My mother wanted me to devote my life to religious work. I thought seriously of becoming a foreign missionary. Then I went away to college; and gradually, as the years passed, a change came over me. I studied biology, science, philosophy, and comparative religions. I read books on how the Bible was written. I began to question many of its assertions. I began to doubt many of the narrow doctrines taught by the country preachers of that day. I was bewildered. Like Walt Whitman, I “felt curious, abrupt questionings stir within me”. I didn’t know what to believe. I saw no purpose in life. I stopped praying. I became an agnostic.
I believed that all life was planless and aimless. I believed that human beings had no more divine purpose than had the dinosaurs that roamed the earth two hundred million years ago. I felt that some day the human race would perish-just as the dinosaurs had. I knew that science taught that the sun was slowly cooling and that when its temperature fell even ten per cent, no form of life could exist on earth. I sneered at the idea of a beneficent God who had created man in His own likeness. I believed that the billions upon billions of suns whirling through black, cold, lifeless space had been created by blind force. Maybe they had never been created at all. Maybe they existed for ever-just as time and space have always existed.
Do I profess to know the answers to all these questions now? No. No man has ever been able to explain the mystery of the universe-the mystery of life. We are surrounded by mysteries. The operation of your body is a profound mystery. So is the electricity in your home. So is the flower in the crannied wall. So is the green grass outside your window. Charles F. Kettering, the guiding genius of General Motors Research Laboratories, has been giving Antioch College thirty thousand dollars a year out of his own pocket to try to discover why grass is green. He declares that if we knew how grass is able to transform sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into food sugar, we could transform civilisation.
Even the operation of the engine in your car is a profound mystery. General Motors Research Laboratories have spent years of time and millions of dollars trying to find out how and why a spark in the cylinder sets off an explosion that makes your car run; and they don’t know the answer.
The fact that we don’t understand the mysteries of our bodies or electricity or a gas engine doesn’t keep us from using and enjoying them. The fact that I don’t understand the mysteries of prayer and religion no longer keeps me from enjoying the richer, happier life that religion brings. At long last, I realise the wisdom of Santayana’s words: “Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.”
I have gone back-well, I was about to say that I had gone back to religion; but that would not be accurate. I have gone forward to a new concept of religion. I no longer have the faintest interest in the differences in creeds that divide the Churches. But I am tremendously interested in what religion does for me, just as I am interested in what electricity and good food and water do for me. They help me to lead a richer, fuller, happier life. But religion does far more than that. It brings me spiritual values. It gives me, as William James puts it, “a new zest for life … more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life.” It gives me faith, hope, and courage. It banishes tensions, anxieties, fears, and worries. It gives purpose to my life-and direction. It vastly improves my happiness. It gives me abounding health. It helps me to create for myself “an oasis of peace amidst the whirling sands of life”.
Francis Bacon was right when he said, three hundred and fifty years ago: “A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”
I can remember the days when people talked about the conflict between science and religion. But no more. The newest of all sciences-psychiatry-is teaching what Jesus taught. Why? Because psychiatrists realise that prayer and a strong religious faith will banish the worries, the anxieties, the strains and fears that cause more than half of all our ills. They know, as one of their leaders, Dr. A. A. Brill said: “Anyone who is truly religious does not develop a neurosis.”
If religion isn’t true, then life is meaningless. It is a tragic farce.
I interviewed Henry Ford a few years prior to his death. Before I met him, I had expected him to show the strains of the long years he had spent in building up and managing one of the world’s greatest businesses. So I was surprised to how calm and well and peaceful he looked at seventy-eight. When I asked him if he ever worried, he replied: “No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn’t need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?”
Today, even psychiatrists are becoming modern evangelists. They are not urging us to lead religious lives to avoid hell-fires in the next world, but they are urging us to lead religious lives to avoid the hell-fires of this world-the hell-fires of stomach ulcer, angina pectoris, nervous breakdowns, and insanity. As an example of what our psychologists and psychiatrists are teaching, read The Return to Religion, by Dr. Henry C. Link. You will probably find a copy in your public library.
Yes, the Christian religion is an inspiring, health-giving activity. Jesus said: “I came that ye might have life and have it more abundantly.” Jesus denounced and attacked the dry forms and dead rituals that passed for religion in His day. He was a rebel. He preached a new kind of religion-a religion that threatened to upset the world. That is why He was crucified. He preached that religion should exist for man- not man for religion; that the Sabbath was made for man- not man for the Sabbath. He talked more about fear than He did about sin. The wrong kind of fear is a sin-a sin against your health, a sin against the richer, fuller, happier, courageous life that Jesus advocated. Emerson spoke of himself as a “Professor of the Science of Joy”. Jesus, too, was a teacher of “the Science of Joy”. He commanded His disciples to “rejoice and leap for joy”.
Jesus declared that there were only two important things about religion: loving God with all our heart, and our neighbour as ourselves. Any man who does that is religious, regardless of whether he knows it. For example, my father-in-law, Henry Price, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He tries to live by the golden rule; and he is incapable of doing anything mean, selfish, or dishonest. However, he doesn’t attend church, and regards himself as an agnostic. Nonsense! What makes a man a Christian? I’ll let John Baillie answer that. He was probably the most distinguished professor who ever taught theology at the University of Edinburgh. He said: “What makes a man a Christian is neither his intellectual acceptance of certain ideas, nor his conformity to a certain rule, but his possession of a certain Spirit, and his participation in a certain Life.”
If that makes a man a Christian, then Henry Price is a noble one.
William James-the father of modern psychology-wrote to his friend, Professor Thomas Davidson, saying that as the years went by, he found himself “less and less able to get along without God”.
Earlier in this book I mentioned that when the judges tried to pick the best story on worry sent in by my students, they had so much difficulty in choosing between two outstanding stories that the prize money was split. Here is the second story that tied for first prize-the unforgettable experience of a woman who had to find out the hard way that “she couldn’t get along without God”.
I am calling this woman Mary Cushman, although that is not her actual name. She has children and grandchildren who might be embarrassed to see her story in print, so I agreed to disguise her identity. However, the woman herself is real- very real. A few months ago, she sat in the armchair beside my desk and told me her story. Here is how it goes:
“During the depression,” she said, “my husband’s average salary was eighteen dollars a week. Many times we didn’t have even that because he didn’t get paid when he was ill-and that was often. He had a series of minor accidents; he also had mumps, scarlet fever, and repeated attacks of flu. We lost the little house that we had built with our own hands. We owed fifty dollars at the grocery store-and had five children to feed. I took in washing and ironing from the neighbours, and bought second-hand clothes from the Salvation Army store and made them over for my children to wear. I made myself ill with worry. One day the grocer to whom we owed fifty dollars accused my eleven-year-old boy of stealing a couple of pencils.
My son wept as he told me about it. I knew he was honest and sensitive-and I knew that he had been disgraced and humiliated in front of other people. That was the straw that broke my back. I thought of all the misery we had endured; and I couldn’t see any hope for the future. I must have become temporarily insane with worry, for I shut off my washing machine, took my little five-year-old daughter into the bedroom, and plugged up the windows and cracks with paper and rags. My little girl said to me: ‘Mommy, what are you doing?’ and I answered: There’s a little draught in here.’ Then I turned on the gas heater we had in the bedroom-and didn’t light it. As I lay down on the bed with my daughter beside me, she said: ‘Mommy, this is funny-we just got up a little while ago!’ But I said: ‘Never mind, we’ll take a little nap.’
Then I closed my eyes, listening to the gas escape from the heater. I shall never forget the smell of that gas. …
“Suddenly I thought I heard music. I listened. I had forgotten to turn the radio off in the kitchen. It didn’t matter now. But the music kept on, and presently I heard someone singing an old hymn:
What a Friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and grief’s to bear!
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer.
Oh, what peace we often forfeit
Oh, what needless pain we bear
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer!
“As I listened to that hymn, I realised that I had made a tragic mistake. I had tried to fight all my terrible battles alone. I had not taken everything to God in prayer. … I jumped up, turned off the gas, opened the door, and raised the windows.
“I wept and prayed all the rest of that day. Only I didn’t pray for help-instead I poured out my soul in thanksgiving to God for the blessings He had given me: five splendid children- all of them healthy and fine, strong in body and mind. I promised God that never again would I prove so ungrateful. And I have kept that promise.
“Even after we lost our home, and had to move into a little country schoolhouse that we rented for five dollars a month, I thanked God for that schoolhouse; I thanked Him for the fact that I at least had a roof to keep us warm and dry. I thanked God honestly that things were not worse-and I believe that He heard me. For in time things improved-oh, not overnight; but as the depression lightened, we made a little more money. I got a job as a hat-check girl in a large country club, and sold stockings as a side line. To help put himself through college, one of my sons got a job on a farm, milked thirteen cows morning and night. Today my children are grown up and married; I have three fine grandchildren. And, as I look back on that terrible day when I turned on the gas, I thank God over and over that I ‘woke up’ in time. What joys I would have missed if I had carried out that act! How many wonderful years I would have forfeited for ever! Whenever I hear now of someone who wants to end his life, I feel like crying out: ‘Don’t do it! Don’t!’ The blackest moments we live through can only last a little time-and then comes the future. …”
On the average, someone commits suicide in the United States every thirty-five minutes. On the average, someone goes insane every hundred and twenty seconds. Most of these suicides-and probably many of the tragedies of insanity- could have been prevented if these people had only had the solace and peace that are found in religion and prayer.
One of the most distinguished psychiatrists living, Dr. Carl Jung, says in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul (*):
“During the past thirty years, people from all the civilised countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life-that is to say, over thirty-five-there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
That statement is so significant I want to repeat it in bold type.
Dr. Carl Jung said:
“During the past thirty years, people from all the civilised countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of hie-that is to say, over thirty-five-there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
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[*] Kegar Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.
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