Heart of Man by George Edward Woodberry

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"As soon as man thus knows himself a creature, he has established a
direct relation with the Creator, did he but realize it,--not in mere
thought of some temporal creation, some antecedent fact of a beginning,
but in immediate experience of that continuing act which keeps the
universe in being,

'Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above,'--

felt and known now in the life which, moment to moment, is his own. The
extreme sense of this may take on the expression of the pantheistic
mood, as here in Shelley's words, without any logical irreverence: for
pantheism is that great mood of the human spirit which it is, permanent,
recurring in every age and race, as natural to Wordsworth as to Shelley,
because of the fundamental character of these facts and the
inevitability of the knowledge of them. The most arrogant thought of
man, since it identifies him with deity, it springs from that same sense
of insignificance which makes humility the characteristic of religious
life in all its forms. A mind deeply penetrated with the feeling that
all we take and all we are, our joys and the might and grace of life in
us, are the mere lendings of mortality like Lear's rags, may come to
think man the passive receptacle of power, and the instrument scarce
distinguishable from the hand that uses it; the thought is as nigh to
St. Paul as to Plato. This intimate and infinite sense of obligation
finds its highest expression, on the secular side, and takes on the
touch of mystery, in those great men of action who have believed
themselves in a special manner servants of God, and in great poets who
found some consecration in their calling. They, more than other men,
know how small is any personal part in our labours and our wages alike.
But in all men life comes to be felt to be, in itself and its
instruments, this gift, this debt; to continue to live is to contract a
greater debt in proportion to the greatness of the life; it is greatest
in the greatest.

"This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. He who is most sensitive
to beauty and prizes it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardent
in the world's service, feels most constantly this power which enfolds
him in its hidden infinity; he is overwhelmed by it: and how should
gratitude for such varied and constant and exhaustless good fail to
become a part of the daily life of his spirit, deepening with every hour
in which the value, the power and sweetness of life, is made more plain?
Yet at the same instant another and almost contrary mood is twin-born
with this thankfulness,--the feeling of helplessness. Though the secret
and inscrutable power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly felt,--

'Closer is He than breathing and nearer than
hands and feet,'--

though in moments of life's triumphs it evokes this natural burst of
happy gratitude, yet who can free himself from mortal fear, or dispense
with human hope, however firm and irremovable may be his confidence in
the beneficent order of God? And especially in the more strenuous trials
of later ages for Christian perfection in a world not Christian, and
under the mysterious dispensation of nature, even the youth has lived
little, and that shallowly, who does not crave companionship, guidance,
protection. Dependent as he feels himself to be for all he is and all
he may become, the means of help--self-help even--and the law of it must
be from that same power, whose efficient working he has recognized with
a thankful heart. Where else shall he look except to that experience of
exaltation during whose continuance he plucked a natural trust for the
future, a reasonable belief in Providence, and a humble readiness to
accept the partial ills of life? In life's valleys, then, as on its
summits, in the darkness as in the light, he may retain that once
confided trust; not that he looks for miracle, or any specific and
particularizing care, it may be, but that in the normal course of things
he believes in the natural alliance of that arm of infinite power with
himself. In depression, in trouble, in struggle, such as all life
exhibits, he will be no more solitary than in his hours of blessing.
Thus, through helplessness also, he establishes a direct relation with
God, which is also a reality of experience, as vital in the cry for aid
as in the offering of thanks. The gratitude of the soul may be likened
to that morning prayer of the race which was little more than praise
with uplifted hands; the helplessness of man is rather the evening
prayer of the Christian age, which with bowed head implores the grace of
God to shield him through the night. These two, in all times, among all
races, under ten thousand divinities, have been the voices of the heart.

"There is a third mood of direct experience by which one approaches the
religious life. Surely no man in our civilization can grow far in years
without finding out that, in the effort to live a life obeying his
desires and worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with Christ's
commands; and he knows that the promises of Christ, so far as they
relate to the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself day by day; he
can escape neither the ideal that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ
in respect to the working of that ideal on others and within himself. He
perceives the evil of the world, and desires to share in its redemption;
its sufferings, and would remove them; its injustice, and would abolish
it. He is, by the mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, a
humanitarian. But he is more than this in such a life. If he be sincere,
he has not lived long before he knows in himself such default of duty
that he recognizes it as the soul's betrayal; its times and occasions,
its degrees of responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty or
of an evil will, its greater or less offence, are indifferent matters;
for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels a stain as a wound,
and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the
purest souls. It is death that is dull, it is life that is quick. It may
well be, in the world's history in our time, that the suffering caused
in the good by slight defections from virtue far overbalances the
general remorse felt for definite and habitual crime. Thus none--those
least who are most hearts of conscience--escapes this emotion, known in
the language of religion as conviction of sin. It is the earliest moral
crisis of the soul; it is widely felt,--such is the nature and such the
circumstances of men; and, as a man meets it in that hour, as he then
begins to form the habit of dealing with his failures sure to come, so
runs his life to the end save for some great change. If then some
restoring power enters in, some saving force, whether it be from the
memory and words of Christ, or from the example of those lives that
were lived in the spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love and more
tender affection enforcing the supremacy of duty and the hope of
struggle,--in whatever way that healing comes, it is well; and, just as
the man of honest mind has recognized the identity of his virtue with
Christ's rule, and has verified in practice the wisdom of its original
statement, so now he knows that this moral recovery, and its method, is
what has been known on the lips of saint and sinner as the life of the
Spirit in man, and even more specially he cannot discriminate it from
what the servants of Christ call the life of Christ in them. He has
become more than a humanitarian through this experience; he is now
himself one of those whom in the mass he pities and would help; he has
entered into that communion with his kind and kin which is the earthly
seal of Christian faith.

"Yet it seems to me a profound error in life to concentrate attention
upon the moral experience here described; it is but initial; and, though
repeated, it remains only a beginning; as the vast force of nature is
put forth through health, and its curative power is an incident and
subordinate, so the spiritual energy of life is made manifest, in the
main, in the joy of the soul in so far as it has been made whole. A
narrow insistence on the fact of sin distorts life, and saddens it both
in one's own conscience and in his love for others. Sin is but a part of
life, and it is far better to fix our eyes on the measureless good
achieved in those lines of human effort which have either never been
deflected from right aims, or have been brought back to the paths of
advance, which I believe to be the greater part, both in individual
lives of noble intention, and in the Christian nations. Sin loses half
its dismaying power, and evil is stripped of its terrors, if one
recognizes how far ideal motives enter with controlling influence into
personal life, and to what a degree ideal destinies are already
incarnate in the spirit of great nations.

"However this may be, I find on examination of man's common experience
these three things, which establish, it seems to me, a direct relation
between him and God: this spontaneous gratitude, this trustful
dependence, this noble practice, which is, historically, the Christian
life, and is characterized by its distinctive experiences. They are
simple elements: a faith in God's being which has not cared further to
define the modes of that being; a hope which has not grown to specify
even a Resurrection; a love that has not concentrated itself through
limitation upon any instrumental conversion of the world; but, inchoate
as they are, they remain faith, hope, love--these three. Are they not
sufficient to be the beginnings of the religious life in the young? To
theological learning, traditional creeds, and conventional worship they
may seem primitive, slight in substance, meagre in apparel; but one who
is seeking, not things to believe, but things to live, desires the
elementary. In setting forth first principles, the elaboration of a more
highly organized knowledge may be felt as an obscuration of truth, an
impediment to certainty, a hindrance in the effort to touch and handle
the essential matter; and for this reason a teacher dispenses with much
in his exposition, just as in talking to a child a grown man abandons
nine-tenths of his vocabulary. In the same way, learning as a child,
seeking in the life of the soul with God what is normal, vital, and
universal, the beginner need not feel poor and balked, because he does
not avail himself as yet of resources that belong to length of life,
breadth of scholarship, intellectual power, the saint's ardour, the
seer's insight.

"The spiritual life here defined, elementary as it is, appears
inevitable, part and parcel of our natural being. Why should this be
surprising? Surely if there be a revelation of the divine at all, it
must be one independent of external things; one that comes to all by
virtue of their human nature; one that is direct, and not mediately
given through others. Faith that is vital is not the fruit of things
told of, but of things experienced. It follows that religion may be
essentially free from any admixture of the past in its communication to
the soul. It cannot depend on events of a long-past time now disputable,
or on books of a far-off and now alien age. These things are the
tradition and history of the spiritual life, but not the life. To the
mass of men religion derived from such sources would be a belief in
other men's experience, and for most of them would rest on proofs they
cannot scrutinize. It would be a religion of authority, not of personal
and intimate conviction. Just as creation may be felt, not as some
far-off event, but a continuing act, revelation itself is a present
reality. Do not the heavens still declare the glory of God as when they
spoke to the Psalmist? and has the light that lighteth every man who is
born into the world ceased to burn in the spirit since the first candle
was lit on a Christian altar? If the revelation of glory and mercy be an
everlasting thing, and inextinguishable save in the life itself, then
only is that direct relation of man with God, this vital certainty in
living truth,--living in us,--this personal religion, possible.

"What has reform in religion ever been other than the demolition of the
interfering barriers, the deposit of the past, between man and God? The
theory of the office of the Holy Spirit in the Church expresses man's
need of direct contact with the divine; the doctrine of
transubstantiation symbolizes it; and what is Puritanism in all ages,
affirming the pure spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of man in
his loneliness, seeking God face to face? what is its iconoclasm of
image and altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the Councils and the
Fathers, but the assertion of the noble dignity in each individual soul
by virtue of which it demands a freeman's right of audience, a son's
right of presence with his father, and believes that such is God's way
with his own? This immediacy of the religious life, being once accepted
as the substance of vitality in it, relieves man at once of the greater
mass of that burden in which scepticism thrives and labours. The
theories of the past respecting God's government, no longer possible in
a humaner and Christianized age, the impaired genuineness of the
Scriptures and all questions of their text and accuracy, even the great
doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital consequence. A man may
approach divine truth without them. Simple and bare as the spiritual
life here presented is, it is not open to such sceptical attack, being
the fundamental revelation of God bound up in the very nature of man
which has been recognized at so many critical times, in so many places
and ages, as the inward light. We may safely leave dogma and historical
criticism and scientific discovery on one side; it is not in them that
man finds this inward wisdom, but in the religious emotions as they
naturally arise under the influence of life.

"This view is supported rather than weakened by such records of the
spiritual life in man as we possess. Man's nature is one; and, just as
it is interpreted and illuminated by the poets from whom we derive
direction in our general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated by
saintly men and holy women in the special sphere of the soul's life with
God. Our nature is one with theirs; but as there are differences in the
aptitudes, sensibilities, and fates of all men, so is it with spiritual
faculties and their growth; and, from time to time, men have arisen of
such intense nature, so sensitive to religious emotions, so developed in
religious experience, through instinct, circumstance, and power, that
they can aid us by the example and precept of their lives. To them
belongs a respect similar to that paid to poets and thinkers. Yet it is
because they tell us what they have seen and touched, not what they have
heard,--what they have lived and shown forth in acts that bear testimony
to their words, that they have this power. Such were St. Augustine, St.
Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas a Kempis, and many a humbler name whose
life's story has come into our hands; such were the Apostles, and,
preeminently, Christ. It is the reality of the life in them, personal,
direct, fundamental, that preserves their influence in other lives. They
help us by opening and directing the spiritual powers we have in common;
and beyond our own experience we believe in their counsels as leading to
what we in our turn may somewhat attain to in the life they followed. It
is not what they believed of God, but what God accomplished in them,
that holds our attention; and we interpret it only by what ourselves
have known of his dealing with us. It is life, and the revelation of God
there contained, that in others or ourselves is the root of the
matter--God in us. This is the corner stone."

* * * * *

The sun was high in the heavens when we ceased talking of these matters
and saw in a lowland before us a farmhouse, where we stopped. It was a
humble dwelling--almost the humblest--partly built of sod, with a barn
near by, and nothing to distinguish it except the sign, "Post Office,"
which showed it was the centre of this neighborhood, if "the blank miles
round about" could be so called. We were made welcome, and, the ponies
being fed and cared for, we sat down with the farmer and his wife and
the small brood of young children, sharing their noonday meal. It was a
rude table and a lowly roof; but, when I arose, I was glad to have been
at such a board, taking a stranger's portion, but not like a stranger.
It was to be near the common lot, and the sense of it was as primitive
as the smell of the upturned earth in spring; it had the wholesomeness
of life in it. Going out, I lay down on the ground and talked with the
little boy, some ten years old, to whom our coming was evidently an
event of importance; and I remember asking him if he ever saw a city. He
had been once, he said, to--the hamlet, as I thought it, which we had
just left--with his father in the farm-wagon. That was his idea of the
magnificence of cities. I could not but look at him curiously. Here was
the creature, just like other boys, who knew less of the look of man's
world than any one I had ever encountered. To him this overstretching
silent sky, this vacant rolling reach of earth, and home, were all of
life. What a waif of existence!--but the ponies being ready, we said our
good-byes and drove on along fainter tracks, still northward. We talked
for a while in that spacious atmosphere--the cheerful talk, half
personal, half literary, lightly humorous, too, which we always had
together; but tiring of it at last, and the boy still staying in my mind
as a kind of accidental symbol of that isolated being whom my notes had
described, and knowing that I had told but half my story and that my
friend would like the rest, I turned the talk again on the serious
things, saying--and there was nothing surprising in such a change with
us--"After all, you know, we can't live to ourselves alone or by
ourselves. How to enter life and be one with other men, how to be the
child of society, and a peer there, belongs to our duty; and to escape
from the solitude of private life is the most important thing for men of
lonely thought and feeling, such as meditation breeds. There is more of
it, if you will listen again;" and he, with the sparkle in his eyes, and
the youthful happiness in the new things of life for us, new as if they
had not been lived a thousand years before,--listened like a child to a
story, grave as the matter was, which I read again from the memoranda I
had made, after that April morning, year by year.

* * * * *

"Respect for age is the natural religion of childhood; it becomes in men
a sentiment of the soul. An obscure melancholy, the pathos of human
fate, mingles with this instinctive feeling. The fascination of the sea,
the sublimity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well as the beautiful
and solemn stars, which, like them, the mind does not distinguish from
eternal things, and has ever invested with sacred awe. It is the sense
of our mortality that thus exalts nature. Yet before her antiquity
merely, veneration is seldom full and perfect; her periods are too
impalpable, and, in contemplating their vastness, amazement dissipates
our faculties. Rather some sign of human occupancy, turning the desert
into a neglected garden, is necessary to give emotional colour and the
substance of thought; some touch of man's hand that knows a writing
beyond nature's can add what centuries could not give, and makes a rock
a monument. The Mediterranean islet is older for the pirate tower that
caps it, and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed graves, makes
England ancestral soil. Nor is it only such landmarks of time that bring
this obscure awe; occupations, especially, awake it, and customary
ceremonies, and all that enters into the external tradition of life,
handed down from generation to generation. On the Western prairies I
have felt rather the permanence of human toil than the newness of the
land.

"The sense of age in man's life, relieved, as it is, on the seeming
agelessness of nature, is a meditation on death, deep-set far below
thought. We behold the sensible conquests of death, and the sight is so
habitual, and remains so mysterious, that it leaves its imprint less in
the conscious and reflective mind than in temperament, sentiment,
imagination, and their hidden stir; the pyramids then seem fossils of
mankind; Stonehenge, Indian mounds, and desolate cities are like broken
anchors caught in the sunken reef and dull ooze of time's ocean, lost
relics of their human charge long vanished away. Startling it is, when
the finger of time has touched what we thought living, and we find in
some solitary place the face of stone. I learned this lesson on the low
marshes of Ravenna, where, among the rice-fields and the thousands of
white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, from whose ruined sides
Christianity, in the face and figure it wore before it put on the form
and garb of a world-wide religion, looked down on me with the unknown
eyes of an alien and Oriental faith. 'Stranger, why lingerest thou in
this broken tomb,' I seemed to hear from silent voices in that death of
time; and still, when my thoughts seek the Mother-Church of Christendom,
they go, not to St. John Lateran by the Roman wall, but are pilgrims to
the low marshes, the white water lilies, the lone Byzantine ruin that
even the sea has long abandoned.

"The Mother-Church?--is then this personal religious life only a state
of orphanage? Because true life necessarily begins in the independent
self, must it continue without the sheltering of the traditional past,
the instructed guidance of older wisdom, and man's joint life in common
which by association so enlarges and fortifies the individual good? Why
should one not behave with respect to religion as he does in other
parts of life? It is our habit elsewhere in all quarters to recognize
beyond ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer judgment, a more
efficient will enacting our own choice. To obey by force is a childish
or a slavish act, but intelligently and willingly to accept authority
within just limits is the reasonable and practical act of a free man in
society; the recognition of this by a youth marks his attainment of
intellectual majority. Authority, in all its modes, is the bond of the
commonwealth; until the youth comprehends it he is a ward; thereafter he
is either a rebel or a citizen, as he lists. For us, born to the largest
measure of freedom society has ever known, there is little fear lest the
principle of authority should prove a dangerous element. The right of
private judgment, which is, I believe, the vital principle of the
intellectual life, is the first to be exercised by our young men who
lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which would
repeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of the
swaddling bands of the primer and catechism before we would remove all
questions to the court of our own jurisdiction. The mind is not a
_tabula rasa_ at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, we will remedy
that, and erase all records copied there. The treasure doors of our
fathers' inheritance are thrown open to us; but we will weigh each gold
piece with balance and scale. All that libraries contain, all that
institutions embody, all the practice of life which, in its innocence,
mankind has adopted as things of use and wont, shall be certified by our
scrutiny. So in youth we say, and what results? What do the best become?
Incapables, detached from the sap of life, forced to escape to the
intellectual limbo of a suspension of judgment, extending till it fills
heaven and earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; the most we can
attain to is an attitude of mind. In view of the vast variety of phases
in which even man's great ideas have been held, a sense of indifference
among them, a vacuity in all, grows up. Pilate's question, 'What is
truth?' ends all.

"This is the extreme penalty of the heroic sceptical resolve in strong
and constant minds; commonly those who would measure man's large scope
by the gauge of their own ability and experience fall into such
idiosyncrasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive social
schemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, for most men,
the pressure of life itself, which compels them, like Descartes,
doubting the world, to live as if it were real, corrects their original
method of independence. They find that to use authority is the better
part of wisdom, much as to employ men belongs to practical statecraft;
and they learn the reasonable share of the principle of authority in
life. They accept, for example, the testimony of others in matters of
fact, and their mental results in those subjects with which such men are
conversant, on the ground of a just faith in average human capacity in
its own sphere; and, in particular, they accept provisional opinions,
especially such as are alleged to be verifiable in action, and they put
them to the test. This is our habit in all parts of secular life--in
scholarship and in practical affairs. 'If any man will do His will, he
shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God,' is only a special
instance of this law of temporary acceptance and experiment in all life.
It is a reasonable command. The confusion of human opinion largely
arises from the fact that the greater part of it is unverifiable, owing
to the deficient culture or opportunity of those who hold it; and the
persistency with which such opinion is argued, clung to, and cherished,
is the cause of many of the permanent differences that array men in
opposition. The event would dispense with the argument; but in common
life, which knows far more of the world than it has in its own
laboratory, much lies beyond the reach of such real solution. It is the
distinction of vital religious truth that it is not so withdrawn from
true proof, but is near at hand in the daily life open to all.

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