upon our system of evaluations both our social environment and our racial heredity have been at work, until there have been established relatively stable points of evaluation which are with relative universality recognized. Our recognitions of value are closely related with our recognition of truth. Professor Starbuck says of the application of scientific method to the study of religion: "We shall have to content ourselves by working around the outskirts, making an inroad here and there, feeling our way where clear paths fail, until we are able to say of the religious sense, as of every other field we try to explore, we understand it, because there are bits of it which satisfy the demands of our intelligence sufficiently to give the feel of knowledge by producing steadfastness in our emotional attitudes."1

There is much of error and emotional instability involved in our evaluations, to be sure, but it is also certain that we have missed many of the great universal stabilities by our very emphasis upon the unstable elements. We have questioned and analyzed the basis of value until we have lost sight of the many solidly founded superstructures upon it.

The value of the God-experience, as a fact of consciousness, is thus as immediate as my evaluation of my friendly neighbor. While not unreasonable, it is not a reasoned-out process. We have reasoned much about religion,

"but all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive or comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their subject matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations, operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not coordinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains." 2

1 Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, New York, 1912, p. 10f. 'James, William, op. cit., p. 433.

XIII

The God Who May Be Known

God

Experi

ence as

Knowl

edge

THE quest of the soul is for the true, the abiding, the dependable. In this quest the philosophers of the ages have gone forth seeking, through some limited experience, to cognize reality. But inasmuch as none has been able to completely cognize so much as the growth process of a blade of grass, the total principle underneath all life. and being has remained tantalyzingly hidden. Nevertheless, men The have caught some gleam of the underlying reality, sufficient to stimulate them to speculative wonder, and have built up a variety of theologies which have been dogmatic statements about a cognitively incomprehensible God. To these we have bowed down, often with a true and worthy worship, but with a mistaken notion as to the significance of intellection in the total experience. We have thought that philosophy and science are at their best in the field of pure cognition, whereas philosophy is far more than a love for intellectual equations, and science is far from its best when it is satisfied with mere logical coherences. It is not a denial of God to say that philosophy and science have often dealt, either positively or negatively, with the false gods of human cognitive comprehension.

But we may know God. Much of our knowledge comes not through the mediacy of cognition, but through an immediate appreciation of relatedness. Thus one knows a friend, is immediately conscious of the attitude which distinguishes friendship, without completely cognizing his friend. When I see at a distance a man with a certain characteristic gait, I say it is my friend Robinson. Inasmuch as the gait is characteristic I am justified in my judgment. Other characteristics I cannot see at this distance, and even when we meet face to face I know that what I see is but the outward and least significant element in my friend's nature. The essential thing is that I know him. I may even mistake another man for Robinson, but I can never be convinced that I do not know Robinson. When I say we can know God, your mind at once reverts to a conception, to various images, to an intellectual portrait of God. Let me urge you to forget the portrait, as far as is possible. You cannot altogether dismiss it, but you can con

ceive of it as a shadowy and partial presentment of a vastly greater Reality.

It is the paradoxical truth of religion that the only satisfying conception of God is that he is greater than any intellectual conception of him. Who can picture a God who relates together all the processes of universal nature? We can picture little gods and call them infinite, and there may be value in such conceptions; but the God of experience is beyond picturization. Our satisfaction is in our own religious attitude. We are not truly religious unless we love beauty and truth and goodness for their own sakes, which means also for our own inner experiences, which means also for their relation to their perfection-God.

The subjectivism of the God-experience is not solipsism, for the basis of this experience is vital and social and racial. The sensefeeling complexes which condition it are not merely self-originated. They tell of my ancestors, of their life, their struggles, their solutions of life's problems. I may have invented a theology, but I have inherited my religion. It bears the pragmatic sanction of my ancestry. It comes out of the reality of experience. Without human experience reality would be of another sort than that which we know. What of culture, art, morality, religion? Because we live, these live also. The whole world of beauty, of truth, of morality, awakes at the touch of a human hand. Concerning the back-lying and all-inclusive realities we may speculate; the God of experience we know.

The God of experience is known through the more original and intimate powers of the mind. The intellect is of later development. It has a limited range and application. "It has been formed by a narrowing, a shrinking, a condensation of consciousness."1 Beyond the limited field of intellect are the broader and deeper and more intimate experiences. "The intellect reveals its origin by the wider sense of consciousness which surrounds it like a penumbra. It is this wider consciousness that enables us to have the direct vision that we have called the intuition of life." This fringe of consciousness beyond cognition is the immediacy of apparently submerged intimate elements. Through these we have our æsthetic appreciations, our unreasoned recognitions, our active moral stimulations. In a very real sense, also, through this sensitive penumbra of intimate reactions we know God.

2

XIV

Sense Experiences Indicated By the Words

of Jesus

OF THE words of the great Teacher we have comparatively few. He wrote no book; we have not even a letter from his pen. There was no scribal disciple to record his daily words of wisdom. All that is left for us is a brief body of quotations, written from recollection after long years. The words in which Jesus recorded his relation toward God are especially fragmentary. Like most finespirited men, he preserved a certain reticence in relation to his deeper experiences, referring to them only when the progress of his teaching demanded.

The imagery of the recorded sayings of Jesus is sublimely simple, but full of a wonderfully rich variety of sense elements. It is the simplicity of the highest art, unaffected and honest, which, upon close inspection, proves to be the product of the infinite complexities with which nature always underlays her masterpieces.

ternal

Rela

tion

ships

In his teaching concerning the kingdom of heaven, Jesus uses visual and auditory imagery freely, but not merely for their own sakes, and never without an adequate background of other imagery. They are symbols through which he touches the organic springs of feeling and appreciation. His emphasis is upon the inner life elements rather than upon externals. He pictures cup and platter, but his chief concern is with their inner purity. He presents no Emphasis apocalypses, and if he has glowing visions he describes them with a upon Inminimum of visual media. The visual element in his parables is not photographic but suggestive. It is the impressionism that is absolutely true to nature; it is the realism that recognizes the dominant reality of the unseen. Life is full and active as we read his words. When Christianity became the accepted faith of the Roman Empire, it triumphed over another faith which seems to have made much of visual symbols. The records of the Iranian Mithra cult, which thus contended with Christianity for supremacy in the early centuries after Christ, show that this Mediator-god was widely symbolized in statues, bas reliefs, coins, and altars. May it not be that one element in the fall of this divinity in Rome was

this very appeal to the visual and more superficial, as distinguished from the Christian appeal to the deeper sense experiences, the feelings, and the life of inner appreciation?

Jesus came at a time when many of his religious fellow-countrymen valued the visual and the cognitive and the external and the formal. If he were the Messiah they must have a sign, a visual symbol. Belief had become relatively intellectualized, so that he must prove to their intellects his Messiahship. "Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no wise believe," he said. "An evil and an adulterous generation seeketh after a sign." Their religion had been worked out formally and intellectually, and had become relatively dissociated from the inner life, character, and conduct, so that he exclaimed: "Woe unto you, ye Pharisees! For ye tithe mint and rue and every herb, and pass over justice and the love of God." The overvaluation of externals, which affected even the more intimate disciples, Jesus met with the conception of the kingdom of God. But even this was to them an external, though glorious, throne erection, in which they might hope for places of honor. To correct this false impression, Jesus said:

"The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo, here! or There! for lo, the kingdom of God is within you."

This appreciation of the reality and high value of the internal is found throughout the records of the life and words of Jesus. He saw life from many angles, combining in himself most harmoniously all sorts of strains and inclinations, but through it all, life was never superficial. His chief interests were in the deep realities of human character.

The God-experience of Jesus may be learned indirectly through his parables, his aphorisms, his conversations, and the fragments of his talks to his disciples which we possess, and also through the records of his attitudes and deeds; but we have a limited number of passages in which he confesses his own inner attitudes with relation to God. Aside from the long prayer in John 17, and omitting The At- indirect references and duplications from different gospels, this titude of direct testimony of Jesus to his own experience is comprised in Toward sixty verses. In fifty of these the word "Father" is used. In four God cases the word "God" is used; in three, "he that sent me"; while

Jesus

the terms "God the Father," "Power," and "The Holy Spirit," are each used once. In each case in which the word God is used there seems to be a feeling of God as set off in contrast. In one case,