CHAPTER II

REDEMPTION

While in the Beatitudes the will is made good mainly by insight, in the ordinary moral teaching it is made good wholly by effort. Morality is then our own stroke; and, if religion is needed, it is only as a swimming-belt. The dependence of morality on religion which history makes plain, is regarded as a sort of first aid in learning to float. Law, we are told, at first appeals to religion, and morality to law, but, like learning to swim on bladders, the better the end is served the more temporary the utility. With progress, law ceases to be enforced by the thunders of Sinai and right and wrong have other sanctions than Heaven and Hell.

Many accept this view, yet still maintain the abiding need of religion on the ground that morality will always need such external support. They point to the length of the course and how man wearies in running it. And experience doubtless confirms all they say about man's failure, even with the bliss of Heaven and the terrors of Hell before his eyes and all promise of help to flee from the wrath to come. But religion and morality, when thus associated, are both set in a false light.

In the first place, even if morality need that help from religion, the less help were needed the better, 114 seeing that the essence of moral progress is to have conscience of right and wrong by direct insight into their own nature, and to be able to act upon reverence for good for its own sake. Hence we should ever be less religious as we became more moral.

In the second place, the backing of our wills by religious rewards and punishments or any extraneous help would corrupt the will by selfish, non-moral motive and lymphatic non-moral dependence, and could not help to make the will good, could, indeed, not fail to corrupt it.

Religion as a device for reinforcing morality, calling in God merely to fill up the gaps in our own effort or to enforce the judgments our consciences fail to maintain, dangerously resembles a mixture of bribery and magic. Not after that fashion ought it to be a physician for the sick.

The Beatitudes take a different road. They start from the view that a good will is primarily of insight, not of effort. Religion is then no more merely a lifebelt, but is our atmosphere, our native buoyancy as it fills our lungs and our native strength as it nourishes our blood, the more necessary for us the greater our effort. The question of God is the question not of an outwardly reinforced, but of an inwardly blessed morality.

A blessed morality is not one free from conflict, but one which enables us to fight as the citizens of a moral universe, and not as Ishmaelites in a moral wilderness. In that case it must be a religious 115 morality. The question of God is just the question of whether morality is the ultimate reality or only a passing convention; and that means, whether we reach it best by rules or by penetration and sensitiveness, by setting our teeth or by finding the true fellowship of our spirits.

This question concerns nothing less than the nature of the world. Is it a world such as Jesus conceived it, where, if we seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness, all the rest is secure; or is it such a world as Huxley propounded, where morality is a nightmare accident, to be maintained, at most for a little space and for a little time, against a natural order which can be effectively used only by the cunning of the ape and the ferocity of the tiger? In the former case alone can the strength of a good will be insight, sensitive and penetrating; in the latter the best it can do is to stick to rules and set its teeth.

Morality can only be blessed in the assurance that the world is God's and, in its final purpose, good. But, as it appears and as we measure it, it is not good. Nor can we, by any high resolve we are capable of exercising, either isolate ourselves from the evil or turn it into good. "My mind to me a kingdom is" is but vaguely true at best, seeing how every experience is of mind and how nothing in our mind can be withdrawn from the influence of our whole experience. As a realm within our control, it is so far from being a blessed possession that our fortitude is little more 116 secure than our fortune and our misery at least as much of our folly as of our fate. The world cannot be taken apart from human use of it, so that we must include in it, not only the society of our fellow-men as we share in it, but our own resolve as we exercise it. And thence come its chief evils, both moral and material.

No religion which has deeply influenced mankind has ever sought blessedness in the world as it appears, but always by redemption from that world; and, the more fully it has faced the issues of life, the more it has included society as part of the world, and ourselves as members of society. From other religions Christianity is distinguished, in this regard, only by a more earnest insistence on the necessity of redemption and by embracing everything more entirely in its scope. Even Buddhism does not travel through as dark a pessimism, for what are virtues for Buddha are often only hypocritical respectabilities for Jesus; while, with Jesus, not only does the fashion of this world pass and its lusts with it, as with Buddha, but the ruler of it, while it lasts, is the Father of Lies, maintained in his pre-eminence by hearts deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

Redemption from the vanity and vexation of the world, as our world to be measured by our pleasure and valued as we possess it for ourselves, is always the supreme religious need, and, without that redemption, we never can discover God's world to be measured by His purpose and valued by what He 117 gives us to possess. Not till we learn that all things work for evil to those who love themselves and seek their own pleasure and possession in the world, can we discover that all things work for good to those who love God and seek His purpose in the world.

No faith in God is worth anything which has not faced this need of redemption from the world. Without that, it is at best an easy trust that a pretty comfortable world has a fairly benevolent origin, which adds nothing to the world as we actually experience it. So long as the world, on the whole, agrees with us, that kind of belief in God is not difficult, but, as it alters nothing in our view of the world, it can, with equal ease, be neglected as a superfluity or even denied as an irrelevancy. What we have lightly accepted we can as lightly reject. God may be an intellectual interest, yet, being an easy, an otiose hypothesis, it makes no practical difference. But, if every possibility of discovering that this life, with all its conflicts, all its ills, all its evanescence, may be blessed, depends on finding life God's dealing with us in His world, the question of God involves every question worth asking, because it involves nothing less than blessedness in our whole experience, which, without Him, has nothing in it that is blessed.