03.02. Chapter 2

II. THE DIRECT DEALING OF MAN WITH GOD A RIGHT AND AN OBLIGATION When Professor James of Harvard University published his Gifford Lectures under the title of “ The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature,” the book created widespread interest. This was to be accounted for principally because of its standpoint, and on account of its conclusion; and also, of course, because of all the valuable matter presented and dealt with in its process. The standpoint of the book Professor James indicated in these words, “ I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution.” And a little further on, still in the introductory part of the book he wrote, “ Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feeling, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend them selves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” As Christian believers we go a great deal further than either of these quotations seems to suggest; but the value of the book consisted in the fact that at last a scientific teacher was willing to admit that the people likely to know most about religion are religious people. It was an entirely new admission on the scientific side. Then after having gathered together all kinds of religious experience, Professor James stated his conclusions, and these may for our purpose be expressed in one very brief quotation, “ We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to His influence our deepest testing is fulfilled.” This is not the dictum of a professor in a theological college, neither is it the statement of a Christian preacher from his pulpit. It is the deliberate and scientific conclusion of one of the most eminent psychologists of this age; and, moreover, it is his conclusion after careful examination of all kinds of religious experiences. The conclusion of the scientist is the commonplace of Christianity, and when I say commonplace I do not mean anything unimportant, but rather one of the fundamental axioms of Christianity. That conclusion is the reason of the Bible. It is the message of the Bible. It is the Bible in brief. All the men who wrote aforetime in divers places and portions, wrote because they believed they had business with God. That great truth is the explanation of the purpose of Incarnation. It is the ultimate reason in Atonement. Not that it explains the method of Atonement, but it accounts for Atonement. Accept that truth, and we begin to understand what sin is. Recognize that fact, and we may commence our study of the great subject of salvation. To believe that truth, and to live in the power of it, is Christianity.

Having affirmed in our previous study the spiritual nature of man, we now proceed to consider that which is the first necessary deduction, namely, that the direct dealing of man with God is both his right and his obligation.

I desire at the very commencement to place emphasis upon the two sides of that subject. Not merely is direct dealing on the part of man with God his right, it is also his obligation. Or to state the case from the other side, not merely is it his obligation, it is his birthright. The subject thus stated suggests to us the natural divisions for our consideration. First, man’s right of direct dealing with God; and secondly, man’s obligation to have direct dealing with God. In dealing with man’s right, I suggest three very simple lines of consideration. First, the nature of the case; secondly, the grace of the case; and finally, an application of the facts of the case.

We begin in the simplest way by saying that in the very nature of the case, in the nature of God and in the nature of man, it follows by a sequence from which there can be no possibility of escape, that man has the right of direct, immediate, and personal access to God. The affirmation that God is a Spirit announces His essential Being, rather than reveals His character. It declares that God is free from the limitations of time and of space. But it is equally true that man is a spirit, that the central fact in human personality is not flesh, which is but a medium of expression; not the mind, which is but the consciousness; but the spirit. Man is essentially a spirit. He transcends his material nature, and immediately touches God. Man is more than physical, and in the more, lies all the mystery that perplexes him, baffles him, startles him, makes him afraid within himself. We do not, neither can we know ourselves. We have often said to our selves in hours of loneliness, What is this strange new mystery of possibility breaking out within my consciousness? We may account for it in the language of the hour by speaking of the over-soul; but in the simpler language of Scripture, it is the spiritual fact in man. The moment consciousness transcends material life, which it does perpetually, it is in the very neighbourhood, in the atmosphere, in the presence of God. The apostle expressed the truth far more simply when in the midst of the culture and learning of Athens he said, “ In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” Our being, then, is spiritual. The deduction of these truths has been most exquisitely made for us in language which so appeals to human nature in its deepest and truest, as to have become almost commonplace by quotation.

“ Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with spirit can meet —

Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.” The sublimity of Tennyson’s teaching in that quotation lies in the simplicity of the one declaration, “ Spirit with spirit can meet.” It is no new discovery. It is as old as the oldest book in the Bible. Eliphaz gave utterance to the same truth when he said to Job, “ Acquaint now thyself with Him, and be at peace, Thereby good shall come unto thee.”

While misinterpreting the condition in which Job found himself, Eliphaz nevertheless be sought him to rise superior to all the material limitation and suffering, and in himself to be come acquainted with God and be at peace. The final illustration of the truth fell from the lips of our Lord when He said to the woman of Samaria, “ God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.” “ In spirit,” that is, in the essential part of them, and “ in truth,” that is, in all life harmonizing with the spirit in the attitude of worship. The writer of the letter to the He brews expressed the same idea when he said, “ He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a Rewarder of them that seek after Him.” First then, the very necessities of the case, in the nature of God and man, make it evident that man can have direct access to God. But think of the grace of the case, which is even more wonderful for us as sinning men.

Let me cite another statement from Professor James’ book. When he states his conclusions, he writes these very remarkable words. Referring to all religious experiences the world over he says, “ There is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts: first, an uneasiness; and secondly, its solution. The uneasiness reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us, as we naturally stand. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.” A most significant and remarkable conclusion, as the result of the examination of all kinds of religious experience, gathered from East and West, North and South, both emotional and intellectual. This man of science, reducing everything to the minimum, seeking not for the greatest common measure, but the least common multiple, says that he finds in all religions these two things, an uneasiness which consists of a sense that there is something wrong; a solution, which consists of a conviction that the wrong may be set right by proper connection with the higher powers.

Christianity recognizes the wrong, and names it sin. Christianity declares that it is possible to make connection with the higher powers through the infinite grace, operating through the work of Jesus Christ. Consequently our declaration is that man may have access to God, notwithstanding the something wrong which perhaps he may not be able to explain, or the history of which he may not be perfectly sure, through the mediation of God in His Son, and by His Spirit.

It is necessary that we should see the connection between this second statement and the first. By nature man can have access to God.

I do not use the word nature now as Paul used it, but in a simpler way. That is not to criticise Paul. He, speaking of the natural man, means man fallen, or in Professor James’ words, man with “ something wrong “ about him. For the moment I do not so use the word, but rather as describing that which lies behind, the first ideal of man. Natural man has access to God, because God is a Spirit, and man is spirit, and “ Spirit with spirit can meet.” But experimentally the spirit of man does not meet with the Spirit of God. The truer language of experience is that of Job, “ Oh, that I knew where I might find Him.” I hear the infinite music of the eternal Spirit sobbing through the shell of human life, but I cannot speak and know I am heard, and I cannot hear so as to be perfectly sure that the speech was His. I have lost ability somehow, some when, some where. If I am a spirit, and He is a Spirit, and it is true that “ Spirit with spirit can meet,” then, to quote once again the language of the scientist, “ there is something wrong about us.” Whether you name it “ something wrong “ somewhere; or whether you call it “ continuous abnormality,” and that also is a quotation from a scientific writer; or whether you call it “ a kink in the moral nature,” and that is a quotation from magazine literature; or whether you call it in the sublime and dignified and awful language of Christian teaching, “ sin,” I care nothing. It is the fact that I have to deal with.

Now the Christian revelation declares, “ God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Him self,” making it possible — may I quote the scientific language again — for man to make “proper connection with the higher powers,” to find his way back into the immediate and conscious fellowship which somehow he has lost. “ God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself,” meeting humanity in In carnation for the sake of humanity’s consciousness, revealing to humanity in the mystery of His dying the infinite process of His own pain whereby humanity’s sin is dealt with and put away. That mediation is perfected in the Spirit. “ Who among men knoweth the things of a ’man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none know eth, save the Spirit of God.”

“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love Him.” The deep things, the profound things, the things of God, eye hath not seen. They are not discovered by looking with the look of sense.

They are not heard by the listening which is merely the listening of the flesh. And into the heart of man with its emotion, and its intellect, and its volition, these things have not come.

How strange it is that we so constantly quote that verse and leave it there, as though the statement in the New Testament is the statement of the Old, that the deep things of God man cannot know. The New Testament quotes it to correct it, enlarge it, carry it on, and the final word is this, that “ unto us God revealed them through the Spirit.” So that the teaching of Christianity is that the deep things of God are revealed by the Spirit. Thus through the mediation of the Son there is the mediation of the Spirit, and into the spiritual nature of a man there comes the light of the Spirit of God. Thus not only upon the basis of man’s nature by Divine intention, for that is lost, but upon the basis of God’s grace mediating through His Son, whereby the lost is found, once again, “ Spirit with spirit can meet.” Now what is the application of these facts?

First I simply state the case I have been at tempting to argue. Every human being by nature and by grace may have direct dealings with God, and that both in the crises and in the commonplaces of life. In the crises we all more or less realize it. I think I have yet to meet the man who has any residuum of belief in religion, who will not admit that in some crisis of pain and anguish, of dire necessity, of awful choice, he has suddenly become conscious of God and of the fact that he could speak to Him. Many a soldier will tell you how that upon the battlefield in the hour of supreme peril, he suddenly knew and spoke to God.

Many a surgeon will tell you, as one told me in referring to the actual case of an operation upon myself, that in the moment of supreme crisis he knew God’s presence and power. In a great crisis the spirit of man becomes naked to God, and knows it. I remember when I first became supremely conscious, awfully conscious of the spirituality of my own being. It was not in a prayer meeting, it was not in a convention.

It was in the crisis of that awful dynamite explosion in New York, when my own wife was in the hotel that rocked and reeled. Never can I forget how when climbing the two stories over the wreckage and ruin and debris in order to reach the place of peril in which I knew she was, I became conscious that my body was a weight which I fain would have flung away to speed me in my effort to reach her. It was a crisis, and in the midst of it I knew that I was spirit, and that I could touch God, and speak to Him. The philosophy has yet to be invented that can rob me of that conviction. Not merely in the crises, however, is such access possible. It is equally so in the commonplaces. Perhaps I have no right to make the distinction between crisis and commonplace.

Those are great words in which Elizabeth Bar rett Browning teaches us that such distinction is false.

“ ’ There’s nothing great Nor small,’ has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin’s bell, And truly I reiterate, nothing’s small! No lily-muffled hum of a summer bee, But finds some coupling with the spinning stars, No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere, No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim, And (glancing on my own thin, veined wrist) In such a little tremor of the blood The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul Doth utter itself distinct.”

Let that truth be recognized, and then remember that man has the right of access to God in the commonplaces, in the matter of friend ships, of habits, of whether we shall read this book or not, of whether we will take our amusement thus or so. Nothing’s small. Issues that make up testing hang upon the trifles of the passing moments, and man can get to God about all such trifles. That is the heart and centre of Christian experience.

If that be one side of the truth of man’s right of access, there is another, and it is this, that because he has such right, he must refuse to permit anyone to interfere between himself and God. This is a necessary sequence. We cannot escape it, and we ought not to attempt to escape it. In the “ Comments of Bagshot “I read, “ Rights are ideals in terms of action. Man first becomes formidable in action when he conceives his ideals as his rights.” Are these things which we have been stating our ideals? Do we believe that the soul of man can speak to God immediately and directly? Do we believe that in the very nature of the case, “ Spirit with spirit can meet “? Do we believe that in the infinitude of grace as revealed in the Christian fact, a man can have communion with God? Is that our ideal?

Then let us make it our right. When we do so we become formidable, we become strong.

It is our duty to make our protest against all symbols which interfere between the spirit and God, and to make angry protest against men or spirits, who ask to stand between us and God. That is the essence — I had almost said of Puritanism. I will use a larger speech. It is the essence of Christianity that the spirit of a man has access to God, and must avail itself thereof. This principle is the destruction of priestism, whether Roman, Anglican, or Free.

Man’s obligation of access is the second half of our consideration, although we have already touched upon it necessarily in considering the right of access. If man be spirit and God be Spirit, and man may find his way to God, he ought to find his way to God. First he owes it to God that he should do so. Surely it will be granted that there ought to be given to God the right to adjust his own. “ Will a man rob God? “ asked the prophet. It is still the question. The application in Malachi is very narrow, though quite sufficient for the time. A man may rob God far more terribly than in tithes and offerings. We rob God when we do not hold communion with Him, when we do not remit to Him for adjustment the spirit Direct Dealing of Man with God 53 which is His, offspring of His very life and essence and nature.

Old King Lear in his madness said, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child.” That is very human, it is on the ordinary human level, and even there it is an awful truth, but in the highest application it tells the tragedy in the heavens of a godless life. It is that of God with a thankless child. I go back to Genesis and I read, “ Adam, where art thou? “and I never read it to-day without thinking of what my beloved friend, Dr. Henry Weston of Crozer, a man of whom I speak with reverence as a teacher, once said of that passage, that it was not the shout of a policeman, but the wail of a Father after His lost child. “ The God in Whose hand thy breath is, and Whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified,” was the charge against Belshazzar. We should in all likelihood have charged him with drunkenness, and asked him to sign a pledge, and in the interests of his nobles we might have started a Social Purity Crusade in Babylon. The prophet of God said that the root sin was neither drunkenness nor fornication, but that he had failed to glorify God. Every man who attempts to manage his life commits the sin of robbing God, and thus of harming Him. We owe it to God, moreover, because of the satisfaction which we ought to give Him in love.

He hungers for love, He delights to bestow gifts in love, and we wound and wrong love when we do not find our way to Him in gratitude and in worship. But our obligation is not merely one toward God. We have an obligation to ourselves. If the spirit be the central thing in our lives, then the mental and the physical are concentric, and where this is so, there is perfect harmony. But if we make the physical the central in life, or if we make the mental the central, we become eccentric. It is the habit of the man of the world to speak of Christian men as eccentric. As a matter of fact, the Christian man is concentric, his spiritual life recognized as supreme, and set in right relation to the Spirit of God, then all the other circles are in their proper place. But if we put the centre of life in the flesh, or in the mind, we are necessarily eccentric. And yet once more. The obligation is not merely to God and self, but also to the universal order. If it be true that in my neglect of God I become eccentric, mark the far-reaching effect of one eccentricity in the spherical order.

It is the history of all the false life of the city, of the country, of the world. It is all eccentric. I do not use the word as merely suggesting a relationship which is of no consequence.

Eccentricity is chaos, ruin, disaster. We owe it then to the universal order that we bring our lives into right relationship to God.

We may summarize quite briefly. Man can have dealings with God, and man must have dealings with God. Man can have such dealings. If I am asked for a final solution of how, I can no more give one than I can give the final explanation of the fact of my being, and that is a proper and fair comparison. I cannot explain the final mystery of my being.

There are reaches of which I am conscious, but which I have not yet discovered, and which I am almost afraid to invade. As we cannot say the last things concerning ourselves, while yet we are certain of the fact of our existence, so neither can we say the last thing as to the method of our access to God, but the testimony of scientific investigation agrees with the declaration of revealed religion, that we have business with God, and that we can find our way to Him.

It is equally true that man must have such dealings with God. Now at this point it is well that we should recognize a peculiar and subtle peril. There is a danger in freedom. When we claim the right of appeal to God, do we exercise that right? It is not enough that we sweep aside all the priests who fain would interfere. We must get to God for ourselves.

We must ask Him about the habits of our lives. We must remit to Him all questions.

One is sometimes afraid lest in the very vehemence of our protest against priestism there should lurk the danger of neglecting to remit all things to God for His arbitrament and arrangement. The real balance of life may thus be expressed, no interference between man and God. Man always submitted to God that He may govern. We rejoice that we are able to find access to God. Let us never fail to yield ourselves to the obligation of the great and gracious privilege.^