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[4] But rather in the discipline of the Mystic as an enrichment of the spiritual life than as a door to the Communion of the Church.

Conversion has of late come up for a pretty thoroughgoing examination by the psychologists, and their conclusions are so generally familiar as to need no restatement here. William James, in a rather informal paragraph quoted from one of his letters, states the psychologist's point of view more simply and vividly than either he or his disciples have defined their position in their more formal works. "In the case of conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really asks, but I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case of the conflict of two self-systems in a personality up to that time heterogeneously divided, but in which, after the conversion crisis, the higher loves and powers come definitely to gain the upper hand and expel the forces which up to that time had kept them down to the position of mere grumblers and protesters and agents of remorse and discontent. This broader view will cover an enormous number of cases psychologically and leaves all the religious importance to the result which it has on any other theory."[5]

[5] Letters of William James, Vol. II, p. 57.

In Luther, Augustine and St. Paul, and a great fellowship beside, this stress of the divided self was both immediate and intense. Such as these through the consciousness of very real fault—and this is true of Augustine and St. Paul—or through a rare spiritual sensitiveness and an unusual force of aspiration—and this is true of many others—did not need any conviction of sin urged upon them from the outside. They had conviction enough of their own. But all these have been men and women apart, intensely devout by nature, committed by temperament to great travail of soul and concerned, above all, for their own spiritual deliverance. But their spiritual sensitiveness is by no means universal, their sense of struggle not a normal experience for another type of personality. The demand, therefore, that all religious experience be cast in their particular mould, and that religion be made real to every one through the same travail of soul in which it was made real to them, carries with it two very great dangers: first, that some semblance of struggle should be created which does not come vitally out of experience; and second, that the resultant peace should be artificial rather than true, and therefore, should not only quickly lose its force but really result in reactions which would leave the soul of the one so misled, or better perhaps, so mishandled, emptier of any real sense of the reality of religion than to begin with.

Protestantism Found Its Authority in an Infallibly Inspired Bible

Now this is too largely what has happened in evangelical Protestantism. The "twice-born" have been set up as the standard for us all; they have demanded of their disciples the same experience as those through which they themselves have passed. Since this type of religious experience has always been the more ardent and vivid, since the churches in which least has been made of it have generally tended to fall away into routine and some want of real power, we have had, particularly since Jonathan Edwards in America and the Wesleys in England, a recurrent insistence upon it as the orthodox type of religious experience. Partly through inheritance and partly in answer to its own genius Protestantism has built up a system of theology tending to reproduce the sequence of conviction of sin, aspiration, repentance, and conversion by doctrinal pressure from the outside. The foundations of it all are in the New Testament and somewhat in the Old, but what has been built upon these foundations has been either too extended or too one-sided. In order to include in one general sense of condemnation strong enough to create an adequate desire for salvation, all sorts and conditions of people, theology has not only charged us up with our own sins which are always a sad enough account, but it has charged us up with ancestral and imputed sins.

This line of theology has been far too rigid, far too insistent upon what one may call the facts of theology, and far too blind to the facts of life. It has made much of sin in the abstract and sometimes far too little of concrete sin; it has made more of human depravity than social justice; it has failed to make allowance for varieties of temper and condition; it is partly responsible for the widespread reaction of the cults and movements of our own time.

Since so strongly an articulate system as this needed something to sustain it, Protestantism has constantly supported itself in the authority of the Old and New Testaments. It displaced one authority by another, the authority of the Church by the authority of the Book, and in order to secure for this authority an ultimate and unquestioned power it affirmed as the beginning and the end of its use of the Scriptures their infallibility. The growth of Protestant teaching about the Bible has necessarily been complicated but we must recognize that Protestant theology and Protestant tradition have given the Bible what one may call read-in values.

At any rate after affirming the infallibility of the text Protestantism has turned back to the text for the proof of its teaching and so built up its really very great interrelated system in which, as has already been said, the power of religion over the life of its followers and the reality of religion in the experiences of its followers locked up on just such things as these: First, the experiences of conversions; second, conversion secured through the processes of Protestant indoctrination, backed up by the fervent appeal of the Protestant ministry and the pressure of Protestant Church life; and third, all this supported by an appeal to the authority of the Bible with a proof-text for every statement.

All this is, of course, to deal coldly and analytically with something which, as it has worked out in religious life, has been neither cold nor analytical. Underneath it all have been great necessities of the soul and issuing out of it all have been aspirations and devoutnesses and spiritual victories and new understandings of God and a wealth of love and goodness which are a part of the imperishable treasures of humanity for three centuries. This faith and experience have voiced themselves in moving hymns, built themselves into rare and continuing fellowships, gone abroad in missionary passion, spent themselves for a better world and looked unafraid even into the face of death, sure of life and peace beyond. But behind the great realities of our inherited religious life one may discover assumptions and processes less sure.

The Strength and Weakness of This Position

Once more, this inherited faith in the Bible and the systems which have grown out of it have been conditioned by scientific and philosophic understandings. The Protestant doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible assumed its authority not only in the region of religion but in science and history as well. The inherited theologies really went out of their way to give the incidental the same value as the essential. There was no place in them for growth, correction, further revelation. This statement may be challenged, it certainly needs to be qualified, for when the time for adjustment and the need of adjustment really did come the process of adjustment began to be carried through, but only at very great cost and only really by slowly building new foundations under the old. In fact the new is not in many ways the old at all, though this is to anticipate.

It is directly to the point here that the whole scheme of religion as it has come down to us on the Protestant side till within the last fifty years was at once compactly interwrought, strongly supported and unexpectedly vulnerable. The integrity of any one part of its line depended upon the integrity of every other part; its gospel went back to the Fall of Man and depended, therefore, upon the Biblical theory of the Creation and subsequent human history. If anything should challenge the scientific or historical accuracy of the book of Genesis, the doctrine of original sin would have either to be discarded or recast. If the doctrine of original sin were discarded or recast, the accepted interpretations of the Atonement went with it. With these changed or weakened the evangelical appeal must either be given new character or lose force. A system which began with the Fall on one side went on to heaven and hell on the other and even heaven and hell were more dependent upon ancient conceptions of the physical structure of the world and the skies above it than the Church was willing to recognize. The doctrine of eternal punishment particularly was open to ethical challenge.

Evangelical Protestantism the Outcome of the Whole Process

Of course all this is rather an extreme statement of the situation fifty years ago. The churches did not all agree in insisting upon a conversion; some evangelic churches were beginning to place their emphasis upon Christian nurture; they sought what is secured for the emotionally twice-born through guided growth and a larger dependence upon normal spiritual conditions, though they were at least one with their brethren in believing that those who come into Christian discipleship must in the end be greatly changed and conscious of the change; they too must possess as an assurance of the reality of their religious life a sense of peace and spiritual well-being.

The high Anglican Church approached the Latin Catholic Church in its insistence upon sacramental regeneration. This wing of the Church believed and believes still that baptism truly administered and the Holy Communion also administered in proper form and accepted in due obedience by priests belonging to some true succession, possess a mystic saving power. Just why all this should be so they are perhaps not able to explain to the satisfaction of any one save those who, for one reason or another, believe it already. But those who cannot understand sacramentarianism may dismiss it far too easily, for though there be here danger of a mechanical formulism, the sacraments themselves may become part of a spiritual discipline through which the lives of men and women are so profoundly changed as in the most clear case of conversion, manifesting often a spiritual beauty not to be found in any other conception of Christian discipleship. Our differences here are not so great as we suppose them.

There have always been liberal reactions within the Church herself, tending either toward relaxation of discipline or the more rational and simple statements of doctrine. What has been so far said would not be true of Unitarianism and Universalism in the last century. But these movements have been somehow wanting in driving power, and so, when all these qualifications are made, evangelical Protestantism has resulted in a pretty clearly recognizable type. The representative members of the representative evangelical churches all had a religious experience; some of them had been converted after much waiting at the anxious seat, or long kneeling at the altar rail; others of them had been brought through Christian teaching to the confession of their faith, but all of them were thereby reborn. They were the product of a theology which taught them their lost estate, offered them for their acceptance a mediatorial and atoning Christ, assured them that through their faith their salvation would be assured, and counselled them to look to their own inner lives for the issue of all this in a distinct sense of spiritual peace and well-being. If they doubted or questioned they were answered with proof-texts; for their spiritual sustenance they were given the services of their churches where preaching was generally central, and exhorted to grow in grace and knowledge through prayer and much reading of their Bible.

The Individual Experience of the Believer the Keystone of Evangelical Protestantism. Its Openness to Disturbing Forces

Now fine and good as all this was it was, as the event proved, not big enough to answer all the needs of the soul, nor strong enough to meet the challenge of forces which were a half century ago shaping themselves toward the almost entire recasting of great regions of human thought. It was, to begin with, unexpectedly weak in itself. Evangelical Protestantism, as has been noted, throws upon the members of Protestant churches a larger burden of individual responsibility than does the Catholic Church. The typical evangelical Protestant has had little to sustain him in his religious life save his sense of reconciliation with God, from whom possibly he never vitally thought himself to have been estranged, and a consequent spiritual peace.

His church promises him nothing except teaching, inspiration, comradeship, an occasion for the confession of his faith and some opportunity for service. His ministers are only such as he; they may exhort but they dare not absolve. He is greatly dependent, then, for his sense of the reality of religion upon his own spiritual states. If he is spiritually sensitive and not too much troubled by doubt, if he possesses a considerable capacity for religious understanding, if his Bible is still for him the authoritative word of God, if his church meets his normal religious needs with a reasonable degree of adequacy, if he is resolute in purpose and if he has no excessively trying experiences in the face of which his faith breaks down, and if the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, or the strain of poverty do not too much distract him (and this is a long and formidable list of ifs) then he is faithful in his church relationships and personally devout. He grows in grace and knowledge and the outcome of it all is a religious character admirable in manifold ways, steadfast and truthful in good works.

The fact that in spite of all hindrances the Protestant churches do go on, registering from decade to decade a varying statistical growth with a strongly organized life and a great body of communicants who find in the religious life thus secured to them the true secret of interior peace and their true source of power, is itself a testimony to the massive reality of the whole system. And yet the keystone of the great structure is just the individual experience of the individual believer, conditioned upon his longing for deliverance and his personal assurance that he has found, through his faith in his church's gospel, what he seeks.

If anything should shake the Protestant's confidence in his creed or his Bible, or if his own inner experiences should somehow fail in their sense of sustaining reality, then all the structure of his religion begins to weaken.

If one may use and press a suggestive figure, here is a religious structure very much like Gothic architecture; its converging arches of faith and knowledge lock up upon their keystones and the thrust of the whole great structure has been met and conquered by flying buttresses. In other words, sustaining forces of accredited beliefs about science, history and human nature have been a necessary part of the entire system and the temple of faith thus sustained may be weakened either through some failure in the keystone of it which is inner experience, or the flying buttresses of it which are these accepted systems of science, history, philosophy and psychology.

Readjustment of Both Catholic and Protestant Systems Inevitable

Out of such elements as these, then, through such inheritances and disciplines the representative religious consciousness of American Protestantism of the end of the nineteenth century had been created. It rooted itself in elements common to all religion, it inherited practically the whole content of the Old Testament, it invested Hebraic systems of sacrifice with typical meanings and Jewish prophecy with a mystic authority. It was in debt to St. Paul and Augustine for its theology. Its cosmogony was 4,000 years old and practically uninfluenced by modern science, or else at odds with it. It was uncritical in its acceptance of the supernatural and trained on the whole to find its main line of evidence for the reality of religion in the supernatural. It made more of the scheme of deliverance which St. Paul found in the Crucifixion of Jesus than the ethics of the Gospels. It was mystic in its emphasis upon an inner testimony to the realities it offered. For the Protestant it locked up unexpectedly upon the infallible authority of the Bible and for the Catholic upon the inerrancy of the Church. It was out of the current of the modern temper in science and philosophy generally. Its conceptions of the probable fate of the world were Jewish and of the future life were medieval, and perhaps the strangest thing in it all was the general unconsciousness of its dependence upon assumptions open to challenge at almost every point and the process of profound readjustment upon the threshold of which it stood.

It is almost impossible to disentangle the action of the two sets of strain which have within the last half century been brought to bear upon it. Each has reacted upon the other. Perhaps the best thing to do is to consider the forces which for the last two generations have been challenging and reshaping inherited faiths, and then to consider the outcome of it all in the outstanding religious attitudes of our own time.