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An essay by Henry Frederick Cope |
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Truth And Life |
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Title: Truth And Life Author: Henry Frederick Cope [More Titles by Cope] Religion of a Practical Mind
The only way to have happiness as a permanent guest is to keep your door open to the helpless. Self shrinks the soul. It is much easier to get interested in art doilies for Hottentots than it is to be simply human to the washerwoman at home. Whoever helps us to think kindly of another aids the coming of the kingdom of heaven. You are not likely to cheer the hearts of men by looking down in the mouth yourself. No man climbs to the Father by treading on his brother. Many things may keep you from the triumphs of life but only selfishness can keep you from the victories of love. The child of heaven always sees something of heaven in the child. There are too many people trying to clean up the world by scalding their neighbours.
Is there a faith for the practically minded man and woman? Or is religion exclusively for the dreamers and those who are contented with sentiment and feeling? These people of action, who measure by results, who have no life to waste on things not evidently useful; these who feel so intensely the needs of humanity that they have no time to waste in anything other than work--is there a religion for them? But religion is not a form of life nor a point of view for one kind of people alone; it is the spirit of higher things coming into the lives of all kinds of people. Its expression will depend on the temperament of the individual. It may lead some to sing hymns, but it will certainly compel others to build houses and to care for the sick and needy. In a world of men and affairs no man is actually religious unless his faith is finding some practical expression, and the greatest need of our day is that our hard-headed men and women who do things shall become inspired with the spirit and ideas of religion and shall do those things which religion's spirit of love and service would indicate as needing to be done. Pious people are deluding themselves if they think that they are cultivating the religious life and meriting the rewards of faith by simply sitting in church and feeding themselves on beautiful sentiments and thrilling visions, or even by vigorously attacking all those who dare to differ from them in matters of religious philosophy. Nor can religion find full expression in harking back over the centuries and elucidating the mysteries of ancient miracles or tracing the history of ancient peoples. If as much brain and energy had been given to solving the problem of society and leading men into the way of right living to-day as have been given to digging into the historical and philological problems of Scripture this world would be a better world by far. We must let the dead past bury its dead. Stay not weeping by the tomb of yesterday; do the work of to-day. There will be much more real religion in the intelligence, care, and sacrifice applied to the problem presented by the millions coming in at the gates of our country than in the most pains-taking study of the emigration of a horde of Israelites millenniums ago. This is what the practical man feels; there is so much to be done, why waste time in dreaming of how things once were done or in wishing for a world where no need or sorrow exists? Therefore, he is apt to say, in the business of bringing things to pass religion has no place; it is only for the dreamers. Yet no one needs religion more than the man who would do any worthy and lasting work in the world. Indeed, the possibility of such a work will not dawn upon him unless some of the spirit of religion and the possession of desire to do great and worth while things is evidence of the heavenly flame within. Any work for the sake of humanity needs a wider vision than that of its own field. Courage fails and hope dies if we see only the dismal problem; if we have only the practical outlook. Some vision of the ideal must enter into all great work; one must learn to see humanity in the light of divinity. It is a good thing to be able to see the Divine in the commonplace, the hand of Providence in American history, the work of the Most High as recorded in the daily papers, as well as in the Gospels; to do our work whether it be laying railroad track, selling dry goods, making or teaching or trading, as part of the service necessary to bring in the better day. Here is the religion of the practical mind, to express by the service of heart and brain and hand the belief that he has in the possibilities humanity, the hope that he has of a fairer, sweeter, nobler age than this, to make real the world's best ideals. So, seeking to bring to earth the best that heaven has dreamed, men have found themselves lifted into the light of infinite truth and love.
THE HEAD AND THE HEART There are temperamental types which never reach any conclusion by pure reasoning; intuitions, emotions, and inspirations take the place of intellectual processes. It would be the height of folly to attempt to make such natures reduce their religion to syllogisms, or to ask them to bring to the bar of the head all the findings of the heart. The emotional nature does not comprehend the manner in which the average mind must wait for its own light. These souls that move by great tides often reach sublime heights. The world would be poor, indeed, without their all-compelling enthusiasms, their glorious visions, and their dominant convictions. But such ones must not forget that there is no royal road to truth; that human nature is not cast in one single, unvarying mold; diversity is not necessarily heresy. There are other natures, not less necessary to the world, not less glorious in their records of leaders, martyrs, and masters of men. These are those that find truth by the slow steps of reasoning; that seek the way of right, with hearts of reverence and feet of faith, in the light of the faculties heaven has given them. They do not feel, they do not understand the winds that, sighing round them, convey such mighty meaning to other souls; they cannot buy progress at the price of blindness. They are the intellectual type. The conclusion that the emotional type must, after all, be the right one is a common one. This is because it makes the most noise and the most easily apprehended demonstration. And, therefore, some tell us that the man who seeks to find the way of truth by the light of the intellect must, without fail, wander into the pit of error; that the only way to come to religious truth is to shut the eyes of the mind and yield to emotion. The thinker constantly is being warned that he cannot apprehend God with his intellect; that he cannot see the way to heaven with the eyes of reason. He is urged to give up the use of his head that he may develop his heart. He even is told that faith is incompatible with reason, and love with logic. So strong is the emphasis on this that he is led to suspect that indolence is seeking to deify ignorance, and that men whose intellectual faculties have atrophied by their subjection to the emotional now are envious of those who retain the power to think clearly, and would have them also deprived of these powers. Nothing could be more clearly opposed to the way of truth than the notion that religion can be bought only at the price of reason, or that the consequence of using the intelligence is the losing of the power of affection for the divine, the good, and the true--of the warmth of heart and feeling that often determine character and conduct. If the faculties are God given they are given for working purposes. If man has a mind and yet may not think concerning the deepest and highest things of his own nature and destiny, then the giving of that mind or the permitting it to develop is the most cruel mockery known to human history. But the simple law of nature that every faculty has some purpose, that no power is without its duty, is the answer to all this. The mind is as sacred as the heart; it is as much a sacred duty to think as it is to aspire. There is nothing too holy for men to think about, to reason about. The mind must serve the truth--must with reverence lead to larger truth. No man is religious who represses any of his reasoning faculties. Every one of the higher powers must be brought to their greatest perfection. Not by dwarfing but by developing themselves do men glorify their Creator. Just as the finest tree in the forest speaks most eloquently of the bounty and beauty of nature, so does the gigantic intellect glorify the intelligence that ordered its being. Fear not to think of sacred things; nothing is sacred because it is mysterious; reverence does not dwell apart from reason. Faith does not reach its perfection in the fool; it shines most glorious where wisdom dwells. There still are the superstitious souls who confound darkness with divinity; who cry aloud against the light of knowledge. But they can no more stay the discovery of truth than the bats can hold back the dawn.
NEW TRUTHS FOR NEW DAYS There are many who think they must live without religion because they cannot be content with the views held by their fathers. The facts on which the faith of the past was based have come into the light so that the modern man, examining them, finds himself in all honesty compelled to question them and often ultimately to call them fables. The attempt to answer the questions of the clear-eyed modern scientific mind by accusing it of inherent antagonism to religion is cheap and ineffectual. There are honest doubters who at the same time are earnest seekers after truth, who desire the best, who are willing to pay any price for personal character and social righteousness. It is because such men are honest that they refuse to be bound by creeds they cannot believe and to buttress beliefs they cannot indorse. No greater loss could come to character than to insist that we shall act and speak a lie in order that the body of religious teaching shall remain undisturbed. The heresy we most need to fear is that which blatantly declares one thing while at heart fearing that another is true. The old generation in religion is accusing the new of treason to faith and the new is accusing the old of blindness to truth. When the father says to the son, "Believe this or be lost," the son answers that he rather would be lost in company with truth and honesty of conscience than be saved at the cost of both. But do these divergencies mean that the man of the modern mind must give up religion and that those who hold to the traditional views can find no fellowship with those who see new light? This is more than an academic question; it presses on every man who, finding in him the universal thirst for religion, finds also standing before the living waters him who says, "You can drink only out of this cup handed down from the fathers; you can approach only on speaking our shibboleth." Our fathers looked on religious truth as something complete and unchangeable, once for all delivered to the saints. But they forgot how different was the truth, as they saw it, from its vision as given to their fathers. Every age tends to look upon itself as the final goal and on its views as the last possible statement of truth. Yet how clearly does the past teach us that our vision of truth is ever changing. The science of to-day will be largely the folly of to-morrow. Truth, in any realm, is a country whose boundaries lie ever before us, whose geography each age must write anew. Truth is a road, not a terminus; a process of search and not the thing discovered alone. He only is religious really who opens heart and mind to the increasing vision of truth, in whom religion is not a cut and dried, fixed and unchanging philosophy, but to whom it is a method and motive for living, a process of adjusting himself to all his world in the full light of all the truth that can come to him. There is a religion for the man who must deny many things that once seemed essential to religion; for the man who feels compelled to doubt all things; it is the religion of the honest, open souled, unreserved search for truth and the translation of that truth as it is known into character, and living. If the setting of the face towards truth means breaking through ancient theology it also will mean bringing us face to face with the infinite. It is a good thing to lose the symbol if we only will seek for the substance. The heart of man cries out for the reality that lies back of all our words and for the realization of our doctrines in deeds. When the test of trouble comes, when earth is a desert and the heavens are brass, we find our refreshing, we find the real resources of religion not in doctrinal statements, not in formal creeds, but in that creed which experience has written on our hearts, in the consciousness of an eternal love not demonstrated by logic, in the sense of the unity of ourselves and our race with the infinite and divine. Every day must have its new creed, its enlarging vision of truth, but back of all lies truth itself, the reality upon which our fathers leaned and the unfailing springs where they were refreshed and the glowing visions that led them on. In that reality lies every man's religion. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |