, lies entirely outside its province, and the attempt to deal with it by departmental rules yields nothing but the rank absurdity that freedom itself is absurd. The logic in question may be compared to a locomotive engine which can move only on the rails that have been laid down for it; and the philosopher who would apprehend the things of the spirit by the means which it affords him is like a man who rides an engine rather than a horse when he goes to hunt a fox. Logical machinery cannot follow the movement of the live spirit, nor arrest it even for a moment's inspection. Within its own province the rule of the traditional logic is, indeed, absolute. But to make that province co-extensive with the realm of truth, to extend the laws which govern it into the universal laws of spirit is a fatal pedantry. So extended, our logic leads not to truth but to falsehood and, ultimately, to the paralysis of the very thought it seeks to regulate, nay, to the extinction of thought itself. This procedure has no claim whatever to usurp the name of "reason," but rather stands condemned as the very type of what is unreasonable. Let those who deny this prove, if they can, in terms acceptable to universal reason, that it would "not be better for the world at large if their necks were wrung five minutes hence."

There is a coward and a hero in the breast of every man. Each of the pair has a "logic" of his own adapted to his particular purpose and aim--which is safety for the coward and victory for the hero. The two are perpetually at variance, the reason of the one being the unreason of the other, the truth of the one being the falsehood of the other. The inner strife, the division in our nature, the law in our members warring against the law of our mind, on which so many great doctrines of religion have hinged, has its origin at this point. Anyone who watches himself narrowly may observe the strife going on, and going on in just this form,--as an argument between the coward within him, who is out for safety, and the hero within him, who is out for victory. They have little common ground and can barely understand each other's speech.

Everything the hero proposes is unreasonable to the coward. Everything the coward proposes is detestable to the hero. The hero would pour spikenard on the head of his beloved--that would be victorious. The coward would sell it and give the money to the poor--that would be "safer." The coward sees a danger in having children and limits his family. The hero would have many sons. On all such points the coward, judged by the standard of what passes muster as logic, is a better reasoner than the hero. But the hero, though he has less to say for himself, when brought before the seat of judgment, is nearer to the fountain head of Reason. Would not the offence of the Cross, submitted at the time to a sanhedrim of "logical" experts, have been condemned as unadulterated folly? Such a sanhedrim is always in session within a man, and the hero has much ado to stand up to its decrees.

Religion is a power which develops the hero in the man at the expense of the coward in the man. As the change proceeds there comes a moment when the cowardly method of reasoning, with its eye on safety, ceases to dominate the soul. At the same moment the heroic element awakes and looks with longing towards the dangerous mountain-tops. Thenceforward the man's reason becomes the organ of the new spirit that is in him, no longer fettered to the self-centre, but mounting up with wings as an eagle. His powers as a reasoner are enriched, his survey of the facts more comprehensive, his insight into their significance more penetrating.

Religion has sometimes been represented as introducing a new faculty called "faith" into the man's life, as adding this faith to the reason he had before, or perhaps as driving reason out and putting faith in its place. This is a misconception. Faith is neither a substitute for reason nor an addition to it. Faith is nothing else than reason grown courageous--reason raised to its highest power, expanded to its widest vision. Its advent marks the point where the hero within the man is getting the better of the coward, where safety, as the prime object of life, is losing its charm and another Object, hazardous but beautiful, dimly seen but deeply loved, has begun to tempt the awakened soul.

Another way of saying the same thing is to name religion the "new birth" of the soul. But a new birth which, while changing all the rest of the man, left his reason unchanged, which turned all the rest of him into a hero, but kept him still reasoning with a coward's logic, would not amount to very much. Unless I am mistaken the new birth must begin in the seat of reason if it is to begin at all. Is not the man's reason the very essence of the man? How then, can he be converted at all unless he is converted there?

Most of the "defences of religion" that I am acquainted with ignore all this. They claim to address themselves to reason. And so indeed they do, but to reason in a low stage of its development, to the half-born reason of the timid and unemancipated soul, to the unheroic side of human nature, treating us as beings whose ultimate interest is to save our own skins, and making use of the logic, admirable on its own field, which self-interest has worked out for that very purpose and which is incapable of reaching any other conclusion. Instead of raising reason to the full-grown stature of religion, they bring religion down to the level of reason while still at the stage of learning the alphabet of its business. To this class of argument belong Locke's "proof" of the existence of God, and Paley's of a Beneficent Designer. These argue as though the search for God were like the search for a lost key or for an invisible carpenter. To the same class may be assigned a more modern type of apologia, which accommodates religion to the supposed demands of physical science, or equates the Kingdom of Heaven with social reform, or domesticates the eternal values to the service of temporal utility, or harmonizes God with democracy, or with whatever else may be the popular obsession of the moment--all of them based on the principle of making concessions to the unconverted reason of carnal men, thereby sacrificing the higher logic of the spirit to the lower logic of the senses.

These constructions have no continuance. A slight shifting in the point of view, a new "demand" from science, a step forward in the higher criticism, a change in the prevalent political obsession, a fit of sickness in democratic aspiration, and down they all go under a breath of the logic that created them, the modernism of to-day becoming the obscurantism of to-morrow. Then the work of accommodation must begin afresh; new concessions are offered to "reason," with the result that rebellious criticism breaks out at another point. Or the cry is raised, by desperate men, that religion is not an affair of the "head" but of the "heart"--as though a religion in which the "head" and the "heart" were at variance could be anything else than a fatal disease of the soul. And may not these apostles of the "heart" be reminded that their proposal to exclude the "head" from the pale of religion has neither force nor meaning until the "head" itself has ratified the bargain and consented to its own exclusion? Which the "head" is not likely to do.

If, then, we are to limit the word "reason" to that side of us to which the aforesaid logic makes its approach, we should realize from the outset that none of us can adduce the faintest shadow of reason why he should exist at all, or why, in Sir Leslie Stephen's words, it were not better for the world at large if his neck were wrung five minutes hence. Indeed, if the half-born logic of the unconverted reason is to rule our actions, I am inclined to think that the advice to commit universal suicide would be at least as "logical" as any other that philosophy could tender to the human race at the present moment.

In my youth I was much in contact with a group of excellent Christians who held that the number of the "saved" had been definitely fixed by divine pre-ordination, the extremists placing it as low as 40,000. But looking back on those times I now see that the ardour with which we believed these things was strictly relevant to the hope each of us entertained that he himself might be included in the number aforesaid. I am very sure that our faith would have collapsed immediately had the revelation been made that the elect were composed exclusively of converted Chinamen. Our conception of the One and the Many was not so disinterested or abstract as to exclude ourselves from a fair chance of having a share in whatever good things happened to be going.

The life of this heroic spirit is religion in being. But can we go further and name it Christianity? I think we can. It is to the heroic spirit, waiting in all of us for the Divine summons which shall call it from death to life, that the figure of Christ, dominating the ages, makes its great appeal. But of this more hereafter.

There is such a thing as the will-to-disbelieve. It is impervious to all appeals. No reason so cogent can be given for believing in the reality of anything but that human ingenuity, egged on by the will-to-disbelieve, can find some means of casting doubt upon it.

The will-to-disbelieve is as necessary a part of our equipment as the will to believe: the two wills being indeed the same in principle, but the opposite in application. The former is a weapon of defence, a protection against deceivers, never more useful than when engaged in exposing shams, fraud and cant practised under the name of religion. The latter is a weapon of attack, the principle of all that is creative in human life. It is akin to love, the most valiant of all qualities, whether it appears in a tigress defending her cubs or in a martyr dying for mankind.

If we fall under the power of the will-to-disbelieve, we shall indeed be well protected from fraud, but ill equipped for the creation of new values, either in our own life or in that of others, which is the prime business of man. For this we need the will to believe that the new values are possible, which the will-to-disbelieve can always doubt.

I cannot agree with those philosophers who maintain that religion is based on the will-to-believe. The two are clearly connected; but it would be truer to say that the will-to-believe is based on religion. Religion encourages a man to act on the assumption that the best things are possible, and checks the will-to-disbelieve precisely at the point where it questions this. It is the God within the man which so acts, and the moment the man perceives its divine origin the will-to-believe acquires a new energy. God is not a product, but the author and living principle of the will-to-believe.

The will-to-disbelieve, if given a free rein, would at last involve us in a depth of scepticism indistinguishable from complete cowardice. But in actual life it never goes to this length, except in the world of pure dialectics and in asylums for the insane. However sceptically inclined a man may be, there comes a point where he suspends his will-to-disbelieve in favour of the proposition that Truth is better than the opposite, though it is quite easy for anyone so minded, and with a little skill in dialectics, to find a point of view from which even this can be doubted. Unless the sceptic believed that Truth is better than its opposite why should he take the trouble to convict his opponent of error or to satisfy himself of the soundness of his own opinions? Clearly he has made his choice at that point--a truly heroic choice if we consider it--committing himself to a position which needs courage to maintain, and thereby proving that he is no coward. In his own way he has faced and bravely answered the question which, in one form or another, has to be faced and answered by everyone. He has chosen to be a hero.

Such are the respective arguments of the coward and the hero. Let it be remembered that these are not the names of two different men. They are names for the same man, as one or other element of his nature comes uppermost. Both are clamant at this moment in you and me, clamant in you as you read these words, clamant in me as I write them.

The will-to-disbelieve is always most active where the controversial interest reigns supreme; least active where men, in a spirit of mutual loyalty, are engaged together in the positive attempt to achieve a better-than-what-is. Into the relations of true lovers the will-to-disbelieve never enters, though a Mephistopheles, standing by, can always find reasons enough for prompting it, and sneer at them for a brace of fools. The will of the true lovers is to believe in each other and to reject all suggestions to the contrary. They will trust each other to the uttermost, in spite of the fact that no conclusive reason can be given why they should do so--heroic lovers that they are! But whenever a human interest, great or small, is detached from its roots in reality and turned into a subject for the war of minds, every assertion made by the one side is a challenge to the other to assert the contrary. The will-to-disbelieve is then in its glory, and finds there are no lengths to which it cannot go. The more it is hammered, the greater its vigour, the greater its ingenuity, in hitting back. Meanwhile both sides are drifting further away from realities and the primary interest in dispute succumbing to the secondary interests of mere controversy. The dominant motive of the controversy has now ceased to be the search for truth and become the resolution of the disputants to overthrow their opponents and not be overthrown. There is no issue. From the nature of the forces engaged the controversy becomes endless.

As the mere plaything of professional controversialists the fate of religion can never be decided. The professional controversialists themselves do not desire that it should be; their interest is to keep the game up for ever; for if a final issue were reached their occupation would be gone. Happily for religion, its fate does not depend on the fortunes of this ever-swaying battle. It depends on the answer given by individual men and women to the question which faces them all over the gateway of life--"Wilt thou be a hero or a coward?"

Religion is one of those high things, and there are many such in life, which lose their meaning when they are over-defended, or over-explained. In explaining them we are apt to explain them away, and without being aware that we are doing so. Whenever the truths of religion are too much defended they are cheapened; and when cheapened they become incredible. Like the love of a man and a woman, or the belief we have in the loyalty of our dearest friends, or the joy we feel in the presence of beauty, or the grief of a broken heart, they resent being made into mere topics for discussion. For this reason religion has suffered as much from its would-be friends as from its avowed enemies. To official Defenders of the Faith, crowned, mitred or wigged, the Faith owes less than the Defenders in question have been wont to claim. I have even heard it suggested, by extremists, that there would be more believers in God if all the theologians would take themselves off.

If religion is founded on Reality, as we are so fond of asserting, we have no need to be over-anxious about its defence, since Reality can always be trusted in the long run to look after itself and its children. We compromise religion whenever our defence of it seems to imply that its fortunes depend on us or on our arguments, an impression too often created by apologetic literature--the impression of something naturally weak which needs an immense amount of argumentative coddling to keep it alive. I observe none of this in the presentation of religion by the Founder of Christianity. His freedom from anxiety for the morrow covered the fundamentals of faith.

Seen on the self-defensive, religion is apt to appear at its worst. It rises to its best in the moment of attack. It represents the expeditionary force of the soul, in its native element where mysteries are encountered, where the seemingly impossible has to be attempted, where creative work has to be done and where the call to play the man is never silent. Most of the quarrels and divisions among believers, which exhaust the energies meant for a Diviner Object, and deface the history of religion, turn on the question of its defence. On the side of defence religion falls asunder into sects which spend themselves in achieving mutual paralysis. On the side of attack its forces converge. Religion is rather that which defends us than that which we have to defend. It stands for the attack upon the powers of darkness and of spiritual wickedness, in high places and in low.

The defence of religion has been overdone. We have cooped up the faith in theological fortresses, surrounding it with an immense array of outworks--creeds, dogmas, apologetics, institutions--and we have used up our resources in holding our "positions" against one another when we ought to have been attacking the common enemy in the open field. These outworks and defences, intended to save us from perplexity, have become a greater source of perplexity than all the rest. It takes a lifetime to understand them, and when understood most of them turn out futile.

It is the fashion nowadays to express alarm about the future of religion. Hardly a day passes but we hear some utterance, read some document, which sounds that note. But look closely and you will often discover that what these people are really alarmed about is not religion itself, but one or other of the entrenched camps in which religion has been cooped up. Where is the church, where is the sect, where is the creed-bolstered institution, unhampered by the cares of these great fortresses? And indeed they are not safe. There is no place on earth where a man's soul is less safe than when it immures itself in one of these masterpieces of military architecture, mostly mediaeval. We live in an age of long-range artillery and of high explosives.

Are you then in search of a religion which will relieve you of perplexity, remove peril out of your path, and surround your soul with an unassailable rampart against doubt? I have to confess that I know of none such. But I know of at least one religion which does far greater things than these.

In the first place, the religion I am thinking of brings all our perplexities to a focus; lifts them up on high; concentrates them on two or three burning points, and shows us with a clearness that admits of no mistaking what a tremendous mystery we are up against in life.

That is the first thing that a true religion does. But if it did that only, it would do us no good but harm, for it would overwhelm us. So it does the second. While on the one hand it reveals to us, as I have said, the deep and amazing mystery of our existence, on the other it reveals something yet deeper and more amazing in ourselves, something divine in everyone of us, which is more than a match for what it has to face. A true religion does both things, does them together, in the same moment, in the same act. It throws a searchlight on our perplexities and raises them to a high level. But in the very act of so doing it raises the greatness of man to a higher level still. It sharpens our consciousness of evil; thereby deepening our consciousness of that in ourselves which opposes evil. Hear the Baron von H?gel. "Christianity has not explained suffering and evil; no one has done so; no one can do so. Yet it has done two things greater, more profound and more profitable for us. From the first it has immensely widened and deepened the fact, the reality, the awful potency and baffling mystery of sorrow, pain, sin, things which abide with man across the ages. But Christianity has also, from the first, increased the capacity, the wondrous secret and force, which issues in a practical, living, loving transcendence, utilization, transformation of sorrow and pain and even of sin. Christianity gave to our souls the strength and the faith to grasp life's nettle."

In stressing the difficulties that come from science and criticism, are we not in danger of losing sight of those greater and permanent difficulties that enter into the very structure of human life, and "abide with men across the ages"? A broken heart is the same in one age, in one place, as in another: and wherever it exists the soul of man has all that it can bear. Those who have faced these major perplexities and conquered them, those who have passed through the Valley of Humiliation and emerged victorious at the other end, will not be greatly troubled by science and the higher criticism. But those who begin their approach to religion by reconciling science with faith, or adjusting the Creeds to the higher criticism, or solving conundrums about the omnipotence of God, or making one set of abstractions fit in with another, will find that all this argumentation avails them very little when the lightning falls on the roof tree, or the Angel of Death spreads his black wings over the house.

We are sometimes told that the Great War has enormously increased the religious perplexities of mankind. I cannot see that it has. All the problems it suggests, all the questions it raises, were equally contained in the lesser wars that went before it, and even if the great one had never occurred, there would still be enough suffering in the world to challenge the strongest faith. An age which has needed the Great War to rouse it to a sense of tragedy must have been living in a fool's paradise up to date. Every problem suggested by the Great War has been there, plain for all ages to see, since suffering and death, since folly and wickedness, first came into the world. I do not doubt that the war has administered a salutary shock to multitudes of lethargic souls who would otherwise have continued to sleep on in the sleep of spiritual death. But with the Christian Churches it is different. It ill becomes them to treat the horrors of the war as a novelty in human experience. All that the war can mean for them was summarized long ago by the man who saw the "whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together until now."

"The present crisis in religion" is another phrase which recent discussion has made familiar. That such a crisis exists no one in his senses can doubt. But the phrase is often used in a way which suggests that the "crisis" has no right to exist, that it constitutes a misfortune peculiar to our own time, that it is an unnatural thing, and that religion will never come to its own until the "crisis" has passed away.

We find, however, that a "crisis" in religion is no new experience, peculiar to the present day. The only ages of the past when a "crisis" in religion did not exist were the spiritually dead ages. Whenever the spirit of God has breathed upon the souls of men the effect has been to awaken the sense of a great crisis. The Epistles of St Paul are full of it. In the Confessions of St Augustine, written in the fifth century, we see how critical he felt the then passing moment to be. There was a crisis at the Reformation, and at the Renaissance. There was a crisis when printing was invented, and when the Bible was translated. There was a crisis when Whitefield and Wesley were urging the masses to flee from the wrath to come. A more recent example can be found in the writings of Carlyle. Everything that has been said since the Great War about the spiritual bankruptcy of Europe, about the need of religious reconstruction, about a change of heart in nations, and governments and individuals, as the only alternative to a complete disaster, was said by Carlyle three-quarters of a century ago, and said by him with a force and trenchancy not since surpassed. Here, for example, is what he wrote in the year 1850.

"In the days that are passing over us, even fools are arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded.... It is not a small hope that will suffice us, the ruin being clearly ... universal. There must be a new world if there is to be a world at all. That human beings in Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance therein--this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal rebirth, if the ruin is not to be total and final. It is a time to make the dullest man consider whence he came and whither he is bound. A veritable New Era to the foolish as well as to the wise" .

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