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Painted Windows by Harold Begbie

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Why is the Church so powerless? Why is it she has so fatally lost the
attention of mankind?

Is it not because she has nothing to give, nothing to teach? Morals are
older than Christianity, and sacramental religions as well. Men feel
that they cannot understand the immense paraphernalia of religion and
its unnatural atmosphere of high mystery; it is so tremendous a fuss
about so very small a result. If God is in the Church, why doesn't He do
more for it, and so more for the world? The revenues of religion are
still enormous. What do they accomplish?

Men who think in this way are not enemies of religion, any more than the
Jews who came to Jesus were enemies of Judaism. They deserve the respect
of the Church. Indeed, it is in finding an answer to their challenge
that the Church is most likely to find a solution to her own problem.
But that answer will never be found if the Church seeks for it only in
her documents. There is another place in which she must look for the
truth of Christ, a truth as completely overlooked by the modernist as by
the traditionalist: it is in the movements of the soul, in the world of
living men.

I believe that there are more evidences for the existence of Christ in
the modern world than in the whole lexicon of theology. I believe it is
more possible to discern His features and to feel the breath of His lips
by confronting the discoveries of modern science than by turning back
the leaves of religious history to the first blurred pages of the
Christian tradition. I believe, indeed, that it is now wholly impossible
for any man to comprehend the Light which shone upon human darkness
nearly two thousand years ago without bringing the documents of the
Church to the light which is shining across the world at this present
hour from the torch of science.

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

For twenty years I have followed this clue to the meaning of Christ and
the nature of His message. I have seen Darwinism, the very foundation of
modern materialism, break up like thin ice and melt away from the view
of philosophy. I have seen evolution betray one of its greatest secrets
to the soul of man--an immanent teleology, an invisible _direction_
towards deeper consciousness, an intelligent _movement_ towards greater
understanding. And I have seen the demonstration by science that this
visible and tangible world in its final analysis is both invisible and
intangible--a phantasm of the senses.

I may be allowed perhaps to recall the incident which first set me to
follow this clue.

One day, when he was deep in his studies of Radiant Matter, Sir William
Crookes touched a little table which stood between our two chairs, and
said to me, "We shall announce to the world in a year or two, perhaps
sooner, that the atoms of which this table is composed are made up of
tiny charges of electricity, and we shall prove that each one of those
tiny electrons, relative to its size, is farther away from its nearest
neighbour than our earth from the nearest star."

I have lived to see this prophecy fulfilled, though its implications are
not yet understood.

The Church does not yet realise that physical science, hitherto regarded
as the enemy of religion and the mocker of philosophy, presents us now
with the world of the transcendentalists, the world of the
metaphysicians, the world of religious seers--a world which is real and
visible only to our limited senses, but a world which disappears from
all vision and definition directly we bring to its investigation those
ingenious instruments of science which act as extensions of our senses.

Every schoolboy is now aware that a door is solid only to his eyes and
touch; that with the aid of X-rays it becomes transparent, the light
passing through it as water passes through network, revealing what is on
the other side. Every schoolboy also knows that his own body can be so
photographed as to reveal its skeleton.

But the Church has yet to learn from M. Bergson the alphabet of this new
knowledge, namely, that our senses and our reason are what they are
because of a long evolution in _action_--not in pure thought. We have
got our sight by looking for prey or for enemies, and our hearing by
listening for the movement of prey or of enemies. Our reason, too, is
fashioned out of a long heredity of action, that is to say an immemorial
discipline in an existence purely animal. So powerful is the influence
of this heredity, so real seems to us a physical world which is not
real, so infallible seem to us the senses by which we fail to live
successfully even as animals, that, as Christ said, a man must be born
again before he can enter the Kingdom of God--that is to say, before he
can behold and inhabit Reality.

At the head of this chapter I have set a quotation from a leading
article in _The Times_ on the recent lectures of M. Coue. It is now
eighteen years ago, treading in the footsteps of Frederic Myers, that I
discussed with some of the chief medical hypnotists in London and Paris
the phenomena of mental suggestion. It was known then that
auto-suggestion is a force of tremendous power. It was stated then that
"an immense hope is dawning on the world," but not then, not even now,
is it realised that this awkward term of "auto-suggestion" is merely a
synonym for the more beautiful and ancient words, meditation and prayer.

We know now that a man can radically change his character, can uproot
the toughest habits of a lifetime, by telling himself that his will is
master in his house of life[9]. And we think that we have made this
discovery, forgetting that Shakespeare said "The love of heaven makes us
heavenly," and that Christ said, "Blessed are they which do hunger and
thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled," and "All things,
whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive," or, as
Mark has it, "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that
ye receive them, and ye shall have them," and "According to your faith
be it unto you."

[Footnote 9: At Nancy even a lesion has been cured by suggestion.]

With our present knowledge of the universe and of the human mind, it is
at last possible for us to perceive in the confused records of the New
Testament the nature of Christ's teaching. He loved the world for its
beauty, but He penetrated its delusions and breathed the air of its only
reality. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth . . . but lay
up for yourselves treasures in heaven . . . for where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also." "What is a man profited, if he shall
gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in
exchange for his soul?" "If thou canst believe, all things are possible
to him that believeth." "He that hath ears to hear let him hear."

His world was always the world of thought. The actual deed of sin was
merely a physical consequence; the cause was spiritual: it was an evil
thought; to harbour an evil thought is to commit the sin. He looked into
the hearts of men, into their thoughts, and there only He found their
reality. All else was transitory. All else would see corruption and die.
The flesh profiteth nothing. But the thought of a man--that is to say
the region now being explored by the psycho-analyst, the
psycho-therapeutist, and the psycho I know not what else--this was the
one region in which Jesus moved, the region in which He proclaimed his
transvaluation of values, a region of which He was so complete a master
that He could heal delusion at a word and disorder by a touch.

One does not perhaps wholly realise, until one has read the muddied
works of modern psychology, how sublime was the soul of Jesus. It might
be possible to infer His divinity from the simplicity of the language
and the white purity of the thought with which He expressed truths of
the profoundest significance even in regions where so many fall into
unhealthiness. "No man can serve two masters"--is not that the teaching
of the modern hypnotist in dealing with "a divided self"? "Set your
affections on things above"--is not that the counsel of the sane
psycho-analyst in treating a diseased mind? "Ask, and it shall be given
you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto
you"--is not this the message of M. Coue, the teaching of
auto-suggestion?--that teaching which makes us say at last that "an
immense hope is dawning on the world."

And, in sober truth, we may indeed believe that this immense hope is
dawning on the world; the hope that mankind may recognise in Jesus, Who
called Himself the Light of the World, the world's great Teacher of
Reality.

Here we approach that unifying principle which was the object of our
quest in setting out to explore the chaos of opinion in the modern
Church.

Is it not possible that the Church might see the trivial unimportance of
all those matters which at present dismember her, if she saw the supreme
importance of Christ as a Teacher? Might she not come to behold a glory
in that Teaching greater even than that which she has so heroically but
so unavailingly endeavoured to make the world behold in the crucified
Sacrifice and Propitiation for its sins?

Is there not here the opportunity of an evangel, the dawning of an
immense hope on the world?

But let the Church ask herself, before she abandons her labour of
expounding doctrines concerning the Person of Christ, whether she is
quite clear as to the teaching of Jesus. "Not every one that saith unto
Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he that
doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven."

Read St. Mark, the earliest, the least corrupted, of the narratives. It
is a declaration of a new power in human life, and a record of its
achievements. It is this, and nothing else. The one great word of that
gospel is Faith--not faith in a formula or an institution, but faith in
the absolute supremacy of spirit. Faith in spirit means power--power
over circumstance, power over matter, power over the heredity of our
animal origin. Jesus not only sets men free from the prison-house of
material delusion, as Plato and others sought to do; He teaches them the
way in which alone they can exercise spiritual dominion.

There were two things to which He set no limits: one, the love of God,
and the other, the power of Faith.

Let all the schools in the Church revise their definition of the word
_faith_, and unity will come of itself. Faith, as Jesus employed that
term, meant _making use of belief_--belief that the spiritual alone is
the real. Faith is the action of the soul. It is the working of a
power. It is mastery of life.

Let the Church realise that Jesus taught this power of the soul. Let her
begin to exercise her own spiritual powers. And then let her understand
that she is in the world to teach men, to lead the advance of evolution,
to educate humanity in the use of its highest powers.

A knowledge of the sense in which Jesus employed the word Faith is the
clue to the recovery of Christian influence.

This is the suggestion which I venture to submit to the Church, at a
moment in history when the harsh and brutal spirit of materialism is
crushing all faith out of the soul and leaving the body no tenant but
its appetites.

I do not think any observant man can deny that the whole "suggestion" of
the modern world is of an evil nature, that is to say, of a nature which
fastens upon the mind the delusions of the senses, making it believe
that what it sees is reality, persuading it that the gratification of
those senses is the end and object of existence. The wages of this
suggestion is death--the death of the soul.

How far the world is gone from sanity, and how clearly science endorses
Christ's teaching, may be seen in the modern craze for unhealthy
excitement, and in the medical condemnation of that morbid passion. A
well-known doctor in London, Sir Bruce Bruce-Porter, has lately
condemned Grand Guignol as intensifying the emotion of fear or
anxiety--"Take no heed"--and has declared anger, or any violence of
feeling, to be a danger--"Love your enemies"--pointing out that "the
experiment of inoculating a guinea-pig with the perspiration taken from
the forehead of a man in a violent temper has resulted in the death of
the guinea-pig with all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning."

Science is the one voice that condemns in these days the self-destroying
madness of a world set on seeking to live habitually in the lower life.
Sometimes journalism may light a candle of reason in our darkness, as
when _The Times_ recently pointed out in a leading article that the
half-humorous interest of the world in the murderer Landru had its rise
in a profound instinct of the human spirit, namely, that horror must be
laughed at if it is not to be feared--to fear it is to be overwhelmed by
it. This instinct is "an unconscious refusal to believe in the ultimate
reality of evil; it is the predecessor of the scientific spirit which
says that evil is something to be overcome by understanding it."

Out of such a lethargy as that which now holds her captive, I do not
think the Church can be roused except by the trumpets of war. Let her,
then, consider whether there is not here, in this world of false values,
of low ambitions, of mean pleasures, of dark materialism, and of
perilous superstitions, a world to be fought, as the doctors fight it,
and the best kind of newspapers, if only for the sake of posterity, a
world against which it is good to oppose oneself--the Children of Light
against the Children of Darkness.

What is the good news of Christianity if it is not the news that "the
spiritual alone is the real," that there is freedom for human life and
mastery for the human soul, that faith in the spiritual is power over
the material? Even in the tentative form which M. Bergson uses to reveal
the reality of the spiritual world there is such joy that one of his
interpreters can exclaim:

Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego
takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm
secrecy of the darkness which ushers our trembling being into
birth. Distinctions fail us. Words are useless now. We hear the
wells of consciousness at their mysterious task like an invisible
shiver of running water through the mossy shades of the caves. I
dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon myself to the delight of
being a pulsing reality. I no longer know whether I see scents,
breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I think? The
question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete self,
each of my attitudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight which
is indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have
resumed contact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits
no form of number.

How much greater the joy of him who knows that Reality is God, and that
God is Father.

The open secret flashes on the brain,
As if one almost guessed it, almost knew
Whence we have sailed and voyage whereunto.

Let us suppose that the whole Church of Christ was engaged in teaching
men this high mystery, this open secret, that all such great
associations as the Christian Students' Movement, the Adult Sunday
School Movement, the World Association for Adult Education, and all the
numerous Missionary Societies throughout the whole earth--let us suppose
that the entire Church of Christ was at work in the world teaching
Christ's teaching, _educating_ men, bringing it home to the heart and
mind of humanity that "life is mental travel," that it is in our
thoughts we live and by our thoughts we are shaped, that flesh and blood
cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, that all terrestrial values are
radically false, that to hunger and thirst after anything is to get it,
that the power of "the dominant wish" is our fate, that in love alone
can we live to the full stature of our destiny, that the Kingdom of God
is within us, that the engine of faith has not yet been exerted by the
whole human race in concert, that conquests await us in the spiritual
world before which all the conquests of the material world will pale
into insignificance, that we are spirits finding our way out of the
darkness of an animal ancestry into the Light of an immortal inheritance
as children of God; let us suppose that this, and not dogma was the
Voice of the Church; must we not say that by such teaching the whole
world would eventually be rescued from our present chaos and in the
fulness of time be born again into the knowledge of spiritual reality?

I believe it is only when a man realises that in its final analysis the
whole universe is invisible, and ceases to think of himself as an animal
and becomes profoundly sensible of himself as a spirit, and a spirit in
communion with a spiritual reality closer than hands and feet, that it
is possible for him to fulfil the two great commandments on which hang
all the Law and the Prophets. And without that fulfilment there must
always be chaos.

If the Church will not teach the world, modern science will inspire
philosophy to take up anew the teaching of Plato, and the world will go
forward into the light, but with no creative love in its soul to save it
from itself. "If therefore," said Christ, "the light that is in thee be
darkness, how great is that darkness."

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