Chapter V

You claim that altruism and the virtues are the monopoly of your creed and your race.

But in reality the teachings of Jesus are not a particle more apt to lead his followers in the golden path than are the sayings of the Lord Buddha, the laws of Moses, the wisdom of Confucius, or the words of the Koran. True tolerance, true altruism teaches us that what is right in Peking may be wrong on the shores of Lake Tchaad, and what is wrong in a Damascus bazaar may be right at a Kansas ice-cream social.

Such true tolerance is far broader than the limits of professing Christianity, than the limits of any established, cut-and-dried creed. It is as broad as the Seven Holy Rivers of Hindustan and as vast as Time. The creed of mutual sympathy is a very old creed: even amongst the troglodytes chosen spirits must have known it, the red-haired barbarians of Gaul must have heard of it, and amongst the lizard-eating Arabs of pre-Islamic days it must have found adherents. It is a human truth, a human principle which is the common property of mankind East and West; but Christian hegemony in worldly affairs has killed it, has blighted it with the curse of the cross.

Intrinsic unselfishness and abstract goodness is older than the Gospel, the Koran, the Veda, or any other religious book. Being at the very core of that civilization from which all changes spring, it is in itself eternally unchangeable, be it clothed in the words of the Sermon on the Mount, the Prophet Mohammed’s three great principles of Compassion, Charity, and Resignation, or the famed edict of the Emperor Asoka, who many centuries before the days of Jesus declared to the world that “a man must not do reverence to his own sect by disparaging that of another man.”

THE SHROUD

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Death, I say, my heart is bowed
Unto thine,—O mother!
This red gown will make a shroud
Good as any other!

(I, that would not wait to wear
My own bridal things,
In a dress dark as my hair
Made my answerings.

I, to-night, that till he came
Could not, could not wait,
In a gown as bright as flame
Held for them the gate.)

Death, I say, my heart is bowed
Unto thine,—O mother!
This red gown will make a shroud
Good as any other!

NEW LOYALTIES FOR OLD CONSOLATIONS

H. A. OVERSTREET

To most persons the conception of a godless world is the conception of a world with the bottom dropped out. It is a world from which all the high values, all the splendid consolations have disappeared. This is true even for many who feel that they cannot, in reason, any longer believe in a personal God. For all their honest disbelief, the world has turned grey for them. It has lost its old wonder and joy. It has become a dead world.

It is interesting to ask ourselves whether all this need be true; whether the high values and the finer consolations may not be just as real when the belief in a personal God has vanished. With the vanishing of that belief, of course, the whole attitude toward the universe is altered. Hopes and comforts that were deeply and warmly of the older order of beliefs have no place in the new order; while loyalties and aspirations that were the breath of its life are become meaningless and without force. But may not new loyalties and aspirations, hopes and comforts find their place strongly and inspiringly in the later order of belief?

It will be interesting, as an answer to this question, to ask how differently a society would behave all of whose members, disbelieving utterly in the reality of a personal God, had no other thought of the divine life than that it was their own larger and more ideal existence.

I remember at the time of the San Francisco earthquake passing one of the cathedrals of the city and finding its broad stone steps, covering a goodly portion of a city square, black with kneeling worshippers. There could be no question of their reason for being there. They were setting themselves right with their God, hoping that in the fervor of their devotion he would have mercy upon them and save them from destruction. So on shipboard in times of great danger one will find the passengers gathered in the cabin praying to God for deliverance,—always, to be sure, with the proviso, “Yet if it be thy will that we perish, thy will be done!”

These are dramatic but typical instances of what occurs constantly in homes and churches where people pray to a personal deity. Could such an attitude of prayer have any meaning for a man who disbelieved in a personal deity? Obviously not. Would he cease to pray? It all depends upon what one is to mean by prayer.

Prayer of the kind indicated is an effort to secure assistance in circumstances where the normal human means fail. Normally, for example, if a man would have bread, he sets about to plant the proper seed, or grind the flour, or mix the dough. He finds out, in short, the laws that govern the production or manufacture of breadstuffs; and he does not expect to secure his desired result until he has accommodated himself in all the requisite ways to these laws and conditions. If a man would save himself from a burning house, he looks for a fire-escape, or a rope, or calls for a ladder; again accommodating his action to the fundamental conditions of the situation. But if the heavens are long without rain and the seed dry up, or the fire burns away the means of escape, the man, at the end of his human resources, calls to another power for help.

Such a call for help is based upon two assumptions, which in some respects scarcely support each other. They are the assumption, first, that there is a power able to control to his beneficent purposes forces that are humanly uncontrollable; but, second, that this power will not act unless attracted by very special and fervent appeal. The latter fact, that special appeal is needed, may be due to the God’s impotence, his inability to be in all places at once: he does the best he can, hurrying hither and thither from one distressing circumstance to another. Or it may be due to his demand that his creatures shall continually turn their minds to him, an attitude which he succeeds in securing in them for the most part only when they are hard pressed with danger.

Stated thus baldly, it would be difficult even on the naïve planes of religious thought to find persons who would acknowledge either that their God was a jealous god, refusing help until all the requisite ceremonies of abasement and supplication had been fulfilled, or that he was a finite God, half distracted by the imploring voices calling to him from all quarters of his universe. And yet, in prayer as it is ordinarily practised, both of these views are more or less unconsciously mingled. What prevents the emergence of their absurdity into clear consciousness is the relatively healthy thought underlying all prayer that if a man would secure something for himself he must himself spend some effort in the process. _Ex nihilo nihil._ In situations that pass beyond all his power of practical human control, there is nothing for him to do but to give his mere effort of adoration and hope.

On the higher levels of religious experience, this semi-magical conception of prayer grows increasingly in ill-repute. The thought is more and more in evidence that if God wished to prevent certain distresses, he would do so of his own beneficent accord. A request for specific aid, in short, would insinuate in him, either a failure to know in all circumstances what was best to be done, or an inability to keep wholly abreast of the tasks which he ought to perform. To save the majesty of God, prayer must become simply a turning of the mind to him, not for specific help, but for that general uplift of spirit which comes from the contemplation of his supreme perfection.

Here obviously is the germ of a higher and radically different conception of prayer. In the more naïve conception, help was to come from the “power not ourselves”; in the maturer conception, help is to come _through the stimulation in ourselves of our own highest powers_—a stimulation effected by the turning of our minds and spirits to the highest conceivable Reality.

The efficacy of prayer, in short, in this conception of it, will lie not in what it brings to us from without, but what it effects within,—what powers, efforts, aspirations it develops in us. Let us return to the kneeling worshippers. As they bowed their heads in fervent supplication, other men and women were distributing bread and clothing to destitute families, or were building shelters, or were clearing the streets of débris, or were patrolling with gun on shoulder against criminal disorder. Is it correct to say, as the older religions have always said, that the latter were engaged wholly in earthly affairs, while the former were entering the higher life of God and the spirit? Or is it truer to hold that the digging away of débris was a far more effective and powerful prayer to God than supplication to him for help?

The kneeling worshippers were indeed turning their minds to their highest conceivable Reality. It was a Reality that they hoped would do things for them. But the diggers of débris, or the distributers of bread and clothing, were likewise, unconsciously no doubt, but in actual effect, turning their minds to their highest Reality. Face to face with the destruction of those things that give order and beauty and power to life, they were thinking (in their unconscious selves) of what a city for men and women and children _ought to be and could be_. It ought not to be a tumbled mass of bricks and burning wood; it ought not to be filled with starving people; it ought not to be given over to looters and murderers; it ought to be a city clean, ordered, happy. With their smoke-blinded eyes, they may not have seen far beyond the immediate demands of their ideal; but ideal it nevertheless was to which they lifted their souls in service. With all its vague inadequacy, it was for them then and there their highest Reality, their God—the ideal life in their members—to which they felt that they must devote themselves with full power of brain and muscle. They asked nothing of this their God; rather it was their God _that asked everything of them_, that stimulated them to the full, devoted summoning of all their essential powers.

When a child lies sick unto death, what is the effective form of prayer? If the divine life, as we have held, is our own ideal life, prayer to such God is the tireless, unflinching effort to bring some measure of that ideal life to realization. The death of a little child of causes that might be controlled is hardly in keeping with the ideal of life. Hence devotion to the ideal calls for every straining of effort,—the loving care, the ceaseless watching, the sacrifice of pleasure and comforts to purchase the best knowledge and skill to save the little life. This is the essential prayer; not the bowing in helpless misery and supplication before a God who needs to be called from some far forgetfulness to his proper tasks.

During recent winter storms, when New York was filled with hundreds of thousands of unemployed, several hundred of these unfortunate men, as reported by _The New York Times_, marched through the snow-filled streets to one of the large evangelical churches where the weekly prayer meeting was being held. As they filed in, consternation spread among the worshippers. Their minister, however, stopped the oncoming crowd and asked them what they wanted. “We want shelter for the night in your church,” they said. The minister, looking at his cushioned pews, replied that he could not permit it. “But cannot we sleep in the basement?” they asked. No, the minister said, they could not, and he advised them to leave the church quietly, at the same time whispering to one of his congregation to call up the police. The police came in due order and rough-handled the men; and the prayers to God were resumed. Meanwhile, at another place in the city, a great body of men and women were gathered, drawn together at the instance of the American Association for Labor Legislation, to consider ways and means for relieving the distressing conditions of unemployment. At the latter meeting men spoke of municipal employment bureaus, of scientific plans for unemployment insurance; they brought forth facts and figures to prove the possibility of regulating business in such a way as to prevent the alternation of slack and rush seasons. They did not mention God. And yet one wonders whether their earnest and forceful deliberations were not a far more fervent prayer to God, a far more devoted yielding of themselves to the power of their ideal selves than the windy prayer of that minister (or of his people) who trusted his God so poorly that he called in the city’s police to help Him out of an ugly scrape.

Once the divine life is believed to be not a beneficent Person other than ourselves to whom we may call for help, but the finer life that lives potentially in ourselves, prayer ceases to be a semi-magic formula applicable to an order of existence beyond our own. Prayer is then nothing more or less than the turning of mind and spirit to the service of the ideal that lives in us. And it is most effectually realized not by departing from human activity, by yielding oneself to a power not oneself; but rather by a vigorous turning to the problems and difficulties of our life and enlisting every last shred of effort to set them right.

It follows then that there is prayer wherever there is service, _service of any kind_ that makes for life-betterment. The chemist who learns a new control has received an answer to his year-long prayer; the physician who finds the saving serum has prayed long and fervently and has been heard of his God. The business man who finds a way of juster coöperation with his men need never have named the word God or joined in holy adoration. But he has prayed—to his ideal of human brotherhood; and has prayed so vigorously that his God has heard and answered.

But in each case the God that has heard and answered has been the deeper possibilities of these men’s own life—their ideal life—which they, by their loyal devotion, have wrought out of mere possibility into some manner of actuality.