William Henry Chamberlin

“ Our studies in philosophy have also led us to see that the present life is lived in a very real heaven, that heaven is here and now, that our Heavenly Father is here at work, automatically sustaining by his life the light of the sun, the energies of the fruitful earth, and clothing with glory the wild flowers of the field, and that he is just like the lovable and stern Jesus. ”

“ Is there anything therefore in the world process as a whole which tends to make it at all analogous to the activities of human life, and to create the belief that there is to be found in it a purpose and intelligence at work—that it has meaning? Now this at least is hardly doubtful, that men have what is naturally a very strong tendency to interpret the universe in this way; and such a tendency is far from being undermined by the results of modern science. Indeed the theory of evolution brings out for the first time in clear relief the essentially dramatic quality of creation. ”

“ As we learn to recognize the superhuman spiritual reality, whom men commonly call God; and as we come to value him as the potent, wise, and loving nourisher of our lives, as our Father, we trust, love, and reverence him. As the flowers stimulate and support our esthetic interests and in doing so become beautiful and dear to us, so our Father, as the support of this new social interest, becomes loved, and interests expressed in ideas and acts engaged in in order to further his life, or do his will, become the supremely satisfying religious interests. ”

“ If the word CHURCH means a building to one and a body of men and women to the other, confusion at once appears and often irritation on the part of both. When this confusion disappears we have the only guarantee there is that the one knows the purpose of the other. Purpose, the only form of causation we know or can conceive of, is thus forever and utterly invisible, intangible, and incapable in any way of being summed up in terms of sensation. ”

“ Since we seem to be able to conjure up an idea in the mind of another in an instant, we expect to cause character to grow in too brief a time. We expect to create life by magic, by merely wishing it to grow, and we fail. ”

“ That something more than blind and haphazard forces are at work, bearing in themselves no relation of prevision to the results which actuary are accomplished, is the first and natural presumption which the spectacle of the world's history raises as it unrolls itself in the imagination—a presumption which it is not easy to eradicate so long as the eyes are not kept too exclusively on the details, and the whole massed effect is allowed to exert its influence. ”

“ Only by the slow process of education, and by a wise use of ideas and acts, can interests in others be made to increase. And we fall into the next error when we identify the life of another with his ideas and acts, and finding his ideas and acts not such as those which we have and which nourish our own interests, we reject them forthwith. In this we fail to recognize that the ideas and acts of a child or of any other person are the means only, a means ephemeral and vanishing, of growth for far more fundamental attitudes towards the world. ”

“ Rogers, "God's purposes are constituted by the relation in which his life stands to other—finite—lives existing outside the limits of the physical world which science studies." And again: "If by cause we mean a source for the understanding of things, I am a cause—a part of the cause, that is—of events that happen in the outer world." ”

“ All other objects in time vanish, and interests supported by them must fail unless they can be made to support the interests of others and so the interest in others. Moral and religious interests are the truly concrete and the practical. Other interests can survive only as abstract aspects of these more inclusive interests. The interests we at first most fully trust must die in order to live as elements of the life that is to abide. Without love of others the promise of the world and all of its glories will prove false. ”

“ His habitual activities found and sustain all of uniformity there is in nature, and his habitual activities create and sustain singularly and separately each and every body that appears in the world. And the universe is the living God, and all that it inhabit live in the light of his shining. ”

“ Being in immediate relationship to men, God, as a moral being, must strive to create life in men, but he must wait for their interests to develop the sense of need to which the growth of these gives rise, and then through faith in men he must labor in a hope for the becoming real of the unseen. God would certainly have a civilization in which men could make themselves physically comfortable, but anthropology teaches that he had to wait for a vast period of time, many thousands of years, for some genius to discover how to make fire at will. ”

“ By individual inspiration and by sending choice spirits among men from time to time, God is no doubt always active to further the life of men. But through Jesus of Nazareth he revealed the fullest life. Of this we may be sure, as Jesus himself taught, through the fact that God cooperated with him in his mighty deeds of love, often modifying his habitual ways of acting in nature and performing miracles to aid him in the training of his disciples through a long and agonizing process of disillusionment, in which they surrendered all desires that were in the way of absolute love of him. ”

“ For example, in expressing a simple thought to a friend, one is not commonly conscious, save feebly at least, of the words, syllables, and elementary sounds he is using, and upon the power to utter which his expression of his thought or interest is so dependent. Thus awareness and feeling of value do not appear in any great intensity in relation to by far the greater part of one’s life, even the ever-increasing store of dynamic habits that make possible the realizing or creating in one’s self of any new life whatever, and the execution of the same either in idea or in overt act. ”

“ In conclusion, then, let us repeat, that if a Divine purpose is immanent in nature, nature's forms must be thought of as evolving in a way parallel to the unfolding of the divine purpose. The use of the theory is a most important means of advancing to a realization of God's immanence in nature and life, and a great remover of intellectual difficulties that hamper faith in so many. ”

“ Finally our studies teach us in regard to the meaning of life that life must not be identified with the body, nor should the death of the body be thought of as the destruction of our lives. We have come to view the body as a great instrument slowly and patiently developed through many millions of years, and now as a gift that permits us to enter upon this present and very precious season of growth, of growth in character or principles of action that will rise again into other seasons of growth. ”

“ From such a point of view for regarding the body of man, it would be as superficial and foolish to say that man's body evolved from the lower animals or from monkeys as it would be to maintain that a palace evolved from a hut through the hut's transforming itself with reference to its human environment until it became able to satisfy the needs of a king. Without reference to human activity we could never comprehend the transformation, but with it, all becomes clear. A man who knows how to make a cottage can vary his habit so as to be able to construct a mansion or a palace. ”

“ It is a spiritual reality that embraces the material forms of nature and their energies as elements into which its life can be analysed, and a reality which, being composed of psychological realities or interests like those in man, is ever growing through a process of dying to live, and is ever creating by faith, by thought, and by ever renewed efforts, new life, new knowledge, and new values. As in every thought process, we now proceed to test or prove this suggestion. We trust that by it we may be able to more fully understand our lives as parts of the great world-whole. ”

“ But foolishly identifying the abstract aspect with the very concrete reality, we often despise the life for its ideas, falsely regarded as false, and .a cause or a people that are nourishing the truest attitudes towards God and man and nature, we reject for no truer reason. One’s interests require simple ideas, those of another require critical ideas, one’s work requires a simple tool, another’s will require a most complex and delicate one, the only test of the validity of the idea or of the tool that most men can or do employ is the outcome. ”

“ But every child, just as he begins with the idea that the world is flat and that the sun rises and sets, begins with the idea that the world is made up of such simple realities as matter, space, time, cause, and motions. ”

“ The origin and growth of the body is regarded as a blind, impersonal process. In time this philosophy will correct itself, but meanwhile, since as a philosophy it is an active interest working among and controlling other active interests, and since it makes life depend upon a lifeless and unmanageable process, all evolutionism is depressing and destructive to life. In contrast with materialism, idealism and evolutionism, our philosophy, recognizing the dependence of life only on the personal and manageable, is optimistic. ”

“ These same studies teach us that full living is by no means an easy process. For all vital interests include the thought process, and thinking always arises through the death of an old interest and a struggle to create new life, new interests, in the face of obstacles. Even in the love of others, there must be a thoughtful and unavoidable observation of the bearings or meanings of our acts on the lives of others; and then in thoughtful action we cannot assert the fuller interests of life without coming into conflict with the cherished but often false interests of others. ”

“ In trying to picture interests or persons we must regard ourselves as material and as caused, and must place ourselves in time and space, thus trying to assimilate the concrete to an abstract aspect of itself, to make the apple depend upon its flavor, to make the rose a quality of its sweet perfume ”

“ He taught that we should actively seek to discover and to satisfy the needs of men. He further taught us to rebuke, severely if necessary, the helplessness and presumption that tend inevitably to grow up in the lives of the recepients of our generosity, blinding them to their need of the greater reality made accessible to them by our generosity, the spirit of love itself. ”