It was in London, when I was first on my own allowance, and free from any supervision of body or mind, that I discovered that mental activities offered a chance for adventure as real and as worthy as any physical field. There I began to appreciate the value of knowledge because it enabled one to do things. When in the operating theatre I watched men familiarly and with confidence achieving magnificent results in relieving pain, prolonging life, and re-storing capacities by their masterly mental qualifications, life seemed suddenly to loom up ten times as attractive as I had ever dreamed it could be. But there was a larger realm of thought which no one could fully comprehend. Many of my teachers were men with wide reputations, who were to me almost as demigods, but among them there was a vast difference of opinion on this subject. Some were silent, and all were reticent regarding it.
The ordinary exponents of the Christian faith had never succeeded in interesting me in any way, or even in making me believe that they were more than professionally concerned themselves. Religion appeared to be a profession, exceedingly conventional, and most unattractive in my estimation, the very last I should have thought of selecting. I considered it effeminate, and should have strongly resented the imputation, and felt heartily ashamed, if any one of my companions had suggested that I was a pietist. I am not excusing my position: I am stating it. I made an exception of the home religion of my mother, which I simply put in a category by itself.
I was attracted one day by the excitement of an enormous crowd outside a tent. I was living at that time in Whitechapel, in the sordid purlieus of which the famous Jack the Ripper was contemporaneously carrying on his profession. One saw every kind of evil, and every variety of wrecked humanity, but among many vanquished, some victors. The fight between good and evil in the individual was always an evident fact. It never occurred to me that I must at some time, willy-nilly, enter consciously into the same arena. I went into the tent, and there I heard a plain common-sense man talking in a plain intelligible way to a huge congregation of really interested people.
The man made me feel in all he said that at least he had thrown every ounce of himself into the issue. In a most matter-of-fact but kindly way, he pulled up a long-winded prayer-bore, who was irritating the audience with droning platitudes, and the Almighty by conferring quite unnecessary information upon him. He even cut short the choir and braved the organist, when he realized that their silence helped more than their art. He ended with an address, the simplicity of which left no doubt in any man's mind that he was a fighter for the practical issues of a better and more cheerful life on earth, a believer in a possible life of big achievement for every soul of us, both here and hereafter. His . . . . appeal for help left a determination in my heart at least. Perhaps I had been wrong in considering the main object of the preaching profession to be preferment rather than social uplift. It was a revelation, it opened a new vision, and I guessed for the first time the meaning in the eyes of the knights of chivalry in familiar famous pictures. Somehow religion as an insurance ticket had never interested me. The selfishness and even cowardice of that appeal, to which I had so often listened, now loomed up in the worse light of distrust. That which I had called faith was after all unfaith. The new faith which there dawned on me for the first time was not the conviction that God would forgive me, but that he had already given me things of which I had not even known; not that he would save me, but that he would use me. I went out with yet a third field for adventure before me, and far the largest, to add to the glory and beauty of life.
A new factor which now forced itself upon me was my will. I believed in free will: it seemed common sense. I knew that materialists did not, and that most of my comrades believed in Darwin and Huxley,
and in the teaching that we are all slaves of unbreakable laws. I believed that I was at the fork of two roads, and could go down the one which I liked. For my venture I wanted knowledge. At that time I thought nothing of reading just as late at night as I could stay awake with a wet towel round my head; but I recognized limits to my capacity. I was forced to admit that there were some things too high for me. And yet — I must go ahead. Only thus will any man find his field for adventure. Courage and every noble virtue, and every idea of the romantic, worthwhile world in which I live would be gone, if I did not believe in free will. "After all, it is not that we strive to do the impossible, but that which to the self of mere experience looks impossible."
. . .
I decided I would prefer and therefore would try to follow the Christ.
What is the explanation of the biased or even bitter spirit in which many men deal with the claim of Christianity to their attention? In medicine and in all other branches of science we are at best supposed
to bring our problems to the bar of our intelligence, without a bias for proving or disproving, but simply told the truth. I have had men come in the middle of the night, come many miles, incur[ing] considerable expense, just to discuss prolonging the life of a patient, who had no more claim on them than that he was a fellow man in distress. Their sole desire was to get wisdom for action, and they considered it a mean thing to worry one iota about the trouble involved in the attempt to prolong mortal
life. The very men who strain at gnats when it is a question of real life, swallow a camel when it relates to mere animal existence.
Among other odd things which struck one with regard to the acceptance of Christianity as a method of life was the fact that the people to decry it most loudly as a remedy were those who had never tried it at
all. The loudest denouncers of a remedy for the body should be those who have tried it without prejudice and found it a failure. It is considered unscientific and irrational for a man to do more than remain silent about a remedy he has not tried personally. If, however, he were to form his opinion by watching others try it, it would be equally unscientific to judge of the experiment unless he were assured it was the unadulterated remedy he was seeing used. Those who have studied Christ's own teachings for themselves, and seen his varied methods tried for humanity's sins and sorrows, have never been disappointed. Most of us must find God, if at all, in the experiences of everyday life.
One cause is almost alone enough to justify and quite sufficient to explain the attitude of mind in which men of science approach the Christian religion. For the claim of priest and theologian and religious teacher of succeeding ages, that their particular faith was knowledge and included absolute truth, was as demonstrably false as it was immodest. "Truth cannot exist in a church any more than learning can in a university." Again, their ceaseless attempts to stereotype the intellectual and social relation of every man of all ages according to their own conception of what the religion of Christ called for has patently held back the true advance of the race. They captured the title of the Christian Church, "vi et armis," just as a knight does the token from his adversary's helm, and arrested the growth of the real church, till
it became like a miserable stunted cretin, for whom for centuries no cure was thought possible. Moreover, they enforced their tenets in a way well calculated to leave objectionable impressions on the minds of scientists, even if they did escape the experience of Galileo. No wonder that, as McComb says: "People are weary of the burden of theological doctrines, and are asking for something permanent, something verifiable in experience, which no criticism can touch and no progress in culture wither." A young German divine is re-
ported to have said, "Christ came to save us from the theologians!"
