Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Omnia exibant in mysterium.

—THOMAS OF AQUIN.

Illi sunt veri fideles Tui qui totam vitam suam ad emendationem disponunt.

—IMITATIO CHRISTI.

IN MYschooldays in Illinois, sometimes when we had a free evening three or four of us would be asked out to some house in town where we would find a group of companionable pretty girls waiting for us. We had what might now seem a curiously chivalrous sentiment towards these girls, regarding them as something to be deferred to, pampered and protected. Perhaps our fine old friend Major Pendennis would have called it one of the “damned romantic notions boys get from being brought up by women,” but there it was. On one of these pleasant social evenings we tried our hand at table-turning. The great wave of interest in spiritist manifestations which swept over Europe and America in the eighteen-forties had pretty well subsided, but one still found backwaters of it here and there. We had never heard of table-turning, but the girls had got wind of it somehow and were eager for a trial. By spreading our finger-tips on a table-top and using some formula—I have forgotten what it was,—to concentrate our attention, we soon had the table rocking at a great rate, and even moved it all around the room.

Inspired by this success, we tried another experiment. Seating a girl in a heavy arm-chair, four of us stood around her, two on a side. Each of us put the tips of his forefingers together, his arms extended full length. Then three times in unison we raised our arms high and lowered them, inhaling deeply and exhaling as we did so. When our arms came down for the third time, we put the joined tips of our forefingers under the edge of the chair-seat and lifted the load of chair and girl four feet in the air as if it were a Windbeutel. There was no hocus-pocus about it; the chair was good sound Victorian walnut, and the girl was a hulking wench who must have run to a hundred and thirty, net; and the odd thing was that in lifting all that mass, none of us felt more than a feather’s weight on his finger-tips. We repeated this once or twice, with the same result. Then we tried lifting without going through the preliminary motions, and failed. We tried again as before, but breaking the rhythm, making the preliminary motions out of unison, and this also was a failure.

We had not the faintest idea of how these odd phenomena “made themselves,” as the French say, but they tapped no vein of superstition in any of us, nor did they move us to take stock in any theory of a spiritist agency at work. The thing was too trivial for that, even in the minds of schoolboys. Table-tipping and hoisting a corn-fed strapping hussy four feet or more in the air would seem an incongruous business for a disembodied spirit to be entertaining himself with, unless he were a jocular fellow like Rabelais’s Cincinnatulo, who liked to mystify people; which I suppose is conceivable. We did not speculate about it, but took it merely as a trick of some kind which we did not understand, and thought no more about it.

Once shortly after this incident I tried spirit-writing out of pure curiosity; I had just then heard of it for the first time. I got several “messages” of such a commonplace character that I could not associate them with the personages from whom they purported to emanate. One which laid claim to come from a deceased aunt, warned me against tobacco and liquor, this being about the last thing which that particular aunt would have in mind to do. I put all this down as sheer nonsense of no evidential value whatever, as far as any external influence was concerned.

One Sunday morning, not long after I had left college, I was in the gallery of the church of the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn. The choir had just begun the Venite and I was all absorbed in the magnificent music when suddenly I was struck with horrible illness and faintness. Something impelled me to turn around, and there I saw sitting in an indolent attitude, his eyes fixed on me with a dull, sinister phosphorescence, a man who might have passed for a twin brother of King Edward VII. The sight of him affected me with the utmost horror and loathing; I never experienced such a sensation even in encountering a water-moccasin. I somehow managed to stagger out of the building, and in a few minutes I recovered completely.

Some months later, in the same place and at the same point in the service, the same thing happened again, precisely as before. I had meanwhile been attending the church quite regularly, always in the same pew, and all memory of the incident had passed out of my mind.

About two years afterwards I was walking up Court Street late one night in a driving rain with my old roommate at college whose home was in South Brooklyn. The street was quite deserted; no one had passed us”. All at once I was taken with a hideous illness and faintness, and put my hand on my roommate’s shoulder to steady myself. He asked what the matter was, and I said, “I don’t know, but I feel as if I had been shot hard by something.” At that moment some one passed us, half-hidden by an umbrella; he turned his head as he went by. It was the same man.

At a friend’s house one evening in the ‘twenties I met a Russian operatic tenor, a fine artist. I had already heard him distinguish himself as Hermann in a marvellous performance of Pique-Dame, such as one could never forget. This evening after dinner my friends persuaded him, much against his wish, to show off a curious trick. Standing before him, you presented the back of your hand; he put the tips of his forefingers together and pointed them at it, about three inches distant. In a minute or so you would feel a strong jet of ice-cold air coming out of his forefingers against your hand as out of a blowpipe. He did this “with great toil and vexation,” like Thaumast in his colloquy with Panurge; he said the effort so exhausted him that if he did the trick oftener than twice at a stretch he was completely done in, which reminded me of Vassily’s collapse, in Tourgueniev’s Strange Story. He did not know how the thing was done, and I wondered how he discovered that he had this peculiar gift. I never heard of another instance of it; though that is saying little, for it may be in every professional magician’s repertoire, for all I would know. There was certainly no unconscious collusion about it, for the subject was not told what to expect.

These three or four extremely trivial experiences in the realm of what is called the hyperphysical or extraphysical are all I ever had. I think I may not have the psychical sensitiveness which invites them; I doubt that spiritists would find me a good medium. I knew nothing, really, about spiritism proper until 1911 when I was in London, and the late William T. Stead talked with me for two hours about his adventures in that sphere. He showed me spirit-photographs, writings, evidences of levitation, and some of the stories connected with these were most remarkable. What interested me chiefly was his saying that he had got thought-transference down to such a fine point that he had practically given up the use of his telephone. Only that morning, he said, he had fixed his mind on getting back an umbrella which some one had borrowed, and the man promptly turned up with it just before I came in. I was reminded of my grandmother’s strange experience at the time of her father’s death in England. There seems to be something in this matter of thought-projection. Goethe left record of some striking instances of it, as did Mark Twain, and as no doubt many others have done. The notable instance of the French officer, Captain de Géroux, and his impressionable sister, an instance amounting to clairvoyance, is well authenticated. The idea that disembodied spirits play any part in thought-projection, however, seems to me gratuitous.

II

By all the evidence of sense-perception there appeared to be “something in” the Russian tenor’s odd performance, as there was in our table-turning and chair-lifting, and as there is in the phenomena of telepathy, clairvoyance, thought-transference, the Poltergeist, and so on. When one has said that, apparently one has said all there is for one to say. But even so, it is also apparently as much as one can say about many of the commonest phenomena observable in our everyday existence. I have often wondered why Protestant theologians make so much of the Scriptural miracles and mysteries when one sees daily so many miracles which are far more impressive and no end more purposeful. The fact that ice floats instead of sinking, which I understand to be a most exceptional phenomenon in nature’s economy, seems to me much more impressive than the miracle of Elisha’s ax-head, or of Jesus and Peter walking on the waters of Galilee. It also seems much more to the point, when one reflects on what this planet would be like if ice did not float, and what would happen to all forms of life if it should cease to float.

Maintaining the order of nature appears to me quite as respectable a miracle as an isolated, momentary and relatively very insignificant interruption of that order would be. Gravitation, always varying directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance, holds the stars in their courses to the farthest reaches of the universe; and here, on a third-rate planet moving in a tenth-rate solar system, it also enabled me this morning to find my shoes exactly where I left them when I took them off last night. I should say that by way of a miracle, either of those performances would be quite as respectable as the other, and quite as respectable as any to be found mentioned in Holy Writ. Mr. Long, the translator of Marcus Aurelius, says most truly that “we can not conceive how the order of the universe is maintained. We can not even conceive how our own life from day to day is continued, nor how we perform the simplest movements of the body, nor how we grow and think and act, though we know many of the conditions which are necessary for all these functions.” As I see it, there is small choice among miracles in this world, for no one has the faintest idea of how, still less why, the order of nature came to be arranged as it is; no one knows how or why the stars came to follow their courses or my shoes came to stay put overnight. “Natural law” accounts for nothing, for natural law means not a thing in the world but the registration of mankind’s experience. Not long ago I read of a fine exhibition of intellectual integrity by a physicist lecturing on magnetic attraction. He told his students that he could describe the phenomena, put them in order, state the problem they present and perhaps carry it a step or two backward, but as for the final “reason of the thing,” the best he could say was that the magnet pulls on the steel because God wants it to.

Some of the Roman Catholic theologians are more to my mind. “All things keep continually running out into mystery,” said St. Thomas of Aquin, seven hundred years ago. In matters where the mystery is more or less sensational or apparently irregular, like our chair-lifting or Mr. Stead’s thought-transference, and where any hypothesis about it is as hard to disprove as it is to prove, my Platonist interest in “the reason of the thing” runs out, and my agnostic French strain keeps me content to have no hypothesis whatever. Like Mr. Jefferson, I have always been content to “repose my head on that pillow of ignorance which a benevolent Creator has made so soft for us, knowing how much we should be forced to use it.”

III

If I were asked to name the most striking spectacle observable in my time, I should say it was the long round-trip voyage which science made away from metaphysics and back again to the most egregious mess of metaphysics that ingenuity could devise. When I was a lad, science had tossed metaphysics into the junkpile. The scientific Left, headed by Moleschott and Büchner, had gone in for Strafford’s policy of “thorough” against the idealist philosophers, especially Hegel. Straight materialist monism was the thing; the universe was to be interpreted strictly in terms of matter and force. Boscovich’s hypothesis had even resolved matter itself into “centres of force,” whatever those might be. Consciousness was a function of the brain; “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.” The moderate and sensible Huxley, Romanes and others, thought it was not quite so simple as all that, and dissented vigorously. But metaphysics were at a ruinous discount all round, and in particular the metaphysics of Christian theology were condemned in terms so severe as to make the exitiabilis superstitio of Tacitus seem mild and judicial.

Science went on with its investigations of matter and force, consciousness, space and time, like the donkey after the carrot, but the carrot apparently as far away as ever. When one was through with atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, protons, and so on, where was one, what had one actually got? Now I see that one great mathematician goes a bit ahead of Boscovich by resolving matter, not into centres of force, but into “groups of occurrences,” and thinks that matter as an actuality, a thing-in-itself, may not exist at all. Another savant thinks that matter is a characteristic of space, while still another suggests that space is a characteristic of matter. Another sage has decided that space has a definite diametrical limit, beyond which there is no space, no matter, not only no anything, but literally no nothing.

I am far from setting myself up as a judge of these deliverances, but in all diffidence I maintain that in their totality they amount to as fine an exhibit of metaphysics as anything the Schoolmen can show. In the course of their efforts to express the inexpressible, define the indefinable, and imagine the unimaginable, these master minds have made the metaphysical grand tour and are back once more in the old familiar port of the Middle Ages, safe and sound. When I heard of a disagreement about the shape of space, one pundit holding that space is cylindrical and another that it is globular, I went back for refreshment to the eleven great theses of Pantagruel, which Rabelais says were “debated after the manner of the Sorbonne, in the Schools of the Decree near St. Denis de la Chartre, at Paris.” I especially wished I might hear our two great men of science debate Pantagruel’s third thesis, which seems so particularly in their line: “Whether the atoms, turning about at the sound of the Hermagorical harmony, would make a compaction or a dissolution of the quintessence by subtraction of the Pythagorean numbers.” In point of intelligibility I do not see a pin to choose between the metaphysics of the Athenasian Creed and the fresh-laid metaphysics set forth in current scientific doctrines concerning matter, space and time. As between the two, I turn from both and seek safety on the old and well-tried ground of agnosticism.

IV

By the time I was thirty I had read quite a bit of theological literature by fits and starts, for no reason in particular but that the subject-matter was interesting and the literature superbly good. I had no religious doubts or misgivings to resolve. Somehow I had completely missed out on the eruption of Sturm und Drang which is supposed, I do not know how correctly, to accompany adolescence, and which is said to give rise oftentimes to religious self-searchings. That period of my life was marked by no more spiritual stress than any other; that is to say, by none. I think, though it is mere conjecture, that this exemption may have been due to the heavy pressure of other matters. I had so much baseball to play just then, so much responsibility about dogs, so much fishing, sailing, swimming, skating, iceboating, horseback-riding, and other general-utility jobs of like nature to attend to, that when these duties were over for the day I was too bone-tired to worry about my spiritual status, or indeed to worry about anything. Perhaps also the lack of emphasis laid on the minutiæ of religious beliefs and observances during my childhood may have had most to do with it. However it may have come about, I do not recall in all my life any religious experience that was disturbing, any harrowing doubts, any stretch of bumptious juvenile atheism, or anything of the kind. And so it was, I suppose, that I approached the magnificent literature of religion with as few prepossessions, as unbiased a mind, as any one could have.

I did hardly anything with comparative religion, except as other reading had brought me into casual contact with the religions of Greece and Rome, and now that in later years I have scratched the surface of that study I wish I had done more. The part of Christian literature which I found most acceptable was the work of writers who had applied an enlightened common sense, combined with an enlightened fervour, to “the divine impossibilities of religion,” and who drove most directly at practice. On the other hand, I found the part of it which was devoted to metaphysical and institutional system-building or system-propping largely unacceptable, as savouring less of religion than of science or, as I thought, pseudo-science. Arnold’s Literature and Dogma gave me a thoroughly satisfactory account of Christianity’s nature and function. His conception of religion as “morality touched by emotion” satisfied me. The object of religion, as I saw it, is conduct; and whatever mode or form one’s religious persuasions may take, if it bears fruit in sound conduct it is ad hoc sound religion.

My philosophical counsellor Edward Epstean lately put this to me in a rather striking figure. He accepts the Pauline doctrine of the dichotomous man, the doctrine of the “two selves,” about which I may presently have more to say, and he likens man’s progress through life, with respect to conduct, to the progress of a rope-walker. Being dichotomous, man is always being put off balance by the promptings of the “lower and apparent self,” and religion functions as a balancing-pole to bring him into equilibrium again and hold him steady under control of “the higher and real self.” It makes no difference, my friend said in his forceful way, “whether that pole is made of Christian oak or Jewish steel or Confucian teak or Mohammedan bamboo, as long as the man finds it best adapted to doing what he wants done, and really makes it work.”

For my own part, aware that I am in any case shut up to anthropomorphism, I see nothing against making a complete job of it. Today I habitually think and speak of God as “a magnified and non-natural man,” as did the two bishops against whom Arnold discharged his broadsides of deadly raillery. The attributes I assign Him are all human, and among the foremost of them I place a highly refined and lively sense of humour. I sometimes imagine Him as immensely tickled by the capers of his pretentious little creatures here below, and I have now and then suspected Him of arranging matters to make those capers show to the best advantage. We oldsters all remember Mr. Garfield’s “heatless Mondays” in the last war, and how regularly on Sunday nights the mercury would drop headlong to an appalling death. After this had been repeated three or four times, one ghastly Monday morning Allen McCurdy met me on the street and said, “Who’s coming out ahead on this, d’ye think, God or Garfield?” The same amusing thought was in my own mind. I remember too, one day when Charles Beard and I were in one of what he used to call humorously our Meditations on the New Testament, he said, “I believe if you approach God in a perfectly frank, self-respecting manner, as one gentleman to another, He will meet you half-way and do the decent thing by you. But I have noticed nine times out of ten, if you go cringing and snivelling up to Him on your hands and knees and try to butter Him up, work Him for something, or make a deal with Him, He won’t even listen; and the tenth time He will wait till you get real close up, and then kick the seat right out of your pants.” This is an anthropomorphic view, surely; but in the premises, what view can be less so?

Aware that the mode of my own religious persuasions was most imperfect and must always be so, I felt great tolerance towards other modes, even those which were based on what seemed to me sheer superstition. As Flaubert says that politics are for the canaille, so with equal truth Joubert says that superstition is the only basis of religion which the lower order of mind is capable of accepting. In so far, then, as superstition alone is effectual in working on that order of mind to bring forth sound conduct, I regard it as respectable and not to be meddled with.

I read considerably in the English religious philosophers of the seventeenth century, especially the group called the Cambridge Platonists, which included Cudworth, John Smith, Whichcote, Glanvill, Culverwel. I imagine that they are quite forgotten now, though I do not know where at this present time one could get a more intelligent practical guidance towards the essential nature of Christianity and towards a more satisfying respect and love for it, than these men offer. To my mind, their great merit lies in keeping a firm grasp on actuality, in their insistence on the evidential value of mankind’s actual experience, and in their emphasis on conduct. Even in skirting the edges of metaphysics, they never let themselves be swept off their feet. When Smith amplifies Luther’s definition by saying, “Where we find wisdom, justice, loveliness, goodness, love and glory in their highest elevations and most unbounded dimensions, that is He; and where we find any true participations of these, there is a true communication of God; and a defection from these is the essence of sin and the foundation of hell,”—when Smith says this, one feels that he has gone as far with a prescriptive system of dogmatic theology as it is safe to go; and he goes no farther. Taylor also, with his mind on metaphysical credenda, gives warning that “too many scholars have lived upon air and empty nothings, and being very wise about things that are not and work not.” And work not—there he comes back, as these men are always coming back, to the basic ground of practice, of conduct; and how great is the reason why they should, for as Whichcote says, “men have an itch rather to make religion than to practice it.” Conduct is the final thing, and dogmatic constructions which fail to give proof of themselves in bringing forth conduct are worse than useless.

V

The history of organised Christianity is the most depressing study I ever undertook, and also one of the most interesting. I came away from it with the firm conviction that the prodigious evils which spot this record can all be traced to the attempt to organise and institutionalise something which is in its nature incapable of being successfully either organised or institutionalised. I can find no respectable evidence that Jesus ever contemplated either; the sort of thing commonly alleged as evidence would not be substantial enough to send a pickpocket to gaol. By all that is known of Jesus, He appears to have been as sound and simon-pure an individualist as Lao-Tsze. His teaching seems to have been purely individualistic in its intent. One would say He had no idea whatever of its being formulated into an institutional charter, or a doctrinal hurdle to be got over by those desirous of being called by His Name. If there is any reputable evidence to the contrary, I can only say with Pangloss, “It may be; but if so it has escaped me.”

Organised Christianity has had the same fate which has beset all of mankind’s attempts at organising itself around some great and good social purpose. The same influences have conspired to vitiate it that have vitiated all other-like attempts, and have done this in the same familiar way. Not much is known about Christianity’s organisation in the first three centuries, but apparently what there was of it was relatively loose and informal. In any case, with due allowance made for intolerances, disagreements, bizarre aberrations, rabid fanaticisms,—and of all these there was no doubt plenty,—the main interest of its rank and file would seem to have been religious. Indeed, it is hard to see where any other kind of interest could have come in, for Christianity had no prestige, no wealth; it was a proscribed, persecuted, hole-and-corner affair, regarded by the State as seditious and by Roman society as contemptible, much as the American State and American society regarded Mormonism not so many years ago. Early in the fourth century, however, Constantine I, like the good politician which he was, foresaw the future of Christianity and established it as the official religion of the Lower Empire. His object was political, not religious; he was out to establish a régime of political absolutism, and he saw that an official religion could be made an extremely useful instrument not only for helping him on in that purpose, but also for keeping people docile under absolutism when it was achieved. So he gave the organisation considerable wealth, a great deal of prestige, and put it on its way to be what Mr. Middleton Murry calls “a good wife to the State.” Ever since then the Christian organisation has pretty diligently fulfilled that function wherever it has been established by the State or subsidised by tax-exemption.

Constantine’s act gave Christianity a social cachet, making it eminently respectable and fashionable. Then Epstean’s law, which before that had not seen much chance to show what it could do, at once herded into the organisation a swarm of persons whose interest was not religious, but secular. Many of these were turned towards it by a careerist motive, but all by one-or-another motive of secular profiteering. For them it was the way of satisfying their needs and desires with the least possible exertion. In the fourth chapter of the Fifth Book, Rabelais gives a racy but substantial account of the operation of Epstean’s law at the time of the Protestant Reformation; in fact, as an exposition of Epstean’s law the whole episode of the Ringing Island is worth a careful reading.

Then on the heels of Epstean’s law came Gresham’s law, fixing the currency-value of religion by the worst type in circulation; that is to say, allowing no more face-value to “morality touched by emotion” than it allowed to a punctilious pro forma acceptance of ecclesiastical dogma and ritual, thus tending to drive the former out. Then finally came the law of diminishing returns, which saw to it that the greater the organisation grew in size, wealth and prestige after passing a certain point, the more the net spiritual product accruing from its operation tended to diminish.

VI

Not long ago a woman I have long known but had not seen for some years, said to me, “I have a surprise for you. I have become a Christian.” This declaration gave me a slight chill. If it meant one thing, it was such an enormous pretension that I could hardly imagine a person of any delicacy who knew its implications would dare to advance it. If it meant another, one would hardly know how seriously to take it; not but what my friend was serious enough, but simply that a better-informed person might find that the statement pointed at something mostly meaningless or even largely stultifying. The question whether one is or is not religious is hard enough to answer; and the question whether one is or is not a Christian is in my opinion impossible to answer categorically; the answer might mean anything or nothing.

I do not find any evidence that Jesus laid down any basic doctrine beyond that of a universal loving God and a universal brotherhood of man. There is no report of His having discussed the nature of God or laying stress on any other of God’s attributes, or that He ever said anything about them. He also exhibited a way of life to be pursued purely for its own sake, with no hope of any reward but the joy of pursuing it; a way of entire self-renunciation, giving up one’s habits, ambitions, desires and personal advantages. The doing of this would establish what He called the Kingdom of Heaven, a term which, as far as any one knows, He never saw fit to explain or define. His teaching appears to have been purely individualistic. In a word, it came to this: that if every one would reform one (that is to say, oneself) and keep one steadfastly following the way of life which He recommended, the Kingdom of Heaven would be coextensive with human society. The teaching of Jesus, simple as it was, was brand-new to those who listened to it. Conduct, “morality touched by emotion,” put forth as the whole sum of religion, was something they had never heard of.

Simple as the teaching of Jesus may have been, it was also very difficult. Following the way of life which He prescribed is an extremely arduous business, and my opinion is that those who can do it are, and have always been, relatively few; even those able to understand the terms of its prescriptions would seem to be few. If the record be authentic, Jesus appears to have been clearly aware that this would be so. Yet there is abundant evidence that Jesus was not merely offering an impracticable counsel of perfection, for the thing has been done and is being done; mainly, as is natural, in an inconspicuous way by inconspicuous persons, yet also by some like St. Francis and others among the great names one meets in the history of Christian mysticism, whom circumstances rendered more or less conspicuous.

Assuming that a person took these matters as stated, and that he faithfully followed out their prescriptions, I think that in the first century and probably in the second, he would have passed muster as a Christian. Later on, when Gresham’s law, which had used St. Paul as its chief instrument, completed its work of intellectualising Christianity into an entirely different public character,—a character which it has maintained ever since,—the case was somewhat different. I greatly doubt that our hypothetical person could have got himself accepted as a Christian at any time in the latter part of the third century, certainly not in the fourth; and certainly not now, unless by some sort of low and unscrupulous collusion-in-perjury which would make hay of the official articles of the Christian Faith.

At the beginning of the fourth century organised Christianity showed a pattern set, not by Jesus, but by Gresham’s law; a pattern essentially Jewish, but sophisticated by some Mithraic accretions. It had reverted to the Jewish conceptions of a particularised and bargaining God, and of a redeeming Messiah. This Christian Messiah, however, was Jesus, who was God’s only Son, and with a third being, called the Holy Spirit, was an integral part of the Godhead. It had reverted to the old metaphysical ideas concerning blood-sacrifice, blood-atonement, refining them somewhat in the transference; it also reverted to an elaborate system of ritual ceremonies and a professional priesthood, and it took over the Mithraic Sunday.

One would be hard put to it to find that Jesus ever had in mind any forecast of anything like all this; there is certainly no suggestion of such a forecast anywhere in the Gospels. Nevertheless organised Christianity is still set in this pattern, and hence the question whether or not one is a Christian is not in most cases, I believe, susceptible of a categorical answer. For myself, I would not pretend to give any kind of answer. My impression is that in the course of a couple of centuries Gresham’s law supplanted a stark and simple doctrine of practice by a stark and highly complex doctrine of belief; and how far the two can be reconciled I should say depends on the individual’s powers of self-persuasion. I can do nothing whatever with reconciling them.

Concerning the legends of miracle and mystery which have grown up around the historic figure of Jesus, I notice with interest that my attitude of mind is exactly what it was when as a three-year-old child I encountered the New England Primer’s doctrine of original sin. For example, I would not affirm or deny that Jesus was born of a virgin mother; I would merely raise the previous question, How can any one possibly know anything about it?1 Or, if I had been at the council of Nicæa in the year 325, and Arius had told me that Jesus was not an integral part of the Godhead, I would have asked him how he knew that; and if Athenasius had told me that He was, I would have asked him the same question. I have seen too many miracles and mysteries in the course of my life ever to take “the high priori road” of affirmation or denial with respect to any.

What impresses me about such matters, however, is not so much the paucity of evidence available concerning them, as that, for all I can see, they are essentially immaterial, adventitious. All the credenda to which Gresham’s law has committed organised Christianity seem to me not nearly so difficult in their improbability as in their pointlessness. I do not see that they have any bearing upon practice. If it were proven beyond doubt that Epicurus was born of Athene’s brain and came into the world like Gargantua, by way of his mother’s ear, I do not see how the fact could affect either the soundness of his philosophy or its applicability. So likewise if all the mass of organised post-Pauline Christianity’s metaphysics were proven true or false tomorrow, I do not see that one’s view of the historic Jesus and His teaching would be in the least affected.

For some years I have been observing that organised Christianity is in a poor way; it has come into some disrepute, but far more into general disregard. It has lost the power of making itself feared, and has gained no power of making itself loved; its ancient prestige has dwindled to the point where Epstean’s law can no longer do any business with it. Its officials are uneasily aware of this, and some of them are looking about for a new apologetic which shall enable “the Church,” as they call it, to recover its lost ground. I doubt their success, and I think with reason. The more forthright of the Church’s officials distribute the responsibility for this disintegration between an irreligious materialistic society and a spineless secularised Church. I suspect that there is far more to it than that. I suspect the trouble is that people at large, even good people, religious people, even those who by Mr. Cram’s classification are to be reckoned as human, have simply stopped thinking of religion in institutional terms; they have become ad hoc individualists.

If this be so, I can not deplore it; neither can I argue any calamitous consequences from it, but quite the contrary. I can conceive of a post-Pauline Church going to destruction, carrying with it the whole cargo of metaphysics which Gresham’s law has loaded on it, yet leaving the historic Jesus standing before society in a clearer light than ever. I have every respect for Sir Thomas Gresham’s memory, but I take leave to think that the religious apologetic produced by the mighty power of his law,—an apologetic based on metaphysics, miracle and magic (there is no word for it but that one),—is no longer serviceable.

The only apologetic for Jesus’s teaching that I find in any way reasonable is the one which Jesus Himself propounded—experience. His way of life is not to be followed because He recommended it, or because He was virgin-born, or was a part of the Godhead, or could work miracles, or for any other reason than that experience will prove that it is a good way, none better, if one have but the understanding and tenacity of purpose to cleave to it; neither of which I have, and I believe very few have. Here once more is where the hard gritty common sense of the Jew comes out, in his instinctive recourse to the apologetic of experience: “O taste and see how gracious the Lord is.” It was also the signal merit of the Cambridge Platonists that they recognised experience as the sum-total of Jesus’s own apologetic. Smith, in his discourse on the Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge, urges it in more impassioned language than any of the others, with the possible exception of Culverwel. “Ἔστι καὶ ψυχῆς αἴσθησίς τις.” Smith says, in a noble passage. “The soul itself hath its sense, as well as the body; and therefore David, when he would teach us how to know what the divine goodness is, calls not for speculation but sensation. Taste and see how good the Lord is.” Continuing, Smith remarks the progressively increasing power of spiritual insight accruing from the discipline of experience—

We shall then converse with God τῷ νῷ, whereas before we conversed with Him only τῇ διανοίᾳ, with our discursive faculty, as the Platonists were wont to distinguish. Before, we laid hold on Him only λόγῳ ἀποδεικτικῷ, with a struggling, agonistical and contentious reason, hotly combating with difficulties and sharp contests of divers opinions, and labouring in itself in its deductions of one thing from another. We shall then fasten our minds on Him λόγῳ ἀποφαντικῷ, with such a serene understanding, γαλήνῃ νοερᾷ, such an intellectual calmness and serenity as will present us with a blissful, steady and invariable sight of Him.

As with the other inscrutable phenomena which I have mentioned, I think there is “something in” the phenomenon of a progressively clarified spiritual insight at which these words are thrown out. It appears by all evidence as something specific, and the sense of it perhaps as to some degree communicable. Beyond this I can say nothing, and I doubt that anything can be said.

VII

I was much interested in some further conversation with Edward Epstean on the subject of religion, tending to show that organised Christianity has made somewhat a mess of its conception of sin and of what to do about it. The point of our talk took me back to Mr. Beard’s remark which I have quoted, about the stultifying ineptitude of orthodoxy’s cringing approach to God as in the prayers we all repeat and the hymns we all sing. Mr. Epstean’s view was based on his Pauline assumption of the dichotomous man, the man of “the two selves,” one divine and the other bestial, and he thought that progress on the way of life recommended by Jesus is better made by an energetic strengthening of the former than by direct efforts to repress and weaken the latter. Whether or not the basic assumption be sound, I believe that the method is eminently sound, and that in laying stress on the opposite method organised Christianity has brought a great deal of avoidable, enervating and rather cruel distress upon those of its adherents who took its pretensions seriously.

“When God created man,” Mr. Epstean said, “He was not out to create a race of competitors, nor could He have done that without upsetting the whole run of His universe; at least, we can’t see how He could, and we do see that He very evidently didn’t. He created man part divine, part bestial, and the two elements have been at war within the individual ever since. When the bestial side gets the better of it for the moment, as it will every now and then, and you go wrong, don’t bother over repenting and nagging yourself about it. Let it go,—forget it,—to hell with it!—and put your energy harder than ever on building up the divine side. Don’t try to repress the bestial side. Repression is negative, enervating. Put all your work on the positive job, and you can afford to let the bestial side take its chances.”

I am not so clear in my mind as I once was about the dichotomous man; Mr. Cram has made some serious difficulties for me on that score. But this does not affect the validity of Mr. Epstean’s view, considered as a matter of method. As such, I think it may be regarded as the one in all respects most consistent with the general discipline contemplated by Jesus’s teaching.

2 Da mihi, Domine, scire quod sciendum.

3 One reason why the religious literature of the Jews is so inestimably precious is that it is thoroughly permeated by a sense of this. The Oriental mind does not take kindly to the subtleties of metaphysics. In the Old Testament the Jew lets his anthropomorphism range with the utmost freedom, but one is all the time conscious that behind it is the hard, clear, cold-pressed, realistic common sense which is always instantly ready to say with Job, “Lo, these are parts of His ways; but how little a portion is heard of Him.”

• 1Parthenogenesis occurs in several groups of the animal world and is probably much more common than has been supposed; hence one might agree that it would be perfectly competent for nature, if so minded, to produce an instance of it, or indeed any number of instances, among mankind. That such an instance has or has not in fact occurred, however, is purely a matter of evidence.
• 2The unknown author of the Imitation was moved to offer a prayer of such wisdom that I have always kept it by me for use as an emergency-brake when my Platonist spirit of inquiry showed signs of getting out of hand. “Grant, O Lord, that the kind of knowledge I get may be the kind that is worth having.” I have already mentioned somewhere far back in these pages that one of the deepest impressions made on me in my childhood was made by my perceiving that ignorance exists, that people know actually very little about anything, nor are they equipped for knowing much more than they do. My friend Henry Stanley Haskins, in his remarkable little work, Meditations In Wall Street, puts it drily that “the eyes, ears, nose, taste and touch are the only parts of our equipment that we can’t rely on for complete and accurate information.” As I grew older I learned that the uses of ignorance, when kept within its proper scope, are great and salutary, and nowhere more so than in matters pertaining to the realm of the spirit. If our knowledge of the causes operating in that realm were complete and certified, I do not believe we should be any better, any wiser in managing our mundane life, or, in spite of the buoyant sentence of Lucretius, any happier. I am sure I should not be; and therefore for me at least, such knowledge is not of the kind that is worth having.
• 3Goethe said truly enough that man never knows how anthropomorphic he is. But man can know, if he has the very small amount of reflective power requisite to enable him to find out, and is willing to use it. The advantage of doing this is that if a person knows how anthropomorphic he is, and if he keeps the consciousness of it constantly in mind, he can then go on being as anthropomorphic as he likes, and no harm done. Some such idea may have been in the back of Joubert’s mind when he said that “it is not hard to know God, provided one does not trouble oneself to define Him.” Any nomenclature will do, any set of hypothetical attributes, if one is constantly aware that all these are a mere matter of words thrown out, as Arnold so happily puts it, at a reality immeasurably beyond one’s power of expression. One may speak of Deus, Zeus, God, Jehovah; of the Ens infinitum infinité, with Spinoza; of the Not-ourselves, making for righteousness, with Arnold; of the Unknown and Unknowable First Cause, with Spencer; of the Best one knows or can know, with Luther; but one may use these or any other terms with safety only if one knows to a certainty how anthropomorphic one is in one’s use of them.