The Mitigation of Theology

“And Moses said unto him, As soon as I am gone out of the city I will spread abroad my hands unto the Lord; and the thunder shall cease, neither shall there be any more hail, that thou mayest know how that the earth is the Lord’s. But as for thee and thy servants I know that ye will not yet fear the Lord God.” — Exodus ix. 29 and 30.

Moses, the deliverer of the Jews, was talking with Pharaoh their oppressor, the King of the Egyptians. Again and again the servant of God had demanded of the monarch that he should let God’s people go; again and again as the monarch scornfully refused, God’s punishments had come, the terrible quick blows of seven of the plagues. In the midst of all the dreadful discipline, there Pharaoh had stood with the captive people held tight in his relentless fists. The more God’s blows beat that closed hand, the more obstinate it seemed to grow. At last the proud king cries for mercy and declares what terms he will make with God. Let God change His whole treatment, let Him spare instead of punishing, let Him lift off His heavy hand, and Pharaoh will yield. “Entreat the Lord (for it is enough) that there be no more mighty thunderings and hail, and I will let you go.” And then comes Moses’ answer, which I read, — God will change His treatment of you; God will take off His hand; “The thunder shall cease, neither shall there be any more hail.” But that change in Him will not bring the change in you that you desire. The milder method will not bring of itself what the severer method failed to bring. The method shall be changed if only to show that God has many methods and will use them all, “that thou mayest know that the earth is the Lord’s. But as for thee and thy servants, I know that ye will not yet fear the Lord.” No change of treatment of itself can bring a change of heart. Let the heart be right and any treatment of God can interpret Him to His child.

The future proved that Moses spoke the truth. “The heart of Pharaoh was hardened, neither would he let the children of Israel go.” That was most natural. Indeed the whole story is full of human nature, so full that it is really a parable of what is happening all the time. It is this value of it which I want to use this morning. I want to make it my text while I try to point out the danger of the newest religious life of our own time. If I am not mistaken, this story of Pharaoh and especially these words which Moses speaks to him, contain the truth which they are much in danger of forgetting, and in much need of remembering, who rejoice most loudly in those changed aspects of the Christian faith which belong to these present days.

The general character of the change which has taken and is taking place in Christian faith is plain. Under many forms as it applies itself to many special doctrines it is one in spirit. It is a desire to escape from the severer, stricter, more formal, more exacting statements of truth and duty, and to lay hold of the gentler, more gracious, more spiritual, more indulgent representations of God and of what He asks of man. I shall have occasion to say before long how deeply I sympathize with this great change in the aspect of faith, how truly I believe that in it there is prophesied a new and richer coming of the kingdom of the Lord of love and life. But now at first I ask you only to note the fact, which no thoughtful and observant man can fail to see, and then to observe how many men among us, how we all perhaps sometimes, are led on to attribute a power to such a change in men’s thoughts of God and of His ways which no mere change of thought, however it may be from the less to the more true, ever can possess. We glory in the fuller spirit of the New Testament which pervades our religion. The stern judge of the older dispensation is lost behind the gracious and merciful presence of the Christ. Pity is more than judgment, sympathy more than authority, persuasion more than rebuke, in the God of whom men are thinking, of whom men are preaching now. As we talk thus it sometimes seems to us as if the work of religion for the world and for us would be accomplished when these new and glorious ideas shall have become supreme and universal. Sin will be conquered, man will be saved, when the old, severe theology shall be entirely dethroned and men hear everywhere the truth of truths, that “God is love.” At such a time it seems to me that some one ought to speak the very words that Moses spoke to Pharaoh, “The thunder shall cease, neither shall there be any more hail. But as for thee and thy servants I know that ye will not yet fear the Lord God.” The mercy, the pity, the tenderness, the long-suffering, the humanness of God — these shall be shown to man as man has never seen them, but be sure that not these aspects of God nor any others of themselves, not this theology nor any other of itself, can make men good, can turn men from their sins, can do away with the fundamental necessities of personal struggle, personal consecration, personal holiness in human lives. It seems to me that men are very much in danger now of attributing to a liberal and spiritual theology that same impossible virtue which men in other times attributed to a hard and formal theology, — a virtue which really no theology can possess, the virtue of itself to make men good and strong and pure. Against that danger I want to warn you and myself. To many an ardent, many a noisy champion of the love of God as against His sternness and His wrath, it seems as if God must be sadly saying, “Yes, I will show you all my love. But yet I know that you will not fear me.”

One striking illustration of what I am saying meets us very often. Constantly in New England, which a generation ago was full of the sternest teachings, I hear the lamentations of men who were brought up under the Puritan theology. I have grown familiar to weariness with the self-excuse of men who say, “Oh, if I had not had the terrors of the Lord so preached to me when I was a boy, if I had not been so confronted with the woes of hell and the awfulness of the judgment day, I should be religious to-day, I should have been religious long ago.” My friends, I think I never hear a meaner or a falser speech than that. Men may believe it when they say it — I suppose they do — but it is not true. It is unmanly, I think. It is throwing on their teaching and their teachers, or their fathers and their mothers, the fault which belongs to their own neglect, because they never have taken up the earnest fight with sin and sought through every obstacle for truth and God. It has the essential vice of dogmatism about it, for it claims that a different view of God would have done for them that which no view of God can do, that which must be done, under any system, any teaching, by humility and penitence and struggle and self-sacrifice. Without these no teaching saves the soul. With these, under any teaching, the soul must find its Father.

Again I say that I believe the new is better than the old. The new theology in all its great general characteristics I love with all my heart; I rejoice to preach it as Moses must have felt his heart fill with joy as he went forth to pray for the calm sky and the stilled thunder. But just because I love it and believe in it, I want to say most earnestly that there is no essential power in it to release man from the hard and inexorable necessities and duties by which alone man treads his unbelief and sin under his feet and comes to God.

I hold, then, this, that the change which so delights man’s imagination and kindles his ambition, the change from the arbitrary to the essential, from the awful to the gentle, from the narrow to the broad, from the formal to the spiritual, is always a change from the easy to the hard, and not, as men are always choosing to think it, from the hard to the easy. It is so everywhere. In government, the old method of despotism breaks open and the new life of popular freedom comes forth. Men shout as if the race were saved. Now all men will be happy! Now all men will be good! What are we finding? Alas for him whom any dangers that proceed from liberty would drive to think for one base moment of shutting back the tide of freedom behind the hard barriers of personal authority again! His folly is only made harmless by its hopelessness. But alas also for the nation or the citizen which does not learn that to live in freedom is harder than to live as a slave, that liberty of itself makes no people and no man prosperous or good, that self-restraint and honesty and generosity and independence, if they are the crown upon the head of a benignant despotism, are the very life-blood in the veins of a selfgoverning republic. Or think of education. We used to dictate arbitrary schemes of study to our college students and to what we chose to call our educated men; now we throw open the whole field of learning and say to the studying man, ay, even to the sophomore in our colleges, “Go study what you will, and if you learn it we will call you learned.” Is the student’s task easier or harder than it used to be? Alas for him who thinks it easier, who thinks that the license to be learned where he will has any way annulled the everlasting law that knowledge only comes by toil! Happy for him who sees at once that the new liberty demands of him severer self-control and a more conscientious just because a freer work! The methods of dictation and despotism attempted less but they were more likely to do what they attempted than the free selection and the personal self-government are to attain their higher ends. Where the boy turns into the man, where the drudge turns into the scholar, where the slave steps forth to liberty, where the Eden of guarded virtue opens into the world of self-deciding moral life, there always the easy changes to the hard, there always the wise soul hears anew the old words of God, “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee,” and” In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.”

But let us come more directly to our subject. The change of which I spoke in the character of religious faith shows everywhere, and I want to follow it into some of its special manifestations. So we shall best perceive the danger which I said belongs to it. In the first place, then, it involves a change in the whole conception of the religious motive. What is it that religiously makes men good and keeps them from being bad? It used to be, no doubt, the fear of the punishment that God would send them if they sinned. It is becoming more and more the perception of what a high life is set before the soul if it does right, and the sight of God’s love which a loving soul dreads to offend. From fear to love! Not that the change is absolute, not that there ever was a Christian faith which was not all pervaded with the power of love, not that there ever can be a true faith in God so loving that it shall not be solemnized by fear, but as the prominent, the conscious, the recognized and trusted power, it is the love of God and not the fear of God that fills the eye of worshipping manhood more and more. This outbreak of protest against the dreadful doctrine of endless punishment is really nothing but an utterance of the profound conviction that not by threats of punishment, however awful and however true, but by the promises of love, are men to be brought into the best obedience to God.

The change which the dethronement of that dogma and all the terrible theology which belonged to it has brought, is so radical that we cannot fully comprehend or state it, but it fills us with joy. It has made religion a new thing for multitudes of souls. It has swept the heavy cloud away and let the sunlight into many a life. It has brought fertility to many a desert. And the thanksgivings of men and women who have found that their religion may be just the love of God because He has loved them, and that in that pure love lies their salvation, make the song and glory of these new years of God. No wonder if amid such joy the danger comes, no wonder if there are men who, thinking they have discovered that there is no hell, seem thereby to have secured their place in heaven, as if to be in heaven were nothing greater and better than to be out of hell. No wonder that one hesitates, eveo when he believes the truth with all his heart, to go to certain men and declare what he believes, because he knows that it will seem to them as if at once the old need of struggle, the old criticalness of living were gone with the old fear of hell; as if some easy way of holiness had been flung open instead of the straight and narrow way that always has led, that always must lead, to everlasting life. But surely if anywhere our principle is true that the change from the less to the greater is a change not from the hard to the easy, but from the easy to the hard, it is true here. Suppose I am a true believer in the old idea of government by terror. Let it stand to me in its blankest form, — I am trying not to sin because if I do sin I shall go to everlasting torment. Under that fear I study all the law and try to keep it all; I pray, I watch; I give myself no rest; never for a moment is the hand that presses down on me relaxed; never for a moment are those blazing commandments lost from before my eyes. I am afraid to disobey. No doubt the obedience that comes is hard, and narrow, formal, and superficial, but an obedience does come. What such a fear can do it does. But let the liberation dawn. Let the larger faith of love take me into its power. Let me begin to serve God, not for His terror but for His dearness. A larger, nobler, sweeter life at once! The sky is broader and the world is bigger! But oh! the new exactingness of this new service. Oh! the way in which the deep affections, all unstirred before, begin to hear the call of duty. Now they must waken. Not the hands only, now the very heart must obey. As much deeper as this new love lies below that old terror, so much deeper must the new watchfulness and scrupulousness go below the old. Not now to escape from pain, but to be worthy of this divine love the soul aspires. Its dangers become far more subtle and at the same time far more dangerous. A finer spiritual machinery must respond to this finer and more spiritual power; and struggle comes to mean for the soul something so much more intense that it seems as if all that it had before called struggle were the most placid calm.

My dear friend, unless this is its efTect in us our milder conception of God’s present and future dealing with the souls of men, however true it may be in itself, is a curse to us and not a blessing. Unless it does this for us we are making the truth of God have the power of a lie. We ought to be afraid of any theology which tampers with the sacredness of duty and the awfulness of life. I would far rather be a believer in the most material notions of eternal penalty and get out of that belief the hard and frightened solemnity and scrupulousness which it has to give, than to hold all the sweet broad truth to which God is now leading us and have it make life seem a playtime and the world a game. No! What one wants to plead with every soul whom he sees going, whom perhaps he himself is trying to lead into the new motive of love, away from the old motive of fear, is this: Remember that you are going where duty will grow not less but more imperious. Remember that watchfulness, obedience, righteousness, will mean far more deep and sacred things to you there than they have meant before. Go there expecting life and salvation to become a thousandfold more solemn. Go there expecting sin to be vastly more dreadful. O you who glory in your new faith, see what it asks of you! See what you must be to be worthy of it! See what a deeper vigilance, what a more utter consecration, there must be in this new soul to which it has been shown that he is to be saved not by the fear but by the love of God!

I turn to another somewhat different development of the freer — what some, no doubt, will call the looser — religious thinking which pervades our time, that which concerns the whole matter of belief in doctrine. Orthodoxy used to mean the intelligent and convinced reception of a large number of clearly defined propositions about God and Christ and man. Orthodoxy now, for many men, has come to mean a sympathetic entrance into the spirit and genius of Christianity, and especially a cordial personal loyalty to Jesus. I know that here there is a true and great advance. I know the man who seeks to understand his Saviour is nearer to the New Testament than the man who merely learns his creed? In all those sacred pages the idea of doctrinal orthodoxy is very vague. In the Gospels it hardly shows at all. The idea of personal sympathy and personal loyalty is everything. “Whom say ye that I am?” that is the ceaseless question. And so I know that a man has come nearer to the mind of Christ when he thinks that his work in life is to enter into the genius of Christian truth and to be the friend and disciple of Jesus, rather than to satisfy himself of the truth of many inferential propositions drawn from what Christ and his apostles said. But here, again, the believer in this new and better method is all wrong if he thinks that it opens to him an easier or less exacting spiritual experience than that in which he used to live when he was the champion of doctrines and of creeds. It needs a greater man to be a Christian in the spirit than in the letter of the faith. He who undertakes it must be prepared for deeper mental experiences, for doubts beside which the old doubts shall seem child’s play, for a complete obedience of which he never dreamed till he began to seek not only the truth of Christ but Christ the truth. For all experience tells us that a man may pretty easily believe any statement of truth which he wants to believe. Intent, exclusive fixing of the mind upon it will almost certainly make it seem true. But how much more than that is needed when I have to enter into the soul of a great system of salvation like Christianity, or to make myself the disciple, with a discipleship that shall renew me into the likeness of a spiritual Lord like Christ. What repression of myself, what independence of my fellow-men, what opening of the inmost secret places of my life to Him! I know that I could convince a man that a certain theory of the atonement was true, that what Christ did for man upon the Cross was just exactly this or this, with far less strain upon His spiritual power, with far less calling out of his profoundest faith, than I should need in order to make him know the mystery of the Christhood in which our dear Lord not merely wrought but was the perfect atonement for our sins. One would need a persuaded mind; the other needs a quickened soul, alive with all the same purposes that filled the soul of Jesus.

Therefore it is, I say, that the new faith demands a larger man and a profounder belief than that which went before. Oh, do not think that because men no longer dare to ask you whether you believe this or that doctrine and to decide whether or not you are a Christian by your answer, that therefore belief has grown a slight and easy thing. As their poor questions fade and die away, all the more deep and awful in the soul’s ear grows the profounder question of the Lord Himself which they used to silence, “What think ye of me?” “Whom say ye that I am?” Be sure that if you are to be a worthy man of the new faith, a worthy Christian of the new time, your heart must be strong to a more heroic capacity of believing what men call impossible. Your thread of unbelief in the new sight you have of its spiritual essence must be far more deep, and your closet must witness far more earnest pleadings with the God of faith than any that the old days of dogmatism ever saw.

3. I take another illustration from the field of man’s relation to his fellow-man in spiritual things. It was a great advance when gradually the idea of spiritual directorship narrowed its range before the progress of the idea of personal responsibility. Once the whole Christian world teemed with confessionals. Certain chosen souls sat by the highways of all life, often with the tenderest solicitude, often too with wondrous skill and experience, all purified and made the more acute by wondrous sympathy, to tell all their puzzled brethren how to unsnarl their skeins of tangled life, what was their duty, in which way they ought to go. It belonged to all kinds of churches of every creed, of every name. That day is past over a very large proportion of the Christian world. Wherever it has passed it never can come back again. Here and there some men who dread the dangers of the new life for their brethren are dragging out the long-overthrown confessional from the rubbish of the ages under which it lies and trying to set its shattered and unsteady framework in its place again; or else they go and borrow one from that part of the Christian world which has not yet disowned its use. Here and there some puzzled soul cries out for it and begs the Church to take a power which her Lord never gave her, and tell it just how it shall sail its most bewildered life. These are anachronisms and exceptions. The world in which we live, the world of progress, the modern world, the modern man wants no confessional and asks the Church to give him not minute rules of duty, but great inspirations and broad principles of life. For the application of those principles, for the special life he ought to live from day to day, from hour to hour, he appeals to his own conscience. Is the modern man right? Indeed he is! The life that he alone must carry up to God at last, he alone must carry through this world of temptation now. He is doing a noble act, an act to which his manhood binds him and in which his manhood is asserted when he goes up to the church, or to the priest, and says, “Give me my life, for I must live it. Help me, advise me, inspire me all you can, but give me my life for I must live it.” Only, it is of infinite importance into what sort of hands he takes that life of his, whether into hands trembhng with anxiety or into hands greedy and coarse with pride. I think that to the best souls of our time there is, with all the exhilaration that comes of the sense of freedom, a pathos that is almost sad about this new consciousness of personal independence, which no man can disown, with which the light souls play as children might play with battle flags, but in which lies unfolded a possibiHty of tragedy which no man has begun to fathom. The best souls seem to come to life as the morning comes to the world, all flushed and bright with hope, but pausing, lingering, creeping up the sky as if the day’s work it saw before it was too great. Oh, how much easier to find my priest and have him tell me what I ought to do than to seek it and find it for myself in all this maze of doubt, hidden under all this heap of passion, prejudice, and pride! Certainly no man is worthy to live in these new days, and be a modern man in the pure church where no spiritual directorship is tolerated, who dares to be frivolous, who is not constantly and almost overwhelmingly, aware that to guide one’s own life is not and cannot be an easy thing, who is not made all the more humbly dependent upon God by the independence of his fellow-men which his soul steadfastly claims.

It would be interesting, if we had time, to trace the clear illustration of our truth in relation to the institutions of religion and the use that men make of them. There, too, a freer method reigns. There, too, the freer method is an advance upon the stricter method just in proportion as it secures more fully the purposes for which the institutions all exist. For instance, there is a less constrained observance of Sunday. There are larger notions of what constitutes the sacredness of the Day of Rest. Is it a gain or a loss, this departure from the severer rules in which we lived some twenty years ago? As Christians we can give but one answer: It is a gain so far as it makes a more reasonable, a more voluntary, a brighter and freer religion possible. If it does that, because it does that, we are glad of the new spirit that fills the Lord’s Day. We rejoice that its distinct difference from the Jewish Sabbath has been distinctly shown, because thereby the chance is opened for us to gain perfectly out of our Lord’s Day what the Jew could only gain most imperfectly by his most scrupulous Sabbatical propriety. The larger liberty of Sunday is beautiful to us because it means not the throwing away, but the true keeping of the Lord’s Day by the man for whom it was made. There is a Sunday conceivable on which no Hebrew shadow rests, a Sunday full of spontaneousness and delight, a Sunday when the soul honors its Lord not merely by turning aside to some fenced and protected regions of its life where alone it seems to it that He abides, but when it touches the familiar things of the other days with new hands and looks on them with new enlightened eyes, and finds them sacred and full of light, — a Sunday whose proper occupations are broadly and freely dictated by the soul’s own consciousness of spiritual needs, a Sunday when men shut their shops not by a law of the State but by the law of God in their hearts, His everlasting law that the life is more than meat, — a Sunday when the duty of the human child to know his divine Father, that duty transfigured to a privilege, fills every hour with fresh and eager and ingenious exercise of the best powers that the children of God possess. Every relaxing of the iron laws of Sunday ought to be the opening of the sacred day towards this divine ideal. Oh, let the men who want the Sunday made more free, be sure, as they are Christian men, that they are asking it in the interest of an elevated and not of a degraded spirituality. Let them know that it is not an easier but a harder Sunday that they ask, a Sunday more exacting in the demands it makes upon the personal conscience, upon the spiritual ambition, upon the constant, unsleeping vigilance of the soul which on the free day would come freely to the presence of God to its own best life. The man who clearly sees and solemnly accepts that responsibility has a religious right as against every church and teacher to claim the full freedom of his holy day.

All these same things are true about all religious observances, about coming to church, about stated times of prayer, about free intercourse with every kind of worship. In every case the tight, hard rule does to a large extent accomplish what it undertakes.

but it cannot undertake the best. He who launches out into a freer life sets sail for higher things, but he ought to know all the dangers of the voyage and be ready for all the patience and watchfulness and sacrifice it will require. If he has faced all that, then let him sail, but not till then. That is the true law of all liberty.

I think that no man carefully reads the words of Christ and does not feel how full his soul is always of this truth which I have tried to preach to-day. He came to lead his people out to freedom. He came to show the love of God. I think that as He stands there in the porch of the Hebrew temple preaching His Christian Gospel we can often seem to see upon His face and to hear trembling in His voice a deep anxiety. He evidently dreads lest to these people freedom and love should seem to be the abrogation and not the consummation of the Law. “Think not that I am come to destroy, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil,” these are His earnest warning words. The broad is more exacting than the narrow; the complete makes larger demands than the partial; how He is always insisting upon that! It was said by them of old time “Thou shalt not forswear thyself. But I say unto you, swear not at all.” “Ye have heard that it hath been said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you resist not evil.” Everywhere He is so anxious that His Gospel should seem to be not the corruption but the transfiguration of duty. That the broad is more exacting than the narrow, that the complete makes larger demands than the partial, that no theology is really an advance on what has gone before it unless it deepens the sense of personal duty and the awfulness of living, — these are the convictions which we want to see firmly set in the minds and consciences of men; and then there is no need to fear, — nay, we may rejoice in and be thankful for every sign of liberal thought and action, every claim of personal freedom which men make for the belief and worship of their souls.

There is a picture which one dares to hope is being realized in many a brave and faithful spirit in these days of ours. A true and earnest man longs for a larger view of God and for a chance to live more freely in His service. By and by he finds that he can have such a chance, that it belongs to him as God’s child. He takes it joyfully. He lives in larger doctrine, in more spiritual relation to all ordinances; and yet as he grows more free he grows more scrupulously, more eagerly obedient. Every wish of God, discerned by free spiritual sympathy, holds him like a law, and his daily delight lies in finding how strong is love to do the work which once he thought could not be done except by fear. Every new theological breadth means a new obligation to be pure and true and holy. It is as if the world had been hooped with iron and kept shut up in a vacuum till some day it was flung freely abroad into its atmosphere, and found its iron hoops no longer needed, only because its new liberty held it so close into a sphere. That is the picture of the best progress of earth, and the promise of the best blessedness of heaven.

We have wandered far enough from the old banks of the Nile where stands King Pharaoh vainly promising that if the thunder and the hail will only cease he will be good. But I hope in all our morning’s wandering we have been learning that the ceasing of hail and thunder of itself makes no man good, that no mitigation of theology, no truer presentation of God, no fading out of old threats, no relaxing of discipline, however they may sweetly tempt men to a higher life, can ever abolish that which i& the first law and the highest privilege of human life, the everlasting need of moral struggle, of patient watchfulness over ourselves, of resolute fight with ourselves and of humble prayer to God, and of brotherly devotion to our brethren which alone makes us truly men.

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