The Present and Future Faith

“When the Son of Man cometh shall He find faith on the earth?” — LUKE xyiii. 8.

I WELCOME you, this morning, to the time-honored observance of Thanksgiving Day. Generation after generation has taken up the pious institution of our fathers, and found in it the fit expression of their own experiences and desires. And the first conviction with which we certainly must greet each new Thanksgiving Day must be that it belongs to us, and that if we are to be really thankful, it must be for mercies which we ourselves are receiving, and with reference to the circumstances under which we live. No day in all the year so demands to be surrounded with its own local scenery. No service so requires to be timely. And therefore one is always led, in thinking what he shall say to the people on Thanksgiving Day, to desire to speak peculiarly of the time in which he and the people are living, and to point out the causes of thankfulness, the thoughts, the lessons, and the warnings which are involved in the social, the political, or the religious conditions which are right around us.

With this feeling, I should like to say a few words thia morning upon the religious conditions with which we are all more or less familiar. I am led to think and speak of the disturbed condition of faith in our time. No subject is more pressing. Even the most careless man’s thoughts rest very much upon it. It is discussed and talked of everywhere. And it is most important. One may very clearly say, that if there is no cause for gratitude and hope in the state of religious life, then, whatever other blessings may be showered out around us, to the deepest sense, and to the most serious men, a Thanksgiving Day becomes a mockery. Let us see then what there is that we can understand about the disturbed and tumultuous faith of our strange times.

“When the Son of Man cometh shall He find faith on the earth?” was Jesus’s question. There have always been two different opinions among people who looked for a final perfection of all things under the Christian faith. One class of men has held that the perfecting state of things was already begun, and that everything would go on developing and improving till the glorious consummation should be reached. The other class has always held that matters were continually getting worse and worse, and must go on decaying and degenerating until they touched the bottom of corruption, and then by some law of reaction and replacement an upward movement must begin, and perfection speedily arrive. It is one of the strangest things, I think, about the world and its history, that the advocates of each of these opinions have alike been able to find corroboration of what they believed in the things about them. One man has waved his hand enthusiastically over human history, and said, “See how everything is improving. It will be perfect before long. It has only to keep on.” Another man standing right

Dy his side, pointing to the same history, says, “You see that everything is getting worse and worse. The only hope is that it will get as bad as possible, and be destroyed, and then something better can come in.” And the strange thing is that both of them find in the self same world abundant confirmations of their theories. The facts must be very remarkably involved and mixed out of which two such different inferences can be drawn, on which two such different anticipations can be built.

And this double interpretation of human history does not come merely from the different characters of different ages. Both theories find confirmation in every age. Both are confirmed by some things that men see in this age of ours. While we speak of the darker symptoms, the signs of decaying faith in our own time, we must not forget that there are other symptoms of a brighter sort which make men hopeful of the future of their race, — more hopeful, probably, in these anxious days than men have ever been before. Let us bear this in mind.

The lack of faith, or the disturbance of faith, which is such a serious feature of our times, is very manifold and puzzling in its influences, but is very simple in its nature and causes. It is traceable, almost everywhere, to the wonderful increase of men’s knowledge of second causes, interfering with, or overclouding their belief in first causes, in principles, in providences, in a personal and loving care back of everything. It comes to many things, but this is where it all comes from. This is where lies the certain amount of truth which is in the statement that times of ignorance are times of faith. No doubt it is easier for men who have learned nothing of the marvellous way in which every object in nature is made a reservoir and a distributer of force, to look back straight into the face of the Sovereign Will out of which all force originally proceeds. It is easier for the savage, with hia chief standing over him, ready to strike him down with his club if he disobeys, to realize and believe in government, than it is for the citizen of a highly organized state who is reached by the authority which is at the head of all only through many subordinate agencies and by nicely adjusted relationships. So that there is some truth in the statement that much knowledge and elaborate life are dangerous to faith in final principles and forces. The more our mind is fastened upon second causes, the more danger there is that it will fail to reach the great first cause. It is a danger to be met, not one to be avoided; but it is one, in the first place, to be recognized very clearly. I need not try to tell the magnificent story of how natural science has brought out the starry host of second causes from their obscurity, and shown how He who works everything, works by every thing in all the world. We all know something of it; and we know, too, how the profuse discovery cf means has in our times clouded the thought of the maker in many minds. We know this, and I need not dwell on it. But I am anxious to point out that there are other skep ticisms, other derangements of faith besides ihose which belong to the region of natural science, which yet have essentially the same character and origin. It may sound strange and fanciful to say that those two evils of which we hear so much, corruption in political life and formalism in church life, are really one, at bottom, with the scientific skepticism of our time; but if one looks at them philosophically he must see that it is truly so. Corruption in political life is really skepticism. It is a distrust, a disuse which has lasted so long that it has grown into disbelief of political principles, of the first fundamental truths of the sacredness of government and the necessity of righteousness. And where has such a disbelief come from? We all know well enough. It is from the narrow view which has looked at machineries, and magnified them till they have hid from view the great purposes for which all machineries exist. If a man tells me that it is absolutely necessary that such or such a political party should be maintained whether its acts and its men are righteous or unrighteous, or else the government will fall, that man is an unbeliever. He has lost his faith in the first principles of government, and he has lost it by persistently tying down his study and his soul to second causes, to the mere machinery of party. And so in church and religious matters, when they are invaded by formalism. When a man tells me that religion cannot stand unless the church be just so organized, or that God will be lost out of men’s thoughts unless you teach certain traditional things about Him, and worship Him with a certain ritual, that man seems to me to be an unbeliever of the most dangerous kind. He has lost his real

faith in God and Christianity and the church by his very devotion to the means, or second causes, through which they work. When I heard an English bishop preach, this summer, that it was necessary to maintain a particular mode of burying the dead, for fear of disturbing men’s belief in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that preaching seemed to me to ‘ndicate a lack of faith in the real essential truth and power of the doctrine, which could not be surpassed by any skeptic. And so it is always. Our jealousy for certain forms, our magnifying their importance, our fear that Christianity will not stand if we do not state and litter it just so, — what is it all at the bottom but a lack of faith in Christianity itself, in its vital power and its original truth? Dogmatism and ritualism are all wrong when they think themselves supremely believing. Both are really symptomatic forms of unbelief. Whenever a man believes that only his machinery can save the nation or the church, he is a disbeliever in the vital force by which the nation or the church lives.

Have we not here, then, the general character of the unbelief or feeble faith of this strange century in which we live? It is that which naturally belongs to a much discovering, much questioning, much reading age, an age critical and inquisitive. It comes from such a multiplication of details and methods as hides principles and purposes out of sight. The naturalist is so busy with the system of nature that he rests there, and loses God. The politician is so busy with the machinery of party that he stops there, and loses patriotism and justice. The worshipper is so busy with the details of worship that he lives in them, and loses Christ. In all you see it is essentially the same, — the disbelief of a critical and cultured time. That it is different from the disbelief of other times there can be no doubt. It is more subtle, more serious, and so perhaps more persistent and dangerous. When we say that it is more widespread we are very apt to be deceived. We are apt to think that our time has less faith than the ages that have gone before, but such an opinion very commonly comes from some idealizing of the past. The world is like a growing man in many ways. It looks back to its childhood, and sees that childhood flooded with a glory which it did not have when it was present. As it seems to every man as if his boyhood were more religious than his manhood has become, so it seems to the world always as if there were some past age, some blessed time, primitive or mediaeval, when faith was universal, calm, and absolute. Both are mere dreams. You cannot find the ages of faith if you look carefully back through history. The disturbances of faith in other times have been different from ours, but there have always been disturbances, and whether they have been greater or less than ours no man can say; for who can really know the mental troubles of any other time except his own?

I am inclined to think that such a statement of the character of our time and of the nature of its skepticism will not satisfy many people. I think that many people are under the impression, not merely that certain causes have turned aside the power of implicit faith from its true objects, but that the whole power of enthusiastic faith is sick, if indeed it be not dead. They point us to the prosaicalness of everything. They complain that there is nothing noble. They would depict their century as if it were given up entirely to low economies, merely prudent, safe, scheming, well-to-do, with nothing of the romantic generosity and enterprise of other days. “That is what is really at the bottom of the decay of religious and political faith,” they say. So I suppose every age has looked to the men who lived in it. But when we ask whether such a charge is really true about the age we live in, I think we are surprised to find how astonishingly untrue it is. It seems as if there had hardly ever been any century which would send down into history more romantic passages, more heroic and poetic deeds, than just this prosaic nineteenth century in which we live. We are astonished when we count them over. When we think of the adventure of our time; when we recall the great Arctic explorations that have called forth an endurance and daring which have been unsurpassed in other days; when we remember the picturesque meetings of strange peoples, which the advance of civilization has brought about, — the meeting of England and Russia face to face in Central Asia, the meeting of Anglo-Saxon and Chinaman on the Pacific shore, the meeting of New Englander and Indian upon the prairies; when we consider the history of slavery in this country with all the passionate experience that it created, the tragedies of private life, the miracles of self-devotion, and the convulsive revolution with which it shook the land; when we consider these things and a thousand others, what is there that is more romantic than they are in any history of any age? What is there anywhere more poetic, anything that more appeals to the imagination than the brilliant advance of natural science? What is there in chivalry more exalted and thrilling than the lives of men who have lived and died in privation and delight for science and its progress? When have men ever proved themselves more capable of lofty and large ideas than in these days, when they are dreaming of a “federation of mankind,” war replaced by peaceful arbitration, and criminals reformed by industry and kindness, and poverty obliterated by universal organized charity? No crusade of the middle ages has anything like the real romantic inspiration that belongs to the modern crusade against ignorance, — the dream of universal education. No old vision of a splendid feudalism

BO taxed and exalted the imagination as the modern picture of self-government. No! It is not that our age is sordid. It is not that it has proved itself incapable of large ideas and glowing visions. It has a romance brighter than any other age ever possessed. And so long as it has that, it has not lost the capacity of faith, — the appetite and love for the unseen and transcendental.

Let us sum up, then, some of the characteristics of our confused time. It is certainly one of the most interesting times in which a man could have been sent into the world to live. It is full of contradictions. On the one hand, it has accumulated an immense knowledge of details and second causes which have made it hard to look beyond to principles and the first origin of things. On the other hand, it has struggled with the principles of life with most ambitious curiosity. It combines immense material development with great susceptibility to spiritual influences. It has disowned the older forms of authority, so that the thunders of a Roman anathema peal harmlessly through its clear atmosphere, and at the same time it has become BO conscious of the largeness of truth that it is willing to listen to almost any confident charlatan who claims to be its teacher, — the most practical and the most visionary, the most hard-headed and the most soft-hearted, the most positive and the most perplexed, the most desponding and the most eager, the most independent and the most credulous of all the ages that the world has seen.

We are in the habit of hearing all this character of our age summed up in the statement that it is a “transition time.” It rather gets its character from its relation to what has gone before it, and what is to come after it, than from what it contains within itself. This is what gives it so much of an aspect of restlessness and unquiet. It is full of the sense of having in many ways broken with the past, and of having not yet thoroughly apprehended the future that is to come. It is not the happiest frame of life. The description that one of its thinkers, the subtlest and most characteristic perhaps of all of them, has given of himself tells well enough the story of the age, —

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead

The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head
Like these on earth I wait forlorn.”

And yet the forlornness of such a mood is always brightened by the persistent conviction that there is a future, and that what there is to come, hard as it is to apprehend, will certainly be apprehended some day. If we described the whole life of the world, as has often been done, as if it were the continuous life of one growing man, this age of ours must correspond, we think, just to the point where youth is passing into manhood. Our world now seems to me to be wonderfully like a high-spirited young man of twenty-one years old. It is just coming of age. It has all the characters and moods that belong to that most interesting and perplexing creature. It has all his remonstrance against the tyranny of the past; all his self-confidence, and at the same time all his self-disgusts; all his self-reliance, with yet all his feebleness; his hope, his petulance, his self-indulgence; his craving for the definite, and his delight in what is vague; his passion for the real and the ideal together; his satisfaction in the present, and at the same time his eager and impatient expectation of what is to come; full of silent moods and yet full of exuberant spirits; reckless and defiant, yet wonderfully capable of tenderness. Altogether the same unsatisfied, unsatisfactory, and interesting creature.

And now of your young man of twenty-one what do you expect? Interesting as he is, he cannot stay what he is; and certainly he cannot go back into any of the lost conditions of his boyhood and his babyhood again. He must go forward; all these new thoughts and passions which have come into him since he was fifteen, and which now are seething in confusion, must find their places and proportions to one another, and a new peace of higher adjustments must come, — the peace of harmonized and well balanced manhood. And just exactly so it must be with our twenty-one years’ old world. An age of transition of course is temporary. It cannot stay just what it is. An everlasting nineteenth century would be intolerable. But on the other hand it cannot go back into boyhood or babyhood again. The man who, tired of the freedom of individual thought, wants to push the church back into the peace of mere authoritative and traditional religion, and the man who, tired of the noise and confusion of popular government, wishes to push man back into feudalism, both are mistaken and neither will succeed. Confusion is to be escaped not by being repressed into stagnation but by being developed into peace. Surely t is no weak optimism to believe that such a development must come — an age critical but not irreverent, and reverent without superstition, full of positive belief and of tolerant charity, in which yet neither interferes with noi deadens the other.

“There may perhaps yet dawn an age
More fortunate, alas !. than we,

Which without hardness may be sage.
And gay without frivolity.”

No elements which you propose to mix combine perfectly at once. You drop your salt into water and it lies crude and undissolved at first; by and by the water takes it in and the two are one. Into a world which has been governed by authority you throw strong notions of liberty and personal independence. They lie crudely together at first, as they are lying now; but they must ultimately be assimilated, and a freer judgment as to what authority it is right to obey must be united with a more loyal obedience to the authority that has been willingly acknowledged. That is the future for which we have a right to hope.

The most pathetic sign of such a transition time is in the position in which it places the best individuals who live in it. The best men in the more fixed and stationary ages speak out the loudest. They stand on certainties, and speak with clear and confident tones. The most noticeable and touching thing about such times as ours is the way in which so many of the best men are silent and will not speak. It is so both in politics and in religion. The most thoughtful men are always tending to withdraw from a political confusion which they cannot understand, and make themselves mere spectators. And how many of the purest and devoutest people whom we know refuse to speak a word in all the tumult of religious and ecclesiastical debate, that always is so loud around us. To take again the words of a very remarkable poem of that most representative poet of our time, whom I have twice quoted already: —

Achilles ponders in his tent,

The kings of modern thought are dumb,

Silent they are, though not content,
And wait to see the future come.

Silent, while years engrave the brow,

Silent, the best are silent now.”

We all feel certainly a disposition of the best and deepest part of us to share this silence, to be still and wait. And when the most representative men, the men most in the spirit of our time do speak, it is not strange that they should be confused and often self-contradictory. It is not strange, it is most suggestive and instructive, that hardly any thinker should be wholly self-consistent; that the most thoughtful men should say things and then take them back, or explain them away; should lay themselves open to charges, and then deny that they deserve them, and so puzzle both their friends and enemies. It is the natural symptom of a time that is not sure how much of the past is good, and not sure what there is waiting in the future; a time and men “wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.”

I do not certainly say that such a time is best, though really in my heart I do not think the world has ever seen a bettor. There must be better ones to come. The story of the world is not told yet. “We are ancients of the earth and in the morning of the times.” But I have only tried to see as clearly as I could what all these symptoms, of which our most serious books and our morning newspapers alike are full, really mean, and what place this bewildering age of ours does probably hold in the long series of the ages. The character that I have drawn of it in these mere fragmentary suggestions is not the mere picture of a theory. It is a character which breaks out everywhere. I see it in every book I read, in the action of every public man I watch. I hear it in evory discussion of any serious question, and in the lightest talk I hold with any of you at your own firesides. It is not that my account of it is not true, but only that I have failed to state it as I see it, if you have not recognized the picture.

And now the question comes which is most personally pressing. How in a time like this can a man live and get the best out of it, and at the same time shun its worst? Here in this time of uncertainties, here in this wandering transition age, we are to live, whether we will or no. We did not choose our time. We may wish and wish in vain that we had been born centuries ago when, as we vainly think, no man doubted, and all men were satisfied. But here we are, not there. And what can one do with his own personal life to keep it from complete confusion, and if it be possible to make it grow strong and rich and true, out of these very circumstances which, perhaps, we hopelessly deplore?

One answer only I can give, and that is very simple. In all the uncertainty and change it is the true man’s place to find what there is that is permanent and certain, and to cling to that. In other sorts of times men do not distinguish between what is lasting and what is transitory. All seems fixed together. Ice and rock alike are solid. In times like these, when the ice breaks up, the rocks stand out solid and strong among the loosened waves. It is a time to find out what is sure and certain and eternal.

Let me try to tell you in a few words what it seems to me are the solid things to which a man may cling. First and most prominent, because most superficial, is the solidity and persistency of nature, the calmness and oldiiesa anil orderliness of this world of growth and matter. It means something that, in the disorder of thought and feeling, so many men are fleeing to the study of orderly nature. And it is rest and comfort. Whatever men are feeling, the seasons come and go. Whatever men are doubting, the rock is firm under their feet, and the stead fast stars pass in their certain courses overhead. Men who dare count on nothing else may still count on the tree’s blossoming and the grape coloring. It is good for a man perplexed and lost among many thoughts to come into closer intercourse with Nature, and to learn her ways and to catch her spirit. It is no fancy to believe that if the children of this generation are taught a great deal more than we used to be taught of nature, and the ways of God in nature, they will be provided with the material for far healthier, happier, and less perplexed and anxious lives than most of us are living.

And secondly, it surely is a time when one ought to make much of the experiences of life which are perpetual, and so which always bring us back to something solid. Joy, sorrow, friendship, work, charity, these are eternal. They do not change with changing times; and if a man throws himself heartily into the life of his fellow-men and takes the pleasures and the pains that come out of the touchings of his life with theirs, he is brought into association with these unchanging verities, and his own life be comes less oppressively unruly. Have you never known something of this? Have you not sometimes, when most perplexed and bewildered with many thoughts, found refuge, strength, health, and peace in mere return from solitude to those relations with your brethren for which man was made? A joy that comes by human company, even a sorrow which has its root in a true human love, brings a man back from the solitude which is not good for him, and which is haunted with perplexity. It puts him again into company with the humanity which has known joy and sorrow all through its changing life. Never was there a time when a man more needed the help and strength of simple, kindly, familiar life among his fellow-men.

And the next thing which is permanent, and which a man ought to cling to with special closeness now, is duty. How old it is, how strong and sure! How strong it makes us when we think that this same simple, single instinct of right and wrong, which makes us do our act to-day, is precisely the same instinct that made men honest and kept them pure before the Flood. So many of the perplexities of our time are on the surface. They do aot reach down to where the conscience lies calm and serene below. And when “this unchartered freedom tires,” when we “feel the weight of chance desires,” it is good to supplicate for the control of duty, and find a “repose that ever is the same.” When a man, lost and confused, comes to you saying, “How can one live in such a time as this? What shall I do?” Answer him first of all simply and strongly, “Do right! Do your duty!” and you have given him at least one sure thing among all that is unsure.

But then, above all things, there is the strength and permanence of religion. Never was there such a time for a man to cling to that. “Ah, but,” you say, “that is the most uncertain of all things! What is more unsettled than religion?” But no, my friends. There may be many thoughts about religion that are not clear, but religion itself, nay, Christianity itself, is sure, and now is just the time for souls to come to a more certain hold upon, as they come to a simpler conception of its truth. The knowledge that love is at the root of everything; the answer of the human soul to the appealing nature and life of Jesus Christ; the value of the soul above the body, of the character above the circumstances; and the eternal life, these are what men may cling to. If any man does cling to these, he is really upon a rock, and whatever else which he thought was rock may prove to be ice and melt away, here he is safe. Here is the great, last certainty. Be sure of God. With simple, loving wor ship, by continual obedience, by purifying yourself even as He is pure, creep close, keep close to Him. Be sure of God and nothing can overthrow or drown you.

And so let us give thanks to God upon Thanksgiving Day. Nature is beautiful, and fellow-men are dear, and duty is close beside us, and He is over us and in us. What more do we want, except to be more thankful and more faithful, less complaining of our trials and our time, and more worthy of the tasks and privileges He has given us. We want to trust Him with a fuller trust, and so at last to come to that high life where we shall “Be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let our request be made known unto God,” for that and that alone is peace.