Why I Am a Christian, by Dr. Frank Crane.
The Autobiography of a Mind, by W. J. Dawson.
An editor once said to Dr. Frank Crane, who spent the first twenty-five years of his adult life as a Methodist and Congregational minister and the next twenty-five as a journalist: “If you will write a book on Why I Am a Christian and tell the truth it ought to be mighty interesting.” Dr. Crane says he has told the truth. I say it is not interesting. Dr. Crane is a Christian because it is pragmatic, because it is usable. That is not a good or sufficient reason. One may be a Mahommedan or a Jew for the same reason. His species of Christianity is, he says, one hundred per cent practical. Mr. Ghandhi’s or Mr. Tagore’s species of Hinduism has a similar percentage. “I am a Christian simply because I like it and I find it conducive to my happiness and my general welfare.” That is a good reason for being a Jew.
Dr. Crane prides himself on his large-mindedness; he is beyond pride or prejudice. “If you should ask me whether I am a Trinitarian or a Unitarian, a Catholic or a Protestant, Fundamentalist or Methodist or Baptist, you might as well ask me whether I am a Guelph or a Ghibelline.” When a man is omnipotent and omniscient he is all these, and none. He is not only the trunk of the tree of which these are branches (some of them gnarled, others withered), but he is the roots as well. In one of his daily sermons he says he left the church in search of adventure. Fortunately for him he left it while the going was good.
“I am happier here and now when I follow the principles of Jesus. I am wretched here and now when I reject them or doubt them.” Does Dr. Crane think that any of his 25,000,000 readers believe that he practices the principles that Christ enunciated to His disciples on the mountain? If he does, such readers are incredibly credulous even for feeders on denutritionised mush. He took thought for the morrow when he shifted to a profession that pays him more in a week than he got in a year labouring in the Lord’s vineyard. I am not contending the right to shift was not his. I am pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of his boast.
His reasons for being a Christian have very little to do with Christ. Indeed, for him Christianity is a point of view, an attitude of mind. It needs no God and very little divinity. His idea of Christianity is so largely matter of fact and so little emotional that his confession—which he wants us to remember is not an argument—can not make much appeal.
Reading Why I Am a Christian is like listening to a lawyer who has a fluent, persuasive vocabulary and who knows how to obtain the best effects from his argument. He carries his auditors along and they want to agree with him, but when he stops his monologue, rationalism claims its rights and the case is decided against him.
It is evident that a church which has had some of the greatest minds of the world at its head, which has lasted through centuries and wars, is based on a foundation more solid than one which could be destroyed by the argument of one of its members. Dr. Crane is a member of the church, but he refuses to recognise the authority of an organised religion. The fear of eternal punishment or the hope of never-ending beatitude have no bearing, he maintains, on his decision, because he finds the former foolish, the latter boring. Dr. Crane thinks he is the first man to shudder at the thought of an eternity spent in heaven, in a state of semi-stupor, singing forever to the music of harps. The church itself encourages no such belief, but since the real meaning of paradise is unknown to man, a symbol has been adopted which no one tries to offer as dogma.
It is not because Christ is God that Dr. Crane believes in Him. It is because He has shown the author what sort of a person God is. It is malicious and pernicious for “a man with a million friends” to express such doubts as to the divinity of Christ. The world does not need a superman, the world needs God, and the figure of Christ is more important as a foundation for the church than any other doctrine of Jesus as a man could be. And there is no denying that the world needs a church.
It is the personality of Christ, what He represents as a man, the idea He gives of what God should be, what He has made of Christianity and the energy He has put into it, the universality of His doctrine and of His appeal and the beautiful story of His life which make Dr. Crane a Christian. He does not ask Christ to help him, to succour him, to save him and to give him happiness; he asks Him to give him enough force to help himself, enough energy to resist falls and enough strength to fight for his own happiness; he does not follow or wish to follow Christ and imitate Him, but he wishes Christ to show him how to get along on his way in the manner which is most pleasing to Him and of which He would approve.
Dr. Crane has made a note of most of the standardised beliefs of the world, of their ideals and fears. He labels them “delusions” and proceeds to smash them in their very foundation. That human nature is evil is a delusion of which reflection has purged him. Punishment and reward are delusions; goodness to be real must be positive; the fact that a man never lies, cheats nor hurts any one, never deceives his wife in thought or act, never does any of the things he should not do, is no proof that he has any goodness in him. The belief that competition is necessary to progress, which has been proved time after time, amounts to naught in Dr. Crane’s estimation; there is no superior class and the idle members of the community, those who have no need of working for a living, have been accursed by God. Dr. Crane thinks also that it is a delusion to believe that happiness resides in riches or in high positions; he advocates looking for happiness every day, as we go along, instead of storing up treasures on earth or happiness for the morrow.
All this leads us to wonder how much of the “Confession” is Dr. Crane’s and how much has been gathered from the wisdom of centuries. Most of his arguments are old and familiar; he writes a long chapter, for instance, on the text of Abraham Lincoln: “God must have liked the common people, He made so many of them.”
Dr. Crane has been writing pontifically so many years that he has come to believe that whatever he says is true. It is true because he says it. There is no discussion or argument about it; he knows. He is a gushing fountain of knowledge and adjectives. He is an oracle whose truth is not to be tested, but accepted.
“To be good, according to Christ’s program, is to fight here; to take up one’s cross daily; to fear not; to love much; to hold on, and to put forth vigour in every way.” Had Dr. Crane added “and to get the money for doing it” it would be his own programme, admitting that writing four hundred words of twaddle daily is the equivalent of taking up one’s cross. To fight here, indeed! “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.”
His reasons for belonging to a church are naïve to the point of childishness. They are: because it is imperfect; because its purpose is to disseminate the most important idea in the world; because he likes it and likes the kind of people that belong; because it is the oldest, most imposing and most beautiful of all the institutions of humanity. “It is in the church that we must seek the origin of every great movement for human welfare.” I suppose it is universally admitted that the French Revolution and the English industrial revolution were the two great modern movements making for human welfare. My information is the church did not have much use for the encyclopedists, and if Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright and Watt were of the church, history does not say anything about it. The church had nothing to do with Pasteur’s discovery, which was the origin of a movement for human welfare which has lengthened the span of life nearly twenty years.
Here and there throughout the book, like freckles on the face of Juno, are sprinkled gems of wisdom. “All the great literature of the past has been tragic”—Rabelais and Don Quixote, for instance. “The fundamental insanity believed by the majority of the world to-day to be the truth is that the work of the world is to be done by defectives who are not clever enough to escape from work.” How pleasant it must be to be so omniscient! Dr. Crane must admit that Lenine and Trotzky did not have that fundamental insanity. And how sane Mussolini is!
Mr. Dawson is a clergyman and the leaves on his tree of life are sere and yellow. When they were green they were smudged by the smokes of London and Glasgow where he pumped up emotion in Methodist Chapel and peddled rhetoric in Presbyterian Church, and thereby gained such fame as pulpit orator that he was called to Newark, N. J., where he ministered unto the needs of the parishioners of the Old First Church for twenty years or thereabouts. Now one of the dreams of his youth has come true; he is living in a simple house near a flowing stream, and the sound of its running water lulls him to sleep and its garrulous voice calls him at dawn. The other, that one day he would become a great writer, he knows will not materialise, but he continues to write because that which was nearly an agony for Flaubert and an exhausting labour for Anatole France is not only a joy but a necessity for Mr. Dawson. To him, it is nearly a fundamental urge. Early in life while he was attending to the spiritual needs of the Wesleyans in the small towns of Devon and Cornwall he wrote poetry by the ream to save himself from the soporific effect of the thick, stagnant atmosphere of dulness that enveloped him. Fate made him a preacher, but his secret aim was to make himself a writer. If authorship of forty books entitles one to such designation, Mr. Dawson is a writer. Another writer whose career closely parallels Mr. Dawson’s, save that Dr. Algernon S. Crapsey had the notoriety of a trial for heresy, recently wrote that he had never seen nor heard Mr. Dawson’s name until the publisher sent him The Autobiography of a Mind for review. That is the only experience that Dr. Crapsey and the writer have had in common so far as I know save that we both read the book through in one sleepless night. But it provoked neither tears nor laughter in me as it did in his colleague. It provoked in me a series of interrogations. Why did he call his book the Autobiography of a Mind? Why did he stay in the Church upward of half a century? How did he reconcile his practices and his preachings? Why did a man so beholden to the ideas of intellectuality not do anything concrete to realise them? Why has a man who has written so extensively and has lived so conspicuously in the public eye been unsung?
To answer these questions it is not sufficient to say it was because he lacked humility; because he did not love his fellow-man, because he had a superiority complex. Many men who have made a permanent impression upon their time bore with similar limitations and suffered similar infirmities; it must be that Mr. Dawson lacked the talent which his personality, conditioned by his conscious mind, proclaimed. Were his book a biography of the mind he would have analysed his failure to obtain the success as a man of letters which he believed his talent justified.
The truth is Mr. Dawson is an emotionalist, not an intellectualist. So far as I can judge from his autobiography he never did any constructive work to fit himself for a writer. Early in life, he began to externalise emotional states in writing and he has continued to do so ever since. Emotional states, unless they are panoplied such as those of Shelley, Rimbaud, Poe, Dostoievsky and countless others, interest only the possessor and those who love him or are beholden to him.
It is passing strange to hear a young Methodist minister of robust health say: “I can not imagine how I could have endured life had I not found early a means of self-expression in my pen. Life would be unendurable for most of us without some means of escape from ourselves. Some find it in golf, others in collecting stamps, others in netting butterflies.” Others find it in cheerful labour in the Lord’s vineyard and that is where it is becoming for all clergymen to find it. If their quest is unsuccessful then they should find other employment. Tedium vitæ is the most unbecoming disease for a priest, and if he has it he should not talk about it.
Mr. Dawson’s father, hard-shelled, self-sacrificing, saturated with a spirit of service, was able, largely through the resourcefulness of an industrious, pious, tireless wife to put aside every year a few shillings. When the legacy came to his son, then pastor of a Church in London, it was quite a tidy sum. He promptly gambled with it and lost. “It was a very pious man of most gracious manners who first persuaded me that it was a foolish thing to buy shares and stocks for honest investment when I could buy a hundred times as many shares on margin. So I bought shares in a gold mine in Africa and a coal mine in Australia.” There is a naïveté about this that is equalled only by his account of his exaltation on the discovery of the word ineluctable and the pleasure he had in using it.
Mr. Dawson had the conventional Christian attitude toward avarice, holding that it is the root of all evil; but he also realised that without money there was no flowering of the softer and more delicate amenities of life. How much mental misery might have been spared the poetic pastor had he, in one of his trips to Italy, “whither I went on all possible occasion,” come upon the story of one Francis Bernardone. One day while Francis was still a boy he had an emotional crisis which in its genesis was not unlike that which Mr. Dawson had when he became conscious that something mysterious was happening to himself. “I—the essential Ego, the thinking Self—was passing out of my body.” Some of Francis’ constant joyousness might have crept into his soul, and the enthusiastic love of poverty which was the keynote of the character of the Poverello of Assisi might have heartened him in many hours of apprehension. But though he had long loved Francis and year by year sought his shrine, and even lectured in his own monastery he would never have succeeded in assimilating his spirit.
When Mr. Dawson approached his fiftieth year, he had an emotional experience of a kind that has often been described; some call it conversion, others seeing a light. He who had an insatiable appetite for pleasure now learned that there was a great difference between pleasure and happiness. For the first time in his life he was completely happy: he had discovered the poor and the sinful and he was moved to deliver them, to succour them, and to purge them. For the first time, he found himself invaded with a spirit of service. He coveted martyrdom for the uplifting of the South London poor. He would devote his strength and the remainder of his days to put in the way of recovery those who had been bruised and battered out of human shape by a terrible misfortune or more terrible vices, and those past cure, he would absolve from their sins and bury. It was all a wonder and a wild delight—while it lasted. But like all emotional states it was transitory.
Perhaps nothing conveys Mr. Dawson’s subjugation to the emotional states like his experience with Roosevelt. The latter talked to him of the virtues of one of his books, The Quest of the Simple Life, which apparently impressed the President as did Pastor Wagner’s classic. The author was forced to the humiliating confession that he had totally forgotten it. The phase of thought and feeling which had produced the book was past. The late Marcel Proust and Mr. W. J. Dawson would not have been congenial! The twelve years that he spent as pastor of the Congregational Church in South London added to his reputation as a pulpit orator and he says that they were marked by great intellectual growth. We have to take his word; there is no display of it in his autobiography.
At the end of this period he came to the United States to lecture. He looked upon Newark and saw that it was a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariot. New Jersey’s metropolis said, “Rise up, come away,” and he came. Whether he found it the rose of Sharon or the lily of the valley we shall not know until his next book is published, but it is safe to assume that he liked it better than South London. We trust he found there “that rare kind of friendship which is rooted in intellectual intimacy,” and that he encountered people interested in the kind of thoughts most vital to him, so that he was not forced, as he was in London, “to relatively low levels of conversation.” Had Mr. Dawson called his book Recollections of Emotional States it would have been far more fitting than The Autobiography of a Mind. The reader who can divine the writer’s mind from this book has perspicacity and penetration that I do not possess.
From the photograph of the frontispiece, and from the lines of the book, I gather that Mr. Dawson was leonine externally and feline internally; that he had great sensitiveness to verbal intoxication and that always logorrhœa threatened to exhaust him; that there was within him a big hedonist and a little puritan, that the latter sat in adverse judgment of the former at all times, and tried to trip him when Mr. Dawson was not watching his step; that he was sensitive as a child and self-conscious as a man; that his ear was not attuned to the reproofs of life and that his eye constantly mistook the comb for the honey.