Bernard Bosanquet

“ We must be on our guard against fining down and explaining away our unity with the eternal in the very act, as we think too hastily, of insisting on it. We must not let go our main grasp of the values which, wherever brought into being in a world, so far make heaven of that place and time, and which all religion teaches us to cherish here and now as everywhere and always — love, beauty, truth. In these our unity is solid and plain — our unity with God and with the whole of being. ”

“ Here even the veteran expert in life must stand to his own mature experience somewhat as the younger generation stands to its predecessor’s. He finds himself necessarily negligent of its entanglements, its history, its controversy, and trying to take it at its centre simply as it is and for its own sake. To be one with the supreme good in the faith which is also will — that is religion; and to be thus wholly and unquestioningly is the religious temper. Then all the riches of the spirit may add themselves to the mood, on condition that nothing in them stands out to impair or to violate it. ”

“ We should fairly set these two attitudes of mind side by side with each other and with the full religious temper which simply rests on its oneness with what is deeper than anything temporal. When we begin to restrict and define, do we not begin to omit and to diminish?
But again, our purpose here is not to make any man doubt his religion; it is only to offer the suggestion that whatever his belief, he should take it so deeply, so in proportion, as not to lose contact with the complete attitude which makes it religion. What is united with the eternal is eternal. ”

“ It only requires us to rise above the appearance, and keep our unhesitating grasp on the reality which is wholly good.
Perhaps we may add, without straying too far from simplicity, that in keeping up this grasp on the complex fact of religion we are led to see that “good” is a hard thing both to appreciate and to realise. It is not some plain decalogue, some clear white against black. It is a life, a spirit, a meaning, to be wrought out and to be fought out. To each of us, religion seems to say, it is and must be offered in our own individual form. ”

“ Of Hope and Progress, as elements in life, the religious man has a solid grasp. He has them in himself, and they are rooted in the good with which he is united. He can see — for here he has sight continuous with his faith — he can see the supreme values at work, cleansing, organising, ordering the world. Their bringers suffer or perish, but in their own operation the values never fail. ”

“ And what religion asks you to do is to keep your eye on that experience, and enter into it as fully as you can. For it is not like anything else, except the degrees of itself. "Out of weakness are made strong" — that is the story of all love and loyalty, all worship, devotedness, aspiration. Life and mind can do nothing by themselves. Their whole structure and way of working is to throw themselves into something greater, something inclusive. “As a little child,” this word will meet us on every side in religion. ”

“ And if more is wanted, as an inclined plane for the common-sense intelligence, I say that any one who considers human nature in the light of the facts of love, loyalty, community, will see that the character which in religion comes to a climax, is its very essence or centre or vital knot. Nobody is anything except as he joins himself to something. “Be a whole or join a whole.” “You cannot be a whole unless you join a whole.” ”

“ If prayer, we argue, can keep us assured of the supreme triumph and of unity with the ultimate power, what can it not do? What can faith not do? From securing our daily bread to any miracle we chance to set our hearts on, all seems possible to it. ”

“ Is it really religion — unity of will and belief with the supreme good — that he is thinking about in any particular doctrine, or is it something else? That is the question for him to answer with all pureness of heart and humility.
The unity of man and nature must be thought of in the same way. For the religious mind nature is the revelation and instrument, or one revelation and one instrument, of God’s will. ”

“ Only, let nothing, no love of striking proofs, no yearning for a short cut to a special path of unity, oust you from the central citadel in which Mansoul possesses religion — oneness with the supreme good in every facet and issue of heart and will. ”

“ Sin is thus the very detail of the conflict in which religious faith asserts the supremacy of the good. It is a deep self-contradiction, which, but for the supreme faith, would dissolve and destroy my actual being. It is the embodiment of the flat contradiction, the rise in which we stay here. The good, I take it, is actually worked out, and has the substance of its victory, in this struggle, where the will is fairly and clearly occupied in re-creating itself. ”

“ That we are in fact sunk in sin, but are somehow real beyond and outside it, might even be a comfortable doctrine.
It is the old story. We are refining, and losing touch. Here is perhaps a plain though prosaic way of bringing home the simple fact. Bona fides is the ultimate need in all matters of conduct, and religion is the supreme bona fides. Your heart is really given to the best you can conceive. But your actual life is narrow and confused, and while willing the object of faith, you will, also, things that as you will them (for they need not be “bad”) are its enemy. ”

“ The situation which this expression embodies is simple, though fundamental, the knot or centre, as we said, in which the open secret of all human nature is bound up. We cannot be “saved” as we are ; we cannot cease to be what we are; we can only be saved by giving ourselves to something in which we remain what we are, and yet enter into something new. The peculiar attitude in which this is effected is religious faith. And this is, as I see the matter, just what we mean by religion — this, and no more, but nothing less. It is faith which is contrasted, not with knowledge, but with sight. ”

“ At any rate the apparently finite world seems to be a necessary arena and instrument of values; and as better insight comes, it does not approximate to a fabric of pure blank preciousness, as the New Jerusalem does to a fabric of mere gems, but rather to more intimate and poignant realisations, united with a deeper perfection and a profounder victory. It is something of this kind that the religious experience offers as the simple and inward fact about suffering. ”

“ No, I am in God, I am in heaven, in it, in him, and for eternity will never leave him. The devil may keep my sins, and the world my flesh; I live in God’s will, his life shall be my life, his will my will ”

“ We possess the mode which applies to us, and for religion that is all we want. If we are to argue and define, we must not stop short of philosophy, which just means keeping hold of the main certainty, while going into all the difficulties. But that is not our business here; we cannot all be trained philosophers, and it would be a queer world if we were. Our business is to see where and how you can really get the good which you trust in your religion to bring you.
In the unity of love and will with the supreme good you are not only “saved,” but you are “free” and “strong.” ”

“ Prayer and worship seem to be of the most intimate essence of religion. And just for this reason, when separately argued about and insisted on, above all its other features they tend to become distorted. Prayer, I suppose, is the very meditation which is, or at the very least which enables us to realise and enter into, the unity which is religious faith. Worship, inward or outward, is in principle the same. ”

“ Everything depends on the expectation and the hope with which we approach it. Religion is the knot, the centre, of all human difficulties; it is a many-sided thing, and if we ask it the wrong questions it will give us misleading responses.
To take the simplest of all examples: Will religion guarantee me my private and personal happiness? To this, on the whole, I think we must answer No; and if we approach it with a view to such happiness, then most certainly and absolutely No. And yet this answer might repel many persons who are quite sincerely inclined to religion. ”

“ It is in and through such a conflict that the good is triumphant for faith, realising the vitality which is its nature in continual origination within and against the dazzle of plausible satisfactions.
Thus it seems to follow from the simple fact of religion that suffering belongs on the one hand to the religious spirit, and on the other to the finite world. I do not mean, or believe, that pain can be the sole feature of life, or is often the predominant one. ”

“ The feeling and admission of defect is, I imagine, presupposed; but it should not, surely, be reflectively predominant so as to divert attention to itself and impair the simple spirit of trust and surrender. Now this is at the same time the spirit of complete appreciation, which alone can seize the whole fact in its due shape and proportion. This is what in any matter of common life we get, as we say, only from those “who really care.” “Love speaks with better knowledge and knowledge with dearer love.” ”

“ Suffering seems a very much wider fact than sin. What bewilders us most in it, I suppose, is its extension over the whole conscious world independently of goodness or badness. It seems as if it followed from any independence, any separateness or self-assertion in things. If things apparently indifferent to one another’s interests assert themselves in the same world, there must be conflict, and, with consciousness, suffering. ”

“ Yet if we take men so different and so representative in their differences as Plato, Bacon, and Spinoza, we find them all agreeing, not in a glorification of the human mind, but in the imperative demand that it should shake off its ‘chains’ and turn to receive the light, that it should surrender its ‘idols’ and ‘become as a little child,’ that it should look at things ‘under the form of eternity,’ not through the vague confusion of its own imagination. ”

“ THE NATURE OF SIN
“Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.”
The diversity or individuality of the good helps us to see clearly the nature of sin. Sin, it is said, only exists for the religious soul. For this soul has given itself wholly to the good and the perfect, but yet still lives in and as its own particular limited self, and its own particular defective world and will. It holds nothing to be real but the good, but yet its own wicked will and wicked world exist. ”

“ He is never out of reach of the world of values, revealed to him and in him. Religion does not say, I think, that he is to believe in an order of values some day to be attained without intermixture of what seems hostile to value. Following our simple purpose, we will not speculate about this. But what we do know is that a simple faith finds on all sides confirmation and realisation, strangely intermingled and interdependent with difficulty and obstruction, in the world in which our feet are set. ”