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Updated: May 28, 2025
It is the function of Christianity to raise this unacknowledging trustfulness and self-giving out of dumb subconsciousness, and to give to it speech, and to crown it with the glory of fully human self-devotion.
It often fails to see that if it is to grow lives it must grow them in the growing period. There still remain many churches that must be converted from the selfishness of adult ministry and entertainment to self-giving service for the development of spiritual lives and, especially, for the development of such lives through childhood and youth.
A religious interpretation of and attitude toward life is essentially that of self-giving in service. "My Father worketh hitherto and I work." "I must be about my Father's business." How noticeable is the child's interest in the vivid word-picture of One who "went about doing good"! The home is the first place for life's habituation to service.
Atmananda, for instance, lectured on Jesus Christ, Gandhi, and McMurphy. "McMurphy," he said at Centre meetings, "leads twelve men to the sea and takes them fishing. After the fishing trip, McMurphy is worn out. He is in pain. He has exhausted his energy so that others might be free. This is the essence of self-giving. This is why I do what I do."
But it can hardly be seriously contended that a crocodile is as much an expression of God as General Booth. It is wise and right, therefore, to restrict the word "divine" to the kind of consciousness which knows itself to be, and rejoices to be, the expression of a love which is a consistent self-giving to the universal life.
Next, the fullest possible sense of our membership of and duty towards the social organism, a completely rich, various, heroic, self-giving, social life: that is, charity. The dissociation of these two sides of human experience is fatal to that divine hope which should crown and unite them; and which represents the human instinct for novelty in a sublimated form.
And if we ask those who have known and taught the life of the Spirit, they too say that love is a passionate tendency, an inward vital urge of the soul towards its Source; which impels every living thing to pursue the most profound trend of its being, reaches consciousness in the form of self-giving and of desire, and its only satisfying goal in God.
It is easy enough for those who regard spiritual history as dead chronicle and its subjects as something different from ourselves, to look upon Rolle's threefold experience of the soul's reaction to God the heat of his quick love, the sweetness of his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his austere, self-giving life as the probable result of the reaction of a neurotic temperament to mediæval traditions.
It is to his mother that a young man turns as his confidant in his engagement; it is to her that he necessarily turns for counsel and advice with regard to his young wife in the early years of his marriage. A young man in love is a man who can receive divine truth even of the hardest, for love is of God, and its very nature is self-giving.
The life of God is such that in the presence of need it must give itself just as water will run down hill; this is the law of its being. Where no need exists, that is, where life is infinite, love finds no expression. To realise itself for what it is, sacrifice, that is self-limitation, becomes necessary. Love is essentially self-giving.
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