A Full Life: The Works of Charlotte Mason

Man lives by Faith, Godward and Manward––

Canon Beeching’s Eleven Sermons on Faith are in refreshing contrast with this sort of modern Sadduceeism. In his view, faith is not mystic, supernatural, an exceptional development; it is the common basis of our dealings with each other. Credit, trust, confidence––the framework of society rests upon these. ‘I can not trust you’––what worse thing can we say to one another? The law recognises every man’s right to the confidence of his fellowmen, and will have a man accounted innocent until he is proven guilty. Our whole commercial and banking systems, what are they but enormous systems of credit, and only one in a hundred, or one in a thousand, fails to sustain this credit. Family and social life rest upon credit of another sort, let us call it moral credit; and only one in a hundred or one in a thousand forfeit the trust. If one here and there give occasion for jealousy, mistrust, suspicion, why, the exception proves the rule. In his dealings with men man lives by credit; in his dealings with God, man lives by faith. Let us use the same word in both cases and say that man is a spiritual being, and in all his relations, Godward or manward, he lives by faith. How simple and easy a thing faith becomes! How especially easy to the children who trust everybody and offer a confiding hand to any guide. Could we only rid ourselves of the materialistic notion that spiritual things are not to be understood by us and that to believe in God is altogether a different thing from to trust a friend, how easy we should find the questions which we allow to stagger our faith.

Thackeray on the Easy and Sceptical Attitude––’And to what does this easy and sceptical life lead a man? . . . To what, we say, does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to shameful loneliness and selfishness, the more shameful because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If, seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest further than a laugh; if; plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the whole wretched world to go past groaning by you unmoved; if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than be such a sensual coward.’ [Pendennis––Thackeray.]

Easy Tolerance Commends itself to many Minds––To accept the outward seeming, to ignore the spiritual reality, is the easier way. To say that prayer is flung, as a child flings his kite, into the air, only to come down again; to say that men are the creatures of circumstances, with no power to determine their own fate; that this belief and that are equal verities, and that the worship of Christ or of Buddha is a mere affair of climate and conditions; this easy tolerance commends itself to many minds in these days.

It is Obvious and Natural that the Father of Spirits should keep Open Access to the Spirits of Men––Nothing can be more obvious, real, natural, necessary, than that the Father of spirits should graciously keep open such intimate access to, and converse with, the spirits of men.

     ’I would that one would grant me,
          O my Lord,
     To find Thee only.

          *           *           *           *           *     That Thou alone wouldst speak to me, and I to Thee,
     As a lover talking to his loved one,
     A friend at table with his friend,’
          [”The Imitation of Christ” (rhythmic translation).]

is ever the aspiration of the devout soul. This continuous aspiration towards closest communion is, spoken or unspoken, the prayer of faith. A vain and fond imagination, says the sceptic, begotten of the heart, as when Narcissus became enamoured of his reflected image! What have we to say in reply? Nothing. He who does not perceive that he loves in his brother, not the material form, but the spiritual being of which this form is one expression, how can he understand that the Spirit of God should draw with irresistible drawings the spirit of man, which is indeed the whole man? For, after all, what is the body but the garment which the spirit shapes to its uses?

All Intercourse of Thought belongs to the Realm of Ideas––In our examination of M. Fouillée’s Education from a National Standpoint, we made some attempt to show that the two schemes of philosophy, which have hitherto divided the world, have done so because both are right, and neither is exclusively right. Matter and Spirit, force and idea, work together in the evolution of character. The brain, somehow, makes material record of those ideas which inspire the life. But the brain does not originate those ideas, They are spiritual in their nature, and are spiritually conveyed, whether by means of the printed page, the glance of an eye, the touch of a hand, or in that holy mystery of the inbreathing of the Divine Spirit, of which we cannot tell whence it comes nor whither it goes. Once we recognise that all thoughts that breathe and words that burn are of their nature spiritual, and appeal to the Spiritual within us––that, in fact, all intercourse of thought and feeling belongs to the realm of ideas, spiritually conveyed, the great mysteries of our religion cease to be hedged off from our common experiences. If the friend who sits beside us deals with us, spirit with spirit, by means of quick interchange of ideas, is it hard to believe that just so is the intercourse between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man? The more perfect the sympathy between human souls, the less the need for spoken words. How easy to go on from this to the thought of that most intimate and blissful of all intercourse, the converse between the devout soul and its God.

Every Man develops his own Philosophy––Our religious thought, as our educational thought is, far more than we imagine, the outcome of our philosophy. And do not let us imagine that philosophy is not for the general run of men, but only for the few. On the contrary, there is no living soul who does not develop his own philosophy of life––that which he appropriates of the current thought of his time, modified by his own experiences.

It would be interesting to trace the effect upon religious thought of the two great schools of philosophy––the Idealistic and the Naturalistic; but that is beyond the writer’s power, and beyond our purpose here; we must confine ourselves to what is immediately practical. The present day crux is, that naturalistic philosophy being in the ascendant, and the things of our religion being altogether idealistic, many noble natures are in revolt, feeling that they cannot honestly accept as truth that which is opposed to human reason. Others, to whom their religious faith is the first thing, but who are yet in touch with the thought and discovery of the day, affect an only half honest compromise with themselves, and say that there are certain questions which they will not examine; matters secular alone being open to searching scrutiny. Now, it is not, as we so often hear, that the times are out of joint, that Christianity is effete, that there is any inherent antagonism between the facts of natural and the facts of spiritual life. It is our own philosophy which needs to be adjusted. We have somehow managed to get life out of focus; we have begun with false initial ideas, and have taken the logical inferences from these for essential truth. We have not perceived that the concern of the reasoning powers is not with moral or spiritual truth, or even with what we call facts, but is, simply, with the logical inferences from any premises whatever accepted by the mind.

Man lives by Faith, Godward and Manward

Things ‘Sacred’ and Things ‘Secular’ an Irreligious Classification––There is a little involuntary resistance in our minds to any teaching which shall draw the deep things of our faith within the sphere of the laws which govern our development as human beings. We prefer that the commerce between God and the soul, in which is our life, should be altogether ’supernatural’; apart from the common laws of life, arbitrary, inexplicable, opposed to reason. If we err in this, it is in reverence we err. Our thought may be poor and crude, but all our desire is to hallow the divine Name, and we know no other way in which to set it apart. But though we err in reverence, we do err, and in the spiritual, as in the natural world, the motive does not atone for the act. We lose through this misconception of our relations with God the sense of unity in our lives. We become aware of an altogether unnatural and irreligious classification into things sacred and things secular. We are not in all things at one with God. There are beautiful lives in which there is no trace of this separation, whose aims are confined to the things we call sacred. But many thoughtful, earnest persons feel sorely the need of a conception of the divine relation which shall embrace the whole of human life which shall make art, science, politics, all those cares and thoughts of men which are not rebellious, sacred also as being all engaged in the great evolution, the evolution of the Kingdom of God.