Painted Windows Part 14

Science requires, therefore, that there should be a real Purpose in the world... . It appears from the investigation of science, from investigation of the method of scientific procedure itself, that there must be a Will in which the whole world is rooted and grounded; and that we and all other things proceed therefrom; because only so is there even a hope of attaining the intellectual satisfaction for which science is a quest.

Reason is obliged to confess the hypothesis of a Creative Will, although it does not admit that man has in any way perceived it. But is this hypothesis, which is essential to science, to be left in the position of Mahomet's coffin? Is it not to be investigated? For if atheism is irrational, agnosticism is not scientific--"it is precisely a refusal to apply the scientific method itself beyond a certain point, and that a point at which there is no reason in heaven or earth to stop."

To speak about an immanent purpose is very good sense; but to speak about a purpose behind which there is no Will is nonsense.

People, he says, become so much occupied with the consideration of what they know that they entirely forget "the perfectly astounding fact that they know it." Also they overlook or slur the tremendous fact of spiritual individuality; "because I am I, I am not anybody else." But let the individual address to himself the question he puts to the universe, let him investigate his own pressing sense of spiritual individuality, just as he investigates any other natural phenomenon, and he will find himself applying that principle of Purpose, and thinking of himself in relation to the Creator's Will.

If there is Purpose in the universe there is Will; you cannot have Purpose or intelligent direction, without Will. But, as we have seen, "to speak about an immanent will is nonsense":

It is the purpose, the meaning and thought of G.o.d, that is immanent not G.o.d Himself. He is not limited to the world that He has made; He is beyond it, the source and ground of it all, but not it. Just as you may say that in Shakespeare's work his thoughts and feelings are immanent; you find them there in the book, but you don't find Shakespeare, the living, thinking, acting man, in the book. You have to infer the kind of being that he was from what he wrote; he himself is not there; his thoughts are there.

He p.r.o.nounces "the most real of all problems," the problem of evil, to be soluble. _Why is there no problem of good?_ Note well, that "the problem of evil is always a problem in terms of purpose." How evil came does not matter: the question is, Why is it here? What is it doing?

"While we are sitting at our ease it generally seems to us that the world would be very much better if all evil were abolished... . But would it?"

Surely we know that one of the best of the good things in life is victory, and particularly moral victory. But to demand victory without an antagonist is to demand something with no meaning.

If you take all the evil out of the world you will remove the possibility of the best thing in life. That does not mean that evil is good. What one means by calling a thing good is that the spirit rests permanently content with it for its own sake. Evil is precisely that with which no spirit can rest content; and yet it is the condition, not the accidental but the essential condition, of what is in and for itself the best thing in life, namely moral victory.

His definition of Sin helps us to understand his politics:

Sin is the self-a.s.sertion either of a part of a man's nature against the whole, or of a single member of the human family against the welfare of that family and the will of its Father.

But if it is self-will, he asks, how is it to be overcome?

Not by any kind of force; for force cannot bend the will. Not by any kind of external transaction; that may remit the penalty, but will not of itself change the will. It must be by the revelation of a love so intense that no heart which beats can remain indifferent to it.

All this seems to me admirably said. It does at least show that there are clear, logical, and practical reasons for the religious hypothesis.

The mind of man, seeking to penetrate the physical mysteries of the universe, encounters Mind. Mind meets Mind. Reason recognises, if it does not always salute, Reason. And in this rational and evolving universe the will of man has a struggle with itself, a struggle on which man clearly sees the fortunes of his progress, both intellectual and spiritual, depend. Will recognises Will. And surveying the history of his race he comes to a standstill of love and admiration before only one life--

a life whose historic occurrence is amply demonstrated, whose moral and spiritual pre-eminence consists in the completeness of self-sacrifice, and whose inspiration for those who try to imitate it is without parallel in human experience.

Love recognises Love. "I am the Light of the World."

I will give a few brief quotations from Dr. Temple's pages showing how he regards the revelation of the Creative Will made by Christ, Who "in His teaching and in His Life is the climax of human ethics."

Love, and the capacity to grow in love, is the whole secret.

The one thing demanded is always the power to grow. Growth and progress in the spiritual life is the one thing Christ is always demanding.

He took bread and said that it was His body; and He gave thanks for it, He broke it, and He gave it to them and said, "Do this in remembrance of Me." ... Do what? ... The demand is nothing less than this, that men should take their whole human life, and break it, and give it for the good of others.

The growth in love, and the sacrifice which evokes that growth in love, are, I would suggest the most precious things in life. Take away the condition of this and you will destroy the value of the spiritual world.

One may form, I think, a true judgment of the man from these few extracts.

He is one who could not move an inch without a thesis, and who moves only by inches even when he has got his thesis. His intellect, I mean, is in charge of him from first to last. He feels deeply, not sharply. He loves truly, not pa.s.sionately. With his thesis clear in his mind, he draws his sword, salutes the universe, kneels at the cross, and then, with joy in his heart, or rather a deep and steady sense of well-being, moves forward to the world, prepared to fight. Fighting is the thing.

Yes, but here is neither Don Quixote nor Falstaff. He will fight warily, take no unnecessary risk, and strike only when he is perfectly sure of striking home.

You must not think of him as old beyond his years (he is only a little over forty) but rather as one who was wise from his youth up. He has never flung himself with emotion into any movement of the human mind, not because he lacks devotion, but because he thinks the victories of emotion are often defeats in disguise. He wishes to be certain. He will fight as hard as any man, but intelligently, knowing that it will be a fight to the last day of his life. He is perhaps more careful to last than to win--an ecclesiastical Jellicoe rather than a Beatty. Nor, I think, must one take the view of the critic that he has never stuck to the main point. Every step in his career, as I see it, has been towards opportunity--the riskless opportunity of greater service and freer movement.

I regard him as a man whose full worth will never be known till he is overtaken by a crisis. I can see him moving smoothly and usefully in times of comparative peace to the Primacy, holding that high office with dignity, and leaving behind him a memory that will rapidly fade. But I cannot see him so clearly in the midst of a storm. A great industrial upheaval, for example, where would that land him? The very fact that one does not ask, How would he direct it? shows perhaps the measure of distrust one may feel in his strength--not of character--but of personality. He would remain, one is sure, a perfectly good man, and a man of intelligence; but would any great body of the nation feel that it would follow him either in a fight or in a retreat? I am not sure. On the whole I feel that his personality is not so effective as it might have been if he had not inherited the ecclesiastical tradition, had not been born in the episcopal purple.

By this I mean that he gives me the feeling of a man who is not great, but who has the seeds of greatness in him. Events may prove him greater than even his warmest admirers now imagine him to be. A crisis, either in the Church or in the economic world, might enable him to break through a certain atmosphere of traditional clericalism which now rather blurs the individual outline of his soul. But, even with the dissipation of this atmosphere, one is not quite sure that the outline of his soul would not follow the severe lines of a High Anglican tradition. He does not, at present, convince one of original force.

Yet, when all doubts are expressed, he remains one of the chief hopes of the Church, and so perhaps of the nation. For from his boyhood up the Kingdom of G.o.d has meant to him a condition here upon earth in which the soul of man, free from all oppression, can reach gladly up towards the heights of spiritual development.

He hates in his soul the miserable state to which a conscienceless industrialism has brought the daily life of mankind. He lays it down that "it is the duty of the Church to make an altogether new effort to realise and apply to all the relations of life its own positive ideal of brotherhood and fellows.h.i.+p." To this end he has brought about an important council of masters and men who are investigating with great thoroughness the whole economic problem, so thoroughly that the Bishop will not receive their report, I understand, till 1923--a report which may make history.

As a member of the Society of Spirits, he says, "I have a particular destiny to fulfil." He is a moral being, conscious of his dependence on other men. He traces the historic growth of the moral judgment:

The growth of morality is twofold. It is partly a growth in content, from negative to positive. It is partly a growth in extent, from tribal to universal. And in both of these forms of growth it is accompanied, and as a rule, though my knowledge would not ent.i.tle me to say always, it is also conditioned by a parallel development in religious conviction.

We are all aware that early morality is mainly negative; it is the ruling out of certain ways of arriving at the human ideal, however that is to be defined, which have been attempted and have been found failures. Whatever else may be the way to reach the end, murder is not, theft is not, and so on. Thus we get the Second Table of the Decalogue, where morality commits itself to prohibitions--this is not the way, that is not the way; then gradually, under the pressure of experience, there begins to emerge the conception of the end which makes all this prohibition necessary, and which these methods when they were attempted failed to reach.

And so we come at last to "the Kingdom of G.o.d as proclaimed by Christ, and the supreme law of ethics, the demonstrably final law of ethics, is laid down--Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."

Of course the words come from the Old Testament. Some critics used to say: "You will find in the Rabbis almost everything, if not quite everything, which you find in the teaching of Christ." "Yes,"

added Wellhausen, "and how much else besides." It was the singling out of this great principle and laying the whole emphasis upon it that made the difference.

To a man who believes that Christ came to set up the Kingdom of G.o.d, clearly neither the Conservative nor Liberal Party can appeal with any compelling force of divinity. How far the Labour Party may appeal must depend, I should think on the man's knowledge of economic law. As Dean Inge says, Christ's sole contribution to economics is "Beware of covetousness"--an injunction which the Labour Party has not yet quite taken to its heart. But Dr. Temple has a right to challenge his clerical critics for Christ's sanction of the present system, which is certainly founded on covetousness and produces strikingly hideous results.

His theological position may be gathered from the following reply which he made, as a Canon of Westminster, to a representative of the _Daily Telegraph_ nearly two years ago. I do not think he has greatly changed.

He was asked how far the Church could go in meeting that large body of opinion which cannot accept some of its chief dogmas. He replied:

I can speak freely, because I happen to hold two of the dogmas which most people quarrel about--the virgin birth and the physical resurrection. There are other heresies floating about! One of our deans is inclined to a.s.sert the finitude of G.o.d, and another to deny anything in the nature of personality to G.o.d or to man's spirit! Rather confusing! Philosophic questions of this kind, however, do not greatly concern mankind. To believe in G.o.d the Father is essential to the Christian religion. Other doctrines may not be so essential, but they must not be regarded as unimportant.

Personally I wish the Church to hold her dogmas, because I would do nothing to widen the gulf which separates us from the other great Churches, the Roman and the Eastern. The greatest political aim of humanity, in my opinion, is a super-state, and that can only come through a Church universal. How we all longed for it during the war!--one voice above the conflict, the voice of the Church, the voice of Christ! If the Pope had only spoken out, with no reference to the feelings of the Austrian Emperor!--what a gain that would have been for religion. But the great authentic voice never sounded. Instead of the successor of St. Peter we had to content ourselves with the American Press--excellent, no doubt, but hardly satisfying.

Let me tell you a rather striking remark by an Italian friend of mine, an editor of an Italian review, and not a Roman Catholic. He was saying that every Church that persisted for any time possessed something essential to the religion of Christ. I asked him what he saw in the Roman Church that was essential. He replied at once, "The Papacy." I was surprised for the moment, but I saw presently what he meant. The desire of the world is for universal peace, universal harmony. Can that ever be achieved by a disunited Christendom? The nations are rivals. Their rivalry persisted at the Peace Conference, disappointing all the hopes of idealists. Must it not always persist, must not horrible carnage, awful desolation, ruinous destruction, and, at any rate, dangerous and provocative rivalries, always dog the steps of humanity until Christendom is one?

Personally, I think reunion with Rome is so far off that it need not trouble us just now; there are other things to do; but I would certainly refrain from anything which made ultimate reunion more difficult. And so I hold fast to my Catholic doctrines. But I tell you where I find a great difficulty. A man comes to me for adult baptism. I have to ask him, point by point, if he verily believes the various doctrines of the Church, doctrines which a man baptised as an infant may not definitely accept and yet remain a faithful member of Christ's Church. What am I to say to one who has the pa.s.sion of Christian morality in his heart, but asks me whether these verbal statements of belief are essential? He might say to me, "It would be immoral to a.s.sert that I believe what I have not examined, and to examine this doctrine so thoroughly as to give an answer not immoral would take a lifetime. Am I to remain outside the Church till then?" Here, I think, the Church can take a step which would widen its influence enormously. No man ought to be shut out of Christ's Church who has the love of G.o.d and the love of humanity in his heart. That seems to me quite clear. I don't like to say we make too much of the creeds, but I do say that we don't make half enough of the morality of Christ. That's where I should like to see the real test applied.

What I should like to see would be a particular and individual profession of the Beat.i.tudes. I should like to see congregations stand up, face to the East, do anything, I mean, that marks this profession out as something essential and personal, and so recite the Beat.i.tudes. There might be a great sifting, but it would bring home the reality of the Christian demand to the heart and conscience of the world. After all, that's our ideal, isn't it?--the City of G.o.d. If we all concentrated on this ideal, realising that the morality of Christ is essential, I don't think there would be much bother taken, outside professional circles, about points of doctrine.

Then, writes the interviewer, arose the question of fervour. "Can the City of G.o.d be established without some powerful impulse of the human heart? Can it ever be established, for example, by the detached and self satisfied intellectual priggishness of the subsidised sixpenny review, or by the mere violence of the Labour extremist's oratory? Must there not be something akin to the evangelical enthusiasm of the last century, something of a revivalist nature? And yet have we not outgrown anything of the kind?

"To Canon Temple the answer presents itself in this way: Rarer than Christian charity is Christian faith. The supreme realism is yet to come, namely, the realisation of Christ as a living Person, the realisation that He truly meant what He said, the realisation that what He said is of paramount importance in all the affairs of human life.

When mankind becomes consciously aware of the Christian faith as a supreme truth, then there will be a realistic effort to establish the City of G.o.d. The first step, then, is for the Church to make itself something transcendently different from the materialistic world. It must truly mean what it says when it a.s.serts the morality of Christ. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers. The fervour is not to be born of an individual fear of h.e.l.l or an individual anxiety for celestial safety, but of an utterly unselfish enthusiasm for the welfare of the world."

I should give a false impression of this very interesting man, who is so sincere and so steadfast, if I did not mention the significant fact of his happiness. He has always struck me, in spite of his formidable intellect and a somewhat pedagogic front and the occasional accent of an ancient and scholarly ecclesiasticism, as one of the happiest and most boy-like of men--a man whose centre must be cloudlessly serene, and who finds life definitely good. His laughter indeed, is a n.o.ble witness to the truth of a rational and moral existence. His strength is as the strength of ten, not only because his heart is pure, but because he has formulated an intelligent thesis of existence.

He has pointed out that the Pickwick Papers could not have been produced in any but a Christian country. "Satire you may get to perfection in pagan countries. But only in those countries where the morality of Christ has penetrated deeply do you get the spirit that loves the thing it laughs at."

PRINc.i.p.aL W.B. SELBIE