Chapter III

Yet splendid as such religious life may be conceded to be, it will apparently lack one of the primary consolations of the older belief, the assurance, namely, that the fundamental government of the world is just and good. “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world.” If, as we have been urging, God is not in his heaven, it may indeed, for all we know to the contrary, be all wrong with the world. A few years ago we were very much perturbed by certain conclusions reached by the accredited masters of science. The universe was running down, they said, and would end a lifeless, frozen mass. The thought of an ever-living God was then a comfort against such ominous prophecy. If God lives, it follows that all things of value will live, that the world cannot go to ultimate ruin.

That old prophecy, however, of a frozen and lifeless world no longer has honor in our land. Recent discoveries of new types of energy, a more penetrating analysis both of the mathematics and mechanics of the situation, show the prophecy to have been made on wholly insufficient and insecure grounds. The old dogmatic materialism has had to give way to a critical and open-minded evolutionism which tends more and more to regard the cosmic process as one of expanding power, in which the values for which we deeply care—conscious life, purposive direction, science, art, morality—appear to have a place of growing security and effectiveness. And yet the evolutionism of the day, unlike the older religious thought, finds no cosmic certainty upon which it may utterly bank. The universe, with all the high values that have been achieved, _may_ indeed go to ruin. There is no absolute guarantee for the future. All that modern evolutionism can say to us is that looking over such history of the world as is accessible, and analyzing the processes there found, it seems highly probable that the line of the future will be a line of advance, an advance from relative disorganization to organization, from a large degree of mechanical indifference to increasing organic solidarity and integration, from antagonisms and conflicts to mutuality and coöperation. But it is only probable. There is no God who holds the destiny in his hands and makes it certain of accomplishment.

In view of this uncertainty as to the world’s government and outcome, it may be asked whether the new type of religion will not be weaker in moral and spiritual vigor than the old. Do not vigor and initiative spring from hope and sure confidence in the fundamental rightness of the world? In answer to this one has but to ask the question: in what type of situation does the human character grow strong and heroic,—that in which there is no doubt of the happy outcome, in which the individual plays his part, assured that nothing can happen wrongly; or that in which the outcome is uncertain, in which the individual realizes that he must fight his way, knowing not whether victory or defeat will greet him, but assured only that whatever happens, he must fight and fight to the end? Is it unfair to say that the old religion with its confident, childlike resting on God (“He loves the burthen”) developed a type of character that was not, in the mass, conspicuously heroic? “God knows best”; “It will all come out right”; “Thy will be done”—these are not expressions of fighting men; they are expressions of men who resign themselves to the ruling of powers greater than themselves. A civilization characterized by such an attitude will not be one strenuously alive to eliminate the sorry evils of life. But the men who believe that the issue of the universe is in doubt, that there is no powerful God to lead the hosts to victory, will, if they have the stuff of men in them, strike out their manliest to help whatever good there is in the world to win its way against the forces of evil. A civilization of such men will be a tough-fibred civilization, strenuous to fight, grimly ready, like the Old Guard, to die but never surrender.

There is, in short, something subtly weakening about the optimism of the traditional religions. Like the historic soothing syrup, with its unadvertised opiate, it soothes the distress not by curing the disease but by temporarily paralyzing the function. “To trust God nor be afraid” means in most cases—not all—to settle back from a too anxious concern about the evils of the world. “God will take care of his own!” How different is this from the attitude: “The task is ours and the whole world’s and we must see it through!”