01.14. Chapter 14

CHAPTER XIV THE DIVINE FRIEND

WE come, then, finally to God as the Friend of men, the highest conception to which we can attain. All other relationships, including that of sons working together with a Father, fall short of the best if they do not reach a climax in friendship. We pass to consider the attainment of that knowledge of God which crowns itself in friendship. Our knowledge of God bases itself on doing the will of God. Friendship apart, and the requirements of justice alone considered, this doing of the will is the only fair condition for entrance into a kingdom of God composed of men as we know them. For a man’s will is the one instrument of his spiritual equipment normally under his own control. If the kingdom of God were only for the acute intellects, able to master intellectual mysteries, many worthy people would have to remain outside. They would not have the requisite understanding. If the doors were to open only to those capable of fine seizures of beauty, or talented with the religious genius of the mystic, only a few could enter. When, however, the condition is only that a man shall set his will toward the will of God, that makes possible a kingdom of multitudes of men who do not indeed do the same things, or actually follow the same courses, but who walk in the same spirit. On such basis men reveal themselves, not as all in the same place, but as all facing in the same direction. The child and the mature man, the learned and the unlearned, the gifted and the commonplace, all have enough power over themselves to lopk toward the will of God, and to seek to catch his spirit.

Someone protests, however, that there is no use trying to do the will of God without knowing about him, and that it is deep-seated religious beliefs which give value to the doing in accordance with the divine will. How can a man be a friend of God without right ideas about God? This seems quite conclusive when urged by a believer with a passion of creedal orthodoxy.

Correctness of theological dogma as a sign of friendship with God must, of course, be considered. Is it possible, with the character of God as revealed in Christ before us, to say that friendship with the divine means formal rightness of theological conceptions? Many of us had predicted that such a question as this would not be raised again in our generation, but much current religious debate shows that our conclusion was premature. If we keep our theology close to life, we may well ask ourselves what basis for friendship there is in identity or similarity of authorized doctrines. This is not to minimize the importance of the formal creeds. Friendship deepens with deepening knowledge, but to make friendship depend too much on knowledge would be to empty religious experience of much of its content. Surely the intimacies of family life do not depend primarily upon such knowledge. The son’s knowledge of his father can no doubt grow gloriously through the years, but it would be astonishingly farfetched to say that any formal correctness of information is the basis of communion between a father and his son. The like-mindedness which is worth everything to the family feeling is a like-mindedness in fundamental aims. Doing the will of God is voluntary and free surrender to the highest spiritual ideals within one’s reach. The better theories we have about God the better we shall carry out the purpose of God, but, surely, we can have full devotion to the divine will without being formally correct in our thought of God, judged by the authorized theological standards. Suppose a lover of men so consecrated that he is willing, if need be, to die for men. This is the very stuff of which the Kingdom is made; this is the kind of soul in whom God delights; and yet the devotion may or may not be toward an established orthodoxy.

Considerations like this, however, are not final. We cannot dispense with earnest and sincere thinking in religious experience. A distinguished philosopher of the last generation declared that reasoning in abstract conceptions is a veritable experiencing of the Deity. Not all truth is on the same plane, and there must needs be honest search for a basis of selection among truths. I know that this arouses the ire of a certain type of truthseekers who will have it that truth is truth, and that all truth-seeking is on the same level. Yet there must be some standard. Some truths are productive and some trifling. A botanist might put in his time counting the separate trees of a forest, but he would hardly win much honor as a truth-seeker by so doing. By one means or another all thinkers try to make their utterances or their discoveries seem the most worth while. They make distinctions between mere catalogues of facts and vital principles, and between judgments of existence and judgments of value.

Now, when all is said and done we weigh truths by their value for human minds. I do not by this accept an uncritical pragmatism as a path to divine knowledge. John Dewey has done well to remind us that the foremost founder of pragmatism in this country, William James, never intended to set up what the world calls success as the standard of judgment for truth, but pragmatism has too often lent itself to a low scale of values as a test of truth. The modern emphasis on socalled efficiency in much religious effort may be well and good as increasing congregations and collections, but it surely cannot be an avenue of approach to intimacy with a Christlike God. The aim of Christian knowledge must be moral as making for the highest and best in human life, even when no immediate practical results are visible. The contemplation of astronomical truth, or the higher mathematics, may not have the slightest utilitarian consequence, and yet may possess the noblest value for the rare delight such contemplation brings on its own account to human minds. .Without trying to elaborate the ideal in detail, we are all fast coming to ’ agree that Christianity is for the enlargement and refinement of human life. The more rich j and full the humanity of men, the more irresistible is our belief in the efficacious presence of the divine. The more genuinely human a man is, the more surely has he grasped the divine.

There must, then, be high moral and spiritual quality in the pursuit of knowledge which leads to friendship with the Divine. There must be a venture of faith in such learning, a positive pursuit of the deliberately chosen best. When I say "best" I do not mean the truth that is easiest or pleasantest. Anyone who has had experience with an educational elective system is familiar with the youth who treats such a system as a quick road to easy courses, and he knows the sad consequences which await such a youth. He is also familiar with that other type of student who sees in an elective system a chance to get at the courses which will do most for a student, courses, some of which challenge as a call to mountain climbing. So with the choice of the ideals toward which the truth-seeker turns his effort.

There cannot be any short summary of what knowledge will count most for the largest and finest human life. So that one thinker impatiently tells us that we would better be content just to seek truth. That aim seems plain enough. Let us free ourselves from all presuppositions whatever, and try to find the truth-in-itself regardless of where it may lead us. An instant’s reflection, however, ought to show us that this is not at all how the search for truth proceeds. The most matter-of-fact scientist carries into his laboratory complex interlaced assumptions which are quite as much determinative of what he will see as is his microscope. Conceptions of natural law, hypotheses of various orders of plausibility, the spirit which we call the scientific temper all these and swarms of other presuppositions too numerous to mention, help or hinder the study of the scientist. Very often the most effective force in leading to a discovery is the unshakeable conviction that what the seeker seeks must be there. This conviction does not put the fact there, but it mightily aids in discovery, sometimes to the oversight of other facts which might seriously modify the significance of the one discovered. We are always hearing about the exceeding morality of the scientific temper, its modesty and humility, its patience in work and waiting. All of this is splendidly just. One of the world’s best spiritual gains of the last three hundred years has been the scientific temper. Still, there is this one point at which the scientific temper falls short. The scientist is not often enough willing to scrutinize his own assumptions. He cannot escape assumptions no matter how closely he watches against them, but once aware of the assumptions he should become even more modest, and more charitable toward workers whose assumptions are more openly expressed. If the scientist is told that he is studying with a utilitarian aim, he may justifiably resent the charge. If, however, he begins to suspect that the object of his search has and can have no significance if it is inconsequential, or trifling he will turn to something else. Which implies that some standard is determining the value of his studies. Value means value to somebody, value to the seeker himself, value to other scientists, value to that universe which, according to the scientist himself, is an expression of law throughout. In the search for the Divine Source of Truth, and for friendship with God on the basis of truth, the thinker is admittedly in danger of assuming the worth for human and divine ideals of what fits in most tightly to his accustomed notions, and thus of missing the appeal of truth for truth’s own sake. One of the foremost theologians of the past generation justified the attitude of the Roman Church toward Galileo on the ground that the ecclesiastical authorities had to consider, not science in itself, but the effects of scientific announcement on the millions of worshipers whose faith might be shattered by such announcement. We do not have to go back to the time of Galileo for other instances of such ecclesiastical solicitude. Because of the organized resistance to newer discoveries and theories the skeptic, the critic, even the scoffer, have their divinely appointed functions in the progress of the divine revelation. Still, this does not make less the importance of the thinking that seeks to put the best possible construction on the universe. The especially Christian reasoning is based upon the will-to-believe and upon the practical life which comes out of the will-to-believe. There is to-day considerable emphasis on the will-not-to-believe, and, it must be admitted, considerable justification for such emphasis. Some features of religion must be met with a will-not-to-believe. The priests of Baal in Old Testament times no doubt were altogether anxious to encourage the will-to-believe, and the prophets attacked them with the will not-to-believe. We touch here a region of inner motive where we cannot pass judgment, so far as any individual is concerned. We can say, however, that in treating of friendship with a Christlike God the ideal must be a IChristlike fullness and fineness of life. A man may doubt everything in order to learn something. His sincere intent may be the advancement of the frontiers of the kingdom of truth. It has often happened in the course of philosophic history that those who have discovered the blindness of blind alleys have served as truly as the men who have found the road through. The exploration of the world in the old days of search for passages to the Far East was at times immensely furthered by the sailors who pushed into bays and inlets and rivers only to find the passage closed. It is occasionally quite as important to find where a road is not as to find where it is. Now, if we are dealing with those who doubt with this constructive aim, if we have before us those who show a will-not-to-believe for the sake of finding something worthy of the will-to-believe, we have a different problem from that of the doubter whose chronic mood is cynical rejoicing at the frailty and failure of the human spirit. Just what pleasure such cynicism would find in a companionship with that divine which centers all upon the good we cannot pretend to say. At the present hour also there are those who preach that the communion of the soul with the divine is best sought in aesthetic delight.

Storied windows richly dight, music reverberating through long-drawn aisles, the cathedral or temple standing forth in architectural glory all this ministers to the religious instinct with an unspeakable efficacy that I, for one, shall not attempt to gainsay. How anyone, however, with the grasp on the ethical nature of God which comes out of the idea of Jesus, can put this sestheticism before the devotion to moral purpose is beyond us. With Jesus (the ethical in God stands first. After that all the resources of art may well be employed to set on high and to adorn the doctrine of God. This is not the opportunity for a lecture, certainly not for a sermon, on the moral basis of art, but it may be just as well to remark that the periods which have taken most seriously the Christ-revelation of God have been those which, on the whole, have soared to grandest heights of artistic achievement, this too without any direct teaching of a dependence of art on Christianity. The explanation seems to be that, with Christianity doing its utmost to enlarge and refine human life, the artistic faculties have shared in the uplift. We have mentioned the Middle Ages in a reference to the former control of the church over trade and industry. We do well to remember that in mediaeval centuries Christianity wrought powerfully upon art as well as upon industry. I do not mean that the church purposely or deliberately controlled artistic expression, but that Christianity looked upon human life as a whole, and that this wholeness of view made for a soundness of ’mental and moral health which revealed itself in such artistic qualities as symmetry of design, proper subordination of parts to whole, and perspective. The Gothic cathedral is the consummate climax of an age that saw life steadily and saw it whole. Whatever else we may say about a Gothic cathedral, we cannot hold that it savors of the aberrant or the abnormal. If the builders of a cathedral felt any tendency to freakishness they vented the impulse on the gargoyles, or they stuck an impish figure in here and there as a detail which those on the lookout for such imps might find if they could. With the working out of the implications of the Reformation more and more provinces of human activity were taken over into what has been called the secular sphere, and the direct influence of religion has been more and more narrowed down. Behold what a result! Instead of treating the massive moral activities of life as themes for interpretation, the artistic impulse to-day works itself out only too often into the portrayal of the diseased and crazy. Progress no doubt comes to human society with the study of the pathological, provided such study aims at the discovery of the secrets of health. Not much advance would result from rummaging around in hospitals and madhouses just to gloat over sickness and lunacy. Our artistic plight is somewhat as if the Gothic builders had put their main effort, not on solving the mechanical principles by which the weight of the roof could be shifted off the walls and carried to buttressed pillars by the diagonal ribs, not on correctly proportioning floor-space and height, not on impressing stone with intellectual and spiritual suggestiveness, but on the imps with this immense difference, that the imps of the Gothic cathedral could not have been other than signs of a likeable roguishness. They would not have been expressions of the morbid cynicism that abounds in art to-day. Art for art’s sake depends on our definition of art. Art should be art for life’s sake.

Artistic considerations, indeed, lie off to one side of my main purpose, but nevertheless the reference to art is pertinent because of the current emphasis on sincerity as the key to all knowledge worth having; and it seems that any eccentric artist can to-day win praise for sincerity. It is not the duty of any human judge to declare whose sincerity stands justified in the eyes of the Source of all truth, artistic or other; but if we are looking for paths to the Center of all truth, we may as well make the most of that all-around wholeness of life which reveals itself in wholesomeness of temper and deed. The so-called "temperamental" is not a key to the divine, in spite of the claims of a type of nervous mysticism. The higher the mind arises in the scale of development the less temperamental it becomes. One reason why we have such difficulty in finding interesting personal records of an artist like Shakespeare may be due to the absence in him of those temperamental peculiarities which lay the foundation for good stories, authentic or legendary, about a famous character. I do not suppose, either, that there is a widespread tendency to contest the standing of Leonardo da Vinci as an artistic genius, but not much in the records of Da Vinci’s career suggests the temperamental. Study of all available principles of mechanics, and of all varieties of living organisms, attaining to insights far ahead of the science of the time, does not betoken emotional flightiness or unsteadiness. So far has the common expectation as to the eccentricity of the aesthetic temperament reached to-day, however, that we no longer count on the ordinary codes of ethics, which guide the conduct of the plain man, as to be observed by the pronouncedly artistic souls. As for all this talk about sincerity, let us reflect that sincerity depends for its moral worth upon the underlying conception as to what in life is worth while, or upon the general ideals of life. It is possible for a drunkard to be altogether sincere in his devotion to his cups. Does not this suspicion of the value of emotionalism, however, pertinent though it may be in this immediate context, open the door to dangerous skepticism about those states of religious feeling which have in all the history of the church been looked upon as a special avenue to the understanding of the Divine, and a high token of favor of the Divine? Conversion, of which Christianity makes so much, mysticism, uplift in prayer, all have resounding emotional accompaniments. If we strike sharply at the emotional stresses of the artistically temperamental constitution, what is to hinder like summary blows against the religiously temperamental constitution? Have we not again and again heard that some persons have gifts that amount to religious genius, and that in the progress of religion, as in all other phases of progress, the genius plays an invaluable role?

Let us remind ourselves, as we heed this question, that Christianity did not invent or discover conversion, or mysticism, or prayer. All these experiences were common to practically all religions at the time Christ was born, and had been common to them for centuries. What Jesus did was to introduce into them the idea of an ethical God whose requirements had to do with righteousness. In evangelical circles weight has always been laid upon conversion as the essential in approach to the divine favor. It was almost inevitable that in such emphasis the emotional upheaval of the experience itself would get into the position of first importance. In Christianity’s stress upon a moral God, conversion takes its start in sorrow over sin, and issues in a determination to lead a new life following the commandments of God. The moral state which results from conversion is the all-essential. A friend for whose power to describe his own mental states I have respect has told me that he experienced two definite conversions in his religious career. One was a conversion out of conventional, traditional acceptance of customary religious practices into materialism. The second was a conversion from the materialism to vital belief in Christ. Emotionally speaking, the first conversion was even more sharply defined than the second. It was in a biological laboratory that my friend, then a college student, was watching through a microscope the changes actually taking place in the tissues of a living organism. Suddenly a seemingly irresistible conviction seized him that these processes were all-sufficient in themselves, that there was no effective spiritual reality in the universe. This experience seemed just as vividly self-evident as did the later crisis which brought this youth back to belief in God. During the time that the spell persisted it witnessed to him of atheism.

Now, incidents like this may not happen often, but they do occur often enough to put us on our guard against taking a conversional crisis as evidence of its own worth. Every student of religious revivals knows that the converts in evangelistic campaigns have to be guided carefully if their conversion results in that changed moral attitude and conduct which fits in with the life which we call Christlike. So likewise with the experiences of mysticism. Just now there is renewed emphasis on the mystical as preeminently an indication of the actual presence of the divine. The mystics are hailed as the friends of God. Any careful student of mysticism will at once admit that some of what passes for mysticism is not predominantly spiritual. The closeness of dependence of spirit on matter, or of mind on nervous organization, the susceptibility of the physical organism to the general conditions in which it is placed, the responsiveness of the imagination to all varieties of stimulus, the oversuggestibility of some types of mind all such factors and many, many others the well-informed of mysticism will readily recognize and discount. Nevertheless, considerable numbers of trained students speak of mysticism as of value apart from whether it is Christlike or not. I have heard mysticism used as a basis for putting Mohammed, Buddha, and Jesus on about the same level, as all alike having discovered the true road to intimacy with God. Distinguished Christian teachers have given us to understand that the mystic experience stands in its own right; and occasionally they tell us that in such experience the soul is lifted beyond all our moral considerations. "Beyond good and evil" is the phrase sometimes used in this connection.

It must be understood at the outset that there ought not to be any objection to trying out all promising paths to an experience of the divine. I have no protest to file against making the utmost of abnormal states of consciousness to discover what human faculties promise most for susceptibilities to the divine. It may be that there is a psychological technique to be followed in fixing the attention on the spiritual values, and that fastings and vigils do have something of the efficacy that Middle Ages saints seemed to find in them. Especially might an age given to self-indulgence seek by stern self-denial to find a door to the temple of the Spirit.

Nevertheless, mysticism to be Christian must be fitted into a system at the center of which stands the Christlike God. If the followers of such a God have visions, they ought to see something worth seeing. The more closely we study those prophets of the Old Testament on whose work Jesus built, the less dogmatic we become as to the nature of the prophetic illumination in its psychological aspects. There is no reason to declare that the visions of the prophets were only pictorial symbolism used by them to illustrate spiritual truths. The visions were, as far as we can understand the records, actual supernormal crises ito which the routine of ordinary everyday life would not give the key. Yet the visions meant something. The emotional stir lent reenforcement to the definite moral purposes and ideals. One of the noticeable features of Old Testament history is the stress laid upon the necessity of moral content in any experience that claimed to bring a message from the Lord of Israel. Israel’s vision of the glory of the Lord which like smoke filled the Temple, Amos’ basket of summer fruit, even the stupendous dramas which rose before the gaze of Ezekiel, all had a moral meaning. They issued in messages of a righteousness to be worked into conduct in market places and temple courts and council chambers.

Let now some student of non-Christian religion discourse to us of visions and trances of Hindu saints and we forthwith grant the validity of the experiences as testifying to deep and genuine religious instinct. We do not doubt or disparage. When, however, the student proceeds to inform us that the Hindu mystic belongs in the same grade of religious importance and significance as the Christian mystic we demur. I once heard an expert in Oriental religion dilating on the worth of some Hindu utterances of mystic ecstasy which were calculated to convey a fresh sense of the awful majesty of the physical universe, of the immensity of the void. If a sense of the awfulness of spatial distances were religiously important, a gaze at the stars, or a perusal of a treatise on astronomy ought to be much more effective. In this glad day of desire for better understanding among the followers of all varieties of religions one voices a criticism of a non-Christian belief at one’s peril. It is at considerable risk, then, that I ask as to the value of Hindu mysticism. I urge the question with all proper hesitancy, because I think I am aware of the danger of judging Hindu mysticism by superficial appearances. Still, what does the mysticism amount to, hi terms of the enlargement and betterment of human life? To stare at the sun, or at one’s own navel, till all rational thought sinks toward unconsciousness what does it amount to? We waive the significance of the ashes and the dirt in which the seer sits, also the stunted and dwarfed muscles that reveal long humiliations of the flesh. What ideas, or ideals, come out of all this? To raise the question at all is to the Hindu a complete missing of the point. He replies to us that the absence of ideas and ideals, and of all specifically intellectual content, is itself the justification of the experience. Mysticism, in its very sinking toward the void, gives a hint of the process by which the soul which has let go of earth falls into the bosom of the^infinite, the infinite being characterized as plenitude, but practically treated as emptiness.

Again, what of it? Well, indifference to human misery, inability to better the human lot, callousness to all appeals to pursue the humanly good and beautiful these are what of it. He would, indeed, be hasty who would deny that Western life would gain something from the reposefulness of the Hindu, for much Western life is forced and distorted. Any relaxation would to some souls be relief, but I doubt if Hindu or other non-Christian mysticism can be rated anywhere near Christian mysticism as tending to the welfare of human life. Let us not forget that Christianity judges everything by the outcome for larger and better humanity, that humanity being of distinctive worth on its own account .and not for absorption into anything else.

There has been some stir of discussion in recent years as to whether Paul and Jesus were not mystics after the order of the nervously unstable. Whereas the type of student I first mentioned classifies Christian mysticism with non-Christian mysticism, with all forms alike noble, another school puts Christian mysticism on the same level with all other mysticisms as all alike symptoms of disordered or unhealthy nerves. So there has been debate about the mental health of Paul and Jesus. The discussion has gone on, for the most part, on a professedly psychological line without any historical sense whatever. Paul saw a vision on the road to Damascus; and to some specialists the symptoms suggest, sunstroke, or epilepsy. Paul heard a voice, thus betraying that he was subject to the "auditions" of the nervously overwrought. All the experts ignore the feature of the Damascus experience which Paul himself said was of prime consequence, namely, the command to break with his old life outright, and to preach the gospel of Jesus to the Gentiles. Considering the immeasurable benefits for the race flowing from the Damascus crisis, we have to remark, paraphrasing Bowne, that, if the experience was sunstroke or epilepsy, we have before us the most remarkable instance of utilizing a personal affliction for the good of humanity in all history. Epilepsy which leaves its victim better and greater after the fits than before differs from epilepsy as we know it. A peculiarity of Christian mysticism seems to be that the faculties of the mystic are exalted into an intensity of activity which preserves the identity of the person but which gives his faculties wider range and keener acuteness. It may be fine to sink out of a troubled world toward a void, but it is better to rise above that world to intellectual and spiritual mastery. The Christian mystic sees sharply and reports clearly. What he sees is worth seeing and worth telling. His visions bear directly upon moral attitude and moral conduct. In the narratives concerning Jesus it is not easy for the biblical critic to get hold of material suggestive of nervous disturbance. A favorite device is to avow that experiences like the Temptation are self-evideutly mystic visions. Let it be granted. Is there anything indicative of mental disorder in a crisis that seizes upon all the essentials of a true method for the spiritual redemption of Israel, and compresses them in immortal utterance within the compass of a few score words? Or is it declared that the mind of Jesus was colored by the apocalyptic of his time? Critics are by no means agreed upon the extent of this coloring, but let it be granted to the specialist to make the most of his case against Jesus. Apocalyptic is obviously a form of thinking foreign to our day, but there is nothing necessarily crazy or mentally unbalanced about it. If we wished an outstanding illustration of the power of Jesus to deal with popular systems from the point of view of the ethical, we might find such illustration in the vigor with which he insisted upon ethical principles as binding for that kingdom of God toward which Jewish apocalyptic looked. The critics are never weary of reminding us how little we know of the historical Jesus. What little we do know, however, is consistent with itself, in the essentials of the portraiture. Every great character shows a tendency to marshal around it elements like itself, and thus it happens that a historic movement takes distinctiveness from its central leader, a distinctiveness often resulting in one-sidedness. Christianity has revealed through the ages a tendency toward balancing part against part so that the total movement grows more and more steadily centered. Making all possible allowance for the fragment of soundness in the claim that a mistake thoroughly believed in is as potent as a truth, we must be excused for exercising our will-to-believe that the experiences of Jesus which helped lay the well-balanced foundations of Christianity were above the normal, rather than off the normal or below the normal. We shall not, merely because of some expert’s guess, believe that a balanced system came from an unbalanced founder.

Christian mysticism at its best appears to be that keen awareness of divine realities which comes out of persistent doing of the divine will it is the awareness of the practiced soul. Just as training of any faculty brings at last to that faculty a directness of perception and of execution which seems altogether mysterious to an uninstructed onlooker, so constant exercise of the whole life in righteousness brings an awareness of spiritual values, keener than eyesight, swifter than formal reasoning, and more instantaneous than deliberate resolution. Obedience leads to spiritual adjustment, and out of the adjustment arise those moral insights which are the best of Christianity.

We are not quite through with mysticism however. The mystics have perhaps too often and too readily assumed that what they call the direct gaze upon God, or direct communion with God, is the essential. If mysticism is communion in friendship, we may well ask whether communion is at its noblest in such direct gaze. Does not friendship, as we know it, come to its finest as each party to the friendship loses himself in a cause to which both are devoted? Which is better, to look directly at God, or at the objects to which God is devoted? If we could but learn the object of the divine thought, the sure road to friendship would necessarily be the contemplation of that object. Now, the Christrevelation leaves us in no doubt as to the object of divine contemplation and effort, namely, a race of men, an organized humanity, redeemed into likeness to Christ. If by some ineffable transport of emotion we could be swept up into a vision of all things in God, the surest testimony that we had actually been with God would be that we had not only seen God more clearly, but had seen the object of his thought and love more clearly. In the friendships which mean most, each party to the friendship finds the other most completely in losing himself in the purposes to which that other is giving himself. So that there is a world of significance for friendship with the Divine in the organic bond which links together in Jesus* word the second commandment with the first as "like unto the first." In service for men we attain to the vision of God. We see God by looking in the direction in which God fixes his gaze. We meet him at the far end of his sweep of vision.

It is from the importance of what God views for our view of God that we must build our doctrine of prayer, if we are to accept God as Christlike. Worshipers frequently declare that the most difficult aspect of the prayer life is intercession, and yet that aspect fits in most harmoniously to any interpretation of the Divine as like unto Christ. Using a somewhat geometrical figure of speech, the expositors of prayer tell us that the closer we come to God the closer we come to one another, and the converse is usually valid. The more earnest the prayer on behalf of others the firmer the seizure of divine values. The more social the prayer the more personal its effects for the praying soul, for the men prayed for, and for God. The prayer that we find hardest to comprehend, namely, the intercessory, Jesus took most easily and naturally for granted. If God is a Father and Friend like unto Christ, the whole conception of prayer suggests the atmosphere of a family, in which the common aim is to deepen the spiritual intimacies of the entire group. Intercession as a means of our getting God to do something for men on our account which he would not do on his own account, simply fades out in the presence of Jesus. Intercession as the strengthening in prayer of that family spirit, of that sympathy which should rule in a family group, may well be among the most potent dynamics in the universe. Here, again, let us remember that the means on which a Christlike God relies are spiritual. Such a God does not transform men by making metaphysical changes in the substance of their souls. He could no doubt wipe out the freedom of men, but that would not be worthy of God. It may be that praying souls themselves loosen influences which the Divine Friend can use on the souls of those prayed for. It has been objected by at least one writer on the attributes of God, that the generation of this social power through intercessory prayer would of itself overpower the freedom of men. This is a strange conclusion- to maintain that when my sympathy for a fellow man becomes so intense that it prompts prayer for that fellow man, or that when nay interest in another’s welfare prompts prayer for that welfare, the man prayed for is so helped that he loses his freedom! To affirm that the Father of the human family cannot send some blessings upon individuals in the family until what we might call the family spirit is roused in behalf of those blessings, is simply to say that social law acts here as elsewhere, but the blessings of the revelation of a kindly friendliness in which God and men join hardly overpower free will. Blessings must be freely accepted to be of spiritual avail. No, intercession to a Christlike God does not call for any overpowering of human freedom. It provides for the release of that freedom in a social atmosphere in which the Father and the sons together show forth good will, till that good will becomes appealing and convincing to the slow or stubborn. Once men have freely come within the circle of the divine friendship, the powers released upon them may indeed seem overwhelming, but even here the forces are freely yielded to. It is as if we surrendered ourselves to a trade wind, or a gulf stream, or to the aroused public opinion of a vast host.

Throughout my entire discussion it may be that some readers have missed what has seemed to them the one thing needful in all sound discussion of the friendship of man with God namely, that solitariness of soul with which each of us must think of himself as standing before God. Concede all we please to the social in religion its power in shaping the individual into distinctiveness, its worth as a field of service of God yet when we concede all this we still have the individual, worth what he is on his own account as a son of God. We have .agreed that it is the function of all social organization and organisms to bring out the distinctiveness of the individual. Must we not by our own argument come at the end to the admission and avowal that the Christian himself, alone before God, is the end before all others worthy? Must not this individual good man seek some virtues wholly on their own account? To take the old reference to the good, the true, and the beautiful, must not these in their Christian aspects be sought on their own account? Must not they fill the whole field of the gazer’s view? The truth in this I am as eager as anyone to exalt. The individual good man is the end of all worthy moral effort. Does a man become good, however, by taking his own perfection as the object of his own striving? The critic replies that he does not mean this, but, rather, that a man becomes good by gazing as directly as he can upon God, that he develops toward the morally good, true, and beautiful by directing himself toward these objects themselves. The questioner becomes a little impatient when we rejoin that the lover of the good, the true, and the beautiful attains a firmer grasp on all these excellences when he tries to share them with others. This appears like a quibble, but quibble or not, our possession of some goods increases in sureness of grasp with every effort to let others share them. There is a giving that does not impoverish. I may fancy that I have by myself thoroughly mastered an idea, but I find that my understanding of the idea increases with my attempts to explain it to another. So true is this that some pedagogues tell us that we do not ourselves understand an idea till we can communicate it. As to the life lived in solitude before God, let us not forget that at the instants when we feel most distinctive and peculiar we are probably most like other people, that we should understand ourselves better if we understood other people better, that we could serve other people better if we let them into our understanding of the deeper phases of experience that seem to us most personal. This last consideration, by the way, accounts for our interest in the diaries of others and intimate records of the personal experience of others than ourselves.

This, however, does not seem to the objector to dig deep enough. The social effect of inner experience seems to him incidental. All that is left for us to say is that the contemplation of God as God without regard to the objects of God’s thought does seem most strange! I do not see how we can escape the idea of men as members of a family if we are to accept Christ’s teaching about God. All utterance about the deepening of the personal life by communion with God alone is worth while, but in the light of the Christ-teaching, even such experiences are best when they are shared. Those who remind us of the worth of the men who contemplate the higher values on account of those values themselves end by suggesting to us that a good life in itself, that is, a life that contemplates such values, is among the richest of society’s assets. With this we all agree, but this brings back the social reference. The soundest advice we can give to some men is to tell them to lose themselves in their work, but in this advice we have in mind the welfare of other men also. No doubt some moral exhortation which tells us to think of all men in our work is distracting. We would better think of the work itself. Thinking of the work, however, is vastly different from thinking of oneself. Once a fundamental aim of service is adopted, the worker need not necessarily be always trying to visualize human beings and their needs. It is more important for his social service to press attention on the task itself. This is quite other, however, than the search for the delight of an approach to a value with oneself in mind.

It is time to draw this essay to a close. Much of what I have written may seem dogmatic and overconfident. May I add, then, in closing, that I have not desired to exhibit dogmatism and overconfidence as proper ternpers in which to approach the Divine. If this approach is in that spirit of friendship which, I think, is all-important, we may discern that a reverence which is not anxious to profess much about intimacy with God is, deep-down, a requisite for close sympathy with the Divine Mind. God’s love for men is based on respect for men. On the basis of the mutual respect of God and men the finest friendship can be built up. The ministry of silence may mean not only that God speaks to. us in the silences, but that he speaks to us about matters concerning which we keep silent, allowing the revelation which comes from God’s speech to work its way out into life. I have used such strong terms as those in which I have spoken of God as being under bonds, of his being obligated, and the like, in a fashion likely to suggest a sterner Deity than the Father of Christ. This has been simply for the sake of calling attention to the moral aspects. What right calls for, God gladly does. We should not care to follow a God who held fast to righteousness through cold duty. Neither should we care for a God who loved us without a zest for righteousness. In the Christlike God righteousness is so truly love, and love so truly righteousness, that the two, down in the depths, are one and the same.

It has not seemed necessary in this essay to discuss the "idea of the holy" as the basis from which all religious experience is by some alleged to take its start, the holy being conceived of as the "numinous," or that which causes awe, or dread. The sturdiest advocates of the "numinous" admit that it must be rationalized and moralized. I may be permitted merely to remark that in genuine Christianity the feeling of awe before the vaguely "numinous" must be transformed into respect and reverence for the divine attributes which are revealed to us from one angle as righteousness, and from another angle as love, and which are merged together inseparably in the Christ.