“We know in part.” This is not the statement of some indifferent agnostic, who, because religious questions are difficult, insists that he does not know anything about them. It is not the statement of a defiant infidel, who, because he does not understand everything about religion, declares that neither he nor any one knows anything about it. It is not the statement of one of those hesitating individuals who are always trying to steer a safe course somewhere between yes and no, between the right of it and the wrong of it; who are never quite sure whether there is or is not a God, but think that the truth lies, perhaps, about halfway between the two claims.
This man Paul was not an agnostic, nor an infidel, nor a hesitator. He knew certain things, he was sure of them. He was ready to say so right out loud, and to stand up and be cut in two for them if need be. “I know whom I have believed,” he cries; there was no uncertainty in his mind on that point. “I know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ”—and it had changed him from a narrow, bigoted, persecuting Pharisee into one who wrote the best hymn on love to be found in print and who embodied the spirit of it in his daily conduct. “I know that all things work together for good to them that love God”—and in Paul’s case “all things” included a great deal of hardship and persecution, of disappointment and sorrow, but he never wavered in his confidence that some wise purpose was being furthered by it all. These and many other things he knew. “In part we know,” was the way he would have placed his emphasis and the actual content of his knowledge was large indeed.
He makes this statement as an honest, modest, reasonable man face to face with spiritual realities too great for perfect comprehension or final statement. His knowledge of them was large, but they were still larger. He must have known when he wrote those words that he was a man of no mean attainments. He wrote a third of the New Testament with his own hand. He did more to shape Christian thought than any one save Christ himself. He had been “caught up into the third heaven,” whatever that may mean. He was the most effective missionary of the new faith the world has ever seen. He was a man of marvelous reach and grasp, but face to face with these great spiritual realities, God and redemption, prayer and duty, immortality and the final judgment, he frankly confesses that the returns are not all in; the last words have not been said and cannot be said; the full appreciation of these high values has not been reached. We know in part.
We are glad to find these words on the lips of the world’s greatest apostle. They are reassuring to those of us who are troubled by the limitations of our own religious knowledge. They match the mood of this modern time of questioning and unrest which is so much in evidence on the college campus and in university circles. They suggest that finality is much more difficult than some of the earlier generations in their simplicity supposed. One does not find those familiar words, “Finis” or “The End,” printed on the last page of a book so commonly as in other days. Even where the author has said his say in several volumes, each one as bulky as a volume of the “Britannica,” he knows that there is more to be said. He leaves the way open without trying to block it by writing, “The End.”
We are conscious that we have not reached the terminus on any of the great trunk lines of religious inquiry. We are scattered along at various way stations, thankful for the part we know, grateful for progress made, but confessing with Paul that we have not attained, that we are not made perfect either in theory or in practise. But whatever headway we have made we are determined in the spirit of Paul to use the part we know and press forward toward the mark of the prize of the high calling of God. This is the dominant mood of the serious but cautious, inquiring element in modern life. We are, therefore, grateful for the word of this modest, reasonable man, who with all his store of spiritual experience said quietly, “We know in part.”
We might carry these words in many directions and find them helpful. Some of us have been greatly disturbed as to the doctrine of Providence. We have been told on high authority that God reigns and that “He doeth all things well.” When times are good we really believe it. We see that the way of the transgressor is hard, as it ought to be, and that on the whole the way of righteousness is the way of peace and honor. We have a comfortable persuasion that all things taken in their completeness and final outcome are working together for good to those whose purposes are right.
But just when we have gotten our doctrine of Providence all snug we witness something like this: Yonder a young Christian mother dies. She was an ideal daughter, a devoted wife, and the beautiful mother of children who loved her and needed her more than they did anything else on earth. But with a whole community of people, perhaps, praying for her recovery she dies, while just around the corner a group of scamps, who are making the world worse, rather than better, live on, fat and hearty. And then somehow our doctrine of Providence, our belief as to the reign of a wise and good God, receives a hard shock.
But we know in part. We know the usefulness of that life here; we do not know to what further and, perhaps, higher service it has been called there. We see what has been interrupted here; we do not see what has been taken up further on. We do not know the ultimate effect of this stern sorrow upon that household, the result of this necessity for the regirding of all their powers as they walk now in the shadow of a great bereavement. We do not even know God’s ultimate purpose for those scamps who live on; the returns are not all in for them either. We know in part, and what we know, taking human life broadly, is so reassuring that we are willing to trust God and walk on by faith.
Ships in Norway, entering the great fiords, sometimes sail so close to the cliffs that one can stand on deck and almost lay his hand upon the face of the rock. When one captain was asked about it, he said, “That which is in sight indicates what is out of sight. The slant above the water-line indicates the slant below and we are perfectly safe.” The general slant of God’s dealings with us, taking the facts we know in the total impression they make as to his wisdom and justice, is such that we are prepared to trust him below the water-line. Therefore when I cannot in some difficult situation make out his ultimate purpose with the naked eye, I fall back upon my confidence in his moral character.
As to this faith in the divine integrity no serious, observant man should remain in doubt. It is a faith which rests upon a wide induction of fact, vaster by far than my own experience of his dealings with me. It is like repeating an axiom to say that the creature does not rise above the Creator. If men at any time, anywhere are good, there must be goodness in the Creator of those men, goodness in the force or forces lying back of them, call those forces by what name we may. And if the stream of human goodness has been widening, deepening, flowing more strongly as the ages have come and gone, it points back to character and purpose in the One who created the stream itself. That goodness in man argues goodness in God, while badness in man does not argue badness in God is plain, in that sane men everywhere regard goodness as normal, while badness is abnormal.
And look at the swelling tide of human goodness down through the ages! Look at Livingstone laying down his life to carry light into the dark continent! Look at Cromwell fearing God and none else, neither king nor pope, neither nobles nor bishops, and giving his life that he might win constitutional and religious freedom for the English-speaking race! Look at Lincoln counting not his life dear if he might serve the cause of the Union and the interests of his brothers in bonds! Look at the vast array of human goodness massing itself in saints and seers, in heroes and martyrs, in teachers and mothers, going forth not to be ministered unto, but to minister, giving their lives for the betterment of the world! Look at it all and then ask yourself if you can believe for one moment that all this goodness originated itself, persisted, and increased in opposition to the will of the Creator or in the face of his moral indifference or without creative goodness in him! The claim would be monstrous! This wide induction of fact begets a profound faith in the moral character of God and when we cannot see we trust, because as to the final meaning of many strange experiences we know in part.
Take the matter of prayer and the way it enters into the formation of character and the shaping of events. We know that prayer registers a definite and wholesome influence on many a life. Those who loudly assert that virtue and vice are as purely physical products as sugar and vitriol, that all right action and wrong action can be accounted for on material grounds, have not made out their case, they have not begun to make it out. There is something unseen, mysterious, but real and powerful, which impels certain people to love the unlovely, to make sacrifices for the thoughtless and ungrateful, to stand firm in the path of duty when it is anything but the line of least resistance. The love of right, the sense of obligation, the habit of adherence to principle, all these are as real as granite. But the forces which make them strong are spiritual, and these forces receive constant reenforcement from the habit of prayer.
This part we know. We have seen the hearts of men turned from anger to love, from unholy to holy purpose, from weakness to strong resolve by prayer. We have seen home life made sweeter because once at least in every twenty-four hours the members of the household came together and knelt before God, confessing their faults, asking his guidance and allowing that which was true and right within them to grow by its communion with him who is altogether true and right. Any sensible man would feel that his life, his property, his family were all safer in a community where men prayed, than in one where they only used the name of God profanely. This part we know about prayer.
But as to the ultimate effect of it, the final philosophy of it, the precise way in which the finite spirit becomes a colaborer with the Infinite Spirit in shaping events, I freely confess that there is a great deal which I do not understand. I know in part, but the part I know is so full of blessed and beautiful results that I want my prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom, for the doing of his will on earth, for the gift of bread for the daily need, for forgiveness, and final deliverance from evil—I want that prayer to go up, winging its way to the throne backed by all the faith and hope and love I can put into it. And I am not troubled by the fact that I cannot explain all the grounds of my confidence, for, like Paul, I know in part.
Take the matter of the future life! There is much here we would like to know. What are our loved ones who have gone on doing now? Are they witnesses of the blunders and the failures we make here? Just how is right rewarded and wrong punished when the two are so intricately interwoven? No man is so white a sheep but that there are patches of goat about him here and there. No man is so bad but that there is some good in him if we observingly distil it out. And what of the final outcome—can good people be happily content if the sinful souls they loved are in conscious pain or even if they have been remorselessly wiped off the slate of existence? Is it too much to hope that God’s persuasions to righteousness being infinite may prove irresistible and so at last successful in every case? So men and women who have loved and lost those who passed out of this world without a sign of genuine repentance or of saving faith have queried ever. A child can ask more questions here in five minutes than all the philosophers and theologians on earth can answer in as many years.
We know in part! We cannot measure off the streets of the new Jerusalem in kilometers. We cannot describe its attractions in any kind of Baedeker. We cannot lay out a detailed program of God’s dealings with the good and the bad people of earth in all the unending years. Nor is there any obligation whatsoever upon us to undertake the construction of such a program.
We know in part and the part we know is something like this: I feel a profound confidence that I shall live on after death. The grounds of my hope are many. The mass of unreason and injustice I would have left upon my hands unexplained and unexplainable if I were to undertake to deny the truth of immortality is one. The all but universal and persistent desire of men for future life is another. Somehow the integrity of the universe is such that it does not develop in men normal, wide-spread, and persistent desires unless there is somewhere to be found a corresponding satisfaction for such desires standing over against them. The fact that the clear visions and the bright hopes of the best poets and prophets the world has known have been on the side of immortality means much. The seers have sung and the prophets have uttered their high anticipations by the power of an endless life. The words of the supreme figure in history, Jesus Christ, as to the truth of immortality mean still more. He saw clearly, spoke wisely, lived divinely, and I cannot believe that here he reared his expectations on a fundamental mistake.
It ought to be remembered that for those who affirm and for those who deny the truth of immortality, it is alike a matter of moral faith because no convincing demonstration has been made out either for or against. The men who deny immortality are not opposing knowledge to faith; they are only meeting a positive faith with a negative one. But inasmuch as reason and experience, the best in literature and the One who has taken the moral government of the world upon his shoulders as none other ever did, stand so strongly upon the side of the positive faith, I feel confident of an unbroken life.
As to the final judgment, I know that righteousness and love which are useful and beautiful here will be useful and beautiful always and everywhere; the clearer the light in which they stand the more their glory will be revealed. I know that sin and selfishness are mean and hateful here, and they will be mean and hateful everywhere; the clearer the light in which they stand the more their hatefulness will be manifest. What shall be their final fate I do not undertake to say. We know in part, but the clear prospects of the life to come, where righteousness and love shall have their freer chance to be and to do, where sin and selfishness shall meet with more awful rebuke, are sufficient to stimulate right action and to give warning to those who would identify their destinies with evil. As to the rest, in the incompleteness of our knowledge, we may safely leave it to the wisdom and the justice of God.
I might carry this idea in other directions, but let me turn at once to the other phase of the topic. In part we know, and the part we know is naturally the part we use. We wish that we knew more. We hope to know more some time. In the meantime we recognize that the way to make progress along that line is to use the part we already know.
In almost any direction, unless it be pure mathematics or formal logic, our knowledge, even in the sophomore year, stops a long way this side of complete understanding. No man knows the length and breadth, the height and depth of his wife’s love for him, if she is a good woman. Some part of it he knows, but the love she might show in some emergency, nursing him through a long illness, sharing with him some painful experience, bearing with him some heavy burden—that fuller love he does not know and cannot know until the time comes for its manifestation. But the part he knows about his wife’s love for him is the part he uses and the very thought of how beautiful it is and of the unrevealed capacity it may contain for willing and joyous sacrifice on his behalf, makes him feel that he ought to be a better man to be deserving of it. Thus he moves along in that part of the strength and beauty of a woman’s love which he knows, allowing the fuller knowledge of it to come as it may. And this is precisely the attitude of the reasonably religious man—those realities with which he deals, God and redemption, prayer and duty, immortality and the final judgment, are confessedly too great for final statement, but he knows something about them and the part he knows is the part he uses.
Next door to my home I have two little neighbors, boys of three and five. They are close friends of mine and they have taught me much. Their father is a physician, a busy, useful, Christian man. The boys understand their father’s life “in part.” They know that he is a doctor and that he goes to see sick people and make them well. But as to the methods he employs and the remedies he uses they know nothing at all. They know in a dim sort of way that he makes the money which pays the bills and keeps them in a home full of comfort and beauty. But as to his financial standing, his investments, and his prospects, they know nothing. They know that along with the hearty good-will which he feels for everybody, he loves their mother and them supremely; but how he came to love that particular woman rather than some other one, and how they were born of that love, or how far that love might go in defending and providing for them, they do not concern themselves for one moment. They know their father’s love in part.
But the part they know is the part they use. They live in their father’s house; they sit at his table; they greet him with a shout when he comes in from his practise. They obey him and trust him and think he is the best man in the world. They climb up into his lap and talk to him, not about his practise, but about their own small affairs, their tops, their marbles, their little wagon—as he wants them to do. He meets them always on their own ground and deals with them in the terms and interests of their own lives. Thus my two little friends live and grow, knowing their father’s life in part.
“Except we become as little children” in the house of our Father, whose total life exceeds our present comprehension, whose plans and purposes for us are too high for complete understanding, whose outlook for us is vaster every way than our own outlook—“except we become as little children we shall in no wise enter his kingdom.” But if we take the part we know and use it, acting on it and living by it, we will be treading the way which leads to a fuller and more blessed experience of the Father’s wisdom and love as surely as my two small friends are doing as they grow up toward their manhood in their father’s house.
In how many ways Jesus made plain this duty of utilizing the near and the familiar when we would learn the remote! He seemed to realize that religion would be crusted over with misconceptions so that ordinary people would find it hard to get at; that some men would write big dull books about it, which no one would want to read; that other men in talking about it would use words which would not go into a suit-case without being folded twice, thus confusing the people. For that reason, perhaps, he made his own teaching simpler than that of any one whose words stand recorded in Holy Writ.
He stood once at midnight among the trees talking with a thoughtful man as to certain aspects of the religious life. “How can these things be?” the man asked. “How can a man be born when he is old?” Just then the wind rustled the leaves at his side and Jesus remarked: “The wind bloweth where it listeth. You hear the sound thereof, but you cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth.” We cannot tell why the wind blows one day from the north and we have cold, another day from the south and we have heat, another day from the east and we have rain. We cannot explain satisfactorily many of the mysteries connected with the wind. But a man who is a fisherman can put up his sail and fill it with this wind which is such a mystery. He can sail out through the Golden Gate and come back in the evening with a boatload of fish for the needs of his family and for other hungry men. The wind that fills his sail he knows, but the origin, the ultimate destiny, and all the relationships it sustains to the other forces in the universe he does not know. The part he knows, however, is the part he uses by relating it to his own life. And this is the act of a man of sense in matters spiritual as well. He knows the life of the Infinite Spirit in part, but he uses the part he knows by relating it helpfully to his own life.
When we start in after that fashion it is a straight course. The boy begins his study of mathematics by learning to count ten—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. He moves straight along by that path until, with these same ten figures, he is computing the courses the planets take and measuring the distances of the fixed stars. He begins his study of literature by learning his letters, a, b, c, etc. By and by, using these same familiar letters, he is making his way through the intricacies of “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”; he is walking with Emerson and Hegel across the fields of philosophy. He begins his study of music by learning the elementary sounds, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do. Presently, with these same tones, he is singing in a great chorus which renders “The Messiah” or playing his instrument in some orchestra which is producing the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. In every situation in life progress is made not by being appalled over the amount we do not know, or by vainly wishing we knew more, but by taking the part we know, relating it to our lives, and making it the instrument of gaining that fuller knowledge.
God is greater than any wise and good father but not different. Carry the love of a wise and good father up to the nth degree and you have the love of God for his people. The life of the spirit is nobler than the life of the flesh, but it stands closely related; it is a life which hungers after righteousness, thirsts for the living God, and grows strong by exercising itself in useful service. Heaven is finer and purer than earth, but not unlike. It was for the Jew a “New Jerusalem,” and it is for every man a “new —” whatever may be the name of the city where he dwells. It is the ordinary life ennobled and glorified by the infusion of a finer spirit. The glorious fulfilment comes through the richer combinations and the fuller development of the simpler parts we know already.
I wish I could persuade the college man who has never entered into an open, joyous, Christian life to just begin. There are many things which he does not understand nor, perhaps, believe. We will put them aside for the moment, not ignoring them, but postponing their consideration. Let him take the part he knows, the moral imperative of living the best life one sees, and no finer life than that of the Christian can be named; the necessity for some competent guide, and none better than Jesus of Nazareth has thus far appeared; the clearly ascertained benefits to be gained by trust and obedience; the helpful reactions which come through prayer and the reading of the Bible; the manifest advantage of cherishing the hope of a future life and of facing squarely upon the fact that what we sow we reap. All this he knows! Let the part he knows be the part he uses. If he will only act upon it, building it into his own life and following where it leads, he will be on his way toward the place where he will know even as he is known.