From New Starts in Life: And other sermons by Phillips Brooks (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1896)

THE JOY OF RELIGION
by Phillips Brooks

"And as for the prophet and the priest and the people that shall say, The burden of the Lord, I will even punish that man and his house. Thus shall ye say every one to his neighbor and every one to his brother, What hath the Lord answered? and What hath the Lord spoken?"
— Jeremiah 23:34-35

THERE must have been a very sad state of things in Jerusalem when Jeremiah the prophet wrote these words. The people were reluctantly religious. They believed in God as Jesus said that the devils believed and trembled. They went to worship Him and to ask His will because they were afraid not to go. They would gladly have stayed away from the temple, and shut all religion out of their houses and their hearts, and been rid of the whole thing if they had dared. They did not dare, and so their religion lay like a heavy cloud upon their city instead of filling its houses and its streets like sunshine. The people, when they talked with one another, called it "The burden of the Lord."

Jeremiah felt how angry God must be with this. He knew that the heart of the Father could not value any such enforced and frightened service of His children. Another picture filled his imagination wholly different from that which he was seeing every day. He pictured to himself the hosts of people all flocking to Jehovah as their dearest friend. He heard the streets all alive with the questions which the people were asking one another about the last utterance of God. "What hath the Lord answered?" "What hath the Lord said?" he heard them eagerly inquiring of one another. Then he turned back from his dream, and lo! there was nothing in the real Jerusalem except this slavish obedience to a Master whom the people did not dare to disobey. No wonder that the word of the Lord came to him, and he spoke. "As for the people and the priest and the people that shall say The burden of the Lord, I will even punish that man and his house. Thus shall we say every one to his neighbor and every one to his brother, What hath the Lord answered? and What hath the Lord spoken? The prophet simply hears issuing from the lips,of God such a remonstrance as must come from th heart of any generous friend whose friendship is accepted as a burden and not welcomed as a joy. The father whose son obeys him out of servile fear, the teacher whose lessons are learned in dogged and ungrateful submission, the generous ruler whose sub jects hatehim, and would rebel against him if they dared,--these all interpret to us the feeling which Jeremiah expresses from the heart of God. Ho modern it all sounds! How it lets us see that th men in old Jerusalem were like the men to-day. I is modern because it is universal. It belongs to our time because it. belongs to all times. Always there have been men who did not dare not to be religious, but who never got at the heart and soul and glory of religion because their religion never came to be an eager, delighted, impatient seeking for the will and help of God. I think that there can be no presentation of God to us more pathetic, more full of gracious dignity and living majesty, than that which shows Him earnestly remonstrating with His children upon this false and base relation which they take towards Him, which makes it impossible for the richest of His life and help to flow over into them.

Let us try to understand this condition of the people of Jerusalem which is also the condition of so many modern men, this strange phenomenon of reluctant religiousness, this service of God which all the time that it is being done still counts itself a burden.

We begin by recognizing the way in which God has built the world so that the healthy and legitimate exercise of every power ought always to be a source of pleasure to its fortunate possessor. How that law runs through everything! Our imagination seems to feel its presence even in unconscious things. The first poetic instinct thinks it almost hears the pine tree shout upon the hill top with the joy of growing, and catches a sense of satisfaction from the rhythm of the machinery with which the factory beats out the music of its work. When we come up to living things, we do not need the effort of imagination. Everyone can see with what enjoyment the bird flies and the dog hunts. The horse as well as the rider is happy in the rush of healthy action. Even the lowest creature who floats on the pool's surface or lies and basks in the sunshine feels, we are sure, some dull, half-conscious pleasure in the mere act of living, in the normal activity of each organic function which is the witness of its place in the great universe of God.

When we mount higher still and come to man then it is still more certain. The test of health in man is that joy follows action. You lift your arm you draw your breath, you think your thought with pain, and you are instantly aware that something is wrong with you. There is some pebble in the stream of life that jars its current and makes it, in so far not life but death, not flow and progress but stop-page and interruption. All your associations with your fellow-men, bringing out your powers into. action, making you use your capacity of living trusting, persuading, obeying, helping, and being helped, all of these ought to bring unmixed delight: The same things which we do in these earthly streets often with reluctance and complaint will bring unr, mixed delight when we do them on the streets o the New Jerusalem. There it will be possible to tes the truth and healthiness of every action by its joy. "It hurts me," or "I do not want to do it," will be the soul's testimony that the thing ought not be done. There will be the safety and the peace of heaven.

"Serene shall be our days and bright,
And happy shall our nature be,
When love is an unerring light,
And joy its own security."

We are very far away from that now. "I know it is my duty because I hate it so," is very apt to be the cynical expression of the condition in which men feel that they are living, but yet it is a noble sign of how our nature cannot fall entirely away from its design and first idea that the human soul always keeps the double sense that it was made for happiness and goodness both, and that when it comes to its completeness it will find them both in harmony, that in the end righteousness and peace shall kiss each other.

It would be very terrible if it were not so, if the intrinsic condition of activity were pain. That would be incredible as a general fact of human life, and it would be incredible also, I think, of any one human power taken by itself. If our experience of man found that there were any capacity of man whose natural exercise, apart from all deranging circumstances, brought distress and misery, how we should stand perplexed and almost dismayed. Plenty of powers there are which, under present conditions, as we are living now, we cannot put into exercise without pain,—we cannot work without weariness, we cannot trust without disappointment, we cannot think without feeling the thought which we send out striking almost immediately on some obstacle which turns it out of the course in which we sent it to find the perfect truth. But all of these we know are accidental pains. To work, to trust, to think, are, in their essence, self-indulgences. The soul seeks them with appetite, seeks them even in spite of the painful experience with which they are now constantly associated, and so bears witness of its belief that in themselves they are sources of joy and not of suffering.

Let us try to keep such a healthy faith as that. Let us be clear-souled enough to see through and, behind the present connection of life and pain, and know that in its essence life is not pain but joy. We are sure that it must be so with God in His complete existence. The omnipotence of God and the bliss of God must belong together. In the infinite range of His power lies the infinite completeness of His joy. He cannot act without happiness any. more than the sun can shine without light. It is not, only a joy in the result of action, we cannot think of God without believing that there is joy in action itself, that every outgoing of power is answered by an inflowing flood of delight. And what we think, must be in God, we believe must be, we find to be potentially in man His child.

And now among the powers of man, lo! there is one highest power which has always been bearing witness of itself, which has always refused to be ignored or denied. Men have tried to deny it and injure it. They have said to it, "Be quiet; you are not a true part of us. You are only a temporary, morbid form of exhibition of some powers of us which are real and which will leave you, their temporary exhibition, behind as they come to their complete life." But still the power of religion, the power in man of counting himself the child of;a heavenly Father and of looking up to that Father for commandment and for care, has always answered back confidently to all such denials of its existence, "Nay, but I am. You know I am, in spite of all your eager saying that I am not." And man, whether he were the savage finding the knowledge of God at the bottom of all things or the sage finding the knowledge of God at the summit and crown of all things, has in the long range of his consciousness owned the existence of this power of being religious among the powers which made up his manhood.

And more than this, he has answered that if this power of religion be in man then it is the greatest of his powers, it is the king among them. This no man will deny. Even he who says that there is no power in man of recognizing, loving, and obeying God will freely say, I think, that, if there were, that power would be the Lord of all man's life, would give man his supreme dignity, and would deserve and ought to have his most careful care.

And now does this religious power also fall under the law of all our powers which I was trying to describe? Our first conviction surely is that it must, simply because it is our highest faculty. "It cannot be," so runs our simplest thought, "It cannot be that all my lower powers are meant and made to give me joy, but this my highest power has no joy to give. It cannot be that I was made so that my thirst should run to the river, and my curiosity to the book, and my friendship to my friend, and yet that my soul should hold back and hesitate when it is offered the chance to go to God. It must be that in my supreme faculty the law of all my faculties will be supremely realized, and that I shall find joy in loving and obeying God which no other indulgence of my nature ever has attained."

And no one who looks carefully at the history of man can fail to own that in general such enthusiastic expectations have beeen satisfied. Among the enjoyments which have brightened men's lives since men began to suffer and enjoy, the enjoyment which has come to men from an assured belief that they belonged to God, and that He loved them, and that they loved Him, shines with a lustre which is all its own. The happiest moments which have been passed. upon this earth have probably been moments in which consecrated human souls have intensely realized their nearness to the soul of God; and the most passionate desire which the world has ever seen has probably been the desire of eager hearts who had tasted of divine communion to come yet nearer to the God to whom they longed to give, in whom they longed to lose their life.

This, I believe, this, I am sure, is true; and fret no doubt the other fact is also true that there have, always been Jeremiah's men upon the earth, that multitudes of men have always looked at the knowledge of God and obedience to Him as sad necessities. Men who have called themselves religious have had at the bottom of their hearts a terrible misgiving that they were religious only from fear, and that, if they dared, they would cast all religion to the winds and go their way unhaunted by the spiritual cares. There is surely something very strange in such a combination of phenomena. Surely it may well make us ask whether it is possible to understand the causes of this reluctance, this shrinking back from that which, when it has its full, power, is the strongest passion that can occupy the soul of man. Why is it that to so many men religion is a burden and a toil instead of an inspiration and a joy? Let me try to give several reasons, all of which have their effect.

The broadest and simplest, perhaps also the most powerful reason, as it seems to me, is that men fail to get hold of the truth that religion is natural to man, and think that it is something strange and foreign. You and I do nothing with the heartiest readiness except what we feel that we were made to do. All other things are either amateur side-issues of our life, or else they are bondages fastened upon us by some outside despotism. The time when he discovers in his nature some strong natural fitness is the moment when a young man's nature wakes to enthusiasm and settles itself down to the determined pursuit, the gradual delighted attainment of some great end in living. Now how is it about the knowledge and obedience of God? Partly because the human soul needs higher help in order to attain this loftiest ambition, partly because, surrounded by the things of earth, many men seem to satisfy their souls with simple earthliness and so the men who seek for and attain to spiritual life appear to be exceptions,—for these and other reasons religion comes to seem to many souls an importation, something unnatural, something to be sought after and attained only with a struggle. A man comes into a savage island and there settles himself down and begins, let us say, to paint. The landscape glows upon his canvas. The soul of all this yet uninterpreted nature becomes translated by his brush. The savages gather about him and admire. He seems to them a creature of another kind. His art is something transcendent, unimaginable. And then suppose that some voice speaks to them and says, "All that which you see is not miraculous. It is not superhuman, not extra-human; it is simply human. It is. in every one of you to do what that man does,"—how perfectly incredible that would sound. And if the voice went farther and compelled every poor savage to undertake as a duty what it declared to be a possibility, then what complaining there would be. With what., reluctant fingers, ashamed of their own clumsiness, those unbelieving savages would take up the brushes which they thought that men like them ought not to touch. Somewhat like that I think it is with many men about, all spiritual things. You say to your friend, "See, is not that beautiful, that Christian life? Look, how that servant of the Saviour walks above the world. Behold how, satisfied with Jesus, he can do without the world's indulgences. Behold how, obedient to Jesus, he can resist the world's temptations. Is it not beautiful?" Your friend replies, " Indeed it is! " and stands and admires, as much enraptured as yourself. But when you turn and bid him live that same life, how he recoils. "Oh, not for me! " he says. "I am a weak and common mortal. These extraordinary flights, these high experiences, are not for me." And if you force his conscience to the task the power of this lurking unbelief infects and poisons every effort that he makes. He cannot because. he thinks that he can-not. What does he need? A larger thought of his own life, a deeper knowledge of himself, a broad'out look over uncultivated, unappropriated . regions of his own nature, a stir and wakening in him of the knowledge that he is God's son. Let all this come, and with it must come courage and hope; and what a man does with courage and hope he always does with joy.

Another reason why the Christian life and Christian duties are clothed for so many people with the aspect of difficulty and reluctance, instead of being full of invitation and delight, seems to me to lie in this—that the Christian religion, by the necessity of the case, presented itself first to the world as a means of rescue and repair, and that that side of it has almost entirely absorbed men's thoughts of it ever since. The world was full of sin when Jesus came. The world is full of sin to-day. When Jesus came into the world, when Jesus comes to you or me, His first work must be to rebuke our sin and bid us leave it. "Repentance " is the first cry. "He that repenteth and forsaketh his sin, he shall find mercy." Now, that is negative! And that is by necessity full of the spirit of fear! And to do negative work fearfully can never waken the most ardent enthusiasm, or make the pulses leap with the most buoyant joy. To be dragged up out of a pit into which we have fallen, to be plucked away from a fire which seems to be racing on to destroy us, to be forgiven for sin for which we have been expecting to be punished,—that stirs the profoundest gratitude and fills us with a peace all the more blessed and complete because of the remembered danger and distress with which it stands in contrast. But still all that is negative. The moment that the face is turned away from the dead past, and looks toward the living future, a new power comes. Then all is positive. " Thou shalt not " is swallowed up and lost in the more mighty, the more divine, "Thou shalt." Then the soul feeds on promises. It no longer is con-tented just to hold its own. Hope is awake, and hope is infinite.

Now, as I said, the first presentation of the Christian Gospel to the world was of necessity as a message of rescue and repair. It was a gospel of forgiveness. The world was old and sick with sin. Christ came as the physician, and had at once to lay His hand upon disease. That need has not ye passed away, can never pass away so long as men sinners. But it may well be doubted whether the Christian faith has not too narrowly confined its to this its first necessary presentation. The Gospel has been made too exclusively a Gospel of forgiveness. We are surprised sometimes when we look through the New Testament to see how very much there is positive, not negative at all. Even if man had never sinned, still there might have come to him the great assurance of how vast was the possible range of goodness and strength to which he might attain ifhe would claim the help of God. Of that assurance the New Testament is full. The forgiveness of sin is but the setting free of the soul that it may realize that assurance. If a man can hear that assurance, through every promise of forgiveness, deepening it, giving it its fullest purpose, he cannot help but listen. There is an eagerness with which the prisoner listens to catch every word of the pardon which is to set him free. But with a healthier and more earnest eagerness the freed prisoner, outside of the jail gate, hangs on the lips of the wise friend who tells him how he may become a strong, respected man again. And so Christianity becomes a new thing to you when in it you feel the power not merely of forgiveness and escape from penalty, but of a manifold new life, of higher thoughts, braver struggles, nobler society with brother-man, profounder character—in a word, of a whole new life. With all that in expectation think what new zest must come into the faith of Christian men. How men would listen for God's word, and ponder it and try to get at its depths! How they would say every one to his neighbor, and every one to his brother, "What hath the Lord answered?" and "What hath the Lord spoken?"

I want to speak of one more of the causes which rob religion of its joy. It is the superficialness and partialness of our religious life. Very many of the best and greatest things are dull and burdensome upon the surface, and they only lay hold upon us and enchain us when we get within the, power of their hearts and souls. The study which is holding its profound student enraptured and sleepless with delight is the same study over which the school-boy yawns and groans. Once, it may be, he who is now the enraptured and delighted scholar was the yawning school-boy. At that long-gone day when he over his hated task, there were two possible way of relieving his weariness and disgust. He migb have cast the dreary study aside altogether and gone out to his play, or he might have pressed on into the heart of his study and found it full of fire and enthusiasm. This last is what he did, and now there is no joy for him like questioning his science for its deepest secrets and delving or waiting till the answer comes.

And here, then, is the man of whom we have be speaking this morning, the man who is reluctantly religious. He does religious duty, he thinks religious thought, but it is weariness to him. "The burden of the Lord," that is the true name for his experience. Is it not the fact that for him also there are two possible ways of escape from the dreariness of a reluctant religion? It is conceivable that he may turn his back upon it all, and give himself up totally to the world as if there were no God, no soul, no heaven, no hell. Or he may press on deep into the knowledge of the eternal and the infinite until he is all absorbed in them, and temporary and finite things lose every value except what they get from the reflections of the infinite and the eternal which appear in them.

You are right in the midst of the clatter of the world. The tumult of society is in your ears. Through it, piercing it as the lightning pierces the stormy sky, there comes some word of God. He tells you that your soul is sacred, that selfishness is death in life, that judgment is coming. You turn away and will not listen. You plunge again into strife of tongues. Perhaps you can escape that voice of God; if you can, it is dreadful. If by a blessed incapacity you cannot escape it, then there is only one thing to do—to listen to it, and obey it, to question it, "What hath God answered?" "What hath God spoken?" To open your heart to the living word of God, to be His servant and to do His will.

O my dear friend, if you. have tried to be religious and have found your religion a burden, what you need to relieve its burdensomeness is to be not less but more religious. If prayer is a task and a slavery, you must not spring up from your knees and rush back into the open fields of self-reliance; you must press forward into deeper and deeper chambers of God's helpfulness. You must desire greater and greater things, things so great that none but God can give them. So, and so only, can you come by and by to eager prayer, to waiting at the door of grace with deep impatience till the answer comes. If self-sacrifice exhausts and embitters you, the refuge is not in self-indulgence but in more self-sacrifice. If the little amateur work which you do for your Master, done in the leisure moments which are left over after your work for yourself is done, is all unsatisfactory, what you need is a brave giving over of your whole life to Him and the doing of everything for His blessed sake. If the little truth which you believe frets and distresses you, you must send out your wonder and your faith to compass the completest knowledge which a soul like yours can win.

So always, he who goes up to conquer peace and righteousness must burn his ships and trust his whole life to the land which lies so rich before him. Oh, the poor, weary, half-way Christians, who play upon the fringes of the religious life, and are never quite sure that they will not turn back again and leave it all behind! Some day they must feel the great strength of Christ taking possession of them wholly. Then, totally consecrated to Him, the learning of His truth, the doing of His work, the growth into His image, shall fill and satisfy their souls.

I have not spoken of the baser reasons which make sometimes the struggle for a higher life a burden and a pain to him who undertakes it. If a man is living in sin which he will not give up and yet is trying to keep a hold upon religion, then of, course to him it is all weariness and woe. But I have chosen to speak to-day of men of better sort. These causes blight their faith and rob it of its freshness and delight. Their religion is not natural enough. It is not positive enough. It is not thorough enough. When I look in upon the lives of those who in all times have most found their service of Christ a perennial joy, I find in them always these qualities. They have counted their service of Christ the crown and consummation of their humanity. They have sought in it not simply rescue, but attainment. And they have given themselves up without reserve into its power.

It is good to feel deeply that Christ Himself is always urging His disciples on to such a faith in Him as this. He glorifies our human life until it claims completeness in obedience to the divine. He is not satisfied to forgive any soul without trying to carry it forward to a positive, gradually perfecting life. He demands the whole devotion of the soul He saves.

Therefore whoever comes into the service of Christ at all gets within sight of the supreme religion. Therefore whoever is trying to do Christ's will even in bondage is close upon the borders of the glorious liberty of the children of God. Therefore one wants to cry to every weary and discouraged Christian, "Oh, keep on! keep on, however hard the work appears to be! This is not the real light of faith, but it is close upon its borders. Be obedient. Do the will of God, however bitter it may be, sure that there is sweetness at its heart, and never resting till you have found its sweetness."

When you have found it, then your whole life listens at the lips of God. To hear Him tell His will by any of His wonderful voices is your perpetual desire. Your ears are always open. "What hath He answered? " "What hath He spoken?" you go asking of neighbor and of brother. And to such eager listening as that the word it listens for surely comes. May we so listen for it that it shall come to us!

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