The Gospel of Joy

Stopford A. Brooke

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783849648794
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"The Gospel of Joy" indicates by its title the prevailing temper of the sermons the volume contains. Mr. Stopford A. Brooke has, in unusual degree, the essential characteristic of a good preacher — unwavering belief. When this is united, as in his case, to a liberal creed and to insight and taste, it preeminently fits the preacher for persuasive discourse He descends to the sluggish or distrustful listener from an altitude of invincible faith. One might offer this criticism—that the author more frequently awakens spiritual emotion and brings it to life, than so interprets life as to make it the direct occasion and support of spiritual emotion. We need, as far as possible, to turn to those lines of action which call out and interweave the thoughts and feelings in the most self-sustained and living products.

THE SIMPLICITY OF CHRIST

Follow me.

St. Luke ix. 59

THE reasoning intellect of man, with all its great and useful capacities, has no capacity for knowing two matters — the things which belong to love, and the things which belong to beauty; that is, the things which belong to religion, and the things which belong to art. The very highest intellect, working only within itself and by the fullest possible use of its means, is totally incapable of comprehending what the love of God is in the soul, or what losing one's life for others is; and is equally incapable of comprehending or knowing what beauty is, or how it lives and moves in poetry, in music, or in the other arts. The world in which these things abide and act is far beyond its ken. Indeed these two sets of things — those which have to do with God as love, and our love for Him and one another; and those which have to do with beauty, are one. All things that belong to love are beautiful, and all things that are beautiful have their source in love.

If the statement that the methods used by the reasoning faculty have no application and are of no use in the world of religion, we might fairly challenge it. Such a uniqueness would lead us to distrust it at first hand. But it does not stand alone. As the religious man lives by love of an invisible righteousness and love which directly deal with him, but his belief in which no intellectual power he possesses can either analyze or demonstrate — so the artist lives by faith in an infinite and immeasurable beauty of which he only knows a part, but of which he is certain he will know more and more, if he be faithful in pursuit of it. And this beauty he also knows that he cannot analyze, nor can he demonstrate its existence. His knowledge of it is gained only by love of it, not by understanding it. In pursuing it, he uses no intellectual powers; nay, he frequently violates or transcends the methods and the laws those, powers lay down as necessary. The statement then made with regard to the world of religion is not unique. It is equally true with regard to the world of art. Blake was curiously right when he said: " Christianity is art, and art is Christianity." Religion can be expressed in terms of art, and art in the terms of religion.

Hence, we are bound to say (and the present time calls on us to say it as clearly as possible), first; That those intellectual formulas of religious truth which we call creeds, confessions and schemes of salvation, which are the work throughout not of the spiritual but of the logical faculty, are matters of which we ought to get rid; if they impose themselves on us as necessary for the religious life, or as permanent or infallible forms of spiritual truth. Secondly, That till we get rid of their tyranny, we shall not be able to simplify our life, or to get down to the root ideas of the life of God with man or of man with God.

One thing, however, the intellect has done for religion at the present time. It advances, like our other powers, and as it advances it clears away a great deal that it once clung to as absolutely true. It made scientific schemes of salvation, fixed and logical formulas of truth, elaborate arrangements of doctrines, proofs of the necessity of miracles for a basis of faith. All these the scientific and critical work of the intellect has in the last sixty years done its best to clear away, and we owe it sincere thanks for the honest work it has performed in its own sphere. We are now able to see spiritual truths without the veils which the scholastic intellect had woven round them. All that the reasoning faculty employed on spiritual things made, and which ecclesiastics infected with the worldly desire of power imposed on us as necessary for salvation, the same reasoning faculty, in its amusing way, has now unmade. The only thing it retains from the old time is its desire of power; and it does its best, in the hands of those philosophic, ethical and scientific persons who ignore a spiritual being in man, to retain that power by insisting on its own supremacy as absolutely necessary for a happy, wise, and even a good life.

The intellect has thus devoured its own children. A number of dogmas, of creeds which confined illimitable ideas in limited forms of thought, of theories with regard to the nature of God, the relation of persons in the Godhead, the twofold nature in Christ, the infallible authority of the Bible or of the Church, the logical necessity of miracle, the nature of man in relation to the universe — these and many others were the creation of the critical and analyzing intellect of man working in the realm of its own vanity. With equal vanity, the same critical intellect, having brought them forth and educated them, has now eaten them up, and smacks its lips with satisfaction over the work it has done. It is a very unnatural mother. But it is a way it has, and it is now employed in bringing forth new children, in making new formulas, in educating new baby-theories of religion and of morals, in labeling and correlating the whole spiritual universe, one single imagination of which it is unable to see or comprehend. We may be sure that before fifty years are over, it will play the cannibal again among the new theories it has invented with regard to what it calls " religious " or " ethical " truth; and all the more quickly because its present theories are for the most part negative, and like children that have no individuality are not likely to engage their mother's affection.

It has destroyed all that it chooses and chose to call Christianity, and now it says that Christianity does not exist. But the real fact is, that what it has destroyed is not Christianity, but its own scheme of Christianity; and a very good thing it is that it has wrought this destruction. In the hands of the Jewish priesthood and afterwards of the Christian priesthood, it hated spiritual truth of old because spiritual truth claimed to be independent of it. It seized it, claimed to analyze it and define it for all men; froze its free waters into icy intellectual forms; and invented, to support these, laws and ceremonies. These, it said, are unchangeable and permanent. Then it allied itself with imperialism and the class systems of the world, and, greedy of power, imposed its schemes and doctrines on the spirit of men, and, menacing damnation, debased and terrified the heart of humanity.

It called its work the Christian religion; but what it invented had nothing whatever to do with Christ; and the practice it carried out blackened and violated the character of Jesus. In its exclusiveness, in its negations, in its law of sin and death, it contradicted at almost every point the law of the universal love of God, and of man's universal love of his brothers. And now, we, who care for Christ, and whose deepest life is in following what He said, only smile at the destruction the critical intellect has wrought upon its own past work; and think that the attack it is so proud of making now on the things of the spirit will be equally impermanent. Once it was too positive, and tried to force us to believe that its logical arrangements were spiritual truth; now it is too negative and says we are not to believe in the spiritual at all. One is as foolish as the other. The fact is that it does not matter a pin what the reasoning and critical faculty, working alone, says in support of or in attack on spiritual truth. It is equally incompetent, whatever side it take, to settle any spiritual question, or to lead us to know anything vital about God, and our life with Him.

Spiritual truth becomes ours by love, not by reasoning. We must love God or we shall never comprehend Him. Man must be loved or we shall never know human nature. It is only when we love the spiritual ideas — those which afterwards we come to call spiritual truths — that we begin to believe that they have been given to our nature, and developed in it from within us, by One whom in time we learn to call our Father. Immortal life must be loved before its full meaning opens before us. Sacrifice of self must be loved for its own sake and done for love of it, before we know that it is life eternal. Righteousness must be loved for itself before we can be filled with it. Jesus our Master must be loved before He shall seem the worthiest to be loved, before we know His life to be the life of the soul. Love is first, and on love comes knowledge in these matters. Only love — living, enkindled, active emotion, in which we lose ourselves in joy and peace — can know and do the truths which bind God to Man and Man to God; which make, that is, religion.

Is the reasoning faculty, then, of no use in matters pertaining to religion? It is of use within its own sphere; in matters which can be investigated, analyzed, criticised or demonstrated. It is the part of the intellect to record the history of religious movements and of religious dogma, and these affairs have much interest for the intellect. It is sometimes useful to analyze the various aspects of religion in the minds of men, and the different forms into which distinct nations have cast their schemes of religious life. The history of doctrines is entertaining; it reveals the fancifulness of humanity, it convinces us of the manifoldness of human nature. Even for the inner life of the soul, it is at times needful to illustrate, divide, compare, to place in different lights, by means of the philosophic intellect, the truths which the spirit of love alone can comprehend; but we must beware lest we fall in love with this intellectual work and think it spiritual; for when these things are thought to be in themselves religious, of any vital importance to the life of God in the soul, they drown, in the end, that life, they shut out God, and they paralyze that love of man which is the natural result of love of God the Father. Moreover, when these things are thought to be spiritual, or to have any real importance for the attainment of divine truth, they cause an unutterable trouble and weariness — the very thing the Christian life ought to take away. We labor for that which is not needful for goodness in life; for that kind of knowledge which hides Christ and overclouds the vision of God; for that which satisfieth not; we pursue, year after year, an apparent knowledge which produces in the end only ruinous pride or passionless despair. Nor is this the only result of this false way of seeing religion. We are drawn away by it from realities to unrealities, from what is vital to that which is dead, from what is needful for human life to that which is not needful, from the work of love to the idleness of argument. We spend most uselessly a mass of time on reasoning concerning God and His truth; whether we can know Him or not; and if we had asked Jesus about what we had done, He would have answered: "That was not needful, nor had it to do with the matter. The thing is simple; Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." And were He asked further He would have replied: " I am the good shepherd; and I know mine own and mine own know me, even as my Father knoweth me and I know the Father." And the reason He knew His sheep was love of them. " I lay down my life for the sheep." And the reason why God knew Him and He knew God, and why His own knew Him, was one and the same — Love, and nothing else. And to attain knowledge of the things of the spirit in that way of love is the source of infinite joy and rest in life, of peace and praise within.

It is different indeed when we attempt to reach the things of the spirit through argument. To transfer them from the region of love and of clear being into the region of the intellect and its illusions, is, like all foolish things — that is, things which are against the nature of the universe — the source of infinite anger and weariness. We know what happens when any great misfortune or circumstance of passion which touches the depths of life gets the mastery over our thought and will. All the thinking in the world will not disperse it; on the contrary, it only deepens the tyranny of the trouble. Yet, in spite of our knowledge of the uselessness of our thinking, we cannot cease it; we are like the worn-out horse who moves round the pillar in the mill — but we are sadder than he. He knows that the mill-stones within go round, but we know more; we know we do not grind corn, but chaff. We come to no conclusion. Yet, in spite of this knowledge, we are lashed by our enslaved will into incessant movement round our sorrow, till the world is sickened to us, and we are furious with our slavery. If we could but break the chain which binds us to ourselves, and working in the quiet fields of humanity drink of the brook of self-forgetfulness, we should be happy; escaping from our pain; learning to admire and love; feeling for the sorrows and joys of others far more than for our own; impassioned for beauty in God, in nature, and in man; no longer lost to divine imaginations in the labyrinth of our own self-sorrows. We cannot love these splendors of God, for we are in love with our self; and self-love is the very contrary of love.

This, which is true in the realm of the affections, is true in the realm of the intellect when it thinks it can investigate or prove spiritual truth. Men, and women even more than men, (for they are more enslaved by the understanding than men,) cannot leave off arguing about religious truths; wholly enthralled by the questions they create; and all the more enthralled because they are strangely vain of their cleverness in this debate. Day after day they read and argue and talk till they are dazed. Article after article, theory after theory, book after book — each adds a new confusion, a new torment. It is a piteous sight. They wheel and plod round their post, grinding their chaff into dust, till the world within them is sick, and the world without them is lost; and nature and man scarcely ever say anything to them. There is but little faith or hope, or admiration, or love, or joy left in their lives. They are choked with the dust of their own intellect employed on matters with which it has nothing to do. At last they are too wearied to think any more, and there are those who die of this grinding folly or creep to the grave, death in their heart. Others escape, and of these there are, at the present time, two types especially who are in sharp contrast one to the other.

The first of these breaks the chain, and, full of self-mockery, looks with opened eyes on all the chaff he has been grinding. " And this," he says, " I once thought to be corn! To this I have given my life, my thinking, even what of love and imagination I possessed. I turn away from it now with disenchantment, with pain, with hatred. There is nothing to feed me here, nothing to kindle the old life and joy which I had when I was young. Everything which seemed to be religious truth, is empty husks, not fit for the swine to eat. I will believe and hope and love these things no more."

And so he wanders far away, and, as his nature or his humour is, lives his life without God, or hope of immortality, or care for the ideal aims of the spirit; sometimes alone in self-scorn, sometimes with dim regrets which he drowns in work or in pleasure, sometimes in selfishness — while others of a different temper turn to labor for man, and to that life of sacrifice which is all the more noble in them, because they now think that man shall perish like the snows of yesterday. There are many ways men take the ruin of their old religious life, or what seemed their religion; but however they take it, they never return to their first position. What they get is something else, if they get anything. Men cannot embrace a ghost once they know it to be a ghost.

But there is a question this type of men might ask themselves, if they were not too weary, if they had some religious temper in them. Instead of saying, "There is no such thing as any spiritual truth," they might say, " Perhaps I have made a mistake. May there not be some corn that I can grind? Is there nothing I can do less full of weariness — something human, simple, natural, loving; less matter of argument, more matter of feeling rightly; not needing thinking about at all, but only joyous and affectionate action among human creatures that I love." So he might ask, but alas! he has so long practiced only his understanding, and is now so proud of its working at complex problems in his own mind, that it does not occur to him to find things through love, or to care for what is simple. Cumbered and troubled by reiterated analysis of life and metaphysical problems, he cannot enter into the lives of men and women, nor arrive at that childlike heart which alone enters into the kingdom of God. " My intellect must be convinced," he says. Alas! after so many years of failure is he still so blind? Has he not yet learnt that as long as he sets the mere intellect to work on spiritual truth, he will have no corn to grind; that as long as any pride in his reasonings remains he cannot have love of man?

What he does not do, the other, the second type, adventures. He, too, breaks his chain; he, too, looks at all the weary work he has gone through and knows that it is illusion; he, too, finds out that he has only ground chaff into dust.

" And I seemed to love it all so well," he says, "and yet could it be loved at all? How could I love argumentative criticism, analysis of doctrines, logical schemes, and the labor of the understanding? They could not love me in return. I begin to feel that all these weary years I have only loved my own self — the pleasure I had in the working of my own brain, my own intelligence and its exercise. And is love of self, or of self-thinking, love at all? Must not love, to be love, love something other than one's own, and live, not for the sake of intellectual vanity and satisfaction, but for the sake of love itself? Does not God ask us to love Him, and to love man, in order that...

Table of contents

• THE ARMOR OF GOD I
• THE ARMOR OF GOD II
• THE ARMOR OF GOD III
• THE CHRISTIAN RACE
• THE LAST SUNDAY OF THE YEAR
• THE HEART OF ST. PAUL
• OF WHAT USE IS THE BATTLE?
• REST
• THE DAY OF ALL SAINTS
• THE SIMPLICITY OF CHRIST
• THE THIRST FOR GOD
• THE HALLOWING OF GOD'S CHARACTER
• THE NATURE OF MAN
• WHAT? IN EXCHANGE FOR THE SOUL
• WHAT IS THE LIFE OF MAN?
• THE IDEAL OF THE KINGDOM
• THE AIMS OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD
• WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY, THE KINGDOM OF GOD?
• THE PREACHING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD