"When I talked with an ardent missionary
and pointed out to him that his creed found no support in my experience,
he replied: `It is not so in your experience, but is so in the other world.'
I answer: `Other world! There is no other world. God is one and omnipresent;
here or nowhere is the whole fact.' "
EMERSON.
" Ye are complete in Him."--Paul.
"Whatever amount of power an organism
expends in any shape is the correlate and equivalent of a power that was
taken into it from without."--Herbert Spencer.
STUDENTS of Biography will observe that in
all well written Lives attention is concentrated for the first few chapters
upon two points. We are first introduced to the family to which the subject
of memoir belonged. The grandparents, or even the more remote ancestors,
are briefly sketched and their chief characteristics brought prominently
into view. Then the parents themselves are photographed in detail. Their
appearance and physique, their character, their disposition, their mental
qualities, are set before us in a critical analysis. And finally we are
asked to observe how much the father and the mother respectively have transmitted
of their peculiar nature to their offspring. How faithfully the ancestral
lines have met in the latest product, how mysteriously the joint characteristics
of body and mind have blended, and how unexpected yet how entirely natural
a recombination is the result--these points are elaborated with cumulative
effect until we realize at last how little we are dealing with an independent
unit, how much with a survival and reorganization of what seemed buried
in the grave.
In the second place, we are invited to consider
more external influences--schools and schoolmasters, neighbours, home,
pecuniary circumstances, scenery, and, by-and-by, the religious and political
atmosphere of the time. These also we are assured have played their part
in making the individual what he is. We can estimate these early influences
in any particular case with but small imagination if we fail to see how
powerfully they also have moulded mind and character, and in what subtle
ways they have determined the course of the future life.
This twofold relation of the individual,
first, to his parents, and second, to his circumstances, is not peculiar
to human beings. These two factors are responsible for making all living
organisms what they are. When a naturalist attempts to unfold the life-history
of any animal, he proceeds precisely on these same lines. Biography is
really a branch of Natural History; and the biographer, who discusses his
hero as the resultant of these two tendencies, follows the scientific method
as rigidly as Mr. Darwin in studying "Animals and Plants under Domestication."
Mr. Darwin, following Weismann, long ago
pointed out that there are two main factors in all Evolution--the nature
of the organism and the nature of the conditions. We have chosen our illustration
from the highest or human species in order to define the meaning of these
factors in the clearest way; but it must be remembered that the development
of man under these directive influences is essentially the same as that
of any other organism in the hands of Nature. We are dealing therefore
with universal Law. It will still further serve to complete the conception
of the general principle if we now substitute for the casual phrases by
which the factors have been described the more accurate terminology of
Science. Thus what Biography describes as parental influences, Biology
would speak of as Heredity; and all that is involved in the second factor--the
action of external circumstances and surroundings--the naturalist would
include under the single term Environment. These two, Heredity and Environment,
are the master-influences of the organic world. These have made all of
us what we are. These forces are still ceaselessly playing upon all our
lives. And he who truly understands these influences; he who has decided
how much to allow to each: he who can regulate new forces as they arise,
or adjust them to the old, so directing them as at one moment to make them
co-operate, at another to counteract one another, understands the rationale
of personal development. To seize continuously the opportunity of more
and more perfect adjustment to better and higher conditions, to balance
some inward evil with some purer influence acting from without, in a word
to make our Environment at the same time that it is making us,--these are
the secrets of a well-ordered and successful life.
In the spiritual world, also, the subtle
influences which form and transform the soul are Heredity and Environment.
And here especially where all is invisible, where much that we feel to
be real is yet so ill-defined, it becomes of vital practical moment to
clarify the atmosphere as far as possible with conceptions borrowed from
the natural life. Few thinkers are less understood than the conditions
of the spiritual life. The distressing incompetence of which most of us
are conscious in trying to work out our spiritual experience is due perhaps
less to the diseased will which we commonly blame for it than to imperfect
knowledge of the right conditions. It does not occur to us how natural
the spiritual is. We still strive for some strange transcendent thing;
we seek to promote life by methods as unnatural as they prove unsuccessful;
and only the utter incomprehensibility of the whole region prevents us
seeing fully--what we already half suspect--how completely we are missing
the road. Living in the spiritual world, nevertheless, is just as simple
as living in the natural world; and it is the same kind of simplicity.
It is the same kind of simplicity for it is the same kind of world--there
are not two kinds of worlds. The conditions of life in the one are the
conditions of life in the other. And till these conditions are sensibly
grasped, as the conditions of all life, it is impossible that the personal
effort after the highest life should be other than a blind struggle carried
on in fruitless sorrow and humiliation.
Of these two universal factors, Heredity
and Environment, it is unnecessary to balance the relative importance here.
The main influence, unquestionably, must be assigned to the former. In
practice, however, and for an obvious reason, we are chiefly concerned
with the latter. What Heredity has to do for us is determined outside ourselves.
No man can select his own parents. But every man to some extent can choose
his own Environment. His relation to it, however largely determined by
Heredity in the first instance, is always open to alteration. And so great
is his control over Environment and so radical its influence over him,
that he can so direct it as either to undo modify, perpetuate or intensify
the earlier hereditary influences within certain limits. But the aspects
of Environment which we have now to consider do not involve us in questions
of such complexity. In what high and mystical sense, also, Heredity applies
to the spiritual organism we need not just now inquire. In the simpler
relations of the more external factor we shall find a large and fruitful
field for study.
The Influence of Environment may be investigated
in two main aspects. First, one might discuss the modern and very interesting
question as to the power of Environment to induce what is known to recent
science as Variation. A change in the surroundings of any animal, it is
now well-known, can so react upon it as to cause it to change. By the attempt,
conscious or unconscious, to adjust itself to the new conditions, a true
physiological change is gradually wrought within the organism. Hunter,
for example, in a classical experiment, so changed the Environment of a
sea-gull by keeping it in captivity that it could only secure a grain diet.
The effect was to modify the stomach of the bird, normally adapted to a
fish diet, until in time it came to resemble in structure the gizzard of
an ordinary grain-feeder such as the pigeon. Holmgren again reversed this
experiment by feeding pigeons for a lengthened period on a meat-diet, with
the result that the gizzard became transformed into the carnivorous stomach.
Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace mentions the case of a Brazilian parrot which
changes its colour from green to red or yellow when fed on the fat of certain
fishes. Not only changes of food, however, but changes of climate and of
temperature, changes in surrounding organisms, in the case of marine animals
even changes of pressure, of ocean currents, of light, and of many other
circumstances, are known to exert a powerful modifying influence upon living
organisms. These relations are still being worked out in many directions,
but the influence of Environment as a prime factor in Variation is now
a recognised doctrine of science.
Even the popular mind has been struck with
the curious adaptation of nearly all animals to their habitat, for
example in the matter of colour. The sandy hue of the sole and flounder,
the white of the polar bear with its suggestion of Arctic snows, the stripes
of the Bengal tiger--as if the actual reeds of its native jungle had nature-printed
themselves on its hide;--these, and a hundred others which will occur to
every one, are marked instances of adaptation to Environment induced, by
Natural Selection or otherwise, for the purpose, obviously in these cases
at least, of protection.
To continue the investigation of the modifying
action of Environment into the moral and spiritual spheres, would be to
open a fascinating and suggestive inquiry. One might show how the moral
man is acted upon and changed continuously by the influences, secret and
open, of his surroundings, by the tone of society, by the company he keeps,
by his occupation, by the books he reads, by Nature, by all, in short,
that constitutes the habitual atmosphere of his thoughts and the little
world of his daily choice. Or one might go deeper still and prove how the
spiritual life also is modified from outside sources-- its health or disease,
its growth or decay, all its changes for better or for worse being determined
by the varying and successive circumstances in which the religious habits
are cultivated. But we must rather transfer our attention to a second aspect
of environment, not perhaps so fascinating but yet more important.
So much of the modern discussion of Environment
revolves round the mere question of Variation that one is apt to overlook
a previous question. Environment as a factor in life is not exhausted when
we have realized its modifying influence. Its significance is scarcely
touched. The great function of Environment is not to modify but to sustain.
In sustaining life, it is true, it modifies. But the latter influence is
incidental, the former essential. Our Environment is that in which we live
and move and have our being. Without it we should neither live nor move
nor have any being. In the organism lies the principle of life; in the
Environment are the conditions of life. Without the fulfilment of these
conditions, which are wholly supplied by Environment, there can be no life.
An organism in itself is but a part; Nature is its complement. Alone, cut
off from its surroundings, it is not. Alone, cut off from my surroundings,
I am not--physically I am not. I am, only as I am sustained. I continue
only as I receive. My Environment may modify me, but it has first to keep
me. And all the time its secret transforming power is indirectly moulding
body and mind it is directly active in the more open task of ministering
to my myriad wants and from hour to hour sustaining life itself.
To understand the sustaining influence of
Environment in the animal world, one has only to recall what the biologist
terms the extrinsic or subsidiary conditions of vitality. Every living
thing normally requires for its development an Environment containing air,
light, heat, and water. In addition to these, if vitality is to be prolonged
for any length of time, and if it is to be accompanied with growth and
the expenditure of energy, there must be a constant supply of food. When
we simply remember how indispensable food is to growth and work, and when
we further bear in mind that the food-supply is solely contributed by the
Environment, we shall realize at once the meaning and the truth of the
proposition that without Environment there can be no life. Seventy per
cent. at least of the human body is made of pure water, the rest of gases
and earths. These have all come from Environment. Through the secret pores
of the skin two pounds of water are exhaled daily from every healthy adult.
The supply is kept up by Environment. The Environment is really an unappropriated
part of ourselves. Definite portions are continuously abstracted from it
and added to the organism. And so long as the organism continues to grow,
act, think, speak, work, or perform any other function demanding a supply
of energy, there is a constant, simultaneous, and proportionate drain upon
its surroundings.
This is a truth in the physical, and therefore
in the spiritual, world of so great importance that we shall not mis-spend
time if we follow it, for further confirmation, into another department
of nature. Its significance in Biology is self-evident; let us appeal to
Chemistry.
When a piece of coal is thrown on the fire,
we say that it will radiate into the room a certain quantity of heat. This
heat, in the popular conception, is supposed to reside in the coal and
to be set free during the process of combustion. In reality, however, the
heat energy is only in part contained in the coal. It is contained just
as truly in the coal's Environment--that is to say, in the oxygen of the
air. The atoms of carbon which compose the coal have a powerful affinity
for the oxygen of the air. Whenever they are made to approach within a
certain distance of one another, by the initial application of heat, they
rush together with inconceivable velocity. The heat which appears at this
moment, comes neither from the carbon alone, nor from the oxygen alone.
These two substances are really inconsumable, and continue to exist, after
they meet in a combined form, as carbonic acid gas. The heat is due to
the energy developed by the chemical embrace, the precipitate rushing together
of the molecules of carbon and the molecules of oxygen. It comes, therefore,
partly from the coal and partly from the Environment. Coal alone never
could produce heat, neither alone could Environment. The two are mutually
dependent. And although in nearly all the arts we credit everything to
the substance which we can weigh and handle, it is certain that in most
cases the larger debt is due to an invisible Environment.
This is one of those great commonplaces which
slip out of general reckoning by reason of their very largeness and simplicity.
How profound, nevertheless, are the issues which hang on this elementary
truth, we shall discover immediately. Nothing in this age is more needed
in every department of knowledge than the rejuvenescence of the commonplace.
In the spiritual world especially, he will be wise who courts acquaintance
with the most ordinary and transparent facts of Nature; and in laying the
foundations for a religious life he will make no unworthy beginning who
carries with him an impressive sense of so obvious a truth as that without
Environment there can be no life.
For what does this amount to in the spiritual
world? Is it not merely the scientific re-statement of the reiterated aphorism
of Christ, "Without Me ye can do nothing"? There is in the spiritual
organism a principle of life; but that is not self-existent. It requires
a second factor, a something in which to live and move and have its being,
an Environment. Without this it cannot live or move or have any being.
Without Environment the soul is as the carbon without the oxygen, as the
fish without the water, as the animal frame without the extrinsic conditions
of vitality.
And what is the spiritual Environment? It
is God. Without this, therefore, there is no life, no thought, no energy,
nothing--"without Me ye can do nothing."
The cardinal error in the religious life
is to attempt to live without an Environment. Spiritual experience occupies
itself, not too much, but too exclusively, with one factor--the soul. We
delight in dissecting this much tortured faculty, from time to time, in
search of a certain something which we call our faith--forgetting that
faith is but an attitude, an empty hand for grasping an environing Presence.
And when we feel the need of a power by which to overcome the world, how
often do we not seek to generate it within ourselves by some forced process,
some fresh girding of the will, some strained activity which only leaves
the soul in further exhaustion? To examine ourselves is good; but useless
unless we also examine Environment. To bewail our weakness is right, but
not remedial. The cause must be investigated as well as the result. And
yet, because we never see the other half of the problem, our failures even
fail to instruct us. After each new collapse we begin our life anew, but
on the old conditions; and the attempt ends as usual in the repetition--in
the circumstances the inevitable repetition--of the old disaster. Not that
at times we do not obtain glimpses of the true state of the case. After
seasons of much discouragement, with the sore sense upon us of our abject
feebleness, we do confer with ourselves, insisting for the thousandth time,
"My soul, wait thou only upon God." But, the lesson is soon forgotten.
The strength supplied we speedily credit to our own achievement; and even
the temporary success is mistaken for a symptom of improved inward vitality.
Once more we become self-existent. Once more we go on living without an
Environment. And once more, after days of wasting without repairing, of
spending without replenishing, we begin to perish with hunger, only returning
to God again, as a last resort, when we have reached starvation point.
Now why do we do this? Why do we seek to
breathe without an atmosphere, to drink without a well? Why this unscientific
attempt to sustain life for weeks at a time without an Environment? It
is because we have never truly seen the necessity for an Environment. We
have not been working with a principle. We are told to "wait only
upon God," but we do not know why. It has never been as clear to us
that without God the soul will die as that without food the body will perish.
In short, we have never comprehended the doctrine of the Persistence of
Force. Instead of being content to transform energy we have tried to create
it.
The Law of Nature here is as clear as Science
can make it. In the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, "It is a corollary
from that primordial truth which, as we have seen, underlies all other
truths, that whatever amount of power an organism expends in any shape
is the correlate and equivalent of a power that was taken into it from
without. We are dealing here with a simple question of dynamics. Whatever
energy the soul expends must first be "taken into it from without."
We are not Creators, but creatures; God is our refuge and strength. Communion
with God, therefore, is a scientific necessity; and nothing will more help
the defeated spirit which is struggling in the wreck of its religious life
than a common-sense hold of this plain biological principle that without
Environment he can do nothing. What he wants is not an occasional view,
but a principle-- a basal principle like this, broad as the universe, solid
as nature. In the natural world we act upon this law unconsciously. We
absorb heat, breathe air, draw on Environment all but automatically for
meat and drink, for the nourishment of the senses, for mental stimulus,
for all that, penetrating us from without, can prolong, enrich, and elevate
life. But in the spiritual world we have all this to learn. We are new
creatures, and even the bare living has to be acquired.
Now the great point in learning to live is
to live naturally. As closely as possible we must follow the broad, clear
lines of the natural life. And there are three things especially which
it is necessary for us to keep continually in view. The first is that the
organism contains within itself only one-half of what is essential to life;
the second is that the other half is contained in the Environment; the
third, that the condition of receptivity is simple union between the organism
and the Environment.
Translated into the language of religion
these propositions yield, and place on a scientific basis, truths of immense
practical interest. To say, first, that the organism contains within itself
only one-half of what is essential to life, is to repeat the evangelical
confession, so worn and yet so true to universal experience, of the utter
helplessness of man. Who has not come to the conclusion that he is but
a part, a fraction of some larger whole? Who does not miss at every turn
of his life an absent God? That man is but a part, he knows, for there
is room in him for more. That God is the other part, he feels, because
at times He satisfies his need. Who does not tremble often under that sicklier
symptom of his incompleteness, his want of spiritual energy, his helplessness
with sin? But now he understands both-- the void in his life, the powerlessness
of his will. He understands that, like all other energy, spiritual power
is contained in Environment. He finds here at last the true root of all
human frailty, emptiness, nothingness, sin. This is why "without Me
ye can do nothing." Powerlessness is the normal state not only of
this but of every organism--of every organism apart from its Environment.
The entire dependence of the soul upon God
is not an exceptional mystery, nor is man's helplessness an arbitrary and
unprecedented phenomenon. It is the law of all Nature. The spiritual man
is not taxed beyond the natural. He is not purposely handicapped by singular
limitations or unusual incapacities. God has not designedly made the religious
Life as hard as possible. The arrangements for the spiritual life are the
same as for the natural life. When in their hours of unbelief men challenge
their Creator for placing the obstacle of human frailty in the way of their
highest development, their protest is against the order of nature. They
object to the sun for being the source of energy and not the engine, to
the carbonic acid being in the air and not in the plant. They would equip
each organism with a personal atmosphere, each brain with a private store
of energy; they would grow corn in the interior of the body, and make bread
by a special apparatus in the digestive organs. They must, in short, have
the creature transformed into a Creator. The organism must either depend
on his environment, or be self-sufficient. But who will not rather approve
the arrangement by which man in his creatural life may have unbroken access
to an Infinite Power? What soul will seek to remain self-luminous when
it knows that "The Lord God is a Sun"? Who will not willingly
exchange his shallow vessel for Christ's well of living water? Even if
the organism, launched into being like a ship putting out to sea, possessed
a full equipment, its little store must soon come to an end. But in contact
with a large and bounteous Environment its supply is limitless. In every
direction its resources are infinite.
There is a modern school which protests against
the doctrine of man's inability as the heartless fiction of a past theology.
While some forms of that dogma, to any one who knows man, are incapable
of defence, there are others which, to any one who knows Nature, are incapable
of denial. Those who oppose it, in their jealousy for humanity, credit
the organism with the properties of Environment. All true theology, on
the other hand, has remained loyal to at least the root-idea in this truth.
The New Testament is nowhere more impressive than where it insists on the
fact of man's dependence. In its view the first step in religion is for
man to feel his helplessness. Christ's first beatitude is to the poor in
spirit. The condition of entrance into the spiritual kingdom is to possess
the child-spirit--that state of mind combining at once the profoundest
helplessness with the most artless feeling of dependence. Substantially
the same idea underlies the countless passages in which Christ affirms
that He has not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
And in that farewell discourse into which the Great Teacher poured the
most burning convictions of His life, He gives to this doctrine an ever
increasing emphasis. No words could be more solemn or arresting than the
sentence in the last great allegory devoted to this theme, "As the
branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more
can ye except ye abide in Me." The word here, it will be observed
again, is cannot. It is the imperative of natural law. Fruit-bearing
without Christ is not an improbability, but an impossibility. As well expect
the natural fruit to flourish without air and heat, without soil and sunshine.
How thoroughly also Paul grasped this truth is apparent from a hundred
pregnant passages in which he echoes his Master's teaching. To him life
was hid with Christ in God. And that he embraced this not as a theory but
as an experimental truth we gather from his constant confession, "
When I am weak, then am I strong."
This leads by a natural transition to the
second of the three points we are seeking to illustrate. We have seen that
the organism contains within itself only one half of what is essential
to life. We have next to observe, as the complement of this, how the second
half is contained in the Environment.
One result of the due apprehension of our
personal helplessness will be that we shall no longer waste our time over
the impossible task of manufacturing energy for ourselves. Our science
will bring to an abrupt end the long series of severe experiments in which
we have indulged in the hope of finding a perpetual motion. And having
decided upon this once for all, our first step in seeking a more satisfactory
state of things must be to find a new source of energy. Following Nature,
only one course is open to us. We must refer to Environment. The natural
life owes all to Environment, so must the spiritual. Now the Environment
of the spiritual life is God. As Nature therefore forms the complement
of the natural life, God is the complement of the spiritual.
The proof of this? That Nature is not more
natural to my body than God is to my soul. Every animal and plant has its
own Environment. And the further one inquires into the relations of the
one to the other, the more one sees the marvellous intricacy and beauty
of the adjustments. These wonderful adaptations of each organism to its
surroundings--of the fish to the water, of the eagle to the air, of the
insect to the forest-bed; and of each part of every organism--the fish's
swim-bladder, the eagle's eye, the insect's breathing tubes--which the
old argument from design brought home to us with such enthusiasm, inspire
us still with a sense of the boundless resource and skill of Nature in
perfecting her arrangements for each single life. Down to the last detail
the world is made for what is in it; and by whatever process things are
as they are, all organisms find in surrounding Nature the ample complement
of themselves. Man, too, finds in his Environment provision for all capacities,
scope for the exercise of every faculty, room for the indulgence of each
appetite, a just supply for every want. So the spiritual man at the apex
of the pyramid of life finds in the vaster range of his Environment a provision,
as much higher, it is true, as he is higher, but as delicately adjusted
to his varying needs. And all this is supplied to him just as the lower
organisms are ministered to by the lower environment, in the same simple
ways, in the same constant sequence, as appropriately and as lavishly.
We fail to praise the ceaseless ministry of the great inanimate world around
us only because its kindness is unobtrusive. Nature is always noiseless.
All her greatest gifts are given in secret. And we forget how truly every
good and perfect gift comes from without, and from above, because no pause
in her changeless beneficence teaches us the sad lessons of deprivation.
It is not a strange thing, then, for the
soul to find its life in God. This is its native air. God as the Environment
of the soul has been from the remotest age the doctrine of all the deepest
thinkers in religion. How profoundly Hebrew poetry is saturated with this
high thought will appear when we try to conceive of it with this left out.
True poetry is only science in another form. And long before it was possible
for religion to give scientific expression to its greatest truths, men
of insight uttered themselves in psalms which could not have been truer
to Nature had the most modern light controlled the inspiration. "As
the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee,
O God." What fine sense of the analogy of the natural and the spiritual
does not underlie these words. As the hart after its Environment, so man
after his; as the water-brooks are fitly designed to meet the natural wants,
so fitly does God implement the spiritual need of man. It will be noticed
that in the Hebrew poets the longing for God never strikes one as morbid,
or unnatural to the men who uttered it. It is as natural to them to long
for God as for the swallow to seek her nest. Throughout all their images
no suspicion rises within us that they are exaggerating. We feel how truly
they are reading themselves, their deepest selves. No false note occurs
in all their aspiration. There is no weariness even in their ceaseless
sighing except the lover's weariness for the absent--if they would fly
away, it is only to be at rest. Men who have no soul can only wonder at
this. Men who have a soul, but with little faith, can only envy it. How
joyous a thing it was to the Hebrews to seek their God! How artlessly they
call upon Him to entertain them in His pavilion, to cover them with His
feathers, to hide them in His secret place, to hold them in the hollow
of His hand or stretch around them the everlasting arms! These men were
true children of Nature. As the humming-bird among its own palm-trees,
as the ephemera in the sunshine of a summer evening, so they lived their
joyous lives. And even the full share of the sadder experiences of life
which came to all of them but drove them the further into the Secret Place,
and led them with more consecration to make, as they expressed it, "the
Lord their portion." All that has been said since from Marcus Aurelius
to Swedenborg, from Augustine to Schleiermacher of a besetting God as the
final complement of humanity is but a repetition of the Hebrew poets' faith.
And even the New Testament has nothing higher to offer man than this. The
psalmist's "God is our refuge and strength" is only the earlier
form, less defined, less practicable, but not less noble, of Christ's "Come
unto Me, and I will give you rest."
There is a brief phrase of Paul's which defines
the relation with almost scientific accuracy,--"Ye are complete in
Him." In this is summed up the whole of the Bible anthropology--the
completeness of man in God, his incompleteness apart from God.
If it be asked, In what is man incomplete,
or, In what does God complete him? the question is a wide one. But it may
serve to show at least the direction in which the Divine Environment forms
the complement of human life if we ask ourselves once more what it is in
life that needs complementing. And to this question we receive the significant
answer that it is in the higher departments alone, or mainly, that the
incompleteness of our life appears. The lower departments of Nature are
already complete enough. The world itself is about as good a world as might
be. It has been long in the making, its furniture is all in, its laws are
in perfect working order; and although wise men at various times have suggested
improvements, there is on the whole a tolerably unanimous vote of confidence
in things as they exist. The Divine Environment has little more to do for
this planet so far as we can see, and so far as the existing generation
is concerned. Then the lower organic life of the world is also so far complete.
God, through Evolution or otherwise, may still have finishing touches to
add here and there, but already it is "all very good." It is
difficult to conceive anything better of its kind than a lily or a cedar,
an ant or an ant-eater. These organisms, so far as we can judge, lack nothing.
It might be said of them, "they are complete in Nature." Of man
also, of man the animal, it may be affirmed that his Environment satisfies
him. He has food and drink, and good food and good drink. And there is
in him no purely animal want which is not really provided for, and that
apparently in the happiest possible way
But the moment we pass beyond the mere animal
life we begin to come upon an incompleteness. The symptoms at first are
slight, and betray themselves only by an unexplained restlessness or a
dull sense of want. Then the feverishness increases, becomes more defined,
and passes slowly into abiding pain. To some come darker moments when the
unrest deepens into a mental agony of which all the other woes of earth
are mockeries--moments when the forsaken soul can only cry in terror for
the Living God. Up to a point the natural Environment supplies man's wants,
beyond that it only derides him. How much in man lies beyond that point?
Very much--almost all, all that makes man man. The first suspicion of the
terrible truth--so for the time let us call it--wakens with the dawn of
the intellectual life. It is a solemn moment when the slow-moving mind
reaches at length the verge of its mental horizon, and, looking over, sees
nothing more. Its straining makes the abyss but more profound. Its cry
comes back without an echo. Where is the Environment to complete this rational
soul? Men either find one,--One--or spend the rest of their days
in trying to shut their eyes. The alternatives of the intellectual life
are Christianity or Agnosticism. The Agnostic is right when he trumpets
his incompleteness. He who is not complete in Him must be for ever incomplete.
Still more grave becomes man's case when he begins further to explore his
moral and social nature. The problems of the heart and conscience are infinitely
more perplexing than those of the intellect. Has love no future? Has right
no triumph? Is the unfinished self to remain unfinished? Again, the alternatives
are two, Christianity or Pessimism. But when we ascend the further height
of the religious nature, the crisis comes. There, without Environment,
the darkness is unutterable. So maddening now becomes the mystery that
men are compelled to construct an Environment for themselves. No Environment
here is unthinkable. An altar of some sort men must have--God, or Nature,
or Law. But the anguish of Atheism is only a negative proof of man's incompleteness.
A witness more overwhelming is the prayer of the Christian. What a very
strange thing, is it not, for man to pray? It is the symbol at once of
his littleness and of his greatness. Here the sense of imperfection, controlled
and silenced in the narrower reaches of his being, becomes audible. Now
he must utter himself. The sense of need is so real, and the sense of Environment,
that he calls out to it, addressing it articulately, and imploring it to
satisfy his need. Surely there is nothing more touching in Nature than
this? Man could never so expose himself, so break through all constraint,
except from a dire necessity. It is the suddenness and unpremeditatedness
of Prayer that gives it a unique value as an apologetic.
Man has three questions to put to his Environment,
three symbols of his incompleteness. They come from three different centres
of his being. The first is the question of the intellect, What is Truth?
The natural Environment answers, "Increase of Knowledge increaseth
Sorrow," and "much study is a Weariness." Christ replies,
"Learn of Me, and ye shall find Rest." Contrast the world's word
"Weariness" with Christ's word "Rest." No other teacher
since the world began has ever associated "learn " with "Rest."
Learn of me, says the philosopher, and you shall find Restlessness. Learn
of Me, says Christ, and ye shall find Rest. Thought, which the godless
man has cursed, that eternally starved yet ever living spectre, finds at
last its imperishable glory; Thought is complete in Him. The second question
is sent up from the moral nature, Who will show us any good? And again
we have a contrast: the world's verdict, "There is none that doeth
good, no, not one;" and Christ's, "There is none good but God
only." And, finally, there is the lonely cry of the spirit, most pathetic
and most deep of all, Where is he whom my soul seeketh? And the yearning
is met as before, "I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there
was no man that would know me; refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul.
I cried unto Thee, O Lord: I said, Thou art my refuge and my portion in
the land of the living.
Are these the directions in which men in
these days are seeking to complete their lives? The completion of Life
is just now a supreme question. It is important to observe how it is being
answered. If we ask Science or Philosophy they will refer us to Evolution.
The struggle for Life, they assure us, is steadily eliminating imperfect
forms, and as the fittest continue to survive we shall have a gradual perfecting
of being. That is to say, that completeness is to be sought for in the
organism--we are to be complete in Nature and in ourselves. To Evolution,
certainly, all men will look for a further perfecting of Life. But it must
be an Evolution which includes the factors. Civilization, it may be said,
will deal with the second factor. It will improve the Environment step
by step as it improves the organism, or the organism as it improves the
Environment. This is well, and it will perfect Life up to a point. But
beyond that it cannot carry us. As the possibilities of the natural Life
become more defined, its impossibilities will become the more appalling.
The most perfect civilization would leave the best part of us still incomplete.
Men will have to give up the experiment of attempting to live in half an
Environment. Half an Environment will give but half a Life. Half an Environment?
He whose correspondences are with this world alone has only a thousandth
part, a fraction, the mere rim and shade of an Environment, and only the
fraction of a Life. How long will it take Science to believe its own creed,
that the material universe we see around us is only a fragment of the universe
we do not see? The very retention of the phrase "Material Universe,"
we are told, is the confession of our unbelief and ignorance; since "matter
is the less important half of the material of the physical universe.
The thing to be aimed at is not an organism
self-contained and self-sufficient, however high in the scale of being,
but an organism complete in the whole Environment. It is open to any one
to aim at a self-sufficient Life, but he will find no encouragement in
Nature. The Life of the body may complete itself in the physical world;
that is its legitimate Environment. The Life of the senses, high and low,
may perfect itself in Nature. Even the Life of thought may find a large
complement in surrounding things. But the higher thought, and the conscience,
and the religious Life, can only perfect themselves in God. To make the
influence of Environment stop with the natural world is to doom the spiritual
nature to death. For the soul, like the body, can never perfect itself
in isolation. The law for both is to be complete in the appropriate Environment.
And the perfection to be sought in the spiritual world is a perfection
of relation, a perfect adjustment of that which is becoming perfect to
that which is perfect.
The third problem, now simplified to a point,
finally presents itself. Where do organism and Environment meet? How does
that which is becoming perfect avail itself of its perfecting Environment?
And the answer is, just as in Nature. The condition is simple receptivity.
And yet this is perhaps the least simple of all conditions. It is so simple
that we will not act upon it. But there is no other condition. Christ has
condensed the whole truth into one memorable sentence, "As the branch
cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye
except ye abide in Me." And on the positive side, "He that abideth
in Me the same bringeth forth much fruit."