The American Historical Review/Volume 23/Reviews of Books/The Spiritual Interpretation of History

 

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

GENERAL BOOKS AND BOOKS OF ANCIENT HISTORY

The Spiritual Interpretation of History. By Shailer Mathews, A.M., D.D., LL.D., Professor of Historical and Comparative Theology at the University of Chicago and Dean of the Divinity School. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1916. Pp. x, 227. $1.50.)

The volume contains six lectures—the William Belden Noble Lectures—given at Harvard University. Their general purpose is to show the necessity of taking account of other than merely economic and geographical forces in interpreting human history. The author is for the most part commendably modest in his claims and does not press his points unduly. He is quite willing to admit the large place that impersonal forces have had in human history, but he rightly insists upon the recognition of other and spiritual motives co-operating with them. He is also sound in declining to estimate the relative importance of social forces.

 

If there is any habit of thought more dangerous than that of antithetical exposition—for who of us really knows enough to set reality in contradictories?—it is that of constantly questioning whether this or that fact is the more important. To ask whether the individual or society is more important is like asking whether the oak or the acorn is primary. Historical situations must be viewed synthetically, not analytically.

 

The first two lectures on the Limits within which the Spiritual Interpretation is Possible, and on Spiritual Tendencies in History as a Whole, seem somewhat perfunctory. The third, fourth, and fifth, on the Substitution of Moral for Physical Control, the Growing Recognition of the Worth of the Individual, and the Transformation of Rights into Justice, are suggestive and informing. The contention that genuine progress has been made along these three lines is supported by abundant illustrations, wholesome practical lessons are drawn from them, and the reasons for encouragement are emphasized in good homiletic fashion. Unfortunately there is no serious grappling with the problems raised by the war. A book on the spiritual interpretation of history appearing at this time might be expected at least to face some of these problems and to recognize their difficulty for the would-be interpreter.

The final lecture on the Spiritual Opportunity in a Period of Reconstruction, though practically helpful, is less compelling than could be wished, and betrays the benumbing effect of trying to combine science and religion in one discussion. The theistic conclusion somewhat hesitatingly drawn in it is all too meagrely supported, and, although to be looked for in a series of lectures like the present, seems an intrusion in the context where it is found. The author apparently feels this, for he hastens on at once to other and I was about to say less controversial matters, but the assumption that his interpretation of history is the interpretation of Jesus would probably be as widely controverted.

The following passage summarizes the positions of the book and reveals the author's attitude and point of view with admirable clearness.

 

To give justice rather than to insist upon rights, to rely upon inner rather than outward moral control, to have every element of life expressive of the same spirit of love that God himself exhibits, and to regard love as not a desire to gain popular approval or even to get friends, but as a sacrificial determination to do to others as one would like to have others do to oneself—all this can be found as truly in any catholic reading of the facts of human history as in the words of Jesus. As has been repeatedly said, social evolution, conditioned as it is by the impersonal and economic world, is yet superior to that world. It is a spiritual movement which, if it be prolonged, will bring the world under the sway of the ideals of Jesus himself.