Some Christian Convictions | Page 9

Societies" among non-Christian faiths. When
the Emperor Julian attempted to restore the ancient paganism, he did
not argue for its superior credibility, but contented himself with
abusing the creed of Christians and extolling the beauty of the rituals of
the religion it had supplanted. But the propaganda of the gospel of
Jesus is invariably one of persuasion, convincing and confirming men's
minds with its truth.
It would be as false, however, to neglect the part a man's willingness
has in his faith. To believe in the Christian God demands a severe
moral effort. It can never be an easy thing to rely on love as the
ultimate wisdom and power in the universe. "The will to believe," if not
everything, is all but everything, in predisposing us to listen to the
arguments of the faith and in rendering us inflammable to its kindling
emotions.
But no man can be truly religious who is not in communion with God
with "as much as in him is." Somebody has finely said that it does not
take much of a man to be a Christian, but it takes all there is of him. An
early African Christian, Arnobius, tells us that we must "cling to God
with all our senses, so to speak." And Thomas Carlyle gave us a picture
of the ideal believer when he wrote of his father that "he was religious
with the consent of his whole faculties." It is faith's ability to engross a
man's entire self, going down to the very roots of his being, that renders
it indestructible. It can say of those who seek to undermine it, as
Hamlet said of his enemies:
It shall go hard, But I will delve one yard below their mines.
As an experience, God is a discovery which each must make for

himself. Religion comes to us as an inheritance; and at the outset we
can no more distinguish the voice of God from the voices of men we
respect, than the boy Samuel could distinguish the voice of Jehovah
from that of Eli. But we gradually learn to "possess our possession," to
respond to our own highest inspirations, whether or not they inspire
others. Pascal well says: "It is the consent of yourself to yourself and
the unchanging voice of your own reason that ought to make you
believe." So far only as we repeat for ourselves the discoveries of
earlier explorers of Him who is invisible have we any religion of our
own. And this personal experience is the ground of our certainty; "as
we have heard, so have we seen in the city of our God."
Religious experience, and even Christian experience, appears in a great
variety of forms; and there is always a danger lest those who are
personally familiar with one type should fail to acknowledge others as
genuine. The mystics are apt to disparage the rationalists; hard-headed,
conscientious saints look askance at seers of visions; and those whose
new life has broken forth with the energy and volume of a geyser
hardly recognize the same life when it develops like a spring-born
stream from a small trickle, increased by many tributaries, into a stately
river. The value of an experience is to be judged not by its form, but by
its results. Fortunately for Christianity the New Testament contains a
variety of types. With the first disciples the light dawns gradually; on
St. Paul it bursts in a flash brighter than noonday. The emotional
heights and depths of the seer on Patmos contrast with the steady level
disclosed in the practical temperament of the writer of the Epistle of
James. But underneath the diversity there is an essential unity of
experience: all conform to that which Luther (as Harnack summarizes
his position) considered the essence of Christian faith--"unwavering
trust of the heart in God who has given Himself to us in Christ as our
Father."
Religious experience has been defined as man's response to God; it
often appears rather his search for Him. But that is characteristic only
of the beginning of the experience. The experienced know better than
to place the emphasis on their initiative in establishing intercourse with
the Divine. "We love, because He first loved us," they say. The Apostle,

who speaks of his readers as those who "have come to know God,"
stops and corrects himself, "or rather to be known of God." Believers
discover that God was "long beforehand" with them. Their very search
is but an answer to His seeking; in their every movement towards Him,
they are aware of His drawing. The verse which begins, "My soul
followeth hard after Thee," continues "Thy right hand upholdeth me."
Religious experience, like all other, is limited by a man's capacity for it;
and some men seem to have very scant capacity