Towards the Great Peace - Ralph Adams Cram
"A consideration of a few facts such as the forgoing must readily
convince even the most unimaginative person that whatever power faith
might have had in the past, it counts for little today; that its
secrets, its very meaning have been forgotten. Otherwise there could not
be this extraordinary exaggeration of the place of money in spiritual
operation, and the unblushing, tacit admission that mammon, which Christ
so warned against, had been recognized as the master of spiritual
situation, instead of the willing servant and useful adjunct of faith it
was designed to be in the Christian vision. Indeed they all speak of
that, largely unconscious, atmosphere of distrust of God which is so
all-prevailing among Christian people today. If the great, positive vice
of the age is covetousness, the great negative one is distrust of God;
the two invariably go together as parts of a whole--one is the reverse
side of the other--for, it is not that we _must_ not, or _ought_ not,
but that we "_cannot_ serve God and mammon." And this atmosphere is one
in which faith cannot exist, it is stifled, crushed, killed, except it
breathe the pure, sweet air of God, with which it can alone surround
itself when human hearts will.
"It is not surprising that out of such conditions should grow false
values, and that spirituality should be measured by the world's
standard. Thus we have fallen into the vicious habit of adjudging
qualifications for spiritual leadership among the clergy by the amount
of their stipends, and measuring their potentialities for usefulness in
the Kingdom of God by the amount of their yearly incomes; among the
laity, the men of power are ever the men of material means, whom we
permit to play the part of Providence in feeding and sustaining the
Church from large purses, the filling of which will not always bear
close investigation, and the really successful parish is always the one
that, no matter what its spiritual condition, rejoices in abundant
material means. So evident is it that the means of spiritual life have
been so confused with the purely material, that it occasions no surprise
when a neighbourhood having changed from the residence district of the
comparatively well-to-do to the very poor, the vestry feels bound to
consider the moving of the church to a more 'desirable' quarter.
"These, of course, are hard facts to face, and it is not strange that we
should seek to evade them by a false optimism that thinks evil is
eliminated by merely contemplating good. The point is, _they must be
faced,_ and at a time when there is some evidence of a little awakening,
it must more and more force itself into the consciousness of the
thoughtful that the dead spiritual conditions of today are due to the
shifting of faith from God to material things as the means of achieving.
The only hope lies in the apparent unconsciousness of the error. This is
invariably the atmosphere that prevails when ecclesiastical history
repeats itself in corruption; it had been true of more than two or three
generations, though obviously unseen save by a few of those contemporary
with the times, that in Jerusalem, 'the heads thereof judge for reward,
and the priests teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for
money; yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say: Is not the Lord among
us? None evil can come upon us.' Corporate unconsciousness, in greater
or less measure, of these conditions, may influence the degree of guilt,
but never can acquit of the sin. And the cold, naked truth is that today
we stand almost helpless before a world of peculiar problems.
"What is there here to reflect the _power_ and _might_ of Christianity,
such as the early Church, especially, possessed, and subsequent
generations, in times of great faith, really knew so much of--the power
to heal the sick, to cast out devils, to achieve wonders out of Christ's
poverty, to experience the thrilling joy of religion in the ever-abiding
Divine Presence, and witness the marvels of faith in the conquering of
the world? How is it we are no longer able to communicate the secrets to
the suffering world which are able to transmute the people's want into
God's plenty, and attract and hold the hearts of men with the joys of
the Vision Splendid? Why is it that hope has given way to resignation,
that the preaching of forgiveness has been dwarfed by the insistence
upon penalty, that distinct evils in the physical sphere are attributed
to God and, because of that, held up to religious estimation as good;
the day of miracles is regarded as belonging to a far distant past, the
answering of prayer looked upon as the exception instead of the rule,
and the old melody of joy in religion exchanged for the wail of despair
in an interpretation of 'Thy will be done' that is only associated with
human calamity? The reply is as simple as, to the thoughtful person, it
is obvious: we have lost knowledge of a living, vital, conquering faith
that is rooted in God Himself, and have satisfied the hunger of human
sense by placing trust in the things of the earth which we see and
touch, and in so doing lost the power spiritually to achieve.
"Now we can only approach, in the hope of a day of better things, the
great practical and intellectual problems of our times from the
standpoint of faith's recovery, for it is only in their relationship to
faith they can be viewed intelligently by the Christian. And it will be
found that at the root of all our difficulties and all our
negligences--so many of them unconscious--and as the cause of our vain
expediencies and attempts to justify the corporate spiritual situation,
is the absence of vital faith and a _whole_ obedience to which God alone
has conditioned results. We need sorely to reconsider what faith really
is, and when we have recovered in some measure that knowledge of it in
experience, which declared its unspeakable worth in the early Church and
in later periods of ecclesiastical history which stand out before all
others, we shall look back upon our past distrust of God and His
promises with shame and wonderment, and proceed to revise our
cataloguing of spiritual values and degrees of sin. For the really
destructive thing, _before all others,_ is a weakened faith that
compromises in a half obedience to Christ and a search for earthly
props. The work of Satan has even been the prompting of distrust of God
in the human family, just as the work of redemption means so largely the
re-establishing of it in the Person of Jesus Christ. From the first
temptation of man to the present moment, all the forces of evil have
concentrated upon breaking man's trust in God and His promises; every
sin has had that as its ultimate end, and every disaster, ill and trial,
in the world and individual life, is subtly presented by the enemy of
God and man (knowing our haziness of vision), so as to place the
appearances against the Creator in a blind disregard for the created;
just as in the life of the Incarnate Son all the great power of the
forces of darkness were brought to bear unsuccessfully upon the snapping
of His faith in His Father--from the time He was tempted to believe
Himself forgotten, when hungering and physically reduced in the
wilderness after His long fast, until the dreadful cry of dereliction
from the Cross at the very end.
"The call for reformation today, then, is to the doing of things left
undone, the search for and recovery of almost lost spiritual powers that
alone lastingly can achieve for God and hasten man's salvation. And this
requires the venture and daring that breaks from the world, withdraws
from compromise, and that, rightly estimating the character and attitude
of God, refuses longer to believe Him the author of evils we resignedly
accept today by calling them good; and instead, claims the powers of the
Divine promises for the utter destruction of the world's ills by a
strict dependence upon spiritual forces and weapons for the
accomplishment of results. Above all, this means a change and reform in
corporate conduct as the end of repentance, for the present almost total
disregard of the laws and principles of Christian living as given in the
Sermon on the Mount."
These are hard sayings and strong doctrine, but will any one say they
are not true? The weakening of religion, with the consequent decline of
civilization, is ultimately to be traced back to _organized_ religion,
not to religion itself, and still less to any inherent defects in
Christianity. Where organized religion has failed it deserved to fail,
because it countenanced disunion, forsook the saving sacraments, and
finally compromised with worldliness and materialism. With each one of
these false ventures faith began to weaken amongst the mass of people
until at last this, which can always save, and alone can save, ceased to
have either the power or the will to force the organism to conform to
the spirit. If we have indeed accomplished the depth of our fall, then
the time is at hand when we may hope and pray for a new outpouring of
divine grace that will bring recovery.
There are wide evidences that men earnestly desire this. I have already
spoken of the great corporate movements towards unity, and these mean
much even though they may at present take on something of the quality of
mechanism instead of depending on the individual and the grace of God
working in him. The "World Conference on Faith and Order," the just
effected federation of the Presbyterians, Methodists and
Congregationalists in Canada, above all the eirenic manifesto of the
Bishops at the last Lambeth Conference, all indicate a new spirit
working potently in the souls of men. Concrete results are not as yet
conspicuous, but the spirit is there and a beginning has been made. Even
more significant is the wide testimony to the need for definite,
concrete and pervasive religion that is daily given by men whose names
have hitherto been quite dissociated from matters of this kind;
scientists, educators, men of business and men of public life. It may be
testimony in favour of some new invention, some synthetic product of
curious and abnormal ingredients; as a matter of fact it frequently is,
and we confront such remarkable products as Mr. Wells has given us, for
example. The significant thing, however, is the fact of the desire and
the avowal; if we have this I think we may leave it to God to see that
the desire is satisfied in the end by heavenly food and not by the
nostrums of ingenuity. For the same reason we may look without dismay on
certain novel phenomena of the moment. In their divergence from "the
Faith once delivered to the Saints" and left in the keeping of the
Church Christ founded as a living and eternal organism through which His
Spirit would work forever, they are wrong and therefore they cannot
endure, but each testifies to the passionate desire in man for religion
as a reality, and no one of them comes into existence except as the
result of desperate action by men to recover something that had been
taken from them and that their souls needed, and would have at any cost.
Each one of these strange manifestations is a reaction from some old
error that had become established belief or custom. No one who holds to
historic Christianity is interested in them, but those who have found
religion intellectualized beyond endurance and transformed either by
materialism or rationalism, seek for the mysticism they know to be a
reality (to employ a paradox) in the ultra mysticism of Oriental cults;
those who revolt against the exaggeration of evil and its exaltation to
eminence that rivals that of God Himself, which is the legacy of one
powerful movement in the Reformation, rush to the other extreme and deny
the existence of evil and even the reality of matter, while spiritism,
the most insidious, perilous and fatal of all the spiritual temptations
that beset the world at this time, gains as its adherents those who have
been deprived of the Catholic belief in the Communion of Saints and have
been forbidden to pray for the dead or to ask for their prayers and
intercessions.
However strange and erroneous the actual manifestation, there is no
question as to the reality and prevalence of the desire for the recovery
of spiritual power through the channels of religion. It shows itself, as
it should, first of all in the individual, and it is only recently that
organized religion, Catholic or Protestant, has begun to show a
sympathetic consciousness and to take the first hesitant steps towards
meeting the demand. Because of this the seekers for reality have been
left unshepherded and have wandered off into strange wildernesses. The
call is now to the churches, to organized religion, and if the call is
heeded our troubles are well on the road to an end. If the old way of
jealousy, hatred and fear is maintained, then humanly speaking, our case
is hopeless. If the older way of brotherhood, charity and
loving-kindness is followed the future is secure in the Great Peace.
Nothing is wrong that leads men to Christ, and this is true from the
Salvation Army at one end of the scale to the Seven Sacraments of
Catholicity at the other. The world demands now not denial but
affirmation, not protest and division but the ringing "Credo" of
Catholic unity.
VIII
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of
Hosts.
We have tried to approach each subject in this course of lectures in the
spirit of peace, and the greatest contributory factor in the achieving
of the Great Peace is the individual himself, on whom, humanly speaking,
rests the final responsibility. "Not by might, nor by power, but by My
Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts." Not by majestical engines and curious
devices and mass-action, nor yet by an imposed human authority enforced
by arms and the law, but by the Holy Spirit of God working through the
individual soul and compelling the individual will. Peace is one of the
promised fruits of the Holy Spirit, and like the others is manifested
through human lives; therefore on us rests the preeminent responsibility
of showing forth in ourselves, first of all, those things we desire for
others and for society.
We have experienced the Great War, we endure its aftermath, and amidst
the perils and dangers that follow both there is none greater than that
which attaches to exterior war, viz., that the attention of both
combatants is focussed on the faults and the weaknesses and the crimes
of the opponent, with the result that both become destructive critics
rather than constructive examples. Chesterton rightly says, "What is
wrong with the critic is that he does not criticise himself * * * rather
he identifies himself with the ideal." Seeing evil in others and
flattering one's self is the antithesis of the spirit that would lead to
the Great Peace, for in that spirit the field of warfare is transferred
from the external to the internal, and the interior contest, which alone
establishes lasting results, necessitates a recognition of our own error
and the need of amendment of our own life.
If our modern devices have failed; if the things we invented with a high
heart and high hope, in government, industry, society, education,
philosophy have in the end brought disappointment, disillusionment, even
despair, it is less because of their inherent defects than because the
individual failed, and himself ceased to act as the sufficient channel
for the divine power which alone energizes our weak little engines and
which acts through the individual alone. There is no better
demonstration of this essential part played by the personal life of man
than the fact that God, for the redemption of the world, took on human
form and became one Man amongst many men. There is no better
demonstration of the fact that it is through the personal lives of
individuals that the Great Peace is to be achieved, both directly and
indirectly, than the fact that peace, the gift of the Holy Spirit, was
promised to the individual man, by Christ Himself, as the legacy he left
to his disciples after His Resurrection and Ascension. Since then the
world has been under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, the "Guide and
Comforter" that was promised, even though it has blindly and from time
to time rejected the guidance and therefore known not the comfort. The
Old Law of "Thou shalt not" was followed by the New Law of "Thou shalt,"
and this in turn by the law of the third Person of the Trinity which
does not supersede the dispensations of the Father and of the Son, but
fulfills them in that it affords the spiritual power, if we will, to
abide by the inhibitions and to carry out the commands.
Our search is for peace, the Great Peace, "the Peace of God which
passeth all understanding," and we shall achieve this for ourselves and
for the world only through ourselves as individuals, and so for the
society of which we are a part, and in so far as we bring ourselves into
contact with the Spirit of God. There is deep significance in the fact
that the first time Christ used the salutation "Peace be unto you," was
after His resurrection. It would seem that this special gift of the Holy
Spirit had to be withheld from man until after the human life of God the
Son had been brought to an end in accomplishment, for He says "Peace I
leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth give I
unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." "It
is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter
will not come unto you: but if I depart I will send Him unto you. When
He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth." "Ye
shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you."
It is the spirit that quickeneth. After God had revealed the Law and
given to us the great redeeming and atoning Life, He saw that we had
need of a further manifestation before we should be able to keep the law
and live the life. Therefore the Holy Spirit was sent to quicken us and
give us power to do what we had both heard and seen. Today we accept the
moral law, we recognize the perfection of Chirst's life, but we need to
be reminded again that the power to be "sons of God" is present with us
if we will but use it. As this power is a spirit it can only be
apprehended spiritually; when our minds and hearts are set on material
things, even on good material things, the "still small voice" of the
spirit remains unheard: but if we listen first to that inward voice and
then use the means of grace afforded us, we are enabled to lift up our
hearts and minds to the Creator and then to use in His service all the
material universe which is also His creation. We can not get a right
philosophy by working for right philosophy, but only by living in the
right relationship as individuals: then as a by-product of religion a
right philosophy will come. We can not get a right industrial system by
searching for a right industrial system, but if we show forth in our
lives the Christian virtues, a right industrial system will come as one
of the by-products of religion. So with each one of our so-called
"problems." Life rightly lived has no problems. This is a hard saying
for an intellectual age whose temptation is to trust in its own power
rather than in the power of God, but "except ye become as little
children" and walk by faith and not by sight the Kingdom of God is
withheld. A soldier who suffered in the late war, and out of his
suffering found peace, says, "Christ's hardest work is to teach the
wise: Those who are entrusted with authority and responsibility will be
the least prepared to make the venture of the Spirit, however much they
may believe in it. They are sacrificing least now: they will have to
sacrifice most when the Spirit comes. They have so much to unlearn:
children and working men have so little. The whole of our world today is
rooted and grounded in intellect. Our machinery, our institutions, our
great systems, the entire body of enterprise is governed by brains. It
is this that will alter. Just behind intellect there is a vision that is
purer, keener, more powerful than the vision of your eyes, than the
hearing of your ears, than the touch of your hands. This world is being
transformed into another which comes into being at our spiritual touch.
The world needs something personal, something from the heart. It is sick
to death with the cold machinery of the intellect. But before men see
this they must change their view of life, they must _be born again._ The
scientists, the historians and theologians, the philosophers, have made
the universe too big. It is not a big place: it is very tiny. Life is so
simple, really. Our wise men have made it so difficult, so ugly. It is
only children who can see the risen Christ; children, perhaps, out of
whom seven devils have been cast. The world needs not critics, but
teachers, and children are waiting everywhere to teach, but men,
shutting the windows of their souls, try rather to mould these little
ones to fit into the vacant spaces of their own stupid world. Are not
children the true artists? They won't tolerate anything but Beauty. They
see Beauty everywhere, not because it is there, but because they want it
there. Everything they touch turns into something far more precious than
gold: every word they utter is a song of praise. You are almost in
heaven every time you look into the eyes of a child." Remember, please,
these are the words of a man who has faced the horrible realities of
modern warfare, and so do not dismiss them as mere poetry, or with
Nicodemus' question, "How can a man be born again?", but listen to a
modern interpretation of the answer to that question:--("The Life
Indeed.") "We must be born again even to see the spiritual kingdom, must
be born of water and the spirit to enter its gates at all. So to his
little audience of disciples Our Lord says it is not an affair of
legislation, of discovery, of which men say, 'Lo here, lo there! but the
kingdom of heaven is _within you._ Why a second birth? This is a second
birth because it must needs supervene at a point where two elements can
work together, the element of an appealing, vitalizing spirit from the
unseen and the element of free human choice. Being of the spirit, it is
the birth into freedom: it is the soul emerging from its prison into the
open air of liberty and light and life." Note the element of free
choice. Our first birth is outside our choice and the gifts are
unconditioned; our second birth, when again we become as little
children, demands our response to the Holy Spirit and our persevering
cooperation with Him to make His influence effectual for ourselves and
for the "communion of saints" and the corporate religion into which the
Spirit also baptizes us. In a recent sermon a bishop of the Episcopal
Church says, "This is the creed of the Church--the Divine Father and
Forgiveness: the Divine Son and Redemption: the Divine Spirit and
Abundant Life. Therefore the Church still insists upon the creation of
moral rectitude and spiritual character as the end and purpose of
religion, aye, as the basic problem underlying all questions relating to
human life--social, industrial, civic, and political. The Church still
preaches the gospel of the Grace of God, the obligation and blessing of
worship, the meaning and virtue of the Christian Sacraments." Also "My
brethren, we shall not be content to criticize and find fault with our
own age and time, but rather we shall pray for the power to see within
its questionings, unrest and discontent--aye, its recklessness and
apparent failures--the strivings of the Spirit of God. But each man has
to voice for himself the conviction of the reality of the spiritual
order and the spiritual life. Therefore, let us believe in and practice
the worship of God, 'praying always' as St. Paul says, 'with all prayer
and supplication in the Spirit,' or as St. Jude says, 'building up
yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit.'"
Let us accept this suggestion and try to find in the unrest of our own
time evidences of "the strivings of the Spirit of God," waiting our
perception and response. The soldier of the Great War, having faced
death and imprisonment and suffering in many forms says, "compared with
the depth of good in the world the evil is shallow." The first evidence
of good in our own day is the almost universal discontent with evils and
the desire to find a better way. The humility which recognizes that so
widespread a condition cannot be the fault of any one nation or group
but is rather the responsibility of each one of us, is cause for hope.
Some of us believe that war can breed only war, hatred only hatred; that
governments cannot make peace, but can only cause cessation of open
hostilities, and that the real peace, the Great Peace, must await the
action of the Spirit. This Spirit, of love and forgiveness, breeds love
and forgiveness, indeed is far more potent than the spirit of hate.
Because of this very strength and potency its evidences are not so
immediately apparent, but they are deeper-rooted. Perhaps in this
material sphere we human beings must see, and to a certain extent
experience, hate, before we can really know love, and consciously and
freely choose it. When that choice is made, when we, knowing all that
hate and evil and malice can accomplish, yet deliberately choose to love
our enemies, we have slain the Adversary and made hate and evil
powerless. Of course we have not power of ourselves to do this but only
through the grace of God. When we try God's way, not waiting for the
other person to reform or to be generous or to speak gently or to
forgive, then and only then do we deserve the name of Christians; then
and only then are we walking in love; then and only then are we really
praying effectually "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it
is in Heaven." We have tried the way of the world, the way of reprisals,
the way of distrust, and, thank God, we are none of us satisfied with
the results. Perhaps now we may be ready to try the way of God by making
the great adventure of faith, each one in his own person; faith in
himself and faith in the future. The way of the world has bred fear that
has issue in hate, and hate that has issue in fear; but the better way,
that of faith, breeds trust that has issue in fellowship, and fellowship
that has issue in trust. There is no problem of labour, of politics, of
society that is insoluble if once it is approached in the spirit of
faith and fellowship and trust, but none of these is susceptible of
solution where the controlling motives are hate, distrust and fear. The
modern policy of centralization and segregation has resulted in dealing
with men as groups and not as individuals. When, for example, iron-bound
cults (they are no less than this) meet as "capital" and as "labour,"
both merge the individuality of their members in a thing which has no
real or necessary existence but is an artificial creation of thought
operating under the dominion of ephemeral, almost accidental conditions.
As a member of an "interest" or a cult, where humanity and personality
are, so to speak, "in commission," a man does not hesitate to do those
things he would never think of doing for himself, knowing them to be
selfish, cruel, unjust and uncharitable. A case in point--if we need
one, which is hardly probable since they are of daily occurrence--is the
pending contest between the mine operators and mine workers in Great
Britain, where both parties, with Government thrown in, are guilty of
maintaining theories and perpetrating acts for which an individual would
be, even now, excoriated and outlawed. The Irish imbroglio is another
instance of the same kind.