My Philosophy and My Religion

He was so interested in the lives of men and women, and the great truth that He perceived and bore witness to to win them and redeem them to their higher and better selves, and thus bear fruit in their lives and in the great life of His people, that He chose the personal way of presenting it. We find Him where the people were and could be gathered together most naturally, out on the hillside, by the lakeside, out under the open sky, and but rarely in synagogue or temple.

He understood human nature also so thoroughly, and His experience with the conditions which He found prevailing among the people was such that He realized that God’s truth must be kept ever‑flowing, upspringing continually and ever‑freshly in the individual heart, and that when encrustations were formed, by being either deliberately planned or woven, or naturally, it meant always spiritual or moral stultification and degradation or death.

The only ones He ever condemned, and these He condemned more than once, and with scathing scorn, were those who formulated systems and said—Here is your truth, subscribe to it—who sought for their own standing or for power or for money to gain control over the minds and therefore the lives of men. Their very keynote was “The prophets have said,” “Moses hath said,” and they sought thus to establish their authority. This is almost invariably true where a system, an organization is formulated and builded upon a free upspringing truth or revelation of any great prophet or teacher, and when it is not kept open to the free and ever‑flowing truth of the present day or hour.

The truth is gone, the shell remains, and on account of the effort made to keep it a close possession it even smells in its decay—or if not this, then it becomes powerless in its influence. It is even worse, being a semblance of the truth, supported many times by casuistry and complacency, it keeps many a one from hearing the Divine voice, and following the Divine guidance that is always imminent in every human soul, waiting to manifest itself and to lead, to beautify and continually to replenish the life, which above all things else is desirable.

The only ones He ever did condemn were those who took the truths of the prophets and inspired teachers and wove them into a system with many furnishings of their own, so that eventually the furnishings exceeded and eclipsed the truths themselves, in order they might gain authority over the minds and lives of men for their own gain.

It was these who flourished then, and who flourish in all times and in connection with all religions of whom He spoke: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.” “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.” “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense make long prayers; therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.”

There have been times when His great virile message has been almost eclipsed. Other prophets inspired by the singular power and beauty of His truth have arisen to bear witness to it, and are upholding it with clear vision and with fervid and heroic power.

One of the most noted characteristics or facts of this, our time, is the great number of men and women who are going directly to the Master, who are sitting at His feet, and are getting an inspiration and a knowledge directly from His life and His teachings, that they have never been able to get otherwise. They are understanding Him in the simple direct manner in which He spoke, and intended Himself to be understood.

The element of fear has lost its hold on the part of all thinking and really aspiring men and women, and they are eagerly after something that is not deadening, but that is truly constructive and building in their lives. Great numbers are finding it in fuller measure in the life and revelations of the Master—sometimes helped by the occasional light that is flashed to them by one who has understood and grasped His great truths—than they have been able to glean from any other source.

To His question: “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” they reply: There is no profit, for unless the soul is awake so that the life can be actively connected and thereby animated by the Divine life and power, so that it is no longer lived merely as a body under the domination of the senses, it remains a poor, but partly developed, pitiable thing. The eternal law, the law of evolution, is so established in the very life itself, that it can find no real and lasting pleasure except in the highest development that it is capable of.

There was a reason, a very clear‑cut and definite reason for the Master’s statement: “Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” There was the same reason that impelled that matchless Parable of the Lost Son. After he came to his senses, he realized the great losses he was sustaining by living alone in the lower stories of his being, missing thereby the greater good that lay in the stories above, and he said—I will arise and go to my father. The other portion of the parable brings out the father’s attitude and great love, in that he longs for the son’s return, and forgiveness is a part of his nature as soon as he does return.

They see a similar reason in Jesus’ saying: “How hard it is for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.” If a man give all of his thought and time to the mere accumulation and keeping of material things which he’ counts as riches, what inclination and time has he for the mind, the soul, the spirit, the unfoldment of which and the leadership of which is the kingdom of heaven. And, let it be said, many men and many women of riches are realizing this as never before, and are realizing what a wonderful thing it is to have riches, and are using them as well as their own time and ability in efforts to bring about in individual lives and in their communities and in the national life, opportunities for a greater realization and actualization of the Kingdom—and as an incident, are pushing straight into it themselves.

They also realize the reason in Jesus’ statement: “He that is greatest among you shall be your servant.” They realize that there is no such thing as finding greatness, any more than happiness, by seeking for it directly; that it comes always indirectly, through the love and the service that we render to others; and that an added reason for this, in addition to its being written into the very law of human life, is because when one is able to get out of his own little self, and enter into the lives of others, his own life becomes multiplied ten, a hundred, a thousand fold, both through participation in their lives, and through the joy that is their joy.

We hear and read much today of the spiritual life and of spiritual men. Just what is meant is, I am sure, not clear to many. My own conception is this—and it may throw some light on the spiritual life in action, and its relation to and part in the lives of individuals and in great world problems.

The spiritual life is the life that is awake to and is under the leadership of the Spirit within—the God Spirit. The one who is so awake realizes that there is but the One Life, and that what we call individuals are but individual expressions of that Life— that we are therefore all members one of another.

He realizes the fundamental basis of the Master’s statement that the greatest law pertaining to life is: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment,” and that a law equally fundamental is: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” His supreme desire then is deliberately to order his life that the divine life within him, which is the God life, can unfold and lead and dominate his life, thus raising it to its highest, whereby he is pushed out in his desire and his efforts in that every other life can realize likewise its highest.

In it he discerns the gradual outgrowing and hence the elimination of the law of the tooth and the claw of the jungle, as pertaining to an earlier and more savage stage of development and life, and supplanting it the law of mutuality—which is love, sympathy, co‑operation. It is the difference primarily between me and mine, and we and ours, because we are all of the same life, members one of another, and therefore co‑operators and helpers one of another.

It is the motive that determines all, and how true one is, whatever one’s conditions are, to that motive. So whatever one’s sphere of action is, humble or large, if he or she has the larger vision, and is animated not by and for self alone, but by the common welfare, which is served alone by love, kindness, care, consideration, sympathy, mutuality, he or she is a co‑operator with God, he or she is a spiritual man or woman—living the truly religious life, although not necessarily professing any religion.

There is a wonderful opportunity here for men of exceptional executive and financial ability and power, that our great natural resources and modern business have brought into being. Can he who has driven and accumulated for self, who has used these wonderful powers for self and for self alone, who sometimes has been a menace and a detriment to the best interests of society at large, be made or become a spiritual man?

Yes, and its rests purely in a change in his motive. Let this new consciousness be born within him—and the awakening of the God consciousness means always the awakening along with it of the social, the neighbor consciousness, and also conscience—and he who formerly was a worker for self with no direct connection with human welfare, becomes at once a co‑operator in the Divine purpose and plan, a co‑worker with God—an engine of power in the cause of truth, righteousness and goodness. Incidentally he steps out from his own little stunted—though apparently to him great—life, into the larger life of God and humanity, whereby it and its worth even to himself become increased many fold.

There is nothing more damning to a man’s own soul, and more damnable in its relations to human welfare, than the idea that the chief end of life is to build, to accumulate, and prosper for one’s self, missing his place in the great human social structure—becoming voluntarily an outcast from the larger life of God—his Father, and from the human kind—his brother.

The greatest man, or, rather, I would say, “the most important” man in his community—the most important man in the world—could it be told who such might be, can drop out of life and thirty days after the ground closes in over his body it will be scarcely remembered that he even lived, unless he has concerned himself with life—so utterly lacking in imagination are those who divorce themselves from life that they become dead to the hopes, the efforts, the problems, the need of help, the heart‑throbs of their fellows.

It is after all the thinker, those most awake to life, those awake to beauty and art, the creator, the teacher, and, above all, those who serve their fellows—which but evidences their interest in life—who get the most out of life while here, and who live on after they have gone.

No wonder we become mentally tired and uncertain, spiritually impoverished and blunted, physically fagged and depleted. Health is the natural and the normal—abounding throbbing health, with a keenness and zest that makes every hour of life enjoyable—and such it would be did we live more natural and normal lives.

We must work for we must have bread, and work, occupation, something useful and valuable to do, is one of the established laws of happiness in life. Our mistake is to think that we can live by bread alone. We become so engrossed in things that we lose the sense of balance in life. We worship bigness, forgetting it has nothing to do necessarily with greatness. “Every man,” said Marcus Aurelius, “is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.”

Life and the things that pertain most directly to it, are after all the things that really count. They are always more interesting than boards, or bricks, or iron, or railroad ties, or lands, or business blocks, and the men and women that are primarily interested in life are always the ones that are the most interesting to others. It was John Burroughs who, in “The Summit of the Years,” wrote: “I am in love with this world; by my constitution I have nestled lovingly in it. It has been home to me. It has been my point of outlook into the universe. I have not bruised myself against it, nor tried to use it ignobly. I have tilled its soil, I have gathered its harvests, I have waited upon its seasons and always have I reaped what I have sown. While I delved I did not lose sight of the sky overhead. While I gathered its bread and meat for my body, I did not neglect to gather its bread and meat for my soul.”

There is no labor problem outside of imagination, sympathy, mutuality, co‑operation. Put this force into operation, select as heads and leaders of labor organizations, and as executives and representatives of capital, those who are big enough to realize this, and our labor problems will be solved almost over night— and, incidentally, hundreds of millions will be saved in annual strikes and lockouts and with a generally fruitless result.

Men—employer and worker—have been working on the basis of self alone, self‑interest, and through it capitalizing antagonism, envy, hatred, the negative forces in life. When they begin to capitalize love, mutuality, cooperation, they will then be dealing with the positive and the true building forces, that will pay active dividends of far greater proportions. And incidentally, but possibly of even greater importance, it will raise their lives from being mean, pitiable specimens of men— because so below their possibilities, below the standard of what men can be, to lives of splendid noble stature, and that will know the joy of love, sympathy, service.

All human relations but await the capitalization of love, sympathy, mutuality, co‑operation, to make them that God‑like thing they can and eventually will be. Why not now? Ignorance alone prevents. Those who have been wise enough to begin, are realizing returns in a two‑fold form—increased dividends, and the satisfaction and joy that results from the observance of one of the fundamental laws of life and conduct.

There are no international problems outside of imagination, sympathy, mutuality, co‑operation—outside of a realization: “Ye are members one of another.” If we haven’t sense enough to realize this yet, and fail to put at the head of affairs in our various nations men who are big enough to know it, un‑self‑centered and direct enough to actualize it, then we must go on with our present blundering methods.

It will mean the periodic destruction of the flower of the world’s young manhood, and eventually a tax‑burden that will drag the entire world into economic ruin, in addition to the burdens that every man, woman and child in the civilized world is laboring under today. Young as we are as a nation a little over ninety per cent of all taxes collected by the Federal Government each year goes for wars—past, present or future.

Out of our blundering chaotic methods, however, a World Court, a world court of right and reason is taking form; but it needs yet the help of men who believe that “God has made of one blood all nations, to dwell on the face of the earth,” and who know that sympathy, mutuality, co‑operation is the ultimate law of all civilized and satisfactory life. It needs their help, that there may be placed and kept at the head of national affairs, men of the type whereby we will reach that state of which President Harding recently spoke when he said: “We shall never be called on to make war so long as God and men rule together.” And when again on the same day he spoke at a Memorial meeting for five thousand war‑dead on the army piers of Hoboken, he said: “It must not be again.”

Internationalism is above nationalism—and it is what the world must come to. At the same time each citizen has a paramount duty to his own country and its affairs and welfare, in order that it may be politically and economically clean and progressive, and that it may be a nation so righteous, so just, and so powerful that it may become a strong and worthy member of the coming world federation.

The weakness of a republican form of government is that you and I, the average citizen, do not take the interest in our own affairs, and by this I mean the affairs of government, that we should take. I am following the impulse to insert here a citizen’s creed, which I prepared sometime ago. I commend its contents to readers in my own country and in all countries.

As eternal vigilance is always the price of liberty, so an intelligent participation in all matters of government on the part of every man and every woman in the nation, is our sole guarantee not only of Democracy in government, but in the promotion of the highest good of all its people. For unless through enlightened self‑interest we make matters of government our business, there are those who inevitably will seek power in and through government to be manipulated for their own aggrandisement and gain.