0. '%f p. W
^ M' ^'' ^' ^' w?- ^' fe"'
.:^ ft ■
Pr'm'm'M^ H^ lUi - w 1^ m- ti .M m 9 '^
'"i^^^m."-^' 1^. ^i. n^
^m''^"^-A'^'^%'^3'..
te %■■: « S
^.,«W*y*^
'^^4
,V:,' JC;.,--, ' -I'Ai. •fife'.'V: .1(5^5,
».gj,v ^4!^: '.1=^,
sK .-<» *■ » » «- «
».. 1l*.
f* -"SS *.,
:•».
^m^
»»
^^*
UBRARV
Ut<,>^ERSlTY OF
US'
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS
THE BAMPTON LECTURES FOR 1905
BY
F. W. BUSSELL
BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFORD RECTOR OF SISLAND, NORFOLK
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
Fiist Published in igoj
TO
T. HERBERT WARREN, Master of Arts
PRESIDENT OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE
AND
VICE-CHANCELLOR OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
THESE LECTURES ARE INSCRIBED
EXTRACT
FROM THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
OF THE LATE
REV. JOHN BAMPTON,
CANON OF SALISBURY.
" I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the
Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the said Lands and Estates upon trust, and to the intents and purposes here- inafter mentioned ; that is to say, I will and appoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford for the time being shall take and receive all the rents, issues, and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, and necessary deductions made) that he pay all the remainder to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, to be established for ever in the said University, and to be performed in the manner following :
" I direct and appoint that upon the first Tuesday in Easter Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads of Colleges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining to the Printing- House, between the hours of ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary's in Oxford, between the com- mencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the end of the third week in Act Term.
vi THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
" Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons shall be preached upon either of the following Subjects — to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics — upon the Divine authority of the Holy Scriptures — upon the authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice of the primitive Church — upon the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ — upon the Divinity of the Holy Ghost — upon the Articles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds.
"Also I direct that thirty copies of the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons shall be always printed within two months after they are preached ; and one copy shall be given to the Chancellor of the University, and one copy to the head of every College, and one copy to the Mayor of the City of Oxford, and one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library; and the expense of printing them shall be paid out of the revenue of the Land or Estates given for establishing the Divinity Lecture Sermons ; and the Preacher shall not be paid, nor entitled to the revenue, before they are printed.
" Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be qualified to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath taken the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one of the two Uni- versities of Oxford or Cambridge ; and that the same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons twice."
PREFACE
My dear Mr. Vice-Chancellor, — There is some- thing peculiarly fitting, I think, in this dedication to yourself, which you are good enough to accept. You were my first tutor in this University; and you now worthily represent to the world its authority, its tradi- tions, its learning, its religious spirit. Your kind words of appreciation after the first lecture of the course did much to encourage me.
I began with a profound sense of the chasm which separates theory and practical life : of the increasing difficulty we find in justifying or explaining the moral scruple, the generous venture, the religious hope. In spite of our disclaimers, we are to-day ' Galileans,' betrayed by our phrase and accent ; pensioners of a past tradition, a past belief, which some try in vain to adapt to the altered conditions of knowledge and the new teaching of science, — some again maintain unquestioned, in illogical content, side by side with alien facts and theories of life, silent now, indeed, but none the less un- compromisingly hostile. Few seem to me to realize how far we have drifted on the downward grade, towards a purely arbitrary state, which is * no respecter of persons ' ; — towards an unknowable God or Root of Being, which is after all mere Force, and gives no answer to prayer.
I find in the mouth of every one a vague word, ' democracy,' a term (whether as fact or hope or move- ment) to which I have hitherto repeatedly failed to attach a clear and precise meaning. I see personal liberty everywhere threatened, personal value everywhere
viii THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
denied ; and men set aside as an old wives' fable the Gospel-teaching of the worth of souls. Many may find wearisome my constant retrospect on the past records of thinkers or statesmen ; but I must plead in excuse the gravity of the lessons I find there, the continuous, un- broken life of European development, each phase big with its future, the secret yet very real influence of academic speculation, as it gradually filters down to the level of practice.
Too many seem to-day to approach social questions with much sympathy but no genuine conviction, with but little knowledge of average human nature, and less of its past experience or discoveries. The Gospel, the People, the average man ; — these to-day are the ' weaker brethren.' It is my aim to show how general welfare is bound up with the faiths and hopes of Christian belief; and again, how the general welfare can only rightly be secured by justice to the particular, by respecting the units which make up the whole : a heap composed of valueless atoms is itself without value.
In the first lecture, I deal with the functio7t and limits of Christian Apologetic, — making it clear, I trust, that the aim is no symmetry of speculative reconstruc- tion, no triumph of merely dialectical overthrow. In the next three, man's relations are traced to himself, to God, to the Body Politic : the second examines the simplest rudiments of his moral instinct (prior to reflec- tion), his amazing enterprise of unselfishness, — that is, if overmuch meditation does not convince him that all effort is fruitless. In the third, he is shown in his attempts to find God, — not as Power or as Wisdom, but as personal friend : (it is this personal side in religion which is prominent throughout.) In the fourth, his social development is traced; and the conceptions contrasted of the mediaeval and the modern State.
Thus, in the former half of the course, we confront the ordinary man at his average level, in his simplest
PREFACE ix
impulses to righteous conduct and religious hope and belief; we see him also in his social development under the guidance of an unconscious evolution, and quite apart from the control of calculating statesmen. We examine his condition to-day ; and in the fifth, discover the vast but largely unacknowledged debt to Christian influences, and recognise the vainness of the common presumption, that Christian ethics will outlast Christian dogma. In the sixth, we trace one indispensable presupposition of genuine religion ; worth and work must be guaranteed to the individual ; the conflict must be real, the victory one to which each contributes, in which each will some day share. The seventh dwells in greater detail upon a subject already intimated in earlier lectures, — the curiously downward grade of European thought, scientific and political, in the nineteenth century, — the strange denial of all humanistic standards, — the de- moralising of the State, and the demoralising of God. In the last, I plead for the only alliance which can give aim and self-confidence to the 'democratic' movement so strangely arrested to-day, any stability to European society and culture : — The Gospel and the People.
For, as it must seem, it is the Gospel alone, which in the face of scientific facts and intellectualist theory, still clings to the belief in the eternal value of the simple and humble soul ; and, while allowing that every venture of moral action or religious aspiration is and must be an ' act of faith,' still encourages those for whom to-day we have no hope, no consolation, and no use, to believe in God's goodness and their own imperishable worth. — Believe me, dear Mr. Vice-Chancellor, very sincerely yours,
F. W. B.
Muttdham House,
near Norwich,
Christmas, 1906.
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
FUNXTIOX AND LiMIT OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC
iroT/xoi de del Trpos d7ro\o7taj' TravTi tQ alrovvTc v/jms \oyov
vepi TTjs iv vjxlv eXiridos. — I Pet. iii. 1 5.
1
§ I. Difficulty of Religious Apologetic ; between Rationalism and orthodoxy : the latter rejoices sometimes in magic, antithesis, defiance .......
§ 2. African paradox rejected : Christian teaching lays emphasis on reconciliation : modern spirit abandons uncompromising dualism but also refuses to eliminate either side of the complementary Truth : this typical of the Alexandrine School ......■■
§ 3. But sharp contrast is more popular, and the over-confidence of subtle logic : religion puts no premium upon superior in- telligence : Gospel message simple and universal, closely allied with true ' Democracy ' . . . .
§ 4. Resumes : — the Christian apologist cannot hope to satisfy both the philosopher and the plain man : the pursuit of abstract 'Truth,' and the consciousness limited to feelings, needs, and personal experience : real audience of the preacher the poor, the sinful, the doubting, and the ignorant
B. Part ii. § 5. Wide scope of the following discussion : relations of Church and world : tendencies of modern thought and modern society : precarious position in morals no less than in dogma : sympathy of the Greek Fathers with intellectual development : the Latin Church-State ; authority and non-fossinmis in con- trast ........
§ 6. Mischief of mediaeval preoccupation with the A(57os-doctrine : humanity met only on its higher planes : supposed identity of Philosophy and Religion .....
§ 7. Apologetic narrowed into an attempt to satisfy the speculative reason : importance of the Nominalist movement : discontent with dogmatic proof rather than with dogma .
§ 8. Violent divorce of the two before the Reformation : reformers aloof from secular wisdom : Leibnitz attempts to conciliate :
xii THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
FACE
simplification of the ' credenda ' during the eighteenth century to a bare religion of Nature . . . . .12
§ 9. The arbiter still Universal Reason : general acceptance by educated and clerical circles of the new belief: sudden and unexpected emergence of the 'will of the people' . .13
§ 10. Superficial optimism of the Age of Enlightenment : profound ignorance of average human nature : claims of the heart against the head : only recent recognition of the emotional or sub-conscious forces which sway society . . .15
§11. Real simplicity of the motives of revolution, economic rather than social : ' will of the people ' reacts towards Csesarism and efficiency . . . . . .16
§ 12. Sum : the apologist resembles Telemachus between the gladiators : the attempted reconcilement or identification of Philosophy and Religion has twice failed : are there symptoms of a new disappointment to-day? . . 17
LECTURE II
The Moral Instinct : Man finds Himself "Lord, what is man?" — Ps. cxliv. 3.
§ I. Human nature and the sanctions of conduct: relation of the conscious unit to himself (subsequently, to God and to the State). ....... 19
§ 2. Our aims and impulses independent of our conscious volition and not originated by our reflection : feelings before judg- ments : impotence of Reason in the sphere of the particular : the Gospel the only possible arbiter between Science and Democracy . . . . . . .20
§ 3. All enlightenment and reform tends to Subjectivism : always implies sceptical reflection upon the sanctions of moral and social rule: consequent danger to the civic ideal . . 21
§ 4. Such periods of Individualism followed by reaction to a Universal : man's social and (originally) unselfish nature may be compared to St. Christopher in the legend . . 22
§ 5- Thought has been a solvent : prevalence of doubt, acquiescence, and resignation : man's true function, to return with Soc- rates to earthly duties . . . . .24
§ 6. The explanations of Thought lag behind common practice : in the field of men's hopes and aspirations, which cany them again towards the life of action, we cannot hope for accurate evidence . . . . . . -25
§7. Motives of 'moral action' classified: (i) pursuit of broken series of pleasures : (2) active social energy under control of unquestioned custom : (3) resignation to a Divine order : (4) pure individual interest in untroubled calm (the explana-
CONTENTS xiii
PAGE
tion, ' obedience to law as law,' omitted because it cannot be
a final motive) . . . . . .26
§ 8. Divorce of virtue and happiness after Socrates : utilitarianism disappointed : Plato driven back upon supersensuous sanctions . . . . . . -27
§9. Large concessions by Aristotle to popular views, and the standard of the average man : prevailing sadness of later Greek reflection on life . . • . .28
§ 10. The Gospel rejects the dualism and sharp contrast into which Hellenism has fallen : function of the Church as supporter of the civic ideal : mediceval State-sanction of morality . 29
§11. Ill-adjusted fabric of Aristotelian and Christian elements in mediceval ethics : Feudalism and Casuistry fill in the gap between theoretical demands and actual fulfilment : wideness of chasm between ideal and practice . . . -3°
§ 12. Arbitrariness of the dictates of morality in Scotus : morality, submission to a personal sovereign, as a condition of future bliss . . . . . • • •3''
§ 13. Domination, in contrast, of the ' Law of Nature' from 1600 to 1800 among the 'enlightened': frank egoism during the eighteenth century, in revenge for the long suppression of individual interests for the general welfare in the preceding age . . . . . . . .32
§ 14. In spite of the imperfections of its allied philosophy, Christianity the only universal and democratic power : no other scheme understands man's inner nature, characterised as it is neither by pure selfishness nor by meaningless devotion to the unknown . . . . . . •34
LECTURE III
The Religious Impulse : Man finds God
" Blessed be he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, and whose hope is in the Lord his God ; who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that therein is ; who keepeth His promise for ever."— Ps. cxlvi. 4, 5.
§ I. Relations of God and man, not as conceived in the great world- religions, but as experienced by the believer : upward path from lower to higher stage of communion (caution against a prevalent and mischievous looseness of assumption) . . 36
§ 2. Earliest stage, fear of the unknown : second, discovery of a Divine protector somehow accessible : third, worshipper becomes a 'fellow-worker' with God (sense of dependence, of estrange- ment, and of reconciliation, in the universal paradox of re- ligious experience) . . . . . . • 3^
xiv THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
PAGE
§ 3. Service in a cause beyond self, a primitive impulse not due to reflection : the chief spring of religious influences : self only forgotten because of unfailing assurance that in the end it must come by its rights . . . . • .40
§ 4. WTiat kind of cause ? immaterial ; and not necessarily ' moral ' : religious feeling independent of morals, often subversive : temper of the missionary and the soldier alike : both confi- dent of inclusion in the coming triumph . . -41
§ 5. Within this division many degrees of willing service, from Thug zealot to Christian martyr : gradual expansion of the scene of conflict : share in the ultimate success, for the humble follower a satisfaction of sense of justice rather than selfish calculation . 42
§ 6. The fourth stage, in which conception of purpose or process rejected as unsuitable to the Divine : mystical surrender to the eternal and unchangeable : the religion of the greater part of mankind . . . . . . -43
§ 7. Singular identity of doctrine in East and West, pagan and Christian : the changing and particular as mere illusion and mirage : goal of nothingness (in practice, mystics more enter- prising and sympathetic than their creed) . . -45
§ 8. The two demands of the religious consciousness — God must be a helper and rewarder in the strife, and a place of rest and peace (Western society inextricably bound up with the former notion) : devotee finds in God help, encouragement, and only at last repose . . • . . .46
§ 9. Conception of God : precarious tie which binds religious and moral feeling : a signal error of the eighteenth century to identify religion and morality (or religion and philosophy) : religion has to provide exemption and immunity, to assure worshipper of special privilege . . . -47
§ 10. Qualities demanded in a deity : curious pre-occupation of divines with logical attributes, or with notions of power and wisdom to which, strictly, the worshipper is indifferent : cheerful sacrifice for a lost cause (in Norse myth) : stimulating effect of long-deferred even uncertain success . . .48
§11. We deal with religion as contrasted with theology: aloofness of thought or theology from average impulses impossible to- day : origin of religious feeling selfish : an appeal for suspen- sion of law, not the recognition of its undeviating rigour : the later willing service due to no quixotic surrender of value but to perfect trustfulness : curious delusion of those who would transfer unselfish loyalty into a realm where there is no longer a master, a purpose, or a work . . . .49
§ 12. Denial of worth or meaning to conscious life in current systems of the universe : surrender to the unknown : at variance with what is best in social or political movement in recent years . 5 1
CONTENTS XV
LECTURE IV
The Social State : Medi.^val and Modern
"What shall one then answer the messengers of the nation? That the Lord hath founded Zion, and the poor of His people shall trust in it." — ISA. xiv. 32.
PAGE
§ I. Aim of the series: standard of worth applied to the Christian conception of the Universe (as in eighteenth century, logical consistency, in nineteenth, historic credibility of the Doctrine) : reason, fact, and tcse : importance of former not denied, but present discussion chiefly concerned with the last : less scruple to-day in applying Utilitarian standard, in a democratic age which will soon know no other test . . . '54
§ 2. Interrogation of the recent course of social development : error of the historical philosophers after the Revolution : ' the goal achieved or within view ' : their ' Reason ' only a name to cover the development of unconscious and unknown forces : sense of helplessness abroad . . . , '55
§ 3. Underlying principles of Western development in mediaeval times : as philosophy is mainly individualist, so Church always social : mistaken conception of the Roman Church-State . 57
§ 4. Conspicuous merits of the mediaeval State : unity and reason- ableness of the Church : its democratic basis : its genuine claim to direct and ennoble every department of secular life, every variation of individual character or rank . . 59
§ 5. No abrupt dualism, of law, natural or Divine, physical or moral : Church less antithetic than Aristotle : in the decay of the Roman system, in the proved emptiness of papal and imperial claims, the ' Law of Nature ' supersedes the Church as a guide 61
§ 6. Machiavelli and Luther creators or pioneers of the modern State : conception of the State gradually demoralised : Church retires from contact with the world : disparagement of the units which compose the whole . . . .62
§ 7. Decay of reverence towards the State : government a revocable contract : sole duty efficiency : undisguised selfishness of the new period of reconstruction (Leo x., Spinoza, Hobbes) : utility in a certain sphere (to keep the poor quiet) contemptu- ously allowed to the Church . . . . -63
§ 8, French Revolution due to divorce of Enlightenment from sympathy with primitive human nature : curious ignorance of the human heart and average motives among eighteenth- century philosophers : their aim not to admit the people to freedom, but to capture the autocracy of the State . . 65
§ 9. Classical antiquity and the modern State aristocratic : sharp contrast to this in the Christian-Teutonic deference to the indi- vidual : decay of belief in worth of units, parallel with nominal
xvi THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
PAGB
extension of popular rights : value of the conception of heaven in the Middle Ages, not to distract attention from secular concerns, but to restrain the ends of mere organic efBciency, to obtain considerate treatment for the weaker , . 66
§ lO. Final issue (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Luther, Rousseau) in irre- concilable hostility ; Sovereignty of the State, Sovereignty of the Individual : French Revolution a protest of rudimentary feeling against a sacrifice of the helpless to an unknown cause : Kant reconquered primitive truth, against the Enlightenment : differentia of man, not thought but moral action . . 67
LECTURE V
The Modern Age as Pensioner of the Past
" Surely thou art one of them ; for thou art a Galilean, and thy speech agreeth thereto." — Mark xiv. 70. " The just shall live by faith."— Rom. i. 17.
§ I. Simple experiences and impulses of average man not to be lost sight of in tracing political generalities : universal application of the Gospel message : whole scheme of Western life bound up with certain prepossessions or matters of faith : their serious peril at the present time : unreflecting morality not so much in danger : emotional basis of morality more secure than any theoretic basis . . . . • 1^
§ 2. Steady debasement of the moral sentiments, origin and sanction, during the past century: the three great 'unities,' Nature, State, God, divested of all ' moral ' implication : the Divine relieved of its few remaining human attributes : a substitute for ' God ' proposed which cannot be an object of worship . 72
§ 3. We cannot afford to eliminate the one quality ('goodness') which makes conception of God at all intelligible : not as a vague stream or tendency: the minimumof religious belief — arighteous and conscious power giving to each his due, and maintaining the conflict as a real issue, not an unmeaning gladiatorial show . 73
§4. Objection — 'impertinent to revive such blind faith ' : faith (in our discussion) is rather loyal self-surrender to a cause not yet won : a belief or sympathy powerful enough to stimulate action : the true ' Age of Faith ' the present day : immediacy of Church authority and cool rationalism of Middle Ages . 74
§ 5. Difficult to rise to any confident moral autonomy : most men are content (with Hegel) to acquiesce in the general moral sense of community : any advance beyond conventional custom and usefulness is a venture of faith, on very slender evidence : moral conduct as defiance of natural law : in the positive content of the moral Law we are mere pensioners of the past 76
§ 6. Every act which is something more than conformity to tra-
CONTENTS xvii
ditional observance or obvious calculation of gain bears witness to conviction of purpose in the world : this obstin- ately impenetrable to reflection : phrases only conceal our profound ignorance : is the wager ' unreasonable ' ? . . 77
§ 7. Complete instability of all moral notions beyond the deceptive routine of society : delusive promises of race perfectibility : abandonment of individual (as worth and character) to cosmic process : tyranny of abstractions which are mere human pre- judices and have no counterpart outside his servile brain (Stimer) ....... 78
§ S. The practical life with its business sympathies and enthusiasm unaffected by the hopeless outlook of speculation (but no reason to suppose that the ensuing torpor may not spread from the educated to the ignorant classes : present system of morals in that case doomed) . . . . •19
§ 9. This overriding of strict logic in the world of practice and common sense, characteristic feature of English thought and statecraft : we find it hard to justify our interest and our work, just as reflection makes us blush at our charity : tear- ing away of many sentimental veils and disguises to-day which screened primitive impulse . . . . . 8l
§10, Two extremes, cynical greed and idealist surrender: between these, indispensable factor in life, the social and personal in- fluence of the Church : provides not an answer to curiosity but an adequate stimulus to action and endeavour : dualistic tendency to separate the domains of certainty and of hope . 83 §11. Sense of personal value, agency, and worth still subsists . 84
§ 12. The incentive to-day is still, as ever, voluntary service in what is conceived as the Highest Cause : the selfish man unnatural except as product of reflection : amid wreck of ideals we still pay an instinctive homage to a certain type of life : we refuse to obey unless we can love and understand : this understand- ing largely a venture of faith . . . . .84
LECTURE VI 'Worth and Work': Striving of Genuine Value
'A5eX^o2, iyi) ifiavrov ov Xoyi^ofiai /careiXT/^eVoi * h de, to. p-kv oirlacj ewiXavdavo/j.ei'os, rots 5e epLirpoadev €W€KTeLv6/j.€vo?, Kara ckottov SiHjkw iTrirb ppa^elov TTJs dvb} KXrjffeiiis. " This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling." — Phil. iii. 13.
§ I. Subject: tiseftdness not truth of Christian religion: curious misconception of religion as anti-social and abstentionist : this
b
xviii THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
should not (if true in the past) apply in the future : likelihood of a retreat of the religious consciousness into itself . . 88
§ 2. Necessary alliance of Church and Society : the ' use ' of religion determines its expansion and survival : reflective process, coercive argument merely secondary and subordinate : the Will-to-live, irrespective of reflection, aims at Satisfaction : at its zenith in Man, becomes a demand for worth and work : relation of this to the post-Kantian movement . . 90
§ 3. INIust this impulse to life be checked, when it reaches the level of self-consciousness? Christian faith denies: our modern science and its increasing reluctance to do more than record series and chronicle facts : we are quite ignorant of the laws which govern rise and decay of nations : the unit alone an actual experience . . . . , -91
§ 4. Limit to-day placed upon ambitious schemes : content to secure personal and individual welfare, and right immediate wrong : one cause of this more modest outlook the doctrine, ' man as the sport of unknown powers ' : to the knight-errant succeeds type of Laocoon : another cause is the democratic demand for immediacy, after too long waiting {fatalism and savagery) . 93 § 5. Current of egoism arrested in the seventeeth century : mechanism supplants teleology : the individual in philosophy and the Commonwealth is subordinated to the Universal, to Sub- stance ; humility takes place of self-assertion : rise and signifi- cance of Deism . . . . , -95
§6. Speculations of Behmen : problem of the ordinaiy man : distance of God, indifterence of Nature, — he takes note of evil and pain neglected in the Great Systems : to him we owe con- ceptions of antithesis and evolution: striving in nature real, not fictitious . . . . . . -91
§ 7. Frank mechanical naturalism of the Great Systems disclosed : all values expelled from a world of eternal necessity and (so-called) Reason : Leibnitz attempts to justify to the individual (for no teleology which stops short of him can be accepted in equity) : his memorable decision not to capitulate to Positivism , 99
§ 8. Return of anthropocentric standard ; ' not man by nature, but nature by man ' : takes up the old Renaissance impulse to per- sonal realisation submerged under the Great Systems: Being and working are the same thing : empty mythology of change- less being gives way: worth of the exceptional, of idiosyncrasy 100 § 9. At every point the world a striving : possibilities press forward to justify themselves : ' while still man strives, still must he stray ' : opposition to Calvinistic autocrat, to Hobbes' Leviathan : Sympathj', not a craven compromise or surrender, but natural : development of self, not retirement from world, but work in Society, according to one's faculties, respecting the rights of others ...... loi
CONTENTS xix
PAGE
§ 10. Great reaction also even in the eighteenth century against the claims of * Reason' (as universal, impersonal, conceding nothing to the individual) : continual criticism of Rationalistic compla- cence : powerful influence of Rousseau upon Kant . • 103
§ II. Kant restates the value of the plain man: free moral action, the one common indispensable element in human nature : his principles incompatible with Bureaucratic autocracy, or un- limited Sovereignty of the State : undying feud of scientific and 'democratic' {i.e. religious) conceptions of man . . 104
§ 12. The Neo-Kantian development ; individual ousted from his rights : rapid degeneracy in the notion of the Source of Life ; unconscious, unmoral, unknowable : unavailing pursuit in the complexity of Science and experience of a Unity : the Gospel alone comprehensive, alone able to satisfy the needs of the individual, and the demands of Reason . . . 105
LECTURE VII
Agnosticism : Arbitrary State, Unknowable God
' Ayvu ffTij) Oei2. — Acts xvii. 23.
"Is there knowledge with the most High?"
§ I. Ontology, the great object of search throughout the nineteenth century : province after province wrested from theology and claimed for unprejudiced inquiry into fact : a minimum of prerogative still conceded in Deism, or the religion of Nature : revival of Platonic immanence, God not distant but ubiquitous : Jtipiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque i/ioveris : this attempted identification (/cara <pv<riv, Kara \6yov) always strained : continuous protest firom the ethical side . . loS
§ 2. Kant and Fichte the last to approach life and its problem from the moral point of view : impossible to resume that attitude : men will not express truth in terms of necessity and restriction (duty, law, obligation) : morality and reason play an insignificant part in the Universe : in the Neo- Kantian mythology, man banished as a moral agent : and even Fichte's ' moral order ' a mere pious postulate which stubborn facts did not respect . . . .110
§ 3. Warm alliance of Idealist and Naturalist : pantkeisiii not to be distinguished from positivism : to some minds this glozing of blind mechanism by pious terminology will always seem ultimate truth : we would only point out that this qualifying of the given as the good or as the ' rational ' is purely an act of Faith . . . . .112
§ 4. Objection : ' is not Hegelianism a vindication of Reason ? ' It cannot be distinguished from Force or the Unconscious : it soon becomes mere name to cover a process of develop-
XX THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
PAGE
ment, without relation to human mind or conscience, only intelligible in its series, not in its issue, or its purport . 113
§5. Development of the Neo-Kantians : the ' thing-in-itself : the Romantic era : a mystical faculty apprehends an imaginary Unity for which ordinary reason is insufficient : end of era of Revolution and individual protest : stages of declension towards Agnosticism : the Real = the ethical (Fichte) = the rational (Hegel) = the 'given and irrational' (later induction of Science and Pessimism) . . . . • "S
§ 6. Fichte already begins to disparage or to despair of the individual : his ' moral order ' (as seen above) a venture of Faith, a pious hope : it cannot convince the unbiassed spectator of the world as it is : sum of imperfect moments cannot be perfection . 116
§7. This 'religiosity' but a momentary halt: Schelling transfers interest to Nature away from Man : his Absolute a revival of Behmen's doctrine, striving of the Will-to-live : he is in truer sympathy with the downward grade of modern thought than Hegel . . . . . . -117
§ 8. ilegel with genial and poetic temperament arrests for a time the disillusion : joyous process of the Absolute from un- conscious to self-conscious Reason : his teaching embellished with religious phrase and symbol but incompatible with orthodoxy . . . . • • .119
§ 9. Complete ' subjection ' of individual to universal Reason (in history, State, morality) : conscious reason appears late on the scene : it is subordinate, secondary, and an ' epipheno- menon ' : Hegel occasionally sensible of the radical ' other- ness' of Thought and Things . . . .121 § 10. In Hegel all subsequent developments are latent : he confesses that relapse into faith is necessary : violent attacks on the Cosmic process from the side of Eudcemonism and of Moralism . . . • . . -123 §11, Com te and the aristocratic revival: the State to be mechanic- ally moralised : strange and illogical compromise of English Puritanism : prevalent contempt for the democratic principle : paralysis of reform : discouragement of philanthropy : what is to be the attitude and function of the Christian Church ? .124
LECTURE VHI Needful Alliance of the Gospel and ' Democracy '
OvSiv yap ireXeluxxev 6 NcJ^uos, iveiaayuyT] de KpdTTOvo% iXiridos, 5t' ^s iyyi^o/j-eu t^ Gey. — Heb, vii. 19.
TrtcrreOcrat yap del rhv Trpocrepxo^i.et'ov T(i3 Gey otl iarl, /cat rols iK^rjTovffiv airdv fiKxOa-rroSoTTjs yiverai. — Heb. xi. 6.
" For the law made nothing perfect ; but the bringing in of a better hope did ; by the which we draw nigh unto God. . . . He that
CONTENTS xxi
PAGE
Cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder
of them that diligently seek Him."
§ I. Can the Church still claim to answer current needs ? Ambiguous meaning of the term ' Democracy ' : a term constantly re- peated in various senses without attempt at strict definition : its debt to Christian and Mediaeval ideas : its fatal entangle- ment in a classical conception of the State (aristocratic intel- lectualism, and worship of abstraction) : the democratic ideal steadily losing ground and, apart from reinforcement of re- ligion, doomed . . . . • .128
§ 2. The two threatening influences, State-aufoo-acy and scientific fatalisJH : ' democracy ' (as its minimum) must allow to each man worth and work : modern revolution where it has risen up from beneath, the insurgence of a rudimentary sense of equity, a demand for partnership on equal terms : sense of personal value combined with loyalty to a cause (integral and complementary features in all /;«/««« activity) . •13'^
§ 3. In all three departments of life, moral, political, religious, we have seen an original petulant selfishness ennobled and trans- formed : instinctive claim to happiness perfectly justified : in the end not a selfish but an ethical demand : Western life built on the conviction, ' God cares for the individual, and will give him his due ' . . . . .132
§ 4. Antithesis and development — realisation only through striving against hindrance : this conception common to modem scientific thought also true in the single life : that religion best which assures man of his value in the eyes of God : the Gospel a protest against Law : sympathy enlisted because the Right is weak, or at least often thwarted ; the least emphasis laid on Divine omnipotence : the average mind has no patience with autocracy or arbitrary decree : ' constitutionalism ' : there is here no such hopeless conflict of Will and Idea (democratic, aristocratic) as prevails in secular thought . 134
§ 5. ' Work ' as applied to God (in Creation, or in Redemption) : however difficult to conceive, voluntary circumscription of prerogative for the sake of training others a common experience on earth, a powerful incentive to loyalty and endeavour . . . . . . .136
§ 6. Deism at least kept alive the ethical side of the Divine nature : useful emphasis on the thought (strictly unphilosophic) of a foreign element thwarting the Divine purpose (Voltaire, J. S. Mill) : Norse mythology (like the legend of Prometheus) stimulating because the gods are weak : experience tells only of the striving and manifold : ultimate rest conceived (or postulated) by pure Thought . . . -137
§ 7. Religion, enlisted with the Gospel of Christ, in the cause of endeavour : religious feeling elsewhere (as we have seen) dis-
xxii THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
connected with practice, or hostile to it : the root of religion (wherever it can be called personal) a desire to escape law : this becomes in Christianity the sense of special grace, special conversion, function, and endowment . . .139
§ S. Danger of a revival of pseudo-philosophy, of mediaeval Realism : Ciod's love (if language is to mean anything) directed to in- dividuals, not to universah : unselfishness of Christians, wherever found, due to this assurance : Christianity not (as wrongly supposed by Nietzsche) merely feminine and absten- tionist : it is quite rightly ' incapable of rising to the complete surrender of Happiness' (Hartmann). . . . 140
§ 9. Noble but illogical appeals of German pessimism and English science to take part in a world-process, which is pronounced blind and mistaken : apprehensive sense in such writers of the decay of civic morality : it is impossible as undesirable to abolish in men that reference of all to standard of self, which is the last achievement of one important side of modern thought and political reform . . . . • .141
§ 10. In the difficulties of modern life, the suspension or anomalies of modern thought, the Church as a conciliator: it alone can satisfy and control the egoistic impulse : it alone can arrest the decay of the common life, of the social basis of Western civilisation ....... 144
SUPrLEMENTARV LECTURE I— A On the Duty of Conciliation in Apologetic
§ I. Gospel message universal ; cannot afford to disregard anything human : singular merit of the Mediaeval Church : its ecu- menical claims and universal sympathy . . . 147
§ 2. The modern Church resigns this overwhelming responsibility, just as political reform has been largely due to indolence : ' liberty of conscience ' an easy creed, especially for the governing classes : coercion of the unwilling for their own good has ceased in the Church . . . .148
§ 3. While compulsion passes to the State, the Churches left with- out rivals, as engines of moral appeal : increase of force in secular matters : open field for the influence of an unarmed Church . . . . . . .150
§ 4. The duly of sympathy brings in the problem of P"aith and Reason : the appeal addressed to average man, not to the exceptional : the message is of Divine interest in men, not of speculative attributes, e.g. ' omnipotence ' : Religion is not,
CONTENTS xxiii
PAGE
cannot be, philosophy : the religion of reason fails, because it is general, not particular . . , , • ^Si
§ 5, ' For whom Christ died ' : * every man as an end ' : but is the intellect excluded ? it is secondary and subordinate : modern specialism makes the universal claim of the Church difficult : Scientific Law and religious grace hard to discuss together : Church as the garden of souls, which other theories hardly allow to exist : Truth in this life never seen as an unbroken whole . i '^2
On the Conflict of Reason and Instinct
§ r. The eighteenth century, or the ' Age of Reason ' : personal, utili- tarian, and in maxims of government, parental and autocratic, not as bureaucrat or priest, but as philosopher . .154
§ 2. Belief in the omnipotence of the legislator : happiness attained through application of rational and universal principles to dis- order of life : ideal a cosmopolitan federation : rude awakening in the emergence of the new element . . . .156
§ 3. Examination of Facts, apart from preconception : subterranean forces, hitherto unsuspected, seen to be working : no theory of values, or of purpose : Reason, unconscious and aimless : Real was the Rational in a sense totally distinct from eighteenth- century usage : Neo-Kantians identify unconscious Reason with God . . . . . . • ^57
§ 4. This comprehension of all things under Reason, sterile, as in earlier times, the abuse of Final Causes : ' will ' soon accepted as a truer title, less burdened with purposive implication : disuse of term Reason marks close of the new jNIediaevalism : gradual lapse into the unknowable, or the Cosmic process . 158
§ 5. Exact reverse of early Hellenic development, from nature to man ; from Thales to Aristotle : Humanism becomes un- popular in the post-classical epoch : modern thought has followed this latter . . . . . .159
§ 6. Instinct : fabric of usage and custom, in savage tribes and in Utopias to-day : difficulty of ' reversion to type,' owing to critical subjectivism of ordinary thought . . .160
§ 7. Antithesis of reflected and spontaneous action : opposing views and tendencies to-day : difficulty of obtaining respect for Law, or common welfare : Reason unsocial . . . .161
§ 8. Hesitation of natural ethics : vagueness or insignificance of their axioms : Reason and Law prescribe only the minimum : scanty results of independent moral inquiry : basis of morality must remain emotional . . , . .162
xxiv THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Medieval Intellectual ism and the Opposition
PAGE
§ I. Threefold work of a Religion: (i) as social institution: (2) personal and attested solace : (3) as field for searchers after Truth : intellectual basis stands then only in the third place : use and value not apodictic certainty .... 165
§ 2. Truth (to mean anything) must be my truth : the witness to a Religion is corporate tradition, and personal use rather than argument : intellectual apologetic cannot recognise this : scholastic arguments are addressed to reason in general : articulate philosophy a surface -justification for a deep conviction ....... 166
§ 3. A dogmatic system an indispensable development, but not wholly a gain : in the same way, Church government as a visible institution : Augustine hands down Roman discipline and Greek speculation : twofold aspect of Mediaeval Church ; a protective, coercive society, and a mystical asylum : a special caste investigated truth : the people were bound to obedience. 167
§ 4. Authority and wisdom of right belongs to the Hierarchy : true Religion, true philosophy, identical : this the basis of the whole development : in Reason lies man's kinship to the Divine: primacy of Reason recognised everywhere . .168
§ 5. Independent inquiry found not to lead invariably to orthodox conclusions : reaction against freethought in the thirteenth century : new view, dogma a mystery : recognition of truths which admitted, and did not admit, of rational proof ; Aquinas supplements the universal (Aristotelian) with a special Christian superstructure : even this, strictly classical and philosophical ; ' to reach God, ecstasy, not reason ' . . . .170
§ 6. Merit of Scholastic Logic : an attempt to make ' the Church's truth mine ' : not as Islam, acquiesce idly in mere arbitrary Will : the Reason which they proposed to satisfy became more and more human and personal in the widening of the sphere of enlightenment from palace (ninth century), Uni- versity (tenth and eleventh century), Mendicant orders (twelfth) : the individual more prominent : the long line of mystics had always borne witness . . . • 171
§ 7. Ascent from the negative and minimum requirement of Law to sense of personal duty : reinforced by emotion : test of truth experience, love given and returned : as the ' credenda ' were one by one removed from sphere of intellect, belief founded more and more on inner conviction : Intellectualism gradually undermined : curious catastrophe of the Reformed Churches — relapsing into the very error from which their movement was a reaction . . , . , 172
CONTENTS XXV
D
On Natural and Rational Religion
PAGE
§ X. Periodic attempts to simplify Religion, by reducing 'credenda' to lowest terms, with an emphasis either on Nature or on man : Pantheism and Humanism : the natural or the moral . • 175
§ 2. Accord of Nature and Reason taken for granted : early attack of Sophists against society : the humanistic epoch at Athens — Reason in harmony with things : later schools did not conceal the gap between intelligence and the actual order : reverence for ' Law ' returns in the Roman Empire, and dominates the Middle Age . . • • • .176
§ 3. Once again the subjective spirit claims deliverance : scientific mind demands that Nature and Reason shall correspond : belief that the two books of God's revelation could not con- tradict : the ' Double Truth,' not a cowardice or an irony, but due to supposed distinctness of realm and method : this, owing to failure of attempts to conciliate, e.g. Science and Religion, Mechanism and Teleology-— still widely prevalent . . 177
§ 4. Natural Theology allowed in the Middle Age— Christianity com- pleted, did not overthrow : were the ' lesser mysteries ' sufficient ? answer in the tolerance of the Crusades : different estimate of the doctrinal superstructures : same problem in education to-day ; to one, the superfluous ; to another, the essence .....••
§5. Two tendencies protest against dogmatic orthodoxy; (i) intel- lectual and sceptic ; (2) mystic and emotional : the intellectual reaction. Pelagian, removes God to a distance : the mystical brings Him close to the soul : intense dualism of the anti- Rationalism of orthodoxy : Gunther pleads for scholastic toler- ance : natural light suffices to guide to God . . -179
§ 6. Religion tends to retire into an inaccessible fastness : all is of faith : Catholic and Protestant unite in denying right of Reason : in place of casuistry and accommodation, there is the 7ion posstimus of supernatural dogma, the inner society of the Elect : demoralising of the State : new basis sought in antiquity for statecraft and conduct : deserted by the Church, new crisis in the antagonism of Individual and State-sovereignty . 180
§ 7. Attempted restatement of belief within the bounds of Reason : Socinian and Deistic movements : significant shrinkage of the 'credenda' in the latter : authority of Bible disappears : written record a mere concession to blindness and ignorance: rapid vanishing of rational theology on the Continent . .181
§ 8. Attempt to supply plausible hypothesis of world from humanistic point of view — a failure : rationalistic temper equally averse to the miraculous (external) and the emotional (inward) : tenets, specially claimed for reason, found to be no more secure than the rest : situation at the opening of the nineteenth century . 182
1 78
xxvi THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
E
The Average Man as the Standard
PAGE
§ I. Religion again considered in its threefold aspect ; theory of world, visible community, personal appeal : the last is of para- mount value, the duty of winning and comforting souls . 1S4
§ 2. The three arbiters, sound reason, the Church, the individual or average man : 'enthusiasm,' the differentia of man rather than thought or deference to law : rests on a conviction of personal worth, which reflection and social experience does not support : only impatience or disappointment leads reformers to wide, col- lective, and coercive measures . . . . . 1S5
§ 3. The part, of interest rather than the whole : modern studies of rudiments, the child, the savage, early society : Religion, as the architectonic science, cannot take interest in secondary and derivative ; that is, cannot be mainly intellectual, mainly social : all are equal, and the only universal faculty is love, as willing surrender : this the modern State cannot expect to elicit . lS6
§ 4. Among early Christians this acceptance of the average confounded the wise : uniform treatment of criminal and pharisee exasper- ated : Christian message not moral or political : it is a revela- tion of God's inmost nature, so far as it is relative to man : it gives a new standard of values : dwindling of State-influence, and hesitation of independent ethics . . . .187
§ 5. Strength of Christianity, a type of Divine character singularly accessible to the ordinary man : vain attempt of philosophy to secure a hutnaiiistic basis : sure appeal, sacrifice in service of a cause not yet won : no reasonable justification of this except in Christianity, where man is first assured of his worth : hope- less rivalry of other creeds of self-abandonment : protest of Fichte ........ 189
§ 6. Provisoes of average man, devoting himself to a cause : these not satisfied in other world-theories : Christianity answers the average man ; the cause is intelligible in general outline, righteous, and does not forget its followers : logical position of Immortality : acceptance must of course be a venture of Faith, as in every moral act . . . . . .190
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE II— A
On the Necessity of basing Institutions upon Average Human Nature
§ I. Curious ignorance of human nature betrayed by designers of Utopian society : neither the virtue of the rulers, nor the drowsy contentment of the subjects, could survive in equilibrium 192
CONTENTS xxvii
§ 2. The modern State and statesmen are also to blame in their hasty judgment of man's needs : problem of sovereignty, State or individual ? the modem theory due to Luther and to Machiavelli : force and expediency : suspicious relations of State and subject in the modern State : notable exception of personal loyalty, an anomaly: no appeal to moral feeling . . . -193
§ 3. Average man unsusceptible to the influence of abstractions : the post-Reformation State might have been remodelled, inde- pendently of Church tutelage, without such loss : became not merely un-religious but un-moral .... 195
§ 4. Error in basing reconstruction upon a supposed Classical model, not on the feelings of average man : the voluntary element might have been retained : Government might have become the extension rather than the denial of the family . . 196
§ 5. Justification for those who seek to restrict the scope of govern- ment (Tolstoy) : some believe this movement inevitable : per- version of preventive action of State : decay of the spontaneous 196
§ 6. The Christian has no such widespread distrust in average human nature : this is better and more generous than the social system : a better acquaintance with ordinary impulse and springs of conduct might have been expected, and is not yet too late . 197
On the Abstentionist Attitude of Reflection
§ I. Value of Christian faith for the present scheme of Western culture : it has no competitor : insignificant r61e of abstract thought : the three higher types — citizen, philosopher. Christian: ' ancient feud ' of the first and last : the Church as harmon- ist and reconciler . . . . . .199
§ 2. Inadequacy of the other types : as a fact they are never found pure and unmixed : yet speculative thought is clear in some modern instances that it has no bearing upon actual life : abdication of philosophy . . . . .201
§ 3. Service rendered by this candid avowal : recognition that the citizen's life is not the Supreme Good ; that Religion and Morality are essentially distinct : abandonment of the early claim of philosophy to co-ordinate all knowledge into a coherent whole : the retirement of the Brahmin or Buddhist theory from active competition leaves the field open to other influences ....... 202
§ 4. Education and gtiidance will pass to those who have most sym- pathy with ordinary men : the ' godless ' citizen, a fiction of anti-Christian imagination : spiritual basis of so-called ' secular ' systems : pure philosophy from the outset anti-civic, in spite of many attempts at compromise and reconciliation . . 203
xxviii THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 5. Increasing detachment and isolation of the Thinker in Greece : the common Hfe attracted only the sceptic, e.g. contrast of Lucian and Marcus Aurelius ..... 205
§ 6. Brief revisal of social interest in the Neoplatonists : long and useful super\nsion of the Mediaeval Church : detachment begins again with Protestantism ..... 206
§ 7- Withdrawal of the Protestant sects : ' mystical ' attitude of the new philosophy : both starting from demand for freedom end in surrender to absolute powers : sinister influence on the development of the State ..... 207
§ 8. The English School alone preserves the compromise between ideal and actual : not open to the disadvantage of pure Monism ; a final verdict expressed in terms of absolute approval or the reverse : Deism, with its strong attempt to retain a moral basis for life, was its characteristic creed : a guarded attitude to the claims of reason : absence of desire to throw all the divisions of life into one : from such source came the ' popular ' philosophy of the eighteenth century .... 209
§ 9. Reaction from the hopeful doctrines of Liberalism at the begin- ning of the nineteenth century : fact of force and existence sole test of merit and only argument : Thought once more turns away from active share in life to its study and criticism : waning influence of philosophy, in practical reaction agidnst the early English Individualism, in theoretic Hegelianism or pure Anarchy : the ' democratic ' movement goes on its way without regard to first principles or stiict consistency . .210
Claims of the Individual for Consideration (historically treated)
§1. Personal consciousness seems an 'aim' in the world - process : claim for liberty always baftled : stages in its demands for emancipation: the Sophists as pioneers . . .213
§2. Reaction against Nature, Habit, Instinct, Control, in favour of Purpose, Insight, Art : yet this claim not for all men ; aristocracy of enlightenment ..... 214
§ 3. The State, as the result of voluntary compact or surrender, of deliberate design : spontaneous element in society, language, behaviour, overlooked : original equality first postulated, then forgotten: 'Sophistic,' speculative, not practical or Icono- clastic (contrast of later movements) : less revolutionary than Plato : not dogma but the proof of dogma disputed (as with Scotus) . . . . . . -215
§ 4. ' Man measure of all things ' ; its meaning : in epistemology, not so much in feeling or in moral judgment : Relativism
CONTENTS xxix
should win approval to-day : man recalled to his true kingdom, giving ' values ' (as Adam names) to the world of things : limits of our human faculties ; a modified anthropocentrism, not anarchy or Nihilism . . • • • .217
§ 5. The age of classical Humanism at Athens won independence for the wise : failure of subjectivity, whether licentious or austere, hastened on the Roman Empire ; a brilliant compromise between the sovereignty of the State and the sovereignty of the Individual : neither Alcibiades nor Diogenes had succeeded : a new freedom claimed and won by Christianity: the East commended personal search, the West was long before it tried to suppress it: the Renaissance, the second great revolt, culminates in the Reformation . . . • .218
§ 6. Curious complicity of intellectual brilliance and despotism : Antinomian tendencies of pure Thought ; revival of the spirit invariably weakens ' morality ' : tolerance and doubt born of the Crusades : ' Age of the Despots ' and culture : the basis ability, not parental right : claim of ruler and of genius to be ' above law ' . . • • • • • 220
§ 7. Fresh outlet in the Religious movements of sixteenth century : the ' Extreme Left ' : revival of Authority : once more the intellectual revival bowed to the Central power, contenting itself with speculative freedom : the State supports freethought in its attacks on belief and clerical influence: irreligion of Courts under the prevailing ' Liberalism ' of Sovereigns before the Revolution : suppression of the Order of Jesus . . 221
§8. The nineteenth century opens with middle-class surrender of impracticable rights : new form of Cajsarism : liberty once more in reflection and private predilection : increasing scope for in- dividualism no longer comprised in citizenship: religion, conscience, taste, and (to some extent) action more free to-day 222 § 9. The strictly academic problem of ' freedom ' not treated : current metaphysical mysticism ignores the difficulty,— emergence of the conscious person : Pantheism more lethargic than a theoretic scientific fatalism, which but rarely comes into conflict with consciousness of intrinsic energy : on this the zest of life depends ....•• 224 §10. The 'Anarchist' movement, its justice and its hopes: the Christian Church in far more genuine sympathy with these aims than with the deification of authority , . • 226
D
Overt Sklfishness of the Revolutionary Maxims
§ I. Selfishness and Unselfishness; vagueness of these terms: the curious growth of undogmatic social * altruism ' in the nineteenth
XXX THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
PAGE
century : modern thought a hybrid, half science and half sentiment : unabashed hedonism of pre-revolutionary aims : the modern revival due alone, consciously or unawares, to Church influence : true reform cannot recognise this canon . 22S
§ 2. Revival of practical and doctrinal Christianity, in the last century, a marvel of history : Hegelian use of Trinitarian formula : of the ' Common Reason,' and continuous corporate life and tradition : almost an apology for Catholicism : a reaction against anti-dogmatic individualism of eighteenth century : in social reform, inspiration only from the teaching of the Gospel : unfairness of the taunt, ' bankruptcy ' of science . . 229
§ 3. Religious impulse in the nineteenth century movements of ' Emancipation ' : bold venture of the Abolitionist, in defiance of all experience : man to be treated not as he is but as he ought to be . . . . . . .231
§ 4. Contrast of the maxims of pre- Revolution philosophy : their message perverted in the delivery to mere incitement to over- throw : a direct appeal to selfishness : oblivion of man's inherent desire to serve a cause : calculating and contracting temper in theology (England and Germany) : rapid dis- appearance of the ' Intellectuals ' at the outbreak of the Revolution . . . . . . -232
§ 5. Emphasis on individual rather than on corporate life distinguishes eighteenth century from mediaeval ideals : republican ideal compounded of incompatibles, — -Greek citizen and Greek sage : Aristides and Socrates : real discord between the two : attempt to restore the rudimentary patriotism of primitive times must always fail ..... 234
§ 6. Imaginary figure of the reforming Ideal : State-immersed, and State-escaping : primitive man not * unselfish ' in the truest sense except for use : the philosopher not strictly ' unselfish ' ; and in any case unsympathetic : character of the Christian doctrine of unselfishness as contrasted with mere self- surrender : founded entirely on the doctrine of the worth of self: no substitute for this energy. . . . 235
SUITLEMENTARY LECTURE III— A
On the Original Independence and Antithesis of Religious Feeling and Moral Behaviour
§ I. Some definitions of Religion and Morality: the general contrast between the subjective and the objective, Gospel and Law : Morality, the law, to Religion, the individual of real import : Morality always unfinal ..... 237
§ 2. Religion a plea for the exceptional : Religion encourages effort
CONTENTS xxxi
PAGE
and comforts failure : Nature-worship, a passing and irrational thrill : gradual increase of intimate and personal religion : Masonic individualism of the Roman epoch in all religions : the protector instead of the world-creator or remote ancestor : religion a matter of choice, not of birth . . • 239
§ 3. Religion, supposed by some to have its origin in State imposture, as a valuable engine of police, is exposed, and often directly hostile to the State : Thuggee : absoluteness of Religion claims to surrender self and override ordinary Morality : joy of the religious martyr contrasted with sadness of the moralist : the unreserved submission laid to charge of Jesuits, true of all genuine religious feeling . . . • • 240
§4. Breach between Religion and Morality, as between statecraft and Morality in the times following Machiavelli and the Reform : Charles i. ; and the Jesuits : era of simplicity : appeal to inmutable Morality as sheer utility: Religion and Morality confused and identified in the eighteenth century by all Schools ; so Reason and Nature : with the failure, ahke of Church and Enlightenment, the question arose again : new scope for ' supererogation ' in the new moralised State • 242
§ 5. Origin and nature of the new ' regimentation ' and discipline . 243
On the Conception of God as General rather THAN as Judge
§ I, Character of 'Law' to excite hostility: growing dislike of restraint : dutifulness, a fundamental trait in primitive culture : with ' enlightenment ' it disappears : all political reflection tends towards withholding allegiance from any alien authority : supposed transfer of power to-day to a ' majority ' has wrought little change ....••• 246
§ 2. Significant refusal to recognise law (Education in England) : ' conscience final arbiter for each ' : Law takes an arbitrary character at the time of the Reformation and the new Com- petitive nationalities : all systems unite in Absolutism (political, Divine, metaphysical) : reaction in the eighteenth century : law the mere condition of present welfare and future blessed- ness (according to common sense, not to arbitrary decree) : laws mere rules of self-interest, forestalling caprice with kindly prudence ...•••• 247
§ 3. This ' popular ' philosophy not popular enough : Calvinism disdains to explain law by human analogy : Deism, profoundly humanistic, moral, and simple : its speedy collapse : the mysterious regains ground : natural bias of Protestantism towards worship of the unknown .... 249
xxxii THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 4. Mysticism and its unanswerable appeal to experience : the ' Union ' : legalism never transcends dualism : all human thought and judgment relative : object of law can only be the welfare of the mass : in eighteenth century, law con- descends to reason and argue, professing its proper aim to be use : men criticise Divine law from same standpoint as human 251
§ 5. Eternal punishment, its lessened significance : God no longer as absolute Judge : notion of arbitrary force passed into realm of nature and State : sense of Divine effort in Christianity : this desire to procure a sanction for human endeavour, the legitimate counterpart of the desire for a place of repose : the paradox of religion : both needs must be satisfied : Christ as a Captain of free soldiers ..... 252
On Surrender to the Unknown
§ I . Mysticism, the most real of experiences : incommunicable : the strictly religious form only toys with nihilism and is genuinely personal : another kind boasts of nothingness : ' hedonism ' of the religious mystic : pessimism of other surrenders to the indefinable and unconscious ..... 255
§ 2. Will or Faith alone can sum up the Universe as a totality : ultimate unities in philosophy out of fashion to-day : specialism of modern thought : the English School discounts the pre- tension of speculation to have discovered Unity : only ' provisional ' or ' working hypothesis ' : a practical need makes us apply a comprehensive term to the Universe : problem, Can this central unity become a partizan ? . . . . 256
§ 3. Religious feeling arises from this desire — ' The Lord is on my side' : spirit of favouritism in the earliest personal impulse to religion : keen sense of dualism, of a real struggle at the root of religion : lulling effect of pure monotheistic systems, whether of will (Islam) or pure Being (Hindu) : Christian belief reads God's character in a human life . . 258
§ 4. ' Humanism ' of the Christian faith : ultimate antithesis : the two- fold demand of the Divine nature — peace and aid in fight : this latter bears the first emphasis in Christian belief, not the final . 259
§ 5. Growth in Greece of man's humanistic demands on the central power : it is gradually invested in human attributes : after Aristotle, abandonment of the anthropocentric point of view : significance of Platonic revival, and Gospel simplicity : the Gnostic, starting from intellectual need, falls back into pure irrationalism : except in Africa and under Augustine's influence the Church never surrenders to the unknown as such 260
CONTENTS xxxiii
PAGE
§ 6. Attitude of TertulHan — the message to be accepted because, not in spite, of its paradox : Septimius Severus, embodiment of a like principle of irresponsible sovereignty : scholastic movement a half-conscious protest against Augustinianism : Absolutism revived by Protestant reformers, though they started from freedom and the standard of individual conscience : this development wholly in keeping with the general movements of seventeenth century ...... 262
§ 7. Supreme aim of the eighteenth century — to eliminate the un- known, mysterious, and unaccountable : reaction against clear- ness and vaunted simplicity in the nineteenth : transparency a demerit to the new school of Obscurantism : this emphasised by the general sense of uncertain aim and irresistible forces : falsification of hopes and designs in every part of social development ....... 264
§ 8. Perverted meaning of ' Reason ' in the new age : anthropocentric standard ridiculed or ignored : reaction in Comtism : Pro- fessor Huxley's moral dualism : refuge in abnegation : Church indispensable as alone giving motive and hope . . 265
SUPLEMENTARY LECTURE IV— A The Three Stages of Modern Apologetic
Credibility ] corresponding to the Three f ?".^^^^cf.f °^. ^^^^ f PHiTo^npHiF^ - Exact Science
Value J i hilosophies [utility
§ I. Different standpoint of man of action and reflection: the one careless of the absoluteness of a working hypothesis : conflict of Science and 'democracy' in one of its phases : rejection of a ' single law ' 'in modern French thought : English doubt of the claims of ' architectonic ' science .... 267
§ 2. Successive isolations of the Religious problem : the ages of Reason, of Facts, of Values, — corresponding to the years 1700-1900: early inquiry into Christian dogma by Rationalism : second inquiry of Science, — the nineteenth century 'historic': this age not prolific in new principles ; but in revivals : its title to distinction, its industry ; its interest, the conflict of ideas . 269
§ 3. Keen and critical inquiry into the Gospel story : attempt to study without prejudice : general belief that its morality might survive its supernatural basis : at length realised that Nature taught an opposite lesson to Christian altruism : much pains to reconcile : final settlement into Gnosticism ; or the theory of combating the Cosmic Process : absence of any clear principle 271 c
xxxiv THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 4. A humanistic reaction sets in ; values : rejection of the standards of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries : a division of territory proposed : modesty of our aim to-day, to understand and pro- vide for average man : silence of contemporary thought on all -ultimate problems ; no reason for rejecting the light we have . 272
On the Pretensions of Esoteric Religion
§ I. The claim of 'Catholicity,' of universal application: unique appeal of Christianity, though it might adjust itself to indi- vidual needs : tendency of all religion to divide into popular and esoteric : Plato's ' noble falsehood ' : this precedent may excuse all deviation in civil crisis from ordinary canons of right ........ 274
§ 2. Often a sincere desire to give the ignorant the best possible : much that is slothful in the freedom we allow others cheerfully to-day : the true duty of slave-owners, as of ' imperial ' races : esoteric reserve in the early scholastics : some myths rejected : unworthy reserve not a fair charge against mediaeval hierarchy 276
§ 3. Parents unconscious of offspring's maturity : Protestant religion betrays a tendency to fall asunder into two : lack of sympathy with the plain man in the eighteenth century : Rousseau and English Revivalism appeal to direct experience, not to reason : a similar modesty in the science of the next age . . 277
§ 4. Science has appeared, deserting its true province of particulars, to teach an esoteric cult : ' monistic ' indifference has no charm for the average mind, no claim on the ordinary life : in the reduction of the simplest moral axiom to the sphere of faith, all ' boasting is excluded, ' and wise and unlearned stand on the same lowly level . . . . . .278
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE V— A Ages of Faith
§ I. The present age the Age of Faith : every first principle (in morals as much as in doctrine) called in question : Western mind can- not settle into pure monotheism (unwarranted by facts) or mere social convention : Christianity indeed stronger than other creeds, because of its influence : Science respects only what is, and finds only this justified : the new canon of authenticity, survival in the theoretic field, proved value in the practical . 281
§2. Reluctance to speak of 'duties,' stress on 'rights': marks, not necessarily a weakening of moral fibre, but a natural result of thought-development : Dualism of law : a condition of welfare,
CONTENTS XXXV
not an arbitrary stipulation : general agreement allowed, even of the modern idiosyncrasies : even this not clearly defined : ' Catholicity ' only belongs to the first axioms of logic : thin- ness of universality : individualism in conception of heaven : we remould social convention and question moral law . 282
§ 3. ' Rights ' not ' duties ' prominent in Christianity as well as in eighteenth-century Enlightenment : privilege before precept : opposition to the rule of majorities quite as marked to-day as earlier revolt against personal tyranny : order of the Church Catechism : outside Christianity religion often means the sacrifice of the worthless to the unknown : State has lost its power of appeal ; threat and compulsion : the Enlightenment (at its best) agrees with Christianity ; man not to be bound, but won, to the right ....-• 284 § 4. ' But is not this vocation and election a mere mythologic postulate ? and this faith in a transcendental destiny a bar to reasonable and modest progress here ? ' : but this objection true of all the principles animating the idealist movements of last century : all Abolitionist measures imply treatment of men as better than they actually are : ' man can only attain freedom or political responsibility if considered already as deserving of it ' : exten- sion of suffrage (where not purely utilitarian) followed same lines : rights before duties ; duties learnt only incidentally by exercising rights : science all the time was accumulating directly opposite e%adence ..... 285 § 5. Both the claims of the Enlightenment for man and the titles of the newly baptized constitute a challenge to facts : the confidence of the reforming secularist more a ' venture of faith ' than the Christian hope : democracy claims immediate enjoyment : sub- jective experience confirms the value of Christian surrender of faith : philanthropy disheartened : earlier appeal for deferred enjoyment and self-denying toil ; would be out of place to-day : effect of doubt in immortality : unselfishness would still be practised, but it could not be rationally defended . . 287
§ 6. The Middle Ages as ' ages of faith ' : inapplicable term : immediacy of the Catholic Church, strong and rational : the ' ages of faith ' begin with the Reformation : in spite of the lessons of actuality, we cling to old beliefs : the postulate of reformers to-day 'dim mythologic postulate,' ' ventures of faith and hope ' : this invoca- tion of Faith more than ever before necessary ; the Church alone answers ....••• 288
B
On the Modern Separation of Classes and Interests
§ I. No common currency in the various departments of exact know- ledge : the ' Universe ' : Hartmann, last of the Great Systems :
xxxvi THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Specialism as much a feature of practical life as of scientific research : conflicting interests and party warfare : distance and abstraction of the unity supposed to weld all together : the feudal polity in some respects a revival of the best features in the Hellenic city-state : Manor a State in miniature . . 290
§ 2. Underneath the forcible unity of the modern State, hating grada- tion and loving uniformity, seethes a conflict of interests : arti- ficial language of political debate fosters the belief in class- animosity : decay of easy intercourse : public language infinitely below ordinaiy practice ..... 292
§ 3. The Churches ; harmony through division : religious differences dwelt on to exclusion of points of agreement : concerted action impossible : idiosyncrasy and the private conscience and private interpretation : sense of unity and common aim disappearing : absence of dogmatism nevertheless, and of sharp distinction, no sign of weariness, but of uncertainty : it is tolerant and modest rather than sceptical or indifferent : the Churches cannot at present heal the breaches in the social order . . 293
§ 4. Contract, the new method, cannot admit ' unselfishness ' : the new State will know no such term : future of Constitu- tionalism, interests and classes alternately represented : the Gospel more unanimous in spite of the schisms of believers : social problems to-day : this severance of interests only to be reconciled by the principle of the Gospel . . , 295
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE VI— A
On the Prevailing Sense of Helplessness before Irre- sistible Forces, or, on Pessimism, its Origin and Significance
§ I. Relativity of all knowledge : early Greek Humanism : the Self as ' measure of all things ' : attempted application of human attribute and sympathies to the Cosmos : new conception of ' Divine ' : certain and calculable : defecation in the humanistic period ; sympathy, goodness, intelligence (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) : in subjective schools anthropomorphism vanishes . 298
§ 2. Exceptional genius rarely mirrors its own age : life and thought of a people in letters and drama : science and philosophy deal always directly with law and uniformity ; adjustment to indi- vidual use quite secondary : literature always with the unit and his conflict with the outward order : the hero or the protagonist is always Athanasius contra mundum : natural bias towards belief in reason and righteousness of things : confusion of intelli- gibility and goodness, of ignorance and vice : man finds his own true being at the heart of things . . . . 299
CONTENTS xxxvii
PAOE
§ 3. Greek tragedy opens with the legend of Prometheus ; representing Humanism and the protest against arbitrary force : unavaiUng attempts at a Theodicy : the poetic mythology, out of re- lation to human interest and moral demand, is swept away : humiliating new reading of ' man measure of all things ' : gradual restriction of sphere ; from the conflict of East and West, the drama of a new dynasty in heaven, to domestic intrigue and liaison : failure of Reason to force its moral and intellectual canons on the world .... 301
§4. Doubt if 'righteousness' receives recognition in the Universe: fallacy of the maxim ' Virtue its own reward ' : serious artists in our own days interest by representing victims in the clutch of destiny, and deny any correspondence to the moral aim of man : this the origin of Pessimism .... 302
§ 5. Pessimism, often merely temperamental : right to agency, and service balked by denial of humanistic aim in the Universe out- side : theoretic pessimism often united with cheerfulness and endeavour : pessimism of Cicero : art and philosophy seek to procure relief by detaching the attention from preoccupied care of the personal : its failure shown in the revived Gnosticism of later years ....... 3^4
§ 6. Such call to illogical self-sacrifice as is heard in some quarters to-day of no avail : Epicureanism is the natural corollary of an aimless world : an accidental world leaves room for the play of human free will : added zest in insecurity of tenure and occa- sion : it is Stoicism that leads to pessimism : nor would proof of accident at once overthrow moral sanctions : even the discovery of pure mechanism might leave a scope for venture : in eighteenth century a sense of freedom succeeded to ' pre- destination ' and caste-system ..... 305
§ 7. Buoyant feeling of Self-sufficiency ; very speedily lost : what Epicurus feared has now come about : impersonal fate succeeds to personal will : a loop-hole still left in his system : this now disproved : heavy air of finality in Roman Empire : pessimism always issues from subservience to unknown law : demand for personal worth and freedom : danger to civilised States, apart from Christian belief .... 307
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE VII— A
On the Anti-Moralism of Idealism and of Science
Tone of recent literature, a reaction from the average to the exceptional : modest and rudimentary problems in a ' demo- cratic ' age : imagination turns from the civic and common- place routine : private world of the man of genius, as an asylum . . . . . . . • 3°9
xxxviii THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 2. Price hitherto paid by the community for over-refinement of a class : in Greece, in Italy, in France : all the personalist schools in later Greece disdain the domestic and social side : wisdom cannot recognise the iinalily of the moral life : simple demands of the people to-day not compatible with the leisured ease of idleness or abstention . . • 3'!
§3. Danger of ' privilege ' in detachment (whether of rank, wealth, commerce, or artistic taste) : Christian principles alone can unite : what is lost in contracting days : most religious and speculative feelings tend to acknowledge a higher realm : the hopes and beliefs on which the sense of unity depends cannot be communicated by argument . . . . • 3^^
§ 4. We have to reckon not with distant unities but with urgent differences, not with law so much as with exception (casuistry) : ultimate unities negligible : gradual abandonment of anthropomorphic hopes : can man gain knowledge of the Universe by surrendering his differentia ? The moral venture of man : nothing gained by denying moral interest to God : no halting-place between historic Christianity and denial of all meaning and worth in the world .... 313
On the Survival of Teleologic Language apart from THE Conception of Intelligible End
§ I. 'Purpose' in the world — in part a humanistic conceit: ir- resistible impulse of man to relate all knowledge and fact to himself: the use of 'law' for physical sequence: introduces teleological sentiment and quiets doubt . . • 3'5
§ 2. This retention of purposive language due largely to modern specialism : attempt of Science to mingle pious exhortation and strict proof: instinctive and hereditary prejudices at variance with the lessons of their physical studies: Nietzsche alone is logical : Christianity itself is less dualistic : but this compromise marks transition : compromise and disinclination to face real issues, a feature of our age : dilemma of ' world- purpose ' : meaning of purpose — scheme in which those asked to suffer and work may also share : no other sense allowable . 317
§ 3. How is this purpose intelligible? postulates of Humanism : days of vague terror before unknown are passing : we cannot prove the truth of the Christian doctrine : no study of nature or history can assure us of any unfailing premium set on righteous- ness : other religions start with unity and perfection, and only condescend to the distressed manifold : Christianity alone starts at the lowest level, with the spectacle of a suffering criminal : it alone builds on facts of obvious experience — the
CONTENTS xxxix
PAGE
weakness of God, the distress of man : contrast ; ' perfect member of a perfect whole' . . . . • 31S
§ 4. We must not judge the universe by a canon out of all relation to our ordinary standards : all the struggles of the past, religious and political, have been directed against arbitrary and irre- sponsible power : motive and meaning to be interpreted morally : if we accept any other standard we are back once again in unreasoning awe of the unknown : we start with the historic and human life of the Saviour : special solicitude for individual cases (in the New Testament) . . •3^9
§ 5. Unconscious Christianism of the recent age : the direct lesson of natural science certainly not self-effacement : Christianity begins by recognising the legitimacy and ends by directing the impulse, of our ' selfish ' instincts — ' what must I do to be saved ? ' at this stage of Western culture, no idle building of Pyramids : prerequisite of all appeal — guarantee of eternal worth ........ 320
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE VIII— A
On the Ideals of Modern Democracy, founded on Christian AND Medlkval Regard for the Dignity of Man
§ I. Vital connection of 'democratic' ideals and Christian belief, if we interpret the vague term as implying appeal to the moral sense of the community through individual privilege and re- sponsibility : democracy rooted in compassion and justice to the individual : this is threatened on all sides to-day, in theory as in practice : serious inquiry must be ; what is meant by such phrases as the ' future lies with democracy ' : the Gospel alone lends any reality or spirit to these claims : the Church recognises the new spirit only so far as it issues from a certain conception of human nature : recounts, like ideal democracy, privilege (matter of faith not of experience) rather than obligation ...... 324
§ 2. The worth of this method borne out by the testimony of all successful government : majesty of law cannot be set up again : apologetic tone of authority before the French Revolution ; attempt to justify to the individual moral consciousness : taxes and laws binding only on those who vote them : genuine and patient consultation of a people, congenial to Christianity, and next to impossible in government to-day, economically and racially competitive : necessary overriding of con- scientious minorities (issue unsuspected by earlier reformers) cannot be reconciled with Christian principle . . . 325
xl THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 3. This ideal of patient ' democracy ' full of concern for the weaker brethren, only found to-day in Christianity : elsewhere other strange ideals of manhood and citizenship : general revulsion of feeling against the older policy of ' let alone ' and belief in human nature : the new types of the visionary ; in extremes of Nietzsche and Hartmann : in either case the present valueless except as a bridge to the future in which we have no share : but the people demand (with perfect justice) immediate fruition : Christianity reinforces this claim : both restore to man his confidence and self-respect, seriously menaced in all other systems ....... 327
§ 4. Is human nature to be trusted or not ? Machiavelli and Hobbes, Luther and Rousseau : Mediaeval respect for ' Will of the People,' and aboriginal rights of individual unit : tenderness for the part : even methods of religious persecution derived partly from this sense of personal dignity : no authority conceived as irresponsible, even that of Pope or Emperor : moral criticism of all rule : refusal to obey against conscience (denied in modern times) a sacred right ; as all office a sacred trust : attempt at Reformation to discover State-sovereignty above law : fatal theory of irresponsible authority .... 328
§ 5. True function of democracy, moral supervision ; common culture cannot unite all classes, only common moral aim : its hopeful- ness in unarmed appeal to innate justice and unselfish instinct : to evoke this latent but powerful force, stress on personal dignity, worth, and responsible use of freedom : this generous creed (common to ideal democracy and Christianity alike) depends entirely on religious prepossessions : Christian belief and the welfare of society, one and indivisible . . . 330
Index
333
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS
LECTURE I
FUNCTION AND LIMIT OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETIC
iro7fj.oi 5i del ir/)6s aTroXoyiav wavrl ry alrovPTi vfjids \6yoy Trepi TTJ^ eV viiiii> eXwioos. — I Pet. iii.
§ I. Difficulty of Religious Apologetic ; between Rationalism and orthodoxy : the latter rejoices sometimes in magic, antithesis, defiance.
§ 2. African paradox rejected : Christian teaching lays emphasis on reconciliation : modern spirit abandons uncompromising dualism, but also refuses to eliminate either side of the complementary Truth : this typical of the Alexandrine School.
§ 3. But sharp contrast is more popular, and the over-confidence of subtle logic : religion puts no premium upon superior intelligence : Gospel message simple and universal, closely allied with true ' Democracy.'
§ 4. Resumes : — the Christian apologist cannot hope to satisfy both the philosopher and the plain man : the pursuit of abstract ' Truth,' and the consciousness limited to feelings, needs, and personal experience : real audience of the preacher the poor, the sinful, the doubting, and the ignorant.
Part ii. § 5. Wide scope of the following discussion : relations of Church and world : tendencies of modern thought and modern I
2 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
society : precarious position in morals no less than in dogma : sympathy of the Greek Fathers with intellectual development : the Latin Church-State ; authority and non-possumus in contrast.
§ 6. Mischief of mediaeval preoccupation with the Adyor-doctrine : humanity met only on its higher planes : supposed identity of Philosophy and Religion.
§ 7. Apologetic narrowed into an attempt to satisfy the speculative reason : importance of the Nominalist movement : discontent with dogmatic proof rather than with dogma.
§ 8. Violent divorce of the two before the Reformation : reformers aloof from secular wisdom : Leibnitz attempts to conciliate : simplifi- cation of the ' credenda ' during the eighteenth century to a bare religion of Nature.
§ 9. The arbiter still Universal Reason : general acceptance by educated and clerical circles of the new belief: sudden and unexpected emergence of the ' will of the people.'
§ 10. Superficial optimism of the Age of Enlightenment : pro- found ignorance of average human nature : claims of the heart against the head : only recent recognition of the emotional or sub- conscious forces which sway society.
§ II. Real simplicity of the motives of revolution, economic rather than social : ' will of the people ' reacts towards Ca^sarism and efficiency.
§ 12. Sum : the apologist resembles Telemachus between the gladiators : the attempted reconcilement or identification of Philosophy and Religion has twice failed : are there symptoms of a new disappointment to-day ?
§ I The task of the Christian apologist is beset with one very real and perhaps insuperable difficulty. He stands intermediate between two classes of minds which he can never hope to satisfy. Any attempt to create a philosophy of Religion is in a similar plight. The earliest Rationalist, Clement of Alexandria, inter- preting the apostolic precept of my text, in a more liberal spirit than heretofore, found himself between the two parties of pagan wisdom and enlightenment, of Christian orthodoxy and unquestioning faith. To the one, such a programme of compromise seemed fore- doomed to failure, because they could not start upon a common definition of the Divine Attributes : to the other, it was both arrogant and superfluous ; if God
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 3
had spoken with authority, man had not to question or to understand, but to obey. The School of Carthage, with its disparagement of the part of man in the scheme of salvation, soon to become traditional, delighted in the paradox which despised reconciliation : quia im- possibile, quia incredibile^ neque quia bonurn est sed quia Deus prcEcepit. The moral law tended to become (as with Duns Scotus) a mere arbitrary command, expression of an absolute will ; with Lactantius, a mere painful condition of future blessedness, which appealed to a far-sighted Hedonism. The Divine Grace became a magical gift, which lay side by side with man's mental equipment or absorbed it altogether : just as with Philo the sun of Abraham's reason has to set before God's voice can be heard in the darkness. Now, at the outset of these lectures, I wish to repudiate this shrill note of defiance as a proper method of Christian warfare. We have no right either to deny or to glory in an antithesis. Right and wrong, the Church and the world, faith and reason, the heart and the head — are instances of dis- tinct and irreconcilable contrast, which repose rather on carelessness or impatience of precise definition than an ultimate and objective antagonism. How much of the painful conflict of Science and Religion, of the lengthy tentative of Christian evidences, might we have been spared, of the repeated failures to readjust Christian argument to ascertained fact, of the violent enmity of conscientious supporters of two independent lines of Truth, had the true motive been conciliation and not a challenge, had the aim been to discover the real sentiments of an opponent or a critic, and to base a reply or an attack upon just so much as each can hold in common !
§ 2. We put aside, then, the African method of apology, Tertullian's paradox, Cyprian's appeal to sheer authority and discipline, Lactantius' arbitrary dualism of here and hereafter, Augustine's despotic and irrational fiat. We
4 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
accept as our task the reconciliation of the Divine and the human, as we accept the cardinal doctrine of our faith, the union of God and man, salvo jure iitriusque natures. The end of creation is neither the glory of God nor the welfare of mankind, but a third object in which the two aims are blended without being confused ; as the old Scotch catechism, " to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." Moral behaviour looks not to the fulfilment of the law for its own sake, nor purely to human advantage. The State or the Church does not exist for itself, nor yet is it a mere abstraction, a flatus vocis to cover an accidental aggregate of selfish and combative individuals, seeking either comfort here or salvation afterwards. It is no explanation of a difficulty, when two elements confront and defy, to stoutly maintain that one has completely disappeared in the other, in the spirit of Eutychianism, nor again that the two are taken up into a higher and etherealised region where both are robbed of their vitality. We are tired of hearing that Mind is a form of matter, or matter an aspect of Mind ; or that the whole Universe is made up of ' mind-stuff.' It is as futile to appeal to irrational emotion in the conduct of life, as to a cold and faultless logic ; and very few of those who glibly inveigh against or deify Reason have any idea of what they defend or attack. The true significance of a certain change of philosophic standpoint both here and in America lies in the conviction that man is neither intended to be " an impersonal organ of the Universal Reason " nor a mere creature of instinct. The modern spirit declines to believe in ultimate antithesis or mutual exclusion ; nor will it consent to suppress or eliminate either side. Everything in nature or in human experience teaches the lesson of dualism, reconciled but perhaps not wholly transcended in a higher sphere. The elusive discrepancies are seen to mark a stage of transition and of relativity. The old enemies shake hands at last after the tournament, and
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 5
yet neither has completely yielded. To resume, the Alexandrian School is a protest against a one-sided development ; and one of our greatest Anglican bishops has done well to recommend the Greek Fathers to a renewed and careful study, broad, tolerant, and genial ; determined as they were to find God and His reason in everything, neither to suppress the human nor to exaggerate the Divine element in things.
§ 3. But the difficulty still remains. For the position of sharp contrast is more popular than that of compromise and opportunism. The early heresies arose when a somewhat obscured side of the truth was brought to light and as it were discovered anew. They were driven in the force of polemic and verbal warfare apart from the needs of life, to exaggerate and distort into undue prominence the fresh element, until alliance and co-operation became impossible. When we have said that Our Lord is " perfect God and perfect man," we have said all that reverent dogma can assert. The progress of heretical over-emphasis, of medieval and modern Rationalism, has brought refinement and perhaps sophistry into doctrinal definition; but it still marks time at this twofold yet single assertion. It is hard to understand, but it has a real meaning to the philosopher and to the peasant alike ; and one thing is absolutely certain, that the Gospel puts no undue premium on intelligence.
This is a point which it is as well to state clearly at the outset of these lectures. The Gospel is a simple and a universal message. It is addressed to the average moral consciousness ; and in outline is capable of compression into a very few lines of a catechism. The power to interpret, to sound the depths of its simplicity, is rather a responsibility and perhaps a temptation than a privilege. It is no disparagement of intellect but rather its complete association with human life ; its right recognised to direct and guide, but not to monopolise.
6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
or claim superiority by retreating to another world altogether different to that of common experience. The need of a Saviour is moral, not speculative; and the apologist for religion is spokesman not of his own pride but of the silent and uncomplaining masses, who feel rather than understand the nature and reality of their faith and hope. Some space in my lectures will be occupied with tracing that phenomenon of the age which perhaps has been most persistently misunderstood — I mean democracy. It is high time a careful and unprejudiced attention was directed towards this movement, if it still be allowed by the cynical to have any significance at all. I cannot do more than point the way to a complete analysis ; at the opening I only desire to make it clear that an intellectual or dogmatic exposition of Christian teaching is and must remain entirely subordinate to its moral preaching, to its spiritual usefulness tested in experience. We neither fall into the mistake of making ethics independent of metaphysics, nor do we elevate metaphysics above ethics — and this, after a digression which has perhaps cleared the ground, brings me back to that primary difficulty which I have implied but not yet fully explained.
§ 4. The Christian apologist will not, if he try ever so hard, satisfy either the philosopher or the plain man. To the latter, an appeal to intellectual support of doctrine appears dangerous or superfluous ; and any alliance between faith and the wisdom of this world almost a sacrilege. The intimate and ultimate proof is his own assurance and conviction — his own spiritual experience. He will not tolerate a verbal or syllogistic argument with its tortuous digression and specious episodes, to confirm what to him is direct and im- mediate. And the serious objector to the Christian scheme, with his professed detachment from personal interest and motive, his disinterested devotion to truth, his elevation of the universal above the particular, is
FUNCTION AND LIMITS ^
continually puzzled by our constant reference to human needs and aspirations. Just as we are approaching his lofty standpoint (perhaps in some concession to an allegorical compromise), we seem to him to slip back into the Valley of Unrest beneath, where dwell and conflict rudimentary impulses, old superstitions of sin, and the whole unreality of particular and independent life and personality — and without this cardinal assump- tion neither Christian preacher nor Christian apologist can stir hand or foot. Just as he reaches forth to welcome the pilgrims into the realm of Law and Identity and the Absolute, we betray our sympathy with the lower life by a wistful glance into the mists we have passed through. We show too clearly that the pursuit of Truth is not our primary motive — but the wants of the poor and the humble. We refuse to shut our eyes to the genuine antithesis there is in things, which refuses to succumb to a formula. I am far from saying that all believers can see dogma alike ; I am far from chilling the enthusiasm or quenching the half-belief of those who since Hegel have seen in the Trinitarian doctrine an explanation of the world- process. But the Christian preacher must never forget, in his intellectual interest in the Faith, that his real audience is the sinful, the suffering, the distressed, the ignorant ; and that the primary message of the Gospel is comfort and forgiveness, a sense of sonship and acceptance ; and in no case the resolution of all the problems of thought and of existence. Yet in spite of the difficulty of adapting apologetic to both classes of hearers, the Church will always attempt and always renew the task. To the one, the apologist appears too recondite, to the other too simple. Yet, nevertheless, this reconciliation is just the work of the Christian student, a work which, like that of philosophy, is never finished. He cannot lose sight of the practical and spiritual simplicity of the Gospel,
8 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
yet he will not readily abandon the task which the apostle in my text lays upon every believer — none the less valuable because always incomplete.
Part II.
§ 5. The scope of these lectures may seem somewhat too ambitious ; the relation of religious thought to human life viewed as a whole, to national and in- dividual development; and especially that design of treating inductively, not merely the feelings and needs of each man, but the value and teaching of that vague abstraction — the Time-spirit in its historical evolution. For this purpose I propose to review the relations existing between the Church and the world, whether of thought or of politics ; estimate the tendencies which we see working with unmistakable force, and, alas ! so uncertain aim in our Western society ; and to remind the complacent of the successive criticism which has undermined not so much our dogmatic but our moral convictions. For here lies the veritable danger of our time ; and the historical method is alone able to help us from the treasure-house of the past to understand the drift of the current which sweeps us irresistibly along. We may or may not regret the need of formulating a Christian philosophy of religion, to meet the half- wistful, half- defiant objections of Gnostic and Hellenic thought: but we cannot deny the necessity. The Latin Church, more interested in discipline than in dogma, maintained the Roman spirit of an ordered and visible community ; and the Pontiff, as we know, will presently succeed to the prerogative of Caesar. The great writers are hostile to private judgment or abstruse speculation, and will not compromise by an alliance with Reason. They contributed little towards the larger issues raised by the Gospel, towards transforming the dictates of
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 9
Revelation into truth evident to the enlightened intellect. The Greek Fathers, as we have noticed, were far more sympathetic ; and it is to them we owe the elaboration of the Aoyog-doctr'me, in which they adopted a belief already current in the pagan world, and met more than half-way the professors of human wisdom or philosophic tradition. We have not time to inquire closely into the effect of this on Christian thought ; nor perhaps boldness either to criticise or to approve. But it may be said, without touching con- troversy, that such preoccupation with the theory of wisdom obscured the value of Christ as a Saviour, just as in the West the conception of kingship, absolute authority and external law, disguised the spiritual inwardness and comfort of the Gospel. An inherent weakness of all pagan thought now emerges, and long remains predominant ; the superior merit of the intellectual, and, if the truth be known, of the ascetic life.
§ 6. It is impossible not to trace the mischievous results in mediaeval history. The attempt of Religion to meet humanity only on its higher planes is from all points of view mistaken. The hour of its chief success is in the moment of man's weakness; and to become entangled in any intellectual hypothesis, im- plicated in any special theory of the world, is as great an evil as to be reduced to mere emotion or hysteria. Whilst Augustine provided the principle of authority and the outline of a dogmatic system, the genial tendencies of Eastern Universalism entered the West in the ninth century. The Gospel had become finally bound up with Hellenic thought ; and this in its latest and perhaps least Hellenic form. The final goal of Erigena's speculation is a return of the creature into the Creator. The old adage of Lactantius that the true philosophy was identical with the true religion is repeated with emphasis. Mediaeval thought
10 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
succumbed to the influence of the intellectualist system of the later Platonists, and to that belief so fatal to the value of the humble life, to the significance of sin, of probation, of pain — that the path of knowledge alone leads to God. It is certainly not a little surprising to find the secular and pastoral duties of the Church so fully acknowledged, and so zealously performed, when the theology was so mystic and transcendental. Yet the whole development of thought in the tenth to the fifteenth centuries takes its time from this unfortunate maxim of Erigena. Philosophy and religion were the same ; the reason could expand the faith once delivered to the saints, but, as yet, imperfectly unfolded. It could enter into the field of faith, into the realm of tradition and unquestioning belief, and convert into rational propositions the Divine mysteries. This is the starting-point of the entire speculative process ; and Lessing, in his Education of the Human Race, is the last of the scholastic theologians. The knowledge, the ymaiq of the Alexandrian teachers, had implied a warm and personal appropriation of the external truth, first taught by authority and then realised by inward ex- perience ; and it is but fair to say that this attitude was still maintained by the Christian Platonists. But the strict scholastic method was purely dialectical, and never touched the heart.
§ 7. Christian apologetic was then narrowed into an attempt to satisfy the speculative Reason. Direct antagonism to the ' credenda ' emerges but rarely, but perpetual interrogative and considerable freedom of speech and inquiry. We may for our purpose omit the great mystical movement, the long line of the theologians of St. Victor through the twelfth century, spiritual parents of the German mystics and ancestors of the Reformers. To such, an immediate emotion is the test and not a process of ratiocination ; and the proof is experience and not the satisfaction of logical
FUNCTION AND LIMITS ii
rules. We find the same tendency both in Islam, as a protest against a narrow and literal orthodoxy, and in the Evangelical Churches, when salvation seemed to depend upon a bare signature to a confession. But it is not here that we must look for the most significant reaction ; rather in the movement of Nominalism, which, partly in the interests of more practical piety, partly in the interests of the particular, partly in a well- grounded conviction of the fallibility of human judg- ment, withdraws one by one the truths of dogma from the sphere of reason, and tends to that separation of the domain of practical and speculative knowledge which to-day marks modern thought. The Nominalists objected not to dogma as such, but to the method of proof. The latter seemed to them singularly in- adequate. (Their searching criticism was not the mark of an arrogant pretension ; it arose rather from a sense of humility and a consciousness of the limits of human intelligence, of the strange and yet impassable barriers which divide off the several departments of our knowledge and experience, of the real world of human activities, the visible and the concrete. There were many who disguised under an avowed deference to church authority a thoroughly sceptical temper; just as there were many like Amalric, Simon, and David, who, under the terms of a mysticism similar to the doctrine of Erigena, concealed a purely Rationalistic Pantheism.) But I speak of the general current of that reaction against Universals, which denied to knowledge the supremacy in human life; which saw in the warfare of separate existence not with Empedocles, Plotinus, and Schelling, a regrettable lapse from pure Being, but a condition of the coming of God's kingdom ; which clearly descried the danger to the ordinary man in an inaccessible and formal theology, and undermined of set purpose the fabric of demonstrable and trans- parent truth. Duns Scotus, though no Nominalist, and
12 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
perhaps, like Anaxagoras, hardly conscious of the gravity of his objection, replaces the Will in a position long usurped by pure Intelligence.
§ 8. By the period of the Reformation the discord between the unequal yoke-fellows had broken out in open war. Philosophy claimed not merely an autonomous system of thought, but to regulate the State and invent a new ethical code, in complete independence. The Reformers rejected any alliance or compromise, dis- paraged Reason, and rested Christian proof on inward experience, on the letter of Scripture, and later on orthodox subscription. The Roman Church, in the wonderful revival of the Counter-Reformation, while secretly borrowing from Machiavelli the arts, the methods, and the maxims of the new wisdom, reverted openly to infallible authority, to that absolutism which had of late become the universal political ideal. Hence- forward the continental Churches held aloof from secular wisdom. The new age was dominated by con- ceptions wholly alien to the mediaeval aim ; in politics, efficiency was the sole desideratum ; and implication of government or state-craft with moral prepossessions was gradually though not at first expressly abandoned. In science, experiment and use were demanded rather than correctness of system ; and the English leaders of thought laid a not unwelcome emphasis on the divorce of intellectual aims and the religious needs of the practical life. (The temper of an almost complacent dualism between faith and knowledge, reason and revelation, is a feature of the English temper so strongly marked, that I may have occasion to refer to it subsequently, and call serious attention to its latest development.) Meantime, in the political field, ihe so- called ' Wars of Religion ' burnt out, giving place to a tired and lethargic stupor, to monarchical reaction, until, in the closing years of the seventeenth century, a new and spirited attempt was made to close up the rift
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 13
between Philosophy and Religion by establishing a modus Vivendi. In this enterprise we notice the universal and adaptable genius of Leibnitz — that great theoretical conciliator of the Churches, who revived the almost forgotten adage, the identity of the truths of Reason and the dogma of the Church. Into the task is thrown, too, the whole weight of the Schools of British Psychology, and, if the truth were told, the sceptical yet by no means wholly destructive crusade of the French enlightenment. Nothing was so much discussed and debated throughout the eighteenth century as the simplification of the ' credenda ' within the limits of rational credibility. It was the task imposed on the learned piety of orthodox divines ; it stimulated the half-serious proffers of alliance by the freethinker. Christianity was proclaimed to be non-mysterious, to be in fact nothing but republication of the primitive belief in God, in judgment, and in immortality; in a word, the religion of Nature — a scanty remnant of ecclesi- astical dogma which was supposed to coincide with the requirements of Man and correspond to the arguments of Reason. This simple and ' self-evident ' creed (as it was generally supposed) could be agreed upon for the use of mankind in the coming era of genuine enlighten- ment, when truth in absolute transparence should guide the race back to Paradise. It is formulated in Voltaire's Henriade no less than in the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau, and the pages of theological utilitarianism or Deistic freethought in England. Everything seemed to promise well for this new venture of modest reconstruc- tion, the lowest or irreducible minimum of a Rationalist creed ; and it was combined with a demand for a respectable and not over-exacting conformity to a bourgeois standard of morality.
§ 9. It may be noticed that the court of appeal and ultimate tribunal is neither the needs and experience of man in himself, but a vague and still scholastic
14 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Universal Reason — raised by its clearness and univer- sality above the vacillations of the several units. With the same profound ignorance of human nature and its requirements, the political reaction against an ineffect- ive centralisation had proposed as a panacea for all social distress the rule of the philosophers, the spread of freethought, in place of half-hearted and unintelligent bureaucrats and a Church which had ceased to believe in itself, its doctrine, or its mission. Indeed, there are signs all over Europe in the Absolutist Governments of a gradual and amiable conversion of the Sovereigns to all the fundamental tenets of enlightenment. Everywhere the Jesuits were expelled, and in the end their Order was finally abolished. The claims of the Papacy (except as a small Italian territory) became as shadowy as the pretensions of the Holy Roman Empire. Catholicism, suspected or despised by all European Governments, could still afford to laugh at itself, and surrender its influence while retaining its privileges and emoluments ; just as a similar unrighteous compact of constitu- tionalism has suggested that Kingship might give up its onerous charges and become an opulent and secure Pensionary of the State. Of conscientious reaction, tenacity of autocratic principle, there is no sign; and prerogative was retained by those who openly professed the creed of Equality, and had not the faintest concep- tion of the meaning and the obligation of the Feudal tie. The battle of the Revolution was already won among the authorities as well as among the educated classes before its tenets filtered down to the lower ranks of society. The pacific substitution of judicious maxims of enlightened selfishness for obsolete superstitions seemed well nigh complete, when a sudden explosion precipitated events in the social world, brought to light new and rudimentary impulses which had been long forgotten in the academy, the closet, and the ' salons.' It exposed a novel factor, which henceforth, however
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 15
blind and unconscious and easily cajoled, will dominate the great movements in the West, or may possibly lead to a reconstruction which will render future movement superfluous — I mean the ' will of the people.'
§ 10. It is a striking testimony to the short sight and superficial optimism of the * Age of Reason,' that although this and similar expressions were continually on the lips of the agents of Revolution or Reform, no attempt had been made to define or sound the obscure depths of popular sentiment. To the philosopher, the average man was a negligible quantity, or a contempt- ible enigma not worth solution ; and he was profoundly convinced of Plato's wisdom, in limiting intellectual wisdom, and in consequence political power, to a single and highly privileged class. It is usually taken for granted that the French Revolution, with its early stage of rational philosophy, was an indispensable prelude to a wider enfranchisement. But the popular voice was heard more distinctly in the acclamation of Napoleon and the extinction of the Directory, than in the out- cries of a Paris mob. The real tendencies of the nine- teenth century are so imperfectly appreciated, that it is necessary at each moment to ask, Are we still employing the same term in the same sense ? And if this be true of an age largely sobered by careful and painstaking inquir}^ by scientific methods and by the widespread decay of idealistic phrase, it may well be true of a century which in the discussion of the most vital problems forgot all the fundamental facts of human nature and experience. The new factors which so com- pletely falsified the predictions of the sanguine were the discovery of man, a creature by no means swayed, out- side his academic theses, by reason but by the opposing passions of blind hate, furious vengeance, loyal self- surrender to a cause, warm and devoted adherence to a person. For this the philosophy of Volney or Holbach had made no provision : for degenerate human nature
1 6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
they had foreseen no guidance but in calm and austere reflection, an absence of enthusiasm, an enlightened self-interest. Rousseau, who by birth and circumstance lived nearer to primitive human nature than any com- placent Rationalist, had set up the claims of the heart against the head, as Scotus those of the will against the intellect. Leibnitz has directed attention to the immense part played in our lives by the obscurer sensa- tions, whose dimness baffled our analysis while it largely impelled our action. The ' clearness ' which the Carte- sians had demanded as a test of truth, was seen to refer not to the indistinct material of practical and moral life, but only to that realm of mathematic truth where Reason has not to move and decide, only to receive and to codify. It is but recently that human pride has recon- ciled itself to the new truth, that the chief forces moving in the realm of political and social development are the incalculable and the sub-conscious. These act without waiting for logical precision or for universal expression, or indeed for any distinct or conscious acceptance. They cannot be predicted ; nay, they cannot with accuracy be described until Time has placed a long interval at the disposal of calm and dispassionate Criticism.
§ II. But if we do detect a glimpse of the nature of the secret yet irresistible forces which sway society, we find they are much simpler and nearer to rudimentary impulse than the dreams and the maxims of philosophers. Revolutions are as a rule economic, not idealistic ; and men who think they are fighting for a sacred cause are as a rule resisting hunger. The sole and unpardonable vice of the modern Absolutist State is inefficiency. The French fought angrily against an ineffective and diffident monopoly of privilege and authority, and the irresolute State was condemned for weakness, for scepticism, not for oppression. They submitted without a murmur to a far severer discipline until that too was found wanting. Behind the orderly and successful government of
FUNCTION AND LIMITS 17
Napoleon was the whole body of conscious public opinion ; and the ' will of the people,' which rarely finds vent except through a single mouthpiece, guided and endorsed this reconstruction out of chaos.
§ 12. I pause, then, to-day on the threshold of the nineteenth century, having attempted to estimate the relations of religious and secular thought in a survey of history since the Christian era. I may perhaps gather up the results. We have noticed the peculiar difficulty of the apologist, who in the very nature of the case cannot hope to satisfy either the Rationalist or the Orthodox ; for the one he is too popular, for the other too abstruse : he plays the part of Telemachus between the gladiators in the arena. But on a very general inquiry into the course of Christian apologetic, we have perhaps arrived at this conclusion: (i) that the ages of the close alliance of dogma and rationalism, though they might seem most successful in the Church's history, yet derived their stimulus from some other quarter ; (2) that in the first it controlled philosophy, and in the second accepted such terms as philosophy was pleased to dictate ; (3) that the general result of this association was a divorce between theology and the Gospel, the definite distinction of dogma and man's practical needs ; (4) that the first great period ended with a return to common life and the simpler demands of man in the Reformation, and the second period of supposed identity and reconciliation abruptly closed with the French Revolution. It remains to be seen how far the nineteenth century enables us to detect the co-operation of those new factors whose appearance so startled and confused the prophets of a new age. There are signs abroad to-day of a somewhat similar though less striking dis- appointment. The Christian Church must take account of all the distress of humanity, and can find a remedy both for the manifest ills of society and a substitute for an independent Idealism which has proved a chimera.
LECTURE I 1 THE MORAL INSTINCT : MAN FINDS HIMSELF
" Lord, what is man ? " — Vs. cxliv. 3.
§ I. Human nature and the sanctions of conduct : relation of the conscious unit to himself (subsequently, to God and to the State).
§ 2. Our aims and impulses independent of our conscious volition and not originated by our reflection : feelings before judgments : impotence of Reason in the sphere of the particular : the Gospel the only possible arbiter between Science and Democracy.
§ 3. All enlightenment and reform tends to Subjectivism : always implies sceptical reflection upon the sanctions of moral and social rule : consequent danger to the civic ideal.
§ 4. Such periods of Individualism followed by reaction to a Universal : man's social and (originally) unselfish nature may be compared to St. Christopher in the legend.
§ 5. Thought has been a solvent : prevalence of doubt, acqui- escence, and resignation : man's true function, to return with Socrates to earthly duties.
§ 6. The explanations of Thought lag behind common practice : in the field of men's hopes and aspirations, which carry them again towards the life of action, we cannot hope for accurate evidence.
§ 7. Motives of ' moral action ' classified : (l) pursuit of broken series of pleasures : (2) active social energy under control of unquestioned custom : (3) resignation to a Divine order : (4) pure individual interest in untroubled calm (the explanation, 'obedience to law as law,' omitted because it cannot be a final motive).
§ 8. Divorce of virtue and happiness after Socrates : utilitarianism disappointed : Plato driven back upon supersensuous sanctions.
§ 9. Large concessions by Aristotle to popular views, and the standard of the average man : prevailing sadness of later Greek reflection on life.
§ 10. The Gospel rejects the dualism and sharp contrast into which Hellenism has fallen : function of the Church as supporter of the civic ideal : mediccval State-sanction of morality.
18
THE MORAL INSTINCT 19
§ ir. Ill-adjusted fabric of Aristotelian and Christian elements in mediaeval ethics : Feudalism and Casuistry fill m the gap between theoretical demands and actual fulfilment : wideness of chasm between ideal and practice.
§ 12. Arbitrarinessof the dictates of morality in Scotus : morality, submission to a personal sovereign, as a condition of future bliss.
§ 13. Domination, in contrast, of the 'Law of Nature' from 1600 to 1800 among the ' enlightened ' : frank egoism during the eighteenth century, in revenge for the long suppression of individual interests for the general welfare in the preceding age.
§ 14. In spite of the imperfections of its allied philosophy, Christianity the only universal and democratic power : no other scheme understands man's inner nature, characterised as it is neither by pure selfishness nor by meaningless devotion to the unknown.
§ I. We were arrested at the threshold of the nine- teenth century by the French Revolution and by the critical philosophy, after a rapid survey of the general development of Christian apologetic. But before we consider the significance of the past hundred years, of the tendencies of clear thought and of dim social movement, we shall be obliged, I am afraid, to get still closer to the inmost recesses of human nature, to penetrate into that rarefied, or it may be subterranean, atmosphere of introspection where (as for Hume and all inquirers into ultimate truth) it is so hard for human courage, patience, and hope to survive. We must examine with cool scepticism the very commonest definition and most generally accepted maxim about man, and rid ourselves of all prejudice and pre- possession. No vague norm of action or motive of conduct can be accepted unchallenged and without impartial scrutiny, simply because we are afraid to face facts, and try without avail to confine our doubt to merely theoretic or theologic proposition. Before we can pass to a correct estimate of that period, its advance in clearness and conviction in the field of natural inquiry and possibly oi public and social welfare, I must ask for your patience for a very similar glance over the relation of man's consciousness to Moral Law as the successive
20 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
ages of European history have conceived and formulated. In the third lecture I desire to trace in outline the chief •moments or stadia in the notions of the Divine Nature ; in the fourth, I shall consider the evolution of the present political condition of Western Europe. The remainder of the course, deserting the pathway of historical reflection, will descend to the still more concrete facts of our present state of development, the needs of society — the value, the significance, the prospects, of the individuals who compose it. We shall speak of this triple relation of the unit quite simply : first, to himself and his inward nature ; second, to God and the ultimate power behind the complex of visible things ; third, to the Body Politic ; — as anthropology, theology, and the doctrine of the State. Our lecture to-day is concerned with this problem, the reconciliation of the notions of duty and happiness, of restraint and inward development.
§ 2. We shall find, I think, the following suggestions borne out : —
(i) That this internal impulse to development pro- vides us with aims and methods of which at first we are wholly unconscious.
(2) That no reflection can upset their value or destroy the cogency of their appeal.
(3) That no explanation, no analysis or definition, can do justice to their significance and reality for us ; being, like the reasons for religious faith (in our first lecture), miserably inadequate for the task.
(4) That man's gradual rise into self-consciousness and a demand for freedom is followed by a sense of insecurity and by a return to the outward restraint, against which at first he rebelled.
(5) That this process of disillusionment afflicts the loftier natures with a mental paralysis, provides them with no sufficient motive for action, and sends them baffled from the duties and pleasures of the present into a dream-world of their own imagination.
THE MORAL INSTINCT 21
(6) That this detachment of the pure intellect, demanding a knowledge of essence and universal rather than of relation and particular, from the concerns of life, is as much a feature of our present age as of earlier periods of acute self-consciousness.
(7) That the Christian religion can alone provide a common ground where the two adversaries may meet and be reconciled, fully recognising as it does the claims of Reason or Science and of Democracy, fully competent to be the impartial arbiter.
§ 3. The whole current of European enlightenment, whether philosophic or religious, has set towards Indi- vidualism— that is to say, the discovery by each man's own experience of the terms, the limits, the functions of his own nature. Until the stage of conscious subjectivity is reached, nothing is strictly of any value. The single citizen or worshipper is to be guided (as by law in St. Paul, 'TTUi^uycoyog \g Xp/o-roj/) in his early steps, but not to be controlled, by external authority. This represents not a final and inscrutable edict, once and for all imposed by some Divine or heroic legislator, but rather an aggregate of past common sense and insight, ever accumulating steadily, derived from the practical ex- perience of the father of the family, which expands by association, like the mediaeval State (cotisociatio con- sociationuni), into the village of the wider community, the tribe, the clan, the nation, the empire. Such guidance of inherited maxim it would be folly to reject, only to stumble blind and solitary among the stones and snares of life. But enlightenment always means conscious reflection upon the ultimate sanction of authority, not perhaps unmingled with defiance, and a sense of undeserved injury or servitude. It will by no means follow that the critic will become an iconoclast ; far from it. Periods of signal insight into the ambiguous or precarious basis of moral and social rule have usually ushered in an age of conscious surrender to spiritual or
22 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
secular autocracy. However we may regret the fact, it is vain to deny it : calm inquiry is a solvent and not a corrective or a confirmer of a vigorous State-morality. Beside the interest of the Infinite, the Universal, beside the joy of expatiating untrammelled within a larger horizon, beside the reposeful sentiment and easy tolerance of the cosmopolitan, the nearer duties of home and State shrink into insignificance. It is curious that both Plato and Cicero should disparage the civic ideal, and should believe that the self-sacrifice of the philo- sophic statesman needs to be carefully reared and sus- tained, sometimes even at the cost of truth. Public service is an irksome and thankless task ; for such condescension to the weaker brethren of the Cave or the ' petty angle ' of earth, a mere vanishing point beside the orbs of planets, must stand, as temptation or as bribe, the assurance of a transcendental recompense. When the brilliant lure seems to fade away into a vague conjecture, the Sage retreats to the impregnable fastness of his own conscious- ness, and lives safe but alone in a narrow if magic circle of deliberate and negative calm. Aristotle is more than half a Quietist; his successors and the followers of the Roman Cicero could make nothing of the ordinary duties of life, the common pursuits and aims of society and government. The underlying pessimism of all philo- sophic thought from first to last is made clear by the continuous stress on celibacy as the higher life.
§ 4. The first result of reflection is to make men very dissatisfied with the present ; whether it is because the control of public opinion seems to thwart self-develop- ment, or because political and religious teaching falls below some ideal standard, or because the larger world of universal law is the real fatherland and home of the philosopher. " I care very much for my country," said Anaxagoras, as he points to the stars. But while we notice this constant recurrence of egoism and abstention in the Greek Sophists, the Renaissance Humanists and
THE MORAL INSTINCT 23
neo-pagans, perhaps also to-day, in the secluded life of pure scientific study, serene and detached, we may be quite sure that such period is always closely followed by a willing surrender to some Universal ; no longer unconscious and traditional, like the unreflecting and perpetual infancy of China, but the free compact and the tired surrender of Disillusionment, Such periods of centralisation and reaction form a striking evidence not jnerely of man's social nature, but of his need of a master. If we may compare the apologist to the martyr TelemacJius, who irritates both combatants by his well-meant but untimely interference, the typical figure of St. CJiristopJier might well stand at the head of this lecture. Man, however selfish his starting-point, is always a pilgrim in search of an Ideal, to which he can pay an unconditional homage. Sometimes this search begins in the eager and fiery zest of youthful enthusiasm, and sinks into the smouldering embers of a disappointed old age. But the claim of man to be an absolute and irresponsible law to himself can never be long or seriously maintained. The banded many and weaker are too strong collectively for the eccentric or the unconventional ; the chaos of religious indi- vidualism leads, through wars and persecution and mutual abuse, amid the loosening of the chains of society, to a voluntary surrender of rights. Sometimes the new master is sought in a Counter-Reformation ; in subservience to a written creed ; in a shameful sub- mission to a Puritan supremacy, more oppressive than Rome ; in the quest for the ' strong man armed,' who is to put an end to disorder. Cum domino pax ista venit. So too, time after time, not through some single and mythic transfer in the remote childhood of our race, does universal egoism lead to unconditional sovereignty. The theorists of the Supremacy of the State do but formulate the accomplished fact ; for the operation of obscure and unconscious forces always precedes this clear
24 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
and logical exposition. We never seek reasons for things until after they have become too strong for us or too weak. § 5. I may seem to be unduly transgressing on the theme of my fourth lecture, when I hope to examine the relation of man to the State. But it will be remembered how closely bound in origin and evolution are Ethics and Politics, how gradual the change from the hard external imperative to the inner motive and disposi- tion, the ' good will ' ; how difficult, perhaps impossible, perhaps undesirable, to awaken the larger part of mankind from a dull deference to authority and convention into a full sense of their prerogative of freedom and of reflecting choice. Also, for political idealists, the most popular form of government is Csesarism ! If the inert yet menacing body of the Russian people could be interro- gated, I doubt not the whole grievance would be the restricted, not the absolute, power of the Autocrat, who to them at least stands for God's vicegerent, the only intelligible repositary of plenary power. Still it is high time that we tried to come closer to man in himself, and to explore the various explanations which he has given for lines of conduct and behaviour which in their early stages were spontaneous and unquestioning. It is this unconscious vigour and pertinacity of primitive man, wherever found, that suggested the modern doctrine of blind and inscrutable Fo7'ce (in nature as in man) working itself out towards complexity, somewhat roughly assumed as equivalent to perfection; and we must constantly remember that the moral theorist does not pretend to invent a code of behaviour or to explain finally the obscure instincts or sympathies which in practice somehow guide one's act. Thought, indis- pensable as it is to personality and to moral value, has not been in the experience of mankind wholly favour- able to practice, as we have already noted. A paralysis extends from the central force in the citadel of man's soul through all the members of the organism. The
THE MORAL INSTINCT 25
equilibrium of argument, the blending of the parallel and hostile lines of right and wrong (if only your sight be strong enough to see that wonderful region ' Beyond good and evil '), the hopeless task of the man of action, the littleness and uncertainty of human life and accom- plishment— all these end in acquiescence. The spectacle of Universal Law, which seemed to early Stoics a lesson of comfort and trustful peace, taught Aurelius either a mystical worship of the unknown (to which secretly returned a more personal conception of God, a more intimate communion and sympathy of the Divine and human), or a horrid doubt whether after all the world he deified bore any correspondence to the virtue or the hopes of man. As a tired and worn-out civilisation must seek new strength among barbarous recruits, so from the primitive and rudiinentajy ijnpulses (lying concealed in artificial man) has Thought to seek fresh vigour, new stimulus and motive for life and action. Each age needs a Socrates to remind man of his proper aim and to pull down to earth not perhaps the wizard's moon of a diseased imagination, but the human intellect lost in the clouds of Metaphysic and negligent of its true kingdom — not the discovery of the ends of life, but the control of the means for their realisation.
§ 6. We shall never be able to report correctly an analysis of our own earlier and untutored process, whether in thought or action. We act and attempt to * give an account ' of the action which has ' gone out of us.' It is harder, much harder, than to explain (as in our first discourse) the reason of the hope that is in us. For in a large measure this hope (the form our religious aspirations must take) rests on this self-same half-reflected action, to which, as to mediaeval dogma, the proof was so inadequate, yet in value and signi- ficance so genuine. But the action itself is some- thing immediate and direct. Behind it lie forces that defy calculation, forces not merely of early
26 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
training, imitation, precedent, custom, fear, restraint, but of the subconscious self and the whole puzzle of a single or a multiple personality. How paltry the prudential maxims of the Seven Sages, the Ionic men of science, beside the natural wealth of virtuous attain- ment, and constant love of children, of friends, and country, which I doubt not was as familiar as to-day, yet so irreducible to formula ! Can anything be more amaz- ing than the false and brutal egoism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, accepted as the sovereign source of all action by philosophers the most kindly and benevolent, when in their common daily experience, in the average man of the time, unreflecting love and unselfishness must at each moment have given the lie to their creed ! (Quite disinterested I cannot call it ; for love, which is its own immediate reward, never counts the sacrifice, nor puzzles whether it is surrendering the true self or the phenomenal self or the not-self; love, which is inapt for casuistry, and blushes only if it is required to confess its aim.) Man is always both better and worse than his creed or his principles. We shall expect here no logical clearness, no symmetry of arrangement, no final and convincing argument ; only attempts to illumine with feeble torches the darkness of that current which rises within us from some unknown source, and tends to some unknown goal.
% 7. The motives of moral action, when it has become aware of itself, may be classified somewhat as follows : (i) the pursuit of a broken series of momentary pleasures ; (2) the conventional aim of domestic and social welfare, active energy in the public service; (3) the resignation of the cosmopolitan to a fated and necessary external order, conceived as Reason or Destiny (or, in religious natures, as the will of Heaven) ; (4) a purely personal preoccupation, with a view to cheerful- nessand tranquillity of mind, such as throughout 'Cci^Greek subjective schools, from the sv0v[Mf] of Democritus to the
THE MORAL INSTINCT 27
oL'Trd.&nu of the last Stoic, the arapat,toc of the last Sceptic and Epicurean, maintained itself as the true principle of egoistic Morals in their fancied independence of all things external to consciousness. These stages corre- spond roughly to the ages of man — infancy, with its fleeting and inconstant criterion ; youth, with its generous but soon discouraged idealism ; middle age, recognising the limits of endeavour and the strange powers that thwart man's work ; and the contentment of the old saved from needless pain by the blunting of sympathies and the simple enjoyment of retrospect over the whole span of life. But we may rapidly dismiss the first, corresponding to the Cyrenaic temper, because it is, in strictness, never found ; both in human experience as well as in the schools of Hellenism it soon settles down into a less ambitious pursuit of settled and life-long calm, which, in despair of co-ordinating sporadic moments of positive joy, prefers to seek a safer asylum in negative peace. For a similar reason I have not even included in the list obedience to Law for its own sake, surrender to the voice of conscience or of duty, however it may find expression, because we are speak- ing of the practice, not of the theory, of moral conduct ; and it is only the philosopher who can afford to contem- plate in abstracto a law which waits for convention to supply its content — which is accepted only because and so long as it can satisfy its subjects' desire for enjoyment or security.
§ 8. It is perhaps impossible for us to extricate the term ' Virtue ' from its association with obedience to an uncompromising external standard, the 'i-w^-a/ and toil' of an unpleasing task ; yet we have with it to translate a word in which the evolution of an inner faculty is the dominant notion, endeavour, and not self-surrender. Socrates, whose influence lay in his life and death, not in the exactness of his teaching or even the success of his method, held together, in a generous inconsistency,
28 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the two notions of duty and of inclmation. He recog- nised the individual's right to happiness ; for after the Sophistic argument no State could afford to disregard this by an authoritative claim upon the citizen's self- abnegation. Yet he reaffirmed the objective, and, what is more, acted up to his precepts. A conflict arose between his duty to God and his duty to man ; and one who had received a Divine mission could not hesitate. His system (if indeed it can so be called) fell apart into the two schools of virtue and oi pleasure — which represent permanent tendencies of human thought and found a lasting place among the Greeks. Plato appears to reconcile the conflicting elements (which, at least in theory, confronted each other with such defiance) ; [jtjavsr/jv n yjG6ii')^v. But in attempting to rise from a frank utilitarian standpoint (in which the 'good' was the ' useful '), he is obliged to appeal to a supersensuous sanction and to call in the aid of religious tradition and a mythic system of retribution and recompense, in order to account for the discrepancy which still emerged. In him, as in his pupil, there is a distinct reaction, wistful rather than effective, towards the early State-conscious morality; though the self-conscious action of rational insight was to be permitted and encouraged in a certain class, it was a ' counsel of perfection.'
I 9. Aristotle, like Bacon, and in much the same spirit of amicable separation of province, deprecated an over- hasty recourse to invisible sanction. Although the highest life and its function is expressed in terms eagerly adopted by the later Religious Mystics, yet for ordinary conduct he refuses to go beyond the limited horizon of earth and the small city-state. He supplants 'right knowledge' by good will ; and, like Socrates, is far too sensible, and too shrewd a student of average human nature, to proclaim a crusade on behalf of pure virtue apart (rom pleasure. His successors, one and all, aimed at securing peace in a world they could not understand,
THE MORAL INSTINCT 29
in an age when the old theory of man's birthright, harmony with nature, was contradicted by every turn of experience ; and the early teleology of faculty, function, and happiness in self-development, was in fact, though not in phrase, abandoned by all. Reflection was quite ready for a more daring flight into the unseen, far from the unsatisfying and chaotic world ; and the distrustful dualism, latent even in the earliest Hellenism in popular tradition and mythology, emerging alike in the religious and austere creed of Plato and in his pupil's intellect- ualism, broke once and for all with the world of things and the innocent pursuits of men. For it will not be out of place here to remind you of a truth which is often forgotten — that the naive blitheness of Paganism is an invention of imaginative historians. A Religion of personal caprice, controlled only by the unknowable, of distrust and of fear ; an assurance of separate immortality strangely lacking in comfort ; a philosophy from first to last ascetic, intellectualist, recluse, and celibate ; a natural theory of the world, which, even in the sanest, emphasised the vast distance between heaven and the sublunar sphere ; a society in which a highly self-conscious ideal- ism must have embittered the sense of the political decay, without providing a remedy ; here, surely, is no promising field for the expansion of those elements necessary for individual enterprise or national vigour. \ 10. Greece provided but the form in which were cast the concrete and practical aims of Rome and of the Gospel. So far from the Christian message entailing a dualism of ' idly confronting realms,' its signal con- tributions were (i) a visible personal historic embodi- ment of the Divine Wisdom ; (2) a distinct understand- ing that the body, no longer as to Plato the ar.yM, the tomb or prison-house of Spirit, should share in the transformed and risen life of the children of God. It would not be necessary to lay stress on this but for the constant repetition of the old fallacy to which I have
30 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
reluctantly referred. The animating principle of the declining civilisation of Rome was the Christian Church. When that wonderful line of imperial statesmen, of unsparing diligence and public spirit, gave up the task as hopeless, the Church stepped into the vacant place, and industriously applied herself to conquer and control the Secular ; to revive with fresh fuel the ' will to live.' Teutonic individualism was never without a certain reverence for the Universal and for a central authority, embodied in a person, and, with all its lofty prerogative not over-exacting in its demands on loyalty. A chival- rous devotion to a feeble or infant sovereign is peculiar to mediaeval as it is foreign to classical sentiment. The basis of moral behaviour throughout the Middle Age was obedience to a Divine Law, interpreted by a devoted and infallible Church, enforced by future sanctions, and privately accommodated to the needs or capacities of each by Casuistry. In the ark of the Church alone safety was to be found, and the system guaranteed the happiness of its subjects. Augustine's emphasis on the Divine Will, his determinism reflecting both the deepest personal religious feeling and the prevailing gloom of the age, had to a certain extent chilled moral fervour. Instead of active morality, men turned to the observance of the cult, to ceremonial and to implicit obedience. Thus there arose a twofold ideal, corresponding to the 'Z'iffTig and yvuGig of the Alexandrines (just as there emerged somev^Jjat later the curious hypothesis of the 'Double Truth'). To the majority, all was external, heteronomous, imposed by authority from without, mechanical, the opus operatum. God was the supreme Lawgiver ; and dogma, if rationalised, was cast into juristic formula. To the larger class religion must have appeared frankly a matter of prudence, and the rule of life utilitarian. It is safe to say that in those times no higher conception would have been understood. § II. The opposite or inward tendency begins con-
THE MORAL INSTINCT 31
sciously in the West with Pelagius, and receives striking illustration in Abelard, transferring the interest of the Divine Atonement from Sacrifice or legal satisfaction to pure example ; laying stress on faith (conceived as internal disposition) and not on works. Meantime, Christian ethics are curiously compounded of Aristotelian secularism, topped by a hasty and ill-fitting adjustment of virtues specially Christie. 1; and the unbalanced fabric needed but a louder demand for independence to split asunder. ' Will ' to Thomas is but the executive which carries out the deliberations of' intelligence', conscience is not an immediate intuition of the right, but a process of thought, a syllogistic process. It "consists in definite premisses and a conclusion derived from them " (Wundt). It is because of the lofty pretensions and practical impotence of earthly sovereignty and the intellectual - moral Ideal that Feudalism and Casuistx] enter practical life. Both aim at filling the void which yawned between the sublime and ecumenical claims of Emperor or Pope and their effect ; so between an inaccessible and monastic ideal which bore little relation to ordinary life. It is in the striking and significant divorce of theory and practice that we find the political and religious import of the mediaeval period ; the key to the solution of much paradox and inconsistency. The one soars to the unity of Christendom and the vision of God, to the realm of universals ; the other is a record of primitive passion and blunt egoism, and on the part of the Church a necessary compromise with the needs of the moment and the docility of the individual.
§ 12. It is not a little strange that Duns Scotus, re- verting to the pure externalism of Law, to Tertullian's formula of the good quia Deus prcecepit, should be also known for his emphasis on Will, his influence through Occam on Nominalism and the Reformers. We have no time to examine this apparent anomaly, but I
32 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
will draw notice rather to the growing scepticism in the powers of human reason, to fathom and explain the mysteries of Revelation ; not unconnected, as we may surmise, with its clear incompetence to regulate common practice according to its lofty standard. Like later apologists, he rests moral duty upon arbitrary will ; for the "contents of reveU«^ion are incomprehensible." Thus there is no guarantee that its dictate will continue the same, and we revert to the pure conditionalism of Lactantius. Without irreverence, such morality may be compared to the futile and conventional tasks of the convict prison, invented merely to keep out of mis- chief or to punish; their sole value resting on punctilious performance. It is easy to see here, held in a very loose alliance, elements of future conflict and deadly animosity. We have, though not explicit, a purely utilitarian concept of morality ; yet we have, as against this arbitrary yoke, a new stress on individual requi'ements, which will soon show itself in the secular or religious Egoism of the new age. If Duns is in some w^ay the parent of the Protestant reformer, he is also the forerunner of independent ethics, of the Enlightenment. In the former, faith, personal and living, becomes not an uninterested acceptance of incomprehensible ' credenda,' from motives of prudence, but an inward necessity impelling to action. In its ideal, Protestantism is an appeal to autonomy in place of heteronomy. It heralds the Kantian reconstruction, but its exalted yet practical theory has not been able to prevent the gradual divorce of faith and works, of Sunday and week day, which is a conspicuous phe- nomenon in the Reformed countries.
§ 1 3. The rupture took place with authority, in the Humanists, with their neo-pagan and Hellenistic ideals ; in the Copernican Lutheranism ("each man as each planet a centre"); in the theorists of independent political systems, as Machiavelli and Bodinus ; or of independent ethics. The entire period from the middle
THE MORAL INSTINCT 33
of the sixteenth century to the French Revolution is dominated by the ' Law of Nature.' Even in Thomas there was a lurking belief that only for the theological virtues was heavenly grace indispensable ; the Crusades had taught men that honour, generous virtue, and chivalry was not a monopoly of the servants of the Church. An attempt was made to ground a convincing appeal for right action (and especially in those difficult crises when private and public welfare are seen in conflict) upon the unwritten yet universally valid Law^ inscribed not merely in the hearts of men but visible throughout creation, and telling with certaint>- of the power, the wisdom, the benevolence of its author and the coincidence of Duty and Happiness in obeying its easy precepts. Its development through the seventeenth- century epoch of Absolutism in thought as in State, in the following age of Individualism gradually awaking to a sense of insecurity in an alien world — this need not detain us. There prevails everywhere the same unex- amined Aristotelian axiom, taken for granted : that the world is a system governed by righteous laws; that function points the way to happiness ; and that virtue will assuredly have its recompense here or hereafter. Some approached it from within from the subjective side: What is my nature? my peculiar faculty or emotion which in gratifying I can perfect ? Others, more universal, inquired into the common element in man's average nature, afraid, it may be, of the threatened ex- cesses of the extreme and subjective Left Wing. Others again devoted themselves, not without mystical fervour, to a deduction of the outward law, whether of the Universe, or of particular and experimental science, or of the State. But nothing can conceal the frank and fundamental egoism, the utilitarian object, of the whole search. There is a shrewd basis, not unlike that of Stoicism, in the ethics of Spinoza : the individual acts for himself and his own advantage alone; if he be 3
34 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
determined by the welfare of others, he yields to the lower influence of the passive emotions. Meantime, the conspicuous and unscientific phenomenon of self- surrender to cause or person ' for conscience' sake ' puzzled these philosophers, as the loyalty of the Jacobite puzzled the Whig. The * Will of the Community ' had reigned supreme throughout the seventeenth century. It was high time to explain (i) what relation this bore to the aggregate of individual wills ; (2) what obligation was incumbent on the unit, intent on his own interest, to concede to the general welfare. And here again we are brought up sharply by the French Revolution and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
§ 14. We set out with no clearer purpose, perhaps, than to discover what man does or is likely to do when he finds himself. The pre-Christian philosophy ended in the ideal of the pure recluse, who almost anticipates Nirvana in his suspension of judgment, of will, of intellect. Christianity was from the first universal and democratic, in the only true sense of adaptation to the commoft needs of average mankind. It was compelled to take the form of law and authority with its young pupils, who burst so gaily into the moribund society of Rome. The secular and religious reform reinstated the ideal, always acknowledged but never widely practical, of private judgment and of freethought, liberty of conscience and of inquiry. Divorced from clerical supremacy, political and moral science has to seek a fresh foundation. Absolutist tyranny in the one provokes the fresh attack on the Universal in the individualism of the latter. In spite of the lip-service of the ' common good,' the ' public welfare,' self-interest was alone recognised as a possible or legitimate spring of action. Yet this motive is as alien to the average standard of man's behaviour, as false to his moral consciousness, as the pure altruism which in the reaction of last century has professed and failed to supplant it.
LECTURE III THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE: MAN FINDS GOD
" Blessed be he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, and whose hope is in the Lord his God ; who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that therein is ; who keepeth His promise for ever." — Ps. cxlvi. 4, 5.
§ I. Relations of God and man, not as conceived in the great world-religions, but as experienced by the believer : upward path from lower to higher stage of communion (caution against a prevalent and mischievous looseness of assumption).
§ 2. Earliest stage, fear of the unknown : second, discovery of a Divine protector somehow accessible : third, worshipper becomes a 'fellow-worker' with God (sense of dependence, of estrange- ment, and of reconciliation, in the universal parado.v of religious experience).
§ 3. Service in a cause beyond self, a primitive impulse not due to reflection : the chief spring of religious influences : self only forgotten because of unfailing assurance that in the end it must come by its rights.
§ 4. What kind of cause ? immaterial ; and not necessarily ' moral ' : religious feeling independent of morals, often subversive : temper of the missionary and the soldier alike : both confident of inclusion in the coming triumph.
§ 5. Within this division many degrees of willing service, from Thug zealot to Christian martyr : gradual expansion of the scene of conflict : share in the ultimate success, for the humble follower a satisfaction of sense of justice rather than selfish calculation.
§ 6. The fourth stage, in which conception of purpose or process rejected as unsuitable to the Divine : mystical surrender to the eternal and unchangeable : the religion of the greater part of mankind.
§ 7. Singular identity of doctrine in East and West, pagan and Christian : the changing and particular as mere illusion and mirage : goal of nothingness (in practice, mystics more enter- prising and sympathetic than their creed).
§ 8. The two demands of the religious consciousness— God must be a helper and rewarder in the strife, and a place of rest and peace
36 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
(Western society inextricably bound up with the former notion) : devotee finds in God help, encouragement, and only at last repose.
§ 9. Conception of God : precarious tie which binds religious and moral feeling : a signal error of the eighteenth century to identify religion and morality (or religion and philosophy) : religion has to provide exemption and immunity, to assure worshipper of special privilege.
§ 10. Qualities demanded in a deity : curious pre-occupation of divines with logical attributes, or with notions of power and wisdom to which, strictly, the worshipper is indifferent : cheerful sacrifice for a lost cause (in Norse myth) : stimulating effect of long-deferred even uncertain success.
§ II. We deal with religion as contrasted with theology : aloof- ness of thought or theology from average impulses impossible to- day : origin of religious feeling selfish : an appeal for suspension of law, not the recognition of its undeviating rigour : the later willing service due to no quixotic surrender of value but to perfect trustfulness : curious delusion of those who would transfer unselfish loyalty into a realm where there is no longer a master, a purpose, or a work.
§ 12. Denial of worth or meaning to conscious life in current systems of the universe : surrender to the unknown : at variance with what is best in social or political movement in recent years.
§ I. It may seem perhaps an impossible and in any case a presumptuous enterprise to describe in a single lecture the relations of God and man as they have been conceived in the various world-religions. But the task before us has a humbler scope than the formulation of a theology or the history of creeds. It is not with this reflective and secondary process that I am at all con- cerned. I do not propose to deal with scholastic defini- tion or with ecclesiastical institutions, but solely with the simpler and personal belief or need, which, though often suppressed and concealed by the over-weight, forms the only substantial foundation for the too symmetrical fabric which is reared above it. We shall not even have to traverse the devious bypaths of primitive savage cult. It will be easy, without venturing beyond our experience or our own contemporaries, to exhaust the various conceptions men form of the Divine
THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE 37
Being, or perhaps more accurately the different attitudes the human soul can assume in the presence of the Unseen. It will be found that there are roughly four stages corresponding sometimes to a personal, sometimes to a historical, progress from a lower to a higher plane. (At this stage in our inquiry, I confess that I employ these words higher and lower with very great reluctance, and always premising 'in the popular sense.' For a very large part of ethical, social, and strictly philosophical writing in the last century has been made valueless by a loose employment of familiar terms, by an unjustified appeal, even in treatises of professed scientific exactness, to current and popular prepossession. Even from a strictly impartial standpoint of inquiry, men cannot rid themselves, when dealing with certain subjects, of those ordinary vague notions with which average human nature makes shift to pass somehow through life. Two instances will readily occur : (i) the steady persistence of regarding that which is later in development as somehow ipso facto higher and better, applying an unknown standard of values, or else reverting to the traditional norm, which was annulled in every other department by the universal protest against teleology ; (2) the unwarranted assumption that a special and in many ways imperfect and inconvenient ethical system would of necessity survive the overthrow of its dogmatic basis. This reluctance to examine closely the primary assump- tions and prejudices on which the commerce of mortals is based, will be found to be a peculiar feature of modern thought ; the rare exceptions, where the callous scrutiny and doubt prevalent in theological debate is permitted also in social and moral life, are supposed to be due to madness or the love of paradox and mere academic thesis. And yet, silent but irresistible forces are under- mining just those practical hypotheses which to-day men reverence with universal lip-service and proclaim as primary and indisputable axioms.
38 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 2. The first stage is, of course, bare fear of the unknown, the capricious ; whether the incalculable violence of a natural element, or the strange desires of some departed ancestor, which, in his translation to the novel powers and conditions of another life, can no longer be foreseen or expected. At this point, ironical obscurity veils the purpose and the wishes of the higher powers. (The doctrine of Nemesis, it may be mentioned, is perhaps a further development of this feeling of help- less dismay before the unknown. The Divine counsels are indecipherable except in this one respect : the gods are clearly anxious to keep men in their proper place. Yet with this an element of certainty, of fixed policy, has crept in to share and perhaps modify the influence of the primitive fear.) At this epoch, too, emerges the priestly caste, as interpreters of the favour or displeasure of the gods; and it would be difficult to determine whether the mythical equality of mankind in tribe or village gave way first to the fear of neighbours and the need of a war-leader, or to the no less genuine terror of the unseen, and the acceptance of a ruling class claiming a direct and exclusive revelation. I need not here say more than that the two protective and mediating offices are often found united in the same person or caste, — the pontiff-king, the warrior-priest are famiHar features in early civilisation, — the definite severance of military and sacerdotal function argues a comparatively late develop- ment. I hasten to the second stage, where the grateful sense of relief in finding a Divine guardian-protector succeeds and overpowers the primitive terror of the unknown. This is strictly the beginning of personal religion (with which the dogmatic or institutional super- structure has been so often and so mischievously con- founded). Mere is found by the rare and fortunate votary a direct and immediate access to one who can help and can be understood, without resort to the formal calendars or mysterious rites of propitiation which form
THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE 39
the peculiar province of the hieratic caste. What the worshipper gains in certainty and affection (gradually- supplanting terror of sheer caprice) he will perhaps lose in efficacy or universality ; the patron or tutelar will, for his very nearness, enjoy a restricted prerogative in a narrow sphere ; and still behind him loom the gigantic and shadowy forms of earlier and malignant powers — Fate, Demogorgon, and the Giants of Norse fable. Nevertheless, the gain far outweighs the loss — a more intimate communion, a deepening devotion, a prayer which is always a demand for aid, protection, encourage- ment, yet can sometimes rise (or sink) to a humble self- surrender. At this stage we have all the familiar features which are essential to every religion — the sense of depend- ence on the national or chosen Protector, the sense of alienation or estrangement or remoteness (by deliberate or unwilling guilt), and the sense (such is the eternal and significant paradox of the religious consciousness!) of intimacy and reconciliation. And here we pass almost insensibly to the third stage, which is closer to the current views on Religion — such, at least, as are openly avowed. Instead of the naive and selfish orison of the votary on behalf of some concrete benefit within the competence of the tutelar to bestow, there comes a revelation of a Divine purpose, into which is summoned his loyalty, his joyous co-operation. He becomes a 'fellow-worker with God.' The horizon is no longer limited to the satisfaction of earthly desires : it widens to disclose the fullest partnership in a Divine scheme. The sense of human dignity is thereby infinitely enhanced. Saint Christopher has found at last the Master, in whose service it is no shame to work. With the curious indifference to logical consistency which the religious mind entertains, the Divine agent, proudly aware of his mission and his mandate, forgets or despises his own selfish interests, and pours contempt on his creaturehood, in complete self-abasement, while on the
40 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
other side he * magnifies his office ' as the interpreter of the Divine Word, as partner in the heavenly counsel.
§ 3. No one can doubt for a moment that it is this temper alone, this inspiriting sense of service in a great cause, that has been able to stir and to transform the world ; has commanded the zeal and consoled the disappointment of the great religious founders or revivers, and secretly inspires the worship of countless humble believers. From the sordid level of immediate interest the soul is lifted into a sphere where greater events are happening, greater issues are at stake ; where personal motives are not so much consciously set aside, as forgotten in the exhilaration of battle for the chosen cause. It is on this unconscious plane (where feeling and the restless desire for conflict overpower reason and reflective prudence) that ' unselfishness ' in the strict sense can alone flourish. At a later stage it is only by a generous fallacy and self-deception that the sense of 'self is pushed aside. There is something unreal in the professed satisfaction in being a mere instrument, a 'potter's vessel' in the hands of the sovereign Artificer, a pawn for the unseen player, a simple soldier in the general's hands. For deep down in the heart of each is a glad suspicion (which, as a rule, not the most subtle reasoning, the most terrible failure can expel) that he who has borne the brunt of the conflict must also in some way share in the triumph of the cause. Did not this belief survive defeat and personal loss, even temporary despair of ultimate victory, no sensible man could justify to himself in calmer moments a wanton sacrifice of present good and tangible benefit ; certainly could never communicate to others his own enthusiasm and ungrudging loyalty, unless, unconsciously perhaps to himself as to them, he could appeal to this hidden assurance of final reward. And it is just here, and only here perhaps, that the two discordant motives blend
THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE 41
and unite, self-realisation as a separate being and self-surrender as member of a larger whole, a worker in a scheme which commands and can recompense our loyalty.
§ 4. It will be noticed (and perhaps unfavourably) that no qualification has been attached to the purpose of the god, the heavenly cause. And for a good reason : at no point is this perfectly clear. I have given no moral attribute to this self-devotion ; for the attitude of the willing zealot is indifferent to moral distinctions, just as Religion in its widest connotation has nothing to do with moral behaviour (in its ordinary acceptance), is often directly foreign or subversive, and at the last can never be completely identified with Ethics. It is by no means necessary to this whole- hearted devotion that the Divine Will should be recog- nised as pleasant, as good, or as understood. The ministry delegated by special favour of Heaven may contradict every standard hitherto received, all custom of the tribe, all convenience of social intercourse, every demand of strictly personal interest and welfare. It may remain to the end so indefinable in its aim, indeed so uncertain in its final achievement, without in any way forfeiting its supreme claims to exclusive dominion over the soul. (The devotion of the missionary is thus precisely analogous to the heroism of the soldier, who neither understands nor interrogates the justice or the design of the campaign, the prudence or the strategy of his commander ; yet not for this ignorance does he believe himself a mere slave of caprice. The soldier, however, may enjoy an advantage of corporate courage, of reflected glory, of regimental tradition, which are denied to the often solitary and despondent prophet of a novel or unpopular creed. Yet it is quite enough for both that the vocation has been clearly uttered, that the present duty demands this or that behaviour, that the general issue is safe in higher hands in spite of all
42 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
hindrance and seeming failure, and that the end is dimly conceived as furtherance of the glory of God, and, in this, of the well-being of the humblest servant and minister.)
§ 5. Within this third division of the religious instinct (in which man finds satisfaction and the fulfilment of his destiny as an agent of God, as a fellow-worker) there are different degrees, from the detestable zealotry of the Thug to the exalted heroism of a Christian martyr. But a tendency will be observed to extend the domain as well as the purpose of the Master. The submissive worshipper is no longer the isolated favourite of some partial and local divinity of glen or shrine or forest, dependent for somewhat pre- carious benefits on the tutelar, whose power expires at a given spot. He is now the active and privileged combatant ranged in an unseen community, surrounded by visible companions of his labours, a partner in a plan gradually unfolding before his eyes. From a national leadership we advance to a claim for universal supremacy, from the temporal protection of a tribe or a mingled band of votaries to an unrivalled sway over things present and to come, over a kingdom co-extensive with earth and the latest fortunes of the race, now identified with the once exclusive Society. From a purely self-centred interest in salvation we pass to sympathy with Church or Society, and finally extend to all men the same title of Brother, not because facts warrant it, but because the Master's sway admits no exception. The consummation may be found in the sublime vagueness of ' some far-off Divine event,' or in a mere equilibrium of a settled social condition ; and it may be, and in the most self-conscious forms must be, closely allied with a promise of recompense in a hereafter — not, as is vulgarly supposed, with selfish and long-sighted calculation of profit and loss, but from a deep-rooted sense of common justice and the fitness of
THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE 43
things. Indeed, it is a satisfaction rather of Reason than of personal greed.
"I do not think," says Professor Pringle Patterson, " that immortality can be demonstrated by Philosophy ; but certainly to a philosophy founded upon self-con- sciousness, and especially upon the moral consciousness, it must seem incredible that the successive generations should be used up and cast aside — as if character were not the only lasting product and the only valuable result of time. It may be said that morality is independent of the belief in immortality — that its true foundation is goodness for the sake of goodness, virtue for virtue's sake — and I willingly admit the nobility of temper that often underlies this representation. As against the theory which would base morality upon selfish rewards and punishments in a future state, it is profoundly true. But immortality is claimed by our moral instincts in no sense as a reward but simply as the ' wages of going on and not to die.' And the denial of immortality seems so much at variance with our notions of the moral reasonableness, that I believe it must ultimately act as a corrosive scepticism upon morality itself."
"Truth for trulh and good for good! The Good, the True, the Pure, the Just ; Take the charm 'for e%er' from them, and they crumble into dust."
Assured of his use and value, the soldier must share also in the triumph, not by proxy but in person. With all this extension of the Divine Prerogative to absol- ute ecumenical sovereignty, this enlargement of the territory to be subjected to God's will until it tolerates no shadow of rivalry, there is yet a stage further, in which must disappear the sense of purpose to be achieved, victory to be won, or duty to be performed.
§ 6. Dispassionate reflection finds an unanswerable
44 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
difficulty in the notion of purpose when connected with the Supreme Being. Delivered from the bonds of local, of national, of secular, of terrestrial limit, confessed as the author and sustainer of the entire Universe, God is still conceived as thwarted and hampered in His designs by dulness of matter or the defiance of man- kind. The passion for a Unity, however vague and colourless, the irresistible march from the seeming manifold to the actual One, forces our reflection to remove this last fetter on the omnipotence, the omni- presence of God. The lower level of strife and conflict, the warfare of opposites, is for logical thought or mystical meditation inconceivable as the last word on the mystery of life. And for the humble sufferer or the ardent devotee, to all who find service impossible and strife distasteful, to all the feminine races and temperaments, as well as to all wise men, whom calm reasoning compels inexorably to final unity — Religion will mean not works or 'fatal doing,' just simply the loving or logical surrender of self into the one and only true Being, the God of Love or incalculable Fate. In this doctrine have concurred not merely the vast and silent masses of the East, from the remote dawn of their legendary story, but most men of deep and secluded thought, in all ages and beneath every sky. It is the one certain goal of all solitary reflection ; the supreme solace of the wearied and despondent; the single answer to the unvarying complaint of earthly vanity. The final moment of fullest communion may be an ecstatic yet still conscious sense of love given and returned, of creaturehood caught up and ennobled in unutterable bliss ; or a condition of all futile striv- ing relaxed, the will to live mortified, separate being and otherness abolished, the baneful gift of thought surrendered, its purpose served ; or the cold homage to universal law, to a blind but resistless working power in the world, carrying us, feebly complaining of our
THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE 45
helplessness or wisely silent, towards an end of which we can form no conception — indeed, can only pre- dicate one negation, that it is indifferent to the for- tunes of the human race, to the welfare of the human person.
§ 7. It may seem unfair to throw together the con- secrated raptures of St. Theresa or Madame de Guyon with the insensibility of a Fakir and the cold despond- ency of an ancient Stoic. Yet in any strict classification it would be impossible to divide ; they present the same features, and, like everything else, must be judged and tested by results and fruits, not by any a priori logical consistency. All forms of such self-surrender in the end deny the import and value of the individual and the significance or reality of the combat of the manifold, which is to most of us always, and to everyone when from oratory or study he turns to practical life, the one incontrovertible truth of experience. The world of speculation is at the present day divided on the question, not of the existence, but of the attributes of God. All paths of reflection, of emotion, of scientific search, lead to Unity; but it still remains for us to inquire, How shall we qualify it? What is it to us, rather to me? And this conditioned world that seems to flaunt its independence, is it genuine, is it real ? Must it not be a mere mirage of illusion ? And these separate egoistic centres of life, striving and fighting, or of thought, doubting and quarrelling, must not it be the mere caprice of the Absolute Spirit to mirror Itself forth in the idle semblance of individuality ? And this sharply driven dividing line of good and bad — has it any meaning at all ? Is it not a convenience, relative, social, and utili- tarian ? Does not he who dwells at the centre of the revolving circle, at the heart of things, enjoy profound peace ? And this notion of progress ? ' Whence and whither?' we may ask, in a universe where all is already perfect, all is God. We may see, by the
46 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
very carefulness with which orthodox mystics have guarded themselves from this Abyss of Indifference, that they feel they are near the brink. However far apart seem the extreme phases of this self- abandonment, their representatives move on the same plane, and in gladness or in despair resign their creaturehood, their significant and special endowment. Their sole part and duty is to win by abstraction and denial the typical excellence of Nothingness, that the Spirit may descend into the empty place. (How much more enterprising and benevolent many were than their creed, the annals of mysticism will display ; but this does not interfere with the general accuracy of our contention.)
§ 8. It would be absurd to deny that room must be found in any religion for both these imperious claims of the human mind — God must be a helper in adversity, a rewarder of His faithful in their willing strife for His cause, besides a place of rest and peace, where dis- tress and conflict have no meaning. But to average intelligence in the West it seems premature to pronounce the conflict already over — insensate to maintain it never existed. Here we reach the central point of these lectures. It would appear that the present scheme of Western society — with all its merits, faults, and possibilities — is inextricably bound up with certain rudimentary beliefs or prejudices, which perhaps are so firmly rooted in the depths of our nature that we need have no fear for them ; yet we are forced to recognise the serious menace aimed by contemporary thought. We have not criticised these opposite tempers, because we have not yet applied the standard of values to our Western civilisation and ideas, to which we so easily assent, — which we so imper- fectly understand.
We must return to the examination of current ideas of end, value, motive, criterion. For the conclusion of this lecture, I must now approach the question of the
THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE 47
Divine attributes. We have hitherto seen how the worshipper finds help, encouragement, rest in the object of his devotion. We have still to inquire into his conception of the Divine nature, which gives such supreme comfort and can call forth such willing homage,
§ 9. Before I continue, I must explain one very signi- ficant omission, the conception of justice as a Divine attribute, God as the moral Law-giver. I might easily excuse this seeming neglect by assuming in the earliest stage fear of righteous punishment as a powerful motive to virtue ; or in the third, willing performance of known commands as an integral part of loyal service. But there is a far deeper reason, to which we have already made allusion : the precarious nature of the tie which associates religious and moral feeling. It was one of the most signal errors, not only of the eighteenth-century enlightenment but of the critical philosophy which overpowered it, to identify religion and morality; and it is hard to say whether a less or a greater mis- take has been committed by those who identify religion and philosophy. For religion (or, if you like, that portion of it, that definition of it, which has now been, perhaps arbitrarily, selected for discussion) is strictly personal, and is not concerned with universal laws either of behaviour or of reasoning. It cannot be doubted that in primitive cults and mysteries one potent incentive to devoutness was the hope of evading the just and natural consequence of sin, of obtaining a special privilege of exemption. The human consciousness can abundantly testify to the frequent separation of moral strictness and piety. How often has Religion been attacked on this very ground, that it subverts the claims of catholic justice by exception, by expia- tion, by immunity, by favouritism ! And how often have these charges been fairly levelled ! Certainly, in a general survey it would be misleading to bring
48 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
conduct and religious feeling into too close an alliance ; it would presuppose and assume the very end at which our discussion aims. Our method is inductive ; our final test, the verdict of history and experience. In the earliest stage of fear, the caprice of the issuer, the unwillingness of the performer, of the decree, mark a lower plane than the sense of Duty; and in the third, the loyal servant, who counts not the cost of his allegiance and his sacrifice, has passed far above the careful and minute observance of exact command. While leaving the question of reciprocal relation un- settled and indefinite, we shall at least have done well to direct notice to the absence of any necessary connection.
§ lo. What does the worshipper expect and demand in the object of his devotion? What are the god-like qualities? Learned divines, speculative philosophers, and natural theologians have for long directed attention to certain attributes which have never in the mind of the worshipper either enforced belief or sustained enthu- siasm ! A triple set of attributes has been a favourite with divines ; and much harmless ingenuity has been expended, much symbolic allegory has played around the Power, the Wisdom, and the Love of God. I need not, I hope, reassure my hearers that I am not speaking of the Christian dogma of the Trinity, which has some- times been entangled with these qualities. Yet it is clear that the first attribute is out of all relation to the prayer of the suppliant ; the second only distantly connected with his wants ; the third alone completely satisfies him, and assures him that his petition has a listener and may have an answer. " For who hath resisted His will?" or "who hath known the Mind of the Lord?" A man at once discounts these awful attributes as outside all meaning and relation to him- self, and passes to the illusion of free action or the comfortable apathy of acquiescence. Can we doubt
THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE 49
that in the logical Predestinarian it is not the bound- less omnipotence that secures his homage, but the consciousness of Election by a merciful and exclusive fiat that compels his wondering love. Man worships neither force nor wise contrivance, nor the absence of limit or restraint ; but he will cheerfully sacrifice himself to a Deity who calls forth his affection, who appeals for his help. We have read a significant apologue of a poor man in a Norse legend, who, hearing of the coming of Surtur and the hosts of evil from Muspelheim, and knowing that the Doom of the Gods is at hand, says, " I am off to die with Odin ! " The religious mind is rarely sustained in practical life by the sense of near victory, of imme- diate achievement; but rather by the conviction of growing evil, the zest of hazard, of the need of con- stant watchfulness and endeavour. Very soon in the early Church the dreams of an instantaneous ' Parousia' fade before the call for strenuous effort, for a gradual and often unsuccessful planting of the Kingdom on hostile ground, every inch of advance hotly contested. The well nigh endless vista of age-long warfare in an alien land took the place of a magical conquest in a moment. But it is obvious that the Church then (with the believer at all times) found itself sustained and inspirited rather than daunted by just this con- viction ; that the combat was real, the consummation infinitely remote, nay, in a certain light, final success precarious, at least in this sphere of being. " When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith upon the earth ? "
§ 1 1. We may resume, then, the issue of our discussion. Religion, the untutored and spontaneous language of the human heart, seeking a meaning in life and a perman- ent value for the soul, stands contrasted with theology, which is its grammar, systematic, orderly, and reflective ; stands contrasted, too, with ethical system or with 4
so THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
philosophy. With this latter we have at present no concern ; our whole aim is to simplify, and to ask what are the primitive and undying forms of this instinct? In an age like the present, it is no time for Philosophy or Theology to claim to stand apart from, or above, the impulses and aims of average men. The origin of all immediate Religion is selfish and personal. " What must I do to be saved ? " It is so far from being a recognition of the Universal, that in its earliest rudiments it is most often a piteous appeal for the suspension of law, for the abrogation in pardon of the outward or inner consequences of sin — it is a protest against the enforcement of a rigorous equity. " If thou, Lord, will be extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who may abide it?" As the conception of the Divine government advances to unity of control and purpose out of conflicting and partial ambitions of a heathen Pantheon, so man, shaking off craven fear of the incalculable, seeks and finds a protector, and at last identifies his own welfare with the grand design. At this point again (as we saw) Religion is contrasted with Morality ; as in the earlier stage, the conscious sinner sought by propitiation to elude law, so now in the willingness of service is the dull performance of slavery transcended. " Henceforth I call you not servants." Further insight into the Divine counsel is given not to the curious or the speculative questioner, "Yea, hath God said ? " but to the dutiful, the obedient in humbler employment. " Thou hast been faithful in a few things ; be thou ruler over ten cities." " Whosoever will do the will . . . shall knozv!' It is a loyal and personal service given to an object of proved goodness : " O taste and see how gracious the Lord is ! " Experience is in the last resort the sole test for the individual, though logical consistency must preside at the formation of a Creed. The early selfish desire to escape pains and penalties becomes a moral zeal to further the Master's
THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE 51
Kingdom and make the world abandon its vain search for rest elsewhere than in God. The smallest and most trivial act is by this spirit hallowed and transformed — the ' cup of cold water ' or the ' widow's mite.' Pre- occupation with the work in hand, eagerness to further the cause (as it gradually assumes clearer proportions), effaces the earlier introspection, self-analysis, and over- powering sense of guilt ; but this self-forgetfulness is due to no quixotic surrender of value, but to the perfect security of the believer, his supreme confidence that with God's chosen nothing can go wrong — " all things work together for good." His heaven is here and now ; its blessedness is at once felt ; he can imagine no other ; it is idle to talk of recompense differing in kind or deferred beyond the tomb. Not in a cynical but in an optimistic sense, " virtue is its own reward." Immortality is rather 'eternal life' which is already bestowed and already experienced. It is clear that this apparent self-surrender is founded upon the strongest (though often veiled and unconscious) assurance of inalienable personal value. Nothing could well be more unreasonable than to expect a transference of this unselfishness into a realm where there is no longer a master or a purpose, no longer a work to be achieved or an agent to be ennobled by its performance.
§ 12. Contrasted with this eagerness of allegiance and endeavour is that stoical 'virtue of necessity,' sub- mission to the unknown. Starting not from a subjective need and human consciousness, but from awful wonder at objective majesty, the Religion of Nature or of absolute thought culminates in the surrender of the individual and the denial of value to life, of significance to the struggle. The manifold is an illusion, the separateness of intelligence a fiction ; and the whole drama is played, with all its pain and distress, harmlessly beneath the true domain of reality, where reigns deathly
52 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
stillness and the icebound silence of indifference. But the religion of history, of human development, of evolution of the race, of enterprise and advance, sets a simpler ideal before man, more accessible to the average type, who has seized the helm. It answers his immediate need, the cry of his solitary anguish ; it sets him again in a visible community, and by patience teaches him his special place, his everlasting worth. It assures him that God needs his help, and he feels that sweet guerdon of service done, and wants no further assurance of his value, of his immortality. It makes him an integral and indispensable part of a great chain stretching from the earliest dawn of human intelligence to the consummation of history, to the coming of the Kingdom ; and in this triumph he well knows he will not be forgotten. When we have considered next time the inner motives, the hidden spring of the recent political development, we shall be able to decide which of these two conceptions of man's place and function is the more agreeable to the natural man.
LECTURE IV
THE SOCIAL STATE: MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN
•' What shall one then answer the messengers of the nation? That the Lord hath founded Zion, and the poor of His people shall triist in it." — ISA. xiv. 32.
§ I. Aim of the series : standard of worth applied to the Christian conception of the Universe (as in eighteenth century, logical consistency ; in nineteenth, historic credibihty of the Doctrine) : reason^ fact, and use : importance of former not denied, but present discussion chiefly concerned with the last : less scruple to-day in applying Utilitarian standard, in a democratic age which will soon know no other test.
§ 2. Interrogation of the recent course of social development : error of the historical philosophers after the Revolution : " the goal achieved or within view": their 'Reason' only a name to cover the development of unconscious and unknown forces : sense of helplessness abroad.
§ 3. Underlying principles of Western development in mediceval times : as philosophy is mainly individualist, so Church always social : mistaken conception of the Roman Church-State.
§ 4. Conspicuous merits of the mediaeval State : unity and reason- ableness of the Church : its democratic basis : its genuine claim to direct and ennoble e\ery department of secular life, eveiy variation of individual character or rank.
§ 5. No abrupt dualism, of law, natural or Divine, physical or moral : Church less antithetic than Aristotle : in the decay of the Roman system, in the proved emptiness of papal and imperial claims, the ' Law of Nature ' supersedes the Church as a guide.
§ 6. Machiavelli and Luther creators or pioneers of the modem State : conception of the State gradually demoralised : Church retires from contact with the world : disparagement of the units which compose the whole.
53
54 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 7, Decay of reverence towards the State : government a revocable contract : sole duty efficiency : undisguised selfishness of the new period of reconstruction (Leo x., Spinoza, Hobbes) : utility in a certain sphere (to keep the poor quiet) contemptuously allowed to the Church.
§ 8. French Revolution due to divorce of Enlightenment from sympathy with primitive human nature : curious ignorance of the human heart and average motives among eighteenth - century philosophers : their aim not to admit the people to freedom, but to capture the autocracy of the State.
§ 9. Classical antiquity and the modern State aristocratic : sharp contrast to this in the Christian-Teutonic deference to the individual : decay of belief in worth of units, parallel with nominal extension of popular rights : value of the conception of heaven in the Middle Ages, not to distract attention from secular concerns, but to restrain the ends of mere organic efficiency, to obtain considerate treatment for the weaker.
§ ID. Final issue (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Luther, Rousseau) in irreconcilable hostility ; Sovereignty of the State, Sovereignty of the Individual : French Revolution a protest of rudimentary feeling against a sacrifice of the helpless to an unknown cause : Kant reconquered primitive truth, against the Enlightenment : differentia of man, not thought but moral action.
§ I. In the first lecture we considered the duties and peculiar difficulty of the Christian apologist, and incidentally arrived perhaps at some limitations or illustrations of what we mean by Religion. In the second, an attempt was made to portray the simplest origin of what are known as ethical impulses ; and in the third we dealt with the religious instincts, complementary indeed, as we hope to discover, to moral ideas, but by no means necessarily associated or allied. Now what is the object of the entire course? A slender contribution to one side of Christian apologetic, which perhaps does not always receive justice. The eighteenth century examined critically the credentials of the Christian Revelation in the light of pure Reason ; the nineteenth has inquired into the historical record, in the light of accurate research. Times, meanwhile, have altered ; and the standard or test is no longer logical consistency
THE SOCIAL STATE 55
and reasonable argument, no longer correspondence with ascertained facts in a remote and in some ways inaccessible past, but, first and foremost, the tise, the value for human life of such an institution, of such body of doctrine. In each province of apology, reason, fact, and use, there has always been abundant and fruitful toil ; but of the three, least has been effected in the last. It will not for a moment be thought that we are disposed to abandon either of the former methods of proof ; but the single clear warning to the student is restriction of province and scope, a ready acceptance of the help of others, and a modest offering of his own results in a special field, without encroaching on the province or hastily presuming to criticise the results of other fellow-workers. Until recently, too, it would have been supposed a mark of confessed weakness if, leaving the familiar tracks of reconciliation with credibility or with fact, the preacher had insisted over much upon the usefulness of the Church and the Gospel, had been content to point out the benefits they had spread, to dilate upon the danger of removing these doctrines which guaranteed them, or the Establishment which stored them in her treasure-house. Causes vv^hich will become manifest later have rendered us less scrupulous to-day in employing a Utilitarian standard. At all events, none can find fault with the test of usefulness ; for in ordinary life it is in effect the only one which is systematically and invariably applied ; and although to the abstract logician there may be something of blasphemy in setting anything before the claims of pure thought, there is a very large audience waiting, quite free from a priori notions of the possibility of a revelation, from any understanding of mere historic accuracy — waiting, I say, for an answer to this question, which has recently gained in loudness and insistency ; Can we afford to do without Christ?
§ 2. For this purpose we have tried to interrogate
56 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
man's nature in its very simplest terms, his crudest and earliest attempts at the satisfaction of that religious instinct which seems, from the distress and the prosperity of circumstance alike, to force him to claim interest and protection from the unseen powers, I want now to inquire if the development of the political body throws any light upon man's nature and needs, and above all, if a certain recent movement towards securing a fuller expression of the general will has met with any measure of success, and possesses for our pur- pose any significance at all. It cannot be gainsaid that, in spite of much taking essentials for granted, inveterate weakness of modern times, we find ourselves carried off our feet by an irresistible current, bearing us no one knows whither. The childish delight of the early historical philosophers arranged in differently coloured sections the very narrow record of human destiny, as then known and conceived. With a naive glee they mapped out the serene advance of the Idea and of mankind (which was but its expression) from the mythic paradise of innocence into the final consummation in the present age. The opposites, which had alike stimulated and impeded the onward march, had been successively cancelled out ; and Spirit was at last fully free, self-conscious and master of itself. Every fact, every being, every institution was instinct with divinity; the Absolute had com- pleted its " dialectical idyll ... on the shores of the Mediterranean," and the long and perhaps painful Theogony was at an end. It is unfair to scoff at these now forgotten speculations ; we do not forget that, as Gnostic defiance challenged Stoic optimism in the first and second century, so in the nineteenth there were not wanting men of fiery protest against the existing order as evil, — as cruel, incomplete, superfluous, an error from the first ; men of cool and critical temper, protest- ing that so far from the Absolute waking up in contentment from its restless dreams, the universal
THE SOCIAL STATE 57
consciousness recoiled in horror from the effects of its somnambulism, and could only expiate its crime by suicide. The supremacy of human intelligence as interpreter and canon of existence has given way to a sense of passivity before unknown powers. There is abroad a tendency (which is not without warrant in experience) to explain movements and currents of thought or social evolution, impulses and actions of man the individual, by reference to subconscious and impersonal forces. These, so far from issuing into the clear light of day for methodical sorting and arrange- ment, can never (so far as we know) be torn from their obscurity and made to reveal their face. It is usual to connect this feeling of helpless surrender with the uniformity of natural law. This is an error : that listless despondency, uncertainty of aim, or alert and unmoral curiosity in things as they are, comes not from a sense of physical regularity (which only perhaps opens up a further dominion of man over his environment) ; but rather from a suspicion that we are the playthings of a blind, incalculable Power, which without end or pur- pose drives into a common grave the individual and the race alike. " A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday." The mere adding up to infinity of valueless atoms cannot possibly produce a valuable heap.
§ 3. I have anticipated somewhat of the subject of a later discourse, that the significance of the issues at stake may be more clearly seen. I will now consider some of the facts in the development of Western society and their connection with our main thesis. It will not be necessary in such a political retrospect to go beyond the mediaeval conception of the Church-State.
The Christian Church is predominantly social ; it is propagandist (nay, persecuting) just because the dominion must be exclusive, a place found for each and all, what- ever race, character, or special gift. Whether as Realm of Truth or Visible Community (Greek or Latin con-
58 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
ception), it is something universal and demanding its consummation in freest and fullest intercourse of equals, though by no means with similar or identical functions.
It will not, I think, be found amiss to group our statements round that remarkable phrase, which has at various times excited such keen admiration, such suspicious distrust, or such open hostility — the Law of Nature. It will be seen how intimately bound up with its definition is the political development of Western Europe. We must first disabuse our minds of a current fallacy : that the Mediaeval Church, absorbed in piety or speculation on the mysteries of the future world, neglected or despised the present order. It has been necessary for the historical philosopher to adapt the Middle Ages to a preconceived plan. The Hellenic age (with strange indifference to facts) they characterised as the harmonious involution of Nature and Spirit, as yet unaware of their rivalry ; in the Christian age, and especially under the dominion of the Roman Church, they are become open enemies, body and soul set in a harsh antithesis ; while the modern age heralds or consummates their reconciliation. This 'schema' no doubt enshrines a partial truth, or rather a small portion of truth ; but as a summary of the entire development it is wholly misleading. We may leave these idealists (who can re-write history from their imagination) to settle the question with those who blame the Church for an excessive immersion in secular affairs. It claimed a universal tutelage and a too exclusive patronage ; it is blamed for materialising the spiritual side of religion and condescending too readily to the gross demands of the ignorant ; in the absence of anything to correspond with the modern State, it was forced to assume the control and the initiative in nearly all matters uncon- nected with warfare or military defence; not civil government alone, but art, jurisprudence, letters, and
THE SOCIAL STATE 59
the comforts or embellishment of life, agriculture and a pursuit of wisdom, which recognised as yet no separa- tion of the province of human and Divine, profane and sacred lore. We are amazed at its marvellous interest and patience ; nothing was too trivial for its attention, nothing too great for its efforts.
§ 4. The Middle Age is an era where a sublime if unattainable ideal of Unity guides and directs, even those who in actual life show least outward trace of its influence. In an age of mere egoism and petty and local strife, when force seemed alone to have the last word, it elevated a supreme power purely moral in its censures, often fulminating from exile and nearly always defenceless ; in a society often stigmatised as rejoicing in blind Faith, it attempted to display the complete harmony of the dictates of Revelation and the require- ments of Reason ; in a political condition, often censured as purely tyrannical and oppressive, it firmly held by the Democratic basis of all human authority, and raised the elective principle against the selfishness of hereditary right ; at a time when the boundaries of a parish or a manor seemed to set the limit to patriotism or sympathy, it claimed to remind one of the common aim of Christendom ; and when we deplore the brutal disregard for human life and regret the ecclesiastical indifference to serfdom, we are tempted to forget the extraordinary emphasis on the brotherhood, the equality of men, and the imperishable value of the individual. Once more, among lawless nations and turbulent princes, commonly believed to conceive power as irresponsible, the greatest stress was laid upon the essentially popular delegation of all office ; no power was above the law, no ruler who was not in the last resort accountable to his subjects. Finally, in an age when our text-books assure us that the interests of the present were sacri- ficed to a constant pre-occupation with the Eternal, we see with astonishment that the Church is not merely
6o THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
cheerfully engrossed in all the multifarious duties of administration, but has reached a complacent sense of finality, nay, of consummate perfection, in political development. The Roman Empire, a divinely con- stituted fabric, with the elected guardians of its twin departments wielding a moral sway by no force of arms, would endure until the absent Ruler came at the last day to resume dominion. I do not need to remind you how vast a chasm yawned between practice and profession, creed and life, theory and actuality; but it does not become us in the present century to cast such an accusation against earlier ages. " What," asks Professor Wallace, " was the crowning merit of Catholicism ? The very thing which many a modern accustomed to identify it with the Inquisition and the Society of Jesus, or perhaps with a caricature even of these, would probably deny to it. That is, that in a rough and imperfect way the Church regarded it as a central and guiding principle of life, to which indeed all other things were but ancillary; but just for that reason conceived it as a duty to give to each of them a place and function within itself. Hence science, art, social life, political union grew up as integral parts of its structure. The unity perhaps was somewhat roughly compacted, and it only held out against criticism so long as progress was slow or impercept- ible. But still, as Dante shows us, the synthesis of life was there. . . . The Reformation comes to make a deep rent in the one body of spiritual life. It breaks up the unity of art, science, morality, and religion" {Gifford Lectures, No. v. p. 71, ed. Caird). In this extract we see the reversal of the customary uncritical attitude; justice is done to the secular mission of the Church of Rome, and the separatist and disintegrating tendency of modern times is clearly shown. The special sciences, like sons leaving the home at maturity, break away from the parent, forget perhaps their deep
THE SOCIAL STATE 6i
obligation, and become involved in fraternal rivalry and conflict.
§ 5. In such a system no abrupt dualism could set Natural Law or physical forces over against the Divine Will. Universalism cannot find place in its scheme for any genuine barrier or restraint to the unique principle of the whole. Spheres that seem independent or even hostile must be reconciled, co-ordinated, and, if need be, compromised. The world-conception founded on Aristotle's views was less dualist than the author ; an inward discord lurking in all earlier Greek thought disappeared in the genial warmth of the later Platonism. The kingdom of Grace was erected on the basis of the kingdom of Nature, not set in a confronting opposition ; the partial expression of legislators or formulators of customary procedure took place below, and subordinate to, the eternal principles of righteousness. These did not indeed stand outside of the Mind of the Heavenly Artificer, as Plato's ideas possessed a prior and in- dependent life and authenticity ; but they were His very Being ; He could not change them without ceasing to be Himself; and it marks a distinct step in the path of disruption when the moral emphasis of Thomism was challenged by the prominence of arbitrary power in Scotus. From this moment the implication of Natural Law tended, if I may so use the term, to become demoralised. In the decay of the Church- State, in the evident self-seeking of its princes, in discontent at parental control, divorced now from parental affection, recourse was again had to this standard. In the sixteenth century thinkers appealed from a distorted Church-State and (as they believed) from the interested impostures of priests, to a Nature which alone could supply a Rational theology and assert the incontestable rights of the individual. Nature, be it noted, is still teleologically conceived ; it is still the work of a wise and beneficent Creator — or as somehow
62 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
in ztse// gracious and purposive — and a knowledge of its laws and obedience to its precepts will assuredly lead each being to perfect development, and so to perfect happiness. But the f/nrd stage is not long delayed : the inquiry whether, after all, we can discover sanction and guarantee for individual rights in contemplating nature ; whether, indeed, the only natural law is not the reign of force, the survival of the strong ; and the complete disappearance of moral ideas from Nature and from the State. Closer scrutiny of the physical and social order banished the certainty of kindly purpose — above all, that regard for the individual, however humble or obscure — on which Christian doctrine the mediaeval fabric had reposed.
§ 6. Machiavelli and Luther stand at the opening of the sixteenth century, pioneers and creators of the modern State. The one represents the Realistic, the latter the Nominalistic, spirit of the Middle Age. The one is Scientific, the other Democratic ; and the conflict of the two rival tendencies is not over to-day — nay, it has hardly as yet begun in earnest. Machiavelli, seeing in Nature no law of right, only of strife and competition, gives up the individual, with his claims, vocation, hopes, destiny. There is no place for him or his timid virtues ; only for the State-organism, whose ruling spirit derides the law of righteousness, and aims at efficiency alone. Luther, because he separates the sphere of religious and secular life, deifies the central authority and is foremost among the apostles of Absolutism in the hope of securing its patronage and protection against the hierarchical claims ; but Machiavelli deprives this of all moral aim. In the development of the conception of the Law of Nature, we have seen it at first identical with the will of God ; next, appealed to as a higher and more sacred authority than partial or local enactment, than the interested code of statesmen or the interested theology of divines ; lastly, losing all ethical force and all relation
THE SOCIAL STATE 63
to what men call good or bad, claiming absolute inde- pendence and commending in the Body Politic sub- missive obedience to the biological rule, survival at all cost. Here is disregard for the average man ; there is no value but in efficiency, which overrides moral scruples in the interest of the whole. The individual is denied all ethical significance both in the refined Idealism, which respects only the general faculty of reason in each man, and not his special character or his peculiar endowment ; in the political theory of re- action, which mocks our intrusting the weighty intricacies of government to the unlettered, presumes the abdication of the people, and 'enthrones in the vacant seat' the expert and the bureaucrat ; in the pure biological concept, which (unlike the gnosticism of Mill and Huxley) sees in the State-end not the reversal of blind natural struggle, but merely its continuation on a plane of greater intensity. It is idle in such con- nection to speak of the rights of individuals ; none can exist save such as are sanctioned and created by the central power, and revocable at will by the same ; law is no declaration or unfolding of eternal truths, it is the command of the stronger, bent only on the single duty of self-preservation. The negligible and uncon- sidered units which compose this Leviathan rise some- how in a purposeless universe into such a condition of thraldom for an unknown end ; yet no theory of the State, however high-sounding, can be founded elsewhere than on the mediaeval belief in the ethical significance, the imperishable value, of the individual.
§ 7. It is the fashion among political theorists and men of science to throw a veil of sentiment around the naked and unabashed experience of natural and social life. The world-spirit, known to us as a blind and irresistible force, without purpose or meaning, is set up as a fit object of worship, as a substitute for the personal God who moves in history and judges human conduct.
64 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
The State, losing something of the fascination of a chival- rous embodiment in an individual, nevertheless still claims the old devotion ; but at the same time we are secretly assured that it is a mere human and temporary expedient, founded not on indefeasible right, but on a precarious contract, which in the interests of order must be treated as irrevocable, while in truth it is nothing of the sort. We are concerned now only with this latter. Machiavelli and his followers tore away the disguise of an Idealism which had worn very thin. " God has given us the Papacy ; let us enjoy it," was the maxim of a Pope on the eve of the Reformation. It was not by such sensuous and immediate gratification of artistic appetite that the pontiffs of the Middle Age subdued the world, as they wandered in exile, yet abating nothing of their Divine claims. The cynical tolerance of the half-sceptical Curia is a poor exchange for the convinced fervour of Torquemada the persecutor, praying in vain to be released from the stern mission which he believed had been imposed on him. Control in the political or religious world is seldom wrested from the strenuous oppressor, but from the cynical, the irresolute, the weakly well-intentioned and diffident ; not from the unswerving foe of the cause of reform, but from the ruler who is more than half convinced of its need and justice. The cause of successful revolution is always won first among the supposed champions of the existing order. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century the theory' of the State was violently separated from those invisible sanctions on which it had hitherto reposed. Idealism disappeared. The plain bare fact was recognised that the Body Politic does not exist to enable men to prepare for an eternity which may never come ; that as an organism it has the sole aim of maintaining its own existence by efficiency in suo esse perseverare. The precepts of the Gospel were seen to be inapplicable to the new public life ; the
THE SOCIAL STATE 65
duties and interests of the Christian and the citizen (or perhaps the statesman) were set apart in different spheres. The Church, indeed, might still be conceived, perhaps, in the strictest subordination, as a useful hand- maid of the State, to teach the poor compliance and resignation, to assure the afflicted or the dangerously- despairing of a certain recompense in another world ; a * ruler's lie,' which marks that development most untrue to the Christian as to the democratic spirit — the division and antithesis of a religion for the ignorant and a religion for the enlightened, an esoteric philosophy set above an exoteric cult, still depending on formula, still enforced by authority.
§ 8. It was this divorce of enlightenment and primi- tive human nature that resulted in the catastrophe of the French Revolution. Until the first rude outburst of the popular passion, statesmen and philosophers had acquiesced in this disingenuous compromise. If, dis- counting some generous commonplace, we examine closely the fundamental ideas of the eighteenth century, we are either distressed at their little sympathy with the mass of mankind, or amazed at their ignorance of the human heart. Up to the very moment when aristocrat and philosopher, in spite of their Liberalism, were involved in a common doom, or at least a common exile, the old fallacy of an enlightened despotism seemed to be the ideal of government. It is substan- tially true that the champions of the Revolution, for all their lofty maxims of human equality (" popular control, inalienable right of individual to freedom and to happiness "), had no thought of any direct con- sultation of the people. Fancying that they were reviving the classical State, and contemptuous of the intervening ages and ideals, they forgot that they were still the children of their time, with a heavy weight of Christian tradition and prejudice, which they tried to adapt to the antique conceptions. They 5
66 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
repeated without serious conviction the well-known maxims of Marsilius of Padua, and those ultra-demo- cratic truisms which passed current {but perhaps ineffect- ive) from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, and were absorbed or obliterated in the centralisation of the monarchic State, when in his own interest the individual was abased, all intermediate groups suppressed between ruler and subject. But their aim was (to the last rude shock of disillusionment) a purely intellectual enlighten- ment ; the substitution of middle-class culture for aristo- cratic privilege ; the capture, rather than the overthrow or the reform, of autocracy. The individual citizen was still to be an automaton, moving, under the patronage and guidance of experts, on the path to a perfection now purely secular ; a fuller emancipation from tutelage was to them inconceivable. They retained, amid some mediaeval phrases, the anti-popular features of the ancient State. One exclusive caste or bureaucracy was to be supplanted by another. There was to be no change in the absolute prerogative of the central authority ; they refused to abate one iota of its preten- sions. The popular will, supposed to correspond with the tenets of its self-elected spokesmen, replaced the Royal will : no effort was made to understand it. Reform, enlightenment, control, was still to be the privilege of the elect. The common man must thank- fully welcome the ' Age of Reason,' but was not expected to further it, or to interfere in its triumphant advance. From such dreams there was a rude awakening.
§ 9. We have now reached the natural time-limit which we have set to our survey of Western progress and thought, in these first four lectures ; and it remains to sum up the general issue of our present discourse. " In sharp contrast," says Gierke, " to the theory of antiquity, runs through the Middle Age the thought of the absolute and undying value of the individual,
THE SOCIAL STATE e-j
revealed by Christianity and grasped in all its depth by the Teutonic spirit. Every individual, in virtue of his eternal destination, is at core something holy and indestructible. The smallest fraction of the whole has its own intrinsic worth, not merely because it is a part of the whole. Every man is to be regarded by the community as an end in himself, never as a mere instrument." The mediaeval period derives all its splendour of achieving the ideal, all its undaunted courage in the face of disappoint- ment, all its consideration for the weaker, its artistic culture (which embellished this life, just because it pointed beyond it), its moral restraint on irresponsible power, — from an abiding sense of the nearness, of the reality of spiritual things. Differing widely with each temperament, sometimes grossly materialised past recognition, the notion of heaven as the ultimate recompense or the true form of human life, pene- trates into every relation. While in a very few this happy contemplation might lead to a surrender of earthly duties, the loss to society was but infinitesimal beside the value of the restriction it placed on savage instincts, the stimulus and gladness it gave to moral endeavour.
§ lo. But political and ethical theories sought an independent basis ; and men advanced from an ill- defined or indefinable Law of Nature to the assertion of the two rival dogmas, the Sovereignty of the State and the Sovereignty of the Individual. The eighteenth century contains in the utmost confusion dull murmurs of protest, cultured criticism, generous theory. Not even Rousseau himself is consistent in explaining the relation of the two sovereignties. The real and often subconscious forces, working underground towards the great catastrophe, were just the primitive instincts of man, who refuses to be sacrificed to an unknown cause, whether it be the intrigues of a court, the needs of a
68 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
dynasty, the mere survival of a community. And the divorce of secular concerns from ethical and religious prepossessions had resulted in a contempt for the indi- vidual and a regard for the type which is characteristic of the scientific spirit. The Revolution might perhaps sweep away the relics of obsolete privilege and a hope- less administrative incoherence, and it might tighten the bonds of the central control ; but the real aim of social life and law: to treat every man as an end-in- himself, and to welcome his voluntary sacrifice but never to compel it — such conception of man's freedom, value, and dignity was rather obscured than placed in any clearer relief Indeed, in actual fact the very simplest axioms of individual right had to be reconquered. Force, efficiency, self-assertion once more usurped the place of moral ideas. From another quarter came the much-needed assistance. Not in the confused theories of politicians, trying to compromise the rival sovereignty of State and Individual ; not in the mere rudimentary passions of hunger, greed, and savage envy, in which the Revolution burnt out; but in the lecture-room at Konigsberg, was the old truth rediscovered — that the differentia of man is not intelligence but morality, and that the true Christian and democratic spirit will appeal not to the exceptional faculty of reason and enlighten- ment, but to the universal sense of duty and willing service in the cause of the Right. For the equality of man (like the purposiveness of the Universe) can never become ascertained fact, it will always be an article of pious belief ; and in so far as it is this, it will supply the motive for our venture, and, however slenderly supported by experience, the guarantee of our ultimate success. It is to this 7ietv emphasis on the old truth, long buried under the actual worship of force, that we must direct attention, in endeavouring to give some account of the century which has just elapsed.
LECTURE V
THE MODERN AGE AS PENSIONER OF THE
PAST
" Surely thou art one of them : for thou art a Galilean, and thy speech agreeth thereto." — Mark xiv. 70.
" The just shall live by faith."— RoM. i. 17.
§ I. Simple experiences and impulses of average man not to be lost sight of in tracing political generalities : tmiversal application of the Gospel message : whole scheme of Western life bound up with certain prepossessions or matters of faith : their serious peril at the present time : unreflecting morality not so much in danger : emotional basis of morality more secure than any theoretic basis.
§ 2. Steady debasement of the moral sentiments, origin and sanction, during the past century : the three great ' unities,' Nature, State, God, divested of all 'moral' implication : the Divine relieved of its few remaining human attributes : a substitute for ' God ' proposed which cannot be an object of worship.
§ 3. We cannot afford to eliminate the one quality (' goodness ') which makes conception of God at all intelligible : not as a vague stream or tendency : the minimum of religious belief — a righteous and conscious power giving to each his due, and maintaining the conflict as a real issue, not an unmeaning gladiatorial show.
§ 4. Objection — " impertinent to revive such blind faith " : faith (in our discussion) is rather loyal self-surrender to a cause not yet won : a belief or sympathy powerful enough to stimulate action : the true ' Age of Faith ' the present day : immediacy of Church authority and cool rationalism of Middle Ages.
§ 5. Difficult to rise to any confident moral autonomy : most men are content (with Hegel) to acquiesce in the general moral sense of community : any advance beyond conventional custom and usefulness is a venture of faith, on very slender evidence ; moral conduct as defiance of natural law : in the positive content of the moral Law we are mere pensioners of the past.
§ 6. Every act which is something more than conformity to traditional observance or obvious calculation of gain bears
69
70 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
witness to conviction of purpose in the world : this obstinately impenetrable to reflection : phrases only conceal our profound ignorance : is the wager ' unreasonable ' ?
§ 7. Complete instability of all moral notions beyond the decep- tive routine of society : delusive promises of race perfectibility : abandonment of individual (as worth and character) to cosmic process : tyranny of abstractions which are mere human prejudices and have no counterpart outside his servile brain (Stirner).
§ 8. The practical life with its business sympathies and enthusiasm unaffected by the hopeless outlook of speculation (but no reason to suppose that the ensuing torpor may not spread from the educated to the ignorant classes : present system of morals in that case doomed),
§ 9. This overriding of strict logic in the world of practice and common sense, characteristic feature of English thought and statecraft : we find it hard to justify our interest and our work, just as reflection makes us blush at our charity : tearing away of many sentimental veils and disguises to-day which screened primitive impulse.
§ 10. Two extremes, cynical greed and idealist surrender : between these, indispensable factor in life, the social and personal influence of the Church : provides not an answer to curiosity but an adequate stimulus to action and endeavour : dualistic tendency to separate the domains of certainty and of hope.
§ II. Sense of personal value, agency, and worth still subsists.
§ 12. The incentive to-day is still, as ever, voluntary service in what is conceived as the Highest Cause : the selfish man unnatural except as product of reflection : amid wreck of ideals we still pay an instinctive homage to a certain type of life : we refuse to obey unless we can love and understand : this understanding largely a venture of faith.
§ I. In the last four lectures we have surveyed man under certain relations, following for the most part the historic method, but never losing sight, I hope, of the simple experiences, the primitive impulses of the average consciousness, which lie behind the generalities of a wider treatment and endorse or correct them. We have assumed beforehand that the Gospel message must be of universal application ; it cannot afford, like some phases of philosophy, to retreat into a fastness, inaccessible to ordinary man. As the eighteenth century examined the credibility a
THE MODERN AGE 71
priori of the Christian Revelation, the nineteenth, the actual authenticity of its historical record, so from another and a humbler side of apologetic, we are trying to ascertain the value of the Christian teaching for human life. In the third lecture we descried the purport or the central point of our lectures in this: that the scheme of Western society and its ideals was indissolubly bound up with certain beliefs, prejudices, and prepossessions which, whether openly acknowledged or as openly rejected in theory, inspired as a fact the general thought and temper, and to some extent modified the individual behaviour of men. Now we have often intimated that these were now exposed to serious peril, and must be very deep-rooted in our reflecting nature if they are destined eventually to survive. Doubt besets not only strict theological certainty, but is equally active in a more secret polemic against moral conduct, the worth of endeavour, the significance of the world's life or our own, the value of ideals which hopefully promise a better stage for individual or for race. It is not necessary to predict a sudden catastrophe in any European country in this divorce of habit and practice from a theoretic basis which is so signal a feature of modern life. The essential characteristic of morality, the 'sympathetic resentment ' which demands impersonally punishment of wrong and returns kindliness to the good, the alternate stimulus and restraint, the one of the visible beauty ot heroism and self-control, the other, the sad experience when on looking within we find how reluctantly we obey our own rule — these have preceded re- flection and can survive it, especially among those classes who are creatures of custom and move only within a carefully prescribed area of routine. But is it a matter of indifference if the behaviour of reflecting men becomes (after all the toilsome effort to reach autonomy, as the willing recognition of law) a mere
72 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
following of habit, unconvinced and hardly self- conscious? Is the State to end as it began, in un- reflecting deference to tribal custom ? Can we realise what our society would be like, if, in a vague sense of danger and an illogical care for public welfare, we were forced to suppress the anti-moral tendencies of free- thought, as the persecuting Church of the Middle Ages faced the duty of crushing heterodox independence. In its strict sense, and sundered from its present sanctions and implications, the moral life has become an act of Faith demanding a humbler prostration of pure intelli- gence than any subscription to a Creed.
§ 2. The steady and continuous tendency of the nineteenth century has been to suggest the lowly origin, the precarious sanction, the mere temporary usefulness, of the Moral Sentiment. The great unities with which each man must have relations — the State, Nature, the Divine Being — have been severed from all mot'al conno- tation : in the first, an outward order bent on its own preservation ; in the second, a never-failing source of varied life and energy; in the third, a comprehensive reason or universal consciousness, which enfolds the manifold both of appearance and of thought. Compared with such majestic universals, the term 'good' dwindles and disappears. How easily we detect \\\q false note when from clear facts of experience authors (whose interests are somehow still human) pass without warning into the realm of moral appeal, and employ the language of conscience, of emotion, and of virtue, heavily weighted as each term is with hypothesis and conjecture. " We dare not say ' God is good,' " writes {Gifford Lectures, viii. 128, Caird) a late distinguished Oxford Professor, "because so to call Him seems to bring Him down to the level of such an one as mortals are, and to offer a cheap commendation of Him whose ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts," This negative and apophatic theology is a mark of reverent modesty in
THE MODERN AGE 73
such a writer, as it was in the many followers of the pseudo-Dionysius and in Nicolas of Cusa, in whom meet and struggle the old spirit and the new ; but it might seem hazardous, in the genuine fear of materialis- ing our concept of God, to reject the sole category by which He can become an object of worship to ordinary men. We have already seen, and I hope shall still stoutly maintain, that the religious sentiment rises from a felt personal need of assistance, from a sense of creaturehood, dependence, and estrangement, which is yet curiously allied with a hope of access, intercourse, and partnership in a great scheme, where man co-operates with God, and the test is experience that God is good. Absolute power, absolute wisdom, as such, can never call forth man's more strenuous and active homage ; we acquiesce, we discount, and at once pass on from such sublime unities to the manifold world of experience, where He, confused yet enticing, our life's true interests. Neither the blind force, the ' Unknowable ' which lies at the back of phenomena, nor the Universal Consciousness, which blends in one focus the several centres of will and intelligence, can, with any due respect to the use of terms, be worshipped.
§ 3. The former we confront and defy, deriving from some mysterious gnostic 'pleroma' that power which enables us to criticise, to baffle, and to reverse the Cosmic process with an influence that yet arises from it ; the latter is in the last resort so intimately ourselves (nearer than breathing) that it is strictly untrue to call it object at all. Nor do these categories of force or reason exhaust the definition of man. Man's differ- entia, let it always be remembered, is Sociability (Wallace, Gifford Lectures^ viii. p. 129), not merely his capacity for living with his fellows and thus developing his highest powers, but in the further and emphatic sense that he is absolutely inconceivable as man apart from society. Man's continual effort is
74 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
"to be not only himself but more than himself." Now, as the universal faculty (to which a so-called democratic age ought to appeal) is an appreciation of goodness, and in the very lowest a dim yearning for better things, however obscure and faintly outlined be the ideal, so in our qualifying of the Eternal behind the changing manifold, we cannot afford to eliminate the single predi- cate that all can understand, because all need. If we may not interpret God by what is somehow felt to be highest in us, existing in all though but potentially and weakly, we relegate ourselves and the course of things to that which in its nature is and must remain unknown. And the good (as we have seen so often) must be no impersonal Benevolence, as with Plato, no mere stream or tendency making for Righteousness, as in the vague sentiment that for a brief moment seemed to supplant the ortho- dox view, but a conscious goodness not divorced from justice, which condescends to care for the humblest, and gives to each his due. " We dare not presume," so speaks Herman Lotze, writing of human destiny {Microcosnius, Bk. iii. chap. 5), "to judge which mental development wins a claim to immortality through the eternal significance it has acquired, and to which this has to be denied. Nor again must we seek to determine whether all animal souls are mortal, all human souls immortal ; but take refuge in the belief that to each being right will be done."
§ 4. I fear that at this point I shall exhaust the patience of some of my hearers. " This pretended apo- logy or eirenicon," it will be said, " amounts to nothing short of a demand for blind belief, for a summons to unreasoning faith. Joseph le Maistre fancied he saw an opportune moment for pressing the papal supremacy, in the wreck of ideals, the uncertainty of aims during the Napoleonic age. And to-day, in spite of the progress in certain science, in our knowledge of man, his origins and his constitution, it is surely too late and too impertinent
THE MODERN AGE 75
to recall us to the submissiveness of the ages of Faith, which is only another term for priest-ridden weakness. For all faith implies authority." It is time, indeed, whether or not it lie in the strict course of the argument, to answer this objection. The age-long antithesis of Faith and Reason has not lost its fascination for modern eyes and ears ; and in the absence of any strict defini- tion it must always attract debate, voluble and incon- clusive, and in some slightly varying form reappear again and again. But if the results of our inquiries into the religious or the moj-al sentiment have been accepted, it will not be difficult to vindicate and to justify the important place of Faith, conceived as loyal self-surrender to a cause not yet won. And must we not begin with a gentle rebuke of a current fallacy, about what are known as the ages of faith ? Would it not be truer to say that our own time has a far better title to the name? We may be reluctant to confess this, but prejudice ought not to hinder our analysis. Under the Mediaeval Church, the carefully planned system of morals, the spiritual director to adapt them, the censure, the absolution, the penalty to enforce, the tangible comfort of sacrament, the visible assurance of a new Birth — how near, how immediate, how concrete was this solace, this restraint ! The Church was not merely armed with powers over the world to come, but, owing to causes we have examined, possessed an effective control over society in this. It was by no mere spiritual menace that an Excommunication or an Interdict drove terror home into the hearts of the most indifferent : the one implied a dislocation of human intercourse, a paralysis of the simplest social co-operation ; the other an out- lawry from the one ark of salvation, a doom not deferred but instantaneous. To the vast majority the Church had no need to explain, to justify by argument the ' credenda,' which could at once be translated into such efficacy ; every day and hour she justified her claim not by
76 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
words but by deeds ; by being, not hy preaching. And to those who had leisure and ability to seek deeper into the truths of Revelation ? Was there ever a moment's pause in the long and tireless endeavour to accommodate and to conform the articles of Faith to the demands of Reason, limited indeed, but always alert and but seldom cajoled into deferential surrender ? Did Faith (say, in St. Anselm) ever mean a whole-hearted submission to Divine Will, and not rather acceptance of certain truths on authority, which the enlightened reason could after- wards declare to be in entire correspondence with its own principles ? Have we forgotten that Lessing, in his Education of the Human Race, and not Hegel, is strictly the last of mediaeval Rationalists, and exactly reproduces their spirit ?
§ 5. The analogy to-day with the first stage of belief would be a contented acquiescence in current social observance and restraint, for convenience and use, and without theory or conviction ; that deference to a respectable and moderate standard, which has been perhaps sufficiently attacked by modern preachers and moralists. Yet this has to suffice for most men, because it is the only security that is left — the 'civil spirit,' the ' reason ' of the community, above which, though we feel its level is low, we have not strength or energy to rise. The transition from a comfortable and perhaps parasitic heteronomy to complete inde- pendence and spontaneous aim has become increasingly difficult. In this gross form of faith, as mere unquestion- ing submission to authority and police, many end as they began their days. The generous idealism of the earlier Liberal movement has long since given way to a distrust or contempt of the feeble individual, and a further lease to the very State -autocracy against which it protested so nobly and yet spent itself in vain. Wherever, here and there, a man rises to a higher sense of duty, of mission, of vocation, than
THE MODERN AGE -jj
he can find prescribed by a social code which enforces
only above the minimum, there we see, in the strictest
and highest sense, the reign of Faith over a human soul,
never so conspicuous or so honourable as in those who
in another sense have ' lost belief.' If we issue forth as
knight-errants, single and alone, from police and routine,
from the commonplaces of sentiment which disguise
our primitive utilitarian impulses, we enter the realm
of Faith, which somehow indefinitely enlarges to admit
all the weightiest concerns of life. In mediaeval theology,
disintegration sets in when, one by one, the articles
of dogma were withdrawn by piety or by doubt from
the sphere of criticism and rational inquiry to that
of faith in a Divine Revelation. And to-day, amid the
increasing fixity of Natural Law, has not every moral
prepossession been submitted to a scrutiny so rigorous
that one who still maintains a canon, unsupported
by nature or by reflection, is in this highest sense a
believer? The moral life is a venture, a hazardous
wager, which rejects and defies evidence. We are the
precarious pensioners of the past ; we have invented
nothing new ; and the claim to find an independent
basis for statecraft and for conduct has failed. Our
aim is to show that the peculiar system of Western
society depends on a doctrinal basis which is both
necessary for its continuance and incapable of strict
demonstration. And an unprejudiced observer will
easily see that the term doctrinal includes not merely
religious ' credenda,' but the simplest and most
fundamental moral axioms.
§ 6. Let us place ourselves for a moment in the position of one who really confronts the facts of life, who refuses to shut his eyes either to the consistency of theory or the requirements of practice ; how would he summarise, if he were quite candid with himself, the results of a century of political unrest and scientific discovery ? And in doing this, let me not be suspected
78 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
either of pessimism or of a triumphant deh'ght that the fate of established theological dogma has befallen also its once successful rival. There is no need for despondency because there is so much to be done, so little of value really attained. Surely it will not be without significance if we discover that the com- monest moral action makes as tremendous demands upon the justice and the goodness of the Power that controls the world, as the Christian faith itself? It is high time that this identity of interest and of use were recognised. Every act that is something more than mere useful conformity to custom bears witness to the undying and inextinguishable assurance of purpose in the world — which for some Divine reason does not cease to animate the devotion of the hero, the daily self-sacrifice of the poor, while it remains obstinately impenetrable to direct proof. One word before I begin my imaginary portrait : shall we call this wager against much, if not all, of the evidence, unreasonable? Unless, as many speculators have thought, the only use of reflection is to decree its own annihilation, this attitude to life is surely the only one which can be accepted as the clearest and sanest outcome of Reason — mature, all-comprehensive, despising no part or need of complex human life ; above all, recognising its supreme worth in alliance with faith, conceived as willing surrender to a cause which satisfies our sense of justice.
§ 7. " The moment I leave the groove of social routine," we will suppose the reflecting man to say, " I find myself bewildered with complete uncertainty. I discover there is no guarantee that the universe recognises righteousness or corresponds to it. From a medical and scientific standpoint, a transvaluation of values has proceeded, until the general welfare seems to demand a sweeping revision of accepted canons, in which the birth and the survival of the unfit forms
THE MODERN AGE 79
the most urgent problem. I am told that the world- process has no meaning, only an unceasing wealth of development into fresh forms ; and that the co?tscious spirit which has arisen late and unhappily to survey the task, has no certain aim but to suffer and to feel its vanity : " the owl of JMinerva takes its flight only when the shadows of twilight are falling." Even if my intelligence could accept the consolation offered by the advance and improvement of the race, I cannot observe any clear tokens that this is possible, or if possible, permanent ; or if permanent, desirable : nor will my sense of justice allow me to take pleasure in the prospect of a perfect State or over-man, even if conceivable, won at such tremendous cost, the reckless and cruel price of suffering and failure through the ages. As objective realities, nature or State, become stubborn, uniform, and oppressive, so my sympathies revert from ideas and generalities — the tyrants of the race — to the individual sufferers in the conflict, which can only be justified by a problematic and precarious millennium, itself subject to the inevitable law of change and decay. I observe that the centre of gravity shifts from the free individual of the Romantic epoch and the popular will of early Liberalism, to the incalculable forces of natural and social evolution. It is impossible to enlist my efforts on behalf of that which must in any case arrive ; the mechanical perfection of a completely moralised State is no concern of mine ; if it is to come, it will come in spite of me. I have learnt one lesson at least in one school : that all individual effort is superfluous, that the course of civilisation is uncertain in its destiny, puzzling and paradoxic in its immediate issue, in its very perfection soon doomed to perish."
§ 8. " This tyranny of a law which we cannot under- stand forces me back upon my subjective states, which I still fondly call myself, under which, though varying with my mood and physical condition, independent
8o THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
of my will and calculation, lies a demand for happiness and for satisfaction which finds no answer in the scien- tific scheme of things. I am confident that this demand is no mere selfish wish for gratification ; quite the reverse : it is a claim for justice, a petition for permanence and worth. I could reconcile myself to suffering and to failure if the rest of men were to come by their rights, as St. Paul to be anathema for his brethren. But I see in their life, even at its highest level, no more meaning than in my own. You can arrive at no sense of worth by adding up an unending series of painful failures. I know not which to pity most : those who in an illusion of freedom take up an unavailing and abortive struggle, or those who have lost even this empty privilege of self-deception, and, folding their hands, await the inevitable. Do I then follow their example of quietism and abstention ? No. I readily admit that this outlook is but the outlook of reflection, and that in actual life I work cheerfully and with zest, sometimes in dimness and with uncertain aim, yet now and again with a sustained and confident effort I am half ashamed of. Then I find myself (to my own surprise) following precepts utterly at variance with the unanswerable logic of the speculative system, and I cannot help discerning in the content of the ethical code to which I still bow, the heritage of an older faith which I have outgrown. What I call my instinct, for lack of a better term, revolts against the dogma of my reflection, and perhaps it is no very serious menace to my activity or my peace of mind. But I cannot forget I am myself born into the traditions and preoccupations of this social fabric, charged with ideas and scruples for which I cannot account, in cooler moments cannot justify. So fenced and protected I may myself defy their influence, but will my children be proof? Powerless as it often is to root out instinct, theory cannot fail in the end to react upon practice. I derive, in such moments of chilling reflection, no comfort
THE MODERN AGE 8i
either from an Idealism which tells me ' All's law yet all's love,' that what ' is ' is already what ' ought to be,' looked at from a sufficient altitude, the lofty watch- tower of eternity (' Religion,' says Taylor, ' may be defined as a consciousness of our perfection as members of a perfect system or whole'); or from the strange creed of savagery and sentiment, which bids an infinitely remote generation march to a victory, which baffles description, over our countless dead bodies. I recognise the immense chasm which separates the spheres and departments of human activity ; like a certain German philosopher, I am content to remain ' a pagan in head, a Christian at heart ' : but I cannot, retaining my prejudice in favour of life and increase and endeavour, conceal my suspicions that this compromise is only due to a period of transition : the whole effect of the new views has not thoroughly permeated my mental fibre ; I am independent of its conclusions in the larger part of my life. But if this creed could be sincerely accepted and appropriated, I cannot conceive it possible that the present system of morals could survive, or a scheme of society even remotely resembling the existing order."
§ 9. Such is the mantle of academic Doubt which in the pressing business of practical life falls harmlessly from our shoulders. This curious overriding of logic, this respect for stubborn facts that refuse to fit in the preconceived plan, this complacent sundering of various departments, — is a familiar, and to some an honourable, feature in English speculation, since the revival of independent thought in this country. We rise above the gloomy creed of our serious reflection, and use language and make ventures in the field of Faith which we find it hard to justify. It is a mark of wilful blindness to deny that the traditional Christian and humanitarian standpoint remains without serious rival. Even Dogma has suffered less than moral earnestness or prejudice, than the cause of the poor. We may again sum up : 6
82 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
all current explanations of the Universe (which are not frankly mystical) omit end and purpose ; they either fall below or claim to rise above an ethical con- ception: in both cases, the individual is the helpless plaything of unseen forces, of heredity, circumstance, mere mode of universal Reason, or tool of State- interest. The State, in spite of a very thin disguise, has completed its deliverance from moral restraint ; and the doctrine of the individual's sovereignty, or even of the individual's rights, has been shaken without being in theory abandoned. Ideal aims, philanthropic or political, have either been satisfied or eliminated ; the abstract demands of the older Liberalism have been achieved without change of the dependence of the masses into a free autonomy, without sensible improve- ment of their condition ; there is a widely felt, an openly expressed disappointment at their sloth and facile abandonment of the principle of self-determination to any dictator or prince of finance, — a privilege won, as it was supposed, at great cost by the heroes of reform. The comparative terms 'higher and lower,' the very epithets, noble, generous, virtuous, need careful analysis, and are constantly employed in a vague and popular sense which will not stand examination. There is a demand for immediacy of fruition and a scorn of the constant procrastination of the end to a remote future : political movements have become social, and are confined to a limited area of candid opportunism. And with all this stripping of sentiment and disguise, the more the average man " sets his affection on things on the earth," so the more do men of thought turn with perverse persistency to the dim comfort of distant Utopias ; and one and all profess a creed which we may safely predict will never be accepted by our masters, a creed which is contained in the single maxin, " Work in faith, since we cannot help the present, for the future of mankind." The Quixotism of Nietzsch and Hartmann shows how
THE MODERN AGE 83
strong is the sympathetic instinct in man : man must have an object to work for, and in contempt of the present they fix their wistful eyes on the chance of a new development.
§ 10. And yet between these two extremes, cynical greed and idealist surrender, interest in the social and personal side of Religion has not disappeared ; it has rather revived than survived. It has ceased to be mere traditional conformity ; it has become not more logical, but more self-conscious. Belief in demonstrable truth or authentic fact may be shaken, but Religion is deliber- ately retained as an indispensable factor in life, almost in defiance of the evidence which seems so overwhelming, against freedom and purpose and reward. And this is so because such ill-founded faith or hope somehow does provide, if not a full answer to curiosity, at least a stimulus to action, just when the scientific conception of God, Nature and the State, is silent and ineffective. Let me read a few words of a veteran inquirer into facts, who has strayed beyond his due boundary into another and an unfamiliar realm : " The Monism of the Cosmos which we establish on the clear law of Substance pro- claims the absolute dominion of eternal iron laws throughout the Universe. It shatters at the same time the three central dogmas of the Dualistic philosophy, — the personality of God, the immortality of the Soul, and the Freedom of the Will." So much for Hackel's destructive side : now, what is his proposed equivalent ? *' Upon the vast field of ruin rises, majestic and brilliant, the new Sun of our realistic Monism, which reveals to us the wonderful temple of Nature in all its Beauty. In the sincere Cult of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful (which is the very heart of our monistic religion), we find ample compensation for the anthropistic ideals of God, freedom and immortality, which we have lost." (I have taken this piece of popular rhetoric as an extreme instance, yet as highly typical of a certain spirit which is
84 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
growing rarer to-day. We note that with the * increas- ing reluctance * of Science to enter into, much more to pronounce upon, ultimate problems, the dualistic tend- ency to sunder sharply the domain of certainty and of hope has again reappeared, and especially in the works of a distinguished English writer on Apologetic.)
§ II. The popular mind cannot accept this somewhat pusillanimous compromise, which seeks to retain the old Ethic together with the new Hypothesis. Without being aware, it divides the world into the realms oi fact, of idea, and of value. And the deeper interests and motives of practical life fall zvithin the last. No know- ledge of series or succession can give a sense of VALUE ; nor can the fullest acquaintance with abstract Truth and the laws of logical thought. Everywhere into the Scheme of Evolution crept back the old discredited teleology in terms implying purpose and design. The appeal to sentiment and a sense of obligation is rather the defiance than the corollary of our scientific knowledge. It is the protest of individual human nature against its absorption in a mysterious universal : in it is a demand not so much for happiness as for leave to work. " In- explicable in a sense as man's personal agency is — nay, the one perpetual miracle — it is nevertheless our surest datum, and our only clue to the mystery of existence." So speaks an eminent Scotch Professor (Pringle Patterson, Mans Place in the Cosmos, vi. and vii.). In it lies the secret of men's attachment to-day, in spite of evidence, to a moral life which they cannot account for ; to a vigorous hope and faith in a future, which has not yet surrendered to apathy.
§ 12. The impulse, the incentive to-day, as it always has been whenever moral action emerges from routine — lies in a generous hazard and venture, in what we conceive to be the Highest Cause. Pure Individualism is an impossible ideal ; however much the Romantic spirit glorifies the realising of self, man, his instant needs
THE MODERN AGE 85
satisfied, always seeks some object on which to lavish himself; and this chivalry is never separated from a dim sense that only in so doing is he attaining his true development, and finding the secret of his inmost nature. In the lower and baser life it is torture to acquiesce. Self-sacrifice, self-abnegation,— loosely though we use these terms in a vulgar sense, — never imply a plunge into a bottomless abyss ; we cannot part (though we try to insist on our pure and disinterested motive) our own welfare from the sovereign achievement of our design. The development of Pessimistic thought into cheerful self-effacement, into appeal for sympathy, before the needs of the race, witnesses to man's impera- tive but illogical need of an object of Devotion. The animal in us seeks for comfort and immediate ease; but the stings of this hidden and unwelcome impulse will not let us rest. We have not needed to point out in detail how closely allied is the current scheme of ethical behaviour to the faith in God and man, in design and meaning and moral value, which the Chris- tian religion can alone supply. We have seen how, little by little, every other department of human inquiry has yielded up the claim to vioral significance which it once usurped. Only the poet speaks of Nature as good and kindly; we have done for ever with the mischievous commonplaces of the eighteenth century. Earnestly as thinkers have striven to save in theory the conception of a State's moral aim, it is impossible to deny that in practice the State follows the law of every other organism. The content of our present social code is being seriously attacked, not without reason, justice, and a respect for the rights of minorities, against obsolete tradition and bondage: all measures of reform have for their sole aim, present use. But amid this slow process of disintegration, the persist- ence of our instinctive homage to a certain type of life, to the Central Figure in human history, is proof
86 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
enough of its permanent value. It is impossible to accuse Religion of insisting upon a greater surrender, a larger venture of faith, than the Moral life demands. Amidst our wealth of concrete fact and comfort, the old certainties of even half a century back have been forced irretrievably into the domain of Faith. Our modern society (for all its materialism and despondent reflection) shows itself the true child of its undoubted ancestry. Its life is the same bold wager of early Christian belief against Evil and a secular tyranny ; the spontaneous championship of the weaker and oppressed, which marks Teutonic chivalry at its best. Everywhere we set ourselves against meaningless restraint of irre- vocable law. We have dethroned capricious despot and irresponsible assembly ; we have probed some of the empty phantoms of idealistic abstractions. We refuse to serve except where we can approve ; to obey, unless we can understand. But this understanding is somehow an act of Faith, an act of Hope !
LECTURE VI
WORTH AND WORK: STRIVING OF GENUINE
VALUE
AdeXcpol, iyij) i^iavrbv ov Xoyii^ofxai KareiXyjcpevaL' iv hi, ra. fiiv dirltTU iirikavdavbfxevoi, toIs 8k ifiTrpoadev iireKTei.v6fji.evo%, Kara ffKOirov Smku i-rrl t6 ^pa^dov ttjs &pu} KX-qaeus. " This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high caUing." — Phil. iii. 13.
§ I. Subject : usefulness not truth of Christian religion : curious misconception of religion as anti-social and abstentionist : this should not (if true in the past) apply in the future : likelihood of a retreat of the religious consciousness into itself.
§ 2. Necessary alliance of Church and Society: the 'use' of religion determines its expansion and survival : reflective process, coercive argument merely secondary and subordinate : the Will-to- live, irrespective of reflection, aims at Satisfaction : at its zenith in Man, becomes a demand for ivorth and work : relation of this to the post- Kantian movement.
§ 3. Must this impulse to life be checked, when it reaches the level of self-consciousness? Christian faith denies: our modem science and its increasing reluctance to do more than record series and chronicle facts : we are quite ignorant of the law-s which govern rise and decay of nations : the unit alone an actual experience.
§ 4. Limit to-day placed upon ambitious schemes : content to secure personal and individual welfare, and right immediate wrong : one cause of this more modest outlook the doctrine, "man as the sport of unknown powers " : to the knight-errant succeeds type of Laocoon : another cause is the democratic demand for imme- diacy, after too long waiting : {fatalistfi and savagery).
% 5. Current of egoism arrested in the seventeeth century : mechanism supplants teleology : the individual in philosophy and the Commonwealth is subordinated to the Universal, to Substance ; humility takes place of self-assertion : rise and significance of Deism.
§ 6. Speculations of Behmen : problem of the ordinary man :
87
88 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
distance of God, indifference of Nature,— he takes note of evil and pain neglected in the Great Systems : to him we owe conceptions of antithesis and evolution : striving in nature real, not fictitious.
§ 7. Frank mechanical naturalism of the Great Systems disclosed : all values expelled from a world of eternal necessity and (so-called) Reason : Leibnitz attempts to justify to the individual (for no teleology which stops short of him can be accepted in equity) : his memorable decision not to capitulate to Positivism.
§ 8. Return of anthropocentric standard ; " not man by nature, but nature by man": takes up the old Renaissance impulse to personal realisation submerged under the Great Systems : Being and working are the same thing : empty mythology of changeless being gives way : worth of the exceptional, of idiosyncrasy.
§ 9. At every point the world a striving : possibilities press forward to justify themselves : " while still man strives, still must he stray": opposition to Calvinistic autocrat, to Hobbes' Leviathan : Sympathy, not a craven compromise or surrender, but natural : development of self, not retirement from world, but work in society, according to one's faculties, respecting the rights of others. § 10. Great reaction also even in the eighteenth century against the claims of ' Reason ' (as universal, impersonal, conceding nothing to the individual) : continual criticism of Rationalistic compla- cence : powerful influence of Rousseau upon Kant.
§ II. Kant restates the value of the plain man: free moral action, the one common indispensable element in human nature : his principles incompatible with Bureaucratic autocracy, or un- limited Sovereignty of the State : undying feud of scientific and 'democratic' {i.e. religious) conceptions of man.
§ 12. The Neo-Kantian development; individual ousted from his rights : rapid degeneracy in the notion of the Source of Life ; unconscious, unmoral, unknowable : unavailing pursuit in the complexity of Science and experience of a Unity : the Gospel alone comprehensive, alone able to satisfy the needs of the individual, and the demands of Reason.
§ I. In the eighth lecture of the present course I hope to show the peculiar fitness of the Christian scheme to meet the difficulties of the present age, — a conclusion which has been hitherto so much antici- pated and tacitly conveyed that the final result will seem little more than a recapitulation. And it will be noticed that I am not speaking of the truth of the Christian religion so much as its usefulness. The
WORTH AND WORK 89
Religious instinct is personal and it is undying. In its assurances, more real than any outward experience, men have found an asylum from the shocks of circum- stance, the injustice of society, the despair of all aim and purpose to be realised on this earth. There is a large amount of truth in the jealousy with which inward peace, founded upon incommunicable conviction, has been regarded by the Civil or Social and by the Ethical spirit. Religion has always seemed to some a cowardly refuge from reality, a deliberate abandonment of common duties, and to imply a pretension to rise superior to social claims and to ordinary moral restraint. The devotee left ordinary tasks undone to revel in morbid hallucination, pretending to a direct intercourse with a Power conceived as the enemy, and one day the avenger, of the existing order. Religion, in a word, has been conceived as individualist, abstentionist, and anti-social. The object of these lectures has been not so much to challenge the relative truth of this impeach- ment in the past, as to show that, however this may be, it must not apply in the future. We ask to set free Christian religion from this imputation ; by an appeal to the simplest method, the most common experience, from the charge of teaching a self-centred preoccupation with personal interests to the exclusion of man's natural duties, the contempt of his natural privileges, as member of a society. It is precisely at this point that the truth of the Gospel seems indispens- able. No, I have not directed notice to the proofs of reasonable or historic religion. There cannot be any possible ground for supposing that Religion is in peril, conceived, as we have seen, as a direct impulse towards a protector and a guarantor of the value and worth of life. But there may be some ground of apprehension that its efficacy and intimate connection with the Social life of humanity may suffer ; that the forces which seem to threaten what we have termed the democratic ideal
90 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
may resent its interference ; and that faith may follow the anchoritic tendency of the various movements of reform, by surrendering some department of human life to an alien power, by limiting its empire, like stoicism, to some inward citadel, and by retreating into a purely subjective state, — out of all strict relation to things as they are. And I say all this with a full knowledge and appreciation of the vigorous secular interests of the churches to-day.
§ 2. In the two lectures which intervene between our final casting-up of results, I wish to examine more closely and somewhat more critically than heretofore certain phases of thought in the centuries which have passed, which seem to render such an alliance between the Church and Society necessary for the survival of Western Ideals. I have to begin, as Religion always must, with the simplest and ultimate fact of experience, the finite consciousness. " The gods we stand by are the gods we need and use," says William James with admirable audacity. " Religions that have approved themselves," he continues, " ministered to sundry vital needs : no religion ever yet owed its prevalence to apo- deictic certainty," or ^coercive arguments.' It will not be supposed that I am seeking to invalidate the analysis of philosophy, or to cast doubt on the dogmatic fabric of theologians ; but it is no part of our task in the restricted area of apologetic we have chosen. I am only maintaining the fact plain to every philosopher who is at the same time a student of history and the human heart, that all such reflective process is secondary and subordinate, and that the test of perma nence and of worth is use and trial. Whatever we style that mysterious inner impulse towards life, new states, development ; whether we speak of the natural instincts, or the will-to-live, or the striving Monad, or the sub- conscious forces, or the 'little perceptions' of Leibnitz, — it is clear that in the life of the organism, State or
WORTH AND WORK 91
individual, here lies the motive force. Reflection can marshal these undisciplined levies ; but it cannot create them : it gives aim, concentration, and tendency, but it is often the 'amazed spectator' of emotions and passions which it can neither explain nor control. Now the form taken by this restless striving at its highest development is a demand for zvork and ivorth. We may trace from the humblest beginnings the impulse to self-preservation upwards into the strictly conscious centres of activity. A complacent altruism posing as self-evident truth, as independent of any further sanction, teaches that in man, this impulse having become self- conscious, is suddenly arrested and reversed. It will be a matter of no little interest to trace the intimate connection of modern creeds of disinterestedness with the teaching of Pessimism ; and, one step further, of the entire movement with the great Pan-logistic system of Hegel. But I may here forestall the issue of such inquiry, at least in this respect : it seems clear that the Reason which dominates in the post- Kantian Schools is not in our sense conscious or purposive ; that but a single turn of sentiment or temperament is required to represent this principle as mere blind and struggling Will, which in the course of its development into know- ledge of self, has but one further step, one only duty left to perform, to renounce the strife ; and that in spite of a glorification of objective State, the modern call to self-absorption in the whole is but a natural consequence of this world-conception, — allowing to the striver no satisfaction in achievement, to his work no enduring value, save as necessary link in an endless chain ; in no way answering the craving of the individual to choose his cause, and to become his true self in so doing, — which we have seen is the underlying motive, in ethics and religion, for all that we have been taught to call the nobler conduct of life.
§ 3. Christian faith gives an answer to this inarticulate
92 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
appeal. It does not allow the impulse to life and realisation to be checked when it reaches the level of conscious satisfaction. It directs, it does not arrest ; it stimulates, it does not forbid. For it, death, actual or symbolical, is the gate and condition of new life. And with consciousness enters a new centre of value ; — the individual an ' end-in-himself,' In the vague abstrac- tions which have coloured or perverted thought of late, we speak of the education of the human Race, the survival or welfare of a society. But in man, solicitude for the type comes to an abrupt end. We do not know the laws which govern the development and pronounce the doom of Societies : the lessons of history cannot be to- day conceived as so clear and unmistakable in their purport. It would be a tenable thesis that the decad- ence of Society was essential to the evolution of the finest art, the highest character ; and that (as we hinted last time) the very perfection of civilisation carries in it a sentence of death. But no one now ventures to pronounce hastily in these ' great matters ' ; and as Science manifests " an increasing reluctance to speak on ultimate questions," so historical and anthropological research corrects error, wrong judgment, and contempt of the past, — but assuredly does not unveil the secrets which govern the life and death of States, nor suggest a cure for any of our recognised evils. A moral judgment upon history is too often a feat of subjective legerdemain, aided by bias, and beyond doubt distorted by imperfect knowledge. The "stream or current that makes for righteousness " must certainly be traced elsewhere than in the fortunes of nations, or the requital of ancestral weakness or guilt on the ' third or fourth generation.' Reform, with all its faults, has nearly always implied a return to this unimpeachable fact of experience, the individual ; when he is lost in subservience to daemonic powers, to natural law, to civic absolutism, to ecclesi- astical patronage, well meaning but mistaken. Such
WORTH AND WORK 93
movements are prompted by a keen sense of the indi- vidual injustice, which is the too heavy price paid for the triumph of some towering abstraction, for the uniformity of a creed, the victory of an Imperial idea. But we must mournfully note in passing, how soon is such a concrete design corrupted by the natural and fatal bias of the human mind : it leans ever towards unification unreal, because premature, by the substitution of truth as an end-in-itself instead of happiness. The Protestant movement soon elevated above subjective needs and experience the supremacy of orthodox formula ; the Revolution, starting with the Rights of Man, ended in absolute disregard of all safeguards of individual liberty; the Liberal movement of the nineteenth century has been rather a victory of Ideas and of constitutional principles, than a steady vindication of the claims of the poor and the oppressed ; and emancipation on two continents sacrificed the real welfare of the slave in his intrinsic worth as a person to the impatient vanity of an immediate and theatrical triumph.
§ 4. The object of our inquiry is an answer to this question : Why are we to-day disposed to limit our ambitious schemes ; to consult the present interests of the actual strivers in the conflict ; to dismiss as beyond our strength the furtherance of Utopian schemes of Society, and to revive once more our interest in the sordid particular ? There are two chief reasons for this whole- some change of front ; they are intimately connected in origin, but from the one I can foresee nothing but an increase of the despondency which tinges much of our present thought and feeling ; from the other, a hopeful if more modest endeavour to centre attention upon the single reality, — the human consciousness as a seat of joy or pain. Into all departments of letters, into every branch of thought, there has crept a conviction that we cannot ascertain the drift nor control the advance of the un- known powers which move the world. It is to no purpose
94 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
that philosophers and statesmen repeat their comfortable assurance that the "real is the rational," the line of progress in Society clearly defined, and the doubt and uncertainty of moral truth and enlightenment slowly passing away, the barriers which divide nations, jealous suspicion, giving place to the sense of a common humanity. If we turn from an academic thesis to Thought in its broader meaning, — all the obscure yet potent forces which press on irresistibly, — we shall find an entire absence of any such hopeful assurance. Man as the moulder of his destinies in the old chivalrous romance gives way to Man the puppet of unseen forces ; and Laocoon has become a type of his unavailing struggle. It is partly because of this sense of undeviat- ing necessity that the immediate want, the immediate duty, is pursued with feverish eagerness ; that the engrossment in business to spare the mind the pain of reflection has become so marked an aim in modern life. And if our drama and our fiction is invaded by this sense of human submission to uncontrolled and incalculable powers, the second motive is, that untrained democratic instinct which, in default of any clear purpose in the voyage, asks to be set ashore to reap at least the gratification of present desires ; and with increas- ing vehemence seeks for justice and equality, not for some future race, but here and now. It is because we believe that the Christian message has an answer to both these problems that we would justify it from the side of use. We compare two volumes ; the one it may be of idealist philosophy, where the outlook is serene, though the atmosphere somewhat rarefied ; and the other, some calm yet remorseless picture of life as it actually is under a self-complacent civilisation. It is because we fear the divorce of thought and justice, a blindness to the real dangers which beset a society of sundered and unsympathetic classes ; — because we believe social endeavour rests not on the fear for public
WORTH AND WORK 95
stability, but upon a reverence for immortal souls ; — because a brutal demand for equal rights and equal enjoy- ment can only be appeased and restrained by religious guidance ; — that we confront seriously yet with confid- ence the fatalism and savagery which are secretly but certainly undermining our Ideals.
§ 5. For the demand of the individual for free scope and a share in the privileges as well as the burden of a complex civilisation, it is impossible not to entertain the liveliest sympathy. A glance at the motives of the chief phases of thought subsequent to the Reformation, will amply justify this claim, even if we doubted it. Society, now, is no longer guided by philosophical theory ; this represents a perhaps insignificant fraction of the dominant influences ; elsewhere we have to seek the origins and impulse, the sting and spur of movement. But the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries permit of generalisation, which our own disclaims. Expressed thought was more representative then ; perhaps less frequent and vocal, more centralised and authoritative ; and the philosopher was the spokesman of a deeper feeling, of a wider public, of more receptive scholars, because in the still considerable integrity of the world of knowledge and of life, each man did not vanish out of sight down his separate avenue of interest, his tunnel of restricted experience, in that strict specialism which to- day divides us, alas! too often, from sympathy and common aim. Still demanding to cover the whole field, still confident that the world without would correspond to the logic of the world within, the framers of the great Constructive Systems of the seventeenth century attempted a unification which would be impossible to- day. " Pay no heed to the individual " ; such was, in brief, the accepted maxim. The current of egoism was suddenly arrested and deliberately held in check. The age of brisk and venturesome personal enterprise was over; the licence of Anabaptist, the open disbelief of
96 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Bruno and Vanini, the fissiparous tendencies in the Reformed creeds, had alarmed the respectable, — that body which, often silent and inconspicuous, nevertheless frames public opinion and guides affairs. The central powers had benefited; the Catholic Reaction and the Protestant doctrine of a Ruler's Right Divine had tightened the fetters over timid and willing slaves. The glow of the early dawn of Renaissance and Reformation had faded into a grey twilight. In place of the luminous ' Forms ' of classical and material thought, self-existent or divinely created, men saw nowhere anything but 'forces.' In every department. Mechanism seemed to replace Teleology ; and we may remark that ever since theology and speculation have been occupied with the single problem of their reconciliation. The old sympathy between man and Nature was gone ; he could not interpret her aims and ends by his own analogy, he could but chronicle her sequences, and adapt to his own uses her blind uniformity. To Descartes, quantity supplants quality, everything but extension and motion is subjective ; God is past comprehension ; to fix His purpose or divine His counsels is mere presumption. His dualist system soon parts into the purely mechanical side of the French enlightenment, as frank Naturalism on the one hand, and on the other the universal Spiritualism of Spinoza and the occasionalists. Concen- trate all attention on the Substance, from which individuals spring; whether as mechanical automata [lliomme machine of the next century) or as passing modes of the Divine thought. "God is the sole truly efficient cause" (Sylvanus Regis). A greater part of human experience, all human activity, was relegated to the inconceivable. Conscious reason had one task, to contemplate not the striving forces or jostle of individauls, but fixed ' forms ' and everlasting unity. " Ego ipse," says Malebranche, " spectator mundi maximum sum et juge miraculum . . . ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis."
WORTH AND WORK 97
Humility takes the place of self-assertion ; deference to State-authorised religion the place of personal con- viction ; and morality became a recommendation to submit to the world-order, and patiently explore with the ancient cynics the limits of human interference (ra k(p'r](jj7v %,. {i,r\). Together with the pantheistic tendency, which after a thorough rearrangement of the material sphere recalls the exiled Deity to a more complete sovereignty than before, it is easy to detect the origins of the later English and French Deism in the Cartesian School. Identified with Nature, God seemed to lose all ethical meaning ; the Deist movement is ethical and anthropomorphic ; though it is not difficult to under- stand Toland's relapse into pure pantheism. " I be- long," says Henry IV., " to the religion of all good and honest men." The epoch of natural religion, irrespective and independent of outward and local forms, has begun. Higher than clear philosophic reasoning, stands natural instinct. The world so uniform and well regulated, had once a prime mover ; and the slender creed, common to, and underlying all special forms of religion, consisted in the two articles : (i) God is to be worshipped by moral conduct ; and (2) rewards and penalties will follow human action. In Deism men strove to retain the two needs of theory and of practical life: a first cause and a moral end for the existing order. And it is clear that the opposite movement, which claimed to bring the Divine so close to creation and to man, did in truth increase the distance and the want of sympathy ; for man (as we have seen) can understand none but a moral purpose, and will pay no heed to God if He be not Judge and Rewarder as well as Creator.
§ 6. Now it is just from this problem that the un- tutored Behmen starts his strange but fertile speculation. While Spinoza is strictly but the logician of Cartesianism, and is falsely claimed as the source of inspiration to the Neo-Kantians, it is in truth Behmen who pierces to 7
98 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the root of things in spite of his concrete allegory, and utters new thoughts, which the nineteenth century, above all, has commented and explained. He begins with the problem of the ordinary man : the distance of God, the indifference of Nature. He is neither the pure thinker nor the mystic; he is nearer to the common consciousness, therefore nearer to us to-day, than Descartes or Spinoza. In him a philosophical desire to understand the interrelation of things meets and blends with a religious longing for union. He faces the problem of Evil and of pain, which receives (it need scarcely be said) but scanty attention in the Great Systems. How came Evil and the manifold? <7i;ojg, with Plotinus as with Anaximander and Empedocles and Hartmann, ra 'ttoWo. k'XQ Tov ivog ixpiarriKZ ? And herein he marks the advance toward Leibnitz from the complacent and eternal self- identity of Spinoza's God-Nature. He enriches, it has been said, German language and speculation by the term and the idea, Development, Antithesis, evolution — here are perhaps the two chief thoughts of our time ! It is from Behmen that Fichte and Schelling and Hegel borrow that strange notion, variously expressed : the ^ dark spot in God! For to him there must be wrath as well as love in God ; bitterness as needful foil to sweet ; without resistance nothing can reveal itself. The striving is real ; the conflict of the visible and the moral world is no empty illusion, no mere innocent play of the Divine forces with themselves. Even in the deepest nature of the Almighty involuntary movement comes before conscious aim. Lucifer, type of self-will, never truly explained or fixed clearly in the system, stands for the early assertive personality, mistaken 7iot in effoi't but in aim. Behmen, incomplete and incoherent, yet gives us two conceptions, which lie at the root of the later development, the law of contrast and of evolution. Even Spinoza, who does not here claim further notice from our standpoint, betrays a similar emphasis on the
WORTH AND WORK 99
involuntary in each being, the impulse to self-preserva- tion, which is its differentia and is a part of the Divine.
§ 7. Whilst the English School were intent on the Criticism of Universals, Substance and Cause, and on the practical problem of the judicious separation between Belief and Reason, naturalism and religion, each in their fitting and respective province ; whilst (to anticipate a few years) the French School were drawing to a logical and legitimate conclusion the Cartesian doctrines, were eliminating, in the vaunted simplicity of the 'Age of Reason,' all superfluous element, every otiose principle ; modern thought was moving underground, it may be, and obscurely, along the lines of Leibnitzian speculation. Man cannot be content with a science oi facts, the ' that ' ; or of ideas, the * what and how ? ' — he must have be- sides a science of values. The flimsy and borrowed trappings of theology dropped, and disclosed the pure naturalism of the Great Systems : men saw that they were dreary, worn-out, and godless ; they lived on the bounty of obsolete ideas, and words which had long lost their meaning. Mechanism and necessity has expelled all values. He, Leibnitz, will accept this and carry it out and beyond itself into a theory of ends, into teleology ; that is, he will explain and justify the existing order to the average man ; he will find a place in it for him ! For it must again be repeated : a science of ends and values cannot disregard this claim ; it cannot be allowed to dwindle into a vaporous eulogy of absolute perfection or self-identity; if it aims at practical success, not a merely logical victory, it must satisfy the sense of justice, the craving for work, the impulse towards loyal adhesion to a genuine cause. There is something pathetic, (if precocious,) in the picture of Leibnitz meditating at the age of fourteen in a gloomy forest, like Hercules at the choice of the ways and the divid- ing paths. Shall he join the new and triumphant school of force and mechanism ? Shall he try to arrest this
loo THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
divorce of knowledge from the needs of man, and sur- mount the fatal edifice of certainty with the old dis- credited dogma of Form and teleology ? He decides not to surrender ends to positivism. And that he may- bring Nature back again into sympathy and communion with man, he reverses the method which then character- ised all scientific thought.
§ 8. He will explain Nature by man, not man by Nature ! He refuses to come back, late and fatigued, to a consideration of himself and that experience of self which is the sole immediate datum ! He will not, on the other hand, become exclusively absorbed in the mysteries within ; is neither pure naturalist, arriving startled and helpless at the inexplicable phenomenon of human agency, nor pure psychologist, whom nothing concerns except the laws of thought, the limits or the faculties of the human understanding. He will unite ; he cannot, in the interests of the practical life he served so well, let the outer and the inner world drift apart till they ' confront idly.' He had still confidence in the harmonising power of intelligence ; a happy gift, to which we to-day, lost in minutia; and overwhelming press of detail, can no longer lay claim. He ensouls body, he will not embody mind ! He takes up the old Renaissance impulse to life, development, activity ; at first involuntary, yet gradually in the strife to realise itself, gaining in clearness of aim and enjoyment. In place of motionless calm, lying for the eye of faith be- hind the empty illusion of conflict, he sets the ideal of progress, continuous development, conation, effort. Existence is continuous, yet are the manifold real and independent ; the atom or the monad (each in its several stage) is big with its past and pregnant with its future state ; is the centre of joy and pain, and therefore alone, or, in the highest sense, real. Being and zvorking are the same thing; for the plain man, surely not a discovery to be despised ; low on the ladder of existence
WORTH AND WORK loi
as he stands, work, activity never-ending, is his portion and his higher privilege ; others may move in the cold but serene heights among the stars. Substance is no all-embracing unity, which the more it receives has the less ; like Saturn devours its own children ; and is none the richer though all the wealth of concrete life is poured into it. Writing de notione substantia:, he desires to reach a purer conception of substance, as an "active force tending without ceasing to enter into action." " Omncm substantiam agere et omne agens substantiam appellari." Here is the new motto. With him the empty mythology of colourless and incomprehensible Being is over: a<ju!tr,g ayj^(>j[JMri(jrog ovtria,. In each tiny centre of life and vigour lies obscure and concealed the law of its development ; it is their individuality that is of interest and value, their uniqueness, not their common conformity to type. Galileo had foreseen our modern love of the concrete, the exceptional, when he had said that stones were useful and worthy of note because, not in spite, of their irregularities. " Be yourself," Leibnitz might say, " carry out the mission God sets you in your special equipment ; He is a constitutional monarch, and no all-absorbing Reason ; bend neither to the tyranny of State or of Idea."
§ 9. When the world is reduced to an orderly mech- anism, then the real interest begins in earnest, so far is it from being exhausted by this setting forth of fact and sequence. That which alone really exists is Force, and force is substance. These centres of energy, at first with blind and obscure movements, press forward to attain " actuality ; and this highest privilege is granted to those that fit into the order of things." Development is not, as with Locke's tabida rasa, as in Helvetius' theory of early training, passive coercion from without, either of Nature or a Minister of Education ; it is unfold- ing from within, not by acquiring fresh content, but by clearing what is already given. The world's essence
102 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
is at every point a striving, a development, a progress. The origin of this is to be found deep down in the nature of Godhead itself, " lurking possibilities, as in Behmen, press to the front and struggle with one another — a prelude to the actual conflict of exist- ence." I do not in the least seek to justify the often obscure and mythical exposition of Leibnitz : I am not concerned to prove the ' truth ' of this or any other system ; ' Truth ' is a word which needs very careful usage. But he sufficiently represents the justification in the world of reflection, the revival of a tendency, of an impulse, in man, which we may safely say will only die with the race. He is weakest in the ready optimism by which he was unfortunately best known in the Schools of the eighteenth century. He wishes to show an over- plus of good in this world of competing monads : to demonstrate that which to mystics of all time has seemed so doubtful, that it was worth while for the One to issue into the manifold. The usual Stoic arguments are forthcoming, the weakness and pettiness of human knowledge; and the universal welfare as supreme aim, not 2,ny private good ; but he adds what is a comment on the mediaeval felix culpa, the sense that every " fall is a fall upwards," that, as in Goethe's prologue, " whilst still man strives, still must he stray," — that pregnant but perilous thought which indeed saves from despair, ennobles failure, and puts life into fresh resolve, while it may often excuse the selfish vagaries of egoism (as in Schlegel's Lucinde), and insist that the man of genius shall be judged by his own law. Agreeably to the dawning conceptions of constitutionalism and reciprocal rights, in his scheme of the Universe or of the State, he will have no Calvinistic autocrat, no absolutist ' Leviathan.' The ' city of God ' has lost some of its Augustinian harshness and dualism ; He reigns among His children like a kind father, not as an angry judge. In the supreme ethical problem, Leibnitz, in
WORTH AND WORK 103
common with the English School of moralists, recognises in sympathy (which impels us to help another) no craven compromise, but a natural faculty. All starts from this impulse to self-realisation ; and the test and guarantee of advance is pleasure experienced in the competition. To preserve self is not (as thought Spinoza) a retreat to the calm of contemplation, to cease to be ' a part of nature ' tossed by passion, — but to take a share in the work of the world, and while respecting others' rights to hold one's own.
§ 10. In that eighteenth century, which we too hastily qualify as Rationalist because we judge from the loudest voices and the greatest catastrophe, there is abroad a great and significant reaction against the claims of Reason. With the Dogmatist, things correspond with the thought but not with the needs of men : aristocratic intelligence and seclusion could understand what was for ever hidden from the normal man. The systems of universal mechanism, of arbitrary State-control, left everything out of relation to the average unit. Pure egoist morals explained none of those tenderer, and, as we call them, unselfish emotions, which are among the commonest experiences of daily life : —
" Man by his dim impulse driven
Of the Right way hath ever consciousness."
(Prologue to Faust.)
Feeling, instinct, inbred sympathy, — such is the obscure and indefinite starting-point of the system of Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Adam Smith. Protest against cold Reason of the Enlightened, as against misused privilege of authority, was the chief note in Rousseau's summons to the world. But in spite of his excursions to do battle with the miraculous, David Hume is the signal type of anti-Rationalist. Reason (as then con- ceived and understood) he disparages of set purpose ; and claims in practical life to follow other guidance. Nay,
I04 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
it is Hume who, with clearer vision of men's needs than had the voluble authors of the Arguments from Design, saw that Religion rises from the distress of the world and the misery of the heart : this is a sense that Evil, so far from being a hindrance, is a motive to Belief. Throughout the eighteenth century continual criticism was levelled at Rationalism. It was obscurely seen, or vaguely felt, that not merely Revealed and Institu- tional Religion, but the barest minimum of natural theology, nay, the very foundation and presupposition of the moral sense and the practical life, rest, though nearest to men's hearts, upon indemonstrable hypothesis. Now, in this entire movement, it is the average man who is in the philosopher's mind ; or, unaware of the extent of his power, is guiding from behind the scenes the advance of thought ! It is impossible to deny the powerful influence of Rousseau upon the whole tone and temper of Immanuel Kant. In his 'school of Humanity' he learnt his chief lesson, the dignity and equality of man. But the great masses of mankind are disqualified from any share in the feats of logic, the delights of the artistic sense, the comforts of so-called civilisation. Where shall we fix the ' lowest terms ' of human nature ? Man's differentia is not Thought, but Action. It is certainly true, in a sense, to say with modern critics of Kant, that only Reason can heal the wounds that Reason herself has inflicted. This has been so often repeated that we fail to notice that the sentence is not a statement of fact, not even a pious wish, but rather a play on words, on the ambiguous uses of a common term.
§ II. In effect, Kant is in thorough sympathy with the reaction which asserted with emphasis the rights of feeling, and distinguished (as Hume had done) the province of faith and knowledge. Only in the life of moral action did he see a ground for a universal appeal. "It can have been no mere accident," says Professor Hoffding, (ll. 33. Eng. trans.), " that several of the leaders
WORTH AND WORK 105
of the movement to the abolition of serfdom were former pupils of Kant." A true morality cannot be found without political freedom, which implies duties rather than privileges, and puts an end, with the nameless oppression of the poor, to the irresponsible mirth of the happy and child-like slave. I need not here note that such liberty, which makes men, is incompatible not merely with bureaucratic autocracy, but with any form of majority absolutism ; and that the supposed victory over tyranny has to be fought again and again, in the unending feud between the scientific and the religious or democratic conception of man, in the perpetual conflict between the sovereignty of the State and Individual right, the general good and respect for the part.
§ 12. We shall trace next time the current of speculation which took its rise from Konigsberg. We shall have occasion to note: (i) how rapidly the active moralism of Kant became tinged with a mystical melancholy ; (2) how once again Thought, with un- abated pretension, gradually usurped the chief place ; (3) how, from his new-found or newly proclaimed rights, the individual was ousted ; (4) how with ominous and rapid decline this Sovereign Reason, as Source of all, seated at the centre of things and in the human brain, became first unconscious, next unmoral, finally unknow- able. We shall notice how, in spite of some wistful claims to have ' already apprehended ' unity, the past century has seen the growing separateness oi spheres and aspects, of special departments, not merely of life, moral, religious, political, but in the realm of pure Science and ascertained fact itself; how the search for a single fount of Being, at once the final object of proof, the initial assumption of each worshipper or discoverer, has been baffled by the complexity of interest, by the divergence of the pilgrims down the avenues of inquiry, further and further (as it may sometimes seem) from each
io6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
other, and from a common centre. And we shall be prepared for the result already foreshadowed : that the Christian faith, precisely because it will recognise and embrace every sphere with a universal hope, can alone answer, I will not say the needs of our heart, and the cry of the distressed, but the fundamental demands of human Reason and thought itself, when it is content to give up grasping shadows and confess its limits ; and this not in despair, but with modest gladness.
LECTURE VII
AGNOSTICISM: ARBITRARY STATE, UNKNOWABLE GOD
'AyvuffTij} Gey. — Acts xvii. 23. " Is there knowledge ixjith the most High ? "
§ I. Ontology, the great object of search throughout the nine- teenth century : province after province wrested from theology and claimed for unprejudiced inquiry into fact : a minimum of prerogative still conceded in Deism, or the religion of Nature : revival of Platonic immanence, God not distant but ubiquitous : " Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris " : this attempted identification (Kara (f)vaiv, Kara \6yov), always strained : continuous protest from the ethical side.
§ 2. Kant and Fichte the last to approach life and its problem from the moral point of \iew : impossible to resume that attitude : men will not express truth in terms of necessity and restriction (duty, law, obligation) : morality and reason play an insignificant part in the Universe : in the Neo - Kantian mythology, man banished as a moral agent : and even Fichte's ' moral order ' a mere pious postulate which stubborn facts did not respect.
§ 3. Warm alliance of Idealist and Naturalist : pantheis7ii not to be distinguished from positivism : to some minds this glozing of blind mechanism by pious terminology will always seem ultimate truth : we would only point out that this qualifying of the given as the good or as the ' rational ' is purely an act of Faith.
§ 4. Objection : " is not Hegelianism a vindication of Reason ? " It cannot be distinguished from Force or the Unconscious : it soon becomes mere name to cover a process of development, without relation to human mind or conscience, only intelligible in its series, not in its issue, or its purport.
§5. Development of the Neo-Kantians : the 'thing-in-itself ' : the Romantic era : a mystical faculty apprehends an imaginary Unity for which ordinary reason is insufficient ; end of era of Revolution and individual protest : stages of declension towards
107
io8 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Agnosticism : the Real = the ethical (Fichte) = the rational (Hegel) = the 'given and irrational' (later induction of Science and Pessimism).
§ 6. Fichte already begins to disparage or to despair of the individual : his ' moral order ' (as seen above) a venture of Faith, a pious hope : it cannot convince the unbiassed spectator of the world as it is : sum of imperfect moments cannot be perfection.
§ 7. This ' religiosity ' but a momentary halt : Schelling transfers interest to Nature away from Man : his Absolute a revival of Behmen's doctrine, striving of the Will-to-live : he is in truer sympathy with the downward grade of modern thought than Hegel.
§ 8. Hegel with genial and poetic temperament arrests for a time the disillusion : joyous process of the Absolute from un- conscious to self-conscious Reason : his teaching embellished with religious phrase and symbol but incompatible with orthodoxy.
§ 9. Complete ' subjection ' of individual to universal Reason (in history, State, morality) : conscious reason appears late on the scene : it is subordinate, secondary and an ' epiphenomenon ' : Hegel occasionally sensible of the radical 'otherness' of Thought and Things.
§ 10. In Hegel all subsequent developments are latent : he confesses that relapse into faith is necessary ; violent attacks on the Cosmic process from the side of Euda;monism and of Moralism.
§ II. Comte and the aristocratic revival : the State to be mechanically moraHsed : strange and illogical compromise ot English Puritanism : prevalent contempt for the deinocratic principle : paralysis of reform : discouragement of philanthropy : what is to be the attitude and function of the Christian Church ?
§ I. Underneath all the varied and feverish forms of inquiry in the nineteenth century, the dominant interest, if not any certain success, has lain within the province of Ontology. Whatever the special field of search, the initial assumption is clear and common to all that the world-order can be known, is therefore in a sense a Unity ; and the final goal is also well in sight, so to adapt the given study and its results to the whole region of experience that, in the end, the Unity anticipated and presupposed may become an achieved and proved truth. What is the ground and cause of mental and physical life ? What is the single root of being whence both issue? What is the One
AGNOSTICISM 109
which separates into the manifold of existence ? After the rupture of the Catholic Ideal, the hierarchic con- tinuity of all being under the Sovereignty of God, province after province was wrested from the theological domain, claimed for free inquiry, and determined no longer according to a theory of values, but from the certainty of facts. It was true that the conception dominant in the mediaeval age was Aristotelian tran- scendence ; yet by His angels, pontiffs, and priests He was never ' far from each one.' The Platonic tradition of the closer intimacy (as it was thought) of immanence, had been preserved unbroken, and though severely repressed had never lacked supporters, from Erigena and Amalric to Eckhart and the TJicologia Germanica. The Divine intervention receded ever further from reality. As in political reform, the prerogative suffered successive limitation ; district after district proclaimed its complete autonomy; and the minimum jealously conceded in the Religion of Nature and of Reason allowed a first impulse to an almost independent creation as a scientific postulate, and b. final judgment upon the behaviour of men as a practical safeguard. But the Platonic conception had been slowly gathering in volume and intensity. God was neither Creator nor Judge ; but rather substance and sustainer of the world in its harmonious interrelation ; inspirer of our highest thoughts, indeed our very self. But the keen and striking antithesis between the outward and the inner, whether in moral life or in the problems of Epistemology, cannot be so easily annulled. The Stoics, and perhaps the Sophists, had maintained that life Kc/.ra (pvaiv was life KKTci Xcyov, — a clear correspond- ence between thought and things, which often demanded a very artificial combination of spheres always too ready to fall violently apart. (And the Sophists, followed by Rousseau, had added the significant appendix : that the life Kura, vo;j^ov contradicted both.) It is clear that what
no THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
sufTfered in this new interest, in the novel conception of God, was the ethical side of life. Wherever the etJdcal spirit has come forward into the chief place, the distrust of Nature, and antagonism to her methods, becomes our conscious or deliberate rule of procedure. What has been the course of development in this new theory ? By what successive stages have thinkers been led to the modern views of ontology, as to the character of the ultimate real, the constitution and the purpose of the unending process ? For teleology, with its train of ideas and terms, penetrates unsuspected into the most professedly scientific and unbiassed treatment ; and the judgment of values cannot be withheld or suspended, after a patient scrutiny of facts (Darwin, Hoffding, II. 441).
§ 2. There have been two tendencies in Modern Thought answering naturally to the two sides of the eternal contrast, mind and matter, thought and things, ego and non-ego. In the search for a third principle which should explain the origin of this dualism, Idealist and Naturalist combined ; or rather, shall we say they pursued their independent study until that wider association of reflection and experience, that publicity and easy interchange of ideas which, with growing independence of special spheres, marks our time, brought them at last from opposite poles, not merely within hailing distance, but even to a common ground of agreement. Kant and Fichte were the last to approach life and its origin from the purely human standpoint of morality and the text of ' Duty.' No philosopher since has attempted to do so ; perhaps none can ever resume the task. (Duty, law, and obligation are ungracious and unfamiliar terms to which the present age listens with ill-disguised unease; and it would certainly be strange if the ultimate expression to denote the ' fine flower ' of cosmic development, of human perfection, were to be alivays derived from
AGNOSTICISM iii
determinism and the realm of necessity; or — in a somewhat higher sphere of social intercourse — the grudging performance of one side of a contract, — un- pleasant but indispensable condition to some future advantage.) This impatience of what, after all, plays (like Reason itself) an insignificant part on the great stage of existence, led, in the successors of Kant in the nineteenth century, to a grandeur of conceptual mythology; from which man, in his strict sense, as moral agent was banished, and man in a new role as a mode of the Universal Being, as a 'organ of the Universal Reason,' was invited to enjoy the spectacle of all Time and all existence, — or rather, to rise above both. To Kant, God is still demanded by the moral sense and the needs of practical life, not so much as the Sovereign autJior of law, but as its guarantor; as the restorer of that due balance of merit and recom- pense which in this world is never seen in equilibrium. (He never answers Hume's pertinent inquiry, Why should we imagine, as there is no correspondence here between justice and happiness, that there is another world where such inequality is redressed ?) To Fichte, again, whose last word is duty, God is nothing but the moral order of the Universe : " I abhor," he says, " all religious conceptions which personify God, and regard them as unworthy of a reasonable being." Fichte, with his intensely mystical temperament, is more fortunate than most critical inquirers into Nature as a whole, or the course of History. It certainly is not from the Science of things or men that we get unmistakable traces of power, wisdom, and goodness. In depersonal- ising God, Fichte s moral order, bound up with that limited acquaintance with the scope of history we noticed before, disappears as the vista lengthens on each side into infinity, — disappears, too, on a more concrete experience of human life and of the human heart. It is clear that the ' moral order ' bears no
112 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
relation to the usual implications of morality. Like Spinoza's God, which might with greater candour be styled Nature, this ' order ' which we readily grant (as fact of experience, as necessity of thought), might very well drop its superfluous predicate. His successors will not trouble much about it ; and under their treat- ment, while the conception of Being gains in grandeur and universality, it drifts away imperceptibly but steadily out of relation to the average life of man.
§ 3, We are now entering upon that brilliant period of philosophy in which the purely Idealist and the purely Naturalist view meet, not in a compromise but in an identity of opinion. The former releases itself from any undue pettiness and constraint, gets free first of geocentric narrowness, then of anthropomorphic prejudice: Source of Being must be above any sym- pathy with a mere stage in development, for it embraces all with equal tolerance ; it is a parent without favourit- ism, and the last remnant of austere moralism vanishes. And from the other side, the Scientific or pure Material- ism gradually transforms crude matter into force, force into will, will into an ambiguous amalgam called mind- stuff. And as they become more and more ' animistic,' more intent on explaining the outward by the facts of inward experience, or datum ; so they meet and fraternise with the opposing force ; and pure Idealism and pure Naturalism coalesce in the sphere beyond and embracing both, — the Cusan's 'harmony of con- tradictories,' place of Indifference, the Absolute. It is no novelty to accuse modern Hegelianism and ancient Stoicism of being indistinguishable from pure Naturalism ; of employing terms out of their current usage, rather from habit and a desire for comprehension than from any conscious wish to deceive. But there will always remain a class of mind to whom this via media, this compromise between spiritualism and mechanism, appears the last term of human
AGNOSTICISM 113
wisdom, as it attempts to adapt itself to a world which it does not wholly create, which, as Hegel him- self seems to confess, contains in the end an indigest- ible residuum. The tendency to save the comfort of religious terms without their meaning or object will always satisfy many who cannot bear to lose at one blow the traditional scheme of life ; it will arise anew from time to time, and chiefly in those periods of eager practical search in the material universe, which convince the earnest thinker that he is but a pilgrim and sojourner in an alien world ; it mitigates the horror of determinism, and, if it bring some vague solace to those who are able to entertain it, it fulfils that standard of usefulness which is the sole ultimate test of creeds, as of institutions. Founded securely on faith and sentiment (personal but incommunicable), it can resolutely close the ears to outward remonstrance, on the part of pure Positivism or moralistic Religion. It is no purpose of the apologist to upset the faith of any; and I would here only point out that this same attempt to qualify the given, as good or as beautiful, is an act not of reason, but of belief (perhaps, a sug- gestion of temperament, or a cry of the heart) ; and takes its place among other voices of defiance or protest against the stubborn crassness of the outward order, — weak perhaps only in this, that it cannot inspire courage and conviction to face the manifold and help to make it one, because by its initial axiom it has already pronounced it to be one and perfect.
§ 4. But, to some, this accusation of tacit agreement with the Naturalist must seem a profane libel on philo- sophers, or a mere academic paradox. " Is not," this is its song, " the whole system of Hegel a long and elaborate vindication of Reason, — a successful attempt to reunite mechanism and design ? Is not the master of what is best and highest in modern thought the only teacher able to answer the pressing claims of exact science and 8
114 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
pure Naturalism? Does he not take man's differentia as intelligence, and show that the universe corresponds to its categories so exactly that his chief text may be written thus : the Real is the Rational ? " It will be my place to reply; that it is difficult to recognise in this system any firm support, I do not say for the moral, but even for the intellectual life ; that the converse of the text is the truer form, that ' the Rational is the real ' ; and that this very use of the term ' Reason ' is the most signal instance of the fatal ambiguity of the new scholastic in the use of words. 'Reason,' in a word, bears a meaning which has scarcely a faint resemblance to current usage. The title itself was partly a heritage from the eighteenth century ; partly the choice was due to the buoyant confidence of Hegel himself in his cardinal belief, thmgs must agree to thought, and logic is ontology. But he was misled by their association, or swayed by a very natural bias. He might have styled it with greater correctness, ' Force,' or the * Uncon- scious,' the ' Will-to-live.' Divorced from moral purpose, cosmic completeness is not far from the ' unknowable.' He could not rid himself, as child of his time, of such joyful anticipation of final sympathy with things. He never lost the ' animistic ' prejudice (if I may use the term) that at the back of phenomena lay, not merely something analogous to man, but his veritable self His successors were less scrupulous. They would not use well-known words in an unusual or unfamiliar sense. Whether starting from his School or from a cool empirical interest in Nature, men had learnt one Kantian lesson, and forgotten another : they read themselves into Nature and disposed of mechanism ; but they forgot that man's essence is not thought but action. They still employed language that might apply also to man and his inner state of passive acquiescence in the inrushing tide of truth ; but they deprived it of all connection with what we term distinctively human. The new creed recognises only
AGNOSTICISM 115
the elect favourites of an intellectual, that is, of a mystical, aristocracy.
§ 5. Thestarting-pointof the later Kantian is of course the * thing-in-itself.' Kant, who thus recalled a limited Realism, had thrown out the important and pregnant suggestion that there might be an affinity between the unknown behind phenomena and the unknown in our- selves ; but at the same time he issues the caution, that this harmony, Reason (with its insistent dualism) would be unable to formulate. This was a challenge to his successors. They could not consent to leave anything outside the sphere of human cognisance. They were impatient of limit and supremely hopeful of success. The critical philosophy had in truth enlarged, while it seemed to restrict, the scope and accuracy of intellect. The unknown will be first taken up into the ' ego ' ; and next, the two will be set together as inseparable twins of one beneficent parent. Three thoughts suggested rather than elaborated by the master, seem to have guided later development. In them we may trace the essential features of modern thought : (i) this obscure yet conceivable affinity between subject and object in the deepest ground of the nature of each ; (2) the ' immanent teleology,' which in the ' Critique of Judgment ' was already preparing to supplant Creation by Evolution, and to affirm the possibility of purpose without conscious Thought ; (3) some dim hints as to an immediate intuition of this Identity, which from the least mystical of modern thinkers heralded the new tendency to seek Truth, with a higher but less conscious faculty than that of Intelligence. The Romantic era opens, full of vague yearnings amid all its triumphant formalism. The Age of Reason closes, with its demand for transparent clearness. Than Reason itself, nescioquid majus nascitur. Armed with these hints, and disregard- ing the caution as to ' forbidden fruit ' which equally formed a part of his teaching, the new philosophers
ii6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
plunge into the dangers of the enchanted forest of the Absolute. Criticism, the epoch of revolution, of individual protest, of the rights of man, is over and out of favour : the constructive metaphysicians belong to the age of the Restoration. The world is recognised as * all our oivn ' : it belongs entirely to the thinking mind : the metaphysical and the ethical principle are one. But what of the restraint, the limit, the xspaj, * anstoss,' which experience shows us stands in our way, the stubborn material of the real, which so often seems to conflict with our wilful impulse or inner ideality? This too is all our own act. Freedom is no magical or original birth- gift : it must be slowly won by the painful toil of overcoming opposition. Development through tran- scending and reconciling contraries ; this is the new text. " This then," cries the awakened Reason, " is the task I set myself when in the night of the UNCONSCIOUS I resolved to return to my home in tranquil self- possession only after labour well and loyally performed." Here, in the Fichtian system (or rather mythology) of Being, we mark the entry of the unconscious and involun- tary, as the source of life in restless striving. Reflection, Reason, Philosophy itself, is a pale copy of what is, after all, already g-wen (datum) when Thought becomes conscious. The Real, said Fichte, is the Ethical. The Real, said Hegel, is the Rational. The Real, declared the metaphysical pessimist and the empiric alike, is the work of a blind or malignant force, which man must anniJdlate^ or reverse. Such, as we have already seen, are the stages of modern thought.
§ 6. Kant's first follower lived too near to the earnest individual protest and hopeful striving of the Revolution to abandon completely the ethical standpoint. But even in this devout and serious soul, it was already threatening to collapse. Not yet do we pass into the serene heights of pure thought-reconstruction, artistic reverie, religious symbolism, and its heavy price for all but the elect, State-
AGNOSTICISM 117
supremacy, which marks the later intellectualism. But he has already begun to despair of the INDIVIDUAL ! Freedom, as self-comprehension, cannot be attained by the single striver, only by the whole process. He turns, to our disappointment, from individuality to Pantheism ! interest is transferred from the many, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, to the human race, conceived by a generous fiction as the subject of evolution and development ; and we are confronted by that unanswerable dilemma, where is the worth of a heap, if the grains are valueless ; of an evolution, itself unconscious, where at no given point emerges the full delight of a realised end ? " It is altogether absurd," says Hartmann, with an asperity which is almost justified, " to conceive evolution as end- in-itself and to ascribe to it an absolute value. For evolution is still only the sum of its moments ; and if the several moments are not only worthless but even objectionable, — so too is their sum, the process." " We cannot get the Absolute, the perfect fruition of experience, by adding together any number of imperfect, finite experiences" (Leighton, Modem Conceptions of God, 136). Still Fichte clings, with the passionate con- viction of a Faith which defies evidence, to the notion of a 'Moral order' gradually realising itself in the world.
§ 7. This is not philosophy, but religion ; a pious hope, not a proved achievement, a known experience ; it is a moment's halting-ground between the ethical and that later view of life which, according to the temperament of each, falls below into the pure mechanism of natural causes, or rises above to artistic contemplation and indifference. For in Schelling, man gives place to iiature, as a real, nay, as a rival, though a complement of self ; and the objective is reinstated. " We do not produce" said this reviving Realism, " we only REPRODUCE." Yet are the two philosophies of nature and of mind parallel and in completes! agreem.ent : they are twins of a common
Ii8 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
father. For the ego (once absolute) subsides into a subordinate role. " Then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all." He denies alike the tenet of sensationalism, that the ' NON-EGO ' produces the ' EGO ' ; of subjective idealism, that the ' EGO ' creates the ' NON-EGO.' Mechanism and teleology are reconciled in a higher sphere; the dual tendency of the Positive and the Romantic elements in human nature. The Higher Principle, which unites and embraces them, is neither the one nor the other ; it is Cusa's synthesis of contra- dictions ; or the absolute ground is pure indifference. Mind is gradually, as it were, extricated from the mass ; and, as Intellect, interacts with Will; their antagonism makes human history, the conflict of THOUGHT and reflection with BLIND NATURAL impulse, — "the one the drag, the other the motive power" (Schiller). How can this dualism be overcome and peace secured ? not by the THEORETIC or the PRACTICAL Reason. We can reach the Highest, as Kant seemed to intimate, only by getting back into the impersonal, and by laying aside the limits of individual reflection, by opening the vacant mind with the mystics of all time to the flow of Truth. Art, as immediate, is greater than philosophy. There we transcend the dualism of reflection, and rise past the finite. But what is the Absolute, both source of our being and knowledge and goal of our striving ? From the ground of blank indifference (of which Hegel dis- approved) the Absolute in SchelHng's later development tended more and more to qualify as ' will striving-to- be', or at least to contain this as primal and indispensable potency. Schelling {On Essence Of Human Freedom, 1809) : " There is in the last and highest resort no other being at all than Volition. Volition is original Being, and to this alone are adapted all its predicates — ground- lessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation. All philosophy only aims at finding this highest term."
AGNOSTICISM 119
(^Scheme of Anthropology) " Will is the proper spiritual substance of man, ground of everything, original producer of matter, the only thing in man, the cause of being." Whereas the negative coercive role of the Understanding, he expresses thus : " It is the not-creating, but regulating {^ = t() ^rspa?), limiting, giving measure to the infinite boundless Will" (cf. v.). Before God can become a person, there is the ' Dark Spot ' of Behmen's theosophy, which must be comprehended and reconciled. It is clear that while Hegel (" who would deal," says Stirling, " with the facts of existence, not with the fictions of conceptions," ii. 91), with his vivid interest in concrete things, maintains his system at the higher level of his original optimism, Schelling, in far truer sympathy with the downward grade of modern thought, relapsed in the gnostical symbolism of his later manner into a pessimistic analysis of the world-process, indiscernible from the definite Gnosticism of later writers.
§ 8. To the ordinary man the key to the philosophy of Hegel is his hatred of abstractions, his love of the concrete, his confidence in human faculties. "The Hidden Secret of the Universe," he says, " is powerless to resist the might of thought ! It must unclose itself before it, revealing to sight and bringing to enjoyment its riches and its depths." He drags down the Absolute from its cold transcendence and indifference into the process of development. To him, the Absolute is the relative. It is not something that surpasses human understanding ; it is supremely knowablc. It had been maintained, as we saw, that the Radix of Nature and of Mind was something which included both, and itself was neitJier. This suggestion to pure mysticism, always the abandonment of the known for the unknown, was supremely distasteful to Hegel. The Absolute, not merely held together in colourless and neutral unity, but itself was, Nature and Spirit. Evolution is from unconscious Reason to self-comprehending Reason, by
120 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the law or formula of the three stages (which was the common property of all Kant's successors). The goal is self-consciozisness and freedom therein. There is a perfect correspondence between what is kktol (pvffiu and Kccrd \oyov. Reason regards with complacence and acquiescence the unconscious work of her dream-trance. Reason fully knows, and cordially endorses the Real. Thus Logic is ontology ; and the Categories assume for him a far greater significance than for Kant. These become the counterparts of the Platonic Ideas, active and creative forces in things as well as necessary forms of thought in our own MIND. His consistent use of the term Reason must not blind us to the fact that he means unconscious impulse which only in man com- prehends itself. He expressly cautions us against supposing that for Thought there need be a Thinker. His acute and yet orthodox commentator, Dr. Stirling, remarks: "We cannot conceive of Thought (ii. 80) as in the first instance just in the air. . . . Thought implies a thinking subject. It may be that this subject is not at first in brsXs^g/a, or even in mpyzioc or fjbop(pri ; it may be," he adds significantly, " that at first it is only in the stage of Imccfjuig, or that it only h, potentially." Nowhere, except perhaps in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, does Hegel suggest an answer to the doubts which must beset the student, as to the real value of his terminologic currency. Hartmann seems to complain of his want of candour. It would be pre- sumptuous to attempt to decide the great debated problems of the Hegelians of the Right and Left. But the general impression is in favour of the latter inter- pretation. The Unconscious and impersonal only attains self-knowledge in the human race ; and these, collect- ively, are the Absolute so far as He can be said to be aware of Himself. Can we doubt that, in the last resort, Hegel's Reason is a blind impulse to life that is some- how ordered and permeated by an unconscious and
AGNOSTICISM 121
immanent teleology? Need we hesitate to attribute such belief to a speculator in the vagueness of the Romantic era, when we find this language in the post- humous work of one of the clearest of English thinkers ? (H. Sldgwick, Philosophy, its Scope and Relations, 243, 244) " I am conscious of requiring for rational conduct such a postulate, viz., Moral order. This leads on to the con- nection of Theism and optimism (so far as a Moral order goes). Neither in my opinion involves the other. We may believe in Moral order — ' the power not our- selves that makes for Righteousness ' — without connect- ing it with Personality. This," he adds, "is generally admitted." It is perhaps with a view of calling attention to the implications, to the historical consequences of this alogical compromise, that I have ventured to deliver these lectures. The substance of my contention, as of every earnest Christian and every genuine philosopher, is to assure the one known reality of its sovereign importance and value, not merely as a bye-product, an accidental epiphenomenon, on the surface of an unend- ing evolution, but as the supreme centre of life, and being, and thought.
§ 9. The active Reason which creates must be pro- nounced unconscious ; and the conception of design merely implies order and interrelation. The Absolute is relative ; God is not an ideal, but the real, the actual. Motion, becoming development through overcoming anti- thesis,— this is just the concrete course; Consciousness and freedom are the goal where self-expansion gives way to self-concentration, and the reign of the Holy Spirit is at hand ; we might almost say, the unholy impulse of the Will-to-live has been for ever checked. This goal, as to Fichte, is out of reach of the individual; it is for the Race alone. History becomes the absorbing study ; and the historical movement of our time owes largely to Hegel, though it has had to correct the premature generalising of the philosopher by careful and unbiassed
122 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
inquiry. As in knowledge, he would bid the individual be the silent and passive recipient of the fulness of the Dialectical process, of itself unfolding truth within — so to the ordinary man the State prescribes and directs, keeping conceit and caprice in check ! The government rests with the world of officials. Was he not indignant with such as believed themselves personally endowed with more reason than had developed in the State historically ? Does he not come near those who suppose the ordering of rights to be the work of history, exalted far above all individual will and reflection ? But for the gifted there is another sphere. In the political life mind cannot find its highest value. The aim of con- scious Reason is to return to the Absolute in art, in religion, and in philosophy. Yet of this highest goal of human faculty and development, Hegel (Collected Works, xiii. 66) can write : " Philosophy makes its appearance when the mind of a nation has worked itself out of the indifferent dulness of the early life of nature, as well as out of the period of passionate interest. . . . The soul takes refuge in the realms of thought : and in opposition to the real world it creates a world of ideas. Philosophy is then the repara- tion of the mischief which Thought has begun. She starts with the decline of a real world. When she appears with her abstractions, painting grey in grey, then the fresh- ness of youth and life is already gone. Her reconciliation is not one in reality, but in an ideal world " (i 816-1830). Hegel seems elsewhere to confess a radical otherness in given nature. " As to Nature," he says, " philosophy, it is admitted, has to understand it AS it is. The philo- sopher's stone must be concealed somewhere in Nature herself: Nature is in herself Rational, and knowledge has to apprehend the Reason actually pervading her." Does philosophy come too late to teach us how the world ought to be ? Is there not a sad significance in the reflection that Thought is the last product of the world-
AGNOSTICISM 123
process ? May we not repeat with increased meaning : " The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering " ?
§ 10. All later developments of thought are found in embryo in the Hegelian system. Unconscious Reason cannot be distinguished from the Blind Will or Unknow- able Energy of later speculators. We bestow upon it a name which belongs strictly to human nature, in the full confidence of the Kantian School that we can interpret and can approve the Cosmic process. " The subjective Idea," Hegel himself confesses {Logic, Eng. transl., Wallace, 371, 373), "does not merely seek to knozv the objective world. It also seeks to realise its own ideals therein. This is the effort of Will towards the Good. The subjective cannot altogether triumph in bending the objective to its purposes ; and it is in the last resort compelled to fall back on the faith that the good is radically and really achieved in the world." It is from such a confession, extorted by the needs of the practical life, that later philosophy develops. Again and again, from the ETHICAL and the LOGICAL standpoint alike, the problem must recur: Do THOUGHT and THINGS agree so completely ? and even if we can master their formula, can we approve their purpose? Do "the Categories reflect in the mirror of pure thought the true nature of the objective world " ? (Leighton, ATodern Conceptiojis of God, 37). Does the Dialectic method " in very truth reflect reality"? can the movement of" thought be ' infallibly ' shown to repeat itself in concrete form in the world of Nature"? (45). Have we a suspicion that Nature is perhaps an " irreducible and wholly refractory element, an unreconciled factor, in the totality of the Divine Idea " ? (20) Do we accept without reserve Mr. Spencer's statement : " The Power manifested through- out the Universe distinguished as material, is the same Power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness"? {Principles of Sociology, iii. 171). " The
124 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
physical government of the world," says J. S. Mill bluntly {Nature, 31), "being full of the things which when done by men are deemed the greatest enormities, it cannot be religious or moral in us to guide our actions by the analogy of the course of Nature." I must defer a fuller survey of the results of irrational Panethelism, of the indifferent criticism by English moral intuition of the Cosmic Process ; but I may here conclude by a summary of the undeniable results of this new Gnostical Reaction. In Schopenhauer and Hartmann, in the 'worst' and the 'best' of all possible worlds, intellect awakens in dismay only to condemn the mischievous activity of its unconscious trance: the former, still be- longing to the Romantic, the Byronic era, counsels INDIVIDUAL emancipation ; the latter, a pupil of later humanitarianism, reproves this selfish aim, and bids us work for a COLLECTIVE Redemption of the race, and of the all-wise, all-perfect Spirit entangled in the meshes of realities. For the one, in quiet and seclusion, the sage or artist can arrive at the goal alone ; for the other, no less an ideal can suffice than the salvation of humanity. Here is the true whole, and persons are but members bound to disinterested service during the transient illusion of their independent life. This conviction of life's evil, this ideal aim, can impel men to renounce a selfish quietism for a strenuous effort to enlighten blind impulse and tempt it to give up the useless struggle. Does not the Positivist School ground it&success upon a similar appeal for a missionary fervour ? § II. Following Hegel in his historical conception of Humanity, is the new Realism of Comte. Strongly anti- democratic and reactionary, casting wistful but forbidden glances at a patrician caste and a mediaeval hierarchy, at the supposed ages of Faith, he centres his interest on the Social life of man, and closes his eyes to the problem which the world of Nature forces on our notice. While, too, the entire English School, from the strictly scientific
AGNOSTICISM 125
side, from Mill and Darwin, to Huxley and Romanes, unable to read themselves into things, or find any correspondence to their ideals without, are content to remain nobly but illogically constant to a moral scheme, which reverses every tenet of science, and every lesson of experience. Brought up in the beliefs of English Liberalism, permeated with the still forcible senti- ments of puritanic morality, they attempt to sustain the dignity and worth of the individual. With the familiar sobriety and indifference to pure Logic of English thinkers, they place their practical creed side by side with their theoretical formula or cruel fact. This complacent dualism they are at no pains to reconcile ; and they turn naturally in their most serious moments to the consolations of the Christian faith. But we have already pointed out the precarious character of this compromise of Faith and Reason, of practical belief and scientific fact, of democratic and aristocratic elements. The movement for the subordination of the humble individual, according to universal law in the natural order, is proceeding apace in the world of Society. The ' immoralism ' of * Zarathustra ' is but the law of nature carried into social life, somehow recognised as a binding command, tinged, falsified, or redeemed from savagery (as we prefer to call it), by the appeal to serve a cause beyond self, — a wish never extinguished in the mind of man ; so to live that our craven race may some day attain perfection in a loftier type. The stern reformer has lost patience with intermittent and personal efforts at social improvement ; and trans- fers his sympathy from the present individuals who toil and suffer, to a scheme, a theory, a Utopia, which is but the reflection of his personal vanity or scientific curiosity. With a widespread unease, a general wish to co-operate in the cure of admitted evils, in a perfect unan- imity of somewhat helpless good-will ; we are crushed by a sense of pitiless and obdurate law, which decrees that
126 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
an over-ripe civilisation shall perish first at the top ; that the human race exists for the benefit of the few: "Humanum paucis vivit genus" of Lucan's C(ssar\ that the very perfection of development makes us too sensitive to suffering to bear the brunt of conflict. Philanthropy seems arrested by irresistible laws of requital, consequence, development, unknown but fatal tendencies. In such a world, and such a society, eager for any novel explanation of the unseen, ready to accept any doubtful message from the unknown, it is for us to consider under what presentation the Christian faith can best meet the needs of the age. In its power to adapt the old truths to new requirements, the Church of Christ is founded upon a Rock, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.
LECTURE VIII
NEEDFUL ALLL\NCE OF THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY
OiJoei' yap iTe\d(j3(Tev 6 N6/ios, iireia-ayufy^] oe KpeirToifOS iXiridos, St Ijs iyyi'^oixev rip Qei£. — Heb. vii. 19.
iriiXTevaai yap dei rov irpoaepxof^evov T<p Gey on. earl, (cat toIs iK'^rjrovffiv avrbu fjLKxdaTroSoTrjs yiverai. — IIi:B. xi. 6.
" For the law made nothing perfect ; but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto God. . . . He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewardcr of them that diligently seek Him."
§ I. Can the Church still claim to answer current needs? Ambig^uous meaning of the term 'Democracy' : a term constantly repeated in various senses without attempt at strict definition : its debt to Christian and Mediaeval ideas : its fatal entanglement in a classical conception of the State (aristocratic intellectualism, and worship of abstraction) : the democratic ideal steadily losing ground and, apart from reinforcement of religion, doomed.
§ 2. The two threatening influences, SidL\.&-aufocracy and scientific fatalism : ' democracy ' (as its minimum) must allow to each man, -worth and work : modern revolution where it has risen up from beneath, the insurgence of a rudimentary sense of equity, a demand for partnership on equal terms : sense of personal value combined with loyalty to a cause (integral and complementary features in all humaii activity).
§ 3. In all three departments of life, moral, folitical^ religious^ we have seen an original petulant selfishness ennobled and trans- formed : instinctive claim to happiness perfectly justified : in the end not a selfish but an ethical demand : Western life built on the con- viction, " God cares for the individual, and will give him his due."
§ 4. Antithesis and developvietit — realisation only through striving against hindrance : this conception common to modem scientific thought also true in the single life : that religion best which assures man of his value in the eyes of God : the Gospel a
127
128 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
protest against Law : sympathy enlisted because the Right is weak, or at least often thwarted ; the least emphasis laid on Divine omnipotence : the average mind has no patience with autocracy or arbitrary decree: 'constitutionalism': there is here no such hopeless conflict of Will and Idea (democratic, aristocratic) as prevails in secular thought.
§ 5. 'Work' as applied to God (in Creation, or in Redemption) : however difficult to conceive, voluntary circumscription of prerogative for the sake of training others a common experience on earth, a powerful incentive to loyalty and endeavour.
§ 6. Deism at least kept alive the ethical side of the Divine nature : useful emphasis on the thought (strictly unphilosophic) of a foreign element thwarting the Divine purpose (Voltaire, J. S. Mill) : Norse mythology (Hke the legend of Prometheus) stimulating because the gods are weak : experience tells only of the striving and manifold : ultimate rest conceived (or postulated) by pure Thought. § 7. Religion, enlisted with the Gospel of Christ, in the cause of oideavotir : religious feeling elsewhere (as we have seen) disconnected with practice, or hostile to it : the root of religion (wherever it can be called personal) a desire to escape law : this becomes in Christianity the sense of special grace, special conversion, function and endowment.
§ 8. Danger of a revival of pseudo-philosophy, of mediaeval Realism : God's love (if language is to mean anything) directed to individuals, not to universals : unselfishness of Christians, wherever found, due to this assurance : Christianity not (as wrongly supposed by Nietzsche) merely feminine and abstentionist : it is quite rightly ' incapable of rising to the complete surrender of Happiness ' (Hartmann).
§ 9. Noble but illogical appeals of German pessimism and English science to take part in a world-process, which is pronounced Wind and mistaken : apprehensive sense in such writers of the decay of civic morality : it is impossible as undesirable to abolish in men that reference of all to standard of self, which is the last achievement of one important side of modern thought and political reform.
§ 10. In the difficulties of modern life, the suspension or anomalies of modern thought, the Church as a conciliator : it alone can satisfy and control the egoistic impulse : it alone can arrest the decay of the common Hfe, of the social basis of Western civilisation.
§ I. It is now time to review the results of the past lectures, and to ask whether at the opening of the twentieth century the Christian faith can still claim to
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 129
answer the needs and reconcile the misunderstandings of the age. We have seen that side by side with a wide but superficial acknowledgment of what we call Democratic principles, there has grown up a habit of thought which is hostile to the rights of Man, to the fundamental maxims of the Enlightenment. It is a persistent weakness of our generation, alike in the religious as in the political sphere, to repeat as unquestioned axioms or proclaim as achieved results phrases which have lost their significance, in terms which have very likely acquired a new sense. But Democracy is of all such expressions. Progress, Advance, Duty, Love, Righteousness, Law, Truth, the most ambiguous, least able to sustain the weight of an exact meaning. It comes down to us in all its genuine and essential claims from the Christian and Catholic middle ages. It is reinforced by the revival of classical learning and the respect for an over-idealised antiquity; but it thereby suffers a stealthy deterioration, losing its wide and catholic application, and subject to restriction in favour of intellect and privilege. Never were its maxims repeated with such assurance as when an iron and un-moral State-supremacy, colossus among atoms, was replacing the complicated and incoherent nexus of mediaeval ideals — ideals of the family and of feudal and corporate life. The two pretenders to sovereignty met in the conflict of the French Revolution ; and the individual defeated there has scarcely recovered a substantial foothold, indeed he has from some points of view steadily lost ground during the purely constitu- tional struggles of the past hundred years. In the domains of social and political intercourse, in the field of economics, the fundamental tenets of Democracy have suffered eclipse ; and the clearer thinkers are demanding the abandonment of mischievous phrases, the substitution of expert efficiency for the intermittent meddling of amateurs. National welfare, the Imperial idea, would 9
130 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
seem to enforce the sacrifice of the Individual ; and, divorced from the unit, and his dignity and worth, Democracy can have no meaning. It is founded on three beliefs, which are flatly contradicted not only by modern statesmanship and political theory, but by the latest results of scientific inquiry: (i) each man as an end-in-himself; (2) no government to be founded on force, but the antithesis of rulers and ruled to be overcome in a system which draws together, merges, and finally identifies them ; (3) justice to present needs, and happiness never to be neglected in favour of some distant Utopia, since no unfairness to the actual can be compensated by any visionary future benefit. And in this connection let me quote the words of that latest apologist to whom I have before alluded : and with them let us dismiss once and for all the notion that the end justifies the means. Mr. Mallock is speaking indeed of the arguments for natural theism, but the same method is valid against all who excuse the inequity and the reckless cruelty of a transition-period by pleading the needs of a coming age. " Let us grant," he says {Religion as a Credible Doctrine, chap, ix., "Sentient Life and Ethical Theism "),—" Let us grant that by a struggle for the existence of the idle, the weak-willed, and the incapable, we may presently turn the earth into a scene of Millennial beatitude, we shall not have advanced a step toward the vindication of God's goodness. Whatever may be God's future, there will still remain His past. If the lives, whom in the age to be He is to bless, are to be witnesses to this Divine goodness, — the lives, whom in the past He has blighted, will be still crying to Him out of the ground ; and since the theist maintains that He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, — the hand which is red with millions of years of murder will never cease to incarnadine all the seas of eternity." The democratic ideal demands an ethical basis, the relation of conscious persons to
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 131
each other, and withers and dies, if interest is transferred to some abstraction, some racial solidarity, or some loftier type of being, with which, we may fancy, our decadent age is pregnant. Concerned as it is with this present life, it demands patience and considerate treatment for the useless ; immediacy not postponement of benefit ; and for its initial tenet as for the solace of its unrealised hopes and unfulfilled promises, it depends strictly and logically enough upon the assumptions of Christian faith. Apart from religion, the democratic ideal is doomed.
§ 2. The two hostile forces are State-autocracy — gradually demoralised since the sixteenth centuiy, and relieved not merely from theological but from moral prepossessions — and scientific Fatalism. I do not think Mr. Mallock is exaggerating when he says {I.e. chap. X., " The New Apologetics of Idealism ") : "The whole philosophy" of modern metaphysicians "resolves itself into an attempt to liberate the Will, which Science holds like a prisoner in its web of universal Causation. . . . They recognise that the central doctrine, the central peculiarity of Religion as distinct from Science and opposed to it, is the doctrine of Free- Will." Now, whatever has been won in the past for the democratic ideal (and we know well to-day how little it is), it is without doubt due to the conviction that each man, here and now, has worth and work ; has rights because he has duties ; and cannot be enslaved to the caprice of any tyrant, king, assembly; or economic law more mischievous than the rest. He need not bow to anything he cannot understand; he is no longer to be forced to spend himself in a cause he does not approve ; he is not to be a drudge of abstractions, whether the caprice of a court, the cry of a majority, the sup- posed welfare of humanity, inexorable Law of Nature, or that Absolute Reason, which, like the intellectus
132 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
agens of Aristotle and Averroes, finds an outlet in the unit, without respecting or exalting him, like the transient and contemptuous Theophany of the Gnostics. This attempt at liberty and self-hood has most certainly been the motive force through the intermittent and disappointing movement, which only the interested and the blind can call a triumphant march of progress towards a known destination. Let no one suppose that I am denying that priceless and familiar experi- ence, devotion to a cause; the whole of the second lecture aimed at nothing but a demonstration of this undying instinct in man, which compels him to wander, like St. Christopher, restless with a ' Divine discontent,' until he find a Master who can claim his whole- hearted allegiance. But it is affectation to deny that the primal impulse in the religious as in the political consciousness is selfish and personal. It is the insur- gence of a rudimentary sense of justice against unfair distribution, and the rigour of inexorable Law. Both take their rise from the same emotion, which can never be reinforced by strict proof, but only justified (as it were) by an act of faith; — a dim feeling of ' imperishable and aboriginal worth,' and the decision to prove this in loyalty to a cause. But it must be clearly understood that man can only logically face^ death or pain or persecution because he is assured that his eternal welfare is in safe keeping.
§ 3. The development of the moral, the political, the religious, shows in all three spheres the same feature — a selfish, petulant instinct of immediacy transformed and ennobled ; an embrace of wider and wider interests in this indefinite self, at first so acutely sensitive, solitary, and morbidly conscious. At the outset, we only question law and seek to evade it; we protest against its limits, and chafe against restraint. Only later, like our first parents, do we find obedience is the sole method of genuine development, not a hasty knowledge of ends^
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 133
but painstaking patience with means; the highest in- dependence, that " service which is perfect freedom." The original impulse is not wrong, only wrongly directed ; we can no more abandon our instinctive claim to happiness in the training and perfection of our personality, than we can abase ourselves without pain and remorse to bestial egoism. It is an ethical demand, and is common to learned and ignorant, rich and poor alike : while the State talks of force, the Scientist of law, the Idealist of Reason. We cannot, even in the midst of exact knowledge, rid ourselves of the hope that there is a Purpose in things and that we have a share and a place in its advance, and its realisation. We shall grasp eagerly at any intimation that God cares for us, has work for us to do ; nay, has need of our help. It is on this secret or silent conviction that Western life has been founded, with its strange and anomalous features of self-repression and common action, wild personal en- terprise and reverence for custom and tradition. I doubt not that in the past, men certain of their nothingness have toiled without thought of self, or prospect of reward, merely in satisfaction at the task which left no place for despair or repining: but we cannot approach the poor and suffering to-day and tell them there is indeed a God, unique fount of being, but that He knows nothing of them, cannot help them, will not recompense them. Have we realised how much of our common moral equipment is due to religious prejudice? how foolish it seems ! how violently threatened from the side of use and value are the commonest yet most sacred insti- tutions ! how doubtful the survival of puritan prejudice in a scientific state ! The time is passing when men can comfortably suppose that Christian behaviour outlasts Christian dogma. We have begun to trace, not without anxiety, their intimate connection. And as at last we have come to this suspected term, let us examine what is the message and the significance of the Christian revelation.
134 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 4. To two fundamental conceptions lying at the root of the Christian faith, the late century has brought valued and unexpected support. Modern thought might indeed be said to be summed up in the two words, anti- thesis and development, development only through and because of antithesis. But the Gospel transfers the interest from a secular or cosmic process to the single life. If science can take nothing into account but the fortunes of a solar system or a sidereal universe, the gradual changes of a species, the normal man, dismayed at these immen- sities, returns to his own pressing needs, Feuerbach, in one of his illuminating sentences, tells us that the pheno- mena of religion are due to the impulse to satisfy the cravings of the heart, bursting through the limits of Reason : thus (he continues) at the highest point, these phenomena take on an ' anti-rational character.' The individual claims (as we have seen) to be the subject of heavenly solicitude ; and among religious beliefs must always prefer that system which assures to him, spite of all seeming and present loss, a central place, an ultimate victory. Now the Gospel appeals to him because in its very essence it is a protest against Law ; it enlists his sympathy because Right is weak and not powerful, " Magna est Veritas et prsevalebit," may seem to combine the self-complacence of the Idealist, to whom the world is already perfect, and the inspiriting challenge to the chivalrous reformer. But to us the emphasis is on the fuUire tense : we " count not ourselves to have apprehended." Of all attributes which a priori Theology bestows so lavishly on the Source of Being, the least noticeable in the Bible is the Divine omnipotence. From an ethical point of view, it is just this quality which we might reasonably expect to be kept in reserve and abeyance. If we have any right to use the analogy of a human parent or an earthly sovereign, it is clear that our love and praise is strictly confined to those who circumscribe their prerogative, divest themselves
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 135
of privilege, communicate bountifully rather than hold jealously to their power. It can scarcely be doubted tb.at the semi-religious fervour of the Atheists before the French Revolution was in the main a protest against the arbitrary and (as vulgarly conceived) the un-raoral exercise of Divine authority — a single im- patient fiat in place of toilsome process. The history of Nature and our own records point to a scheme — slow, painful, often thwarted and interrupted — of gradu- ally imparting to living creatures a sense of self-conscious independent life, which grows in vivid intensity until it culminates, too often painfully, in civilised man. We have already seen the curious results in contemporary thought cf the general recognition of this doctrine. From the unknown Root of Being sprang the impulse to life, blind and unconscious ; and in its ceaseless development a new force came into play ; Reason and reflection, which reverse and thwart the primitive desire. For Wz/l and Idea in every modern system confront each other in irreconcilable enmity — just as their counterparts in actual life, the instinct of the people and the re- straining or apathetic influence of knowledge ; the tendency to personal zest and gratification, the quiet acceptance, at most the stealthy elusion of impersonal Law. Now the Christian faith allows no such despair of the province and the efficacy of conscious life. Entering into no definite analysis of the mind, its origin and faculty, allying itself with no specific system of philosophy, keeping strictly within the understanding of the simplest, it asserts that the universe exists for the perfecting and discipline of souls for a higher destiny in an unseen world : of this God Himself has been the example and will be the reward. At one time, the Church by austere detachment from society might teach the vanity and evil of all earthly things ; at another, with no treason to the principles of its original charter, it recalls a de- spairing age to the sense of life's dignity and value.
136 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 5. " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." It is not perhaps for us to explain why this sense of gradual effort and precarious effect should be somehow bound up with our conception of God's dealings with mankind. Yet it would be idle to deny that in tiiis sense of the voluntary limitation of the Divine, this self-imposed restraint of Almighty power, lies a principal incentive to earnest zeal for the Right. The R-ight appeals to us (so we have seen), because in place of realising itself with irresistible and inherent force, it prefers to win by gentle pleading an entrance :nto the heart of each. Whenever the layman's interest in theology has revived, whenever accepted dogma (tending always to absolutism and disparagement of tha part) is once more opened to scrutiny, there have always appeared two separate tendencies: (i) to immerse the Deity in His works, or (2) from the ethical standpoint, to dis- tinguish Him from a creation which conceals rather than reveals His nature. And with this distinction of the Creator and His works, there arises another form of that Dualism which can never long be kept at bay even in the strictest Unitarian and Monistic systems. The old question reappears. Is the thwarting and hindrance of matter due to mere stubborn blindness or to malevolence and deliberate spite? Is evil a mere sign of defect, or a conscious and personal challenge? And is God almighty but not all-kind, or is He working to form, not indeed a good or perfect universe, but the 'best of all possible worlds,' in the most negative and despairing sense? Shall we limit His goodness or His power? Let me quote Lotze {Microcosmns, Book ix. chap. 5): "It is quite useless to analyse the attempts made to solve this problem. No one has here found the thought which would save us from our difficulties, and I too know it not. Let us therefore say that where there appears to be an unreconciled contradiction between God's goodness
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 137
and His almighty power, there our finite wisdom has come to an end of its tether ; that we do not U7ider- stand the solution, which nevertheless we believe in."
§ 6. Deism, with all its narrow prejudice and un- accountable repugnance to a Divine Self-revelation, at least kept alive the idea of moral creator and righteous judge, before whom the fortunes of the human race, the deserts of the individual, were of far greater import than the rise and fall of stellar systems. It led infallibly, when confronted with the manifest evils of life, to a belief in the necessary limits which refractory matter imposes on God's good will. It is not too much to say that Theistic apologetic during the nineteenth century has been an attempt to detach the Deity from too close a contact, too comprehensive a responsibility, for the Natural order. We cannot here trace the emphasis of this ethical conviction from Peter Bayle, Rousseau, and Voltaire, down through the English Scientific School. But I must pause to consider the standpoint of one of our clearest thinkers ; who stands on the verge of denial, because from religious motives he cannot deify a natural power which sets at defiance our moral sentiment. The three essays of John Stuart Mill represent a standpoint (perhaps a compromise) which can never be wholly superseded by any specious unity. He is the spokesman of those who see in God a helper and protector, nay, a fellow-striver who needs our work ; not a place of rest, where antitheses are annulled, and good blends insensibly with evil. We have already pointed out that both conceptions are necessary and complementary ; but we cannot allow the logical need for an all-inclusive world-order (rendering reciprocal action possible) to supersede the moral demand. How potent this sense of real co- operation even in a losing cause can be, let the religion of our ancestors testify. The religious myths of the Norsemen, to a degree unknown in Southern Europe
138 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
or the East, moulded conduct and nerved endeavour — partly by the very hopelessness of the conflict. "Throughout his life," says Professor Ker,"the Norseman hears the boom of the surges of chaos upon the dykes of the world." This is the precarious ground reclaimed from the Titanic forces, who are not as in Greece finally subdued at the outset, but only held in check for a season, — truly a TcoffiMog, limited and threatened, outside which are only the demonic and unrighteous forces of Muspelheim, Nifleheim, and Jotunheim. The tales of the battles of Odin and the giants, of Thor and treacherous Loki, passed into poetry when it had ceased to control as theology ; and received in its final form the unauthorised Christian consolation of the return of Baldur the Good after the terrible day of Ragnarok and the promise of ' new heavens and a new earth.' Unlike the theology of Greece and Rome, it is a struggle not merely against fearful odds, but with the prophecy of ultimate defeat. Yet it is upon such gloomy legends and traditions that the youth of the Anglo-Saxon race has been nourished. Restless enter- prise, outspoken defiance, untiring toil in a doubtful cause, owe much to a survival of the old Viking temper — at its worst, a savage Berserk^ at its best, the calm heroism of a Christian martyr. Diverted from mere brute egoism, lust of spoil and carnage, this temper soon becomes chivalry, sense of personal honour, aristocratic protection of the weak, and is enshrined in the motto which can never be the text of a bureau- cracy, ' Noblesse oblige.' Experience shows us the fact of a world of manifold and conflicting elements. Unity and rest is rather a pious hope than an accepted axiom. Faith and Reason alike may anticipate a final reconcilia- tion ; but no one is assisted if we deny the reality, the genuine character, of the present struggle. We have not time to inquire fully into the significance of the new claim to transcend the disorderly realm of illusion, and rise
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 139
' Beyond Good and Bad.' Religion and philosophy in its highest intensity has usually professed to depreciate the 'fatal doing' which marks the sphere of turmoil, and to oppose the perfect calm of the tdestic to the hurried and feverish incompleteness of the cathartic virtues. And it may well be that in some achieved equilibrium of a better state, the sad material for our moral virtues will have been eliminated, and our charity, justice, compassion, have no call for their exercise. Yet at present there is no such prospect ; and we cannot lose the example of God's patience in the building of the world ; the pain and agony of the scheme of redemption.
§ 7. It is surely not too much to say that in Christianity Relicfion becomes enlisted for the first time in the cause of endeavour and the common life. In earliest origin and in latest phases, religious feeling is distinctly un- connected with practice ; it is regarded with well-founded jealousy and suspicion in the city-states of Greece or Rome, and in the world-empire which replaced and comprehended them. We have not tried to disguise the anti-social tendencies of that selfish instinct which impels the anchorite or the philosopher to seek a higher communion than earthly ties can give. But here is the alliance which to us as citizens and Christians seems indispensable for our Western ideals. The root of religion is a desire to escape law and to transcend its sphere. Each converted sinner looks upon himself as a standing miracle, a ' brand plucked from the burning ' by a signal instance of the Divine mercy. Here is no recognition of unchanging order, no admiration for a consummate whole, but rather a cry for deliverance ; no acquiescence in perfection, but a curious halting between a sense of human frailty and unworthiness, and pride in that new consciousness of Divine sonship. Fear and diffidence are overpowered in the constraining force of a special grace, a special mission ; God's messenger is
I40 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
summoned to remove mountains and convince the kings and princes of the earth. Satisfying the personal demand for worth and work, it becomes social. The Gospel of Christ transformed and reinvigorated the dying world of antiquity because of its emphasis on the individual, the one straying sheep, the single lost piece of money; the appeal of St. Paul for brotherly forbearance is reinforced by the highest sanction, y^gp ov XpifTTog ccTrz&avs, ' for whom Christ died.' Thus man's impulse to religion is the desire to assure himself not of the secrets of the universe, but of his own place and duty and happiness in his limited surroundings. The effort of faith, essential to every religious as to every moral act, is the conviction, whether gradual or instan- taneous, that the life of God's children is precious in His sight. If we read aright the record of man's thought or achievement, we shall find it is this convic- tion alone (even if not always consciously held) that sends a man cheerfully to spend his labours and his life in the cause of mercy or righteousness. No secular sanction can offer an assurance or satisfaction in any way equivalent. Religion, apart from the discipline and perfection of the individual, the consecration and utilising of his special endowment, cannot exist in the world as a dynamic force.
§ 8. We must beware of that modern revival of mediaeval Realism which can artfully substitute the whole for the part, while we are not looking. Mr. Mallock is quite right when he says : " The whole meaning, the essence, of the theist's doctrine of God is his doctrine of God's love for the individual human soul. Christ did not die, according to the Christian's idea of Plis death, in order to preserve the peculiarities of the Teutonic race or the Celtic, or to save the soul of any corporate body. The Church, no doubt, is spoken of as the Divine Bride ; but the Church is nothmg if not composed of individuals ; and except as related to the life and conduct of the
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 141
individual, God's love is nothing also, as every theist knows." So the Christian Church, while it satisfies the legitimate and indeed irresistible aspiration and claim of each unit to be considered as end-in-himself, neverthe- less just for this reason gathers up the individuals from isolation : it sets them each in his due place in a social fabric, with different functions indeed in the hier- archy, but with no loss of intrinsic equality. Talent, opportunity, influence, capacity, are gifts strictly lying outside the real man, to use rather than to possess. The conception of life is only social, and devoted to the common good, because it is primarily and profoundly individualistic. Only the man assured of the lasting worth and dignity of his own life, of the safety of his happiness in the hands of God, can afford to sacrifice it for the benefit of others, in v\-hom he sees children of a common father. " The Christian theory of the world," says Hartmann (c. xiii.) with curious bitterness, " is simply incapable of rising to the complete resigna- tion of happiness ; even its ascesis is thoroughly selfish. Hence it is small wonder if we, who are still more or less entangled, I will not say in the Christian faith but in the Christian philosophy, indignantly resent this com- plete renunciation of happiness." In the next chapter, with perplexing inconsistency, he makes the very sur- render of the last hope a ground of earnest appeal : " Of the world known to us, we are the first-fruits of the Spirit, and must bravely wrestle. If victory does not follow, it is not our fault. . . . Therefore vigorously forward ! in the world-process as workers in the Lord's vineyard, for it is the process alone that can bring redemption. Only in complete devotion to life and its pains, not in cowardly renunciation and withdrawal, is anything to be achieved for the world-process."
§ 9. Some of us, who listened some years ago to Professor Huxley here in Oxford, cannot fail to recall his final words of mingled optimism and despair,
142 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
of fatalism and appeal for effort, blended in an honour- able but illogical confusion : " Nobody professes to doubt that so far as we possess a power of bettering things, it is our paramount duty to use it, and to train all our intellect and energy for this supreme service to our kind." He is indignant at the ' fanatical individualism ' of our time : " Duties to the State are forgotten ; and tendencies to self-assertion are dignified by the name of rights. . , . We should cast aside the notion that the escape from pain and sorrow is the proper object of life." Such language belongs to an epoch that is already closed for ever. To found on the evil and vanity of the world-order and the single life an apotheosis of the State, of man's duty to man, to ground an appeal for self-restraint and willing service for a race which never ought to have issued from non-being, — such were sentimental theories current indeed in an age of transition, when criticism, triumphant as it sup- posed over dogma, had not ventured to attack morals, but sounding wholly meaningless and incoherent to- day. Closely ' entangled ' indeed were these writers with the old presuppositions which they scorned, who thought that self-denial and renewed patriotic zeal were the natural corollary of the destruction of Christian hopes.
"It was not religion," says John Stuart Mill {Utility of Religion), " which formed the strength of the Spartan institutions ; the root of the system was devotion to Sparta, to the ideal of the country or State, which, transformed into ideal devotion to a greater country, the world, would be equal to that, and far nobler achievements." Here, combined with imperfect sympathy, with antique modes of thought, we have a typical instance of that humanitarian hopefulness of a past generation, that strikes to-day so strangely upon our ears. There is keener national jealousy and com- petition : there is no lull in the struggle ; and a ' federa-
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 143
tion of mankind' would arise to-day from expediency and not enthusiasm, and would certainly begin by restricting the privileges of humanity to the higher races. Nor indeed is it possible for consciousness, once thoroughly awakened, to become immersed once more in childlike and unquestioning State-duty and routine. When he continues to applaud the 'service of the State,' and desires to extend the national duty of Cicero's 'offices' into a cosmopolitan fervour, we feel he is speaking to us in an unknown tongue, and find it hard to believe that but half a century has since elapsed.
" If, then," he says, " persons could be trained as we see they were ' in ancient Rome,' not only to believe in theory that the good of their country was an object to which all others ought to yield, but to feel this, practically as the Grand Duty of life, so also may they be made to feel the same absolute obligation towards the universal good."
This may be briefly answered by saying that we cannot forget or abolish the effect of the intervening period ; that even their patriotism was confined to a small and highly interested circle ; and that he has himself disposed, on an earlier page, of any right to use such dogmatic terms as the Universal Good, by refusing to recognise a motive or an end in Creation : " The past and the future are alike shrouded from us ; we neither know the origin of anything that is, nor its final destination." In such a sceptical confession of universal mystery, we may approve the naive civisni of the English School, but in motive only, not in logic.
Yet the odd persistence of obsolete notions of duty, obligation, and (however vaguely and timidly expressed) of the 'Beauty of Holiness,' point unmistakably to a need of the human heart which cannot be expelled, to an emotion which cannot be left without an object. In
144 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
face of such a sublime defiance of the laws of logic and the cosmic process, in favour of a moral ideal of purposeless heroism, let no one deny the empire of trust and hope over the human heart, and let no one accuse the Christian of his venture of confidence and his wager of Faith. But let us not be deceived ; the day is past for the repetition of such poetic sentiment. We are too near facts ; and we are accustomed to a colder analysis ; we have severed departments too rigorously. The people, long cajoled by promises, finding themselves no better for the increase of constitutional complexity, are resentful at delay ; and, losing confidence in ideals, suggest ivwiediate enjoyment. Neither pure selfishness nor pure altruism is typical of the heart of man ; both are abnormal developments, and it must be remembered that we are trying not to support a theory, but to reach the average consciousness of mankind ; and perhaps to mediate between two irreconcilable conceptions of our life. The two impulses to self-development and to service of others are blended and cannot be gratified apart. Yet it may safely be said that the satisfaction of the demand for worth and work must precede any confident and eager endeavour in the cause of others' welfare, at least if it is destined to withstand the despondency of temperament, the shock of disappointment, the logic of calm reflection.
§ 10. I began by disavowing any schemes of defiant or paradoxic apology; the mission of the Church of Christ is to conciliate, it is a disinterested arbiter. But we have been obliged to expose the fallacy or blindness of those generous but mistaken speculators who transfer virtues and emotions natural to a world of moral purpose and individual meaning, to a secular process, where to ' follow Nature,' the only known law, is to struggle at all cost after survival. What is imperilled now is the sense of Duty, the value of ideals, moral restraint, and that peculiar and complex system of moral behaviour
THE GOSPEL AND DEMOCRACY 145
which owes more to religious and less to social forces than we care to allow. It is idle, in an age which is unconsciously absorbing very rudimentary influences and impulses, to point to instances here and there of isolated generosity, where a sense of virtue survives the conviction of personal nothingness. 00 rXfj/jjOv apzr^ Xoyog ap' iiirO, lyco hi a\ cog 'ipyov '/J(tkouv. We have at least traced the evaporation of the old spiritual fervour from the great departments of common life ; of moral aim from the State, of design and purpose from the world of Nature. We are confronted with the reason- able yet inconvenient demands of a people to whom we no longer give whole-heartedly the consolations of Religion, to whom the fantastic panaceas of statesmen must seem a mockery rather than an alleviation of their distress. Reflection as a contemplation of the unity of things somehow drifts farther away from the needs and the understanding of the average man. The failure of the proposed remedies has become a common- place. It is far from our purpose to deride the un- conscious piety of the apostles of Enlightenment or disparage the well - meant efforts of the leaders of Reform ; but it is time that attention was directed to the forces, intellectual and social, which are slowly but surely dissolving our Western civilisation. The Gospel, in its simple appeal to the individual consciousness, in its certain and confident answer to the problems of life, demands no greater venture of faith than we see underlying the speculations of honest doubt. And the future of our threatened State lies with the Church ; lies with that creed which teaches that all men are equal before their Father in heaven, and that highest and lowest alike, sinners yet heirs of everlasting life, are united as brothers by a common hope in a common salvation. Hear the conclusion of the whole matter: God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE I— A
On the Duty of Conciliation in Apologetic
§ I . Gospel message universal : cannot afford to disregard anything human : singular merit of the Medicsval Church : its ecumenical claims and universal sympathy.
§ 2. The modern Church resigns this overwhelming responsibility, just as political reform has been largely due to indolence : ' liberty of conscience ' an easy creed, especially for the governing classes : coercion of the unwilling for their own good has ceased in the Church.
§ 3. While compulsion passes to the State, the Churches left without rivals, as engines of moral appeal : increase of force in secular matters : open field for the influence of an unarmed Church.
§ 4. The duty of sympathy brings in the problem of Faith and Reason : the appeal addressed to average man, not to the exceptional : the message is of Divine interest in men, not of speculative attributes, e.g. ' omnipotence ' : Religion is not, cannot be, philosophy : the religion of reason fails , because it is general, not particular.
§ 5. ' For whom Christ died ' : ' every man as an end ' : but is the intellect excluded ? it is secondary and subordinate : modern specialism. makes the universal claim of the Church difficult : Scientific Law and religious grace hard to discuss together : Church as the garden of souls, which other theories hardly allow to exist : Truth in this life never seen as an unbroken whole.
§ I. Of the many points raised for discussion in the preced- ing lecture, none perhaps is so important to-day as the right tone of apologetic. The Church claims universality for the Gospel message, which implies a power of adaptation to the varied needs of successive ages. It cannot afford to make enemies gratuitously, or to allow any part of human nature, any object of human interest, to lie outside its sympathy. We recognise the nobleness of the mediaeval ideal in the wide scope of ecclesiastical tutelage, and we cannot but regret its failure, even if such failure was inevitable. The Middle Ages indeed suffered in Church and State from the sublimity of
147
148 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
their ideals ; the only too patent discrepancy between exalted theory and petty practice. The Church, in her eager deter- mination to include everything human, went too far in concession to individualism. Every class in the civil hierarchy had its due functions and failings, every representative his special temptations and besetting sins. Allowance must be made for all. Persecution, which only developed gradually and with reluctance, which reflected rather certain national and racial characteristics than settled Church policy, might be attributed to fear of contagion, to the need of stern example, ense reddendum^ but also to an exaggerated interest in the eternal welfare of the culprit, a too sensitive interpretation of the responsibility of 'pastors and masters.' Mr. Buckle has done good service for a juster estimate of the motives which swayed and directed the severest features of Church discipline. In any case we must refuse to allow the criticism or take seriously the indignation of those who defend the far more aggravating and intolerant encroachment of the reformed hierarchies on private Hberties in Scotland or Geneva, or of those who see nothing to censure in the new social rule, that the safety of the State is the sole law. We may, nay we must, regret the uncompromising unity, the absolute sovereigny claimed by the Church, the implication of secular and spiritual duties, the employment of bodily force to intimidate conscience, to expel error, or to browbeat honest conviction. We can deplore, too, the frequent abuse of these large powers by the interested, as we can that Italianising of the once ecumenical papacy which more than any other cause precipitated the Teutonic Reformation. But we can recognise the nobiUty of original motive, the singleness of aim, the zeal of the devoted Catholic hierarchy from highest to lowest, who at the cost of ceaseless toil and self-denial were true to their purpose, to leave 'nothing human' outside the ennobling influence of the Church.
§ 2. It would have been so much easier to have divided with an amicable partition those tutelary duties, sacred and profane. How much of our vaunted constitutional reform is due to a sense of justice? How much to a genuine desire to be rid of an overwhelmmg responsibility? How we have lately marvelled at the reluctance of autocracy to communicate
ON THE DUTY OF CONCILIATION 149
cheerfully and spontaneously what after all is but an irksome burden, only to the uninitiated a privilege ! We are in the Church of England more modest in our claims, more restricted in our sphere : the recognition of individual liberty of con- science has relieved us of an anxious and never-ending care. Some future historian of emancipation from political and clerical leading-strings may perhaps, 'if defending a thesis,' show that sloth and selfishness were at the bottom of the movement. " Am I my brother's keeper ? " A Divine Right is merely a heavy weight, and the larger the number of constituents of the sovereign power, the ' easier lies the head ' of the titular sovereign. Now we may deny, we may boast, or we may be ashamed of, the decay of direct influence among the clergy of the Reformed Churches. It is not a question which immediately interests us at this point. We are concerned with the Church's attitude to the world, the tone of the Gospel tidings. It is clearly implicated (I will not say entangled) in social and political questions, and the emphasis on this or that portion of the Divine message must vary with the varying needs of the age. And the attitude assumed must be one of candid interest and sympathy, never of mere authority, defiance, no7i possiimus. We cannot revert in the Church to a feudal patronage of comfortable automata : the wonderful minuteness of the hourly control among the Jesuit converts in Paraguay can perhaps attract the visionary sociaHst who understands neither history nor human nature, but deceives no one who, besides knowing the heart and its instincts and impulses, has given even a cursory glance to the trend of European development. It may well be found that the Church (like a personal sovereign) is the sole agency for moral, opposed to coercive, appeal. There are grave and noteworthy signs abroad that the secular power, despairing of enlisting the loyalty, of securing the co-operation, of all its citizens, and bound to maintain its own survival as a competing organism in the struggle of life, will sacrifice easily the old notions of personal value, freedomi, accountability ; the old Kantian axiom, " Every man as an end, not merely as a means." We recognise that ' minorities must suffer ' in the easy give and take of matters indifferent to the conscience. But a reaction in favour of the old State Absolutism of
ISO THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the monarchic period (so called), the over-riding of personal interests and scruples, is impossible to-day, unless we are prepared to turn national history into a mere series of oscilla- tions, swings of the pendulum, in which each new Government has but one duty before it : to right the wrongs and reverse the policies of its predecessor.
§ 3. The Church has finally renounced coercion of the unwilling, has limited its mission to conversion of the unconvinced. Under a provocation happily unknown hitherto in our country, some protests reach us from remote Italy, that persecution has not been abandoned as a principle and might even on occasion be revived ; but we need not listen seriously to this mere echo of the Middle Ages. The Churches, in the disappearance of other moral agencies, have been left a fair field. Their policy, as well as their mission, is to conciliate, to harmonise, to show sympathy. It is idle to close one's eyes to the signs of the times : class envies, national and racial jealousy, ill-defined subterranean movements which elude calculation and control, open and rudimentary challenges to surrender. And yet it is a commonplace of history and of experience that no authority can long defend itself by force. Public opinion (perhaps not much stronger in volume, not more vocal to-day than in the benighted days of personal rule) has always been, will always be, the sovereign. And public opinion, while it resents the application of force, consents to be converted, recognises the value of appeal. Two allied nations, one the foremost, the other the most backward in European civilisation, have assumed of late the appearance of armed camps ; and the foe is within and of their own family. The rapid declension to coercive measures throughout Europe during the last century must cause alarm to every unprejudiced observer. The future of a civilised nation, it might be presumed, after the confident prophecies of Victorian writers, must rest with unconstrained devotion to principles, amity in class relations, elimination of penalty, of bayonet, of truncheon. But the inefficacy of moral appeal is a common- place to-day ; it is heard with impatience, it is uttered falteringly. Moral agencies must be defenceless ; for therein lies their strength. Personal sovereignty, in king and pontiff, has gained of late by the divorce from forcible control. No one could
ON THE DUTY OF CONCILIATION 151
venture to deny the value of such a last resort in unending class warfares or race feuds. The Church, armed simply with the Gospel message of individual salvation, and because of this ready to sympathise in every phase of personal character and communal development, starts at least with no prejudice against it on the score of ambitious authority or coercive control. And while the more conservative must beware of mistaking the time-honoured for the essential, let the champions of freedom and advance take care that they do not become tyrannous, secular, 'political,' and identify the Gospel with the bitterness of social rancour and the shibboleths of a narrow party.
§ 4. But this stress on the duty of sympathy and conciliation especially suggests the problem of Faith and Reason, doctrine and philosophy, the age-long conflict which with all the countless fluctuations of meaning and definition has advanced so little since apostolic times. Nor can it be said that in the first lecture, though a brisk attempt was made to review the whole period, any very definite lesson was learnt or result attained. Any remark on the attitude of the Church, to positive Science, for example, or Idealist reflection, must savour either of paradox or of the veriest commonplace. It seems that the preacher inust take his stand on the catholicity of his appeal. It is no use denying that he speaks to average man. He cannot flatter the exceptionally gifted, either in wealth or influence or intellect, without being untrue to his mission. He enters when the other forces or consolations of life have been exhausted, are powerless to raise or to comfort. He must be content to meet men and women on the sordid level of the actual, of this or that private experience or spectacle of others' misery which has left the soul in despair. He is indifferent to nothing external that may help to revive a dwindling self-respect or a kindliness towards a society that is, after all, mainly responsible for the victims' misfortunes, a faith in a God who seems to have left this world alone. It is the simplicity, if you hke, the opportunism of this appeal, that is essential. The Gospel is useless if it cannot fit the lowest depression, the vilest guilt of real life. " God cares for the sinner, and has suffered that he might be saved " : it is nothing more and nothing less. Here we have the irreducible
152 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
minimum of 'credenda.' How idle to begin in speculative theology, with a curious list of metaphysical attributes ! Unless we know how God employs this power, a titular omnipotence, contradicted at every hour of experience, is a matter of mere scholastic declamation ; to the average man of supreme indifference, to the sufferer a mockery. The superstructure of the Gospel story has at first no reference at all to the poor, the bereaved, the needlessly suffering. It is for this reason that the attempts to identify religion and philosophy have failed. Religion within the sphere of reason is but the recognition of certain general truths, and only the most dubious item — future judgment — has any reference to the individual, his hopes or his behaviour. The course of years has shown that the once certain axioms of this meagre and impersonal creed are to many devout and thinking minds completely indemonstrable, if not hopelessly improbable. The Church and its ministers have not the time or the wish to desert their proper task in order to patch up a precarious eirenicon with a prevailing phase of thought.
§ 5. This, then, is the limit which must always be put to doctrinal compromise : virep ov Xpio-ros airiOavev. There is the genuine test. ' Opportunist and individualist,' it will be said ; but what if the rigour of a sound ethical philosophy as well as the tenderness of the Gospel unite in insisting : " every man as an end, not merely as a means"? Has, then, the Church nothing to do with Reason, with dogma, with the intellect? Can it afford to miss the chance of reaching un- belief through the understanding ? How far is it justified in comforting the ignorant by the crude fancies of mythology? It is idle to deny that such problems are raised to-day. Let us say this, that the answering of hard questions is a secondary and subordinate duty. The specialism which besets all modern life and its studies gives each institution a separate function and sphere, to each man his special endowment and worth through work. Science at least is on our side, in preferring idiosyncrasy to any abstract generalisation ; as when Galileo told us that it was the exceptional in the stone or the man, and not the typical, that was of interest — just the rough corners, not the polished sphere. At every turn we are reminded that truth is many-sided, and that no man caq
ON THE DUTY OF CONCILIATION 153
look it full in the face ; that we are apt to disappear from each other's gaze down the little private tunnels of our exploration. There is as yet no clearing-house of knowledge ; no common dialect of the regions of facts, of ideas, of values. One who attempts to estimate this entire complexity of life must needs be superficial and run bravely the risk of error and misunderstanding. All we can do is to be modest, patient, charitable — especially where we cannot grasp. The signal difference of standpoint and principle which makes the debates of Church and Philosophy sometimes so unreal, is that they are not thinking of the same thing : the one of the certainty of Law universal, the other of hopes of exceptional grace and forgiveness ; the one of some imposing abstraction or figment of convenient usage, arbitrary 'concretions in discourse ' — State, universe, spirit, Reason ; the other of some trembling and disquieted seat of consciousness. To the one, the ultimately real is the ideal ; to the other, the person, the soul. Howsoever begotten, and for whatever purpose in the world-process, there to us is reality. It is still acutely sensitive, it feels pain and pleasure and entertains strange hopes, though it is menaced with annihilation. The Church is the com- munity in which this strange plant can thrive ; for a recognition of the unit leads to no barren subjectivism, the hallowing of mere caprice, or anchorite seclusion. The Church is a community in a sense in which Universe and State cannot hope to be. The apologist has not primarily to answer or to adjust ; but he must find a place for all. His own message is simple enough, but no pride of intellect must lead him to entanglement ; pure thought is another province. By his very profession he is debarred from recognition of some of its chief axioms ; he always hopes in God's mercy, in a special and signal favour for the sinner. He will not prescribe to the philosopher, nor will he allow his own chosen standpoint of practice to be weakened or compromised. Each has a certain work to do ; the same set of diagrams or letters will not serve for every department of life. Nay, in the same person are there not of necessity, according to his mood or study, aspects altogether distinct, intervals insurmountable in that Truth, which in this world at least is never seen as an unbroken whole ?
154 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
B
On the Conflict of Reason and Instinct
§ I. The eighteenth century, or the 'Age of Reason' : personal, utilitarian, and in maxims of government, parental and autocratic, not as bureaucrat or priest, hut as philosopher.
§ 2. Belief in the omnipotence of the legislator : happiness at- tained through application of rational and universal principles to dis- order of life : ideal a cosmopolitan federation : rude awakeni?ig in the emergence of the new element.
§ 3. Examination of ¥a.cis, apart from preconception : subterranean forces, hitherto unsuspected, seem to be working : no theory of values, or of purpose : Reason, unconscious and aimless : Real was the Rational in a sense totally distinct from eighteenth-century usage : Neo-Kantians identify unconscious Reason with God.
§ 4. This comprehension of all things under Reason, sterile, as in earlier times, the abuse of Final Causes : ' will ' soon accepted as a truer title, less btirdened with purposive implication : disuse of term Reason marks close of the new MedicBvalism : gradual lapse into the unknow- able, or the Cosmic process.
§ 5. Exact reverse of early Hellenic development, from nature to man, from Thales to Aristotle : Humanism becomes unpopular in the post- classical epoch : modern thought has followed this latter.
§ 6. Instinct : fabric of usage and custom, in savage tribes and in Utopias to-day : difficulty of ' reversion to type,' owing to critical subjectivism of ordinary thought.
§ 7. Antithesis of reflected and spontaneous action: opposing views and tendencies to-day : difficulty of obtaining respect for Law, or common welfare : Reason unsocial.
§ 8. Hesitation of natural ethics : vagueness or insignificance of their axioms : Reason and Law prescribe only the minimum : scanty results of independent moral inquiry : basis of morality must remain emotional.
§ I. Frequent reference will be found in these lectures to the recognition of a certain hostility, supposed to exist between subconscious and conscious thought, whether in the individual or in society. I shall here call it the conflict of Reason and Instinct, using these words not in any very strict sense but with sufficient precision for our purpose. The eighteenth century (as is often remarked) may very well bear the title 'Age of Reason.' Where God was acknowledged, He bore the character of a magnified human personality, first mover
REASON AND INSTINCT 155
and moral judge, sitting quite apart from the mechanical system, and so loosely connected thereto that French materialism felt no scruple in dispensing altogether with a postulate so superfluous. But until the revival of Spinoza (which is merely materialism beatified), the emphasis was upon the uniqueness, the personality, the conscious reason, the deliberate moral aim of a power transcending all human qualities, but differing in degree and not in essence. So in their anthropology the ' man ' they confronted was the educated intelligent social being, conceived of in a classical aspect, as free from illusion and enthusiasm, self-sufficient, and a determined opponent of convention (not indeed because it was a subconscious creation — of this in the century of Enlightenment the philosopher had no conception — but because Church and State were hypocritical impostures of interested individuals, of priest and king). Protests in favour of native human goodness, of rudimentary sympathy and brotherly kindness, were made in a tentative v/ay ; but it is clear that the claims of the heart of the average man were disregarded, and all faith in the future pinned to the capture of State-autocracy (and with it, of compulsory education) by the philosophic elect. In Germany — Teutonic and subjective alike in war, in politics, in contemplation — the Enlightenment was absorbed in the problem of personal immortality, to which more strictly theologic questions were subordinated : it was the conscious survival of the intelligent spirit, not re- immersed in a reservoir of thought, but preserving all its achieved individuality and asking for more realms to conquer. " Have I not time before me, and is not eternity long enough?" Clearness was the test of truth, as among true Cartesians on either side of the Rhine, not the dimness of incalculable impulse. Read the two popular expositions of current philosophy, Volney's Ruins and Holbach's System of Nature, and you will ascertain the strength and the limita- tions of the eighteenth century and its Enlightenment. There is no sentimental sacrifice to others; there is a robust prudence, which finally resolves the moral dictates into the self-evident truths of calculating egoism, and makes a last tribunal and a final appeal out of conscious intelligence, determined to sweep away all lumber of the past, to live in
156 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the clear light of transparent motive, to make the best of the good world, which had been so long perverted or misconstrued, and to train up to the same happy use of occasion the less privileged and less alert by the wholesome discipline of parental government.
§ 2. We can easily detect the source of these conceptions. In the reaction against a clerical tutelage, before the great rift came which to-day cuts life into independent fragments, men reverted to classical ideals, to an aristocratic scheme of govern- ment, to detailed legislation for purely secular ends, to the extinction of the now rival spirit of religion or its complete subordination beneath civil authority. "Sometimes," says Mr. Willert, in a study of the French Renaissance (note, Quarterly Revieiv, April 1906), "Sometimes Montaigne asserts, like Rousseau, that our reason and our civilisation have corrupted our lives ; and yet, like the followers of Rousseau, he believes that human nature may be improved by regulation and careful training. The laws of Lycurgus were, he observes, well nigh miraculous in their perfection. This belief in the omnipotence of the legislator was one of the most momentous of the ideas of antiquity handed down by the Renaissance to the men of the Revolution." The ancient king or judge might content himself with interpreting the tribal custom or reviving its forgotten sanctions, but the new State authority (supposed to centre in the alert, the discerning, the methodical) knew no limits. "Give me the children, and in a few years I will transform the world " ; and have not all Utopias been founded on the certain effect of rational principle applied to the now vagrant and disorderly methods of social hfe? Being abstract and typical, the re- forming ideas of the Enlightenment seemed fit for universal application. In the homogeneous society of the reading and educated public throughout the eighteenth century, in the Con- tractual Constitutionalism which replaced parental despotism and promised to end war (that ' sport of princes '), there seems to be a foretaste or a guarantee of the dream of a cosmopolitan Federation, at least of a States - General of Europe. We know how rudely disappointed were these hopes by the emergence of a new element which, perilous alike in its wonted lethargy and its intermittent fury, we seek to-day
I
REASON AND INSTINCT 157
to pacify, to control, and to educate. Yet how often this attempt has, in the absence of fixed principles, declined into a mere watchful opportunism, and how ill-assorted is the actual necessity for such and such concession to popular feeling, and the arguments and theories set forth to justify the surrender !
§ 3. The human studies in the last century were conducted on altogether different lines. Scientific method was perhaps for the first time applied to human history and progress ; and this means simply and solely that facts were examined and no questions asked — that is, no principles involved. There was no change in the ultimate standard of utility (in the last re- sort egoistic), but there was a patient search into custom, use, and value, which was quite foreign to the ipse dixit and clear logic of the Age of Reason. It is impossible to deny here the direct influence of the French Revolution and its natural and necessary climax, the Empire.
Vague will and impulse upsetting the philosophic house of cards — vague will, at last embodied in the 'world-spirit on horseback ' — subterranean forces long held in check rushed to the front, and became intelligible only when the sage con- descended to study history, recognise development in nation as in nature, and restrict his province to accumulating fact and holding back theory until, like Fichte's system, it became ' sun- clear,' unmistakable. It will be shown how the term Reason lingered on for a time to cover the Life-Force and its mani- festations. But this Reason is totally unconscious and knows no purpose. Its study involves no theory of values, no recognition of moral aim (for man or universe) ; merely, as with science, a plain statement that ' whatever is, is,' with all the naive solemnity of Parmenides ; and that the series or stages by which a nation, man, or universe reached a present condition were discoverable by patient search. Man's in- telligence could retrace the steps of the creative energy, and, in a sense no one can deny, the real was the Rational, and the Rational the real. But this is not the Ratiofial of the eighteenth century, but a word which covers totally distinct conceptions. Hitherto the term had always implied a certain dualism, an Aristotelian vous working on matter, as creative God, or as moral agent, or as calculating student. But it
158 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
becomes of a sudden all-inclusive, and embraces everything in heaven and earth. It is supposed by a certain party that it is a philosophical achievement and act of creditable daring, to call the sum of things God. But if we ask what is gained by this comprehension, no satisfactory reply is forthcoming. We are made to do violence to a popular prejudice of separa- tion, which is perhaps insurmountable ; and we at once extinguish all standard of values. It is mere human conceit, and a mode of the old geocentric error, to take for granted the unfailing correspondence of thought and things. The totality must always remain inaccessible ; even the very name universe, unity, is a convenience of subjective thought, a ' concretion in discourse ' for practical purposes, and so out- side the region of strict proof. Let it not be supposed that speculation has derived anything but benefit from the bold design and partial achievement of the Neo-Kantians ; but we learn even more from its errors, and have been finally con- vinced that such summary and comprehensive formula can never issue from human lips, can never suit the manifold and manifest interests of human life.
§ 4. The believer may assert that every detail of natural sequence, every human act and circumstance, is controlled by Divine Providence ; just so the IdeaUst may regard every step in the process as the direct outcome of the immanent Aoyos. Both are to a great extent mere ventures of faith, and not on that account disqualified from influence in the practical sphere. But it may well be questioned with what right such summary solution is admissible in the realm of pure theory or pure science.
In the former we have (and we need to have) a working standard of values; in the latter, strictly speaking, we have none at all. As final causes made science sterile for ages, and drove all would-be honest doubt and study to a lazy asylum, so the comprehension of all phenomena under the very definite title Reason leads to a quiet acquiescence in the actual, which is the very reverse of human practice, and the denial (if we may use the word) of human duty. The attempt to sum up the universe (so far as it was then known) in terms of a single side of man's spiritual life proved a failure. As we shall trace subsequently, will was accepted quite early
REASON AND INSTINCT 159
in the century as more comprehensive, less loaded with im- plications of conscious adaptation to a beneficent end. The use of the term was a mere survival ; its disuse marks the close of the new Medievalism. The formula of Hegel is naively humanistic; the growing school of inductive science in all departments of search disparaged the prerogative of man, his pretensions to omniscience without the troublesome effort to ascertain. Some attacked, in the interests of man, the blind vital force which brought him forth to a life of pain. How long the old reverent attitude of theology lingered is clear from Hartmann's curious language about the Uncon- scious ; side by side with a real desire to correct its errors he parades its Divine qualities, its all-wisdom. But the process of ' defecation to complete transparency ' was by no means terminated. Infinite Energy, the Unknowable, became favourite terms. A belated attempt marked one English writer to unite it once more to a moral purpose — 'a Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness ' — then came the final dualism of a well-known school in our own country, scientifically accurate, morally indignant, which bids man defy the Cosmic Process, as the condition of his progress and nobility.
§ 5. This de-qualifying tendency takes then the opposite path to the early Greek schools. Beginning with infinitude and evolution, expressed in the terms though lacking the evidence of modern science, the Greek mind introduced into the source of life or withheld from its definition those qualities which seemed most akin to human nature. The illimitable horizon of Ionia narrowed down into a small but restless city-state, where man was the ' measure of all things.' Sophist and Socrates alike mark a protest against immersion in the Absolute, the claim for individual worth which con- templation so reluctantly concedes. The latter especially approaches close to familiar religious tradition, and the sense of particular providence and a definite post or station allotted to each earthly sentinel. Plato, who severs this intimate personal connection, reserves for the philosopher an esoteric belief in an impersonal goodness, which also binds together all things in heaven and earth and gives each its due. Aristotle gives to the Source of life and motion the quality of
i6o THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
pure Thought ; and in effect his system lends more countenance than he imagined to dualism and the doctrine of the Divine transcendence. We need not here try to trace the evaporation of this pious belief. Humanism, *man the measure of all things,' lost favour rapidly. Semitic and Phenician influences stifled and overwhelmed the sense of individual originality, value, and independence. The decay of civic zeal, the lively give and take of equals, was either a cause or an effect. The wise, and certainly the more useful, members of society gave up (as the English School to-day) the visible world to the mechanical play of the fortuitous, reducible, nevertheless, to a sort of order; and found in refined social intercourse a substitute for the older activities. Modern thought has followed the course of post-Aristotelian development rather than the earlier stages, from unqualified ground to theistic prime mover. In our day the downward grade has reached its final point. But we may note that the too modest pro- fession, 'the Real is the Unknowable,' is as far from the truth as the too complacent, ' the Real is the Rational.' In trying to ascertain for our own uses the world-purpose, it is neither nothing, nor yet again everything, to be able to trace the sequence of its phenomena.
§ 6. By ' instinct ' we mean quite generally the original equipment, the native impulses of human nature, all that unreflected and marvellous fabric of complex language, social custom, individual motive, to which personal and conscious legislator or grammarian, calm and rational calculation, has contributed so little. In spite of the Idealist, there is the world ready to hand, in system, order, and life, before the soul of man (as self-conscious intelligence) peered forth timidly upon the scene. It is but the habitual humanism or personalism of our methods that seeks to derive, like Athena in full panoply, in place of natural development, all State institutions from a Divine and infallible Lawgiver. Constantly are we reminded by students of primitive man that the chief or the body of elders never lay claim to initiate legislation (in the modern sense), only to explain and interpret custom, in itself sacred, binding, and unquestionable. Heavy upon savage life is the dead hand of tribal usage. Westermarck's and similar inquiries, however we may hesitate to accept
REASON AND INSTINCT i6i
all their conclusions, seem at least to prove beyond doubt the austere morality of early man, which in many points would set an example to Christian and civilised society ; his strict devotion to ancestral routine, not wholly to be explained by selfish fear of consequences, and combining much of that disinterested public spirit which to-day we discuss so much and find so seldom. It is not a little curious to notice that many so-called wild dreams, unattainable Utopias of social reform, merely contemplate a reversion to this type; for the perfectly morahsed State of Mr. Spencer, our modern automatic educationalism, the French attempts to teach civic duties apart from religious sanction, the ' instinctive ' morality of Mr. Samuel Laing (to note one popular author out of many who is confident in the irresistible force of common opinion and uniform training) — all these are strictly indiscernible from the unquestioning civic faith and loyalty of savage tribes. But the solvent of modern thought is sophistic, critical, and rebellious; and it is only by a certain timid illogicality that the champions of the particular reason and free conscience can surrender the treasure when found to State-welfare and autocracy.
§ 7. Into many of our subordinate discussions must this antithesis intrude : of reflected and spontaneous action. For our very practical purpose, it matters nothing whether this latter be the outcome of centuries of careful training, of parental example, of inherited sensitiveness to another's pain (as more than half our own) ; or whether we accord to the primitive unit a sense of duty to convention irrespective of the personal cost of obedience. Even to this age, so eager to trace the vestiges of early civilisation, to read some- how in the startled eyes, the abrupt grasp, the rudimentary emotions, passions, motives of childhood, some secret of pre- historic man — even to us the real origins lie back buried in profound obscurity. We are astonished at the intricacy, the detail, the complexity of their modes of life; and the more prolonged our study, the more sensible we become of their high moral restraint, of the unseen control exercised upon intermittent passion. It may safely be said that there is no likelihood of the reimposition of a code of behaviour so rigorous and exacting on the youth and manhood of to-day. II
1 62 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Moral inquiry is with us coolly sceptical, inquisitive, and largely destructive. Systems seem to work laboriously towards the enunciation of a truism, in many cases amounting to the mere uninstructive tautology, " it is right to do what is right," — leaving ambiguous the sanction of the former use to indi- vidual judgment, the content of the latter to common con- ventional usage, often to the code of some expelled or disparaged creed. And to many (as we have seen already) the sole hope for any uniform morality devoted to the recognised purpose, the 'welfare of the State,' would appear to lie in a frank denial of free-will, in a careful system of breeding and training of healthy young animals ; deceived, when they reach a questioning and sophistic maturity, by some ' rulers' lie,' some noble but necessary untruth. As a matter of everyday experience, man's instinct is far more social than any reflected code of morality, and needs but encouragement, but emphasis, rather on the beauty than on the obligation of holiness.
§ 8. When Professor Sidgwick states his moral axiom, "I ought not to prefer my own lesser good to the greater good of another," we are not merely concerned with the vagueness of every term employed, and especially of the last, but are rather surprised that the change from spontaneous to reflecting morality should accomplish so little. It is certainly not a ' counsel of perfection,' an exacting standard. The uncalculating usage of the poor is far in advance of this modest demand, and popular achievement is usually ahead of rational schemes of 'duty.' Calculation (fatal to moral fervour) must enter to compute the balance of ' goods ' ; and the ambiguity of ' another ' (the Gospel question, ' Who is my neighbour?') is fatal to full understanding. If by 'another' is meant merely a co-partner in a visible moral community, endowed with a moral consciousness as developed as my own, a fellow and comrade in the art or business of life, it may safely be said that the average miner, peasant, artisan acts, though he know it not, on principles altogether ' higher,' and with less reference to self. As we are concerned with the actual practice of man, we will here only point out, that in the very nature of the case all moral rules must lag behind the familiar yet unnoticed level of observance. In the field of
REASON AND INSTINCT 163
conduct, Reason, with its perpetual summons of every institu- tion, principle, or impulse before its own tribunal, must act rather as a sedative to endeavour than a stimulus. Prescribing universally, it can only dictate a minimum ; and extending the circle of 'neighbourhood' into a vague cosmopolitan sentiment, it deprives the ethical emotions of their firm base in that instinctive homage to the good person, that unfailing sympathy with others, that love of justice redressing the balance by amend and punishment, which is certainly not learnt except in the school of home and social training, and of which books of professed ethical insight give, like mediaeval Rationalism, so inadequate a justification. It would be unbecoming to foretell hastily that no ethical system can explain the most familiar experience ; but it is well to remind ourselves now and again of the scanty results, of the falsified pretensions of independent moral studies. This problem must in the sequel recur in many other forms ; here it will for the present suffice to sum up our results : the prevailing tendency is to employ the inductive method, to interrogate human records as we interrogate (since the Baconian reform) natural sequence, without prepossession. Moral conduct is as much an established fact as the uniformity of nature. Whether man is free or not, but a mere creature and pensioner of the past, it is not our part to inquire. We are contented to find among the lowest races the same rudiments of moral behaviour and cheerful service, without thought of self, as we try to discover and to encourage amongst ourselves. But it is significant that, true to the pessimistic conceptions of man after the Reforma- tion, modern reflection seems to have a far humbler estimate than experience warrants. Nay, in proposing as a distinct feature of modern ethics (perhaps a distinct advance) the notion of ' bounden duty ' and of ' obligation,' a curious legalism without judge or penalty has been introduced, with the same mischief that marked Anselm's juristic explanation of the Atonement. Appeal to what we term ' nobler ' or ' more generous' instincts, implies appeal to the freedom (shall we say to the aesthetic sense ?) of average man. " I am too proud," says Heine, " to be influenced by greed for the heavenly wages of virtue, oj by fear of hellish torments. I strive after the good because it is beautiful and attracts me
1 64 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
irresistibly; and I abominate the bad because it is hateful and repugnant to me." We can tutor, but we cannot implant. The basis of moral conduct is, and must always remain, immediate, emotional.
C
MEDIiEVAL InTELLECTUALISM AND THE OPPOSITION
§ I. Threefold work of a Religion : (i) as social inslitution : {2) per- sonal and attested solace : (3) as field for searchers after Truth : intellectual basis stands then only in the third place : use and value not apodictic certainty.
§ 2. Truth [to mean anything) must be my truth : the witness to a Religion is corporate tradition and personal use rather than argu- ment : intellectual apologetic cannot recognise this : scholastic argu- ments are addressed to reason in general : articulate philosophy a surface-Justification for a deep conviction.
% T,. A dogmatic system an indispensable development, but not wholly a gain : in the same way, Church government as a visible institution : Augustine hands down Roman discipline and Greek speculation : twofold aspect of Medicsval Church : a protective, coercive society, and a mystical asylum : a special caste investigated truth : the people were bound to obedience.
§ 4. Authority and wisdom of right belongs to the Hierarchy : true Religion, true philosophy, identical : this the basis of the whole development : in Reason lies man's kinship to the Divine : primacy of Reason recognised everywhere.
§ 5. Independent inquiry found not to lead invariably to orthodox conclusions : reaction against freethought in the thirteenth century : new view, dogma a mystery : recognition of truths which admitted, and did not admit, of rational proof ; Aquinas supplements the uni- versal {Aristotelian) with a special Christian superstructure : even this, strictly classical and philosophical ; ' to reach God, ecstasy, not reason.'
§ 6. Merit of Scholastic Logic : an attempt to make ' the Church's truth mine ' : not as Islam, acquiesce idly in mere arbitrary will : the Reason which they proposed to satisfy became more and more human and personal in the widening of the sphere of enlightenment from palace {ninth century). Monastery {tenth and eleventh). University {twelfth). Mendicant orders {thirteenth) : the individual more prominent : the long line of mystics had always borne witness.
§ 7. Ascent from the negative and minimum requirement of Law to sense of personal duty : reinforced by emotion : test of truth experience, love given and returned : as the ' credenda ' were one by one removed
MEDIEVAL INTELLECTUALISM 165
from sphere of intellect, belief founded more and more on inner convic- tion : Intellectualism gradually undermined : curious catastrophe of the Reformed Churches— relapsing into the very error from which their movement was a reaction.
§ I, Every religion addresses itself to the social or the individual consciousness of its adherents ; it is either a time- honoured institution with which the hfe of the community is intimately bound up ; or a proved source of peace, knowledge, or moral strength. That which we might wish to put in the forefront, the personal appeal, as the indispensable condition of all true faith, as a matter of fact is found either seldom or only secondarily in long-established cults of national worship. Compliance and conformity, where so much is dark and obscure to the groping intelligence, seems the wiser course ; and it is not uncommon to see a wave of zealous reaction revive confidence in a Church just at a time when its entire dogmatic structure seems to totter. It must not be forgotten that religion embodied in a visible community plays a three- fold part: it actually docs perform an important function in society, with which, it may seem, no other institution could be charged ; it does without doubt satisfy (from various motives of experienced safety or peace or spiritual intercourse) a large number of believers, with whom personal religion, we might say, has superseded mere social convention or vague respect for antiquity; and lastly, and only lastly, it has to provide for a slender proportion of friends or foes, for earnest seekers after Truth, a justification of the peculiar dogmas it inculcates, the special promises it professes to reveal. The intellectual interest of Religion which we call Apologetic, stands therefore in the third place. The survival of a particular creed will only in a lesser degree depend on this satisfaction of the cautious and critical reason. Whatever of peril may be thought to lurk in the consequences, whatever weakness of dialectical harness may be found in the arguments of Professor James ( Varieties of Religious Experience), it cannot be doubtful as a historical fact that "the gods we stand by are the gods we need and use ; that religions which have approved them- selves ministered to sundry vital needs; that no religion ever yet owed its prevalence to apodictic certainty." " If we claim," he says, "any reasonable probability, it will be as much
1 66 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp." He is quite aware that "dogmatism will continue to condemn him for this confes- sion ; mere outward form of unalterable certainty is so precious to some minds." But he represents the large and increasing number of those who shrink from the arrogance which is as unfitting as pure scepticism to human nature : " Rather do I fear to lose Truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly."
§ 2. If truth is to mean anything to me, it must be my truth ; truth within my powers of apprehension and in relation to certain of my cherished aspirations. To these it cannot be entirely dumb and indifferent ; or as with the recognition of the calculable uniformity of matter and its modes, or of an infinite and incomprehensible deity, I pass on in quest of some more relative and sympathetic aid. It cannot be too often repeated that in human life it is the provisional, the exceptional, that is of interest : the stable, the ultimate, the final — are they ever within our reach ? The Universal type, say of Stoic Sage, ceases to attract or to influence us just because of its universality. Faded and attenuated, such an ideal is either something uninteresting and apart, or (in the desire of its creators to banish anything that seems lofty or pretentious) it provides us with a minimum below average practice. The Truth, then, of a Religion is partly vouched for by the corporate testimony of a society, by unbroken tradition (to this it is not likely in the twentieth century we shall fail to do justice), partly to the witness of individual experience of use and worth. Now intellectual apologetic cannot condescend to this latter, and still more cannot be induced to recognise the complexity of the former — its refusal to be bound by a single set of rules, its carelessness of ' apodictic certainty.' " It cannot occur," says Kaftan, in his Truth of the Christian Religion^ " to the Schoolmen to consider the proofs chiefly in relation to the personal faith of the individual. God deals with the in- dividual through the Church. It is important only that the Authority of the Church should be justified in the sight of Reason in general." It is indeed a very cold and detached impersonal reason that is satisfied with scholastic arguments. Nominalism (as we have remarked) disparages not the objective
MEDIAEVAL INTELLECTUALISM 167
truth of the ' credenda,' but the subjective supports, which are beneath its level in dignity. To quote Mr. James once more : " If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which Rationalism inhabits. ... Its inferiority in founding belief is just as manifest when it argues for religion as when it argues against it." He believes such proofs and evidences are a surface- justification to account somehow, and very imperfectly, for a conviction based elsewhere : " Articulate reasons in the meta- physical and religious sphere are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of Reality have already been impressed in favour of the same conclusions." The great world-ruling systems. Buddhistic or Catholic, grow up " when intuitions and reasons work together." "Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of Truth, and our articulately verbalised philosophy is but its showy translation into formula. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us; the reasoned argument is but a surface-exhibition."
§ 3. While some have identified Religion with a social in- stitution, the last and most effective police supervision for the secret movements of the citizen, — in a word, with mere morality and customary observance, — others have disengaged it from all w^orldly contact and utilitarian purpose, and made its aims those of Idealist philosophy. But Religion is neither a depart- ment of the State nor the material of speculative thought. It is perhaps to be regretted that it has to clothe itself with a material and organised life in the State, borrowing much if not all from its ancient foe. It is an indispensable development, yet by no means wholly a gain, when a dogmatic and dialectical system grows up to guard the narrow line of orthodoxy within and to explain and justify to the candid critic without. It was the liberality rather than the narrowness of the Church which led to the predominance of Hellenism. The completed scheme of Church government and philosophy which Augustine handed down, the Mediaeval Church, is a compound of Roman legalism and Greek speculation. Moving in distinct spheres, the one begins where the other leaves off; just as the Super- natural enters to complete the Natural. The twofold aspect of the Church becomes intelligible : a strong, protective, and if need be coercive State; and an asylum for the abstract
i68 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
philosopher, the mystical enthusiast. From Rome it borrowed the secular aim, a sort of democratic utilitarianism, which pro- vides for the mass a precise system of conduct and belief, not lacking in shrewd and sympathetic adjustments to individual needs. In spite of its professed absolutism, the unlimited pre- rogative of the hierarchy, this State is very kindly and bene- ficent; it modifies by judicious compromise its universal claims ; it is content, not indeed, like its prototype, with a few grains of incense, but with a modicum of outward submission. It spends infinite pains on attempts to convince, and never condemns except in view of individual salvation or the State need (not seriously contradicted to-day) of stamping out a viperous brood or a dangerous heresy. Into the secrets of dogma the vulgar were neither expected nor encouraged to penetrate. Like the Chinese in relation to their mandarin class, whose powers they regard without envy, the average Christian felt himself dispensed from a fruitless personal quest, because there existed a special caste, whose duties lay just in that intricate labyrinth where he felt no inclination to enter. The whole history of mediaeval development centres round the relation of Authority and Reason, or, in other words, of faith and knowledge. The widespread deference to Authority, the Alexandrine interpretation of Faith (as surrender to the wise guidance of the expert), was a testimony to the honesty of the hierarchy ; of that governing class or caste which every Utopian idealist, when he reconstructs society, seeks to create for the close supervision of the still (and ever?) dependent multitude.
§ 4. Authority and wisdom belonged of right to the hier- archy. For the obvious fact that average man could not guide his thought or conduct aright, an explanation was found in original sin, the corruption of reason. The canon of behaviour must be imposed from without; the secrets of dogmatic truths must be accepted on trust. But definitely intellectualist as was the Mediaeval Church, there was nothing like the permanent separation of clerk and layman such as we find in Brahminic India. Many truths could be discovered on the path of unaided reason ; just as many were ascertained only by listening to Authority. The optimistic belief at the bottom of all their thought and development was the Platonic
MEDIAEVAL INTELLECTUALISM 169
unity of things — a unity with steps, series, and gradations, but never interrupted by a sudden leap, by an impassable gulf. When we issue out of the three almost silent centuries into the Carolingian revival, we have at once in full panoply the genial system of Erigena. It was to him inconceivable that an ultimate discord should separate Divine and human knowledge. True Religion, as he tells us in the Predestina- tion no less than in the Division of Nature, and true philosophy are interchangeable terms. With far more sig- nificance than Lactantius he asserts this axiom, on which the mediaeval development is wholly based. Like Lessing, he believed that the Church teaches to the amazement of the open-mouthed and simple what mature reflection can recognise as self-evident. Gospel teaching is just rational truth, and Reason has the primacy ; we have to state dogma in a twofold way to the unlearned and to the enlightened. Berengarius shows almost a pious horror at those who make light of Dialectic ; it is incomparably better to appeal to Reason, for in this consists man's kinship to the Divina In Anselm, his arguments are proofs of reason ; nowhere do we see an attempt to build articles of theology upon practice — to Y>^ov\de. practical motives of faith. Reverence for Reason is carried so far with him that it becomes a duty to seek rational proofs for the 'credenda.' Here the judgment of Reason is the final appeal even in this zealous authoritarian ! Indeed, Anselm, as Augustinian as Platonist, is sure of the agreement of the two methods ; there will be the same results from rational research and from credence in legitimate authority. It is superfluous to mention Abelard, the Broad Churchman, in this connection ; primacy of Reason above Authority is here an axiom ; the reign of Authority is due merely to unreasoning crowd. In the absence of leisure or capacity, the fully developed dogma must be transmitted to the mechanical believer ; but the true Christian is he who goes over again for himself the stages of argument and dialectic. In a word, from the Revival to the beginning of the thirteenth century, the ultimate primacy was given to Reason whether explicitly or by implication. To the intelligence of man all mysteries of the faith were comprehensible. Reason, Divine and human, could not in the end be at variance.
I70 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 5. Gradually it became apparent that independent research did not invariably move on the same lines or arrive at the same conclusions. The Church took alarm. There was a reaction against freethought which culminated in the fruitless prohibition of Aristotle. The authorities were indeed largely justified. "Government," says Hegel, "belongs to the small world of officials " ; and those who hold that the concrete, the historic, and the continuous (in thought and institution) should predominate over the clever and captious idiosyncrasy of sophists, cannot find fault with the decision of the Church. The collective reason is pitted against the vain individual reason, just as Heraclitus had confronted them. Already with Lanfranc we see the cool rationalism of Anselm giving way to a new spirit of reverence — " Depart not by a foot's- breadth from the Fathers " — and we find in him the moral view that dogma was a mystery, and however examined must always remain so. Bernard represents a similar reaction ; even mystical rapture, the genuinely intimate personal inter- course, can be won only by surrender to Authority ; just as, even for the highly gifted visionary, the Director must in the last resort decide between a true vision and a hallucination. But to these writers there was merely a precautionary bias in favour of authority, in view of the disorder of freethought; there was no sense of a profound rift between Divine and human wisdom — there was rather an 'intrinsic affinity.' Both individual reason and Church dogma were Hellenic — were based on the classical idealism of antiquity. With the gradual increase of Aristotelian influence, we note new features. The great systems recognise a division which would have seemed incomprehensible to Anselm. To him, the whole of dogma was true on speculative lines ; while they recognised truths which admit and truths which did not admit of rational proof, of speculative support. Some writers of the time, as Peter Lombard and Alexander of Hales, seem to shrink from a discussion of the provinces and relations of reason and authority. Perhaps the earliest to propound a clear division was Hugh of St. Victor : there is truth ex ratione and supra rationeni. Aquinas recognises Hugh as his master, rejects the ontological argument of Anselm (which is strictly dialectical), and prefers the more ' concrete '
MEDIEVAL INTELLECTUALISM 171
evidence of the world and visible works of God to any verbal proof. And the whole tone, temper, and style of his great system is Aristotelian ; the basis where reason and proof are admissible has the common features of rational and moral outlook in all ages. He supplements this (as has been said) by building on its foundations a mystical superstructure — the peculiarly Christian dogmas to be learnt only from the Church. Yet how permeated his mind was with Hellenic influence we can see from his doctrine of the Vision of God, and of salvation through knowledge. Here we have classical intellectualism, with its inevitable tendency towards ecstasy and supernatural grace, in the acknowledged failure of ordinary faculties to reach God.
§ 6. What was the merit of the logic and dialectic of the Schoolmen ? Apart from its vain and perplexing subtleties, it was an honest attempt to appropriate truth, " to make the Church's truth mine." The careful study of Scripture and dogma taught men to believe the Divine Will was not an arbitrary and despotic power, but was intelligible. It did not acquiesce in mere power and will. Islam, for most of its converts, did so acquiesce ; and those who sought to penetrate behind the veil came back with a curious spirit of pantheistic indifference. But the Church never abandoned the idea that the Gospel was not a mere condition of future blessedness, but was nearer akin to the intimate needs of the human soul. The logic and the method at their disposal might vary from age to age, as enlightenment spread from the palace to the monastery, from the monastery to the university, from the university to the Mendicant orders. Interest widened and deepened in this process, and at the end the theologian came very near common human nature. For what was the reason which this dialectic proposed to satisfy? — the universal or impersonal reason which so many believed was one in all men ? or that personal reason which, in spite of William of Champeaux's contempt of the merely accidefital difference making each man himself, seemed more and more to engross attention ? The one might be satisfied by the 'coercive arguments' of the school, by some almost mechanical schematism of Lully. In the latter was a large residuum of emotion, to which such proof appealed in
172 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
vain, or carried no lasting conviction. Gradually, with the advance of enlightenment, the individual becomes more prominent, not as a poor representative of a type, but as himself. The Realist of the time of Abelard apologises for the particular ; Nominalism awakens with the first stirrings of the Renaissance, with Bacon and Raymund of Sabunde, to a new interest in idiosyncrasy, in hcecceitas. Throughout the long Dialectical age the mystic temperament had pro- tested sometimes too rebelliously in favour of immediate and individual experience, personal and direct. Faith was an act of human will, or a sudden influx of Divine grace; the final test was always emotion. We can trace the spiritual ancestry of the Reformers back through the German Mystics, through the Victorines, to Erigena himself. The needs of the soul were never without a champion ; yet in spite of this, the test of the Church remained officially true, a justification, mainly intellectual, to a final bliss only in knowledge satisfied. Nothing is more remarkable than the survival of this spirit in the Reformed Churches. Starting from a distinct motive to destroy the tyranny of an external Church and restore the individual believer to his rights, the movement ended in arid and precise formulas and Confessionism. It is always difficult to reconcile the two aspects of the Church, as a missionary and as a State institution.
§ 7. Religion, it has been said, is ' Morality touched with emotion,' but it must not be forgotten that morality itself is already emotion. Whenever the individual transcends un- intelligible dictates or blind social routine, he yields to a sense of special function, which is not a burden or an obligation, but a privilege. He neither calculates his action by rules of universal cogency and application, nor does he consider his own personal expediency ; the two uses of reason, the catholic and the petty. He does not formulate a theory of supererogation, but, if questioned, he would certainly answer that a law, to be general, can prescribe only a very vague negative and slender minimum, and that the first step in moral advance is to ascend from the universal and typical to the particular, to find out his own endowment and make the most of it. The impulsive force behind this must be of the nature of sentiment and emotion ; it is, at the very lowest, a kind of irrational trust in
MEDIEVAL INTELLECTUALISM 173
the purpose of things and the worth of one's fellow-creatures ; at its highest, a loving devotion to a cause, as yet perhaps im- perfectly known, to a Master with whom veritable intercourse even here is possible, and vouches for future blessedness. The whole mystical tradition had this merit, in spite of needless anchoritism and of speculative aberration. The test of truth was for them experience ; love, given and returned, was some- thing which dialectic could not touch ; it could neither support nor overthrow. While it was clear that the philosophical defence of Christian belief was uncertain, that the calm exercise of reason gave no certain warranty for the ' credenda,' while one by one the dogmas (felt necessary by moral instinct) were removed from the keen search of criticism and the play of dialectical argument, belief in the Gospel was founded more and more on inward conviction and assurance, and on the growing sense of personal worth, quite compatible, as it would appear, with the humblest abasement of ' creaturehood.' With Feudalism (a pendant, as we see, to the compromise of Casuistry) the absolute dominion of Universals is broken down ; instead of confronting State, or Empire, or Papacy, the average man found refuge in a nearer home, a limited horizon, under a visible human protector. The Renaissance, with its warm ap- proval of subjectivity and adventurous freedom, completed the liberation. What a man felt was true for him ; the test of right, as of religion, was experience. Intellectualism was gradually undermined ; the very universahty of Reason robbed it of individual cogency; pressure of mere undeniable syllogism was as distasteful as the hard externality of State custom and ceremony. With William of Occam, as with the German mystics, it was recognised that all knowledge that transcends experience, nay, all precepts of morality, must be assigned to faith. It remained for the Reformers to explain and interpret this faith ; and it was reserved (by a signal catastrophe) for the Reformed Churches to relapse, in their emphasis on Con- fession and on literal orthodoxy, into the very intellectualism from which they had arisen protesting.
174 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
D
On Natural and Rational Religion
§ I. Periodic attempts to simplify Religion, by reducing ' credenda' to lowest terms, with an emphasis either on Nature or on man : Pan- theism and Humanism : the natural or the moral.
§ 2. Accord of nature and reason taken for granted : early attack of Sophists against society : the humanistic epoch at Athens — reason in harmony with things : later schools did not conceal the gap between intelligence and the actual order : reverence for ' Law ' returns in the Roman Empire, and dominates the Middle Age.
§ 3. Once again the subjective spirit claims deliverance : scientific mind demands that nature and reason shall correspond : belief that the two books of God's revelation could not contradict : the ' Double Truth,' not a cowardice or an irony, but due to supposed distinctness of realm and method : this, owing to failure of attempts to conciliate, e.g. Science and Religion, Mechanism and Teleology — still widely prevalent.
§ 4. Natural Theology allowed in the Middle Age — Christianity completed, did not overthrow : were the ' lesser mysteries ' sufficient ? answer in the tolerance of the Crusades : different estimate of the doctrinal superstructures : same problem in education to-day : to one, the superfluous ; to another, the essence.
§ 5. Two tendencies protest against dogmatic orthodoxy; (i) in- tellectual and sceptic; (2) mystic and emotional: the intellectual reaction. Pelagian, removes God to a distance; the mystical brings Him close to the soul : intense dualism of the anti-Rationalism of orthodoxy : Gunther pleads for scholastic tolerance : natural light suffices to guide to God.
§ 6. Religion tends to retire into an inaccessible fastness : all is of faith : Catholic and Protestant unite in denying right of Reason : in place of casuistry and accommodation, there is the non possumus of supernatural dogma, the inner society of the Elect : demoralising of the State : new basis sought in antiquity for statecraft and conduct : deserted by the Church, new crisis in the antagonism of Individual and State sovereignty.
§ 7. Attempted restatement of belief within the bounds of Reason : Socinian and Deistic movements : significant shrinkage of the ' credenda ' in the latter : authority of Bible disappears : written record a mere concession to blindness and ignorance : rapid vanishing of rational theology on the Continent.
§ 8. Attempt to supply plausible hypothesis of world from human- istic point of view — a failure : rationalistic temper equally averse to the miraculous {external) and the emotional {inward) : tenets, specially claimed for reason, found to be no more secure than the rest: situation at the opening of the nineteenth century.
NATURAL AND RATIONAL RELIGION 175
§ I. Eeflecting men have in all ages turned from the tyranny of a State-Church and the supposed impostures of designing priests to the simpHcity of a true Religion, within the limits of reason, guaranteed both by nature and experience. Such a religion comprises little more than the precepts of morality slightly raised above the ordinary level, and some- times divested of all connection with profit and loss, reward and penalty. If the emphasis rests upon the epithet natural, the main requisite will be a willing surrender to the general scheme of things and a fulfilment of the special task or duty incumbent on man. Such a union of duty and resignation will, for example, be found in Marcus Aurelius; calm ac- quiescence in outward happenings beyond our power, resolute performance of fitting and humane virtues, cheerfulness, kind- ness, forgiveness, mainly neutral, it will be observed, and feminine. If the emphasis be laid rather on man, and the chief interest be social reform — in a word, if the movement be humanistic and the world conceived as a mechanism set in motion by a far-off Divine mover — certain postulates are made, much in advance of the Naturalism already noted. The Deity is conceived as transcendent, as moral, and as retributive. Advancing science and certitude drives out the somewhat mis- chievous reverence for mere physical phenomena, which we may note in Seneca, in Lucilius, in all who try to pass straight from chemistry to worship. Man, again the centre, if not of the universe, at least of his own thought, assumes a certain correspondence outside to his inmost needs. God, no longer a mere physical power, is a Creator of a sphere of moral dis- cipUne, and a judge and rewarder of the proficient there. No doubt among professing Deists, to whom moral aim and tran- scendence are the first axioms of theology, we notice a constant tendency to fall over into its opposite. Pantheism — as, for instance, in Toland. But this division will hold good in the main for the religion of calm reflection. As the sense of awe and wonder at the infinite is uppermost, so will man be for- gotten or discounted, bidden to remember his essential insig- nificance and to enjoy in the vague thrill of ' cosmic emotion ' some faint substitute for worship ; as the insistent self-conscious- ness of men becomes urgent, almost released by enlightenment from servitude to phantoms and abstractions, and warring with-
176 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
out respite against conventional fetters, so moral and social needs demand a personal sovereign, to whom each in the end is accountable. The one is strictly 'natural,' the other * rational ' ; yet the two words are nearly always found applied with equal pertinence to the simple religion which, as it was thought, can be supported by invincible arguments. There is no suspicion that the two may not be compatible.
§ 2. It is instructive to notice how many clear minds have taken for granted the identity, or at least the harmony, of Nature and Reason. On no question has there been greater confusion of thought, vagueness of result, absence of definition. In spite of the accidental character of current Greek cosmogony, the awakening of really human interest found man, like Rousseau, sanguine and enterprising, armed with a rough-and- ready teleology (rather an instinct than an assurance), prepared with his reason to join issue with Convention, and backed by the silent but effectual alliance of Nature. Society was the foe ; back to Nature was the text. The practical significance of the Humanistic age at Athens lies in this : from the selfish and calculating Reason of the unit an appeal lay to the diffused or corporate conscience, which found expression in the social laws and customs of a civilised State ; and behind the mechanism of Nature, on which the sophist depended for his doctrines — free competition and the survival of the fittest — there lay the same order, discipline, and wisdom, somehow working for a good and righteous end (whatever precise meaning they might attach to these terms), setting to each his place and giving to each his due. This pious teleology, which aimed at restoring both for State and universe a recognised objective, at conciliating individual and general will, had but a short and troubled reign. The nearer objective, the community, was more and more discredited by philosophic thought; and from the first it had claimed vaguely to be cosmopolitan. The larger objective. Nature or the Universe, was abandoned to the play of incalculable atomic motions, or rapidly summed up in a pietistic phrase, which meant nothing but a recognition of the actual, though it was borrowed from human intelligence. Neither Epicurus nor Zeno really expressed the world in terms intelligible to the understanding or relative to man ; but only the former was candid enough to confess it. With the Roman
NATURAL AND RATIONAL RELIGION 177
Empire returned the reign of 'Law' in its widest sense, as social convention. It was founded on a democratic and utilitarian movement, which cared neither for the worship of the universe nor for the disorderly greed of rival statesmen. Western Europe, for six hundred years under Empire and Church, settled down under the tutelage of continuous tradition, and expected by obedience to win security in this world and salvation hereafter, vo/aos was once again /Sao-tXeus airdvTwv unchallenged; and nothing is more significant than the steadiness and sobriety of the unlimited autocracy in either department.
§ 3. But when it reached maturity the subjective spirit again resented control, and tried to place itself in a direct relation with the realities, hitherto only mediately accessible in Church dogma or a caricature of science; and over both of these spheres a jealous hierarchy, like some faithful but unintelligent dragon, seemed to keep watch. While the mystical movement approached God on the path of devotion and love, the scientific spirit again demanded that Reason and Nature should corre- spond. The more pretentious believed that the human mind had the master-key to the secrets of Nature ; the more humble preferred the patient and surer method of induction, observa- tion, and experiment. And (as we must often repeat) the ' seamless vesture ' of the mediaeval omne scibile fell away into distinct and unrelated pieces and departments. It was idle for Raymund of Sabunde to protest that Nature and the Bible could not be otherwise than in agreement ; just as it was in vain that Scotus and later orthodox intellectualism insisted on the identity of religion and philosophy. Raymund could not believe one of God's books could contradict the other ; just as Anselm perhaps was secure that in the end human reason was bound to agree with dogma — for both were Divine. But this age was marked by the emergence of differences and contrasts, under a fictitious disguise of unity ; the sciences, having been released from the Church, began to drift away from each other. The painstaking student, applying the methods of one depart- ment to another, trying to compare or correlate their results, found himself hopelessly embarrassed ; the Double Truth (as has been remarked) was by no means an ironical or timid deference to the ' powers that be,' but the expression of a real 12
178 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
conviction, — that different realms demanded different laws, had different avenues of approach. And it has become, since the Middle Ages, a mere affectation to pretend to a guidance of the whole of life under a single rule : the indefensible in one department is the paramount in another ; and there is no ' clear- ing house' where the several schemes can be interpreted in terms of each other. The basal problem of modern thought since Descartes is the conciliation of mechanism and teleology ; and within the last half century it has taken the detailed form of a ' Harmony of Science and Religion.' Yet that apostle of compromise would indeed be bold who announced that any real advance had been made towards a solution. A modus Vivendi has been reached which is valid for all practical purposes, viz. to keep the rivals resolutely apart. It is not likely that reason, with its passion for unity, completeness, con- sistency, will remain contented, or indeed ought to remain contented, with this sorry dualism. But it seems fruitless to deny at present the essential lack of sympathy between the realms of fact, idea, and worth.
§ 4. Natural Theology attempted, as long as possible, to hold together this world and the next. Though many people to-day are under the impression that our age is marked by a reconciliation of antitheses, it is characteristic of the Middle Age rather than our own to believe in ultimate harmony. They had no such accentuated distinctions as we have grown accustomed to,— Church and State, Church and World, Church and Society. There is no Dualism (as of the Protestant Epoch) in the system of Aquinas. All is orderly and hierarchic; and the morality of the average man, indeed of the average Hellene, is only completed, not overthrown, by the more perfect or supplementary code of the Gospel. Abelard gives the earliest and perhaps the best type of rational and natural religion before the suspicion of separate spheres entered. To him, as to Iqter Deism, religion is mainly morality, and the Gospel the republication of the code of Nature. As to Raymund, just three hundred years later, all positive dogma, even the Bible, is a concession to human weakness, an exposition, under the guise of authority, of the very simple truth which a man could ascertain for himself by the aid of Reason. Once allow that unaided intelligence can
NATURAL AND RATIONAL RELIGION 179
attain a sufficiency of light and truth, and the question arises, ' What then is the value of the further illumination ? Are not the lesser Mysteries enough?' The Crusade made men more tolerant ; they came back convinced that honour, virtue, and science were not confined to Christians. The attitude to the Catholic and dogmatic superstructure will vary : to some a superfluous excrescence or mischievous perversion ; to others, the precious and indispensable part of religion. To-day we have a very similar experience, which shows how little human nature and its problems have changed in a thousand years. The conflict and the combatants are the same. In the matter of national education some complain of sectarian bitterness, of undue emphasis not on the main and unimpeachable issues of religion, but just those points most open to doubt and controversy. Children, it is said, " are not to be taught the Gospels as a whole ; but to be encouraged from their earliest years to attach capital importance, not to opinions on which Christians are agreed, but to those as to which they are at war" (Right Honourable J. Asquith, May loth, 1906).
§ 5. Against the precision of dogmatic or confessional orthodoxy, two diff"erent tempers protest : the intellectual and the emotional, critics of the head and the heart. The Re- formed Churches show precisely the same double reaction. There is abroad in the seventeenth no less than the thirteenth century the opposition of pure reason, the opposition of pure feeling,— Intellectualism and ^Mysticism. Again and again the exigency of a State Church, which is bound to employ a written constitution, excites the dislike of those who would base religion either on a general intelligence or on an individual experience. The intellectual reaction, as we have seen, is usually deistic, and removes the first mover as far as possible from the ascertainable mechanism of the world ; the mystical claims that God is " not far from each one of us." (And this, again, is subdivided into the orthodox mystics, who just avoid the pantheistic abyss, Scotus, the Victorines, the 'German mystics,' Weigel, the Quakers 3 and the heretical sects, which, whether in twelfth or sixteenth century, so strongly resemble each other, Amalric, David, the Beghards, the Anabaptists.) The tendency of the one may be styled Nestorian Pelagian, — man has to work out his own salvation ;
i8o THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
of the other, Eutychian,— for the light and truth and peace and oneness with God, which spiritual experience provides, is not man's achievement, not the native divinity of the soul, but a special grace, a forcible occupation by the Holy Spirit, when the poor individuality is swept away. Both parties will resent the alliance of philosophy and religion, dialectic and theology : the rationalist, as derogatory to reason ; the pietist, as hurtful to faith. The whole mediaeval conflict is fought out over again in the Hofmann controversy about the year 1600. To him, as to Bernard and Hugh of St. Victor, philosophy is of the devil. "Philosophy is in religious matters a robber, as we see clearly by the opposition between the elements of the world and the elements of Christ." The ' double truth ' which Luther once more defends against the Sorbonne, is accepted: The same thing is not true in theology and in philosophy. "Next to the devil," says Hofmann, in his Preface to Pfaffrad's theses, "the Church has never had a worse enemy than Reason and Carnal Wisdom." Gunther {Theologice ef Philosophice. iinitua amicitia osfensa, 1600) in defence of Reason from this sweeping and well-sustained attack, pleads against the paradox and dualism which seemed to have entered the modern spirit with the Reformation. He occupies the scholastic position : both spring from God " and both agree with each other ; yet is Theology the determining standard, and must be recognised as queen and mistress." Liddel maintains the same thesis ; to put a contradiction between them is to put a contradiction in God. The light of nature can lead to the knowledge of God; other propositions rest solely on revela- tion, and can be formulated but not cognised by reason. We have the distinction, ' articuli puri et mixtil'
§ 6. We cannot but be struck by the recurrence in identical terms of the old dispute which marks the opening of the fourteenth century. There is the same pressure from the natural theologian, the same impotence of formula, the same thin limit of supra-rational and irrational, so easily passed, the same tendency on the part of earnest believers to carry bodily the content of dogma into the realm of faith, away from the insidious support or open defiance of philo- sophical argument. Hofmann is like Occam ; he does not
NATURAL AND RATIONAL RELIGION i8i
perhaps exactly deny the natural knowledge of God, but he accounts the 'credenda' as belonging to the mysteries of faith. The distinction of ' pure and mixed articles ' he abandons; truth is only grasped by faith, that is by the operation of the Holy Spirit. Olearius assents to the doctrine of the ' Double Truth,' and thus divides thought and faith into two distinct regions which have nothing in common. In view of the retirement of religion into an inaccessible fastness, Reflection, unable to come to terms with Religion, tries to find its own basis for conduct and for belief. To rational interpretation and criticism, both Churches offered uncompromising hostility. The Catholic revival had purified the faithful, had stereotyped dogma; it had 'closed the canon,' and set (or fancied it had set) a final limit to doctrinal development. The Reformed Communions, as we have seen, revert in their more liberal exponents to a purely mediaeval attitude ; they see in Philosophy only a handmaid to Religion. The State and the reflecting individual are forced into an attitude of distrust. We shall afterwards draw atten- tion to the demoralising of the conception of the State ; it was left to fight a purely natural battle in a natural world. The individual was thrown back upon his own resources. In place of casuistry and accommodation, the Churches answered non possnmus and withdrew to the company of the elect, the faithful, the 'twice-born,' the converted. This dualism was felt in every department of life. Ethical studies were commenced afresh from their rudiments and simplest terms. Systems of the universe, and of man's conduct, were eagerly sought out of ancient philosophers ; and nearly every school of antiquity had its professed and earnest representatives. Meantime, Law took on more of an arbitrary and utilitarian character : the monarchy represented the ' Will-to-live ' of an organism which had slowly won its way to self-consciousness. The individual confronted the State, both demanding the recognition of sovereign rights.
§ 7. Two expressions of the natural religious instinct may be noticed : the Socinian and the Deistic movements. Separated by more than a century, they have much in common ; and the variation is altogether instructive. Both are cool and rationalistic, equally determined to keep well within the
1 82 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
bounds of evidence and the conclusions of reason. But the difference is startUng ; the one is founded on the Bible, and, while rejecting many cardinal beliefs of Christianity, retains, somewhat capriciously, much of the marvellous. The Deistic School depends for guidance on no written record. The faith proposed is like that of Henry iv., the ' religion of all honest men.' The ' credenda ' have shrunk to a mere recognition of a first cause of the world and an ultimate judgment of man. The old mediaeval freethought revives again ; Christianity is no novel and priceless revelation, but a restatement of forgotten truths as old as the world. Raymund of Sabunde had supposed the Scripture was 'added,' as it were, ' because of offences,' when men were no longer able to read the Book of Nature. It had no supreme or intrinsic merit ; it was a condescension to the blind and incompetent. The moral detail of this simple faith was based largely on the current behaviour of the * gentleman ' and man of honour, as evolved in England, — a land where wealth and position had always acknowledged their responsibilities, and had usually led and but rarely come into conflict with public feeling. For extremes of scepticism, pure selfishness, or 'altruistic' sentiment, we must go elsewhere; to those countries which, pushing conduct into mathematical rigour and thought into logical issue, borrowed largely from England, and, without being aware, altered the loan past recognition. Even the slender tenets of Deism vanish in the development of the French Enlightenment; and in Germany all interest is centred upon the arguments for personal immortaUty; or that peculiar form of belief which in a godless universe retains some idea of consequence, retribution, and reparation, may be indebted to Buddha or to Averroes, and finds its clearest exponents in Fichte and Mr. McTaggart.
§ 8. I have wished to trace thus far the claim of independent reason to interpret the world, and to restore to human con- sciousness the irreducible minimum of certainty, — which religion seemed no longer able to afford. I do not propose to follow its onward (or downward) course ; for the limits of our first lecture make us halt on the threshold of the nineteenth century. Nor is this the place to revive (as we must sooner or later) the old doubt as to the complete agreement of Nature
THE AVERAGE MAN 183
and Reason. We have been mainly concerned to show the origin of the rationalising temper, in impatience at external miracle and paradox, in lack of sympathy with the feelings or emotions which for most men constitute the beginnings of conduct and belief. Between the views of religion as a visible institution, or a wealth of private and personal experience, lies the attempt to reduce it to the common and universal laws of intelligence, — relieved of any childish deference to tradition and authority, of sentimental weakness in preferring hallu- cination and subjectivity to one's saner and more impersonal moments. We have noted the recurrence of the same problem, What precisely is the ultimate Co)itcnt of this rational belief? how far can it be recognised as catholic, ascertainable by all reasonable beings, cosmopolitan and, like the ' Law of Nature,' of universal and unquestioned validity ? It was discovered that the Content was apt to vanish ; that the dogmas still claimed as obvious to intelligence were as uncertain as the rest. A wider knowledge of the world and of man, which the new century brought, carried all such axioms or beliefs (indispens- able as they were for the practical life) into the realm of faith.
"Jesus died because He strove Against the current of this wheel : its name Is Caiaphas, the dark preacher of Death, Of sin, of sorrow, and of punishment ; Opposing Nature : It is Natural Religion."
Blake.
E
The Average Man as the Standard
§ I. Religion again considered in its three/old aspect ; theory of world, visible community, personal appeal : the last is of paramount value, the duty of winning and comforting souls.
§ 2. The three arbiters, sound reason, the Church, the individual or average man : ' enthusiasm,' the differentia of man rather than thought or deference to law : rests on a conviction of personal worth, which reflection and social experience does not support : only im- patience or disappointment leads reformers to wide, collective, and coercive measures.
§ 3. The part, of interest rather than the whole : modern studies of rudiments, the child, the savage, early society : Religion, as the
1 84 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
architectonic science, cannot take interest in secondary and derivative ; that is, cannot be mainly intellectual, mainly social : all are equal, and the only universal faculty is love, as willing surrender : this the modern State cannot expect to elicit,
§ 4. Among early Christians this acceptance of the average con- founded the wise : uniform treatment of criminal and pharisee ex- asperated : Christian message not moral or political : it is a revelation of God's inmost nature, so far as it is relative to man : it gives a new standard of values: dwindling of State-influence, and hesitation of independent ethics.
§ 5. Strength of Christianity , a type of Divine character singularly accessible to the ordinary man : vain attempt of philosophy to secure a humanistic basis : sure appeal, sacrifice in service of a cause not yet won : no reasonable justification of this except in Christianity, where man is first assured of his worth : hopeless rivalry of other creeds of self-abandonment : protest of Fichte.
§ 6. Provisoes of average man, devoting himself to a cause : these not satisfied in other-world theories : Christianity answers the average man ; the cause is intelligible in general outline, righteous, and does not forget its followers : logical position of Immortality : acceptance must of course be a venture of Faith, as in every moral act.
§ I. I HAVE applied to the modern Apologist the simile of Telemachus, falling a victim to the two combatants he tried in vain to 'reconcile.' Religion in its widest sense has three sides : it is a theory of the universe, it is a State-system embodied in a visible community, and it is a direct appeal to the personal spirit, isolated from his fellows and confronted by the Eternal. As a theory of the universe it can be supported or refuted by arguments and methods common to all exact thinkers ; as a society, it has its own written constitution, and its laws of self-preservation, when, for the welfare of the whole, the part must, if needs be, suffer ; as an appeal, that which we call the ' simple gospel,' it is directed to that unique ultimate reaUty, so far as we know, the sentient and aspiring conscious- ness. Apologetic may decide to display the truth of the Christian scheme of existence, or to attack correctly that implication of God, man, nature, fate, and providence which many conceive to be the only alternative (and here Olearius would seem to be in agreement with Sir George Cornewall Lewes) ; or it may seek to justify the tutelage of the Church, the relative if not absolute value of a beneficent and disinterested society, especially in days when the State has lost or given
THE AVERAGE MAN 185
up her moral purpose, — the probable truth in the wisdom of the collective mind accumulating in long years of power and experience. Or, again, it may merely aim at awakening the torpid personality, at providing an asylum against the sorrows of the world, at adjusting the message, full of hope and en- couragement, to the needs of each. " They argued not, but preached, and conscience did the rest." Now, each of these three attitudes can be justified. It is impossible to withdraw the dogmatic and intellectual side from criticism, or keep Church teaching entirely aloof from the currents of the time. No one, again, would propose, in the dearth of successors, to banish an institution which performs a function of growing value needful in a 'democratic' age, — a vigilant supervision of the encroachment of rulers upon a people's rights. But it cannot be denied that the third is of paramount, if not of exclusive, importance. The convincing or silencing of ' heretics ' against their will by ' coercive ' argument, the justifying of the mission of a Church establishment, the need of a hierarchy, of some consistent order, discipUne, and government : these cannot compare with the duty of winning souls.
§ 2. " Every law," says Punjer, " requires interpretation and application to individual cases. The Catholics regard the in- fallible office of the Church in teaching as the means of doing this : other Christians take other views. The * Enthusiasts ' find this means in the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the inner word. Others, who are called by their opponents * Unitarians ' or ' Socinians,' find it in sound reason " (sana ratio). This well expresses the general division between the three forms of apology; the vindication of the rights of the Church, of sovereign Reason, of the average individual. Although the term ' Enthusiast ' (as we see in the Masonic Liturgy) for long had a sinister meaning, yet it is in this direction that the present sympathies of men are tending. Man, before he is a conscious member of a community, before he can exercise reason, is stirred by emotions, instincts, and affections. He is swayed by feelings which he cannot explain, while they give him undeniably the substance of his life. Social discipline and clear reasoning will guide or control, but will not supply them. The primitive and rudimentary may
1 86 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
be influenced, nurtured, or even extinguished by convention and thought, but never created. The * differentia ' of man is not a calculating submission to law, nor a detached exercise of reason, but spontaneous surrender to a cause in whose service, at first sight, the individual has so little to expect. Moralists have to take this impulse for granted ; but strictly this cannot implant or explain it. ' Enthusiasm ' is just this spirit, rising to heights of heroism which does not count the cost ; or sinking to depth of fanaticism or self-indulgence in which every moral restraint is swept away. And the sense of immediate inspiration is just this necessary complement of self- devotion — the assurance of personal value : what we have called the paradox of the reUgious sentiment, a mingled pride and humility, nowhere more conspicuous than in the Epistles of St. Paul. Life in Society, calm reflection, do not teach this personal value; the evidence goes all the other way. What would-be reformer of social abuses has not at times turned away in despair from a fruitless task in which his own direct efforts are unavailing, in which the wider experience of average mankind teaches him only how ineffective is the unit ? It is, of course, this consciousness which, in default of success with individuals, drives men to the poor substitute of a compul- sory and collective legislation, where the soul is forgotten, and the barren and lifeless abstraction, race, State, Church, class, is set up instead. Yet both history and the short experience of life may teach us that the whole can only be reached through the part.
§ 3. Therefore it must be the part that interests us : not in its sophisticated and conventional perfection, but in its earlier stages. To this we trace the eager studies of the child, of primitive man, of the rudiments of society. Almost overlaid and hidden, the original nature and essence of man is patiently sought for. We are trying at last to get beneath the surface. The special sciences, economics, pure philosophy, politics, through no fault of their own, are obliged to consider man from a certain and restricted point of view ; to isolate him in a particular relation, and during this strictly limited survey to keep steadily out of sight the rest of his complex nature. Religion, if it is to have any genuine significance, any lasting value, must be the architectonic science. Nothing else can
THE AVERAGE MAN 187
harmonise the several elements in man and give coherence to his life and aim. And religion cannot take an exceptional interest in what is secondary and derivative ; it cannot be mainly intellectual or social. It must consider the deepest thinker, the wisest statesman, just on the same level as the humblest believer. It looks upon each as having much to receive but something to offer. The service, the talent, the faculty may and must differ in each, but the spirit of the loving surrender and loyal work will be the same in all. We must start with what is universal, not with the privilege of a few. Now the only universal emotion is love, — attachment to a person or a cause. As soon as the instinct of self-preservation is satisfied, the interests expand with sympathy towards the Divine Being or protector, the human parent or society, which has supplied and can guarantee this safety. This is the source of all moral conduct that is spontaneous and uncovenanted. "God first loved us"; that is, the believer is somehow assured of special grace or favour, and then in return will trust implicitly, obey without questioning each detailed command, surrender present comfort and advantage, even life itself. A sovereign, individual or society, or deity, will receive what it gives, and no more. It is hopeless to expect in a utilitarian State of modern times, which avowedly overrides the special case for the general welfare, and regards man in the mass and the type, the same neglect of self, the same patriotic spirit, the same personal loyalty which belonged to more primitive times. Obedience to law and custom will proceed from the calculations of prudence, or, in a crisis which demands severe self-abnegation, ^from a sense of noblesse oblige, or (for want of a better term) from a heroic impulse which carries one far beyond the conditions of the precise contract. But in this latter 'supererogation' man is impelled by an ' enthusiasm ' which he cannot perhaps logically justify ; he feels the indwelling power of a Spirit not his own.
§ 4. If it be one principal aim of these lectures to inquire into the real meaning of ' democracy,' to show its intimate and necessary connection with the Gospel, no apology should be required for the title of this essay, — 'the average man as the Standard.' That which puzzled and confounded the pagan sages and statesmen on the introduction of Christianity
1 88 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
was its universality, its inclusiveness, and its intolerance. It professed to satisfy the poor, the ignorant, the slave ; and it carried the same methods up through the ranks of society, as yet ' unconvinced of sin.' The chief opposition came from this uniform treatment ; " this people who knoweth not the law are cursed." The same intellectual superiority left its trail on Jewish and Hellenic thought alike. The very simplicity of the message stood in the way of its welcome ; the wise and moral demanded ' some great thing,' and there was more fascination in the Abana and Pharpar of Neoplatonic mysticism : " Be loyal to the Master who died for you ; be good to the brethren for His sake; try to pass to all men the story of Salvation." It has been supposed that Christianity is the restatement of a moral code of duty ; or the rule of a human society. It is far from our purpose to disparage the work of the Gospel in strengthening and defining the rules of behaviour, or in pro- viding dim outlines of a perfect State. But it is clearly neither moral nor political in the first place. It is the revelation of God's nature in its inmost essence, rather than the finite external promulgation or revival of a law. It gives this life new meaning and value, just because it puts it in relation to eternity ; not because it preaches finality here in a community, uniform and artificial. It is idle to deny that the essential in our faith is the metaphysical. It provides a new standand of values for human life, because it reveals the Divine nature and gives an answer to man's long hopes. It has been supposed, without due inquiry into average mankind, that a moral or a political system can be set before us with authority, apart from any preconception. It is certainly true that the modern State, making no appeal except to force and utility, recognising only a numerical majority and its one law of self-preservation, exerts on us an ever-decreasing moral influence. It has long ceased to respond to the question, " What is man ? " It does not recognise, nor need it be expected to recognise, the deeper claims of our nature ; and, rightly, absorbed in limited and secular concerns, it cannot face the mysteries of life, of pain, of individuality. Ethics, again, rarely attempting to start from a principle wholly independent of religion, is forced to be satisfied with a vague truism as its initial axiom, 'and to borrow its content from the Christian conscience ; to regard with dis-
THE AVERAGE MAN 189
may the waxing forces of a scientific theory of conduct largely at variance with the present ideal.
§ 5. From a human or purely historical point of view, the success of Christianity is due to this resolute detachment. It quiets the fears, and encourages the hopes, of the average man, by giving a type of Divine character startlingly different from the ordinary manifestations of ' power ' and ' wisdom ' shown in creation. Philosophy, ever attempting in vain to secure a humanistic basis for speculation, finds itself beaten back again into the open sea of Naturalism, — which, sometimes open and unabashed, sometimes in the masquerade or disguise of panthe- ism, denies to man any real significance, save, perhaps, as pre- paring for some new and inconceivable order of things. " I tell you," says Don Juan in Mr. Bernard Shaw's Man and Super- man^— " I tell you that, as long as I can conceive something better than myself, I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life's incessant aspiration to higher organisation, wider, deeper, intenser self- consciousness, and clearer self-understanding." " Later on," he says, " Liberty will not be catholic enough : men will die for human perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly. . . . Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea Hke a hero. ... If you can show a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, what he will later on call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to him personally." This self-surrender to the service of a cause with- out counting the cost is indeed man's most conspicuous differentia; but can it be asserted that it finds any rational justification elsewhere than in the Christian religion ? A triumph won at the expense of our present sufferings by some higher creature could find no place in any righteous scheme of the universe, as we count righteousness and justice to-day. If this is the last word of scientific speculation, it will not be long before the enthusiasm wears off. "Shall I beget beings like myself," says Fichte, inthe Destitiy of Man, "that they too may eat and drink and die, leaving behind them beings like themselves to repeat over again the same things that I have done ? To what purpose this ever-revolving circle, this cease-
I90 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
less and unvarying round, in which all things appear only to vanish again, and pass away only that they may reappear as they were before ; — this monster continually devouring itself that it may again reproduce itself, and bringing itself forth only that it may once more devour itself? " There is no certainty of some ' far-off Divine event ' ; there is no proof, nor even prob- ability, of any certain ' advance ' or ' progress ' (if we can attach conceivable meaning to these terms.)
§ 6, Writers who have been reluctant to break entirely with the Christian and altruistic theory of life, have long played with this kind of delusive Realism (in the mediaeval sense) as a substitute for personal comfort. But such hopes, in the perfection of man or society, apart from the Christian message, are wild and visionary. Nature or the cosmic process knows nothing of a terminus, a goal, a realised ideal. What looks like attained perfection, as Professor Huxley begins in his Evoliitiofi a?id Ethics, is but the unstable point whence begins the gradual descent. Equilibrium is not life, but death ; development can only strictly be used of individuals, not of collective entities, which are only called one for con- venience ; education, as Lotze argued against Lessing's vague medisevalism, can only apply to the growing and continuous experience of conscious beings, not to the general term which combines them in a class. The average man has a few provisoes in attaching himself to a cause unreservedly ; it must be righteous, intelligible, it must include himself. One is forced (so often is the taunt levelled at Christianity) to repeat that the doctrine of immortality satisfies not so much a selfish instinct as a rational demand. Apart from it, righteous- ness, virtue, justice, happiness cease to have a meaning. The Gospel satisfies at once man's desire to know himself and to know God : " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." The axioms of this architectonic science must be received in faith, but must and can be tested by experience : belief must precede and pass into knowledge. The answer is made to the appeal of unhappiness and unrest ; in its origin quite selfish, " What must I do to be saved ? " The anxious question is put not by the thinker or the citizen, but by the average man ; who before he works in the vineyard wishes to be assured of his own value, that he is not labouring in a bad or a mean-
THE AVERAGE MAN 191
ingless cause. The special work, talent, equipment, is a minor matter; in a very true sense works add nothing to faith. Christianity gives a conviction which seems wanting in other religions, of co-operation in a Divine scheme, in which the recompense is not so much distinct achievement as the willingness of service itself. And this willingness, as is shown in the experience of numberless Christians (even of St. Paul, who prays to be anathema for his brethren), depends upon the absolute confidence that each one of us is safe in the hands of a Master who cannot deceive. Else were resignation and devotion unrighteous, a useless and stubborn defiance of the laws which govern things. That this is an act of faith (often on the slenderest evidence) cannot be denied; but it is not greater than is demanded by any moral choice of which the issue and the consequence is obscure, the sole guidance, " I must for I ought, I can for I must."
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE II— A
On the Necessity of basing Institutions upon average Human Nature
§ I. Curious ignorance of human nature betrayed by designers of Utopian society : neither the virtue of the rulers, nor the drowsy con- tentment of the subjects, could survive in equilibrium.
§ 2. The modern State and statesmen are also to blame in their hasty judgment of man's needs : problem of sovereignty. State or individual ? the modern theory due to Luther and to Machiavelli : force and expediency : suspicious relations of State and subject in the modern State : notable exception of personal loyalty, an anomaly : no appeal to moral feeling.
§ 3. Average man unsusceptible to the influence of abstractions : the post-Reformation State might have been remodelled, independently of Church tutelage, without such loss : became not merely un-religious but un-moral.
§ 4. Error in basing reconstruction upon a supposed Classical model, not on the feelings of average man : the voluntary element might have been retained : Government might have become the extension rather than the denial of the family.
§ 5. Justification for those who seek to restrict the scope of govern- ment {Tolstoy) : some believe this movement inevitable : perversion of preventive action of State : decay of the spontaneous.
§ 6. The Christian has no such widespread distrust in average human nature : this is better and more generous than the social system : a better acquaintance with ordinary impulse and springs of conduct might have been expected, and is not yet too late.
§ I. Human nature is very much better (using the word in its widest and most popular sense) than its professed exponents and eulogists seem willing to recognise. All Utopias for the last four hundred years have discerned the ideal in a vmv TTo'Xts superintended by a scientific and disinterested aristocracy. They have extolled the latter at the expense of the former, the refined minority at the expense of the great bulk of the people,— and this with all their pretensions
HUMAN NATURE 193
to democratic sympathy. There is no reason to trust the dutifulness of an intellectual more than of a hereditary or pluto- cratic ruling caste. Ability has its temptations as well as avarice or pride of assured position. A republic — that is, a people shorn of its natural representatives — is exposed to unscrupulous wealth and unscrupulous ambition. But an equal mistake, and perhaps one more mischievous, is to be found in the conception of the still governed and subordinate classes. It is presumed that a uniform distribution of comfort will expel envy and satisfy the heart's desire. It is almost need- less to say, it would effect neither one nor other. It could not free men from the passion of competition, nor would it lull into forgetfulness their higher sensibilities. Striving is for the people the essence of hfe, first for self, next for a cause. Acquiescence and rest in equilibrium, as was said in the last essay, is impossible whether in Nature or in the State. The dignity of man, if it is not attained in ideal feudal vassalage to a trusted and beloved master, is certainly not won by subservience to a food-distributing committee; nor could human nature find satisfaction in such a society, bound as it must be by rigorous laws, supported by picturesque myths, safeguarded now and again by a secret and murder- ous attack on revolutionary ideas. We are concerned at present not with the Utopians' unwarranted confidence in a scientific ruling class, but with their curious ignorance of original human nature, of those impulses which lie at the root of all human action. It will appear an undeserved calumny upon the poor and lowly to believe that they have no aspiration beyond a uniform and tiresome plenty ; that in the shifting of responsibility from parent to State (the aim of all Utopian schemes since Plato) they will be glad of relief from a distasteful burden. In our still uncertain and precarious life of to-day, having even yet some element of hazard and adventure, it is impossible to enter fully into this ideal of a leaden and ascertained monotony ; but from the moral point of view, it cannot be doubted that such an existence would be inadequate to the needs of human feeling.
§ 2. If the visionary has failed to interpret and make allowance for the deeper side of man, the modern State, the modern politician, has also been at fault. It would seem 13
194 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
that the more civilised the community, the less the appeal to moral feeling. After 1500, the modem State confronts the dissociated atoms which once formed subordinate groups with a tempered independence, with local ties and s)-mpathies, with a certain autonomy more or less genuine. It breaks down all intermediate corporauons and autliorities which pretended to compete with it. As we have already noticed, we see the two incompatible claims preparing for the contest which still hangs in the balance to-day — the sovereignty of the State, the sovereignty of the indi\-idual ; and all modern government is but a compromise between the two. At the same time the State became independent and secular; its measures were directed to the sole purpose of ensuring its surnval as an organism. The popular basis of all ci\-il authority everywhere acknowledged in the Middle Age was displaced by a theory oddly pieced together from the new belief in Didne right and a sincere yet shamefast respect for force, ability, and cunning. The two pioneers (or rather spokesmen) of the new State, Luther and Machiavelli, invented between them a conception of sovereignty which the Middle Ages could not have recognised or accepted. Within the communit)- appeal was made to utility or to fear ; laws, definite, precise, and arbitrary, succeeded to custom and local usage, which might be said to persuade rather than compel, to represent the pietj' of ancestors rather than the caprice of a tyrant. The coercive machinery, within and without, poUce and soldiers, becxmie more and more complex and efficient; and it need not be said reaches the greatest perfection after the protest of the Revolution and among the most ' democratic ' States. The relations of ruler and subject are marked by mutual suspicion and distrust : ever)- tax-payer is a potential defrauder of the revenue ; every government ofiicial is a natural enemy ; every fresh edict will begin or conclude with a penalty. The term loyalty is applicable only to a very peculiar and anomalous relation, a sentiment of attachment to a Person (who is strictly forbidden to exert direct influence in the State) ; or is allowed, for want of this personal object, to evaporate into a vague pride in the country of one's birth, and a utQitarian willingness to fight, if necessary, in its defence. Can it be said in such societies that appeal is made, in the name of right, to the higher motives of the people ? Is it
HUMAN NATURE 195
reserved for primitive communities and their strange sur- vivals to-day to shame Western civilisation by a contrast of methods ?
§ 3. It may well be asked, whether a far safer and more moral basis of authority might not have been fixed for the post-Reformation State? We cannot accept the excuse that the vastness of the new territories, welded into one out of piecemeal confusion, made austere and impersonal relations between rulers and ruled indispensable. In China, owing to the wise moderation of the central authority, the absolute ruler of the largest Empire under heaven is nothing but the Father of the State, and borrows from the simplest human relation some of its sanctity and moral influence. With the disappearance of kingship, it cannot be doubted, the last pretext for any appeal except to force or self-interest might be removed ; and the average man is notably unsusceptible to abstractions which often cloak the intrigues of faction and party. The eftective force behind this ancient monarchy, at the disposal of its sovereign, is inconsiderable; to Western notions, ludicrously inefficient. Yet it is certainly something to have aimed at a government which imposed laws and secured obedience without invoking force, however far short the practice fell of the ideal. Legislators in Europe who tried to set free the secular life of the people from Church tutelage, might have retained with advantage (had it been in their power) some of the best features of mediaeval society : local independence within small areas of province, township, and village ; the sense of reciprocal duties between ruler and subject ; the voluntary taxation of classes by themselves to meet extraordinary expenditure ; liberty of free association; personal and social ties as the basis of poHtical intercourse in place of the doubtful coherence of naked atoms. But it would seem that the conception of the State drifted off at once from its old moorings, and became not only irreligious but unmoral. Personal ethics (as we shall have occasion to see) were avowedly the ethics of self-interest, and to the select body of experts forming the Government were handed over many of the duties which man had once owed to himself and his fellow. It is probable that we have not yet reached the end of this process; such a point might be marked by the oft-threatened but never-effected 'separation
196 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
of Church and State,' by the overriding of parental inclination scruple, and responsibility in the interests of the race.
§ 4. If social institutions had in that unfortunate period of reconstruction been based on the feelings of average man, and not on a supposed return to a classical ideal, the result might have been more promising : a moral bond might have been retained; class jealousies and antipathies, to a large extent fomented by the sovereign authority, might have been appeased. Many of the burdens of parochial and civil life might have been regarded as privileges, and that public spirit in local and municipal improvements have been fostered which was so conspicuous in the Roman Empire under the wise and moderate supervision of the Imperial system. Taxes, no longer the im- position of an alien authority, might have been regarded as 'benevolences,' as voluntary subsidies. The assertion that such a scheme is impracticable, is to accept, at the outset and to save trouble, the Calvinistic belief in man's evil nature. But if the ' democratic ' movement has any definite principle it is the contradiction of this, the appeal to the original innocence and kindly feeling of the heart. The government by force of the sullen and recalcitrant cannot be considered the final form of society ; nor can its alternative, violent partisan reaction at the close of given periods, and the retrievement of loss by the well-known method, ' spoils to the victors.' Had human nature been understood or consulted, had it somehow managed to become articulate and to secure a hearing, government might perhaps have been the extension rather than the denial of the family. The spirit of willing obedience might have been transferred with happy result into a higher sphere ; the imperative and arbitrary character of the new legislation might have been softened. It need not be repeated that the change to what are termed representative institutions altered nothing in the general temper. It is indeed possible that the feeling of alien authority is stronger, now that a Government cannot lay claim to represent more than one-half of the nation.
§ 5. It is easy to idealise a mere possibiUty and to exag- gerate the defects of a development, perhaps inevitable; but it is clear that those movements which under various names seek to reduce the power and scope of government, have a genuine grievance against its abuses. No one can read
HUMAN NATURE 197
Tolstoy's End of the Age without a sense that his strictures are largely justified, that the painful constitutional reform of the last century has done little to relieve the distress of the toilers, to give a real value and definiteness to their boasted liberties. On this point few will be at issue with the writer. Acknowledgment of our failure is universal; only the means of applying a remedy are discussed ; and man's effort is paralysed by a sense of the unknown forces, social and economic rather than political, which disregard the highest motives of reformers and stultify their enterprise. But at least an appeal might be tried to the more generous instincts of mankind : to loyalty, a sense of honour, unselfish action for the common good, which in these days has been replaced by an anxious waiting for the next encroachment of the rulers. We are witnessing to-day the disappearance of the voluntary and spontaneous. It cannot be denied that in an exaggerated estimate of free-will, consequent on the nominal recognition of individual rights and value, the State was content to sit com- placently, vigilant but idle, until some crime had been done, rather than to take measures of prevention. It is no doubt a gain that the centre of interest is transferred from the punish- ment of a criminal to the early education, to the circumstances and training of the young, which stops the formation of such a character; yet it is impossible to avoid a certain mechanical automatism, and it is the common fault of all Utopian schemes that undue emphasis is laid on this early policing of character and industry, on the uniform minimum of unconscious virtue and compliance with rule that must result. The State (which in this context can never be anything but a well-meaning but fallible committee) takes over many of the ancient virtues, such as charity and the care of parents and children, and applies a certain, if gradual, solvent to the ties of domestic life. The time for ' voluntarism ' has passed, as for ' works of supererogation.'
§ 6. With this widespread distrust in average human nature, of which the above supplies symptoms rather than causes, the Christian can have no sympathy. Certain ages and nations have suffered because the ideal, recognised and carelessly re- spected in theory, has remained, like Plato's ideal domain, without contact with practice. It is possible in the other
198 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
extreme to have an avowed system of government and adminis- tration on a much lower and more sordid level than public sentiment. In the private life of the people there is little trace of that bitterness of class-feeling, that intensity of religious hatred, that complete selfishness of aim, which might be supposed to exist by the frequent auditor of political harangues. There is still for the ordinary person something in Government beyond a vexatious and alien power, elected by a factious minority, which it is his sole duty to cover with confusion and turn to the right-about as quickly as he can. There is some- thing in the everyday relations of landlord and tenant, employer and workman, which is characterised by a vague yet significant 'good feeling,' 'mutual understanding,' which shows no trace of jealous suspicions or resolute hostility. There is some danger that the wanton and irresponsible language freely em- ployed at certain crises in the history of ' democratic ' nations may not be so immediately discounted and forgotten ; may, by the insensible influence of repetition uncontradicted, silently chill the intimacy and confidence of the various orders in the State. Before a secular and selfish education has spoilt the finer motives, before an embarrassed State transfers the old spontaneous virtues to legislation and bureaucracy, it would be well for statesmen and social reformers to come nearer to the sound and generous heart of the people, to study rather than despair of the average man ; and to found institutions and government upon the natural aspirations of St. Christopher, which lie waiting for a cause and a master to serve, in all men, but in a high degree among those nurtured in the hopes and ideals of the Gospel.
B
On the Abstentionist Attitude of Reflection
§ I. Value of Christian faith for the present scheme of Western culture : it has no competitor : insignificant role of abstract thought : the three higher types — citizen, philosopher, Christian : ' ancient feud' of the first and last : the Church as harmonist and reconciler.
REFLECTION 199
§ 2. Inadequacy of the other types : as a fact they are never found pure and unmixed : yet speculative thought is clear in some modern instances that it has no hearing upon actual life : abdication of philo- sophy.
§ 3. Service rendered by this candid avowal : recognition that the citizen's life is not the Supreme Good ; that Religion and morality are essentially distinct : abandonment of the early claim of philosophy to co-ordinate all knowledge into a coherent whole : the retirement of the Brahmin or Buddhist theory from active competition leaves the field open to other influences.
§ 4. Education and guidance will pass to those who have most sym- pathy with ordinary men : the ' godless ' citizen, a fiction of anti- Christian imagination : spiritual basis of so-called ' secular ' systems : pure philosophy from the outset anti-civic, in spite of many attempts at compromise and reconciliation.
§ 5. Increasing detachment and isolation of the Thinker in Greece : the common life attracted only the sceptic, e.g. contrast of Lucian and Marcus Aurclius.
§ 6. Brief revival of social interest in the Neoplatonists : long and useful supervision of the Mediceval Church : detachment begins again with Protestantism.
§ 7. Withdrawal of the Protestant sects : ' mystical ' attitude of the new philosophy : both starling from demand for freedom end in sur- render to absolute powers : sinister influence on the development of the State.
§ 8. The English School alone preserves the compromise between ideal and actual : not open to the disadvantage of pure Monism ; a final verdict expressed in terms of absolute approval or the reverse : Deism, with its strong attempt to retain a moral basis for life, was its characteristic creed : a guarded attitude to the claims of reason : absence of desire to throw all the divisions of life into one : from such source came the ' popular ' philosophy of the eighteenth century.
§ 9. Reaction from the hopeful doctrines of Liberalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century : fact of force and existence sole test of merit and only argument : Thought once more turns away from active share in life to its study and criticism : waning influence of philosophy , in practical reaction against the early English Individualism, in theoretic Hegelianism or pure Anarchy : the 'democratic' movement goes on its way without regard to first principles or strict consistency.
§ I. One of the chief aims of this series is to draw attention to the function of Christian faith in practical Ufe, of individual or history ; to show that Western culture cannot dispense with the postulates which lie behind it, and that the peculiar moral ideal which is the outcome depends upon certain principles and matters of belief, to be held firmly or even defiantly,
200 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
never in the strict sense to be fully proved or explained. One fact which makes this part easier for the apologist is the insignificant role of abstract thought. The sole competitor and possible successor of Christian influence is and can only be the State, prescribing behaviour with fatherly minuteness, and in the slender field still left for personal initiative teaching some very general maxims of morality. If there are three types to be found which we desire for a moment to contrast — the citizen, the philosopher, the Christian — it will not be supposed that we deem them incompatible or incoherent. As no character is absolutely consistent, as the amiable weak- ness or strange anomaly redeems the most pedantic, so an admixture of these three types, or |rather attitudes, in actual life is to be discovered in every man. But broadly the distinction of these ideal figures, sequestered from each other in imagination, may be said to lie in this : the citizen finds warranty and guidance enough in human society for his ends and conduct; he looks beyond to no supernatural sanction, and is contented with the present and secular; for him morality can be taught upon a civic basis, and principles of honour inculcated independent of any dogma as to the nature of man and the universe, or their connection ; life, regulated by instinct which is concrete in society, seems long enough in the service of family and country to attain merit and satisfaction, and ultimate problems need not be raised. To the philosopher, or student of truth, this pursuit is an end in itself: sometimes the secrets of nature are his aim, to which only in a less degree the convenience and obvious use of their discovery attracts him ; often the search for reality, that which abides and exerts continuous force behind the world of ex- perience and change — to him the usefulness of such a pursuit is incidental, is a mere episode ; knowledge is his desire, however out of sympathy he must in this search become with the world of actual things. This figure is familiar to us as delineated by Plato, as realised in numberless sages of East and West, and even to-day pure speculation has its adherents in our own practical country. What is of significance to us at the present time is to note that this silent and absorbed figure stands resolutely aloof from the interests of the citizen. Morality and Truth (as we may have occasion to see later)
REFLECTION 201
are once again contrasted, as in the time of Aristotle, as throughout the constant practice and speculation of India. We are asking that the true function of the Church in the world, as a harmonist, should be duly estimated. We believe that the third figure alone can reconcile the animosity, the 'ancient feud,' of the two former, and bring together once more the sundered worlds of the real and the ideal.
§ 2. The practical need of independence and detachment, the vanity of attempting to make one set of logical rules do duty in an alien sphere, is no ground for reproaching the legitimacy, the cogency, of consistent systems. The type is unreal just because it is a type; and by banishing all that is individual it has lost all that is living. But this ' unreality ' does not interfere with its merit. In its proper place, it is indispensable. The Stoic ' wise man ' had its use in preaching, as it had its purpose ; but it was fortunate that no one could actually realise the monstrosity. No one can be a mere citizen, a mere thinker ; for the two have to meet in everyday life. The one has his private moments of anxiety, of hope and of wonder, and (certainly in earlier years) of speculation ; the other, his weaker relapses into sentiment and interest. It is not because the Christian rejects the civic ideals, or despises the sage's whole-hearted devotion to 'truth,' that he insists on their inadequacy. He claims that the Gospel embraces and ennobles every department, function, and relation of life ; and when he takes note of the dismal gulf which stretches between temporary expediency in actual life and the unapproachable ideal, he confidently believes that the mission of the Church is to unite what is separated, to conciliate what is hostile. " Philosophy," says Mr. McTaggart in his Hegelian Studies (204), "can afford us no guidance as to the next step to be taken at any time. . . . We are confronted to-day with schemes both for increasing and diminishing the stringency of social ties. . . . We are invited to nationalise the production of wealth. On the other hand, it is suggested that the relations of husband and wife, of parent and child, should be reduced to the minimum which is physiologically necessary. I have no intention of suggesting that the second tendency is right or — here at least — that the first is wrong. But I maintain that the question is one upon
202 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
which philosophy throws no light, and which must be decided empirically. The Ideal is so enormously distant, that the most perfect knowledge of the end we are aiming at helps us very little in the choice of the road by which we may get there. Fortunately, it is an ideal which is not only the absolutely good, but the absolutely real, and we can take no road that does not lead to it. (205) The result seems to be that philosophy can give us very little, if any, guidance in action. Nor can I see why it should be expected to do so. . . . And if it should be asked. Of what use then is philosophy? and if that should be held a relevant question to ask about the search for truth, I should reply that the use of philosophy lies, not in being deeper than science, but in being truer than theology ; not in its bearing on action, but in its bearing on religion. It does not give us guidance : it gives us hope."
§ 3. This extract supplies us with an excellent example of a philosophical phase which is extremely difficult to seize, to estimate, or to criticise. But it is not our present concern to draw notice to the ill-assorted parts, the rapid and discon- certing alternations of standpoint, the pure intellect and the obscure emotion, the Spinozan pietism, and the acrimonious negation of orthodoxy, which comes out even in this short passage, as it appears in all the writings of this small but important school — the British Hegelians. We would only call attention here to the candid avowal. It would be unfair and absurd to ridicule all the claims of philosophy because the philosopher is frank enough to confess that he has no salutary advice or suggestion for everyday concerns. To assert that the Hfe of citizens in community is not the supreme good, that the rules and dictates of Moral Law (often harsh, local, and petty) do not represent the supreme reality, is merely to revive in the West a cardinal doctrine of all Eastern sages from the birth of time, which has been forgotten in the childish zest and feverish petulance of Teutonic influences in Europe. It has been too often taken for granted that religion is synonymous with morality ; and it is one purpose at least of this course to point out the essential differences between them ; to show that only after a very superficial study of their nature and symptoms could any
REFLECTION 203
inquirer fall into the error of confounding them. Religion is not even 'morality touched with emotion.' And Mr. McTaggart and the rest of his school have done this service : they have maintained the distinction, the independence, the relative merits of the religious and the moral Hfe. But in common with their Oriental forefathers, from whom somewhat reluctantly they must trace their spiritual descent, they have locked the door that leads from one realm to the other and have lost the key. It was once the boast of Philosophy that it co-ordinated all knowledge and experience into a coherent whole. That again and again the philosopher failed to make good his promise was no hindrance to new and sanguine endeavours. Men once more arose who claimed to cover the whole ground, and provide not only ultimate satisfaction but the initial alphabet of the sciences. But by such honest confession as we have read above, one vast hemisphere of knowledge and experience is allowed to fall away from the guidance and the interpretation of Thought. The field is now left clear by this abdication for any substitute, in authority or stimulus. Significant enough of the present state of feeling is the repeated boast or the muttered regret that the Catholic Church has before it a new and brilliant era of worldly use- fulness. Conscious reason, reflected and systematised, is un- availing in the domain of experience. It tells of a 'king- dom not of this world,' of a single absolute, or of a republic of spirits self-existing from all eternity. It lays emphasis either on the Brahmin's doctrine that 'God is the all,' or on the Buddhist belief in a series of lives governed by an impersonal rule of recompense (Fichte's Moral Order). But in neither case has it any suggestion to offer about the manifold and uncertain life which alone we know and alone remember.
§ 4. If these two currents of life, practical and theoretical, set in different directions ; if the one suffer from an absence of all principle but convenience and opportunism, and the other retreat in haughty indifference to cloudland — the education of the world will fall into the hands of those who have most sympathy with the difficulties and aspirations of ordinary men. The pure citizen, dreamt of in the French Revolution, godless, patriotic, and eloquent of moral abstrac-
204 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
tions, has never as a fact existed. The basis of classical duty and love to country and parents was entirely religious ; and no one who is acquainted with the real springs and sanctions of conduct in China or in Japan will pretend to have at last discovered a pure sense of obligation and self- denial apart from ' superstition ' or transcendental belief. The solidarity of the family, visible and invisible, shades of ancestors and worshipping descendants, has its counterpart in the Christian doctrine of the Church militant and triumphant. There is no genuine secularism, limiting hopes and duties to the span of a single precarious life, in the great Confucian scheme, which, though reverently silent about heaven or the Supreme Being, can prescribe, on the basis of parental affection and filial duty, a civilisation far older and perhaps more stable than our own. The godless citizen, whose fore- fathers were mere dust in an urn, yet whose sense of honour was more acutely sensitive than the Christian conscience, is a fiction of interested partisans. Always has some dim sense of spiritual communion with past heroes reinforced a civic enthusiasm, apt to abate in the cool light of reflection, and to be extinguished altogether in the more personal delight of speculative search. It is, it may be hoped, superfluous to show how from the very first the tide of Greek thought set away from the wall of the city-state. Hegel and Carlyle agree in this, that the criticism of a social institution or the grammar of a language does not begin until it has lost its early vigour. To be self-conscious is still vaguely a reproach ; the owl of Minerva wings her melancholy flight when evening shadows fall. Certain it is that Attic humanism, starting from a great and widespread distrust in the State, powerfully stimulated by a singular act of blind injustice and indis- criminating hate, represents an attempted compromise with civic life that failed. Socrates, it is true, died complying with an unrighteous judgment of his country which he might have evaded, but in a very different spirit from the unquestioning, unreasoning surrender of those whose epitaph runs —
" Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by, That here obedient to their laws we lie ! "
For, like Antigone, he died vindicating a sacred region of
REFLECTION 205
personal faith, a mission over which the State had no power, into which it could not penetrate. Religious conviction, conscience, truth, became of paramount importance, were not amenable to dictation from one's fellows ; were, like the chief good to Aristotle, something private and inalienable.
§ 5. His two successors, though genuinely sincere in defining man's differentia as sociality, yet clearly lead away from the narrowness of civic routine. Half the time of the military and monastic order, Plato's guardians, is passed in devotional exercise, in the contemplation of ideal forms. Their contact with real life was half-unwilling, and could only be borne in the hope of ultimate freedom from the common- place, in the dread of unworthy substitutes. Cicero, who some centuries later, and in strict imitation at a time of similar disillusionment, has to fix a celestial reward to attract the best men towards the irksome duties of founding and ruling States. Aristotle, perhaps half-unconsciously, marks a still further stage of detachment. Interested in statecraft and public institutions, as in any other sphere of orderly and accessible knowledge, he shows the acumen of the student rather than the eager zest of the agent ; and, judging merely in the light of previous and later development among Greek thinkers, we cannot wholly explain away the priority he gives to the theoretic life. Indeed, Greek ethics began and ended not with convention and community, but with cosmo- politanism — a bold endeavour to find the law of nature valid for all rational beings. The ' Semitic ' School of the Porch is no less a stranger and a pilgrim in a foreign land ; preferring, in the enforced isolation of the fabulous sage, to imitate the 'god,' where their predecessors, the Cynics, had imitated the ' beast.' Their ideal was more refined and somewhat more sympathetic, but it could not be called more social. For the Epicurean, a charmed circle of friendship and seclusion took the place of domestic or social cares; and the civilised world fell an easy prey to the greedy struggles of the Diadochi, to the calmer and more disinterested ambition of Rome. Elsewhere, we have tried to show how among the Sceptical School alone, distrusting both individual human reason and the stability of its objective, was a strong reaction found towards life in society. With them, as with
2o6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Hegel, the unconscious collective will or spirit at work in society is the true guide ; and this will be found to be purely partial and relative, owing in each age and people its notable features to climate, race, national character, and to a political development which somehow runs its appointed course quite independent of its loud-voiced actors. We may well contrast the attitude of Lucian and of Marcus Aurelius. The sum of Lucian's world-wisdom is comprised in the significant words of the ' Hermotimus ' — Kal av toivw . , . es to Xolttov av afjuwov TTOtr/crats (3lov re KOtvoi' uTraaL /3iovv a^toiv kol ^vjxiro\LTi.v<Tri rot?
TToA-AoiS Ovh\v aXXoKOTOV K. TCTU^WyUcVoi/ cATTt^WV ; Whllst tlie
true home of the Imperial philosopher is not the busy State and its corrupt commerce of fools, but the inner shrine of a meditative soul, and a world-fabric which, in spite of the Stoic axiom (Kara (jivaiv = KaTo. Xoyov), has somehow drifted out of the comprehension and sympathy of the thinker.
§ 6. The more austere features of abstention vanished in the Neoplatonic School. A hierarchy of varying natures and capacities, each good in its especial place, succeeded a ' crude dualism ' of saved and lost ; in the scheme of things there were 'many mansions.' In the progressive education of souls by re-birth requital was always impartial ; station, duties, and recompense adjusted to the fitness of the proficient. Amidst all the disorder of the reign of Egnatius Gallienus (253-268 A.D.), the feudal period of the earlier empire, there was room in the School of Plotinus for quiet philanthropic work, for lectures at the court, even for suggestions of political experiment ; for it was proposed to test the value of Plato's ' Republic ' in a ruined city in Campania. While the strenuous hand of central authority relaxed, individual enterprise revived; the provinces of Rome throbbed with a new if tumultuous life; and the philosopher issued from his privacy to tend the widow and the orphan or to propose a social scheme. Mysticism has indeed not seldom been found united with a sound judgment in practical matters, with keen interest in others' welfare; but only when the basis is religious. We have before traced the curious detach- ment of the great mediaeval minds from the common life; the interpretation of all problems in terms of the only universal science, jurisprudence. We are apt to forget the
REFLECTION 207
less conspicuous workers who have left no record; and the erroneous view has been widely received, that the Church neglected the present for an imaginary future. We need hardly perhaps repeat that the active development of science and society, of individual and general reason, could never have taken place without its support and guidance. We must not judge the thoughts of an age by its chief writers, just as we cannot estimate national welfare by the brilliance of a court, the success of a foreign policy. The thinker and the poet must always be exceptional rather than repre- sentative; and humanitarian sentiments are most flattered at a time when they have least influence. " The passion for unity in the mediaeval mind," says Mr. Figgis, " only expressed the fact that this unity was so seldom realised." The logical culmination of Christian theory might be an absorbed devotional ecstasy, but the constant practice was a patient supervision of mundane interests, 'the day of small things.' Pure anchoritism was rather a pagan heritage than a Christian tradition ; the believer was never taught to be heedless of externals, careless of behaviour, or indifferent to social well- being. It was the error of the Reformers, reacting from a system of graduated conduct, somewhat threadbare and artificial at that time, to suppose that all duties, Hke all merit, were equal; that there was one true pattern or type of life, as well as one single path of orthodoxy. Where the Catholic Church utilised and guided the exceptional, the Protestants expelled. The mystical or detached temperament is elevated to saintship by the one, no less than the fiery zeal of the missionary ; but it becomes suspect in the other, and forms a sect. The Catholic Church cannot, at one and the same time, be accused of undervaluing and overvaluing the present.
§ 7. It cannot be denied that with the Reformation, religion, not merely clericalism, ceased to exert a moral supervision over statecraft. Protestantism bowed to the secular power, and largely helped in strengthening its claims to irresponsible sovereignty. The old problem of Tertullian, Novatian, Donatus, once more reappeared. Did the true Church con- sist of the obedient or of the perfect, of the conforming or the converted? Each sect, breaking away in the first place
2o8 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
from an indistinct ecumenical union, found even a national basis beyond their imagination ; their embrace becomes con- stantly restricted, their membership more difficult. Rulers, indeed, Catholic and Protestant alike, might show strong interest in religious difference, — in war, the religious issues were dominant for a century and a half after Luther, — but the two sides of human life were no longer in any vital connection. And pure philosophy in the eighteenth century followed the lead of the strictly religious and Puritan movement. The three Revivals — of learning, of religious thought, of independent philosophy — issued, as we know, from the cradle of freedom ; the one common motive was desire for personal autonomy. Breaking from the control of the Catholic objective, the pioneers did little more at first than transcribe, edit, and interpret the treasures of the ancient world; they did not originate; they did but exchange one authority for another, the ' dead hand ' of the Church for the ' dead hand ' of an alien culture. The Reform within the Church had in view the enfranchisement of the subjective spirit; but it entailed sub- mission to the Book, though it opened the door to private versions, and took refuge against this new 'Sophistic' in a rigorous Confessionism. Modern philosophy in the early years of the seventeenth century tried to repudiate all authority, ipse dixit and hearsay. But, as we might expect, in de- manding this complete independence, it left also in perfect autonomy the other realm of practical life, never really amenable to logic. It could not overthrow the edifice so patiently built up by the unconscious efforts of workers in Church and State, the coral-reef of popular custom. Its attitude over against this dead weight was one of convinced or ironical deference; in Montaigne and in Descartes re- appears in a novel phase that mediaeval doctrine of the Double Truth, which in some form or another seems necessary to all aristocratic and esoteric philosophy. The keynote of this age is ' the subordination of the individual to the absolute powers,' just as the text of thought in the next century is free personality. Resignation is the chief doctrine of orthodox and innovator alike — submission to the autocratic State (which just then happened to be controlled by masterful individuals), pious obedience to the world-process, with which
REFLECTION 209
in a strange confusion of thought the Divine will was absolutely identified (for the Divine, expelled by reflection from accidental and intermittent interference with the parts, had been restored to the undivided sovereignty of the whole). Only in England did the practical independence and sober sense of her philosophers refrain from this mystic surrender of rights into irresponsible hands. Detachment of thought from the actual, and recognition of any power because it ivas, not because it could be justified, to reason, to justice, or to imagination, exerted a truly sinister influence on the un- checked development of the State towards an un-moral autocracy. Unprincipled intrigue and secular diplomacy took the place of ecclesiastical arbitration. The States of Europe were broken up into open or covert foes ; and reflection, seeing only the accomplished fact, intent on its own inward peace and security, did nothing towards supplying the want which the abdication or rejection of the old guide had created. § 8. The whole practical and popular movement of philosophy in the ensuing age took its rise in this island. Here the intimate connection of the ideal and the actual had never been severed. The man of thought was also the man of action. ConstitutionaHsm, or the compromise between the rival doctrines of sovereignty, whether of State or Individual, is defended and explained by the same pen that examined so coolly the pretensions of the human understanding. Hume is not ashamed to confess that in the light of day he forgets, or is obliged to put aside, the prepossessions of his strict theory. This wise attitude makes the best of both worlds without seeking to force them into an unnatural or a premature unity. Monism, since Calvin and Spinoza, had expelled the ' human- istic ' illusion on which a confident, practical life is necessarily built. Intent upon arbitrary Will or changeless Substance, it could only envisage a supposed totaHty ; it would not con- descend to arrest its attention and concentrate its notice upon a trivial stage in the fleeting process. And, as we may soon detect in the later development, if, owing to the religious and moral (that is, humanistic and relative) instinct of man, it is impossible to refrain from a general qualification of the whole, the sole terms which can apply are absolute good and absolute bad. And, as we must often repeat, it is a mere 14
2IO THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
question of temperament what the final verdict will be. We may perhaps admire the pious equanimity of Spinoza more than the hopeless discontent of later pessimism ; but there are no arguments, there is no arbiter that can decide on the truth of the two phases. All ultimate verdicts, where they are not temperamental petulances, are ventures of faith or acts of faith. From this unfortunate position the English School was saved by its interest in practice, behaviour, develop- ment, the individual ; and also, in no small degree, by its sense of humour. Deism, the supposed religion of nature and of reason, is a concession to the needs of the practical life : it accepts mechanism, without the piety of a morbid resignation, but superposes a teleologic postulate, — which amounted to a moral demand that man should be the end of creation, and virtue something better than 'its own reward.' English thinkers had no desire to batter down with wanton impatience the walls of partition between the divers interests and sciences of life. They recognised the limits and the fallibility of human reason, and were at no pains to show that it was Divine, or God Himself. They doubted whether the development of the spiritual element in things could be correctly estimated by a vague introspection into one's own soul, or a still more vague scrutiny of the human records of a few thousand years. So long as they had working rules which were actually effective in their respective departments, they had no wish to coerce the rest under one set, raised into an artificial and paramount position. They were loyal to their State and country without requiring a logically perfect or consistent Constitution. And from them came the sacred flame of energetic thought, not satisfied with ideal vision, but seeking to perfect the real, which largely kindled the eager and sanguine movement of the French Revolution.
§ 9. Philosophy in this age is popular, not abstruse ; it is concerned with the world and feels its responsibility. In place of devotional homage to the Universal, enlightened self- interest, best attained by social amity and forbearance, is the end in view for all. But the idea of innate goodness and the happiness of free co-operation gave place in the early years of last century to the doctrine of State-control. Philosophy veered, with the wind of middle-class opinion, towards the
REFLECTION 2 1 1
salutary and unenterprising. The emphasis on the personal, the ' humanistic,' the moral, gave way before the cult of force, of the unconscious yet irresistible world-spirit ; before the blissful contemplation of the universe from the aesthetic side, equally prominent in Hegel and in his most bitter opponent, Schopenhauer. For the guidance of the average man, the concrete spirit of the race embodied in its institutions seemed to suffice. The State, like everything else, justified itself by the mere fact of existence, which now remained the sole argument and test of merit. Thought once more bowed to the ' powers that be,' and, leaving the masses under military tutelage and inquisitive police, passed on to its own esoteric studies. Only in England has the voice of protest been raised in favour of individual development and self-realisation. The champions of the older Liberalism, with all their ignorance of human nature, at least believed in it ; their pious faith almost atoned for their lack of first-hand acquaintance. It is essential to the welfare of government (though it may sound strange to-day) that it should repose upon a basis of mutual confidence and respect. This was attempted by the English writers, half- statesmen, half-philosophers, the disappointment of whose generous sentiments and outlook is the most alarming symptom on the political horizon. Once again, even in England, philo- sophy retired into the clouds, or rather into that ideal ' watch- tower ' from which the Universe might be contemplated in an imaginary totality; a survey pleasing indeed to the pride or piety of the speculator, but not to be shared by those whose work still kept them 'attached to the soil.' Some of these still retain, with creditable inconsequence and in one distinct compartment, an interest in social advance and individual discipline. But the entire small but notable movement of British Hegelianism is strictly a reaction against the freedom and hopefulness of the older Liberals, though few of its representatives might care to confess it. Elsewhere, if philosophy is sincere, it is on the side of autocracy ; where it is sanguine as well as sincere, it is carried in its noble love for liberty far beyond the bounds of sobriety, into the denial of all law and all control. But the influence of these prosaic academicians or overwrought Idealists is infinitesimal. They have neither the patience nor the confidence which is necessary
VIF
CLAIMS FOR THE iXi\:DUAL 21
S 7. Fresh outUt in tJu Reliiictu m the ' Extrewu Lefi ' : m ital cf A uih :r: revnrsi homed to the Ceniral f u.<rr, c, ■ . fretdom : ike StaU supprts rrt!^t\cu;i: ■ cUricai injhuiue : irr^hcirr. cf C.-^ris u- ism ' of Sovereigns btfort tkt Retclutu >. . 0/ Jesus.
f 8. The nineteenth c^ntnry optns with-.iddU- impracticabU rishts : nrx form cf Casarv. rejUction and private predilection : incrfs^- no longer comprised in citizenship : reh^ soms extent) action more free to-day.
{ 9. The strictly academic problem current n: ' ' m ignores
the cons. -.eism met
scie ' : mess
S 10. TJu- ' .J»~ Christian Church n. mith the deijication of auii^Uy.
Kin century :
rit:!!:iual
: ive
.fid
■jI-
- Crier
in - T ...... .^tt^ttsm
nee, taste, and (to
m ' not treated :
:iy. — emergence of
than m tktonHc
:t mith conscious-
' ^fs : the ms than
coercive axgumenL' In effect, mpatib'.e with our well-defined
§ I. Whether we regret or are gntful for the result, we cannot doubt that the emergence of • nsciousness
is at least one principal 'aim' of th- — ^ iS, as mani- fested at least on our planet When e speak of freedom in any genuine ^te
.value of this < 1 . - is
)t a fact of experience or a theory trca can be establishetl
"5 more patently
systems of the
1, or with the knowledge . the wayside of life.
it invariably under the
custom, impersonal :
Church -s ; and, lastly. ::. .
, automatic State-conirol, wh. —
brain and motive are extiiK
into con
eeds be u
certain nor accor.
It may well be thougn: .
)b!em the historical te-
liest days of Europea.
a method is perha^
Universals, — natural
thodox creeds, and
educa-
_ -.vorking
The spirit struggles
• ■ • ' -.ful
i.er
.: they desire — self-
- •'-od to apply
:o trace it
to the present
.^..^^n sable; at any
212 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
for reformers who would deal direct, not with Acts of Parlia- ment, Ukases, Dumas, and Utopias, but with average mankind. But in spite of its present-day eclipse, the ' democratic ' instinct is still strong; and ordinary men and women with certain duties and uncertain leisure, with vague aspirations towards that which they dimly feel to be the Good, form in our civilisation an element by no means negligible.
Claims of the Individual for consideration (historically treated)
§ I. Personal consciousness seems an ' aim ' in the world-process : claim for liberty always baffled : stages in its demands for emanci- pation : the Sophists as pioneers.
§ 2. Reaction against Nature, Habit, Instinct, Control, in favour of purpose, insight, art : yet this claim not for all men ; aristocracy of enlightenment.
§ 3. The State, as the result of voluntary compact or surrender, of deliberate design : spontaneous element in society, language, be- haviour, overlooked : original equality first postulated, then forgotten : ' Sophistic,' speculative, not practical or Iconoclastic : {contrast of later movements) less revolutionary than Plato : not dogma but the proof of dogma disputed (as with Scotus).
§ 4. ' Man measure of all things ' ; its meaning : in epistemology, not so much in feeling or in moral Judgment : Relativism should win approval to-day : man recalled to his true kingdom, giving ' values ' (as Adam names) to the world of things : limits of our human faculties ; a modified anthropocentrism, not anarchy or Nihilism.
§ 5. The age of classical Humanism at Athens won independence for the wise : failure of subjectivity, whether licentious or austere, hastened on the Roman Empire ; a brilliant compromise between the sovereignty of the State and the sovereignty of the Individual : neither Alcibiades nor Diogenes had succeeded : a new freedom claimed and won by Christianity : the East commended personal search, the West was long before it tried to suppress it : the Renaissance, the second great revolt, culminates in the Reformation.
§ 6. Curious complicity of intellectual brilliance and despotism : Antinomian tendencies of pure Thought; revival of the spirit in- variably weakens ' morality ' : tolerance and doubt born of the Crusades: ' Age of the Despots ' and culture : the basis ability, not parental right : claim of ruler and of genius to be ' above law.'
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 213
§ 7. Fresh outlet in the Religious movements of sixteenth century : the ' Extreme Left ' : revival of Authority : once more the intellectual revival bowed to the Central power, contenting itself with speculative freedom : the State supports freethought in its attacks on belief and clerical influence : irreligion of Courts under the prevailing ' Liberal- ism ' of Sovereigns before the Revolution : suppression of the Order of Jesus.
§ 8. The nineteenth century opens with middle-class surrender of impracticable rights : new form of CcBsarism : liberty once more in rejection and private predilection : increasing scope for individualism no longer comprised in citizenship : religion, conscience, taste, and (to some extent) action more free to-day.
§ 9. The strictly academic problem of 'freedom ' not treated : current metaphysical 'mysticism ignores the difficulty, — emergence of the conscious person : Pantheistn more lethargic than a theoretic scientific fatalism, which but rarely comes into conflict with conscious- ness of iyjtrinsic energy : on this the zest of life depends.
§ 10. The 'Anarchist' movement, its justice and its hopes: the Christian Church in far more genuine sympathy with these aims than with the deification of authority.
§ I. Whether we regret or are grateful for the result, we cannot doubt that the emergence of the personal consciousness is at least one principal ' aim ' of the secular process, as mani- fested at least on our planet. When we speak of freedom in any genuine sense, we imply the independence and ultimate value of this consciousness. It need not be said that this is not a fact of experience or a theory which can be established by 'coercive argument.' In effect, nothing is more patently incompatible with our well-defined speculative systems of the world, or with the knowledge gathered by the wayside of life. We find it invariably under the control of Universals, — natural law, social custom, impersonal tradition, orthodox creeds, and Catholic Churches ; and, lastly, the heavy hand of formal educa- tion and automatic State-control, which goes on silently working long after brain and motive are extinct. The spirit struggles in vain to emerge into complete autonomy, and the thoughtful or daring must needs be unhappy, because they can neither accurately ascertain nor accomplish what they desire — self- realisation. It may well be thought a tedious method to apply to each problem the historical test, to attempt to trace it from the earliest days of European thought to the present time. But such a method is perhaps indispensable; at any
2 14 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
rate, on this topic, we have no alternative. For it is Greek cities and Greek thinkers that stand to us as the first champions of freedom. Before self-consciousness awoke, the independent research of Naturalism had, without knowing it, laid claim to entire liberty. When the individual who mocked at the interests or protested against the control of society, found him- self with even less guarantee for freedom in the world of things, an acute Individualism, blithe or resigned, arose in the Sophistic movements. Man, hitherto a serf in a State regulated by ancestral routine or an accidental phenomenon in a fatal world, might somehow regain his independence. He could come back once more to the State and his fellows, having learnt this at least in his Wanderjahre, that nothing was sacred, and that his true cleverness lay in making others, by hook or by crook, think like himself. He became an adept in rhetoric, always in Greece a more powerful engine than the sword. Single and detached, as befitted their principles, found- ing no school, establishing no body of doctrine, the Sophists perambulated Greece, and taught selfishness as a fine art, in the cooling temperature of the reaction after the Persian wars. After all, it is to them that we owe the implicit doctrine, " Each man as end and not merely as means," upon which basis rests the entire structure of our humanitarian ethics. It is true it did not apply beyond the circle of the noble, the gifted, and the opulent. But even so it must be deemed a distinct conquest, a vantage-ground won for human thought and freedom, against the tyranny of unquestioned convention, which, whether in social or moral sphere, is a dead weight on progress.
§ 2. Everywhere was there abroad a tendency to refer de- velopment to conscious and deliberate initiative. "Design calculating Purpose and Invention," says Gomperz of the speculations of Protagoras, " fill the room of Nature, Habit and unconscious Instinct. ... By * art,' ' wisdom,' or ' virtue ' . . . men built houses, governed the Commonwealth, and fulfilled the moral law. . . . We think (he continues, not without humour) that we can discern a pedantic note in these utter- ances [of the Platonic Socrates], a hint of the schoolmaster's exaggerated reverence for what is founded on reflection, re- duced to rule, and teachable by precept. Such a view of life
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 215
(he concludes) was eminently suited to the infancy of mental and moral sciences, and was in none . . . more strongly or more clearly developed than in the person of Socrates." There is no need to wonder at the illogical issue of the doctrine, " Every man an end and a centre in himself." With an honest desire to elicit the spontaneous in every man, the Socratic method combined an intense hatred of the merely capricious. As with the ' Enlightenment ' which about two hundred years ago spread over all educated society in Europe a wonderfully homogeneous body of rules and principles, this vaunted freedom of the unit to think and act only with the sanction of a convinced inward approval, very soon made way for a minute State-tutelage, which was to be perpetual and (it must be feared) hypocritical or ironic, like its master. It is difficult to disembarrass the Platonic accretions from the genuine Socrates; but it seems clear that he would have assented to thus confining humanity's real prerogative to a narrow and cultured circle. The wise man, claiming an inlet into Universal Reason, might pretend to no advantage over his fellows, if they would only resign themselves to its dictation ; but in the end he was always prone to impose on others his own arbitrary and personal system. With the slow process of converting the ignorant, he was very naturally impatient ; like his successors, it seemed enough if one privileged class in the State possessed insight ; if " the philosopher could rule as king," if the "enlightenment could capture the machinery of absolutism," if, with Mr. H. G. Wells, " the New Republicans combined to sweep away grey and deliquescent democracy," all requirements would be satisfied. It need not be said that such a compromise could content neither party ; neither Aristophanes or Cephalus the Conservatives, or Alcibiades the Radical individualist.
§ 3. The State, men began to think, arose in the voluntary combination of rational men, in the free reflecting choice of rulers and forms of government. They overlooked the early insignificance of the individual, except as limb of a tree, member of family or class. They disparaged the "slow and imper- ceptible achievements of the moderately gifted multitude " in their veneration, not so much for the God-inspired, God- descended hero, as for the figure of the calm, dispassionate citizen, trained by long discipline of self-government, — a reflec-
2i6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
tion of themselves which they strangely and imprudently threw back into the misty past. The same prepossession hindered the recognition of the spontaneous element in language, and led to the constant antithesis of nature and convention, of (^uVts and v6fx.o<;, each finding zealous champions. The Atomists, who were really the earliest Sophists, see in the one, changeless, indestructible constancy; in the other, whether in human society or personal feeling, mere idiosyncrasy, amenable to no law. When this was found in its highest perfection, masterful, unscrupulous, and free from all trammels, it could command (as later in the case of the Italian despots) an aesthetic approval ; for vague and undefined democracy is only, if one may use the term, the vestibule to hero-worship. And in rejoicing in the strength of the 'young lion's cub,' or in seeking to revive aristocracy, they overthrew alike the pretensions of an original equality, postulated as the origin of all society. It has been well pointed out that the great difference between the enlighten- ment of sophist and of ' philosopher ' was that the former never seriously descended into the sphere of practice. Greece was homogeneous — but not crushingly uniform — in its government and social traditions. No urgent economic problems, as in France a century ago or in Russia to-day, pressed for solution. There was no violent overthrow of religion or commonwealth, only a gradual decline in interest and conviction. The Greek cosmopolitanism (which was really limited to the confines of the Greek world) was, it is true, a mere disguise for individuahsm, — but it was passive and despondent, not iconoclastic. The 'Intellectual' movement in France or in Russia claimed at once to upset the existing fabric and issue in a daring challenge to any and every authority; but the criticism and analysis of the Sophists was never a revolutionary propaganda. Indeed (if for a moment we may speak generally of an uncon- certed movement of individuals that cannot be recognised as a ' school '), Sophistic was never so radical as Plato or the Cynics. And Aristophanes is perhaps guilty of no injustice in divert- ing attention from the harmless rhetoric and paradoxes of the ordinary itinerant to the real mischief of the arch-Sophist. Prodicus is the apostle of the simple Hfe, of strenuous man- hood. About the middle of the fifth century, Protagoras legislates effectively for the new colony of Thurii. The State
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 217
had less to fear from the brief riot of juvenile individualism delighting in academic thesis, than from the studied aloofness and disdain of philosophy. The Roman Empire again, in- dulgent (within Umits) to fanciful and orgiastic cults, refused to listen to the exclusive and uncompromising claims of Christianity. Once more the Sophists, by many hastily charged with atheism, seem on closer inspection to have doubted not so much the existence of the gods, as its proofs, — not ' belief in, but cognition of, the Gods.' And here, as indeed in the whole later Nominalist movement in the Middle Ages, there is nothing violent, nothing in the vulgar sense 'sceptical'; it is merely the Greek equivalent of the wise or time-serving Tacitean adage, ' Sanctius ac reverentius visum de actis deorum credere quam scire^ which, in an age of exaggerated deference to the clear, formal, and correct, to rational insight and conscious purpose, allows some moment in matters of deep import to non-rationalised belief and the weight of spontaneous popular faith and tradition.
§ 4. It would be impossible to leave this topic without reference to its most notable maxim — uv^pcoTro? /xeTpov ajravTotv, in which we fancy we can detect the extreme of individualism and anarchy. Like most other relics and fragments of the Sophistic age, it is terse and obscure, for Heraclitus is still the model for gnomic statement ; like the rest it is capable of two opposite meanings, as the famous amphilogy, to avixcfiepoi' Tov KpetTTovos, elthcr one to be deftly put in prominence for the vain blows of the debater and as deftly withdrawn at the will of the skilful Sophist. It can only be blindness or ' torpor ' in Thrasymachus that somehow the chance is missed of disconcerting Socrates by a lofty and idealist meaning of the ' interests of the right.' So our most subjective of maxims may be a proud claim for human reason in general to weigh and appraise the world of things, by indisputable right, as Adam, called on to give names to the animals ; it may be the pretension of a sovereign or the despair of a sceptic, for ever shut up in his own imaginary world which is for him alone, but it certainly need not be interpreted as a demand for the absolute validity without appeal of individual stand- ards ; ^Tiof ho7nines, tot sententice — and we might add, tot ?nimdi. If the whole sophistic tendency is towards Relativism, it
2i8 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
must merit the approval of an age like our own, which in its persevering industry in particular departments has tacitly condemned any wild attempts at summary implication and all complacent dogmatism. The Sophistic age recalled man to his true kingdom, — the calm survey of all things not as they are in themselves, but as they are in relation to himself, his knowledge and his needs : for Humanism is mainly a fixing of values (sometimes, with Nietzsche, a ' transvaluation '), an appraisement. In medicine, man already set up as the aim no vague definition of average human nature, but an inductive, casuistic inquiry what he is in relation to his food and drink and to the rest of life's duties. Kant has been compared to Socrates; but, to speak candidly, he resembles him only in that moral austerity or unction (whichever you will) that is always completely separable from the tenets of any particular creed or system. In the real field of philosophy, meta- physical thought, his forerunners are the Sophists ; ' know- ledge is for ever limited by the bounds of our human faculties ' ; we can never look out upon the world with other than human eyes. And in this lies no Nihilism, no anarchy. Later Humanism bade us forget the individual and "lay hold on eternal life " (€<^' oa-ov ivS^x^raL aOavari^eLv). But the keynote of Greek tragedy and Greek Sophistry is modesty and caution, /A€TptoT7/5 : it maintained the anthropocentric stand- point, but without the pride of exclusiveness, without the pretensions to absolute knowledge, which have been the bane of all the Great Systems. The chief maxim or article of the Sophistic creed teaches us to recognise, not to despair of, our limitation ; a tempered individualism based on humility which must surely be the genuine spirit of any discoverer or moral teacher of values.
§ 5. Underneath a transparent disguise of loyalty to the State, the classical humanists of Athens undermined its authority, and won the recognition of the independence of the wise. At least, it must be acknowledged that the private life of the highest civic order, whether devotional exercise or scientific study, becomes more prominent than his public duties. It was the failure of egoism that hastened on the ' social compact ' of the Roman Empire. The isolated sage was either miserable, defenceless, and persecuted ; or made
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 219
impossible demands on a social world and a Nature, both of which had long ceased to have any moral import. Both C^sar and Antony, it may be said, represented too much the wild subjectivity of Alcibiades to have any permanent influ- ence on society. It was law-abiding simplicity, unwearying diligence, steady reaction towards Conservative past, that ensured power to Augustus. The pretension to be 'above law ' had failed, as the claim to live aloof from society. The Imperial system was a brilliandy successful compromise between the Sovereignty of the State and the Sovereignty of the Individual. It satisfied the mature self-consciousness of the latter, without letting slip the principles of order and cohesion. And a government which is by turns accused of extreme socialism and military despotism must, if we take the mean between these two wild accusations, have adapted itself not infelicitously to the needs of the age. In Christianity, the individual won another triumph in the separation of the sphere of conscience and conformity. It was only in the debatable borderland of the two that the Empire challenged this inde- pendence. Largely allowing personal autonomy and private creeds, there was for the loyal statesman a point at which further concession was impossible. The Greek Church never ceased exhorting believers to prove and test dogma for them- selves, to transform faith into knowledge. It is true that formal orthodoxy was of vital importance, but the Easterns never identified this with lip-service or a dull compliance with authority. The Western Church, with its Roman tradition and Augustinian influences, surrendered more to the Universal, visibly and beneficently embodied in the Hierarchy. But (as we have tried to show) it cannot be said to have stifled free- thought and private judgment, until it became alarmed at the conspicuous divorce of fact and theory, ascertained knowledge and accepted creed. We have now reached the second great revolt in the history of thought. The Renaissance, far more diffuse and varied than the Sophistic movement, is also far more weighty and long enduring in its results. It cannot be summed in a single sentence, or exhausted in a short analysis of its signal features. It covered every side of human life, and its final issue was the Reformation. Luther might well have supposed he was fighting against an ungodly secular wisdom
2 20 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
as against a narrow and perverted Italian papacy; but in truth he was the last in the long series of Reformers who sought to remove the shackles of the personal spirit, and who, alas ! only opened the way for a more cruel tyranny,
§ 6. To many it will always be matter for wonder that periods of exceptional enlightenment, of literary brilliance, of rapid social advance, have been so often marked by a return to despotism. The phrase 'Augustan ' applied to such golden epochs is not without a deep significance. We may notice that this attitude, acquiescence in the strong hand, is no homage to legitimacy, but a deference to sheer force and ability ; it is no revival of the idea of parental sovereign, but a new conception of arbitrary will. In effect, pure thought, the reflective earnestness that wishes, with Descartes, to sweep away all prepossessions, is somewhat anarchic, antinomian, and unsocial. It is precisely this dull-hued edifice of respectable convention that arouses its doubt or its disdain. It has a standing quarrel, a smouldering resentment against society. Even orthodox inquirers into the moral sentiments and the laws or current behaviour of civilised countries, must stand aghast at the chaos of incoherence and absurdity which tolerates the fact if the name be not pronounced, finds ready excuse or tolerant cloak for certain classes of offence, and bans others equally sordid, no doubt, yet in evil effect no worse, without appeal. The revival of the Spirit has never failed to weaken moral cogency or to soften the moral fibre. Tolerance and breadth of view is incompatible with prophetic indigna- tion. The intercourse of East and West — silently in the penetration of Arab culture from Spain, loudly in the religious wars around the Holy Sepulchre, which, beginning with hate of zealots, ended in something akin to respect — weaned the Western peoples from conceit and undermined their sense of exclusive privilege. A cosmopolitan complacence entered European society, wherever men of intelligence passed beyond criticism of the existing churchly order. Once more admira- tion was felt for the spontaneous and untutored ; and the *Age of the Despots' was regarded with indifference or approval, not merely because a certain order and a centralised court afford field or asylum for the artist and poet, for the man of perverted genius against outraged society, but also because
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 221
thought fancies it can detect its own triumphs in the success of ' Will,' untrammelled by social restraint, unbiassed by social prejudice. The despot, alien or illegitimate, appealed to no hallowed veneration for a parent Sovereign ; he claimed allegiance in virtue of his brilliance and ingenuity alone. And as Csesarism, or the pious expectation of a coming ' Saviour of Society,' flourishes best in the dead level of democracy, so it is just in an intense and widely expanded culture that the despot could grasp his precarious sceptre without scruple or question. Public opinion did not condemn ; for the gifted and the ambitious could not be bound by the slender and discredited ties of ordinary moral restraint. Claims for the benefit of an elect few, in the field of aristocratic studies, found their counterpart in the pretension of a ruler to be ' above law,' — pretension which no Roman emperor, and no accredited mediaeval potentate had ever raised. It is easy to see the peril, not merely to social institutions, but to current civic practice and domestic faith, in the success of these maxims of unmixed subjectivity. But the glamour of the Renaissance was but transitory ; and in a more serious Europe the selfish instinct betook itself to the outlet of religious emotion.
§ 7. The Peasants' War and the kingdom of Munster awoke even the authors to the perils of the ' extreme left ' in the new movement ; the subjective impulse ran riot, without proper content and training, demanding with wild violence a freedom it could not profitably employ. The individual, rising from the basest serfdom and subjection to authority, recognises no halting- place between his former ' creaturehood ' and the crudest pre- tensions as an immediate and inviolable organ of deity. To feel one with the Divine Spirit has always been the solace of the humble and the oppressed ; and this union of pride and nothing- ness is invariably found in the mystical temper, which can never speak too highly or too lowly of itself. But the Reformed movement recoiled in alarm from its logical issues ; and, as we have seen, individuaUsm fared hardly at the hands of a new and more vigorous ecclesiastical power (from which tyranny, perhaps, Mr. Buckle first tore the veil), or lost its sense of autonomy in following the precise lines of orthodox confession. The duty of defending the cause of the unit against the universal fell to the pure philosopher ; for the statesman and
2 22 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
jurist were too much occupied in safe-guarding the new autocracy to show themselves sensitive to individual rights. The principle of authority, silently undermined or openly defied after the collapse of the Papacy, now rose into prominence. Round it rallied the middle classes, always the real arbiters of national destiny and development. It seemed to offer order and security after chaos and unmeaning turmoil; and the saddening experience of religious conflicts only increased men's respect for a central and impartial ruler, who, like Henry iv., was of ' the religion of all good men.' The philosophers, who were its warm supporters, unlike their stoical antitypes of austere or theatrical protest under the Roman Empire, found in freedom of thought the true sphere of individual independence. Throughout the seventeenth century, with all the prevalent doctrine of mystical submission, there ran a healthy current of liberty. The wise men gladly resigned to still competent hands the cares of office and popular control, if they might pursue uninterrupted studies in wild and unexplored branches of knowledge, or perhaps seek a welcome asylum at Court from ignorant prejudice. Except in Spain, where the sovereign did but endorse the hotly religious temper of the people, except in the rare occasion of a monarch's penitential reaction or remorse, the secular power availed itself gladly of this formid- able enemy to its ancient rival. In France, it looked on with amused indifference or secret pleasure at witty or acrimonious attacks on the Church ; and, it may be, felt only a pained sur- prise when the philosophers, tired of one-sided fight, turned their artillery upon State institutions, with unexpected vehemence, about the middle of the eighteenth century. Freedom of thought and expression had been largely conceded by the Government ; a cheap scapegoat was tossed now and again to the demands of a dwindling clerical power ; the wealthier and influential escaped. There were few Courts that did not coquet with irreligion. The monarchical idea had, to its cost, enfranchised itself from any religious implication. The Jesuit Order was condemned all over Western Europe by the secular power ; and the Pope pronounced the dissolution of his last and staunchest body of allies.
§ 8. But, in spite of this alliance, the future lay neither with the royal and sceptical 'first servants of a free people,' nor
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 223
with the learned and perhaps generous but unpractical men who by turns flattered and lampooned them. It lay with the constant champions of the social order, — neither with the rabble nor their late masters. The eighteenth century was, in some aspects, a carnival of innocent egoism, of facile sentiment, of cheap tears. The new age saw once more the centripetal tendency predominate, — a willing abandonment of impractic- able rights to one who knew best how to use authority. An age eloquent to tedium of the ' Rights of Man,' had secured, had defined none. Hobbes' theory of a primitive surrender to a single ruler almost took on itself historic truth. Csesarism, as we have seen earlier, is one, perhaps not the least effective of compromises between the two incompatible Absolutisms, — of State and of man. The citizen, flattered at being consulted, cynically aware that no change in constitution ever changes his real dependence, is ready enough to yield to the ' strong man armed.' The claim for liberty retired to a spiritual or an intellectual realm, which now became far more important than the eighteenth century could have dreamt. Certain provinces of life preserve their autonomy ; conscience, religious emotion, and the sphere of private predilection, which increases in times of material comfort, scientific invention, and social rest- lessness, and, above all, among peoples where the direct interest of citizenship is slackened, as it is to-day, in the vast extent of the State. Ever since the Reformation the secularis- ing of the State had been in truth complete, though neither statesmen nor peoples were conscious of the severance ; though wars, in name religious, in truth partly national, partly economic, concealed the truth. And when the State, after the Revolution, increased and developed her police and her coercive machinery for the sake of public order, it was obliged, in the growing minuteness of this external supervision, to forfeit any genuine control of the inner life ; it is curious, even to-day, to notice how reluctant it is to make the confession. The logical inconsequence of the English has maintained a peculiar associa- tion of Church and State, alternately threatened and respited ; but elsewhere consistency demands their complete separation, — the resumption of an imperium in imperio, two suspicious rivals, not as Cavour anticipated, libera Chiesa in libera Stato. It is perhaps unusual to regard the last century as a time when
224 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
a once intense interest in public affairs grew slack ; but the opening of new occupations, new avenues of pleasure, new paths of gain, new possibilities and interpretations of religion, have reduced to a secondary place this once absorbing pursuit. The individual has discovered so many lines of private and personal development, which may be followed without the leave of State regulation ; it is obvious to all but optimistic and super- ficial observers that the real danger lies in the retirement of the rich and gifted from the cares of domestic or civil life, in the supineness incident to all diffused 'democracies,' in the autocracy of the State captured, in the absence of legitimate guardians, by a small minority, alert and unscrupulous. In matters of religious choice, also, the individual is free, though we cannot pretend that all envy and animosity is allayed. And the outcome of the often unintelligible conflicts of the nineteenth century is this : the State in its own domain possesses enhanced powers and is reinforced by every new discovery ; but the individual outside of this is more free, because so large and so valuable a part of life lies entirely outside this control and is at his own disposal. In the lessening of moral demands, the tolerance of public opinion again, man enjoys (in certain respects and with strange and notable exceptions) a freedom undreamt of by the free citizen of a Greek or Mediaeval State.
§ 9. It will not be expected that the present discussion should treat with academic nicety the fundamental problem of Freedom. At the level of these arguments, where the real and ideal are closely and inseparably linked, — the level but seldom transcended by the average man,— the whole question of freedom is well nigh meaningless. Forming an integral part of the mental equipment in each one (whatever its origin) is a sense of power, choice and responsibility, which he cannot shake off if he try. In a practical debate, which has for its aim the defence of the chief Christian dogmas as essential to moral and social life, no one will blame an apologist if he keeps his foot resolutely on the high road of existence, clear of any grass-grown by-paths of pure theory ; if he is content to examine facts and experience. Mr. Mallock, in an eloquent passage in the Veil of the Temple, has shown us how in the last hundred years the waves (as he puts it) of scientific laws
CLAIMS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 225
and fatal sequence have engulfed the last boasted asylum of free activity. To the thinker, this may bring a feeling of despair ; but action soon restores the zest of uncertain conflict against unknown odds, and whatever may be the alien and foreign character of that which determines conduct in 'me,' whether the ' dead hand ' of ancestral usage or scruple, or a transient indwelling of the Divine Spirit itself, the tyranny is unfelt, because the individual is somehow identified with this indefinable force. Such theoretical doubt can never seriously impair the vital impulse, the enjoyment of the struggle and doubtful issue. Perhaps a more urgent, serious danger lies in the strange hybrid of philosophic and religious thought, the metaphysical mysticism which disconcertingly alternates emotion and logic. To this allusion has been and will be so frequent, that it is needless to enlarge upon the obvious defect it shares with all previous and kindred systems. It neither explains nor justifies the emergence of the personal, which, whether by accident or providence, or by some inscrutable and yet purposive law, seems to have been the goal of development at least on this earth. After the painful discovery of the self, as the true end of philosophy, practical ethics, religion, and political agitation, it is useless to point out that the discovery is after all worthless. We are still left with an acute sense of its truth. But we can more easily shake off a scientific fatalism which momentary experience contradicts — at least so far as our feelings are concerned — than the benumbing influence of Pantheism. Against this (whatever its precise phase) no new arguments can be levelled, because no new principles are maintained. The tyranny of fact we can overlook and forget ; but if it come to us in a half-moral, half-pietistic disguise, the effect is far deeper. It is idle to repeat that in such a universe good and endeavour are illusions, and the only end of the universe intelligible to us (with our narrow^, selfish, and human- istic outlook), " the glory of God and the salvation of man," becomes inconceivable. The sense of overpowering mechanism induced the puritan Stalwarts in the Scientific School, like Huxley, to lay all the greater emphasis upon the specially human life of virtue and social welfare. Man has always risen by confronting and defying Nature. But if the pressure comes from the side where we looked for help, for sympathy, for love, 15
226 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
and if a painful consciousness of insignificance be the only attribute of the ' deity within,' what more powerful solvent can we imagine of that active social life which is so inextricably bound up with the doctrines and hopes of the Gospel ?
§ lo. Side by side with these theoretic denials of individu- ality we see the necessary counterpart in the modern claim for immediate enjoyment, immediate realisation of promises once so lavish. A word must be said about that School of violence or of vision which sees in all government an unmixed evil. Whether we believe with Calvin and Hobbes, that human nature is radically mean and corrupt, or with Rousseau, that it is perverted solely by its rulers, it is clear that if authority is to be founded on moral rather than physical force, appeal must be made to the generous instincts ; men must be taken into the fullest confidence of their protectors, and treated as if they were much better than they are. This is a common- place of the most narrow experience of authority, but it is constantly forgotten in the summary or reactionary legislation of to-day, the 'administrative right,' which for State purposes condones the violation of ordinary moral rule ; in the unfor- tunate dualism of constitutional government, which has become a mere tug-of-war, diversified by loud menace and abuse, none the less mischievous because so largely artificial and engineered. The claim of the Anarchist is to super- annuate all obsolete misrepresentatives of the popular will, to reinstate average man, to expel abstractions and the fatal chimDera of patriotism and national entity, — and, on its most generous side, to trust men as open-handed, honest, and sympathetic by the removal of restraint. For here is the secret of all government : " Maluit," says Tacitus of his father-in-law and a mutinous legion, "videri invenisse bonos quam fecisse." Reference has already been made to Tolstoy's Efid of the Age; and in this ideal document and in the earnest writings of Mr. Auberon Herbert may be found the most temperate exposition of a system wrongly associated with a policy of secret murder alone. This is no place to descant upon the justice of such claims or (it may be) the vanity of such hopes. It is one of the most significant of the movements by which the subjective spirit has endeavoured to win independence from a tyrannical objective, anonymous
REVOLUTIONARY MAXIMS 227
and intangible. True 'democracy,' as the Christian Church can conceive and welcome it, is intimately bound up with such an attitude to life, trustful, confident, appealing. Whatever may be the errors of this violent challenge to existing institu- tions, to that sensible increase in coercion which followed the scare of the Revolution, it is only on these or somewhat similar lines that the Church can recognise the value of progress or the worth of political and social enfranchisement. And herein lies the reservation with which Christians regard the work of the State: it is content in law with a bare minimum and with outward conformity ; it cannot penetrate to the motive or ennoble the personal spirit. It is fair to say that it makes no such exalted claim. And it is for this reason that the mission of the Church is indispensable and supple- mentary : while it recognises authority and order, it remembers that the ' Sabbath was made for man,' and sees even in the mistaken issues of the doctrine which makes the unit the only real, the true spirit on which the lines of State develop- ment must proceed in Western society.
D
Overt Selfishness of the Revolutionary Maxims
§ I. Selfishness and Unselfishness: vagueness of these terms: the curious growth of undogmatic social ' altruism ' in the nineteenth century : modern thought a hybrid, half science and half sentiment : tmabashed hedonism of pre-revolutionary aims : the modern revival due alone, consciously or unawares, to Christian influence : true refortn cannot recognise this canon.
§ 2. Revival of practical and doctrinal Christianity, in the last century, a marvel of history : Hegelian use of Trinitarian formula : of the ' Common Reason,' and continuous corporate life and tradition; almost an apology for Catholicism : a reaction against anti-dogmatic Individualism of eighteenth century : in social reform, inspiration only from the teaching of the Gospel : unfairness of the taunt, ' bank- ruptcy ' of science.
§ 3. Religious impulse in the nineteenth century movements of Emancipation' : bold venture of the Abolitionist, in defiance of all experience : man to be treated not as he is but as he ought to be.
§ 4. Contrast of the maxims of pre-Revolution philosophy : their
228 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
message perverted in the delivery to mere incitement to overthroie .' a direct appeal to selfishness : oblivion of man's inherent desire to serve a cause : calculating and contracting temper in theology (England and Germany) : rapid disappearance of the ' Intellectuals ' at the outbreak of the Revolution.
§ 5. Emphasis on individual rather than on corporate life dis- tinguishes eighteenth century from medicBval ideals : republican ideal compounded of i^icompatibles, — Greek citizen and Greek sage : Aris- tides and Socrates : real discord between the two : attempt to restore the rudimentary patriotism of primitive times must always fail.
§ 6. Imaginary figure of the reforming Ideal : State - immersed, and State-escaping : primitive man not ' unselfish ' in the truest sense except for use : the philosopher not strictly ' unselfish' ; and in any case unsympathetic : character of the Christian doctrine of unselfish- ness as contrasted with mere self-surrender : founded entirely on the doctrine of the worth of self : no substitute for this energy.
§ I. There is nothing more perplexing than the common use of the terms, selfish and unselfish. They have a rough- and-ready practical meaning, are easily intelligible to the instinct of children, and (as we have maintained in the text of the Lectures) correspond to a fundamental impulse in ordinary man, which for brevity and clearness we have likened to the zeal of St. Christopher in the well-known legend. It can hardly be supposed that a preacher wishes to discredit or throw doubts upon an especially Christian virtue : " He that will lose his life, shall save it." But it is important, in the lazy confusion to which modern thought is especially liable, to point out how very slender is the logical or metaphysical basis for any consistent doctrine of ' unselfishness,' as this is generally understood. Modern thought is half science, half sentiment; the glaring discrepancies between the traditional or 'mythological' view and the system recently ascertained and believed to be beyond dispute, are reconciled (at least for working purposes) by an appeal to the common instincts of mankind. And these are not, in any strict sense, founded upon 'reason' at all. Pushing aside whatever is hard and ruthless in the scientific creed of competition and extermina- tion, society falls back upon a body of inherited rules and prepossessions; and these, singularly incompatible with the results of scientific research, may well constitute a necessary complement and balance. Life (it is impossible
REVOLUTIONARY MAXIMS 229
to insist on this too often or too strongly) is far too complex to yield to the sway of a single set of rules ; and it is impossible to imagine an ethical system, applicable to our present state of development, which derives directly from the accurate investigation of law, and does not borrow either largely or entirely from the precepts of the Gospel. Therein lies one significant difference from the thought of the pre- Revolutionary age. It must be confessed that one turns with something of relief to the unabashed and candid hedonism of their aims, from the false and inopportune sentiment which in treatises on mere fact and pure truth is introduced to distort the clear outline of system ; coaxing or appealing in a region where only law incontrovertible should reign. It may be as well to lay down at once this axiom, which is by no means the mere prejudice of an interested partizan ; that the prominence of ' altruistic ' feeling in Europe during the nine- teenth century is due in the main to a revival, not merely of Christian fellowship but of Christian dogma, and wnthout the continued support of the latter is most certainly doomed to extinction. Not indeed that educated man can ever dispense with an object outside himself on which to lavish unstinted affection and devotion ; but it is certain that his choice would fall on some Ideal State, or some individual man of higher perfection. He would not be likely to err weakly on the side of instinctive sympathy with the failures and the incom- petence of life, with the wrecks of humanity. The true reformer would steel his resolution against the pitiful com- plaints and feeble murmurs of those who are nothing but hindrances in the ' path of progress.'
§ 2. This revival of doctrinal and practical Christianity in the nineteenth century is after all, and with all allowance for our empty churches, one of the standing marvels of history. Whether speculation in finding the key of the universe in the Trinitarian formula conferred a real benefit or opened the way to cloudy pietism and mischievous allegory, it is not here pertinent to discuss. But it is none the less significant that aid should have been sought in the ' arcana ' of the faith against the dry morality, the cold and isolated individualism, in which had ended the practical teaching of Hegel's prede- cessors. The vivid sense of corporate life, of continuous
230 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
tradition, of the value of history as a standard and a guide, pulses through his whole system ; and recalled the sequestered Revolutionary units once more into a harmonious common- wealth. Much of his writing may be read in the light of a deliberate defence of the Church and of Catholicity. Where he praises the ' common reason,' apart from individual genius or caprice, building up with unconscious dutifulness the fabric of our society, his arguments tell quite as much in favour of the Church's doctrine and fellowship. He dispelled the illusion of the fictitious unit, or masses of uncommunicative units, out of which both religious reform and political theory had created an imaginary and invisible Church and an arbitrary and coercive State. Here at least is one sign of a warmer appreciation of Christian lessons than we can discover in the anti-dogmatic individualism of the previous century. Mean- time the artistic sense had awoken in the Romantic Schools, and sought in the beauty and variegation of the age of chivalry some compensation for the present monotony. Once more, the State confining and restricting its function to suspicious policing and a negative attitude, left all the positive and adventurous domain of life open to any influence. And how great a field there was for the efforts of the indignant and sympathetic reformer ! In spite of the hesitating eulogies of the great Revolution we have still to listen to, not one of the hopes for which men had written, fought, and died had been as yet realised : in the new industrial age, the condition of the worker left (and still leaves) far behind in hopeless squalor and in conscious misery the lot of the peasant serf in the pre- ceding age. ' Sic vos non vobis ! ' Whatever movement was then on foot to benefit the masses must take its inspira- tion not from the anachronism of a classical revival of citizen- ship, not from wild and destructive schemes of jealousy and revenge, but from the teaching of Christ, the still living embers of the Church-spirit. It would not be difficult, in the solemn and pragmatic manner of a German history, to show a priori that the development could not have been otherwise, could not in any case have followed different lines. But where facts and their lessons are clear, there is no need to pursue any method except that of patient and modest induction. We need lay no arrogant emphasis on what is sometimes
REVOLUTIONARY MAXIMS 231
termed the ' bankruptcy of Science,' the failure of Idealist or Romantic thought to heal the wounds of practical life ; — it is eminently unfair to demand universal application from any special science ; it is certain that neither Science nor Art can teach morals, or create other than utilitarian or aesthetic canons of behaviour. It is therefore not strange that the revival of the social instinct was due in greatest part to the secret workings of the Christian spirit on the average kindly heart.
§ 3. The reform movement in the previous century had been classical and anti-Christian. Where the present endeavour for social redress was not utilitarian, merely desirous of evading the too weighty burden of a governing class, of avoiding a violent outbreak by parley and compromise and divided authority, it was definitely inspired by Christian ideals. And the aim was not overthrow, but reconstruction. Kant, who had learnt from Rousseau's theories and his own experience, would have wel- comed the Emancipation of the Negro as the legitimate outcome of his pious belief in ' man as an end.' This movement, where it was not secretly economic, was in the very strictest sense religious : the children of the same Father, worshippers at the same altar, could not accept the social distinction of absolute master and serf Without this faith in the religious equality of mankind, it is hard to see what motive force lay behind the age powerful enough to disturb vested interests and make men contemplate great personal sacrifices unmoved. Yet the fervour of this zeal would have been out of place had they not firmly adhered to the teaching of immortality. Every social Utopia seems to look forward to a form of State-serfdom ; and had the sympathy of those enthusiasts been limited to the present life and sufferings of the victims of plantation cruelty, they might have aimed xdX\\Qx positively at the better treatment of individuals than ?iegatively made provision for a wholesale emancipation. It might indeed to-day be termed a piece of fanciful idealism rather than a sober measure of reform. It issued with all its disappointments and misreckonings, not from the classical tenet, 'AH men are born free,' but from a deep if unconscious conviction of the individual's infinite worth. This, in sufficient intensity to exert real influence over life and conduct and ideal, is supplied, so far as we know, by religious belief alone. It cannot be given by philosophy, which
232 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
first dramatically isolates the individual upon a pedestal, and then almost with the sudden deftness of a conjuror absorbs him into a Supreme Unknown ; it is not instilled by any teach- ing of facts, by any interrogation of Nature ; for neither Science nor Nature recognises the single life. In defiance of this commonest experience, the hopeless anomaly and inequality of men, the Abolitionist preferred to make a bold venture, which was wholly one of religious faith ; to regard and to treat men as equal, before they could be so in fact. In company with a devoted and perhaps over sanguine band of Christian reformers in our own later day, they boldly proclaimed the ' supremacy of moral over physical law,' and threw the gauntlet, like Professor Huxley, to a cosmic process and to economic fact.
§ 4. It is far from our purpose to disparage the earnestness or question the principles of those who made onslaught upon a corrupt and sceptical hierarchy, an idle aristocracy, and a selfish or puppet monarchy. But they could replace nothing on the site of the ruins, which in theory they contemplated with such satisfaction. Their attacks were sincere, but ignorant, unreasonable, and unhistoric. Personally brave and devoted, they set before the world maxims of selfishness, not only far below their own practice, but even below the enlightened self- interest which was prevalent in the three reflecting and disputing societies of France, Germany, and England. No scheme can be popular unless it comply with two conditions: (i) it must demand some present sacrifice for the cause; (2) it must some- how guarantee the final share of the devotee in its triumph. It must satisfy man's amazing instinct for unselfish service, which Reason and the 'cool moment' cannot contemplate without astonishment ; and it must take care not to stultify itself by admitting the possibility of ultimate failure. The two are needful correlates : man's whole-hearted devotion to God's service; God's tender care for the individual. This (we must reiterate again and again) is the minimum of religious belief — of a kind sufficient to impel to action. Now, in the French ' Reign of Reason,' which it was vaguely proposed to substitute for the chaos of impotent institutions, long since undermined, no such satisfaction was to be found. In spite of the semi-religious fanaticism which M. de Tocqueville very justly
REVOLUTIONARY MAXIMS 233
discerns in the pioneers of this movement, they roused in their followers nothing but feelings of disgust and contempt for the existing order ; and in the lowest classes resentment and desire for speedy vengeance. Emanating, as all attempts at reform in history, not from the sufferers but from the righteous and dissatisfied members of the privileged class, the message which left their lips in devout indignation reached the ears of their audience as a mere incitement to pillage, and to satisfy the rudimentary passions of envy and greed. It was a direct appeal to selfishness and to immediate enjoyment, which refuses to bide its time. The text-books of the age reveal to us the true ground-work of this insurrection against authority. Self-interest was best attained in a body of free fellow-workers ; in that constitutional or anarchic State, from which so much was hoped; in the removal of a weak central administration, or, as most preferred, in its capture by the intelligent band of unanimous reformers. At the same epoch, 'theological utilitarianism ' expresses (in cumbrous phrase) the calculating attitude of the religious temper in our own land ; the growing demands of the individual and the strictness of moral law ; and in Germany, it is significant that the interest in pure theology and the Being of God, sensibly pales before an absorbed keenness in the problem and the proofs of immortality. Partly the vague and negative character of the literary reformers, partly their ignorance of human nature, partly that appeal which fell so far below the generous instincts of their hearers, might account for the disappearance of any educated control at an early stage in the development of Revolution. The flight of an idle aristocracy, whose interests had been artfully dissociated from their natural clients, this was hardly perhaps to be regretted; but the retirement or ineffectiveness of the very class who had carefully engineered the movement of protest, the writers and philosophers of France, left the field open for the very chance they had most warmly opposed. The seat of authority in a stupefied nation was usurped by a clique who masked personal enmities under patriotic sentiment, and who provoked the inevitable reaction in favour of pure Will, pursuing without disguise its own ends, but in so doing con- ferring the indirect benefit of peace and order on the whole country.
234 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 5. This peculiar emphasis on the individual and his finite aims, rather than on the corporate life, distinguishes the eighteenth century from the Middle Age. The Ideal redeemed man which floated vaguely before the eyes of the educated, was a compound of the early Greek citizen, the later Greek sage, and the B-oman subject, who could appeal direct to a uni- versal recognition of the ' Law of Nature.' This last ingredient played by far the smallest part in the somewhat incoherent amalgam. This ideal figure mainly consisted of a typical law-abiding member of a Hellenic community; whose native and spontaneous devotion to his home and State, with its pressing needs and constant demands on his immediate loyalty, was supposed to be reinforced by individual reason, musing on the problems of existence and its own place in the whole, in one sense, partial, isolated, and estranged, but in another, universal, sympathetic, and all-embracing. The generous but superficial minds of the eighteenth century worshipped with indiscriminate homage Aristides and Socrates, the Cato who expelled the first entry of philosophy into Rome and the Cato who died after reading the Phxdo. They were not aware of the religious basis of family worship, on which was built the ancient city-state, an overgrown village of kinsmen ; and they did not appreciate the feud which raged between the conservative yet active citizen and the abstract and often idle thinker. For it is obvious to any student of the classical period that the cosmopolitan coolness of the latter contributed in no small degree to the overthrow of the State, with its vivid and immediate appeal to self-interest, to instinctive affection for comrades, at least in theory of the same blood. The two ideals are utterly inharmonious and divergent : in the hundred years of the Humanistic School at Athens the great leaders tried, with perfect sincerity but to no purpose, to reconcile these conflicting claims. Instinct, custom, and emotion, buried but never entirely eradicated in the philosophic mind, strove with personal conviction and logic ; and the anti-social Schools, as we must often repeat, show the extent of the failure. But in spite of this hostility the motive in either was the same — desire to realise self. When this aim was found to be defeated by the narrow prejudice of urban life and by the well-meant curiosity of friends, the carping vigilance of bystanders, a
REVOLUTIONARY MAXIMS 235
larger area was sought in the Universe itself; and the strange and fallacious title ' cosmopolitan ' was accepted as an ideal after which it was man's duty to strive. The earlier Greek citizen, like the savage, even like the civilised Chinese to-day, had no conception of the member apart from the whole, of the real existence of the son cut off from his family, of the citizen exiled from his State. This dependence on a cor- poration, as it were, for a derived life, is an invariable sign of rudimentary culture, — noble and generous indeed, it may readily be allowed, but always rudimentary, and to be tran- scended in the first step of civil evolution, to be defied at the first effort of independent thought. Who with even a shadowy knowledge of human development could maintain that every step forward was a step upward, that progress always set definitely towards an ideal goal ? It is impossible not to regret with Aristophanes, with Cephalus, the disappearance of the old sanctions and the old simplicity. But the forces which are moving and moulding society are as much beyond our ken as they are beyond our control.
§ 6. The imaginary figure, compounded of the citizen with his imperfectly awakened, the sage with his morbidly sensitive, self-consciousness, hovered before the minds of these reformers, to whom Christianity was the source of decadence and absten- tion, and the Middle Ages, no less than the Imperial epoch in Rome, an unspeakable aberration. In the proposed restoration of this fictitious type, they paid no heed to the incongruity of the two constituents, the State-contented, the State-escaping ; but they took the self-centred basis, which was the one common element in both. It is no discredit to the early types of society that in them the unit calculates his own interest by the sole known method, deference to ancestral custom ; it is we who are to blame by reading into the sim- plicity of the savage mind virtues (or perhaps qualities) of a far later evolution, which indeed reflect, not the self-confidence of a classical age, but a long series of surrenders to a malign Fortune, ruling over an evil or a fortuitous world. It is true that primitive man is unselfish, but merely in the sense that he has not found himself, is unaware of his own independent being. It is untrue to say that the philosopher is unselfish, because if wisdom mean anything, it implies the justification
2 36 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
to an inward standard, either of knowledge or approval (we must note the significant difference or reservation) of all happenings in heaven and in earth. The seeming abnegation, which puzzles us, or perhaps a little chills our sympathy by its verbal expansiveness at the close of some great personal system of the Universe, is in reality the triumph rather than the denial of the highest self. The sage does not bow to an unknown outside, letting his individuality flow outward in homage, but he takes the Universe in to himself; he zV it ; he embraces everything, till nothing is left unexplained or unrelated ; nay, it has no existence apart from his thought \ he is the one and universal Sovereign ; it is no wonder that with so wide a heritage and dominion, he gives up readily the trivial titillations of average life. Whatever may be the merits of such an outlook, it cannot comprise among them the virtue of sympathy, which is not merely the best but the only whole- some source of ' unselfish ' action. How often unselfishness is preached, not from love of others, but from hate, disgust, or despair of self! The pride of Diogenes looks out from his tatters ; and the maxims of self-surrender never lose sight of self. The Christian spirit, which is no self-regarding austerity, no mere dwelling upon personal defects and blemishes (has not God need of all sorts ? ), but a genuine self-forgetfulness, in interest in others, in service of a cause, finds no counter- part in the tenets of antiquity, or in that republican doctrine which, regardless of the anachronism, strove to revive them. The modified success, which we may with no little shame and some hesitation attribute to our social efforts to-day, is due to the inspiration of the Gospel message, in .many no doubt unconscious, to the secret workings of the Spirit. This lesson is as far as possible from any meaningless sacrifice of a personality, which logic and science, coldly correcting our conceits, alike pronounce to be without worth or permanence ; it teaches or rather confirms the natural instinct of brother- hood and fellow-feeling ; and in matters of secondary import the test is not obedience to law, but respect for the weaker, " for whom Christ died." There is no sign either in past history or in a survey to-day of the world and its spiritual influences which warrants us in the belief that a substitute for this energy is forthcoming.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE III— A
On the Original Independence and Antithesis of Religious Feeling and Moral Behaviour
§ I. Some definitions of Religion and Morality: the general con- trast between the subjective and the objective. Gospel and Law : to Morality, the law, to Religion, the individual of real import : Morality always imfinal.
§ 2. Religion a plea for the exceptional : Religion encourages effort and comforts failure : Nature-worship, a passing and irrational thrill : gradual increase of intimate and personal religion : Masonic individual- ism of the Roman epoch in all religions : the protector instead of the world-creator or remote ancestor : religion a matter of choice not of birth.
§ 3. Religion, supposed by some to have its origin in State imposture, as a valuable engine of police, is opposed, and often directly hostile to the State : Thiiggee : absoluteness of Religious claims to surrender self and override ordinary Morality : joy of the religious martyr contrasted with sadness of the moralist : the unreserved submission laid to charge of Jesuits, true of all genuine religious feeling.
§ 4. Breach between Religion and Morality, — as between statecraft and Morality in the times following Machiavelli and the Reform : Charles I. ; and the Jesuits : era of simplicity : appeal to immutable Morality as sheer utility : Religion and Morality confused and identified in the eighteenth century by all Schools ; so Reason and Nature : with the failure, alike of Church and Enlightenment, the question arose again : new scope for ' supererogation ' in the new moralised State.
§ 5. Origin and Nature of the new ' regimentation ' and dis- cipline.
§ I. That Religion and Morality have indeed some points of agreement but many points of difference, might seem to be a commonplace. But this truth is repeatedly forgotten or over- looked by the religious apologist, who to secure acceptance with an always wider audience identifies Religion with customary Morality ; and also by the ethical Rationalist (now almost an obsolete type), who wishes to restrict the province of the Church to the teaching of honesty and self-control, the
2 38 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
function of the priest to the duties of a State policeman. By Religion we do not of course mean a State-Establishment : — otherwise this will come under the head of that inherited com- plex, which with its teachings so many of us accept without further question. The term is here used in the supposed ' Protestant ' sense — personal and direct access to a Saviour and Protector, or at least to a Creator. And this is the only true definition of the religious feeling : " he took him apart from the multitude . . . What must I do to be saved ? " No doubt the awakened sinner will gladly accept the ordinary channels of grace, the sense of support and fellowship given by corporate life in a Church ; — but all this will have a new mean- ing and value in the light of his inward and incommunicable experience ; both higher and lower, for the standard and the test is now within him. Now Morality is a word of very doubtful usage; strictly, it should mean the following of custom and the acceptance of such restraints as society from time to time puts on caprice or violence ; but it is also often used to convey the notion of that intrinsic and personal principle, which, whatever may be its source and derivation, prescribes to its fortunate possessor a far higher and more careful rule than society can ever demand. It will be said that this is a need- lessly tedious way of stating the truism, that Religion and Morality alike pass from the objective to the subjective stage ; that the law, human or Divine, is no longer written and engraven on tablets, but the " word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it" (Deut. xxx. 14). "This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them" (Heb. x. 16) . . . " and they shall not teach every man his neighbour ... for all shall know Me from the least to the greatest" (chap. viii. 11). This transition is indeed simply from acceptance on trust and in fear to acceptance in love and with personal test and know- ledge; in a word, from the Law to the Gospel, and in this phrase everything is contained and implicit. But it will not be doubted that in common parlance to-day it is the term Religion which preserves a notion of the intrinsic and intimate, the voluntary and spontaneous, while the other still gives us the more rigid outline of conformity to existing usage, obedi-
RELIGION AND MORALITY 239
ence (often unconvinced) to coercive law. One of the chief disputes of the time centres round the ' teaching of ]\IoraUty.' There are warm supporters of its independence, StoaKTov apa rj 'Aperq. But there is a large and I believe growing body of men who cannot accept Morality as ultimate or as self- sufficient ; as involving any but a paradoxic result. In order that it may explain and justify one of its rules to the inquisit- ive consciousness, it has to leave its own domain and encroach on the sphere, borrow from the convictions or belief of Religion. The reason is not far to seek : it is only Religion that recognises the individual.
§ 2. I see no reason to modify what is said in the Lectures on Religion when it becomes personal, as an asylum or retreat from the tyranny of convention or the fear of Nature. Religious fervour always pleads for the exceptional : first, for an excep- tional forgiveness, for pardon, for mercies strictly uncovenanted ; next, for an opportunity for exceptional service, a devotion of self and its faculties in gratitude for blessings received — or anticipated. No play of logic or coolness of Rationalism could ever destroy the emotional element in Religion : " We love Him because He first loved us." Nature may indeed in some temperaments evoke a thrill of ' cosmic emotion,' a sense of awe at the mightiness or the beauty or the incomprehensibility of the Universe. But however legitimate such raptures may be, it is clear they can but remind us of our nothingness : they are powerless to encourage effort or console failure. And yet this is what is meant by Religion, whenever the word is used by average mankind, outside the text-books of dogma or apology. In ancient Greece, there was the special parent or guide or protector, first of the family and local haunt, next of the individual, in his fast-growing self-importance; and we have (as a caution) the heroic figures of Sarpedon and Hippolytus, not to mention the sinister legends of Tantalus and Ixion. The special tutelars did not lose their comforting nearness and identity because their familiar features were found, as barriers broke down, in countless other divinities throughout Hellas. Then poetry stepped in and attempted to give coherence to the whole, and provided a detailed theogony. Before, men did not puzzle about the relation of these many Divine figures to the dark background of Fate, or the closer yet
240 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
not much more sympathetic Nature. The notion that a God created the world appears very late upon the scene of thought ; and in answer to a passionate and instinctive demand that things shall somehow correspond to man's sense of aim and righteousness. Religion was in a certain sense natural, and recognised tremendous and untutored forces at work, who could not be completely brought within the scale of human vision or before the tribunal of human judgment. But, as with the Jews, true religious feeling found for its object domestic and national gods ; or an intimate personal protector. When the State religion broke up quietly and survived only in immemorial rite, the philosopher reverted to a natural deity, life and substance of the world, whom he vainly strove to invest with the peculiar qualities that man desiderates in his Deity, as bringing Him nearer to His creature by common attributes. Others, of whom we see the type in Appuleius (indeed, in the great band of Mithraists throughout the Roman world), found that religion was not a matter to be ' born into ' by the mere fact of family and common ancestors, but to discover for one's self, to deserve by trial and discipline, to enter by painful and perhaps long-deferred initiation. This Masonic in- dividualism, rather of special choice than national privilege, had indeed always been in the Mysteries an emotional outlet for pious fervour, wearied with the openness and formality of the sterotyped ritual, the runic unintelligibility of the liturgy. But under the Roman Empire, that happy arena for idiosyn- crasy, this side of Religion, its most personal and intimate, came into prominence not merely in Christianity, but in most other heathen cults.
§ 3. Throughout, religious feeling, beginning acutely in a protest against law, seems to rise above social usage, by en- tailing a stricter conformity to certain duties, a purer personal life than the State could either recognise or enforce. The sceptic who tried to write the ' Natural History ' of Religion vacillated (to put out the ' dream-theory ' of Lucretius and the Atomists) between a physical origin in dread of unknown forces, and a deliberate political imposture. " Primus in orbe deos fecit timor : " we may contrast with the ' Critias ' fragment, where Religion is a mere device of the State, following the citizen into his secret privacy and inner thoughts by means
RELIGION AND MORALITY 241
of this invisible yet ubiquitous police. But, as history has proved, Religion is never content to maintain this subordinate and ancillary position. It cannot accept without scrutiny the rules which the State draws up for its subjects, and it can claim to override them when its own peculiar welfare or teaching is at stake. It is never a very stable or faithful public servant : its kingdom is not of this world ; its aim is beyond, and often counter to, the political end. It demands more of its followers, because it has a secret code of its own ; but also, in a certain sense, less, inasmuch as no merely social law is binding against the interest or the doctrine of the smaller organisation. We see in Thuggee the original anti- thesis of our two terms : all States, not even excepting Sparta and Venice, proscribe assassination ; but some religions may require it ! Cases are by no means uncommon where an act universally condemned by public opinion is performed as a sacred duty, a religious rite ; and the permitted licence of certain pagan worships, as Astarte and Mylitta, is no warrant for supposing a wide relaxation of that moral sternness, habitual as it would seem to the savage ; rather the reverse. Religion, it must be remembered, is the most absorbing, importunate, and unsatisfied of all the objectives to which man, never self- sufificing, can surrender himself. On occasion he must give up everything, even his moral observance, his purity of life : the names of Jael, Judith, and Maher-shalal-hashbaz will prove that even among the Jews, whose religion was far more closely implicated with outward and visible morality than the rest, certain situations, as critical and exceptional, were held to exempt from the usual stringency. It has been constantly urged against the Jesuits that religion, conceived as the welfare of the Holy See and the prosperity of the Order, becomes a universal solvent of every obligation. Such attacks may indeed in part be justified, but they show unlooked-for ignorance of a very rudimentary truth — that religious feeling, when personal, is not content with obeying the regulation of the State, with sinking into submission to a civil department. It claims life as an absolute whole, without a single reservation, such as Saul tried to make (from motives, it may well be con- ceived, of pity and compassion). Unlike the State, it does not demand sacrifice without compensation. INIr. James, though 16
242 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
he scarcely alludes to immortality in his book on religious experience, makes it abundantly clear that abnegation is no mournful asceticism, no ' death at duty's call ' ; loss of pleasure, nay of selfhood, is a supreme rapture. It might be hard to recall both moods in the poet's ' duke et decorum pro patria mori.' We do not find, in our more introspective age, pro- pensity and reason go so easily hand in hand ; but if we must divide them, it may perhaps be necessary to give the former to the religious martyr, the latter to the melancholy if self- approving hero.
§ 4. It would seem, then, that Religion can ensure greater sacrifices than the State, and can, without question, act as the ' Dispensing Power ' of the most cherished rules of its rival. It was this sense that armed the darts of the Rationalist attack. It was by no means the conscientious oppression, but the dishonest intrigue of post - MachiavelUan Church and State on the Continent, that excited the earliest and more lucid of its foes. When the most virtuous of English Sovereigns was tainted by this indirectness, when the doctrine ' the end justifies the means ' was accepted as a maxim in a religious order and practised in secret by the courts of Western Europe, it is no wonder that the simple-minded took refuge in a Church of the Elect, the educated in the ' natural Reason.' Men appealed either to 'eternal and immutable morality,' with Cudworth and the Cambridge School, or, contemptuous of any metaphysical sanction, sought to found conduct in civil life on pure utility, either social or individual welfare. England, always inclined to Teutonic individualism, re- formed (or reduced) her religious establishment so as to be well within the limits of average conformity. It expelled (not indeed without reason) the Extremists and ' Enthusiasts,' whose pretensions to the sole guidance of the inner light might indifferently lead to sainthood or libertinage. It became the handmaid, the preacher of pure morality ; and it may be again pointed out that the Masonic liturgy well reflects the prudently complacent temper, the sober charity, sympathetic yet by no means exacting, the scanty dogmatic postulates, of that era. Men laboured with astonishing industry to show that Christianity was pure morality, the restatement of an original law, forgotten or obliterated. Conduct was the whole
RELIGION AND MORALITY 243
of life ; and Kant, who has much of the ' Anglican ' spirit from his Scotch descent, views with suspicion anything that seems to go beyond. Throughout the eighteenth century, Religion and Morality (as also Nature and Reason) were constantly and indeed unpardonably confused. The Church- State of the Enlightenment sought, like Catholicism, to universalise ; to embrace all in a single formula, to admit no exception to rule, to level down where it could not level up, to derive the whole of life and experience from a unique root. Such Monism failed, as all monistic efforts must. When the old regime and (what is often overlooked) its successful rival, the Enlightenment, perished together in the French Revolution, the question had once more to be put to an age ready, in its nakedness and exhaustion, to seize on any and every answer. What is the precise relation of Religion and Morality ? It may be at once answered that Religion had taken under its protection what may be termed the ' supererogative ' element in Morals. It seems difficult to convince men that the more perfect the social organisation, the more restricted the field of moral action. Combined action and careful instruction of the young may reduce that which now demands a critical and precarious choice to such formal rules as we consult in sanitation or etiquette : it will then be quite clear that a minority, dissatisfied with such automatic customary observance, will seek to rise above it in the small field still accorded to spontaneity; others, impatient of control, will seek to fall below it, or openly to defy its restraint.
§ 5. The narrowing of this field of possible error, temptation, indeterminate choice, is to some the weakness, to others the strength, of civilised society. But it is only the fact which concerns us here. The one certain outcome of the vague struggles of the Revolution was to arm authority with fresh powers, with chances of closer supervision. The inventiveness of scientific progress is always on the side of authority and capital : hicmanum pmicis vivit geims. The forces which from the very beginning of the nineteenth century stood behind the nominal leaders, were no longer aristocratic; the real but prosaic interests of the middle class were predominant : public order, security and expansion of commerce, certainty of contract, judicial integrity. The ' Regimentation ' of society
244 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
proceeded apace, in spite of the protests of a pure and generous Liberalism, which had far more sympathy with Rousseau than with Hobbes. Once more disappointed with human nature and the results of free competition, even larger powers were (perhaps with a sigh) made over to the Government. Unex- pected economic issues — the ousting of the yeoman and small holder, the industrial slavery — warranted an encroachment on the rights of capital. The last, most Christian and idealistic, maxim of the early Revolution, the sacredness of the individual, was abandoned. Men were dealt with not as units, but as groups and in the mass ; and society passed — here rapidly, there with obvious reluctance — in half-unconscious transition, from a belief that legislation could do nothing to the conviction that legislation can do everything. Those who lately had held, in their eager enthusiasm for uncorrupt human nature, that the sphere of Government should be as small as possible, were now anxious to enlarge it indefinitely. The great and eternal feud between ' Democracy ' and Science presented itself anew in the rivalry of the expert and the amateur. The growing complexity, growing burdens of Government, and (it must be added) its growing suspiciousness, implied the increase of functionaries and bureaux. While political reformers were never tired of extolling with unconscious irony the blessings of personal liberty, the equality of the toiler, the political judgment of the illiterate, they were hasting at the same time to transform the mass of the people into well-drilled automata — not indeed with any deliberate policy of servitude ; forces too deep to analyse, and certainly far beyond the com- prehension of those whom they controlled, hurried a society which prated of freedom into a regimental discipline. And in the enlarged field of original choice (for discipline cannot, with all its efforts, account for the whole of life), religious, social, philanthropic, the sphere of the spirit and the conscience, Christian dogma and Christian tradition exerted a new and unexpected influence. To this revival is due in no small measure the unconcealed antagonism between Church and State. Religious feeling, wistful or dogmatic, controls the still considerable element of 'supererogation.' It is not so much antithetic to current morality as supplementary. Granted a legal minimum, it prescribes, according to individual
GOD AS GENERAL 245
capacity, an ideal maximum to be striven after. Not to every rich young man did Christ say, " Go, sell all that thou hast " ; it is a special and particular vocation. This perhaps could not be better expressed than in the words of the Bishop of Birmingham : " Within the area secured by legislation, the positive and characteristic Spirit of Christ had its vantage ground ; and that was the spirit of self-sacrifice " (St. Mary's Commemoration, 1906). Where the political development has worked unhappily, leaving only to the Church the sphere of willing and gratuitous service, is just in this increase of enactment, coercive and spoliatory legislation, without any appeal to principle, only to sordid interest. "We love Him because He first loved us," is the secret of the Christian incentive. It is no wonder that in the portion of life which is still autonomous all the known influences are Christian ; that in the threatened banishment of religious teaching no substitute is forthcoming to arouse the generous emotions ; which after all, and however closely they must be watched and guided, are the sole motive-powers in modern as in ancient life.
B
On the Conception of God as General, rather THAN as Judge
§ I. Character of ' Law,' to excite hostility : growing dislike of restraint : dutifulness, a fundamental trait in primitive culture : with ' enlightenment ' it disappears : all political reflection tends towards withholding allegiance from any alien authority : supposed transfer of power to-day to a ' majority ' has wrought little change.
§ 2. Signifcant refusal to recognise law (Education in England) : ' conscience final arbiter for each ' : Law takes an arbitrary character at the time of the Reformation and the new competitive nationalities : all systems unite in Absolutism (political. Divine, metaphysical) : reaction in the eighteenth century : law the mere condition of present welfare and\ future blessedness (according to common sense not to arbitrary decree) : laws mere rules of self-interest, forestalling caprice with kindly prudence.
§ 3. This ' popular ' philosophy not poptilar enough : Calvinism disdains to explain law by human analogy : Deism, profoundly
246 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
htimanistic, moral, and simple : its speedy collapse : the mysterious regains ground : natural bias of Protestantism towards worship of the Unknown.
§ 4. Mysticism, and its unanswerable appeal to experience : the Union ' : legalism never transcends dualism : all human thought and judgment relative : object of law can only be the welfare of the mass : in eighteenth ceniiiry, law condescends to reason and argue, professing its proper aim to be use : men criticise Divine law from same standpoint as human.
§ 5. Eternal punishment, its lessened significance : God no longer as absolute Judge : notion of arbitrary force passed into realm of nature and State : sense of Divine effort in Christianity : this desire to procure a sanction for human endeavour, the legitimate counterpart of the desire for a place of repose : the paradox of religion : both needs must be satisfied : Christ as a Captain of free soldiers.
§ I. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to divest 'law' in the eyes of average men of its arbitrary and unaccountable character. The supposed change from an irresponsible ruler or oligarchy to popular arbitrament has done as yet very little to lessen this feeling. Laws are still drawn up by mixed bodies of experts and amateurs, tempered to meet a general and lukewarm approval, often forced into incoherence by timely compromise, and to the general public distasteful or unintelligible. At this mention of Law in the abstract, all that is questioning, sceptical, and revolutionary in the spirit awakens. And this is the real meaning of maturity — not to take on trust, but to submit to individual judgment : freedom of conscience consists in nothing else. It is typical of a very prevalent ignorance of human nature to believe that reverence for law is an achievement of advancing civilisation, and peculiarly appropriate to an age of 'free democracy.' No greater mistake could be made. The whole political develop- ment suggests, the whole political theory recommends, that every man consider law calmly in relation to himself and his needs, obeying only in so far as he can approve ; the overthrow of existing restraint is a duty, and discontent is the condition or source of advance. Absolute end in view there is none, and at no stage in a fluent process is any sanctity discoverable which could silence the criticism and arrest the innovating hand. Undoubtedly public law has, like religious belief, its irreducible minimum ; but open and serious debate is held to-
GOD AS GENERAL 247
day over questions which less than a century ago were decreed beyond the reach of doubt or assault. Can it, for example, be supposed for a moment that the State, if able to extricate itself completely from Christian influence, will maintain intact that peculiar system of sexual relations, taboos, and penalties, in which it is hard to distinguish the origin, whether State's utility as summa lex. Christian idealism, or prejudice of a narrow middle class? If it is difficult even in the smallest community to agree upon statutes which receive unanimous homage, it is impossible in the overgrown society of a modern State, where, by the very fact and theory of the constitution, it is always a minority that is in power. If law excites only covert defiance in the natural man (of whom St. Paul in Romans vii. shows a profound and sympathetic knowledge), it is idle to suppose that the future of Western society will show any substantial increase in the law-abiding principle. Deference to convention is an unmistakable mark of rudimentary and primitive society; once shaken {like the confidence in a benevolent autocrat), it cannot be reinstated. The sign of all ' enlightenment ' is coolness and relativity ; siir tout point de zele ! Emotion may creep in shamefast by a back door; Reason may later, nay must, make an alliance with sentiment, to stir at all : ovQ\v ■>] Aiaj/ota klvcl : just as the painstaking studies of logic and scholastic merge at last in Mysticism. But let us keep detached and separate the criticism, which must be impartial and without bias ; and the loyalty, with which as citizens we accept after due discus- sion a result we may personally disapprove. We are not predicting any violent upheaval; but it is well to remember that the average man has been taught to withhold respect from that which he has not made, or cannot understand himself. This is the fundamental postulate of any system within even distant approach to genuine democracy. Law, let us resume, if suspected of arbitrary character, of interested and partizan motives, will command no obedience ; and evasion will not merely be generally condoned but recommended.
§ 2. We have recently seen a remarkable instance in our country of this reference of law to individual approval or dissent. It is only too apparent that free institutions, statesmen's integrity, open debate cannot ' universalise '
248 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
particular enactments, cannot overpower conscientious objec- tion. And whatever may be the inconvenience, whatever the disappointment of those who believe nothing is easier to elicit and interpret than the popular will, it is well that it should be so. The standpoint of such refusal to follow the ' majority ' is, if narrow, at least moral. It preserves at least, even in a mistaken way, a principle threatened in the multiplied re- sponsibility of the State : that a large part of life must remain outside the interference of a secular State ; that conscience, as Cardinal Newman wrote to the Duke of Norfolk, must for each be the final arbiter. There is no need here to discuss the possible perversion of the conscience, paraded as a disguise for unworthy motives. I call attention to the broad principle of resistance ' for conscience' sake,' here, not in a country where religious and secular animosities divide the nation into openly hostile camps, but where the vast bulk of the people are still agreed in loyalty to the broad doctrines of a common faith. Let us now ask. What in such an age is our attitude to God as Lawgiver ? Clearly this cannot constitute an appeal for our services or our love.
Buried beneath His Mercy-Seat. O Christians ! Christians ! tell me
why You rear it on your altars
Jehovah's finger wrote the Law ; Then wept ; then rose in zeal and
awe, A nd the dead corpse from Sinai's
heat
(W. Blake, ' Gates of Paradise.')
From the beginning of the sixteenth century, law, human and Divine, tended to withdraw itself proudly from contact with the vulgar, and to become centralised, arbitrary, irrespon- sible. The individual, still recognised in the petty manorial courts as a unit with rights, still viewed by the Director's casuistry as an 'end in himself,' became insignificant before the unified law of France or England, the everlasting fiat of doom or salvation. The real relation of the universal and the particular was never examined or defined. It was held by Jesuit, Spinoza, Richelieu, Roundhead, that man was a sub- ordinate member in a great scheme or system; even at the height of conscious conflict he was but the vehicle of a purpose greater than himself, ' a vessel of grace or wrath/ (though he is careful to interpret this Divine foreknowledge according to his
GOD AS GENERAL 249
predilection). In the subjective reaction of the eighteenth century this deference to law is changed. Religious en- thusiasm had everywhere decayed ; monarchy was no longer implicitly trusted : it had displayed evident signs of human frailty ; in France it had failed of its chief aims ; in England, had been replaced by a clever and intriguing oligarchy. Law was a mere compact and convention, not the edict of a superior in goodness and intelligence. Throughout that age Law became the mere condition of present comfort or of future blessedness. The small yet fervent circle of Calvinistic mysticism might take comfort, as do all mystics, in reposing on absolute certainty, especially if this assurance was personally hopeful. But to most thinkers within and without the Church, laws, moral or political, were just the rules of self-interest, invented (for no grand ulterior purpose out and beyond individual convenience) by a benevolent and by no means encroaching sovereign ; just as the dogmas of Christianity were no esoteric mysteries, but (to Toland and to Lessing alike), so far as they were true, the setting-forth for the benefit of the unleisured and ignorant of truths transparent to the cultured intelligence, — and, it must be avowed, commonplace to the last degree.
§ 3. Yet this was the strong side of the 'popular' philosophy of that age : its resolution to accept nothing which could not be related, in understanding or in use, to the individual consciousness. It is not superficial because it is 'popular,' but because it is not popular enough ; because no pains were taken to trace the deep things of the heart, the genuine but secret springs of human action. In the Deist as in the Calvinist system, God entered into reckoning only at the first beginning and the final close of the destiny of the universe or the single soul. In both a place was left for judgment and for retribution. The latter, weighted as it was with the dogma of predestination, could not, like the former, commend to the normal intelligence or the rudimentary notions of justice a dogma which rejected all such standards. Deism, anxious to retain against the evidence of science, surely and steadily accumulating, man's place and dignity, raises human qualities to Divine honours, good-will, artistic contrivance, moral aim. God reappears, after a long absence, at the close
250 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
of the drama. The world and man have been left during the interval to their native resources : the guidance of physical law, disturbed by no favouritism or miraculous intervention ; the light of natural reason and conscience, amply sufficient to secure happiness through obedience to its simple conditions. Life was easy to the prudent ; the facts of the universe were clear ; nothing was needed but to remove the ruined fabric of obsolete mythology that kept out the sun. But the brief career of Deism, its sudden collapse or silence about the middle of the century, is a strong proof of the hold of the mysterious on the human mind. 'Reasonable religion' disappeared, or at least renounced any claim to effective control. Men plunged again into the solace of irrevocable law. Edwardes and Wesley are different types of one and the same movement towards a recog- nition of a Supreme Power, of whom it is true, " My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are My ways your ways." In both (in spite of the missionary vigour which sometimes accorded so strangely with their tenets) we see clearly the natural trend of the Protestant to quietism, to a Church of the Elect, to individual assurance, towards a veneration which is in the last resort a worship of the unknown. And against this, there must be, prima facie, no immediate objection ; the doubt arises not in hearing the dogma that the "judgments of God are unsearchable and His ways past finding out," but in testing the credentials of the prophet who claims to know them. If one must be candid, the Roman Church insists far less on the arbitrary and authoritative. Dogma has been carefully built up, not by individual cleverness, but by inspired councils, by modest scholastic induction of authorities. The papal control was not above law, nor was the doctrine un- reasonable. But the Protestant movement, to which Heine, in a pamphlet of singular brilliance and inaccuracy, traces free rational thought, abases the human intelligence as it disparages human merit. It is far more strictly 'monastic' than the Catholic saint in his hermitage. It opens the field for the reverence for the unknown and unknowable, the Night of Novalis and the mystics, Spencer's indecipherable First Cause, which, among the increasing certainties of Science, is so strange a feature in our speculation to-day. But for Religion to lose contact with Reason is almost worse than to relax its hold
GOD AS GENERAL 251
on Justice. Universal in its claim over human life, the 'credenda' must satisfy our instinct for righteousness, and cannot possibly demand worship for that which in fancied majesty or conceit withdraws altogether out of the field of human observation. It is easy to discover an object of affectionate regard nearer home.
§ 4. The mystic in all time has the unanswerable plea of personal experience. God, to his logic, may be the nameless darkness of Dionysius, the indifferent ground of Cusanus or of Eckhart, but to his soul a tasted bliss. Against the reality of these subjective visions frigid argument beats in vain. But the legalist has no such recourse. Law and its subject or victim remain irreconcilably opposed, and the dualism is ultimate. The expression 'glory of God' only seeks to cloak ignorance. It is the defect or the merit of the human mind — but in either case inalienable, I'Siov koI dvac^aiperov — that it can only conceive things in relation to itself, in terms of itself. It cannot put off the Kantian spectacles, through which, never issuing out of its unsympathetic isolation into the core of things, it views the universe. And it cannot, in any fancied detachment, resist applying a moral standard, a test of value, or of ' righteousness,' or of pleasure, to its experience : a local and humanistic canon indeed with which to plumb infinitude. But who has ever refrained from giving a verdict so based as from an equitable tribunal ? Is there any philosopher who can dis- guise his antipathy or his approval, confronted with the whole, with the supreme need of correlating it to himself? For it is only speculative philosophy which can afford to be impersonal ; and speculative philosophy is, on its own showing and the public judgment, incomplete. What is the purpose of Law ? It is surely playing with thought to define it other than as the welfare of the many, guarded by interdict and control, embodied in solemn phrases which represent the lessons of past experience, enforced on the mass for their good by the rulers, human or Divine, few, mature, and responsible. The individual who throws himself gladly into devotion to a cause or loyalty to a person looks with suspicion at the majesty of Law. When autocracy had to justify itself to ordinary critics, the French kings explained their benevolent motives in pre- ambles of an ingratiating clearness. Law, hitherto unamenable,
252 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
like thepatriapoiesias, to any questioning, then took the public into its confidence. A reactionary or a soldier might reproach this concession as dangerous to the arcajia imperii, in the significant and recurrent phrase of Tacitus. But the whole end of political life is at once secured if by such patient colloquy the citizen is convinced that the new statute aims solely at his interest ; that he is not a tool in the hands of scientific experimenter or theoretical charlatan. Assured of this, he will cheerfully obey. And it must be remembered that, in spite of the divorce between religious and actual life, more and more accentuated in the last four hundred years, men will take the same maxims and principles to guide their verdict on the Divine Law as they have already been taught to apply to human legislation.
§ 5. In one notable point of dogmatics there has been no revival of conviction : the doctrine of eternal punishment. In the sense of a subjective hatred and defiance of good, which would find happiness in hell but misery in heaven, it must always remain a dreadful possibility. But as a penalty imposed from without for offences of youth or ignorance it has all but vanished from the treatise or the sermon. It is indeed hard to dispute that the ' entire ' con- ception of God as Judge has retreated into the background. The notions of force and irresponsible power having passed into nature and State, the appeal in Christianity is not to fear, or even the hope of future recompense, but to the immediate delight of willing service. In the Churches there has been remarkable increase in missionary zeal and social interest, a return to closer contact with the practical concerns of life. The religious life is a serious conflict; those may perhaps think otherwise who by religion mean the ' sense of being a perfect member of a perfect system.' Now, in the perpetual paradox of religious experience it is vain to expel this complementary side, of peace in the midst of war, of Divine nearness in the midst of abasement to creature- hood. Nor need we find fault with those who lay on it too great and too exclusive stress, for without such alternate over-emphasis on the Divine and human in the Christian message, 'strength made perfect' only 'in weakness,' the balance of truth must suffer. But we are writing of the
GOD AS GENERAL 253
average experience, which 'counts not itself to have appre- hended.' And to such it is the human Hfe of our Saviour, as a supreme manifestation of God, that gives courage and hope. ' What,' says ScheUing, in an almost inspired moment, 'What if God wouW enter the world of discipline and of suffering so as to become perfect, so as to learn obedience, ' though He be Lord of all ? ' Here under Behmen's influence is the point of transition from the motionless and indifferent ground, not merely with Hegel to a semi-purposive process, but to a fully conscious person. Mill believes, not without good reason, that we find all the saints, heroes, and martyrs of religion, and all the humbler workers who have left no name, to have been upheld by the thought of 'fellow- service.' There are two sides of pious enthusiasm, the active and the theopathetic, typified by Martha and Mary. The religious idea must somehow unite in itself the conviction of a motionless calm at the heart of things, and the sense of a close protector and sympathetic friend to help one in the struggle. No other theory of the Divine Nature comes nearer to satisfying both these instincts than the doctrine of the Risen Lord, who has 'passed behind the veil.' To one, unity the ideal, if not found at once, snatched and forestalled by reasoning faith or proved against proof by pious logic ; to another, effort and a sense of obstacles gradually surmounted, secrets only unfolding themselves to the ardent searcher. To one, Spinoza or Emerson the type; all here and now complete ; no advance, no purpose ; truth, immediate, whole, and entire. To another, Lessing's part bold, part timid rejection of this unconditional gift ; for to such temperament conquest and achievement, as the path to perfection or to knowledge, contested inch by inch, outweighs all the joys of possession. The stimulus, the incentive, to much Christian activity to-day, to much secular well-doing and impatience of wrong, is this sense of military service under a General who Himself has gone through the ordeal of war like the meanest of His soldiers. We do not complain if the mystic chooses to dwell on the comforting assurance of peace and harmony as already secured. But Christian zeal receives its inspira- tion from a belief in the present imperfection of the world ; from the conviction that, by our means, God will accomplish
254 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
His designs ; He who is not a master of slaves, but a Captain of free soldiers, Himself made perfect through suffering.
On Surrender to the Unknown
§ I. Mysiicism, the most real of experiences : incommunicable : the strictly religious fonn only toys with nihilism and is genuinely personal : another kind boasts of nothingness : ' hedonism ' of the religious mystic : pessimism of other surrenders to the indefinable and unconscious.
§ 2. Will or Faith alone can sum up the Universe as a totality: ultimate unities in philosophy out of fashion to-day : specialism of modern thought : the English School discounts the pretension of speculation to have discovered Unity : only ' provisional ' or ' working hypothesis ' : a practical need makes us apply a comprehensive term to the Universe : problem, Can this central unity become a partizan ?
§ 3. Religious feeling arises from this desire — ' The Lord is on my side ' : spirit of 'favouritism ' in the earliest personal impulse to religion : keen sense of dualism, of a real struggle at the root of religion : lulling effect of pure monotheistic systems, whether of will (Islam) or pure Being {Hindu) : Christian belief reads God's char- acter in a human life.
§ 4. ' Humanism ' of the Christian faith : ultimate antitheses : the twofold demand of the Divine nature — peace and aid in fight : this latter bears the first emphasis in Christian belief, not the final.
§ 5. Growth in Greece of man's humanistic demands on the central power : it is gradually invested in human attributes : after Aristotle, abandonment of the anthropoccntric point of view : significance of Platonic revival, and Gospel simplicity : the Gnostic, starting from intellectual need, falls back into pure irrationalism : except in Africa and under Augustine' s influence, the Church never surrenders to the unknown as such.
§ 6. Attitude of Tertullian — the message to be accepted because, not in spite of its paradox : Septimius Severus, embodiment of a like principle of irresponsible sovereignty : scholastic movement a half-conscious protest against Augustinianism : Absolutism revived by Protestant reformers, though they started from freedom and the standard of individual conscience : this development wholly in keeping with the general movements of seventeenth century.
§ 7. Supreme aim of the eighteenth century — to eliminate the unknown, mysterious, and unaccountable : reaction against clearness and vaunted simplicity in the nineteenth : transparency a demerit
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 255
to the new school of Obscuvantism : this emphasised by the general sense of uncertain aim and irresistible forces : falsification of hopes and designs in every part of social development.
§ 8. Perverted meaning of ' reason ' in the new age : anthropo- centric standard ridiculed or ignored : reaction in Comtism : Pro- fessor Huxley's moral dualistn : refuge in abnegation : Church indispensable as alone giving motive and hope.
§ I. The student of thought or religion is again and again confronted by the puzzUng symptoms of Mysticism. They deviate but slightly in type and features from age to age, from creed to creed ; everywhere, indeed, they preserve certain marks and signs that never vary. One universal characteristic seized on for especial attack by critics is this : the mystic resigns himself to the Unknown, sinks his role of inquirer or logician or free agent, to plunge headlong into something which is not himself, which in the very nature of the case he cannot, or only verj' imperfectly, define. In a sense, this objection, though unsympathetic to an extensive phase of thought and feeling, is justified : the description of the Universal with which he is so familiar and so well content is incommunicable ; his joys he cannot share with others, and he has not even the grace to seem ashamed at this ; nay, the further beyond precise definition, the truer for him the experience. But it must be remembered that all the while, if he be a genuine mystic, it is no ' unknown ' at all, but the most real of things. Nothing else exists beside it ; and the test is not barren argument, but direct contact and immediacy. Mysticism reverts to the earliest and simplest canons of truth ; we pass through intellectual evidence to the emotional assent, and through them to the enjoyment of the senses. We detect what is real by proof (often valueless in action), by faith, and by touch and taste. The lowest and the highest things in the scale of being are judged by a like criterion. But the certainty thus derived, if intimate and personal, cannot be shared or imparted; with the first and last of Gorgias' axioms every true mystic must sympathise, though there may be a certain freemasonry among the adepts. The orthodox and philosophic among the band mark out with admirable precision the stages in the journey, the nightly pilgrimage to Mount Carmel. But at the decisive moment, when you
256 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
have followed their dialectic or their appeal with conviction and approval, they vanish within an open door, which at once closes upon them. To the uninitiated such contem- plative joys are the most empty and barren of all delusions ; to the mystic himself, the most positive of facts. But there is no bridge between the exceptional experience and the unsympathetic critic; there is a 'great gulf fixed.' It will not then be supposed that we summarily include these devout raptures among surrenders to the unknown. Religious mysticism, however it may innocently sport wath nihilistic phrase, is in reality personal, is directed towards a Deity conceived as a person, finds supreme satisfaction in an inter- course which, if it pass beyond the colloquy of a friend, only becomes the passionate silence of a lover. There is, however, another kind, which boasts that it has no definable object. Negative in its interest, and quietist in aim, its sole doctrine is the nothingness of the subject, the vanity and inadequacy of thought, the unique 'duty' to become absorbed in a larger life, which after all has no conscious existence apart from the sum of its members (and how can the sum of the imperfect make a perfect whole?). It may be urged against the purely religious mystic by the practical or the narrow, that it is a system of hedonism. Inasmuch as some amount of pleasure immediately felt (not merely indefinitely deferred and expected) is a needful ingredient of all moral assent, especially to those involving self-sacrifice, this is no very terrible accusation. The impersonal mystic (with whom we have chiefly to deal) is a disciple of Pessimism,
§ 2. There is not the slightest warranty, in the history of mankind or of thought, for supposing that we can ever sum up the Universe as a whole except by an effort of will or an effort of faith. The complexity and specialism of modern life (so well pointed out by Mr. Merz in his remarkable volumes on recent intellectual tendencies) puts out of court at once the glib and presumptuous unifications which were once in fashion. Strictly speaking, there are no philosophical systems to-day coherent and all-embracing. Any supposed representatives of such claim to inclusion and finality are mere restatements and faded copies of an archaic and primitive type of thought. The passion and error of the human mind
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 257
(as the English Schools since Bacon have always seen) is to rise at once to unity, without mastering the particulars which go to compose it. No doubt it is absurd to try and curb by rule and method the spontaneous intuitions, which throw, it may be, a glimpse of light on the way and give promise of a coming harmony. Bacon himself cannot tame the ventures of genius ; Science would fare badly indeed if it was not guided by dim hints and vaticinations. But, it must not be forgotten, these visions of an ultimate end, in which fragments meet in a perfect whole and the rays blend in a single shaft of light, are but provisional hypotheses. These the searcher after truth must in turn abandon, with regret it may be, but unsparing candour, if the facts disprove. Now it is clear that to apply any summary title to a whole, which can never be known in its totality or in its still undetected possibilities, is either an impertinence or a paradox, or — an act of faith, undertaken on account of life's practical needs. Solviiur ainbulando is still a sufficient if unscientific solution. Debate without cease seems to-day to centre round the problem whether Truth is, because we use it, or because it uses us. We are not to be entangled into such thorny discussion. The priority of an antecedent ' world of logical truth,' which forestalls our entrance upon the scene, and sets in precise moulds our methods of thought and reflection, is a hypo- thesis necessary to pure Science, and, it may very well be, to all clear abstract thinking. But we are speaking here of mixed Science, tarnished and adulterated by contact with practical concerns. It is a practical need, which forces and enables man to apply a comprehensive term to the universe. Such verdict will be tinctured with the special bent and bias of the philosopher ; and in the end it is the human elements of personality, of sincerity, which wins respect for the system ; the unproven and wistful anticipations in the midst of arid certainty, which really attract and account for deeper influence. Granted that the world is 'knowable,' that is, merely, that its sequences can be concatenated in relation to thinking consciousness, what is its inmost essence, its real meaning, the core of its being ? and can that which in its very definition includes and welcomes and confounds all its parts into its central indifference, ever become a partizan ? 17
258 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 3. The earliest incentive to religion is to be found in this desire to make God a partizan. " No one ever acted," says Henry Jones, "without some dim though perhaps foolish enough half-belief that the world was at his back : whether he plots good or evil he always has God for his accomplice." Religious feeling is not (except in the young or senile) an awestruck recognition of law and unity; it may indeed pass into this attitude of acquiescence, this quietistic lethargy, when men are tired of trying to correlate it to their needs. But in the first instance it is a vigorous appeal for favouritism, not entirely free from the contracting spirit. It is a demand that the highest power known or suspected shall take a side, that the God of battles shall "go forth with our armies," or, in strictly personal and pacific function, "shall bring me again to my father's house in peace." The nature of the obstacle against which our efforts are directed has been variously interpreted ; but whether matter be dull and crass or somehow animated, both in ourselves and in the world around, by some malignant influence, the contest of life in any case is not wholly imaginary and fictitious. As this sense of discord and variance in our inner nature, in society, in the world at large, is the chief and urgent element of experience, so we track out the nature and qualities of each of the hostile groups, try to ascertain its tendencies and affinities, and by compromise unite them for practical purposes into a working harmony. And here our powers end; to reproach such a method as opportunist and unprincipled is merely to reproach us with being human. For this endeavour starts from no desire to attain logical accuracy in life, — which is, after all, easily won by emptying your formula of all content, making it (as most ethical maxims are wont to become) merely tautologic A = A. It arises not from the scientific but from the ' felicific ' impulse, — if I may use the word to express the desire tomake the best of one's self and of a world which in the last resort must always remain an enigma. Personal religion grows out of the consciousness of self, out of varied feelings, despairing, conceited, or commercial; it ends in its ennoble- ment and consecration. It is in this process, one of defecation, not of surrender or absorption, that man demands that his God shall be a partizan. It may be, as with Jacob at Bethel, a demand for personal safety; with Moses or Paul, in his
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 259
sublime unselfishness, a demand that the people of the Lord shall come by their own, even at the cost of his own rejection, becoming 'anathema' for them, innocent for the guilty. Or with conscientious persecutors of later day, faithfully perse- vering in their terrible and mistaken duty. Or in modern times, a demand for an ' ever-present help in trouble,' against impersonal foes, sin and indifference. Our own liturgy shows the earlier form, God's enemies are the nation's enemies and the king's ; ' victory over all his enemies ' is still the ideal. Even when we have forgiven the sinner, and only think how to convert him and loose him from ignorance and vice, we still, even in our tolerance or sloth, ask that God shall be on the side of right, as we interpret it. In all pure monotheistic systems (except the Christian) there is a very perceptible lowering of the spiritual temperature. The more comprehensive the unity, the more fictitious and ironic the antitheses which once appeared so stubborn and impracticable. The establishment of such a system coincides with a decline of zest and conviction in life. Wherever, through vast tracts of time and land, such a belief has existed unshaken and un- questioned, what the Western calls ' advance and development ' is indefinitely arrested. This thought, " God's in His heaven ; all's well with the world," may have two lessons : ' fatal doing ' is a mistake and an impiety ; or, it behoves me to be up and active in His cause. Impartial testimony from history will show that the Christian Gospel cannot sink into torpor or com- placence, because its basis is, and must remain, largely dualistic, because in it we are taught to learn the nature of deity by studying a human life. " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father . . . My Father worketh hitherto, and I work."
§ 4. Christianity is then humanistic, that is, does not com- promise as other monotheistic belief must perforce do, with the rigour of physical law, with nature's indifference to happi- ness or desert, or to the aims and hopes of mankind. It fixes our attention upon the value of a simple life, attainable by every one, without respect to rank, knowledge, or opportunity. It resolutely asserts, against almost unvarying evidence, a moral end in the universe; not a vague current setting towards an indefinable righteousness, but a personal guidance, judgment, recompense of individuals, — a moral aim related to all, and, in
26o THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
spite of obvious problems, broadly intelligible to all. It will not allow this antithesis, at least of natural and spiritual, to be transcended, or the distinction of right and wrong to be blurred, as with Assassins and perhaps with Templars, in an esoteric cult of indifference or a region ' Beyond Good and Bad.' This refusal is sturdy and sincere, and accounts both for the un- doubted force which the Gospel has exerted over development, and for those brief but violent periods of antipathy to the world, when, against some comforting preaching of Unity, or salvation already achieved, the seductive influence of some secular culture, the enervating effect of new comfort and multi- plied appliance, the Church feels bound to raise the standard of effort and of opposition. "Ye worship ye know not what; we know what we worship." All narrower antithesis of self and others, of nation and Christendom, of Christian thought and earnest pagan philosophy, may be put aside or surmounted. But the widest scope of view from the watch-tower of wisdom {wa-irep €k TrepiwTriys) cannot justify US in viewing life or the universe as an achieved harmony. Happily for the zest of human endeavour, the struggle is still raging, the triumph is not yet won. This assurance does not entail condemnation of those who seem already to have put off their armour and entered into rest. The twofold need in God, as a * place of peace,' a bond of unity, and as a helper in the fight, — this we have often noticed. There is a serious significance in that fanciful interpretation of Trinitarian dogma which appealed to Abbot Joachim and to Hegel and Schelling. The present age of effort and striving and failure is the Kingdom of the Son; and the perfect peace or Kingdom of the Spirit is to be attained only by suffering and trial. There is a point, as we all know, where resignation to the Divine Will becomes a snare. Has not some modern writer, thinking perhaps of the story of Jacob, spoken of the worthiest attitude to God — ' Behave to Him as to a generous foe ' ?
§ 5. Having shown the limits to which Christianity can go in the process of conciliation, of ' crossing out ' antithesis, let us see whether the course of independent human thought can provide any lessons from its sedulous pursuit of Unity. First, a single material element was held by the lonians to account for the variety of things, and Heraclitus in the East and
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 261
Xenophanes in the West were the earUest to introduce, in place of mechanism, a certain notion of purpose, of continuity not merely of sequence but of aim, even of conscious blessedness. The universe, which was once too far above to interfere with the lesser spheres of the gods, gradually takes on their semi- human attributes. In the Attic or classical age, this concep- tion was still more firmly established ; instead of a never-ceasing process, infinite in time and space (where the primitive sub- stance was never out of masquerade), or an unchanging organism, circular limited; one system, the Platonic, was pervaded by a moral purpose ; another, magnetically attracted by a stable and permanent, though inaccessible, point of conscious ttitelligence. This somewhat naive confidence that the universe would answer to men's moral hopes, as it certainly yielded to their interpretation, was followed by that long and perhaps inglorious reaction in which the anthropocentric standpoint was in effect abandoned by all Schools. The Stoic was the first to worship the unknown ; for it surpassed his cleverness to attempt to bring into line natural, social, and moral forces. Stoicism, where it is not used in the superficial sense of unrepining and patient forbearance, implies agnosticism and nothing more. As we know, where it failed to provide satisfaction for personal needs, the more mystical side of Plato was put under contribution ; and the alliance of Porch and Academy was complete before the classical age of the New Platonists. Here, again, the almost personal sense of intimate communion relieved their doctrine from absurdity, their venture of faith from sheer foolhardiness. It might indeed be impossible to explain to others what was this secret commerce between particular and universal soul ; but to Seneca and to Aurelius, as to any other pious devotee in East or West, it was a fact of incontrovertible experience, the most real thing in life. In the larger world outside the Schools, in the rekindled interest in various cults, society sought alleviation of its ennui, and some lightening of the perhaps oppressive sense of uniform law, human and Divine. Then came Christianity, with its ready and simple message, its profound yet not obtrusive metaphysics, and expelled the awe felt at the powerful and the strong, or the respect paid to unintelligibility simply on that ground and under that title. It cannot be doubted that the Gnostic
262 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
systems largely encouraged this humiliating worship; and, starting in a praiseworthy desire to co-ordinate the 'credenda,' to apply pagan criteria to Christian belief, to " be ready always to give an answer," this movement of intellectual curiosity fell into ' old wives' fables ' and irrationalism. The Catholic Church strove against this reproach by submitting to the ordinary moral judgment of the individual, or to continuous corporate tradition (guided, but never overpowered, by inspiration), all necessary articles of Faith. It never flinched from open dis- cussion ; in the Conciliar or in the Mediaeval period it deferred to the definition of Greek philosophy, or the more rigid formula of Roman law. In its Christology it preserved, against the menace of absorption, the independence of the human side ; it rejected the ' transient and miraculous theophany ' of Cerinthus, and the purely magical doctrine of Grace. But it is true that, to some extent, the dominating influence in the Church of the Middle Ages is to be found in Augustine's doctrine, whether of Church-supremacy, or the Divine counsel and foreknowledge. And the African Church was from the first a determined apostle of Absolutism, which disdained any reckoning with ordinary standards.
§ 6, To Tertullian — at least in one peculiar and (some may suppose) artificial attitude, which he assumed and intensified in the fire of debate — the Christian message is to be accepted, not because it answers so fitly the unspoken aspirations, the inarticulate needs of the heart, but because it runs counter to all intellectual logic, all ordinary experience. Like a flash of lightning out of a clear sky came the Divine marvel ; came the summons to an unconditional capitulation. Rebuking the liberal Alexandrinism, which looked for patient develop- ment even in the Divine purpose, for partial revelation even in dark and pagan times ; which groped diligently for any trace of likeness and for points of affinity from the common ground for learner and for preacher ; Tertullian rejected such compromise as unworthy the unique majesty of a sudden and unprepared Theophany. It is not a little significant that about the same time, and from the same country, issued into the field of world- politics Septimius Severus, a similar figure with a similar mission, who tore from force a thin disguise of legality, and became the first military autocrat in Rome. Then Cyprian
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 263
transfers this belief in irresponsible sovereignty into the sphere of Church government; Lactantius into the moral life; for, in itself arbitrary and indifferent, the demand of virtue and piety are only of value because God has so ordained ; the test of quia Deiis prcccepif, common to the African School and Duns Scotus, the anti-Thomist. Augustine sums up all doctrine, morals, and principles of statesmanship for the Western world in the next millennium ; and in his finished theory the moral aspects of the Gospel well nigh disappear behind the arbitrary. The whole Scholastic movement is a serious and perhaps an ineffectual protest against this surrender to the unknown. But they fought for the ifiteUigeiice, not for the moral sense ; and in satisfying this universal Reason by logic and formula, they did not reach the heart. Now it is not a little strange that unlimited power as a chief attribute of Deity, that distrust of intellect, that (within a narrow society) hierarchic tyranny, should have marked the issue of a reformation which avowedly began in sympathy for the unit and its claim for freedom of conscience and direct access to God. Yet the Reformation undoubtedly ended by reviving Augustinianism, with all its unreconciled dualism, its intolerance, its absolutism, — against which the practice and (to a large extent) the theory of the Mediaeval Church had reacted. We have already traced the retirement of the religious element to its own peculiar and private fastness in the following years ; the increasingly secular and un-moral character of the State. Philosophy in the seven- teenth century, like statesman and citizen, surrendered gladly to autocracy. The God of the thinker is Law and fiat absolute, to whom time and purpose and aim cannot be allowed. The system or fabric is discoverable in its laws and sequence by thought, but not amenable to a moral verdict or criterion. Already the world of artistic unity, of speculative contemplation, has unfolded itself beyond the visible, where there is 'no variableness, no shadow of turning.' In that age, though pious faith (until disillusioned) believed in a benevolent design in- cluding units. State and Church were dominated by a notion of arbitrary and irresistible power. Indeed, this was only toler- able because its intervention was not perpetual, its presence not always felt. The State was paramount, but its actual en- croachments were limited ; the Divine fiat of doom or salvation
264 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
was irresistible; but it left much to the pleasing or agonised uncertainty of the individual in the long interval of suspense.
§ 7. We need not again traverse the ground already covered in dealing with the eighteenth century; the novel claims of the individual for consideration and respect, the Constitu- tionalism, attained in England and demanded elsewhere by the educated, the utilitarianism in theology, which suggested that the 'greater glory of God' was best won by consulting the happiness of the several units that made up His kingdom. A government, a State, an institution like the Sabbath, did not exist for its own sake ; just as the end of law is not its own empty fulfilment, but the welfare of those for whose benefit it has been set up. The entire aim of this epoch of eager and sanguine reform was to eliminate the unknown ; to show the facility of prudent virtue, the simplicity of the Divine purpose, the open candour with which the secrets of nature were laid bare to patient and unprejudiced search. There was no place for ' mystery ' in such an age ; the mystic and the ' enthusiast ' were together banished from the coming realm of pure reason. In the nineteenth century, when romantic thought reverted wistfully to the charm of half-lights, Gothic cathedrals, feudal chivalry, vague artistic delineation, blurred and suggestive out- lines, hints and intimations of the spiritual ; when philosophers, tired of the banal transparency of rational truisms which facts refuted, went back to the 'little sensations' of Leibnitz, the unconscious background of thought ; Religion regained much of the shadow and reserve which men had tried to dispel. There was a great revival of dogma, which in the Christian system has always retained, and always must retain, a certain element of paradox, of paralogism — the finite taking on infini- tude. Clearness became a demerit in the eyes of the new School of Obscurantists; the test of value became to many incomprehensibility ; the obvious was despised or handed over to the dull routine of the State. Enigmatic utterance, ' Hymns to the Night,' and mystical sighs and aspirations, took the place of straightforward teaching and simple lessons of honesty and truth. Despairing of reason, men accepted the guidance of feeling. In spite of the apparent deference to calm logic and calculated rule, it may be questioned if any age has been less influenced and moulded by conscious plan, by statesmanship
SURRENDER TO THE UNKNOWN 265
of decided aim. Great movements have swept along their supposed agents and engineers towards goals which they never dreamt of, to conclusions they never suspected. The common and well-founded taunt of opportunism implies not a lack of moral principles in individuals, but a puzzled ignorance as to their right application in a world so changed. Many are content to resign themselves to the current and drift with the stream. And in the Social world, which is largely usurping the place once occupied by pure politics, no one would venture to decide where the future lies, with State-sovereignty or with individual liberty, with automatism, beneficent but not spon- taneous, or with a noble but perilous autonomy.
§ 8. Elsewhere we have tried to show the remarkable ' down- grade ' tendency to empty the Source of Being of any quality that seems akin to ourselves, that might confirm the truth of Kant's pregnant suggestion — the unknown element in things may perchance turn out to be very near to our own mind. Deism, with its narrow but humanistic moralism, was completely out of fashion. Nature-worship, with its truths and its fallacies, took hold of men's imagination ; and suited exactly the temper of an age romantic just because it was prosaic. Poets sang of the mysterious and indefinable emotion, which seized on the soul like some panic or bacchic rapture. When Reason was mentioned as the root or key of being, it was not the limited calculation of the logician, but the whole impetus and onrush of unconscious forces. All schools, whether optimist or pessi- mist in tone, ignored or derided the anthropocentric standard. Unable to penetrate the secret of the origin and meaning of the world-process, the French School proposed to lay an embargo on metaphysical dreams or idle search, and find in ' Humanity ' a substitute for an extinct Deity : the English, seeing even here something beyond verification and sensible experience, recommended a return to the national State, to a visible community, to ordinary moral duties of the old-fashioned type, closely modelled on Puritan forms, among which they had been brought up. And in some few, the sense of baffled intel- ligence striving in vain to understand, drove to the utmost length of renunciation or defiance. Such are some of the re- actions which the doctrine of the unknown and unknowable provoked. A large proportion of thinkers despair of finding
266 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
any counterpart to human needs and demands without. Some conceal their disappointment by a revival of Stoic abnegation or Buddhist calm, by calling men to defer ungrudgingly to a race-purpose which they cannot decipher, and in which they cannot participate. Yet never was age so carefully primed and prepared against the insidious charming of these preachers of self-sacrifice. The individual to-day has learnt both his worth and his power. If the State, if the Divine purpose cannot justify itself to him, to his sense of value and righteousness of aim, he will have none of it; he will turn to 'cultivate his garden,' an obvious duty not without its own simple delight and immediate recompense. Although (as we see clearly) the human mind is eager to discover a cause worth the serving, the modern half-hearted appeals, duty for duty's sake, surrender of present gain for a remote and problematic posterity, are listened to with chilling silence. Christianity provides us with an ideal object for our efforts, with a Sovereign who can recognise merit and guarantee future triumph, with a sense of personal value, with the assurance of the worth of endeavour; and in this teaching, not merely appropriate to the present day but indis- pensable, the Church occupies a unique position : it is the sole hope of Western society.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE IV— A
The Three Stages of Modern Apologetic
Credibility"! TPure Reason
Fact [ corresponding to the J^^
Value J ^"^^^ Philosophies |utility
§ I. Different standpoint of man of action and reflection : the one careless of the absoluteness of a working hypothesis : conflict of Science and ' democracy ' in one of its phases : rejection of a ' single law ' in modern French thought : English doubt of the claims of ' architectonic ' science.
§ 2. Successive isolations of the Religious problem : the ages of reason, of facts, of values, — corresponding to the years 1 700-1900 ; early inquiry into Christian dogma by Rationalism : second inquiry of Science, — the nineteenth century ' historic ' : this age not prolific in new principles ; but in revivals : its title to distinction, its in- dustry; its interest, the conflict of ideas.
§ 3. Keen and critical inquiry into the Gospel story : attempt to study without prejudice : general belief that its morality might survive its supernatural basis : at length realised that Nature taught an opposite lesson to Christian altruism : much pains to reconcile : final settlement into Gnosticistn ; or the theory of combating the Cosmic Process : absence of any clear principle.
§ 4. yl humanistic reaction sets in ; values : rejection of the standards of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries : a division of ter- ritory proposed : modesty of our aim to-day, to understand and provide for average man : silence of contemporary thought on all ultimate problems ; no reason for rejecting the light we have.
§ I. The traveller in search of Religious truth may follow three paths at discretion : he may point to the probability or reasonableness a priori of the doctrine ; he may carefully ascertain the accuracy of the method of revelation (if indeed the religion has any historical kernel) ; or he may point to the value of the beliefs in their wholesome influence on life
267
268 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
and happiness, to the social uses of the Church which is their custodian. Now the undying feud between the philosophic and the popular attitude to things, is due to their different criterion. There is no sign at present that this stubborn incompatibility can be reconciled. The average man is not in the least interested in the pursuit of truth, that is of logical consistency. If he can be provided with a working hypothesis, a general rule of conduct, a scientific presumption, somehow applicable to things, he has neither leisure nor inclination to concern himself with the absoluteness of the hypothesis which he finds so useful, with 'eternal and im- mutable morality,' or with the essential relation of thought and things. This (it will be said) is but to paraphrase the commonplace that the busy man's standpoint i?, practical, the philosopher's speculative. But some commonplaces are pro- found; and some truisms are so often repeated that their meaning and implications are apt to be forgotten. The modern conflict of physical Science or abstract philosophy with the aims and ideals of 'democracy,' should convince a careful student of this complex age that the antithesis is of very real import. It is not too much to say that the future of Western Europe (it would be arrogant to say of mankind) must depend on the settlement or compromise which may be arrived at between the two. The Christian and ' democratic ' axiom, 'every man an end in himself,' admits of no dispute whatever in the opinion of the religious believer or the genuine lover of his kind. It is a doctrine in which science and philosophy cannot acquiesce, not because their point of view is false, but because it is partial. We have ere this maintained that there is no such thing as an 'architectonic' science. We listen with attention to the loud disclaimer of the supposed identity of natural and social phenomena, which of late years has reached us from France (once the very home and cradle of monistic theory and logical coherence), from Rauh, Levy- Bruhl, Jankelevitch, fellow-countrymen of the great champions of a sifigle mastering law, Rousseau, Napoleon, Comte. We in England have not indeed become once more conscious of this dualism, because we have never forgotten it. In the eyes of the strict it has always been the reproach of English thinkers that they have never accepted the undivided sover-
CREDIBILITY, FACT, AND VALUE 269
eignty of pure thought. The philosopher in these islands has always been many things beside ; the most materialist, a devout Christian ; the most sceptical, a sound man of business ; the most convinced of the vanity of things, an eager, practical worker for the good of his age. It is the merit of the ' Constitutional ' temper, which implies not, as is so idly supposed, an insurgence of the people against mon- archical whim, but (let it be seriously remembered at the present time) a generous deference to the weaker side, a dislike of all dictatorship and State-encroachment, a spirit of compromise, which puts up with what is second-best in theory, if only a modified perfection will win a more general accept- ance. It is surely no small achievement to brave with good- humour this taunt of illogicality ; at given moments to isolate the matter under discussion, to define precisely the sphere of debate, so that we successfully avoid the temptation of reducing all to an abstract unity, to a 'night in which all cows are black.' But if it is insisted that an architectonic science, or at least rule, must be found, we must unhesitatingly claim that place for Religion, which, in the sense employed in these essays, is always practical and not speculative.
§ 2. In each of the two last centuries, thought centring attention on the religious problem has been dominated by an exclusive idea. To the age of reason succeeds the age of fact; and to this, again, the age of values. Each of our pre- decessors has made an honest attempt at covering the whole ground of experience with a single formula. Individual search was at first directed upon the theory of revelation ; only imperfectly self-conscious and without humane sympathies, these critics rejected the belief in any Divine unfolding, save that contained in the all-sufficient volume of Nature. A closer inquiry into this Divine and benevolent mechanism would disclose all secrets needful for man's well-being. The very fundamental conception of Christianity, the union of the finite with infinitude, put its whole dogmatic basis at once out of court. Instead was left a human prophet of pure moral teaching and blameless life. Starting from prepossessions a priori, very natural to their habit of thought and impartial criticism, they rejected the credibility of the story; because God, as they conceived Him, could never have acted in that
270 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
way. With the failure of Rationalism, identifying itself with a Nature it had never investigated, a new method was adopted. Theories and logic and vision were given up to the Idealist and Romantic Schools of discontented poets and philosophers ; practical duties were entrusted to the State, with its largely increased powers ; and the universal aim in all branches of knowledge was to ascertain what really happened. The nineteenth century is above all the ' historic ' age, — the age of unbiassed inquiry into origins and stages of development. All scientific study must start free from prejudice, though it may be animated and stimulated by every kind of vague hypothesis. It must rigidly divest itself of any kind of moral prepossessions; and how difficult this is no reader of the great authors of Science is unaware; it seems impossible for them to forget in the sense of the import of their mission that we do not go to exact inquiry for commonplaces of moral exhortation, and that a lay-reader and his tone of thought is entirely out of place in a laboratory, " Render unto Csesar " ; and this is no despairing surrender, but a necessary limitation of province and propriety. This simple registry of fact is the great achievement of the age that is past ; its industry is the best title to remembrance, its exactitude. The nineteenth century may well be challenged to have produced a single new principle, a single fresh idea : its novelty and interest lie in this, — that it displays all principles, all ideas in conflict. It brought forth an abundant crop of revivals of antique or forgotten doctrines ; because a purely negative survey of things as they have happened, or will again happen, can be reconciled to any and every hypothesis as to the source and meaning of the whole. When Mr. Darwin was asked whether he considered his discoveries told in favour of Christianity or against it, he answered without hesitation, " In favour." Although far more exact proof of the unbroken chain of circumstance is now forthcoming, it cannot be said that the sense of fatal necessity is really more acute and oppressive than in the sixteenth century ; when Kepler, mark- ing at one moment the leap from mediaeval to modern thought, removed the anhnce motrices in his second edition and substituted natural forces. In the tracing of sequence and series, in the prediction of coming events, in the control
CREDIBILITY, FACT, AND VALUE 271
(customary but always precarious) of physical phenomena, the past epoch has made unrivalled progress. But it has made no innovation in qualifying the Universe into whose secrets it has so closely penetrated. With all its knowledge it prefers to confess its ignorance. Except in a narrow and pietistic clique, the voice of optimism is silent ; and in spite of some superficial disclaimers of pessimism, the most prevalent theory of the Universe as a whole is borrowed from the gnostic dreamers of the second century.
§ 3. The attitude of such an age to the Gospel was one of keen interest and criticism. Recognising the importance of Christian phenomena in world-history, in social and political development, writers of all Schools divested themselves of all prejudice and metaphysic. It was not their concern to rave against priestcraft or fumble with forgotten controversy. Dispassionate calm, and even wistful sympathy, mark their writings; the Gospel-record took its place with everything human or natural, — a development having ascertainable cause, motive, laws, utility ; following a course easy to be traced, and doomed like all else to find an end when its vitality was exhausted. In this research into religious origins, there was nothing necessarily hostile, except perhaps the implicit assump- tion that Christianity was a pure and natural phenomenon. Some ventured to attack certain doctrinal outposts, without carrying the site of the main citadel; others refrained from any comment, though the result of their work was subversive of belief; others, again, regretted the painful necessity of plain speaking, and comforted their hearers with the thought that the beneficial effects and pure morality of the Gospel would survive the overthrow of its dogma. For nothing was more typical of the last century than the vagueness and instability of its moral sanction. It was imagined that, apart from any 'doctrine of man and his nature, of the universe and its meaning,' the ' beauty of holiness,' in a very restricted and Christian (not to say Puritan) sense, was obvious and irresistible. The clearest thinkers, blind in this respect to the real tendency and average temper of their age, preached the separation, indeed the enfranchisement, of altruistic ethics from the only doctrine which gave it cogency or attractiveness. At that stage they neither knew nor cared whether further
272 THEOLOGY AND TROGRESS
investigation into the root-principle of life or the stages of its evolution gave any warranty for this curious self-surrender. As deepening knowledge laid bare the wide rift between the lessons of natural selection and the teaching of the Gospel, men were at much pains to conceal, to deny, or to explain it. Many volumes were written on the relations of Science and Religion; and whatever was the standpoint of the authors, secular or orthodox, the final resuU was the same, — we must leave to Nature her fatalism and her cruelty, and see in God only ineffable love, and in supreme abnegation man's highest duty. Even where the second axiom was rejected (as in the British School of Science), the cogency of the third was never seriously called in question. A demur might be raised that except in the brief and instinctive sacrifice of maternal love, man could seek in vain for any counterpart or encouragement in Nature to their very exacting code; and at last a final rupture took place with the inexorable physical system. Man's sole virtue and sole hope lay in ceaseless combat of the cosmic process ; the antithesis, which even lurked in the complacent monism of the Stoics, between 'ftiy' nature and ' uiiiversaV nature, was recognised as the base and incentive of all human endeavour, the ground of all human society. This antithesis is the esoteric belief which actually governs Western conduct. Yet the stream of apologies and reconciliations has not ceased. Some explain away the reality of animal pain ; others would console individual misery and failure by the unsatisfactory and indistinct theory of an example set to posterity; others deny, or give an unfamiliar interpretation to immortality. And while the life-impulse prevents the extinc- tion of the race (at least among our simpler classes), while nations are recruited by the natural working of a passion which has never recognised Reason as its master, — the best die out and leave no heirs. In the acknowledged vanity of things (apart from the Christian hypothesis) none can supply anything approaching a clear and logical justification of their hopes, their principle of action, their clinging to life ; or of the widespread yet quite unreflected 'goodness,' kindness and sympathy, which we meet with at every turn in dealing with average and unsophisticated mankind.
§ 4. Whilst only a few, soon silenced or confined as mad-
CREDIBILITY, FACT, AND VALUE 273
men, follow to its logical conclusions the lesson of natural facts, the remainder are (as we must, I fear, again remind them) but pensioners of a system which they have done their best to undermine. It is not to the inconsistency of this attitude we would call especial attention ; the only enemies to the advance of thought and the profit of men are the claimants to absolute truth, the proposers of systems complete and symmetrical. It is to the new standard which they employ, a criterion which they will only avow with reluctance — the standard of values. We must again utterly repudiate the taunt of ' bankruptcy,' which is levelled, here and in France and in Germany (with the famous ' ignorabimus ' of Dubois-Reymond), at scientific pretension. Never was a shaft so aimless or so innocuous. Because some meddlesome sciohsts endeavoured in vain to extract rules for the moral life from physical phenomena, it is the acme of religious arrogance to blame the system, when in their own department they had won such results. But we have made no little step towards clearness of thought if we recognise that man is neither ' an organ of pure reason,' nor a higher, that is, more complex, animal, guided only by the push and thrust of outward circumstance ; but first and foremost, and in spite of his introspective and self-centred temper to-day, a social being, eager to find a cause worth his support, actuated by generous instincts, which owe little allegiance to the control of calculation and reflection. It is in the conviction that neither the eighteenth nor the nine- teenth centuries exhausted the nature of man that we are proposing to-day a fresh and, it may be, lasting division of territory. The former cared nothing for average men, though it talked much of average humanity. The latter, moving in somewhat blind sentiment along the path of so-called political reform, must confess that it has not properly understood the character and needs of those masses whose ideal rights it maintained with such unselfish vigour. And while this enthusiasm for freedom has been damped by the cynical and sinister results of the parallel movement, of scientific induction, men are perhaps only too ready to despair finally of the salva- tion of the individual. He is to be left to penal settlements, to coercive legislation. We have at least outlived inordinate confidence in intellect apart from experience and the sympathy 18
274 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
and tolerance which it should bring ; we have found nothing to controvert, but also nothing to guide us in peculiarly human duties, in the advancing certainty of facts, pursued down their several avenues of knowledge. But we have at last met man face to face ; we are endeavouring to understand that which is unsophisticated — the child, the savage, the peasant. And it is because we believe in the Gospel message as the unique medicine of society through the individual, that we accept in an age that would be ' democratic ' if it could, the canon of value and of worth ; — at least a working test and guarantee in a world where all really ultimate questions are still so profoundly obscure. But a widespread darkness is no reason for shutting out such glimmers of light as are permitted to reach us.
B
On the Pretensions of Esoteric Religion
§ I. The claim of ' Catholicity,' of universal application : unique appeal of Christianity , though it might adjust itself to individual needs : tendency of all religion to divide into popular and esoteric : Plato's ' noble falsehood' : this precedent may excuse all deviation in civil crisis from ordinary canons of right.
§ 2. Often a sincere desire to give the ignorant the best possible : much that is slothful in the freedom we allow others cheerfully to-day : the true duty of slave-owners, as of ' imperial ' races : esoteric reserve in the early scholastics : some myths rejected : unworthy reserve not a fair charge against medicBval hierarchy.
§ 3. Parents unconscious of offspring's maturity : Protestant religion betrays a tendency to fall asunder into tivo : lack of sympathy with the plain man in the eighteenth century : Rousseau and English Revivalism appeal to direct experience, not to reason : a similar modesty in the science of the next age.
§ 4. Science has appeared, deserting its true province of par- ticulars, to teach an esoteric cult : ' monistic ' indifference has no charm for the average mind, no claim on the ordinary life : in the reduction of the simplest moral axiom to the sphere of faith all ' boasting is excluded,' and wise and unlearned stand on the same lowly level.
§ I. One of the safest and most obvious tests of the value
ESOTERIC RELIGION 275
and benefit of an institution is its catholicity. The wider the circle to which it appeals, the greater its beneficial effect, and (what may even weigh more with some minds) the better the test of its 'truth,' its accordance not merely with a brief national temper or private idiosyncrasy but with some ob- jective reality. It was a ground of early attack upon Christianity that it wished to be catholic and exclusive. It was indeed a reproach that rising from the narrow creed of an isolated people it claimed to transcend all distinctions of race, age, and rank, and blend in one family all the nations of the earth. And though the emphasis of the appeal might vary slightly in each case, the appeal was always the same : man's weakness and need of God, God's ' tender love towards man- kind,' and (the eternal religious paradox) the ennobling possibility for man of willing service in the highest cause. To one, the stress might be laid on comfort in unmerited distress ; to another, on the rescue from some special thraldom of evil habit ; to another, on deliverance from the vagrancy of intellectual uncertainty ; to another, once again, on the touching spectacle of a visible and cheerful community at peace within itself. To one class alone did the message appeal in vain, to those who felt no need of such help. For such, even the Saviour Himself could ' do no mighty work.' But let the weak- ness and dependence be once allowed, and redemption was nigh at hand ; and in all the difference or versatility of its application, the Gospel lesson was always the same — "God so loved the world." To some, rest and quiet after the turmoil of life in the ' everlasting arms ' ; to others, the fiery zeal of missionary enterprise ; — to one, the remote cell of the hermit ; to another, the martyr's stake ; to another, the auditorium of the cate- chumens, or some meeting-place of earnest yet pagan thought. But throughout, ' one and the self-same spirit.' Now, so far as we know from historical research, every great religion has suffered by drifting into two unequal parts : the ' truths,' or visible images and stories, accommodated to the vulgar ; and the real meaning of this symbolism, entrusted only to the wise or proficient. It has been divided into exoteric and esoteric religion ; simple duties, blind obedience, dogmas verbally repeated, ceremonies unintelligently performed, on the one hand ; on the other, secret beliefs or practices, sceptical study,
276 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
ironical compliance, authoritative utterance to the laity. Even Plato's generous rulers had to appeal in an ideal State to the influence of falsehood. The welfare of the State, the dutiful submission of its citizens, seemed to depend on the acceptance of a definite mythology, which amongst other ends was to reconcile them to distinctions of lot. It would be easy, following this innocent example, to justify logically any special deviation from veracity and justice, at the trumpet-call, ' salus Reipublicse.' The natural perversion of this kind of doctrine was seen even in Plato's day, in the intermittent murder of dangerous helots ; and the Venetian oligarchy and the Spanish Inquisition can plead the same precedent. In purely religious matters it implies the strict regulation of the supply of dogma to the vulgar, the perpetual tutelage of the uneducated, com- fortable but unprogressive, and the haughty yet ironical pretensions of the privileged hierarchy.
§ 2. This is the defect which follows in the train of any sincere solicitude for the ignorant — a desire to give the best that is possible for them to understand. Like our boasted political enfranchisement, there is much that is slothful in the shifting of responsibility, in the open Bible, in the public dis- cussion of abstruse questions, in leaving so much unsettled for the unstrung conscience of youth. We can see two motives at work in either tendency : an eager sympathy with those who do not enjoy privilege, and a secret desire to be rid of its burden. But it cannot well be denied that with the Reforma- tion, religion surrendered much of its contact with daily life, the minister much of his minute influence on his flock ; that to-day, the retirement of the competent and conscientious from the guidance of affairs may soon constitute a real danger. It is more difficult, yet infinitely more interesting, to guide the independent than to govern the slave. Yet so far as the ultimate welfare of the latter was concerned, how often would it not have been the kindest policy to retain boldly the odious name of slave-master, rather than imperil the future of the weak by premature emancipation 1 The Mediaeval Church was sincere in its claims to universal dominion, not merely over the hearts or counsels of kings, but over the minute details, commercial intercourse, of gild traditions, of peasant life. The dogma, carefully prepared, was derived to the
ESOTERIC RELIGION 277
obedient layman, like sacramental grace, through the proper channel of the accredited priesthood. It is difficult to accuse the great names of the scholastic period of intellectual pride, yet it is plain that something of esoteric reserve entered into the priestly spirit. It is impossible to bring home either to Templar or Jesuit the sweeping accusations of irreligion which have been levelled at them in company with all secret and mysterious confraternities, challenging envy and suspicion, like the Freemasons to-day, by their wealth or influence. To substantiate the prosecution in a few cases is not to accept the charge as generally proved against the whole body. It is inconceivable (as has indeed been alleged) that the admission of a Templar implied in every case a trampling on the Cross, or that the inner doctrine of the devoted company of Jesus is a barren Deism. It was not pride of intellect that hastened on Protestant reform ; it was loss of conviction and honour in the very headquarters of Catholicism, — " God has given us the Papacy ; let us enjoy the gift," — confronted by the chivalrous Teutonic individualism which cannot stand a lie. With all the various forms of reserve which might be taken by an aristocratic religion, accommodated for acceptance to the popular competence, it cannot be honestly maintained that the Roman Church as a whole has seriously erred in keeping back truth from the people. It is almost impossible (so com plex is human nature) to explore and analyse motives with success. But a sincere reluctance to burden a weaker brother with a load of dialectic may be laid to the credit of the Church, no less than the visible and picturesque ceremony, which, while it might unduly materialise the spiritual element, tamed and interested and occupied the eager barbarians, and in concrete form taught them useful lessons.
§ 3. It was the chief mistake of the hierarchy not to under- stand when their pupil became adult. But it was, for many reasons, both a natural and creditable error. It is difficult for the ordinary parent to realise when his offspring is mature; and to let the fledgling go from home to the only effective educator — experience.
The unfortunate confessionalism of the Reformed Churches, their preoccupation with literal orthodoxy, hindered the effective application of the great and simple truths to which the earlier
278 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
movement appealed. In an age in which so much deference was paid to EnUghtenment, Religion could not fail to assume two guises — for the educated and the ignorant. We have pointed out the supposed merit of Deistic simplicity, the universal currency of the few dogmas they were still content to leave. But it would be a mistake to imagine the Deists as warmly sympathetic with the peculiar difficulties of the inferior classes ; and their lack of warmth was fatal to their proposed substitute for revealed and established Religion. The whole age ignored the plain man, though it professed to recognise only a popular standard. Clearness and intelligibility was the sole test ; but it accepted what was clear and intelligible only to that strangely limited and uniform mind, polite society in West Europe. In Germany and in England, re- actions toward a personal religious pietism took place. These excluded the very notion of esoteric reserve, in their disdain of secular wisdom, of the support which dialectic and preciseness of dogma might be supposed to yield to Faith. Like the movement of Rousseau, these appealed to the ground of the heart, to the direct immediacy of access to God, to a mystical sense, which has never been wanting in the Church, even in the most arid times. Viewed with profound disapproval by the upholders of 'reasonable' religion, of prudence and of common sense, in whose ears ' enthusiasm ' was the most damning charge, the renewed power of personal religion flourished apace, and in our own country contributed directly to the later ' Catholic ' movement some of its best features. It was not to be expected that any claim to greater intellectual insight should be allowed in the nineteenth century. A very real and general desire to see things as they are, not merely as confronted by tradition and by prejudice, led to patient research, candid avowal of ignorance, and open discussion.
§ 4. That which is lasting in this age is neither its political development nor its fancied recovery of lost principles, but merely its mastery of facts. It examines these in their special groups without undue prepossession, and above all with no moral bias. But the scientific spirit sometimes seems to teach that it is unadvisable to dazzle the vulgar with naked 'Truth.' It has proved hard, if not impossible, to co-ordinate into a system, to animate with a humanistic sympathy, these various
ESOTERIC RELIGION 279
groups of necessary facts, which are somehow, in the end, kindred. Men have almost ceased (or will soon cease alto- gether) to speak of the ' religion of Science ' as something apart from and superior to the ' religion of man,' as this is revealed in the Gospel. Esoteric religion has always, in past ages as to-day, tended towards a negative Pantheism, and the mdifference of distinctions, as of matter and spirit ; towards denial of any absoluteness of division, in questions of right and wrong. But however strongly philosophic reflection may set- in favour of this monistic apprehension of the world, it is certain that it has few attractions for the average mind. The religious revival in the nineteenth century has been, after all, social, not speculative ; and in the relegation of the most elementary axioms to the realm of faith there is a real guarantee against the revival of intellectual pride. So long as the 'rightness of reason,' the 'power and wisdom and benevolence of the Creator,' 'the certainty of moral recompense,' were truths self-evident to the educated, and sufficient for their guidance, Avhile the masses stood in need of positive doctrines, personal and historic ; there was room for the ' lesser and the greater mystery,' according to the adept's proficiency. But now that these are no less matters of pious faith than the most abstruse 'credendum' of Christian theology, all men are reduced, without respect to their insight or attainments, to the same humble level.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE V~A
Ages of Faith
§ I. The present age the Age of Faith : every first principle {in morals as much as in doctrine) called in question : Western mind cannot settle into pure monotheism, (unwarranted by facts) or mere social convention : Christianity indeed stronger than other creeds, because of its influence : Science respects only what is, and fnds only this justified : the new canon of authenticity, survival in the theoretic field, proved value in the practical.
§ 2. Reluctance to speak of ' duties,' stress on ' rights ' : marks not necessarily a weakening of moral fibre, but a natural result of thought- development : Dualism of law : a condition of welfare, not an arbitrary stipulation : general agreement allowed, even of the modern idiosyncrasies : even this not clearly defined : ' Catholicity ' only belongs to the first axioms of logic : thinness of universality : individualism in conception of heaven : we remould social convention and question moral law.
§ 3. ' Rights ' not ' duties ' prominent in Christianity as well as in eighteenth-century Enlightenment : privilege before precept : op- position to the rule of majorities quite as marked to-day as earlier revolt against personal tyranny : order of the Church Catechism : outside Christianity religion often means the sacrifice of the worth- less to the unknown : State has lost its power of appeal ; threat and compulsion : the 'Enlightenment {at its best) agrees with Christianity ; man not to be bound, hut won, to the right.
§ 4. 'But is not this vocation and election a mere mythologic pos- tulate ? and this faith in a transcendental destiny a bar to reasonable and modest progress here ? ' : but this objection true of all the principles animating the idealist movements of last century : all Abolitionist measures imply treatment of men as better than they actually are : ' man can only attain freedom or political responsi- bility if considered already as deserving of it ' : extension of suffrage {where not purely utilitarian) followed same lines : rights before duties ; duties learnt only incidentally by exercising rights : science all the time was accumulating directly opposite evidence.
§ 5. Both the claims of the Enlightenment for man and the titles
of the newly baptized constitute a challenge to facts : the confidence
280
AGES OF FAITH 281
of the feforming secularist more a ' venture of faith ' than the Christian hope : democracy claims immediate enjoyment : subjective experience confirms the value of Christian surrender of faith : philanthropy disheartened : earlier appeal for deferred enjoyment and self-denying toil ; would be out of place to-day : effect of doubt in immortality : unselfishness would still be practised, hut it could not be rationally defended.
§ 6. The Aliddle Ages as 'ages of faith ' : inapplicable tertn : immediacy of the Catholic Church, strong and rational : the ' ages of faith ' begin with the Reformation : in spite of the lessons of actuality, we cling to old beliefs : the postulate of reformers to-day ' dim mythologic postulate,' ' ventures of faith and hope ' : this in- vocation of Faith more than ever before necessary ; the Church alone answers.
§ I. It will not be found needful to deal at any great length with the meaning and implication of this phrase — 'Ages of Faith.' The standpoint occupied by these discussions (whether true or false diagnosis of the course of thought) must be by this time too clearly ascertained to stand in want of further definition. It has been maintained in them that the present age is the real ' age of Faith ' ; because the function of reason has been reduced to a registry of phenomena, because no single tenet of the scantiest theology or of the most attenuated moral code remains at the present moment unshaken. Let it be clearly understood, and let men face the issue honestly, that the doctrine of purposive creation and moral plan in the world, the very definition and use of ' virtue,' the justification of unselfishness (otherwise aimless) stand on no different level to the particular dogmas of Christianity. They are pure matters of pious and personal faith whenever they pass beyorrd social convention, the compact of the weak. Arguments for and against these beliefs (so indispensable to the social life) play harmlessly round them ; conviction, if it follows at all, comes from another source. Among other nations, where prevails a prehistoric monotheism or its substitute, secular socialism, deference to custom and respect for tradition may prevent a really shrewd and outspoken inquiry into facts. But the Western mind, once embarked on an independent voyage of exploration, cannot be recalled from dangerous shoals. In the new light of scientific fact and theory, the same doubt that sets aside the Divine mission of Jesus is
m
V-
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE V— A
Ages of Faith
§ I. The present age the Age of Faith : every first principle (in morals as much as in doctrine) called in question : Western mind cannot settle into pure monotheism {unwarranted by facts) or mere social convention : Christianity indeed stronger than other creeds, because of its influence : Science respects only what is, and finds only this Justified : the new canon of authenticity , survival in the theoretic field, proved value in the practical.
§ 2. Reluctance to speak of ' duties,' stress on ' rights ' : marks not necessarily a weakening of moral fibre, but a natural result of thought-development : Dualism of law : a condition of welfare, not an arbitrary stipulation : general agreement allowed, even of the modern idiosyncrasies : even this not clearly defined : ' Catholicity ' only belongs to the first axioms of logic : thinness of universality : individualism in conception of heaven : we remould social convention and question moral law.
§ 3. ' Rights ' not ' duties ' prominent in Christianity as well as in eighteenth-century Enlightenment : privilege before precept : op- position to the rule of majorities quite as marked to-day as earlier revolt against personal tyranny : order of the Church Catechism : outside Christianity religion often means the sacrifice of the worth- less to the unknown : State has lost its power of appeal ; threat and compulsion : the Enlightenment (at its best) agrees with Christianity ; man not to be bound, but won, to the right.
§ 4. 'But is not this vocation and election a mere mythologic pos- tulate ? and this faith in a transcendental destiny a bar to reasonable and modest progress here ? ' : but this objection true of all the principles animating the idealist movements of last century : all Abolitionist measures imply treatment of men as better than they actually are : ' man can only attain freedotn or political responsi- bility if considered already as deserving of it ' : extension of suffrage (where not purely utilitarian) followed same lines : rights before duties ; duties learnt only incidentally by exercising rights : science all the time was accumulating directly opposite evidence.
§ 5. Both the claims of the Enlightenment for man and the titles of the newly baptized constitute a challenge to facts : the confidence
2S0
{
AGES OF FAITH
281
of the reforming secularist more a ' venture of faith ' than the Christian hope : democracy claims immediate enjoyment : subjective experience confirms the value of Christian surrender of faith : philanthropy disheartened : earlier appeal for deferred enjoyment and self-denying toil ; would be out of place to-day : effect of doubt in immortality : unselfishness would still be practised, but it could not be rationally defended.
§ 6. The Middle Ages as 'ages of faith' : inapplicable term: immediacy of the Catholic Church, strong and rational : the ' ages of faith ' begin with the Reformation : in spite of the lessons of actuality, we cling to old beliefs : the postulate of reformers to-day ' dim mythologic postulate,' ' ventures of faith and hope ' : this in- vocation of Faith more than ever before necessary ; the Church alone answers.
§ I. It will not be found needful to deal at any great length with the meaning and implication of this phrase — 'Ages of Faith.' The standpoint occupied by these discussions (whether true or false diagnosis of the course of thought) must be by this time too clearly ascertained to stand in want of further definition. It has been maintained in them that the present age is the real ' age of Faith ' ; because the function of reason has been reduced to a registry of phenomena, because no single tenet of the scantiest theology or of the most attenuated moral code remains at the present moment unshaken. Let it be clearly understood, and let men face the issue honestly, that the doctrine of purposive creation and moral plan in the world, the very definition and use of ' virtue,' the justification of unselfishness (otherwise aimless) stand on no different level to the particular dogmas of Christianity. They are pure matters of pious and personal faith whenever they pass beyoi^d social convention, the compact of the weak. Arguments for and against these beliefs (so indispensable to the social life) play harmlessly round them ; conviction, if it follows at all, comes from another source. Among other nations, where prevails a prehistoric monotheism or its substitute, secular socialism, deference to custom and respect for tradition may prevent a really shrewd and outspoken inquiry into facts. But the Western mind, once embarked on an independent voyage of exploration, cannot be recalled from dangerous shoals. In the new light of scientific fact and theory, the same doubt that sets aside the Divine mission of Jesus is
r
# it #
282 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
admissible against a moral creator or a teleologic aim. In strictness, indeed, the Christian message is less open to assault than a vague monistic piety, or even moral Theism. For the scientific spirit finds that which is, that which survives, justified at the outset by this very fact. And, whatever its origin, the influ- ence of the Gospel over all Western development, and its peculiar consecration of the personal, its appeal to loyalty, is beyond question. Study may indeed point out changes of emphasis, from doctrinal to moral, from individualist ethics to social interest, from outward dignity in the world to inward calm, but never to a fundamental rearrangement of first principles. And as to-day the chief problem before believer and unbeliever alike is the position of the Church and its teaching in the future community, we recognise first the fad that it is still a power to be reckoned with, next that it has a practical value for the average man of sober judgment, as vigorous institution or as moral solace and appeal; — only in the last and subordinate place does the scientific spirit allow the inquiry to be raised as to the tntfh of the message, the authenticity of its credentials. For authenticity is proved solely by survival, not a priori. We have already called attention to this different attitude in criticism; stress on the strong theoretical justification by the Fact that it is there: — in the practical field, the acknowledged value of principles and traditions in an age which has outlived all its own, and is singularly ready (outside a certain sphere of utilitarian inter- ference) to accept not ungratefully any guidance, any extraneous support to the beliefs which still seem essential to social welfare. § 2. It is a commonplace to-day that we are afraid to speak openly of ' duties ' : and the only safe topic is ' rights.' In one sense, this marks not, as many idly suppose, a weakening of the moral fibre, but a plain and necessary development of common sense, the individual consciousness, confronted with experience. The terms duty, law, obligation, even religion, speak of dualism and chains and bondage. A law is obeyed, surely not because it is an end-in-itself, or a stipulation, perhaps capricious, of a higher power, but because it is a condition of welfare. We take it on trust, but on reaching the age which bids us inquire and criticise, we find there is perhaps nothing sacro- sanct in the prohibition or command ; and in modern times we
AGES OF FAITH 283
have certainly outlived the notion of sacredness, in that which is obnoxious to perpetual alteration, both in principle and detail. The centre of gravity has passed irrevocably from the objective fact to the subjective tribunal. " Only in terms of myself can I interpret the world." And herein lies a plea at least for the ' truth ' as well as the use of the humanistic or * moral ' attitude, which of late years has appeared so ill-founded and problematic. We can never know the 'thing-in-itself ' or the particular phenomena except in this relation. 'Truth' may indeed exist somewhere as a unity beyond our ken, but in the actual world it has as many appearances as there are thinkers : quot homines, tot veritates. But this same rela- tivity, which limits the jurisdiction of our particular colour sense, musical and aesthetic taste, moral view and ideal, may also be retrieved by the large though vague resemblance, irreducible to exact canon, which exists between the judg- ment of the varying units. What is significant is first the idiosyncrasy of our sensations and our verdicts, next the agreement that blends these variegated rays into a single shaft of light. But if we are thankful for this vague and general guidance, let us be modest enough not to claim absoluteness even for this. It is not even capable of strict definition ; Truth, as well as law, is always weak, owing to its preten- sions to universality (eXXetVei . . . 8ia to KaOoXov). In this light, as Novalis saw, the uncompelled sympathy and fellow- feeling of another is of vital importance, and gives a new and irrestistible confidence to our own convictions. The spontane- ous in us meets a voluntary approval outside, and leaves the domain of illusion or hallucination. We do not enter bound, as the votaries into the sacred grove of the Semnones, into a rigid realm of Truth. That which is catholic in the genuine sense is confined to the attenuated first axioms of logic. The universal is thin and rarefied, like the vast and homogeneous vapour of the nebular hypothesis ; life pulses with conflict and variety, as light in its pure brilliance is made up of all hues merged for the general effect, but still distinguishable in them- selves. And as truth here is partial and relative, so we must believe heaven hereafter, no flat uniform perfection, suddenly reducing to a dead level all the countless varieties of character and predilection, but a hopeful outlook for future develop-
284 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
ment of the qualities here handselled and disciplined, under the eyes of the same Master and in the same service of the right. This kind of ' individualism,' whether based on these or similar arguments, is in truth the only dogma that has any genuine influence to-day, that Christianity can aff"ord to recog- nise. Law succumbs to inquiry : first appearing as aweful and not to be questioned, it next is seen as a tiresome restraint on individual freedom; finally, in the inevitable 'synthesis,' as a loving and needful provision against the rashness of judgment not yet mature, a condition not a hindrance of progress. But in this process it has become a means ; it is no longer an end ; and as we are at liberty to evade physical law, so we are free to remould social convention, and (within certain limits) to question the absoluteness of moral authority. § 3. The changed temper which dwells on rights rather than on duties is justified not merely by the whole underlying motive of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, of modern political reform, but by the presupposition of Christianity itself. The early bloodless revolution in thought, the later sanguinary outburst, the patient development, part idealist part utilitarian, within the last fifty years, all arose from indignation at the disregard of individual rights, at the mis- carriage of personal justice, at the abuse of privilege. There was among the best no idea of substituting one arbitrary sovereignty for another; but a visionary dream of direct government of the people by themselves. It is wholly an error to suppose that the average man bows more willingly to the 'will of the majority,' of which he does not happen to be a member, than to the edicts of a king into whose council-chamber he cannot claim admittance. There is every probability (as history repeatedly shows) that the latter, even in his selfish aims, is really furthering impartially the national welfare, and is its best representative. There is the strongest presumption that even at their most generous level the efforts of sections will seldom rise much beyond exultation in some party-victory. There is the same spirit of dull opposition to majority-rule as to court-caprice or bureaucratic interference. And this is in no sense a sign of degeneracy ; it is only a sign of maturity, which conceives calmly and in relation to itself, which refuses to be the dupe of a specious phrase or an
AGES OF FAITH 285
eloquent speaker. And Christianity too knows nothing of submission to Law for the sake of law and its automatic uniformity. It is noted by preachers and divines that, of set purpose or by felicitous chance, the Church Catechism begins by a triumphant recapitulation of Christian privilege, next of Christian belief (an account of the solicitude, the sacrifices of God to recall us from ruin), and only in the third place arrives at the duties which are incumbent on one who has for no merit of his own already received so many gratuitous rights. Like begets like ; the spirit of Christian endeavour and martyrdom is no idle surrender of the worth- less to the unknown, but a loyal attempt, however poor, to meet the love of God. Brought up in such a school, it is no wonder that the Christian looks askance at the claims of the State to obedience and even to love. The two foremost nations in European culture are in the throes of civil war, each in their typical manner excited or phlegmatic. Once more a religious question, what is Caesar's, what Divine ? has arisen to embitter the good feeling of the social Hfe. The State, which to-day is but the alternation of faction, honest but discontinuous, each bent on retrieving the errors or reversing the policy of the last Government, cannot help having recourse to threat and compulsion ; but it has thereby lost its power of appeal. It begins in suspicion of its subjects as much to-day as formerly. Christianity (as well as the Enlightenment in its more generous, least cynical moods) begins with the election, the vocation, the glorious destiny of the individual, who by this feels himself not bound, but won, to a better life of grateful service.
§ 4. Now it cannot be raised as a reproach against Christianity that these privileges are dim mythologic postulates resting on a system of imposture by which the wealthy have tricked the poor into submission, in hopes of recompense beyond the tomb. I believe here is the real gravamen against the Church in the minds of earnest social reformers. In laying stress on faith and futurity, the poor have been cajoled into letting slip immediate opportunities for redress of grievance; discontent has been stigmatised by an interested hierarchy, in the pay of the State, as the chief crime in the sight of Heaven ; and thus the path of advance has been barred. Now it must be
286 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
clear to any student of the political or social movements during last century that all the first principles which have animated idealistic zeal, in overturning abuse of privilege, in recovering lost rights, and in renewing lost self-respect, have without exception been of the nature of ' mythologic postulates.' One and all have entailed violent contradiction of existing circumstance, defiance of every possible ex- perience. The enfranchisement of the negro rested on a somewhat complex general notion, compounded of Christian sentiment for the weaker and oppressed, a ' classical-antique ' veneration for undefined liberty as in itself desirable, a rudimentary sense of justice, and behind all, the pressure of certain economic facts. The Abolitionist movement was a ' leap in the dark,' a presumption that individually the slave was better than he appeared, and in any case could only attain freedom if he was already treated as deserving it. The sympathy with oppressed classes and nationalities, being also idealistic, derived most of its warmth from a glowing and prophetic prospect of what they might become if rightly used, and was seldom reinforced by any unmistakable sign of their present merit. The gradual extension of voting-power in England might indeed very justly be defended on grounds of prudence ; it being not a sentiment of justice alone, but the pure common sense of worldly administration, which counsels the removal of every grievance before it is acutely felt by the sufferer. It certainly could not find much support in sober logic ; and indeed, at the time when such measures were passed (largely; it must be feared, from partizan motives), the science of government was fast becoming so complicated a business, was falling so certainly from the hands of the amateur into the hands of the adept and professional, that it seemed a pleasantry to secure with some solemnity the pre- dominance of ignorance in the national councils. It cannot then be for one moment doubtful that the real lever in this remarkable and bloodless revolution was a Christian and an idealistic view of human nature, which in faith looked far beyond the facts and even the probabilities, which dwelt on privilege first before coming to deserts, on rights before enumerating duties. It was a gage of defiance thrown, by the reaction of a sentiment largely pietistic and religious
AGES OF FAITH 287
without knowing it, against the fataUstic lesson which was being urged on men from each new scientific discovery, of the natural inequality of mankind, the certain doom of the subject races, of the weaker vessel, of honest simplicity, either in the rivalry of statesmanship or commerce.
§ 5. The imaginary prerogative of man, " born free and equal and with an inalienable claim to happiness and right of self-development," is no less a " dim mythologic postulate " than the solemn titles of the newly baptized, " a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven." Both are a visible paradox, a strong protest against facts; a presumption in favour of the triumph of innocence and righteousness, which is hardly derived from experience. Indeed, to speak truly, the confidence of the social reformer on the lines of secularism is more strictly a 'venture of faith ' than the pious hope of the Christian. There is abundant proof of the actual benefit of such belief as can convince the poor of a future blessedness, as can give peace and resignation to the most afflicted lot. If the claim of modern 'democracy,' which as yet has never entered into its promised rights, is to immediacy of enjoyment, surely the happiness of the converted (subjective though no doubt it must be to the end, like all happiness) is the most 'immediate' and undeferred return for a single act of faith and surrender ! One alarming symptom to-day is this : the faith which alone supports any genuine social reform, which with generous lavishness would give all privilege before exacting any duty, is growing disheartened. A calm diagnosis of the altered temper of philanthropy to-day and half a century back is much to be desired. Mr. Hobhouse, in an interesting volume on ' Democracy and Reaction,' has traced with much care and feeling the decay of the old illusions and prepossessions on which the earlier and more hopeful move- ment was borne along. We might indeed smile at the inconsistency of the pioneers who called on men to sacrifice their lives freely for a cause, for an abstraction, the freedom of Greece or the union of the Italian provinces, while they were perhaps at the time accusing the Church of postponing indefinitely man's happiness beyond the grave. Sometimes they dwelt on the immediate conquest of the ' Land of
288 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Promise,' and displayed the heavy clusters of Eshcol, which told of speedy enjoyment there. But at others, they were forced to address themselves to the spirit of self-denial, service in a losing cause (as it must often seem), an appeal to impulsive and uncalculating human nature, which seldom fails ; they begged the disappointed claimants to wander without repining in the wilderness, that their children might one day enter Canaan. We may seriously doubt if such an appeal will be so successful to-day. The entire movement in early times was animated by vague beliefs in human nature, which, closely examined, turn out to be inseparably united with respect for the individual, his character, his chances, and his immortality. The curious sophistry which consoles the creature of a brief hour for its pain and failure, by pointing out the benefit of his example on a posterity yet unborn, was not then in fashion. Thinkers had not fully confronted the implications of ' thanatism ' : we have certainly discovered that ' indefinite postponement of pleasure ' to a remote con- tingency (for our tenure of this planet is precarious no less for the race than the individual) is no doctrine that can be openly taught. Let no one mistake my meaning: the unreasoned surrenders of the unselfish, for children, friends, or country, will still take place. Scientific arguments against survival could neither wholly eradicate the belief in our continued life nor extirpate that involuntary sympathy and respect for others which, if carefully analysed, must carry with it the belief in the personal units, their wholesome discipline and perfectibility. But this doctrine is not one which calm Reason can allow to be preached or inculcated ; we may (and probably shall) practise unselfishness ; we could not possibly defend or explain it.
§ 6. It was the fashion to point scornfully at the ignorance of the Middle Ages, at the subservience to a narrow and interested governing class, at their easy belief in the marvellous — in a word, at the ' Ages of Faith.' In the Lectures we have raised the question, whether ' Faith ' is quite the right word to employ wuth regard to a loyal acceptance of a Church whose corporate reason analysed and demonstrated the ' credenda,' whose practical authority, with or without State- aid, could punish offenders and coerce the recalcitrant. In
AGES OF FAITH 289
the sense of vague and wistful moral surrender to the absent, as the Ideal, ws epw/xcvov, it is certainly not applicable. It implies merely the yielding to the opinion of experts in matters where they and they alone were qualified to judge ; the truly 'democratic' character of the hierarchy, recruited from every class in society, providing an open ladder to the highest office, prevented any complaint of the secrecy or imposture of an intriguing oligarchy. The Church was well able to perform her promise ; to rebuke kings and rescue the oppressed. It is the Protestant systems which have encouraged men to this unlimited deferment; and it is, in consequence, difficult for them to have parley with Socialism, — always, in its very essence and under the most clever disguises, the gospel of 'the Immediate.' The 'Ages of Faith' in reality began with the Reformation. The emphasis on belief has been ever since growing more intense. The discord of faith and facts — facts political, social, domestic, scientific — has never before been so acute. And yet the world walks still, or tries to walk, by faith and not by sight. There is still a pitiful and half- ashamed reluctance to follow Nature's easy method with regard to the incompetent, still a shrinking to end incurable disease. There is still a desire to give opportunities and field for training to that freewill, which we in our scientific moments pronounce to be a dangerous illusion. There is still a deference to individual character, which is inexplicable except on the assumption that something precious and dear to Almighty Power lies behind the worn and soiled vesture. There are still some who would resent a mechanically virtuous Republic, not so much because of the unnatural load on a disinterested ruling caste, half- monk, half- soldier, which is its indispensable condition ; but because (for reasons it is hard to explain without becoming vague and 'sentimental') such animal comfort and unreflecting ease seem to entail the atrophy of the personal. But examine what you will of the tenets of reforming propaganda, in one and all you will find the scientific view of man and society conveniently forgotten and obscured, whenever that comes into conflict with the ' dim mythologic postulates ' of man's freedom and worth, — which must still animate the eloquence or the appeal of secularism. And this invocation of Faith to help us, where 19
290 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the lesson of facts seems to run counter to our moral instincts, must become increasingly prevalent in an age where the discord between real and ideal is so emphatic. But it seems clear that it is answered in Christianity alone; and that, therefore, in the Church alone rest the hopes of Society.
B
On the Modern Separation of Classes and Interests
% I. No common currency in the various departments of exact knowledge : the ' Universe ' : Hartmann, last of the Great Systems : specialism as much a feature of practical life as of scientific research : conflicting interests and party warfare : distance and abstraction of the unity supposed to weld all together : the feudal polity in some respects a revival of the best features in the Hellenic city-State : Manor a State in miniature.
§ 2. Underneath the forcible unity of the modern State, hating gradation and loving uniformity, seethes a conflict of interests : arti- ficial language of political debate fosters the belief in class-animosity : decay of easy intercourse : public language infnitely below ordinary
practice.
§ 3. The Churches ; harmony through division : religious differ- ences dwelt on to exclusion of points of agreement : concerted action impossible : idiosyncrasy and the private conscience and private interpretation : sense of unity and common aim disappearing : absence of dogmatism, nevertheless, and of sharp distinction, no sign of weariness, but of uncertainty : it is tolerant and modest rather than sceptical or indifferent : the Churches cannot at present heal the breaches in the social order.
§ 4. Contract, the new method, cannot admit ' unselfishness ' : the new State will know no such term : future of Constitutionalism, interests and classes alternately represented : the Gospel more unanimous in spite of the schisms of believers : social problems to-day : this severance of interests only to be reconciled by the principle of the Gospel.
§ I. Mention has more than once been made of the specialism of science, in virtue of which each group of seekers follows its own especial line, uses its peculiar methods and dialect, disappears down its own tunnel out of sight of the rest. There exists no central and paramount court to
MODERN SEPARATISM 291
unify these divers results and exchange their contributions into a uniform currency. Every harmony is an act of (private) faith or hypothesis. The very term 'universe' is heavily loaded with assumption, probably for ever outside the range of strict verification. As a fact, few attempt this unification, for the day of Great Systems is over; or if attempted, it is in a semi-religious spirit and for purposes of the practical life. Of this there is a remarkable instance in Hartmann, perhaps the last of the great Absolutists who recall the spirit and tone of the seventeenth century, — in its curious anomaly, acute self-consciousness and stern reaction from individualism towards incomprehensible power. His ' unifica- tion,' purely a matter of temperament guiding unaAvares his exhaustive studies, is clearly religious; he finds a substitute for the Christian Deity which seems worthy of his devotion ; and (significant enough of the modern spirit) is not ashamed in a philosophic treatise to exhort men to be up and doing ' the Lord's work in the Lord's vineyard.' It is doubtful if this attitude could be revived. Save for religion and a small metaphysical school, which trembles uncertain between logic and sentiment, such unity is neither needed nor pursued. Convention (a mere working compromise) supports us when we come back to real life from our special studies, with their academic detachment, reserve, and singleness and narrowness of purpose. The complex of hfe we leave to be put together by wiser heads than our own, and we trust and lean on the past, to an extent undreamt of by many who fancy themselves the boldest revolutionaries and iconoclasts. And in this very social life we find, when we arrive, the same specialism, the same antithesis and antagonism. Interests and classes have drifted apart ; and it is a truism to-day that Lord Beaconsfield's ideal conception of a Lower House is almost realised, because strictly it is not places that are represented, but the conflicting interests of classes. And the tendency must increase. To be outspoken in this matter is to court the taunt of reaction and mediaevalism ; yet the fact is surely patent enough. The unity, which is supposed to weld and harmonise, is too distant, too cloudy and imaginary, to have any real effect. The State is a mere abstraction, or a hybrid monster with claims to omnipotence. FeudaHsm, which has sometimes been called
292 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the antithesis of the Greek polity, was in fact largely its revival. It was founded on a belief in restricting the horizon of the State to visible people, palpable interests, to local issues. On the estate, it is true that country pursuits took the place of municipal or Imperial sympathies ; but this had already occurred in the last century of the Western Empire, — certainly in France in the case of ApoUinaris Sidonius and his fellows. The centre of gravity shifts indeed from town to village (as to-day from village to town), but the general spirit is much the same, — a half-fictitious sense of kinship, reciprocal duties, daily and hourly intercourse, often rough and brutal it may be, but no more systematic than cruel conduct among slave- owners in more modern times, no more deliberate and authorised than ill - treatment of household dependants in Greece and Rome. There was no need to go beyond the limits of the domain for justice, for religious comfort, for military protection ; the Manor was a State in miniature.
§ 2. It is far from my purpose to hold up for unquestioning approval the mediaeval ideal. For whatever its perfection in theory, it was seldom realised. And the casual recognition of an ideal which no one pretends to put in practice may bring comfort to sufferers in hopes of amendment, but makes the privileged callous or ironical. But to any one who detects how much the social movement of last century owed to the Christian-mediaeval, how little to the classical-antique, ideal, a survey of the principles, a respectful attention to the maxims, on which the former depended, will not seem amiss. The intermittent suggestions of federalism, provincial autonomy, ' Home rule,' local government, — the protests of anti-Imperialists, — remind one unmistakably to-day of the gathering reaction against a worship of abstractions which, however noble in theory, means as a rule the success of a clique. Centralised government regards the mass of citizens as units ; it opposes (along with a measure of public opinion) a dull resistance to the claims of privilege or exemption ; and law is intolerant of the exception. But underneath the artificial harmony thus created seethes a chaos of conflicting interests. Many evils of modern life are due to the want of easy inter- course between the various ranks of the community, that snapping of purely personal bonds of goodwill to give place
MODERN SEPARATISM 293
to mere ties of contract, which is possibly inseparable from the present state of social culture. Classes rarely meet to discuss unless they are beforehand determined to disagree. It might well have been expected that a larger sympathy, a better understanding, an easier tolerance would be secured by political reform (regarded as the first duty of a long- trusted hereditary caste), of systematic education (as one chief function at least of a serious State). But (as we pointed out in the case of the Enlightenment) this sympathy was nearly always wasted upon imaginary figures ; and in spite of the patient induction of parallel science, thinkers were reluctant to learn from actual and unprejudiced experience. It is possible that the average man discounts at once the fictitious indignation and menace of political speech. To hsten to such debate is to believe that society is composed only of hostile groups. We have before noticed the strangeness of the situation; our public language is at times infinitely below the level of our common practice. The good understanding in our own country between high and low, rich and poor, is the wonder of those who take the trouble to penetrate past the bristling sophisms or vulgarities of politicians to our inner life and ordinary routine ; it would be impossible to suspect its existence if they relied on purely political aspects for gauging the temper of a great nation.
§ 3. If, while the Republic is too masterful to secure real loyalty, and cannot bind its citizens together in common aim and resolve, the Church might be supposed to provide a rallying point, the situation to-day must cause us serious concern. The Christian message is a principle of harmony, perhaps only this because also of division, — "I came not to send peace, but a sword." As against the secular power, the ' world,' the Church must assume a neutral attitude, and at times a posture of challenge and defiance. We hear on all sides complaints that in the subdivisions of the Church so much more stress is laid on points of difference than on broad principles of agreement, that we cannot achieve con- certed and unanimous action. It is perhaps a trite criticism to note, as the distinguishing mark of latter-day thought, just this emphasis on idiosyncrasy. It is the special note that is commended, not the typical : and although we are glad to
294 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
be free from the vague eighteenth-century veneration for the type, yet modern experience has forced the varied and multiple so persistently into the sphere of vision and interest, that in many things the sense of unity has disappeared. It is always a sign of earnestness and conviction to overvalue detail, even though it may be a narrow and mistaken honesty. Ages of great unities, of wider embracing generalisations, are ages of weariness or impatience, — the fatigue of the old (as in the political movement towards ' Imperialism ' at the Christian era), or the immature achievement which youth boasts as final (as in the hurried and inconsequential ideal structure of Mediaeval monarchy). An age which thinks more deeply and more freely, on which perhaps presses too great a load of unrelated and indigestible facts, cannot afford an early unification. In place of great ideas, it must busy itself in concrete detail, without comprehensive formula. Its tolerance is merely an armed and suspicious neutrality; a sign of mutual agreement to surrender something, so that each institution may mark out its own distinct 'sphere of influ- ence,' may 'cultivate its own garden in peace.' It is a common error to mistake compromise or toleration for acquiescence or fatigue ; it is neither ; it is due to a scepti- cism which, outside the limits of its own experience, knows no certainty. It is not abstentionist, but often vigorous enough within these boundaries ; but outside is the Unknown, or the purely conventional, useful but relative and provisional. The brisk (and to us arrogant) dogma of a summary division into elect and lost gives way to Universalism, with its 'un- covenanted mercies ' ; ' other sheep which are not of this fold ' ; its consummation when ' God shall be all in all.' It is not that men have grown less serious, but that they have grown less certain. But this less defiant spirit has not led to any real harmony or power of co-operation : the differences are still there, even if we are not always talking of them. We must not expect the Church, as it is to-day, 'the company of all faithful people,' to be of immediate avail or sovereign influence in healing the breaches of our social order. Yet it is difficult to see any other aid forth- coming. Contract, with its calculation and its egoism, its suspicious emphasis on rights, is now the rule in political
MODERN SEPARATISM 295
and social life. A monarch is a covenanted ' First Citizen ' with certain ceremonious and social duties ; his place is con- ditional on their punctual fulfilment; to the great detriment of the State, the parental has in most countries given way to a miUtary or contractual type.
§ 4. Contract, unless it be lazy or pusillanimous, cannot in reason surrender its rights; that is why the hopes of unlimited unselfishness are doomed to be so rudely upset in the new State. There is no longer ground left for unanimous appeal. The future of constitutional States seems to be the successive prominence of certain classes and interests in an unvarying round. Each in turn must receive attention, and, it is to be feared, at the expense of its predecessor, at the costly sacrifice of continuity, of the general welfare. Much honest zeal must evaporate in an atmosphere of distrust : changes of government will imply the capture of the central citadel by some new faction ; and each is under bond to effect at all hazard some definite and instantaneous improvement in the condition of a certain part of the community. In nations, where no violent ebullition need be expected, the work of the State in domestic matters must be like the web of Penelope. Whatever be the bitterness of religious rivalry, we are more likely to find a remedy in the principles of the Gospel, the broad basis of doctrine, than in any appeal which a future commonwealth could make. The exigencies of modern life, which all appear to regret, which no one can remedy, force the workers to live aloof from other classes, — to inhabit ergastula where we find little or no trace of the comfort, amenities, and scientific adjustment which is the chief boast of the last age. It is only Christianity, or that sympathy which is morally if not doctrinally Christian, that can compel the happier lot to take thought for the less privileged. When all advance is measured by a material standard, the central authority might readily be charged with the duty of rearing and educating perfect and uniform citizens for the great con- flict of competitive States. But the enterprise of individuals and of groups which will not resign the care of the poor to mechanism, is a sign that the Christian ideal is still powerful. No one can review without some alarm the symptoms of modern social inequalities; the growing sense of detachment
296 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
and irresponsibility in rank and riches, due (quite logically) to the admission of all classes to political influence, the relief and emancipation of a once serious governing class ; the condition of the toiler; commercial dishonesty; dwindling interest in the home ; multiplication confined to one end of the social scale. The Church in such an age has before it a new and important work. It must unite on those essential doctrines which cannot be surrendered, — the divinity of Christ, the brotherhood of man in and through Him, the priceless worth and dignity of each individual soul. In faithful maintenance of these it runs counter, like every Idealist or Secularist project of reform, to current experience ; for all action must rise in faith ; and faith in human nature — the real individual, not the imaginary and abstract type or race — is the most difficult of all. The Church need not once more be clothed with worldly power ; nor need it, on the other hand, refuse willing co-operation in all social schemes. It must boldly face the ignorance and want of sympathy which separate classes even in days of a common and uniform education. It will recognise here the greatest hindrance to the Kingdom of God ; and its mission will be to preach the simple message, "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself"; the parts not divided and hostile, but com- ponents of one body, which, through the varied gift and duties of each, becomes not a dead abstraction but a living whole.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE VI— A
On the Prevailing Sense of Helplessness before Irre- sistible Forces, or, on Pessimism, its Origin and Significance
§ I. Relativity of all knowledge: early Greek Humanism: the Self as ' measure of all things ' : attempted application of human attribute and sympathies to the Cosmos : new conception of ' Divine' ; certain and calculable : defecation in the humanistic period ; sym- pathy, goodness, intelligence {Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) : in subjective schools anthropomorphism vanishes.
§ 2. Exceptional genius rarely mirrors its own age : life and thought of a people in letters and drama : science and philosophy deal always directly with law and uniformity ; adjustment to individual tise quite secondary : literature always with the unit and his corifict with the outward order : the hero or the protagonist is always Athanasius contra mundum : natural bias towards belief in reason and righteous- ness of things : confusion of intelligibility and goodness, of ignorance and vice : man finds his own true being at the heart of things.
§ 3. Greek tragedy opens with the legend of Prometheus ; repre- senting Humanism and the protest against arbitrary force : unavailing attempts at a Theodicy : the poetic mythology, out of relation to human interest and moral demand, is swept away : humiliating new reading of ' man measure of all things ' : gradual restriction of sphere ; from the conflict of East and West, the drama of a new dynasty in heaven, to domestic intrigue and liaison : failure of Reason to force its moral and intellectual canons on the world.
§ 4. Doubt if ' righteousness ' receives recognition in the Universe : fallacy of the maxim ' Virtue its own reward ' : serious artists in our own days interest by representing victims in the clutch of destiny, and deny any correspondence to the moral aim of man : this the origin of Pessimism.
§ 5. Pessimism, often merely temperamental : right to agency and service balked by denial of humanistic aim in the Universe outside : theoretic pessimism often united with cheerfulness and endeavour : pessimism of Cicero : art and philosophy seek to procure relief by detaching the attention from preoccupied care of the personal : its failure shown in the revived Gnosticism of later years.
297
298 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 6. Such call to illogical selj-sacrifice as is heard in some quarters to-day of no avail : Epicureanism is the natural corollary of an aim- less world : an accidental world leaves room for the play of human free- will : added zest in insecurity of tenure and occasion : it is Stoicism that leads to pessimism : nor would proof of accident at once overthrow moral sanctions : even the discovery of pure mechanism might leave a scope for venture : in eighteenth century a sense of freedom succeeded to ' predestination ' and caste-system.
§ 7. Buoyant feeling of Self-sufficiency ; very speedily lost : what Epicurus feared has now come about : impersonal fate succeeds to personal will : a loop-hole still left in his system : this now disproved : heavy air of finality in Roman Empire : pessimism always issues from subservience to unknown law : demand for personal worth and freedom : danger to civilised States, apart from Christian belief.
§ I. When the intelligence of the Greeks rose from the partial gods of city, grove, and hearth, to the conception of a single overruling force, the discovery filled them at first with an enthusiasm which afterwards cooled, giving way to mistrust and lethargy. What man seeks in his curiosity and pursuit of truth (which we willingly concede as a primitive and abiding impulse) is not the ' thing-in-itself,' but its relation to ourselves. " We may here," says Gomperz of an early physician, " almost detect the insight, or at least the conjecture, that all our know- ledge about Nature is relative ; and that the true goal of human inquiry is not what Nature is in herself, but what she is in relation to man's perceptive faculties." This commonplace is constantly forgotten or overlooked to-day. The final unity, which we pretend to grasp, is a venture of logic, of faith, or of devotion ; and very few, increasingly few in modern times, ever arrive at a point in the ascent in which the universe can be so regarded, ' as if from a conning-tower.' It is by no means true that when practical needs are satisfied the keen pursuit of knowledge relaxes ; but the knowledge sought is always partial and always relative, — cutting off, with conscious arbitrariness, a piece of the knowable for inquiry, — quite contented if the results can be summed up in terms intelligible to man and his aim, easily verified by test and experiment, and laying no claim to any infallible comprehension. And in Greece, as Humanism spread under the gradual influence of Sophistry, all investigation was perpetually being recalled to the question : How does this stand in relation to me, to my intelligence,
PESSIMISM 299
and to my practical needs ? As beyond human ken, use, and interest, many avenues of exploration were closed; attention was centred on the self, — and this became the ' measure of all things.' This standard was applied to a new unity, which loomed large as the coherent cosmos, held together by a principle of life, harmony, and continuity, to which, somewhat inaptly, the term ' Divine ' was applied. For ' Divine ' had before meant little else than unaccountable, the outcome of arbitrary caprice, which, even after the patient and devout study of experts, could never be really certified. The new conception of ' Divine ' meant, on the contrary, reasonable or consistent, — a force governed by its own eternal laws, which search could detect and verify once for all. The notion of ' reason ' or purpose and constant aim in the recognised flux of existence was interpreted at Athens in the humanistic or strictly teleologic form ; Heraclitus and the Stoics, however, understood by it method and regularity alone, but not relative convenience to man. Man, for himself, might be the * measure of all things,' implying a limit of his powers, not any proud claim to sovereignty. Socrates had definitely claimed the Divine power as human in the best sense, as accountable, as affording not merely tidings of special vocation by accredited channels, but also secret personal intimations. His theology was in the highest degree relative and humanistic ; he bowed to no universal order, but found the best vindication, the most excellent virtue of deity, in sympathy with individuals. But the steps in the decay of this naive confidence (which alone is true religious feeling) can be easily traced : Plato in his ' Idea of Good,' preserves the notion of teleology, while disengaging it from embarrassing connection with persons ; Aristotle seats it as pure Intelligence in inaccessible majesty ; the later schools (as we have so often seen) relieved it of the last vestige of anthropomorphism.
§ 2. It is doubtful if the great writers of any age can be accepted as the best exponents of its spirit and temper. Reaction is in most, it may be said, the chief incentive ; even for the satirist facit indignatio vers2im, the insolence of the rich, the crass tolerance of the vulgar. We complain, in the dull recitals of courts and camps, that we learn little in histories of a people's genuine Ufe and feelings. The same doubt
300 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
perplexes us in the study of exceptional genius, which belongs to no age or race, but to all time. Romance and the stage provide, perhaps, safer guidance, though even here caution is needed : at least we are admitted, with these imaginary and heroic figures, to a more intimate communion with individual humanity; we stand nearer to the throng and its sympathies than in the impersonal studies of the philosopher or the man of science. Now, if we consult Greek letters, poetry and the drama, we shall find our previous estimate of the course of philosophic religion receiving clear and additional support. While science and reflection calmly examine law, only later and with a little reluctance adjusting it to use and individual difference, letters, strictly speaking, are engaged always with the strife, the conflict of the unit and the universal order. The interest is confessedly purely personal; it is a growth, or a discipline of character, of the spontaneous ; and the scenery of social or natural law is around it, rigid and unfeeling. But the sympathy of the audience or the reader is invariably engaged for the hero, against the blind force of circumstance or the misunderstanding of his fellows. The protagonist is always in a sense Athanashis contra nni?idum, the exception protesting, often fruitlessly, against the rule. " Man is no idle spectator of the conflict of the forces of right and wrong; Browning never loses the individual in the throng, or sinks him into his age or race. Although the poet ever bears within him the certainty of victory for the good, he calls his feUows to the fight as if the fate of all hung on the valour of each. The struggle is always personal, individual, like the duels of the Homeric heroes. It is under the guise of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning." So writes Henry Jones in his valuable work on " Browning as a philosophical and religious teacher." Now the study of Greek drama and history during that notable century of enlightenment, convinces us of a deeply critical and self-conscious attitude, even outside strict philo- sophic inquiry; and of a firm resolve to bring everything in heaven and earth to book before the tribunal of reason, a faculty in which were blended logical accuracy and the moral standard of conscience. That which we to-day keep apart with effort was then indistinguishably confused, — clear thought and moral judgment, scientific inaccuracy and conscious falsehood.
PESSIMISM 301
These canons, each sovereign in its own special sphere, were indiscriminately, or even alternately, applied. ^Ve are never sure if the matter under discussion is to be treated by proof or by appeal; if we are taking part in an unbiassed debate, or listening to a sermon. But philosophy surrenders at once her proud claim of arbiter if she becomes a partizan. Moral appeal is no part of philosophy at all ; the pure spirit is content with viewing (not realising) truth, — oWev rf Atavota /civet, — it has no wish to consummate that which is already perfect. But where the demarcation of provinces was not precise, the ordinary consciousness, half guided by tradition, half by the keen and critical education then prevalent, summoned every- thing to the bar to hear a verdict which was sometimes logical, but more often strongly tinged or distorted by moral and humanistic prejudice. It was a natural bias to attempt to find reason and righteousness in things. Man was somehow con- scious that here lay his own true being ; and he persisted in the conviction that these constituted the essence, the core of things.
§ 3. Greek Tragedy, as well as Hesiod's poems, may be said to open with a Theogony, rather with the succession of a new dynasty ; it closes with its overthrow. Prometheus represents humanism and reason against arbitrary force ; thus early is heard the note of protest against the autocracy. Man appears later on the scene, to become the plaything of destiny ; he struggles in the toils like Laocoon. Sometimes this eternal order is identified with the will of Zeus ; the human sympathy which bewailed the fatal death of a favourite in the Homeric poems has given way to the passionless resolve of an absolute sovereign ; he is ' no respecter of persons.' Sometimes the moral sense claims him as its champion and representative, as establishing the broad principles of truth, kindliness, and justice, which overrule the partial and selfish enactments of tyrants. Sometimes the Pantheon breaks into feud ; and human passions, transfigured as objective deities, bring men to ruin. At others, a family curse or doom sweeps away the innocent with the guilty, under the sanction of the highest powers. And, once again, we see the lesson of mediocrity and modesty and relativity inculcated, XPV ^povdv TdvOpuiTnvd, the retort of common sense to Aristotle's advice, e^' oaov ivSex^Tai
302 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
d6avaTL^€Lv ; because the unseen forces are strong, incalculable and vindictive. And by the time of the Middle comedy, at least, all this mythology vanishes in legend and allegory, or perhaps lingers in unreasoning rite and custom. But the lesson re- mained : the disappointment of the humanistic hopes, that sought to find in man the centre of the universe, the * measure of all things.' This indeed he was, but in a humiliating sense. The littleness and the vanity of man is a constant theme or bitter complaint on the earlier stage. While Greek Tragedy seems to ask, using the familiar illustration of heroic myth. What was his relation to the Divine world ? comedy at the same time sought to discover the relation to the political, and later drama to the social world. Each time the sphere is found to be more restricted, the hopes more modest, the interests more trivial. In all the greater emotions and severer crises of life, man is portrayed as overmastered by a ' power not himself,' which cannot be said in any known sense ' to make for righteous- ness.' It is largely this personal sense of the emptiness of endeavour, in matters moral or political, that led to the attitude of indifference and aloofness, which Subjectivism perforce adopted in the post-Aristotelian Schools. In spite of the empty and verbal protests of the Porch, this was the strongest testi- mony to the failure of Reason (a moral as well as a logical intelligence; to force experience into conformity to its canons.
§ 4. The main problem, into which subside at length all other conundrums on the world's origin and meaning, is this : Does 'righteousness,' as we generally understand and try to practise, receive any recognition in the scheme of things ? or is the discrepance between merit and receipt so glaring, that one party has to defer all reconciliation beyond the grave, another to deny the correspondence of man's aims and the plan of the universe, a third to explain the seeming injustice of circum- stance and lot by the doctrine of re-birth, of discipline perhaps unending, of individuality wider than the compass of a single life ? It is of no avail to revive the lofty heroics of Averroes and Pomponatius (indeed, of all modern secularism unaware of its parentage), that the truly virtuous look not to empty external or deferred reward, but find in the practice and enjoyment of virtue an all-sufficing recompense. This is of course both profoundly true and profoundly false : true, as representing
PESSIMISM 303
in fact the doggedness of moral impulse, when every moral sanction has gone except the vague and too often misleading axiom the ' duty ' of doing ' good ' : but also false, inasmuch as, in theory, rational justification is wholly wanting ; and we must again repeat, we go to philosophers for clear thinking and not for parenetic unction. It behoves the apostle of religious negation and moral certitude to examine with a little more courage the content of his positive convictions. It is quite as likely that the practical rule of behaviour, the sensitive scruples which form a birthright and heritage he cannot abdicate, is as erroneous as the world-theory which grew up alongside or perhaps dictated it. Few have had this boldness, because in spite of the possible absurdity or anomaly of its claims, this conventional code is founded on tried usefulness ; it is a work- ing scheme which satisfies the unthinking ; it has on its side the immeasurable influence or dead weight of conservatism, which is the inherent strength (or weakness) of every demo- cratic society. Now, in modern delineations' of character set loose in the heyday of youth to make its way in the world, to confront and surmount obstacles, and, it may well be, ' find ' itself through self-loss, the more serious artists do not maintain the correspondence of man's aspirations or deserts with the nature of things. The mere good-humoured mirror held up to life, as in the Attic later comedy, with its humanistic triumph of virtue and a happy ending, is out of fashion. The individual, to excite a jaded attention, must be shown in the grip of fatal circumstance, of ignorance, of misery, of an overpowering and sinister craving, of inherited taint and predisposition. Every- where, man, the agent, is in the clutch of incalculable powers, and is neither the ' captain of his soul ' nor master of his destiny. It is curious to see the conviction of the author succumb to popular insistence ; the true reading involves no such righteous requital, but the audience must not be sent away in unavailing tears and uncomfortable protest. Sometimes, to a drama or to a tale there are two endings : in one, the instinctive sense of justice is satisfied ; in the other, the author's sense of truth and experience. We cannot restore the relation of things to that which we feel to be our legitimate demand. We need look no farther than this for the origin and meaning of Pessimism.
304 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
§ 5. Pessimism involves a large inroad of emotion, moral or esthetic, not perhaps wholly justifiable, into the passionless atmosphere where Thought lives. We must exclude as wholly due to personal temperament, or to settled national character, or to some acute crisis in the life of men or States, that vague despondency or savage disapproval of the present world, which paints ' grey in grey ' over the Orient, and since the failure of the 'age of Reason' has exerted undoubted charm over some elect Western minds. A general diagnosis, a semi-philosophic motive at least must be given ; for the philosopher has neither time nor inclination to investigate every form of psychological morbidness, or discuss with sympathy the whole series of untoward events which have depressed the temperament once so buoyant. Now the natural impulse of man is to be an agent, to take a risk, and to serve a cause. Whenever law, natural order, scientific theory, arbitrary or over-parental authority, seem to deny scope to this primitive desire of man to be him- self,— and in so being to become something more, — there rises the temper of indifference or mutiny which we call Pessimism. It is a despondent state of mind rather than a clear system of thought ; yet it can be well maintained as a strict philosophy by those who in practical life are energetic, kindly, and cheerful. And these deserve a more attentive hearing than those for whose acrimony we can so easily account. Social life fills us with a sense of real happenings, urgent duties for State or family, progress and happy achievement awaiting its pioneers on quite definite lines. But the philosophic habit, which we only assume on solemn occasion, must disparage this turmoil of an ant-heap, and either point to a serener realm, or deny the sense or use of the whole vain phantasmagoria. " Jam ipsa terra ita mihi parva visa est, ut me imperii nostri, quo quasi punctum ejus attingimus, pseniteret." Confidence in action and virtue must indeed have been shaken when a Roman and a statesman could write thus; when, lost in the abysses of time and space, the ' Great Year,' and the solar system, he had to reinforce the civic instinct by a supernatural sanction, — somehow insisting against hope that Heaven must recognise and reward the virtue of the honest man of affairs. Effort seems worth while, so long as we are engrossed in the active life, and can respect or acknowledge the worth of persons. But
PESSIMISM 305
art and thought, unlike religion, deal callously with individuals as mere representatives of an eternal type. How clear and detached Hegel keeps his mind from contact with those transcendental questions in which the hope and welfare of the unit is bound up ! But the high level of aesthetic contempla- tion (in which Schopenhauer finds relief, like a rested Ixion) or of abstract and comprehensive formula (winning always new triumphs as it is applied on every side to phenomena, with signal success), cannot be maintained. Practical philosophy became, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, pessimistic or dualistic, save only where it was more than half emotional and religious ; and found in a form of Spinozism just that medley of fact and sentiment which satisfies some elect and exceptional minds. For in a universe of such immensity, of such strict natural concatenation, what is the use of pain and labour, or the reality of endeavour ? It must be urged again and again that endeavour must have a purely personal subjective end, though we know that is not the incentive of action. It cannot be the service exacted from the miserable serf by some ambitious pyramid-builder. And the present age, which does not know (outside the immediate and limited opportunism of politics) whither it is tending or what is the goal in view, cannot (when it begins to reflect) either justify or explain this restless striving after nothing; or this unreasoning defiance of what is bound in any case to come ; or this acute sense or illusion of free action which only conceals a race-impulse or an ancestral scruple, unhappily indurated and painful.
§ 6. It is indeed by a creditable misuse of logic that such students as Hartmann and Nietzsche enjoin on us the sacred mission of furthering the cause. To intensify thought till life becomes to all men unbearable, or to work for the coming of a superior type to crush us, is much like Mr. Spencer's dream of a moralised State. If one of these three contin- gencies are fated, it will arrive whether we assist or not ; and in the meantime sober modesty recalls us to our ' garden,' to the enjoyment of such pleasures as are attainable, knowing that both fretful repining and ambitious idealism are equally hurtful to the only happiness within our reach. This is the temper of that Epicurean system which under the Roman 20
3o6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Empire forms such a pleasing contrast to the bravado of the Stoics and the restless servility or greed of the average citizen- client. Yet, like them, it has within it no spring of progress, no motive of advance ; and reflective schemes of the universe seem to waver between two equally impossible ideals — self-centred ease, not wholly satisfied with its creed, and often in practice rising far above it ; and a demand for abnegation, which lacks all support in reason or common sense. But in a purely accidental world (as the School of Epicurus conceived it) there was room for human freedom ; and there was an added charm of fearful joy, in snatching such brief pleasures as blind occasion offered. It would be a great mistake to suppose that pure mechanism would at once overthrow the ordinary rule of conduct. Man is proud to discover that even in a chance medley, the kvk€wv or 'witch's cauldron' of Aurelius, he can formulate and maintain his own laws. It is true that, in strict proof of the brute and soulless force behind things, Herbert Spencer's dread of a 'groping protoplasm,' the pure relativity (if not folly) of all ethical distinctions would be placed beyond controversy. There would be no more talk of ' eternal and immutable morality ' ; ethical science would sink in theory to mere statistics, and in practice to sheer opportunism. But, as every philosopher shows, the instincts of man are stronger than his reason ; calculated and formal belief has as little effect on the individual life as the purpose and eloquence of states- men over the control of national forces. It is an error for the theological advocate to press too violently the instantaneous out- come of religious unbelief. If its tenets still left to man even a modified power over the cosmic process and a sense of a genuine initiative, the life-impulse as well as the pleasure of venture and hazard, of social intercourse and family ties, might largely restore the shaken confidence of mankind. To those who, like Epicurus, Lucretius, and the antitheists of the eighteenth-century campaign, see in God only an unfeeling autocrat and in rehgious ethics serfdom, not willing service, such discovery of the pure mechanism at the root of things might indeed almost revive a semi-religious temper, a sincere devotion to Nature, who for a time seemed so kindly. A feeling of freedom, of personal and individual life, not lost but embraced in the whole, might very well succeed to the
PESSIMISM 307
sense of arbitrary predestination, of the close confinement of a rigid caste-system. And indeed it cannot be denied that protests against religions have often been guided by a moral and religious motive. The first impulse of the newly enfranchised is to fancy himself self-sufficient, his deliverance complete.
§ 7. How evanescent is this exalted feeling, nay, how strictly confined to a narrow and poetic circle, or to brief moments of rapture in ordinary life, the records of the last century may tell. For that which Epicurus feared most of all has come about : the absolute power of a personal will, always supposed to be amenable to entreaty, is succeeded by the fatalism of an un- intelligent order. In this, this most human of scientists, most scientific of humanists, shows, as usual, a profound knowledge of average human nature. Give but a loophole of uncertainty in the fiat of destiny, and man will strive with courage all the more eager because the chances are so slender ; he is always on the weaker side. But convince him that neither the outward sequence nor his own inherited character may be changed, and there is an end not only to religious hope and to moral appeal, but to the simple confidence and zest on which life depends. The Epicurean system recognised and to a certain extent ennobled the individual ; this phenomenon the agnostic absolutism of the Stoics disparaged or denied. Neither could stand as principles of missionary ardour, of social sympathy or progress ; for the air of finality hung heavily about the institu- tions of the Roman Empire. But as a temper with which to confront the blows of life, the former is incomparably the saner. It is far better to believe there is no purpose in the world, except the purpose man creates for himself, his own little ends which in his tiny span he follows with wise folly as if eternal, than to bow servilely to one with which we have nothing in common. It is this sense of useless effort against forces, social and personal, which are beyond our control that leads to the subdued and diffident attitude assumed to-day (it is idle to deny) by reflective thought. The strange issue of many movements, undertaken for the benefit of men ; the collapse of confidence in the idealist or constitutional methods which sought to reclaim the criminal and aid the distressed by asking them to share our burdens while we retain our privilege ;
3o8 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the creeping lethargy which must follow a serious and convinced acceptance of scientific truth ; the acknowledged impotence of mere training or secular education to instil a principle other than that of temperate and cautious self-interest — these symptoms or results of a free development in a single direction have made it clear that Science, supreme in its own sphere, can give no guidance in another. In thought, as in morals, as in politics, the demand of men is for freedom and for worth, not the substitution of one form of coercion for another. It is worthless to escape personal caprice, as Epicurus saw, merely to serve the impersonal law of a State, the ' will of majorities,' the relentless physical order. Wherever we look there is the same claim put forward for personal life here and now, with no indefinite postponement to a cloudy future. Unless Christianity guide the new movement and display the true implications of the great doctrine, ' man as an end, not as a means,' the most civilised countries may find themselves con- fronted with anarchy.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE Vll-A
On the Anti-Moralism of Idealism and of Science
§ I. Tone of recent literature, a reaction from the average to the exceptional : modest and rudimentary problems in a ' democratic ' age : imagination turns from the civic and commonplace routine : private world of the man of genius, as an asylum.
§ 2. Price hitherto paid by the community for over-refinement of a class : in Greece, in Italy, in France : all the personalist schools in later Greece disdain the domestic and social side : wisdom cannot recognise the fnality of the moral life : simple demands of the people to-day not compatible with the leisured ease of idleness or abstention.
§ 3. Danger of ' privilege ' in detachment (whether of rank, wealth, commerce, or artistic taste) : Christian principles alone can unite : what is lost in contracting days : most religious and speculative feel- ings tend to acknowledge a higher realm : the hopes and beliefs on ivhich the sense of unity depends cannot be communicated by argument.
§ 4. We have to reckon not with distant unities but with urgent differences, not with law so much as with exception {casuistry) : ultimate unities negligible : gradual abandonment of anthropomorphic hopes : can man gain knowledge of the Universe by surrendering his differentia ? The moral venture of man : nothing gained by deny- ing moral interest to God : no halting-place between historic Christianity and denial of all meaning and worth in the world.
§ I. There have never been wanting in any condition of civilised society thinkers who disputed the finaUty or the sufficingness of the moral life — the life of custom, routine, conformity, enlivened only by the rare moments when the individual, left to himself, had to make a genuine choice. We need not again traverse the ground covered by the essays on the Intellectualism of the Hellenic or the Middle Ages, on the pretended division of religion into popular and esoteric. But we have once more to urge the claims of social life, and the necessity of its alliance with the Christian hypothesis of
309
3IO THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
the world and man. It must be clear to most students of the currents and tendencies of our development, that the tone of our letters and thought marks a very distinct reaction from the average towards the exceptional. It is inevitable that a 'democratic' age should ascertain and satisfy very rudi- mentary demands ; its claims are honest and blunt, and con- cern the simplest things in life— bread, wages, housing, and the relations between money, skill, and work. For this reason writers turn from the commonplace of the present to an ideal world, and are no doubt rightly apprehensive of the future of their favourite studies. Letters, except in the complacence of ' Augustan' ages, are seldom without this note of criticism and reaction ; nay, under Augustus himself was not the eulogy of order, peace, and comfort often broken by an involuntary homage to the simplicity of the past, a com- plaint that even under the most benevolent system the real golden age of innocence could never return? Notes of disclaimer mark all the most intimate passages of poetic self- revelation. It needs the heroic abnegation of Plato's guardians to mingle contemplative exercise and routine ; for Philo's Moses, the cares of rule and the joys of Divine intercourse ; and it was long a tradition, in the making of a Christian bishop as in the winning of a savage bride, that a due show of reluctance and resistance was indispensable. The absence of fixed principles in statecraft; the avowed meanness of motive in a modern State, tolerable only in its vast scale ; the continual thwarting of the calm march of theoretic justice or progress by dull and prejudiced individuals, which is inseparable from a true ' democratic ' regimen — all this has driven the idealist and the poet, no less than the man of science, into a private world, into that specialism which we have noted as a chief feature of this present age. The learned and the gifted are more exclusive, and find it hard, however necessary, to ' condescend to men of low estate.' We have remarked the abdication of practical philosophy : we may easily trace the growing interest in the romantic, the exceptional, the marvellous, a harmless diversion from the prose of actual life ; and we cannot wonder if, above the virtues of respectable honesty and decent life, sensitive natures seek a more satisfying ideal, aesthetic, religious, or contemplative.
ANTI-MORALISM 311
§ 2. It is to be feared that the vaunted refinement of an aristocratic culture must be based on something akin to serfdom. The general community pays a high price for the unselfish pleasure of contemplating a leisured class, living in artificial detachment from the sordid details of everyday. The triumphs of Greek intellect, or French urbanity, nay, of Italian art, were dearly purchased, and the common life suffered. Writers have been at some pains to relieve Aristotle of the stigma of academic aloofness, to insist that his practical teaching implies the due balance of social concern and isolated study. But, as we have seen, whatever his own personal * golden mean,' it is impossible to acquit him of providing later abstention, with all its rules, contrasts, and prejudices. Sages were anxious to find a ' world-virtue ' superior to the regulated and narrowly watched behaviour of a small town ; and they discovered it in surrender to the unknown. The ' world-virtue,' as well as the due comprehen- sion of the ' world-system,' was out of the reach of ordinary men entangled in the cares of family and social life. It is not without significance that the first step of Sakhya-Mouni on the road towards perfection is the desertion of wife and child. The later Cynics deliberately dissuade from the snares of the wedded state ; and the Stoics, in their endless and unprofitable debates * whether the wise man should marry, should take part in public affairs,' showed how little they were disposed to recognise the ultimate validity of the civic norm. Thought, no less than art, is in the strict sense unpopular, just because both are impersonal. And to-day the conflict of the two phases of thought is becoming acute because the half-formed aims of the common people, their inarticulate aspirations, the more definite demands of their spokesmen, are not compatible with the survival of leisure and privilege, of detachment and unconcern. It is not idle luxury alone that demands the sacrifice of the weaker.
§ 3. It is noticed that the rift between social interests and leisured 'privilege' (by which term no one, I feel sure, will suspect me of restricting the use to dignity of birth or wealth) is not so conspicuous in this country as elsewhere. An idle aristocracy is as dangerous as a proletariat out of work ; and it is immaterial whether this superior class represents obsolete
312 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
tradition, commercial success, or aesthetic seclusion. It is one of the chief defects of our present condition that, with all the genuine effort after fellow-feeling and a revival of the concerns of the common life, there is, with some notable exceptions, so little endeavour to penetrate the ignorance and reserve which hides class from class. Now it would appear that the Gospel alone can overpower the very natural sense of superiority and ' exclude boasting,' It lays its chief emphasis upon something which is universal and within reach of all, define it as you will. Its ideal of society is nearer to Communism than to that form of polity under which we live to-day — with its misty unities looming outside the range of clear vision and its severance of parts and interests and classes. And by Com- munism there is no reason to restrict the definition to a common use of goods. This may or may not be a necessary side of appUed Christian principle ; but it at least entails a community of sentiment, of worship, of hope. It is quite easy to imagine a more real unanimity between a Christian slave- owner and his so-called ' chattels,' between a landlord and his ' serfs,' than between employer and employed in days of pure con- tracting independence. About the theory or strict legitimacy of their position they perhaps were not concerned; a sense of responsibility, a Christian kindliness of heart, a firm belief in that ultimate equality and brotherhood of man which to us to-day is such a dim and unsubstantial hope, stood them in good stead, and in practice supplied the want of logic in their theory. Beside sympathetic personal intercourse, system and symmetry are insignificant ; the purely rational is a valuable negative and corrective, but it can neither start nor consum- mate. The belief in a higher realm, which is above the petty distinctions and blunt antithesis of the moral life, is a common feature of most religions and of all devotional ' philo- sophy.' Plato's ideal guardian is always passing and repassing up or down a Jacob's ladder, from the one to the many, from the many to the one. But he has an evident reluctance to assume office and the care of the concrete, to descend again into the gloom of the cave. One who has enjoyed a vision of unity and harmony (by what strange means possible, let us consult Professor James on ' religious experience ') is amazed at the obtrusiveness of the exceptional. Moral ' science ' is to
ANTI-MORALISM 313
such highly unsatisfactory, because it is the perpetual discovery of fresh cases which cannot be brought under a single rule, which must remain a Maw to themselves.' Preciseness in principle is unimportant ; might it not even be called perilous ? for did not the Stoics in theory at least condone any evasion of conventional habit or violation of law if performed from serious and consistent motive ? And principle, just when it is clarified into a truism and lifted to the highest rank of un- questioned axiom, seems to lose its effectiveness. Unless one already felt the claims of ' duty ' and loved one's fellow, no Kantian canon would carry conviction. The place of philosophy is, like Science, strictly speaking, descriptive and neither normative nor heuristic. The principles or prejudices which do even to-day largely sway social language, if not social practice, are hopes and beliefs undaunted by the flat contra- diction or indifference of facts. The facts of life and nature are near us — these vague hopes and (perhaps) unfounded convictions — these too are near us ; but the mysterious unities of Absolute, or Natural Order, or Commonwealth are very far off. It is the pure subjectivity of the mystic that makes him a poor judge of another man's soul and circumstances. The verdict of the experts may constitute a standard of esthetic taste, but its validity does not extend beyond its own depart- ment, and art is not life. Any instantaneous or laboured con- viction of the unity of this universe, to us so complex and full of harsh antithesis, is a comforting and personal belief as well as being an indispensable initial axiom. But ' coercive argu- ment ' hovers round unavailing ; and only soul speaks to its like and communicates its spiritual message as by an electric shock. § 4. And we have to reckon with what is near and urgent ; a distant unity void and colourless, because universal, is at once negligible. When the claims of mediaeval sovereignty were highest, its actual prerogative was lowest. When the Creator entered through modern philosophy, into an undis- puted sway over all things in virtue of His eternal law, interest was at once transferred to the still precarious realm of the play of phenomena. When certain dogmas of the Reformed Churches surrendered to incalculable grace (whether as per- sonal faith or as the fiat of authority) the chief place in soteriology, the matter was over and done with once for all ;
314 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
and men, satisfied that there can be but one uniform force in the world, turned to the nearer illusion of difference. We can elsewhere trace how this ultimately real lost by degrees all resemblance and affinity to man, all sympathies with his demands. It is not too much to say that the esoteric doctrine of pure science must be a mere repetition of Par- menides : ' what is, is.' Anything beyond the category of bare existence is in some sense anthropomorphic, animistic super- stition. The pessimism of a limited but profound and sincere school is a last word of anthropocentric prejudice. Such, too, is the confidence of an indeterminate religious idealism. So impossible is it for man to cease to translate into language of the objective his own wants and aspirations, to cease to demand imperiously a countenance, somehow human, behind the veil. But can this resemblance and kinship be traced any the better if we surrender our strictly human differentia ? Man, we have seen throughout, must serve a cause not yet won, with which he will identify himself without care or fear ot the issue. And moral action is this unselfish venture; it is idle to call it submission to known laws. Have we gained anything if we give up that quality in God which puts Him in sympathy with our struggles? Do we win anything for the better understanding of the Divine Nature if we depict life as a vast and cruel amphitheatre, and human endeavour as a gladiatorial show, with a foreordained or meaningless end? If we supplant Christ, partner and captain in the fight as well as rewarder at the last, by some vague and unconscious benevolence, some central point of vision, where good and evil, pain and joy indistinctly blend, have we given a better, a more ' rational ' interpretation of the world ? We have given one, indeed, which is known by experience to have brought comfort to the heart and to the head of exceptional natures, but which helps only the elect, who are predisposed to receive such comfort. The Christian appeal is universal, and cannot permit the sovereign claims of the good will, of the pure heart, of the unselfish endeavour for a beloved Master, to evaporate in the thin air of Nihilism. And yet the whole tendency of independent theology has shown that there is no safe halting- place between historic Christianity and the denial of all mean- ing and all worth to the world.
TELEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE 315
B
On the Survival of Teleologic Language apart FROM THE Conception of Intelligible End
§ I. 'Purpose' in the world — in part a humanistic conceit: ir- resistible impulse of man to relate all knowledge and fact to himself: the use of ' law ' for physical sequence : introduces teleological senti- ment and quiets doubt.
§ 2. This retention of purposive language due largely to modern specialism : attempt of Science to mingle pious exhortation and strict proof: instinctive and hereditary prejudices at variance with the lessons of their physical studies : Nietzsche alone is logical : Christi- anity itself is less dualistic : but this compromise marks transition : compromise and disinclination to face real issues, a feature of our age : dilemma of ' world-purpose ' : meaning of purpose — scheme in which those asked to suffer and work may also share : no other sense allowable.
§ 3. How is this purpose intelligible ? postulates of Humanism : days of vague terror before unknown are passing : we cannot prove the truth of the Christian doctrine : no study of nature or history can assure us of any unfailing premium set on righteousness : other religions start with unity and perfection, and only condescend to the distressed manifold : Christianity alone starts at the lowest level, with the spectacle of a suffering criminal : it alone builds on facts of obvious experience — the weakness of God, the distress of man : contrast ; ' perfect member of a perfect whole.'
§ 4. We must not judge the universe by a canon out of all relation to our ordinary standards : all the struggles of the past, religious and political, have been directed against arbitrary and irresponsible power : motive and meaning to be interpreted morally ; if we accept any other standard we are back once again in unreasoning awe of the unknown : we start with the historic and human life of the Saviour : special solicitude for individual cases {in the New Testament).
§ 5. Unconscious Christianism of the recent age: the direct lesson of natural science certainly not self-effacement : Christianity begins by recognising the legitimacy and ends by directing the impulse 0/ our ' selfish ' instincts — what must I do to be saved ? ' at this stage of Western culture, no idle building of Pyramids : prerequisite of all appeal — guarantee of eternal worth.
§ I. It must be by a stretch of anthropomorphic fancy that we apply the term ' purpose ' to the world. The more accurate and strictly scientific method is to posit only existence and • perfection,' which exclude the thought of plan, of any gradual
3i6 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
approach to a better state. Many thinkers to-day, while they deny to it purpose and, in its strictest sense, law, believe that purpose (like reason) is confined to man, and to social man ; and so once more we are brought round to the State and its sovereignty. Now we need not waste time in proving badly what history proves well : that satisfied immersion in the State is a feature of the primitive rudiments, and it may be of the dotage also, of Society. It does not belong to the period of mature thought, which is also the period of criticism and of individuality. The attempt of Auguste Comte to lay meta- physical studies under an interdict, is a violent and half- mediseval reaction against private liberty. Man, as well as being a citizen, is an independent partner in the company of rational beings, not a mere 'inlet of abstract thought,' a mutinous point in ' groping protoplasm.' And he is in instant and necessary connection with the cosmos ; and though to-day he has at length learnt a wise sobriety and temperateness of epithet, he cannot help his irresistible appetite to unite, to qualify, and to explain. The application of the term ' law ' to physical sequence is a signal instance of this limit to human powers of self-surrender. This word, happily or unhappily, is bound to retain all the implication of a wise authority, personal or manifold, legislating with direct and conscious aim for the common good. Of this association it is nearly im- possible to rid ourselves. It quiets the average listener to proofs of scientific fatalism, with a vague but friendly and familiar sound ; it enables the man of exact study (who must also somehow be a preacher) to pass rapidly from one ' law ' to another, as if in pari materia ; to trace the reappearance of ' natural law in the spiritual world ' ; to spend endless time in pious but fanciful conciliations of Science and Religion. No better example could be given of the real antithesis, of the hasty alliances and superficial compromises, which exist to-day unappreciated. The term 'law' has introduced into the whole survey of facts a teleologic sentiment, which, as we have noted, pacifies the vulgar and misleads even the accurate. One of the first cares of a religious apologist is to disentangle this confused skein, to inquire not into the error but into the reason of the error, and to trace carefully the lesson taught by this curious survival.
TELEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE 317
§ 2. It is due to a natural and well-grounded fear of violently upsetting the basis of life, or to a belief that in the wreckage of superfluous superstition a minimum of pure religion can be brought safely to the shore. It is due also, and in no small measure, to modern specialism, which betrays the novice or adventurer in a foreign subject by a word, a phrase, or an assumption, when the man of one talent heedlessly strays beyond his particular pursuit. The mathematician detects the strained effort when the pure philosopher draws illustration from an unfamiliar theme ; the philosopher, in his turn, when the theologian ventures into pure speculation ; but, above all, the theologian himself, when science or thought, forsaking their proper sphere, claim to exhort and to convince otherwise than by direct proof of fact or logic. A man of calm emotions, blameless life, and unswerving adherence to the ordinary moral standard, throws himself into a particular branch of knowledge. Though he claims to exercise here an absolute independence, he can never really emancipate himself from his respectable prepossessions. His ancestry and education, Hebrew or Scotch, Celt or Slav, his temperament, sanguine or austere, creep out at significant intervals, in spite of all his disavowal. Pure Logic has perhaps been applied to life only by Nietzsche with remorseless exactness. Haeckel, when he stands within hail of practice, becomes pietistic and emotional. And the rest, perhaps in Darwin's happy unconsciousness, have laboured to show how appropriate is the pure teaching of the Gospel in an age which can strictly recognise no power in the world but rude and irresponsible force. It would be an impertinence, if we were not sure it is mere inconsistency, when such forcible rebuilders of the world of practice and theory accuse Christian belief of that very antithesis and dualism of which their own creed is so conspicuous an example. It is no discredit, surely, if the stubborn report of facts or experience, grating harshly on our finer sense, our spiritual hopes, our moral judgment, at once drives these complex men to maintain against all odds their instinctive prejudices. So far from capitulating, they hold on the more tenaciously. Yet this mood of arbitrary compromise and separate compartments must be merely a stage of transition. If you have once allowed the indefeasible sovereignty of facts and despised any other
3i8 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
intuition of truth, it is impossible to reserve a certain area or doctrine from prying or seizure. Disinclination to face real issues is characteristic of our time. To revert to the original problem, either the world has a ' purpose ' or it has none — it simply is, discoverable, but not amenable to any judgment passed by limited and purposive reason in relation to itself. If it has a purpose, it must be one either intelligible to us or beyond our scope. If intelligible, it must include us, not only as 'means' but as 'ends.' No one to-day, after the long battles against arbitrary power, is prepared to sacrifice (at least without a conflict) the only reality, present life and enjoyment, for a phantom. Convince a worker or a sufferer that it is no phantom, but a serious cause, that his efforts have real weight, that in the issue " he shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied," and he will lend unselfish aid. But the exclusion of the toilers in the world-process from share in a final result is as preposterous as the exclusion of the workers from the benefits of order, comfort, and social advance, to which they so largely contribute, from which they reap so little. Sic vos lion vobis I
§ 3. Now, if it be once granted that the cause is somehow and to a certain degree intelligible, we must ask how it comes to be within our capacity to understand. And we must not fear the taunt of humanism ; for we cannot step off our own shadow or view the world otherwise than through human senses, judge it by any other standard in the last resort than that of use and value. The days of empty awe before the unknown or the irresistible are rapidly passing. The universe may have, like the God of Spinoza, an infinite number of attributes and purposes which we cannot fathom. Christianity assures us of one supreme end, the building of a Divine temple by the patient polishing of the several stones. The historic process takes precedence of natural law, and heaven is to be attained not by a magical fiat but by a toilsome process of individual discipline. But it is not conceivable that this attitude to the world which we believe indispensable to the safety of Western ideals can be supported by any direct or irrefragable proof. The fate of nations was once held to depend on moral virtue or decline ; we know now that the law of decay follows a certain and fixed cycle : over-refinement or
TELEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE 319
complex civilisation is the unvarying prelude. Neither the open book of Nature nor the records of history assure us of any special premium set on 'righteousness,' and it is mis- leading— except perhaps, after Plato's perilous precedent, to add a moral for youthful studies — to force a meaning into the past. But the Gospel speaks to us of a definite aim from the very dawn of human life, in which each wiUing convert bears a part, as much by his weakness as by his strength, by his sufferings and failure as by his success. Other religions start from a sublime idea of perfection and come down to average human level with reluctance or condescension. But Christianity starts with proposing to the sinner the spectacle of a suffering criminal; and thus, by at once meeting the distressed and the degraded on their own ground, raises on this basis a theology which the wisest cannot exhaust. Other systems begin deductively not with the variety and complexity of our life, but with the unity and harmony of the whole ; they are brought down, puzzled and perplexed, to the prmciphim in- dividtialionis (if I may in this connection use the phrase) and to the 'problem of Evil.' Christianity boldly confronts the difificulty which they explain away with devious or plausible argument, or else altogether avoid ; it starts with the weakness of God and the sin and sorrow of pain, and on this foundation of fact, that may not be gainsaid, builds its edifice of morals, of piety, and of hope. It is strange that this unvarying appeal \.o faith, a belief in a real so different to its 'appearances,' does not prevent the message from being understood even by the humblest. Indeed, understanding that is to move men to action and endeavour must always be of this character ; flaw- less knowledge, which mirrors unchanging verities, carries no such incentive or stimulus. ' To know one's self as perfect member of a perfect whole ' is a definition of religion which for most men would have no meaning.
§ 4. Now it must be widely recognised by the impartial inquirer that the proposed substitutes — human perfectibility, race-virtue, pure idealism, 'super-man,' or any doctrine of an already beatified absolute — do not take the slightest pains to make themselves clear to the average mind. Their pro- fessors have no aptness for reasoning on the level of the common people, and in the end such creeds must be left to
320 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
their authors, subjective, esoteric, and incommunicable. That genus of mysticism, supposed separate and superior, which claims to be based on logic, is as much a matter of feeling as the rest; and everybody in the end finds what he went out ' into the wilderness to see ' — a note of harmony in a discordant world for a weary soul or a harassed intellect — perhaps a pre- text for that abstention and shifting of responsible burdens which has ever followed on over-reflection. If we must judge the universe and our place there by a canon quite out of reach, quite unsympathetic to our normal standard, we have gained nothing from the struggles of the past, against arbitrary will. Divine or human. We cannot come straight from open con- verse with our fellows, from the hearth, the market-place, the political debate, and introduce into that religious sense which alone can make life one, which works in closest intimacy with all its parts, categories and principles wholly unfamiliar there ! We are back once more in a stupefied wonder at the incom- prehensible, from which it is the function of all true personal religion to awaken the sleeper. The human figure of Christ, His teaching, His example, can at least be understood; the truth of His claims to divinity, of His promise of 'eternal life,' seem to have been gradually borne in upon believers in His personality by growing conviction. The Church begins, as we have said, by induction ; not by reference to a general maxim, but in solicitude for a particular case. Each case is met and treated on its own merits ; every convert is taken for a season ' apart from the multitude,' or sent into some Arabian solitude. The New Testament records special vocations, and not to all but to one was addressed the command, ' Sell all that thou hast.' We recommend this ' intelligibility ' with all the more confidence, because no careful student of the last century can doubt the source of its inspiration. Wherever it lifted itself into a region of idealism often mistaken, of enthusiasm often too easily disappointed, we may detect the impulse of a soul at one with us in essentials, fancying indeed it bore out the advice of natural law, but in truth reacting against it to an earlier faith in God and man. Seneca scepe noster . . . testimonium anima naturaliter Christians.
§ 5. Just because the Churches, reviving after torpor to a sense of a world-mission, could offer, not merely or chiefly
TELEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE 321
a metaphysic of the universe, but a simple rule of life, of a society held together by love rather than by force, it succeeded in winning converts, even among those who least suspected its imperceptible influence. The schemes of the eighteenth century were antique pagan and classical ; the whole tone of social interest and improvement in the next age is Christian. And while rejoicing in this manifest token of the adaptive power of the Gospel message, we may not allow this anomaly of principles and practice to pass unchallenged. The peculiar moral of a survey of Nature is not self-effacement, but realisa- tion of self, — as few have seen, and fewer still have had the courage to confess. These have been styled madmen, as all are styled who beat their wings against the tyranny of pre- judice (w^hich has outlived or forgotten its justification). Christianity has no reason to avoid confronting facts — some- times strangely and wrongly called ' truth.' Not to recognise the value, the reasonableness of our ' selfish ' instincts, to attempt to expel rather than ennoble and direct, is to commit an inexpiable sin against the individual and the race. Once more we must assert that the race, at this latter date, is not likely to build useless Pyramids for the deification of an idea ; to waste itself and the little span of life (its only certainty to-day) in wanton asceticism. Systems and creeds that do not pro- fess to answer this initial inquiry, 'What must I do to be saved ? ' are already doomed. The end set before the convert may be infinitely remote, but must be clear and intelligible. An ideal, a master, blind to the service, the distress, the efforts of their followers, can enlist no sympathy. And if to this blindness be joined the further disqualification that the cause is already won, insult is added to injury. The whole moral struggle of mankind becomes an aimless play of Divine forces, without end or meaning, or the cruel spectacle of gladiators. Such a deity will not hear from humanity in these latter days, " morituri te salutant," but cries of protest and righteous wrath. This is an open secret to those who know what is passing in minds of cool reflection. The days of mere emotion are over ; — Renan coming in to supplement the rigour of scientific fact with Gallic sentiment. To-day we expect not perhaps an alliance but a careful marking out of boundary. Christianity provides indirectly for the Universal, because it
322 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
appeals directly to the personal. And it succeeds, not because it denies science or seeks with feverish alarm to incorporate the lesson of accumulating facts with its own doctrine, but because it teaches self-respect, and guarantees to the unit, not momentary pleasure, but eternal worth.
SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURE VIII— A
On the Ideals of Modern Democracy, founded on Christian and Medieval Regard for the Dignity
of Man
§ I. Vital connection of ' democratic ' ideals and Christian belie/, if we interpret the vague term as implying appeal to the moral sense of the community through individual privilege and responsibility : democracy rooted in compassion and justice to the individual : this is threatened on all sides to-day, in theory as in practice : serious inquiry must be ; what is meant by such phrases as the 'future lies with democracy ' : the Gospel alone lends any reality or spirit to these claims : the Church recognises the new spirit only so far as it issues from a certain conception of human nature : recounts, like ideal democracy, privilege {matter of faith not of experience) rather than obligation.
§ 2. The worth of this method borne out by the testimony of all successful government : majesty of law cannot be set up again : apologetic tone of authority before the French Revolution ; attempt to justify to the individual moral consciousness : taxes and laws binding only on those who vote them : genuine and patient consulta- tion of a people, congenial to Christianity, and next to impossible in government to-day, economically and racially competitive : necessary overriding of conscientious minorities (issue unsuspected by earlier reformers) cannot be reconciled with Christian principle.
§ 3. This ideal of patient ' democracy ' full of concern for the weaker brethren, only found to-day in Christianity : elsewhere other strange ideals of manhood and citizenship : general revulsion of feeling against the older policy of ' let alone ' and belief in human nature : the new types of the visionary ; in extremes of Nietzsche and Hartmann : in either case the present valueless except as a bridge to the future in which we have no share : but the people demand {with perfect justice) immediate fruition : Christianity reinforces this claim : both restore to man his confidence and self-respect, seriously menaced in all other systems.
§ 4. Is human nature to be trusted or not ? : Machiavelli and Hobbes, Luther and Rousseau : Meditsval respect for ' Will of the People,' and aboriginal rights of individual unit : tenderness for the part :
323
324 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
even methods of religious persecution derived partly from this sense of personal dignity : no authority conceived as irresponsible, even that of Pope or Emperor : moral criticism of all rule : refusal to obey against conscience (denied in modern times) a sacred right ; as all office a sacred trust : attempt at Reformation to discover State-sovereignty above law : fatal theory of irresponsible authority.
§ 5. True function of democracy, moral supervision; common culture cannot unite all classes, only common moral aim : its hope- fulness in unarmed appeal to innate justice and unselfish instinct : to evoke this latent but powerful force, stress on personal dignity, worth, and responsible use of freedom : this generous creed {common to ideal democracy and Christianity alike) depends entirely on religious prepossessions : Christian belief and the welfare of Society, one and indivisible.
§ I. It may perhaps seem needless to lay further emphasis on the peculiar debt of certain modern political ideals to Christianity. While in their strictest sense Christianity and Socialism are irreconcilable, the vague yet potent connotations of the term ' democracy ' are inseparable from Christian belief, and if divorced from this vital union, fall at once to the ground. For this much-abused word, whatever it cannot mean, at least imphes this : an appeal to the general moral sense of the community, not to its criticism of detail or its expert cleverness, but to its sound practical verdict on honest men and whole- some measures. Its restriction, in the mouth of many speakers, to class-rivalry, to the envy of the less successful, to the seizure of certain immediate benefits, would be grotesque, if they had not the excuse of the current vagueness and misuse of language, and the pressing need to-day of the restatement of the very simplest first principles. It is perhaps a truism that the most familiar is also the most foreign; but it may be doubted if any other word of equal currency is employed with such varied shades of meaning, in senses and contexts so incompatible. Now the whole movement, which bears this sonorous but somewhat empty title, had its roots in compassion and a sense of justice, in a conviction of individual value in spite of all appearance ; which, native to the human soul, confirmed and developed by Christian training and promise, are out of fashion in a strictly scientific and com- petitive age. To this ' democracy,' all the tone of the present age, the acumen of social reformers, the spirit of letters, the
MODERN DEMOCRACY 325
grasp and intrigue of capital, even the cabals of partizan statesmen, are alike hostile. And, deserted by the fashion, it has perhaps forgotten its best friend. Yet men idly repeat the comforting and meaningless phrase that 'the future lies with democracy.' We do not dispute the truth of this in a certain sense. Public opinion will always guide and have its way, as it has done in the past, however it may find expression — through educated sentiment, plebiscite, revolt, an energetic sovereign with a mandate from his people, or per- haps even through the indirect means of representative institu- tions. But nothing is gained by parading this commonplace ; its vague universality robs it of all real life. It is the duty of all who as Christians and as citizens are concerned in human welfare, not here alone but wherever man is found, to inquire seriously what men wish to convey and understand, in such a formula. Those who have had the patience to follow our survey so far will recognise (as one may hope) the truth and the justice of the claim we make for Christianity, as the sole reinforcing spiritual power behind the often mistaken, often abortive efforts of 'enfranchisement' or emancipation. The axioms of the Gospel alone lend any meaning, give any content to the new principles, any background and stability to the new and equal life. Let others commend the recent shifting of power and responsibility as a matter of pubHc utility, as a relief to the overburdened shoulders of con- scientious incompetence, as the political intrigue of party warfare. With such the Church can have no sympathy and no concern. It can recognise the new spirit only so far as it issues from a certain conception of man's nature, dignity, rank, function, and possibilities. It must criticise from its own point of view, or be false to its mission. And it heartily welcomes a movement which, like itself, frankly begins its task by recounting rights before duties, privilege before obligation.
§ 2. It may be doubted whether any man of sense, with the slightest knowledge of what 'is in man,' the briefest experience of administration, could ever hold a different view. The reflecting man, the boasted product of cool enlightenment, hears mention of law and regulation with dislike and suspicion. To him, all such is a servant and a means ; he is an ' end-in- himself.' You may appeal to his logical consistency, or (in
326 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
practice more safely) to his generous instincts, but not to his fear of compulsion, to any visible or palpable sanction of a violated precept. Let it be clearly recognised that we cannot reinvigorate the majesty of law to the average mind, as some- thing in itself desirable, unless it first be submitted to a test of individual approval ; and in this use and justice inextricably combine. When the doomed monarchy of the French began to preface its laws by long academic exordia, recommending the aim and motive of the proposed restriction on indefinite liberty, a great principle was recognised, congenial to the hopeful yet critical temper of that age. Before you could issue a behest you must justify it to the moral consciousness. A deprecating and apologetic tone was noted in authority. But, like all other moral principles, this was overthrown in the Revolution ; giving place to the imperious word of command, the drum-head court-martial, and the maxim " Salus reipublicae summa Lex," which (however disguised by diplomatic blandishments) has ever since remained in practice the chief guide of rulers. That people should only pay such taxes as they had voted, only obey such laws as they had themselves made, is not a recognition of this latter principle, but a direct contradiction. The consultation of a people slow and not easily moved, hard of hearing in a crisis, and sometimes carried away by ungovernable and unexpected impulse, swayed unaccountably by personal fascination, is a toilsome and precarious process which suits ill the needful secrecy and swiftness of competitive governments to-day. But it accords well with the Christian view of freedom, with the patient forbearance which marks in every detail the work of Christ and His Church. Wherever a minority is converted, not over- borne, there is the Christian spirit, not the hasty and timid violence into which representatives of the people are so often betrayed, ' because their time is short ' and their charge revocable. But meantime the needs of the Commonwealth cannot wait; and the active interference of the people is confined to condoning a mandate overstepped, to giving a verdict of moral condemnation, when it is too late to retrieve the neglect or the blunder. For it is the unhappy irresponsi- bility of government to-day which is a curious and paradoxic issue of a people's claims to rule. " Quicquid delirant," and
MODERN DEMOCRACY 327
the rest, will be still true (for it is always the few who determine, always the many who pay the cost) ; but with the increase in the numbers of a so-called responsible body, the sense of individual accountability has almost vanished.
§ 3. Now this ideal of a democracy, patient, moral, and tender towards the weaker brethren, not a plausible excuse for a spirited and perhaps unscrupulous clique of experts, that is what has passed to the asylum and guardianship of the Churches — of Christian belief in its wide sense. Else- where there do indeed exist, apart from the nervous and superficial opportunism of statesmen, certain ideals of man- hood and of citizenship, which are almost unrecognisable as a logical extension of the liberal sentiment and implicit Christian zeal for mankind, out of which they pretend to have proceeded. There has taken place, indeed, a complete and to many unconscious revulsion of feeling against the old principle of 'let alone' and untrammelled development. Nothing could well be more abrupt than the contrast between the old idealist belief in the goodness of human nature, the spontaneous flowering of virtue in the open air, the evils of all restraint ; and the modern conception, daily gaining ground, of congenital weakness, the inertness of the masses, the need of a government strong, pitiless, and minute. The eyes of the dreamer are fixed on a remote vision of a * new creature.' Impatient with the slow process of present aims, he will gladly sacrifice all to a possible future, even himself. He fancies that every immediate interest must surrender to the absorbing pursuit of an ideal man or type, far from the control which crushes the few to the level of the many ; or of a race-consciousness so poignant, acute, and unanimous that the ghost of the ' Will-to-live ' will be for ever ' laid.' It is the custom to deride these extremes of position and negation — of admiration for the pure unfettered spirit exulting as ' over-man ' in the freedom at last realised, of mystical devotion and surrender to Nothingness. But between these two hover irresolutely all modern views of the universe. And it will be noted, whatever the ultimate aim, the present duty for the average member would be the same, submission of private welfare to a cause, in which the unit by no stretch of imagination can personally hope to share. It is just at this moment, when reflected thought soars into a
328 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
region so remote from average sympathies and ideals, that the Christian message, "Now is the appointed time, now is the day of salvation," comes to the support and the purification of the righteous and democratic demand for immediate fruition. For both of these try, in the very teeth of things, to stem the tide, to arrest the perpetual flux, for each individual ; to make him somehow an ' end-in-himself,' because for him and his eternal welfare came into being the visible system, screen or scaffolding of a spiritual purpose. God the Son descended from glory to take on Him ' the form of a servant,' and to suffer death upon the Cross — virkp ov Xpio-Tos aireOavev, here as always the ultimate guide in conduct, ultimate truth in dogma. Even if none other but he were to be saved, the 'tremendous sacrifice ' would have been somehow worth while. Both begin by restoring to man his confidence, self-respect, by assuring him of his prerogative — a prerogative which cannot be reason, for that is late and secondary and partial, but is found in the heart, in the generous instincts to which appeal is seldom made in vain. We must soon face the dilemma, — shall we treat human nature as radically good, or radically evil ? in need of absolute independence or absolute tutelage? as having in itself some impulse towards the light, some source of spontaneous action, or in default of any intrinsic spring, to be caught young and moulded in a fixed type to automatic virtue ? § 4. We must choose between the rival merits of the scientific and antique, the religious and personal view ; between a con- ception suggested by Machiavelli and Hobbes and followed more or less openly by modern statecraft, and a conception based on Christian principles reinforced by Roman civil law, maintained with unabated pretensions through the Middle Ages, revived against authority by Luther for a brief space (before he and his followers yielded to the false charm of ' almightiness and power ' in both spheres. Divine and human), and once more proposed by Rousseau and the genuine ' liberalism ' he called into being. Gierke, who lifts the veil from much that is obscure in mediaeval theory, helps us to understand the ideal of that inconsistent age, lofty and grovelling at the same time : his entire volume bears out our contention that some- thing of vital importance has since been lost or forgotten. " Political thought," he affirms, " when genuinely mediaeval,
MODERN DEMOCRACY 329
starts from the whole, but ascribes an intrinsic value to every partial whole, down to and including the individual. If it holds out one hand to Antique thought, when it sets whole before parts, and the other to the modern theory of Natural Law, when it proclaims the intrinsic and aboriginal rights of the individual, its peculiar character is that it sees the Universe as one articulated whole, and every being (whether joint being, or community, or a single being) as both a part and a whole : a pari, determined by the final cause of the Universe, and a whole with a final cause of its own. To every being is assigned a place in that ivhole, and to every link between beings corresponds a Divine decree " {ov yap yiverai tto'Ai? e| 6jj.olwv). Later : " An ancient and generally entertained opinion regarded the Will of the People as the source of temporal power." Even in the religious persecution we read an extraordinary respect for the individual. Baldus, writing at the close of the fourteenth century, enlarges quite in the spirit of the old apologue of the belly and the members, upon the State as an organism — not in the modem light to read a lesson of the validity of the law of self-preservation, overriding all other rules, but to point to the value and importance of the minutest fraction of the body politic. This tenderness for the part is emphatic : " Si abscinderetur auricula, non esset corpus perfectum sed monstruosum " ; if remonstrance fails, in the last resort, a ruler may proceed to amputation, but " cum dolore compassionis " : — " ne pars sincera trahatur." It is a great error to attribute to mere irony the double truth (of faith and reason), or to mere hypocrisy the solicitude and tedious delay of the Inquisition's method. A natural human bent towards tyranny, a Southern delight perhaps in cruelty towards a foe, is here struggling against a sincere respect for another ; — a wish to postpone harshness until it could no longer be avoided. "Lordship is office," says Gierke, "and implies not ownership but duties. . . . Pope and Emperor stood on the same level with any president of a corporation." Over all was the idea of Divine law anterior to any special enactments, which derived their authority only from conformity to it. " Superiori," says Decius, about a century after Baldus, "non est obediendura quando egreditur finis officii sui." With the disappearance
330 THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
of the Church's claims to be a disinterested and effective interpreter of this law (which the secular magistrate should execute under its instructions) with the revival of the ancient spirit of 'realism' and antique influences, the State (as we have often remarked) threw off the wholesome restraint. "Jurisprudence and philosophy, as soon as they felt the first rustle of the breath of classic antiquity, vied with each other in discovering a theoretical expression for an idea of the State which should be independent of the idea of Law." In a word, "the State's relation to Law is not merely sub- servient and receptive, but rather dominant and creative." Sovereignty was elevated above positive law : " Princeps " (for in personal monarchy alone in the eyes of the publicist lay the chances of the State) " legibus solutus est."
§ 5. We have spoken of the only true function of ' democracy ' to maintain a general moral supervision over those actual rulers, who even in the tiniest or most progressive of common- wealths must always be a minority. If the people surrender this, there is nothing left for them. The sovereign who is 'above law' may become a 'law to himself,' or bow to public opinion. But we can only regard with fear and suspicion absolute power lodged in the hands of an anonymous body, a 'Venetian oligarchy,' to all intents irresponsible as units. That which binds together rulers and ruled can never be a common culture, but only a common moral aim. Democracy believes that this impulse to cheerful corporate action (not seldom involving sacrifice of personal well-being though never of personal principles and hopes) is inborn in every man. And (as the experience of the genuine ruler will bear out) to call forth this sentiment needs not minute regimentation nor a system of fear, but a sense of privilege, of dignity, and of responsible use. Like Christianity, the true reformer preaches a gospel of faith ; and gives men rights before they have learnt to employ them. But, it must be earnestly maintained, this generous creed has no lasting root except in the principles and prepossessions which it shares with, or has derived direct from the Gospel. The contest of science and democracy is no idle paradox, no academic antithesis. It pervades and confuses modern thought and modern endeavour. It gives rise to eager and spasmodic efforts after
MODERN DEMOCRACY 331
individual interest, at the conquest of the mass through the reclaimed units which compose it. And, after these inter- mittent attempts, it compels the disheartened reformer to sink back again into hopeless apathy, surrendered to currents which set in an unknown direction ; or take refuge in the feverish ineffectiveness of legislation, which must always remain ' outside ' and in a measure hostile. Belief in human nature, in the priceless worth of the person and his immortal destiny, in the abiding solicitude of God for the meanest and most depraved, in the sense of worth and steady though slow advance towards full membership of the kingdom, — in these thoughts, as we believe, indispensable to any happy life among Western nations, in these 'ventures of faith,' our heritage from the past and our hopes for the future, the Gospel and the Churches can reinforce the flagging interest and can put life into the dismayed outlook. Christian belief and the welfare of Society are one.
INDEX
Abelard, 31, 169, 178.
Absolute, the, Schelling's conception
of, 118. African Church, 262. Age of history, 270, Age of reason, 99, I54-I55» 232 Age of the despots, 220-221. Ages of Faith —
Mediaeval, falsely so called, 75- 76, 288.
Present, 281.
Reformation the starting-point of, 289. Aim of present lectures, 55, 71. Alexander of Hales, 170. Alexandrian School, 3, 5, 30. Amalric, 109, 179. Anabaptists, 179. Anarchism, 226. Anaxagoras, 22. Anchoritism, 207. Anglican Church —
' Catholic ' movement in, 278,
Extremists expelled from, 242.
Social and political questions, implication in, 149.
State and, illogical relation of, 223. Anselm, 163, 169, 170. Antinomian tendency of pure
thought, 220. Antithesis. {See also Dualism) —
Behmen's insistence on, 98.
Development through, 134.
Modern attitude towards, 3-5, 7. Apologetics, Christian —
Difficulty of, 2, 6-7, 17.
Narrowed aims of, 10.
Necessary task of, 8.
Place of, 165.
Representative character of apolo- gists, 6.
Tone of, 147. Apologetics, intellectual, limitations of, 166.
Appuleius, 240.
Acjuinas, Thomas, system of, 31, 33, 61, 170-171, 178.
Aristotle, 22, 61, 109, 301 ; system of, 28, 159-160, 205, 299, 311 ; Mediceval prohibition of, 170.
Art compared with philosophy, 118.
Asceticism, Pagan exaltation of, 9, 29.
Asquith, H., quoted, 179.
Atomists, 216, 240.
' Augustan ' ages, 220.
Augustine, 3, 30, 167, 262, 263.
Average moral consciousness. Chris- tian appeal to, 5.
Averroes, 132, 302.
Bacon, 28, 172, 257.
Baldus cited, 329.
Bayle, Peter, 137.
Beghards, 179.
Behmen, 97-98, 119, 253.
Being and working, identity of, 100.
Berengarius cited, 169.
Bernard, 170, 180.
Bible, the, 177, 182.
Bodinus, 32.
Brahminism, 203.
Brotherhood —
Development of idea of, 42.
Mediaeval emphasis of, 59. Browning, Robert, cited, 300. Bruno, 96,
Buckle cited, 148, 221. Buddhism, 203.
Csesarism, 24, 65, 219, 221, 223.
Calvin, 226.
Calvinism, 249.
Carlyle cited, 204.
Cartesian School. See Descartes.
Casuistry, 30, 31, 1 73.
Categories in Hegelian system, 120,
123. Catholicity a test of value, 274-275.
333
334
THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Cavour cited, 223. Celibacy, philosophic attitude to- wards, 22, 29. Cerinthus, 262. Charles i., King, 242. Chinese Empire, 195, 204. Christian Church. {See also African, Anglican, Greek, Protestant, Roman) — Community, regarded as a, 153. Conciliatory function of, 144, 151,
201. Defencelessness of, her strength,
^Si- Detachment of, from political parties, 151. Christianity —
Adaptability of, 126, African Church, 262. Communistic ideal of, 312. Conscience and conformity sepa- rated in, 219. Democratic ideal inseparable from,
324-325-
Dogmatic paradox in, 264.
Essential nature of, 188.
Greek Church, 219.
Humanistic, 259-260.
Intelligibility of, 319-320.
Law, Gospel a protest against, 134.
' Mythologic postulate ' objec- tion, 286-287.
Only hope of society, 290, 331.
Reformed Churches. See Pro- testant.
Revival of, in nineteenth century, 229.
Roman Church. See that title.
Self-realisation assured by, 321- 322.
Socialism incompatible with, 324.
Starting-point of, 319.
Struggle in, 260.
Supplementary character of, theory as to, 178.
Survival of, a justification, 282.
Teleology of, 4, 135.
Theology divorced from Gospel,
Universality of appeal of, 5-6, 106, 144, 147, 151, 188, 314. Unselfishness of, 236. Value of, in practical affairs, 282. Worth and work claim satisfied by, 140-141, 144. Christopher, St., 23, 39, 132. Cicero, 22, 205, 304.
Citizen, Christian and philosopher
contrasted, 2CX3. Civic ideal, 22. {See also State. ) Classes, separation of, 292-296. Clement of Alexandria, 2. Compromise —
Modern time, note of, 317-318.
Scepticism, result of, 294. Comte, Auguste, 124, 268, 316. Confucianism, 204. Conscience' sake, resistance for, 248, Constitutionalism, 209, 269, 295. Contract method, 293-295, 312. Contrast, law of, 98. Copernican Lulheranism, 32. Cosmic emotions, 239. Cosmic process, defiance of, 159. Cosmopolitan federation, idea of,
156. Cosmopolitanism, Greek, 205, 216,
234-235- Credenda —
Analysis and demonstration of,
by Medieval Church, 288. Co-ordination of, attempted by
Gnostics, 262. Deistic statement of, 182. Enforcement of, 75. Interrogative towards, 10. Irreducible minimum of, 151-152. Rational proofs for, Anselm's
view regarding, 169. Righteous instinct must be satis- fied by, 251. Simplification of, 13. Crusades, 220. Cudworth, 242. Cusa, Nicholas of, 73, 112, 1 18,
251. Cynic School, 205, 216, 311. Cyprian, 3, 262-263. Cyrenaics, 27.
Darwin, 125, 317; quoted, 270.
David, 179.
de Tocqueville cited, 232.
Decius quoted, 329.
Deism —
Collapse of, 250.
Credenda as stated by, 181-182.
' Enthusiasm ' distasteful to, 278.
Jesuits charged with, 277.
Nature of, 13, 97, 137, 210, 249.
Pantheistic tendency of, 97, 175. Democracy —
Christianity akin and essential to ideal of, 34, 131, 324-325.
INDEX
335
Democracy — continued.
Confidence in humanity the atti- tude of, 196, 227, 330.
Conservatism inherent in, 303.
Disappointment regarding, 82, 211, 331-
Function of, 330.
Generosity in, suggested appeal to, 198, 330.
Hero-worship in relation to, 216.
Hostile forces against, 131.
Immediacy of fruition demanded by, 94, 131, 144, 287, 328.
Meaning and origin of term, 129,
324- Mediaeval Church s attitude
towards, 59. Misapprehension regarding, 6, 15. Opportunist dealings with, 157. Privilege in detachment, attitude
towards, 310-312. Revolution by, 14-15. Science and philosophy, feud
with, 244, 268. Unconcern of, with first prin- ciples, 212. ' Will of the people ' —
Emergence of, 14-15, i7j ^S^- Middle Ages, in, 329. Supremacy of, 34. Democritus, 26. Descartes, 16, 96, 97, 155, 208,
220. Despotism, enlightened, as theorj'
of government, 65. Development. See Evolution. Devotion to a cause, 85, 125, 132,
189, 198, 229, 232. Dionysius, 251. Disillusionment, 20, 22-23. Divine, meanings of term, 299. Divine attributes, 47-48 ; rejection
of moral, 72-73. Dogma —
Differing estimates of, 179. Growth of system of, 167. Mysterious nature, view as to, 170. Double truth theory, 30, 177-178,
180, 181, 208. Dualism. (See also Antithesis) — Absence of, in system of Aquinas,
178. Certainty and hope, separation of
realms of, 84. Christian attitude towards, 29. Hellenistic, 29. Mediaeval compromise of, 61.
Dualism — continued.
Persistence of, 4, 136, 158, 268. Post- Re formation, 181. Prominence of, in English thought,
12. Science and religion, of, 178. Stoic monism, latent in, 272. Theory and practice, of, 125. Dubois-Reymond cited, 273. Duns Scotus, system of, 3, 1 1-12, 16, 61, 177, 179, 263; diverse elements in, 31-32.
Eckhart, 109, 251. Edwardes, 250. Efficiency as aim, 62, 68. Emancipation of slaves, 93, 105,
231-232, 276, 286. Emerson, 253. Empedocles, 11. Energy, centres of, loi. Enlightenment, Age of. See Age of
Reason. ' Enthusiasm,' 278. 'Enthusiasts,' 185, 242. Epicureanism, 27, 205, 305-307. Epicurus, 176.
Equality of man, theory of, 68. Erigena, 9, il, 109, 169. Eutychianism, 4. Evil, problem of, 98. Evolution —
Antithesis, by, 134.
End-in-itself theory, 117.
Law of, 98,
Leibnitzian insistence on, 100-
lOI.
Exceptional, the —
Law intolerant of, 292. Religious demand for exceptional treatment. See under Re- ligion. Value of, loi, 152, 166, 293. Experience, inward, 6, 10, 12, 50,
Faith- Ages of, 75-76, 281, 288, 289. Conception of, offered, 75. Emotional test of, 172. Evil a motive for, 104. Facts in discord with, 289. Hegelianism founded on, 113,
123. Human nature, in, 296. Levelling effect of, 279. Mediaeval Church, in, 168.
336
THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Faith — continued.
Morality's demand on, 72, 75, 86, 144, 173, 191, 281-282.
Rationalistic axioms transferred to realm of, 183.
Reason, antithesis with, 75.
Works in contrast with, 30-31. Fatalism, 94-95. Feudahsm, 31, 173, 291-292, Feuerbach cited, 134. Fichte, 98, 182; system of, iio- III, 116-I17, 157; quoted, 189 ; cited, 203. Figgis, Mr., quoted, 207. Force —
Doctrine of, 24.
Hegelian ' Reason ' better so called, 114.
Mind-stuff, 112.
Modern appeal to, 150, 211.
Sole existence, as, loi. Franchise extension, 286. Freedom of modern times, 224. Freemasons, 277. Free-thought —
Anti-moral tendencies of, 72.
Reaction against, 170.
Seventeenth century, in, 222. Free-will —
Mallock on, 131.
Rersonal sense of, 224-225, 305. French Revolution —
Atheist attitude before, 1 35.
Cause of, 16, 65.
Conduct of, 65-66.
Miscalculation regarding, 15.
Progress of, 93, 233.
Gahleo, loi ; cited, 152. Gierke quoted, 66, 328-329- Gnostic Theophany, 132. Gnosticism, 261-262. Gomperz quoted, 214-215, 298. Good will, 24, 28. Gore, Bishop, quoted, 245. Gospel. See Christianity. Government —
Cjesarism, 24, 65, 219, 221, 223.
Constitutionalism, 209, 269, 295.
Essential basis for welfare of, 211.
Irresponsibility of modern, 326. Greek Church, 219. Greek Fathers, 5, 9. Greek Schools, tendency in, 159. Greek Tragedy, 301-302. Gunther cited, 180. Guyon, Madame de, 45.
Haeckel, 317 ; quoted, 83. Happiness, universal claim to,
132-133- Harmony of contradictories, II2,
118. Hartmann, 82, 305 ; system of, 124, 291; quoted, 117, 141; cited, 120, 159. Heaven —
Individualist conception of, 283-
284. Medireval conception of, 67. Hedonism — Mystic, 256. Proe- Revolution, 229. Hegel, 98, 159, 253, 260, 305 ; system of, 91, 112-114, 1 16, 1 19-123, 206, 211,230; quoted, 170 ; cited, 204. Hegelianism, British, 202, 21 1. Heine quoted, 163. Helvelius, loi.
Heraclitus, 170, 217, 260, 299. Herbert, Auberon, cited, 226. Heresies, early, origin of, 5. ' Higher ' and ' lower,' sense of
terms, 37, 82. Historical method, 8. Historical research, province and
limitations of, 92. History, Hegelian emphasis on im- portance of, 121. Ilobbes, 223, 226, 328. Hobhouse, Mr., cited, 287. Hoffding, Prof., quoted, 104-105. Hofmann controversy, 180. Holbach, 15 ; cited, 155. Hugh of St. Victor, 180 ; cited,
170. Humanism —
Christian, 259-260. Decline of, 159-160. Eighteenth century, in, 32. Greek, 176, 204, 234, 298, 299. Values, a fixing of, 218. Hume, David, 103, 209. Hutcheson, 103.
Huxley, Prof., 63, 125, 225, 232; quoted, 142 ; cited, 190.
Idealist and Naturalist, meeting- ground of, 112.
Ideas V. persons, 93.
Immanence, theory of, 109.
Immortality, justice of demand for, 190.
Indifference, place of, 112, 118.
INDEX
337
Individual, Fichte's despair of, 117. Individual as end-in-himself — Christian recognition of, 92, 121, 134, 140-141. 152, 153, 186, 268, 308, 328. Disregard of, 63, 95. Emancipation based on doctrine
of, 231-232. Imperialism in relation to, 130. Mediaeval insistence on, 66-67. Origin of doctrine, 214. Individual consciousness as aim in
world-process, 213. Individual freedom — of modern times, 224 ; under Roman Empire, 240. Individualism —
Eighteenth century, 33-34. Heaven as conceived by, 283-284. Impossibility of, as an ideal, 84. Sophistic, 214.
Sovereignty of Individual in con- flict with Sovereignty of State, 67-68, 105, 181; com- promise of Roman Empire, 219. Tendency towards, in European thought, 21. Industrialism of nineteenth centur}-,
230, 244. Instinct, 160, 162. Intellect — Christian system, position in, 5-7,
I1-12. Detachment of, in modem times,
21.
Kant's system, position in, 68.
Pagan systems, position in, 9.
Sphere of, 25. Intellectualism —
French and Russian, 216.
Mediaeval, 165- 1 73.
Orthodoxy resented by, 179-180. Islam, II, 171.
James, Prof. William, quoted, 90, 165, 167 ; cited, 241-242, 312. Jankelevitch, 268. Jesuits —
Anti-moral self-surrender of, 241.
Deism charged against, 277.
Dissolution of Order of, 14, 222.
Tenets of, 248. Jews —
Deity of, 240.
Religion superseding morality among, 241.
22
Joachim, Abbot, 260.
Jones, Henry, quoted, 258, 300.
Jurisprudence, mediaeval exaltation
of, 206. Justice —
Hume on, III. Mallock on, 130. Omission of, as Divine attribute, 47-
Kaftan quoted, 166. Kant, Immanuel —
' Anglican ' spirit of, 243.
Neo-Kantians, 115, 158.
Post-Kantian Schools, 91.
Rousseau's influence on, 104.
Socrates, compared with, 218.
System of, 104-105, iio-iii.
Work of, 68.
otherwise mentioned, 34, 231, 251, 265. Kepler, 270. Ker, Prof., quoted, 138.
Lactantius, 3, 9, 32, 169, 263. Laing, Samuel, cited, 161. Lanfranc cited, 170. Latin Church. See Roman Church. Law —
Compact of self-interest, 249. Dualism implied in, 282. Exceptional not tolerated by,
292. Hostility to, 246-248. Individual approval necessarj- for,
326. Natural. See Nature. Phases in conception of, 284. Physical sequence, application of
term to, 316. Post- Reformation character of,
248. Purpose of, 251. Roman supremacy of, 176-177. Sovereignty above, 330. Le Maistre, Joseph, 74. Leibnitz, 98, 264 ; work of, 13, 16 ;
system of, 99-103. Leighton, Mr., quoted, 123. Leisured classes, 31 1-3 12. Lessing, 10, 76, 169, 190, 253. Levy-Bruhl, 268. Liberal ideals of nineteenth century,
211. Liddel cited, 180.
Literature as representing its age, 299-300.
338
THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Locke, loi.
A(57os-doctrine, 9.
Lotze, Herman, quoted, 74, 136;
cited, 190. Love — •
Nature of, 26.
Universality of, 1 87. Loyalty, anomalous character of, in
modern states, 194. Lucian quoted, 206. Lucifer, 98. Lucilius, 175- Lucretius, 240, 306. Lully, 171.
Luther, Martin, 62, 180, 194, 219, 328.
Machiavelli, 32, 328; State-theory
of, 62-63, 194. McTaggart, Mr., 182 ; quoted, 201-
202. Majority-rule, 284, 285. Malebranche quoted, 96. Mallock, W. H., quoted, 130, 131,
140 ; cited, 224-225. Man —
Average, 212. Differentia of — Action, 104, 114. Enthusiasm and self-surrender,
186, 189. Intelligence, 114. Self-preservation, 99. Sociability, 73, 205. Helplessness of, modern por- trayal of, 303. Measureofall things, 217,299,302. Primitive, 160-161, 241. Marcus Aurelius, 175, 206, 261. Marsihus of Padua, 66. Mediaeval Church. See trnder
Roman Church. Medigevalism, new, close of, 159. Merz, Mr., cited, 256. Mill, J. S., 63, 125 ; system of, 137 ; quoted, 124, 142-143 ; cited, 253. Minorities, 149. Missionary devotion, 41. Mithraists, 240. Monarchy, 194-195. Monism, S3, 209 ; failure of, 243. Montaigne, 156, 208. Moral action, classification of
motives of, 26. Moral order, theories as to, I lO-l 12, 117; Sidgwick'sviewasto, 121.
Moral V. intellectual, 5-7, 11-12,
68, 330. Morality —
Basis of, 164.
Cambridge School's view of, 242.
Danger to, from reflection, 71-72.
Doubt in relation to, 71, 78-81.
Emotional nature of, 172.
Essential characteristic of, 71.
Faith demanded for, 72, 75, 86, 173, 191, 281-282.
Law of ISIature defied by, 77.
Meanings of term, 238.
Political freedom inseparable from, 105.
Primitive, high standard of, 161, 241.
Protest of individual against absorption in the universal, 84.
Reasonableness of, 78.
Religion distinct from, 41,47, 5°) 202-203, 238-242 ; in an- tagonism to, 241-242 ; iden- tified with, 242-243.
Sanction of, in nineteenth century, 271.
Spiritual revival leading to weak- ening of, 220.
Universality of appeal of, 74, 97, 104, 163. Mysteries, ancient, 240. Mysticism —
Certainties in, 249, 251, 255-256.
Elements conducing to, 247.
Orthodoxy resented by, 179-180.
Practical acumen united with, 206.
Self-surrender in, 46.
Temper of, 172-173, 221. Mystics of twelfth century, 10.
National decay, 318-319. Naturalism. See Religion — Natural. Naturalist and Individualist, meet- ing-ground of, 112. Nature —
Attitudes towards, various, 58. Christian altruism, antithesis
with, 272. Convention, antithesis with, 216. Demoralisation of law of, 61-63. Dominance of law of, 33. Morality as defiance of law of, 77. Revelation, postulated agreement
with, 177, 180. Worship of. See Religion — Natural.
INDEX
339
Nemesis, doctrine of, 38. Neo-Kantians, 1151 158. Neo-Platonists, 206, 261. Newman, Cardinal, quoted, 248. Nicholas of Cusa, 73, 112, 118, 251. Nietzsche, 82, 218, 305, 317. " Noblesse oblige," 138. Nominalism —
Duns Scotus, influence of, 31.
Proofs of dogma, objections to, II, 166, 217.
Revival of, 172. Norse myths, 49, 137-138- Novalis, 250 ; cited, 283.
Obedience to law, 27, 30, 132. Obscurantist School, 264. Occam, 31, 173. Olearius cited, 181, 184. Omnipotence and its self-imposed
restraint, 134-136. Ontology —
Logic identified with, 120.
Nineteenth century study of, 105, 108. Opportunism, 265.
Paganism —
Blitheness of, non-existent, 29.
Weakness of, 9. Pain, problem of, 98. Panethelism, 124. Pantheism —
Deistic tendency towards, 97, 175-
Effect of, on zest of life, 225.
Positivism not to be distinguished from, 112.
Rationahstic, li. Papacy —
Cynical acceptance of, 64, 277.
Italianising of, 148.
Mediaeval and later, 59, 64. Patterson, Prof. Pringle, quoted, 43,
84. Patriotism, rudimentary, 235. Pelagius, 31. Persecution —
Disappearance of, almost uni- versal, 150.
Ratio7tale of, 57> I48- Pessimism —
Mystic, 256.
Origin and meaning of, 303-304.
Philosophic, 22. Peter Lombard, 170. Philo, 3. Philosophers, rule of the, 14.
Philosophy — All-inclusive claimsof, abandoned,
203. Function and limitations of, 202,
313- Greek schools of, detached from
common life, 205. Pessimism of, 22. Popular, of eighteenth century,
210. Religion distinct from, 47, 152-
153-
Religion identified with — first attempt, 9-10, 17; second attempt, 13, 17; byErigena, 169. State approval of, 222. Superficial character of, 167. Surrender of, to autocracy in
seventeenth century, 263. Unselfishness of, so-called, 236. Philosophy of religion, need of
formulating, 8. Plato, 61, 74, 216; civic scheme of, 15, 22, 205 ; supersensuous sanctions of, 28 ; system of, 109, 159, 168-169, 299. Platonism — Later, 10, 61.
Stoicism in alliance with, 261. Plotinus, II, 98, 206. Political language v. ordinary prac- tice, 293. Pomponatius, 302. Positivism — Appeal of, 124. Leibnitz' rejection of, lOO. Pantheism not to be distinguished from, 112. Practical and speculative know- ledge, separation of, II. Practice ahead of moral rules, 162. Predestination, Calvinistic, 249. Priestly caste, rise of, 38. Prodicus, 216. Protagoras, 214, 216, Protestant Churches —
Deferment of promised good
taught by, 289. Nature of, 32.
Orthodoxy demanded in, 12, 93, 172-173, 207-208, 221, 277. Quietism of, 250. Religion as defined by, 238. Secular power exalted by, 96, 207. Punishment, eternal, dogma of, 252.
340
THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Purpose in the world, 78, 84, 26 1 ; dilemma as to, 318.
Quakers, 179.
Rational as the real, 114; Neo-
Kantian sense of, 157-158. Rationalism —
Characteristics of, 175-176. Eighteenth century, 103-104. Leibnitzian, 13. Mediaeval, 76.
Quarrel of, with Religion, 242. Rauh, 268. Raymundof Sabunde, 172, 177, 178,
182. Realism — Comtian, 124.
Mediaeval, 190 ; revival of, 140. Reality —
Church's conception of, 153. Modern conception of, 116. Rational the real. See Rational. Unknowable the real, 160. Reason —
Age of, 99, 154-155. 232. Catholic and Protestant antagon- ism to, 181. Comprehension of all things
under, 158. Hegelian use of term, 114. Humanistic and Stoic interpreta- tion of term, 299-302. Mediaeval Church, in, 168-169. Province of, 16, 24. Romantic significance of term, in
nineteenth century, 265. Rule of, supposed results of, 156. Unconscious, 157. Unsocial influence of, 163. Reasons, superficiality of, 167. Recompense doctrine, rational
necessity of, 42-43. Reconciliation of divine and human,
4, 7. Reformation of sixteenth century — Ages of Faith dating from, 289. , Augustinianism revived by, 263. Cause of, 148.
Renaissance in relation to, 219. " Results of, 32, 60. Reformed churches. See Protest- ant. Regimentation of society, 243-244. Reincarnation, doctrine of, 302. Relativism, sophistic tendency towards, 217-218.
Relativity— of truth, 166, 283 ; of
knowledge, 298-299. Religion —
Architectonic science, as, 186,
269. Christian. See Christianity, Christian enlistment of, in cause
of common life, 139. Democratic ideal dependent on,
131. 324-325- Emotional element in, 239-240. Essential elements of, 39. Exoteric and esoteric, 65, 275-279. Favouritism demand of, 47, 50,
139, 153. 239-240, 258. Individual recognised by, alone,
239.
Individualist nature of, charge as to, 89.
Interest in, revived, 83.
Morality identified with, 242-243.
Morality distinct from, 41, 47, 50, 202-203, 238-242 ; in an- tagonism with, 241-242.
Natural, 97, 109, 175-176, 265 ; origin of, 240.
Origin of, and impulse to, 104,
132, 134, 139-140, 240,258. Paradox of, 252. Partizanship of God claimed by,
258. Personal, distinction of, from
dogmatic, 38. Philosophy, relations with. See
Philosophy. Protestant definition of, 238. Rational, 175-176, 250. Science and, attempts at con- ciliation of, 178. Social function of, 165. Stages of development in — fear of the unknown, 37 ; recog- nition of divine protector, 37-38, 239 ; CO - operation with divine purpose, 38-43, 50-52, 253 ; self-surrender, 44-46, 51-52. State opposed by, 241-242. Theology in contrast with, 49. Threefold work of, 165, 184-185. Truth of any, witnesses to, 166. Utilitarian character of, 90, 165,
166. Wars of, 208. Renaissance —
Influence of, lOO, 219-221. Relativity doctrine of, 173.
INDEX
341
Renan, 321.
Republicanism, irreconcilable oppo-
sites in, 234-236. Responsibility, shifting of, 148-149. Revivals, three, of eighteenth
century, 208. Revolution, French. See French. Revolutions — Origin of, 16. Progress of, 64. Richelieu, 248.
' Right to do what is right,' 162, Righteousness in scheme of things,
problem as to, 302. Rights rather than duties, 284-286. Roman Church —
Counter-Reformation, 12. Discipline rather than dogma the
preoccupation of, 8. Exoteric side of, 277. Gnostic School contrasted with,
262. Jesuit Order, dissolution of, 14,
222. Mediaeval —
Breadth of interests of, 58, 60,
147-148, 207, 276. Democratic character of hier- archy of, 289. Enforcement of appeal of, 75-
76, 288-289. Twofold aspect of, 167-169. Protestant bodies compared with,
250. Secular mission of, 58-60. Roman Empire —
Christianity, attitude towards,
217. Compromise between rival sove- reignties, 219. Individuality fostered in, 217, 240. Romanes, 125. Romantic era, 115. Romantic schools, 230. Rousseau, 13, 137, 226, 278, 328 ; system of, 16, 103, 109, 156, 176 ; influence of, on Kant, 104.
Sceptical School, 205.
Scepticism, 27.
Schelling, 11, 98, 260 ; system of,
117, 119 ; quoted, 253. Schlegel, 102. Scholasticism — • Arguments of, 166.
Scholasticism— tr<7«/^;^/^^(/.
Logic and dialectic of, merit of, 1 7 1
Method of, 10.
Nature of, 263. Schopenhauer, 124, 211, 305. Science —
Function of, 313.
Method of, 157. Scotus, Duns. See Duns. Scotus, Erigena. See Erigena. Self-consciousness, 204. Self-realisation —
Baffled efforts for, 213, 234.
Christian recognition of demand
Leibnitzian theory as to, 103. Self-surrender not incompatible with, 41. Self-surrender. {See also Devo- tion)— Conscience' sake, for, 34. Disillusionment, through, 23. Extreme view of, 327. Love, of, 26. Religious, 44-46, 51-52. Self-realisation not incompatible
with, 41. Universal desire for, 85, 189. Utilitarian state, not to be ex- pected by, 187. Selfishness and unselfishness, use of
terms, 228. Seneca, 175, 261. Sensationalism, 118. Septimius Sevenis, 262. Shaftesbury, 103. Shaw, Bernard, quoted, 189. Sidgwick, Professor H., quoted,
121 ; cited, 162. Smith, Adam, 103. Socialism, 289, 324. Socinian movement, 1 81-182. Socrates, influence of, 27 - 28 ; system of, 159, 215, 299 ; death of, 204-205 ; Kant compared with, 218. Sophists, 109, 176, 214, 216, 218. Spencer, Herbert, 250, 306 ; quoted,
123 ; cited, 161. Spinoza, 248, 305 ; system of, 33, 96-98, 103, 112, 155, 253; temperament of, 210. State- Church and, illogical relation of,
in England, 223. Conformity not motive the con- cern of, 227.
342
THEOLOGY AND PROGRESS
State — continued.
Duty to, as urged by Huxley and
Mill, 141-143. Family the origin of, 234. Freedom of individuals in, 224. ' Godless ' citizen, fiction of,
203-204. Morality of, 22, 200. Origin of, theories as to, 215. Philosopher-king theory, 215. Post-Reformation, basis of, 195-
196. Regimentation of, 243-244. Religion in opposition 10,241-242. Rise and fall of ignorance as to
causes of, 92. Secularisation of, 223. Self-preservation the aim of, 63,
64, 85, 149, 194. Supremacy of, 23. Theory of. Machiavellian, 62-63. Voluntarism, disappearance of,
197. Stirling, Dr., quoted, 119, 120. Stirmer quoted, 81, Stoicism —
Arguments of, 102. Classification of, 45. Domestic and social side dis- dained by, 27, 205, 311. Dualism latent in, 272. Epicureanism compared with,
307-
Naturalism of, 109, 112.
Platonism, alliance with, 261.
' Reason ' as understood by, 299.
Spinoza's ethics touched with, 33. Sub-conscious motive, 16, 20, 57. Subjectivism. See Individualism. Sympathy, 103.
Tacitus quoted, 226. Teleology —
Christian, 4, 135.
Leibnitzian, 99.
Mechanism and, conciliation of, 178.
Mechanism as supplanting, 96.
Scientific view penetrated by, no. Templars, 260, 277. Terms, popular sens" of, 37. Tertullian, 3, 31, 262. Theory and practice —
Divorce of — Mediseval, 31, 60; modern, 71, 78-81, 125.
Reaction between, 80.
Theology in contrast with Religion, 49.
Theresa, St., 45.
Thing-in-itself theory, 115.
Thomas, Thomism. See Aquinas.
Thought without thinker, 120.
Thuggee, 241.
Toland, 97, 175.
Tolstoy cited, 197, 226.
Trinitarian dogma, 48, 260.
Truth- Antecedent world of, theory as
to, 257. Arrogant pretensions regarding,
166. Distinct aspects of, 152-153. Double truth theory, 30, 177-
178, 180, 181, 208. Relativity of, 166, 283. Test of, in mystical tradition, 173.
Tyranny, forms of, 105.
Ultimate sanctions, 13-14, 21.
Unbelief, religious, immediate re- sults of, 306-307.
Unconscious, the, in Fichtian system, 116.
Unity —
Provisional hypothesis of, 257. Theories as to, 313.
Universal Reason as ultimate sanc- tion, 14.
Universal v. particular, 6, 11, 21.
Universalism of Mediaeval Church, 61.
Unknowability of world powers,
93-94. Unknowable, the, 159-160. Unknown, surrender to the, 255-
266. Unselfishness — Christian, 236. Contract method incompatible
with, 295. Indefensibility of, except on
Christian hypothesis, 288. Meaning of term, 228. Primitive, 235. Source of, 236. Utilitarianism — Aristotelian, 28, 33. Duns Scotus, of, 32. Mediaeval, 30.
Platonic abandonment of, 28. Standard of value in present
lectures, 55, 88. Theological, 233, 264.
INDEX
343
Utopians —
Miscalculations of, 192-193, 197. Personal element atrophied in
republics of, 289. Primitive sanctions, reversion to,
161. Serfdom contemplated by, 231.
Value —
Catholicity a test of, 274, 275.
Sense of, 84, 282. Values —
Christian standard of, 188.
Humanism a fixing of, 21S.
Modern acceptance of standard of, no, 273. Vanini, 96. Victorines, 172, 179. Virtue —
Meanings of term, 27.
Pleasure in relation to, 28.
Reward, its own, theory as to, 302. Volition as original Being, 1 18, 119. {See also Will-to-live.)
Volney, 15; cited, 155. Voltaire, 13, 137.
Wallace, Prof., quoted, 60, 72,
73-
Weigel, 179.
Wells, H. G., quoted, 215.
Wesley, John, 250.
Westermarck cited, 160.
Will and Idea in conflict, 135.
Will of the people. See Democ- racy.
Will-to-live, 90, 114.
Willert, Mr., quoted, 156.
William of Occam, 31, 173.
Work and worth, demand for, 91, 131 ; Christianity in relation to, 140-141, 144.
World -spirit as object of worship,
63-
Wundt cited, 31.
Xenophanes, system of, 261. Zeno, 176.
Printed by
Morrison & Gibb Limited
Edinburgh
A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS
PUBLISHED BY METHUEN
AND COMPANY: LONDON
36 ESSEX STREET
W.C.
CONTENTS
|
PAGE |
PAGE |
||
|
General Literature, . |
2-19 |
Little Blue Books, |
27 |
|
Ancient Cities, |
19 |
Little Books on Art, |
27 |
|
Antiquary's Books, |
20 |
Little Galleries, |
28 |
|
Beginner's Books, . |
20 |
Little Guides, , . . . |
28 |
|
Business Books, . |
20 |
Little Library, |
28 |
|
Byzantine Texts, . |
21 |
Miniature Library, |
30 |
|
Churchman's Bible, |
21 |
Oxford Biographies, |
30 |
|
Churchman's Library, . |
21 |
School Examination Series, |
30 |
|
Classical Translations, |
21 |
Social Questions of To-day, |
31 |
|
Commercial Series, |
22 |
Textbooks of Science, . |
31 |
|
Connoisseur's Library, |
22 |
Textbooks of Technology . |
31 |
|
Library of Devotion, |
23 |
Handbooks of Theology |
ri |
|
Standard Library, |
23 |
Westminster Commentaries, |
32 |
|
Half-Crown Library, . |
24 |
||
|
Illustrated Pocket Library o |
f |
Fiction, |
32-36 |
|
Plain and Coloured Books |
24 |
The Shilling Novels, . |
37 |
|
Junior Examination Series, |
26 |
Books for Boys and Girls |
38 |
|
Junior School-Books, . |
26 |
Novels of Alexandre Dumas, |
38 |
|
Leaders of Religion, |
27 |
Methuen's Sixpenny Books, |
39 |
OCTOBER 1906
A CATALOGUE OF
Messrs. Methuen's
PUB Lie AT IONS
Colonial Editions are published of all Messrs. Methuen's Novels issued at a price above 2^. 6^., and similar editions are published of some works of General Literature. These are marked in the Catalogue. Colonial editions are only for circulation in the British Colonies and India.
An asterisk denotes that a book is in the Press.
I.P.L. represents Illustrated Pocket Library.
S.Q.S. represents Social Questions Series.
Part I. — General Literature
Abbot (Jacob). See Little Blue Books.
Abbott (J. H. M.). Author of 'Tommy Cornstalk.' AN OUTLANDER IN ENGLAND: Being some I.mpressionsok AN Australian Abroad. Second Editioti. Cr. Zvo. 6s. _ _
A Colonial Edition is also published.
AcatOs(M. J.). See Junior School Books.
Adams (Frank). JACK SPR ATT. With 24 Coloured Pictures Super Royal idnio. is.
Adeney (VV. F.), M.A. See Bennett and Adeney.
/Eschylus, See Classical Translations.
/Ssop. See I.P.L.
Ainsworth (W. Harrison). See I.P.L.
Alderson (J. P.). MR. ASQUITH. With Portraits and Illustrations. Demy Zvo. ys. 6d. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Aldis (Janet). MADAME GEOFFRIN,
HER SALON, AND HER TIMES.
With many Portraits and Illustrations.
Second Edition. Demy Zzw. \os. bd. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Alexander (William), D. D. , Archbishop of Armagh. THOUGHTS AND COUNSELS OF MANY YEARS. Demy xdmo. is. 6d.
Aiken (Henry). THE NATIONAL SPOp.TS OF GREAT BRITAIN. With descriptions in English and French. With 51 Coloured Plates. Royal Folio. Five Guineas net. The Plates can be had separately in a Portfolio. .£3, 3^. net. See also I.P.L.
Allen (Jessie). See Little Books on Art.
Allen (J. Romilly), F.S.A. See Antiquary's Books.
Almack (E.). See Little Books on Art.
Amherst (Lady). A SKETCH OF EGYPTIAN HISTORY FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRE- SENT DAY. With many Illustrations. DcTiiy Zvo. js, 6d. net.
Anderson (F. M.). THE STORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE FOR CHILDREN. With many Illustrations. Cr. Zvo. is.
Anderson (J. Q.l, B.A., Examiner to London University, NOUVELLE GRAMMAIRE FRANCAISE. Cr. %vo. is.
EXERCICES DE GRAMMAIRE FRAN- CAISE. Cr. Zvo. IS. td.
Andrewes (Bishop). PRECES PRI- VATAE. Edited, with Notes, by F. E. Bru.ht.man, M.A.,ofPusey House, Oxford.
AnffIo'=Australian. AFTER-GLOW ME- MORIES. Cr.Zvo.bs.
A Colonial Edition Is also published.
Aristophanes. THE FROGS. Translated into English by E. W. Huntingford, M.A. Cr. 8r'£). 2.S-. M.
Aristotle. THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by John Burnet, M.A., Pro- fessor of Greek at St. Andrews. Cheaper issue. Demy?>TO. ^os. 6d. net.
Ashton (R.). See Little Blue Books.
Atkins (H. Q.). See 0.\ford Biographies.
Atkinson (C. M.). JEREMY BENTHAM, Demy 'ivo. 5^. net.
Atkinson (T. D.). A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE. With over 200 Illustrations. Fcap. Svo. 3^. 6d. net.
A GLOSSARY OF TERMS USED IN ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE. Illus- trated. Fcap. Zvo. 3^. 6d. net.
Auden (T.), M.A., F.S.A. See Ancient Cities.
Aurelius (Marcus). See Standard Library and W. H. D. Rouse.
Austen (Jane). See Little Library and Standard Library.
Aves (Ernest). See Books on Business.
Bacon (Francis). See Little Library and Standard Library.
General Literature
Baden-Powell (R. S. S.), Major-General. THE DOWNFALL OF PREMPEH. A Diary of Life in Ashanti, 1S95. Illustrated. Third Edition. Large Cr. Zvo. _ 6j. A Colonial Edition is also published.
THE MATABKLE CAMPAIGN, 1896. With nearly 100 Illustrations. Fourth Edition. Large Cr. Zvo. ts.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
*Bagot (Richard). THE LAKE OF CO MO. Cr. Zvo. 35. dd. net.
Bailey (J. C), M.A. See Cowper.
Baker (W, G.), M.A. See Junior Examina- tion Series.
Baker (Julian L.), F.LC, F.C.S. See Books on Business.
Balfour (Graham). THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Second Edition. Tixjo Volumes. DetnyZvo. 25^. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Bally (S. E.). See Commercial Series.
Banks (Elizabeth L.). THE AUTO- BIOGRAPHY OF A 'NEWSPAPER GIRL.' Second Edition. Cr.Zvo, 6s. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Barham (R. H.). See Little Library.
Baring (The Hon. Maurice). WITH THE RUSSIANS IN MANCHURIA. Third Edition. Deviy ivo. js. 6d. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Baring-Gould (S.). THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. With over 450 Illustrations in the Text, and 12 Photo- gravure Plates. Gilt top. Large quarto.
the' TRAGEDY OF THE C.^SARS. With numerous Illustrations from Busts, Gems, Cameos, etc. Fifth Edition. Royal Zvo. 10s. €d. net.
A BOOK OF FAIRY TALES. With numerous Illustrations by A. J. Gaskin. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. Buckram. (>s.
OLD ENGLISH FAIRY TALES. With numerous Illustrations by F. D. Bedford. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. Buckram. 6s. A Colonial Edition is also published.
THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW. Re- vised Edition. With a Portrait. Cr. 8va. ■}S. 6d.
DARTMOOR : A Descriptive and Historical Sketch. With Plans and numerous Illus- trations. Cr. Sz'O. 6s.
A BOOK OF DEVON. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Cr. Z710. 6s.
A BOOK OF CORNWALL. Illustrated. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
A BOOK OF NORTH WALES. Illus- trated. Cr. Zz'o. 6s.
A BOOK OF SOUTH WALES. Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
A BOOK OF BRITTANY. Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
A BOOK OF THE RIVIERA. Illustrated. Cr. Sz'O. 6s. A Colonial Edition is also published.
THE RHINE. Illustrated. Crozvn Zvo. 61.
A BOOK OF GHOSTS. With 8 Illustra- tions by D. Murray Smith. Second Edi- tion. Cr. Z~'o. 6s.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
OLD COUNTRY LIFE. With 67 Illustra- tions. Fifth Edition. Large Cr. Zvo. 6s.
A GARLAND OF COUNTRY SpNG : English Folk Songs with their Traditional Melodies. Collected and arranged by S. Baring-Gould and H. F. Sheppard. Demy ^to. 6s.
SONGS OF THE WEST: Folk Songs of Devon and Cornwall. Collected from the Mouths of the People. ByS. Baring-Gould, M.A.,and H, Fleetwood Sheppard, M.A. New and Revised Edition, under the musical editorship of Cecil J. Sharp, Principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire. Large I tn- perial Zvo. 5^. net.
See also Little Guides and Half-Crown Librarj'.
Barker (Aldred F.). See Textbooks of Technology.
Barnes (W. E.), D.D. See Churchman's Bible.
Barnett (Mrs. P. A.). See Little Library.
Baron (R. R. N.), M.A. FRENCH PROSE COMPOSITION. Second Edition. Cr.Zvo. 2S. 6d. Key, 3^. net. See also Junior School Books.
Barron (H. M.), M.A., Wadham College, Oxford. TEXTS FOR SERMONS. With a Preface by Canon Scott Holland. Cr. Zvo. y. 6d.
Bartholomew (J. G.), F.R.S.E. See C. G. Robertson.
BastabIe(C. F.), M.A. SeeS.Q.S.
Batson (Mrs. Stephen). A BOOK OF THE COUNTRY AND THE GARDEN. Illustrated by F. Carruthers Gould and A. C. Gould. Demy Zvo. \os. 6d.
A CONCISE HANDBOOK OF GARDEN FLOWERS. Fcap. Zvo. ^s. 6d.
Batten (Loring: W.), Ph.D., S.T.D. THE HEBREW PROPHET. Cr. Zvo. 3^. 6d net.
Beaman(A. Hulme). PONS ASINORUM ; OR, A GUIDE TO BRIDGE. Second Edition. Fcap. Zvo. is.
Beard (W. S.). See Junior Examination Series and Beginner's Books.
Beckford (Peter). THOUGHTS ON HUNTING. Edited by J. Otho Paget, and Illustrated by G. H. Jalland. Second Edition. Demy Zvo. 6s.
Beckford (William). See Little Library.
Beeching (H. C), M..A., Canon of West- minster. See Library of Devotion.
Begbie (Harold). MASTER WORKERS. Illustrated. Demy Zvo. is.6d.net.
Behmen (Jacob). DIALOGUES ON THE SUPERSENSUAL LIFE. Edited by Bernard Holland. Fcap. Zvo. 3^. 6d.
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Belloc (HillaJre). PARIS. With Maps and Illustrations. Cr. ?>vo. 6j.
*MARIE ANTOINETTE. With many Portraits and Illustrations. Demy 8vo. I2i-. 6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Be]lot(H. H. L.), M.A. THEINNERAND MIDDLE TEMPLE. With numerous Illustrations. Crown &vo. 6s. net. See also L. A. A. Jones.
Bennett (W. H.), M.A. A PRIMER OF THE BIBLE. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 2S. 6d.
Bennett (W. H.) and Adeney (W. F.). A BIBLICAL INTRODUCTION. Third Edition. Cr. %vo. ys. bd.
Benson (Archbishop) GOD'S BOARD: Communion Addresses. Fcap. Zvo. 31-. 6d. net.
Benson (A. C), M.A. See Oxford Bio- graphies.
Benson (R. M.). THE WAY OF HOLI- NESS: a Devotional Commentary on the 119th Psalm. Cr. Zvo. 5^.
Bernard (E. R.), M.A., Canon of Salisbury. THE ENGLISH SUNDAY. Fcap. Svo. IS. 6d.
Bertouch (Baroness de). THE LIFE OF FATHER IGNATIUS. Illustrated. Demy Zvo. loi. td. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Betham.Edwards(M.). HOME LIFE IN FRANCE. Illustrated. Fourth Edition. Demy Zvo. js. 6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Bethune-Baker (J. P.), ALA. See Hand- books of Theology.
Bidez (M.). See Byzantine Texts.
Bigrgs (C. R. D.), D.D. See Churchman's Bible.
Bindley (T. Herbert), B.D. THE OECU- MENICAL DOCUMENTS OF THE FAITH. With Introductions and Notes. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Binns (H. B.). THE LIFE OF WALT WHITMAN. Illustrated. Demy Zvo. los. 6d. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Binyon (Laurence). THE DEATH OF ADAM, AND OTHER POEMS. Cr. Zvo. 2,s. 6d. net.
•WILLIAM BLAKE. In 2 volumes. Super Royai Quarto. £1, is. each. Vol. 1. — The Book of Job.
Birnstingl (Ethel). See Little Books on Art.
Blackmantle (Bernard). Seel.P.L.
Blair (Robert). Seel.P.L.
Blake (William). See I.P.L. and Little Library.
Blaxland (B.), M.A. See Library of Devotion.
Bloom (T. Harvey), M.A. SHAKE- SPEARE'S GARDEN. Illustrated. Fcap. Zvo. 3J. 6d. ; leather, ^s. 6d. net. See also Antiquary's Books
Blouet (Henri). See Beginner's Books. Boardman (T. H.), M.A. See Textbooks
of Science. Bodley (J. E. C), Author of France." THE
CORONATION OF EDWARD VII.
Demy Zvo. 21s.net. By Command of the
King. Body (George), D.D. THE SOUL'S
PILGRIMAGE : Devotional Readings
from his writings. Selected by J. H> Burn,
B.D., F.R.S.E. PottZvo. 2s. 6d. Bona (Cardinal). See Library of Devotion. Boon (F. C). See Commercial Series. Borrow (George). See Little Library. Bos (J. Ritzema). AGRICULTURAL
ZOOLOGY. Translated by J. R. AiNS-
woRTH Davis, M.A. With 155 Illustrations.
Cr. Zvo, Third Edition. 34-. 6d. Betting (C. G.), B. A. EASY GREEK
EXERCISES. Cr. Zvo. zs. See also
Junior Examination Series. Boulton(E. S.), M.A. GEOMETRY ON
MODERN LINES. Cr. Zvo. 2S. Boulton (William B.). THOMAS
GAINSBOROUGH With 40 Illustra-
tions. Second Ed. DetnyZvo. •js.6d.7ict. SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, P.R.A. With
40 Illustrations. Demy Zvo. •js.6d.net. Bowden (E. M.). THE IMITATION OF
BUDDHA : Being Quotations from
Buddhist Literature for each Day in the
Year. Fifth Edition. Cr. i6mo. is. 6d. Beyle (W.). CHRISTMAS AT THE ZOO.
With Verses by W. Boyle and 24 Coloured
Pictures by H. B. Neilson. Super Royal
16m O. IS.
Brabant (F. Q.), M.A. See Little Guides. Bradley (J. W.). See Little Books on Art. Brailsford (H. N.). MACEDONIA.
Illustrated. Demy Zvo. iis.6d.net. Brodrick (Mar>') and Morton (Anderson).
A CONCISE HANDBOOK OF EGYP-
TIAN ARCHEOLOGY. Illustrated. Cr.
Zvo. 3^. 6d. Brooke (A. S.), M.A. SLINGSBY AND
SLINGSBY CASTLE. Illustrated. Cr.
Zvo. •js. 6d. Brooks (E. W.). See Byzantine Texts. Brown (P. H.), LL.D. , Fraser Professor of
Ancient (Scottish) History at the University
of Edinburgh. SCOTLAND IN THE
TIME OF QUEEN MARY. Demy Zvo.
•JS. 6d. net. Browne (Sir Thomas). See Standard
Library. Brownell (C. L.). THE HEART OF
JAPAN. Illustrated. Third Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. ; also Demy Zvo. 6d. A Colonial Edition is also published. Browning (Robert). See Little Library. Buckland (Francis T.). CURIOSITIES
OF NATURAL HISTORY. Illustrated
by H. B. Neilson. Cr. Zvo. ^s. 6cL
General Literature
Buckton (A. M.) THE BURDEN OF ENGELA : a Ballad-Epic. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. y. 6ii. net,
EAGER HEART : A Mystery Play. Fourth Edition. Cr. Zvo. ts. net.
Budge (E. A. Wallis). THE GODS OF THE EGYPTIANS. With over loo Coloured Plates and many Illustrations. Two I'ohtmes. RoyalZvo. £,-i^ v- net.
Bull (Paul), Army Chaplain. GOD AND OUR SOLDIERS. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. (>s. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Bulley (Miss). See S.Q.S.
Bunyan (John). THE PILGRIM'S PRO- GRESS. Edited, with an Introduction, by C. H. FiSTH, M.A. With 39 Illustra- tions by R. Anning Bell. Cr. Zvo. 6s. See also Librarj' of Devotion and Standard Library. 1
Burch(Q. J.). M.A.,F.R.S. A MANUAL OF ELECTRIC.A.L SCIENCE. Illus- trated. Cr. Zto. -^s.
Burgess (Qelett). GOOPS AND HOW TO BE THEM. Illustrated. SwaU ^to. 6s.
Burke (Edmund). See Standard Librarj'.
Burn (A. E.), D.D., Rector of Handsworth and Prebendary of Lichfield. See Handbooks of Theology.
Burn (J. H.), B.D. SeeLibrary of Devotion.
Bumand (Sir F. C). RECORDS AND REMINISCENCES. With a Portrait by H. V. Herkomer. Cr. Sz'O. Fourth and Cheafier Edition. 6s.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Burns (Robert), THE POEMS OF. Edited by Andrew LANGand W. A. Ckaigie. With Portrait. Third Edition. Demy Zvo, gilt top. 6s.
Burnside (W. F.), M.A. OLD TESTA- MENT HISTORY FOR USE IN SCHOOLS. Cr. Zvo. zs. 6d.
Burton (Alfred). See I.P.L.
Butler (Joseph). See Standard Library.
Caldecott (Alfred), D.D. See Handbooks of Theology.
Calderwood (D. S.), Headmaster of the Nor- mal School, Edinburgh. TEST CARDS IN EUCLID AND ALGEBRA. In three packets of 40, with Answers. 15. each. Or in three Books, price 2d., id., and 3^.
Cambridge (Ada) [Mrs. Cross]. THIRTY YEARS IN AUSTRALIA. Demy Zvo. 77. 6d.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Canning (George). See Little Library.
Capey (E. F. H.). See Oxford Biographies.
Careless (John). See I.P.L.
Carlyle (Thomas). THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION. Edited by C. R. L.
Fletcher, Fellow of Magdalen College,
Oxford. Three Volumes. Cr. Zvo. i8j.
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF OLIVER CRO.MWELL. With an Introduction by C. H. Firth, M.A., and Notes and Appendices by Mrs. S. C. Lomas. Three Vobitnes. Dcmv Zvo. iZs. net.
Carlyle(R. M. and A. J.), M.A. See Leaders of Religion.
'Carpenter (Margaret). THE CHILD IN ART. Illu^trated. Cr. 8r'C. 6s.
Chamberlin (Wilbur B.). ORDERED TO CHINA. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Channer (C. C.) and Roberts (M. E.). LACEMAKING IN THE MIDLANDS, PAST AND PRESENT. With 16 full- page Illustrations. Cr. Zvo. zs. 6d.
Chapman (S. J.). See Books on Business.
Chatterton (Thomas). See Standard
Chesterf'ield (Lord), THE LETTERS OF, TO HIS SON. Edited, with an Introduc- tion by C. Strachey, and Notes by A. Calthrop. Two Volumes. Cr. Zvo. i-2.s.
Chesterton (Q. K.). DICKENS. With Portraits and Illustrations. Second Edition. Demy Zvo. js. 6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Christian (F. W.). THE CAROLINE ISLANDS. With many Illustrations and Maps. Demy Zvo. 12s.6d.net.
Cicero. See Classical Translations.
Clarke (F. A.), M.A. See Leaders of Religion.
Cleather (A. L.) and Crump (B.). RICHARD WAGNER'S MUSIC DRAMAS : Interpretations, embodying Wagner's own explanations. /« Four Volumes. Fcap Zvo. 2s. 6d. each. Vol. I.— The Ring of the Nibelung.
Third Edition. Vol. il— Parsifal, Lohengrin, and
The Holy Grail. Vol. III. — Tristan and Isolde,
Clinch (Q.). See Little Guides.
Clougb (W. T.). See Junior School Books.
Coast (W. G.), B.A. EXAMINATION PAPERS IN VERGIL. Cr. Zvo. 2S.
Cobb(T.). See Little Blue Books.
Cobb (W. F.), M.A. THE BOOK OF PSALMS : with a Commentary. Demy Zvo. los. 6d. net.
Coleridge (S. T.), SELECTIONS FROM. Edited by Arthur Sy.mons. Fcap. Zvo. 2S. 6d. net.
Collingwood (W. G.). See Half-Crown Library.
Collins (W. E.), M.A. See Churchman's Liiiiary.
Colonna. HYPNEROTOMACHIA POLI- PHILI UEI HUMANA OMNIA NON NISI SOMNIUM ESSE DOCET ATQUE OBITER PLURIMA SCITU SANE QUAM DIGNA COMMEMO- RAT. An edition limited to 350 copies on handmade paper. Folio. ThrceGuineas net. Combe (William). See I. P. L.
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Cook (A. M.), M- A. See E. C. Marchant
Cooke=Taylor (R. W.). See S.Q.S.
CorelU (Marie). THE PASSING OF THE GREAT QUEEN : Fcap. i,to. is.
A CHRISTMAS GREETING. Cr. i,to. is.
Corkran (Alice). See Little Books on Art.
Cotes (Rosemary). DANTE'S GARDEN. With a Frontispiece. Second Edition. Fcap. Zvo. ■2S. 6d.; leather, y. 6d. net.
BIBLE FLOWERS. With a Frontispiece and Plan. Fcafi. Zvo. 2.<-. ()d. net.
Cowley (Abraham). See Little Library.
Cowper (William), THE POEMS OF. Edited with ?.n Introduction and Notes by J. C. Bailey, M.A. Illustrated, including two unpublished designs by William Blake. Demy Zvo. xas. td. net.
Cox (J. Charles), LL.D., F.S.A. See Little Guides, The Antiquary's Books, and Ancient Cities.
Cox (Harold), B. A. See S.Q.S.
Crabbe (George). See Little Library.
Craigie(W. A.). A PRIMER OF BURNS. Cr. Zvo. 2S. 6d.
Craik(iVIrs.). See Little Library.
Crashaw (Richard). See Little Library.
Crawford (F. G.). See Mary C. D.-inson.
Cross (J. A.). A LITTLE BOOK OF RELIGION. Fcap. 87'0. as. 6d. net.
Crouch (W.). BRYAN KING. With a Portrait. Cr. 'ivo. 3^. dd. net.
Cruikshank(a.). THE LOVING BAL- LAD OF LORD BATEMAN. With 11 Plates. Cr. \(>i>to. is. 6d. net.
Crump (B.). See A. L. Cleather.
Cunliffe (Sir F. H. E.), Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford. THE HISTORY OF THE BOER WAR. With many Illus- trations, Plans, and Portraits. In 2 vols. Quarto. 15^. each.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Cunynghame (H. ), C. B. , See Connoisseur's Library.
Cutts(E. L.), D.D. See Leaders of Religion.
Daniell (G. W.), M.A. See Leaders of Religion.
Danson (Mary C.) and Crawford (F. 0.). FAIHEi^S IN THE FAITH. Fcap. '&z'0. IS. 6d.
Dante. LA COMMEDIA DI DANTE. The Italian Text edited by Paget Toynbee, M.A.,D.Litt. Cr. 8vo. 6s.
THE PURGATORIOOF DANTE. Translated into Spenserian Prose by C. Gordon Weight. With the Italian text. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
See also Paget Toynbee, Little Library and Standard Library.
Darley (George). See Little Library.
D' Arcy (R. F.), M.A. A NEW TRIGON- OMETRY FOR BEGINNERS. Cr.Svo. 2S. 6d.
Davenport (Cyril). See Connoisseur's Library and Little Books on Art.
Davey (Richard). THE PAGEANT OF
LONDON With 40 Illustrations in
Colour by John Fulleylove, R. I. /«
Two Volumes. Demy ivo. js. 6d. net.
Each volume may be purchased separately. Vol. I. — To a.d. 1500. Vol. II. — A.D. 1500 TO 1900. Davis (H. W. C), M.A., Fellow and Tutor
of Balliol College, Author of ' Charlemagne.'
ENGLAND UNDER THE NORMANS
AND ANGEVINS : 1066-1272. With
Maps and Illustrations. Demy Zvo. los. 6d.
net. Dawson (A. J.). MOROCCO. Illustrated.
Demy 8zio. los. 6d. net. Deane (A. C). See Little Library. Delbos (Leon). THE METRIC SYSTEM.
Cr. 8vo. IS. Demosthenes. THE OLYNTHIACS AND
PHILIPPICS. Translated by Otho
Holland. Cr. Zvo. 2s. 6d. Demosthenes. AGAINST CONON AND
CALLICLES. Edited by F. Darwin
Swift, M.A. Fcap. Svo. 2s. Dickens (Charles). See Little Library and
I.P.L. Dickinson (Emily). POEMS. Cr. Svo.
^s. 6d. net. Dickinson (G. L.), M.A., Fellow of King s
College, Cambridge. THE GREEK
VIEW OF LIFE. Fourth Edition. Cr.
?,vo. 2S. 6d. Dickson (H. N.). F.R.Met. Soc.
METEOROLOGY. Illustrated. Cr. Svo.
2s. 6d. Dilke(Lady). See S.Q.S. Dillon (Edward). See Connoisseur's Library
and Little Books on Art. Ditchfield (P. H.), M.A., F.S.A. THE STORY OF OUR ENGLISH
TOWNS. With an Introduction^ by
Augustus Jessopp, D.D. Second Edition.
Cr. Svo. 6s. OLD ENGLISH CUSTOMS: Extant at
the Present Time. Cr. &vo. 6s.
See also Half-crown Library. Dixoa (W. M.), M.A. A PRIMER OF
TENNYSON. Second Edition. Cr. Svo.
2S. 6d. ENGLISH POETRY FROM BLAKE TO
BROWNING. Second Edition. Cr. Svo.
2s. 6d. Dole (N. H.). FAMOUS COMPOSERS.
With Portraits. Tzvo Volumes. Demy
Svo. i2i. net. Doney(May). SONGS OF THE REAL.
Cr. Svo. 3^. 6d. net. A volume of poems. Douglas (James). THE MAN IN THE
PULPIT. Cr. Svo. 2s. 6d. net. Dowden (J.), D.D., Lord Bishop of Edin-
burgh. See Churchman's Library. Drage (G.). See Books on Business.
General Literature
Oriver(S. R.), D.D., D.C.L., Canon ofChrist Church, Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Oxford. SERMONS ON SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH THE OLD TESTAMENT. Cr. ivo. 6s. See also Westminster Commentaries.
Dry (Wakeling). See Little GuiJes.
Dryhurst(A. R.). See Little Books on Art.
Duguid (Charles). See Books on Busine.ss.
Dunn(J.T)., D.Sc.and Mundella(V. A.). GENERAL ELEMENTARY SCIENCE. With 114 Illustrations. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 3^. td.
Dunstan (A. E.), B.Sc See Junior School Books and Textbooks of Science.
Durham (The Earl of). A REPORT ON CANADA. With an Introductory Note. Demy Sz'O, as. 6J. net.
Dutt (W. A.). A POPULAR GUIDE TO NORFOLK. Medium ivo. 6d.net.
THE NORFOLK BROADS. With coloured Illustrations by Frank South- gate. Cr. Zz'o. 6s. See also Little Guides.
Earle(John), Bishop of Salisbury. MICRO- COSMOGRAPHIE, or A PIECE OF THE WORLD DISCOVERED. Post -i6mo. ■zs net.
Edmonds (Major J. E.), R.E. ; D.A.Q.-
M.G. See W. Birkbeck Wood. Edwards (Clement). SeeS.Q.S. Edwards (W. Douglas). See Commercial
Series.
Egan (Pierce). See I.P.L.
Egerton (H. E.), M.A. A HISTORY OF BRITISH COLONIAL POLICY. New and Cheaper Issue. Demy 8vo. ■^s. 6d. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Ellaby (C. Q.). See The Little Guides.
Ellerton (F. O.). See S. J. Stone.
Ellwood (Thomas), THE HISTORY OF THE LIFE OF. Edited by C. G. Crump, M.A. Cr. S7'o. 6s.
Epictetus. See W. H. D. Rouse.
Erasmus. A Book called in Latin EN- CHIRIDION MILITIS CHRISTIAN I, and in English the Manual of the Christian Knight.
From the edition printed by Wynken de Worde, 1533. fcap. %vo y. 6d. net.
Fairbrother(\V. H.), iM.A. THE PHILO- SOPHY OF T. H. GREEN. Second Edition. Cr. ?,vo. 3^. 6d.
Farrer (Reginald). THE GARDEN OF
ASIA. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Fea (Allan). BEAUTIES OF THE SEVLNTEENEH CENTURY. With 100 Illustrations. Demy Zvo. 1-2s.6d.net.
FELISSA; OR, THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF A KITTEN OF SENTI- MENT. With 12 Coloured Plates. Post i6fno. 2S. 6d. net.
Ferrier (Susan). See Little Library.
Fidler (T. Claxton), M.Inst. C.E. See Books on Business.
Fielding (Henry). See Standard Librarj-.
Finn (S. W.), M.A. See Junior Examination Series.
Firth (C. H.), M.A. CROMWELL'S ARMY: A History of the English Soldier during the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Fisher (Q. W.), M.A. ANNALS OF SHREWSBURY SCHOOL. Illustrated. Demy Zz'O. 10s. 6d.
FitzGerald (Edward). THE RUEAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAm. Primed from the Fifth and last Edition. With a Com- mentary by Mrs. Stephen Batson, and a Biography of Omar by E. D. Ross. Cr. Svo. 6s. See also Miniature Library.
FitzGerald (H. P.). A CONCISE HAND- BOOK OF CLIMBERS, TWINERS, AND WALL SHRUBS. Illustrated. Fcap. %vo. 3i-. 6d. net.
Flecker (W. H.), M.A.,D.C.L., Headmaster of the Dean Cose School, Cheltenham. THE STUDENT'S PRAYER BOOK. The Text of Morning and Evening Prayer and Litany. With an Introduc- tion and Notes. Cr. Zvo. 2s. 6d.
Flux (A. W.), M.A., \yilliam Dow Professor of Political Economy in M'Gill Universitv, Montreal. ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES. Demy Zvo. ys. 6d. net.
Fortescue (Airs. Q.). See Little Books on Art.
Eraser (David). A MODERN CA-M- PAIGN; OR, WAR AND WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY IN THE FAR EAST. Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. 6s. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Eraser (J. F.). ROUND THE WORLD ON A WHEEL. With 100 Illustrations. Fourth Edition Cr. ivo. 6s.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
French (W.), M.A. See Textbooks of Science.
Freudenreich (Ed. von). DAIRY BAC- TERIOLOGY. A Short Manual for the Use of Students. Translated by J. R. AiNSwoRTH Davis, M.A. Second Edition. Revised. Cr. Zvo. 2S. 6d.
Fulford (H. W.), M.A. See Churchman's Bible.
C. G., and F. C. G. JOHN BULL'S AD- VENTURES IN THE FISCAL WON- DERLAND. By Charles Geake. With 46 Illustrations by F. Carruthers Gould. Seccnd Edition, Cr. Zvo. is. net,
Qallaher (D.) and Stead (D. W.). THE COMPLETE RUGBY FOOTBALLER. With an Account of the Tour of the New Zealanders in England. With Illustra- tions. Demy 'ivo. T.OS. 6d, net.
Gallichan ( W. M.). See Little Guides.
Gambado (Geoffrey, Esq.). See I.P.L.
Gaskell (Mrs.). See Little Library and Standard Library-.
Gasquet, the Right Rev. Abbot, O.S.B. See Antiquary's Books.
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Oeorsre(H. B.). ^^.A., Fellow ofNewColleRe, Oxford. KATTLES OF ENGLISH HIS- TORY. With numerous Plans. Fourth Edition. Revised, with a new Chapter including the South African War. Cr. Svo. ■^s. tii.
A HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE. Second Edition. Cr. ?iVO. T,s. 6d.
Qlbbins (H. de B.). Litt.D., M.A. IN- DUSTRY IN ENGLAND : HISTORI- CAL OUTLINES. With 5 Maps. Fourt/i Edition. Demy Zvo. los. 6d.
A COiMPANION GERMAN GRAMMAR. Cr, iivo. IS. fir/.
THE INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Eleventh Edition. Revised. With Maps and Plan.s. Cr. Zvo. 35-.
ENGLISH SOCIAL REFORMERS. Second Edition. Cr. Srw. 2S. td. See also Commercial Series and S.Q S.
Gibbon (Edward). THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. A New Edition, edited with Notes, Appen- dices, and Maps, by J. B. Bury, M.A., Litt.D., Regius Professor of Greek at Cam- bridge. In Seven Volumes. Demy Zvo. Gilt top, Zs. 6d. each. A Iso, Cr. Zvo. ts. each.
MEMOIRS OF MY LIFE AND WRIT- INGS. Edited by G. BiRKnECK Hii.l, LL.D. Demy Zvo, Gilt top. Zs. td. Also Cr. Zvo. bs. See also Standard Library.
Gibson (E. C. S.), D.D., Lord Bishop of Gloucester. See Westminster Commentaries, Handbooks of Theology, and Oxford Bio- graphies.
Gilbert (A. R.). See Little Books on Art.
01oa^(M.). See K. Wj^itt.
Godfrey (Elizabetli). A BOOK OF RE- MEMBRANCE. Edited by. Fcap. Zvo. •2S. dd. net.
Godley (A. D.), M.A., Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. LYRA FRIVOLA. Third Edition. Fcap. Zvo. is. f>d.
VERSES TO ORDER. Second Edition. Fcap. Zvo. 2.f. dd.
SECOND STRINGS. Fcap. Zvo. 2i. 6d.
Goldsmith (Oliver). THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. Fcap. iijno. With 10 Plates in Photogravure by Tony Johannot. Leather, 7.S. 6d. net. See also I.P.L. and Standard Library.
Goodricii- Freer (A.). IN A SYRIAN S.-\DDLE. Demy Zvo. -js. 6d. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Goudge (H. L.), M.A., Principal of Wells 'i'heological College. See Westminster Com- mentaries.
Graham (P. Anderson). See S.Q.S.
Granger (F. S.), M.A., Litt.D. PSYCH- OLOGY. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 2s. 6d.
THE SOUL OF A CHRISTIAN. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Gray(E. M'Oueen). GERMAN PASSAGES FOR UNSEEN TRANSLATION. Cr.
Zvo. 2S. 6d. Gray (P. L.), B.Sc. THE PRINCIPLES OF
MAGNETIS.M AND ELECTRICITY:
an Elementary Text-Book. With 181
Diagrams. Cr. Zvo. 3s. td. Green (G. Buckland), M.A., late Fellow
of St. John's College, Oxon. NOTES ON
GREEK AND LATIN SYNTAX. Cr.
Zvo. 3s. 6d. Green (E. T.), M.A. See Churchman's
Library. Greenidge(A. H. J.), M.A. A HISTORY
OP' RUNIE: During the Later Republic
and the Early Principate. In Six Volumes.
Demy Zvo. Vol. I. (133-104 B.C.). 10s. 6d.
net. Green well (Dora). See Miniature Library. Gregory (R. A.). THE VAULT OF
HEAVEN. A Popular Introduction to
Astronomy. Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. 2J. 6d. Gregory (Miss E. C). See Library of
Devotion. Greville Minor. A MODERN JOURNAL.
Edited by J. A. Spender. Cr. Zvo.
JS. td. net. Grubb(H. C). See Textbooks of Technology. Guiney (Louisa I.). HURRELL
FROUDE: Memoranda and Comments.
Illustrated. Demv Zvo. jos. td. net. Gwynn(M. L.). A BIRTHDAY BOOK.
New and cheaper issue. Koval Zvo. 5.?. net. Hackett (John), B.D. A HISTORY OF
THE ORTHODOX CHURCH OF
CYPRUS. With Maps and Illustrations.
Dcmv Zvo. 15s. net. Haddon (A. C), Sc.D., F.R.S. HEAD- HUNTERS BLACK, WHITE, AND
BROWN. With many Illustrations and a
Map. Demy Zvo. \^s. Hadfield(R. A.). See S.Q.S. Hall (R. N.) and Neal (W. G.). THE
ANCIENT RUINS OF RHODESIA.
Illustrated, Second Edition, revised.
Demy Zvo. xos. td. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published. Hall (R. N.). GREAT ZIMBABWE.
With numerous Plans and Illustrations.
Second Editiofi. Royal Zvo. iis.net. Hamilton (F. J.), D.D. See Byzantine Texts. Hammond (J. L.). CHARLES JAMES
FOX. Demy Zvo. los. td. Hannay (D.). A SHORT HISTORY OF
THE ROYAL NAVY, Illustrated. Two
Volumes. Demy Zvo, ys.td.each. Vol.1.
1200-16SS. Hannay (James C), M.A. THE SPIRIT
AND ORIGIN OF CHRISTIAN
MONASTICISM. Cr. Zvo. ts. THE WISDOM OFTHEDESERT. Fcap.
Zvo. 3^. td. net. Hare (A. T.), M.A. THE CONSTRUC- TION OF LARGE INDUCTION COILS.
With numerous Diagrams. Demy Zvo. ts.
General Literature
Harrison (Clifford). READING AND
READERS, heap. 3w. 2J. td.
Hawthorne (Nathaniel). See Little Library.
HEALTH, WEALTH AND WISDOM. Cr. &V0. IS. net.
Heath (Frank R.). See Little Guides.
Heath (Dudley). Sf-e Connoisseur's Library.
Hello (Ernest). STUDIES IN SAINT- SHIP. Translated from the French by V. M. Crawforp. Fcafii,7,<o. -^s. dd.
Henderson (B. W.), Fellow of Exeter Colles^e, Oxford. THE LIFE AND PRINCIPATE OF THE EMPEROR NERO. Illustrated. Anu and cheaper issue. Demy Zz'O. ts. 6d. net.
AT INTERVALS. hcapZvo. 2s.6d.net.
Henderson (T. F.). See Little Library and Oxford Biographies.
Henley (W. E.). See H.alf-Crown Library.
Henson (H. H.), P..D., Canon of Westminster. APOSTOLICCHRISTIANITY: As Illus- trated by the Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians. Cr. Zto. 6s.
LIGHT AND LEAVEN : Historical and Social Sermons. Cr. Zto. 6s.
DISCIPLINE AND LAW. Fcap. Zvo. 2S. 6d.
Herbert (George). See Library of Devotion.
Herbert of Cfaerbury (Lord). See Minia- ture Library.
Hewins (W. A. S.), B.A. ENGLISH TRADE AND FINANCE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. Cr.ivo.
2S. 6d.
Hewitt (Ethel M.) A GOLDEN DIAL.
A Day Book of Prose and Verse. Fcap.
%vo. 2s. 6^. net. Heywood (W.). PALIO AND PONTE :
A Book of Tuscan Games. Illustrated.
Royal Z-'O. 21!. net. Hilbert (T.). See Little Blue Books. Hill (Clare). See Textbooks of Technology. Hill (Henry), B.A., Headmaster of the Boy's
High School, Worcester, Cape Colony. A
SOUTH AFRICAN ARITHMETIC.
Cr. Zvo. 3 jr. td. Hillegas (Howard C). WITH THE
BOER FORCES. With 24 Illustrations.
Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. ts.
A Colonial Edition is also published. Hirst (F. W.) See Books on Business. Hobhouse (Emily). THE BRUNT OF
THE WAR. With Map and Illustrations.
Cr. Zvo. 6s.
A Colonial Edition is also published. Hobhouse(L. T.). Fellow of C.C.C, Oxford.
THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE.
Demy Zvo. 10s. 6d. net. Hobson(J. A.), M.A. INTERNATIONAL
TR.\DE : A Study of Economic Principles.
Cr. Z~'0. 2S. 6d. net. PROBLEMS OF POVERTY.Sixt/i Edition.
Cr. Z710. 2S. 6d. Hodgkin (T.), D.C.L. See Leaders of
Religion.
A
Hodgson (Mrs. W.) HOW TO IDENTIFY OLD CHINESE PORCELAIN. Second Edition. Pe/st Zvo. 6s.
Hogg (Thomas Jefferson). SHELLEY AT OXFuRD. With an Introduction by R. A. .Stke.\tfeild. Fcap, Zvo. 2S. net.
Holden = Stone (O. de). See Books on Business.
Holdich (Sir T. H.), K.C.I.E. THE INDIAN BORDERLAND : being a Personal Record of Twenty Years. Illus- trated. Demy Zr'O. 10s. 6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Holdsworth (W. S.), M.A. A HISTORY OF ENGLISH L.\W. /» Two P'oturnes. Vol. I. Demy Zvo. \os. 6d. net.
Holland (Canon Scott). See Library of Devotion.
Holt (Emily). THE SECRET OF POPU- LARITY : How to Achieve Social Success. Cr. Zr>o. -is. 6d. net.
A ColonTal Edition is also published.
HoIyoake(a. J.). THE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT TO-DAY. Fourtli Edition. Cr. Zvo. 2S. 6d.
Hone (Nathaniel J.). See Antiquary's Books.
Hoppner. See Little Galleries.
Horace. See Classical Translations.
Horsburgh(E. L. S.), M.A. WATERLOO : A Narrative and Criticism. With Plans. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 51. See also Oxford Biographies.
Horth(A. C). See Textbooks of Technology.
Horton(R. F.),D.D. See Lea<iers of Religion.
Hosie (Alexander). ^L•^NCHURIA. With Illustrations and a Map. Second Edition. Demy Zvo. js. 6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
How (P. D.). SIX GREAT SCHOOL- MASTERS. With Portraits and Illustra- tions. Second Edition. Demy Zvo. "js. 6d.
Howell (0.). SeeS. Q. S,
Hudson (Robert). MEMORIALS OF A WARWICKSHIRE PARISH. Illustrated. Demy Zvo. 15J. net.
Hughes (C. E.). THE PRAISE OF SHAKESPEARE. An English Anthol- og>-. With a Preface by Sidney Lee. Demy Zvo. y. 6d. net.
Hughes (Thomas). TOM BROWN'S SCHOOLbAVS. With an Introduction and Notes by Vernon Rrndall. Leather. Royal -^^mo. 2S. 6d. net.
Hutchinson (Horace O.) THE NEW FOREST. Illustrated in colour with 50 Pictures by Walter Tvndale and 4 by Miss Lucy Kemp Welch. Large Demy Zvo. 2\s. net.
Hutton (A. 'W.), M.A. See Leaders of Religion and Library of Devotion.
Hutton (Edward). THE CITIES OF UMBRIA. With many Illustrations, of which 20 are in Colour, by A. Pisa. Second Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s._
A Colonial Edition is also published.
lO
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
ENGLISH LOVE POEMS. Edited with an Introduction. Fcap. ?ivo. y. td. net.
Mutton (R. H.). See Leaders of Religion.
Hutton (W. H.), M-A. THE LIFE OF SIR THOMAS MORE. With Portraits. Second Edition. Cr. Sz'o. $s. See also Leaders of Religion.
Hyett (F. A.). A SHORT HISTORY OF FLORENCE. £>e>ny Svo. ys. 6d. net.
Ibsen (Henrik). BRAND. A Drama. Translated by William Wilson. Third Edition. Cr. i,vo, y 6d.
Inge (W. R.), INI.A., Fellow and Tutor of Hertford College, Oxford. CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM. The Bampton Lectures for iSqg. Demy Zva. 12s. 6d. net. See also Library of Devotion.
lnnes(A. D.), M.A. A HISTORY OF THE BRITISH IN INDIA. With Maps and Plans. Cr, Sz'O. 6s.
ENGLAND UNDER THE TUDORS. With Maps. Demy %vo. 10s. 6d. net.
Jackson (C. E.). B.A. See Textbooks of Science.
Jackson (S.), M.A. See Commercial Series.
Jackson (F. Hamilton). See Little Guides.
Jacob (F.), M.A. See Junior E.\amination Series.
Jeans (J. Stephen). See S. Q. S. and Busi- ness Books.
Jeffreys (D.Qwyn), DOLLY'S THEATRI- CALS. Described and Illustrated with 24 Coloured Pictures. Su/>erRoyal z6>no. 2s.6d.
Jenks (E.), M.A., Reader of Law in the University of Oxford. ENGLISH LOCAL GOVERNMENT. Cr. Svo. 2s. 6d.
Jenner (Mrs. H.). See Little Books on Art.
Jessopp (Augustus), D.D. See Leaders of Religion.
Jevons (F. B.), M.A., Litt.D., Principal of Bishop Hatfield's Hall, Durham. RE- LIGION IN EVOLUTION. Cr. Svo. 3 J. 6d. net.
See also Churchman's Library and Hand- books of Theology.
Johnson (Mrs. Barham). WILLIAM BOD- HAM DONNE AND HIS FRIENDS. Illustrated. Demv%vo. zos.6d.net.
Johnston (Sir H. H.), K.C.B. BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA. With nearly 200 Illustrations and Six Maps. Third Edition. Cr. i^to. iZs. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Jones (R. Crompton), M A. POEMS OF THE INNER LIFE. Selected by. E/eTentk Edition. Fcap. ?,vo. 2S. 6d. net.
Jones (H.). See Commercial Series.
Jones (L. A. Atherley), K.C., M.P., and Ballot (Hneh H. L.). THE MINERS' GUIDE TO THE COAL MINES REGULATION ACTS. Cr.&uo. 2s. 6d. net.
*COMMl!/RGE IN WAR. DeinyZ-vo. 21J. net.
Jonson (Ben). See Standard Library.
Julian (Lady) of Norwich. REVELA. TIONS OF DIVINE LOVE. Edited by Grace Warrack. Cr. Svo. ^s. 6d.
Juvenal. See Classical Translations.
'Kappa.' LET YOUTH BUT KNOW: A Plea for Reason in Education. Cr. Svo. y. 6d. net.
Kaufmann (M.). See S. Q. S.
Keating (J, F.), D.D. THE AGAPE AND THE EUCHARIST. Cr. Svo. -^s. (>d.
Keats (John). THE POEMS OF. Edited with Introduction and Notes by E. de Selin- court, M.A. Demy Sz!0. ys. 6d. net. See also Little Library, Standard Library, and E. de Selincourt.
Keble(John). THE CHRISTIAN YEAR. Withan Introduction and Notes bj'W. Lock, D.D., Warden of Keble College. Illustrated by R. Anning Bell. Third Edition. Fcap. Svo. 3^. 6d. ; padded Tttorocco, ^s. See also Library of Devotion.
Kempis (Thomas ft). THE IMITATION OF CHRIST. With an Introduction by Dean Farrar. Illustrated by C. M. Gere. Third Edition. Fcap. Svo. -^s. 6d.; padded tnorocco. ^s.
Also Translated by C. Bigg, D.D. Cr. Svo. -^s. 6d. See also Library of Devotion and Standard Library.
Kennedy (Bart.). THE GREEN SPHINX. Cr. Svo. -iS. 6d. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Kennedy (James Houghton), D.D., Assist- ant Lecturer in Divinity in the University of Dublin. ST. PAUL'S SECOND AND THIRD EPISTLES TO THE CORIN- THIANS. With Introduction, Dissertations and Notes. Cr. Svo. 6s.
KestelKJ. D.). THROUGH SHOT AND FLAME : Being the Adventures and Ex- periences of J. D. Kestell, Chaplain to General Christian de Wet. Cr. 8r'<7. 6s. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Kimmins (C. W.), M.A. THE CHEMIS- TRY OF LIFE AND HEALTH. lUus- trated. Cr. Svo. 2s. 6d.
Kinglake (A. W.). See Little Library.
Kipling (Rudyard). BARRACK-ROOM B.ALLADS. 7?,rd Thousand. Trventy- first Edition. Cr. Svo. 6s. A Colonial Edition is also published.
THE SEVEN SEAS. 62nd Thousand. Tenth Edition. Cr. St'o. 6s.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
THE FIVE NATIONS. ^ist Tliousand. Second Edition. Cr. Svo. 6s.
A Colonial Edition is al.so published.
DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES. SLcteentk Edition. Cr. Svo. 6s.
A Colonial Edition is also pu-blished.
Knight (Albert E.). THE COMPLETE CRICKETER. Illustrated. Demy Svo. js. 6d. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
General Literature
1 1
Knowling: (R. J.)i M.A., Professor of New
Testament Exegesis at King's CoHege, London. See Westminster Commentaries.
Lamb (Charles and Mary), THE WORKS OF. Edited by E. V. Lucas. Illustrated. In SeziCK Volumes. DemyZvo. ^s.dd. each.
THE LIFE OF. See E. V. Lucas. See also Little Library.
Lambert (F. A. H.). See Little Guides.
Lambros (Professor). See Byzantine Texts.
Lane= Poole rstanley). A HISTORY OF EGYPT IN THE MIDDLE AGES. Fully Illustrated. Cr. 8vo. 6s.
Langbridge(F.),M.A. BALLADSOFTHE BRAVE : Poems of Chivalry, Enterprise, Courage, and Constancy. Second Edition. Cr. Svo. 2S. 6d.
Law (William). See Library of Devotion and Standard Library.
Leacli (Henry). THE DUKE OF DEVON- SHIRE. A Biography. With 12 Illustra- tions. DcmyZvo. J2s. 6d. net. A Colonial Edition is al^o published.
Le Braz (Anatole). THE LAND OF PARDONS. Translated by Frances M. (JOSTLING. Illustrated in colour. Second Edition. Crozvn Zz-o, 6s.
Lee (Captain L. Melville). A HISTORY OF POLICE IN ENGLAND. Cr. Zvo. ■3,s. 6d. net.
Leigh (Percival). THE COMIC ENGLISH GRAMMAR. Embellished with upwards of 50 characteristic Illustrations by John Leech. Post \6>no. ■zs. 6.1. net.
Lewes (V. B.), M.A. AIR AND WATER. Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. 2s. 6d.
Lewis (Mrs. Gwyn). A CONCISE HANDBOOK OF GARDEN SHRUBS. Illustrated. Fcap. %vo. 3^. 6d. net.
Lisle (Fortun^ede). See Little Bookson Art.
LittlehaIes(H.). See Antiquary's Books.
Lock (Walter), D.D., Warden of Keble College. ST. PAUL, THE MASTER- BUILDER. Second Edition. Cr. Sva. ^s. 6d.
THE BIBLE AND CHRISTIAN LIFE. 0. Svo. 6s.
See also Leaders of Religion and Library of Devotion.
Locker (F.). See Little Library.
Longrfellow (H. W.). See Little Library.
Lorinier (George Horace). LETTERS FROM A SELF-MADE MERCHANT TO HIS SON. }■ -l/teenth Edition. C?. Zvo. 6s. A Colonial Edition is also published.
OLD GORGON GRAHAM. Second Edition. Cr. Zz'o. 6i. _ _ _ A Colonial Edition is also published.
Lover (Samuel). Seel. P. L.
E. V- L. and C. L.'Q. ENGLAND DAY BY DAY : Or, The Englishman's Handbook to Efficiency. Illustrated by George Morrow. Fourth Edition, Fcap. Ato. is. net.
Uicas (E. v.). THE LIFE OF CHARLES
LAMB. Witk numerous Portraits and Illustrations. Third Edition. Two Vols. Demy Svo. 21s. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
A WANDERER IN HOLLAND. With many Illustrations, of which 20 are in Colour by Herbert Marshall. Sixth Edition. Cr. Zvo. ts.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
THE OPEN ROAD : a Little Book for Way- farers. Tenth. Edition. Fcap. %vo. ^s. ; India Paper, ys. 6d.
THE FRIENDLY TOWN : a Little Book for the Urbane. Third Edition. heap. Svo. 5J. ; India Paper, yj. 6d.
Lucian. See Classical Translations.
Lyde(L. W.), M.A. See Commercial Series.
Lydon(Noel S.). See Junior School Books.
Lyttelton(Hon. Mrs. A.). WOMEN AND THEIR WORK. Cr. Zvo. 2s. td.
M. M. HOW TO DRESS AND WHAT TO WEAR. Cr. Zvo. is. net.
Macaulay (Lord). CRITICAL AND HIS- TORICAL ESSAYS. Edited by F. C. Mon- tague, M.A. Three Volutnes. Cr. Zvo. iZs. The only edition of this book completely annotated.
M'Allen(J. E. B.), M.A. See Commercial Series.
MacCulIoch (J. A.). See Churchman's
MacCunn (Florence A.). MARY STUART. With over 60 Illustrations, including a Frontispiece in Photogravure. Demy Zvo. 10s. 6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published. See also Leaders of Religion.
McDermott(E. R.). See^Books on Business.
M'Dowall(A. S.). See Oxford Biographies.
Mackay(A. ftl.). See Churchman's Library.
Magnus (Laurie), M.A. A PRIMER OF WORDSWORTH. Cr. Svo. 2s. 6d.
Mahaffy(J. P.), Litt.D. A HISTORY OF THE EGYPT OF THE PTOLEMIES. Fully Illustrated. Cr. Svo. 6s.
MaitIand(F.W.), LL.D., Downing Professor of the Laws of England in the University of Cambridge. CANON LAW IN ENG- LAND. J? ova I Zvo. js. 6d.
Maiden (H. E.), M.A ENGLISH RE- CORDS. A Companion to the History of England. Cr. Zz'o. j^s. 6d.
THE ENGLISH CITIZEN : HIS RIGHTS AND DUTIES. Fl/th Edition. Cr. Zvo. IS. 6d.
A SCHOOL HISTORY OF SURREY Hiustrated. Cr. Szw. is. 6d.
Marchant (E. C), M.A, Fellow of Peter- house, Cambridge. A GREEK ANTHO- LOGY Second Edition. Cr. Svo. 3^. 6d.
Marchant(C. E.)), M..\.,and Cook(A. M.), M.A. PASSAGES FOR UNSEEN TRANSLATION. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo, w. 6d,
12
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Marlowe (Christopher). See Standard | Library.
Marr(J. E.). F.R.S., F How ofSt John's Col- ! lei^e, Cambridfje. THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF SCENERY. Second Edition. Illustrated. Cr. ?>vo. 6s.
AGRICULTURAL GEOLOGY. Illustrated. Cr. 8vo. 6s.
Marvell (Andrew). See Little Library.
Masefield (John). SEA LIFE IN NEL- SONS TIME. Illustrated. Cr. Svo. js. 6d. net.
ON THE SPANISH MAIN. With Por- traits and Illustrations. Demyivo. ios.6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Maskell (A.). See Connoisseur's Library.
Mason (A. J.), D.D. See Leaders of Religion.
Massee (George). THE EVOLUTION OF PLANT LIFE : Lower Forms. Illustrated. Cr. Zzio. 2.f. 6d.
Massinger (P.). See Standard Library,
Masterman(C. F. Q.), M.A. TENNYSON AS A RELIGIOUS TEACHER. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Matheson (Mrs. E. F.). COUNSELS OF LiFE. FcaJ>. Zvo. 2S. 6d. net.
May (Phil). THE PHIL MAY ALBUM. Second Edition, 4 to. is. net.
Mellows (Emma S.). A SHORT STORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Cr. Zzio. y. 6d.
Methuen (A. M. S.). THE TRAGEDY OF SOU'I H AFRICA. Cr. Svo. 2s. net. Also Cr. 8r'<7. -^d. net.
A revised and enlarged edition of the author's ' Peace or War in South Africa.'
ENGLAND'S RUIN : Discussed in Six- teen Letters to the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P. Seventh. Edi- tion. Cr. Zvo. 3^. net.
Michell(E. B.). THE ART AND PRAC- TICE OF HAWKING. With 3 Photo- gravures by G. E. Lodge, and other Illus- trations. Demy Zvo. 10s. 6d.
Millais (J. 0.). THE LIFE AND LET- TERS OF SIR JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS, Presidentof the Royal Academy. With many Illustrations, of which 2 are in Photogravure. JV^eiv Edition, Demy 8vo. ■js. 6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Millin (Q. F.). PICTORIAL GARDEN- ING. Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. y. 6d. net.
Millis(C. r.), M.LM.E. See Textbooks of Technology.
Milne (J. O.), M.A. A HISTORY OF ROMAN EGYPT. Fully Illustrated. Cr. Sz/o. 6s.
Milton (John), THE POEMS OF, BOTH ENGLISH AND LATIN, Compos'd at several times. Printed by his true Copies.
The Songs were set in Musick by Mr. Henry Lav/es, Gentleman of the Kings Chappel, and one of His Majesties Private Musick.
Printed and publish'd according to Order. Printed by Ruth Raworth for Hum- phrey MosELEY, and are to be sold at the signe of the Princes Armes in Pauls Church- yard, 1645,
See also Little Library, Standard Library, and R. F. Tovvndrow.
Minchin(H. C.),M.A. See R. Peel.
Mitchell (P. Chalmers), M.A. OUTLINES OF BIOLOGY. Illustrated. Second Edi- tion. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Mitton (O. E.). JANE AUSTEN AND HER TIMES. \\'ith many Portraits and Illustrations. Second Edition. DejnyZvo. loi. 6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
' Moil (A.).' See Books on Business.
Moir (D. M.). See Little Library.
Money (L. Q. Chiozza). RICHES AND POVERTY. Second Edition Demy Zvo. ^s. net,
Montaigne. See C. F. Pond.
Moore (H. E.), See S. Q. S.
Moran(ClarenceQ.). See Books on Business.
More (Sir Thomas). See Standard Library.
Morfill (W. R.), Oriel College, Oxford. A HISTORY OF RUSSIA FROM PETER THE GREAT TO ALEXANDER II. With Mapsand Plans. Cr. Zvo. 3.C. 6rf.
Morich(R. J.), late of Clifton College. See School Examination Serie";.
Morris (J.). THE MAKERS OF JAPAN. With many portraits and Illustrations. Demy Zvo. 12.C 6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Morris (J. E.). See Little Guides.
Morton (Miss Anderson). See Miss Brod-
THE 'motor YEAR-BOOK FOR igo6.
With many Illustrations and Diagrams.
Detny Zvo. 7s. 6d. net. Moule(H. C. G.), D.D., Lord Bishop of Dur-
ham. See Leaders of Religion. Muir (M. M. Pattison), M.A. THE
CHEMISTRY OF FIRE. Illustrated.
Cr. Zvo. zs. 6d. Mundella (V. A.), M.A. See J. T. Dunn. Munro (R.), LL.D, See Antiquary's Books. Naval Officer (A). See I. P. L. Neal (W. C). See R. N. Hall. Newman (J. H.) and others. See Library
of Devotion. Nichols (J. B. B.). See Little Library. Nicklin (T.), M.A. EXAMINATION
PAPERS INTHUCYDIDES. Cr, Zvo. 2s, Nimrod. See I. P. L. Norgate (G. Le Q.). SIR WALTER
S60TI. Illustrated. Dtmj' Zvo. 7s. 6d. nti.
General Literature
13
Norregaard (B. W.). THE GREAT I SIEGE : The Investment and Fall of Port Arthur. Illustrated. Dentytvo. ios.6d.net. Northcote (James), R.A. THE CONVER- SATIONS OF JAMES NORTHCOTE, R.A., AND JAMES WARD. Edited by Ernest Fletcher. With many Portraits, j Demy Zvo. loi. td. Norway (A. H.). NAPLES. With 25 Col- oured Illustrations by Maurice Greiffen- HAGEN. A New Edition. Cr.Zvo^ 6s. Novalis. THE DISCIPLES AT SAIS AND [ OTHER FRAGMENTS. Edited by Miss j Una Birch. FcaJ>. Zvo. is. 6d. j
Oldfield (W. J.). Canon of Lincoln. A PRIMER OF RELIGION. Fcap Zvo. IS. 6d. Oliphant (Mrs. ). See Leaders of Religion. OmanCC. W. C), M.A., Fellow of All Souls', Oxford. A HISTORY OF THE ART OF WAR. Vol. II.: The Middle Ages, from the Fourth to the Fourteenth Century. Illus- trated. Demy Zvo. los. 6d. net. Ottley (R. L.), D.D. See Handbooks of
Theology and Leaders of Religion. Overton (J. H.). See Leaders of Religion. Owen (Douglas). See Books on Business. Oxford (M.N.), of Guy's Hospital. A HAND- BOOK OF NURSING. Third Edition. Cr. Svo. 3s. 6d. Pakes (W. C. C). THE SCIENCE OF HYGIENE. Illustrated. Demy Zvo. 15^. Palmer (Frederick). WITH KUROKI IN MANCHURIA. Illustrated. Third Edition. Demy Zvo. ys. 6d. net. A Colonial Edition is also published. Parker (Gilbert). A LOVER'S DIARY.
Fcap. Zvo. s^. Parkes (A. K.). SMALL LESSONS ON
GREAT TRUTHS. Fcap. Zvo. is. 6d. Parkinson (John). PARADISI IN SOLE PARADISUS TERRESTRIS, OR A GARDEN OF ALL SORTS OF PLEA- SANT FLOWERS. Folio. £3, 3s. net. Parmenter (John). HELIO-TROPES, OR NEW POSIES FOR SUNDIALS, 1625. Edited by Percival Landon. Qrtarto. 3s. 6d. net. Parmentier (Prof. Leon). See Byzantine
Texts. PascaL See Library of Devotion. Paston (George). SOCIAL CARICA- TURES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Imperial Quarto. £1, izj. 6d. net. See also Little Books on Art and I. P. L. Pater8on(W. R.)(Benjamin Swift). LIFE'S
QUESTIONINGS. Cr. Zvo. 3s. 6d. net. Patterson (A. H.). NOTES OF AN EAST CO.\ST NATURALIST. Illustrated in Colour by F. Southgate. Second Edition. Cr Zvo. f.s-
NATURE IN EASTERN NORFOLK. A series of observations on the Birds, Fishes, Mammals, Reptiles, and stalk- eyed Crustaceans found in that neigh- bourhood, with a list of the species. With 12 Illustrations in colour, by Frank Southgate. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Peacock (N.). See Little Books on Art.
Pearce (E. H.), M.A. ANNALS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. Illustrated. Demy Zvo. ts. td.
Peel (Robert), and Aiinchin (H. C), M.A. OXFORD. With 100 Illustrations in Colour. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Peel (Sidney), late Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and Secretary to the Royal Com- mission on the Licensing Laws. PRACTI- CAL LICENSING REFORM. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. li. 6d.
Peters (J. P.), D.D. See Churchman's Library.
Petrie (W. M. Flinders), D. C. L. , LL. D. , Pro- fessor of Egyptology at University College. A HISTORY OF EGYPT, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. Fully Illustrated. In six volumes. Cr. Zvo. 6s. each.
Vol. I. Prehistoric Times to XVIth Dynasty. Fifth Edition.
Vol. II. The XVIIth and XVIIIth Dynasties. Fourth Edition.
Vol. III. XIXth to XXXth Dynasties.
Vol. IV. The Egvi'T op the Ptole.mies. J. P. Mahaffy, Litt.D.
Vol. v. Roman Egypt. J. G. Milne, M.A.
Vol. VI. Egypt in the Middle Ages. Stanley Lane-Poole, M.A.
RELIGION AND CONSCIENCE IN ANCIENT EGYPT. Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. 2S. 6d,
SYRIA AND EGYPT, FROM THE TELL ELAMARNATABLETS. Cr. Zvo. zs. 6d.
EGYPTI.AN TALES. Illustrated by Tris- tram Ellis. In Two Volumes. Cr. Zvo. 3S. 6d. each.
EGYPTIAN DECORATIVE ART. With 120 Illustrations. Cr. Zvo. 3s. 6d.
Phillips (W. A.). See Oxford Biographies.
Phillpotts (Eden). MY DEVON YEAR. With 38 Illustrations by J. Ley Pethy- bridge. Second and Cheaper Edition. Larze Cr. Zvo. 6s.
UP ALONG AND DOWN ALONG. Illustrated by Claude Shepperson. Cr. ^to. ss. net. A volume of poems. Pienaar (Philip). WITH STEYN AND DE WET. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 3s. 6d.
I A Colonial Edition is also published.
! Plarr (Victor a.) and Walton (F. W.). A
I SCHOOL HISTORY OF MIDDLE-
I SEX. Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. is. 6d. Plato. See Standard Library.
14
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Plautus. THE CAPTIVI. Edited, with an Introduction, Textual Notes, and a Com- mentary, by W. M. Lindsay, Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Demy %vo. \os. 6d. net.
Plowden=Wardlaw (J. T.). B.A., King's College, Cambridge. See School Examina- tion Series.
Podmore (Frank). MOI>ERN SPIRI- TUALISM. T7ui> Volumes. Demy ?,vo. 2ii. net.
A History and a Criticism.
Poer (J. Patrick Le). A MODERN LEGIONARY. Cr. ivo. Ss.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Pollard (Alice). See Little Books on Art.
Pollard ( A. W.). OLD PICTURE BOOKS. Illustrated. Demy&vo. ys. 6d. net.
Pollard (Eliza F.). See Little Books on Art.
Pollock (David), M.I.N. A. See Books on Business.
Pond (C. F.). A DAY BOOK OF MON- TAIGNE. Edited by. Fca^. Svo. 3s. 6d. net.
Potter (M. C), M.A., F.L.S. A TEXT- BOOK OF AGRICULTURAL BOTANY. Illustrated. Stcond Edition. Cr. Zvo. i,s. 6d.
Power (J. O'Connor). THE MAKING OF AN ORATOR. Cr. ^vo. (>s.
Pradeau (G.). A KEY TO THE TIME ALLUSIONS IN THE DIVINE COMEDY. With a Dial. Small quarto. 2S. 6d.
Prance (Q.). See Half-Crown Library.
Prescott(0. L.). ABOUT MUSIC, AND WHAT IT IS MADE OF. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Price (L. L.), INI. A., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxon. A HISTORY OF ENGLISH POLITICAL ECONOMY. Fourth Edi- tion. Cr. 8vo. zs. 6d.
Primrose (Deborali). A MODERN BCEOTIA. Cr. Szio. 6s.
Pugin and Rowlandson. THE MICRO- COSM OF LONDON, OR London in Miniature. With 104 Illustrations in colour. /« Three Volumes. Small i,to. £3, 3.r. net.
• Q ' (A. T. Quiller Couch). See Half-Crown Library.
Ouevedo Villegfas. See Miniature Library.
G.R. andE.S. THE WOODHOUSE COR- RESPONDENCE. Cr.Uw. 6s. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Rackham (R. B.), M.A. See Westminster Commentaries.
Randolph (B. W,), D.D. See Library of Devotion.
Rannie (D. W.), M.A. A STUDENT'S HISTORY OF SCOTLAND. Cr. Zvo. r^S. 6d,
Rashdall (Hastings), M.A., Fellow and Tutor of New College, Oxford. DOC- TRINE. AND DEVELOPMENT. Cr.
Zvo. 6s.
Rawstorne (Lawrence, Esq.). See I.P.L.
Raymond (Walter). A SCHOOL HISTORY OF SOMERSETSHIRE. Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. is. 6d.
A Real Paddy. Seel.P-L.
Reason (W.), M.A. See S.Q.S.
Redfern (W. B.), Author of ' Ancient Wood and Iron Work in Cambridge,' etc. ROYAL AND HISTORIC GLOVES AND ANCIENT SHOES. Profusely Illustrated in colour and half-tone. Quarto, £2, ■zs. net.
Reynolds. See Little Galleries.
^Rhodes (W. E.). A SCHOOL HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE. Illustrated. Cr.Zvo. IS. 6d.
Roberts (M. E.). See C. C. Channer.
Robertson (A.), D.D., Lord Bishop of Exeter. REGNUM DEI. The Bampton Lectures of 1901. Demy Zvo. 12s. 6d. net.
Robertson (C. Grant). M.A., Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford, Examiner in the Honours School of Modern History, Oxford, 1Q01-1Q04. SELECT SlATUTES, CASES, AND CONSTITUTIJNAL DOCU- MENTS, 1660-1832. Defny Zvo. lor. 6d. net.
Robertson (C. Grant) and Bartholomew (J. G.), F.R.S.E., F.R.G.S. A HIS- TORICAL AND MODERN ATLAS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE. DemyQuarto. 4i. 6d. net.
Robertson (Sir G. S.), K.C.S.I. See Half-Crown Library.
Robinson (A. W.), M.A. See Churchman's Bible.
Robinson (Cecilia). THE MINISTRY OF DEACONESSES. With an Introduc- tion by the late Archbishop of Canterbury. Cr. Zvo. ^s. 6d.
Robinson (F. S.). See Connoisseur's Library.
Rochefoucauld (La). See Little Library'.
Rodwell (G.), B.A. NEW TESTAMENT GREEK. A Course for Beginners. With a Preface by Walter Lock, D. D., Warden of Keble College. Fcap. Zvo. 3X. 6d.
Roe (Fred). ANCIENT COFFERS AND CUPBOARDS: Their History and De- scription. Illustrated. Quarto. £1., 3s. net.
OLD OAK FURNITURE. With many Illustrations by the Author, including a frontispiece in colour. Demy Zvo. los. 6d. net.
Rogers (A. G. L.), M.A. See Books on Business.
Roscoe (E. S.). ROBERT HARLEV, EARL OF OXFORD. Illustrated. Demy Zvo. -js. 6d. This is the only life of Harley in existence. See also Little Guides.
General Literature
15
Rose (Edward). THE ROSE READER.
Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. -zs. 6a. Also in 4
Parts. Parts I. and II. td. each ; Part
III. id. ; Part IV. \od. Rouse (W. H. D.). WORDS OF THE
AN'CIENT WISE: Thoughts from Epic-
tetus and Marcus Aurelius. Edited by.
Fcap. tvo. y. 6d. net. Rowntree (Joshua). THE IMPERIAL
DRUG TRADE. Second and Cheaper
Edition. Cr. Zvo. 2s. net. Rubie (A. E.), D.D. See Junior School
Books. Russell (W. Clark). THE LIFE OF
ADMIRAL LORD COLLINGWOOD.
With Illustrations by F. Brangwyn.
Fourth Edition. Cr. %vo. ts.
A Colonial Edition is also published. St. Anslem. See Library of Devotion. St. Augustine. See Library of Devotion. St. Cyres (Viscount). See Oxford Bio- graphies. St. Francis of Assisi. See Standard
Library. ^
'Saki' (H. Munro). REGINALD. Second
Edition. Fcap. %vo. is. td. net. Sales (St. Francis de). See Library of
Devotion. , „„
Salmon (A. L.). A POPULAR GUIDE
TO DEVON. Medium Zvo. 6d. net. See
also Little Guides.
Sareeant (J.), M.A. ANNALS OF
WESTMINSTER SCHOOL. Illustrated.
Demy tvo. qs. td. Sathas (C). See Byzantine Texts. Schmitt (John). See Byzantine Texts. Scott (A. M.). WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL. With Portraits and Illus- trations. Cr. Zvo. 3J. td.
A Colonial Edition is also published. Seeley(H.Q.),F.R.S. DRAGONS OFTHE
AIR. Illustrated. Cr. Zvo. ts. Sells (V. P.), ^LA. THE MECHANICS OF DAILY LIFE. lUustrated. Cr. Zvo. 2S. td.
Selous (Edmund). TOMMY SMITHS ANIMALS. lUustrated by G. W. Ord. Sixth Edition. Fcap. Zvo. is. td.
Settle (J. H.). ANECDOTES OF SOLDIERS. Cr. Zvo. zs. td. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Shakespeare (William).
THE FOUR FOLIOS, 1623; 1632; 1664; 1685. Each Four Guineas net, or a com- plete set, Twelve Guineas net. Folios 3 and 4 are ready. Folio 2 is nearly ready.
The Arden Shakespeare.
Deiny Zvo. is. td. net each volume. General Editor, W. J. Craig. An Edition of Shakespeare in single Plays. Edited with a full Introduction, Textual Notes, and a Commentary at the foot of the page.
HAIklLET. Edited by Edward Dowden,
Litt.D. ROMEO AND JULIET. Edited by Edward
Dowden, Litt.D. KING LEAR. Edited by W. J. Craic. JULIUS C.\ESAR. Edited by M. Mac-
millan, M.A. THE TEMPEST. Edited by Moreton
Luce. OTHELLO. Edited by H. C. Hart. TITUS ANDRONICUS. Edited by H. B.
Baildom. CYMBELINE. Edited by Edward Dowden. THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.
Edited by H. C. Hart. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.
Edited by H. Cuningham. KING HENRY V. Edited by H. A. Evans. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.
Edited by W. O. Brigstocke. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.
Edited by R. Warwick Bond. TIMON OF ATHENS. Edited by K.
Deighton. ^ ,.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Edited by
H. C. Hart. TWELFTH NIGHT. Edited by Moreton
THE^ MERCHANT OF VENICE. Edited by C. Knox Pooler.
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. Edited by K. Deighton.
The Little Quarto Shakespeare. Edited by W. J. Craig. With Introductions and Notes. Pott \tmo. In 40 Volumes. Leather, price u. net each volume. Mahogany Revolving Book Case. lar. net. See also Standard Library.
Sharp (A.). VICTORIAN POETS. Cr. Zvo. IS. td.
Sharp (Cecil). See S. Banng-Gould.
Sharp (Mrs. E. A.). See Little Books on Art.
Shedlock (J. S.) THE PIANOFORTE SONATA. Cr. Zvo. ^s.
Shelley (Percy B.). ADONAIS ; an Elegy on the death of Jpbn Keats, Author of ' Endymion," etc. Pisa. From the types of Didot, i32i. IS. net.
Sheppard (H. F.), M.A. See S. Baring- Gould.
Sherwell (Arthur), M.A. See S.Q.S.
Shipley (Mary E.). AN ENGLISH CHURCH HISTORY FOR CHILD- REN. With a Preface by the Bishop of Gibraltar. With Maps and Illustrations. Part I. Cr. tvo. zs. td. net.
Sichel (Walter). DISRAELI : A Study in Personality and Ideas. With 3 Portraits. Demy tvo. iis.td. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published. See also Oxford Biographies.
Sime (J.). See Little Books on Art
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
SImonson (G. A.)- FRANCESCO G U A R D I. With 41 Plates. Imperial
Uto, £:2, '2S. net. Sketchley (R. E. D.). See Little Books on
Art. Skipton (H. P. K.). See Little Books on
Art. Sladen (Douglas). SICILY: The New
Winter Resort. With over 200 Illustrations.
Second Edition. Cr. Svo. ^s. net. Small (Evan), M.A. _ THE EARTH. An
Introduction to Physiography. Illustrated.
Cy. Zvo. 2S. 6d. Smallwood (M. G.). See Little Books on
Art. Smedley(F. E.). See I.P.L. Smith (Adam). THE WEALTH OF
NATIONS. Edited with an Introduction
and numerous Notes by Edwin Cannan,
M.A. Two volumes. Demy Svo. 21s.
net.
See also English Library. Smith (Horace and James). See Little
Library. Smith (H. Bompas), M.A. ANEW
JUNIOR ARITHMETIC. Crown Svo.
2S. 6d. Smith (R. Mudie). THOUGHTS FOR
THE DAY. Edited by. Eca/>. 8vo.
2s. 6d. net. Smith (Nowell C). See W. Wordsworth. Smith (John Thomas). A BOOK FOR
A RAINY DAY : Or Recollections of the
Events of the Years 1766-1833. Edited by
Wilfred Whitten. Illustrated. Demy
Zvo. i2i. 6d. net. Snell (F. J.). A BOOK OF EXMOOR.
Illustrated. Cr. Zz'O. 6s. Snowden(C. E.). A HANDY DIGEST OF
BRITISH HISTORY. De^uy 8vo. 4s. 6d. Sophocles. See Classical Translations. Sornet (L. A.). See Junior School Books. South (Wilton E.), M.A. See Junior School
Southey (R.). ENGLISH SEAMEN.
Edited by David Hannay. Vol. I. (Howard, Clifford, Hawkins,
Drake, Cavendish). Second Edition. Cr.
Zvo. 6s.
Vol. II. (Richard Hawkins, Grenville,
Essex, and Raleigh). Cr. i,vo. 6s. See also Standard Library. Spence(C. H.), M.A. See School Examina- tion Series. Spooner (W. A.), M.A. See Leaders of
Religion. Staley (Edgcumbe). THE GUILDS OF
FLORENCE. Illustrated. Second Edition.
Rovnl Zzw. 16s. net, Stanbridge (J. W.), B.D. See Library of
Devotion. •Stancliffe.' GOLF DO'S AND DONT'S.
Second Edition. Fcap Svo. zs. Stead (D. W.). See D. Gallaher.
Stedman(A. M. M.), M.A. INITIA LATINA : Easy Lessons on Elemen- tary Accidence. Ninth Edition. Fcap.
'&V0. IS.
FIRST LATIN LESSONS. Ninth Edi- tion. Cr. Zto. 2s.
FIRST LATIN READER. With Notes adapted to the Shorter Latin Primer and Vocabulary. Sixth Editionrevised. iSmo. zs. 6d.
EASY SELECTIONS FROM C^SAR. The Helvetian War, Second Edition z8mo. IS.
EASY SELECTIONS FROM LIVY. The Kings of Rome. iSmo. Second Edition, zs. 6d.
EASY LATIN PASSAGES FOR UNSEEN TRANSLATION. Tenth Edition Fcap. Zvo. zs. 6d.
EXEMPLA LATINA. First Exercises in Latin Accidence. With Vocabulary. Third Editio7i, Cr. Zvo. zs,
EASY LATIN EXERCISES ON THE SYNTAX OF THE SHORTER AND REVISED LATIN PRIMER. With Vocabulary. Tenth and Cheaper Edition, re-written. Cr. Zvo. zs. 6d. Original Edition. 2S. 6d. Kev, 3^. net.
THE LATIN COMPOUND SENTENCE : Rules and Exercises. Secotid Edition. Cr. Z7)o. zs. 6d. With Vocabulary. 2^.
NOTANDA QUAEDAM : Miscellaneous Latin Exercises on Common Rules and Idioms. Fourth Edition. Fcap. Svo. zs. 6d. With Vocabulary. 2S. Key, 2s. net.
LATIN VOCABULARIES FOR REPE- TITION : Arranged according to Subjects. Thirteenth Edition. Fcap. Zzio. zs. 6d.
A VOCABULARY OF LATIN IDIOMS. zSmo. Second Edition, zs,
STEPS TO GREEK. Second Edition, re- vised. zSmo, zs.
A SHORTER GREEK PRIMER. Cr. Svo. zs. 6d.
EASY GREEK PASSAGES FOR UNSEEN TRANSLATION. Third Edition, re- vised, Fcap. Zvo. zs. 6d.
GREEK VOCABULARIES FOR RE- PETITION. Arranged according to Sub- jects. Fourth Edition. Fcap. &vo. is. 6d.
GREEK TESTAMENT SELECTIONS. For the use of Schools. With Introduc- tion, Notes, and Vocabulary. Fourth Edition. Fcap. Zvo. 2s. 6d.
STEPS TO FRENCH. Seventh Edition, zZmo. Zd.
FIRST FRENCH LESSONS. Seventh Edi. tion, revised. Cr, Zvo. zs.
EASY FRENCH PASSAGES FOR UN- SEEN TRANSLATION. Fifth Edi- tion, revised. Fcap, Zvo, zs, 6d.
General Literature
^/
EASY FRENCH EXERCISES ON ELE- MENTARY SYNTAX. With Vocabu- lary. Fourth Edition. Cr. Svo. 2S. 6d.
French'" VOCABULARIES FOR RE- PETITION : Arranged according to bub- ject^s. Thirteenth Edition. Ecap.^vo. is. See also School Examination Series.
Steel (R. Elliott), M.A. F C.S. THE WORLD OF SCIENCE. With 147 Illustrations. Second Edition. Cr. Zto. 2S.6d. See also School Examination Series.
Stephenson (C), of the Technical College, Bradford, and Suddards (F.) of the Yorkshire College. Leeds. ORNAMEN- T:\h DESIGN FOR WOVEN FABRICS. Illustrated. Denij' &vo. 'Third Edition.
Strph^son (J.). MA THF CHIEF
TRUTHS OF THE CHRISTIAN
FAITH. C>: Zro. 35. 6d. Sterne ( Laurence). See Little Library. Stcrry (W.). M.A. ANNALS Ot ETON
COLLECiK. Illustrated. X'^wjySw. 7^-6«; Steuart (Katherine). BY ALLAN
W\TER. .Seeond I'.dition. Cr.Zvo. bs. Stevenson (R. L.) THE LETTERS OF
ROBERT LOUIS SIEVENSON TO
HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS.
Selected and Edited by Sidney Colvin.
Si.xth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 12^. LiBKARY Edition. Dcniy^To. -2 vols, iss.net.
A Colonial Edition is also published. VAILIMA LETTERS. With an Etched
Portrait by William Strang. Ei/ih
Edition. Cr. ^vo. Buckravi. 6s. A Colonial Edition is also published. THE LIFE OF R. L. STEVENSON, See
Stevenso°n'(M. I.). FROM SARANAC TO THE MARQUESAS. Being Letters written by Mrs. M. I- Stevenson during 1887-8. Cr. &z'0. 6s. net. ,. , ,
A Colonial Edition is also published.
lETTERS FROM SAMOA. Edited and arranged by M. C. Bai.four. With many Illustrations. Second Ed. Cr.Zvo. 6s.net.
Stoddart (Anna M.). See Oxford Bio-
Stlkes'^F. Q.), B.A. HOURS WITH
RABELAIS. From the translation of biR T. Ukouhart and P. A. Motteux. With a Portrait in Photogravure. Cr. Zvo. y. 6d.
Stone (S. J.). POEMS AND HYMNS. With a Memoir by F. G. Ellerton, M.A. With Portrait. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Storr (Vernon P.), M.A., Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion in Cambridge University ; Examining Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury; formerly Fellow of UniversityCollege, Oxford. DEVELOP- MENT AND DIVINE PURPOSE Cr. ?>vo. 5-r. net.
Straker (F.). See Books on Business.
A
Streane (A. W.), D.D. See Churchman's Stroud' (H.), D.Sc, M.A. See Textbooks of
StrutTTjoseph). THE SPORTS AND PASTIMES OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND. Illustrated by many engrav- ings. Revised by J. Charles Cox, LL.D., F S A Quarto. 21 J. net.
Stuart (Capt. Donald). THE STRUGGLE FOR PERSI-V. With a Map. Cr.Zvo. 6s.
5turch(F.)., Staff Instructor to the Surrey CountvCoJncil. MANUAL TRAINING, DRAWING (WOODWORK). Its Prin- ciples and Application, with Solutions to Examination Questions, 1892-1905, Ortho- graphic, Isometric and Oblique Projection. With 50 Plates and 140 Figures. I<oolscap.
Suckling (Sir John). FRAGMENTA AURE.'V: a Collection of all the Incom- parable Peeces, written by. And published by a friend to perpetuate his memory. Printed by his own copies.
Printed for Humphrey Moseley, and are to be sold at his shop, at the sign of the Princes Arms in St. Paul s Churchyard, 1646.
Suddards (F.). See C. Stephenson.
Surtees IR. S.). See LP. L.
iwift (Jonathan). THE JOURNAL TO STELLA. Edited by G. A. Aitken. tr.
Symes'j. E.). M.A. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. Second Edition. Cr.tvo.
Sympson(E. M.), M.A., M.D. See Ancient
Cities. ,
Syrett (Netta). See Little Blue Books. Tacitus. AGRICOLA. With Introduction Notes, Map, etc By R..F. Davis, M.A., Fcai>. ivo. zs. GERMANIA. By the same Editor. J'cap.
&V0. IS. See also Classical Translations. TalIack(W.). HOWARD LETTERS AND
MEMORIES. DemyZvo. ios.6d.net. Tauler (J.). See Library of Devotion Taunton (E. L.). A HISTORY Ot THE JESUITS IN ENGLAND. Illustrated.
Demy Si'O. -zis. net.
Taylor (A. E.). THE ELEMENTS OF METAPHYSICS. Deviy^zw. jos.6d.net. Taylor (F.Q.), M.A. See Commercial Series. Taylor (I. A.). See Oxford Biographies. Taylor (T. M.), M.A., Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. A CON- STITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF ROME. Cr. Zt'O. 7s. 6d. Tennyson (Alfred, Lord). THE EARLY POEMS OF. Edited, with Notes and an Introduction, by J. Chorton Collins, M.A. Cr. Sto. 6s. „ _
IN MEMORIAM, M.\UD, AND THE PRINCESS. Edited by J. Churton Collins, M.A. Cr. 8vo. 6s. See also Little Library.
iS
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Terry (C. S.). See Oxford Biographies. Terton (Alice). LIGHTS AND SHADOWS
IN A HOSPITAL. Cr. Sva. 3s. 6d. Thackeray (W. M.). See Little Library. Theobald (F. v.), IVT.A. INSECT LIFE.
Illustrated. Second Ed. Revised. Cr. Zvo.
zs. 6d. Thompson (A. H.). See Little Guides. Tileston(MaryW.). DAILY STRENGTH
FOR DAILY NEEDS. Tivel/th Edition.
Medium xdtno. is.6d.net. Also an edition
in superior bindins;, 6,?. Tompkins (H. W."), F.R.H.S. See Little
Towndrow (R. F.). A DAY BOOK OF
MILTON. Edited by. Fca^. Zvo. 2,s.6d.
net. Townley (Lady Susan). MY CHINESE
NOTE-BOOK With 16 Illustrations and
2 Maps. Third Edition. Demy '&vo. los.
6d. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published. *Toynbee(Paget), M.A., D.Litt. DANTE
IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. Demy
Ivo. \2S. 6d. net.
See also Oxford Biographies. Trench (Herbert). DEIRDRE WED and
Other Poems. Cr. Zvo. $s. Trevelyan(Q. M.), Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge. ENGLAND UNDER THE
STUARTS. With Maps and Plans. Second
Edition. Denty Sco. los. 6d. net. Troutbeck (Q. E.). See Little Guides. Tyler (E. A.), B.A., F.C.S. See Junior
Sc:hool Rooks. TyrelUQill (Frances). See Little Books on
Art. Vardon (Harry). THE COMPLETE
GOLFER. Illustrated. Seventh Edition.
Demy '&vo. los. 6d. net. A Colonial Edition is also published. Vaughan (Henry). See Little Library. Voegelin (A.), M.A. See Junior Examina- tion Series. WaddelKCoL L. A.), LL.D.,C.B. LHASA
AND ITS MYSTERIES. With a Record
of the Expedition of 1903-1904. With 2000
Illustrations and Maps. Demy Zvo. 2ii.
net. Also Third and Cheaper Edition. With 155 Illustrations and Maps. Demy Zvo. ys. 6d. net. Wade (Q. W.), D.D. OLD TESTAMENT
HISTORY. With Maps. Third Edition.
Cr. Zvo. (>s. Wagrner (Richard). See A. L. Cleather. Wall (J. C). DEVILS. Illustrated by the
Author and from photographs. Demy Zvo.
t,s. dd. net. See also Antiquary's Books. Walters (H. B.). See Little Books on Art. Walton (F. W.). See Victor G. Plarr. Walton (Izaac) and Cotton (Charles).
See I.P.L., Standard Library, and Little
Library.
WarmeIo(D. S. Van). ON COMMANDO.
With Portrait. Cr. Zvo. y. td. _ A Colonial Edition is also published.
Warren -Vernon (Hon. William), M.A. READINGS ON THE INFERNO OF DANTE, chiefly based on the Commentary of Benvenuto da Lmola. With an Intro- duction by the Rev. Dr. Moore. In Two Volumes. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 15J. net.
Waterhouse (Mrs. Alfred). WITH THE SIMPLE-HEARTED : Little Homilies to Women in Country Places. Second Edition. Small Pott Zvo. 2s. net. See also Little Library.
Weatherhead (T. C), M.A. EXAMINA- TION PAPERS IN HORACE. Cr. Zvo. IS. See also Junior Examination Series.
Webb (W. T.). See Little Blue Books.
Webber (F. C). See Textbooks of Techno- logy.
Wells (Sidney H.). See Textbooks of Science.
Wells(J.),M.A.,FellowandTutorofWadham College. OXFORD AND OXFORD LIFE. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. y. 6d.
A SHORT HISTORY OF ROME. Sixth Edition. With 3 Maps. Cr. Zvo. 3J. 6d. See also Little Guides.
'Westminster Gazette' Office IBoy (Francis Brown). THE DOINGS OF ARTHUR. Cr. j^fo. 2s. 6d. net.
Wetmore (Helen C). THE LAST OF THE GRE.\T SCOUTS ('Buffalo Bill'). Illustrated. Second Edition. Demy Zvo. ts. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Whibley (C). See Half-crown Library.
Whibley (L.), M.A., Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. GREEK OLIGAR- CHIES : THEIR ORGANISATION AND CHARACTER. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Wh!taker(G. H.), M.A. See Churchman's Bible.
White (Gilbert). THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. Edited by L. C. MiALL, F.R.S., assisted by W. Warde Fowler, M.A. Cr. Zvo. 6s. See also Standard Library.
Whitfield (E. E.). See Commercial Series.
Whitehead (A. W.). GASPARD DE C O L I G N Y. Illustrated. Demy Zvo. 12s. 6'i. net.
Whiteley (R. Lloyd), F.I.C., Principal of the Municipal Science School, West firom- wich. AN ELEMENTARY TEXT- BOOK OF INORGANIC CHEMISTRY. Cr. Zvo. re. 6d.
Whitley (Miss). See S.Q.S.
Whitten(W.). See John Thomas Smith.
Whyte(A. Q.), B..Sc. See Books on Business.
Wilberforce (Wilfrid). See Little Books on Art.
Wilde (Oscar). DE PROFUNDIS. Sixth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 5'. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
General Literature
19
Wilkins(W. H.), B-A. See S.Q.S.
Wilkinson (J. Frome). See S.Q.S. Williams (A.). PETROL PETER: or Mirth for INIotorists. Illustrated in Colour by A. W. Mills. Demy i,to. 3^. dd. net.
Williamson (M. Q.)> See Ancient Cities.
Williamson (W.)- THE BRITISH GARDENER. Illustrated. Demy Zvo. los. 6ci.
Williamson (W.), B.A. See Junior Ex- amination Series, Junior School Books, and Beginner's Books.
Willson (Beckles). LORD STRATH- COXA : the Story of his Life. Illustrated. Demy Zuo. -js. dd.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
WJImot-Buxton (E. Al.). l^IAKERS OF EUROPE. Cr. ivo. Sixth Ed. _ 3^. td.
A Text-book of European History for Middle Forms.
THE ANCIENT WORLD. With Maps and Illustrations. Cr.Sro. 3^. 6<^. See also Beginner's Books.
WHson(Bishop.). See Library of Devotion.
Wilson(A. J.). See Books on Business.
Wilson (H. A.). See Books on Business.
Wilton (Richard), I\LA. LYRA PAS- TORALIS : Songs of Nature, Church, and Home. Pott Sr-c. zs. td.
Winbolt (S. E.). M.A. EXERCISES IN LATIN ACCIDENCE. Cr. Z-jo. zs. td.
LATIN HEXAMETER VERSE : An Aid to Composition. Cr. Zvo. 3s. td. Key, 5^. net.
Windle (B. C. A.), D.Sc., F.R.S. See Ami- quary's Books, Little Guides and Ancient Cities.
Winterbotham (Canon), M.A., B.Sc, LL.B. See Churchman's Library.
Wood (J. A. E.). See Textbooks of Technology.
Wood (J. Hickory), DAN \.ENO. Illus- trated. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Wood (W. Birkbeck), M. A., late Scholar of Worcester College, (Oxford, and Edmonds (Major J. E.), R.E., D.A.Q.-M.G. A HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR IN THE UNITED STATES. With an Introduction by H. Spenser Wilkinson. With 24 Maps and Plans. Demy Svo. 12s. td. net.
Wordsworth (Christopher). See Anti- quary's Books. Wordsworth (W.). THE POEMS OF.
With Introduction and Notes by Nowei.l C. Smith, Fellow of New College, Oxford. In Four Volumes. Demy &vo. ^s. net each. See also Little Library.
Wordsworth (W.) and Coleridge (S. T.). See Little Librarj'.
Wright (Arthur), M.A., Fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge. See Churchman's Library.
Wright (C. Gordon). See Dante.
Wright (J. C). TO-DAY. Fcap. itmo. IS. net.
Wright (Sophie). GERMAN VOCABU- LARIES FOR REPETITION. Fcap. Zvo. IS. td.
Wrong (George M.), Professor of History in the University of Toronto. THE EARL OF ELGIN. Illustrated. Demy Svo. js. td. net.
A Colonial Edition is also published.
Wyatt(Kate) and Gloag vM.). A BOOK OF ENGLISH GARDENS. With 24 Illustrations in Colour. Demy Svo. 10s. 6s, net.
Wylde (A. B.). MODERN ABYSSINIA. With a Map and a Portrait. Demy Svo. \%s. net. A Colonial Edition s also published
Wyndham (George). THE POEMS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. With an Introduction and Notes. Demy Svo. Buck- ram, gilt top. 10s. td.
Wyon (R. ). See Half-crown Library.
Veats (W. B.). AN ANTHOLOGY OF IRISH VERSE. Revised and Enlarged Edition. Cr. Svo, 3^. td.
Young (Filson). THE COMPLETE MOTORIST. With 138 Illustrations. Sixth Edition, Deviy Svo, \is. td. net. A Colonial Edition is also published.
Young (T. M.). THE AMERICAN COTTON INDUSTRY: A Study of Work and Workers. Cr.Svo. Cloth., 2s.6d. ; paper hoards, is, td.
Zimmern (Antonia). WHAT DO WE KNOW CONCERNING ELECTRI- CITY? Fcap. Svo. \s. td.net.
Ancient Cities
General Editor, B. C. A. WINDLE, D.Sc, F.R.S. Cr. 2>vo. 4^. 6d. net.
Chestfr. By B. C. A. Windle, D.Sc F.R.S.
Illustrated by E. H. New. Shkewsbury. By T. Auden, M.A., F.S.A.
Illustrated. Canterbury. By J. C. Cox, LL.D., F.S.A.
Illustrated.
Edinburgh. By M. G. Williamson. Illus- trated by Herbert Railton.
Lincoln. By E. Mansel Sympson, M.A., M.D. Illustrated by E. H. New.
Bristol. By Alfred Harvey. Illustrated by E. H. New,
20
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Antiquary's Books, The
General Editor. J. CHARLES COX, LL.D., F.S.A.
A series of volumes dealing with various branches of English Antiquities ; comprehensive and popular, as well as accurate and scholarly.
Derny %vo. 'js. 6d. net.
English Monastic Life. By the Right Rev. Abbot Gasquet, O.S B. Illustrated. Third Edition.
Remains of the Prehistoric Age in England. By B. C. A. Windle, D.Sc, F.R. S. With numerous Illustrations and Plans.
Old Service Books of the English Church. By Christopher Wordsworth, M.A., and Henry Littlehales. With Coloured and other Illustrations.
Celtic Art. By J. Romilly Allen, F.S.A. With numerous Illustrations and Plans.
Archaeology and False Antiquities. By R. Munro, LL.D. Illustrated.
Shrines of British Saints. ByJ. C. Wall. With numerous Illustrations and Plans.
The Royal Forests of England. By J. C. Co.x, LL.D., F.S.A. Illustrated.
The Manor and Manorial Records. By Nathaniel J. Hone. Illustrated.
Seals. ByJ. Harvey Bloom. Illustrated.
Beginner's Books, The
Edited by W. WILLIAMSON, B.A,
Easy French Rhymes. By Henri Blouet. Illustrated. Fcap. "ivo. is.
Easy Stories from English History. By E. M. .Wilmot-Buxton, Author of ' Makers of Europe.' Cr.Zvo. is.
Easy Exercises in Arithmetic. Arranged
byW.S. Beard. Second Edition. Ecap.Zvo.
Without Answers, 15. With Answers, i.r. -id. East Dictation and Spelling. By W.
Williamson, B.A. Fifth Edition. Fcap.
Zvo. IS.
Business, Books on
Cr. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
A series of volumes dealing with all the most important aspects of commercial and financial activity. The volumes are intended to treat separately all the considerable industries and forms of business, and to explain accurately and clearly what they do and how they do it. Some are Illustrated. The first volumes are —
Ports and Docks. By Douglas Owen.
Railways. By E. R. McDermott.
The Stock Exchange. By Chas. Duguid.
Second Edition. The Business of Insurance. By A. J.
Wilson. The Electrical Industry : Lighting,
Traction, and Power. By A. G. Whyte,
B.Sc. The Shipbuilding Industry: Its History,
.Science, Practice, and Finance. By David
Pollock, M.I.N. A. The Money Market. By F. Straker. The Business Side of Agriculture. By
A. G. L. Rogers, M.A. Law in Business. By H. A. Wilson. The Brewing Industry. By Julian L.
Baker, F.I.C.F.C.S.
The Automobile Industry. By G. de H. Stone.
Mining and Mining Investments. By 'A. Moil.'
The Business of Advertising. By Clarence G. Moran, Barrister-at-Law. Illustrated.
Trade Unions. By G. Drage.
Civil Engineering. By T. Claxton Fidler, M.Inst. C.E. Illustrated.
The Iron Trade. By J. Stephen Jeans. Illus- trated.
Monopolies, Trusts, and Kartells. By F. W. Hirst.
The Cotton Industry and Trade. By Prof. S. J. Chapman, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce in the University of Man- chester. Illustrated.
General Literature
21
Byzantine Texts
Edited by J. B. BURY, M.A., Litt.D A series of texts of Byzantine Historians, edited by English and foreign scholars Zachariah of Mitylene. Translated by F. J. Hamilton, D.D., and E. W. Brooks. Demy %vo. 12s. dd. net.
EvAGRius. Edited by L^on Parmentier and M. Bidez. Demy Zvo. los. i>d. net.
The History of Psellus. Edited by C.
Sathas. DemyZvo. i^s. net. EcTHESis Chronica. Edited by Professor
Lambros. Demy ?vo. ts. 6d. net. The Chronicle of Morea. Edited by John
Schmitt. DemyZvo. i^s. net.
Churclinian's Bible, The
General Editor, J. H. BURN, B.D., F.R.S.E.
A series of Expositions on the Books of the Bible, which will be of service to the general reader in the practical and devotional study of the Sacred Text.
Each Book is provided with a full and clear Introductory Section, in which is stated what is known or conjectured respecting the date and occasion of the com- position of the Book, and any other particulars that may help to elucidate its meaning as a whole. The Exposition is divided into sections of a convenient length, corre- sponding as far as possible with the divisions of the Church Lectionary. The Translation of the Authorised Version is printed in full, such corrections as are deemed necessary being placed in footnotes.
The Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to THE Galatians. Edited by A. W. Robin- son, M.A. Second Edition. Fcap. Svo. ^s. 6d. net.
EccLEsiASTES. Edited by A. W. Streane, D.D. Fcap. %vo. xs. 6d. net.
The Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to THE Philippians. Edited by C. R. D. Biggs, D.D. Second Edition. Fcap Zvo. IS. 6d. net.
Churchman's
General Editor, J. H.
The Beginnings OF English Christianity.
ByW. E.Collins, M.A. With Map. Cr.Svo.
2S. 6d. Some New Testament Problems. By
Arthur Wright, M.A. Cr. 8vo. 6s. The Kingdom of Heaven Here and Here- after. By Canon Winterbotham, M.A. ,
B.Sc.,LL.B. Cr.Zvo. 3s. 6d. The Workmanship of the Prayer Book:
Its Literary and Liturgical Aspects. By J.
Dowden, D.D. Second Edition. Cr. Zzo.
3J. 6d.
The Epistle of St. James. Edited by
H. W. Fulford, M.A. Fca/>. Zvo. is. 6d.
net. Isaiah. Edited by W. E. Barnes, D. D. Two
Volutnes. Fcap. Zvo. 2s. net each. With
Map. The Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to
the Ephesi ans. Edited by G. H. Whitaker,
]\LA. Fcap. Zvo. is. td. net.
Library, The
BURN, B.D., F.R.S.E.
Evolution. By F. B. Jevons, M.A., Litt.D
Cr. Zvo. IS. 6d. The Old Testament andtheNewScholar-
SHip. By J. W. Peters, D.D. Cr. Zvo. 6s. The Churchman's Introduction to the
Old Testament, By A. M. Mackay, B. A.
Cr. Zvo. 3s. 6d. The Church of Christ. By E. T. Green,
^LA. Cr. Zvo. 6s. Comparative Theology. By J. A. Mac-
CuUoch. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Classical Translations
Edited by H. F. Fox, ^LA., Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford.
Crown Svo. A series of Translations from the Greek and Latin Classics, distinguished by literary excellence as w^ell as by scholarly accuracy.
Cicero— Select Orations (Pro Milone, Pro Mureno, Philippic 11., in Catilinam). Trans- lated by H. E. D. Blakiston, M.A. 5^. Cicero — De Natura Deorum. Translated by F. Brooks, M.A- 3^. 6d.
[Continued.
^schylus — Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Eu- menides. Translated by Lewis Campbell, LL.D. 5s.
Cicero — De Oratore I. Translated by E. N. P. Moor, M.A. 2S. 6d.
23
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Classical Translations — continued.
Cicero — De Officiis. Translated by G. B.
Gardiner, M.A. 2J. 6d. Horace — The Odes and Epodes. Translated
by A. D.Godley, M.A. ■2s._ Lucian — Six Dialogues (Nigrinus, Icaro-Me-
nippus, The Cock, The Ship, The Parasite,
The Lover of Falsehood) Translated by S.
T. Irwin, M.A. 3.?. 6d _
Sophocles — Electra and Ajax. Translated by E. D. A. Morshead, M.A. -zs. 6d.
Tacitus — Agricola and Germania. Trans- lated by R. B. Townshend. 2.?. 6d.
The Satires of Juvenal. Translated by S. G. Owen. 2S. 6d.
Commercial Series
Edited by H. de B. GIBBINS, Litt.D., M.A.
Crown Svo,
A series Intended to assist students and young men preparing for a commercial career, by supplying useful handbooks of a clear and practical character, dealing with those subjects which are absolutely essential in the business life.
Commercial Education in Theory and
Practice. By E. E. Whitfield, M.A. 5^-. An introduction to Methuen's Commercial
Series treating the question of Commercial
Education fully from both the point of view
of the teacher and of the parent. British Commerce and Colonies from
Elizabeth to Victoria. By H. de B.
Gibbins, Litt.D., M.A. Third Edition. 2s. Commercial Examination Papers. By H.
de B. Gibbins, Litt.D., M.A. is. 6d. The Economics of Commerce, By H. de
B. Gibbins, Litt.D., M.A. Second Edition.
js. 6d. A German Commercial Reader. By S. E.
Pjally. With Vocabulary, zs. A Commercial Geography op the British
Empire. By L. W. Lyde, M.A. Ei/tU
Edition. 2S. A Commercial Geography of Foreign
Nations. By F. C. Boon, B.A. 2s.
A Primer of Business. By S. Jackson,
M.A. Third Edition, is. 6d. Commercial Arithmetic. By F. G. Taylor,
M.A. Fourth Edition, is. 6d. French Commercial Correspondence. By
S. E. Bally. With Vocabulary. Third
Edition, zs. German Commercial Correspondence. By
S. E. Bally. With Vocabulary. Second
Edition, zs. 6d. A French Commercial Reader. By S. E.
Bally. With Vocabulary. Second Edition. 2s. Precis Writing and Office Correspond- ence. By E. E. Whitfield, M.A. Second
Edition, zs. A Guide to Professions and Business.
By H. Jones, is. 6d. The Principles of Book-keeping by Double
Entry. By J. E. B. M'Allen, M.A. zs. Commercial Lavi^. By W. Douglas Edwards.
Second Edition, zs.
Connoisseur's Library, The
Wi'de Royal %vo. 25^. net.
A sumptuous series of 20 books on art, written by experts for collectors, superbly illustrated in photogravure, collotype, and colour. The technical side of the art is duly treated. The first volumes are —
Mezzotints. By Cyril Davenport. With 40
Plates in Photogravure. Porcelain. By Edward Dillon. With ig
Plates in Colour, 20 in Collotype, and 5 in
Photogravure. Miniatures. By Dudley Heath. With 9
Plates in Colour, 15 in Collotype, and 15 in
Photogravure.
Ivories. By A. Maskell. With 80 Plates in
Collotype and Photogravure. English Furniture. By F. S. Robinson.
With 160 Plates in Collotype and one in
Photogravure. Second Edition. European Enamels. By H. Cunynghame,
C.B. With many Plates in Collotype and a
Frontispiece in Photogravure.
General Literature
Devotion, The Library of
With Introductions and (where necessary) Notes.
Small Pott Zvo, cloth, 25. ; leather, 2s. 6d. net.
These masterpieces of devotional hterature are furnished with such Introductions and Notes as may be necessary to explain the standpoint of the author and the obvious difficulties of the te.xt, without unnecessary intrusion between the author and the devout mind.
The Confessions of St. Augustine. Edited
by C. Bigg, D.D. Fi/ih Edition. The Christian Year. Edited by Walter
Lock, D. D. Third Edition. The Imitation of Christ. Edited by C.
Bigg, D.D. Fourth Edition. A Book of Devotions. Edited by J. W.
Stanbridge. B.D. Second Edition. Lyra InnocentiUM. Edited by Walter
Lock, D.D. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy
Life. Edited by C. Bigg, D.D. Second
Edition. The Temple. Edited by E. C. S. Gibson,
D.D. Second Edition. A Guide to Eternity. Edited by J. W.
Stanbridge, B.D. The Psalms of David. Edited by B. W.
Randolph, D.D. Lyra Afostolica. By Cardinal Newman
and others. Edited by Canon Scott Holland
and Canon H. C. Beeching. M.A. The Inner Way. By J. Tauler. Edited by
A. W. Hutton.M.A. The Thoughts of Pascal. Edited by C.
S. Jerram, M.A.
On the Love of God. By St. Francis de
Sales. Edited by W. J. Knox-Little, M.A. A Manual of Consolation from the
Saints and Fathers. Edited by J. H.
Burn, B.D. The So.n'G of Songs. Edited by B. Blaxland,
M.A The Devotions of St. Anselm. Edited by
C. C. J. Webb, M.A. Grace Abounding. ByJohnBunyan. Edited
by S. C. Freer. M.A. Bishop Wilson's Sacra Privata. Edited
by A. E. Burn, B.D. Lyra Sacra : A Book of Sacred Verse.
Edited by H. C. Beeching, M.A., Canon of
Westminster. A Day Book from the Saints and Fathers.
Edited by J. H. Burn, B.D, Heavenly Wisdo.m. A Selection from the
English Mystics. Editedby E. C. Gregorj*. Light, Life, and Love. A Selection from the
German Mystics. Edited by W. R. Inge,
M.A. An Introduction to The Devout Life.
By St. Francis de Sales. Translated and
Edited by T. Barns, M.A.
Methuen's Standard Library
/« Sixpenny Volumes.
The Standard Library is a new series of volumes containing the great classics of the vorld, and particularly the finest works of English literature. All the great masters will be represented, either in complete works or in selections. It is the ambition of the publishers to place the best books of the Anglo-Saxon race within the reach of every reader, so that the series may represent something of the diversity and splendour of our English tongue. The characteristics of The Standard Library are four : — i. Soundness of Text. 2. Cheapness. 3. Clearness of Tvi'E. 4. Simplicity. The books are well printed on good paper at a price which on the whole is without parallel in the history of publishing. Each volume con- tains from 100 to 250 pages, and is issued in paper covers. Crown 8vo, at Sixpence net, or in cloth gilt at One Shilling net. In a few cases long books are issued as Double Volumes or as Treble Volumes.
The following books are ready with the exception of those marked with a t, which denotes that the book is nearly ready : —
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The translation is by R. Graves.
The Novels of Jane Austen, In 5 volumes. Vol. I. — Sense and Sensibility.
Essays and Counsels and The New Atlantis, By Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam.
Religio Medici and Urn Burial. By
Sir Thomas Browne. The text has been
collated by A. R. Waller. The Pilgrim's Progress. By John Bunyan. Reflections on the French Revolution.
By Edmund Burke. The Analogy of Religion, Natural and
Revealed. By Joseph Butler, D.D.
\Conti}nt/-d
24
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
The St/vndard Library — continued. The Poems of Thomas Chatterton. In 2 volumes. Vol. I. — Miscellaneous Poems. fVol. II.— The Kowley Poems. fViTA Nuova. By Dante. Translated into
English by D G. Rossetti. Tom Jones. By Henry Fielding. Treble Vol. CuANFORD. By Mrs. Gaskell. The History of the Decline and Fall of THE Roman Empire. By Edward Gibbon. In 7 double volumes. Vol. V. is nearly ready.
The Text and Notes have been revised by J. B. Bury, Litt.D., but the Appendices of the more expensive edition are not given. tTuE Vicar of Wakefield. By Oliver
Goldsmith. The Poems andPlays of Oliver Goldsmith. The Works of Ben Jonson.
tVoL. I. — The Case is Altered. Every Man in His Humour. Every Man out of His Humour.
The text has been collated by H. C. Hart. The Poems of John Keats. Double volume. The Text has been collated by E. de Selincourt. On THE Imitation of Christ. By Thomas a Kempis.
The translation is by C. Bigg, DD., Canon of Christ Church. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy
Life. By William Law. The Plays of Christopher Marlowe. tVol. I.— Tamburlanethe Great. The Tra- gical History of Dr. Faustus. The Plays of Philip Massinger. tVol. I.— The Duke of Milan.
The Poems of John Milton. In 2 volumes.
Vol. I. — Paradise Lost. The Prose Works of John Milton.
Vol. I. — Eikonoklastes and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Select Works of Sir Thomas More.
Vol. I. — Utopia and Poems.
The Repup,lic of Plato. Translated by
Sydenham and Taylor. Double Volume.
The translation has been revised by
W. H. D. Rouse.
The Little Flowers of St. Francis.
Translated by W. Heywood. The Works of William Shakespeare. In 10 volumes. Vol. I. — The Tempest ; The Two Gentlemen of Verona ; The Merry Wives of Windsor ; Measure for Measure ; The Comedy of Errors. Vol. II. — Much Ado About Nothing; Love's Labour 's Lost ; A Midsummer Night's Dream ; The Merchant of Venice ; As You Like It. Vol. III. — The Taming of the .Shrew ; All 's Well that Ends Well; Twelfth Night ; The Winter's Tale. Vol. IV. — The Life and Death of King John ; The Tragedy of King Richard the Second ; The First Part of King Henry iv. ; The Second Part of King Henry iv. Vol. v.— The Life of King Henry v. ; The First Part of King Henry vi. ; The Second Part of King Henry vi. The Life of Nelson. By Robert Southey. The Natural History and Antiquities of Seluorne. By Gilbert White.
Half-Crown Library
2s. 6d. net. Strange Survivals and Superstitions. By S. Baring-Gould. Third Ediiipti.
Crown ^vo. The Life of John Ruskin. By W. G.
CoUingwood, M.A. With Portraits. Sixth
Edition. English Lyrics. By W. E. Henley, Second
Edition. The Golden Pomp. A Procession of English
Lyrics. Arranged by A. T. Quiller Couch.
Second Edition.
Chitral : The Story of a Minor Siege. By Sir G. S. Robertson, K.C.S.I. Third
Edition. Illustrated.
Illustrated Pocket Library of Plain and Coloured Books, The
Fcap %vo. 3^. dd. 7iet each volume. A series, in small form, of some of the famous illustrated books of fiction and general literature. These are faithfully reprinted from the first or best editions without introduction or notes. The Illustrations are chiefly in colour.
COLOURED BOOKS Old Coloured Books. By George Paston. I By Nimrnd. With iS Coloured Plates by With 16 Coloured Plates. Ecaf'.?jTO. is.net. Henry Aiken and T. J. R.awlins. Fourth
Tmf Life and Death of John Mvtton, Esq. I Edition. \Continued
Yorkshire Oddities and Strange Events. By .S. Baring-Gould. Fourth Edition.
English Villages. By P. H. Ditchfield, M.A., F.S.A Illustrated. Second Edition.
A Book of English Prose. By W. E. Henley and C. Whibley.
The Land of the Black Mountain. Being a Description of Montenegro. By R. Wyon and G. Prance. With 40 Illustra- tions.
General Literature
25
Illustrated Pocket Library of Plain and Coloured Books — continued.
The Life op a Sportsman. By Nimrod. With 35 Coloured Plates by Henry Aiken.
Handlev Cross. By R. S. Surtees. With •'^ Coloured Plates and 100 Woodcuts in the Text by John Leech. Second Kdiiion,
Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour. By R. S. Surtees. With 13 Coloured Plates and 90 Woodcuts in the Text by John Leech.
JoRROCKs' Jaunts and Jollities. By R. S. Surtees. With 15 Coloured Plates by H. Aiken. Second Edition.
This volume is reprinted from the ex- tremely rare and costly edition of 1843, which contains Aiken's very fine illustrations instead of the usual ones by Phiz.
Ask Mamma. By R. S. Surtees. With 13 Coloured Plates and 70 Woodcuts in the Text by John Leech.
The ,4nalvsis of the Hunting Field. By R. S. Surtees. With 7 Coloured Plates by Henry Aiken, and 43 Illustrations en Wood.
The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of THE Picturesque. By William Combe. With 30 Coloured Plates by T. Rowlandson.
The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of Consolation. By William Combe. With 24 Coloured Plates by T. Rowlandson.
The Third Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of a Wife. By William Combe. With 24 Coloured Plates by T. Rowlandson.
The History of Johnny Quae Genus : the Liule Foundling of the late Dr. Syntax. By the Author of ' The Three Tours.' With 24 Coloured Plates by Rowlandson.
The English Dance of Death, from the Designs of T. Rowlandson, with Metrical Illustrations by the Author of 'Doctor Syntax.' Two Volumes.
This book contains 76 Coloured Plates.
The Dance OF Life : A Poem. By the Author of 'Doctor Syntax.' Illustrated with 26 Coloured Engravings by T. Rowlandson.
Life in London: or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend, Corinthian Tom. By Pierce Egan. With 36 Coloured Plates by I. R. and G. Cruikshank. With numerous Designs on Wood.
Real Life in London : or, the Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and his Cousin, The Hon. Tom Dashall. By an
Amateur (Pierce Egan). With 31 Coloured Plates by Aiken and Rowlandson, etc. Two Volumes.
The Life of an Actor. By Pierce Egan. With 27 Coloured Plates by Theodore Lane, and several Designs on Wood.
The Vicar of Wakefield. By Oliver Gold- smith. With 24 Coloured Plates by T. Row- landson.
The Military Adventures of Johnn-y Newcome. By an Officer. With 15 Coloured Plates by T. Rowlandson.
The National Sports of Great Britain. With Descriptions and 51 Coloured Plates by Henry Aiken.
This book is completely different from the large folio edition of 'National Sports 'by the same artist, and none of the plates are similar.
The Adventures of a Post Captain. By A Naval Officer. With 24 Coloured Plates by Mr. Williams.
Gamoma : or, the Art of Preserving Game ; and an Improved Method of making Planta- tions and Covers, explained and illustrated by Lawrence Rawstorne, Esq. With 15 Coloured Plates by T. Rawlins.
An Academy for Grown Horsemen : Con- taining the completest Instructions for Walking, Trotting, Cantering, Galloping, Stumbling, and Tumbling. Illustrated with 27 Coloured Plates, and adorned with a Portrait of the Author. By Geoffrey Gambado, Esq.
Real Life in Ireland, or, the Day and Night Scenes of Brian Boru, Esq., and his Elegant Friend, Sir Shawn O'Dogherty. By a Real Paddy. With 19 Coloured Plates by Heath, Marks, etc.
The Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy. By Alfred Burton. With 16 Coloured Plates by T. Rowlandson.
The Old English Squire : A Poem. By John Careless, Esq. With 20 Coloured Plates after the style of T. Rowlandson.
*The English Spy. By Bernard Black- mantle. With 72 Coloured Plates by R. Cruikshank, and many Illustrations on wood. Two Volumes.
PLAIN BOOKS
The Grave : A Poem. By Robert Blair. Illustrated by 12 Etchings executed by Louis Schiavonetti from the original Inventions of William Blake. With an Engraved Title Page and a Portrait of Blake by T. Phillips, R. A. The illustrations are reproduced in photo- gravure.
Illustrations of the Book of Job. In- vented and engraved by William Blake.
These famous Illustrations — 21 in number — are reproduced in photogravure.
iEsop's Fables. With 380 Woodcuts by Thomas Bewick.
\Contivued.
26
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Illustrated Pocket Library of Plain and Windsor Castle. ByW. Harrison Ainsworth.
With 22 Plates and 87 Woodcuts in the Text
by George Crullcshank. The Tower of London. By W. Harrison
Ainsworth. With 40 Plates and 58 Woodcuts
in the Text by George Cruikshank. Frank Fairlegh. By F. E. Sraedley. With
30 Plates by George Cruikshank. Handy Andy. Bj' Samuel Lover. With 24
Illustrations by the Author.
Coloured Books — continued.
The Com pleat Angler. By Izaalc Walton and Charles Cotton. With 14 Plates and 77 Woodcuts in the Text.
This volume is reproduced from the beauti- ful edition of John Major of 1824.
The PiCKWtCK Papers. By Charles Dickens.
With the 43 Illustrations by Seymour and Phiz, the two Buss Plates, and the 32 Con- temporary Onwhyn Plates.
Junior Examination Series
Edited by A. M. M. Stedman, M.A. Fcap. 8vo. is.
This series is intended to lead up to the School Examination Series, and is intended for the use of teachers and students, to supply material for the former and practice for the latter. The papers are carefully graduated, cover the whole of the subject usually taught, and are intended to form part of the ordinary class work. They may be used viva voce or as a written examination.
Junior French Examination Papers. By
F. Jacob, M.A. Second Edition. Junior Latin Examination Papers. By C.
G. Botting, B.A. Fourth Edition. Junior English Examination Papers. By
W. Williamson, B.A. Junior Arithmetic Examination Papers.
By W. S. Beard. Second Edition. Junior Algebra Examination Papers. By
S. W. Finn, M.A.
Junior Greek Examination Papers. By T. C. Weatherhead, M.A.
Junior General Information Examina- tion Papers. By W. S. Beard.
A Key to the above. Crown Svo. 3^. 6d. net.
Junior Geography Examination Papers. By W. G. Baker, M.A.
Junior German Examination Papers. By A. Voegelin, M.A.
Junior School-Books
Edited by O. D. Inskip, LL.D., and W. Williamson, B.A.
A series of elementary books for pupils in lower forms, simply written by teachers of experience.
A Class-Book of Dictation Passages. By W. Williamson, B.A. Eleventh Edition. Cr. Zvo. IS. dd.
The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Edited by E. Wilton South, M.A. With Three Maps. Cr. Zvo. is. 6d.
The Gospel Accordingto St. Mark. Edited by A. E. Ruble, D.D. With Three Maps. Cr. Zvo. IS. 6d.
A Junior English Grammar. By W.William- son, B.A. With numerous passages for parsing and analysis, and a chapter on Essay Writing. Third Edition. Cr. &vo. zs.
A Junior Chemistry. By E. A. Tyler, B.A., F.C.S. With 78 Illustrations. Secotid Edi- tion. Cr. 8z'«. IS. (>d.
The Acts of the Apostles. Edited by A. Ec Ruble, D.D. Cr. ivo. zs.
A Junior French Grammar. By L. A. Sornet and M. J. Acatos. Cr. %vo. zs.
Elementary Experimental Science. Phy- sics by W. T. Clough, A.R.C.S. Chemistry by A. E. Dunstan, B.Sc. With 2 Plates and 154 Diagrams. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. zs. 6d.
A Junior Geometry. By Noel S. Lydon. With 276 Diagrams. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. zs.
A Junior Magnetism and Electricity. By W. T. Clough. Illustrated. Cr. Svo. zs. 6d.
Elementary Experimental Chemistry. By A. E. Dunstan, B.Sc. With 4 Plates and 109 Diagrams. Cr. 8vo. zs.
A Junior French Prose Composition. Bfy R. R. N. Baron, M.A. Cr. &vo. zs.
The Gosi'EL According to St. Luke. With an Introduction and Notes by William WiHiamson, B.A. With Three Maps. Cr. Zvo. zs.
General Literature
27
Leaders of Religion
Edited by H. C. BEECHING, M.A., Canon of Westminster. Wifk Portraits. Cr. b:\». 2J. net.
A series of short biographies of the most prominent leaders of religious life and thought of all ages and countries.
Cardinal Newman. By R. H. Hutton. John Wesley. By J. H. Overton, ]\I.A. JBisHOP WiLBERFORCE. By G. W. Daniell,
M.A. Cardinal Manning. By A. W. Hutton, M.A. Charles Simeon. By H. C. G. ISIoule, D. D. John Keble. By Walter Lock, D.D. Thomas Chalmers. By Mrs. Oliphant. Lan'celot Andkewes. By R. L. Ottley,
D. D. Second Edition. Augustine of Canterbury. By E. L.
Cutts, D.D.
William Laud. By W. H. Hutton, M.A.
Third Edition. John Knox. ByF. MacCunn. Second Edition. John Howe. By R. F. Horton, D.D. Bishop Ken. By F. A. Clarke, ALA. George Fox, the Quaker. By T. Hodgkin,
D.C.L. Third Edition. John Donne. By Augustus Jessopp, D.D. Thomas Cranmer. By A. J. Mason, D.D. Bishop Latimer. By R. ^L Carlyle and A.
J. Carlyle, M.A. Bishop Butler. By W. A. Spooner, M.A.
Little Blue Books, The
General Editor, E. V. LUCAS.
Ilbisirated, Demy i6mo. 2s. 6d.
A series of books for children. The aim of the editor is to get entertaining or exciting stories about normal children, the moral of which is implied rather than expressed.
1. The Castaways of Meadowbank. By
Thomas Cobb.
2. The Beechnut Book. By Jacob Abbott.
Edited by E. V. Lucas.
3. The Air Gun. By T. Hilbert.
4. A School Year. By Netta Syrett.
5. The Peeles at the Capital. By Roger
Ashton.
6. The Treasure of Princegate Priory.
By T. Cobb.
7. Mrs. Barberry's General Shop. By
Roger Ashton.
8. A Book of Bad Children. By W. T.
Webb.
9. The Lost Ball. By Thomas Cobb.
Little Books on Art
Wt't/i vtany Illustrations. Demy l6mo. 2s. 6d. net.
A series of monographs in miniature, containing the complete outline of the subject under treatment and rejecting minute details. These books are produced with the greatest care. Each volume consists of about 200 pages, and contains from 30 to 40 illuitrations, including a frontispiece in photogravure.
Holbein. Mrs. G. Fortescue. BuRNE-JoNES. Fortun^e de Lisle. Second
Edition. Rembrandt. Mrs. E. A. Sharp CoROT. Alice Pollard and Ethel Birnstingl. Raphael. A. R. Dryliurst. Millet. Netta Peacock.
Greek Art. H. B. Walters. Second Edition.
Bookplates. E. Almack.
Reynolds. J. Sime. Second Edition.
Romney. Georee Paston.
Watts. R. E. D. Sketchley.
Leighton. Alice Corkran.
Velasquez. Wilfrid Wilberforcc and A. R
Gilbert. Greuze and Boucher. Eliza F. Pollard. Vakdvck. >L G. Smallwood. Turner. Frances Tyrell-Gill. Durer. Jessie Allen. Hoppner. H. p. K. Skipton.
Illuminated MSS. J. V.''. Bradley. Christ in Art. Mrs. Henry Jenner. Jewellery. Cyril Davenport. Claude. Edward Dillon. The Arts of Japan. Edward Dillon.
28
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Little Galleries, The
Detny i6mo. 2s. 6d. net.
A series of little books containing examples of the best work of the great painters. Each volume contains 20 plates in photogravure, together with a short outline of the life and work of the master to whom the book is devoted.
A Little Gallery of Reynolds. A Little Gallery of Romnev. A Little Gallery of Hoppner.
A Little Gallery of Millais.
A Little Gallery of English Pohts.
Little Guides, Tlie
Small Pott Zvo, cloth, 2s. 6d. net.; leather, 35'. (id. net.
Oxford and its Colleges. By J. Wells,
M.A. Illustrated by E. H. New. Seventh
Edition. Cambridge and its Colleges. By A.
Hamilton Thompson. Illustrated by E. H.
New. Second Edition. The Malvern Country. By B. C. A.
Windle, D.Sc, F.R.S. Illustrated by E.
H. New. Shakespeare's Country. By B. C. A.
Windle, D.Sc, F.R.S. Illustrated by E.
H. New. Second Edition. Sussex. By F. G. Brabant, M.A. Illustrated
by E. H. New. Second Edition. Westminster Abbey. By G. E. Troutbeck.
Illustrated by F. D. Bedford. Norfolk. By W. A. Dutt. Illustrated by
B. C. Boulter. Cornwall. By A. L. Salmon. Illustrated
by B. C. Boulter. Brittany. By S. Baring-Gould. Illustrated
by J. Wylie. Hertfordshire. By H. W. Tompkins,
F.R.H.S. Illustrated by E. H. New. The English Lakes. By F. G. Brabant,
M.A. Illustrated by E. H. New. Kent. By G. Clinch. Illustrated by F. D.
Bedford.
Illustrated by B. Illus-
Rome By C. G. Ellaby.
C. Boulter. The Isle of Wight. By G. Clinch.
trated by F. D. Bedford. Surrey. By F. A. H. Lambert. Illustrated
by E. H. New. Buckinghamshire. By E. S. Roscoe. Illus- trated by F. D. Bedford. Suffolk. ByW. A. Dutt. Illustrated by J.
Wylie. Derbyshire. By J. C. Cox, LL.D., F.S.A.
Illustrated by J. C. Wall. TheNorth RiDiNGOF Yorkshire. By J. E.
Morris. , Illustrated by R. J. S. Bertram. Hampshire. By J. C. Cox. Illustrated by
M. E. Purser, Sicily. By F. H. Jackson. With many
Illustrations by the Author. Dorset. By Frank R. Heath. Illustrated. Cheshire. By W. M. Gallichan. Illustrated
by Elizabeth Hartley. Northamptonshire. By Wakeling Dry.
Illustrated. The East Riding of Yorkshire. By J. E.
Morris. Illustrated. Oxfordshire. By F. G. Brabant. Illus- trated by E. H. New. St. Paul's Cathedral. By George Clinch.
Illustrated by Beatrice Alcock.
Little Library, The
With Introductions, Notes, and Photogravure Frontispieces. Small Pott Svo. Each Volume, cloth, is. 6d. net ; leather, 2s. 6d. net.
A .series of small books under the above title, containing some of the famous works in English and other literatures, in the domains of fiction, poetry, and belles lettres. The series also contains volumes of selections in prose and verse. The books are edited with the most scholarly care. Each one contains an introduction which gives (i ) a short biography of the author ; (2) a critical estimate of the book. Where they are necessary, short notes are added at the foot of the page.
Each volume has a photogravure frontispiece, and the books are produced with great care.
Anon. ENGLISH LYRICS, A LITTLE BOOK OF.
Austen (Jane). PRIDE AND PREJU- DICE. Edited by E. V. Lucas. Two Volumes.
NORTHANGER ABBEY. Edited by E. V.
Lucas. Bacon (Francis). THE ESSAYS OF
LORD BACON. Edited by Edward
Wright.
General Literature
29
Barham (R. H.). THE INGOLDSBY
LEGENDS. Edited by J. B. Atlay.
Two Voluvies. Barnett (Mrs. P. A.). A LITTLE BOOK
OF ENGLISH PROSE. Beckford (William). THE HISTORY
OF THE CALIPH VATHEK. Edited
by E. Denison Ross. Blake (William). SELECTIONS FROM
WILLIAM BLAKE. Edited by M.
Perugini. Borrow (George). LAVENGRO. Edited
by F. HiNDES Groo.me. Two Volumes. THE ROMANY RYE. Edited by John
Sam psox. Browning (Robert). SELECTIONS
FROM THE EARLY POEMS OF
ROBERT BROWNING. Edited by W.
Hall Griffi.n', M.A. Canning (George). SELECTIONS FROM
THE ANTI-JACOBIN : with (jeorge
Canning's additional Poems. Edited by
Lloyd Sanders. Cowley (Abraham). THE ESSAYS OF
ABRAHAM COWLEY. Edited by H. C.
MiNCHIN.
Crabbe (George). SELECTIONS FROM
GEORGE CRABBE. Edited by A. C.
Deane. Craik (Mrs.). JOHN HALIFAX,
GENTLEMAN. Edited by Anne
Matheson. Two Volumes. Crashaw (Richard). THE ENGLISH
POEMS OF RICHARD CRASHAW.
Edited by Edward Hutton. Dante (Alighieri). THE INFERNO OF
DANTE. Translated by H. F. Gary.
Edited by Paget Toyneee, M.A., D.Litt. THE PURGATORIO OF DANTE. Trans-
lated by H. F. Cary. Edited by Paget
Toyneee, M.A., D.Litt. THE PARADISO OF DANTE. Trans- lated by H. F. Carv. Edited by Paget
Toyneee, M.A., D.Litt. Darley (George). SELECTIONS FROM
THE POEMS OF GEORGE DARLEY.
Edited by R. A. Streatfeild. Deane (A. C). A LITTLE BOOK OF
LIGHT VERSE. Dickens (Charles). CHRISTMAS BOOKS.
Two Volumes. Ferrier (Susan). MARRIAGE. Edited
by A. Goodrich - Freer and Lord
Iddesleigh. Two Volumes. THE INHERITANCE. Two Volumes. Qaskell(Mrs.). CRANFORD. Edited by
E. V. Lucas. Second Edition. Hawthorne (Nathaniel). THE SCARLET
LETTER. Edited by Percy Dearmer. Henderson (T. P.). A LITTLE BOOK
OF SCOTTISH VERSE,
Keats (John). POEMS. With an Intro- duction by L. Bin-yon, and Notes by J.
Masefield. Kinglake (A. W.). EOTHEN. With an
Introduction and Notes. Second Edition. Lamb (Charles). ELIA, AND THE
LAST ESS.-VYS OF ELIA. Edited by
E. V. Lucas. Locker (F.). LONDON LYRICS. Edited
by A. D. Godley, M.A. A reprint of the
First Edition. Longfellow (H. W.). SELECTIONS
FROM LONGFELLOW. Edited by
L. M. Faithfull. Marvell (Andrew). THE POEMS OF
ANDREW MARVELL. Edited by E.
Wright. Milton (John). THE MINOR POEMS
OF JOHN MILTON. Edited by H. C.
Beeching, M.A., Canon of Westminster. Moir(D. M.). MANSIEWAUCH. Edited
by T. F. Henderson. Nichols (J. B. B.). A LITTLE BOOK OF
ENGLISH SONNETS. Rochefoucauld (La). THE MAXIMS OF
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD. Translated
by Dean Stanhope. Edited by G. H.
POWELl-
Smith (Horace and James). REJECTED
ADDRESSES. Edited by A. D. Godley,
M.A. Sterne (Laurence). A SENTIMENTAL
JOURNEY. Edited by H. W. Paul. Tennyson (Alfred, Lord). THE EARLY
POEMS OF ALFRED, LORD TENNY-
SON. Edited by J. Churton Collins,
M.A. IN MEMORIAM. Edited by H. C.
Beeching, M.A. THE PRINCESS. Edited by Elizabeth
Wordsworth. MAUD. Edited by Elizabeth Wordsworth. Thackeray(W. M.). VANITY FAIR.
Edited by S. Gwynn. Three Volumes. P E N D E N N I S. Edited by S. Gwynn.
Three Volumes. ESMOND. Edited by S. Gwynn. CHRISTMAS BOOKS. EditedbvS.GwTNN. Vaughan (Henry). THE POEMS OF
HENRY VAUGHAN. Edited by Edward
Hutton. Walton (Izaak). THE COMPLEAT
ANGLER. Edited by J. Buchan. Waterhouse (Mrs. Alfred). A LITTLE
BOOK OF LIFE AND DEATH. Edited
by. Ki7iih Edition. Wordsworth (W.). SELECTIONS FROM
WORDSWORTH. Edited by Nowell
C. Smith. Wordsworth (W.) and Coleridge (S. T.).
LYRICAL BALLADS. Edited b>- George
Sampson
30
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Miniature Library- Reprints in miniature of a few interesting books which have qualities of humanity, devotion, or htei ary genius.
EuPHRANOR : A Dialogue on Youth. By Edward FitzGerald. Krom the edition pub- hshed by W. Pickering in 1851. Veiny 22mo. Leather, is. net.
PoLONius : or Wise Saws and Modern In- stances. _ By Edward FitzGerald. From the edition published by W, Pickering in 1852. Demy 2^1110. Leather, 2s. net.
The RubAiyAt of Omar KhavvAm. By Edward FitzGerald. From the ist edition of 1859, Third Edition. Leather, \s. net.
The Life of Edward, Lord Herbert op Cherbury. Written by himself. From the edition printed at Strawberry Hill in the year 1764. Medium ^^uto. Leather, zs. net.
The Visions of Dom Francisco Quevedo ViLLEGA'-., Knight of the Order of St. James. Made English by R. L. From the edition rinted for H. Herringman, 166S. LeatJie . zs. net.
Poems. I'v Dora Green well. From the edi. tion of ] C48. Leather, zs. net.
Oxford Biographies
Fcap. Svo. Each volume, cloth, 2s. Sd. net ; leather, 31. 6d. net.
These books are written by scholars of repute, who combine knowledge and literary skill with the power of popular presentation. They are illustrated from authentic material.
Robert Burns. By T. F. Henderson.
With 12 Illustrations. Chatham. By A. S. M'Dowall. With 12
Illustrations. St. Francis of Assisi. By Anna M. Stod-
dart. With 16 Illustrations. Canning. _ By W. Alison Phillips. With 12
Illustrations. Beaconsfield. By Walter Sichel. With 12
Illustrations. Goethe. By H. G. Atkins. With 12 Illus- trations. Fenelon. By Viscount St. Cyres. With
12 Illustrations.
Dante Alighieri. By Paget Toynbee, M.A.,
D.Litt. With 12 Illustrations. Second^
Edition, Savonarola. By E. L. S. Horsburgh, M.A.
With 12 Illustrations. Second Edition. John Howard. By E. C. S. Gibson, D.D.,
Bishop of Gloucester. With 12 Illustrations. Tennyson. By A. C. Benson, M.A. With
9 Illustrations. Walter Raleigh. By I. A. Taylor. With
12 Illustrations. Erasmus. By E. F. H. Capey. With 12
Illustrations. The Young Pretender. By C. S. Terry.
With 12 Illustrations.
School Examination Series
Edited by A. M. M. STEDMAN, M.A. Cr. 8vo. zs. 6d.
French Examination Papers. By A. M. M. Stedman, M.A. Fourteenth Edition. A Key, issued to Tutors and Private Students only to be had on application to the Publishers. Fifth Edition. Croivii &7'0. 6s. net. Latin Examination Papers. By A. M. M. Stedman, M.A. Thirteenth Edition. Key I Fourth Edition) issued as above. f>s. net. Grbbk Examination Papers. By A. M. M. Stedman, M.A. Eighth Edition.
Key {Third Edition) issued as above. 6s. net. German Bxamination Papers. By R. J. MoricTi. Sixth Edition.
Key {Third Edition) issued as above. 6s. net.
History and Geography Examination Papers. By C. H. Spence, M.A. Second Edition.
Physics Examination Papers. By R. E. Steel, M.A., F.C.S.
General Knowledge Examination Papers. By A. M. M. Stedman, M.A. Fifth Edition.
Key {Third Edition) issued as above. •js. net.
Examination Papers in English History. By J. Tait Plo'wden-Wardlaw, B.A.
General Literature
31
Science, Textbooks of
Edited by G. F. GOODCHILD, B.A., B.Sc, and G. R. MILLS, M.A.
Practical Mechanics. By Sidney H. Wells. I Technical Arithmetic and Geometry.
Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 3^. bd. Practical Physics. By H. Stroud, D.Sc,
M.A. Cr. Sz'o. 3^. 6d. Practical Chemistry. Part l By W.
French, M.A. Cr. Svo. Fourth Edition.
is.td. Part 11. By W. French, M.A. , and
T. H. Boardman, M.A. Cr. Zvo. is. dd.
Minis, M.I.M.E.
By C. E. Jackson,
By Cr.
By C.
I 35. (>d.
I Examples in Physics.
B.A. Cr. Svo. 2J. 6d. *Ele.mentary Orga.nic Chemistry.
A. T£. Dunstan, B.Sc. Illustrated.
Social Questions of To-day
Edited by H. de B. GIBBINS, Litt.D., M.A. Crown Svo. zs. 6d.
A series of volumes upon those topics of social, economic, and industrial interest that are foremost in the public mind. Trade Unionism— New and Old. By G.
Howell. Third Edition. The Commerce of Nations. By C. F.
Bastable, M.A. Fourth Edition. The Alien Invasion. By W. H. Wilkins.B. A. The Rural Exodus. By P. Anderson
Graham. Land Nationalization. By Harold Cox,
B.A. Second Edition. A Shorter Working Day, By H. de B.
Gibbins and R. A. Hadfield. , ^^ „ ^,
Back to the Land. An Inquiry into Rural Railway Nationalization. By Clement
Depopulation. By H. E. Moore. Edwards. ^ ^
Trusts, Pools, and Corners. By J. Stephen University and Social Settlements. By
jgajjs_ 1 W. Reason, M.A.
Teclinology, Textbooks of
Edited byG. F. GOODCHILD, B.A., B.Sc.,andG. R. MILLS, M.A.
Fully Illustrated.
How to Make a Dress. By J. A. E. Wood. An Introduction to the Study of Tex-
The Factory System. By R. W. Cooke I Taylor. I Women's Work. By Lady Dilke, Miss
BuUey, and Miss Whitley. ' Socialism and Modern Thought. By M. j Kauffmann. 1 The Problem of the Unemployed. By J.
A. Hobson, M.A. Life in West London By Arthur Sherwell, M.A. Third Edition.
Third Edition. Cr.Svo. is. 6d. Carpentry and Joinery. By F. C. Webber.
Fi/t/i Edition. Cr. Svo. 3s. 6d. Mili.ineky, Theoretical and Practical.
By Clare Hill. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo.
tile Design. By Aldred F. Barker. Demy
ivo, ys. 6d. Builders' Quantities. By H. C. Grubb.
Cr. 8z>o. 4S. 6d. Rfepoussfi Metal Work. By A. C. Horth.
Cr. Sz'O. 2S. 6d.
Theology, Handbooks of
Edited by R. L. OTTLEY, D.D., Professor of Pastoral Theology at O.xford, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. The series is intended, in part, to furnish the clergy and teachers or students of Theology with trustworthy Textbooks, adequately representing the present position of the questions dealt with ; in part, to make accessible to the reading public an accurate and concise statement of facts and principles in all questions bearing on Theology and Religion.
The XXXIX. Articles of the Church of England. Edited by E. C. S. Gibson, D.D. Fifth and Cheaper Edition in one Volume. Demy Zvo. i2i. td.
An Introduction to the History of Religion. By F. B. Jevons. M.A., Litt.D. Third Edition. Demy Zvo. jos.6d.
The Doctrine of the Incarnation. By R. L. Ottley, D.D. Seconi and Cheaper Edition. Demy Zvo. i2j. i>d.
An Introduction to the History of the
Creeds. By A. E. Burn, .D.D Demy
Zvo. 10s. 6d. The Philosophy of Religion in England
AND America. By Alfred Caldecott, D.D.
Demy Zvo- los. 6d. A History of Early Christian Doctrine.
By J. F. Bethune Baker, M.A. Demy Zvo.
lof. 6(/.
32
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
"Westminster Commentaries, The
General Editor, WALTER LOCK, D.D., Warden of Keble College, Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis in the University of Oxford.
The object of each commentary is primarily exegetical, to interpret the author's meaning to the present generation. The editors will not deal, except very subor- dinately, with questions of textual criticism or philology ; but, taking the English text in the Revised Version as their basis, they will try to combine a hearty accept- ance of critical principles with loyalty to the Catholic Faith.
The Book of Genesis. Edited with Intro- duction and Notes by S. R. Driver, D. D. Fifth Edition Demy 8vo. los. 6d.
The Book of Jop.. Edited by E. C. S. Gibson, D.D. Second Edition. DemyZvo. 6s.
The Acts of the Apostles. Edited by R. B. Rackham, M.A. Demy Zvo. Third and Cheaper Edition. \os. 6d.
The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians. Edited by H, L. Goudge, M.A. Demy Zvo. 6i.
The Epistle of St. James. Edited with In- troduction and Notes by R. J. Knowling, M.A. Demy'&vo. bs.
Part II. — Fiction
Albanesi (E. JMaria). SUSANNAH AND
ONE OTHER. Fourth Edition. Cr.
Zvo. 6s. THE BLUNDER OF AN INNOCENT.
Second Edition. Cr, ?,c'0. 6s. CAPRICIOUS CAROLINE. Second Edi- tion. Cr. Svo. 6s. LOVE AND LOUISA. Second Edition.
Cr. Svo. 6s. PETER, A PARASITE. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE BROWN EYES OF MARY. Third
Edition. Cr. %vo. 6s. Anstey (P.). Author of 'Vice Versa.' A
BAYARD FROM BENGAL. Illustrated
by Bernard Partridge. Third Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 3^. 6d. Bacheller (Irvine), Authorof 'EbenHoIden.'
DARREL OF THE BLESSED ISLES.
Third Edition. Cr. Sffl. 6.r. Ba^ot (Richard). A ROMAN MYSTERY.
Third Edition. Cr. %vo. 6s. THE PASSPORT. Fourth Ed. Cr.ivo.6s. Baring. Gould (S.). ARMINELL. Fi/th
Edition. Cr. i,To. 6s. URITH. Fifth Edition. Cr.Svo. IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA.
Edition. Cr. Sz>o. 6s. CHEAP JACK ZITA. Fourth Edition.
Cr. Svo. 6s. MARGERY OF QUETHER. Third
Edition. Cr. Sr'O. 6s. THE QUEEN OF LOVE. Fi/th Edition.
Cr. 8z>o. 6s. JACQUETTA. Third Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s. KIT! Y ALONE. Fifth Edition. Cr.Zz'o. 6s. N0£MI. Illustrated. Fourth Edition. Cr.
'&V0. 6s. THE BROOM-SQUIRE. Illustrated.
Fifth Edition. Cr. S,vo. 6s,
6s. Seventh
DARTMOOR IDYLLS. Cr. Bvo. 6s. THE PENNYCOMEQUICKS. Third
Edition. Cr. Svo. 6s. GUAVAS THE TINNER. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. BLADYS. Illustrated. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. PABO THE PRIEST. Cr. Svo. 6s. WINEFRED. Illustrated. Second Edition.
Cr. Svo. 6s. ROYAL GEORGIE. Illustrated. Cr. Svo. 6s. MISS QUILLET. Illustrated. Cr. Svo. 6s. CHRIS OF ALL SORTS. Cr. Svo. 6s. IN DEWISLAND. Second Edition. Cr.
Svo. 6s. LITTLE TU'PENNY. A New Edition. 6d. See also Strand Novels and Books for
Boys and Girls. Barlow (Jane). THE LAND OF THE
SHAMROCK. Cr. Svo. 6s. See also
Strand Novels. Barr (Robert). IN THE MIDST OF
ALARMS. Third Edition. Cr. Svo. 6s. THE MUTABLE MANY. Third Edition.
THE COUNTESS TEKLA. Third Edition.
Cr. Svo. 6s. THE LADY ELECTRA. Second Edition.
Cr. Svo. 6s. THE TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOAT.
Illustrated. Third Edition. Cr. Svo. 6s. See also Strand Novels and S. Crane. Begbie (Harold). THE ADVENTURES
OF SIR JOHN SPARROW. Cr. Svo. 6s. Belloc(Hilaire). EMMANUFX BURDEN,
MERCHANT. With 36 Illustrations by
G. K. Chesterton. Second Edition.
Cr. Svo. 6s.
Fiction
Benson (E. F.) DODO. Fourth Edition.
Cr. ivo. ts. See aUso Strand Novels. Benson (Margaret). SUBJECT TO
VANITY. Cr. Zvo. 3^- 6'^- Bourne (Harold C. ). See V. Langbndge. Burton (J. Bloundelle), THE YEAR
ONE: A Page of the French Revolution.
Illustrated. Cr. ivo. i>s. THE FATE OF VALSEC. Cr. Zvo. 6^. A BRANDED NAME. Cr. Zvo. ds.
See also Strand Novels. Capes (Bernard), Author of 'The Lake of
Wine.' THE EXTRAORDINARY CON-
FESSIONSOFDIANAPLEASE. Third
Edition. Cr. ivo. ts. A JAY OF IT.\LY. Fourth Ed. Cr. Z-oo. ts. LOAVES AND FISHES. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. ds. „^-,-„r
Chesney (Weatherby). THE TRAGEDY OF THE GREAT EMERALD. Cr.
the' MYSTERY OF A BUNGALOW. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. See also Strand Novels.
Clifford (Hugh). A FREE LANCE OF TO-DAY. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Clifford (Mrs. W. K.). See Strand Novels and Books for Boys and Girls.
Cobb (Thomas). A CHANGE OF FACE. Cr. Zvo. 6s. _ „„,^
Corelli (Marie). A ROMANCE OF TWO WORLDS. Twcnty-Scz'cnth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
VENDETTA. Twenty-Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
THELMA. Thirty-Fourth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. ^ I
ARDATH : THE STORY OF A DEAD SELF. Sixteenth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
THE SOUL OF LILITH. Thirteenth Edi- tion. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
WORMWOOD. Fourteenth Ed. Cr.Zvo. ds.
BARABBAS: A DREAM OF THE WORLD'S TRAGEDY. Forty-first Edi- tion. Cr. Zvo. 6s. , ^ ,
THE SORROWS OF SATAN. Fifty-first Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
THE MASTER CHRISTIAN. 167/A Thousand. Cr. Zvo. 6s. ^^,,^„ ,,.
TEMPORAL POWER: A STUDY IN SUPREMACY. 150M Thousand. Cr.
GOEV'S GOOD MAN : A SIMPLE LOVE STORY, izith TkousaTtd. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
THE MIGHTY ATOM. A New Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
BOY. A New Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
JANE. A New Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s.
Crockett (S. R.), Author of ' The Raiders etc. LOCHINVAR. Illustrated. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
THE STANDARD BEARER. Cr. Zvo. ts.
Croker(B. M.). THE OLD CANTON- MENT. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
JOHXSa A. Second Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s.
33
Third Edition
Third Sixth
THE HAPPY VALLEY.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. A NINE DAYS' WONDER.
Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. PEGGY OF THE BARTONS.
Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. ANGEL. Fourth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. A STATE SECRET. Third Edition. Cr.
Dawson''(Francis W.). THE SCAR.
Second Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s. Dawson (A. J). DANIEL WHYTL. Cr. Zvo. y. 6d. , , ^, , ,
Doyle (A. Coaan), Author of Sherlock Holmes,' 'The White Company, etc. ROUND THE RED LAMP. Ninth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. Duncan (Sara Jeannette) (Mrs. E^•erard Cotes). THOSE DEL GHTFLL AMERICANS. Illustrated. 1 hird Edition. Cr Zvo 6s. See also Strand Novels. Findiater(J. H.). THE GREEN GRAVES OF BALGOWRIE. Fijth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
See also Strand Novels. Findlater (Mary). A NARROW WA\ .
Third Edition. Cr.Zvo.. 6s. THE ROSE OF JOY. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
See also Strand Novels. Fitzpatrick (K.) THE WEANS AT ROWALLAN. Illustrated. Second Edi- tion. Cr.Zvo. 6s. ,.„T,T- T^i-NT Fitzstephen (Gerald). MORE KIN
THAN KIND. Cr. Zvo. 6s. Fletcher (J. S.). LUCIAN THE
DREAMER. Cr. Zvo. 6s. . ^^ ^ , Fraser(Mrs. Hugh), .'^.uthorof The Stolen Emoeror^ THE SLAKING OF THE SWORD. Cr. c,7'o. 6s. IN THE SH.\DOW OF THE LORD.
Second Edition. Crown Zvo. 6s.
Fuller-Maitland (Mrs.), Author of The
Day Bookof BethiaHardacre. BLANCHE
ESME.\D. Second Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s.
Gerard (Dorothea), Author of ' La'Jy Bahy.
THE CONQUEST OF LONDON.
Second Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s.
HOLY MATRIMONY. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. MA.DE OF MONEY. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE BRIDGE OF LIFE. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE IMPROBABLE IDYL. Third
Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
See also Strand Novels. ,, ^ „ „ xi c- Gerard (Emily). THE HERONS
TOWER. Cr.Zvo. 6s. ,
Qissing (George), Author of g^^^^A '^
the Year of luoilec, etc. THE lU\\x>
TR\VKLLE"R. ^^f""'''^'^- Cr.Zvo. 6s.
THE CROWN OF LIFE. Cr. Zvo. 6s
Gleig (Charles). BUNTER'S CRUISE.
Illustrated. Cr. Z7.'0 3^- 6^- „, f,
Harraden (Beatrice). IN VARYING
MOODS. Fourteenth Edition. Cr.Zvo. b..
'A
yivm%9>. Methukn's Catalogue
lUllllim. I r '.■/III,, f.t. ntl.h/i '■•.H'AKf'it/l>. <:r.>/i>n, f.t.
'inn, 'isiAiui, <)\( iitK tiuinn,. cr.
i'liiii, fit.
lUrhnriMm (AKtimu 0.). I'AT/KNCK
lill.MI. ( r tw,„, /•,♦, nicliMti* (Ui>U*^ri), I MIC J'KOCMK'r OK
»W(,I' K KU',/ >iO"A;/»f-, ,',««»// /Ultliin.
I'r, Hi'i), fit, 'fOMlilllW or** C.ONViClKNC.K. :,tcoH,l
I'. (111,111. f I. Wmi. '... II'(,IX I'l/ll, I'./IIIkii (f.V.iirt. f,%. Mill, WOMAf-l wrill 'IMK, KAN, Sixth
Ih/l/lmi. I r. Willi, fn. IIVn.WAVfl, i I. Hpii. (,». i UK, <IAI/|)|(,M OK AI,I,AII. IhnlrtHlh
li.lllioit I I I!/',., f.«. ■Mill, lll,A( K M'ArjIJi.l,. Cr.Wvfl. f,i. IIoMhoi (.ImIiii <MIv»i), Aiillmr of ' Uolini
oiHMH..,' run. Mi,l<i()t)H wooiNi;.
*'<, ll«v. I.,.
Il*)|ii> (Aiilliiiti.v). 'IIIK (iOI) IN 'nil'.
TAK Inilli hilitinn. (V. lire. r,i. A CIIANdlii OK A IK, .V/.iM luiilwi,.
t '» . ii*v. r.j. A MAN UK MAKK. /'('//A fufi/ioH. <>.
II»V, fil,
IMir, (IIUONICMCl OK COUNT AN inNIO. Am M A. /(//.'»(. (V, Mr,-, f.v.
nil.'ll.'lO. lllllMLOrll !■>' II. K. Mil I AU.
."h I th luilti,>H. ('•■, ll«'.>. fl,«. MIMtiN liAl.n:, IlliixiiiitPil. .s>rvNi'AA'.i'(V/','N.
t '», IW',-, Ov,
'niK.KiNirs ^^IKK^1K. v-i-wr/A K,iiti,».
«JUIN,VNrU'„ hVn'th KMtum. (V. 8t¥. (->.
TUK l>OI I Y IMAI.OOUKS. < 'r. Hi-,.. (.,«.
A NKKV AN r OK IIIK »'U1M.U\ lllux- li,>|i«>l .^.'t»»('4 A.«'< (■(.'<». <>, (ins 0*-,
ll«>|>» ^di'MllMnO, A\ithoi of ' A r<\i<linnl nnit l>U lonx. 1..IU,',' olv\, Plo, line l.Al>Y OK I \ ru Ay.vH.^ A'.<', (''.tsts". ^«.
lloiiali (Itni^iRouV. IIIK MlSSlSSirri
m'luu K. iiUiMirtt.Hi, r», ;ifs>. <vv-,
lloiixiinii ^CUmihmuoV TUK IIKK OK MK ,\v!l v>\ \l I OKOAI IS, i», Stsv tv,v-.
H,vn» vC J, C«itvllflo\ AiitlwM- v<t 'Cnvnnin Kv>t»>*-'MK IIOKKOvKS, rUKSKR.
>" ' ' ' ■ , !• i V, CV,\\
J«vot-. v» >> ^ MANY CARO.OKiv
*»\^ ■WiN NA i
sK mwVkk ok CK\KT. UU>^«t*t«^l.
A ♦JN N»".
VUK UKVVKK Sv''Kl\ «,Vs<iptfv f*v
TMR GOLDEN BOWL. Third EdUum.
f.r. 'ftVo. f,s. Janttfrn fGustaf). ABRAHAM'.S SACRI-
f K.K. Cr. >/i,o. fji. Kt»y» (U. A. Mitchell). HE THAT KA7I-,7H i'^KLAU WITH ME. Cr.
I'.-iio. Ct. i.an;/brldjfe (V.) and Bourne (C.
Harold.;. TilE VALLEY OF IN-
Hl'.l'll ANCK. Cr.Z7jo. 6s. LawlcHd CMon. Emily;. WITH ESSEX
IN IK KI.A.SfO. Cr. '6vo. ds. ;;'■'■. ali,'<Slr;,„rl Novels. l.(iwnon CMarry;, Author of 'When the
I'.illy lioil..' CHILDREN OF THE
f.UMI. Ci-.V.vo. Cs. I.c Oiionx fW.). THE HUNCHBACK OF
Wl'.:,l ,VIIN.STEI<. Third Edition. Cr.
y.t'ti. 6.P,
Till'-, CLOSED HOOK. Third Edition.
Cr. Wvo. <Mi. 'IIIK VALLEY OF THE SHADOW.
IMiistr:i(<il. Third Edition. Cr.^vo. ts. I'.KI 1 1 N I) 'IIIE THRONE. Third Edition.
( r. y.vii. fi.i. l.rv.U-Ycul8 (S.). ORRAIN. Second
/•:,iiti.>ii. Cr.V,T('. (,S. l.oiijT (.L Luther), Co- Author of 'The
D.uliii^ of the Gods.' MADAME
I U ir'l' I.', R ].' 1 , Y. Cr. 8w. 3^. td. .SIXTY jANK. Cr. ?.to. 6s. Lowln (Cecil). TlIK MACHINATIONS
dl'' 'nil''. MYO OK.. Cr. Svo. 6s. l.ynU (liiliuO. DERRICK VAUGHAN,
NOVI'.l.lST. 42»(/ T/tausand. Cr. &vo.
\s: (>,/. JVl'dirthy (Justin H.), Author of ' If I were
Kiiiu.' Till'', LADY OF LOYALTY
llOUSK. Illustrated. Third Edition. Cr.
St','. o,v, •nil'-. DRY.\I>. .'^i-c^'itd Edition. Cr.Sro. 6x. MnvilofiHld ^Ronal<D. THE SEA MAID.
,SV. .'•(.I /',,•'..;,"». C-V. Sr'<'. 6s. Mncnaujrlitan (,S.). THE FORTUNE OF
CH R IS ri N A MACNAB. Third Edition,
Cr. Sf.'. r,v.
n\nlot^Lucas\ COLONEL ENDERBYS WIKK. E.-urtk E.ii:!0-i. Cr, Srv. 6s.
.\ COIXSKL OF PERFECTION. -Vm- E.itti^H. Cr. SrA W.
THK WAGES OF SIN. Fi/UeuH Edition.
Cr. St\<. Ctf.
TUK CARISSIMA. E^rik Editum. Cr.
$r\\ 6»\ lUK OA TKLESS BARRIER. EcvrzA Edi-
THK HISTORY OF SIR RICHARD CAI.M.VDY. vS-««»T«.-i £ji.i>«, c«-.Srwi. 6s. Sfff .-v'.so Books for Bo\-s and Girl*.
M«navMr^ .M. E.>. OLIVIAS SUMMER. Aavx.s' ij'.- .-.-.*«, Cr, Siv. ds.
A LOST ESTATE. A Xnr Edititm.
C-V v*IVi. 6*
TKKFARISHOFHILBY. ASraEditi.-^
Fiction
35
THE PARISH NURSE. Fourth Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. GRAN'MA'S JANE. Cr. ivo. 6s. MRS. PETER HOWARD. Cr. Zvo. 6s. A WINTER'S TALE. A New Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6i. ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS. A New
Edition. Cr. i>vo. 6s. ROSE AT HONEYPOT. Third ^d Cr. 1,vo. 6s. See also Books for Boys and Oirls. Marriott (Charles), Author of /l^e Column.' GENEVRA. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. Marsh (Richard). THE TWICKENHAM PEERAGE. Second Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s. A DUEL. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE MARQUIS OF PUTNEY. Second Edition. Cr. ivo. 6s. See also Strand Novels. Mason (A. E. W,), Author of 'The Four Feathers,' etc. CLEMENTINA. Illus- trated. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. . 6-r- , Mathers (Helen), Author of ' Coram' thro the Rye.' HONEY. Fourth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. „ „ „
GRIFF OF GRIFFITHSCOURT. Cr. Zvo.
6s. THE FERRYMAN. Secand Edition. Cr.
Zvo. 6s. , -r, J
Maxwell (W. B.), Author of 'The Ragged
Messenger.' VIVIEN. Eighth Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. „, . ,
THE RAGGED MESSENGER. Third
Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. FABULOUS FANCIES. Cr. Zvo. Ss. Meade (L. T.). DRIFT. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. RESURGAM. Cr. Zvo. 6s. VICTORY. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
See also Books for Girls and Boys. Meredith (Ellis). HEART OF MY
HEART. Cr. Zvo. 6s. 'Miss Molly' (The Author of). IHt
GREAT RECONCILER. Cr. Zvo. 6s. Mitford (Bertram). THE SIGN OF THE
SPIDER. Illustrated. Sixth Edition.
Cr. Zvo. "xs. 6d. „
IN THE WHIRL OF THE RISING.
Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE RED DERELICT. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. , , ,
Montresor (F. F.), Author of 'Into the
Highways and Hedges.' THE ALIEN.
Third Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s. ,,^.^^
Morrison (Arthur). TALES OF MEAN
STREETS. Se-.'enth Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s. ACHILDOFTHE JAGO. Fifth Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. TO LONDON TOWN. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. CUNNING MURRELL. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE HOLE IN THE WALL. Fourth Edi- tion. Cr. Zvo. 6s. DIVERS VANITIES. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Nesbit (E.). (Mrs. E. Bland). THE RED
HOUSE. Illustrated. Fourth Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s.
See also Strand Novels. Norris (W. E.). THE CREDIT OF THE
COUNTY. Illustrated. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. ^^, , „ _
THE EMBARRASSING ORPHAN. Cr.
Zvo. 6s. NIGEL'S VOCATION. Cr. Zvo. 6s. BARHAM OF BELTANA. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s.
See also Strand Novels. OUivant (Alfred). OWD BOB "THE
GREY DOG OF KENMUIR. Eis^hth
Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. Oppenhelm (E. Phillips). MASTER OF
MEN. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Oxenham (John), ^"'1^°^?/ 'J'=^^}'^r2^
Grand Bavou. ' A WEAVER OF WEBS.
Second Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s. THE GATE OF THE DESERT. Fourth
Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. Pain (Barry). THREE FANTASIES.
Cr. Zvo. I.S. ,. . ^
LINDLEY KAYS. Third Edition. Cr.
Zvo. 6s. Parker (Gilbert). PIERRE AND HIS
PEOPLE. Sixth Edition. MRS. FALCHION. Fifth Edition. Cr.Zvo.
THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE.
Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6^- „^ ,,, THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD. Illus-
trated Ninth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. WHEN VaLMOND came TO PONTIAC : The Story of a Lost Napoleon. i'ljth. Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. AN ADVENTURER OF THE NORTH : ; The Last Adventures of 'Pretty Pierre. ' Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. ' THE SEATS OF THE MIGHTY. lUus- trated. Fourteenth Edition. Cr. Zvo. bs. THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG: a Romance of Two Kingdoms. Illustrated. Fifth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE POMP OF THE LAVILETTEb.
Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. y. 6d. Pemberton (Max). THE FOOTSTEP.S OF A THRONE. Illustrated. Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. I CROWN THEE KING. With Illustra- tions by Frank Dadd and A. Forrestier.
PhiUpotts (Eden). LYING PROPHETS.
CHILDREN^'OF THE MIST. Fifth Edi- tion. Cr. Zvo. 6s. . r, . -
THE HUMAN BOY. With a FrontLspiece. Fourth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
SONS OF THE MORNING. Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
36
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
THE RIVER. Third Edition. Cr. %vo. 6s. THE AMERICAN PRISONER. 77ii>-d
Rdition. Cr. &710. 6s. THE SECRET WOMAN. Fourt/i Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. KNOCK AT A VENTURE. With a Frontis- piece. Third Edition. Cr. Svo. 6s. THE PORTREEVE. EourtA Edition. Cr.
Zvo. fit. See also Strand Novels. Pickthall (Marmaduke). SAID THE
FISHERMAN. Fifth Edition. Cr. Zvo.
6s. BRENDLE. Second Edition. Cr. 8z'0. 6s. •Q,' Author of 'Dead Man's Rock.' THE
WHITE WOLF. Second Edition. Cr.
Svo. 6s. THE MAYOR OF TROY. Fourth Edition.
Cr. 8vo. 6s. Rhys (Grace). THE WOOING OF
SHEILA. Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. 6s. THE PRINCE OF LISNOVER. Cr. Zvo.
6s. Rhys (Grace) and Another. THE DI- VERTED VILLAGE. Illustrated by
Dorothy Gwvn Jeffreys. Cr. 8z/o. 6s. Ridgre (W. Rett). LOST PROPERTY.
Second Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. ERB. Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. 6s. A SON OF THE STATE. Second Edition.
Cr. Svo, 3i. 6d. A BREAKER OF LAWS. A New Edition.
Cr. Zvo. y. 6d. MRS. GALER'S BUSINESS. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. 6s. SECRETARY TO BAYNE, M.P. Cr. 8vo.
y. 6d. Ritchie (Mrs. David G.). THE TRUTH- FUL LIAR. Cr. Svo. 6s. Roberts (C. G. D.). THE HEART OF
THE ANCIENT WOOD. Cr. Svo.
3^. 6d. Russell (W. Clark). MY DANISH
SWEETHEART. Illustrated. Fi/t/t
Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. HIS ISLAND PRINCESS. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Cr. 6vo. 6s. ABANDONED. Cr.8vo. 6s.
See also Books for Boys and Girls. Sergfeant (Adeline). ANTHEA'S WAY.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE PROGRESS OF RACHAEL. Cr.
8vo. 6s. THE MYSTERY OF THE MOAT. Second
Edition. Cr. 87>o. 6s. MRS. LYGON'S HUSBAND. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE COMING OF THE RANDOLPHS.
Cr. Z7'o. 6s.
See also Strand Novels. Shannon. (W.F.) THE MESS DECK
Cr. Zvo. 3i. 6d.
See also Strand Novels.
Sonnischsen (Albert). DEEP-SEA V AGA^ BONDS. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Thompson (Vance). SPINNERS OF LIFE. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Urquhart (M.), A TRAGEDY IN COM- MONPLACE. Second Ed. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Waineman (Paul). BY A FINNISH LAKE. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
THE SONG OF THE FOREST. Cr. Zvo. 6s. See also Strand Novels.
Waltz (E. C). THE ANCIENT LAND- MARK : A Kentucky Romance. Cr. Zvo. 6s.
Watson (H. B. Marriott). ALARUMS
AND EXCURSIONS. Cr. Zvo. 6s. CAPTAIN FORTUNE. Third Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. TWISTED EGLANTINE. With 8 Illus- trations by Frank Craig. Third Edition,
Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE HIGH TOBY. With a Frontispiece.
Third F.ditio7i. Cr. Zvo. 6s. See also Strand Novels. Wells (H. G.). THE SEA LADY. Cr.
Zvo. 6s. Weyman (Stanley), Authorof A Gentleman
of France.' UNDER THE RED ROBE.
With Illustrations by R. C. WooDViLLE.
Titentieth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. White (Stewart E.), Authorof ' The Blazed
Trail.' CONJUROR'S HOUSE. A
Romance of the Free Trail. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. White (Percy). THE SYSTEM. Third
Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE PATIENT MAN. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. Williamson (Mrs. C. N.), Author of 'The
Barnstormers.' THE ADVENTURE
OF PRINCESS SYLVIA. Second Edi- tion. Cr. Zvo. y. 6d. THE WOMAN WHO DARED. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE SEA COULD TELL. Second Edition.
Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE CASTLE OF THE SHADOWS.
Third Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. PAPA. Cr. Zvo. 6s. Williamson (C. N. and A. M.). THE
LIGHTNING CONDUCTOR : Being the
Romance of a Motor Car. Illustrated.
Fi/teenth Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. THE PRINCESS PASSES. Illustrated.
Seventh Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. MY FRIEND THE CHAUFFEUR. With
16 Illustrations. Seventh Edition. Cr.
Zvo. 6 f . LADY BETTY ACROSS THE WATER.
Si.t th Edition. Cr. Zvo. 6s. Wyllarde (Dolf), Author of 'Uriah the
ilittitc.' THE PATHWAY OF THE
PIONEER. Fourth Edition. Cr.Zvo. 6s.
Fiction
37
Methuen's Sliilling Novels
Cr. ^z'o. Cloth, \s. net.
Encouraged by the great and steady sale of their Sixpenny Novels, Messrs. Methuen have determined to issue a new series of fiction at a low price under the title of 'The Shilling Novels.' These books are well printed and well bound in cloth, and the excellence of their quality may be gauged from the names of those authors who contribute the early volumes of the series.
JMessrs. Methuen would point out that the books are as good and as long as a six shilling novel, that they are bound in cloth and not in paper, and that their price is One Shilling net. They feel sure that the public will appreciate such good and cheap literature, and the books can be seen at all good booksellers. The first volumes are —
Balfour (Andrew). VENGEANCE IS
MINE. TO ARMS. Baring-Gould (S.). MRS. CURGENVEN
OF CURGENVEN. DOMITIA. THE FROBISHERS. Barlow (Jane), Author of 'Irish Idylls.
FROM THE EAST UNTO THE
WEST. A CREEL OF IRISH STORIES. THE FOUNDING OF FORTUNES. Barr (Robert). THE VICTORS. Bartram (George). THIRTEEN EVEN-
INGS. Benson (E. F.). Author of 'Dodo." THE
CAPSINA Bowles (Q. Stewart). A STRETCH OFF
THE LAND. Brooke (Emma). THE POET'S CHILD. Bullock (Shan F.). THE BARRVS. THE CHARMER. THE SQUIREEN. THE RED LEAGUERS. Burton (J. Bloundelle). ACROSS THE
SALT SEAS. THE CLASH OF ARMS. DENOUNCED. FORTUNE'S MY FOE. Capes (Bernard). AT A WINTER'S
FIRE. Chesney (Weatherby). THE BAPTIST
RING. THE BRANDED PRINCE. THE FOUNDERED GALLEON, JOHN TOPP. Clifford (Mrs. W. K.). A FLASH OF
SUMMER. Collingwood (Harry). THE DOCTOR
OF THE 'JULIET.' Cornford (L. Cope). SONS OF ADVER- SITY. Crane (Stephen). WOUNDS IN THE
RAIN. Denny (C. E.). THE ROMANCE OF
UPFOLD MANOR. Dickson (Harris). THE BLACK WOLF'S
BREED. Dickinson (Evelyn). THE SIN OF
ANGELS.
Duncan (Sara J.). *THE POOL IN THE
DESERT. A VOYAGE OF CONSOLATION. Embree (C. F.). A HEART OF FLAME. Fenn (G. Manville). AN ELECTRIC
SPARK. Findlater (Jane H.). A DAUGHTER OF
STRIFE. Findlater (Mary). OVER THE HILLS. Forrest (R. E.). THE SWORD OF
AZRAEL. Francis (M. E.). MISS ERIN. Gallon (Tom). RICKERBV'S FOLLY. Gerard (Dorothea). THINGS THAT
HAVE HAPPENED. Gilchrist(R. Murray). WILLOWBRAKE Glanville (Ernest). THE DESPATCH
RIDER. THE LOST REGIMENT. THE KLOOF BRIDE. THE INCA'S TREASURE. Gordon (Julien). MRS. CLYDE. WORLDS PEOPLE. Goss (C. F.). THE REDEMPTION OF
DAVID CORSON. Gray (E. M'Queen). MY STEWARD-
SHIP. Hales (A. G.). JAIR THE APOSTATE. Hamilton(Lord Ernest). MARYHAMIL-
TON. Harrison (Mrs. Burton). A PRINCESS
OF THE HILLS. Illustrated. Hooper (I.). THE SINGER OF MARLY. Hough (Emerson). THE MISSISSIPPI
BUBBLE. 'Iota' (Mrs. Caffyn). ANNE MAULE-
VERER. Jepson (Edgar). KEEPERS OF THE
PEOPLE. Kelly (Florence Finch). WITH HOOPS
OF STEEL. Lawless (Hon. Emily). MAELCHO. Linden (Annie). A WOMAN OF SENTI.
MENT. Lorimer (Norma). TOSIAH'S WIFE. Lush (Charles K.). THE AUTOCRATS. Macdonell (Anne). THE STORY OF
TERKSA. Macgrath (Harold). THE PUPPET
CROWN
3^
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Mackie (Pauline Bradford). THE VOICE IN THE DESERT.
Marsh (Richard). THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN.
GARNERED.
A METAMORPHOSIS.
MARVELS AND MYSTERIES.
BOTH SIDES OF THE VEIL.
Mayall (J. W.). THE CYNIC AND THE SYREN.
Monkhouse (Allan). LOVE IN A LIFE.
Moore (Arthur). THE KNIGHT PUNC- TILIOUS.
Nesbit (Mrs. Bland). THE LITERARY SENSE.
Norri8(W. E.). AN OCTAVE.
OHphant (Mrs.). THE LADY'S WALK.
SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNE.
THE TWO MARY'S.
Penny (Mrs. Frank). A MIXED MAR- AGE.
Phillpotts (Eden). THE STRIKING HOURS.
FANCY FREE.
Pryce (Richard). TIME AND THE WOMAN.
Randall (J.). AUNT BETHIA'S BUTTON.
Raymond (Walter). FORTUNE'S DAR- LING.
Rayner (Olive Pratt). ROSALBA.
Rhys (Grace). THE DIVERTED VILL- AGE.
Rickert (Edith). OUT OF THE CYPRESS
SWAMP. Roberton(M. H.). A GALLANT QUAKER. Saunders (Marshall). ROSE A CHAR.
LITTE. Sergeant (Adeline). ACCUSED AND
ACCUSER. BARBARA'S MONEY. THE ENTHUSIAST. A GREAT LADY. THE LOVE THAT OVERCAME. THE MASTER OF BEECHWOOD. UNDER SUSPICION. THE YELLOW DIAMOND. Shannon (W. F.). JIM TWELVES. Strain (E. H.). ELMSLIE'S DRAG NET. Stringer(Arthur). THE SILVER POPPY. Stuart (Esmfe). CHRISTALLA. Sutherland (Duchess of). ONE HOUR
AND THE NEXT. Swan (Annie). LOVE GROWN COLD. Swift (Benjamin). SORDON. Tanquerav (Mrs. B. M.). THE ROYAL
QUAKER. Trafford=Taunton (Mrs. E.W.). SILENT
DOMINION. Upward (Allen). ATHELSTANE FORD. Waineman(Paul). A HEROINE FROM
FINLAND. Watson (H. B. Marriott). THE SKIRTS
OF HAPPY CHANCE. •Zack.' TALES OF DUNST.\BLE WEIR.
Books for Boys and Girls
Illustrated. Crown 2>vo. 3j. 6^.
The Getting Well of Dorothy. By Mrs. W. K. Clifford. Second Edition.
The Icelander's Sword. By S. Baring- Gould.
Only a Guard-Room Dog. By Edith E. Cuthell.
The Doctor of the Juliet. By Harry CoUingwood.
Little Peter. By Lucas Malet. Second Edition.
Master Rockafellar's Voyage. By W. Clark Russell. Third Edition.
The Secret of Madame de Monluc. By
the Author of " Mdlle. Mori." Syd Belton : Or, the Boy who would not go
to Sea. By G. Manville Fenn. The Red Grange. By Mrs. Molesworth. A Girl of the People. By L. T. Meade.
Second Edition. Hepsy Gipsy. By L. T. Meade. 2^. dd. The Honourable Miss. By L. T. Meade.
Second Edition. There was once a Prince. By Mrs. M. E.
Mann. When Arnold comes Home. By Mrs. M. E.
Mann.
The Novels of Alexandre Dumas
Price 6d. Double Volumes, i.r.
The Three Musketeers. With a long Introduction by Andrew Lang. Double volume.
The Prince of Thieves. Second Edition.
Robin Hood. A Sequel to the above.
The Corsican Brothers.
Georges.
Crop-Eared Jacquot; Jane; Etc.
Twenty Years After. Double volume^
Amaury.
The Castle of Eppstein.
The Snowball, and Sultanetta.
Cecile ; OR, The Wedding Gown.
ActAo
Fiction
39
The Black Tulip.
The VicoMTE de Bragelonne.
Part I. Louise de la Valliere. Double
Volume. Part II. The Man in the Iron Mask. Double Volume, The Convict's Son. The Wolf-Leadek. Nanon ; OR, The Women' War. Double
volume. Pauline; Murat; and Pascal Bruno. The Adventures of Captain Pamphile. Fernandk. Gabriel Lambert. Catherine Blum. The Chevalier D'Harmental. Double
volume. Sylvandire. The Fencing Master. The Reminiscences of Antony. Conscience. Peke La Ruine. Henri of Navarre. The second part of
Queen Margot. The Great ^L■^.SSACRE. The first part of
Queen Margot. The Wild Duck Shooter.
niostrated Edition. De7ny %x<o. Cloth. The Three Musketeers. Illustrated in Colour by Frank Adams. 2i. td.
The Prince of T'hievks. Illustrated in
Colour by Frank Adams, zs. Robin Hood the Outlaw. Illustrated in
Colour by Frank Adams. 2j. The Corsican Brothers. Illustrated in
Colour by A. M. M'Lellan. is. td. The Wolf-Leader. Illustrated in Colour
by Frank Adams, is. 6d. Georges. Illustrated in Colour by Munro Orr.
Twenty Years After. Illustrated in Colour by Frank Adams, y.
Amaurv. Illustrated in Colour by Gordon Browne, zi.
The Snowball, and Sui.tanetta. Illus- trated in Colour by Frank Adams. 2S.
The Vicomte de Bragelonne. Illustrated in Colour by Frank Adams.
Parti. Louise de la Valliere. 3J.
Part II. The Man in the Iron Mask. 3^.
Crop-Eared Jacquot; Jane; Etc. Illus- trated in Colour by Gordon Browne. 2j.
The Castle of Eptstein. Illustrated in Colour by Stewart Orr. i.r. 6d.
Act6. Illustrated in Colour by Gordon Browne, js. 6d.
Cecils ; or, The Wedding Gown. Illus- trated in Colour by D. Murray Smith. IS. 6d.
The Adventures of Captain Pamphile Illustrated in Colour by Frank Adams. xs.td.
Methuen's Sixpenny Books
Austen (Jane). PRIDE AND PRE- JUDICE.
Bagot (Richard). A ROMAN MYSTERY.
Balfour (Andrew). BY STROKE OF SWORD.
Baring=Oould (S.). FURZE BLOOM.
CHEAP JACK ZITA.
KITTY ALONE.
URTTH.
THE BROOM SQUIRE.
IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA.
NOftMI.
A BOOK OF FAIRY TALES. Illustrated.
LITTLE TU'PENNY.
THE FROBISHERS.
Barr (Robert). JENNIE BAXTER, JOURNALIST.
IN THE MIDST OF ALARMS.
THE COUNTESS TEKLA.
THE MUTABLE MANY.
Benson (E. F.). DODO.
Bronte (Charlotte). SHIRLEY.
Brownell (C. L.). THE HEART OF JAPAN.
Burton (J. Bloundelle). ACROSS THE
SALT SEAS. Caffyn (Mrs)., (' Iota'). ANNE MAULE-
VKRKR. *Capes (Bernard). THE LAKE OF
WINE. Clifford (Mrs. W. K.). A FLASH OF
SU.MMER. MRS. KEITH'S CRIME. Connell (F. Norreys). THE NIGGER
KNIGHTS. Corbett (Julian). A BUSINESS IN
GREAT W.\TERS. Croker (Mrs. B. M.). PEGGY OF THE
BARTONS. A STATE SECRET. ANGEL. JOHANNA. Dante (Alighieri). THE VISION OF
DANTE (GARY). Doyle (A. Conan). ROUND THE RED
LAMP. Duncan (Sara Jeannette). A VOYAGE
OF CONSOLATION. THOSE DELIGHTFUL AMERICANS.
40
Messrs. Methuen's Catalogue
Eliot (George). THE MILL ON THE
FLOSS. Findlater (Jane H.). THE GREEN
GRAVES OF BA.LGOWRIE. Gallon (Tom). RICKERBV'S FOLLY. GaskelKMrs.). CRANFORD. MARY BARTON. NORTH AND SOUTH. Gerard (Dorothea). HOLY MATRI- MONY. THE CONQUEST OF LONDON. MADE OF MONEY. Gissing (George). THE TOWN TRAVEL-
LER. THE CROWN OF LIFE. Glanville (Ernest). THE INCA'S
TREASURE. THE KLOOF BRIDE. Qleig (Charles). HUNTER'S CRUISE. Grimm (The Brothers). GRIM. MS
FAIRY TALES. Illustrated. Hope (Anthony). A MAN OF MARK. A CHANGE OF AIR. THE CHRONICLES OF COUNT
ANTONIO. PHROSO.
THE DOLLY DIALOGUES. Hornung (E. W.). DEAD MEN TELL
NO TALES. Ing-aham (J. H.). THE THRONE OF
]:)AVID. LeQueux(W.). THE HUNCHBACK OF
WESTMINSTER. Levett- Yeats (S. K.). THE TRAITOR'S
WAY. Linton (E. Lynn). THE TRUE HIS- TORY OF JOSHUA DAVIDSON. Lyall(Edna). DERRICK VAUGHAN. Malet (Lucas). THE CARISSIMA. A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION. Mann (Mrs. M. E.). MRS. PETER
HOWARD. A LOST ESTATE. 'J- HE CEDAR STAR. Marchmont (A. W.). MISER HOAD-
LEYS SECRET. A MOMENT'S ERROR. Marryat (Captain). PETER SIMPLE. JACOB FAITHFUL. Marsh (Richard). THE TWICKENHAM
PEERAGE. THE GODDESS. THE JOSS.
Mason (A. E. W.). CLEMENTINA. Mathers (Helen). HONEY. GRIFF OF GRIFFITHSCOURT,
SAM'S SWEETHEART.
Meade (Mrs. L. T.). DRIFT.
Mitford (Bertram). THE SIGN OF THE
SPIDER. Montresor (F. F.). THE ALIEN. Moore (Arthur). THE GAY DECEIVERS. Morrison (Arthur). THE HOLE IN
THE WALL. Nesbit(E.). THE RED HOUSE. Norris(W. E.). HIS GRACE. GILES INGILBY. THE CREDIT OF THE COUNTY. LORD LEONARD. MATTHEW AUSriN. CLARISSA FURIOSA. 01iphant(Mrs.). THE LADY'S WALK. SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNE. THE PRODIGALS. Oppenheim (E. Phillips). MASTER OF
MEN. Parker (Gilbert). THE POMP OF THE
LAVILETTES. WHEN VALMONDCAMETO PONTIAC. THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD. Pemberton (Max). THE FOOTSTEPS
OF A THRONE. I CROWN THEE KING. Phillpotts (Eden). THE HUMAN BOY. CHILDREN OF THE MIST. Ridge (W.Pett). A SON OF THE STATE. LOST PROPKRTY. GEORGE AND THE GENERAL. Russell (W. Clark). A MARRIAGE AT
SEA. ABANDONED.
MY DANISH SWEETHEART. Sergeant (Adeline). THE MASTER OF
BEECH WOOD. BARBARA'S MONEY. THE YELLOW DIAMOND. Surtees (R. S.). HANDLEY CROSS.
Illustrated. MR. SPONGE'S SPORTING TOUR.
Illustrated. ASK MAMMA. Ilhistr.ited. Valentine (Major E. S.), VELDT AND
LAAGER. Walford (Mrs. L. B.). MR. SMITH. THE BABY'S GRANDMOTHER. Wallace (General Lew). BEN-HUR. THE FAIR GJD.
Watson (H. B. Marriot). THE ADVEN- TURERS. Weekes (A. B.). PRISONERS OF WAR. Wells(H.G.). THESTOLEN BACILLUS. White (Percy). A PASSIONATE
PILGRIM.
V.
>
CENTRAL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY University of California, San Diego
|
DATE DUE |
|
|
JUN 14 1979 |
|
|
i.:^' - ' ^^"'5 |
|
|
CI 39 |
UCSD Libr. |
':'«-^> #. • % . « ♦ # ii 1 ,
. ». m » * * * * *■ «:' « .» .* •. • ■ ^ i. • • f « » «. t •' t • t 9 9%»% ■
»•■« «p: »*:••«"*'• • « ■» '■ » ♦ * ' 4 f-' •' # *^- * %■ •' •, • « * -^ *. 1;- ft ft * 3, ,-;,
<• *. f « f: « •••••» * *^iL„»-.*«*-* '^.■
■ * « 1 1 1 a « • •. * » * *i*JM^M*«»'-.* * k\ « « « « f« • ft J • ♦ « |i;t X*.**-*
" ft « « • • « « t » f .4 9 » .» * »: » .. . . . -., « f « # « t ?. » t «. .» t « •. » «^»
- t <• t A t ft • -^ *fljt # 9 * • t t t • .*
* 1 » « t • • jk ^ « •JMLPf •■ *JJ *^^'
|*:t*.t -.^ 'i» H f, . # « A ft « « t. .■» .f .«
- >« »: ■«■ # « « # ^ , .«J| ,« « « « ;* *
'-,'■••.• % ' ■. ^.- ■ -^ ■-■ '; ^-s' '^ 'itiff^Ww '^' .^if ^ • V- tip -^^
f # * « » ?i mmM m ^ m
1 • f '• .^ .j» • %f il, • S. 4 1 * i
• » i^
t » • » • ^
^ 9 9 m \ a
» » * » -* -
'f f
p- f-
|
■ ■■■ ■ ■■■ |
|
■ ■■■ |
|
Mm ■ |
fev fe^
#- K.
'V.^
'VNN
• ♦♦•,*
« t >^ V • • « » .
«. r t- t • * « <k • • • <• ■•
* « t • • • • • I • • • *
k' • • • 1 1 • • » • At « •'! ly
^ % * * 9 « •% t • • « • • «w 9 4 H • • fl f • • • t • • t • f f J « « » « « •••••• • • • «r
V -« • A
• ft ft •
■« »\ •• r -» in «- -
T *
« 'V !> ftuO
4 ,"»
• «
I