The more deep and transforming a man's own religious experience has
been, the more he will insist upon the importance of this inward
approach. Here is a man who has had a profound evangelical experience.
He has gone down into the valley of the shadow with a deep sense of
spiritual need; he has found in Christ a Saviour who has lifted him up
into spiritual freedom and victory; he has gone out to live with a
sense of unpayable indebtedness to him. He has had, in a word, a
typical religious experience at its best with three elements at the
heart of it: a great need, a great salvation, a great gratitude. When
such a man considers the modern social movement, however beautiful its
spirit or admirable its concrete gains, it seems to him superficial if
it presents itself as a panacea. It does not go deep enough to reach
the soul's real problems. The continual misunderstanding between the
Church and the social movement has, then, this explanation: the
characteristic approach of the Christian Gospel to the human problem is
from within out; the characteristic approach of much of the modern
social movement is from without in.
II
If, therefore, the Christian Gospel is going to be true to itself, it
must carefully preserve amid the pressure of our modern social
enthusiasms certain fundamental emphases which are characteristic of
its genius. It must stress the possibility and the necessity of the
inward transformation of the lives of men. We know now that a thorny
cactus does not have to stay a thorny cactus; Burbank can change it.
We know that a crab-apple tree does not have to stay a crab-apple tree;
it can be grafted and become an astrakhan. We know that a malarial
swamp does not have to stay a malarial swamp; it can be drained and
become a health resort. We know that a desert does not have to stay a
desert; it can be irrigated and become a garden. But while all these
possibilities of transformation are opening up in the world outside of
us, the most important in the series concerns the world within us. The
primary question is whether human nature is thus transformable, so that
men can be turned about, hating what formerly they loved and loving
what once they hated. Said Tolstoy, whose early life had been
confessedly vile: "Five years ago faith came to me; I believed in the
doctrine of Jesus, and my whole life underwent a sudden transformation.
What I had once wished for I wished for no longer, and I began to
desire what I had never desired before. What had once appeared to me
right now became wrong, and the wrong of the past I beheld as right."
[1]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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