Chapter V

THE special form of idealism held by our forefathers, the Christian faith, with its great central tenets of God, immortality, the necessity of right-doing in the light of these faiths, has suffered with the other forms of idealism during the last decades. Those who, intentionally or unintentionally, have attacked, many of those who have defended, have alike done it injury. Of our intellectual vanguard, some have denied, some have ignored, some have been wisely patient and silent, awaiting the adjustment of new wisdom to old. As for the first,--surely those who hold sense-observation to be the basis of all knowledge should take no such vast leap into the dark as that involved in denial of these old beliefs. It is when certain of these new thinkers slip beyond their own self-defined province, and philosophize in ways contradicting their own premises, that one fails to follow them; when, grown bold with their conquest of physical nature, they make a vast leap from observation of phenomena into metaphysical statement, without consciousness of what they are doing, that one listens with profound distrust. Doubtless we have all known one or two, ready to make assertions dogmatic beyond the dogmatism of old theology, founded upon nothing but the assumption that they, who can truly observe facts in the physical world, could assert nothing but fact. I respect them when they observe; I tremble when they begin to generalize.

It is indeed a crowning irony when one is called upon to believe, in the name of discoveries in the world of phenomena, that faith in God and in immortality is untenable. Because it is possible to see with the aided eye organisms unsuspected before our day,--this does not prove that the immemorial spiritual instincts of humanity have no foundation. The assumption that the great hopes of mankind cannot be true because they cannot be detected under microscope or through telescope, has floated in the air, darkening wise counsel, has assumed an authority never won; the present is full of unnecessary renunciations and unproved denials. In the intoxication of new discovery regarding the laws of organic growth, the leap from belief in unseen realities to doubt or to denial has been too swift and too absolute. Probably, in a great majority of cases, thought, intellectual process, has had little to do with the change. Humanity has lost hope without knowing why; the air has been thick with doubt and fear. Hearing a great noise in the dark, aware of attack, many have rushed away, leaving great treasure, while the enemy was still far from taking the stronghold. This new poverty of life which we call Progress is thus, in many cases, the misfortune, but not the fault, of those who, unable to think for themselves, take for granted that the most insistent voice must be the right voice.

How greatly the defenders of the faith, in much of the warfare, have missed the issue! The time that has been lost, the good territory yielded in contesting the literal interpretation of Genesis, may well fill us with shame. If the story of the serpent of Eden must slip from dogma to myth, must faith in the unseen realities therefore go? If our forefathers were wrong in linking the large faith of their spiritual lives indissolubly with the story of Adam and that of Jonah, we must discriminate where they failed to discriminate, remembering in all humility that with their smaller knowledge of external things went a far profounder knowledge than ours of things spiritual. We must keep the greater; the less is not to us the sacrifice it was to them; let it go!

If we ask, why this close linking with myth, who can answer? We know only that the human soul develops slowly; shade by shade the truth grows clear. We, who have learned something of the incredible slowness of physical development, can afford to have patience with the spiritual, but we cannot afford to let slip back anything that the soul has achieved, proved, made its own. In the long quarrels over the husk, the kernel has too often slipped out of sight; essentials have gone with unessentials. We can no longer in good faith teach the young that the misfortune of our present predicament may be traced to eating an apple; but those of us who are unable to step to the marching music of our time may, in impassioned good faith, until modern thinkers make a better case against us than they have yet made, teach the young that the great realities of life are of mind and soul, not body; that growth and change are necessary, fundamental, vital, the very condition of life; that it is for them to remove reverently whatever outer veil may have obscured their forefathers’ great light of faith; but that doom is upon them if they lose the light.

Doubtless the greatest wrong done the Christian faith by its defenders was the attempt to reduce it to a mere matter of reasoning. The pity of it is that, at a time when the whole fabric of Christianity was shaken and the whole spiritual life was at stake, theologians should so have emphasized fact, clinging to a dead literalness of interpretation! Through the long decades of the nineteenth century, trying to meet the geologists upon their own ground, they were very properly worsted. Why borrow, and use weakly, weapons which belong to a different warfare, knowledge? Sense-perception, playing a large part, and rightly, in science, is neither starting-point nor goal here, nor is historical fact. Proofs of a real religion are not limited to repetition of fact. When they imitated the scientists, in their demand for external evidence, and imitated them badly, the inevitable happened. More and more their own great world of spiritual aspiration and endeavor was ignored by those whose high privilege it was to make known the vitalizing power of the faith they held, its subtle answer to the soul’s deepest need. The doom of a faith is its loss of inner sources of vitality, its “materialization in fact,” and perhaps the Church has been rightly punished for forgetting that its weapons should be primarily weapons of the spirit, its world the world of divine endeavor. This is no time to haggle over theology; the object is not to save the church, but to save alive the souls of men.

Myth could go; dogma itself could go; Christianity would still be. Milestones in the path of the human spirit, dogmas have done great service, but none have been great enough to express the potential greatness of the spiritual life of the human race. Greatly have they helped; at times they have greatly hindered. Seemingly necessary bulwarks in time of stress and siege, the human soul has lived on after their demolishing; the human spirit is greater than they. Modern warfare has demonstrated that great forts and intrenchments are useless; that does not mean that there is to be no fighting. Faiths, beliefs, patriotisms are still there, but the fighting is to be in the open, a matter of life and death, the issue an issue of vitality.