SOME YEARS AGO I
got up one morning intending to have my hair cut in preparation for a visit to
London, and the first letter I opened made it clear I need not go to London.
So I decided to put the haircut off too. But then there began the most
unaccountable little nagging in my mind, almost like a voice saying, “Get it
cut all the same. Go and get it cut.” In the end I could stand it no longer. I
went. Now my barber at that time was a fellow Christian and a man of many
troubles whom my brother and I had sometimes been able to help. The moment I
opened his shop door he said, “Oh, I was praying you might come today.” And in
fact if I had come a day or so later I should have been of no use to him.
It awed me; it
awes me still. But of course one cannot rigorously prove a causal connection
between the barber’s prayers and my visit. It might be telepathy. It might be
accident.
I have stood
by the bedside of a woman whose thighbone was eaten through with cancer and
who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones, as well. It took
three people to move her in bed. The doctors predicted a few months of life;
the nurses (who often know better), a few weeks. A good man: laid his hands on
her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through
rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photos was saying, “These
bones are as solid as rock. It's miraculous.”
But once again
there is no rigorous proof. Medicine, as all true doctors admit, is not an
exact science. We need not invoke the supernatural to explain the
falsification of its prophecies. You need not, unless you choose, believe in a
causal connection between the prayers and the recovery.
The question
then arises, “What sort of evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer?” The
thing we pray for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not going to
happen anyway? Even if the thing were indisputably miraculous it would not
follow that the miracle had occurred because of your prayers. The answer
surely is that a compulsive empirical Proof such as we have in the sciences
can never be attained.
Some things
are proved by the unbroken uniformity of our experiences. The law of
gravitation is established by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies
without exception obey it. Now even if all the things that people prayed for
happened, which they do not, this would not prove what Christians mean by the
efficacy of prayer. For
prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion,
is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens
to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes
grant and sometimes refuse them. Invariable “success” in prayer would not
prove the Christian doctrine at all. It would prove something much more like
magic—a power in certain human beings to control, or compel, the course of
nature.
There are, no
doubt, passages in the New Testament which may seem at first sight to promise
an invariable granting of our prayers. But that cannot be what they really
mean. For in the very heart of the story we meet a glaring instance to the
contrary. In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that
a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. After that the idea that prayer
is recommended to us as a sort of infallible gimmick may be dismissed.
Other things
are proved not simply by experience but by those artificially contrived
experiences which we call experiments. Could this be done about prayer? I will
pass over the objection that no Christian could take part in such a project,
because he has been forbidden it: “You must not try experiments on God, your
Master.” Forbidden or not, is the thing even possible?
I have seen it
suggested that a team of people—the more the better—should agree to pray as
hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in
Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results
and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat
the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of
irrelevant factors.
The trouble is
that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions.
“Words without thoughts never to heaven go,” says the King in
Hamlet.
Simply to say
prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would
serve as well as men for our experiment. You cannot pray for the recovery of
the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have
no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and
none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should
be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and
the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever
your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying. The experiment
demands an impossibility.
Empirical
proof and disproof are, then, unobtainable. But this conclusion will seem less
depressing if we remember that prayer is request and compare it with other
specimens of the same thing.
We make
requests of our fellow creatures as well as of God: we ask for the salt, we
ask for a raise in pay, we ask a friend to feed the cat while we are on our
holidays, we ask a woman to marry us. Sometimes we get what we ask for and
sometimes not. But when we do, it is not nearly so easy as one might suppose
to prove with scientific certainty a causal connection between the asking and
the getting.
Your neighbor
may be a humane person who would not have let your cat starve even if you had
forgotten to make any arrangement. Your employer is never so likely to grant
your request for a raise as when he is aware that you could get better money
from a rival firm and is quite possibly intending to secure you a raise in any
case. As for the lady who consents to marry you—are you sure she had not
decided to do so already? Your proposal, you know, might have been the result,
not the cause, of her decision. A certain important conversation might never
have taken place unless she had intended that it should.
Thus in some
measure the same doubt that hangs about the causal efficacy of our prayers to
God hangs also about our prayers to man. Whatever we get we might have been
going to get anyway. But only, as I say, in some measure. Our friend, boss,
and wife may tell us that they acted because we asked; and we may know them so
well as to feel sure, first that they are saying what they believe to be true,
and secondly that they understand their own motives well enough to be right.
But notice that when this happens our assurance has not been gained by the
methods of science. We do not try the control experiment of refusing the raise
or breaking off the engagement and then making our request again under fresh
conditions.
Our assurance is quite different in kind from scientific knowledge. It is born
out of our personal relation to the other parties; not from knowing things
about them but from knowing them.
Our
assurance—if we reach an assurance—that God always hears and sometimes grants
our prayers, and that apparent grantings are not merely fortuitous, can only
come in the same sort of way. There can be no question of tabulating successes
and failures and trying to decide whether the successes are too numerous to
be accounted for by chance. Those who best know a man best know whether, when
he did what they asked, he did it because they asked. I think those who best
know God will best know whether He sent me to the barber’s shop because the
barber prayed.
For up till
now we have been tackling the whole question in the wrong way and on the wrong
level. The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of
mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine—something
that functions automatically. Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal
contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly
concrete Person.
Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it;
confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the
presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God
shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary—not necessarily
the most important one—from that revelation. What He does is learned from what
He is.
Petitionary
prayer is, nonetheless, both allowed and commanded to us: “Give us our daily
bread.” And no doubt it raises a theoretical problem. Can we believe that God
ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For
infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness
needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that
are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate.
He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us
food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers; or knowledge without
the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead,
He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of
men to co-operate in the execution of His will. “God,” said Pascal,
“instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of
causality.” But not only prayer; whenever we act at all He lends us that
dignity. It is not really stranger, nor less strange, that my prayers should
affect the course of events than that my other actions should do so. They have
not advised or changed God's mind—that is, His over-all purpose. But that
purpose will be realized in different ways according to the actions, including
the prayers, of His creatures.
For He seems
to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He
commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in
the twinkling of an eye. He allows us to neglect what He would have us do, or
to fail. Perhaps we do not fully realize the problem, so to call it, of
enabling finite free wills to co-exist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve
at every moment almost a sort of divine abdication. We are not mere recipients
or spectators. We are either privileged to share in the game or compelled to
collaborate in the work, “to wield our little tridents.” Is this amazing
process simply Creation going on before our eyes? This is how (no light
matter) God makes something—indeed, makes gods—out of nothing.
So at least it
seems to me. But what I have offered can be, at the very best, only a mental
model or symbol. All that we say on such subjects must be merely analogical
and parabolic. The reality is doubtless not comprehensible by our faculties.
But we can at any rate try to expel bad analogies and bad parables.
Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our
act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated
from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes
operate.
It would be
even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court
favorites, people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of
Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that. And I dare not leave out the
hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian: “I have seen
many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous.
But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it.
As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are
not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic.”
Does God then
forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all
said, near His tortured death, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” When God becomes
man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need.
There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the
courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers
are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw
hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less
tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to
defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
The World’s Last Night
THERE ARE many
reasons why the modern Christian and even the modern theologian may hesitate
to give to the doctrine of Christ’s Second Coming that emphasis which was
usually laid on it by our ancestors. Yet it seems to me impossible to retain
in any recognizable form our belief in the Divinity of Christ and the truth of
the Christian revelation while abandoning, or even persistently neglecting,
the promised, and threatened, Return. “He shall come again to judge the quick
and the dead,” says the Apostles’ Creed.
“This same Jesus,” said the angels in Acts, “shall so come in like manner as
ye have seen him go into heaven.” “Hereafter,” said our Lord himself
(by those words inviting crucifixion), “shall ye see the Son of Man…coming in
the clouds of heaven.” If this is not an integral part of the faith once given
to the saints, I do not know what is.
In the fallowing pages I shall endeavor to deal with some of the thoughts that
may deter modern men from a firm belief in, or a due attention to, the return
or Second
Coming of the Saviour. I have no claim to speak as an expert in any of the
studies involved, and merely put forward the reflections which have arisen in
my own mind and have seemed to me (perhaps wrongly) to be helpful. They are
all submitted to the correction of wiser heads.
The grounds
for modern embarrassment about this doctrine fall into two groups, which may
be called the theoretical and the practical. I will deal with the theoretical
first.
Many are shy
of this doctrine because they are reacting (in my opinion very properly
reacting) against a school of thought which is associated with the great name
of
Dr. Albert Schweitzer. According to that school, Christ's teaching about his
own return and the end of the world—what theologians call his
“apocalyptic”—was the very essence of his message. All his other doctrines
radiated from it; his moral teaching everywhere presupposed a speedy end of
the world.
If pressed to an extreme, this view, as I think Chesterton said, amounts to
seeing in Christ little more than an earlier William Miller, who created a
local “scare.” I am not saying that Dr. Schweitzer pressed it to that
conclusion: but it has seemed to some that his thought invites us in that
direction. Hence, from fear of that extreme, arises a tendency to soft-pedal
what Schweitzer's school has overemphasized.
For my own
part I hate and distrust reactions not only in religion but in everything.
Luther surely spoke very good sense when he compared humanity to a drunkard
who, after falling off his horse on the right, falls off it next time on the
left.
I am convinced that those who find in Christ's apocalyptic the whole of his
message are mistaken. But a thing does not vanish—it is not even
discredited—because someone has spoken of it with exaggeration. It remains
exactly where it was. The only difference is that if it has recently been
exaggerated, we must now take special care not to overlook it; for that is the
side on which the drunk man is now most likely to fall off.
The very name
“apocalyptic” assigns our Lord’s predictions of the Second Coming to a class.
There are other specimens of it: the
Apocalypse of
Baruch,
the
Book of Enoch,
or the
Ascension of Isaiah.
Christians are far
from regarding such texts as Holy Scripture, and to most modern tastes the
genre
appears
tedious and unedifying. Hence there arises a feeling that our Lord’s
predictions, being “much the same sort of thing,” are discredited. The charge
against them might be put either in a harsher or a gentler form. The harsher
form would run, in the mouth of an atheist, something like this: “You see
that, after all, your vaunted Jesus was really the same sort of crank or
charlatan as all the other writers of apocalyptic.” The gentler form, used
more probably by a modernist, would be like this: “Every great man is partly
of his own age and partly for all time. What matters in his work is always
that which transcends his age, not that which he shared with a thousand
forgotten contemporaries. We value Shakespeare for the glory of his language
and his knowledge of the human heart, which were his own; not for his belief
in witches or the divine right of kings, or his failure to take a daily bath.
So with Jesus. His belief in a speedy and catastrophic end to history belongs
to him not as a great teacher but as a first-century Palestinian peasant. It
was one of his inevitable limitations, best forgotten. We must concentrate on
what distinguished him from other first-century Palestinian peasants, on his
moral and social teaching.”
As an argument
against the reality of the Second Coming this seems to me to beg the question
at issue. When we propose to ignore in a great man’s teaching those doctrines
which it has in common with the thought of his age, we seem to be assuming
that the thought of his age was erroneous. When we select for serious
consideration those doctrines which “transcend” the thought of his own age and
are “for all time,” we are assuming that the thought of our age is correct:
for of course by thoughts which transcend the great man’s age we really mean
thoughts that agree with ours. Thus I value Shakespeare’s picture of the
transformation in old Lear more than I value his views about the divine right
of kings, because I agree with Shakespeare that a man can be purified by
suffering like Lear, but do not believe that kings (or any other rulers) have
divine right in the sense required. When the great man’s views do not seem to
us erroneous we do not value them the less for having been shared with his
contemporaries. Shakespeare’s disdain for treachery and Christ’s blessing on
the poor were not alien to the outlook of their respective periods; but no one
wishes to discredit them on that account. No one would reject Christ’s
apocalyptic on the ground that apocalyptic was common in first-century
Palestine unless he had already decided that the thought of first-century
Palestine was in that respect mistaken. But to have so decided is surely to
have begged the question; for
the question is whether the expectation of a catastrophic and Divinely ordered
end of the present universe is true or false.
If we have an
open mind on that point, the whole problem is altered.
If such an end is really going to occur, and if (as is the case) the Jews had
been trained by their religion to expect it, then it is very natural that they
should produce apocalyptic literature. On that view, our Lord’s
production of something like the other apocalyptic documents would not
necessarily result from his supposed bondage to the errors of his period, but
would be the Divine exploitation of a sound element in contemporary Judaism:
nay, the time and place in which it pleased him to be incarnate would,
presumably, have been chosen because, there and then, that element existed,
and had, by his eternal providence, been developed for that very purpose. For
if we once accept the doctrine of the Incarnation, we must surely be very
cautious in suggesting that any circumstance in the culture of first-century
Palestine was a hampering or distorting influence upon his teaching. Do we
suppose that the scene of God’s earthly life was selected at random?—that some
other scene would have served better?
But there is
worse to come.
“Say
what you like,” we shall be told, “the apocalyptic beliefs of the first
Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament
that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse
still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their
Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He
said in so many words, ‘this generation shall not pass till all these things
be done.’ And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world
than anyone else.”
It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible. Yet how teasing,
also, that within fourteen words of it should come the statement “But of that
day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven,
neither the Son, but the Father.” The one exhibition of error and the one
confession of ignorance grow side by side. That they stood thus in the mouth
of Jesus himself, and were not merely placed thus by the reporter, we surely
need not doubt. Unless the reporter were perfectly honest he would never have
recorded the confession of ignorance at all; he could have had no motive for
doing so except a desire to tell the whole truth. And unless later copyists
were equally honest they would never have preserved the (apparently) mistaken
prediction about “this generation” after the passage of time had shown the
(apparent) mistake. This passage (Mark
13:30-32) and the cry “Why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) together make
up the strongest proof that the New Testament is historically reliable. The
evangelists have the first great characteristic of honest witnesses: they
mention facts which are, at first sight, damaging to their main contention.
The facts, then, are these: that Jesus professed himself (in some sense)
ignorant, and within a moment showed that he really was so. To believe in the
Incarnation, to believe that he is God, makes it hard to understand how he
could be ignorant; but also makes it certain that, if he said he could be
ignorant, then ignorant he could really be. For a God who can be ignorant is
less baffling than a God who falsely professes ignorance. The answer of
theologians is that the God-Man was omniscient as God, and ignorant as Man.
This, no doubt, is true, though it cannot be imagined. Nor indeed can the
unconsciousness of Christ in sleep be imagined, nor the twilight of reason in
his infancy; still less his merely organic life in his mother's womb. But the
physical sciences, no less than theology, propose for our belief much that
cannot be imagined.
A generation
which has accepted the curvature of space need not boggle at the impossibility
of imagining the consciousness of incarnate God. In that consciousness the
temporal and the timeless were united. I think we can acquiesce in mystery at
that point, provided we do not aggravate it by our tendency to picture the
timeless life of God as, simply, another sort of time. We are committing that
blunder whenever we ask how Christ could be
at the same moment
ignorant and omniscient, or how he could be the God who neither slumbers nor
sleeps
while
he slept. The italicized words conceal an attempt to establish a temporal
relation between his timeless life as God and the days, months, and years of
his life as Man. And of course there is no such relation. The Incarnation is
not an episode in the life of God: the Lamb is slain—and therefore presumably
born, grown to maturity, and risen—from all eternity. The taking up into God's
nature of humanity, with all its ignorances and limitations, is not itself a
temporal event, though the humanity which is so taken up was, like our own, a
thing living and dying in time. And if limitation, and therefore ignorance,
was thus taken up, we ought to expect that the ignorance should at some time
be actually displayed.
It would be difficult, and, to me, repellent, to suppose that Jesus never
asked a genuine question, that is, a question to which he did not know the
answer. That would make of his humanity something so unlike ours as
scarcely to deserve the name. I find it easier to believe that when be said
“Who touched me?” (Luke 7:45) he really wanted to know.
The
difficulties which I have so far discussed are, to a certain extent, debating
points. They tend rather to strengthen a disbelief already based on other
grounds than to create disbelief by their own force. We are now coming to
something much more important and often less fully conscious. The doctrine of
the Second Coming is deeply uncongenial to the whole evolutionary or
developmental character of modern thought. We have been taught to think of
the world as something that grows slowly towards perfection, something that
“progresses” or “evolves.” Christian Apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It
does not even foretell, (which would be more tolerable to our habits of
thought) a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from
without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, a brick flung at the
gramophone, a curtain rung down on the play—”Halt!”
To this
deep-seated objection I can only reply that, in my opinion, the modern
conception of Progress or Evolution (as popularly imagined) is simply a myth,
supported by no evidence whatever.
I say
“evolution, as popularly imagined.” I am not in the least concerned to refute
Darwinism as a theorem in biology. There may be flaws in that theorem, but I
have here nothing to do with them. There may be signs that biologists are
already contemplating a withdrawal from the whole Darwinian position, but I
claim to be no judge of such signs. It can even be argued that what Darwin
really accounted for was not the origin, but the elimination, of species, but
I will not pursue that argument. For purposes of this article I am assuming
that Darwinian biology is correct. What I want to point out is the
illegitimate transition from the Darwinian theorem in biology to the modem
myth of evolutionism or developmentalism or progress in general.
The first
thing to notice is that the myth arose earlier than the theorem, in advance of
all evidence. Two great works of art embody the idea of a universe in which,
by some inherent necessity, the “higher” always supersedes the “lower.” One is
Keats’s Hyperion and the other is Wagner’s Nibelung’s Ring. And
they are both earlier than the Origin
of Species.
You could not have a clearer expression of the developmental or progressive
idea than Oceanus’ words ‘tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be
first in might."
And you could not
have a more ardent submission to it than those words in which Wagner describes
his tetralogy.
The
progress of the whole poem, therefore [he writes to Rockel in 1854], shows the
necessity of recognizing, and submitting to, the change, the diversity, the
multiplicity, and the eternal novelty, of the Real. Wotan rises to the tragic
heights of willing his own downfall. This is all that we have to learn from
the history of Man—to will the Necessary, and ourselves to bring it to pass.
The creative work which this highest and self-renouncing will finally
accomplishes is the fearless and everloving man, Siegfried.*
The idea that
the myth (so potent in all modern thought) is a result of Darwin’s biology
would thus seem to be unhistorical. On the contrary, the attraction of
Darwinism was that it gave to a pre-existing myth the scientific reassurances
it required. If no evidence for evolution had been forthcoming, it would have
been necessary to invent it. The real sources of the myth are partly
political. It projects onto the cosmic screen feelings engendered by the
Revolutionary period.
In the second
place, we must notice that Darwinism gives no support to the belief that
natural selection, working upon chance variations, has a general tendency to
produce improvement. The illusion that it has comes from confining our
attention to a few species which have (by some possibly arbitrary standard of
our own) changed for the better. Thus the horse has improved in the sense that
*“Der
Fortgang des ganzen Gedichtes zeigt demnach die Notwendigkeit, den Wechsel,
die Mannigfaltigkeit, die Vielheit, die ewige Neuheit der Wirklichkeit und des
Lebens anzuerkennen und ihr zu weichen. Wotan schwingt sich his zu der
tragischen Hohe, seinen Untergang zu
wollen.
Dies ist alles, was wir aus der Geschichte der Menscheit zu lernen haben: das
Notwendige zu wollen und selbst zu vollbringen. Das Schopfungswerk dieses
hochsten, selbst vernichtenden Willens ist der endlich gewonnene furchtlose,
stets liebende Mensch; Siegfried.”
Fuller research into the origins of this potent myth would lead us to the
German idealists and thence (as I have heard suggested) through Boehme back to
Alchemy. Is the whole dialectical view of history possibly a gigantic
projection of the old dream that we can make gold?
protohippos
would be less useful to us than his modern descendant. The anthropoid has
improved in the sense that he now is Ourselves. But a great many of the
changes produced by evolution are not improvements by any conceivable
standard. In battle men save their lives sometimes by advancing and sometimes
by retreating. So, in the battle for survival, species save themselves
sometimes by increasing, sometimes by jettisoning, their powers. There is no
general law of progress in biological history.
And, thirdly,
even if there were, it would not follow—it is, indeed, manifestly not the
case—that there is any law of progress in ethical, cultural, and social
history. No one looking at world history without some preconception in favor
of progress could find in it a steady up gradient. There is often progress
within a given field over a limited period. A school of pottery or painting, a
moral effort in a particular direction, a practical art like sanitation or
shipbuilding, may continuously improve over a number of years. If this process
could spread to all departments of life and continue indefinitely, there would
be “Progress” of the sort our fathers believed in. But it never seems to do
so. Either it is interrupted (by barbarian irruption or the even less
resistible infiltration of modern industrialism) or else, more mysteriously,
it decays.
The idea which here shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of
the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from
experience. And it is a myth which distracts us from our real duties and our
real interest. It is our attempt to guess the plot of a drama in which
we are the characters. But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We
are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience.
We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are “on” concerns us
much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
In
King Lear
(III:vii)
there
is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even
a name: he is merely “First Servant.” All the characters around him—Regan,
Cornwall, and Edmund—have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the
story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such
delusions. He has no notion how the play is going to go. But he understands
the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old Gloucester)
taking place. He will not stand it. His sword is out and pointed at his
master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is
his whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play,
that is the part it would be best to have acted.
The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know
when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment:
say, before you have finished reading this paragraph. This seems to
some people intolerably frustrating. So many things would be interrupted.
Perhaps you were going to get married next month, perhaps you were going to
get a raise next week: you may be on the verge of a great scientific
discovery; you may be maturing great social and political reforms. Surely no
good and wise God would be so very unreasonable as to cut all this short? Not
now,
of all
moments!
But we think
thus because we keep on assuming that we know the play. We do not know the
play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who
are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows. The audience, if
there is an audience (if angels and archangels and all the company of heaven
fill the pit and the stalls) may have an inkling. But we, never seeing the
play from outside, never meeting any characters except the tiny minority who
are “on” in the same scenes as ourselves, wholly ignorant of the future and
very imperfectly informed about the past, cannot tell
at what moment the end ought to come. That it will come when it ought, we may
be sure; but we waste our time in guessing when that will be. That it
has a meaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it. When it is over, we may be
told. We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each
of us on the part that each of us has played. The playing it well is what
matters infinitely.
The doctrine
of the Second Coming, then, is not to be rejected because it conflicts with
our favorite modern mythology. It is, for that very reason, to be the more
valued and made more frequently the subject of meditation. It is the medicine
our condition especially needs.
And with that,
I turn to the practical. There is a real difficulty in giving this doctrine
the place which it ought to have in our Christian life without, at the same
time, running a certain risk. The fear of that risk probably deters many
teachers who accept the doctrine from saying very much about it.
We must admit
at once that this doctrine has, in the past, led Christians into very great
follies. Apparently many people find it difficult to believe in this great
event without trying to guess its date, or even without accepting as a
certainty the date that any quack or hysteric offers them. To write a history
of all these exploded predictions would need a book, and a sad, sordid,
tragic-comical book it would be. One such prediction was circulating when St.
Paul wrote his second letter to the Thessalonians. Someone had told them that
“the Day” was “at hand.” This was apparently having the result which such
predictions usually have: people were idling and playing the busybody. One of
the most famous predictions was that of poor William Miller in 1843. Miller
(whom I take to have been an honest fanatic) dated the Second Coming to the
year, the day, and the very minute. A timely comet fostered the delusion.
Thousands waited for the Lord at midnight on March 21st, and went
home to a late breakfast on the 22nd followed by the jeers of a
drunkard.
Clearly, no
one wishes to say anything that will reawaken such mass hysteria. We must
never speak to simple, excitable people about “the Day” without emphasizing
again and again the utter impossibility of prediction. We must try to show
them that that impossibility is an essential part of the doctrine. If you do
not believe our Lord's words, why do you believe in his return at all? And if
you do believe them must you not put away from you, utterly and forever, any
hope of dating that return? His teaching on the subject quite clearly
consisted of three propositions. (1) That he will certainly return. (2) That
we cannot possibly find out when. (3) And that therefore we must always be
ready for him.
Note the
therefore.
Precisely because
we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments. Our Lord
repeated this practical conclusion again and again; as if the promise of the
Return had been made for the sake of this conclusion alone. Watch, watch, is
the burden of his advice. I shall come like a thief. You will not, I most
solemnly assure you you will not, see me approaching. If the householder had
known at what time the burglar would arrive, he would have been ready for him.
If the servant had known when his absent employer would come home, he would
not have been found drunk in the kitchen. But they didn't. Nor will you.
Therefore you must be ready at all times. The point is surely simple enough.
The schoolboy does not know which part of his Virgil lesson he will be made to
translate: that is why he must be prepared to translate any passage. The
sentry does not know at what time an enemy will attack, or an officer inspect,
his post: that is why be must keep awake all the time. The Return is wholly
unpredictable. There will be wars and rumors of wars and all kinds of
catastrophes, as there always are. Things will be, in that sense, normal, the
hour before the heavens roll up like a scroll. You cannot guess it. If you
could, one chief purpose for which it was foretold would be frustrated. And
God's purposes are not so easily frustrated as that.
One’s ears should be closed against any future William Miller in advance. The
folly of listening to him at all is almost
equal to the folly of believing him. He couldn't know what he pretends,
or thinks, he knows.
Of this folly
George MacDonald has written well. “Do those,” he asks, “who say, Lo here or
lo there are the signs of his coming, think to be too keen for him and spy his
approach? When he tells them to watch lest he find them neglecting their work,
they stare this way and that, and watch lest he should succeed in coming like
a thief! Obedience is the one key of life.”
The doctrine
of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not
make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne’s
question “What if this present were the world’s last night?” is equally
relevant.
Sometimes this
question has been pressed upon our minds with the purpose of exciting fear. I
do not think that is its right use. I am, indeed, far from agreeing with those
who think all religious fear barbarous and degrading and demand that it should
be banished from the spiritual life. Perfect love, we know, casteth out fear.
But so do several other things—ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption; and
stupidity. It is very desirable that we should all advance to that perfection
of love in which we shall fear no longer; but it is very undesirable, until we
have reached that stage, that we should allow any inferior agent to cast out
our fear. The objection to any attempt at perpetual trepidation about the
Second Coming is, in my view, quite a different one: namely, that it will
certainly not succeed. Fear is an emotion: and it is quite impossible—even
physically impossible—to maintain any emotion for very long. A perpetual
excitement of hope about the Second Coming is impossible for the same reason.
Crisis-feeling of any sort is essentially transitory.
Feelings come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them: they
cannot be our regular spiritual diet.
What is
important is not that we should always fear (or hope) about the End but that
we should always remember, always take it into account. An analogy may here
help. A man of seventy need not be always feeling (much less talking) about
his approaching death: but a wise man of seventy should always take it into
account. He would be foolish to embark on schemes which presuppose twenty more
years of life: be would be criminally foolish not to make—indeed, not to have
made long since—his will. Now,
what death is to each man, the Second Coming is to the whole human race.
We all believe, I suppose, that a man should “sit loose” to his own individual
life, should remember how short, precarious, temporary, and provisional a
thing it is; should never give all his heart to anything which will end when
his life ends. What modern Christians find it harder to remember is that the
whole life of humanity in this world is also precarious, temporary,
provisional.
Any moralist
will tell you that the personal triumph of an athlete or of a girl at a ball
is transitory: the point is to remember that an empire or a civilization is
also transitory. All achievements and triumphs, in so far as they are merely
this-worldly achievements and triumphs, will come to nothing in the end. Most
scientists here join hands with the theologians; the earth will not always be
habitable. Man, though longer-lived than men, is equally mortal. The
difference is that whereas the scientists expect only a slow decay from
within, we reckon with sudden interruption from without—at any moment. (“What
if this present were the world’s last night?”)
Taken by
themselves, these considerations might seem to invite a relaxation of our
efforts for the good of posterity: but if we remember that what may be on us
at any moment is not merely an End but a Judgment, they should have no such
result. They may, and should, correct the tendency of some moderns to talk as
though duties to posterity were the only duties we had. I can imagine no man
who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary
who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices
inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to
confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now
reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the
faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential
part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had
never been anything but a fantasy.
Frantic
administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the
reflection that “this present” might be “the world’s last night”; sober work
for the future, within’ the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.
For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds laboring in their
vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good
plans to deliver humanity a hundred years hence from some great evil. The
curtain has indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great
campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyranny will never in fact
proceed to victory. No matter; you were at your post when the Inspection came.
Our ancestors
had a habit of using the word “Judgment” in this context as if it meant simply
“punishment”: hence the popular expression, “It’s a judgment on him.” I
believe we can sometimes render the thing more vivid to ourselves by taking
judgment in a stricter sense: not as the sentence or award, but as the
Verdict. Some day (and “What if this present were the world’s last night?”) an
absolutely correct verdict—if you like, a perfect critique—will be passed on
what each of us is.
We have all
encountered judgments or verdicts on ourselves in this life. Every now and
then we discover what our fellow creatures really think of us. I don’t of
course mean what they tell us to our faces: that we usually have to discount.
I am thinking of what we sometimes overhear by accident or of the opinions
about us which our neighbors or employees or subordinates unknowingly reveal
in their actions: and of the terrible, or lovely, judgments artlessly betrayed
by children or even animals. Such discoveries can be the bitterest or sweetest
experiences we have. But of course both the bitter and the sweet are limited
by our doubt as to the wisdom of those who judge. We always hope that those,
who so clearly think us cowards or bullies are ignorant and malicious; we
always fear that those who trust us or admire us are misled by partiality. I
suppose the experience of the Final Judgment (which may break in upon us at
any moment) will be like these little experiences, but magnified to the Nth.
For it will be
infallible judgment. If it is favorable we shall have no fear, if unfavorable,
no hope, that it is wrong. We shall not only believe, we shall know, know
beyond doubt in every fiber of our appalled or delighted being, that as the
judge has said, so we are: neither more nor less nor other. We shall perhaps
even realize that in some dim fashion we could have known it all along. We
shall know, and all creation will know too: our ancestors, our parents, our
wives or husbands, our children. The unanswerable and (by then) self-evident
truth about each will be known to all.
I do not find
that pictures of physical catastrophe—that sign in the clouds, those heavens
rolled up like a scroll—help one so much as the naked idea of judgment. We
cannot always be excited. We can, perhaps, train ourselves to ask,) more and
more often how the thing which we are saying or doing (or failing to do) at
each moment will look when the irresistible light streams in upon it; that
light which is so different from the light of this world—and yet, even now, we
know just enough of it to take it into account. Women sometimes have the
problem of trying to judge by artificial light how a dress will look by
daylight. That is very like the problem of all of us: to dress our souls not
for the electric lights of the present world but for the daylight of the next.
The good dress is the one that will face that light. For that light will last
longer.
