Now this, it seems to me, is my point of departure for the estimate of my possible resources. I cannot expect less of the good things of the universe than God would naturally bestow on His son. To expect less is to get less, since it is to dwarf my own power of receiving. If I close the opening through which abundance flows it cannot be strange if I shut abundance out.

And that is precisely what we find throughout the human race, millions upon millions of lives tightly shut against His generosity. The most generous treatment for which the majority of us look is man's. The only standard by which the majority of us appraise our work is man's. You have a job; you get your twenty or thirty or fifty or a hundred dollars a week for it; and by those dollars you judge your earning capacity and allow it to be judged. You hardly ever pause to remember that there is an estimate of earning capacity which measures industry and good will and integrity and devotion, and puts them above all tricks of trade and rewards them—rewards them, I mean, not merely in mystical blessings in eons far off, possibly the highest blessings we shall ever know, but rewards them in a way that will satisfy you now.

"He satisfieth the empty soul," writes the psalmist, in one of the sublimest lyrics ever penned, "and filleth the hungry soul with goodness."

"Yes, of course," says the Caucasian. "When you have crushed out all your present cravings and forgotten them, He will give you joys of which now you have no conception."

But are not my present cravings those which count for me? and do they not make up precisely that character which renders me unique? True, my longings now may have to the longings I shall one day entertain only the relation of your little boy's craving for an alphabetic picture-book to the course in philosophy he will take when he is twenty-five; but so long as the picture-book is the thing he can appreciate you give it to him. Is not this common sense? And can we expect the Father of us all to act in other than common-sense ways?

It is because we do so expect—because we do so almost universally—that we have blocked the channels of His blessings. The world is crowded with men and women working their fingers to the bone, and even so just squeaking along betwixt life and death and dragging their children after them. They are the great problem of mankind; they rend the heart with pity. They rend the heart with pity all the more for the reason that there is no sense in their poverty. There is no need of it. God never willed it, and what God never willed can go out of life with the speed of Satan out of Heaven. We have only to fulfil certain conditions, certain conditions quite easy to fulfil, to find the stores of the Universal laid as a matter of course at the feet of the sons of God.

"Prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of Hosts," are the striking words of the prophet Malachi, "if I will not open you the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it.... And all nations shall call you blessed, for ye shall be a delightsome land,"



XIX

But it is the old story: we do not believe it. It is too good to be true, so we put it away from us. In a world where the material is so pressing we use only material measures, and bow only to material force.

So be it! That is apparently as far as our race-development takes us. It takes us into suffering, but not out of it. Individuals have come into it and worked their way out again; but most of us can go no faster than the crowd. In that case we must suffer. In a terrible crisis in his history, and after many sins, David was able to write these words: "I sought the Lord ... and He delivered me out of all my fears." It is the royal avenue, and it is open to anyone. And yet if we do not take it, it still does not follow that all is lost.

Of the world as it is the outstanding fact is the necessity for struggle. Struggle may conceivably enter into every other world. There is something in us which requires it, which craves for it. A static heaven in which all is won and there is nothing forevermore but to enjoy has never made much appeal to us. If eternal life means eternal growth we shall always have something with which to strive, since growth means overcoming.

While sorry, then, that we have not released ourselves to a greater degree than we have, we may take heart of grace from what we have achieved. We must simply struggle on. Struggle will continue to make and shape us. Whether our problems spring from a world of matter, from a world of men, or from ourselves, their solving brings us a fuller grasp of truth. The progress may be slow but it is progress. Hardship by hardship, task by task, failure by failure, conquest by conquest, we pull ourselves up a little higher in the scale. Some day we shall see in the Universal all that we have been looking for, and be delivered out of all our fears.



CHAPTER VI

THE WORLD AS IT IS AND THE FALSE GOD OF FEAR



I

Of all fears the most dogging and haunting are those connected with money. Everyone knows them, even the rich. For many years I was their victim, and will now try to tell how I got rid of them so effectively that I may call it entirely.

Having a good many responsibilities I lived in terror of not being able to keep pace with their demands. The dread was like a malign invisible presence, never leaving me. With much in the way of travel, friendship, and variety of experience, which I could have enjoyed, the evil thing was forever at my side. "This is all very well," it would whisper in moments of pleasure, "but it will be over in an hour or two, and then you'll be alone with me as before."

I can recall minutes when the delight in landscape, or art, or social intercourse, became alien to me, something to be thrust away. Once in driving through rich, lush, storied Warwickshire on the way to Stratford-on-Avon—once in a great Parisian restaurant where the refinement, brilliancy, and luxury of the world seemed crushed into epitome—once at a stupendous performance of Goetterdaemmerung at Munich—once while standing on the shores of a lovely New Hampshire lake looking up at a mountain round which, as Emerson says, the Spirit of Mystery hovers and broods—but these are only remembered high points of a constant dread of not being able to meet my needs and undertakings. There used to be an hour in the very early morning—"the coward hour before the dawn," it is called by a poet-friend of my own—when I was in the habit of waking, only to hear the sleepless thing saying, as my senses struggled back into play, "My God, can you be sleeping peacefully, with possible ruin just ahead of you?" After that further sleep would become impossible for an hour or two, such wakings occurring, in periods of stress, as often as two and three times a week.



II

It was the spiritually minded man whom I have already quoted as giving me the three great points as to God's direction who first helped me to see that, on the part of anyone working hard and trying on the whole to do right, the fear of being left without means amounts in effect to denial of God. Thinking this over for myself during the course of some years, this fear has come to seem to me of the nature of blasphemy. It is like the "Curse God and die," of the wife of Job. I shall not hesitate to speak strongly on the subject, because so few are speaking on it strongly—while the urgency is pressing.



III

I have already said that it does not seem reasonable that the Father should put us into His universe to expand, and then deny us the power of expanding. The power of expanding is not wrapped up in money, but in the world as it is the independence of the one of the other is not very great. "One of the hardest things I ever had to do," a mother said to me, not long ago, "was to tell my little girl that her father and I could not afford to send her to college." That is what I mean. To most of us "expanding" and "affording" amount to the same thing.

True, there are natures which transcend the limitations of "affording," and by innate strength do what others resign themselves to not doing. For instance, there are men and women who "put themselves" through college, doing similar things which bring out the best in their characters. These are the exceptions; and they are the exceptions precisely for the reason that, whether they know it or not, they are nearer than their fellows to the divine working principle. It is not necessary for us to be conscious of that principle in order to get much of its result, though consciousness enables us to get more of it. The strong are strong because of harmony with God, at least to some extent. They may misuse their strength, as we can misuse anything; but the mere fact of possessing it shows a certain degree of touch with the Universal. But I am speaking chiefly of the weak, of those who think first of all in terms of restriction rather than in those of privilege to come and go and be and do.

I repeat that though this privilege is not dependent on money, money expresses it to the average mind.

And what is money after all? It is only a counter for what we call goods. Goods is the word with which, according to our Anglo-Saxon genius for the right phrase, we sum up the good things with which the Father blesses His children. The root connection between good, goods, and God is worth everyone's attention, A hundred dollars is simply a standard of measurement for so much of God's good things. A thousand dollars represents so much more; a million dollars so much more again. But it is important to note that this is not God's standard of measurement; it is man's, and adopted only for man's convenience.

As for God's standard of measurement it is inconceivable that the Universal Father should give to one of His children far more of His "goods" than he can use, while denying to another that which he is in absolute need of. The Universal Father could surely not do otherwise than bless all alike. With His command of resources He must bless all alike, not by depriving anyone, but by enriching everyone. If everyone does not enjoy plenty it must be because of the bringing in of some principle of distribution which could never have been His.



IV

The right and the wrong principles of distribution are indirectly placed before us by our Lord in one of the most beautiful passages which ever fell from human lips. Familiar as it is, I venture to quote it at length, for the reason that the modern translation makes some of the points clearer than they are in the King James version which most of us know best.

"No man can be the bondservant of two masters; for either he will dislike one and like the other, or he will attach himself to one and think slightingly of the other. You cannot be the bondservants both of God and of gold. For this reason I charge you not to be over-anxious about your lives, inquiring what you are to eat or what you are to drink, nor yet about your bodies, inquiring what clothes you are to put on. Is not the life more precious than its food, and the body than its clothing? Look at the birds which fly in the air; they do not sow or reap or store up in barns, but your Heavenly Father feeds them; are you not of much greater value than they? Which of you by being over-anxious can add a single foot to his height? And why be anxious about clothing? Learn a lesson of the wild lilies. Watch their growth. They neither toil nor spin, and yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his magnificence could array himself like one of these. And yet if God so clothes the wild herbage which to-day flourishes and to-morrow is cast into the oven, is it not much more certain that he will clothe you, you men of little faith? Do not even begin to be anxious, therefore, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For all these are questions that Gentiles are always asking; but your Heavenly Father knows that you need these things—all of them. But make His Kingdom and righteousness your chief aim, and then these things shall be given you in addition. Do not be over-anxious, therefore, about to-morrow, for to-morrow will bring its own cares. Enough for each day are its own troubles."

In this passage there are two points, each of which may merit a few words as a means of eliminating fear.



V

The first point is the reference to what we are to make our "chief aim"—the Kingdom of God and righteousness.

I feel sure we generally miss the force of these words through our Caucasian sanctimoniousness. We can think of God's Kingdom and righteousness only in the light of the pietistic. The minute they are mentioned we strike what I have already called our artificial pose, our funereal frame of mind. I am not flippant when I say that in the mind of the Caucasian the first step toward seeking the Kingdom of God and righteousness is in pulling a long face. We can hardly think of righteousness except as dressed in our Sunday clothes, and looking and feeling wobegone. To most of us the seeking of righteousness suggests at once an increase in attending church services, or going to prayer-meetings, or making missionary efforts—excellent practices in themselves—according to the form of pietism we are most familiar with. Those of us who have no form of pietism feel cut off from making the attempt at all.

Oh, to be simple!—to be natural!—to be spontaneous!—to be free from the concept of a God shut up within the four walls of a building and whose chief interests are the sermon and the number of parishioners! The Kingdom of God is the Universal Kingdom, including everyone and everything—all interests, all commerce, all government, all invention, all art, all amusement, all the staid pursuits of the old and all the ardour of the young, all sport, all laughter, all that makes for gladness. It is the Kingdom of the bird and the flower and the horse and the motor-car and the motion-picture house and the office and the theatre and the ballroom and the school and the college and everything else that man has evolved for himself. He has evolved these things wrongly because nine times out of ten he has seen them as outside God's Kingdom, instead as being God's own undertakings because they are ours. All that we have to do to seek His Kingdom is to do what we are doing every day, with energy and fun, but to do it knowing we are His agents and co-workers. As a matter of fact, most of us are, to some extent, doing that already, getting food, shelter, clothing, and all other necessary things as our reward. What we do not get is relief from fear, because we do not understand that fear above all things is what He would take away from us.



VI

The second point is a curious one, and all the more emphatic for being curious. Our Lord invents a false god. He names the false god of fear, who was never named before. Mammon is the word which the modern translator gives as gold. As Mammon it is translated in the Authorised Version, whence we get the familiar phrase, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon."

But Mammon was never the name of an idol or other form of false deity. The word, which is Syriac, means money. Our Lord, apparently, made it the name of a false god in order to set before us, and make vivid to us, a false principle.

That false principle is in the belief that the material essentials for living and expanding are dependent on man's economic laws.

This is a point of vast importance to the individual who desires to strike out beyond the crowd, not only getting what he needs, but ridding himself of fear.

The law of supply and demand is the most practical which the human race in its present stage has been able to evolve. That it is not an ideal law is obvious. There are ways in which it works, and ways in which it does not. When the Christians began to act for themselves they established a community of goods, such as had obtained among the little band who gathered round our Lord. Almost at once it was given up, presumably as being too advanced for the existing world of men. I suppose we might say the same of the various systems of Socialism and Communism urged on us at the present day. However good they may be, we are not ready to put them into practice. That, I judge—without positively knowing—is the reason why certain great Christian bodies oppose both. These bodies, I assume, are not hostile to equal distribution in itself, but only to equal distribution before men are developed to a stage at which it would be wise.

But my point is independent of all men's theories, and rests simply on the fact that, whatever the law of man, God is not bound by it.

If we can believe the Old and New Testaments—which, of course, some of us do not—He has shown on many, many occasions that He is far from being bound by it. Time after time He comes to the individual's relief according to His own law. We reject these occurrences as mythical on the ground that the laws of supply and demand—and some other laws as law is understood by us—do not support them; and yet it is in the power of the individual to test the truth for himself.

That is one of the burdens of both Testaments. The individual is implored to see the only real system for the distribution of "goods" as God's. It is not expressed in that way, but that is what it comes to. God owns and disposes of everything. He has not put us into His Universe and left us to fend for ourselves. He follows us. He cares for us. Not one is forgotten or overlooked by Him. It is personal watching and brooding and defence. He is our Father, not merely for the purpose of hearing us sing hymns, and forgiving our sins when we stop committing them, but for all our aims and objects. Nothing that concerns us is so small but that His Infinite Intelligence follows it; no need of ours is so large but that His All-Ownership can meet it. "Do not two sparrows sell for a half-penny?" is our Lord's illustration on this point, "yet not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father's leave. But as for you," He reasons, in order that we may understand the infinitesimal nature of God's care, "the very hairs on your heads are all numbered. Away then with fear!"[31]

[31] St Matthew.



VII

Away then with fear, because our first and over-ruling and all-determining relationship is to Him.

In eliminating money-fears from my own life that was the fact which helped me most. I had not only to seize it intellectually, but to get what William James calls the "feeling" of it, the apprehension of it in my subconsciousness. It was like acquiring a new instinct. The Metanoia, the re-directing of my thought, was a thorough and basic change.

It meant getting up in the morning with a new conception as to why I was working and for whom. I had taken it for granted hitherto that I was working for such and such a firm, for as much money as they would pay me. As much money as they would pay me was the limit of my expectation. Beyond the law of supply and demand I had no vision; and whenever the demand fell short fear was the result.

The change in my base was in seeing that working for such and such a firm, for as much money as they would pay me, was merely incidental. It was secondary. It was not what determined my position. It was not what determined my reward. It was a small way of looking at a situation which was big. It was a small way of looking at a situation which was big, merely to confine my objective to such selling and buying as goes on in the planet called the Earth. I was working for the Master of the Universe, who had all the resources of the universe with which to pay me for what I was worth to Him.



VIII

It is this last fact, as I have hinted already, which fixes my true value. To the firm for which I am working I am worth so many dollars and cents, and if for any reason I am unable to do their work they will get someone else who can. I am not essential to them in any way, however essential they may be to me. It is my part to "keep my job," since if I don't I may find it hard to get another. If I do get another it will be on the same principle, of being paid what I can be made to work for, and not a penny more.

But in working for the Master of the Universe I am working for One to whom I am essential. My "job" could not be "swung" by anyone else, since everyone else is essential to the swinging of his own. I am not "taken on" to do what anyone else could do as well; I am positively needed for this thing and for no other thing.

The nature of "this thing" for which I am needed may be seen in the obvious duties of my situation—as regards my family, my employers, and my surroundings, which sum up my responsibilities toward men in general. No explanation of myself can be independent of men in general, since my work is for them in its final aim. If I forget them I forget God, God expressing Himself to me through men in general, as through my family and my employers in particular.

Incidentally, then, I work for men, but essentially and consciously I work for God, and look to God for my recompense.

Now God is the most generous of all paymasters. It is natural enough that He should be so. He who delights in the grace of a bird or the colour of a flower must delight in a man in proportion to a man's higher place in the creative scale. As our Lord points out, that is no more than common sense. And, delighting in us as He does, God could not possibly stint us in what we earn from Him. Merely to suppose so is to dishonour Him. A large part of His joy must be in our joy.

The simplest way in which I can express it is that in consciously trying to work with God, not man, as our employer, things happen to us which, to the best of our foresight, would not have happened otherwise. Often they seem accidental, and possibly we ascribe them to accident till the coincidences become too numerous to explain by coincidence and nothing more. It constantly happens to myself, for instance, to find the whole solution of some tangled financial problem hanging on the chance turning of my steps to someone's office, and the chance turning of the conversation to some specific observation. Chance is the explanation which comes to me first, till I reflect on the finespun chain which brought me to that particular spot and those particular words. Leading is what I see then; and seeing it once I am more confident of being led the next time. The next time, therefore, I am the less afraid, having the definite experience to support me.

There are millions of men and women to whom life brings no more than the monotony of a treadmill round, year in and year out, with a cramping of mind, spirit, and ambition, who might have been free had they measured themselves by God's standards and not by men's. It is simply the taking of a point of view, and adjusting the life to it. In doing one's work primarily for God, the fear of undue restriction is put, sooner or later, out of the question. He pays me and He pays me well. He pays me and He will not fail to pay me. He pays me not merely for the rule of thumb task which is all that men recognise, but for everything else I bring to my job in the way of industry, good intention, and cheerfulness. If the Lord loveth a cheerful giver, as St Paul says, we may depend upon it that He loveth a cheerful worker; and where we can cleave the way to His love there we find His endless generosity.

In my own case this generosity has most frequently been shown in opening doors for me where I saw nothing but blank walls. He has made favourable things happen. It may be said that they would have happened anyhow; but when they have happened on my looking to Him, and have not happened when I did not look to Him, it is only fair to draw the conclusion that He was behind the event.



IX

It may also be urged that if there was really a God who delighted in us He would make favourable things happen to us whether we looked to Him or not. So He does. Every life, even among those who never think of Him, is full of such occurrences. Every individual gets some measure of supply for his necessities, and in many instances a liberal one. God's sun rises on the wicked as well as on the good, and His rain falls on those who do right and those who do wrong.

At the same time there is a force generated by working consciously with Him which we have to go without when we disregard Him. It is not, I suppose, that He refuses to co-operate with us, but that it is out of our power to co-operate with Him. If His is the only right way to our success and prosperity, and we are, to any extent, taking the wrong, it stands to reason that to that extent we must fail.

It is doubtless for this reason that our Lord emphasises seeking His righteousness as well as His Kingdom. His Kingdom might be roughly defined as His power; righteousness as the right way of doing anything. But you never obtain power by going the wrong way to work; whereas by working in the right way you get your result. The conclusion is obvious.



X

It is often objected to the point of view I have been trying to express that so much weight is thrown on material blessing. God gives spiritual rewards, it is contended, not material ones. To expect the material from Him is to make Him gross, and to become gross ourselves.

And yet those who put forth this objection are doing their utmost to secure material comforts, and to make material provision for the future. Are they doing it independently of God? Are they working in a medium into which God cannot enter? Is it argued for a single minute that "goods" are not God's good things, and that money is not their token? True, the love of money is the root of all evil. Of course—when you separate money from God, as Caucasians mostly do; not when you take money as one of the material symbols for God's love toward his sons.

As a matter of fact, we dig a gulf between the material and the spiritual which does not exist. We have seen that modern physical science is showing us how near to spirit matter comes, while it is highly probable that further research will diminish even the slight existing difference between them. Matter may really be considered as our sensuous misreading of the spiritual. That is to say, God sees one thing; our senses see another. In the wild lily cited by our Lord our senses see a thing exquisite in form and colour; and yet, relatively speaking, it is no more than a distortion of what God beholds and delights in. It is a commonplace fact that, even within the limitations of the senses, our sense-faculties perceive few things, if anything, quite accurately. Matter may therefore be considered as our wrong view of what God sees rightly. Both for Him and for us the object is there; but it is there with higher qualities than we can appreciate or understand.

The situation is not unknown among ourselves. A picture by a great master hangs on a wall. Two men look at it—the one with an expert knowledge of painting, the other with none. The untrained eye will translate into daubs of colour and meaningless forms what the skilled understanding will perceive as a masterly setting forth of beauty. So the good things—the "goods"—with which God blesses us, as well as the money which is their symbol, may be taken as having to God a meaning which they do not possess for us, but not as being outside the sphere of His interest and control.



XI

It is the tendency to puts "goods" and money outside the sphere of His interest and control which has impelled us—and perhaps the Caucasian especially—to have one God for the spiritual and another for the material. We try to serve God and Mammon to an extent far beyond anything we are generally aware of. It is not merely the individual who is doing it; it is part of our collective, social, and national life. Our civilisation is more or less based on the principle.

It is a mistake to suppose that a formal belief in One Almighty, All-knowing, All-loving God has, to the immense majority of us, ever been more than an ideal. It is a mistake to suppose that because the false god is no longer erected before us in silver or stone he is no longer served. The world has never outgrown idolatry, the so-called Christian world no more than any other. "Dear children," are the words with which St. John closes one of his epistles, "guard yourselves from idols." He at least did not think that the idol had been forsaken because the use of his name was given up.

We may define as a god any force to which we ascribe a supreme and controlling power in our lives. It is of little consequence whether or not we give it name and personality, so long as that force rules us. So long, too, as it wields a power which the One God does not, so long as we make the false god greater than the true, and more influential.

This is no mere figure of speech; it is fact. We have never guarded ourselves from idols. We have never done more toward recognising the Father than the putting Him in the pantheon with our other gods. Even though we have inscribed the whole pantheon with His name, the other gods have been in it.



XII

I have said that our whole collective life is based on the principle of one God for the soul and another for the body; and so it is. In what we call our temporal life God gets only a formal recognition, while Mammon is the referee. Beyond the controlling power of money we have no vision, and we see no laws. The sphere of material productivity being one in which, according to our foregone conclusion, God does not operate, we have to make the controlling power of money our only practical standard. It has its laws—chiefly the laws of supply and demand—within whose working we human beings are caught like flies in spider-webs. Though we struggle, and know we are struggling, we take it for granted that there is nothing to do but struggle, and struggle vainly. We take it for granted that we are born into a vast industrial spider-web, whence there is no possibility of getting out, and in which we can only churn our spirits rebelliously. In proportion as God is a God of love, Mammon is a god of torture; but such is our supineness of spiritual energy that we go on serving Mammon.



XIII

But I am writing only for the individual. I am trying to suggest to him that however much his race, his nation, his society, may serve Mammon, he is free to renounce the idol and escape the idol's laws. Escaping the idol's laws he comes within the realm of God's laws; and coming within the realm of God's laws he reaches the region of plenty.

He may be the poorest and most ill-paid labourer; but God will recognise his industry not in proportion to its technical skill, but according to the spiritual excellence which goes into it. Technical skill depends largely on the right man finding the right job; but as our world is organised at present the right man, more often than not, is put into the wrong job and has to do his best with it. God sees and estimates that best; and as surely as He makes His sun to rise and His rain to fall will give it its just compensation.



XIV

Our industrial questions are primarily spiritual. That is why they can never be settled on a purely economic basis, and why every attempt to settle them on a purely economic basis leads to conditions more confused than those from which we have emerged. The so-called purely economic basis is the basis where only Mammon's laws are considered, and God's are held to be impractical.

Quite so! But even then the individual is free. Working with God he is always master of the situation as it affects him.

The problem of Capital and Labour, for example, has, in one form or another, been before the world for thousands of years. The more acute it becomes the further we are from a solution, and were never so far from a solution as we are to-day. Poverty, again, is the canker at the heart of both Church and State, and has been so in every stage of our civilisation. In 1921 it is no more under control than it was in the days of Charlemagne or Attila or Xerxes. Charitable efforts to relieve it have proved as effective as tickling with a feather to cure disease. Or again, high prices and low wages, high wages creating high prices, resented conditions leading to strikes, strikes bringing confusion to both wages and prices alike—these things perplex the most clear-sighted among us, compelling us to wonder as to what new troubles we are heaping up. Or again, taxes crippling incomes and gnawing at the heart of industry vex us each year with a sense of the futility of all man's efforts for the common good, and the uselessness of our energies. These difficulties, with many kindred ones, are the working of the laws of Mammon. The case is simple. We shall never be free from the difficulties till we are free from the laws. The bondservants of Mammon will go on from misery to misery, till the will which opposes God is broken down. There is no other way. The colossal disintegration of the world now taking place before our eyes may be the beginning of this end.



XV

But I return to the point I have emphasised already, the only point to this book. The individual can act on his own account. He does not have to wait till the race as a whole gives up the service of Mammon, or even the nation to which he belongs. He can set himself free, and enjoy the benefits of freedom.

There must be many to whom, as to myself, the kingdom of heaven will really be at hand when they are delivered from the snares and entanglements of man's economic systems. Caught in those systems, imprisoned in them, more hopelessly enmeshed the more they struggle to save themselves, the suggestion that a change in point of view will take us out of them will seem to some of us too amazing to be true.

Nothing will prove it true but a man's own experience. Mine will convince nobody; no other man's can convince me. Demonstration must be personal before we can make anything our own. But the fact remains, as sure as the surest thing we know anything about, that the law of Mammon does not work, while the law of God does work, and will work for anyone who calls it to his aid.

No one who has ever seen the early morning trains into any great city vomiting forth their hundreds of thousands of men and women, trudging more or less dispiritedly to uncongenial jobs, can have felt anything but pity for so many lives squeezed into the smallest possible limitations. Admitting cheerfulness, admitting a measure of content, and a larger measure of acceptance of what can't be helped, there still remains over these hordes the shadow of a cloud from which they know they never will escape. Clerks, factory hands, tradesmen, working men and women of every stamp and occupation, they bow to the fact that they will always work hard at tasks which are rarely their own choice, that they will always work for little money, that they will always be denied their desires for expansion; that as it was with their fathers and mothers before them, so it will be with them, and so it will be with their children after them.

With the supineness of our race most of them force themselves to be satisfied with what comes. But here and there is a rebel. Here and there is a man or a woman who feels that joyless work, and small pay, and little or nothing to look forward to, are cruel elements in life, not fair, not just, on the part of God or man. But what can they do? They are in man's economic machine. The machine turns round and they turn with it. They can do nothing else but turn with it. They see no prospect except of turning with it till they die.

It is out of such men and women that our modern world breeds revolutionists, that exalted and yet dangerous band who seek redress from the laws of Mammon by appealing to the laws of Mammon, so making confusion worse confounded.



XVI

A revolution indeed is needed; but a revolution in point of view.

Political revolution, for the sake of righting governmental abuses, has been known to produce beneficent results.

Material revolution, the attack of the poor on the rich to take away their possessions, has never achieved anything. Many a time it has been tried, and many a time it has failed. Being part of the system of Mammon it could do nothing else than fail. The evils which Mammon has wrought Mammon will never remedy. There may be instances in history of economic cures for economic ills; but I think they are few. In general such cures are of the nature of our "settlements" of strikes. They settle to-day what is again unsettled to-morrow, leaving the work to be done all over again, and so on into a far future.

The revolution in point of view has these great advantages:

First, it contains within it the seeds of success, since it is revolution toward God, the owner of the Earth and the fulness thereof; Next, it takes place within the individual himself, doing no one else any harm;

Lastly, it does not run counter to man's economic laws; it only uses and transcends them. It directs and corrects them. Working along their lines it stimulates their fruit. Letting the inner man out of the economic trap it sets him in a world in which first, and last, and before everything else, he is God's servant in God's pay. God's pay being sure, and paid in the way we need it, we no longer have money-fear to be afraid of. Money-fear being set aside we can the more easily give ourselves to the knowledge that "the Kingdom of God does not consist of eating and drinking, but of right conduct, peace, and joy, through the Holy Spirit; and whoever in this way devotedly serves Christ, God takes pleasure in him, and men commend him highly."[32]

[32] Epistle to the Romans.



XVII

And lest what I have said should seem fanciful or chimerical let me add that I am not saying these things merely on my own responsibility. To my certain knowledge there are hundreds of thousands—some millions—of people throughout the world who at this very minute are living according to this principle, and proving that it works in practical effect.

Neither am I speaking theoretically, as I have tried to make plain. To a degree that convinces myself I have made the demonstration. Where my life was like a dark and crooked lane in which I might easily be lost, it has now become as an easy and open highway; where money-fear was the very air I breathed, it is now no more than a nebulous shred on a far horizon. Money-fear comes occasionally; but only as the memory of pain to a wound which you know to be healed. It comes; but, like Satan out of Heaven, I can cast it from me with a thought.



CHAPTER VII

THE FALSE GOD OF FEAR AND THE FEAR OF DEATH



I

The fear of death was greatly diminished for me on grasping the principle of everlasting Growth.

This principle we gather from whatever we know of life. Our observation of life is, of course, limited to this planet; but as far as it goes it shows us a persistent and perpetual system of development. We have only to let our imaginations go back to the first feeble stirrings of life in the ooze of the primeval seas, contrasting that with what it became in Plato, Sophocles, St. Peter, St. Paul, Raphael, Shakespeare, and Darwin, to see how high the climb upward has reached. Jesus of Nazareth I put on a plane to which we have not yet attained, though in sight as the great objective.



II

That the same law operates in the individual life is a matter of everyone's experience. Such knowledge as each man has of himself is that of a growing entity. Each year, each day, expands him a little further, with increased fulness of character. At thirty he is more than he was at twenty; at fifty more than he was at thirty; at eighty more than he was at fifty. Nothing but a perverted mortal point of view stands in the way of further expansion still.

The perverted mortal point of view is one of the impulses we have to struggle with. The mortal tendency, which means the deadly tendency, always seeks to kill whatever has the principle of life. This tendency is in every one of us; but in some of us more than in others.

You can see it at work in the morbid mind, in the mind that is easily depressed, and in the mind that easily closes.

Perhaps it is in this last that it becomes our most pernicious enemy. The closing mind is found in all our ranks; the closed mind is the deadwood of all our professions. It is not only deadwood; it is death-in-life, the foe of the developing life-principle, the enemy of the Holy Ghost.

That the dead mind should be found among people who have had few intellectual advantages is not surprising. On them it is forced from without, by sheer pressure of circumstance. Where it is most painful is precisely where it does most harm, among the classes we call professional. There, too, it seems commonest. Lawyers, doctors, clergymen, teachers, writers, politicians, business men with dead minds choke all the highways of life. To the extent that they have influence they are obstacles to progress; but sooner or later the time comes when they no longer have influence. Life shelves them on the plea that they are old; but that is not the reason. They are shelved because they have killed their minds, becoming living dead men.

As a matter of fact, one of the most valuable of our social and national assets is the old man who has kept his mind open. Found all too rarely, he is never shelved, for the reason that life cannot do without him. Having the habit of expansion he continues to expand, keeping abreast of youth and even a little in advance of it. The exception rather than the rule, there is no reason why he should not be the racial type.



III

He is not the racial type because so many of us begin to die almost as soon as we have begun to live. Our very fear of the death-principle admits it into our consciousness. Admitted into our consciousness it starts its work of killing us. It wrinkles the face, it turns the hair grey, it enfeebles the limbs, it stupefies the brain. One of its most deadly weapons is fatigue, or the simulation of fatigue. The tired business man, who rules American life, is oftener than not a dead business man. If he looked ahead he would see what we idiomatically know as his "finish." He is not only dying but he infuses death into manners, literature, and art, since he so largely sets the standard which becomes the rule.

War on the death-principle should be, it seems to me, one of the aims to which the individual gives his strength; and once more he can do it on his own account.

In the first place, he can watch himself, that he does not mentally begin to grow old. To begin mentally to grow old is to begin mentally to die. He must think of himself as an expanding being, not as a contracting one. He must keep in sympathetic touch with the new, damning the know-it-all frame of mind. He must keep in sympathetic touch with youth, knowing that youth is the next generation in advance. The secrets of one generation are not those of another; but if he who possesses the earlier masters also the later he is that much the richer and wiser. The gulf which separates parents and children is one which the parents must cross. They can work onward, while the children cannot work backward. Up to a certain point the older teach the younger; beyond a certain point the younger teach the older. He who would go on living and not begin to die must be willing to be taught, reaping the harvest of both youth and age.

In the second place, he who would live must not kill anyone else. The deadly tendency in ourselves is forever at work on those about us, chiefly on those we love. We watch, tabulate, and recount their symptoms of decay. Making notes of them for ourselves we discourse of them to others. "He begins to look old," is a commonplace. The response will probably emphasise the fact. By response to response we spin round a friend the age-web which lengthens into the death-web. In our expressive American vernacular we speak of "wishing" conditions on others, an instinctive folk-recognition of the force of mentality. We do it in a sinister sense more often than by way of helpfulness. We "wish" by thinking, by talking, by creating an atmosphere, by forcing things into the general consciousness. Old age and decay, bad enough in themselves, we intensify by our habits of mind. Death, which in any case awaits our friends, we woo to them by anticipations of demise. It is not ill-intentioned. It comes out of a subconsciousness in which death and not life is the base.



IV

For most of us the fear of death is a subconscious rather than an active fear. It becomes active for those who through illness, or in some other way, see a sentence of death hanging over them; but during the greater part of the life-span we are able to beat it off.

As to the life-span itself there is reason to suppose that it is meant to be more regular than man allows it to become. There may easily be an "appointed time" to which we do not suffer ourselves, or each other, to attain. Those strange, inequalities by which one human being is left to pass over the century mark, another is cut off just when he is most needed, while a third does no more than touch this plane for an hour or two, may be the results of our misreadings of God's Will, and not the decrees of that Will itself.

We are here on ground which may be termed that of speculation; and yet speculation is not quite the right word. I dare to think that we have reached a stage of our development at which we are entitled to make with regard to death certain inferences which were hardly possible before our time. We may make them timidly, with all hesitation and reserve, aware that we cannot propound them as facts; and yet we may make them. The human mind is no longer where it was a hundred years ago, still less where it was five hundred years ago. Though we make little progress we make some. We are not always marking time on the same spot of ignorance and helplessness. What is mystery for one age is not of necessity mystery for another. Even when mysteries remain, they do not of necessity remain without some hint of a dawn which may broaden into day. Many of our most precious illuminations have come in just this way; a faint light—which slowly, feebly, through centuries perhaps, waxes till it becomes a radiance.



V

I talked some time ago to an orthodox Christian lady whose brother had recently died, and who was speaking of death.

"The one mystery," she called it, "on which no single ray of light has been vouchsafed in all the ages man has been on earth."

I did not agree with her, but knowing her to be an orthodox Christian lady I did not venture to express my opinion.

But hers is the position which many, perhaps most, of us take. "No one has ever come back," we say, "to tell us what his experience has been," and we drop the subject there. Not only do we drop the subject there, but we resent it if everyone else does not drop the subject there. "God has hidden it from us," we declare, "and what He has hidden from us it is presumption for us to pry into." It is useless to urge the fact that this way of reasoning would have kept us still in the Stone Age; we are not to be reached by argument.

Let me say at once that I am not taking up the question of the psychic, or entering into it at all. I shall keep myself to the two points of view which have helped me, as an individual, to overcome, to some degree, the fear of death, considering them in reverse order from that in which I have mentioned them. Those two points of view are:

A. That, according to God's Will, we come into this phase of being for an "appointed time" which we do not always reach;

B. That we pass out of this phase of being as we came into it, for Growth.



VI

A. The question of an appointed time seems important chiefly to the right understanding of God's love. Between us and the understanding of that love bereavement is often a great obstacle. Oftener still it is a great puzzle. I do not have to catalogue the conditions in which the taking away of men, women, and children, sorely needed here if for no other purpose than to love, has moved us to deep perplexity, or to something like a doubt of God. We have probably all known cases where such tragedy has driven sufferers to renounce God altogether, and to curse Him. Some of us who have been smitten may have come near to doing this ourselves, or may have done it.



VII

I have already spoken of the Caucasian's habit of shuffling off on God those ills for which he will not face the responsibility himself, and I am inclined to think that this is one of them. In my own experience the explanation of "God's Will" made to the mother of a little family left fatherless, or to the parents of a dead baby, or to a young man with a young wife in her coffin, has always been revolting. I have made it; I have tried, on the faith of others, to think it must be so. I have long since ceased to think it, and feel happier for not crediting the Universal Father with any such futile tricks.

I should not go so far as to say that we human beings have misapplied the laws of life in such a way as to kill those who are dear to us; rather, I think, we have never learned those laws except in their merest rudiments. We are not yet prepared to do more than bungle the good things offered us on earth, and more or less misuse them. We misuse them ourselves; we teach others to misuse them; we create systems of which the pressure is so terrible that under it the weak can do nothing but die. We give them no chance. We squeeze the life out of them. And then we say piously, "The blessed Will of God!"

As an illustration of what I mean let me cite the two following cases among people I have known:

A young lady belonging to a family of means was found to be suffering from incipient tuberculosis. The doctors ordered her to Saranac. To Saranac she went, with two nurses. Within eighteen months she was home again, quite restored to health. This was as it should have been.

At the same time I knew a car-conductor, married some six or seven years, and the father of three children. He, too, was found to be suffering from incipient tuberculosis. He, too, was ordered to Saranac. But having a wife and three children to support, Saranac was out of the question. He went on conducting his car till his cough became distressing, whereupon he was "fired." A minimum allowance from his church kept the family from starvation, while the nearest approach to Saranac that could be contrived was an arrangement by which he slept with his head out the window. In course of time he died, and his widow was exhorted to submit to the Will of God.



VIII

I cite the latter case as typical of millions and millions of deaths of the kind at which we stand aghast at God's extraordinary rulings. Why is it, we ask, that He snatches away those who are needed, leaving those who might be spared? As to the latter part of the question I have nothing to say; but when it comes to "snatching away" I feel it important to "absolve God" of the blame for it.

In the instance I have quoted the blame for it is clear. Falling on no one individual, it does fall on an organisation of life which gives all the chances to some, denying them to others. So long as we feel unable to improve on this organisation we shall have these inequalities. But let us face honestly the consequences they bring. Let us not confuse all the issues of life and death as we do, by saddling the good and beautiful Will of God with the ills we make for ourselves.



IX

All untimely bereavement is, of course, not of the nature of the above illustration. And yet I venture to believe that in all untimely bereavement some similar explanation could be found. For example, in the intervals of writing these lines I have been reading a recent biography of Madame de Maintenon. In it is a chapter describing the series of catastrophes which fell on Louis the Fourteenth, and the French kingdom, within little more than a twelvemonth. His son and heir, his grandson, the second heir, his great-grandson, the third heir, the second heir's wife, and still another grandson were all carried off by smallpox. In the apartments of Madame de Maintenon, his wife, the aged monarch was counselled to submit to the awful Will of God which saw fit thus to smite him. What no one perceived was that by crowding round the bed of each sufferer in turn the survivors courted contagion.

But, there again, it is not much more than a century since this fact became known to anyone. Easily within living memory is the discovery that disease is due to bacteria. Our whole system of sanitation is of recent development, and obtains only among the English and the Americans even now. In many parts of Europe and America, to say nothing of Asia and Africa, people still live as in the Middle Ages, and infant mortality is appalling. Those of us who pay most attention to sanitary laws live unhealthily, diminishing our powers to resist attack. I mention these facts, not as making a list of them, but to indicate the many causes through which we bring bereavement on ourselves, when the Will of God would naturally make for survival and happiness.

It must never be forgotten that in this phase of our existence we never carry out that Will except to a remote degree. We only struggle towards doing it. When great sorrows come it is because in the struggle we have not been successful. Either we ourselves have failed; or the failure of others affects us indirectly. While God's Will may be for our happiness, we can attain to neither the happiness nor the Will—as yet.

Nevertheless, we would not have it otherwise. In our more thoughtless or more agonised minutes we are likely to cry out for a life in which the conditions ensuring our happiness could not so easily miscarry; but that would mean a static life, and a static life, above all things, we will not endure. As already seen, we ask for difficulties to conquer, successes to achieve. To contend is our instinct, not to be passive and enjoy.

Difficulties to conquer can only exist side by side with the possibility of not conquering them. The victory which is merely a walk-over is scarcely a victory. Achievement counts only when something has been overcome. Even then the overcoming of one thing merely spurs us on to overcome another. To rest on our laurels is doom. For a race which has the infinite as its goal the word must be on and on. The static heaven of bearing palms and playing harps and bliss, which the naive interpretation of our fathers drew from the imagery of the Apocalypse, has long since made us rebellious. Something to strive for we demand, even at the risk of bereavement.



X

It is at once the disadvantage and the glory of our own generation that it is only on the fourth or fifth step of the stairway by which we are climbing. But at least it is heir to the conquests which go to its stage of advance. Untimely bereavement is less common to-day than it was a few centuries ago; it is more common to-day than it will be a few centuries hence. Such storms of affliction as in 1712 swept over the house of Louis Quatorze occur less frequently now. But they still occur. We have not got beyond them. They are only bound to occur less and less frequently, till they become no more than matters of scarcely credible record.

In the meanwhile it may be a comfort to others, as it is to me, to be able to "absolve God" from the charge of capricious and intolerable thwarting of our love. To me, at least, the blow is easier to bear when I know that His beloved hand didn't strike it. I cannot understand being tortured out of sheer love, while patience with what leaves me with my whole life maimed is only the patience of the vanquished.

On the other hand, I can bear with my mistakes, I can bear with the mistakes of others, I can bear with the failures which are the fruit of our lack of race-development, so long as I know that God is on my side. The affliction which would be too poignant as coming directly from Him is half soothed already when I know that He is soothing it. I may have lost what He gave; but far from snatching it from me He would have had me keep it. Of all my comforts that assurance is the first.

In addition, I have the satisfaction—a meagre satisfaction you may call it, but a satisfaction all the same—of knowing that by the ploughing and harrowing of my heart a step is taken toward that future in which hearts shall be less harrowed and ploughed. "It must never happen again." That is what we keep saying with regard to the Great War. Well, it may happen again. We have as yet no trustworthy pledge to the contrary. But of this we may be sure, that it will not happen again very often. It is less likely to happen again for the very reason that it has happened. If the Great War does not prove to be the last war it is the more probable that the next war will. I mean that we do learn our lessons, though we learn them only as feeble-minded children learn theirs. Agony by agony, something is gained, and my personal agony counts with the rest. The fact may give me no more than the faintest consolation, and possibly none at all; and still in the long, slow stages of our upward climb my agony counts, whether its counting consoles me or not.



XI

The inference that we come into the life of this planet for an "appointed time" we draw from what we see of God's system of order. All other things do so, as far as we observe. The plant springs, to grow and bloom, to bear fruit and seed, and so renew itself. Fish, bird, and animal have their appointed round varying only in detail from that of the plant. Man's appointed round would seem to vary only in detail from that of the animal, except that he himself interferes with it.

To the best of my knowledge the plant, from the blade of grass to the oak or the orchid, always fulfils its life-span, unless some act or accident cripples or destroys it. I mean that we never see God bringing the shoot above the soil just to nip it before it unfolds. We never see Him bring the bud to the eve of blossoming just to wither it. Having given it its mission He supplies it with rain, sun, and sustenance to bring that mission to its end. True, the plant has enemies, like everything else, enemies which it may not escape. But generally speaking, it does escape them, and lives to finish its task.

So, too, with the more active living thing. It, too, has its enemies. It, too, may not escape them. But assuming that it does, God allows it, to the best of our observation, to work out its full development. The only "bereavement" he brings to the lion, the thrush, or the elephant, or any other creature capable of grief is, apparently, from those hostile sources of which the hostility is more or less gratuitous. A man shoots a lion, or the lion kills an antelope; but they do so through misreading of God's Will, not through fulfilling it.

For the lower ranks of creation misread that Will in their way as much as the higher in theirs. All ferocity must be misinterpretation of the divine law of harmony and mutual help. Internecine destruction probably has a meaning we can only guess at. Guessing at it we are at liberty to surmise that what God sees as loving contention for excellence, each gaining by the other's gain, we understand as bitter strife, and consumption of the flesh and blood. The rivalry we can best appreciate is that of brutality; the chief benefit the stronger creature seeks from the weaker is in killing and eating him. Why this should be part of our struggle I do not know; but part of our struggle it seems to be—from the humblest organism up to man—the mistaking of God's Will before learning to understand it.

And lest I should seem to assume too much, in saying this, let me add that our progress out of this state of preying on each other has long been foreseen by the pioneers of truth. The vision is at least as ancient as Isaiah, when he descried from afar the accomplished rule of the Son of David:

"With righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth.... And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together.... And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the seas."



XII

If I am correct in thinking that our passage across the life of this planet is meant to last for an "appointed time," I presume that that time would be measured by experience rather than by years. There exists what we vaguely call the round of life. We are born; we grow; we know family interests; we learn; we work; we love; we marry; we beget children; we train them to take our places; we pass beyond. There are variations on this routine, some of us having more, some of us having less; but in general it may be taken as typical. It is our mission, as the plants and the lower living things have theirs.

It seems reasonable, then, to think that each baby born is meant by the Father's Will to reap this experience before it proceeds to further experience. It must be a stage in its growth or it would not come into it. When it is balked of it something is amiss. The child who dies in infancy has lost something. The lad or the girl whom our organised life drives from this plane before reaching fruition has lost something. The parent whom our conditions force onward before he has brought his task to a stage at which he can peacefully lay it down has lost something. I am not saying that God does not control resources by which that loss can be abundantly made up, but only that the loss would seem to be there. It is loss for the one who departs as well as for those who remain behind.



XIII

That is what I gather from the instances in the Old and New Testament in which those who had gone on before their time were called back again. There are six of these instances in all: one in the Old Testament, and five in the New. Of four of them we are expressly told that those restored were young; of the other two nothing is said as to age, but one at least was probably young, while the other was greatly needed.

The child called back by Elisha was still a little boy. The daughter of Jairus was still a little girl. The son of the widow of Nain was a young man, as was also Eutychus raised by St. Paul. Though we are not told the age of Lazarus we judge that he was at most no more than in man's maturity. Dorcas of Lydda may have been of any age, but, judging by the circumstances, she had not completed her task.



XIV

My point is this, that if these things happened, they seem to bear out my suggestion that our own inducement of premature death cuts us off from fulfilling our appointed time and getting our appointed experience. Only on some such ground can we believe that any would be permitted to return.

Should this be so we would be in a position to assume that all who go over ahead of time would be allowed to come back, if we had sufficient spiritual power to recall them. But that power is of the rarest. Our Lord, apparently, was in control of it only at times, and on at least one occasion, that of the raising of Lazarus, its exercise was not what we should call easy. But that He believed it to be at human command to some extent is clear from the fact that its use became one of His four basic principles. "Raise the dead," was the second of the commands with which He sent out his first seventy disciples.



XV

I dwell on the subject only because of its bearing on the love of God. If it becomes plain to us that by the understanding of God's Will we gain a richer experience, with less fear of being cut off before our work is done, that Will makes a stronger appeal for being understood. That we have not understood it earlier, that we have not particularly cared to understand it, is due, I think, to our assumption of its capriciousness. It has been so underscored as inscrutable—the word generally applied to it—that the man in the street has felt mystified by it from the start. Being mystified he has settled down to think as little about it as he could.

But a great force striving with man to put common sense into his methods is worth comprehending. It does not compel us to common-sense methods for the reason that we value only that which we work out for ourselves. We work nothing out but through suffering. We learn nothing, we take no forward step, except as we are whipped to it by anguish. That is why there is so much mourning in the world. God does not cause it; we bring it on ourselves; but each time we bring it on ourselves we creep one tiny step nearer that race-conclusion which is now coming to us about war, and will one day come to us about death, that "It must never happen again."



XVI

In other words, death will be abolished by race-unanimity not to submit to it. We shall have travelled far in this direction when the average mind begins to perceive that God did not send death into His creation, but that we ourselves developed it. Having developed it ourselves we must get rid of it ourselves, and already some of that work has been done. "For seeing that death came through man," are the words of St. Paul, "through man comes also the resurrection of the dead." When he speaks of "Jesus Christ who hath abolished death," his words are stronger still. "He has put an end to death and has brought Life and Immortality to light by the Good News, of which I have been appointed a preacher, apostle, and teacher."

This Life and Immortality are not to be relegated to other ages and worlds; they are for us to work out now.

The degree to which we work them out depends on our own efforts. Death will be our doom for many generations to come, because so few of us have the energy to strive against it. Release can come only when the race at large is willing to cast the evil thing off. One would suppose that we would be willing now; but we are far from being willing. We shall go on forcing our dear ones to die before their time, falling sick ourselves, enduring agonies, and rotting in graves, till we have suffered to the point at which we cry out that we have had enough. There will be a day when in presence of the useless thing we shall say, with something amounting to one accord, "It must stop." That day will be the beginning of the end of the age-long curse to which we still submit ourselves. In the language of St. Paul, "The last enemy to be destroyed is death," leaving us with the belief that, when we have progressed to the overthrow of other forces opposed to us, we shall go on to the overthrow of this one—and that it will be overthrown.



XVII

From one kind of fear this reasoning has almost entirely delivered me—that of being taken away in the midst of my responsibilities, and before my work is done. I am not so audacious as to say that it may not happen; but only that, reasoning as I do, I am no longer a prey to apprehensions on the point. They used to come to me, not like the money-fear, an abiding visitant, but in spells of intense dread.

I suppose that most men with families, and much unfinished business, know this dread, and have suffered from it. You think of the home you have built up, and of what it would be without you. You think of your wife, grappling with a kind of difficulty to which she is unaccustomed. You think of your children who turn to you as their central point, and who would be left without your guidance. You think of other duties you have undertaken, and wonder who will carry them through. You seem to be so essential to everyone and everything; and yet, you have been told, it may be the Will of God to remove you from them, and either let your plans collapse, or put their execution on the shoulders of someone else.

I am not so presumptuous as to say that for me this may not happen. I only say that I do not think it will. I do not think so because, according to my judgment, He having helped me to go as far as I have gone, will help me to finish my task before giving me another one.

My task, I think, He must estimate as I do. That is, my duties to others being not wholly of my choosing, but having come to me according to what I may call His weighing and measuring, I take them to be the duties He would have me perform. If so, He would naturally have me perform them till I come to the place where I can reasonably lay them down.

Therefore, I dismiss the fear of untimely separation from my appointed work. Such a separation may come; but if it does, it will probably come by some such means as I have briefly tried to sketch; my own mistakes; the mistakes of others; the effect of race-pressure. In any case, my personal resistance, it seems to me, is made the stouter by feeling that my tasks are His tasks, and so that so long as I am needful to their accomplishment, I remain. If I go, it will be because He has the succession of events so planned as to reduce collapse, failure, or suffering to a minimum.



XVIII

B. The thought that the minute after death will only be another little step in Growth, to be followed by another and then another, as we are used to growing here, greatly diminishes one's shrinking at the change.

It is entirely a modern thought. The past, even of a few centuries ago, never entertained it. It is doubtful if it was mentally prepared to entertain it, or evolve the idea.

This is not to depreciate our fathers' mental powers. Different generations have different gifts. One age works along one line, another along another. The past had a certain revelation of truth; but the revelation of truth did not end with the past. Our ancestors received as much as they could take. What, it seems, they were unable to take was anything which made death less horrible. We may say, in fact, that they didn't want it. They liked having death made horrible. Many people like it still. The mitigation of that horror they condemn, resent, and often ascribe to the devil.

And yet there is a tendency to see light through this gloom, and to seek views of death more in the line of common sense than those which have come down to us. It is not a strong tendency, but it exists. It exists in the face of opposition on the part of those religious conservatives who think conservatism and orthodoxy the same thing; and it runs the gauntlet of the sneers and jeers of the materially minded who make common cause with the old guard of the churches; but it exists. It exists, and goes forward, becoming a factor in the thought-life of our time.

It is not yet two hundred years since the plea was put forth on behalf of mankind that, in the administration of divine justice, no one suffers less than he deserves, but also that no one suffers more.

The hostility to this seemingly harmless teaching was of the most intense. There is hostility to it still, but mild as compared with that felt by our great-great-grandfathers. That no one should suffer less than he deserves went without saying; but that no one should suffer more was declared a black heresy. As there are those who declare it a black heresy to-day, it may be worth while, in the interests of the conquest of fear, to say a word as to the relation of God and punishment.



XIX

To my mind it is chiefly verbal.

It is permissible to say that there is no such thing as punishment; there are only wrong results. It depends upon your way of putting it. The wrong method produces wrong results in proportion as it is wrong. Wrong results mean wrong conditions; and wrong conditions mean suffering. You may call this the law of God, but it is the law of anything. It is not positive law, it is negative. As a matter of fact, God does not need to put forth a law on the point since everything works that way.

What we call sin is simply a wrong method. It may be a wrong method meant to produce wrong; or it may be a wrong method in the hope of producing right. In any case it brings its consequence in pain.

That consequence may be corrected in this phase of our being, or it may be carried over into the next. Carried over into the next the individual, according to our ancestral teaching, comes under the sentence in which our fathers delighted as "damnation." Not only did damnation involve the most fiendish torture the Almighty could invent, but the torture was inflicted, without an instant of relief, throughout the eons of eternity.

I recall a sermon to which I listened as a boy of nine. It was on a summer's evening, when the windows of the church were open. A moth fluttered about a light. The church stood at the foot of a mountain. The preacher was trying to explain to us the eternal duration of God's punishment. "Think of that moth," he said, "carrying away one grain of sand from that mountain, and going off for a million years, after which it would return and take away another grain. And think of it keeping this up, one grain every million years, till the whole mountain was removed. Well, that would be only a moment as compared with the time you would be in hell."

On the generations comforted and fortified by this sort of teaching I have no comment to make; but we of another generation should surely not be reproved for moving away from it. We move away from it in the direction of common sense, since common sense must be an attribute of the Universal Father as it is of the wiser among mankind.



XX

I revert, then, to my statement that God's relation to punishment is chiefly verbal. His "wrath against sin" is a way of "putting it." If you can best express the suffering which springs from wrong methods as "God's wrath" you are at liberty so to express yourself; but we should not lose sight of the fact that the wrong methods produce the suffering, and not an outburst of fury on the part of One who is put before us as Love.

The fact that the Hebrew writers often used a vivid form of warning and invective is not a reason why we should keep on doing it. The Hebrew writer was a primitive speaking to primitives. Meaning what we mean, he required a stronger, fiercer vocabulary than we ever need. In saying this I am not dodging the issue; I am stating a fact which rules in all historical interpretation. To make the phraseology of two thousand years before Christ the literal expression of the thought of two thousand years after Him is to be archaic beyond reason. Having grasped a principle, we phrase it in the language of our time.

The language of our time makes, on the whole, for restraint, sobriety, and exactitude of statement. Few of our habits modify themselves more constantly and more rapidly than our forms of speech. Not only does each generation find something special to itself, but each year and each season. To me it seems that much of our misunderstanding of God springs from the effort to fix on Him forevermore the peculiarities we infer from the idiom of five thousand years ago. Only to a degree does that idiom convey to us what is conveyed to those who heard it as a living tongue; and of that degree much is lost when it percolates through translation. To cling to words when all we need is to know principles, clothing them in our own way, seems to me not only absurd in fact but lamentable in result. I venture to think that more people have been alienated from God by a pious but misapplied verbal use than were ever estranged from Him by sin.



XXI

Our ancient Hebrew predecessors understood God in their own way. We understand Him in the same way, but with the clarification wrought by the intervening years of progress. In other words, they bequeath us a treasure which we are free to enrich with our own discoveries.

Among our own discoveries is a clearer comprehension of pain as resulting from wrong methods, and of God's detachment from pain. More and more, punishment becomes a concept we reject. Even in our penal institutions, which have been for so many centuries a barbarous token of our incompetence, we begin to substitute for punishment something more nearly akin to cure. If we find mere vengeance unworthy of ourselves we must find it unworthy of the Universal Father. If we concede to the criminal the right to a further chance we concede it to ourselves. If we recognise the fact that the sinner on earth may redeem himself, working from error towards righteousness, the same principle should rule in the whole range of existence. There is nothing about the earth-life to make it the only phase of effort and probation. Effort and probation are probably conditions of eternity. They will be in our next experience as they have been in this, leading us on from strength to strength.



XXII

One main difference between the mind of the past and the modern mind is that the mind of the past tended to be static, while the mind of to-day is more and more attuned to a dynamic universe. Civilisation before the nineteenth century was accustomed to long periods with relatively little change. Most people spent their entire lives in the same town or the same countryside. In the class in which they were born they lived and died, with little thought of getting out of it. This being so they looked for the same static conditions after death as they saw before it. A changeless heaven appalled them with no sense of monotony, nor did a changeless hell do anything to shake their nerves. Their nerves were not easily shaken. They were a phlegmatic race, placid, unimaginative, reposeful.

Because we of to-day are more restless it does not follow that our views should be truer. We only know they are truer because we are so much nearer the truth than they had the opportunity to come. We prove that we are nearer the truth by our greater command of the Father's resources. If our whole horizon of truth were not broadened, we could not possess this command.



XXIII

Changing our static conception of life to that of a dynamic will to unfold, we see the climax we commonly call death as only a new step in unfoldment. Whatever I have been, the step must be one in advance. It would not be in accord with creative energy that I should go backward. The advance may entail suffering, since it is probable that it will give me a heightened perception of the wrong in my methods; but there are conditions in which suffering signifies advance.

And yet if I suffer it can only be with what I may call a curative suffering. It will be suffering that comes from the recognition of mistake; not the hopeless anguish of the damned. Having learned "how not to do it," I perceive "how to do it"—and go on.

But the perception of "how to do it" is precisely what most of us have been acquiring. I venture to think that few of us will come face to face with death without being more or less prepared for it. Life is so organised that, at its worst, all but the rare exceptions make progress daily, through obedience to the laws of righteousness.

In saying this we must count as righteousness not merely the carrying out of a rule of thumb laid down by man's so-called morality, or the technical regulations prescribed by the churches for the use of their adherents; we must include every response to every high call. We must remember that all a man does in the way of effort to be a good son, a good brother, a good husband, a good father, a good workman, a good citizen, is of the nature of slowly creeping forward. Above every other form of training of the self this endeavour determines a man's spiritual standing, and his state of worthiness. He may know some failure in each of these details; and yet the fact that in the main he is set—as I am convinced the great majority are set—toward fulfilling his responsibilities helps him to be ready when the time comes to put the material away.

The great common sense of the nations brought us to this perception during the years when the young men of the world were going down like wheat before the reaping machine. For the most part, doubtless, they were young men in whom the ladies who attend our churches would have seen much to reprimand. The moral customs of their countries were possibly held by them lightly. The two points which constitute pretty nearly all of American morality they may have disregarded. And yet we felt that their answer to the summons, which to them at least was a summons to sacrifice, showed them as men who had largely worked out their redemption. Whatever our traditions, we were sure that those who were ready to do anything so great could go to the Father without fear.

But war calls for no more than a summing up and distillation of the qualities we cultivate in peace. These men were ready because homes, offices, banks, shops, factories, and farms had trained them to be ready. So they are training all of us. Traditions help; the churches help; but when it comes to the directing of the life toward righteousness—the effort to do everything rightly—no one thing has the monopoly.



XXIV

Going to the Father without fear! All the joy of life seems to me to hang on that little phrase. I used it just now of the young men who passed over from the battlefield; but I used it there with limitations. Going to the Father without fear is a privilege for every minute of the day. More and more knowledge of the Father is the progress for which we crave, since more knowledge of the Father means a fuller view of all that makes up the spiritual universe. Into that knowledge we are advancing every hour we live; into that knowledge we shall still be advancing at the hour when we die. The Father will still be showing us something new; the something new will still be showing us the Father.

It will be something new, as we can receive it. He who can receive little will be given little; he who can receive much will be given much. In growth all is adjusted to capacity; it is not meant to shock, force, or frighten. The next step in growth being always an easy step, I can feel sure of moving onwards easily—"from strength to strength," in the words of one of the Songs for the Sons of Korah, "until unto the God of gods appeareth everyone of them in Zion."[33]

[33] The Book of Psalms.



CHAPTER VIII

THE FEAR OF DEATH AND ABUNDANCE OF LIFE



I

After all, the conquest of fear is largely a question of vitality. Those who have most life are most fearless. The main question is as to the source from which an increase of life is to be obtained.

An important psychological truth was involved when our Lord made the declaration, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." This, I think, was the first plain statement ever made that life was a quantitative energy; that it is less or more dynamic according to the measure in which the individual seizes it. But once more the Caucasian has stultified the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth by evaporating it to the tenuous wisp which he understands as spiritual. Between the pale ghost of such spiritual life as he has evoked from the Saviour's words and manly and womanly vigour in full-blooded exercise he has seen no connection.



II

Few of us do see a connection between strength of spirit and strength of limb; but it is there. I am not saying that a strong spirit cannot coexist with a feeble frame; but the feeble frame is a mistake. It is the result of apprehension and misapprehension, and bred of race-fear. The strong spirit would have put forth a strong frame if we had given it a chance. Abundant life must be life, healthy, active, and radiant. It should show the life-principle no longer driven from sea to land, and from land to air, or battling with a million foes, but vigorous and triumphant.

This vigour and triumph we ought to work into our point of view, so kneading it into our subconsciousness. Strong in proportion as our subconsciousness is strong, fearless in proportion as our subconsciousness is fearless, the going from strength to strength becomes a matter of course to us. Urging us on in sheer joy of power, abundance of life becomes still more abundant through the indwelling of the life-principle. That mystic resistless force, which has fashioned already so many forms, is forever at work fashioning a higher type of man.

Each one of us is that higher type of man potentially. Though we can forge but little ahead of our time and generation, it is much to know that the Holy Ghost of Life is our animating breath, pushing us on to the overcoming of all obstacles. For me as an individual it is a support to feel that the principle which was never yet defeated is my principle, and that whatever the task of to-day or to-morrow I have the ability to perform it well. The hesitation that may seize me, or the questioning which for an instant may shake my faith, is but a reminder that the life-principle is not only with me, but more abundantly with me in proportion to my need. My need is its call. The spasm of fear which crosses my heart summons it to my aid. It not only never deserts me, but it never delays, and is never at a loss for some new ingenuity to meet new requirements. "From strength to strength" is its law, carrying me on with the impetus of its own mounting toward God.



III

And the impetus of its own mounting toward God is not confined to what we view as the great things of life. Between great and small it makes no distinction. It is as eager on behalf of the man behind a counter as on that of him who is governing a country. The woman who has on her shoulders the social duties of an embassy, or the financial cares of a great business, has it no more at her command than she who is nursing her baby or reckoning her pennies to make both ends meet. It rushes to the help of all. Wherever there is duty or responsibility it is begging at the doors of our hearts to be let in, to share the work and ease the burden.

As I get up each morning, it is there. As I plan my day while I dress myself, it is there. As I think with misgiving of some letter I tremble at receiving, or with distaste at some job I must tackle before night, it is there.

It is there, not only with its help, but with its absolute knowledge of the right way for me to act. The care that worries me may be so big as to involve millions of other people's money, or it may be as small as the typing of a letter; but the right way of fulfilling either task is pleading to be allowed to enter my intelligence. My task is its task. My success will be its success. My failure will react on it, since failure sets back by that degree the whole procession of the ages. Whether I am painting a great masterpiece or sewing on a button my success is essential to the Holy Ghost of Life.



IV

So I, the individual, try to confront each day with the knowledge that I am infused with a guiding, animating principle which will not let me drop behind, or lose my modest reward, so long as I trust to the force which carries me along. By trusting to it I mean resting on it quietly, without worrying, without being afraid that it will fail me. "Fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil."[34] By doing evil, I presume is meant making a mistake, taking the wrong course. If, however great the cause, I fret myself I disturb the right conditions. By disturbing the right conditions I choke off the flow of the life-principle through my energies.

[34] The Book of Psalms.



V

At a moment when the little buffer state between Egypt and Assyria was afraid of being overrun by the one or the other it was frantically casting about to decide with which it would throw in its lot. "With neither," a great prophet thundered in the ears of the people. "In calmly resting your safety lieth; in quiet trust shall be your strength."[35]

[35] The Book of Isaiah.

My small experience in the conquest of fear can be condensed into these four words: Calmly resting! quiet trust! That amid the turmoil of the time and the feverishness of our days it is always easy I do not pretend. Still less do I pretend that I accomplish it. I have said, a few lines above, that I tried. Trying is as far as I have gone; but even trying is productive of wonderful results.



VI

Least of all do I claim to have covered the whole ground, or to have discussed to its fulness any one of the points which I have raised. Whole regions of thought which bear on my subject—such as psychology, philosophy, and religion as I understand the word—I have carefully endeavoured to avoid. My object has been to keep as closely as possible to the line of personal experience, which has a value only because it is personal. Telling no more than what one man has endeavoured to work out, what I have written seeks no converts. Though, for the sake of brevity, it may at times seem to take a hortatory tone, it is a record and no more. In it the reader will doubtless find much to correct, and possibly to reject; and this must be as it happens. What I hope he will neither correct nor reject is the sincerity of the longing to find God's relations to the phenomena of life, and the extent to which the phenomena of life reflect God.



VII

In the end we come back to that, the eternal struggle whereby that which is unlike God becomes more and more like Him. In watching the process, and taking part in it, there is, when all is said and done, a sense of glorious striving and success. With each generation some veil which hid the Creator from the creature is torn forever aside. God, who is always here, is seen a little more clearly by each generation as being; here. God, who ever since His sun first rose and His rain first fell has been making Himself known to us, is by each generation a little better understood. God, whom we have tried to lock up in churches or banish to Sundays and special holy days, is breaking through all our prohibitions, growing more and more a force in our homes and our schools, in our shops and our factories, in our offices and our banks, in our embassies, congresses, parliaments, and seats of government. Into His light we advance slowly, unwillingly, driven by our pain; but we advance.

The further we advance the more we perceive of power. The more we perceive of power the more we are freed from fear. The more we are freed from fear the more exultantly we feel our abundance of life. The more exultantly we feel our abundance of life the more we reject death in any of its forms. And the more we reject death in any of its forms the more we reflect that Holy Ghost of Life which urges us on from conquest to conquest, from strength to strength, to the fulfilling of ourselves.

THE END