Project Gutenberg's Spiritual Energies In Daily Life, by Rufus M. Jones This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Spiritual Energies In Daily Life Author: Rufus M. Jones Release Date: December 22, 2019 [EBook #61004] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE *** Produced by WebRover, QuakerHeron, Monicas wicked stepmother and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE BY RUFUS M. JONES, Litt.D., D.D. Professor of Philosophy in Haverford College Author of Studies in Mystical Religion; The Inner Life; The World Within, etc. [i] [ii] [iii] New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved Copyright, 1922, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1922 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE I wish to thank the editor of The Atlantic Monthly for his permission to print in this volume the chapter entitled “The Mystic’s Experience of God,” also the editors of The Journal of Religion for their permission to use the article on “Psychology and the Spiritual Life.” Some of the shorter essays have been printed in The (London) Friend and in The Homiletic Review. Kind permission has been granted for their reproduction. INTRODUCTION RELIGION AS ENERGY Religion is an experience which no definition exhausts. One writer with expert knowledge of anthropology tells us what it is, and we know as we read his account that, however true it may be as far as it goes, it yet leaves untouched much undiscovered territory. We turn next to the trained psychologist, who leads us “down the labyrinthine ways of our own mind” and tells us why the human race has always been seeking God and worshiping Him. We are thankful for his Ariadne thread which guides us within the maze, but we feel convinced that there are doors which he has not opened —“doors to which he had no key.” The theologian, with great assurance and without “ifs and buts,” offers us the answer to all mysteries and the solution of all problems, but when we have gone “up the hill all the way to the very top” with him, we find it a “homesick peak”—Heimwehfluh—and we still wonder over the real meaning of religion. We are evidently dealing here with something like that drinking horn which the Norse God Thor tried to drain. He failed to do it because the horn which he assayed to empty debouched into the endless ocean, and therefore to drain the horn meant drinking the ocean dry. To probe religion down to the bottom means knowing “what God and man is.” Each one of us, in his own tongue and in terms of his own field of knowledge, gives his partial word, his tiny glimpse of insight. But the returns are never all in. There is always more to say. “Man is incurably religious,” that fine scholar, Auguste Sabatier, said. Yes, he is. It is often wild and erratic religion which we find, no doubt, but the hunger and thirst of the human soul are an indubitable fact. In different forms of speech we can all say with St. Augustine of Hippo: “Thou hast touched me and I am on fire for thy peace.” In saying that religion is energy I am only seizing one aspect of this great experience of the human heart. It is, however, I believe, an essential aspect. A religion that makes no difference to a person’s life, a religion that does nothing, a religion that is utterly devoid of power, may for all practical purposes be treated as though it did not exist. The great experts—those who know from the inside what religion is—always make much of its dynamic power, its energizing and propulsive power. Power is a word often on the lips of Jesus; never used, it should be said, in the sense of extrinsic authority or the right to command and govern, but always in reference to an intrinsic and interior moral and spiritual energy of life. The kingdom of God comes with power, not because the Messiah is supplied with ten legions of angels and can sweep the Roman eagles back to the frontiers of the Holy Land, but it “comes with power” because it is a divine and life-transforming energy, working in the moral and spiritual nature of man, as the expanding yeast works in the flour or as the forces of life push the seed into germination and on into the successive stages toward the maturity of the full-grown plant and grain. The little fellowship of followers and witnesses who formed the nucleus of the new-born Church felt themselves “endued with power” on the day of Pentecost. Something new and dynamic entered the consciousness of the feeble band and left them no longer feeble. There was an in-rushing, up-welling sense of invasion. They passed over from a visible Leader and Master to an invisible and inward Presence revealed to them as an unwonted energy. Ecstatic utterance, which seems to have followed, is not the all-important thing. The important thing is heightened moral quality, intensified fellowship, a fused and undying loyalty, an irresistible boldness in the face of danger and opposition, a fortification of spirit which nothing could break. This energy which came with their experience is what marks the event as an epoch. [iv] [v] [vi] [vii] [viii] [ix] [x] St. Paul writes as though he were an expert in dynamics. “Dynamos,” the Greek word for power, is one of his favorite words. He seems to have found out how to draw upon energies in the universe which nobody else had suspected were even there. It is a fundamental feature of his “Aegean gospel” that God is not self-contained but self- giving, that He circulates, as does the sun, as does the sea, and comes into us as an energy. This incoming energy he calls by many names: “The Spirit,” “holy Spirit,” “Christ,” “the Spirit of Christ,” “Christ in you,” “God that worketh in us.” Whatever his word or term is, he is always declaring, and he bases his testimony on experience, that God, as Christ reveals Him, is an active energy working with us and in us for the complete transformation of our fundamental nature and for a new creation in us. All this perhaps sounds too grand and lofty, too remote and far away, to touch us with reality. We assume that it is for saints or apostles, but not for common everyday people like ourselves. Well, that is where we are wrong. The accounts which St. Paul gives of the energies of religion are not for his own sake, or for persons who are bien né and naturally saintly. They are for the rank and file of humans. In fact his Corinthian fellowship was raised by these energies out of the lowest stratum of society. The words which he uses to describe them are probably not over strong: “Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name [i.e. the power] of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”[1] It is to be noticed, further, that St. Paul does not confine his list of energies to those mighty spiritual forces which come down from above and work upon us from the outside. Much more often our attention is directed to energies which are potential within ourselves—even in the most ordinary of us—energies which work as silently as molecular forces or as “the capillary oozing of water,” but which nevertheless are as reconstructive as the forces of springtime, following the winter’s havoc. If the grace of God—the unlimited sacrificing love of God revealed in Christ—is for St. Paul the supreme spiritual energy of the universe, hardly less important is the simple human energy which meets that centrifugal energy and makes it operate within the sphere of the moral will. That dynamic energy, by which the man responds to God’s upward pull and which makes all the difference, St. Paul calls faith. We are so accustomed to the use of the word in a spurious sense that we are slow to apprehend the immense significance of this human energy which lies potentially within us. Unfortunately trained young folks and scientifically minded people are apt to shy away from the word and put themselves on the defensive, as though they were about to be asked to believe the impossible or the dubious or the unprovable. Faith in the sense in which St. Paul uses it does not mean believing something. It is a moral attitude and response of will to the character of God as He has been revealed in Christ. It is like the act which closes the electric circuit, which act at once releases power. The dynamic effect which follows the act is the best possible verification of the rationality of the act. So, too, faith as a moral response is no blind leap, no wild venture; it is an act which can be tested and verified by moral and spiritual effects, which are as real as the heat, light, and horse power of the dynamo. Faith has come to be recognized as an energy in many spheres of life. We know what a stabilizer it is in the sphere of finance. Stocks and bonds and banks shift their values as faith in them rises or falls. Morale is only another name for faith. Our human relationships, our social structures, our enjoyment of one another, our satisfaction in books and in lectures rest upon faith and when that energy fails, collapses of the most serious sort follow. We might as well try to build a world without cohesion as to maintain society without the energy of faith. We have many illustrations of the important part which faith plays in the sphere of physical health. The corpuscles of the blood and the molecules of the body are altered by it. The tension of the arteries and the efficiency of the digestive tract are affected by it. Nerves are in close sympathetic rapport with faith. It is never safe to tell a strong man that he is pale and that he looks ill. If two or three persons in succession give him a pessimistic account of his appearance, he will soon begin to have the condition which has been imagined. Dr. William McDougall gives the case of a boy who was being chased by a furious animal and under the impulse of the emergency he leaped a fence which he could never afterwards jump, even after long athletic training. The list of similar instances is a very long one. Every reader knows a case as impressive as the one I have given. The varieties of “shell-shock” have furnished volumes of illustrations of the energy of faith, its dynamic influence upon health and life and efficiency. Faith in the sphere of religion works the greatest miracles of life that are ever worked. It makes the saint out of Magdalene, the heroic missionary and martyr out of Paul, the spiritual statesman of the ages out of Carthaginian Augustine, the illuminated leader of men out of Francis of Assisi, the maker of a new world epoch out of the nervously unstable monk Luther, the creator of a new type of spiritual society out of the untaught Leicestershire weaver, George Fox. Why do we not all experience the miracle and find the rest of ourselves through faith? The main trouble is that we live victims of limiting inhibitions. We hold intellectual theories which keep back or check the outflow of the energy of faith. We have a nice system of thought which accounts for everything and explains everything and which leaves no place for faith. We know too much. We say to ourselves that only the ignorant and uncultured are led by faith. And this same wise man, who is too proud to have faith, holds all his inhibitory theories on a basis of faith! Every one of them starts out on faith, gathers standing ground by faith, and becomes a controlling force through faith! There are many other spiritual energies, some of which will be dealt with specifically or implicitly in the later chapters of this book. Not often in the history of the modern world certainly have spiritual energies seemed more urgently needed than to-day. Our troubles consist largely now of failure to lay hold of moral and spiritual forces that lie near at hand and to utilize powers that are within our easy reach. Our stock of faith and hope and love has run low and we realize only [xi] [xii] [xiii] [xiv] [xv] feebly what mighty energies they can be. I hope that these short essays may help in some slight way to indicate that the ancient realities by which men live still abide, and that the invisible energies of the spirit are real, as they have always been real. We have had an impressive demonstration that a civilization built on external force and measured in terms of economic achievements cannot stand its ground and is unable to speak to the condition of persons endowed and equipped as we are. We are bound to build a higher civilization, to create a greater culture, and to form a truer kingdom of life or we must write “Mene” on all human undertakings. That is our task now, and it is a serious one for which we shall need all the energies that the universe puts at our disposal. I am told that when the great Hellgate bridge was being built over the East River in New York the engineers came upon an old derelict ship, lying embedded in the river mud, just where one of the central piers of the bridge was to go down through to its bedrock foundation. No tug boat could be found that was able to start the derelict from its ancient bed in the ooze. It would not move, no matter what force was applied. Finally, with a sudden inspiration one of the workers hit upon this scheme. He took a large flat-boat, which had been used to bring stone down the river, and he chained it to the old sunken ship when the tide was low. Then he waited for the great tidal energies to do their work. Slowly the rising tide, with all the forces of the ocean behind it and the moon above it, came up under the flat-boat, raising it inch by inch. And as it came up, lifted by irresistible power, the derelict came up with it, until it was entirely out of the mud that had held it. Then the boat, with its subterranean load, was towed out to sea where the old waterlogged ship was unchained and allowed to drop forever out of sight and reach. There are greater forces than those tidal energies waiting for us to use for our tasks. They have always been there. They are there now. But they do not work, they do not operate, until we lay hold of them and use them for our present purposes. We must be co-workers with God. Haverford, Pennsylvania. Mid Winter, 1922. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction: Religion as Energy vii CHAPTER I THE CENTRAL PEACE I. Peace That Passes Understanding 1 II. The Search for a Refuge 5 III. What We Want Most 10 CHAPTER II THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK I. Trying the Better Way 15 II. He Came to Himself 23 III. Some New Reasons for “Loving Enemies” 29 CHAPTER III THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US I. Where the Beyond Breaks Through 35 II. Conquering by an Inner Force 41 III. Living in the Presence of the Eternal 46 CHAPTER IV THE WAY OF VISION I. Days of Greater Visibility 50 II. The Prophet and His Tragedies 54 III. A Long Distance Call 60 CHAPTER V THE WAY OF PERSONALITY I. Another Kind of Hero 65 II. The Better Possession 69 III. The Greatest Rivalries of Life 74 CHAPTER VI AGENCIES OF CONSTRUCTION I. The Church of the Living God 79 [xvi] [xvii] [xviii] [xix] [xx] II. The Nursery of Spiritual Life 83 III. The Democracy We Aim At 86 IV. The Essential Truth of Christianity 91 CHAPTER VII THE NEAR AND THE FAR I. Things Present and Things to Come 98 II. Two Types of Ministry 102 III. We Have Seen His Star 106 CHAPTER VIII THE LIGHT-FRINGED MYSTERY I. The Religious Significance of Death 111 II. The New Born out of the Old 127 CHAPTER IX THE MYSTIC’S EXPERIENCE OF GOD 133 CHAPTER X PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 160 SPIRITUAL ENERGIES IN DAILY LIFE CHAPTER I THE CENTRAL PEACE I PEACE THAT PASSES UNDERSTANDING We are all familiar with the coming of a peace into our life at the terminus of some great strain or after we have weathered a staggering crisis. When a long-continued pain which has racked our nerves passes away and leaves us free, we suddenly come into a zone of peace. When we have been watching by a bedside where a life, unspeakably precious to us, has lain in the grip of some terrible disease and at length successfully passes the crisis, we walk out into the fields under the altered sky and feel a peace settle down upon us, which makes the whole world look different. Or, again, we have been facing some threatening catastrophe which seemed likely to break in on our life and perhaps end forever the calm and even tenor of it, and just when the hour of danger seemed darkest and our fear was at its height, some sudden turn of things has brought a happy shift of events, the danger has passed, and a great peace has come over us instead of the threatened trouble. In all these cases the peace which succeeds pain and strain and anxiety is a thoroughly natural, reasonable peace, a peace which comes in normal sequence and is quite accessible to the understanding. We should be surprised and should need an explanation if we heard of an instance of a passing pain or a yielding strain that was not followed by a corresponding sense of peace. One who has seen a child that was lost in a crowded city suddenly find his mother and find safety in her dear arms has seen a good case of this sequential peace, this peace which the understanding can grasp and comprehend. We behold it and say, “How otherwise!” There is, St. Paul reminds us, another kind of peace of quite a different order. It baffles the understanding and transcends its categories. It is a peace which comes, not after the pain is relieved, not after the crisis has passed, not after the danger has disappeared; but in the midst of the pain, while the crisis is still on, and even in the imminent presence of the danger. It is a peace that is not banished or destroyed by the frustrations which beset our lives; rather it is in and through the frustrations that we first come upon it and enter into it, as, to use St. Paul’s phrase, into a garrison which guards our hearts and minds. Each tested soul has to meet its own peculiar frustrations. All of us who work for “causes” or who take up any great piece of moral or spiritual service in the world know more about defeats and disappointments than we do about success and triumphs. We have to learn to be patient and long-suffering. We must become accustomed to postponements and delays, and sometimes we see the work of almost a lifetime suddenly fail of its end. Some turn of events upsets all our noble plans and frustrates the result, just when it appeared ready to arrive. Death falls like lightning on a home that had always before seemed sheltered and protected, and instantly life is profoundly altered for those who are left behind. Nothing can make up for the loss. There is no substitute for what is gone. The accounts will not balance; frustration in another form confronts us. Or it may be a breakdown of physical or mental powers, or peradventure both together, just when the emergencies of the world called for added energy and increased range of power from us. The need is plain, the harvest is ripe, but the worker’s hand fails and he must contract when he would most expand. Frustration looks him straight in the face. Well, to achieve a peace under those circumstances is to have a peace which does not follow a normal sequence. It is not what the world expects. It does not accord with the ways of thought and reasoning. It passes [1] [2] [3] [4] all understanding. It brings another kind of world into operation and reveals a play of invisible forces upon which the understanding had not reckoned. In fact, this strange intellect-transcending peace, in the very midst of storm and strain and trial, is one of the surest evidences there is of God. One may in his own humble nerve-power succeed in acquiring a stoic resignation so that he can say, “In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.” He may, by sheer force of will, keep down the lid upon his emotions and go on so nearly unmoved that his fellows can hear no groan and will wonder at the way he stands the universe. But peace in the soul is another matter. To have the whole heart and mind garrisoned with peace even in Nero’s dungeon, when the imperial death sentence brings frustration to all plans and a terminus to all spiritual work, calls for some world-transcending assistance to the human spirit. Such peace is explained only when we discover that it is “the peace of God,” and that it came because the soul broke through the ebbings and flowings of time and space and allied itself with the Eternal. II THE SEARCH FOR A REFUGE Few things are more impressive than the persistent search which men have made in all ages for a refuge against the dangers and the ills that beset life. The cave-men, the cliff-dwellers, the primitive builders of shelters in inaccessible tree tops, are early examples of the search for human defenses against fear. Civilization slowly perfected methods of refuge and defense of elaborate types, which, in turn, had to compete with ever-increasing ingenuity of attack and assault. But I am not concerned here with these material strongholds of refuge and defense. I am thinking rather of the human search for shelter against other weapons than those which kill the body. We are all trying, in one way or another, to discover how to escape from “the heavy and weary weight of all this unintelligible world,” how to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We are sensitively constructed, with nerves exposed to easy attack. We are all shelterless at some point to the storms of the world. Even the most perfectly equipped and impervious heroes prove to be vulnerable at some one uncovered spot. Sooner or later our protections fail, and the pitiless enemies of our happiness get through the defenses and reach the quick and sensitive soul within us. How to rebuild our refuge, how to find real shelter, is our problem. What fortress is there in which the soul is safe from fear and trouble? The most common expedient is one which will drug the sensitive nerves and produce an easy relief from strain and worry. There is a magic in alcohol and kindred distillations, which, like Aladdin’s genie, builds a palace of joy and, for the moment, banishes the enemy of all peace. The refuge seems complete. All fear is gone, worry is a thing of the past. The jargon of life is over, the pitiless problem of good and evil drops out of consciousness. The shelterless soul seems covered and housed. Intoxication is only one of the many quick expedients. It is always possible to retreat from the edge of strenuous battle into some one of the many natural instincts as a way of refuge. The great instinctive emotions are absorbing, and tend to obliterate everything else. They occupy the entire stage of the inner drama, and push all other actors away from the footlights of consciousness, so that here, too, the enemies of peace and joy seem vanquished, and the refuge appears to be found. That multitudes accept these easy ways of defense against the ills of life is only too obvious. The medieval barons who could build themselves castles of safety were few in number. Visible refuges in any case are rare and scarce, but the escape from the burdens and defeats of the world in drink and drug and thrilling instinctive emotion is, without much difficulty, open to every man and within easy reach for rich and poor alike, and many there be that seize upon this method. The trouble with it is that it is a very temporary refuge. It works, if at all, only for a brief span. It plays havoc in the future with those who resort to it. It rolls up new liabilities to the ills one would escape. It involves far too great a price for the tiny respite gained. And, most of all, it discounts or fails to reckon with the inherent greatness of the human soul. We are fashioned for stupendous issues. Our very sense of failure and defeat comes from a touch of the infinite in our being. We look before and after, and sigh for that which is not, just because we can not be contented with finite fragments of time and space. We are meant for greater things than these trivial ones which so often get our attention and absorb us; but the moment the soul comes to itself, its reach goes beyond the grasp, and it feels an indescribable discontent and longing for that for which it was made. To seek refuge, therefore, in some narcotic joy, to still the onward yearning of the soul by drowning consciousness, to banish the pain of pursuit by a barbaric surge of emotions, is to strike against the noblest trait of our spiritual structure; it means committing suicide of the soul. It cannot be a real man’s way of relief. In fact, nothing short of finding the goal and object for which the soul, the spiritual nature in us, is fitted will ever do for beings like us. St. Augustine, in words of immortal beauty, has said that God has made us for himself, and our hearts are restless until we rest in him. It is not a theory of poet or theologian. It is a simple fact of life, as veritable as the human necessity for food. There is no other shelter for the soul, no other refuge or fortress will ever do for us but God. “We tremble and we burn. We tremble, knowing that we are unlike him. We burn, feeling that we are like him.” In hours of loss and sorrow, when the spurious props fail us, we are more apt to find our way back to the real refuge. We are suddenly made aware of our shelterless condition, alone, and in our own strength. Our stoic armor and our brave defenses of pride become utterly inadequate. We are thrown back on reality. We have then our moments of [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] sincerity and insight. We feel that we cannot live without resources from beyond our own domain. We must have God. It is then, when one knows that nothing else whatever will do, that the great discovery is made. Again and again the psalms announce this. When the world has caved in; when the last extremity has been reached; when the billows and water-spouts of fortune have done their worst, you hear the calm, heroic voice of the lonely man saying: “God is our refuge and fortress, therefore will not we fear though the earth be removed, though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.” That is great experience, but it is not reserved for psalmists and rare patriarchs like Job. It is a privilege for common mortals like us who struggle and agonize and feel the thorn in the flesh, and the bitter tragedy of life unhealed. Whether we make the discovery or not, God is there with us in the furnace. Only it makes all the difference if we do find him as the one high tower where refuge is not for the passing moment only, but is an eternal attainment. III WHAT WE WANT MOST There are many things which we want—things for which we struggle hard and toil painfully. Like the little child with his printed list for Santa Claus, we have our list, longer or shorter, of precious things which we hope to see brought within our reach before we are gathered to our fathers. The difference is that the child is satisfied if he gets one thing which is on his list. We want everything on ours. The world is full of hurry and rush, push and scramble, each man bent on winning some one of his many goals. But, in spite of this excessive effort to secure the tangible goods of the earth, it is nevertheless true that deep down in the heart most men want the peace of God. If you have an opportunity to work your way into that secret place where a man really lives, you will find that he knows perfectly well that he is missing something. This feeling of unrest and disquiet gets smothered for long periods in the mass of other aims, and some men hardly know that they have such a thing as an immortal soul hidden away within. But, even so, it will not remain quiet. It cries out like the lost child who misses his home. When the hard games of life prove losing ones, when the stupidity of striving so fiercely for such bubbles comes over him, when a hand from the dark catches away the best earthly comfort he had, when the genuine realities of life assert themselves over sense, he wakes up to find himself hungry and thirsty for something which no one of his earthly pursuits has supplied or can supply. He wants God. He wants peace. He wants to feel his life founded on an absolute reality. He wants to have the same sort of peace and quiet steal over him which used to come when as a child he ran to his mother and had all the ills of life banished from thought in the warm love of her embrace. But it is not only the driving, pushing man, ambitious for wealth and position, who misses the best thing there is to get —the peace of God. Many persons who are directly seeking it miss it. Here is a man who hopes to find it by solving all his difficult intellectual problems. When he can answer the hard questions which life puts to him, and read the riddles which the ages have left unread, he thinks his soul will feel the peace of God. Not so, because each problem opens into a dozen more. It is a noble undertaking to help read the riddles of the universe, but let no one expect to enter into the peace of God by such a path. Here is another person who devotes herself to nothing but to seeking the peace of God. Will she not find it? Not that way. It is not found when it is sought for its own sake. He or she who is living to get the joy of divine peace, who would “have no joy but calm,” will probably never have the peace which passeth understanding. Like all the great blessings, it comes as a by-product when one is seeking something else. Christ’s peace came to him not because he sought it, but because he accepted the divine will which led to Gethsemane and Calvary. Paul’s peace did not flow over him while he was in Arabia seeking it, but while he was in Nero’s prison, whither the path of his labors for helping men had led him. He who forgets himself in loving devotion, he who turns aside from his self-seeking aims to carry joy into any life, he who sets about doing any task for the love of God, has found the only possible road to the permanent peace of God. There are no doubt a great many persons working for the good of others and for the betterment of the world who yet do not succeed in securing the peace of God. They are in a frequent state of nerves; they are busy here and there, rushing about perplexed and weary, fussy and irritable. With all their efforts to promote good causes, they do not quite attain the poise and calm of interior peace. They are like the tumultuous surface of the ocean with its combers and its spray, and they seldom know the deep quiet like that of the underlying, submerged waters far below the surface. The trouble with them is that they are carrying themselves all the time. They do not forget themselves in their aims of service. They are like the ill person who is so eager to get well that he keeps watching his tongue, feeling his pulse, and getting his weight. Peace does not come to one who is watching continually for the results of his work, or who is wondering what people are saying about it, or who is envious and jealous of other persons working in the same field, or who is touchy about “honor” or recognition. Those are just the attitudes which frustrate peace and make it stay away from one’s inner self. There is a higher level of work and service and ministry, which, thank God, men like us can reach. It is attained when one swings out into a way of life which is motived and controlled by genuine sincere love and devotion, when consecration obliterates self-seeking, when in some measure, like Christ, the worker can say without reservations, “Not my will but thine be done.” CHAPTER II [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] THE GREAT ENERGIES THAT WORK I TRYING THE BETTER WAY A very fresh and unusual type of book has recently appeared under the title, “By An Unknown Disciple.” It tells in a simple, direct, impressive way, after the manner of the Gospels, the story of Christ’s life and works and message. It professes to be written by one who was an intimate disciple, and who was therefore an eye-witness of everything told in the book. It is a vivid narrative and leaves the reader deeply moved, because it brings him closer than most interpretations do into actual presence of and companionship with the great Galilean. The first chapter is a re- interpretation of the scene on the eastern shore of Gennesaret, where Jesus casts the demons out of the maniac of Geresa. A man on the shore of the lake told Jesus, when he landed there with his disciples in the early morning, that it was not safe for any one to go up the rugged hillside, because there were madmen hidden there among the tombs: “people possessed by demons, who tear their flesh, and who can be heard screaming day and night.” “How do you know they are possessed by demons?” asked Jesus. “What else could it be?” said the man. “There are none that can master them. They are too fierce to be tamed.” “Has any man tried to tame them?” asked Jesus. “Yes, Rabbi, they have been bound with chains and fetters. There was one that I saw. He plucked the fetters from him as a child might break a chain of field flowers. Then he ran foaming into the wilderness, and no man dare pass by that way now....” “Have men tried only this way to tame him?” Jesus asked. “What other way is there, Rabbi?” asked the man. “There is God’s way,” said Jesus. “Come, let us try it.” As Jesus spoke, “His gaze went from man to man,” the writer continues, “and then his eyes fell upon me. It was as if a power passed from him to me, and immediately something inside me answered, ‘Lead, and I follow.’” The narrative proceeds to describe the encounter with the demoniac man whose name was “Legion.” “He ran toward us, shrieking and bounding in the air. He had two sharp stones in his hand, and as he leaped he cut his flesh with them and the blood ran down his naked limbs. The men behind us scattered and fled down the hillside; but Jesus stood still and waited.” The effect of the calm, undisturbed, unfrightened presence of Jesus was astonishing. It was as though a new force suddenly came into operation. The jagged stones were thrown from his hands, for he recognized at once in Jesus a friendly presence and a helper with an understanding heart. His fear and terror left the demoniac man and he became quiet, composed and like a normal person. Meantime some of the men who ran away in fear, when the madman appeared, frightened a herd of swine feeding near by, and in their uncontrolled terror they rushed wildly toward the headland of the lake and pitched over the top into the water where they were drowned. “Fear is a foul spirit,” said Jesus, and it seemed plain and obvious that the ungoverned fear which played such havoc with the man had taken possession also of the misguided swine. It was the same “demon,” fear. A little later in the day when the companions of Jesus found him they saw the man who had called himself “Legion” sitting at Jesus’ feet, clothed and in his right mind—a quieted and restored person. We now know that this disease, called “possession,” which appears so often in the New Testament accounts, is a very common present-day trouble. The name and description given to it in the Bible make it often seem remote and unfamiliar to us, but it is, in fact, as prevalent in the world to-day as it was in the first century. It is an extreme form of hysteria, a disorganization of normal functions, often causing delusions, loss of memory, the performance of automatic actions, and sometimes resulting in double, or multiple, personality, a condition in which a foreign self seems to usurp the control of the body and make it do many strange and unwilled things. This disease is known in very many cases to be produced by frights, fear, or terror, sometimes fears long hidden away and more or less suppressed. The famous cases of Doris Fischer and Miss Beauchamp were both of this type. They were only extreme instances of a fairly common form of mental trouble, generally due to fears, and capable of being cured by wise, skillful understanding and loving care, applied by one who shows confidence and human interest and who knows how to use the powerful influence of suggestion. Dr. Morton Prince, who has reported these two cases, has achieved cures and restorations that read like miracles, and his narratives tell of minds, “jangling, harsh, and out of tune,” broken into dissociated selves, which have been unified, organized, harmonized and restored to normal life. Few restorations are more wonderful than that effected upon a Philadelphia girl under the direction of Dr. Lightner Witmer. The girl was hopelessly incorrigible, stubborn, sullen, suspicious, and stupid. She screamed, kicked, and bit when she was opposed, and she utterly refused to obey anybody. So unnatural and dehumanized was she that she was generally called “Diabolical Mary.” She was examined by Dr. Witmer, underwent some simple surgical operations to remove her obvious physical handicaps, and then was put under the loving, tender care of a wise, attractive, and understanding woman. The girl responded to the treatment at once and soon became profoundly changed, and the process went on until the girl became a wholly transformed and re-made person. The so-called shell-shock cases which have bulked so large in the story of the wastage of men in all armies during the World War, turn out to be cases of mental disorganization, occasioned for the most part by immense emotional [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] upheaval, especially through suppressed fear. The man affected with the trouble has seemed to master his emotion. He has not winced or shown the slightest fear in the face of danger; but the pent-up emotion, the suppressed fear and terror, insidiously throw the entire nervous mechanism out of gear. The successful treatment of such cases is, again, like that for hysteria, one that brings confidence, calm, liberation of all strain and anxiety. The poor victim needs a patient, wise, skillful, psychologically trained physician, who has an understanding mind, a friendly, interested, intimate way, a spirit of love, and who can arouse expectation of recovery and can suggest thoughts of health and the right emotional reactions. This method of cure has often been tried with striking effect upon the so-called criminal classes. Prisoners almost always respond constructively to the personal manifestation of confidence, sympathy, and love. Elizabeth Fry proved this principle in an astonishing way with the almost brutalized prisoners in Newgate. Thomas Shillitoe’s visit to the German prisoners at Spandau, who were believed to be beyond all human appeals, though not so well known and famous, is no less impressive and no less convincing. There was perhaps never a time in the history of the world when an application of this principle and method—God’s way—was so needed in the social sphere of life. Whole countries have the symptoms which appear in these nervous diseases. It is not merely an individual case here and there; it takes on a corporate, a mass, form. The nerves are overstrained, the emotional stress has been more than could be borne, suppressed fears have produced disorganization. There are signs of social “dissociation.” The remedy in such cases is not an application of compelling force, not a resort to chains and fetters, not a screwing on of the “lid,” not a method of starving out the victims. It is rather an application of the principle which has always worked in individual cases of “dissociation” or “possession” or “suppressed fear”—the principle of sympathy, love and suggestion—what Jesus, in the book mentioned above, calls “God’s way.” The “dissociation” of labor and employers in the social group, with its hysterical signs of strikes and lockouts, upheaval and threats, needs just now a very wise physician. Force, restraint, compulsion, fastening down the “lid,” imprisonment of leaders, drastic laws against propaganda, will not cure the disease, any more than chains cured the poor sufferer on the shores of Gennesaret. The situation must first of all be understood. The inner attitude behind the acts and deeds must be taken into account. The social mental state must be diagnosed. The remedy, to be a remedy, must remove the causes which produce the dissociation. It can be accomplished only by one who has an understanding heart, a good will, an unselfish purpose, and a comprehending, i.e., a unifying, suggestion of coöperation. This way is no less urgent for the solution of the most acute international situations. It has been assumed too long and too often that these situations can be best handled by unlimited methods of restraint, coercion, and reduction to helplessness. Some of the countries of Europe have been plainly suffering from neurasthenia, dissociation, and the kindred forms of emotional, fear-caused diseases. Starvation always makes for types of hysteria. It will not do now to apply, with cold, precise logic, the old vindictive principle that when the sinner has been made to suffer enough to “cover” the enormity of his sin he can then be restored to respectable society. It is not vindication of justice which most concerns the world now; it is a return of health, a restoration of normal functions, a reconstruction of the social body. That task calls for the application of the deeper, truer principles of life. It calls for a knowing heart, an understanding method, a healing plan, a sympathetic guide who can obliterate the fear-attitude and suggest confidence and unity and trustful human relationships. Those great words, used in the Epistle of London Yearly Meeting of Friends in 1917, need to be revived and put to an experimental venture: “Love knows no frontiers.” There is no limit to its healing force, there are no conditions it does not meet, there is no terminus to its constructive operations. II HE CAME TO HIMSELF Was there ever such a short-story character sketch as this one of the prodigal son! No realism of details, no elaboration of his sins, and yet the immortal picture is burned forever into our imagination. The débâcle of his life is as clear and vivid as words can portray the ruin. Yet the phrase which arrests us most as we read the compact narrative of his undoing is not the one which tells about “riotous living,” or the reckless squandering of his patrimony, or his hunger for swine husks, or his unshod feet and the loss of his tunic; it is rather the one which says that when he was at the bottom of his fortune “he came to himself.” He had not been himself then, before. He was not finding himself in the life of riotous indulgence. That did not turn out after all to be the life for which he was meant. He missed himself more than he missed his lost shoes and tunic. That raises a nice question which is worth an answer: When is a person his real self? When can he properly say, “At last I have found myself; I am what I want to be?” Robert Louis Stevenson has given us in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a fine parable of the actual double self in us all, a higher and a lower self under our one hat. But I ask, which is the real me? Is it Jekyll or is it Hyde? Is it the best that we can be or is it this worse thing which we just now are? Most answers to the question would be, I think, that the real self is that ideal self of which in moments of rare visibility we sometimes catch glimpses. “All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.” “Dig deep enough into any man,” St. Augustine said, “and you will find something divine.” We supposed he believed in total depravity, and he does in theory believe in it; but when it is a matter of actual experience, he announces this deep fact which fits perfectly with his other great utterance: “Thou, O God, hast made us for thyself, and we are restless [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] (dissatisfied) until we find ourselves in thee.” Too long we have assumed that Adam, the failure, is the type of our lives, that he is the normal man, that to err is human, and that one touch, that is, blight, of nature makes all men kin. What Christ has revealed to us is the fact that we always have higher and diviner possibilities in us. He, the overcomer, and not Adam, is the true type, the normal person, giving us at last the pattern of life which is life indeed. Which is the real self, then? Surely this higher possible self, this one which we discover in our best moments. The Greeks always held that sin was “missing the mark”—that is what the Greek word for sin means—failure to arrive at, to reach, the real end toward which life aims. Sin is defeat. It is loss of the trail. It is undoing. The sinner has not found himself, he has not come to himself. He has missed the real me. He cannot say, “I am.” If that is a fact, and if the life of spiritual health and attainment is the normal life, we surely ought to do more than is done to help young people to realize it and to assist them to find themselves. We are much more concerned to manufacture things than we are to make persons. We do one very well and we do the other very badly. Kipling’s “The Ship that Found Itself” is a fine account of the care bestowed upon every rivet and screw, every valve and piston. He pictures the ship in the stress and strain of a great storm and each part of the ship from keel to funnel describes what it has to bear and to do in the emergency and how it has been prepared in advance for just this crisis. Nansen was asked how he felt when he found that the Fram was caught in the awful jam of the Arctic ice-floe. “I felt perfectly calm,” he said. “I knew she could stand it. I had watched every stick of timber and every piece of steel that went into her hull. The result was that I could go to sleep and let the ice do its worst.” With even more care we build the airplane. There must be no chance for capricious action. The propeller blades must be made of perfect wood. There must be no defect in any piece of the structure. The gasoline must be tested by all the methods of refinement. The oil must be absolutely pure, free of every suspicion of grit. But when we turn from ships and airplanes to the provisions for training young persons we are in a different world. The element of chance now bulks very large. We let the youth have pretty free opportunity to begin his malformation before we begin seriously to construct him on right lines. We fail to note what an enormous fact “disposition” is, and we take little pains to form it early and to form it in the best way. We are far too apt to assume that all the fundamentals come by the road of heredity. We overwork this theory as much as earlier theologians overworked their dogma of original sin from poor old Adam. The fact is that temperament and disposition and the traits of character which most definitely settle destiny are at least as much formed in those early critical years of infancy as they are acquired by the strains of heredity. Education, which is more essential to the greatness of any country than even its manufactures, is one of the most neglected branches of life. We take it as we find it—and lay its failures to Providence as we do deaths from typhoid. It must not always be so. We must be as greatly concerned to form virile character in our boys and girls and to develop in them the capacity for moral and spiritual leadership in this crisis as we are concerned over our coal supply or our industries. There are ways of assisting the higher self to control and dominate the life, ways by which the ideal person can become the real person. Why not consider seriously how to do that? He that overcomes, the prophet of Patmos says, receives a white stone with a new name written on it, which no man knoweth save he that hath it. It is a symbolism which may mean many things. It seems at least to mean that he who subdues his lower self, holds out in the strain of life, and lives by the highest that he knows, will as a consequence receive a distinct individuality, a clearly defined self, instead of being blurred in with the great level mass—a self with a name of its own. And that self will not be the old familiar self that everybody knows by traits of past achievement and by the old tendencies of habit. It will be the self which only God and the person himself in his deepest and most intimate moments knew was possible—and here at last it is found to be the real self. The man can say, “I am.” He has come to himself. We ask, at the end, whether it may not be that the world will soon come to itself and discover the way back to some of its missed ideals. Here on a large scale we have the story of a desperate hunger, squandered wealth, lost shoes, lost...