THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT IN MODERN LIFE

Ulysses G. B. Pierce, D.D.

One of the earliest criticisms that the gospel of Jesus encountered was the supposition that he presented to the world an easy faith. And if one keeps that in mind some of the sternest sayings of the Master will get a truer perspective to give them their real value. To those who had broken away from the legal system of the Old Testament with its fastings, its ceremonies, and its giving of tithes, it seemed as if the day of the millennium had come when this humble Nazarene came to the people and told them that the true fast was the penitent heart, that the true ceremony was the righteous life, and that the true tithing was to live justly. To those who had labored hard to save from a miserable pittance enough so that once a year they might visit the holy city of Jerusalem, there to present their devotions and their offerings, it must have seemed little less than a financial and spiritual relief to hear from the Master's lips the words that in the larger dispensation of the spirit: "Neither in Jerusalem nor in this mountain shall ye worship, but ye shall worship in spirit and in truth." Was not that, then, an easy religion with no fasts or feasts or pilgrimages? Some evidently thought it so, and rushed into hasty and unconsidered discipleship of the Nazarene; so that he himself had to rebuke them and say that the Kingdom of heaven suffereth violence. And again and again this is the occasion whereupon he has to remind his ardent followers that "straight is the way and broad is the path which leadeth to destruction" - that is, to the destruction of the religious sensibilities, and straight and narrow is the path which leads to life. And in a more serious vein he says: "So far from my religion being an easy religion, it is the hardest kind of faith that one may live. To whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom they commit much, of him will they ask the more."

And it is but a repetition of ancient history that the religion of the Spirit which we are considering should meet this same easy criticism. "The religion of the Spirit," one says, "0h, yes; you offer to us an easy faith; you tell us that there is resident in each one of us the Spirit of his Father; that all he has to do is to hearken to the Voice; that that voice spake not unto his fathers concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices, but its monition was, 'Hear and obey me.'" So we are tempted sometimes to yield to the temptation to call our faith the liberal faith, not without the suggestions that because the way is a broad way, therefore it is an easy way.

Now, so far from that being the fact in the case, I think it is no more than fair to ourselves in our parting conversation to remind ourselves that the religion of the Spirit is the hardest kind of religion that any one can live. He who is seeking the easy course had better forthwith return to the legal and dogmatic faith; if he is seeking the easy way it lies not here. The faith of the Spirit makes serious demands on us; it carries with it heavy obligations; it is surrounded by subtle perils, and he who would really live the religion of the Spirit has no small task before him. "To whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required, and to whom they commit much, of him will they ask the more."

In order, however, that we may see the subject with some perspective, let us remind ourselves that every form of faith has its obligations. We cannot possibly escape from this. The dogmatic faith has its obligations no less than has the religion of the Spirit, and is threatened with its peculiar perils. The predominant character of dogmatic faith is that it is fixed; that it has, so to speak, a natural and organic history. There was a time when it was not; there was a definite time when it came into existence; it has certain definite historical, or supposed to be historical, documents; its perils are the perils of institutionalism. Being fixed, the peril that dogmatic faith encounters is to keep this fixedness within due limits. So that the obligations and the peril of every form of dogmatic faith are threefold.

First, being a fixed faith, there is always danger less its fixity shall lead to blindness and intellectual stupor, if not to mental stupidity. If truth once and for all was delivered to the saints, why do we need the Spirit of truth? Now, if in any document or combination of documents we have the authentic record of dogmatic faith, certainly nothing more can be added to it; so that the peril is that what started as a rock shall end as a wall. And thus we are only repeating history. What great movement has come into this world which has not been opposed by dogmatic religion? Every great discovery that one can call to mind in short order has been met by the objection and the mental stupor of those who had committed themselves to a form of faith which had a natural history. The discovery did not coincide with this document; it was not supported by this text, therefore it could not be true.

The second peril of dogmatic faith relates not only to its fixity, but also to its aggressiveness. If dogmatic faith is imbedded and embodied in certain doctrines and documents then it is incumbent upon those who have been fortunate enough to receive these documents to pass them on to the world. The command comes to them to preach this gospel to all the world, to baptise and make disciples of all people to this kind of faith. Here at once zeal is enlarged in the hearts of the disciples. The peril of dogmatic faith is to keep zeal within its bounds. The Old Testament writer understood it perfectly when he said: "Zeal for thine house hath eaten me up." That is, there is a zeal which not only baptizes, but consumes. There are heavenly flames which come down not only at Pentecost, but come down to enrage, and consume men. So, almost from the first, dogmatic faith has been a vigorous persecutor, and Mohammedanism is by no means the only form of dogmatic faith which has made its way by use of the sword. We can study it in Mohammedanism with least prejudice and better perspective, because we ourselves are not involved in it. But whoever has even a smattering of church history knows that the one peril of dogmatic faith has been how to keep its zeal from consuming the world.

And the last peril due to this same fixity of dogmatic faith relates to the attitude of the individual believer. The dogmatic faith having a natural history, and to be propagated in beliefs and in documents, it is necessary that one maintain the right attitude of mind toward this. Therefore he must believe them and accept them into his own life. That is very good. Man is redeemed and saved by what he actually believes. It is the great elevating power in his life; but here is the peril, that men shall pretend to believe what they do not. What pages of church history are soiled by the records of men and women who on the one hand have died for what they thought to be true, and on the other hand of men and women who have allowed other people to infer that they believe things which in their private life they disavow. Blindness, the persecuting spirit, the danger of hypocrisy - these are the besetting sins that tempt and injure every form of dogmatic faith.

But does the religion of the Spirit escape? If dogmatic faith has its obligations, does the experience of the religion of the Spirit introduce us to an easy and open way, where on the one hand there are no obligations, and on the other hand there are no perils? No. It introduces us to a form of faith which, being higher in development, has more serious obligations, and, having more serious obligations, it has more subtle perils. The perils of the religion of the Spirit are due not to its fixity, but to its fluidity. The religion of the Spirit is not a rock; it is a stream, and it carries with it the perils of a moving body. Dogmatic faith is institutional; it is loyalty to a belief. The religion of the Spirit is purely personal; it is loyalty to him who is superpersonal, to him who is over all and through all and in all. So part of our obligation and peril in the relation of the Spirit arises from this purely personal nature of the obligation.

I beg you for a moment to think of that and see how serious it is. He who worships in the religion of the Spirit is under obligation to him only who is in heaven. He may go to church, therefore, or not as he thinks best; he may worship in Jerusalem or in this place or in neither place as he thinks best; he may read from this or from that book or no book, as he thinks best. In the religion of the Spirit the church cannot mark against us our absences from public worship; truancy and tardiness have no record on our books; we are not even critics of the behavior of one another! Think of the awful peril and the obligation which lie here. Are you interested in the propagation and the extension of the religion of the Spirit? It is entirely in your own hands; here is the peril, that on a fine day one shall not associate himself with the church because it is too fine a day to be in doors; on the stormy day he shall not associate himself in public worship, because it is too unpleasant to go out. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean to imply that any large percent of people who worship in the religion of the Spirit take that attitude of mind. I believe that they do not; I believe there is no body of worshippers more loyal to their convictions, who stand by their guns more manfully than the people of our liberal churches; but here is the peril. The peril of the dogmatic faith is mental blindness, the persecuting spirit and of hypocricy of life. The chief peril of the religion of the Spirit is the absence of corporate responsibility, that we shall feel that we have our life in our own hands; that if we wish to identify ourselves with the institutions of the religion of the Spirit we will do so, and if not it is nobody's concern but our own.

So, as we consider together some of the obligations of the religion of the Spirit, if we congratulate ourselves on the one hand that we escape the peril of intellectual stupor, and if it is less to be laid to our charge than to the charge of some other communions that we have done much of the persecuting and the harrying, if for us there is less motive for hypocrisy; let us not be too sure that there are no other perils that threaten and no obligations which we overlook.

And the first one arises from the very nature of the religion of the Spirit. It is not, as was said, a protest; it is a reaching out; it is an affirmation; its highest word is: "I come not to destroy, but to fulfil." It does not set itself against dogmatic faith; its danger is not that. Rather it is the more subtle and more comfortable feeling of complacency that sooner or later dogmatic faith will have to ripen into spiritual religion; and we have the comfortable feeling that soon or later other people will be as wise and good as we are! I do not know how much of the Pharisaic spirit there is in that, but it certainly suggests to the mind the parable of the Master of the two men who went up to pray. If one of those was a dogmatist and the other a follower of the religion of the Spirit was there not danger that the latter should be aware of his superiority? I think of all bigotry the liberal brand is the worst. Of all kinds of complacency that of the religion of the Spirit is most reprehensible. And yet it is a peril which lurks in the mind of every one of us. The persuasion is so easy that the world is being evolved, and that it is only a question of time before people will outgrow their bigotry and superstition, and see the world with the calm view with which you and I see it. That itself is the religion of the Spirit not only ripening but rotting. It is the religion of the Spirit passing into a dogmatized state. If one wishes a picture of the horror and the beauty of that, let him read Alfred Tennyson's Palace of Art, a picture of the soul who dedicates itself to knowledge and yet would escape the obligations of knowledge. And the whole point of view of that soul is given to us in the words:

"I care not what the sects may brawl, I sit as God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all."

The first peril then of the religion of the Spirit is that those who worship the Father in that fashion shall forget themselves, and shall alienate themselves from his life by becoming high-minded, haughty, proud, and envious.

Nor, again, is the freedom of which we boast a rose without a thorn. If dogmatic faith has its peril, so that zeal is liable any moment to pass into persecution, and the smoldering flame of missionary work to break into the hot fires of bigotry and persecution; there is always latent in those who worship in the religion of the Spirit the fear lest religious liberty shall be interpreted to mean religious independence. As the world is constituted there is no such thing for us as independence. We are members of one body; we belong to the same human society, whether we will or not. Presbyterian or Baptist, Episcopal or Roman Catholic, we all were first members of one great family; we are not independent, but we are most dependent upon one another. Freedom can mean only this, the exercise of our highest functions according to their own nature. That mind is free which thinks truly; there is no other kind of mental freedom. That conception of intellectual liberty which congratulates itself that it can think whatever it wishes to and say whatever it wishes to because it is living in a free country, if you please, has no basis in fact whatever. My mind is free when and in so far as it submits itself to the laws of my mind; my heart is free only so far as it obeys the laws of my emotional nature; the highest law of my heart is to feel kindly toward my brother; for me to hate my brother is not to be a free man; it is to be a slave. The only kind of freedom in action, the only real freedom in action, is the ability and the opportunity to do right: the privilege of doing as I wish is not freedom at all; it is slavery exactly as it is slavery for a locomotive to jump the track thinking that thereby it gains freedom; it is only a manifestation of caprice. The locomotive is freest when it is on the track and obeying the mandate of the engineer. Now here is the peril that confronts us, not that of persecution but that of license, the peril of the open mind which shall indulge itself in strange vagaries, in queer things, in out-of-the-way realms, and think that because a thing is curious therefore it must be true. No, the only freedom in religion that is worthwhile is the freedom of speaking the truth when it is known to be the truth, the freedom to feel kindly toward every man, woman, and child, whatever his color, to love all the lower animals and plants; the freedom to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with his God. For that kind of freedom you and I would if need be go to the stake. Any other kind of freedom is not worth the words that we spend upon it. Says our poet Lowell, who has glorified the religion of the Spirit by poems which constitutes its liturgy:

"Is true Freedom but to break Fetters for our own dear sake, And with leathern hearts forget That we owe mankind a debt? No! true freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!"

The measure of our liberty, the scope of our freedom is in the energy that we can summon and release for the emancipation of others. Our chief concern is not to be free, but to set free. I do not wish to seem to be making an invective against what I believe is the most precious faith in the world, neither would I willingly cast any aspersions on what I believe is the most loyal Christian body in the world, those who "worship after the way called heresy." But because we are in earnest in these things we want to know whether this is an easy faith, and if not, wherein the difficulty and the danger lie. So see how our very idea of progress carries with it its own peril. It was Mohammed who said that the way to heaven is as narrow as the edge of a saber. The difference between genius and insanity is a hair line. The difference between truth and error is almost microscopic. Where does the progressive mind become the eccentric mind? Now that is a peril toward which the dogmatic temper is in no way exposed; his faith is a matter of history; it is fixed, a creed, a church. He who reads it may think that he understands it, but the religion of the Spirit is fluid; it is progressive. Here then is our peril; we shall say to ourselves: "This is the day in which God speaks in the human soul, and then we make a most illogical conclusion: "This is the day in which God speaks in the human soul; therefore we care nothing about ancient documents." You see how illogical it is. Here is the true logic: "This is the day when God speaks in the human soul; yesterday was the day when he spoke in the human soul; there never was a time when he did not speak in the human soul." So instead of our being disregardful of traditions, scriptures, and institutlons, we are not living up to our opportunity unless we are more zealous and jealous of them than the dogmatist could possibly be. That is the reason why, believing as we do in the ever present Holy Spirit, we of this faith prize our Holy Scriptures, because God spoke then as he speaks now. But here is the peril which confronts us, that in our passion for progress we shall mistake novelty for development. There is nothing new under the sun; the great truths of religion are as old as the hills; the 139th Psalm is as modern as if it were written yesterday. The soul knows no time; inspiration is not the conning of old documents; it is the opening of the heavens whereby the unseen registers itself in the soul of man. And because we believe in the continuous revelations of God in the soul of man; therefore the logical mind reveres the ancient scriptures and appreciates their spiritual worth.

Shall I mention the two other perils which confront us? The religion of the Spirit is nothing if not practical. I have often felt with you the regret that in the famous passage quoted from Micah we have it rendered as we do. "What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." The impression that the average man gets is that the Lord does not require much of us. That he will be satisfied if we live clean lives and meet our obligations and are not haughty about it. But did you ever try to live that life one day? to do justly - how hard that is. But few of us know what justice is; having discovered it, how many changes all along the line would be required by the business man who with his clear vision of justice would resolve to live it for one day. And to love mercy, does not that seem to conflict with justice? And to walk humbly - why the man who had done justly and loved mercy would be just the man to lose his humility. It would be like the peril of the early riser; he could not help telling people that he gets up early; so one wonders which is worse, to be lazy or to be proud. The danger is that in the religion of the Spirit we shall somehow think that our religion is reducible to morality, and we shall make no great demands on people to join our church; that all you have to do is to live up to your ideals as nearly as convenient, and to do justly as the world understands justice, and to be humble about it. So it may come about that those people who ought to be the most spiritually minded, whose minds ought to be most subtle and sensitive to spiritual impressions, who ought more than others to live in the realm of the unseen and to walk with angels, are in danger of excommunicating themselves from everything that they cannot see or touch. Philanthropy is a noble thing, but it is the child of religion, not the parent of religion; doing well is necessary, but it is not the root of religion; it is the fruit of religion. "Every good gift and every perfect boone cometh down from above from the Father of lights with whom there is no variableness nor shadow that is cast by turning." The good life comes from the good heart, not the good heart from the good life. So our Bible is as profound as it is simple, when it says that Jesus Christ went about doing good. Why? Did he think that was the kind of a fife the world needed? He went about doing good because God was with him.

The peril of the religion of the Spirit is that it shall seek to eliminate the unknown; take out the mystery of life and reduce religion to the barren level of ethics. I do not mean to speak disparaging of ethics; you understand me perfectly, but ethics is the child of religion; it nurses at the breast of faith.

And, lastly, the obligation and the peril of the religion of the spirit lie in its inclusiveness. It is so easy for us to say, "The world is my country; to do good is my religion." Very well, the world is your country; will a letter reach you at that address? To do good is your religion, and what specific good thing are you able to do. "I recognize," the Spirit says, "good in all churches. I do not wish to limit myself to the communion of any sect." Very well, how many churches can you attend at the same hour? There is danger that we shall be not only broad in our thinking, but thin in our thinking. We have sometimes felt that the liberal mind would almost rather be considered sinful than to be accused of being narrow. I think the word narrow with us takes the place of the word "devil." Our chief concern is not to be broad; it is to be true. We need not have any fears of being narrow; the thing we need to fear is being shallow. What we want is not primarily broad thinking, but thinking. It is harder to think than it is to think broadly. We do not need so much latitude in our faith as we do longitude. We need to get our bearing; to know what we are, and to know that we are a body of free-thinking and free worshipping people.

Therefore, because of that fact, we must organize ourselves to do our work in this world. One sometimes feels that we are in danger of forgetting that, in the world of matter in which the providence of God calls us to be living, spirits do not function except through bodies. A spirit without a body does not seem to come; it must use some kind of a body; a ghost is not a great dynamic power for social righteousness; we need men and women who are positive without being dogmatic; we need men and women who are free without being queer, progressive without being eccentric, practical without becoming commonplace, inclusive without being evasive. These are the perils of the religion of the Spirit.

Now do you ask, Who is sufficient for these things ? I answer, You, every one of us. This is the kind of religion which ultimately you are going to live; you are spiritual beings; God has not left himself without witness in your heart; you are not satisfied with the kind of life that you have been living; the Spirit of holiness in you, the Holy Ghost in you is yearning even now for a better and a fuller life. It asks you to live it now, not to contrast it with another faith, but to take it exactly as it speaks to you, in your conscience; to keep yourself free by obeying the law of your mental and moral and spiritual constitution; to keep yourself moving with the Spirit of God; to make yourself practical in the world, and when duty calls to be where you can be of actual service in this world. You or I can do that; more than that you and I will endeavor more than ever to do it. For one I take great satisfaction in feeling that in some humble way I am associated with a body of men and women throughout our country and in foreign lands who maintain their personal freedom and are resolved, so far as in them lies, to bring in the glorious kingdom of the living God. For we know the admonition of him who lived the religion of the Spirit as no other has lived it: "To whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom they commit much, of him, will they ask the more."