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 recognisable 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.
