William Penn Lecture
1944
Two Worlds
Delivered at
Arch Street Meeting House
Philadelphia
by
Henry J. Cadbury
Harvard University
Among the curious tales of insane persons with
which I was entertained in my youth was one of a man who
called himself an Octagon. To my father, who met him in a
routine visit that he paid as director to an asylum, the
patient explained that he had a front side and a back side, a
top side and a bottom side, an inside and an outside, a
right side and a left side. That makes eight sides or an octagon.
We have it on gospel authority that possessed
persons often tell the truth. Without encouraging the cult of
abnormal psychology I may therefore use Mr. Octagon as text for
some comments on the duality of existence. Life seems to
present us with pairs of opposites - not only four pairs but
many. These alternatives, not always in the same
dimension, produce upon the sanest of us a sense of multiplicity
of personality, which is not easy to resolve. Long before
men talked of dual personality, or schizophrenia, or used
the other jargon of philosophy and psychology, they talked
of being possessed with devils, with seven devils at one
time, or even with a legion of devils - enough individual
demons to inspire to suicide two thousand swine. There is in fact
no reason to limit these pairs of opposites to a total of
eight, You can add any extra independent sides you please.
Any polygon will do. A dodecahedron or any higher category
of many-sidedness would be equally appropriate. Perhaps
the scientists have a name for it. Certainly complexity ought
to spell one kind of psychopathic complex. In the light of
my story I'll call it "the polygon complex."
This multiplicity of our nature creates problems.
The problems are often occupational. From the time the
boy begins to wonder whether he wants to grow up to drive
a fire engine or whether he would rather be an inventor,
from the time the girl is distraught between the ambition of
being a Hollywood star, or of becoming the domestic mother of
a large number of babies including at least one pair of twins
- yes, from childhood on we have decisions to make
whose dual appeal reflects the variety of our inner nature.
Every decision seems to close the door to an attractive
alternative with the finality of the day of judgment. Our polygonous
- not to say polygamous - nature is confronted with only
a monogamous possibility. We have to choose, and
How happy could I be with either,
Were t' other dear charmer away.
The necessity for choice - let us say between two jobs
- ought to be welcomed, but it tends to worry us. For
one reason it worries us because we are used to thinking
of choices in terms of right and wrong, and many
practical alternatives present themselves in which the
most conscientious examination of our motives cannot
rapidly lead to a decision on any clear moral grounds. We may
quite falsely let ourselves rationalize the more attractive as
the more righteous course,. or we may morbidly proceed on
the basis that the more distasteful an opening the more
unselfish and praiseworthy would be our acceptance of it. I
can remember the relief that came to me once in such a
quandary when a wise older friend suggested that sometimes one
is confronted with two alternatives, either of which would
be entirely right. In spite of this evident truth, the
haunting feeling that some obscure moral preference is to be
sought for in many of the most secular choices of life is not
easily banished.
Within this same area we meet demands for two
quite different ways of spending our free time. We have a duty
to society, but society exists in concentric rings about us,
and furthermore there are different ways in which it may
be served. Family, church, neighborhood, state, humanity,
all make claims upon our loyalty - and loyalty to one seems
at least to rob the others of some of our attention, even if
there is no actual conflict. The reality of such conflict cannot
be denied. No man can serve two masters, and yet
the incompatibility can be overpressed. The solution at least
in some cases is not "either
or" but "both
and" and if
not both at the same time, at least both alternatively. The
much discussed and disputed verse of the gospels seems to
say, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's
and unto God the things that are Gods." It would often be easier
to quote and to imitate the "either-or" solutions. I am not
sure we ought to. I recall the remark of the wife of a very
active man of affairs. She said, "At any rate his private life is
above reproach, because he hasn't any." I think he ought to
have had some, even at the risks involved both for his wife
and for his reputation.
The difficult choices are well illustrated by a
recent article on that distinguished Philadelphian,
Benjamin Franklin, from which I quote or summarize:
Our first truly great scientist is also one of our most significant political and diplomatic
figures. Benjamin, Franklin combined within his
person the "poor boy who made good," the public
servant and social organizer, the political leader and
the scientist
The usual portrayal of Franklin presents him as a political figure who, in his spare time,
dabbled in science. His own century, on the other
hand, considered him a scientist who had entered
the arena of international politics, and many of his contemporaries wrote to him beseeching him
to give up the illusory career of international diplomacy and domestic politics in order to
return to the more "useful" career of scientific investigator.
Franklin took the opposite view. According to his credo
the needs of the community are always greater than the needs of any single individual, be
he scientist or any other kind of citizen. In time
of national or civic emergency the pursuit of pure science (the search after knowledge for its
own sake), however interesting it may be, is but
another cultural luxury to be given its "due weight"
and no more.
For five years he was able to devote himself to
science and he became a leading if not the leading scientist of
his age. This was his love and first choice, which he
could abandon only with regret. The political duties which
soon called him away never really to return militated against
his own preference and the public's appraisal.
But in his own mind, this famous savant was citizen first and scientist second. The needs of
the community were always paramount. But this much is certain, that by becoming a full
and actively participating member of society, he thereby became the more complete man.
By fulfilling his social obligation, as he saw it,
he thereby achieved his full stature as a human
being.1
The more versatile the person, and the more wide
his outlook, the more difficult these choices or
these combinations become. No one wants to be narrow
minded but no one wants to fritter away life because of
dilettante playing with a great variety of interests. If the specialist
is defined as knowing more and more about less and less,
his opposite must be defined as knowing less and less
about more and more. Yet we are aware of persons who
have somehow succeeded with no more than twenty-four
hours a day at their disposal in enriching their own lives and
the lives of others by a wide and well selected variety of
interests and services. I am impressed with how much of the
best flavor of life some persons can sandwich into the
interstices of bread-winning. There is a lot of self-pity and sense
of frustration due to the sheer inability of persons to live by
a principle of both
and instead of
either
or; while others, not without strict discipline, can live creatively in more
than one aspect of their lives without seeming to rob Peter to
pay Paul.
One of the great assets of Quakerism, in so many of
its most significant features, is its amateur status. Neither
in worship nor in social service are we professionals,
whatever other professions we may have. We bring to bear our
expert knowledge whatever it may be, but we can only
continue our characteristic contribution by our capacity to
combine with diverse and highly competent individual
specialized skills, other generous and intelligent avocational
sympathies. A friend of mine commiserates the professional
clergyman because he is doomed to be a perpetual amateur in a
world of experts who can therefore scarcely respect him.
In Quakerism we demand no professional minister. We are
like William Saroyan who is modestly put down in
Who's Who as "an amateur Christian."
Even in the field of religion itself the problem
of opposites is still with us. I may express my conviction
that here also the treatment of opposites is not to be
mainly settled by any one-sided selection.
And God fulfills himself in many ways
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
There is for example the perennial problem of
reason versus emotion in religion. I suppose this will continue
to bother adolescents for many generations to come.
The educational process tends to apply the test of reason. If
a certain religious view does not seem to meet that test it
is set down to mere emotion and so rejected. The other
side, namely, the protagonists of feeling, are either convinced
of the rationality of emotion or else they glorify its
unreason. They gladly admit their ignorance, or they claim
intuitive knowledge. They are as suspicious of cold reason as
their opponents are suspicious of mere whim or superstition.
So the battle goes on within the young and among them.
On the one hand there is the demand for complete
emotional surrender of the reason for the act of faith. This
almost amounts to a cult of irrationality. On the other there is
an equally stringent scepticism which almost deities
reason and looks askance at any enthusiasm as mere emotion.
The history of this conflict is long and rather
consistent. One recalls Plato's figure of man as a charioteer, whose
ill-matched and rather unmanageable steeds are the
passions and the reason. The problem has a continuous history
in Christianity long before the present
modernist-funda-mentalist phase. An ancient and learned preacher, to
whom a listener somewhat chidingly remarked, "God hath no
need of human learning," gave the reply, "Still less hath he
need of human ignorance." My philosophic friends tell me
that we are now living in a period of obscurantism and we
may expect to see more praise of the irrational before we get
over it. We are also living in a time of deep and ill
considered prejudice against emotion. We do well to recognize and
to beware of this extreme. Even the rationalist must know
the limitations of his cool reason; the world in which he
lives illustrates the power of ideas, yes, but of ideas
implemented for better or for worse with fanatical devotion. He
must somewhat wistfully consider whether abstract reason
may not somehow find fruitfulness in a more dynamic
expression - at least of the will. Instead of a blind self-surrender to
a religion whose so-called simple gospel is in reality
the intellectual systematization, by no means simple or
obvious, of another age, the rational and sensible man can find
a power no less moving and controlling in an
intellectually respectable modern knowledge and interpretation.
The choice between these two aspects of life is, I
must insist, not the choice between God and the devil, but
a dichotomy inherent in the dual makeup of personality.
The enrichment both of the intellect and of the
emotional sensitivity is a not incompatible pair of objectives. The
terms I have used are neither scientific nor complete but they
will probably be understood. The problem at least will
be recognized, and many variations will be suggested and
many classical symbols and illustrations will be recalled. The
kind of synthesis is not unlike that which Tennyson recommends:
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before,
But vaster.
The answer is not found by choosing exclusively
either reason or emotion. In connection with our Quaker
peace position I am amused to place side by side the criticism
of two individuals, who recognized that the springs of such
a position should be both emotional and rational.
When England was threatened by Napoleon, Robert Southey
wrote: "My views of religion approach very nearly to
Quakerism.
If it was not for Bonaparte, I should have little hesitation
in declaring that it is the true system of the Gospel; that
is, my reason is convinced, but I wanted to have the
invasion over before I allow it to be
so."2 You can cancel this out by the words of Woodrow Wilson: "What I am opposed to is
not the feeling of the pacifists but their stupidity. My heart
is with them but my mind has a contempt for
them."3 There are many of us who believe that mind and heart can
both endorse a policy which is less likely to fail than
Wilson's policy of "force without stint or limit."
I am not denying that the pacifist has his own
very difficult combinations to make. In our convictions and
in our efforts to justify our case to others we find
ourselves alternating between two quite different poles - the
moral and the practical. There is no reason why both bases
should not be sound. War may be not only immoral but
irrational, not only irrational but futile, not only futile but
immoral. When one argues on the moral ground one is attacked
on the practical, and vice versa. Honesty may be also the
best policy, but it makes a difference on which ground
one commends it. So also with pacifism. We find it difficult
to combine the two considerations without apparent
alternative surrender of each. How can we remain true to the
Quaker tradition of arguing from principles and not
from consequences against a system whose dire
consequences are so conspicuous to all who are not prejudiced by
some great illusion? The self-evident folly of war and its
equally self-evident ethical unjustifiability tend in our thought
and speech not so much to corroborate one another but in
a sense to cancel each other out. That is because we have
not learned the technique of "both
and."
There are many other contrasts in our
contemporary problems that illustrate the sense of dilemma in the
thinking of these days. Even from the most utilitarian side there is
a difference of opinion as to whether a harsh peace or a
soft peace would be more durable, while the moralist
keeps playing with the somewhat irreconcilable concepts of
justice and mercy. I need not remind you that on this level
the Allied leaders are arrogating the office of God, but with
none of the omniscience or prescience which normally is
attributed to that office. Yet even if they could serve as divine agents
I am not sure that the divine attributes would be found
easily reconciled. The Jewish rabbis played upon the themes
of God's justice and God's mercy and found the conflict
between them logically insoluble, yet they insisted on both
qualities. His policy is not "let justice be done, though the
heavens fall." God's dilemma is thus stated, "If thou seekest
justice, there will be no world here; if thou seekest a world,
there will be no justice here," and it is said God "takes the
string by both ends," that is, he chooses both
alternatives.4 I doubt whether Christian theologians have resolved the
difficulties. Perhaps it is natural for mankind in making God in its
own image to attribute to the godhead the same human kind
of inner conflict.
An entertaining proposal of synthesis in this
connexion comes from the pen of the brilliant English publicist,
Phyllis Bottome; and it is especially interesting to us because
she calls us Quakers by name. "What we need today in
every country," she writes, "are a race I can only describe
as Serpent-Doves. All countries possess doves, and the
British Isles are particularly rich in them - such as our
many Quakers and pacifists - people who go in for saving
victims at any and every personal cost except that of fighting
what produces victims. Serpent-doves fight those who
make victims, and then try to cure their defeated antagonists
of their fighting instincts."
Phyllis Bottome is writing about the education of defeated Germany. She admits that "we can teach
the Germans nothing that we are not already practising."
She evidently does not agree with her countryman
Brandon Bracken that if we bomb Germany "a lot of people will
come to believe that there is a good deal of soundness in
the Quakers' religion." She professes to espouse the
gospel injunction, "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as
doves." Of modern Christians she says : "Some are pure dove,
and look - and often act - no farther than their own noses.
Some are pure serpent, and their wisdom is not by itself
enough to reach and release the broken hearted." She
therefore recommends that we send to defeated Germany people
who are both, though she adds: "The Quakers should, of
course, go as usual because, although they are unfortunately
pure dove, they are needed where there is such an overflow
of victims. Besides, there is no humbug about them. They
are real doves."5
A somewhat different contrast in religion is that
between the active or executive and the contemplative. No doubt
some of us are more inclined one way and some the other,
though in our highly active and practical civilization
the contemplative is rare and therefore rather at a
premium. Here also I would urge mutual exchange and
sympathy rather than rival claims. In that book of most
remarkable human understanding, the Gospel of Luke, one finds
the classic picture of these sister virtues in those two
familiar spinsters, Mary and Martha. As with other
temperamentally different housemates they fail to appreciate adequately
each other's merits. Their failure need simply be cited for
our present instruction. As they supplemented each other
we all of us probably need supplementation from one side
or the other.
Augustine wrote in his City of God (xix, 19):
As to these three modes of life, the con-templative, the active, and the composite,
although so long as a man's faith is preserved, he
may choose any one of them without detriment to
his eternal interests, yet he must never overlook
the claims of truth and duty. No man has a right
to lead such a life of contemplation as to forget
in his own case the service due to his neighbor;
nor has any man a right to be so immersed in
active life as to neglect the contemplation of God.
And therefore holy leisure is longed for by the love
of truth; but it is the necessity of love to
undertake requisite business.
Another religious contrast - but an independent one
- is between the old and the new. One sanction for truth
or for action is its conformity with standards of the past.
The accumulated wisdom and experience of the ages
cannot lightly be ignored. "The old time religion" has on the face
of it something to recommend it, and religion has
almost inherently a quality of continuousness, not to
say conservatism, that is an undoubted strength. This
emphasis does not appear to outsiders the strong point of
Quakerism. We sit so loose to the conventions of both church and
state. The classic creeds, the time honored rituals, the
established organizations of the standard Christianity are alien to
us, or rather we to them. Our besetting sin, according to
an acute churchman, is historic ingratitude.
There is however an opposite virtue that
accompanies every vice. That virtue in our case is the reality of
original experience. Not to be conformed to the past is less
serious for those who are transformed by the renewing of
their minds. Reality, freshness, spontaneity, even novelty,
surely still have something to recommend them. The
secular advertisers know the worth of what is new. Fox was not
the only early Friend who could say, "This I knew
exper-imentally," that is, by experience. Because of this
insistence on fresh reality the early Friends refused to recite the
psalms of David, even in metre, because they might not
themseives be in the same state in which David was.
Can the assets of both emphases be retained and
the liabilities of both be avoided? I think they can. The
Friends regarded their movement as primitive Christianity
revived. They claimed to leap back to some sixteen centuries
before. The fusion of old and new is much more characteristic
than is often recognized either in innovating or in
conservative religion and this is true of individuals as well as of groups.
If anyone ever thought he broke with the past it
was the Apostle Paul. All that was formerly wrong to him
was now right, every asset a new liability. "What things
were gain to me these I counted loss
sheer rubbish." Even
in contrast with the crucified Jesus he seemed to
his contemporaries and to modern scholars the iconoclast -
the founder of a new religion; and yet one of the
most characteristic words of his letters is the phrase, "I
received
I handed on." Tradition is the watermark of the most
creative stages of religion. The gospel itself - the good news -
contains the saying: "No man having drunk old wine
straightway desires new, for he says, `The old is good.'" Another
gospel saying knows the synthesis, for we read, "Every scribe
that is made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven is 1ike
a householder that brings out of his treasury things both
old and new." Judicious men and women in search for
truth cannot afford to neglect either old or new.
The combination of old and new is, however, an undoubted cause of tension. Life is growth and growth
is transition and when transition occurs unevenly there
are painful maladjustments. Not only in adolescent years
are our spiritual lives growing. We mature unevenly - as
children do - in social poise, in intelligence, in spiritual
under-standing. One or the other of the parts of us is more
grown up than the others, or more backward.
This is as true of mankind collectively as it
is individually. Society too is an exhibit of uneven
development. The phenomena are familiar: civilization still mixed
with barbarism; science used in the promotion of
savagery; organization bent upon the recovery of primeval chaos;
sub-Christian social standards among persons of the
highest culture; childish international relations alongside of
mature medical and psychiatric treatment of personal problems.
To bring our backward parts abreast of our furthest
progress, to straighten our line of advance, is the difficult but not
too discouraging task before us. It is not a new task.
Someone has suggested that Adam probably said to Eve as they
left the Garden of Eden: "My dear, we are living in an age
of transition." Mankind will continue in transition
until paradise is regained. That fact accounts for the
tensions that must be expected. In the meantime, like
Matthew Arnold, we find ourselves
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head.
The history of religion and especially of
religious controversy is strewn with the "either
or" approach.
Since so much of the religious need is not for more religion but
for better religion, the need for discrimination seems
justified. Here again extremes are not necessary and the
intolerance of demanding uniformity of experience is often a
detriment. Those who insist that their experience must be the
normative experience turn many away - not only from their type
of religion, but from other types as well. What futile and
painful agony is suffered by those who, being taught that
true religion shows itself in one definite pattern, count
themselves lost and hopeless sinners simply because
temperamentally or from sheer honesty they cannot confess to the
required experience. Professor James has described two kinds
of persons as the once born and the twice born. The
twice born are those who have had the definite critical
conversion experience. The once born are those who slowly and
from unsaintly beginnings have grown from grace to grace
without cataclysmic overturnings. Professor James classifies
even the founders of Quakerism in the once born category.
Violent conversion, that carries with it the sense of terrible
prior sinfulness, is not characteristic of Quakerism.
Typical Friends are "seekers" who become in Cromwell's
phrase "happy finders."
Though George Fox had his quest and though
perhaps when a youth he sowed, as a modern writer puts it,
his "Quaker oats," yet his writings, so voluminous in
extent, reflect throughout, as his virulent critics later
emphasized, no single reference to even a peccadillo. His
"perfectionism," as it was called even then, was a scandal to
his contemporaries, just as modern Quakerism - especially
with its pacifism - is a scandal to the dogma of original sin
(now called demonism) of Barthians. Yet there are few
young Friends even today that have not met somewhere
the evangelical demand to show reason why they should not
be condemned for lacking an almost datable crisis of conversion.
This unfortunate demand for standardization of experience is not limited to Quakerism. Modern
evangelism promotes the expectation of conversion and finds
its assurance in that experience. The classic case of Saul
of Tarsus; known to all Christians, has had its
untoward influence. There is every reason why it need not
be duplicated. Nobody has pointed this out more clearly
than one of his best modern interpreters, the Lutheran
scholar, Johannes Weiss:
In our religious development there is usually lacking any clear consciousness of the sharp
point of change when we pass from despair to peace with God, from unhappiness to grace. For,
differing from Paul and his Gentile Christians, we do
not consciously step over from Judaism or
heathenism to Christianity, or from enmity to God to
peace with him. We grow up in the Church itself, in
which God richly and fully forgives us our sins daily.
We live from childhood in the sunshine of God's
grace, which, for the Apostle, arose in deep night, like
a light-giving star never seen before. We have therefore never had this great experience,
which for Paul and his community was something of
an additional pledge of justification, or a proof of
their assured salvation.6
How much damage to the genuineness and variety
of religion such expectations cause would be hard to
calculate. What frustrations and misplaced effort men suffer
by assuming that in things spiritual as in things temporal
we must be forever "keeping up with the Joneses."
Our Quaker expectation of conformity has been
different from the evangelical, but has had similar effects. It is
the aspect of religion which for not more than a generation
has been called among us "mystical," though it was set up as
a yardstick in the Society long before it had that name. It
is the expectation that in our truest and highest experience
- however rare - each should have what he can call
an experience of God. In our demand for veracity
and spontaneity we have encouraged a somewhat
stereotyped standard of what the best Friend should be - and by
the same token we have discouraged those who
temperamentally or by sheer honesty have to admit they are not
mystics. Instead of recognizing the other media of divine grace,
or the other and perhaps more useful channels of
revelation and fortification, we have unconsciously set up
an impression particularly in the young that some
special immediate mystical and transcendent experience ought
to be found by the really favored - a kind of pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow. Unless it is found they come to think
of themselves as somehow defective if not positively guilty,
and even if they find it they count the long intervals without
it as so much loss. They are a good deal like those
unhappy drudges I meet sometimes who have so little
appreciation for their vocation and so much for their vacation that
they describe fifty out of fifty-two weeks of the year as not
living but merely existing. Though much of the morbidity
and introspection of some earlier generations of Friends
has happily been left behind, there is still great need of a
healthy-minded emphasis on what in the title of William
Littleboy's useful pamphlet is called "Quakerism for the
Non-Mystic." We human beings make for one another strange
bed-fellows, but I see no reason why we should try to settle our
difficulties by the tactics of Procrustes, stretching out the short
people and cutting off the long ones to fit the same bed.
I am far from denying the existence of the unseen world,
that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore.
I agree that the world we see tends to be "too
much with us," and that "the seeming unreality of the
spiritual life"7 is an illusion which a little intelligent
consideration can help to expel. Other-worldliness is a term that can
be used of an outlook quite as extreme as worldliness. Nor
am I urging the attitude commonly described as "making
the best of both worlds." Such a thing as the presence of God
or of Christ, does not always come in the ways men expect
it, and it sometimes is not recognized. Some expect it in
a Friends' Meeting, some in a celebration of Mass or of
the Lord's Supper. Sometimes it is made known in the
simplest homely acts, as in the breaking of bread.
The problem for most of us is not to recognize
the unseen but to forego seeing it and, like the men of the
Bible, to endure as though we saw him that is invisible. If as
a matter of experience neither intellectual certainty nor
mystic insight is often ours to enjoy we must still carry on.
Tasks in hours of insight willed
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.
The parables of Jesus have as their frequent
setting the behavior of servants left behind during the long
and distant journey of the master. This motif of hope
deferred, of what may reverently be called the absence of God,
may well be true to the experience of both Jesus and his
first followers - an authentic feature quite as much of our
time as of theirs.
Another frequent cause of tension is what is most
simply expressed as "the one versus the many." Particularly in
an age of social concern we seem to be confronted with a
choice between personal religion and social religion, and we
can find excessive emphasis now upon one and now upon
the other. Does the state exist for the individual or the
individual for the state? If the former, what will prevent the
individual from indifference to all social solidarity and
responsibility? The democratic emphasis on personal freedom is only
too often a cloak for irresponsible selfishness - "Every man
for himself and the devil take the hindmost."
In the ethical sphere the conflict of standards
between individual and group morality has long been evident. "If
we should do for ourselves what we are doing for Italy,"
said Cavour, "we should be the greatest knaves." Long
before Reinhold Niebuhr attempted to justify the distinction
of "Moral Man and Immoral Society," a contemporary of
Paul wrote in prayer (2 Esdras 3:36):
Individual men mayst thou find who have kept thy commandments,
But nations thou dost not find.
Now our Christian and Quaker heritage has added
to personal religion a demand for social religion. This
means love of neighbor as oneself. It also means a concern for
social institutions and standards. The problem of pacifism, says
a recent writer,
"arises from the Christian's sense of re-sponsibility for his fellow men. In his
well-known book, `Ecce Homo,' Sir J. R. Seeley rightly
observed regarding the advent of the early Church, "Henceforth it became the duty of every
man gravely to consider the condition of the
world around him."8
This social concern is a conspicuous feature of
modern Quakerism. Its historic roots are instructive, its
mani-festations are widely known today. The burden of the
world's suffering is indeed laid upon us, and we are unequal to
the tasks.
Unfortunately even absorption in the tasks of relief
and social reform raises the characteristic problems of
an antithesis and synthesis. The needy and wayward
are individuals rather than wholesale groups and one must
not fail to see the trees for the wood. Besides the
wholesale service which is necessary, the world needs what
the telephone company calls "person-to-person" service.
The would-be reformer is also a person. His
inner individual religion should not be supplemented by a
purely social religion; still less should his ardent social ideals
be allowed to obscure his own need for personal piety
and integrity. How can we minister to the cure of souls if
our souls are sick, or to the mental ills of a distracted world
if we are not mature, well adjusted, real persons? They
will surely say to us this proverb, "Physician, heal thyself."
In spite of striking examples of social pioneering in our
history, the Society of Friends has transmitted to us mainly
the resources of solid inner piety. If we are living on
this inheritance without renewing it, we are prodigal sons.
We shall find that if this peters out our social service will
become salt without savour.
Here again the answer is not "either
or"
but "both
and." Religion can be exclusively social or
exclusively personal. Professor Whitehead has given his
well-known definition, "Religion is what the individual does with
his solitariness." "Religion is solitariness," he repeats, "and
if you are never solitary you are never religious.
Collective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, churches, rituals,
bibles, codes of behaviour, are the wrappings of religion, its
passing forms."9 But John Wesley says with equal
assurance: "Christianity is essentially a social religion, and to turn
it into a solitary one is to destroy
it."10
Among the inventions attributed to Benjamin
Franklin are what we call today bifocal glasses. I may therefore
use as illustration of our philosophic problem the scientific
device of bifocals. We know the human eye has remarkable
ability to change its focus; it can see across a room as well
as across a field. When the eye gets old and requires glasses
it requires one set of glasses for reading and another set
for general purposes. I met the other day a man who had
a third pair of glasses especially for shaving. The mirror,
he said, doubled the distance from his eye to his beard so
that ordinary reading glasses would not do. To keep
changing glasses is too much trouble and so the oculist
finally persuades us to use spectacles with two and sometimes
three lenses in them. They have their inconvenience but most
of us at last succumb to them. We recognize the
double demands made upon our eyes and we
deliberately supplement nature's way of accepting both.
The same is true of our spiritual vision. We need to
see life steadily and see it whole. But the whole has parts.
There is need for a Christian order that will perfect the
relations of classes and races and nations. There is also the
need next door and the need within. Socially we need to
be equipped with both a telescope and a microscope. It
would be nice to have new eyes for invisibles. At least we can
aspire to have a bifocal capacity for the twofold spheres of
human perspective.
Like other boys, I was once intrigued with another
dual feature of life which I may call its amphibiousness.
We humans can navigate on land, and also after a fashion in
or on water. Other creatures can run faster, many others
can swim better. As for flying, we unfeathered bipeds are
about the only ones that have no wings. In locomotion as in
vision we supplement nature by artifice. Long before I ever
saw Europe I worked out a plan to traverse it with a kit
that would involve both a folding bicycle and a folding boat.
I planned to canoe through the canals with my pack
and bicycle in my boat and then to cycle along the roads
with pack and folded canoe on my back. Today I suppose
the day-dreaming boy adds for variety a baby helicopter.
Less playfully men talk today of amphibian machines, grim
tanks that swim, or boats that fly.
In the spiritual world too we are pressed by
amphibian necessities, or I may say rather that we are by
nature amphibians who have to live in two worlds, We belong
to the past as well as to the present, to the present as well
as to the future. We have more than one loyalty, more
than one aptitude, more than one responsibility. This all
produces the keenest tension and inner conflict and uncertainty
until we have learned the fact and have by nature or by
artifice adjusted ourselves to it. Perhaps we have scarcely
learned the unity of the geographical physical world and of
one humanity upon it. Even when we do there are
other dimensions. Just as patriotism is not enough
and nationalism is not enough in "one world," so even
global thinking is not enough in two worlds. Margaret Fuller
once remarked that she accepted the universe. We recognize
that paradoxically it is a "pluralistic universe" and that
in accepting it the recognition of its multiple character
is essential to our understanding and to any peace of
mind. Looked at from several angles we are commuters
between two poles, denizens of two spheres, destined to live
where double areas cross one another and overlap. It is in all
these overlappings that I use the term two worlds, and insist
that if we ignore either alternative we do it to our peril.
But let the frame of things disjoint,
Both the worlds suffer.
So Shakespeare. "And what," asked Jesus, "shall
it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his
own soul?" Much is said today about integration, of which I
am highly sceptical. Integrating can be done on the lowest
levels and for the most futile ends, as total war is teaching us.
In the area of growth tension is necessary, just as there is
no locomotion possible without friction, no climbing
without gravitation. I wish I could suggest a simple device for
living double. I doubt if there is any easy formula. But I
commend to us the effort. At every crisis of his life, it has been
said, Jesus showed that he knew that we belong, as Kant
says, to two worlds. God's will is to be done on earth as it is
in heaven. With reference to many alternatives we still
seem to hear him saying: "These ye ought to have done and not
to have left the other undone." Life is no simpler in our
day than it was in his. If I may return to my lunatic friend
Mr. Octagon I might summarize our task as finding bifocals
for bilateral amphibious bipeds.
Notes:
1. I. Bernard Cohen, "Benjamin Franklin as Scientist
and Citizen," The American Scholar, xii. 1943, pp. 474,
475, 481.
2. Robert Southey to C. W. Williams Wynn, Esq. Dec.
3, 1807. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey,
edited by J. W. Worter, 1856, ii, 31.
3. Address before the American Federation of Labor
at Buffalo, Nov. 12, 1917. The Messages and Papers
of Woodrow Wilson, 1924, vol. i, p. 439.
4. G. F. Moore, Judaism, i, 389.
5. The Spectator, October 15, 1943, p. 354.
6. The History of Primitive Christianity. Eng. Trans. 1937,
p. 502 f.
7. The title of a very helpful book by Henry Churchill
King (Macmillan, 1908).
8. C. J. Cadoux, Christian Pacifism
Re-examined, 1940, p. 14.
9. A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the
Making, 1917, p. 16.
10. John Wesley, Works (3rd American edition), i, p.
211, and frequently elsewhere to the same effect.