Hodder nodded.
"It was a crime. It had nothing to do with religion. I thought it over for a year--I couldn"t. Oh, I have since been thankful. I can see now what would have happened to me--I should have had fatty degeneration of the soul."
The expression was not merely forcible, it was overwhelming. It brought up before Holder"s mind, with sickening reality, the fate he had himself escaped. Fatty degeneration of the soul!
The little man, seeing the expression on the rector"s face, curbed his excitement, and feared he had gone too far.
"You will pardon me!" he said penitently, "I forget myself. I did not mean all clergymen."
"I have never heard it put so well," Holder declared. "That is exactly what occurs in many cases."
"Yes, it is that," said Engel, still puzzled, but encouraged, eyeing the strong face of the other. "And they lament that the ministry hasn"t more big men. Sometimes they get one with the doctrinal type of mind--a Newman--but how often? And even a Newman would be of little avail to-day. It is Eucken who says that the individual, once released from external authority, can never be turned back to it. And they have been released by the hundreds of thousands ever since Luther"s time, are being freed by the hundreds of thousands to-day. Democracy, learning, science, are releasing them, and no man, no matter how great he may be, can stem that tide. The able men in the churches now--like your Phillips Brooks, who died too soon--are beginning to see this. They are those who developed after the vows of the theological schools were behind them.
Remove those vows, and you will see the young men come. Young men are idealists, Mr. Hodder, and they embrace other professions where the mind is free, and which are not one whit better paid than the ministry.
"And what is the result," he cried, "of the senseless insistence on the letter instead of the spirit of the poetry of religion? Matthew Arnold was a thousand times right when he inferred that Jesus Christ never spoke literally and yet he is still being taken literally by most churches, and all the literal sayings which were put into his mouth are maintained as Gospel truth! What is the result of proclaiming Christianity in terms of an ancient science and theology which awaken no quickening response in the minds and hearts of to-day? That!" The librarian thrust a yellow hand towards the pile of books. "The new wine has burst the old skin and is running all over the world. Ah, my friend, if you could only see, as I do, the yearning for a satisfying religion which exists in this big city! It is like a vacuum, and those books are rushing to supply it. I little thought," he added dreamily, "when I renounced the ministry in so much sorrow that one day I should have a church of my own. This library is my church, and men and women of all creeds come here by the thousands. But you must pardon me. I have been carried away--I forgot myself."
"Mr. Engel," replied the rector, "I want you to regard me as one of your parishioners."
The librarian looked at him mutely, and the practical, desiccated little person seemed startlingly transformed into a mediaeval, German mystic.
"You are a great man, Mr. Hodder," he said. "I might have guessed it."
It was one of the moments when protest would have been trite, superfluous. And Hodder, in truth, felt something great swelling within him, something that was not himself, and yet strangely was. But just what--in view of his past strict orthodoxy and limited congregation--Mr.
Engel meant, he could not have said. Had the librarian recognized, without confession on his part, the change in him? divined his future intentions?
"It is curious that I should have met you this morning, Mr. Engel," he said. "I expressed surprise when you declared this was a religious age, because you corroborated something I had felt, but of which I had no sufficient proof. I felt that a great body of unsatisfied men and women existed, but that I was powerless to get in touch with them; I had discovered that truth, as you have so ably pointed out, is disguised and distorted by ancient dogmas; and that the old Authority, as you say, no longer carries weight."
"Have you found the new one?" Mr. Engel demanded.
"I think I have," the rector answered calmly, "it lies in personality. I do not know whether you will agree with me that the Church at large has a future, and I will confess to you that there was a time when I thought she had not. I see now that she has, once given to her ministers that freedom to develop of which you speak. In spite of the fact that truth has gradually been revealed to the world by what may be called an Apostolic Succession of Personalities,--Augustine, Dante, Francis of a.s.sisi, Luther, Shakespeare, Milton, and our own Lincoln and Phillips Brooks,--to mention only a few,--the Church as a whole has been blind to it. She has insisted upon putting the individual in a straitjacket, she has never recognized that growth is the secret of life, that the clothes of one man are binding on another."
"Ah, you are right--a thousand times right," cried the librarian.
"You have read Royce, perhaps, when he says, "This mortal shall put on individuality--""
"No," said the rector, outwardly cool, but inwardly excited by the coruscation of this magnificent paraphrase of Paul"s sentence, by the extraordinary turn the conversation had taken. "I am ashamed to own that I have not followed the development of modern philosophy. The books I have just returned, on historical criticism," he went on, after a moment"s hesitation, "infer what my att.i.tude has been toward modern thought. We were made acquainted with historical criticism in the theological seminary, but we were also taught to discount it. I have discounted it, refrained from reading it,--until now. And yet I have heard it discussed in conferences, glanced over articles in the reviews.
I had, you see, closed the door of my mind. I was in a state where arguments make no impression."
The librarian made a gesture of sympathetic a.s.sent, which was also a tribute to the clergyman"s frankness.
"You will perhaps wonder how I could have lived these years in an atmosphere of modern thought and have remained uninfluenced. Well, I have recently been wondering--myself." Hodder smiled. "The name of Royce is by no means unfamiliar to me, and he taught at Harvard when I was an undergraduate. But the prevailing philosophy of that day among the students was naturalism. I represent a revolt from it. At the seminary I imbibed a certain amount of religious philosophy--but I did not continue it, as thousands of my more liberal fellow-clergymen have done. My religion "worked" during the time, at least, I remained in my first parish. I had no interest in reconciling, for instance, the doctrine of evolution with the argument for design. Since I have been here in this city," he added, simply, "my days have been filled with a continued perplexity--when I was not too busy to think. Yes, there was an unacknowledged element of fear in my att.i.tude, though I comforted myself with the notion that opinions, philosophical and scientific, were in a state of flux."
"Yes, yes," said Mr. Engel, "I comprehend. But, from the manner in which you spoke just now, I should have inferred that you have been reading modern philosophy--that of the last twenty years. Ah, you have something before you, Mr. Hodder. You will thank G.o.d, with me, for that philosophy. It has turned the tide, set the current running the other way. Philosophy is no longer against religion, it is with it. And if you were to ask me to name one of the greatest religious teachers of our age, I should answer, William James. And there is Royce, of whom I spoke,--one of our biggest men. The dominant philosophies of our times have grown up since Arnold wrote his "Literature and Dogma," and they are in harmony with the quickening social spirit of the age, which is a religious spirit--a Christian spirit, I call it. Christianity is coming to its own. These philosophies, which are not so far apart, are the flower of the thought of the centuries, of modern science, of that most extraordinary of discoveries, modern psychology. And they are far from excluding religion, from denying the essential of Christ"s teachings.
On the other hand, they grant that the motive-power of the world is spiritual.
"And this," continued Mr. Engel, "brings me to another aspect of authority. I wonder if it has struck you? In mediaeval times, when a bishop spoke ex cathedra, his authority, so far as it carried weight, came from two sources. First, the supposed divine charter of the Church to save and d.a.m.n. That authority is being rapidly swept away. Second, he spoke with all the weight of the then accepted science and philosophy.
But as soon as the new science began to lay hold on people"s minds, as--for instance--when Galileo discovered that the earth moved instead of the sun (and the pope made him take it back), that second authority began to crumble too. In the nineteenth century science had grown so strong that the situation looked hopeless. Religion had apparently irrevocably lost that warrant also, and thinking men not spiritually inclined, since they had to make a choice between science and religion, took science as being the more honest, the more certain.
"And now what has happened? The new philosophies have restored your second Authority, and your first, as you properly say, is replaced by the conception of Personality. Personality is nothing but the rehabilitation of the prophet, the seer. Get him, as Hatch says, back into your Church. The priests with their sacrifices and automatic rites, the logicians, have crowded him out. Why do we read the Old Testament at all? Not for the laws of the Levites, not for the battles and hangings, but for the inspiration of the prophets. The authority of the prophet comes through personality, the source of which is in what Myers calls the infinite spiritual world--in G.o.d. It was Christ"s own authority.
"And as for your other authority, your ordinary man, when he reads modern philosophy, says to himself, this does not conflict with science?
But he gets no hint, when he goes to most churches, that there is, between the two, no real quarrel, and he turns away in despair. He may accept the pragmatism of James, the idealism of Royce, or even what is called neo realism. In any case, he gains the conviction that a force for good is at worn in the world, and he has the incentive to become part of it..... But I have given you a sermon!"
"For which I can never be sufficiently, grateful," said Hodder, with an earnestness not to be mistaken.
The little man"s eyes rested admiringly, and not without emotion, on the salient features of the tall clergyman. And when he spoke again, it was in acknowledgment of the fact that he had read Hodder"s purpose.
"You will have opposition, my friend. They will fight you--some persons we know. They do not wish--what you and I desire. But you will not surrender--I knew it." Mr. Engel broke off abruptly, and rang a bell on his desk. "I will make out for you a list. I hope you may come in again, often. We shall have other talks,--yes? I am always here."
Then it came to pa.s.s that Hodder carried back with him another armful of books. Those he had brought back were the Levellers of the False. These were the Builders of the True.
II
Hodder had known for many years that the writings of Josiah Royce and of William James had "been in the air," so to speak, and he had heard them mentioned at dinner parties by his more intellectual parishioners, such as Mrs. Constable and Martha Preston. Now he was able to smile at his former att.i.tude toward these moderns, whose perusal he had deprecated as treason to the saints! And he remembered his horror on having listened to a fellow-clergyman discuss with calmness the plan of the "Varieties of Religious Experiences." A sacrilegious dissection of the lives of these very saints! The scientific process, the theories of modern psychology applied with sang-froid to the workings of G.o.d in the human soul! Science he had regarded as the proclaimed enemy of religion, and in these days of the apotheosis of science not even sacred things were spared.
Now Hodder saw what the little librarian had meant by an authority restored. The impartial method of modern science had become so firmly established in the mind of mankind by education and reading that the ancient unscientific science of the Roman Empire, in which orthodox Christianity was clothed, no longer carried authority. In so far as modern science had discovered truth, religion had no quarrel with it.
And if theology pretended to be the science of religion, surely it must submit to the test of the new science! The dogged clinging to the archaic speculations of apologists, saints, and schoolmen had brought religion to a low ebb indeed.
One of the most inspiring books he read was by an English clergyman of his own Church whom he had formerly looked upon as a heretic, with all that the word had once implied. It was a frank yet reverent study of the self-consciousness of Christ, submitting the life and teachings of Jesus to modern criticism and the scientific method. And the Saviour"s divinity, rather than being lessened, was augmented. Hodder found it infinitely refreshing that the so-called articles of Christian belief, instead of being put first and their acceptance insisted upon, were made the climax of the investigation.
Religion, he began to perceive, was an undertaking, are attempt to find unity and harmony of the soul by adopting, after mature thought, a definite principle in life. If harmony resulted,--if the principle worked, it was true. Hodder kept an open mind, but he became a pragmatist so far. Science, on the other hand, was in a sphere by herself, and need have no conflict with religion; science was not an undertaking, but an impartial investigation by close observation of facts in nature. Her object was to discover truths by these methods alone. She had her theories, indeed, but they must be submitted to rigorous tests. This from a book by Professor Perry, an advocate of the new realism.
On the other hand there were signs that modern science, by infinitesimal degrees, might be aiding in the solution of the Mystery....
But religion, Hodder saw, was trusting. Not credulous, silly trusting, but thoughtful trusting, accepting such facts as were definitely known.
Faith was trusting. And faith without works was dead simply because there could be no faith without works. There was no such thing as belief that did not result in act.
A paragraph which made a profound impression on Hodder at that time occurs in James"s essay, "Is life worth living?"
"Now-what do I mean by I trusting? Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible world, and to authorize and excommunicate those whose trust is different?... Our faculties of belief were not given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by. And to trust our religions demands men first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature that man can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma and definition."
Yet it was not these religious philosophies which had saved him, though the stimulus of their current had started his mind revolving like a motor. Their function, he perceived now, was precisely to compel him to see what had saved him, to reenforce it with the intellect, with the reason, and enable him to save others. The current set up,--by a thousand suggestions of which he made notes,--a personal construction, coordination, and he had the exhilaration of feeling, within him, a creative process all his own. Behold a mystery "a paradox"--one of many.
As his strength grew greater day by day, as his vision grew clearer, he must exclaim with Paul: "Yet not I, but the grace of G.o.d which was with me!"
He, Hodder, was but an instrument transmitting power. And yet--oh paradox!--the instrument continued to improve, to grow stronger, to develop individuality and personality day by day! Life, present and hereafter, was growth, development, the opportunity for service in a cause. To cease growing was to die.
He perceived at last the form all religion takes is that of consecration to a Cause,--one of G.o.d"s many causes. The meaning of life is to find one"s Cause, to lose one"s self in it. His was the liberation of the Word,--now vouchsafed to him; the freeing of the spark from under the ashes. The phrase was Alison"s. To help liberate the Church, fan into flame the fire which was to consume the injustice, the tyranny, the selfishness of the world, until the Garvins, the Kate Marcys, the stunted children, and anaemic women were no longer possible.
It was Royce who, in one illuminating sentence, solved for him the puzzle, pointed out whence his salvation had come. "For your cause can only be revealed to you through some presence that first teaches you to love the unity of the spiritual life... You must find it in human shape."
Horace Bentley!
He, Hodder, had known this, but known it vaguely, without sanction. The light had shone for him even in the darkness of that night in Dalton Street, when he thought to have lost it forever. And he had awakened the next morning, safe,--safe yet bewildered, like a half drowned man on warm sands in the sun.
"The will of the spiritual world, the divine will, revealed in man."
What sublime thoughts, as old as the Cross itself, yet continually and eternally new!