No one can write his real religious life with pen or pencil. It is written only in actions, and its seal is our character, not our orthodoxy. Whether we, our neighbour, or God is the judge, absolutely the only value of our “religious” life to ourselves or to any one is what it fits us for and enables us to do. Creeds, when expressed only in words, clothes, or abnormal lives, are daily growing less acceptable as passports to Paradise. What my particular intellect can accept cannot commend me to God. His “well done” is only spoken to the man who “wills to do His will.”

We map the world out into black and white patches for “heathen” and “Christian” as if those who made the charts believed that one section possessed a monopoly of God’s sonship. Europe was marked white, which is to-day comment enough on this division. A black friend of mine used often to remind me that in his country the Devil was white.

My own religious experiences divide my life into three periods. As a boy at school, and as a young man at hospital, the truth or untruth of Christianity as taught by the churches did not interest me enough to devote a thought to it. It was neither a disturbing nor a vital influence in my life. My mother was my ideal of goodness. I have never known her speak an angry or unkind word. Sitting here looking back on over fifty years of life, I cannot pick out one thing to criticize in my mother.

What did interest me was athletics. Like most English boys I almost worshipped physical accomplishments. I had the supremest contempt for clothes except those designed for action or comfort. Since no saint apparently ever wore trousers, or appeared to care about football knickers, I never supposed that they could be the same flesh as myself. It was always a barrier between me and the parsons and religious persons generally that they affected clothing which dubbed my ideals “worldly.” It was even a barrier between myself and the Christ that I could not think of Him in flannels or a gymnasium suit. At that time I should have considered such an idea blasphemous whatever that meant. As soon as religious services ceased to be compulsory for me, I only attended them as a concession to others. The prime object of the prayers and lessons did not appear to be that they might be understood. So far as I could see, common sense and plain natural feelings were at a discount. A long heritage of an eager, restless spirit left me uninterested in “homilies,” and aided by the “dim religious light,” I was enabled to sleep through both long prayers and sermons. Justice forces me to add that the two endless hours of “prep” lessons after tea had very much the same effect upon me.

At the request of my mother I once went to take a class at the Sunday School. These were for the “poor only” in England in those days. Little effort was expended on making them attractive. I recall nothing but disgust at the dirty urchins with whom I had to associate for half an hour. An incident which happened on the death of one of the boys at my father’s school interested me temporarily in religion. The boy’s father happened to be a dissenter, and our vicar refused to allow the gates of the parish churchyard to be opened to enable the funeral cortege to enter. My chum had only a legal right to be buried in the yard. The coffin had therefore to be lifted over the wall and as the church was locked, father conducted the service in the open air. His words at the grave-side gave a touch of reality to religion, and still more so did his walking down the aisle out of church the following Sunday when the vicar referred to the destructive influence of anything that lent colour to dissent. Later when father threw up the school for the far more onerous and less remunerative task of chaplain at the London Hospital, even I realized that religion meant something. Indeed, it was that tax on his sensitive, nervous brain that brought his life to its early close. No man ever had a more generous and soft-hearted father. He never refused us any reasonable request, and very few unreasonable ones, and allowed us an amount of self-determination enjoyed by few. How deeply and how often have I regretted that I did not understand him better. His brilliant scholarship, and the friends that it brought around him, his ability literally to speak Greek and Latin as he could German and French, his exceptionally developed mental as compared with his physical gifts, were undoubtedly the reasons that a very ordinary English boy could not appreciate him.

At fourteen years of age, at Marlborough School, I was asked if I wished to be confirmed. Every boy of that age was. It permitted one to remain when “the kids went out after first service.” It added dignity, like a football cap or a mustache. All I remember about it was bitterly resenting having to “swat up” the Catechism out of school hours. I counted, however, on the examiner being easy, and he was. I am an absolute believer in boys making a definite decision to follow the Christ; and that in the hands of a really keen Christian man the rite of confirmation is very valuable. The call which gets home to a boy’s heart is the call to do things. If only a boy can be led to see that the following of Christ demands a real knighthood, and that true chivalry is Christ’s service, he will want all the rites and ceremonies that either proclaim his allegiance or promise him help and strength to live up to it.

What I now believe that D.L. Moody did for me was just to show that under all the shams and externals of religion was a vital call in the world for things that I could do. This marks the beginning of the second period of my religious development. He helped me to see myself as God sees the “unprofitable servant,” and to be ashamed. He started me working for all I was worth, and made religion real fun a new field brimming with opportunities. With me the pendulum swung very far. The evangelical to my mind had a monopoly of infallible truth. A Roman Catholic I regarded as a relic of mediaevalism; while almost a rigour went down my spine when a man told me that he was a “Unitarian Christian.” Hyphenation was loyalty compared to that. I mention this only because it shows how I can now understand intolerance and dogmatism in others. Yes, I must have been “very impossible,” for then I honestly thought that I knew it all.

About this time I began to be interested in reading my Bible, and I learned to appreciate my father’s expositions of it. At prayers he always translated into the vernacular from the original of either the Old or the New Testament. To me he seemed to know every sense of every Greek word in any setting. Ever since I have been satisfied to use an English version, knowing that I cannot improve on the words chosen by the various learned translators.

Because I owed so much to evangelical teachers, it worried me for a long while that I could not bring myself to argue with my boys about their intellectual attitude to Christ. My Sunday class contained several Jews whom I loved. I respected them more because they made no verbal professions. I have seen Turkish religionists dancing and whirling in Asia Minor at their prayers. I have seen much emotional Christianity, and I fully realize the value of approaching men on their emotional side. A demonstrative preacher impresses large crowds of people at once. But all the same, I have learned from many disillusionments to be afraid of overdoing emotionalism in religion. Summing up the evidence of men’s Christlikeness by their characters, as I look back down my long list of loved and honoured helpers and friends, I am certainly safe in saying that I at least should judge that no section of Christ’s Church has any monopoly of Christ’s spirit; and that I should like infinitely less to be examined on my own dogmatic theology than I should thirty-five years ago. Combined with this goes the fact that though I know the days of my stay on earth are greatly reduced, I seem to be less rather than more anxious about “the morrow.” For though time has rounded off the corners of my conceit, experience of God’s dealing with such an unworthy midget as myself has so strengthened the foundations on which faith stood, that Christ now means more to me as a living Presence than when I laid more emphasis on the dogmas concerning Him.

This chapter would not be complete without an endeavour to face the task of trying to answer the questions so often asked: “What is your position now? Do you still believe as you did when you first decided to serve Christ?” I am still a communicant member “in good standing” of the Episcopal Church. One hopes that one’s religious ideas grow like the rest of one’s life. It is fools who are said to rush in where angels fear to tread. The most powerful Christian churches in the world, the Greek and the Roman, recognizing the great dangers threatening, have countered by stereotyping the answer for all time, assuming all responsibility, and permitting no individual freedom in the matter. The numbers of their adherents testify to how vast a proportion of mankind the course appeals. And yet we are sons of God and at our best value freedom in every department of our being spirit as well as mind and body. George Adam Smith says: “The great causes of God and humanity are not defeated by the hot assaults of the Devil, but by the slow, crushing, glacier-like mass of thousands and thousands of indifferent nobodies. God’s causes are never destroyed by being blown up, but by being sat upon. It is not the violent and anarchical whom we have to fear in the war for human progress, but the slow, the staid, the respectable; and the danger of these lies in their real skepticism. Though it would abhor articulately confessing that God does nothing, it virtually means so by refusing to share manifest opportunities for serving Him.”

Feeble and devious as my own footsteps have been since my decision to follow Jesus Christ, I believe more than ever that this is the only real adventure of life. No step in life do I even compare with that one in permanent satisfaction. I deeply regret that I did not take it sooner. I do not feel that it mattered much whether I chose medicine for an occupation, or law, or education, or commerce, or any other way to justify my existence by working for a living as every honest man should. But if there is one thing about which I never have any question, it is that the decision and endeavour to follow the Christ does for men what nothing else on earth can. Without stultifying our reason, it develops all that makes men godlike. Christ claimed that it was the only way to find out truth.

To me, enforced asceticism, vows of celibacy, denunciation of pleasures innocent in themselves, intellectual monopoly of interpretation of things past or present, written or unwritten, are travesties of common sense, which is to me the Voice within. Not being a philosopher, I do not classify it, but I listen to it, because I believe it to be the Voice of God. That is the first point which I have no fear in putting on record.

The extraordinary revelations of some Power outside ourselves leading and guiding and helping and chastening are, I am certain, really the ordinary experiences of every man who is willing to accept the fact that we are sons of God. Only a child, however, who submits to his father can expect to enjoy or understand his dealings. If we look into our everyday life we cannot fail to see that God not only allows but seeks our cooperation in the establishment of His Kingdom. So the second fundamental by which I stand is the certainty of a possible real and close relationship between man and God. Not one qualm assails my intellect or my intuition when I say that I know absolutely that God is my Father. To live “as seeing Him who is invisible” is my one ideal which embraces all the lesser ideals of my life.

It has been my lot in life to have to stand by many death-beds, and to be called in to dying men and women almost as a routine in my profession. Yet I am increasingly convinced that their spirits never die at all. I am sure that there is no real death. Death is no argument against, but rather for, life. Eternal life is the complement of all my unsatisfied ideals; and experience teaches me that the belief in it is a greater incentive to be useful and good than any other I know.

I have read “Raymond” with great interest. I am neither capable nor willing to criticize those who, with the deductive ability of such men as Sir Oliver Lodge, are brave enough and unselfish enough to devote their talents to pioneering in a field that certainly needs and merits more scientific investigation, seeing that it has possibilities of such great moment to mankind.

The experiences on which rest one’s own convictions of continuing life are of an entirely different nature. Even though the first and personal reason may seem foolish, it is because I desire it so much. This is a natural passion, common to all human beings. Experience convinces me that such longings are purposeful and do not go unsatisfied.

No, we do not know everything yet; and perhaps the critic is a shallower fool than he judges to be the patient delvers into the unknown beyond. The evidence on which our deductions have been based through the ages may suddenly be proven fallible after all. It may be that there is no such thing as matter. Chemists and physicists now admit that is possible. The spiritual may be far more real than the material, in spite of the cocksure conceit of the current science of 1918. Immortality may be the complement of mortality, as water becomes steam, and steam becomes power, and power becomes heat, and heat becomes light. The conclusion that life beyond is the conservation of energy of life here may be as scientific as that great natural law for material things. I see knowledge become service, service become joy. I see fear prohibit glands from secreting, hope bring back colour to the face and tone to the blood. I see something not material make Jekyl into Hyde; and thank God, make Hyde over into Jekyl again, when birch rods and iron bars have no effect whatever. I have seen love do physical things which the mere intellectual convictions cannot make hearts beat and eyes sparkle, that would not respond even to digitalis and strychnine. I claim that the boy is justified in saying that his kite exists in the heaven, even though it is out of sight and the string leads round the corner, on no other presumption than that he feels it tugging. I prefer to stand with Moses in his belief in the Promised Land, and that we can reach it, than to believe that the Celestial City is a mirage.

This attempted analysis of my religious life has revealed to me two great changes in my position toward its intellectual or dogmatic demands, and both of them are reflections of the ever rightly changing attitude of the defenders of our Christian faith. “Témpora mutantur et nos mutamus in illis.” Christians should not fret because they cannot escape adapting themselves to the environment of 1918 which is no longer that of 918, or 18. The one and only hope for any force, Christianity no less than others, is its ability to adapt itself to all time.

I still study my Bible in the morning and scribble on the margin the lessons which I get out of the portion. I can only do it by using a new copy each time I finish, because it brings new thoughts according to the peculiar experiences, tasks, needs, and environments of the day. I change I know. It does not and yet it does for we see the old truths in new lights. That to me is the glory of the Scriptures. Somehow it suits itself always to my developing needs. Christ did not teach as did other teachers. He taught for all time. We find out that our attitude to everything changes, to the things that give us pleasure and to those that give us pain. It is but a sign of healthy evolution (in this chapter, I suppose I should call it “grace”) that the great churches have ceased to condemn their leaders who are unsound on points which once spelt fagot and stake. To-day predestination no longer involves the same reaction, even if dropped into a conference of selected “Wee Frees.” The American section of the Episcopal Church has omitted to insist on our publicly and periodically declaring that we must have a correct view of three Incompréhensibles, or be damned, as is still the case in our Church of England.

I am writing of my religion. The churches are now teaching that religion is action, not diction. There was a time when I could work with only one section of the Church of God. Thank God, it was a very brief period, but I weep for it just the same. Now I can not only work with any section, but worship with them also. If there is error in their intellectual attitudes, it is to God they stand, not to me. Doubtless there is just as much error in mine. To me, he is the best Christian who “judges not.” To claim a monopoly of Christian religion for any church, looked at from the point of view of following Jesus Christ, is ridiculous. So I find that I have changed, changed in the importance which I place on what others think and upon what I myself think.

Unless a Christian is a witness in his life, his opinions do not matter two pins to God or man. Of course, to-day we should not burn Savonarola, any more than we should actually crucify that brave old fisherman, Peter, or ridicule a Gordon or a Livingstone, or assassinate a Lincoln or a Phillips Brooks, even with our tongues, though they differed from us in their view of what the Christian religion really needs. Oh, of course we shouldn’t!

Perhaps my change spells more and not less faith in the Saviour of the world. As I love the facts of life more, I care less for fusty commentators. As I see more of Christ’s living with us all the days, I care less for arguments about His death. I have no more doubt that He lives in His world to-day than that I do. Why should I blame myself because more and more my mind emphasizes the fact that it is because He lives, and only so far as He lives in me, that I shall live also?