John H. Finley

“ But whether the biologist be right or I, we agree that it is the constant obligation of the living generation to try to lift mankind toward whatever highest height the individual has reached or can reach—and it is not a local, a parochial, a provincial, or even a national obligation, but a world obligation, in this tele-victorian age—from generation to generation, from nation to nation. ”

“ No wonder that the venture and the happiness have gone out of faith, which is the trust in the centuries as against the years, in the unseen instead of in the seen. There is little to be gained by society congratulating itself in its victory over alcohol if all the time it judges all success by outward and obvious standards. As things are, it is regarded almost as a crime not to have made money, and the doom of the “unsuccessful” is not pity but reprobation. How is it that, in a universe in which we believe that the fundamental factors are spiritual, such a conception should have come to rule! ”

“ As the most primitive and picturesque visualization of the curriculum of this bequest of the race mind of one generation to the next, the pillars of Enoch stood on the verge of history against the Eastern sky of our civilization’s dawn. They have crumbled, or they lie buried in sands that have hidden their wisdoms. The excavator’s spade could uncover no more interesting record than that which would tell us what this great teacher thought should be saved from flood and fire out of the experience of the race. ”

“ Is it not possible that Jesus’ social plan is the true and only way so to adjust the individual to his environment that he will find that which he is seeking? Is it not possible that Jesus’ plan provides the only practical way to eliminate the disastrous hatreds and wastage of modern industry, and to bring capital and labor into effective co-operation? Is it not possible that his idea of the fraternal community is the only satisfactory solution of our international problems? ”

“ Isolate we have indeed been as a people, but not provincially nor narrowly nor proudly isolate. We kept out of the partisan Ptolemaic concerns of Europe, but when the freedom of mankind was threatened, America’s policies leaped to the world horizon of her interest in humanity. Our America has had from the first a cosmic view, a concern for all mankind. “All men” are included in its national creed. It is only those who would narrow our horizon of sympathy and bring a Ptolemaic sky over our heads again that it has in its doctrine excluded. ”

“ We need rather to emphasize the simple truth that poverty is not the only, or indeed the worst, of mortal evils, that happiness does not consist mainly in the things which money can buy, that the man of narrow means may enrich himself with treasures which only he can give to himself, and which no one can take from him, that the purest satisfaction is in the sense of work honestly done and duties well met, and a mind and conscience at ease with itself. Even to the very poor, if such must be, religion may offer manifold compensations. ”

“ What we are faced with to-day is not the destruction of religion but the change in its form and outlook. The permanent thing in the Christian religion, the unique thing, is that it has been the attempt to set forth Jesus of Nazareth. Everything else has been temporal, but that has been permanent. As men look back over history they see that many expressions of that loyalty have become antiquated, and have, without any active hostility on the part of reformers, simply ceased to be. The human mind has no longer regarded them as adequate. ”

“ In a world manifestly distracted and blown from its moorings, in a society seething already with envy, it is not the part of wisdom to sow broadcast words that are calculated to inflame discontent into passionate hatred or sullen despair. That way leads to madness. What we need is rather a clearer perception of, and a firmer insistence on, those immaterial values which it is within the power of every man to make his own, whatever may be the seeming injustice of his material condition. ”

“ At the same time mankind was beginning to feel its unity and to work out its problems in universal terms. The yearning for brotherhood and for vital bonds that would bind each man to his fellows was strong. Consciously or unconsciously men everywhere were seeking for a satisfying philosophy of life that would afford them peace and happiness in this life and a definite hope of even greater joy in the realm beyond. They were also longing for a social organization that would give them freedom and an opportunity for each to live his life to the full. ”

“ These men are distilling into society a discontent that knows no satisfaction, that must engender only bitterness of disappointment and mutual distrust and hatred, and that in the end, if not checked by other motives, will bring about internecine warfare and a suicide of civilization of which the hideous years through which we have just passed are a warning admonition. And these teachers have the field to-day. We applaud them for their pretensions of philanthropy, even when we doubt the utility of their philosophy. We are browbeaten by the volume of their noisy propaganda. ”

“ We are mealy-mouthed and afraid to speak out in open denunciation, even when secretly we burn with indignation at the baseness of their words. We sulk in silence, as if we had nothing to say. Meanwhile they have had the field to themselves, and the world every day is more filled with fear and disquiet.
104 There is no danger that by opposing other views of life to this insolent naturalism we shall put an end to that normal discontent with material conditions which may be a necessary incentive to natural and social progress. ”

“ Physical progress has its source in physical discontent, and, by an extension of terms, social progress has its source in social discontent; and any doctrine which dulls the edge of this discontent is thereby an obstacle in the path of individual and racial welfare. Discontent is motion and the striving for better things, it is life; content is just stagnation and death. And here lies the charge against religion. ”

“ So the Christian Church, even in its most ascetic days, admitted that property and marriage and prestige were the normal condition of life; and Buddhism drew up two distinct tables of law, one for the religious state pure and simple, the other for the mass of mankind who are engaged in practical affairs. But both Christianity and Buddhism held that the natural instincts were ruinous if left to themselves, and that they became salutary instruments of welfare only when limited and softened and illuminated by a law not of themselves. ”

“ But the Good Samaritan, seeing only a neighbor—though a total stranger—in dire distress at the hands of scoundrels, would hurl himself like a bolt into the fray. And if, after deadly conflict, he too lay robbed, bleeding, and sore by his neighbor’s side, there would be no glimmer of regret in his heart; but as each helped the other to bind up his wounds, their hearts would rejoice that each had found a friend in a good fight for the right. ”

“ A second limitation upon the privilege of self-determination is, of course, the rights and the welfare of others. While we are to decide our own actions in accordance with the spirit of Jesus, we should impose upon ourselves the limitation that we will not act contrary to the interests of others or contrary to the welfare of the community, and this same principle would properly apply in any democratic community or state. While it is right for them to seek their own development, people should avoid injury to other peoples or races, and resistance to such injury is justified. ”

“ Even the greatest writers, when they deal with eternal truth, the Apostle Paul himself being witness, write in the language of their time for the men of their time, and are influenced in their statements by the ideas that are in the air in their time. The truth itself is a matter of Christian experience, whether it be taught by the old women of Bedford to John Bunyan, or by the thoroughly equipped scholar of to-day to a student who has all his senses exercised to receive the truth. ”

“ I would not imply that all these enemies of religion, or even those of them who are most influential to-day, are conscious advocates of a pitiless egotism or believe that the repudiation of religion would throw mankind into that anarchy of internecine warfare which Hobbes described as the state of nature, or which Nietzsche glorified as the battle-field of the superman. It is rather the mark of modern naturalism that it is plastered up and down, swathed and swaddled, masked and disguised, with sentimentalisms. ”

“ But you will say that these principles of conduct and the feelings that go with them are mere abstractions, fictions of the analytical reason; no man is, or can be, purely religious as I have defined the term, or purely naturalistic. And that is true, is in fact the point at which I am aiming. On the one hand, no man can utterly uproot the natural impulses out of his soul; and if a few men in a generation approach anywhere near it, the saints and martyrs and lonely sages, they are by their virtues cut off from the common life of mankind. ”

“ Were all men, or even a considerable proportion of men, at any time to overcome the natural discontent that drives us on to seek greater possessions and higher honors and more power, then, surely, all ambition and invention would die, the wheels of progress would slacken and stop, civilization would fail, and society would sink back into barbarism, so far at least as we measure civilization and barbarism by physical standards. ”

“ Dewey, or by a gracious inclusion anterior to Francis Bacon, it has been the task of philosophers and religious leaders to find reasons for the existence of such institutions on ideal grounds, and to justify those who profit from them at the expense of the masses. Religion and philosophy have been simply the servile allies of the predatory classes of society. The hope of the world is in the new gospel of pragmatic materialism. ”

“ One never knew whether to wonder most at men’s ignorance of what the Christian Church should have been teaching them, or at their indifference to some matters which the peace standard of domestic ethics regarded as vital, or at their continual and magnificent gaiety of spirit, their glorious comradeship, their mastery of fear. The war showed how little conventional religion stood for. ”

“ Once that were had, we should then call upon the greatest minds of the earth—the Enochs of to-day—to confer as to what this minimum for every child should be; for mere mental inertia, pride, prejudice, the force of habit and such causes have prevented that curriculum from keeping up with the accumulation of fundamental truth as it has been brought into the luminous circle of the knowledge of some, at any rate, of the race, from the encircling darkness. ”

“ Of course, customs, habits, laws have so passed judgment upon most of our every-day acts that we do not need to stop to argue with ourselves the question as to whether stealing or killing other human beings or bearing false witness are for the benefit of humanity or for its detriment. 124 We know it, we feel it; custom has made it instinctive; and yet our laws make very clear the distinction between murder and the execution of the death sentence or killing in self-defense; and the basis of the distinction is, of course, the welfare of the community. ”

“ We will not discriminate between those who hold this philosophy to be true and those who regard it as an illusion, but an illusion necessary for the preservation of society. The line for us is drawn between those who, for whatever reason, cling to a religious philosophy of the unseen and those who denounce such a philosophy as a check to the progress and prosperity of the race. ”

“ Wherever the Spirit of Christ is quick there will always be the double process in action, the challenging of old forms and the creation of new. The speech in the process may vary from generation to generation, but the process itself is a symptom of life. The desire for change is no evidence of impiety; it may be the setting forth of the prophet. The ages which are the ages of godlessness are those in which there has been no challenging of the accepted thing. In social as in religious life there are always multitudes whose motto is “Leave well alone.” ”