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Yes, but within human life, unfolding from the earlier life of
earth, and growing, little by little, by constant struggle and
unremitting effort towards a heightened, broadened, nobler level of
fulfillment, it seems to me that purpose and significance, no matter
how difficult to express, are so evident as to be beyond all
reasonable doubt. If it be otherwise, the human mind itself is
nothing but a means to madness; and all knowledge, no matter how
objective in its outreach, or however cautious and austere, is just
a suicidal fantasy. I can follow Lincoln in a second affirmation. I
believe in "the power in the life"--"the spirit in the life." God
beyond man, God outside of man, may be entirely speculation. I do
not say that this is so; but I am willing for the moment to leave it
as an undetermined question. But God within man, "Life immense in
passion, pulse and power,", life militantly seeking the conquest of
all that is less than life, life with meaning rising to moral
meaning, life with purpose rising to spiritual purpose--this, it
seems to me, is undeniable, except by those who do less living than
debating. And certainly I speak this morning, not as one who comes
from the study of a philosopher or a theologian--though I have
neglected neither philosophy nor theology--but as one who lives, and
thinks as he lives. I find my God not in my books but in my living,
and his purpose not in my arguments but in experience and
perception. Mankind has not come all this way--millions and millions
of years of struggling pilgrimage--from empty causes and to no
avail, to no sufficient purpose. Whatever may happen to this
particular generation--and we, ourselves, shall largely decide
it--the end is still in view and the purpose is invincible.
The thing that has happened is that human life itself has reached a
crisis: the total life of man throughout the planet and the life of
every individual human being within that larger life. If I may say
so, this is no new thought to me: I must ask pardon for almost
quoting myself, for I have said it many times for many years. The
present culmination was predictable. Anyone who cannot grasp the
larger truth of what the present crisis means--the truth that man is
required to raise the level of his life to the point of actual
transformation--will prove incapable of understanding the situation
of which he is a part, and incapable of all decisions which are
demanded of him. it is a simple truth, but like all simple truths,
extremely large. To people accustomed to truth dispensed in retail
sizes, it will seem too wholesale to be credible. But then, these
are the same people who have refused to believe in anything which
has happened in the last ten years until it actually did happen.
They refused to accept the dimensions of the world struggle until it
could no longer be avoided. They refused to see that the world must
be governed as a unity, a community, until terror made them see the
truth that wishful thinking had obscured....I say again, this is a
total crisis in human life itself demanding that we rise to a new
level, not only of belief and affirmation, but of performance. All
older, easier ways of life are ending; their course is nearly
finished. An age is ending not only for the outer world but for the
inner world: the world of motive and conscience, of mind and spirit.
Let no one suppose that the critical days which have come to us are
just a hateful residue from the past--that no meaning for the future
lies within them. There is a hateful residue from the past--that is
what we have to overcome. It is the old world's ancient evil--and we
must end it. But of equal or greater significance is the challenge
from the future--the unmade future which is nonetheless molding the
present and deciding the paths that we must take. It will be a
higher humanity than our own which will inherit that future : it
will be and it should be. Like Moses viewing the Promised Land, we
are able to see such a future and prepare for it; but we are not
able to enter it. The ways of the past are too much with us. Or like
David, who longed to build for his God a glorious temple, we can
prepare the materials and plan the outlines, but we cannot build.
"There is too much blood on your hands," said Jehovah to David. And
the old story is full of meaning. To us, too, it must be said,
"There is too much blood on your hands." We are too full of
prejudice, of blindness, of greed, of hate and superstition--yet we
can prepare the way. WE must. To survive, we must. To that level we
must rise.
For "from the future comes a cry"--a cry of challenge, a cry of
entreaty. It is for the future we must live--to live at all--though
it be a future we ourselves shall never see. There is nothing else
to live for--and in the last analysis, there never was. It is what
we aim towards that gives our lives their meaning; their meaning and
their true fulfillment. Evolution is not the blind pushing of life
forward so much as the purposive pulling of it onward. There is no
interpretation of life at all except as growth; and growth can only
be explained in terms of what it moves towards. Mankind may fulfill
the laws of its growth, or--any given generation of it--perish. What
we cannot do is to ignore or change the laws, the purpose, the
requirement. For man can no more refuse this claim and still survive
than an acorn can become a cactus. Just as an oak in all its growth
is always moving towards fulfillment as an oak, and not as anything
else, so is man. The refusal of a fuller human stature when the
moment which requires it has arrived is an invitation to death. We
must begin to be altogether human, building a fully human world, or
return--as to ourselves--self-defeated and unfulfilled, to the dust
from which we came. For the future is molding the present; the word
of challenge and requirement has gone out. "From the future comes a
cry."
Let no one suppose that this is a time to lose or lessen his faith.
It is a time to lose the worthless creeds which men have formerly
too much believed in. The greater truths remain more true than ever.
Yes, and great faith is not, as some have said, a meager candle in
the dark, but a thousand, thousand torches soon to be flaming in the
night-time; and in the distance a gathering brightness where
horizons presently will glow.
It was for times like these and faith like this that man was made:
man with his fears and doubts, his insufficiencies and
contradictions; man with his loves and hates, his joys and pain; man
that was never altogether man--but shall be. For "the spirit in the
life" is in him.
In his immaturity, man needed contradictions: errors that taught the
painful way to truth, hate that bolstered courage, even
superstitious terror to fill the blankness of the awful dark. And
because the beauty that he sought lay always just beyond his reach,
because the longing in his heart was thwarted, his resentments
turned to malice and sometimes to savagery. The mark of Cain was
upon his brow: it was and it is. He would not be "his brother's
keeper"ach, because the longing in his heart was thwarted, his
resentments turned to malice and sometimes to savagery. The mark of
Cain was upon his brow: it was and it is. He would not be "his
brother's keeper"ach, because the longing in his heart was thwarted,
his resentments turned to malice and sometimes to savagery. The mark
of Cain was upon his brow: it was and it is. He would not be "his
brother's keeper" and so he became his brother's slayer. And he made
his gods in his own tormented image. Yet in his secret heart, he
always had a fragment of the truth--the truth that was eventually to
save him. And to find the other fragments and fit them all together,
he had to find a way to every other human heart. Then the truth
would be entire, the many fragments fitted into wholeness; and the
image of God, the only perfect likeness, would be complete and
perfect: mirrored in the brotherhood of man.
That is what it was to be--even from the beginning. Do you remember
Swinburne's verses, from Atalanta in Calydon:
Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance fallen from heaven;
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And life, the shadow of death.
And the high gods took in hand
Fire, and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years;
And froth and drift of the sea;
And dust of the laboring earth;
And bodies of things to be
In the houses of death and of birth;
And wrought with weeping and laughter,
And fashion'd with loathing and love,
With life before and after
And death beneath and above,
For a day and a night and a morrow,
That his strength might endure for a span
With travail and heavy sorrow,
The holy spirit of man.
That is what it was to be--always: the holy spirit of man. And be it
soon or late, that is what it shall be.
Prayer: O God, by the truth we have dimmed and are able to dim no
more, persuade us; and by the love we have quenched and robbed our
hearts in quenching, save us. Amen.
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