A DEEPER SPIRITUAL NOTE

REV. WILLIAM SULLIVAN

It may reassure you somewhat, in the beginning, when I say that I shall not be long. There are many, possibly, who would say, You are perfectly right in not detaining us very long, for the nature of your subject calls for only the briefest of comment. There is a prevalent attitude, to the effect that a chapter headed "The Spiritual Attitude of the Church" need be but the shortest chapter in the philosophy of ecclesiology. The spiritual temper, attitude, aspiration, and outlook of a church does it not deal with the unrealities, with the guesses, with the conjectures? Let us have done with it, and place our feet on earth. It is in order to say a word which possibly may meet such a misgiving as that, that I was very glad to accept the invitation to speak on precisely this subject.

You will permit me, as you permit everybody, to express an opinion; and my opinion is that we are in the presence of a corpse when we are in the presence of a church that is not filled with a sense of its spiritual conviction. As long as you have an inner history of man as well as an outer history of society; as long as you have the solemn moment when the young man upon the threshold of his life must make the high decision between the unholy and the holy, and must fight that out within the solitary sanctuary of his own soul; as long as we have men and women confronted with fidelity or infidelity; as long as we have men in Church or in State who have to face the issue veracity or unveracity; as long as we have all life's tragedies; as long as we have all the solemn moments when the individual, now divorced and secluded from the most insistent social environment, and standing between the naked awfulness of the right on one side and the easy seductions of wrong on the other; as long as all this is constitutive of human experience, must we have a philosophy of life and a message from the church which shall enter into those darker

and sublimer hours, and give to us the revealing of the supreme reality by which in that moment we are to judge. The inner life of man never can be expunged from experience. However we are immersed in a social aggregate, to whatsoever extent we are the creature of historic or biological antecedents, -notwithstanding all, you and I must enter into our hours of decision and of conflict, when we wrestle with the demons and look upward toward the angels of a higher light. Because of all these experiences of men, that religion to me is meaningless which has not a full, a clear, and a prophetic utterance to meet those experiences.

It is, then, without the slightest apology for a subject which might seem to some actually to call for an apology, that I will ask you, for the space of a very few moments, to examine what particularly is the character, the nature, and the needs of the present preaching of the spiritual life by a church, by a religion.

The last speaker did his work so well that he has almost completely preoccupied the ground I was hoping to cover. So aptly has he expressed his thought, and so closely does it touch upon mine, that I will only recall but not revise his statements. He has said and I wish to repeat it in this statement The whole meaning in the process of things, this universe, this wilderness of ups and downs, this criss-crossing of currents, of occurrences, of forces, of collisions, all the welter that you call the world, including ourselves, means to me, my friends, absolute futility without personality. When you ask me to look up at the stellar systems and admire the rings of Saturn and the gas of Jupiter, and when you tell me how big it all is, I cannot put my spirit in bondage to mere bigness. When you tell me to look back through the ages through which the whole business has grown from a revolving incandescent thing that was the cradle of the world, and ask me to admire the mighty stretch of ages that have elapsed from that hour to this, I cannot feel myself overcome except in imagination, which is not the highest of our faculties; I cannot feel myself overcome any more by the swing of time than by the magnitude of matter. But when you tell me, here

and now the mighty and mysterious process has broken open into consciousness, we at last have a person. When you give me not only a person, but a person whose passion is for the truth, a person whose adoration is for right, - then the universe means something wholly definite; then from a meaningless swirl, meaningless molecules, it becomes the breaking open of a vision supreme in its rationality, divine in its opportunities, worthy of living, with something in it that is worthy to adore.

Because there is this marvelous miracle in this universe a man; because this curious incident and episode interrupts the sovereign sway of physical law a human soul that can look to a distant ideal and die for it; because there have arisen individuals in the world who could look to their social environment and, for the sake of truth, defy it; who look out into all the brotherhood about them, and for the sake of the distant brotherhood and the still higher ideal suffer themselves to be stoned and crucified by their social environment in this marvelous miracle in the history of this cosmic arrangement, you present me with something which makes me at home in a universe of spirit and will and truth and right, and you bring my soul face to face with the august Source from which these ideal purposes proceed. This gives meaning to life, to the universe, to the spirit; and I assure you, friends, that absolutely nothing else gives it to me any meaning whatsoever that is rational or that can inspire the feeblest of my enthusiasms.

The business, then, of a church, so far as it has a spiritual vocation, is to reveal this to reveal reality; to answer that impulse within us which is simply deathless, to integrate this unity with that unity. You may pass all the sentences of what is called common-sense that you please, upon what is called the metaphysical impulse, the religious impulse pass sentence of death upon it again, as has been done ten thousand times; it is the most vain of futilities. The spirit that forever arises from its repeated subjugations, the soul upon which a death-sentence has been spoken so many times, simply demands to be made one with the sovereign Oneness of the

world. And so the spiritual activities of a church are not an accessory, an embroidery, a superficial, transitory, and worthless thing.

We then, I think, are scarcely true in speaking of the spiritual power of any church as we might speak of the beauty of its stained-glass windows or of the cut of the minister's coat. It is not that. Unless it is a necessity of speaking, a necessity of willing, a necessity of worshiping, let us have done with it as disease, as sickness, as moonshine. But merely to seduce the æsthetic sense, merely to have parading choirs, merely to have something to charm the eye or the ear, and say, "We must throw this in because people like that sort of thing". I cannot tell you with what indignation I look upon such a conception of a spiritual interpretation of a church's work. Unless it is needed, vital, necessary, rational, throw it away, and do not beguile us with folly, do not blind us with dust.

Secondly: There is another, a particular reason in addition to that which perhaps we may call a universal one - why it is of the greatest necessity, I think, that the church of the present day should give its care to the fostering of this life of the spirit. This is what I should like to leave with you as the contribution of thought, if you permit the phrase, which I would make this morning.

There rests before the liberal church this necessity, this destiny to prove to the world vitally enough, long enough, consistently enough, that the Supreme Reality is enough for the highest worship, the deepest morality, the holiest devotion, and the divinest enthusiasm. The world's religions thus far have always been afraid of the Supreme Reality, as man has always been afraid of great truths. Man always distorts them, breaks them into fragments. That is what is behind polytheism. What is the meaning of polytheism? It is not the deliberate manufacturing of pluralities out of hand. The philosophical reason why men have been polytheists is because of their inability to grasp the totality of unity. It is too big. They have got to have a god for sky, a god for earth, and a god for water, and so on, because of the inability to embrace an idea that is comprehensive, glorious, and splendid. Like

wise has it been thus far the fate of religion, religious thinking and religious devotion too, to be unable to take in the unity of the Supreme Reality and to live alone in its presence. Therefore your demi-gods and half-gods and our emotional appeals and imaginative challenges. I think the course of the evolution of things is clear. The term religious evolution means that the Supreme Reality living in the universe is alone adequate for the highest needs and the deepest experiences of the spirit of man ; - God alone. There is what I should say is the religion of a very distant future.

But now I am reminded, and cannot refrain from expressing, that great causes are generally compromised if not condemned by their shibboleths. It is a pity that a great movement should have a motto. There is no idolatry so seductive and none so dangerous as the idolatry of a phrase. I confess to you that I am sorry under these circumstances that we so glibly toss about among ourselves "the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man"—and for this reason: The phrase has taken the part of the awful and terrific substance. Because we have reached an individual vision we have deluded ourselves into thinking that we have passed through a spiritual experience. Nothing of the kind. Until the hour comes in our spiritual growth when the word "God" shall bow the head, when it will mean fearful justice, awful purity, searching love when it means this throwing us down into adoration, we may use it, but not till then.

The task of religion- and of a free religion is not to chatter to men that our faith is the Fatherhood of God, but to show what this real is which is covered by the name God;. to make it awful, to make it dominating, to make a man who is committing any injustice, against a woman or a worker or a child or a fellow-man, tremble in the presence of that justice eternal; to make a man who has transgressed the finer delicacies of life shrink down with a petition for pardon in the presence of life's end, the only end that gives it meaning, which is sovereign, infinitely immaculate. When the ideal of religion is taken out of the echo-region of a phrase, and put into our inner experiences, the world will see, and we shall see, that