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The Will of the Voice (1)
IN Bernard Shaw's great prophetic play Back to Methuselah Eve, the Mother of humanity, says in her old age of her grandson Enoch: 'Enoch walks on the hills and hears the Voice continually, and has given up his will to do the Will of the Voice . . . but it took Enoch 200 years to learn to interpret the Will of the Voice.' That may seem a strange quotation to bring to the opening meeting of a great Conference which represents to those who have convened it a moment full of promise in the history of British Christianity. But we are here because the Churches and Christian bodies that we represent are all commmitted, like Enoch, to the walk with God, and want to learn to interpret the Will of the Voice. We are the delegates of men and women of all types who agree in refusing the animal view of existence: who desire to know God's nature and conform to His purpose—to live, that is, towards the standards of Divine Reality. We want a clue to the thread of God's purpose running through this tangled creation; and we want it all the more because we are so solidly sure about Him. We feel that, so far, we have neither
(1) Address delivered at the First Session of the Copec Conference, Birmingham, April 1924.
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interpreted nor obeyed the Voice. We have been not so much wicked, as stupid, muddled and vague.
Yet when we take humanity as a whole, when we think of its lowly origins, what marvellous insights we have been given into God's eternal character and purpose; into the superhuman facts of holiness and of love! Put all this together—the best and deepest that we have known—the whole Christian inheritance of spiritual truth and beauty—all the witness of the saints—all they reveal of the realities of that spiritual world towards which we stretch out in our little prayers. Put together these inconceivable disclosures of God—'fairest yet strongest, unchangeable yet changing all '—given to us, little half-animal things. Add to them the ultimate disclosure, made actually, by the most humbling of condescensions, in human nature itself: and then confront all this with the use that we have made of it.
Consider again, that as Christians we do actually possess the clue to God's Will which we ask for. We are allowed to perceive in Jesus Christ the inmost nature of God, and His relation with the world, in the degree in which our little human souls can bear it. We have seen the emergence in human history of perfect holiness and ceaselessly redeeming love, as solid facts. We could, as the saints have always done, live with His continuing Spirit here and now, if we were willing to pay the price. We can, in our prayer, touch infinite and hardly guessed forces, draw on an unfailing source of power; the living water of Creative Love. In other words, the nature and purpose of the Infinite God are, and always have been, doubly re-
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vealed to us: in the facts of history, and in the spiritual contacts of our own inner life. And in the life and teaching of Our Lord these two channels of revelation in their fullness come together: in His Person the life of history and the life of prayer met, and the result was the vision of the Kingdom of God, the assigned end at once of social and of individual growth. Look at that vision, and then look at this planet, of which we are the responsible inhabitants. It is needless to say more about that.
Now, is it not our task, is it not the solution of our problem—open as we are to both these great currents of reality—to bring together and harmonize the life revealed in history and the life revealed in prayer? Are we not here, really, as delegates from Christian bodies whose right to exist depends on knowing and proclaiming this? Is not the whole of the New Testament a demand that this shall be done? Does it not declare that there is a power accessible to us, in which it can be done? When we think of the perpetual miracles of personal redemption worked by the supernatural grace of God, can we dare to say that the wider miracle of social redemption is beyond the Christian span? Surely we cannot venture to limit the influence and possible transfiguring power of God upon the history which He pervades, sways, yet transcends. This very conference has come into being as a result of the pressure of God upon history. It is a part—we don't know what part —of His great mysterious and unceasing action on human thought and human life. All limitations to that action are ours, and are the very essence of
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our sin. It is our frightened selfish resistance, or, worse than our resistance, our disgusting pious apathy, our dull certainty that social regeneration won't happen, which stops it from happening. Our frightful lack of the dynamic virtues—Faith, Hope, Charity. In one of the deepest declarations of the New Testaament, the very object of the Incarnation is described 'as the bringing into humanity of a more abundant life' which we might perhaps translate as the bringing into the stream of history and social life of that other stream of supernatural energy—that vivid grace which feeds the individual soul. Do we seem to have appropriated that energy? Are Christians in the bulk so vividly alive? Has something been added to their power, as well as their obligation?
A genuine Christian ought to be alive all over, with a depth and vitality of soul that makes shallow judgements and prejudices impossible. A Christian social order should be permeated in every part by this life; controlled by a supernatural aim. If it were so, how full that order would be of joy and of vigour, how transfused by adoration and love. But it isn't, is it? What we seem to have done, on the contrary, is to make life on the natural level a failure, and on the supernatural level an impossibility, for all but a mere handful of souls. What about all this? Have we, with our wonderful access to the hills, with our Christian vision and Christian privileges, yet failed in our common life to interpret the will of the Voice?
Remember, we claim to know. Every member of the Conference is the delegate of a society that
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believes it is trying to follow Jesus Christ; that accepts Jesus Christ as revealing the real character of the Infinite God, the nature of Reality, the conditions of fellowship under which alone we can be truly real. It is quite easy to denounce such statements as idealism. But they are not. They are realism; and what is wrong with current Christianity is that it does not face all the implications of that fact. Hence its vision and prayer have been divorced from its action; and thus both sides of its life have been maimed. We have forgotten the second thing that Enoch did. He gave up his own will, in order to do the will of the Voice; and that means unconditional consecration.
Christianity was given to us as a complete revelation in human terms of God and His purpose, demanding from us a completeness of surrender and response. But we have snipped it at both edges, limited both its supernatural and its natural outlook, and made it ineffective and incomplete. We have reduced its supernatural vividness and splendour, its holy beauty, its hardness and romance. We have lost our instinct for Eternal Life. And having done that we find, as we might have expected, that this sterilized Christianity is strangely impotent upon the natural plane. So the purpose of this Conference and the prayers of those who have called it together will never be fulfilled by the mere passing of resolutions, or the framing of rules and principles which Christians can apply to the problems of active life. It will only be fulfilled if the Church again becomes a Church of Prophecy and Vision; and like Enoch, in that which some choose to call her old age, listens to the Voice and learns to
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interpret its will. She must follow her Master to those nights upon the mountain from which He returned with power to teach and heal the world, if she would restore to full vividness the completely integrated Christian life of adoration and of action, and so remake the bridge between the natural and supernatural worlds—lifting the life of human intercourse in all its phases to the level on which it ought to be, the level of sacrament.
As it is, whilst we are talking theology, or going to church, or sewing the miserable little patches we call charity and social service into the rotten garment of our corporate life, or perhaps are enjoying those tiny apprehensions of God to which we can attain, in what we childishly believe to be a 'spiritual' way—whilst we are indulging in these various religious pursuits, I had almost said religious amusements, countless human souls as dear to God as our own are passing through this world under conditions of which no Christian, no lover of Christ, with an ounce of imaginaation, can bear to think; conditions which make their achievement of full spiritual life impossible. Thousands of us are eating what we suppose to be the Bread of Eternal Life at our brothers' expense. We cannot seriously suppose that this represents the purpose of God, the will of the Voice. Yet we continue our devotional basking in the sun, our religious self-cultivation; and let the maiming influence of environment play on these myriads of other souls, pressing them back to the animal levels. We just don't give them a chance.
The mystics, with their deep experimental sense of
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God, and of all that is involved in His service, had a hard name for this kind of thing. They called it adorning Christ's Head, and neglecting His Feet'. 'Surely', says one, 'He will more thank thee and reward thee for the meek washing of His feet when they be very foul, and yield an ill savour to thee, than for all the curious painting and fair dressing thou canst make about His head by thy devout remembrances.' 'His feet, ragged and rent'—ragged and rent with treading roads we have made so much rougher than they ought to be. Yet those feet are as much a part of His mystical body as the superior cells which see and interpret the world's beauty and truth; and unless our outflowing love and reverence goes equally and actively to all parts of His incarnate revelation, can we hope to read His purposes right?
The mystic Ruysbroeck says that the Love of God enters the little but uplifted soul of man as a simple light: and then it grows, and becomes a spreading light, which flows out to all in common. Now the infinite and all-creative Love of God comes into the soul of the Church in the simple light of Christ. But it has not there been transformed into the spreading light which shall redeem the whole world; it has not been fully used, fully applied. And the result is that even in the Churches, which are created to foster it, the light somehow seems to burn rather dim. Has the simple light given to us in the story of the Magdalen been generally applied to human sin? or that of the Good Samaritan to the obligations of brotherhood? or that of the Pharisee and Publican to moral and religious values? As to the Sermon on the Mount,
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it is really a series of indictments, is it not, of our 'wonderful modern civilization'; so absolutely clear of all suspicion of poverty of spirit, purity of heart, mercy, meekness, peace! It is needless to continue: we know quite well that our country is not a Christian one. In other words, we know that the bit of this planet for which we are responsible is not corresponding with God's nature or fulfilling His purpose. And we have let the confusion get so dense now, that we can't cut our way out of the thicket; we can only proceed bit by bit to the restoration of Faith, of Hope, of Charity.
I began by quoting one modern prophet; now I will quote another. In a recent essay, Bertrand Russell pointed out the frightful danger involved in the modern alliance between man's half-savage impulses and his growing scientific power; and having done this, he said, 'Only kindliness can save the world; and even if we knew how to produce kindliness we should not do so, unless we were already kindly'. Now I do not propose to do as far too many apostles of social Christianity have done; reduce the pure Love of God to organized kindliness. But no one can deny that living, vivid, realistic Christianity—the reign of Christ's Love in individual hearts—does make men kindly and more than kindly. It lights the fire of supernatural charity, compassion, self-sacrifice. It turns the prose of humanitarian conduct into poetry, turns a decent attitude to our fellows into love. And if one of our most distinguished and least theological minds, trying every path, has discovered that only love in its various kinds and degrees
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can put the world right—what is this, but a demand for the widespread application of the Christian secret; another indication that man is growing, and beginning after many errors to interpret the Will of the Voice? 'If we knew how to produce kindliness, we should not do so unless we were already kindly.' That is a· word of deep wisdom: for the Christian attitude and action are only produced and appreciated by implicitly Christian souls—that is, those whose vision of God transcends their vision of themselves and their own interests. Real kindliness, in our little half-real and dimly-conscious spirits, can only emerge as the faint reflection of a Love that immeasurably exceeds and precedes our own.
If we believe that the Incarnation reveals to us the character and purpose of the Absolute Love; then it becomes a great illumination of the mind, as well as a stimulus to our love and will. It links our struggle, all, every bit of it—the falling sparrow, the child, the worker, the deliberate and redemptive suffering and renunciation of the clear-sighted and pure—all this it links with God's achieved Perfection, with a Power and Spirit that will be more and more operative in us, the more fully we give ourselves to their work and ends. 'All things work together for good to them that love God!' If they don't for us, perhaps this may have something to do with the quality of our love. The love of God demands courage and industry. It must be whole-hearted, without a hint of reserve. No dread of awkward consequences. No mean hankerings after safety and comfort. 'Not worn out with labours, not daunted with any difficulties! '
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The love of God that is truly operative, is the total self-giving of our tiny wills to His will; nothing, however hard, that is really demanded held back in the name of prudence or reasonable behaviour. Only that personal unlimited surrender can help us, I am convinced, to interpret the Will of the Voice; to see the proportion in which our tiny notions of necessity stand to His Nature and Purpose.
I read the other day the story of a Brownie who lived in a wood.(2) He had a little wheelbarrow and passed his time in a very moral and useful manner, picking up slugs and snails. Yet there was something lacking in his life. The King of the World passed through that wood very early every morning, and made all things beautiful and new; but the Brownie had never seen Him—he longed to, but something prevented it. He had one cherished possession; a lovely little soft green blanket which had once fallen out of the fairy queen's chariot, and which he hadn't been able to help keeping for himself. It was very cold in the wood at night, but the blanket kept him so warm and cosy, that he never woke up in time to see the King of the World. And one day there came to him a Shepherd, who looked deep into the soul of the Brownie, and said to him, 'Haven't you yet seen the King of the World?' And the Brownie said 'No. I do so want to, but somehow I can't manage it.' Then the Shepherd replied' But I seem to see something in your soul that keeps you from the Vision; something that looks rather like a blanket!' And at that a terrible fight began in the heart of the
2 Visions in Fairyland, by D. Sewell.
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little Brownie—a battle between wanting to go on being warm and comfortable in his blanket, and the longing to see the King of the World. Perhaps the ultimate choice which lies before us may turn out to be the Brownie's choice between the Heavenly Vision and the Blanket.
