Henry Churchill King

“ On the one hand, Have the great facts which theology studies any help to give to the man who faces the problem of social progress—of the steady elevation of the race? On the other hand, Has the great fact of the immensely quickened social consciousness of our time, with all that it means, any help to give to the theologian in his attempt to bring the great Christian truths really home to men, to make them more real, more rational, more vital? ”

“ The very meaning of religion is sharing the life of God. As soon, now, as God is conceived as essentially holy and loving, a God of character, a living will and not a substance—and Christianity to be true to itself, must always so conceive him—so soon religion and morality are indissolubly united. God's life, according to Christ's teaching, is the life of constant and perfect self-giving. To share the life of God, therefore, to share his single purpose, is to come into the life of loving service. The two fall together from the point of view of the social consciousness. ”

“ Is not the precise method of redemption, then, to no small degree, cleared for us right here, in this conviction of the social consciousness of the contagion of the good in a self-surrendering association—the only solidarity of which we can be certain? Christ saves us, in the only certain way we know that any man is ever saved to better living, through direct contagion of character, through his immediate influence upon us. The power of the influence of a redeeming person must depend upon two facts: the richness of the self that is given, and the depth of the giving. ”

“ Why, that is, from the point of view of the ideal—of religion and theology—why are we constituted so alike? so that we must influence one another? so that the results of our actions necessarily go over into the lives of others? so that the innocent suffer with the guilty and the guilty profit with the righteous? so that we must recognize everywhere the claim of others? so that we must respect their personality? ”

“ Indeed, the very moral judgment, that incessantly prompts the problem of evil for every one of us, is required, for its own existence, to assume the validity of the relations about which it questions. For it complains, for the most part, of those facts that follow inevitably from the necessary mutual influence of men; but the chief sources of the joy it requires, that it may justify the world, lie in these same mutual relations. ”

“ The New Testament comes to stand, thus, in no merely external and mechanically authoritative relation to the life and faith of the church, but in the most interior and vital relation. And Bible study gets a new significance for us, as we see it, as at one and the same time our chief way to our own vision of God's actual, concrete self-revelation, and our deliverance from our merely subjective dreaming. We come to share in some living way the vision of these others who have seen most directly and most largely. ”

“ Philosophy, too, is exerting all along a half-unconscious pressure toward the thought of the organic unity of society. That philosophy may exist at all, it must start from the assumption of a universe, a real unity of truth, and its problem is to find a discerned unity. It knows no unrelated being, and, consequently, whether it theoretically accepts {13} the formulation or not, it must admit that, as a matter of fact, to be is to be in relations. It asserts as a universal fact, what natural science and psychology both affirm in their own respective spheres, the concrete relatedness of all. ”

“ This sense of the value and sacredness of the person not only characterizes increasingly the whole social and moral evolution of the race, but it is to be seen in the clearly conscious demand for equality of rights, and, especially—to take a single example—in the growing recognition that the child is an individual with his own rights; that he has a personality of his own of a sanctity inviolable by the parent; that there are clear bounds beyond which no one may go without personal outrage. ”

“ Nothing save a sense of deep and intimate connection with the solid core of things, nothing save a settled and fervid conviction that the universe is on the side of the will in its struggle for that whole-hearted devotion for the welfare of the race, without which morality is an affair of shreds and patches, can give to the will the force and edge suitable to the difficult {46} work it has to do. But this sense of kinship with what is deepest and most abiding in the universe—what else is meant by pure religion. ”

“ In the first place, theology does not mean to transfer to God human limitations; rather, it conceives him to be the only complete personality with perfect self-consciousness and full freedom, no part of whose being is in any degree foreign to himself. Nor, in the second place, does it mean to forget that the personal relations in which God stands to other persons are unique, and that, in three definite respects: that conviction of the love of God, as of no other, must underlie, as a great necessary assumption, all our thinking and all our living ”

“ Do we need, or can we intelligently use, a mystical solidarity? The only solidarity of the race which we seem really to need, or with which we seem able intelligently to deal, is the actual like-mindedness and the actual personal relations themselves—the reciprocal action of spirits—the only kind of reciprocal action which we can finally fully conceive. Any other finite solidarity than this, though it has often figured in theology, seems to me only a name without significance. ”

“ And observe that he confidently expects this kingdom to be universal—appealing to men of all races and of all times, and to be eternal—still standing when all else shall have passed away. And upon his belief in this character of his kingdom he stakes his life, and calmly gives to himself as the goal of his life the establishment of just such a kingdom; and remains to the end confident of his success. The mere vitality of will in such a purpose is hard to take in, and alone may well give us pause. ”

“ I do not now ask at all as to any man's metaphysical theory about Jesus Christ; I only ask that it be noticed that those who question common theories altogether still get their ideal of God from Jesus Christ; and that this is the wonderful thing that has happened on our earth: that there has once lived a man—daily moving about among men, a concrete circumstantial account of whose life in many particulars we have—the features of whose character one can transfer absolutely to God and say, That is what I mean by God. ”

“ The justifiable elements in mysticism, then, may be said to include: the insistence on the legitimate place of feeling in religion as a real and vital experience; the emphasis on one's own conviction and faith; the real difficulty of expressing the full meaning of the religious experience; the demand for a complete ethical surrender to God; and the faith in the real unity and worth of the world in God. Now if one tries to bring together these justifiable elements in mysticism, the truly mystical may all be summed up as simply a protest in favor of the whole man—the entire personality. ”

“ We, as founders and builders of the true society, find ourselves shut up to an impassioned faith in the sincerity of the universe and the integrity of the fundamental being. Our religion is a deep and wide synthesis of feeling, whereby that personal will in us, which grounds society, comes into solemn league and covenant with the fundamental being. Here is the focus-point of the prophetic revelation. At this point, the deep in God answers to the deep in Man.... All that He is He puts in pledge for the perfecting of the society He has founded. ”

“ There will never be an easier way to God. It is shallow thinking that supposes that, if there be any possibility of turning to God in the future life, it is of small moment that one should now put himself where he ought to be. The full results of all our evil sowing, we must receive. The utmost that on any rational theory, then, can be held out to men, is the hope that, facing a greater heritage of evil than now they face, they might return to God under the same condition of absolute moral surrender, which now holds, and the fulfilment of which is now far more easily possible to them. ”

“ The great truth of Calvinism, that God is the ultimate source of all, was perhaps never more secure than to-day; but that God, who is the absolute and ultimate source of all, is the fully personal God, whose will is never divorced from his reason and love, who knows no such abstraction as a bare and empty omnipotence without content or direction, but who is himself always living love. ”

“ We know no deeper law in the building of character, than that righteous character comes through that association with the best in which there is mutual self-giving. The problem of character implies not only a bare recognition of a man's moral freedom, but a sacred respect at every point for his personality. If a man is ever to have character at all, it must be absolutely his own ”

“ In this free winning to character, no association counts for its most that is not mutual. I become in character most certainly and rapidly like that man with whom I constantly am, to whose influence I most fully surrender, and who gives himself most completely to me. ”

“ This whole thought of "a state that is half a swoon and half an ecstasy" is a sort of swamping of clear self-consciousness and definite moral initiative, in which the very reality of man's personality consists. It is a heathen, not a Christian, idea of inspiration which demands the suppression of the human, whether in consciousness, in will, in reason, or by belittling the sense of obligation to others. But mysticism has at least tended toward failure in all these respects. ”

“ First, the Fatherhood of God, that God is in his very being Father, Love, self-manifesting as light, self-giving as life, self-communicating, pouring himself out into the life of his children, wishing to share his highest life with them, every one. Second, the concrete, unmistakable revelation of the Father in Christ, revealed in full ethical perfection, as an actual fact to be known and experienced; no longer an unknown, hidden, or only partially and imperfectly revealed God, but a real, living God of character, counting as a real, appreciable, but fully spiritual fact in the real world. ”

“ At no point, therefore, can the religious life withdraw itself from the daily duty and maintain its own existence. The constant inevitable condition of the religious communion is the ethical will. Our providential place is God's place to find us. Where God has put us, just there he will best find us. This is further seen in the fact that the true Christian experience is a constant paradox: God ever satisfying, and yet ever impelling—never allowing us to remain where we are, but holding up to us the always higher ideal beyond ”

“ Only the riches of a personal life can satisfy our claim on life, our desire for life; and, ultimately, we can be fully satisfied only with God's own life in the fullest revelation he can make of it to us men. Only this can be "the unspeakable gift." The thirst for God, for the living God, is a simply true expression of the human heart when it comes to real self-knowledge.
But the riches of the personal life of Christ are necessarily hidden to one who does not come into the sharing of Christ's purpose. ”

“ It is no light-hearted indifference to character, to which the genuine social consciousness leads. No age, indeed, ever saw so clearly as ours that the most essential conditions of happiness are in character, or was more certain that sin carries with it its own inevitable consequences. It is not a less, but a more, profound sense of the seriousness of the problem of moral character, that makes us hesitate to dogmatize concerning the future life. ”

“ If a man cannot see his way to a faith both in the divine foreknowledge and in the moral initiative of men, therefore, he must not hesitate to choose even the divine nescience of the free acts of men, rather than think of God as compelling men. Our whole moral universe tumbles about our ears, if he who is the source of all is not in earnest with persons. And yet there is much theological thinking, of which the common notions of a personal reign of Christ on the earth may be taken as an example, that practically looks to a kingdom by compulsion. ”

“ Is {3} the Christian truth so great that it not only includes all that is true in this new social consciousness—is fully able to take it up into itself and to make it feel at home there—but also, so great that it alone can give the social consciousness its fullest meaning, alone enable it to understand itself, and alone furnish it adequate motive and power? Is the social consciousness, in truth, only a disguised statement of Christian convictions, and does it really require the Christian religion and its thoughtful expression to complete itself? ”

“ And a true mysticism knows that the spirit, reverent of personality, leads to a self-restraint that does not seek the emotional experience simply as such on any conditions; but, knowing the supreme psychological conditions of happiness and character and influence, it loses itself in an unselfish love and in absorbing work, and understands that it must simply let the experiences come. ”

“ On the other hand, if a complete and indubitable revelation of the future life were given us, no doubt there would be much that could make but small appeal to us, and might even prove positively depressing, because we have not yet the experience which would interpret to us its meaning and open to us its joy. Our earthly life may furnish us an analogy. The joy of a grown man is often preëminently in his work, but he would find it difficult to explain to a child the source of his joy. ”

“ There is to be no over-riding of the free personality anywhere. He faced successively the temptations to place his dependence on the mere meeting of men's material needs—the kingdom by bread; the temptation to place his dependence on that which appealed most strongly to the oriental mind—the use of wonder-working power—the kingdom by marvel or ecstasy; the temptation to place his dependence on force—the kingdom by force. But Christ sees clearly that God is no mere supplier of bread; that God is no mere wonder-worker, no mere giver of wonderful experiences ”

“ The recognition of the facts is the vital matter, but thought can hardly see them unmoved. How are we to think of Christ? With clear remembrance, now, that Christian teaching itself insists upon the kinship of God and men; that absolute barriers, therefore, cannot anywhere be set up; that a revelation unrelated to all else could be no revelation; and that Christ himself often pointed out the likeness between his own life and work and those of his disciples;—still we may not ignore actual differences, and must honestly strive to do justice to them in our own conception of Christ. ”

“ When God and everything that is sacred threaten to disappear in the darkness, or our doom is pronounced; when the mighty forces of inexorable nature seem to overwhelm us, and the bounds of good and evil to dissolve; when, weak and weary, we despair of finding God at all in this dismal world,—it is then that the personality of Christ may save us. ”

“ We probably cannot better express this unity of our highest ethical life with the life of God than by renewing our old faith that we are children of a common Father, who have come, under God's own leading—so far as a social consciousness is ours—voluntarily to share in God's loving purpose in the creation and redemption of men. We do not work alone ”