University of Chicago
ICibrarics
THE RELEVANCE OF THE CHURCH
THE RELEVANCE
OF THE CHURCH
BY
F. R. BARRY
M.A., D.S.O.
CANON OF WESTMINSTER
RECTOR OF ST. JOHN'S, SMITH SQUARE
CHAPLAIN TO THE KING
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1936
3
Printed in Great Britain
1294671
"THE SIMPLICITY THAT is IN CHRIST."
2 Cor. xi. 3.
"IN RELIGIOUS PROBLEMS, SIMPLE SOLUTIONS ARE BOGUS SOLUTIONS."
Whitehead.
The Moorhouse Lectures, which
furnish much of the material
for this book, were delivered in
St. Paul's Cathedral, Mel-
bourne, during November, 1934.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . ix
CHAPTER I
THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY . . . . .21
i. A Century of Church Life . . . . .21
ii. Christianity and the New Age .... 34
iii. Defeat or Revival ? . . . . . -39
CHAPTER II
THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE ..... 46
i. Churchmanship, True and False . . .46
ii. The Church as God's Act 60
iii. Introversion and its Remedy .... 75
CHAPTER III
THE MAJESTY OF GOD ....... 82
i. The Need for Theology 82
ii. God in Christ ....... 93
iii. Creator and Redeemer . . . . .109
CHAPTER IV
THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP . . . . 117
i. The Theology of Worship . . . . 1 1 7
ii. The Art of Worship . . . . . .134
iii. The Ordering of Worship . . . . .142
CHAPTER V
THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY . . . . -
i. Tradition and Experiment in Ethics . . -
ii. Some Ethical Tasks of the Church . . .164
iii. The Constructiveness of Christianity . . .184
vii
Vlll CONTENTS
FACE
CHAPTER VI
THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH . . . .188
i. Worship and Work . . . . . .188
ii. Ministers and Ministry . . . . .197
iii. The Body of Christ . . . . . .219
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . 231
INTRODUCTION
must have a Church," said the Duke
of Wellington, in appointing William Grant
Broughton to the archdeaconry of New South Wales. 1
Nonchalance or prophetic vision, it is due in great
measure to the Duke's insistence and to the courage,
insight and tenacity of the great man whom he chose
to nominate, that the Church had the right to take
part in the Melbourne centenary of last year.
It did this on a most ambitious scale. In con-
nection with the official celebrations, the Arch-
bishop of Melbourne arranged a congress, at which
there were present Bishops and others from nearly
every diocese in the continent, for the re-affirmation
of the Gospel which the Church offers to Australia.
The Moorhouse Lectures, on which this book is based,
were delivered in the course of this congress at the
invitation of the Archbishop. What hidden depths
there must be in a people which is willing to include a
series of lectures in a programme of national festivity !
It was a great honour for me to be asked to take part
in this commemoration. I cannot adequately express
my gratitude for the education which the experience
gave me. Nor can my wife or I ever forget the
overwhelming kindness extended to us, both per-
1 Archdeacon of N.S.W., 1829, first Bishop of Australia, 1836,
Metropolitan of Sydney, 1847.
IX
X INTRODUCTION
sonally and officially, during our visit to the Australian
Church.
The centenary proclaimed to the world the amazing
enterprise and vitality which seem to be in the blood
of our race. But what has bred the greatness of
Britain is, before all else, its Christianity. The Church
welded it into national unity and first taught it the
uses of self-government. The Church fed its passion
for freedom as against privilege and usurpation, and
championed the liberties of the common man. The
Church gave it liberal education and the discipline
of the Christian tradition. Whatever we owe to
climate and geography, to fortune or to inborn char-
acteristics, it is Christian inspiration and leadership
which have been decisive in our inheritance.
Australia was born from that spiritual parentage.
The Church has sustained, steadied and instructed it
through the period of tumultuous adolescence, grow-
ing to maturity in its growth. The Nation now
stands at the open gateway of the next stage in
historical development. It was well to pause beside
this milestone, at the perilous cross-roads of modern
history, to ask the place of the Christian religion,
especially the Anglican interpretation of it, in the
future not only of Australia, but of the whole Common-
wealth of British peoples.
The nations are moving towards a new era at
present unforeseen and unpredictable ; and the
world in which the Church must now live cannot be
even approximately the same as the world of the
founders and pioneers. So incredibly fast are we
moving that in popular usage the word Victorian is
INTRODUCTION XI
now almost a synonym for primitive. A generation
is now taking control for whom " pre-war " means
almost prehistoric. Was the religion which we have
inherited so inextricably interwoven with the pattern
of thought, emotion and conduct which ruled nine-
teenth-century society that it cannot survive its dis-
integration ? Or does it contain within itself such
vital and creative resources that it may lead us into a
new future amid tasks, conditions and opportunities
undreamed of yet in our philosophy ?
The greatest triumphs of our religion in the hundred
years that are now closing have been overseas and in
the mission-field. There the Churches, confronted
with obstacles and with a lack of man-power and
resources which we would have found daunting, if
not fatal, have achieved a record of enterprise and
courage which may well put the Home Church
to shame. If we would estimate its vitality, we
should study the Church in the British Dominions
and in those new nations stepping into history under
Christian guidance and tutelage. There can be no
doubt about the answer : Christianity is woven into
the texture of all that is noblest in our traditions.
We have only to think of the faith and courage which
have gone to the building up of great nations, trans-
planting all that is best in our inheritance into new
conditions in far distant countries and then to
separate that, if we can, from the legacy of Christian
conviction. Whatever is best and most fundamental
in us we owe to our ancestral Christianity ; whatever
we can contribute to the future is inalienably
dependent on it.
Xll INTRODUCTION
And it is scarcely possible to exaggerate what the
world has yet the right to expect of us. What we
have seen in Europe in the last decade has revealed
the spiritual sterility of self-contained economic
nationalism resting only on secular foundations. We
have learnt something of its intrinsic horror. It
appears to us to violate everything that British tradi-
tion holds most in reverence. A secularised nationa-
list policy unredeemed by spiritual conviction not
only starves a people's soul : it will also bring with it
physical starvation. For no appearance of economic
revival can be other than illusory and short-lived till
we have solved the international problem. States-
men who promise anything else delude us. Nor can
we remember too often that our English inheritance
of liberty, which we prize even above life itself, is
bound up with our English Christianity. Faith and
Freedom go together. Where Faith dies, Freedom
perishes. It is happening all over the world to-day.
The demoralisation of Europe is the wasting fever
of a lost faith. There can be no hope for the revival
of international co-operation or of free, liberal
institutions except upon a spiritual foundation. We
cannot look to the future with confidence, apart from
the contribution of Christianity in sustaining the
spiritual values of national and international life.
The leadership of Europe is still ours, if we have the
courage and insight to assume it. Yet without some
ultimate conviction we shall be but blind guides
leading blind men. We can take our true place in
Europe only if we can stand forth as a Christian
nation.
INTRODUCTION Xlll
But Europe is only a small part of the world, and
the great decisions no longer rest in the hands of
Europeans alone. New influences have entered the
field of force. For example, the delicate and dan-
gerous issues of pacts on the eastern frontier of Ger-
many are inseparable from Far Eastern politics.
The centres of gravity are shifting from the Atlantic
to the Pacific basin, and the fate of Western Europe
is bound up with the success or failure of the Churches
in the Christianisation of the Far East. Thus it
needs but little imagination to envisage the great
tasks of leadership which are reserved for the
Australian people as the chief Christian power of the
Pacific. It is not too much to say that the whole
future depends on the depth, reality and effectiveness
of our English-speaking Christianity.
Once more, to take a totally different area, we may
think of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. One can hardly
believe that in less than forty years, since the end of the
Mahdist regime, British rule could have achieved so
much. Tribes who have been, since the Pharaohs,
the victims of iniquitous exploitation are being led to
the gateways of nationhood. The sterile blight of
massacre and the slave-trade is being redeemed into
fruitful enterprise and constructive education for
freedom. It is one of the brightest pages in our
record. But all this disinterested service has been,
and is, confessedly inspired by the consecrations of
Christian loyalty.
The study of history during the last century leaves
no room for doubt that the Christian faith is the great
formative force that holds the future. But if it can
XIV INTRODUCTION
do so much in its weakness, in the sorry caricature
that we have made of it, what may it not do in its
strength and its reality ?
Faced with so many incalculable forces as those
which bewilder and frighten the world to-day, the
tendency of the pre-war generations is to revert to a
mere traditionalism. Of this the young are properly
impatient. They wish to break free into a new era,
and are rightly suspicious of any programme which
seems to suggest a reversion to the past. Christianity
too suffers from this suspicion. It will never com-
mend itself to the young or claim their still uncom-
mitted loyalties if it is presented as a mere plea for
the resuscitation of the past or the artificial recovery
of a tradition. This seems to me to be a right attitude.
The spirit of Christ is essentially creative, and must
embody itself in new forms with the changing needs
of changing generations. The wine of its inexhaustible
resources must continually be poured into new bottles.
But the Anglican interpretation of the faith bequeathed
to us by our predecessors appears to be uniquely
adapted to meet the religious needs of the present
age.
For the genius of the Anglican inheritance is
experiment working upon tradition. We no longer
suppose, like Dr. Thwackum, that Christianity always
and everywhere means the English Act of Uniformity,
or sung matins and litany at eleven. Neither in a
social nor a religious heritage is there such a thing as a
fresh start for the life of Christ's Church is con-
tinuous ; and the building into Melbourne Cathedral
of a stone from Westminster Abbey was a happy
INTRODUCTION XV
symbol of that continuity. But there is such a thing
as creative evolution. And it is the glory of the Eng-
lish Church to have been instructed as the householder,
bringing out of its treasures things both new and old.
The householder metaphor is pregnant. For, in the
words of the last Lambeth Conference, " Every
Church of our communion is endeavouring to do for
the country where it exists the service that the Church
of England has done for England to represent the
Christian religion and the catholic faith in a manner
congenial to the people of the land, and to give scope
to their genius in the development of Christian life
and worship." 1 It would be a disaster if the over-
seas Churches were to reproduce in distant continents
the controversies and the limitations which have been
imposed on the Church in England by the accidents
of European history. Anglicanism is something
far richer and more flexible than Church-of-
Englandism.
There are two policies now before the Church.
By way of illustrating the two alternatives, it is not
hard to think of two dioceses in different parts of the
Anglican Communion. In one, our Church has
taken its stand stiffly on the strictest formularies of
Churchmanship. Its membership consists of the
clergy and a small inner circle of the devout, while
the great mass of the laity are outside. In the other,
it is functioning as the conscience of the whole
English-speaking community, and supplying the
leadership and inspiration of all its moral and religious
ideals. The official policy of the latter diocese would
1 Lambeth Encyclical^ 1930, p. 29.
XVI INTRODUCTION
be censured in the former as laxity. But which of the
two has understood best the true and authentic
Anglican tradition ?
The Church of England has never been a sect.
When most vital and most true to itself it has been
the soul and conscience of the nation ; and it may be
claimed that at the present moment, after years of
comparative eclipse, it has regained the chance to
discharge this function. Its spokesmen are once
more the acknowledged leaders of Christian opinion
in matters of public policy.
It may be still deplorably out of touch with the
great majority of our population. But it has before
it an opportunity greater than any that has yet been
offered to us. In the bankruptcy of secular leadership,
our people are willing, and even eager, to accept a
strong lead from their Church. It need give but a few
generous gestures, and the people of England will be
with it. But if Anglicanism fails the world now, it is
no other form of Christianity which will win its
allegiance, but paganism.
In the following chapters I make some attempt to
estimate the existing opportunity, and to inquire how
we may best meet it. I have tried to appraise the
contemporary reaction against institutional religion,
and to suggest the true line of approach to reviving
the idea of the Church in its relevance to the world
situation. Next, I endeavour to set forth the the-
ology on which such an enterprise must depend,
and to follow out some of its implications into the
sphere of Christian public worship, the ethical content
of the Christian life, and the function of the Christian
INTRODUCTION XV11
society in its widest and most catholic ideal, as the
Body of Christ in the world.
My last book was received with a kindness which
was almost embarrassingly generous, and brought me
many new friends and great encouragement. It was,
however, exposed to the just criticism of leaving
the reader too much in the air. The question " Exactly
what does this book mean ? " must have been singularly
hard to answer. I have wished for some time to
remedy the defect. Not long after that book was
published, I met in Oxford a well-known divine, who
observed " That task was comparatively easy ; what
you have to do next is much more difficult to
explain what is the relevance of the Church."
It was that remark which produced the present
volume. For several years I have cherished the hope
of trying to show how the main arguments which
had been developed in the earlier book could be
applied to the actual conditions of the Churches as they
exist in the world to-day. The invitation to lecture
in Australia supplied the occasion for making the
attempt.
It had been my intention to include a good deal
more than what is now published. In particular, I
had projected a chapter which was to discuss some
very topical questions in regard to the organisation of
the Church, and to ask how far the existing systems,
whether administrative or financial, whether in the
parishes or at the centre, really serve the Church's
true end as an education in Christian faith and
practice. This would, I think, have materially
XV111 INTRODUCTION
increased the interest and solidity of the book.
But pressure of work after my return has made this
idea quite impracticable, and I was compelled
reluctantly to abandon it. Those who undertake
the role of Issachar (Gen. xlix. 14) must clip their
literary aspirations.
This book may well seem almost parochial, alike in
ambition and in achievement, when compared with
the wide range of its predecessor. I can only reply
that this was deliberate, and indeed essential to its
immediate purpose. A great many books are now
being published which discuss Christianity from out-
side. My aim here has been to start from inside,
from within the faith and experience of the fellow-
ship centred in the parish church (or its equivalent
in the Free Church polities) and thence to explore
some of its implications and envisage some of its
wider possibilities. This makes the treatment some-
what less imaginative, but also, I venture to hope,
more realistic.
Much of what follows was written, perforce, at sea.
Certain traces of undulatory movement which, as I
have been told, are observable in the form and
matter of one section may be explained, even if not
justified, by the behaviour of that capricious element.
But I cannot omit a word of acknowledgement to
the officers of the Orient Line for the courtesy and
consideration which enabled me to do any work at all.
As before, the material of these chapters was eagerly
planned and debated in talk with my friend, the
Bishop of Coventry. He was not able to see the
final draft, but has devoted part of his convalescence
INTRODUCTION XIX
to the melancholy task of proof-reading, and has
helped me with many invaluable suggestions. I
have also to thank my friend, L. S. Hunter, Arch-
deacon of Northumberland, for a like service ; my
wife for constant encouragement and criticism and
for laborious work with a type-writer ; and my
publisher for his forbearance.
F. R. B.
WESTMINSTER,
April, 1935.
B 2
/ THE RELEVANCE OF THE CHURCH
CHAPTER I
THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
i\A CENTURY OF CHURCH LIFE
THE history of the past hundred years has been
not seldom misrepresented as though it were
that of the last Christian century the age when
religion was slowly dying, defeated by scientific
emancipation and its own interior intellectual weak-
ness. It is the exact opposite of the truth. On the
contrary, this has been the age of almost miraculous
expansion. It has been one of the most creative
periods. The most signal expansion of Christianity,
as a great German scholar has said, belongs to the
nineteenth century not the first. " The advance of
Christianity in the early days was small and slow
compared with its recent growth and the work of
modern missions." 1 It may be briefly reviewed under
four headings ; and if we think chiefly of our own
Church it is not that we either forget or undervalue
the precious contributions of the other Churches.
The story has been so admirably told in a recent
book by the Dean of Exeter 2 that we need no
1 H. Weinel, quoted by Edwyn Bevan, Christianity, p. 231.
2 Church and People, 1789-1889, by S. C. Carpenter (S.P.C.K.).
21
22 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
more here than a rapid summary. Let us take
first :
(a) Missionary Expansion. In 1835, as i g now notori-
ous, Australia was in the diocese of Calcutta a See
which had only recently been founded (1814) under
pressure from Wilberforce and Simeon. (" It was," says
Carpenter, " the Evangelicals who taught the Church
to be missionary.") Those were, no doubt, great
days for archdeacons. The Archdeacon, wrote the
Secretary of State, "is to take rank and precedency
in the Colony next after the Lieut.-Governor ; and
you will on all public occasions be careful to confer
on him such marks of attention as may most effectu-
ally recommend his person and his Sacred Office to
the" respect of the lower and less educated classes of
society." 1 Government raised every kind of diffi-
culty about the creation of overseas dioceses, and
archdeacons flourished sedibus vacantibus. But the
growth of the Anglican episcopate in the century
with which we are now concerned may be taken as the
outward, visible sign of inward and spiritual vitality.
In the year 1834 there were five dioceses outside
Great Britain 2 : none in the whole of Africa or
Australia, one (Calcutta) for the whole of India.
Australia received its first Bishop (Broughton) in
1836 ; in the present year its Church life is organised
1 Despatch of Bathurst to Sir T. Brisbane, Dec. 21, 1824.
Quoted in Giles, Constitutional History of the Australian Church,
p. 203.
2 Nova Scotia (1787), Quebec (1793), Calcutta (1814),
Jamaica and Barbados (1824). Madras was founded in 1835,
Australia (Sydney) 1836, Bombay 1837, Toronto and New-
foundland 1839, New Zealand (Auckland) 1841, Capetown,
Melbourne and Newcastle 1847.
A CENTURY OF CHURCH LIFE 23
in 25 dioceses and 4 Provinces. There are today,
outside the British Isles/ 149 Anglican dioceses, and
in the whole. Anglican Communion not less than 218
Bishops. 1 Areas which but a hundred years ago
were undiscovered or unoccupied or held by strug-
gling and obscure missions regarded either as paries
infidelium or as parts of the diocese of London now
support great self-governing Churches under the
rule of their own Metropolitans, themselves bases or
*' advanced headquarters " of vigorous missionary
activity.
This startling movement of expansion is the con-
stitutional and organic expression of an intense mis-
sionary development covering the whole of the earth's
surface, from the tropical jungle to the frozen
Labrador, which is without parallel in Christian
history. Those who charge it against the English
Church that it is incapable of breeding saints cannot
have studied its missionary annals. There is a story
of heroic sainthood, of consecrations, martyrdoms
and sacrifices which are its proudest claim on our
loyalties. Those who, in face of its missionary
achievement in the regeneration of degraded tribes-
men and the building up of new nations, still regard
Christianity as a spent force, must be wilfully blind-
ing themselves to evidence. Wherever the Gospel
has been preached, the School and the Hospital have
gone with it : what it did for our sodden Saxon
1 This figure does not include the 103 " Protestant Episcopal "
Bishops of U.S.A. in communion with the G. of E. " Bishops "
here and in the text means Diocesans, and excludes Suffragans
and Coadjutors.
24 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
ancestors it has proved its power to achieve in the
redemption of Hindu Untouchables and the educa-
tion of Melanesian cannibals, in the national Renais-
sance of Uganda, and in the Christian Universities of
the Far East. Western civilisation has inflicted foul
and ghastly wrongs on the backward peoples in its
exploitation of material wealth, and we are all in the
same condemnation. When it is cited before the
judgment of history its chief hope of a favourable
verdict lies in that which the Christian Church has
done.
In devoting itself to its proper task of evangelisation
and redemption, the English Church has found its
own life. It has learnt the meaning of fellowship in
service, both as between the various " schools of
thought " within its own ample embraces and as
between itself and the other Churches. It is in this
cooperative enterprise that the dream of a Church one
and universal has come nearest to actualisation, as
the South India project can testify. The hope of
reunion lies with the new Churches. And while our
Church has been spreading branches outwards it has
also taken root downwards. It has outgrown many
of its insular prejudices and has come to a far clearer
understanding of its place and its vocation in
Christendom.
(b] Internal Development. The Melbourne centenary,
during the celebrations of which these lectures were
delivered, very nearly synchronised with that of the
Oxford or Tractarian Movement. While Broughton
was journeying to England to plead for more chap-
lains in Australia to lay secure spiritual foundations
A CENTURY OF CHURCH LIFE 25
for the great national future which he foresaw, John
Henry Newman was editing the Tracts. Whatever
the final verdict on the Tractarians (of whom I shall
have more to say later), all of us now gratefully
acknowledge how much enrichment and deepened
devotion they brought into the life of our fellowship.
That, thank God, is no longer a party question. But
what I wish to stress now is the way in which the
Oxford centenary was observed. There had been
fears, suspicions and misgivings, lest it should be made
a sectional demonstration and thus an occasion of
bitterness and division. It was, in fact, nothing of
the kind. It became a festival of the Church of
England, in which Churchmen of all " schools " and
traditions thankfully and trustfully collaborated.
May we not claim this as significant of the new
spirit and temper which have come to us ? The
partisan mind is a back number. Questions which
but a short time ago would have been hotly and
bitterly controversial are now discussed at every
Church gathering sensibly, objectively and tolerantly,
and with no desire to make party capital. It is not a
question of a working compromise between incom-
patible schools of thought. It is that the many and
diverse elements embraced in the Anglican tradition
have come to see that each needs the others to com-
plement its own contribution. The most trusted and
influential leaders are today the men with .^ynpptic
niinds not partisans of dead controversies. The old
outlooks may persist in backwaters, but not in the
main stream of the Church's life. Quietly, unnoticed
and unadvertised the most fruitful growth being the
26 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
least selfconscious this new temper is gaining
strength.
As it is still popularly supposed that the Church
of England is the battleground of disputatious
ecclesiastics for Churchmen are " news " only when
they quarrel or figure in criminal proceedings it
seems important to emphasise this. It is one of the
factors that will count most in the religious life of
the next decade. For what it means is that the
Anglican Communion is becoming aware of itself,
as no mere accident of history, no mere resultant of
conflicting forces, but as the native Christian tradi-
tion of the Anglo-Saxon and English-speaking peoples
with its own characteristic ethos and its own authentic
contribution. All over the world it has taken root
and has reproduced itself true to type. Even where
it is not the Church of England but the Church of
Canada or Australia, or the Protestant Episcopal
Church of America, even when it contains other races
and languages, as in India, China, Africa and Japan,
it is still recognisably the same Church. It is thorough-
bred and it breeds true. With whatever local varieties
and differences such as it is its genius to encourage
it persists, in its own specific identity and the funda-
mental unity of its witness, liberal, catholic and
evangelical.
(c] Enrichment of Thought. On the base of the font
in Coventry Cathedral there are figures symbolic of
the deadly sins, each bearing an appropriate emblem.
Some of these were defaced or missing, and Victorian
zeal has replaced one of them by a figure representing
Heresy, who is shown reading from an open book, on
A CENTURY OF CHURCH LIFE 2J
which is inscribed Essays and Reviews. We have
travelled quite a long way since then ! Not very many
contemporary Churchmen have so much as heard of
that publication which at the time caused such an
uproar. The bitterness of those days of controversy
and even the questions about which it raged are
almost beyond the comprehension of Christian
teachers and students in our own time. To us it
sounds wholly incredible that Bishop Wilberforce
wrote a savage attack on a book which admittedly he
had never read ! - 1 Still more unbelievable is the
blindness of those who attacked this unhappy volume
to the new light that was breaking all round them.
" Their blindly conservative attitude," says Arch-
deacon Storr, " shows how English theology had for
years been standing aloof from all the larger
movements of thought in the world outside." Ortho-
doxy still took its stand on the literal inerrancy of
Scripture and that (apparently) in the Received
Text ; and it had no real appreciation of the pres-
sure of thought on its closed system. What withstood
Darwin's hypothesis 2 was not Christian theology at
all, but an untenable theory about the Bible, and an
orthodoxy which all modern students would regard as
indefensible obscurantism. Yet it is all very recent
history ! The startiing fact is that the journey from
Essays and Reviews in 1860, by way of Lux Mundi and
Foundations, to the recent Essays Catholic and Critical,
1 Cf. Storr : Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth
Century, pp. 449-450.
2 The Origin of Species was published the year before Essays and
Reviews. Newman's Essay on Development thus preceded it by
fourteen years.
28 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
was covered in not more than one normal lifetime.
Jowett's pupils are teaching in Oxford ; plenty of
men still in active work grew up under the influence
of Liddon who was killed by the shock of Lux
Mundi ; and the outstanding figures of that group
have died only during the last year or two. (It
is hard for men of my own age to realise that
Bishop E. S. Talbot had been the first Warden of
Keble.)
We cannot attempt here even to summarise the
development of the last fifty years or the stages by
which there has been built up the constructive philo-
sophical theology characteristic of the twentieth
century. 1 To it, all branches of learning have con-
tributed. Biblical and historical scholarship notably
that of the great Cambridge School, and of men such
as Charles, Driver, Peake and Sanday re-laid the
critical foundations . Philosophy has rebuilt upon them,
turning away from the barren denials and insecure
reiterations which had brought theology into con-
tempt to a frank acceptance of all truth from whatever
source it may be vouchsafed, strong in the faith that
the light that shines in Christ is indeed the true light
that lighteth every man. " I have always been (said
Gore) a free-thinker." Thus step by step there has
grown up a free, convincing, creative theology which
would be a glory to any Christian century. It may
be claimed without exaggeration that today English-
speaking Christianity can meet the best thought of
the twentieth century on its chosen fields and out-
1 See Carpenter, op. cit., Ghs. XVI and XVII, and G. J.
Webb, A Century of Anglican Theology.
A CENTURY OF CHURCH LIFE 2Q
think it. Indeed Philosophy and the Natural Sciences
will soon have to confess before all the world that with-
out the contribution of Christian thought none of their
own constructions can stand. The initiative has
passed to Theology. Not since the mighty achieve-
ment of St. Thomas has theology been so vital or so
catholic.
It seems to be true that each generation thinks of
itself as a race of Epigoni, and this induces a salutary
humility. We deplore a lack of " great" men today,
and there seem to be few among us of the stature of a
Gore, a Greighton or a Westcott. Yet it may be that
fewer great minds stand out towering over their
contemporaries because the average level is so much
higher. And in fact it would be exceedingly difficult
to name any Christian generation which could point
to a greater number of teachers of the first rank in
all branches of Christian learning than the English-
speaking Churches possess today. If one attempts
to compile a summary list of men actively teaching
at this moment who might be cited in evidence of
this claim, the result becomes positively spectacular.
Our own Communion is nobly represented, and
may claim to be coming into its birthright as essentially
the Church of the new learning. But in this task
all Churches have cooperated, discovering in it a
new sense of fellowship which is bringing an unlooked-
for reward.
(d) Movements towards Reunion. This enrichment
and widening of range in the intellectual life of the
Churches has brought to them all an enlarged vision
of the Christian Society itself. What has been most
30 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
hopeful and significant during the last quarter of our
century has been the growing strength of the reunion
movement. To this many factors have contributed.
It is partly due to the liberation inspired by better-
trained historical scholarship and a more sensitive
intellectual conscience. We are coming, at long last,
to recognise that there cannot be different kinds. of
truth, each the prerogative of one Church as though
there could be a Presbyterian truth, an Anglican, a
Baptist or a Lutheran. There is truth, and all
Christian thinkers are colleagues and partners in its
service. As all have been learning from one another,
each contributing the distinctive gifts of his own
tradition and inheritance, they have been released
from the controversial spirit. Few theologians are
now concerned to uphold sectional interpretations of
a truth which is greater than all our apprehensions of
it. This theological cooperation transcending old
denominational frontiers has engendered a new
temper of trust amongst the leading minds in all
Churches. The scholars have been proved to be men
of action.
Pragmatic motives have also been at work. The
Churches have all learnt from the discipline of
straitened resources in both money and men, which
has opened their minds to the wastage and futility in
our duplicated organisations and our overlapping
and even competing ministries. The Churches have
found that they are too weak to face the stupendous
task that confronts them and the mighty forces
arrayed in opposition with their scattered and
disunited armies. They have learnt the need for
A CENTURY OF CHURCH LIFE 3!
" unity of command." Where the Church has been
most " up against it," the drive towards unity has
become most urgent. Most potent of all has been
the recognition that, in a world torn by fear and
hatred, the Church as the reconciling society is not
only frustrating its own mission, but bringing reproach
on the name of Christ by its divisions and its broken
fellowship. The conviction grows that our divided
Christendom is not merely a practical inconvenience,
but a reproach, a shame and a scandal, a betrayal
before the world of our profession. Thus the Great
Church is beginning to awake, and Christians in all
denominations are learning to offer constructive
loyalty to that one holy catholic Church in which for
so long we have professed belief.
The movement is going forward throughout Chris-
tendom, even within the Roman Communion, despite
its official and public intransigence. If it is still at
the stage of " pacts " and has not yet reached the
" Geneva" method, it is not therefore necessarily the
weaker, and may even be stronger and more realistic.
The more the interconfessional differences between
local Churches are resolved, the fewer become the
occasions of friction, and the greater the hope of
coalescence into an ecumenical reunion. In our own
Church, as we have already observed, there has been
during the last 25 years a notable re-centring of out-
look and achievement of a common mind. This has
been matched by a coming together within various
separated Churches. The formation of the United
Church of Canada, the Methodist reunion in England
and the Presbyterian in Scotland, are perhaps the
32 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
most signal examples. The areas of division are
already narrowed. Negotiations have long been in
progress between our Church and the English Free
Churches, and were initiated (even if no more)
between the two territorial Churches north and south
of the river Tweed. Even though the official " con-
versations " with their almost inevitable set-backs
appear to be tedious and disappointing, yet in various
unofficial ways, and through agencies such as the
" Friends of Reunion," much is being achieved under
the surface, and a practical friendship and cooperation
such as would in the past have been inconceivable are
almost universally taken for granted. No doubt it
is true that the rank and file in the Churches concerned
are as yet but half-awakened ; but a new resolve has
been born which must prove to be irresistible in the
long run. Meanwhile, close and intimate under-
standing is established between the Church of
England and the Episcopal Scandinavian Churches ;
communion is already in sight between the
Orthodox and the See of Canterbury ; and, what
is perhaps most significant, it has now been
formally restored between ourselves and the Old
Catholics.
In the mission-field, where the old differences are
at once most crippling and most irrelevant, the will to
unity is most masterful. The most conspicuous and
impressive evidence is the scheme, now approaching
realisation, of the United Church in South India.
But everywhere it is being recognised that the work
of any one Church is but part of a worldwide Christian
movement, and can be fruitful only within that context.
A CENTURY OF CHURCH LIFE 33
All that is vital in the Christian mission is inter-
confessional and inter-national.
Here the Churches owe an immense debt (which
they have not too generously repaid) to the World
Student Christian Federation, with its vision of
students gathered from all lands in a great inter-
denominational fellowship as Christian leaders and
servants of their own people. It has been the pioneer
in this kind. Many of those who are doing big things
for the Kingdom of Christ among the nations, many
of those who are giving effective leadership to the
cause of Christian reunion, have been trained by the
British Student Christian Movement of the World
Student Christian Federation. The latter was almost
the only religious organisation which preserved its inter-
national contacts during the fury of the world war ;
and it did a work of outstanding value in reconstruc-
tion and reconciliation in the wild, embittered years
that succeeded it. It has stood for an international
Christianity when even the Churches had become
nationalist. That conviction is now part of a com-
mon legacy. The ecumenical movements and confer-
ences known as " Lausanne," " Stockholm " and
"Jerusalem " are at once symbols and instruments of
the vision, gaining in strength and clarity, of a reborn
fellowship in Christ that one true Church universal
in which all our paths must converge, and the nations
shall bring their glory and honour into it.
Thus, in whatever direction we look, the Christian
record during the past century is one both of expan-
sion and consolidation. The year 1935 finds the
34 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
Church of Christ in the world and not least the
Anglican portion of it alive, hopeful, forward-looking,
flexible as an instrument of God's will in the distracted
and bewildering world which it is now being
summoned to redeem.
2. CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE
The century that has elapsed since the accession
of Queen Victoria has seen the most cataclysmic
changes of any period in the human record. Man-
kind has passed within living memory through such a
revolution in outlook, such an upheaval in all the
conditions of life, as would hitherto have needed a
thousand years. From the stone age to the death of
Queen Victoria (as Gerald Heard observes) is one era ;
we are now living in the second. l The advanced thought
of twenty-five years ago is the obscurantism of today.
The emotional patterns of the earlier period no longer
fit the conditions of our experience. The established
forms of social behaviour seem unadapted to the new
tempo. The moral axioms of our grandparents no
longer present themselves as axiomatic. It had
hitherto been assumed that each generation would
live its life substantially under the same conditions
as those which it had inherited from its predecessors
and would pass these on to its successors. We are
living (says Prof. Whitehead) in the first period of
human history for which these assumptions are false. 2
Violent and terrific new forces are hammering out
1 These Hurrying Tears, p. i.
2 Adventures in Ideas, p. 1 1 7,
CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE 35
the moulds of a new world-order, and we cannot
foresee what will be the form of it. Will it be an
impersonal and soulless mechanism in which personal
values are discounted and liberty is but a dead dogma ?
Will it break down in anarchy and bloodshed ? Or
will Spirit regain the mastery and shape process to
its own purpose ? That is the crucial problem of the
new age ; and the answer rests with the forces of
religion.
We are groping after a spiritual ideal and a principle
of social organisation with which to fashion that new
form of Community which is now beginning, with so
much confusion and so much suffering and ill-
adjustment, to emerge on to the stage , of history.
Admittedly we are not yet succeeding. What has
come to be called the new morality is at present crude,
negative and defiant. The relation between the
political state and the communities on which it is
based, whether cultural or economic, is still a matter
of hopeless uncertainty. We have not yet learnt to
relate nationality to the world-community, recognised
as inevitable, but prevented as yet from becoming
actual at once by crude, atavistic passions and by that
imperfect organisation which does so much to enhance
their ferocity. The task seems too great, both for our
intelligence and for our moral and spiritual resources.
For what is decisive now is human quality. The
more complicated life becomes, the more searching is
the demand that it makes on character. And amid
the onrush of our new knowledge the most startling
discovery is this that the outward framework of
circumstance which has served both to protect us
C 2,
36 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
and to limit us, is itself transient and fluid. The
supposedly solid, external world of Nature proves to
be the construction of our minds. Political, social and
economic conditions are born out of our own half-
conscious impulses. Circumstances are ourselves in
action. As never before in the history of our race
we know now that Character is Destiny. At every
point we are thrown back on ourselves.
Before that terrifying recognition it is not surprising
if man's spirit weakens. " Before the magnitude
of the tasks ahead man's spirit has for the moment
faltered and his vision contracted. The public
mood is apprehensive where it should be bold,
and defensive where broad and generous policy
is most required." x If all depends on the man
within, and if within ourselves we are still aware
of the wolf, the ape, the tiger and the donkey,
then our prospect is indeed lugubrious. We have
had to learn through fear and suffering that we
cannot be our own redeemers. Frustrated and in-
decisive, we are unable to break our way out through
the walls of inertia and despair. Such a renewal as
the world waits for cannot be generated from within :
it must be appropriated from without. Mankind
needs more than anything else such a revival of faith
in God, creative, victorious and transforming, as shall
lift it out of despondency and helplessness and set it
bravely to work upon the world again. It is the
decisive hour for Christianity. Everywhere in the
world it has reached the point when it must go
forward to win or perish. And indeed the supreme
1 Salter : Recovery, Epilogue.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE 37
issue of the new age is the victory or defeat of Chris-
tianity. On this more than on anything else whatever
hangs the future of human civilisation. The Church
cannot stand on the defensive. If in these ambiguous
nineteen-thirties anything can be confidently predicted,
it is that any faith or institution content to stand merely
on the defensive is doomed, irrevocably and beyond
hope.
But there is no need for such craven tactics.
The initiative is with the Christian forces. All other
solutions are bankrupt and all other prescriptions
discredited. Every day demonstrates more clearly
the emptiness and sterility of life devoid of ultimate
spiritual conviction. In the midst of all our exuberant
interests the heart of the world is numbed and disillu-
sioned. What Gregory of Tours said about the
decline of the Imperial system might be quoted truly
about our age : In cordibus aruerat it had gone dead
in the hearts of men. 1 With the decay of faith in a
living God and a sovereign purpose for mankind the
world of today is all at cross-purposes, its thought
confused, its values blurred, its aims wavering and
indecisive. Yet it is everywhere being realised that
only by the recovery of conviction and the release of
spiritual forces can the twentieth century be saved.
Thoughtful people are everywhere conscious that
our grotesque economic chaos in which millions are
condemned to penury because (we are told) there is
too much to eat is a symptom of something far more
fundamental a profound moral and spiritual malaise.
The intensified international antagonisms which
1 Quoted by Christopher Dawson : Enquiries, p. 209.
38 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
threaten to bring civilisation down cannot be resolved
except by conversion and rebirth into a new attitude.
Security is essentially a moral problem. In every
nation the great majority care for peace more than
for anything else : yet we are moving headlong to war.
In face of both these stupendous dangers the political
expedients are bankrupt. The tasks that await man-
kind are insoluble by contradictory technical pro-
nouncements and the faithless chicanery of politics.
They can be achieved only on the plane of sheer
moral and spiritual conviction : " So is the will of
God and so it must be ; it is right, it is possible and
it shall be done." There is nothing but faith in a
living God which can offer the moral and spiritual
dynamic to lead mankind out into the new age.
The peoples are waiting for a deliverer. Unem-
ployment, penury and frustration are slowly sapping
hope and vitality, while the ambiguous dogmas of
economists confuse their minds but offer them no
deliverance. Haunted by the spectre of war, they are
yet allowing themselves to be persuaded to adopt the
methods most certain to produce it. Yet there is in
the hearts of the common people a profound distrust
and dissatisfaction, and a growing sense that leaders
have failed them. They are waiting for convinced
leadership, as Germany shows only too clearly. If a
voice were found to speak with authority across the
confused and vacillating utterances of experts, theorists
and politicians, to bring home to the heart and mind
of the plain man the deep revolutionary simplicities
of the things which belong to his peace, there would
be such overwhelming response as has never been
DEFEAT OR REVIVAL? 39
imagined in history. Christianity may yet be that
voice. It may be the emancipator of mankind " to
give light to them that sit in darkness and to guide
their feet into the way of peace." There is given to
English-speaking Christianity an opportunity utterly
unprecedented for creative spiritual leadership. It
is ours, at least, to lead our own people and to bring
them back to Christian conviction through vital
reinterpretation of the legacy which we have inherited.
And the English people are still far more Christian
than they themselves or the Clergy admit.
3. DEFEAT OR REVIVAL?
There is set before us an open door. Yet at
first sight, it must be admitted, such a phrase seems
the exact reverse of the truth. We can hear the
doors banging all round us. Amid the play of
reactionary forces which seem to be closing in on the
world the weak, scattered influences of religion might
appear almost futile in powerlessness. It has been
sardonically observed that my book The Relevance of
Christianity was published just at the precise moment
when it became conspicuously irrelevant. Over a
great part of the world today the idea of free spiritual
community is not merely discredited, but scorned.
The dominant thought of the moment is collectivist.
Both in religion and in secular politics liberalism is
damned as well as dead. The young, who but a few
years ago seemed to be so impatient of authority as
to imperil the whole social structure, now passionately
40 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
disbelieve in freedom. 1 What fills the whole con-
temporary horizon is the rise of the totalitarian state,
whether in its Communist or Fascist form for both
of them rest on the same philosophy persecuting rival
religions because it is itself a religion. Hobbes and
Machiavelli have returned, and the Church now finds
itself confronted with a modern form of the worship
of the Great Beast. The Great Leviathan is a far worse
menace to the whole Christian conception of life than
were ever the claims of romantic Eros. In many
parts of the world the stage is set for the old conflict
between Christ and Caesar ; and it looks as though the
Church would be vindicated not so much by the
vigour of its leadership as by the courage of its
martyrdom.
The outlook is sufficiently discouraging. Yet it is
the gateway of opportunity. For the real underlying
cause of that reactionary temper which seems to be
paralysing mankind is the bankruptcy of non-theistic
Humanism. The world is sick with the fever of dis-
illusionment. We have tried to believe in Man instead
of God and are now unable to believe in either. Broad
humanitarian ideals seemed to offer the last generation
a substitute for the supernatural faith which it could
no longer accept. But humanitarian ideals are not
winning in the world today. At point after point
they are being defeated. It is hard now to believe
1 " Fascist and Communist, the young, illiberal regenerated
world split into these two camps, mutually fearing and loathing
one another but reserving their contempt for such as her, for the
drifting individualists who uttered the foolish cry of ' liberty.' "
Rose Macaulay : Going Abroad, p. 306 (of Mrs. Buckley and her
son Giles).
DEFEAT OR REVIVAL? 41
in human nature. The " strong " state rests on a funda-
mental scepticism of the capacity of human nature,
whether morally or intellectually, to sustain the
responsibility of self-government. With the decay of
ultimate conviction life was becoming a meaningless
process in which the individual man or woman had
ceased to count and had no part to play. Hence the
appeal of Fascism and Communism, which seemed to
implant some mystic touch at the heart of politics
and economics. " Deprived of the moral inspiration
of the old religion, yet dissatisfied with the alternative
of a self-centred individualism, these (countries) have
long been seeking for a dynamic ideal to save them
from personal and national demoralisation. Fascism
and Communism have power because they present
such an ideal and present it practically as a religion"*
Young Communists and young Nazis describe the
rebirth which they have experienced in the classical
language of religious conversion. But the State on
whose altar they are dedicated is but " a swollen and
distorted form of one function of Society." 2 The
absolute State denies human nature : as it claims to
rule men's souls and consciences it usurps, whether
implicitly or explicitly, the sovereign claims of
spiritual reality, and thus involves such repudiation
of all that constitutes true humanity as to make
personal values chimerical. But, apart from belief
in God and immortality, all talk of freedom becomes
1 Streeter, in Personal Ethics, p. 12.
2 From a paper by Revd. W. G. Peck in The Student Movement,
January, 1934, on "Patriotism and the Church," to which these
paragraphs are considerably indebted.
42 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
unmeaning. Unless there is a spiritual destiny
beyond time for individual persons, the defence of the
value of the individual becomes almost impossible to
maintain. Without faith in God there is no bar to the
omnicompetent claims of State-necessity.
Thus the recrudescence of Nationalism threatening
not only the peace of the world, but all that Christian
civilisation stands for is at bottom a question of
religion. It denies mankind because it denies God.
The absolute claim of the national sovereign State
makes a common humanity impossible. But it rests
on a fundamental atheism the denial of a common
world-purpose in which all nations are to be partakers.
Nationalism, says Aldous Huxley, is the positivistic
creed of the " new stupid " a substitute for tradi-
tional religion but " even more obviously false and
mischievous." 1 Apart from the Christian belief in
God, Sovereign and Father of all mankind, there is
no higher moral authority than the interest of the
national group. To admit that claim is essential
blasphemy. But only a true religion can transcend it.
And unless Nationalism is transcended Spengler's
vaticinations will be verified ; our civilisation will
very soon be done. For one thing, we shall have
starved ourselves to death, and the four horsemen of
the Apocalypse will soon be riding across a stricken
world. Here we encounter the insane paradox that,
the more the world understands its economic inter-
dependence, the more madly it attempts to violate
the elementary principle of recovery. There can
hardly be one educated person in any country in the
1 Beyond the Mexique Bay, p. 107.
DEFEAT OR REVIVAL? 43
world today who believes that economic nationalism
is anything but a policy of suicide. Yet all nations
assiduously pursue it. Our proved dependence on
one another, the means of transport and communica-
tion, the Cartel, the machinery of exchange and all the
subtly interlocking forces which have made the world
one economic organisation, have not yet made it a
community. For what the nations have chiefly in
common is precisely that which serves to divide them.
Their common economic necessity is what sets them
at one another's throats. Maddened by fear, they
exhaust their vitality in straining after a self-contained
economy which is, in the very nature of things,
impossible, attempting to make economic frontiers
march with those of political organisation. But
there are no economic frontiers ; and were it not for
the terror of war itself the result of economic terror
no sane Government would try to defend them.
As it is, behind artificial, barriers of tariffs, quotas,
subsidies and restrictions, Governments are saving
their faces while the populations are being sapped by
privation, insecurity and panic. That is the way
towards dissolution. The demoralisation of Central
Europe is born of fear driven mad by hunger. Nor
is it confined to Central Europe. Other countries,
too, have their Dillingers : other nations have seen
barricades : we do not know how far the disease will
spread. 1 Civilisation, as Christopher Dawson says,
1 " When people are brought up on creeds which they cannot
believe, they are left with no creeds at all, and are apt to buy
pistols and take to banditry, bag-snatching and racketeering
when employment fails and they find themselves short of money."
G. B. Shaw : On the Rocks, Preface, p. 168.
44 THE CHRISTIAN OPPORTUNITY
is facing the worst dangers that have threatened it
war, revolution and starvation with no inward
resources at its command and with no higher appeal
than self-interest.
Yet beside this judgment we may set another. The
decisive factor in the situation is not so much the
public anxiety as the amazing volume of goodwill,
courage, patience, cheerfulness and loyalty amongst
private citizens of all nations, which awaits only the
touch of conviction to be summoned into victorious
effectiveness. Here is the chance for spiritual leader-
ship. " I believe (says Sir Arthur Salter) that in a
crisis which is psychological as well as economic the
real constructive forces in the world have been under-
estimated and only need to be evoked to make our
task possible." 1 What can evoke those still untapped
resources ? It is the essential creed of Christianity
that the forces of life, renewal and construction are
stronger than those of reaction and decay. That is
the Gospel of the Resurrection. What the world is
waiting for is a rebirth of vital, convincing Christianity
to give men back a purpose to live for and the know-
ledge of a Power that can redeem us, to restore them
to faith, fellowship and freedom.
When the Christian says, " I believe in God," he
does not mean (as is frequently suggested) I am so
afraid of the facts of life that I want to fly to the arms
of a fantasy and take refuge in an imagined wish-
fulfilment. What he asserts is the exact opposite.
He means, " I believe that this is a real world and I
resolve to live a real life in it. I believe this world is
1 Recovery, seventh edition, Preface.
DEFEAT OR REVIVAL? 45
coming out somewhere, as the sphere of a spiritual
purpose, and that this purpose is made manifest in
the life and spirit of Jesus Christ, in His death and in
His resurrection. Therefore, I take my courage in
both hands and commit myself to that cause. I
believe that the lifegiving and redeeming forces
which are at the heart of a spiritual universe are
mightier than those which seem to resist them, and
that men who are in touch with Christ are in touch
with unconquerable resources. In that faith, there-
fore, mortal men may triumph and live victoriously
and creatively."
CHAPTER II
THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
i. CHURCHMANSHIP, TRUE AND FALSE
THE one really formidable argument against the
truth of the Christian religion is the record of the
Christian Church. Again and again it has denied its
Lord, distorted His teaching and betrayed His Spirit.
Again and again it has taken the wrong side. The
Church as an organised institution has too often
appeared not merely irrelevant, but positively injurious
and obstructive to the cause of Christ in the world.
History reveals with sombre monotony how easily the
thought of ecclesiastics drifts out of line with the mind
of Christ. Men may be forgiven for thinking that it
is inherent in " organised religion " to pervert the
original spirit of the Founders. Moreover, it has
unfortunately been true that much of the teaching
about the Church given by its official representatives
has shocked the Christian conscience of the plain
man. It has sometimes treated secondary questions
as though they were fundamental Christian issues
straining a gnat and swallowing a camel. It has
sometimes forgotten the Gospel altogether. There is
a deep suspicion in many minds that assertions made
on behalf of the Church have often little to do with
Christianity and may even seriously misrepresent it.
4 6
GHURGHMANSHIP, TRUE AND FALSE 47
What is known as " definite Church teaching " has
produced a great many very indefinite churchmen.
In the minds of too many modern men and women
the ecclesiastical forms of Christianity have come to
be most disastrously associated both with triviality of
concern and with questionable sincerity in expression.
Further, the notorious inability of the Christian
Churches to realise in act, either in social or economic
relations, the brotherhood which their pulpits pro-
claim, brings the whole idea into derision. Many
sincere disciples of Christ think it better that they
should remain outside, where they feel less com-
promised and more honest. The idea of the Church
has somehow gone wrong ; the whole conception is
under a cloud at present ; and for one or another of
many reasons the claim of institutional Christianity is
exposed to widespread distrust. Not only among half-
educated critics who have never taken the trouble to
understand it, but among some of the finest Christian
spirits. Indeed, one of the chief facts to be reckoned
with in the existing religious situation is that to many
faithful disciples the word Church and the word
Christianity seem to stand for two different things.
A very dangerous fissure is here opening between the
clergy and the lay people.
No one who cares for the future of religion can
acquiesce in this situation. The Churches as we know
them in Britain are predominantly middle-aged
societies, and much that is most hopeful and promising
in contemporary life and religion stands in no con-
scious relation to them. Unless the process can be
redirected, the Churches will soon cease to count at
48 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
all. They must face a steadily declining membership
in which the death-rate far exceeds the birth-rate ;
and while they last they must be the refuge of the
least adventurous elements in religion. Nobody who
is committed to Christ's cause and the Christianisa-
tion of the social order can regard this prospect
without profound misgiving.
But if we would reconstruct the Church idea in the
loyalties of the rising generation, no mere tradition-
alism will serve us. For them the appeal to history
does not hold. It may be true, historically speaking,
that the whole solid strength of Christianity has been
embodied in the Christian Church. But that, they
reply, is no argument : whatever it may have been in
the past, it has now outgrown its usefulness. The
appeal to support an ancient institution, whether it
be political or religious, on the ground that it cannot
otherwise survive, will be met by raising the previous
question : Has the institution any survival value ?
Social and political institutions and the moral ideals
with which they are bound up find themselves here
in the same case as the Church. All established
traditions are suspect, and those that seem to the
young to be most compromised by the moral debacle
of 1914 are most likely to fall into condemnation.
No claim presented in such terms is compelling.
Along such lines we shall find the road blocked.
Moreover, what tells heavily against us is the deep
suspicion of propaganda. The result of experience in
the war has been to make it almost an axiom in the
minds of thoughtful and educated people that official
propaganda must be untrue. It is probable that this
CHURCHMANSHIP, TRUE AND FALSE 49
counts for more than the clergy have as yet realised
in contemporary reaction against the Church. Many
undergraduates think of the Church as merely part
of a general conspiracy organised by the War Office.
Thus there seems to be very little hope if we argue in
terms of an institution which is just " there " and asking
for our submission. We must get back behind thread-
bare arguments and candidly face the fundamental
questions : What is the place of the Church in the
modern world ? and Does Christianity need a Church
at all ? .
Let us be clear what is at stake in all this. It is
not merely a clerical anxiety. It is not that we wish
the new generation to accept with more docility and
receptiveness the traditional teaching of the clergy,
which is not in itself necessarily a true aim. For, as
Cromwell told the Scots ministers, it is possible we
may be mistaken. The issue here is far more momen-
tous. We are concerned with something no less than
the reconstruction of our social order on its true
spiritual basis, and the Christianisation of the world's
life. When we look at the chaos of the world today,
is it not clear that its deepest need is for a society to
revive within it which rules its life by spiritual con-
victions ? The root cause of our present confusion is
that politics, economics and ethics are in no true
relation to one another and are all unrelated to
religion. Our civilisation has no centre. The modern
way of escape from this confusion is by way of
recourse to the omnicompetent State, which can apply
the methods of compulsion over the whole field of
communal life because modern men are only agreed
50 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
on those material and economic interests to which
compulsory methods are applicable. 1
When people believe that the chief end of man is
to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, then there can
be spiritual unity, with large freedom for persons and
groups within it. When they believe, as John Locke
asserted, that the end for which men unite in com-
monwealths is the preservation of their property,
then the State must become God. 2 The new civilisa-
tion which is emerging cannot find both unity and
freedom till it is centred upon the will of God. Its
fundamental need is redemption from destructive and
sterile self-sufficiency, with the consequent inter-
national antagonisms, into the freedoms of the
Kingdom of God. But in our age of high-power mass-
production no merely individual insights can with-
stand the pressure of collectivism. At a time when all
alert political thinking is intensely preoccupied with
the Group (whether economic or national), it is strange
that so many in their religious thinking are swinging
out towards an individualism which in other spheres
of life they reject. It is partly, no doubt, a desire to
keep a way open by which they can escape from the
pressure of mechanisation and regimentation and (as
we say) " live their own lives " in the things of most
intimate concern to them. It is, nevertheless, a
mistaken attempt. For it is the task of the Christian
society to provide for its members a common life
which offers a richness of self-fulfilment greater than
1 A. D. Lindsay : The Churches and Democracy, pp. 53 sq.
2 I owe the juxtaposition to Mr. Buchan's Oliver Cromwell,
p. 22.
CHURCHMANSHIP, TRUE AND FALSE 51
anything which can be made accessible in a State-
enforced uniformity.
In face of the mighty drive towards Fascism,
individual religion is helpless. 1 Christianity can
barely survive amid the intolerant blizzards of mass
rule, such as threatens its existence in Europe and
may yet sweep across our own land, save as a society
conscious of itself and organised by its own trans-
cendent allegiance. Nothing but a revival of the
Church can withstand the usurpations of Caesarism.
What is needed to redeem and mitigate the over-
riding claims of the State are vital, free associations
within the community which the State rules, acknow-
ledging loyalties so strong that they will not burn
incense to Ccesar. This, as the Master of Balliol has
pointed out in the lecture from which I have already
quoted, is the one hope of salvation for democracy ;
and the genius of the Christian society is democratic,
not authoritarian.
There is this further and all-important point. The
Church as the one international society is the one
force which can resist effectively the dangerous pre-
tensions of nationalism. It has been the Anglican
achievement to combine tradition and experiment,
freedom and order, in vital synthesis. And the world-
1 Cf. John Strachey's remark, " Life, with the growth of large
scale production, is becoming less and less individual and more
and more communal again. Thus, for anyone who can achieve
religious belief at all the Catholic form of Christianity is becoming
increasingly appropriate." The Coming Struggle for Power, p. 161.
But I am not arguing for a highly organised monarchical Church
vis-d-vis the modern corporate state, but, as the text should make
clear, the opposite.
D 2
52 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
wide Anglican Communion, conscious of itself as a
world- wide Church, yet united only by spiritual bonds
of faith, loyalty and a common order, is endowed with
unique opportunities as the nucleus of a universal
society transcending political and racial differences.
This is what the Church is intended to be. It is, in
ideal, the world-community with its life centred in the
divine Reality, thus at once transcending and redeem-
ing all positive, secular societies, though it must
embody itself in them. And it is, in fact, the unique
instrument through which societies can be redeemed,
as being itself the redeemed Society gathered out of
every people and tongue. It is the witness to God's
reign on earth and the foretaste of its realisation.
Here, however, we reach the bigger question : Is
the Church necessary to Christianity ?
There are a good many people today who might be
prepared to give weight to the suggestion that the
Church may have a pragmatic importance. What
they find it impossible to accept is that belief in the
Christian Church is integral to the Christian religion.
The grounds for this contemporary attitude are, as
we have seen, not hard to appreciate. Yet it stands
in startling divergence from the Christianity of the
New Testament. If a man is a Fascist or a Com-
munist, then the Fascist or Communist state is central
in his political philosophy. He cannot accept Com-
munist or Fascist principles and remain detached from
the organisation. So it is with the Church in the
New Testament. As it is called into being by the
Gospel, so it is part of the Gospel which it preaches
and an essential element in its own creed.
CHURCHMANSHIP, TRUE AND FALSE 53
In religion, however, the man of the modern world
wishes to try this strange experiment of believing the
principles of Christianity and disbelieving in that
society in which alone they can be incarnated. Many
signs, in England at least, suggest that we are now
standing on the threshold of a great revival of faith
and conviction. The crushing sense of futility and
failure which hangs like a fog over public affairs is
fc-rcing back the rising generation on a search for the
ultimate springs of hope and freedom. People are
hungry for a living religion, for a God to pray to
and a faitfh to live by and a power to recreate the
social order. Nobody who is in touch with the
Universities can fail to observe how the young men
and women are turning back to seek almost desperately
for the secrets of Christian faith and life. And the
tide is coming in very fast. But to watch it fills one
both with hope and fear. The Christianity which
they are rediscovering is in most ways magnificently
vital. It is sincere, spontaneous and self-sacrificing.
It is ready for big response to big claims. But it has,
on the whole and summarily stated, very little regard
for the Christian Church. To most of the younger
people in our time the Christian religion presents
itself in terms of an individual relationship between
themselves and the Christ they seek to follow. For
the Church, at least as traditionally conceived, they
are unable to see the necessity. Admittedly it may
be of some value that people who hold a conviction
in common should associate for mutual encourage-
ment and the wider propagation of their beliefs, as
in a political party or a trade union. But the
54 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
Christian life can quite well dispense with this.
Church membership seems to be regarded more or
less as an optional " special subject," not part of the
prescribed Christian course.
Now all this needs very tender handling. We must
never forget that religion is now passing through a
reconstruction and readjustment in comparison with
which the Reformation in the sixteenth century was
but a tiny bubble. A restatement of belief is in process
much further reaching and more fundamental than
the still mediaevally-minded Reformers dreamed of.
There is, even more urgently than there was then, a
demand for simplicity and reality and a concentration
on " things that matter." There is, in common with
the reforming movements, a determination to press
back to Christ, to the Gospel and to the " pure "
word of God, as the ultimate court of appeal. And
all great revivals have come from a rediscovery of the
mind of Christ, to revitalise a dead tradition or to
check and purge a false interpretation. But there is
this tremendous difference, that the critical scholar-
ship of the last century brings us more closely into
touch with the historical Jesus Christ of Nazareth
than was possible for our Christian predecessors at
any time in the past thousand years. And
Christianity, after all, is Christ.
If a non-ecclesiastical Christianity, much concerned
with the Spirit and teaching ofjesus and very little with
organised religion, holds the allegiance of the younger
people, there is no cause there but for hope and thank-
fulness. It is probably the best thing that could happen
as the first step in a real resurrection of the Christian
GHURGHMANSHIP, TRUE AND FALSE 55
Church which is His Body. It is urgently important
at all times that the Christian conscience should be
sensitive to the comparative failure of the Church to
express in action the Spirit of its Lord, and exercised
to redress that discrepancy. The Spirit of Jesus (as
that great missionary Temple Gairdner loved to
reiterate) is the only asset of the Church. But
without the Church Christ is unfulfilled. And as
part of the new Reformation there must be a creative
reconstruction of our thought and teaching about the
Church itself. It is not more arguments about
Churchmanship that will offer the right way of
approach, but more understanding of God and Christ
and the method of God's work in the life of man.
We must start not from institutional theories, but from
Christ Himself and the Gospel.
The Church is necessary to Christianity because
through it Christ's work is done and the Gospel which
He proclaimed is verified. Without it both would be
frustrated and unrealised. Christ proclaimed the
coming of God's kingdom and offered Himself that
it might come true. Whatever precisely the Kingdom
of God meant to Him it implies, at the very least,
transformed relationships between men and God and
men and one another, brought into being by the
divine initiative. The Gospel is the good news about
God because of what Christ has revealed and wrought,
that he who has seen Him has seen the Father, and
that it is God who is in Christ reconciling the world
to Himself. A Church that has ceased to exhibit
that Gospel has forfeited its claim to men's allegiance.
But apart from the Church, what Gospel is there ?
56 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
If no redeemed society had been born, then the Cross
of Christ was defeat. Reconciliation is an empty
word till it is verified in a common experience. But
men learnt to say " God is Love " through what they
learnt in the new community.
Wherever this Gospel has been proclaimed men
have been drawn by it into a fellowship wherein, by
a common partaking in Christ's Spirit, they are
reconciled to one another. It was so that the Christian
movement started. The Church as the New Testa-
ment presents it to us is conceived not as a voluntary
society which a man may or may not decide to join,
but as God's act through Jesus Christ called into being
by His redemptive purpose. This is, for the New Testa-
ment, the evidence that God is at work in the world
through Him ; here the eternal purpose of redemption
clothes itself in visible form on earth. In a world of
alienation and antagonism where men felt that they
were estranged from God, a new society woke into
life by the touch of God through Christ in the Gospel.
In it the barriers were down, and in mutual trust and
forgiveness men learnt the meaning of the divine
love. It was something unprecedented and unique ;
no fortunate accident of history, but the work of God
whose will for the world to call men into fellowship
with Himself through Christ and thereby with one
another was thus being revealed and fulfilled. It
was the divine will coming true, on earth as it is in
heaven. This is the heart of Christian experience ;
it is what Christ means in the lives of men. It is the
starting point of the Gospel as it is its verification and
fruition, the outward manifestation and the instru-
CHURCHMANSHIP, TRUE AND FALSE 57
ment of the grace and truth which it proclaims.
Thus the Church is part of its own Gospel as the
means whereby mankind can be " saved," reconciled
to God and one another through Christ's redeeming
and lifegiving Spirit. It is the organ of Christ's
work in the world.
To profess belief in the Church, therefore, is to live
in the faith that Christ will win, that in Him mankind
will be redeemed out of fear, hatred and antagonism
into a true community of the Spirit in which God's
love and justice will reign and the mind of Christ be
the law of liberty. And it is to pledge one's life to
that cause. This is no abstruse doctrine of theology,
but the consecration of discipleship. And it is what
is vital and permanent in the Catholic doctrine of the
Church.
But this is not in the least inconsistent with the
great Evangelical tradition. Some Christians are
apt to be afraid of it. Partly because as we shall see
later it has frequently been stated in the wrong way ;
partly because they think it belittles that personal
intercourse of the soul with God without which there
is no real religion. Let us first remove this misunder-
standing.
There is no vital, developed religion which is not
" personal " religion, and certainly there is no
Christianity. Religious progress has come not least
through the emancipation of religion from a merely
communal or group conception of it to the recogni-
tion of individual souls as the subjects of religious
experience. Such a movement is reflected in the
Old Testament ; and the faith of Christ, which sets
58 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
supreme value on persons made for communion with
God, is unalterably a personal religion. Yet, because
personality is social, an individualistic religion may
prove to be the very reverse of " personal." Men
become persons in relationship. And because of the
social nature of personality all " Grace " comes to
men through societies. It is one of the laws of human
experience that all appreciation and all knowledge, all
our values and all our moral insights, are mediated by
social inheritance ; and ihis is as true in religion as
elsewhere.
The pioneer in the arts and sciences owes his epoch-
making discovery to the tradition which he supersedes.
The moral and religious reformer is the child of the
society which he criticises. Even the flash of mystical
intuition, which seems the direct immediate con-
frontation of the soul " alone with the Alone," is in
fact mediated and made possible by the seer's religious
inheritance. Everywhere in life this law holds. But
it holds in a special sense of Christianity. The claim
to " owe nothing to the Church " is almost unbeliev-
ably superficial. To what do we owe so much as the
knowledge of Christ's name ? There are, no doubt,
lonely " conversions " which seem to be entirely
unmediated by any Church or any personal agent :
they come, as St. Paul said, " by revelation." But
even these are in fact due to the inspiration of some
Christian deed (the manner of Stephen's death, for
example), the memory of a Christian upbringing, a
phrase in the New Testament, and so forth ; and
these are the focus or embodiment of the spiritual
legacy of the Church.
CHURGHMANSHIP, TRUE AND FALSE 59
" Back to Christ " is an inspiring cry : but in fact
we can only find Him if we go where His people are.
If it means Back to the Synoptic Gospels, at least half
their meaning evaporates some would say that they
become meaningless if we ignore that common experi-
ence which they assume and from which they come.
They were born out of the worshipping community.
And as with them, so with the Christian life. It lies at
the heart of Christian experience that God's redeeming
gift through Christ Jesus comes uniquely to men and
women when they share in His faith and fellowship.
That, in essence, is what the Church means. Nobody
with the New Testament before him can doubt that it
was, and is, from the matrix of this inward spiritual
community that the new life flows upon the world, with
its new values and insights and transfigured qualities
of character, to redeem and to redirect it from with-
in. The Christian redemption of the social order is
offered the world through this redeemed society.
In saying this, we do not delude ourselves with
futile dreams of a revived Theocracy. The Church
will never again " rule " the world in the sense that
" one set of men (the clergy) laid down rules for
another set of men," which was the mistake of the
mediaeval system. 1 It may be regarded as a false
ideal to conceive of the Church as itself a social order
a society standing over against others and embracing
all human activities is a characteristic polity of its
own. That does not affect the main argument. For
our present purpose it is not even necessary to use
institutional language at all. We may think in terms
1 Lindsay : Christianity and Economics, p. 144.
6o THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
of a company of friends, drawn together in worship
and fellowship by their most distinctive and precious
possession and the bond of their common discipleship.
Nevertheless, it still remains true that the Church
is the instrument of God's work, reconciling the
world to Himself. Through the outward movement
upon the world of that communion in the Christ-
Spirit which is His supremely redemptive gift, there
may be fashioned a transformed social order in which
the changing materials of the world's life biological,
economic and political, with all the technical factors
involved in them may be made the incarnation of
that Spirit and the outward embodiment of His will
for men. That is implied in the phrase, the Body of
Christ. It would be the Kingdom of God in the
world's life. In view of this we may even say truly
that the Church must dominate human history. For
God's work in man through Christ Jesus is His
uniquely precious and determinative but ever-renewed
act in the world's life. All that is good is of His
creation, summoned into life by His touch. But
" through the Incarnation and by His Holy Spirit
in the Church God is ever moving forth to conserve
and to perfect all that He has achieved, and still
strives to achieve, in hearts wherein Christ is not yet
enthroned." I
2. THE CHURCH AS GOD'S ACT
This idea is often misrepresented. Those who are
most sensitively alive to this rich conception of the
1 Lambeth Encyclical, 1930, p. 20.
THE CHURCH AS GOD*S ACT 6l
Church as the unique (but not the sole) instrument of
God's Kingdom in the life of the world are apt to
spoil their case by expounding it in " high and dry "
institutional doctrine. This is why people are some-
times repelled by it. The danger in the " Catholic "
type of teaching is that the Church should be repre-
sented as an almost impersonal and mechanical
system through which " means of Grace " are con-
veyed. But such thought moves on a sub-Christian
level. You can have a perfectly logical exposition of
the way in which " Grace " is given through the
Church, its ministry and its sacraments, which has
yet no moral or spiritual content, and appears to
have no vital connexion with the mind of Christ
revealed in the New Testament. But the " Grace "
of a living God is not impersonal, and no system can
be a " channel " for it. Such a view is profoundly
un-catholic ; and the evangelical, reformed Churches
grew up not least by way of protest against this
debased medizevalism. It is not thus that Christ
dwells with His own.
The formative idea of the Christian fellowship is in
the phrase " Where two or three are gathered." The
Grace of God comes to Christian people through the
life and worship of the Church because, when Chris-
tians meet together in the faith and in the name of Christ,
That comes alive in their hearts which is liberating,
" sovereign and life-giving" (Kvpiov /cat tfairoiovv] .
" Means of Grace " through sacraments and ministries
are derivative from that experience and the life of the
Christian community ; and no theory about them
can be true which is more " mechanical " than that is.
62 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
Moreover, interpretations of this kind seem to lead,
with fatal facility, into that perversion of the Church-
idea which conceives of it as a clerical society. The
Church is a " priestly " society that is, in respect of
its whole membership : but it is not a clerical society.
Few things have done more harm than the confusion
between " Clericalism " and " Churchmanship." The
English layman has an instinctive dread that what he
vaguely calls " high church " doctrine will hand over
his conscience to the clergy and enable them to impose
views upon him which he knows in his heart to
be inconsistent with the spirit and teaching of
Jesus Christ. And for this he has a good deal of
justification.
To some minds there is a strong appeal in the
thought of a great institutional system, logical,
consistent and authoritative. It appears to be intel-
lectually imposing and an antidote to slack, flabby
thinking. It is plausible, but it is fallacious, and in
the end it gravely misinterprets the genius of the
Christian religion. It makes, no doubt, for practical
efficiency ; it seems to supply a fine fighting faith.
When the Church is hard-pressed, the natural ten-
dency is the tightening up of institutional stresses,
with strong appeals for discipline and authority.
But there is too high a price to be paid for it. Institu-
tional authoritarianism is not the genius of Chris-
tianity.
It is of the very utmost importance to keep our
thought of the Church uncontaminated by the virus
of the " ecclesiastical " mind. The obstinate reli-
gious individualism so characteristic of our native
THE CHURCH ASGOD'SACT 63
temper is at heart a protest against that. The
Englishman has seen it in action, insisting, in the
name of the Church, on theories which are blankly
incompatible both with the Christian idea of God and
the realities of the Christian life. It appears to him
an unchristian frame of mind. He has seen pre-
occupation with a system result in unchurching
fellow Christians who have thought right to order
their common life on a different principle of organisa-
tion. That may be irrefutable in logic, but he knows
that it is simply untrue.
Hence, as the Bishop of Gloucester observes, the
word Church, which ought to inspire a great vision of
fellowship in Christ, comes to stand for something
sectarian and implies separation and exclusiveness.
The theologian who expounds its doctrine seems to
dwell on what will keep people out of it, instead of
seeking how many he can include. x If that is what the
Church-idea stands for it seems to the Englishman to
be something different from what he has learnt of Christ
in the Gospels. He is shocked, also, by the triviality
into which too often, as he observes, the ecclesiastical
outlook degenerates. The things that clergy are apt to
think importantare frequently, so he believes, negligible.
The idea of the Church for which we are here
contending is at every point contradictory to the
merely ecclesiastical point of view. But it is in
fundamental accord with the true " catholic " tradi-
tion. The ecclesiastical temper and outlook are a
perversion of genuine " Catholicism." Nobody can
be too " high " a churchman. You cannot hold too
1 What it Means to be a Christian, pp. 165-166.
64 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
high a view of the Church, because it is God's act
through Christ Jesus : it is not of ourselves, it is the
gift of God. But the " higher " the view we hold of
the Church, the more we appreciate its unique mission
in the redemption of the world's life, the less " ecclesias-
tical " should we be, and the less concerned with the
trivial interests and tawdry bric-a-brac of ecclesias-
ticism. A man may be a perfectly good churchman
without ever reading a Church newspaper. 1
Such are on the whole its best members ; and it is
not the least of our weaknesses that we associate the
idea of Churchmanship with ways in which people
spend their spare time rather than with doing their
job in the world well. But the latter is integral to the
Church's life, and far more important to the Kingdom
of God than membership in " Churchy " societies.
It has been the great contribution of the Liberal
school in the Church of England to keep alive an
essential protest against excessive rigidity and formal-
ism. By its scholarship and historical research it has
undermined many of those assumptions on which
rigid theories had been based. It has been the brave
1 " I have so much insisted upon the Church in my recommen-
dations that it may look inconsistent if I warn you against
Church Societies, Church newspapers the little Churchinesses
which, I should think, must be fairly frequent in your Cathedral
Town. ... To love Holy Communion, yet tactfully, unironic-
ally to escape from all Eucharistic Guilds, etc., to care for God's
work in the world especially in and through Christianity, and
yet (again quite silently, with full contrary encouragement to
others who are helped by such literature) never opening a Church
paper or Magazine. ... I only want to clear away every
possible half-notion that in order to love God, Christ, Church
dearly, it is necessary for everyone (hence also for you) to be
Churchy" Von Hugel : Letters^ p. 289.
THE CHURCH AS GOD'S ACT 65
champion of freedom. Against obscurantists on both
wings it has stood for the claim of intellectual liberty.
To it chiefly we owe the vindication of biblical and
historical criticism and a scrupulous regard for the
laws of evidence. Its courageous and unfettered
thinking has led the Church through the readjust-
ments and reconstructions of its theology, enabling it
to retain the respect of educated men and women and
to hold its place in the Universities. Without its
critical and prophetic spirit the Church would have
hardly survived the crisis and would almost certainly
have succumbed before the onslaughts of modern
knowledge. We can hardly exaggerate the debt
which we owe to it. Its great names are deservedly
held in honour in English-speaking Christendom and
beyond it. The weakness of this school, on the other
hand, has been its rather inadequate and sterile
interpretation of the Church itself, as at best a useful
religious organisation and at worst a "necessary evil."
This is odd, from those who have done so much
for the rediscovery of the New Testament. For
the Church is conceived in the New Testament as
" coming down out of heaven from God." It is
God's act through Jesus Christ. The " grace of the
Lord Jesus " and the " love of God " were experi-
enced by the first Christians within the " community
of the Holy Spirit." 1 It was " God who called them
into fellowship through His Son Jesus Christ our
Lord." Fellowship and Communion are the same
thing, as they are translations of the same word : it
means not merely a " brotherly " expansiveness, but
1 2 Cor. xiii. 14.
66 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
a common partaking in that reality which creates the
distinctively Christian experience. It is " communion
in the Holy Spirit " a mutual sharing in the new life
imparted to men by God through Jesus Christ.
And it was the direct, immediate result of the Lord's
life and death and resurrection. On no other terms
is it intelligible. No account of the Church can be
true which does not directly connect it with Him ;
and no interpretation of Christ Himself can claim any
historical justification which does not account for the
rise of the Christian Society.
It was out of the heart of that Community that
there were born all those new insights, those new
resources of faith and character, that sense of emanci-
pation into new worlds which the Christians described
as rebirth in Christ. It was what God, the self-
imparting Goodness, could now evoke out of human
history because of His work in man through Christ
Jesus. It was not something imposed upon the
Gospel, robbing it of its vital spontaneity : it was its
verification and fruition. It was Jesus, coming to
His fulfilment. Indeed, we may say without exaggera-
tion that it was through this experience in community
that they came to understand His significance. The
Christology of the early Church grew with the
deepening and widening of its own life.
And at this point it is well to insist that the claim
of the Christian Society to become the universal
community is bound up with its God-given origin.
It claims to be the society for all men precisely
because it " comes down from above." This cuts
across twentieth century prejudice, but is really con-
THE CHURCH AS GOD's ACT 6j
firmed by human experience. Humanistic moral and
religious systems are incorrigibly sectarian and exclu-
sive. The chief concern of self-centred societies is the
safeguarding of their own frontiers. They may do
this by highly trained butlers quick to detect those
who do not belong, or by rules of professional etiquette,
or by visas, passports and Ellis Island ; but they all
want to keep other people out as the best way of
securing their own unity. The chief concern of the
Christian society, at least when it is true to its own
character, is to be going out into the highways and
gathering in " both bad and good." It is not a
society of select persons, but the home and school both
of saints and sinners. It can hope to be catholic and
all-including, irrespective of race, endowment or
education, because it is not an earth-born society, but
God's gift to man through Christ Jesus.
Contemporary thought seems to imagine that
Christianity could be universalised and Christ brought
near to the common man if we would drop those trans-
cendent attributes with which Christian faith has
invested Him and present Him frankly as "just like
one of ourselves." But this is the contradictory of the
truth about it. The categories employed in the New
Testament to interpret the significance of the Lord
rise in height and daring concurrently with the
discovery of what He could do and the range of His
redemptive influence. Men learnt to acclaim Him
as " Son of God " when they discovered His univer-
sality and that He could be the Saviour of all the
world. The same is true of the Christian Society.
It can gather all mankind into its fellowship and make
E 2
68 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
them partakers in its life because it derives through
Christ from the Father. The divine claim of the
Christian Society is the secret of its human avail-
ability.
The modern mind is obsessed by the problem
whether the Church was " founded " by Christ, and
doubts whether it can honestly be argued that He
thought in terms of an organised society to preserve His
teaching, and carry on His work. Those who think
that this is non-proven can appeal plausibly and
perhaps convincingly to the evidence of the Synoptic
Gospels. But it is not a legitimate deduction that the
whole idea of a Church is therefore a perversion of His
thought and an "institutionalising" of His Spirit.
That would not follow from the evidence. It might
be perfectly true to His Spirit even though He had
never expressly purposed it. After all, the developed
Christian Society, as exhibited in the Acts and Epistles,
was there first, and produced the Gospels. The reason
why the Gospels were written was that people who had
" learned Christ " already, within the experience of
the community, wanted a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth
and some account of the origin of the Movement.
The reason why these Gospels were accepted was that
they rang true to that experience.
But the desire for a negative conclusion is partly
at least the reaction of honest men against the
rather desperate special pleading to which tradi-
tionalism has had recourse. The forlorn attempts
to call in as evidence teaching of which there
is no trace in the records (which yet " may " or
" must " have been given by Him during the period
THE CHURCH AS GOD'S ACT 69
after the Resurrection) in order to make a traditional
view plausible, suggests a case too weak for rational
argument. People who have been brought up on
such subterfuges naturally " see red " and lay about
them as soon as they learn the rudiments of criticism.
The first necessity, therefore, is complete candour.
I do not think it is possible to maintain that Jesus of
Nazareth " founded " the Church in the sense in
which (for example) John Balliol and Dervorguilla
founded their College. He did not say Let us found
a society. He did not provide it with statutes. He
did not prescribe its organisation. It may be, as many
scholars believe, that the eschatological colouring of
His thought and abrupt foreshortening of His per-
spectives made it impossible for Him to foresee the
emergence of any kind of religious community. That
opinion can cite a good deal of evidence, though it
ignores a good deal on the other side. (It would, for
example, be very strange if a mind so saturated as
His in the teaching of Deutero-Isaiah had not thought
hi terms of a " remnant " and the ministry of a
redeemed community. It would be strange that He
spent so much time in selecting and training the twelve
unless He had some intention of using them. Nor is
it easy to see why St. Peter wanted to fill up the place
of Judas unless they had been led to expect that the
twelve had some special part to play in the restoration
of Israel. 1 )
Yet even if we accept the extreme statement of the
eschatological interpretation it does not invalidate the
contention that the Church is the creation of His
1 Cf, Luke xxii. 28.
7O THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
Spirit ; which is all that is really fundamental for us.
The Church existed in germ and nucleus from the
day when He gathered His first disciples round Him ;
and its life has been continuous ever since. " No
other source than Jesus Himself can be found for those
things which are most decisively original and vital in
Christianity." 1 It is the constant historical reference
which has kept the Church vigorous and creative,
and whenever this has failed it has withered. The rite
which lies at the centre of its cultus links its life finally
and inseparably with Him who was crucified under
Pontius Pilate. 2 This in itself makes it impossible
to think of the Church as other than continuous with
the " little flock " of the days in Galilee. Through
friendship they had learnt faith. Through life in
community with Him they had learnt to worship God
as Our Father the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Through the power of the Resurrection His redeeming
presence became yet more intimate, and the love
wherewith the Father had loved Jesus came to "be
in them " and He " in them." This is the organic
relationship between the prophetic ministry in Galilee
and the community of the Holy Spirit in which His
redemptive work was verified.
Christianity has never affirmed that Jesus of Nazareth
in the days of His flesh is God's final word in human
1 Grensted : The Person of Christ, p. 36.
2 The so-called mystery hypothesis about the origins of the
Christian cult is really too absurd to be taken seriously, especially
after N. P. Williams' critique in Essays Catholic and Critical,
pp. 392 ff. See also W. R. Matthews : Essays in Construction,
Ghs. X and XI. " If there is any continuation of the religion
of Jesus in the world, the Catholic Church with its supernatural
claims has by far the best title."
THE CHURCH AS GOD'S ACT 'Jl
history. His own teaching implicitly denies it. The
story in the Gospels is unintelligible unless He thought
of Himself as " more than a prophet " as the Inaugu-
rator of the New Age and the Bearer of a redemptive
mission. The mysterious apocalyptic language ex-
presses His claim upon the future x : and its meaning
is most perfectly interpreted in the most intimate
passages of the Fourth Gospel. " It is expedient for
you that I go away." That Gospel has given the deepest
expression to the inner secrets of personal discipleship,
yet it is the most " churchly " book in the New
Testament. Its Christ speaks out of the heart of the
Christian community. It translates the eschatological
language of the Synoptic records into new terms the
Spirit who comes to lead men into all truth and to
build up a community in Love, bringing Christ
nearer to men's hearts than ever in the days of His
life on earth, as the Vine of which they were the
branches.
This common partaking in the Spirit expressed
itself by intrinsic necessity in a community of worship
and service. Life was now experienced from a new
centre. God's Kingdom was coming into the hearts
of men, and the " powers of the coming age " had
begun to transform this world of time. " In Christ "
all things were becoming new. There were deeper
backgrounds to personality ; there were wider hori-
zons of thought and enterprise ; there were moral
and spiritual capacities to be elicited out of human
nature which neither religion nor morals had yet
dreamed of. People who had never before " counted "
1 See Relevance of Christianity, pp. 91-99.
72 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
things that are not, in St. Paul's blunt description
now became vitally individual. For this Church was
a community of persons not a " totalitarian " experi-
ment like Caesarism, Fascism or Communism, which
sacrifice men to collective policy. It was a home, in
which men and women could be themselves and could
be their best : the Gospel spoke in the language of
home " in our own tongue wherein we were born."
Life, within it, assumed a new sacredness, and enter-
prise found a new incentive. Men bred in an
atmosphere of despair, paralysed by the atrophy of
conviction, lost to the secret of moral regeneration,
could now get bravely to work on the world again.
A new chapter in history had opened.
The various documents of the New Testament
contain, as it were, the introductory paragraphs in
that still uncompleted chapter. They allow us to see
the new scale of values which the brethren begin to
acknowledge, the transfigured qualities of character
which begin to appear in average men and women,
the moral and intellectual vitality evoked from them
by the lifegiving Spirit, the creative and regenerative
resources which are in the possession of the redeemed.
The full meaning has yet to be discovered : the complete
content of the new order has yet to be disclosed in
human experience. But this Community in the Holy
Spirit was rightly described as God's " new creation."
It was God, at work in men's hearts through Christ,
who had gathered them into this experience. The
Community was the act and gift of God reconciling
the world unto Himself, and the instrument of that
reconciliation. And it is an act constantly renewed.
THE CHURCH AS GOD'S ACT 73
It is now, as it was then, out of common worship and
friendship " in Christ " that the great liberations are
born and the characteristic Christian responses to the
pressure of God upon the world evoked.
To insist upon this is of the first importance. For
the gravest obstacle to Christian faith is the annihilat-
ing sense of contrast between the " Jerusalem that is
above " and the "Jerusalem that now is." It is diffi-
cult, as Dr. Matthews says, to resist the feeling of anti-
climax in looking at the Church as it now exists
" compared with the creative act which gave it
birth ' J1 It is now in bondage with its children.
" The Churches," as we know them in the modern
world, are massively organised institutional systems,
working through a complex machinery of financial
and administrative routine. This is not least true of
the Church of England, with its rigid framework of
legal precedent and its immensely strong social
tradition. No one can understand the Church of
England, or hope to achieve any reforms within it,
till he has schooled himself to appreciate the enormous
pressure and thrust of the traditional and the almost
unbreakable resistance of its legal and administrative
steelwork. That is not necessarily all to the bad. It
may even pertain to its characteristic ethos as a Church
which has consecrated for a thousand years the public
as well as the private life of the nation. Yet its
elaborate, complicated mechanism does seem frigid,
impersonal and remote compared with the intimacy
and spontaneity of the Koinonia in the New Testament.
The idea of the Church on which we have been
1 Op. cit., p. 234.
74 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
dwelling seems too ethereal to survive embodiment
in diocesan boards and sub-committees.
There is, of course, no real inconsistency between
spontaneous spiritual inwardness and organised prac-
tical efficiency : spirit must always fashion itself a
body. But organisation can stifle spirit ; and the
very strength of our system is a danger to it. The
essential simplicities of the faith of Christ may be,
and too easily are, obscured by the complexity of the
external instrument. It sometimes seems as though
the official voice of the Church of England had for-
gotten how to speak the language of Galilee. Though
it now represents but a small minority, " the Church "
is one of our " national institutions " ; it is a great
traditional organisation for supporting religion and
other good causes ; it is honoured as such by the Press
at its best ; and probably to a number of its own
members it does not represent very much more than
that. They would feel disconcerted and self-con-
scious if they were told that its business in the world
is to embody the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Many of them
may feel pride and confidence in the continuity of the
Church they know with the stream of Christian life
from the first days. But it is probable that the great
majority think of the Church described in the New
Testament as but the half-formed tentative beginning
of the organisation which has grown out of it.
It therefore becomes supremely important to insist
that the scriptural experience of community in the Holy
Spirit, as the matrix of new and enriched response to
life, is not merely the historical origin, but the regula-
tive idea of the Church, at all times and in all places.
INTROVERSION AND ITS REMEDY 75
And if the Church is to retain vitality it must be
continuously breaking through the massive framework
of the organisation. For the Church is God's act at
each point of time : though it is continuous, yet it is
never finished. It is, as St. Paul said, yet to be ful-
filled ; it is not a tradition merely, but a growth, an
adventure rather than an institution. It is in the
world as the vital nucleus of community perfected in
God. It perpetuates itself in its environment as the
manifold elements of the world's life are redeemed
from the dominion of worldliness and incorporated
into the " Body " of Christ.
3. INTROVERSION AND ITS REMEDY
f
For the Church is in the world to redeem it.
A Church true to its character and mission will
be looking outwards upon the world, not inwards
upon its own system. If its interest becomes
fixated on exclusively institutional concerns the
outward flow of its life will be inhibited and it will
be threatened with auto-intoxication. Thus an
excessive preoccupation with ecclesiastical or insti-
tutional questions seems to connote an inadequate
understanding of what is really implied in Church
membership. So von Hugel observed of Dr. Pusey
that " He was incapable, or had made himself
incapable, or deliberately acted as though he were
incapable, of taking any interest in anything that
was not directly, technically religious and not
explicitly connected with religion." And this, he
comments, was quite uncatholic " quite unlike the
76 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
great catholic saints, quite unlike the Jesus of the
Synoptists." 1
That was, indeed, the disastrous mistake to be laid
at the door of the Oxford Tractarians, whom we were
commemorating so recently. I am not now thinking
of those royal men such as Gore, Scott Holland
and E. S. Talbot, who were born later out of this
tradition eminent among our saints and prophets
and the masters of my own generation but of the
group who produced the Tracts. Of the latter it is
not unfair to say that they made the Church of Eng-
land self-conscious. Looking out on a demoralised
society in which (as they believed, rightly or wrongly)
the influence of Religion was fatally weakening, they
set out to revive and secure the Church. They were
men of profound spiritual experience, and some of them
of heroic moral stature, whose candle is never likely to
be put out. They belong to the classics of religion.
No incumbent of St. Mary's at Oxford can escape
from the haunting influence of Newman 2 : no one
who believes in the Church of England can forget
Keble's tenacious anglicanism. They did revive in
our own Church and beyond it a devotion, a richness
and a spirituality for which we owe them perpetual
gratitude.
Yet it remains that their whole trend of thought
was essentially backward-looking and reactionary.
They believed that the right way to revive the Church
1 Letters, p. 254.
2 Out of all the innumerable books about him that which
comes nearest to understanding Newman is Mr. Geoffrey Faber's
brilliant study, Oxford Apostles.
INTROVERSION AND ITS REMEDY 77
as a living society in its own right, not a mere religious
department of the State, was to close the ecclesiastical
frontiers. They resisted all liberal speculation. They
refused to recognise changing circumstances. They
joined battle on mistaken issues. In face of nearly
all suggested reforms, the Tractarian leaders took
the wrong side. With the great issues stirring in
the world in the pregnant period of the Reform
Bill they seem to have felt no religious concern. It
is, surely, a singular coincidence that at the moment
when Mr. Keble was preaching about National
Apostasy, the House of Commons was passing into
law its most conspicuously Christian measure. 1
It was the misfortune of the Tractarians that their
instinct was to look backwards to define the nature
of a living society in terms of what they supposed it
to have been in the Patristic and Conciliar periods.
Thus they drew the Church away from current affairs
and out of touch with the movements of life ; and the
things that seemed to them most important are not
those that have counted for most in history. They
did not look out with prophetic vision over the forces
astir in the world and ask How can the Church
redeem them, and purify and secure what is of worth
in them ? They thought of the Church as a static
institution built on the apostolic succession, and their
emphasis lay on its own interior logic. And thus
whether by design or accident they introduced into
the Church of England, and indeed into English
1 The Abolition Act was introduced on July 5, 1833, second
reading July 22. Committee stage, July 25. Death of Wilber-
force, July 29. Keble's sermon was July 14.
78 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
Christianity, an introversion and self-concern, a pre-
occupation with its own security, from which it has
not yet fully recovered. It has meant a remoteness
from living issues and an ecclesiastical self-centredness
which despite their rich contribution has proved
itself a ruinous legacy. It is this which is still chiefly
responsible for the alienation of the English people
from the corporate life and devotion of the Church,
and that breach between lay and clerical Christianity
which so weakens contemporary religion.
But an introverted Church has no future. The task
that is committed to it on earth is the redemption of
the social order ; and in dedicating itself to this
mission it will be redeemed from self-conscious anxiety
about itself and its organisation. It is probable, I
think, that in future the institutional factor in the
Church's life will come to seem less and less important.
It may even be that " the Churches " must die that
the Church may live in a redeemed world-order.
Such speculations may or may not prove to be true.
But in any case it is surely most necessary to be clear
in our minds that the institutional questions are
secondary and derivative, not primary and funda-
mental. Their importance is strictly instrumental to
the nature and purpose of the Church itself.
That has not always been clearly recognised . Indeed,
it might be rather more accurate to say that a frank
acceptance of this standpoint involves something like
a reversal of accepted and customary ways of thought.
In the past, the question What is the Church ? has
been answered in terms of institutional structure.
The Church, people have said, is a Society which is
INTROVERSION AND ITS REMEDY 79
organised in such and such ways. Inevitably the
conclusion has followed that a body of Christians
organised hi some other way is not a " Church " (or
a " true Church ") at all. Hence all the confusion
and broken fellowship and reciprocal excommunica-
tions and rival claims to be the only true Church which
have disgraced the history of Christendom. Hence,
too, the exaggerated importance attached to questions
of precedent and validity which has so much sapped
the vitality of the Churches.
The mistake in all this was not in the logic. Great
Christians like Bishop Gore have accepted with
unconcealed reluctance conclusions which seemed to
be logically inevitable, even although they do not
correspond with the realities of Christian experience.
There was nothing wrong with the arguments, but
they led to conclusions which do not square with the
facts. The mistake must have lain in false premisses.
They sought to define the nature of the Church in
terms of its institutional organisation. But it is
function that determines structure rather than struc-
ture that determines function. The true nature of
any living system consists not in its organisation alone,
but in the end towards which it is tending and the
purpose by which it is organised. The nature of a thing
is its meaning or, in Aristotelian language, its Telos.
What constitutes an organic, living whole is the
unity of the purpose informing it ; and conscious
self-direction towards an end is the prerogative of
mind or spirit. True, that the mind transcends its
outward expression. The purpose has always a
richer content than is ever fully expressed in the
80 THE CHURCH IN THE NEW AGE
system, and the medium of its self-expression may
partially thwart or frustrate that purpose. The whole
is not identical with its meaning. On the other hand,
in no true whole are form and content ever com-
pletely separable ; it may be the case that with a
different structure it would itself be something quite
different. It is thus rather superficial thinking which
assumes that the Church or indeed anything else
could be taken to pieces and remade without ceasing
to be what it is. Yet this does not invalidate the
contention that enquiry into the nature of a system
must at least have more regard to its purpose than
to the forms through which it has been externalised.
Therefore a true philosophy of the Church will be
teleological rather than archaeological. It will not be
exclusively concerned with history nor with the forms
of the existing structure. Its question will be What
is the Church for? It will therefore no longer be
condemned to attempting to solve the practical
problems of the Church in twentieth century civilisa-
tion by archaeology and appeal to precedent. It will
recognise that the right methods, the right ministries
and orders of worship, are those which best serve its
true nature in the midst of contemporary conditions,
as the mediator of the Spirit of Christ, the sacrament
of God's reality and the instrument of divine redemp-
tion in the manifold forms of the world's life.
The question, therefore, is not Which is the true
Church? It is rather How can the Church come
true ? Looking at the divided, fragmentary Churches
into which the Christian fellowship has been broken,
we shall not ask Which of all these Societies can claim
INTROVERSION AND ITS REMEDY 8l
to be the true Church of Christ ? We shall ask by
what means they can grow together into that which
the Church is meant to be the measure of the stature
of the fullness of Christ.
The self-concern and the self-scrutiny with which
the Church is at present afflicted are the symptoms of
a morbid condition. Religion must be dangerously
unhealthy when it keeps on asking how it can save
itself. When it is vital, vigorous and virile the
Christian Church will be least self-conscious, so
absorbed in its saving mission that it finds its life in
self-forgetfulness. It will not now regain its vitality
by arranging conferences about itself, nor will it
strengthen its authority by overmuch taking thought
for the preservation of its own life. For the Church,
as for its members, the law holds that they who are
willing to lose their lives find them. Thus the way
of renewal for the Church is by giving itself with
imaginative courage to the leadership and redemption
of the new age, with all the demands of adventurous
faith implied in that tremendous vocation.
But this must mean for the Church a rediscovery
of the Gospel which it exists to proclaim, and of the
Purpose whose instrument it is ; and, above all,
a new liberation into the vision of the Glory of God.
CHAPTER III
THE MAJESTY OF GOD
i. THE NEED FOR THEOLOGY
/CHRISTIANITY does not stand in the world
V.^fbr one more platitudinous reminder that it is
better to be good than bad. It stands for a gospel
about God. " This is life eternal, to know thee the
only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast
sent." That is the voice of authentic Christianity.
The vision of God is the centre of religion, and the
heart of faith is the conviction that communion with
the living God gives life whatever significance and
worth, whatever hope and mastery it may have.
Without that there is no Christianity. Once emptied
of vital faith in God the Church has nothing left to say
to the world. It has ceased to be a constructive force
at all and becomes either a picturesque anachronism
(like the Lord Mayor's coach or the Bishop's gaiters)
or a dead ethical traditionalism striving in vain to
resist the tides of change. The first necessity for the
Church today is to recover a vision of the living God.
That sounds strange to many of our contemporaries
whose religious awareness is no longer vivid and who
therefore tend to equate Christianity with kindness,
generosity and duty. But the Christian religion is, after
all, not something about ourselves and our virtues ;
82
THE NEED FOR THEOLOGY 83
nor something about ourselves and our sins ; the
Christian religion is something about God. Conver-
sion lies at the heart of it and without faith in God it
has no meaning.
Some, who desire a " modern " Christianity, would
have it abandon its credal assertions, which seem to
them the vestigial remains of a world-view that is
now no longer tenable, and to identify itself frankly
with the progressive ideals of humanity. But in
that case it would be only another name for the ruling
moral opinions of the western world. And it cannot
be claimed that at the present moment these bear
upon them the signs of victory. Did I not desire a
" modern " Christianity I should not be at the pains
of writing this book. But a religion that meets us on
our own level, as a mere summary of the accepted
values, must be sterile and, in the end, destructive.
It may add the terrific stimulus of religion to our
worst and least admirable propensities. It may only
too easily become identified with the hopes and fears
of a national group, thus offering dangerous rein-
forcement to the passions of nationalist fury. But
religion is meant to redeem the social order, not to
confirm it in its bad habits. Christianity preaches
a gospel of redemption of a world transformed from
that which now is into the world that is willed by
God, by grace of His victorious power within it. It
would have no hope that can redeem the present, no
faith to mould the conditions of the future, without
that conviction of a living God reconciling the world
to Himself, which is thought to be obscurantist and
reactionary.
F 2
84 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
The attempt to substitute Man for God has brought
us enough despair and confusion. There can be no
true Gospel for mankind which has not the right to say
to it Come up higher. There is no hope of moral eman-
cipation except through a revival of faith in God. For
the first question about Christian conduct is not What
ought I to do ? but What is God like ? Hence the vital
importance of theology . For to accept or rej ect Christian
doctrine is not merely to entertain a preference for one
possible theory as against others ; it is a decision about
the way to live. It follows from this that all brave experi-
ment in the life of the Church and in Christian practice
must be guided by a^ecure theology. Without it we shall
drift to disaster ' e like waves of the sea driven by the wind
and tossed, doublemindedmenunstableinallourways."
The demand for a non-theological Christianity is
on the surface of it ridiculous. For what kind of
religion can there be which does not involve " think-
ing about God " ? But it really means something
quite different a theology which does not darken
counsel. It is, in effect, a demand for a theology
which is credible, convincing and relevant. Deeply
engrained in the popular mind is the feeling that some-
thing unspecified has happened to make the traditional
Christian faith untenable. People have learned the
new grounds for doubt, as Dr. Matthews says, not the
new grounds for confidence. 1 In actual fact, as all serious
students know, contemporary movements of thought
are converging upon the Christian position. The intel-
lectual climate of our own time is far more congenial
to a Theistic world-view than was that in which the
1 Essays in Construction, p. 109.
THE NEED FOR THEOLOGY 85
Victorians grew up. But this is not yet popularly
recognised. It takes something like fifty years for the
work of experts in any branch of learning to percolate
to the mind of the man in the street. And the popular
mind is still at the mercy of views about the Christian
religion and the supposed findings of science which
are fifty years out of date. Christianity is believed to
stand for theories about Scriptural inspiration or
Miracles or everlasting punishment such as all
educated Christians are in fact eager to repudiate.
Unfortunately, its intellectual mentors encourage the
popular mind in these misconceptions. The Christian
faith as set forth for criticism by its best-known literary
opponents is often scandalously misrepresented. Even
writers of scientific eminence are content to remain
culpably unaware of statements of the Christian
philosophy elaborated in volume after volume by
men of at least their own mental calibre and often
(to speak the truth) far better educated. One wonders
indeed whence our " intellectuals " derive these
caricatures of Christian doctrine which they demolish
with such zest and brilliance. Certainly not from the
Universities or from any representative Christian
teacher ; hardly, one would suppose, from a pulpit.
It is difficult to resist the impression that they must
have relied for their information on the obiter dicta of
the Rectory nurse-maid. The real situation now is
that the best thought of the time has reached the point
when only the Christian solution can rescue it from
confusion and bankruptcy. There is being gradually
reconstructed, by scholars and philosophers in all the
Churches, an interpretation of the Universe centred
86 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
upon the Christian belief in God and the Christian
reading of man's life and destiny, which no other
system of thought can rival. A compelling Christian
theology is available, and the first duty of the Christian
Church is to proclaim an intelligible religion. In
religious problems (says Professor Whitehead, with his
usual Delphic oracularity) " simple solutions are
bogus solutions."
The Christian Church has consistently held the
frontier it is doing this already in the New Testa-
ment against those forms of irrational emotionalism
which have constantly threatened to swamp the
western world. " Christianity would long ago have
degenerated into a noxious superstition, apart from
the levantine and European intellectual movement
sustained from the very beginning until now." 1 It
has sometimes been blind to new truth ; but it has
never played false to reason.
It is a familiar gambit of journalism to contrast
the dry, scientific light of disinterested, rational
enquiry with the irrationality and obscurantism to
which, it is said, the Church is committed. But
that is precisely the wrong criticism. If there is an
objection, it is the exact opposite that the Church
has at times cared too much for mere correctness
of opinion at the risk of valuing intellectual
orthodoxy above Beauty and Love, which matter
more. (For if God is the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ then the Christian belief in God can never
be fully contained in a formula : it is a response, a
spirit and a life.) Yet the Christian creed is the charter
1 Adventures in Ideas, p. 207.
THE NEED FOR THEOLOGY Bj
of unfettered thought and intellectual freedom. Chris-
tianity has exalted Reason till it has enthroned it
above the stars and insisted that God Himself is
bound by it. We may think that its emphasis was
exaggerated. We may regard the claim of the scho-
lastics to weave the whole available sum of knowledge
into a logical system of Theology as one that no sane
modern man would make. Nevertheless, as White-
head insists, it was the theology of the Western
Church, with its superb and unshaken confidence in
the ultimate rationality of the Universe because it is
ordered by God's mind and will, which has made the
triumphs of modern science possible. 1 In our day,
when "a prison of the mind is being built from
Strasbourg to Vladivostock," 2 the Church still upholds
the banner of freedom. It can offer people intel-
lectual liberty because it believes in a world that does
make sense, as expressed in its tremendous affirma-
tions about the being and character of God.
Unfortunately, the traditional Christian creed has
come to be bound up in its presentation with theories
about the physical universe which the adult intel-
ligence can no longer hold. Because they have
abandoned the theories, people think they must cease
to believe in God. Yet theories about the physical
universe have been revolutionised in our lifetime :
men have not ceased to believe that it exists. Belief
in the existence of the external world and belief in
God both depend not on any particular cosmologies,
but on the pressure of recurrent experience, which
1 Science in the Modern World, pp. 18, 19.
2 The Times, leading article, June 21, 1934.
88 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
persists through all our changing interpretations. 1
It is not the facts, but their presentation which the
advance of knowledge makes obsolete. The older
theology gave the right answers to the particular
questions that were put to it, and so far as they go the
answers are still valid. From our point of view they
were the wrong questions : or at any rate they were
not the questions which the modern man wants to
ask. We do not start out from the same assumptions.
Our horizons are so much further distant. We
conceive our world in terms of evolution and still
unrealised possibilities. The ancient creeds (we say)
are too small for us though it would be hard to find
a phrase more generous than the words " Creator
of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible"
There is no existence, known or unknown, no depths
discovered or undiscovered, which are not embraced
in its magnificent outlook. But the real result of the
new discoveries, with all their enlargement of our
mental frontiers, is not to dethrone God from His
sovereignty, but to unveil a far grander vision of the
glory and majesty of the Lord.
O Lord how glorious are thy works : thy thoughts are very
deep.
An unwise man doth not well consider this : and a fool doth
not understand it.
What has broken down is not Christian faith in God,
but those crude, false, unworthy ideas of Him with
which we have too long limited or debased it. We
cannot construct the faith of tomorrow with the
mental furniture of yesterday. The dogmatic theo-
1 Cf. William Adams Brown : God at Work, pp. 32 ff.
THE NEED FOR THEOLOGY 89
logics of one age are the mythological symbols of the
next. We must rise to the height of God's new revela-
tions if we would lead mankind back to conviction.
Our presentation of Christian faith (in contradistinc-
tion from that faith itself) whether by way of teaching
or in worship is sometimes still too small and meagre
to hold the allegiance of the twentieth century. 1
It is this which must now be transcended.
" The world is groping after a religion in which it can believe
without evasions, without dishonest ambiguities, without self-
deception and without superstition ; a religion that answers our
questions not with a false completeness where completeness is
impossible, but by striking to the depths within us and making
us feel that those depths have been reached. . . . Above all, at
this moment, a religion in which the vaster universe of modern
knowledge (with all that we think we know) can be enfolded, as
the universe of the middle ages (with all that they thought they
knew) was organically enfolded in the religion of its intellectual
leaders." 2
Such a religion the Christian Church has ; but the
case must not be allowed to go by default. Chris-
tianity will never again be strong till the Church
has regained the allegiance of the educated and pro-
fessional classes. We have been far too ready to
assume that they are outside the scope of its ministry.
Such a policy is suicidal. A terrible nemesis waits
for any Church which neglects its ministry to the
Universities. The close relation of Church and
University has been one of the most profound
influences in our national life and religion. It is
1 " They have not revolted against the Gospel but against a
presentation of the Gospel which falls far short of its true range
and splendour." Lambeth Encyclical, 1930, p. 19.
2 Noyes : The Unknown God, p. 12.
go THE MAJESTY OF GOD
only when he travels in other countries that an English
parson can fully appreciate how much this has meant
both to Church and State, and how ruinous would be
its severance. It is hardly too much to say that it is
this educational tradition which more than anything
else has saved Britain from the Komsomol and the
Hitler-Jugend. At its peril will any Church forget
the student-class. After all, the whole of the next
generation will have its attitude to life moulded by
the men and women who are today in the Colleges.
If there is one suggestion which our Church may
venture to offer the Church in the new countries, it
is Put your picked men in your Universities. Students
are a special constituency, and their needs are not
satisfactorily provided for by the ordinary parochial
machinery. Yet there is nothing which will count
more in providing Christian leadership in the parishes
as well as in education and public life. There is no
cause with a stronger claim on Christians, whether in
new Churches or old, than the due endowment of
ministries to students. 1
But outside this specialised area there is no less
need and no less opportunity. Evangelisation in the
twentieth century means primarily education, and
conversion involves the allegiance of the intellect.
The experience of the " Way of Renewal " has taught
the clergy what liberation of spirit and what enrich-
ment of personal devotion may come from intellectual
reawakening. It has now to be transmitted to the
1 The British Student Christian Movement is trying to
establish close contacts with the parish Churches in England.
Those interested should write to the Secretary* of the Church of
England Committee, Annandale, Golders Green, N.W. n.
THE NEED FOR THEOLOGY QI
lay members. Every parish church, in its own degree
and according to the capacity of its membership,
must become a centre of Christian education. Because
we are not sufficiently alive to this immense and
exacting opportunity, we are today in very serious
danger of appealing only to the least thoughtful.
A Church which accepts that situation might as well
close down entirely. But there is a great deal of help
available. There is plenty of good and cheap litera-
ture, and an excellent scheme of group-study organised
by the B.B.C. in connexion with its religious broad-
casts. But whether by these or less formal methods, it
must be the fixed aim of the Christian pulpit to re-
capture the minds of thinking men and women, to
unveil for them anew the vision of God, and to lead
them back to a faith that stands the test. We must
disinfect Christian faith and life from the taint of any
intellectual obscurantism.
But here we must remember two facts which are
still rather imperfectly appreciated. First, that an
intelligible theology must be stated in the language
and thought-forms of the generation to which it is
addressed. Christianity, at its first appearance, had
a ready-made religious vocabulary and spoke in the
language of Jews to Jews. As it moved out into the
Roman Empire it had to create new forms of expres-
sion. The Fourth Gospel is the earliest venture, as
it is the most splendid achievement, in the re-transla-
tion of the original message into the language of a
new culture. A like task awaits our generation.
One great religious need of our own time is to find a
significant vocabulary wherein to present the eternal
Q2 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
and living truth in the idiom of our contemporaries.
The traditional language which has been bequeathed
to us from our Roman and Hellenistic inherit-
ance no longer speaks to the twentieth-century
man. Not only does it fail to convey to him the truth
of which it was once the sufficient medium : it makes
the quite disastrous suggestion that the Christian
faith is so intertwined with the thought and life
of a dead culture as to be irrelevant to his own
condition.
Secondly, this fatal suggestion is reinforced by the
presentation of Christian theology as an a priori system
of doctrine unrelated to any living experience. Text-
book methods are hopelessly discredited everywhere
except in the teaching Church. It is high time we
abandoned this anachronism. The old-fashioned
deductive theology, logically consistent and impreg-
nable, set forth, as it were, in a mental vacuum and
" proved " by appeal to authoritative texts, is dan-
gerously inadequate to the new age. The Gospel is
not a theorem which can be proved by deductive
argument. The proper question is not How can we
prove it ? but What light does Christianity throw on
life ? So, with regard to contemporary opinions, it
has to be shown not that the latest pundit is
prepared to concede some truth to Christianity, but
that the revelation of God in Christ makes sense
of the world as nothing else can. After all, the
business of theology is to interpret life as men
know it.
GOD IN CHRIST 93
2. GOD IN CHRIST
There are, no doubt, numbers of people both
within the Churches and outside them whose idea
of God is still more or less formal. For them the
claim that the way of revival is the way of recovered
faith and vision corresponds to little in actual experi-
ence. We have first to liberate the word " God "
from those suggestions of crude supernaturalism, and
from those pagan and sub-Christian elements with
which it is still disastrously infected. For Christianity,
it must be remembered, stands for an affirmation
about God uniquely and characteristically its own.
Christians do not worship the Absolute, or a
" numinous " cosmic emotion : still less " One above "
or Old Nobodaddy : but the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ. And misgivings that are some-
times expressed about the implications of Christian
Theism ought really to be addressed elsewhere. They
are urged by able and sincere men and are entitled
to a respectful answer. It is the more worth while to
examine them, since the answer serves to bring out
more clearly the characteristic Christian position.
For in fact the objections lie much more damagingly
against the philosophical and Hellenic than against
the distinctively Christian form of Theism.
It is urged that belief in a God who changes not,
even if purged of crude anthropomorphism, inhibits
moral and intellectual enterprise : I AM is the object
of a faith too static to inspire creative direction and
insight in a universe of evolving ideals. But surely
this is a misunderstanding ? There can be no eagerness
94 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
in the search for truth unless we believe that truth is
" there " to discover, objective, commanding and
eternal. Similarly with our moral aspirations. The
objectivity of the moral ideal is the precondition of
all free morality. We cannot base our standards and
values on a contingent and evolving goodness which
is, like ourselves, at the mercy of changing circum-
stances and the prey of the devouring years. It is
surely true that all spontaneity, all moral endurance
and resource, all brave research and fruitful experi-
ment, come into life from the contemplation of the
eternal and unchanging Goodness. " Thy righteous-
ness standeth like the strong mountains : thy judg-
ments are like the great deep." Thus belief in a God
who abides forever the same is not only (as we have
already insisted) the axiom of experimental science,
but also the inspiration of moral enterprise.
But there is something more to be said about this.
He that comes to seek Truth or Goodness must believe
not only " that it is " but that it is " the rewarder of
them that seek after it." 1 How can we be inwardly
transformed to the apprehension of that ideal which
we see from afar but leave unrealised ? It seems too
distant and inapprehensible and the very sublimity
of the far vision daunts the faltering steps with which
we approach it. The re-shaping of inward personality
cannot be achieved it is a truism which has wrecked
many a scheme of ethics from within that which is
to be re-made. 2
1 Heb. xi. 6.
2 Cf. A. E. Taylor : The Faith of a Moralist, I, Gh. VI.,
especially p. 230.
GODINGHRIST 95
It needs an activity brought to bear upon us by
that Perfection towards which we aspire. If life is in
process of becoming, if we are seeking to be trans-
formed from the present is to the future ought to be,
that can be only if the eternal Goodness is at work
here within the time-process, permitting us to be made
partakers of it.
It is at this point that the Christian idea of God,
basedlon His revelation in Christ, is differentiated most
clearly from the faith of the Platonic tradition. The
fundamental concern of Christian Theism is with the
responsiveness of the God it worships. It is much to
know that our highest ideals have their ground in an
eternal Being who is the Guarantor of our values.
It is much that purified souls may contemplate them
as perfected in Him. It is much, but it is not enough.
For if that is all there is to be said, the hope and
possibility of " salvation " remain still completely
within ourselves. Man, imperfect, finite, unfinished,
his spirit darkened not by ignorance only, but also by
inner treachery and betrayal, has to lift himself by his
own hair to the contemplation of the pure Idea and
make himself partaker in the eternal. That is not
specially good news for sinners. But this philosophy,
even at its greatest, rests on a less than Christian idea
of God. If by God we mean only Absolute Value
(or as Plato would say, the Idea of Good), the problem
of Nicodemus has no answer. 1 If God is but another
name for a principle or ideal of perfection inaccessible
to our finitude, the enigma of conscience must remain
insoluble. We may worship afar, but we cannot
1 John iii. 3-8.
96 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
" draw near " ; there is no motive power which we
can supply. 1 The vision of God, in that case, may
stab us with a sense of our own poverty and unworthi-
ness, but it cannot transform us into its own likeness
or admit us to redeeming communion with Him.
But if God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, if
He is (as Christians say) " Love," then He is self-
revealing, self-communicating, imparting to His crea-
tures His own excellence and redeeming men's hearts
by the grace of Christ filling the earth with majesty
and wonder.
This is what matters to the religious man. His
concern is not with abstract speculation but with the
character of the God he worships. To believe in God
is of little importance unless He is the living Redeemer
as well as the ground of Goodness and Reality. If
it is otherwise, faith in God is mainly a matter of
academic interest. It could not make much moral
difference. A God who merely accounts for the world
as it is whether as the Eternal Mathematician, the
Supreme Value, the Infinite Being, or whatever other
concepts men may form of Him is not a God whom
Christians can worship. He does not fulfil the law of
Christ. Christianity requires the conviction of a God
who is Transformer and Redeemer, who is Himself
the Giver of all Goodness and the Source of the faith
by which we move towards Him. Thus God meets
us " in the face of Christ." What is distinctive about
Christian Theism is the mediation of God to man
through Him.
1 Cf. " No man comes to me except God the Father draw him "
side by side with " No man comes to the Father but by me."
GOD IN CHRIST 97
Dr. Oman's magnificent volume The Natural and
the Supernatural has made clear how close is the
connexion between a true Christian theology and
a true theory of knowledge. And, in fact, in all
our experience there is at least an element of response
to initiative which is brought to bear upon us.
All growth, whether physical or spiritual, involves
some reciprocal relationship between us and the
sustaining environment. Knowledge is the reply to
a question which is asked as much by the known as
by the knower. 1 That mysterious fact which we
describe as " influence " is a movement upon us from
another, and not from another only, but through him.
There are people to whom, as we say, we " owe our
souls." Are we not conscious that through those men
and women something comes out of the heart of things,
revealing to us more than their character a quality
of life and spirit which we know to have a claim
upon us, and summoning us to move out and meet
it? We learn from these familiar examples that
Reality is self-communicating and, at least in some of
its modes, redemptive. The Saints and the classic
personalities in religion, conduct and the arts exem-
plify this fact still more significantly. In Christ the
principle is fulfilled. In Him that comes forth to
meet us which we know to be sovereign and absolute.
1 " Both chronologically and causally, the act of perception
starts at the end of the chain remote from the percipient in the
sun, the electric light or the chair. We must not, for instance,
compare the act of vision, as Descartes did, to a poking about in
space as a blind man pokes about with a stick ; the object is
the starting point not the terminus of an act of perception."
Sir J. Jeans : The New Background of Science, p. 1 1 .
98 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
It is God and no other who there lays His touch
upon us. It is this decisive Christian experience,
verified, possessed and interpreted by His work upon us
in Christ Jesus, which creates conviction in a redeem-
ing God. The response which God through Christ
evokes from us teaches us to hear his invitation in the
pressure upon us of all claims of goodness, and then
to move out in Christian faith and worship over the
whole wide range of values.
In an earlier book, I wore out my readers in
attempting to answer the question What are values ?
The answer was not completely satisfactory ; but I
think now that it was the wrong question. It belongs
to a different philosophy. The right approach, as I
am now suggesting, is the very much more direct
question What kind of God do Christians worship ?
All the rest will flow from our answer to it. But it
must be recognised frankly that this approach
leads us along a road on which Christianity
and Platonism cannot for long be travelling com-
panions.
This has been very strongly urged recently by the
Swedish theologian, Dr. Nygren, in his study Eros
and Agape. He desires to establish a sharp distinction
between Christianity and Platonism as seen in their
respective ideas of Love. He rightly insists that the
Greek Eros, even its most spiritualised form, even in the
great Platonic Symposium, remains something essen-
tially man-centred. It is the eternal spark in the
human soul, imprisoned here in " becoming " and
delusion, aspiring to rise towards the eternal Forms
and reunite with the eternal reality. The initiative
GOD IN CHRIST 99
is with the ascending soul, not in the Goodness
towards which it aspires. There is no equivalent to
the idea of" Grace," of the self-impartation of infinite
to finite. Even in its development in Aristotle, for
whom God is the cause of all " movement " advance
from lower to higher realisation in the rational
hierarchy of the Universe as the object of the world's
desire (KW& &>s epupevov], there is no place for any divine
initiative. It cannot be said that God loves the world,
of whose existence He cannot be aware since He
contemplates only His own rationality. There is no
equivalent to the Christian saying We love, because
He first loved us.
But the whole Christian conception of Love and
the point, he thinks, of some of the hardest
parables such as that of the Labourers in the
Vineyard is that all love has its source in God, not
in anything of intrinsic worth in man. (" While we
were yet sinners Christ died for us.") So that what
Christianity intends by Agape is the exact contradic-
tory of Eros. It means partaking in that divine life
imparted to us by its divine Source, admitting us to
participation in it. Thus the idea of the " worth of
the human soul " is a pagan not a Christian concep-
tion. All that is lovable in us is of God's gift ; and
the love which is characteristic of the New Testament
is entirely and wholly a God-given " Grace." Chris-
tians are moved to love of the brethren because God
through Christ has visited and enabled them simply
and solely because God is love. The two conceptions
are strictly antithetical. Dr. Nygren quotes the
dictum of Wilamowitz that, if the author of i Cor.
Q 3
IOO THE MAJESTY OF GOD
xiii. and Plato could meet one another, despite the
similarity of their language they would find no point
in common.
He therefore suggests that the whole Platonic
tradition in Christian theology is a mistake. It was
Luther's outstanding achievement, he thinks, to call the
Church back from the Hellenic categories which it had
used as its theological medium to its own native and
characteristic emphasis on the knowledge of God
through " Grace " by faith alone.
Dr. Nygren, I think, overstates his case. These
sharp, absolute antitheses are almost bound to fail
to do justice to the complex history of ideas. Plato's
philosophy is majestic witness to the hunger and thirst
of man for the eternal ; and unless there is that in
the soul of man which is there depicted as Eros, is it
true that man is " made in the image of God," or
would any incarnation be possible ? We must also
insist on a further qualification. True as it is, and
as has been urged already, that the primary and
essential Christian emphasis is its faith in God as
Redeemer lifting men to share in His own perfection,
yet an exclusive emphasis on redemption, overlooking
God's work in creation, is at once intellectually
unsatisfying and also fatal to any Christian ethic.
To this we return at further length subsequently.
Meanwhile, it seems relevant to remind ourselves that
Luther's achievement has another side to it. Without
realising its disastrous consequences, he did in effect
withdraw Christianity from all those values of
humanist culture of which the philosophia perennis of
the mediaeval Church was the vehicle. He repudiated
GOD IN CHRIST IOI
more than St. Thomas ; he abandoned the hope of
transforming the world. The subsequent history of
the Protestant Churches, wavering in unstable equili-
brium between pietism and secularisation, may serve
both as commentary and warning.
These reservations must be made first. Never-
theless, with all these qualifications, Dr. Nygren's
thesis is of the greatest importance. In the last resort,
as it seems to me, the Christian and the Platonic forms
of Theism are not only different, but incompatible.
"Speaking as a theist " (writes Dr. Inge) 1 "I
regard religion as an affirmation and apprehension
of absolute values." But this, surely, is not the
Christian starting-point. Speaking as a Christian, I
regard religion as an act of trust and self-committal
to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Faith in absolute values is quite possible without
having heard so much as the name of Christ. His
place in the " platonic " theology is that of a uniquely
impressive witness to an independently valid body of
truth, which would still remain credible without Him.
And there are, certainly, very many roads which lead
men to the knowledge of the true God : but no man
comes to the Father but by Him. There is no direct
path from " absolute values " to the Christian belief
in God. Metaphysically, it is just possible to employ
the philosophy of values as the vehicle of Christian
theology ; some well-known and deservedly esteemed
1 God and the Astronomers, p. 175. For a damaging but con-
structive criticism of Platonism as a " religion of escape " and
therefore sub-Christian, see L. W. Grensted, The Person of Christ,
p. 180.
IO2 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
books are the evidence that it can be done. Yet when
we come to religion and morality, the whole tone and
temper of this philosophy breathes in a climate which
is not that of the Gospels. It could never be claimed
of absolute values that they come to seek and to save
that which is lost. It cannot be said of Beauty, Truth
and Goodness that they " take upon themselves man
to deliver him." The Platonic God could become
incarnate only at the price of ceasing to be God.
In practice no less than in speculation we seem to
encounter this incompatibility. There is something in
the Platonic tradition, however nobly and generously
interpreted, which remains aristocratic and exclusive.
Now and again it degenerates into scorn. " This
multitude which knoweth not the values. . . ." But
the Christian religion, when all is said and done, is
not the ascent of purified souls to the contemplation
of the absolute values : it is the response of the
common man and sinner to God's redeeming and self-
revealing activity. The absolute values are not alive :
they are metaphysical and moral concepts.
We are getting near to the centre of our enquiry.
For this reason I am specially anxious that the next
stages in the argument should not be dismissed as
abstract and " highbrow," and that I should succeed
in making them intelligible. For if I succeed, it is
upon these positions that the whole presentation of
the Christian Church and of the content of the
Christian life which is contained in these chapters
rests.
The idea of absolute values belongs to that " intel-
lectualist " Greek philosophy of which, to its own
GOD IN CHRIST IO3
constant embarrassment, the Christian Church be-
came legatee. This system seeks to interpret the
Universe in terms of static, conceptual perfection, and
assumes that what is most real and most akin to the
divine nature is that which approximates most closely
to the order of pure conceptual selfconsistency. In
other words, that is most divine which is most com-
pletely impersonal and furthest removed from any
such contingency as is implied in a living, personal
will. It requires elaborate mental acrobatics to
square these philosophical assumptions with the
personalist and experimental approach to the inter-
pretation of our experience which is congenial to the
twentieth century. It is still more difficult to harmo-
nise them with the presuppositions of Jesus Christ, and
that faith in a " personal," living God which we
inherit, through Him, from Judaism. They belong
to a different tradition. Christianity is irrevocably
committed to faith in a God active in the world, the
creative Source of all that is good in it, the Conqueror
of what is evil. Nothing is Christian which obscures
that emphasis. This, as we have seen, is consistent
with all our experience of reality in the various modes
of its presentation to us. But for Christians the
decisive experience is the impact of Spirit on our
spirits which is mediated through Jesus Christ. He
is central, the unique mediator. And what gives
Christian Theology its breadth, its range and its
generous humanism, is just this centrality of Christ in
authentic Christian experience. We know that God
is at work in the world because we know what He does
through Christ. In Him we know God as Redeemer,
IO4 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
and this experience of the Holy Spirit is the guar-
antee of faith in a living God, imparting to the world
His own excellence and evoking from it ever new
responses.
This saving knowledge of God through Jesus Christ
is at once more intimate and more significant than
any other moments in our knowledge of Him.
The living heart of Christian conviction is the
incomparable and unique preciousness of His work
in man's life through Christ, giving us the right to
become sons of God, pardoning, sanctifying and
renewing, and eliciting out of common human nature
still undisclosed possibilities. In the great picture in
the Sistine chapel, the touch of God on man's sleeping
spirit is summoning Adam into life. On those who
will respond to Christ's call the touch is more intimate
and life-giving, and it makes them free of a new world
of experience. God's greatest work in human nature
is made possible because of Christ. Where frightened
and sinful men and women dare through Christ to
say " Abba, Father " ; where they are made par-
takers of His Spirit and gathered into that redeeming
intimacy ; there is an activity of God towards us so
decisive in its depth and richness as to be almost
incommensurable with His other acts and self-
disclosures. It is the unique and characteristic
instance of God's responsiveness to the needs of men.
If that is blurred, we have lost Christianity. Com-
pared with this all other modes of God's activity and
self-revelation are for us at least relatively secondary.
Where men see Christ as central in the Universe they
commit themselves to an affirmation in the light of
GOD IN CHRIST IO5
which all their other insights, as well as all their
critical reservations, become relatively unim-
portant.
Now this perhaps is what underlies the traditional
theological distinction between Natural and Super-
natural. In the forms in which it has hitherto been
stated, few modern thinkers will wish to defend it.
To the man in the street the word "supernatural" stands
for a crude conception of the miraculous ; and when
he says that he cannot accept a supernatural form of
Christianity this is probably what he has in mind.
In fact, what he is really repudiating is not Chris-
tianity, but Deism. Yet even in its philosophical form,
in its Thomist and scholastic formulation, the distinc-
tion seems to most of us untenable. Few today,
outside the Roman communion, could endorse the
metaphysic on which it rests or the concept of God
which it implies. We cannot accept this hard and
fast Dualism. There is one world, we say, and the
world is God's. So we tend to say, in loose, popular
language, " everything is equally supernatural " a
statement which may be justified as a protest against
a crude, uncriticised supernaturalism, but is, neverthe-
less, quite inadequate to the realities of Christian
experience.
For the distinction does stand for something. In
itself, the word " supernatural " has become so deeply
involved in false and misleading associations that
Theology would be wise to abandon it. But we
cannot escape from what it stands for.
In the book to which I have already referred,
Dr. Oman finds that the " supernatural " is the
IO6 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
self-disclosing Reality which is the constant
presupposition of all our knowledge and all our
experience. Thus all growth in wisdom and
stature is indeed " supernaturally " imparted to us.
It is, I fear, almost impertinent to refer thus briefly,
in passing, to a treatise of such far-reaching importance.
But I do not believe that, in the long run, we can
wholly dispense with the distinction which the older
theologies recognised. If we could find the right way
of stating it, must we not maintain that there was
" something in it " ? The intellectual forms in which
it was stated are, admittedly, tenable no longer.
Von Hugel, all through his massive studies, was
wrestling with an attempt at re-statement. There
are few, probably, who can feel quite certain either
that they have understood his position or, if they have,
that they find it quite satisfying. But the instinct of
the Church was probably right. For the Church
itself and the Christian life are " other " not " wholly
other," but nevertheless " other " than anything
else in human experience. The revelation of God
through Christ Jesus is something different and
distinct from the revelation of God through a sunset
though it is the same God who is revealed. It is
what constitutes Christianity ; and this was what the
traditional statements meant by God's supernatural
gifts to man. That, I suggest, is what the distinction
stood for. It stood for the real difference in quality
between God's activity in the world as the Source of
all Truth and Goodness and that most inward,
characteristic work in us which has been made possible
by Christ Jesus.
GOD IN CHRIST IOJ
This is in agreement with the New Testament.
The Epistles and Gospels never doubt that the Spirit
of God is at work in the pagan conscience and in
whatsoever is honest, true and lovely : yet they are
almost ruthless in insisting that God's gift through
Christ the Holy Spirit is at once the essential
endowment and the unique prerogative of Chris-
tians. It is right that we should school our minds to
recognise and worship the divine glory in the vastness
and majesty of the Universe, in all worth-while forms
of activity, and in all that is wonderful and praise-
worthy. But it is possible for our thought of God to
become so generalised and impersonal that the heart
of the believer remains cold and is never kindled into
communion with Him. And indeed it seems that a
certain homeliness in the approach of the worshipper
to God is necessary to the Christian religion. The
doctrinal and liturgical tradition of the Church as
the family of worshippers is peculiarly adapted to
that need. It comes to God " through Jesus Christ."
Its central and almost exclusive emphasis is upon
this act and revelation : and in other modes of God's
work in the world it seems, by comparison, to have
little interest.
Now this is both a strength and a weakness.
The parson who said " I cannot understand what
cosmic processes have to do with religion" was
technically, of course, professing Arianism though
he would have been horrified to know this.
But he had a case, all the same. The Church is
here to proclaim what it knows that God redeems
man through Jesus Christ, and to keep open that
IO8 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
central gateway through which men come to the
knowledge of the Father. That is its primary task
and its chief business. Its massive liturgical concen-
tration with the almost total exclusion from its
worship of any response to the divine activity in the
broad fields of life as a whole outside His work in man
through the Incarnation is the sign of its fidelity
to that trust. It is right in its instinctive recognition
that if it extends its line on too wide a front it may
find its centre and citadel exposed. There is, however,
a danger lest by refusing to establish contacts it may
find itself in a perilous isolation.
It is right that Christians should be recalled from
vague, nebulous ideas of God to a " Christocentric "
theology. But, as I have tried elsewhere to point
out, this fundamental Christian insistence is always in
danger of being isolated from the other factors in
human experience. Religion is then left in a vacuum,
unrelated to those tasks and claims and those other
forms of activity and knowledge which are the actual
substance of human life. Then religion is left high
and dry, and seems irrelevant to the world of affairs.
It cannot hope to transform the social order or even
to have any great importance for it, unless we relate
the knowledge of God in Christ with the actual busi-
ness of living in the world, and the needs, interests
and opportunities of contemporary civilisation. But
if we know God through Jesus Christ, we know Him
both as Redeemer and Creator ; and we know that
what He achieves in the hearts of men and women
because of Him, it is His will to achieve throughout
the whole world.
CREATOR AND REDEEMER 109
3. CREATOR AND REDEEMER
The Object of Christian faith and worship is the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. They
remain on a sub-Christian level till they have reached,
through Christ, to the Father, the Creator both of
heaven and earth. The Christian religion must
therefore have a place within the range of its doctrine
and devotion for other concerns in life than the
religious. If it is God who meets us in Christ, then
our response to all forms of Goodness in thought,
appreciation or conduct is bound up with our
response to Him and is part of a Christian's conver-
sion. To this conviction we are committed by the
Christology of the Fourth Gospel and the classical
Christian theology. It is taken for granted in the
catholic creeds. The God who is known to us in
Christ is not only the Object of religion : He is the
living reality of the world. If Christ is "of one
essence " with the Father, then the Universe is com-
mitted to Him ; in Him the purpose immanent in
history emerges into personal embodiment ; in Him
uniquely we have access to the creative and redemp-
tive forces which are alive at the heart of our ex-
perience. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ is known to us, through Him, with a special
inwardness ; no man comes to the Father but by
Him. But God does not live in the sacristy. He is
not the monopoly of Christians. He is the Creator of
the world ; and the will which is incarnate in Christ is
His will for the world of His creating. It is therefore
not the religion of Christians which leaves the world
IIO THE MAJESTY OF GOD
unredeemed behind it. " The true way of redemp-
tion from ' the world ' is the way of reconciliation to
the purposes of God in the world." Nor is it a
Christian theology which excludes from its field of
vision the activity of God in the world apart from and
outside of the Incarnation. It is, indeed, the
heresy of Arius. The " Nicene " creed is a standing
protest against committing ourselves to a Redeemer
who is not truly " one " with the Creator. For that
breaks our inner life into fragments.
But this is, as it seems to me, the weak point in the
so-called Barthian theology which is sweeping the
continental Universities and beginning to exercise
an influence on the theological faculties in England.
It has been its great and massive contribution to
recover the sense of the divine initiative. Chris-
tianity, it insists, starts with God and His redemptive
activity towards us, not with our wavering " ideals "
or the temperature of our religious emotions. God,
says Barth, is the Subject of theology, and all our know-
ledge of Him derives from the utterance of His Word
revealed in us, which at once breaks us and liberates
us. But (apart from the fact that not all Christian
experience is, or ought to be, of this " twice-born "
type) just how is God's word revealed ? For if God
is known to us only in religion, and the specifically
religious responses, then the knowledge of God is
confined to this one form of our experience. It is
hard, in that case, to see how the knowledge of God
can unify life into a coherent whole or redeem and
sanctify its manifold enterprises. If it cannot do this,
it is stultified. Moreover, as I have elsewhere insisted,
CREATOR AND REDEEMER III
if religion is thus drawn apart from life it becomes
itself impoverished and anaemic. But it is precisely
into this impasse that the Barthian theology seems
to be leading us.
The moral grandeur of Karl Earth's resistance to
the force of the totalitarian State makes it a most
unwelcome task to criticise him. Yet we cannot
accept his theology.
For Barth, so far as I understand him, seems to
desire to establish a sharp distinction between the
faith by which God is apprehended and all the other
activities of our spirits. It is something unique and
incommensurable ; when the visitation comes to
men they recognise it. But what of those who remain
unvisited by these apocalyptic disclosures ? They
are, after all, the majority of mankind. All such
attempts at isolating religion in order to vindicate
its reality result, in the end, in leaving " religious
experience " too much at the mercy of our moods and
tenses. Notoriously this has been the consequence of
attempts to interpret the nature of religion by analytic
and psychological methods. Though Barthianism
starts from the other end, and is rigorously a priori, it
cannot be said to succeed in avoiding this danger.
The difficulty is more than a matter of method : it
concerns the being and nature of God. Barth is
concerned to recall Christianity to the prophetic
and biblical tradition and recover its lost faith in a
living God. That is a wholly legitimate ambition, as
has been strongly urged in the previous pages. The
God of Jeans, Eddington and Whitehead seems to be
a long way removed from the God of Abraham,
112 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
Isaac and Jacob. But this leads Earth to distinguish
abruptly between the revelation of God in the Bible
and any other relative apprehension of Him. God is
known to us through the prophets and through His
Word incarnate in Christ. There is no other authentic
revelation to which faith can make its response.
No doubt we are prone, in preaching, to imply that ;
and the strongly biblical colouring of our liturgies
and the massing of historical suggestions intended to
evoke faith and worship may tend to impose it upon
congregations. But to this Christianity cannot give
its sanction. It is not consistent with its own creed.
Still less can it endorse the attempt to enhance the
glory of God's redemption by denigration of the
natural man. " The power of God (writes Barth) can
be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the
souls of men." 1 But if God is in no sense revealed in
the glory and majesty of the world and the plain
goodness of common men and women their cheer-
fulness, their patience and their courage then
Christianity is a mistake. For then God is not at work
in the world in any such sense as the Gospel claims.
Vital religion can never be safeguarded by rending
the texture of man's experience. Barthianism is
really another form of that dualism between faith and
knowledge, reason and revelation, which has haunted
Protestant Christianity and is fast draining it of its vital-
ity. It is indeed scarcely less disastrous than the dualism
between cultus and ethics which has vitiated some
forms of Catholicism. It is, moreover, completely at
variance with the attitude expressed in the Parables,
1 Epistle to the Romans, p. 36.
CREATOR AND REDEEMER 113
with their serene, magisterial confidence that the world
is God's world and He is at work in it, so that His
revelations in nature and history are solid with His
disclosures in religion, and the laws that govern the
manifold life of men are, at their own level and in
their own degree, manifestations of the Father's
will. 1 Christianity is profoundly committed to this
faith in God as Creator of the world no less than the
Redeemer of man's life. The two conceptions are
obviously indissoluble. If God is not the Lord of
the Universe He cannot give us victory in the world
but only provide a means of escape from it and that
is not Christianity, but paganism. Undeniably the
Christian Gospel has been presented in that form at
some periods, and the Church today is still paying
the price. Therefore we owe a deep gratitude to
Professor Raven for his vehement and tenacious
reminders that God is the Creator of the Universe and
that religion is only significant in the context of our
experience as a whole.
Nevertheless, this necessary insistence is also ex-
posed to its own particular dangers. Disinterested
search for truth, self-sacrificing love or devotion to
duty, are genuine responses to the claim of God,
even though men are not consciously aware of Him,
even though they profess themselves atheists. At all
costs we must hold fast to that. Yet the fact remains
that, though these attitudes may be in themselves
profoundly " religious," they cannot be identified
with religion. The knowledge of God which is given
through religion is not a more reliable form of know-
1 Cf. O. G. Quick : The Realism of Christ's Parables.
H
114 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
ledge than that which comes through Science, Art or
Morality all true knowledge is knowledge of the
true God. But it has a real difference in its quality.
It has a depth, inwardness and richness, a cleansing
and lifegiving vitality which is its own inalienable
prerogative. Moreover, human experience on a wide
scale seems to show that all those activities which
belong to what we recognise as the good life lack
something in strength and creativity and may even
become sterile and degenerate when they are not
fructified by religion and brought consciously into
relation to God. And if man is indeed made for
communion with God this is just what we should
expect. So long as his deepest need is unsatisfied
(though he may not himself be aware of it), there is a
frustration in his inner life ; his full possibilities
remain unrealised, his richest gifts still unevoked, and
it happens sometimes that his best " goes bad on him."
(That some atheists are far finer characters than some
Christians is plainly not an objection to this state-
ment.) He needs both fulfilment and redemption in
that conscious response to God, as the Object of
worship, faith and consecration, which is the concern
of religion.
Further than this, while we must maintain that
every recognition of goodness is a real disclosure of
God, yet if we accustom ourselves to thinking as
though God's revelation in a sunset is on an equality
and on the same level with His revelation in Christ
Jesus we have parted company with the Christian
religion. The salt will be found to have lost its
saltness, the distinctive savour has gone. What is at
CREATOR AND REDEEMER 115
issue here is something far more than the distinction
between persons and things, and the obvious fact that
a personal revealer can disclose God more fully than
an impersonal. It is the core and essence of Chris-
tianity. The God whom the Christian Church pro-
claims is the God who redeems us through Jesus
Christ ; and He is the Redeemer and the Mediator.
To obscure or minimise the uniqueness and cen-
trality of Christ in Christianity is to change it into a
different religion.
But God is the Creator of the world, and we cannot
isolate His work through Christ from His other
creative and redemptive activity, and the other
modes of His self-disclosure. All the divine activity
in the world, so far at least as concerns man
and that is all that religion can respond to is at once
creative and redemptive. His every disclosure to our
sleeping spirits, whether on the peaks of heroic
insight or the pedestrian walks of daily duty, whether
in the achievement of new knowledge, in the mastery
of technical skill, in the opening of our hearts to love
and beauty, or through the conviction of forgiveness,
comes to us as summons and awakening, inviting us
to communion with Himself. If God is indeed the
living God, ceaselessly imparting to the world His
own original, underived excellence, then all loyal
response to goodness, in whatever forms it may be
presented to us, is genuine response to God. All
goodness is of the divine initiative. It is not of our-
selves, it is the gift of God " in his majesty as Creator
and his even greater majesty as Redeemer." 1 But
1 Cf. Lambeth Encyclical, 1930, p. 20.
Il6 THE MAJESTY OF GOD
Creator and Redeemer are one God. He meets us
" in all that calls forth the reverence and admiration
of men and women at their best," in the glory of
nature, in the commands of conscience, and most
characteristically yet most searchingly in His revela-
tion " in the face of Christ." The so-called secular
tasks and interests are bound up with the religion of
a Christian. Intellectual and aesthetic values are
part of God's gift and revelation to Him. But only
because of the outflow upon them of that faith in
God's revealing and redeeming work which is
mediated for him by Christ. It is out of the matrix
of this experience that the Christian concern with
" the values " is born.
To this experience the Church exists primarily in
order to bear witness. It is an " otherworldly "
society of men " not conformed to this world." But
it is this in order that the world and the whole of
man's thought and enterprise may be gathered within
God's redemptive purpose and brought into con-
formity with His will.
A true theology therefore we must have. Without
it all the activity of the Church will be misdirected
or insecure. But worship moulds the theology of
its members, and exhibits it to the world, far more
effectively, both for good and evil, than any
formulation of doctrine. It is through the worship
of the Christian Society and the spiritual quality of
its life that the vision of God in His majesty and
glory is to be manifested among men.
CHAPTER IV
THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
i. THE THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP
IN times of public anxiety like the present, there is
always the cry What is the Church doing? The
most obvious thing that the Church does, what every
onlooker can watch it doing, is to gather people
together for worship. And this is not only its most
obvious, but its most characteristic activity. The
Church is a community of worshippers, and the
worship of God is its primary concern. At every
level, primitive or developed, worship is the hall-
mark of religion. Till recently this would have been
such a platitude that it would not have been worth
while to say it. Today it sounds almost paradoxical.
In the past, perhaps, we may have been too ready to
think that the Church was discharging its mission so
long as its buildings were filled with worshippers,
and, obviously, a Church may be full and yet have
little to do with Christianity. But we have reacted
against this so violently and have been so eager to
insist that " Church-going is not the whole of reli-
gion " that it almost needs courage to suggest now
that " going to Church " really is important. Start-
ling though it may be, we must risk saying so. For
when we have made every qualification, it remains
117
Il8 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
true that the influence of the Church depends upon the
quality of its worship which is not only its primary
means of grace, but also its chief instrument of
evangelism and its most vital contribution to the
Christianisation of the social order. Its revival in
England depends, more than on any other one factor,
on a renaissance in Christian public worship. " The
younger generation is not very much interested in
theological dogma and it is almost wholly uninterested
in principles of Church Government. What it is
concerned about in the sphere of organised religion
is to find a cult which is spiritually satisfying." 1
When we think of the rather lifeless congrega-
tions sometimes found in our Churches and Cathe-
drals only too frequently a tiny handful gathered
out of a vast population we cannot but feel that
something has gone wrong. Is this what the Church
claims chiefly to be doing ? Is it a very important
contribution to the anxious life of the twentieth
century ? Admittedly it is possible for worship to
be as deadly as anything imaginable, and utterly
deadening in its effects. Everyone with his eyes
open knows that. I do not think we could honestly
be surprised if few of the rising generation were
prepared to regard Services in Church as an integral
part of their Christian lives.
Yet if the habit of public worship dies out the
Church and the Christian ethic will die with it.
Before all else, the Christian community is a fellow-
ship united by worship of the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ. That is its essential bond of unity.
1 Micklem : Our Approach to God, p. 1 1
THE THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP Iig
We have seen how deep it lies in the Christian view of
things that the Grace of God is offered and secured to
us through the common faith and worship of the society.
And if Christians do not share together in this central
and primary religious experience, can they remain a
community at all ? It was the need of the Church for
large buildings in which its congregations could meet
by contrast with the small pagan temples in which the
priests were to offer sacrifice which has filled the world
with the glorious architecture which still remains to
the twentieth-century man the chief visible symbol of
religion.
Moreover, most of the forces of the modern
world conspire to make belief in God difficult. When
we think of the pressure of materialism, the strength
of worldly and trivial suggestion, the despair-laden
atmosphere of scepticism which weigh on the spirit
of the modern man, how can we hope that people
will resist them or retain their hold on spiritual
conviction apart from the focus of public worship
and the illumination and renewal of which it should
be the God-given vehicle? Men will sit starving
in the midst of plenty, trying to keep alive an im-
poverished and often devitalised religion with their
own meagre insight and experience. By participa-
tion in corporate worship they may be made free
of a range and richness of spiritual conviction and
experience far exceeding anything accessible to the
lonely search of an individual faith.
Yet to deplore the poverty of Church-going is a
rather futile proceeding. It is a barren -and negative
approach. We shall not secure a revival of worship
ISO THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
by bleating entreaties to the young to " come to
Church " as a painful Christian duty, still less by
devising artful dodges which may attract them inside
our Churches. We need far more constructive
remedies. To invite people to come to Church is
useless unless we are giving more thought and trouble
to what they are to find when they get there. For at
present far too many are being starved. Many have
ceased to hope that the Churches can satisfy their
instinctive need for worship, and must either allow the
instinct to wither or seek elsewhere an inferior satis-
faction for it in dancing, pageantry, tattoos, and even
the crude emotional "kick" of the cinema which at
least takes people out of themselves a little, though it
may not take them to God. The Church cannot regain
its leadership till it regains the capacity for worship.
This cannot be done by mere rule of thumb. It de-
mands acknowledged, creative principles and a clear
apprehension both of what, as worshippers, we are
trying to do and of what we expect to receive. It
needs a solid theological background and a power of
imaginative interpretation.
The odd thing is that so little thought is devoted to
this exceedingly urgent task. There is plenty of first-
class constructive thinking in the re-presentation of
creeds and theology, and an output of administrative
ability which may fairly be claimed as of " cabinet
rank." On the crucial question of worship in the
circumstances of the twentieth century mostly flabby
thought is being expended. " The defect of the
liberal theology of the last two hundred years
wrote Dr. Whitehead is that it has confined itself
THE THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP 121
to the suggestion of minor vapid reasons why people
should continue to go to Church in the traditional
fashion." 1 This is really the crux of the whole
situation. A true and vital theology is necessary ;
but it will not win the allegiance of the new age unless
expressed and interpreted in worship. We labour to
bring our theology up to date in the changed mental
climate of our own time, but assume that traditional
worship just " goes on." In point of fact, it is not
going on, and such experiments as are being made are
too often erratic and uninformed. We cannot go
farther till we have thought more. If public worship is
lifeless and mechanical, if (as may be true in extreme
instances) it is even detrimental to religion, this may
be partly because modern Christians have as a rule
so few clear conceptions of the nature and meaning
of worship itself. Why do we worship and what are
we trying to do ?
Worship begins, as it ends, in wonder. In essence
it is the outreach of man to the spiritual factor in his
environment, in which alone his life is fulfilled. It
may thus be said to be natural to man, and, in fact,
we find no stage in history at which man has not been
a worshipper. Even at its most primitive level, where
it may not amount to very much more than a dim
recognition of the uncanny, it has nevertheless a
coercive quality. The object of worship is always
regarded as exercising a claim on the worshipper, and
therefore as sacred rather than merely odd. Thus
worship starts (as Dr. Kirk says), not in any activities
of our own, but in those which God brings to bear upon
1 Adventures of Ideas, p. 208.
122 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
us. 1 Thus, as in the order of nature, all growth and
all advance in knowledge are by way of response to
environment, so it is that in the realm of spirit we grow
in grace and in the knowledge of God. What religion
calls the offering of worship is, in fact, our response to
that touch of God on our hearts and minds which is
what it calls Grace. Worship and Grace are always
correlative, as action and contemplation are corre-
lative. It is God who evokes the response which
He rewards. We must no doubt be prepared to
recognise as manifestations of the spirit of worship
man's many and various responses to the claim of the
spiritual upon him in submission to the imperatives of
conscience, disinterested devotion to knowledge, sur-
render to the vision of beauty, in the lover's self-
dedication, and all other recognitions of worth. But
the specifically religious consciousness learns to hear
in and through these the call of the infinite Perfection
summoning spirit to its true fulfilment where alone it
can be wholly satisfied. It knows that in response to
this claim it finds the fulfilment of its own nature in
personal communion with God. There we have
worship in its true meaning.
For Christians it means even more than this.
Worship, in its Christian definition, is the hallowing of
God's name. This is the end for which man was
1 " Worship depends not upon our own activities but upon the
activities which God brings to bear upon us ; to them we are
forced to react as worshippers. If without selfscrutiny and self-
torment a man can remain alive to the goodness in his environ-
ment, it will draw out all that is best in him, leading him ever
nearer to the perfect goodness revealed in the Incarnate Lord."
Kirk : The Vision of God, p. 465.
THE THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP 123
created to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.
Thus in extent it is as wide as life. For it covers both
the direct approach to God in prayer, sacrament and
adoration, and all those activities of spirit which are
called forth, sustained and redeemed by our response
to the vision of God in Christ. The life of spirit needs
for its full development both the rest of contempla-
tive enjoyment and the energy of active response.
Christian worship embraces both these moments.
In both these aspects it is the gift of God. But it is the
gift of God in a unique sense. The true differentia of
Christian worship is that it is the response of man's spirit
to God's special grace and revelation mediated through
Jesus Christ. Its inmost shrine is communion with
Him in the gracious and forgiving love wherein
Christ reveals Him as Father.
The life of spirit is all of one piece, and worship
ought to redeem and fructify all those responses
to Spirit which God through Christ evokes and
rewards. The vision of God in Christ is continuous
with the vision of God in His other modes of self-
manifestation and self-giving, which at once sustain
and are enriched by it. In all such visitations and
influences the Holy Spirit invites our response to
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. If
Christ is the true Light that lighteth every man, then
whatever is good and true and lovely is the gift and
the invitation of the Father, summoning us to com-
munion with Himself. It ought, therefore, to go
without saying that all appreciation of value, in what-
ever form it may be presented to us, is a true hallowing
of God's name and a true concern of Christian wor-
124 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
shippers. Where men are making goodness come
true whether in thought, in art, or in conduct
there they are setting forward God's glory. If to
worship is to hallow God's name, then one intention
of religious worship is that men should glorify God hi
those other activities of life which are not specifically
religious.
But all Christian experience seems to show that such
continual "living in God's presence," such dedica-
tion of thought and will to Him, need direct com-
munion with God in prayer. Neglect of the latter
gravely impoverishes and normally even rules out the
former. Further than this, the full liberation and
sanctification of Christian faith and prayer is the
fruit of that unique experience which is open to us in
corporate Christian worship.
Our concern in this chapter is limited to this corporate
public worship of Christians that is, to " Services "
in church. The private devotions of individual
Christians, the family worship of the Christian home,
and the prayer-meeting of friends and associates
derive from and are dependent on the corporate
worship of Christ's society. Moreover, the intimacy
and informality proper to such occasions of worship
obviously differ in quality from that which inheres in
corporate public worship.
It is true, no doubt, that there are many Christians
who would find it hard to endorse, from their own
experience, the exalted claim we have made for
corporate worship. Its deepest and richest possibilities
may be revealed, or they may be obscured, by the
ways in which such worship is presented. A truly
THE THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP 125
interpretative presentation presupposes a right under-
standing as well as the art to evoke the essential
experience.
It is one of the aims of this chapter to set out
the significance of Christian worship in its widest
range of interpretation. But that which constitutes
Christianity is the unique work of God in man by His
manifestation "in the face of Christ," and the gift
which is shared in the redeemed community. It is
this which is at the centre of Christian worship, and
the characteristic " response " of Christians is towards
that uniquely redemptive act. By comparison all
else is secondary.
We cannot doubt, therefore, that the Church is right
in its massive concentration, in worship, on the facts
unique to Christian experience Grace, Forgiveness,
Reconciliation, the joyful acceptance of the Gospel,
the offering of ourselves " through Jesus Christ "
and newness of life through the Resurrection.
What God achieves in the life of men through Christ
is " other " than what He achieves or can achieve
in lives in which Christ is not enthroned. To doubt
that is to doubt Christianity. And thus quite apart
from the question of its supposed Dominical Institu-
tion, into which we cannot here enter the Eucharist
or Holy Communion Service is the norm and arche-
type of the worship of Christians. Within that
experience of worship the Christian is in his true
native climate. When disciples meet in the name of
Christ, not trusting in their own righteousness, to
submit themselves to His redeeming influence and to
offer themselves through Him to the Father, there
126 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
they know a Presence in the midst of them, and a new
life released in their hearts which is unique in its
inwardness and richness. This is, indeed, the
crucial vindication of God's responsiveness to the
needs of men. All that Christian devotion means
by " Grace " is dependent upon this unique experi-
ence.
But those who have understood this most vividly
have often dangerously misinterpreted it. Chris-
tians believe in the Real Presence of the living Christ
in the Eucharist because they believe in His Presence
in the Church. It has been too often stated the other
way round, as though the ground for believing in the
Church is the gift that comes through the Eucharist
which is Counter-Reformation Theology. This is
more than an academic point ; it affects our whole
conception of worship and of the method of God's
work in men. This error is but another form of
that false interpretation of Christ (technically called
the Eutychian heresy) which was rejected in the fifth
century. Overwhelmed by the sense that through
Jesus Christ God Himself touches the lives of men, by
the " given-ness " of Grace and truth through Him,
it presented Him as a kind of impersonal instrument
through which God's redemptive work was done, not
a Person compact of emotion, thought and will.
But that would have made of Him a mere channel
through which an influence of redemption flowed,
not a living, personal Redeemer. That would have
left God's work in Christ unique indeed, but totally
unrelated to anything else in human experience or
to His claim on the reason and will of men. It would
THE THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP 12J
have made " salvation " impersonal which is incon-
sistent with Christianity.
There is too much teaching about the " Real
Presence " which is perilously akin to this heresy.
It treats the Sacraments as a kind of pipe through
which " Grace " flows into the Church, which derives
from this its redemptive quality. But this interpreta-
tion is so depersonalised, so unrelated to God's other
gifts and his work in the heart of the Christian fellow-
ship, that it is in the end almost mechanical. It
concentrates attention so exclusively on the Grace of
God through the Eucharist as to forget that God is
at work in the history of men and nations, and that
what He does in men's hearts through Christ He wills
to do throughout the whole world. Thus an entirely
legitimate desire to stress the uniqueness of God's
response to men in the community of the Holy Spirit
may evacuate Christian devotion of its moral and
spiritual content.
Clear thinking on this point is crucial to our whole
understanding of Christian worship. Else we fall
into one of two mistakes. Either we denude Christian
worship of what is most distinctively Christian in it ;
or we leave it so far in the air, isolated from every-
thing else we know, as to make it appear almost
irrelevant to the actual tasks of Christian men and
women. The faith and worship of the Christian
fellowship are the matrix of the distinctively Christian
values and the Christian interpretation of life. And if
we take the New Testament as our guide I do not
think there is much room for doubt that the Chris-
tianisation of the world's life is meant to proceed from
128 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
the centre outwards rather than inwards from the
circumference.
But the aim of all Christian devotion is that men
should become more responsive to the claims
and gifts and tasks which God presents to them
in the other aspects of their experience. Men are
meant thereby to be redeemed from blindness, list-
lessness and selfconcern, and liberated into new
insight and richer service for the glory of God. To
whatever extent it does not result in this, worship is
falling short of God's glory. Its truth and reality are
tested, as Canon Quick finely observes, " not by any
intensity of its own secluded devotion, but rather by
its power to extend its meaning and influence beyond
its own limited sphere, so as to give a Godward direc-
tion and interpretation to activities where God is
no longer the object of the limited consciousness." 1
Christian worship finds its fulfilment when men,
through Christ, are admitted to communion with
God's redemptive activity in the world. God is
glorified when His sons " finish the work He has given
them to do." Thus the worship of the Church fails
if it does not succeed in relating the response of men
to God's other claims in the broad field of life as a
whole, and the wide, rich interests of humanism,
with their specifically religious acceptance* of His
self-impartation through Christ.
The conclusion seems therefore to follow that these
other and manifold forms of value the claims, enrich-
ments, interests and activities of the actual world in
which our lives are spent must be brought inside
1 The Ground of Faith and the Chaos of Thought, pp. 135-136.
THE THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP I2Q
Christian worship . Not in the hope of making it attrac-
tive to a larger number of people by adding a topical
interest to our Services, but for two, more profound,
reasons. First, because they are part of God's work and
integral to the cause of His Kingdom. If God is the
Creator of the world, then the establishment of His
sovereignty when His will is done on earth, as it is in
heaven cannot be confined to religious concerns.
Secondly, because a right attitude to the so-called
secular interests in life is part of what is meant by
conversion; and conversion is, for the Christian
religion, the end for which worship is intended.
That religion means primarily worship is one of
those truths that the clergy have learnt too well and
the English layman has scarcely learnt at all. Hence
that deplorable and disastrous breach (which seems
to be widening rather than narrowing) between the
point of view of the clergy and that of the people to
whom they minister. The clergy tend to regard
Christianity as chiefly a matter of devotional exer-
cises, the laymen as chiefly a matter of Christian
conduct. Hence they are apt to get at cross purposes.
The people complain about the " clerical mind "
and think that the parson is only interested in per-
suading them to attend services which have no
obvious bearing on life. The parson breaks his
heart by lamenting that some of the best Christians
in his parish better, perhaps, than those who fre-
quent the Services very seldom set foot inside the
Church. On both sides there is misunderstanding.
But, in fact, as Dr. Streeter would say, "both are
right and both of them get prizes." Christianity is a
I3O THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
way of living which is what the pious sometimes
forget ; but a way of living centred upon God
which is what the practical Christian must remember.
Christianity, after all, is a religion : its centre of
gravity is in the divine will : it is a life hid with Christ
in God. The essence of Christian morality is " not
to be conformed to this world." The very meaning
of Christian discipleship is the consecration of man's
life to God as He is made known to us in Christ.
Therefore worship must come in the first place ; and
the Church has been entirely right in the tremendous
stress which it has laid upon it.
The danger of religiously-minded people is to
think that devotional and liturgical exercises are all
that the will of God for the world requires of them.
But the primary emphasis in Christian worship is
the acknowledgment of God's sovereignty : Our
Father, hallowed be thy name. That means the
submission of our thinking to the truth as it is in
Christ Jesus, and the testing of our conduct and
policies by God's will for men as Christ reveals it.
Thus the very conception of worship implies the idea
of lifelong conversion a gradual re-direction of
attitude. To worship in the full Christian sense entails
a far-reaching revolution in the ways we think and
the values we acknowledge. This truth is frequently
forgotten, with the result that worship degenerates
with fatal ease into sentimentalism. A man may be
thoroughly conscientious, he may be genuinely sin-
cere in his private religious devotion, and yet remain
fundamentally un-Christian in the whole tenor and
content of his thinking about the great affairs of the
THE THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP 13!
world, or about such matters as his investments,
into which the spirit of worship has not yet pene-
trated. This is the danger of many congregations,
and one reason why Christianity seems to achieve
relatively little in the moralisation of the world's
life. The right criticism about the Church is not that
it puts the worship of God first what else is it in the
world for ? but that so many of us fail to realise
how great is the demand made by worship if God
indeed fulfils the law of Christ.
The authentic worship of the Christian Church
must thus be always dynamic and transforming. We
use glib phrases about " loving God," but what vast
issues are not in fact contained in them ! It involves
the education of a lifetime, in the growing apprehen-
sion of truth, the training of our appreciation and
our standards of excellence and beauty, the enrich-
ment and deepening of our sympathies. To love God
is not primarily a matter of stimulating religious
emotions. That may do us a great deal of harm.
If we are worshipping a false God which means, for
Christians, one less good than the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ then the more intense our
religion the less shall we be advancing in Christianity.
It is not, for example, a valid excuse for debilitating
and sentimental hymns that " the people like them "
because they are familiar and that, though they may
not be good poetry may be, indeed, quite shameless
drivel yet they help to evoke religious feelings. For
if God is perfect Truth and perfect Beauty people ought
not to like that kind of thing, and worship ought to
be teaching them something better. Vigilantly we
i a
132 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
must " keep ourselves from idols." About everything
connected with worship we must be constantly asking
Is it true ? Is what it is trying to express worthy of
the God whom Christ has revealed to us ? So that
the very idea of loving God and worshipping Him
" in spirit and reality " involves the idea of " being
transformed by the renewing of our minds, so that
we may prove what is the will of God " in our
moral, aesthetic and intellectual attitudes.
We are thinking, remember, about Christianity,
not about un-particularised " religion." Religions
are distinguished from one another not chiefly by
differences of " externals," which are more or less
constant in all religions, but by their ideas of the
God they worship. The nature of Christianity
imposes a certain definite character on its worship :
its moral and intellectual content is peculiarly and
decisively its own. Thus the Christian idea of worship
must not be too lightly identified with other con-
ceptions now widely popular-. It must not, for
example, be equated with that subjective meditation
on the wonder and mystery of things which is pre-
scribed by " scientific humanism." It is directed to
a living God to whose will we are to be conformed.
It is not sufficient to identify it, as is suggested by a
distinguished biologist, with " that irrational, alogical
element which is the most valuable contribution of
religion to life." 1
1 J. Needham : The Great Amphibium, p. 78 ; cf. p. 5, " the
essential component of religion is mystery and mystical experi-
ence." For a searching estimate of the social loss involved in
the jettisoning of social worship, see the first and last chapter of
The Bleak Age by the Hammonds.
THE THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP 133
" In the middle ages," writes Dr. Needham, " men made
themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake, and in
the future the same invitation will be extended to us to suppress
our sense of the holy, to stamp it out and confront defiantly a
world denuded of awe or mystery. Such a deicide will be a
homicide too. . . . That is why it seems to me that it is now
more necessary than ever to participate actively in religious
rites, and to maintain firmly the fundamental validity of the
religious experience as a characteristic activity of the human
spirit. . . . There is no reason for denying that once this admis-
sion is made organised religion follows automatically." x
"In an age dominated by science " this protest is
of real value. I do not wish to seem anything but
grateful for it. Yet it is, I think, necessary to insist
that this conception nevertheless falls short of worship
as Christianity conceives it. For an " alogical core of
the universe " is not the object of Christian faith and
loyalty.
Indeed, this whole philosophy of the " Numinous "
taken over, perhaps too lightheartedly, by some English
thinkers from Germany, seems to be open to very grave
objection. Some of our theologians have seized upon
it as offering philosophical justification for traditional
elements in the " catholic " cultus. But it is, surely,
a dangerous alliance. No sane person is likely to
suppose that the human reason can " define " God.
A God defined is a God finished. True religion
involves a sense of distance, and there is a danger
lest, in our eagerness to relate worship to the common
day, religion evaporate in familiarity. It is also true
that the thrill and wonder of the " Grace and truth
which came through Jesus Christ " presuppose the
vast, stupendous depths of Divine being and reality
1 Op. cit., pp. 41-42.
134 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
which are incommunicable to man's experience and
inapprehensible by finite spirits. Yet, unless there is
real correspondence between the being of God and the
mind of man, the Christian assumptions are false.
Christians do not worship a vague Numen, but One
whose character we know the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
2. THE ART OF WORSHIP
But in saying this we have moved a step further
and are viewing the question from a new angle.
Christian worship is a means of grace but also an
instrument of education. It is public worship more
than anything else which moulds the theology of
Christian people. Therefore one of the functions of
worship is to provide a school of education in the
Christian faith and way of living. Nobody will
dispute the assertion that worship ought to be leading
people to God. But this must mean that those who
take part in it are thereby gathered within an active
process of Christianisation in mind and temper and
in their attitude to life as a whole. What is said and
done must be an expression of that response to God
and the world which is given to us through the Spirit
of Christ. It should feel as if we believed in the
Resurrection. It should be a potent instrument of
evangelism. Even the stranger coming in casually
should feel himself in the presence of something sin-
cere, spontaneous, hopeful and constructive, which at
once invites and constrains him to learn more of the
THE ART OF WORSHIP 135
Source from which it issues. Where the group that
meets in the parish church is of low spiritual vitality,
it is worship that should nourish and stimulate it.
It should be evoking from congregations more than
they have yet learnt to offer. It should be the
growing point of the Christian community. It is
therefore of the utmost importance that worship
should not say or suggest anything unworthy of the
Christian religion.
For religious worship is an art, and indeed the
supreme art of Christendom, embracing all art-
forms within it. As such, it is seeking to express some-
thing through its own proper artistic medium.
There are thus two vital necessities. First, that what
it is seeking to express shall not be unworthy of the
God it worships ; secondly, that all its constituent
elements shall be made organic to its avowed purpose.
It ought to be possible after any Service to ask
What was that Service saying ? and we ought to ask
about any Service Does it really say what it means ?
Its medium is, to a very large extent, traditional and
stylised material : and we must not underrate the
value of traditional customary forms charged with
historical associations, even if imperfectly understood,
as the vehicle of unspoken convictions. Thereby the
congregation at worship is united with historic
Christian experience and with profound spiritual
forces which have moulded what is best in our
English heritage. Especially is this true of village
churches, where life is still largely ruled by tradition.
But the priest always needs the prophet. And these
forms need to be kept vital by the constant play of
136 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
experimental criticism. 1 As an art worship must be
formal. There is nothing in the least incompatible
between formal art and spontaneity. Some of the most
perfectly spontaneous and lyrical creations of art have
worked through rigidly conventional forms. This is
true not only in poetry and music, but also in painting,
sculpture and architecture. It is therefore a quite
false ideal as the Free Churches have begun to find
out 2 to hope that by making worship informal we
should thereby make it more spontaneous.
But formal does not mean lifeless or mechanical.
And what is here past comprehension is how it has
ever been allowed to happen that Christian worship
should become dull. It may be unskilled and badly
done so are many exciting melodramas ; it may be
primitive in its artistic expression, thin and
impoverished in its religious content ; but how it
should be possible for anybody to allow what is done
in the name of Christ to appear dull, tedious and
uninteresting that we must regard as inexplicable.
It can only be that clergy and people have not under-
stood what it is they are trying to do. They have
acquiesced in something that just happens instead of
making something worth while.
True, that on the whole English Churchgoers make
lamentably small demands on the clergy. The
rector does what they call " taking the service,"
and that as a rule is all they expect of him. They
may look for help and stimulus from his preaching,
1 Cf. T. S. Eliot on " Tradition " and " Orthodoxy " in After
Strange Gods, p. 29.
2 Cf. E. R, Micklem, op. cit., p. 54.
THE ART OF WORSHIP 137
as from his friendship and his pastoral care ; but
the Service is just something that happens. The
tragedy is that so many incumbents should be con-
tent to accept this position. There are men who
prepare their sermons elaborately yet give no thought
to the Service itself. Yet all the while it is preaching
the sermon for them, or else as far more commonly
happens cancelling out the effect of it in advance.
Suggestion is always stronger than logic. And the
fact is that in scores of churches in England we are
recklessly throwing away our chance simply through
lack of creative imagination in the planning and
ordering of our public worship.
It is not by any means only the fault of parsons.
Many of those who are working for something better
are defeated by reactionary parishioners. In some
parishes the bitter truth is that the people who most
frequent the church are the most fanatical obscuran-
tists. If such as these are allowed to control policy
it is not much use having the young confirmed. The
parish church will not be a home for them. Yet
there is, just on the fringe, a very large number of
young men and women ready and even eager to be
drawn in, if our worship becomes less unimaginative.
Yet, however much may be hoped from effective
lay-cooperation, it is plain enough that the chief
responsibility must rest on the shoulders of the
clergy. After all, leadership in prayer and worship
is the primary task for which a man is ordained. It
is, I venture to say, the most important and responsible
of our ministerial functions and should be the first
claim on our mind and spirit. But what does not yet
138 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
seem to be fully realised is that this is a specialised
job and as time goes on will become so increasingly.
It calls not only for certain innate gifts, but for careful
preparatory training and for assiduous exercise and
discipline. It is as much a special vocation as that of
the poet, architect or doctor, and demands, like
these, technical equipment. Yet it is left almost
entirely to chance. We do not ask much of theological
colleges. Perhaps, as it is, the task that is set them is
impossible. But it should not be unreasonable to ask
that ordinands may at least be capable of reading
aloud the Bible and Prayer Book in a natural voice,
with some sense of rhythm and some appreciation of
English prose. Perhaps, too, we might ask for some
experience in preparing and leading informal devo-
tions : far too many meetings are wrecked by the
parson's prayers at the opening and the close. I do
not suggest that this is enough : but a man who can
do well what is prescribed for him will be able later,
as he matures, to offer some contribution of his own.
This is needed mainly in two directions in using
the forms of Service we have, and in fashioning those
that we need but have not yet. The Services in the
existing Prayer Book need to be so worked upon and
interpreted as to make them a sensitive medium to
express the worship of twentieth-century Christians.
We have insisted above that Holy Communion is
the true archetype of Christian worship. But it needs
to be sustained and interpreted by other, non-sacra-
mental, Services ; and in fact the Church has from
the first taken over the Synagogue type of Service
the word-of-God Service, as the Germans call it
THE ART OF WORSHIP 139
consisting of prayer, Scripture and instruction as
preface or support to the Liturgy. We must recognise
that for most modern Englishmen " going to Church "
implies this kind of Service that is, in effect, Morn-
ing or Evening Prayer. Many clergy regard this as
deplorable, but, welcome or unwelcome, this is the
fact. Rightly or wrongly this is the form of worship
with which most of our people are familiar ; and for
very many it is their one contact with the teaching
and worship of the Church. Therefore whatever
" views " we may hold, an obligation rests on the
parson to make the most that can be made of these
Services, as a gateway through which the average
Churchgoer may be led to the heart of Christian
conviction.
It might seem to require a certain ingenuity to adapt
the daily office of monks, as it emerged in 1552, as a
Sunday Service for modern laymen. But a very great
deal can be done, given only some judgment and
imagination, without over-stepping the bounds of
conformity. The Prayer Book provides the material :
the minister's function is to interpret it.
We have to do the best that is possible with the
forms provided in the existing Prayer Book. But I
cannot fail to record my conviction that over and
above the Prayer Book Services we need some-
thing more experimental to sustain, interpret and
supplement them, if the Church is to answer the call
of the new age. The Prayer Book superbly enshrines
the genius of English-speaking Christianity : but it
needs creative re-interpretation. The Prayer Book
Services, by themselves alone, are inadequate, both
140 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
in form and content, to the religious needs of the
twentieth century. There are many public occasions
in our time, which in 1662 were not contemplated.
There are new approaches to life and religion, a
revolutionised attitude to Scripture, a far greater
conception of the Universe, a changed aesthetic and
intellectual idiom, which combine to require new
forms of expression as the vehicle of contemporary
religion. We are faced with the task of re-interpreting
the traditional legacy of Christian worship in the
artistic idiom of a new age. This is a task far more
demanding. It needs a rare combination of qualities :
scholarship and experiment must meet together,
restraint and imagination must kiss each other.
We cannot expect to produce to order the geniuses
who will carry the work through for us. But it is
surely the function of Bishops, as the chief priests and
pastors of their dioceses, to encourage clergy and
people in this task of liturgical experimentation. It
is tragic that so many of them confine themselves to
the attempt to secure standardisation and define the
permissible limits of eccentricity. If in default of
episcopal leadership the inferior clergy make bad
mistakes or have given up trying to do anything, it
cannot be said to be entirely our fault. Yet under
the pressure of sheer necessity a great many attempts
are being made. Some are mere unskilled improvisa-
tion, some are truly creative invention. The latter
term may be fairly applied to some of the services in
Liverpool Cathedral and to that used at the enthrone-
ment of the present Archbishop of Canterbury, as well
as to some of the admirable suggestions which have
THE ART OF WORSHIP 141
been published by the B.B.G. 1 Thus there is
gradually accumulating, in the cathedrals and larger
parish churches, to say nothing of school and college
chapels, a great deal of useful material, some of
which at least deserves preservation. If anyone
could devote skill and leisure to editing and publishing
this material he would be making a big contribution
to the revival of worship in England. 2
Such a revival needs the cooperation of all sections
and schools of thought in the Church. For the decline
into which we have fallen, the Liberals and the
Evangelicals are at least partly to blame. Disliking
Anglo- Catholic ceremonial, they have allowed them-
selves to assume that the working alternative to High
Mass is something flat, conventional and too lengthy.
They have even accepted the dangerous heresy that
" externals " in worship are unimportant, whereas
in fact they are of enormous importance.
But we are passing now into a new era. Old fears
and suspicions are dying out. Party cries and allegi-
ances are becoming obsolete. We are learning to
believe in the Church of England. Anglicanism has
all the cards in its hand. It has its rich historical back-
ground, its tradition of intellectual freedom, its legacy
of ordered experimentalism, its native gift for restrained
magnificence and austere splendour in worship, and
1 Services for Broadcasting (B.B.G., 1930).
2 The book should be published with loose leaves, each Ser-
vice or act of worship on a separate page, and each obtainable
separately at a cheap rate, the leaves being stocked by the
Publisher in large quantities. In this way the Services could be
brought within reach of any parish church that desired to use
them.
142 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
it has inherited the noblest language yet moulded by
the lips of man. We have now to work trustingly
together to embody this inheritance in new forms,
open to all truth, but strong in our own, and so to
rebuild the Church of the English people.
3. THE ORDERING OF WORSHIP
-\
In conclusion, I venture to offer a few suggestions
for the actual ordering of Services. It must be
remembered that public worship cannot be, and
should not attempt to be, like private devotion or
an informal prayer-meeting transferred from the
home to a Church building. Its aim and character
are entirely different. It is a corporate and symbolic
action. It is neither to be expected nor desired that
every phrase and every part of the Service should be
equally significant and appealing to every individual
taking part. It is the worship of the Body corporate.
It is meant to be a recapitulation and evocation of
Christian experience, so fashioned that each individual
can make his response to the total impression. It is
bound to be " stylised " and universalised, and is best
thought of as a kind of drama only that here the
" audience " are the " actors " and that the whole
worshipping congregation ought to be caught up
within the action.
The form of worship is universal, but it ought not there-
fore to be abstract. It is stylised, but not therefore life-
less. The importance of words, forms and ceremonials is
primarily psychological. We can hardly suppose that
one form of words or one order of ceremonial usage
THE ORDERING OF WORSHIP 143
is more pleasing to God than another. One, of course,
may suggest a true and another a false idea of God,
and in so far they are matters of Christian principle.
But, as between various possible ways of ordering and
expressing our worship, assuming a fully Christian
theology, it would seem that the primary consideration
should be the extent to which they help or hinder the
receptiveness of those taking part to God's renewing
and redeeming Presence. And this is partly at least
a matter of temperament, education and social
tradition. Not all congregations need the same thing.
If we could once get that clearly recognised it would
be the end of much barren controversy. In any case
it does not need arguing that leadership in worship
requires at least some study and understanding of the
principles of Group Psychology.
The minister's business is not to " preach " the
Service, or to make it a means to his self-expression.
He is there to lead the worshipping congregation.
But it must depend largely on him whether or not the
Service is an instrument for the creative expression of
their worship. Of course it is true that liturgical
forms of worship are meant, partly, to safeguard
congregations against the vagaries of individual
ministers. Yet even set forms need interpretation :
stage directions presuppose actors : and even in the
conduct of Matins and Evensong a great deal depends
on the minister. It is his inalienable responsibility.
The personal factor can only be eliminated by having
recourse to a Tibetan prayer-wheel. No parson,
however experienced, can devote too much thought
or trouble to the way in which he orders these Services.
144 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
It is not merely the method of " taking " them the
control of voice, movement and so forth but the
planning of the Service itself which demands anxious
thought and preparation. And, after all, we have
fairly wide discretion. Even inside rubric and custom
a great deal is left to ourselves. For example, the
Book provides the words : but it says nothing which
prescribes the tempo. And few things more defeat the
spirit of worship than the breathless rush, at uniform
pace, with which the Service is apt to speed its way
from Dearly Beloved to the Blessing, with never a
pause or a change of rhythm. Nor, as a rule, is
nearly enough time allowed for the people to stand up
and kneel down. Nothing in any rubric forbids the
intercalation of silent periods, whether at the beginning
or in the course of it.
So again we are told how to begin the Office ; there
is nothing which makes it illegitimate to preface it
with some introduction, whether of Scripture, music,
or silence, which may help to create a receptive
atmosphere. But this is of quite crucial importance.
The opening words are vital to the whole Service.
A dead, conventional opening is fatal. And one of
the weakest points in the Anglican Service is the way
in which it plunges at once, without preparation or
preliminary, into the words of the General Confession.
After all, the Lord's Prayer is the Christian model,
and the order is presumably of importance. It is
only after Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom
come, Give us our daily bread, that the Master of
prayer introduces the note of penitence.
But the preface provided for the Service in
THE ORDERING OF WORSHIP 145
the second Prayer Book of 1552 is not properly
part of the office. In the 1928 book it is printed, as
it should be, detached as an introduction to the office
itself, which begins O Lord open Thou our lips.
We are not obliged to use this introduction, and it
is, I should hold, necessary to devise other intro-
ductory forms. The easiest, simplest and probably
best is, first, a period of silence prefaced by a few
words of direction, and then one or two sentences of
Scripture, freely and deliberately selected to strike
the keynote of the whole service. When the General
Confession is used it should be occasionally and with
emphasis, as, for instance, on Sundays in Lent ; but
even then the really right place for it is considerably
later in the Service, as, for example, after the
Sermon.
Once more, it is expressly provided in the revision
of 1928 that the minister may pray in his own words
" after the conclusion of Morning or Evening Prayer
or of any service contained in this Book." This,
surely, is not mere concession ; it is meant to suggest
an ideal. The revisers do not want us to be content
with reading collects out of a book ; they want us to
lead the people in prayer.
The ideal which is there suggested can be inter-
preted in a great many ways. The true value of
" extempore " prayer resides in its relevance, not in
its unpreparedness. But in fact whatever we do or
say, or allow to be said or done, in Church is leading
or misleading the people. Every phrase, note, pause
or gesture is conveying a true or a false suggestion
about God and the Christian way of life. Therefore
K
146 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
\ve need to be " very jealous " for the honour and
glory of the God we worship. We must exclude from
our Churches at all costs the insincere, the slovenly
and the trivial, and no smallest detail is unimportant
from the poise of the celebrant at the high altar to the
cleanliness of the hassocks in the back pews.
Unity in conception and structure, the subordination
of parts to one whole, are among the obvious qualities
of good art. By contrast, what is often the worst
failure in the worship of the Church as we know it,
is its distracted, episodic character. Lessons, Psalms,
Hymns, Prayers and Sermon seem too often at Matins
or Evensong to have no intelligible inner relation,
and to subserve no one controlling idea. So far as
possible this must be counteracted. The Service
should move from one point to another within the
unity of an organic whole. It cannot do this if the
first lesson is the bloodthirsty saga of Deborah, the
second a series of healings on the Sabbath, 1 and the
Sermon about something quite different. Ideally, the
Service on every Sunday ought to have its own distinct
" note," so that in the course of the Church-year the
chief factors in Christian faith and life should find
their due expression in worship. 2 At least the various
elements in the Service must be organic to one leading
idea. If this involves a departure from the Lectionary
in selecting the passages of Scripture, that liberty was
1 As is actually the case at Morning Prayer on the Second
Sunday after Trinity in the revised lectionary.
2 A tentative scheme of this kind was put forward in the
" Proper " published in the so-called Grey Book ; suggestions
for the hymns Sunday by Sunday at the end of Songs of Praise are
based upon it.
THE ORDERING OF WORSHIP 147
approved in the Homilies, and may even be said to
have been urged upon the Clergy in the seventeenth
century. We should do well to claim it in our own
day.
The prayers that follow after the third collect are
now, by common consent, at discretion. It is there-
fore quite possible for ministers to provide that at
least Lessons, Prayers and Sermon should balance
and support one another. The Sermon, at any rate,
is in our own hands. There are, roughly speaking,
two kinds of Sermon. There is the full-length Sermon
or lecture discussing big questions of faith and conduct,
regarded as a whole in itself, independently of a
Service of worship, and followed by a prayer and the
blessing. This kind has, I believe, a great future.
It may be that the best arrangement is that the Sermon
should always be detachable from the Service of
worship preceding it, and that it should be made easy
for .the people to be present at either or both. 1
But there is also the more familiar kind which is
contained in a Service of worship. This presents
extraordinary difficulty both to the preacher and
to the congregation. But if we retain this kind
of preaching we can turn the necessity to glorious
gain by making it part of the whole act of worship.
Its general theme must be that of the whole Service.
Its treatment, of course, is the preacher's contri-
bution ; vitality, freshness, independence and humour
1 E.g., a Sunday morning might be arranged thus Morning
Prayer (half an hour) Hymn Sermon (half an hour) Hymn
Holy Communion. People could come for Matins only or
Sermon only or Holy Communion only, or for Matins and
Sermon, or Sermon and Holy Communion.
K 2
148 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
may supply not only the necessary relief but also
enrichment to the complete whole. (The fool in
Shakespeare will illustrate this point.) But it must
lead naturally into prayer again, and should be
followed by prayer from the pulpit. The proper end
to a sermon, I suggest, is " Let us pray," not a
peroration or the rather conventional " And now."
It may well lead into a period of silence or meditation
directed by the preacher, which should then be
gathered up into spoken prayers which have been
composed or provided beforehand. All this will
obviously be much easier if the Sermon is placed in the
middle of the Service, not at the end, as has become
customary.
It ought, perhaps, to be said quite frankly that not
every newly ordained man would be wise to attempt
what is here suggested, or anyone to attempt it
on every occasion. Everybody must use his own
judgment. But in one way or another the Sermon
and the rest of the Service must be held together. 1
And of this, in principle, I am certain, that in sitting
down to prepare his sermon the first question that a
man should ask himself is Into what prayer is this
going to lead the people ? He can then plan out both
the Service and the Sermon. In Churches where
there is more than one minister this entails close
consultation between all concerned, including, of
course, the organist. It should not be too much to
1 I am thinking now about parish churches, where the clergy
do most of the preaching themselves. The problem of visiting
or " strange " preachers is one about which there are no known
rules.
THE ORDERING OF WORSHIP 149
expect this : though too often it is quite obvious that
none of them, has given a moment's thought to it till
the last minute in the vestry, and the ministrants are
all at cross purposes.
The remaining element in the preparation is the
choice of the hymns, and this needs laborious trouble.
To choose them, casually for a month in advance
without reference to the rest of the Service or
even the subject of the Sermon is to give up the
attempt altogether. It may mean a whole morning's
work to make the right choice for a given Sunday ;
but to grudge whatever time may be needed is to
waste all the rest of the time we spend on the prepara-
tion and ordering of the Service. Irrelevant hymns
will kill everything else.
But nothing devised by perverse ingenuity can so
successfully ruin an act of worship as the ceremony of
" giving out notices." A string of remarks about
whist-drives and jumble-sales intruded into an interval
in the Service hopelessly shatters the atmosphere of
worship. Notices should be ruthlessly cut out. If
we cannot afford to print what is necessary, at least
we can publish them at some other moment before
the Service or when it is over. The same applies to
the Banns of marriage. If the Church Assembly is
interested in worship it could make a most fruitful
contribution to it by a Measure permitting banns to
be published by being posted in the Church porch.
Failing that, we must find another solution.
The question of music is far too contentious for a
layman like myself to risk an opinion. Fortunately
there is ample advice available. But one point is
150 THE RENAISSANCE OF WORSHIP
surely beyond argument that we cannot tolerate in
the worship of God a standard conspicuously inferior
to that which all the potential worshippers can hear
any evening at home on the wireless. Parish churches
cannot afford not to keep up with a rapidly rising
standard. The apology which is commonly offered
is to emphasise the poverty of the resources which
the average parish church can command. But most
parish churches would be well advised to forget all
about cathedral services, to use the natural voice
most of the time, and to concentrate on congregational
singing of really good, clean virile hymns, and a
limited number of chants. Let me choose the hymns
for my people, and let who will teach them their
theology ! The selection of hymns is of crucial import-
ance ; and without joining the battle of the hymn-
books, I believe that the introduction of Songs of Praise
will double a congregation in two months. 1
1 There is an excellent chapter on Music in Worship in
Archdeacon Hunter's book The Parson's Job.
CHAPTER V
THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
i. TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT IN ETHICS
" T"F the light that is within thee be darkness, how
J_great is that darkness." But how can we be sure
that it is not ? That is the problem of this generation.
No preacher who speaks about right and wrong as
though all were agreed in the meaning of those words
is addressing the audience in front of him. Just what
is the right course of action in our tangled and
complicated age ? That is what they most want to
know. Neither conscience nor social tradition seem
to offer any secure criterion. All our certitudes
have become " problems." We speak about the
problem of the Family, the problem of Patriotism
and so forth, finding ourselves tortured with mis-
givings in the sphere of the most direct moral duties.
Perhaps for the first time in Christian history Chris-
tian parents find themselves at a loss how to instruct
their children in conduct. So widespread is our moral
insecurity. And the drift away from the Churches
may perhaps be very largely explained by a resentful
feeling of disappointment that they do not provide
people with help at the point where they are most
conscious of needing it. The conspicuous detachment
from the Church of the young married couples of the
152 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
professional classes seems here to be specially sig-
nificant.
Admittedly without some moral tension any civilisa-
tion must stagnate. History is always in transition ;
moral traditions are always in the making. The
young are nearly always dissatisfied with the pre-
vailing and established standards, and but for this
fertilising criticism moral ideas would quickly become
petrified into unexamined taboos. The discontent
of the rising generation is the oxygen both of religion
and morality. In periods of specially rapid change,
when the bonds of society are being dissolved by new
and little understood forces, whether spiritual or
material, and new intellectual emancipations demand
a revision of all the accepted axioms, the process is
violently accelerated. At such times the younger
people suspect that traditional standards are " mere
conventions " imposed on society by its vested
interests and bound up with the sterlising legacy of a
now discredited religion. Thus criticism of religion,
as Marx said, is the beginning of all criticism. The
first result is the heady doctrine that " right " and
" wrong " are merely relative terms which exist by
" convention " and not by " nature " and have no
real or metaphysical basis. This leads to the repudia-
tion of all standards and a crude, fierce gospel of
self-expression. This stage quickly brings disillu-
sionment and passes into anxious enquiry for
constructive principles of conduct. At such times
both philosophy and religion are chiefly preoccupied
with ethics, and the drama tends to become moral
debate.
TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT IN ETHICS 153
This cycle is more or less regularly recurrent.
Many of the problems which are being canvassed in
contemporary fiction and drama are raised, some-
times in almost identical form, in Euripides, Plato and
Aristophanes. In the flowering time of the middle
ages, at the Renaissance and at the Revolution,
Europe passed through that same turmoil of ethical
scepticism and confusion and attempted ethical
reconstruction in which the whole world is involved
today. It is steadying to bear this in mind. Our
difficulties are not unique : the post-war mood is a
commonplace of history, and the moral predicament
in which we find ourselves has precedent enough in
the human record.
Yet the predicament seems to be unprecedented
both in the violence of its impact and in the
world-wide range of its incidence. The moral be-
wilderment of our own time is at once more general
and more radical than mankind as a whole has yet
experienced. We have been subjected to the pressure
of all possible forces of disintegration within the
shortest time-span conceivable, and indeed within
one normal lifetime. In many parts of the world
today men whose fathers were naked savages are
skilled engineers and technicians, and the sons of
men whose lives were surrounded by uncriticised
tribal custom or the dead moral dogmas of the Koran
are now Bachelors in Arts and Science. This change
is, I think, unexampled in the breathless rapidity of
its tempo, and it may be allowed to stand as a symbol
of the first three decades of the twentieth century.
It is not to be wondered at if the pace and suddenness
154 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
of these readjustments are putting a heavy strain on
the heart.
The volcanic upheaval of the war, overwhelm-
ing us in bitterness and anxiety to the third
and fourth generation, broke on a world already
becoming exiled from nearly all its accustomed
securities. The critical solvents of the new knowledge
were already at work on established loyalties. The
westernisation of the backward peoples was already
destroying the old tribal faiths and uprooting nations
from their ancestral allegiances. Technical and
economic development was changing the pattern of
western society, revolutionising the social order,
shifting the centres of political force and causing
ominous cracks in that structure of capitalism but-
tressed by democracy which had so magnificently
enshrined the Queen. During the reaction under
Edward VII 1 people were beginning to ask, Why
shouldn't I ? Religion, at least as taught by the
Churches, was losing its hold on the professional
classes though the mild scepticisms of that period
are the Sunday School lessons of today. (When we
remember what was regarded up to the war as dan-
gerous modernism we stand aghast at the thought
of the obscurantism which we then mistook for
enlightenment.) Questionings about creed and con-
duct were already widespread and unsettling : every-
body was reading Bernard Shaw : Mr. Potter
1 But the Edwardian emancipation was curiously superficial
and hardly went deeper below the surface than Grundyisms and
respectabilities. Cf. the remarks of Maurois about Edwardian
drama and the censorship in King Edward and his Times, pp. 237-
238.
TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT IN ETHICS 155
repeatedly " losing his faith." Yet, despite the dis-
cordant voice of Nietzsche, liberal humanitarian
ideals were still almost everywhere taken for granted,
and whatever the doubts about Christianity, most
Englishmen comfortably assumed that the main
principles of the Christian ethic offered mankind
permanent moral guidance.
The war not only brought to a crisis the latent
poisons of disintegration : it annihilated all the
remaining certainties. As the carnage dragged on its
course, in which it became increasingly impossible to
find any trace of moral justification, loyalties were
wounded and smashed to death. When at length the
blizzard came to an end, all the familiar landmarks
had perished. The young emerged lost and uprooted
from the moral certitudes of their predecessors, and
with a consuming indignation against all those moral
assumptions which seemecfc, not only to have failed,
but to have so disastrously betrayed them. Every-
thing that was " pre-war " was suspect. The young
had no history at their backs. They seemed to them-
selves adrift in a world which began only after the
Armistice, with no appeal to inherited experience and
no principles that would stand the test. 1 The world
had to be rebuilt from the ground, but they knew no
foundation on which to build.
Meanwhile their disgust and disillusionment with the
" Christian " and pre-war morality was completed by
1 The effect of the experience on a young man and a young
woman respectively has been described by Hugh Fausset in
Prelude to Life, and Vera Brittain in The Testament of Touth. For
an interesting study of its impact on the young in Germany, see
Otto Piper's Recent Developments in German Protestantism.
156 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
the shame of the peace treaties. No wonder that they
were driven desperate and abandoned themselves to
the cult of a " good time " for what else did life seem
to offer ? No wonder if they embraced the assump-
tion that all men and women over forty were not only
blind but insincere, and that all religious and moral
traditions were in themselves necessarily false. All
standards alike seemed to have broken down.
The wild epicurean reactions of the nineteen
twenties have now spent their force. They have been
succeeded by a profound seriousness. It is not, I think,
at all true to say that the young men and women of
the nineteen thirties are more morally lax than their
parents such a judgment wholly misrepresents them.
They are, indeed, in a number of ways more stringent,
and many of them are shocked by the levity of their
senior post-war contemporaries. They are devoting
themselves with keen minds and uncompromising
sincerity to the task of understanding their world and
reconstructing its institutions. To describe the outlook
of this generation as a " revolt against Christian
morality " is a tragic misdirection of justice. It is a
search for a new morality, seeking for guidance wher-
ever it may be found, and ready to welcome Christian
solutions if they can show cause why they should be
accepted. They will not be accepted on authority.
For what is most of all characteristic about the con-
temporary moral outlook is its thorough-going experi-
mentalism. This is what makes the " new morality "
new. It is not an alternative to the Christian ethic
nothing so systematic as that. Still less, as ruri-
decanal conferences are rather absurdly prone to
TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT IN ETHICS 157
suggest, is it a recrudescence of paganism and a
justification of sexual self-indulgence. (What demon
put it into the heads of Christians that morality is
all about sex ?) It is an experimental morality by
contrast with a morality of tradition.
It is otherwise, no doubt, among other peoples.
Driven by poverty and humiliation to a depth of
desperation and bitterness that we can only with
difficulty imagine, the young generation in Central
Europe, and in those vast areas of the world in which
Soviet rule is established, have surrendered them-
selves to a moral creed which must be regarded as
antithetical to the ethic which rests on Christianity.
Of that we shall have more to say later. But among
ourselves the whole situation is still open and can still
be redeemed. A generation that faces moral per-
plexity with such frank and open-eyed realism, such
courage and such hatred of subterfuge, cannot be far
from the Kingdom of God. In perfect good faith it
may say and do things which make older people's
hair stand on end : but the light within it is not
darkness. It may be that if, during those years with
which we are concerned in this estimate, I had not
been allowed the double privilege of being a Fellow of
an Oxford College and Vicar of a University Church,
I might incline to a less hopeful verdict. But a man
must write out of his own experience. And, in my
view, the young men and women who are now passing
from school and college into our ambiguous and
distracted world are so fundamentally sound in
quality and so essentially honest in outlook that they
may be found to have " come to the Kingdom "
158 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
precisely " for such a time as this." They are deter-
mined not to be over-ridden by any appeal of senti-
ment or emotion, and are too hard-boiled to respect a
vague uplift. They are looking questioningly towards
Christ, who alone remains still undiscredited. The
whole future turns on the question whether the
Church has insight and courage enough to offer
them a convincing Christian leadership and to help
them to fashion in the new age a new and creative
Christian morality.
If the " new " morality is un-Christian and some
of its experiments and suggestions do cut across
Christian principle that is not merely because it is
new. Christianity is in itself a new morality. It was
thus that it first appeared in the world, transvaluing
the accepted values, undermining many established
traditions, and beginning to reconstruct the social
order from a new centre and on new foundations. It
first appeared as a dangerous revolution. It is
probable that the name Christian excited as much
terror and antagonism in the breasts of conservatively
minded Romans as the mention of " Reds " in a
West-end club today. It was a new moral dynamic
which expressed itself in changed ways of living. When
" the law " and the old codes had failed, both through
lack of inherent vitality and because their actual
prescriptions could no longer claim correspondence
with the patterns of a transitional society, Christianity
introduced a creative ferment which at once broke
down the decaying tissues and began to build a new
living system. At all its vigorous and inspired periods
it has proved this same regenerative power. Where
TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT IN ETHICS 159
men have been in life-giving touch with the Spirit
of the living Christ the Christian religion has always
manifested this transforming ethical creativity. The
song of the Church is always a new song : where
men are " in Christ " there is " a new creation."
Thus the claim to be a new morality, at all times and
in all places, pertains to the very nature of our religion.
Its hold on the allegiance of the modern age will
depend on its power to vindicate that claim, to embody
its perennial inspirations in such new forms and
patterns of conduct as the changed needs and con-
ditions of life demand, and to fashion the recalcitrant
materials of an unforeseen social evolution into a
spiritual world-order. It is not the stuff out of which
it is composed that makes a thing material or spiritual,
but the purpose by which it is directed.
Christianity is a life, not a formula. The Christian
ethic (as I have written elsewhere) is " not so much a
code to be defended as an insight to be achieved " ;
else it is merely the fossilised record of a long obsolete
moral system which cannot maintain itself in a
strange environment. The actual content of Christian
duty must change with the changing generations.
Not, of course, that the Christian way of living can
ever be " shaped to the pattern of the world " in
which at a given moment it dwells. Faiths and
standards, like men and women, are only too easily
shaped and moulded by the pressure of external cir-
cumstances. Life consists not merely in adaptation
to environment but in mastery over it. And an ethic
which is merely conformed to the outward conditions
of a culture, and those thought-forms and behaviour-
l6o THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
patterns which they impose on the bodies and souls of
men, is but an echo of life, not a guide to it. This is
specially true of the Christian ethic, which rests on
an estimate of human activity irreconcilable with
those assumptions with which the minds of twentieth-
century men are being almost compulsorily indoc-
trinated. It cannot compromise its conviction that
the centre of gravity for man's life is not to be found
in this world at all. If Jesus was wrong at the centre
of His thinking, then the Christian ethic is a false
ethic. But if He was right, the conclusion follows
that we cannot take bits of our Lord's moral teaching
and " apply " them in a civilisation which rests on
totally different assumptions. Our civilisation must
" repent " before it can talk of " applying " Chris-
tianity. To be saved without being converted, which
is what the contemporary world is asking for, is in the
nature of Christian things impossible.
From this point of view the Christian ethic cannot
conceivably be brought up to date. It can never be
completely acclimatised in any form of secular
civilisation, and must always stand as a witness and
a protest against a too facile conformity to the ruling
tendencies of a given period. Its citizenship is in
heaven. Yet an ethic becomes merely formal, and to
that extent morally sterilising, unless it is realistically
related to the actual circumstances and conditions with-
in which life must be lived, and the concrete problems
of conduct about which decisions have to be made.
These are in constant process of change. An ethic
presented in terms of" rules " will and always must be
anachronistic as a positive guide to right living. It
TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT IN ETHICS l6l
will always reflect the conditions of the period in which
it was formulated rather than those of contemporary
life. Thus it can only escape from obscurantism at
the price of avoiding all actuality.
In that period of solid confidence which was finally
shattered by the war, the main principles of the
Christian life were run into the moulds of a code which
was perhaps generally sufficient in relation to those
temporary circumstances. But those circumstances
no longer hold. Scientific and technical develop-
ments, far-reaching economic changes, the emergence
of a new range of problems as regards our duty both
to posterity and to international cooperation, above
all the spread of education and the dangerous
enlightenment of new knowledge, have altered the
whole pattern of moral action and complicated all
moral choices. The accepted code has accordingly
broken down.
Moreover, we have begun to recognise how deeply
that code itself was coloured with the prevailing
assumptions of its context. We are sceptical about
its legitimacy, and refuse to equate " Christian
morality " with the average moral standards of a
past age, however much tinged with Christian
emotion. And again, going back behind that, we
suspect that all manner of alien elements have seeped
into the Christian moral tradition and to some extent
polluted the reservoirs. We may instance the Roman
law of property, and definitely sub-Christian theories
about the authority of the sovereign state, which had
almost come to claim Christian sanction. Nor can
we forget that the " Christian " sexual ethic has been
l62 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
promulgated exclusively by males, and predominantly
at that by monks and celibates. We are not prepared
to accept their prescriptions as permanent or as
finally authoritative for the Christian conscience in
the twentieth century.
Once more, contemporary thought is saturated
with evolutionist presuppositions. To our way of
thinking, life means movement. The idea of a faith
once and for all delivered, whether in religion or
ethics, cuts across all our approaches. The result
is that an ethic of authority, contained in a code or a
written text claiming universal applicability, is to us
almost a contradiction in terms.
But the Christian ethic is not of this kind. The
claim which the Church makes for the " finality "
of the way of living revealed in Christ does not rest
on authoritative texts. It does not extend to docu-
ments or prescriptions, whether of the Fathers or
Councils, or even of the New Testament itself. It is
not a teaching, but a Person, whom it calls the Way,
the Truth and the Life. It is the eternal and final
quality of " the mind that was in Christ Jesus," His
sovereign insight and dedication, His supreme revela-
tion and embodiment of the meaning of goodness
itself within the conditions imposed upon Him by
history. It is, yet more, His ever-renewed power to
redeem and re-create human lives and to reproduce
the fruit of His own spirit in all peoples and all
generations, amid circumstances and demands com-
pletely unlike His own, which designates Him Lord of
the moral universe. We do not know whither He is
going ; we do not know the full and completed mean-
TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT IN ETHICS 163
ing of the Christian life in the world ; only that He is
the way and the truth. 1 The actual content of the
Christian ethic must be in continual change and
development as Hie itself sets us new lessons and
confronts us with fresh opportunities. The task
of this Christian generation is to discover what is the
Christian ethic in relation to our own time and place.
In this the candour and objectivity of the seekers
after a " new morality " should prove an invaluable
reinforcement.
The demand for an experimental, as opposed to
an authoritarian ethic, need not be at all incon-
sistent with acknowledging Christ's spiritual
sovereignty. There is not, indeed, any real doubt
that as between these two conceptions our Lord
Himself is on the side of the moderns. It was for
this that He challenged the antagonism of the most
powerful interests in Palestine ; the stand that He
made about the Sabbath was the initial cause of the
Crucifixion. But He stood for freedom against
formalism, not because He believed in evolution or in
the relativity of history or in any other of our high-
sounding theories, but because He believed in a living
God, creative of Beauty, Love and Righteousness.
And unless it is founded on that conviction, all our big
language about freedom becomes a mere petition in
moral bankruptcy.
But the ethical dynamic of Christianity is precisely
that victorious conviction. " He that sitteth upon
the Throne saith, Behold I make all things new."
It is the faith of the Incarnation that God is ever
1 John xiv. 5, 6.
L 2
164 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
redeeming to Himself the manifold elements in the
world's life, to incorporate them into the Body of
Christ. The more vigorous its Christianity the less,
therefore, will the Church be daunted by the magni-
tude of the ethical tasks before us. It will see in the
new conditions and complexities with which in our
time we are confronted, not more obstacles to Chris-
tian living, but fresh material for its achievement.
2. SOME ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH
Someone has said that predicting the future is
" the most gratuitous form of error." It would be
waste of time and ingenuity were we to attempt to
forecast the system, whether social, economic or
political, in which the society of the future is likely
to organise its common life. The important ques-
tions about it are moral. Will mechanisation over-
whelm spirit, or will spirit assert control over
mechanism ? What will be its standards of valuation
will persons still be the slaves of things, as they are
in the existing social order, or will it care supremely
for persons and for things only so far as they serve the
ends of personal and spiritual development ? Will it
be self-centred and self-sufficient an organised system
of relations which holds good only within that society
but without regard to the meaning of life itself?
Or will it be a city that hath foundations, in which
the corporate life of men and women is redeemed,
directed and sustained by communion with spiritual
reality ? These are the primary Christian concerns ;
and these are not vain speculations ; they involve
SOME ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH 165
instant and practical decisions. Has the Church the
faith, insight and power so to recreate society from
within that, whatever the shape of the new order, it
will be a moral society of persons, not a mere complex
of processes ? Are we to make history or to suffer it ?
These are the questions which life today is asking us.
The Church cannot meet this situation with a
merely traditionalist morality or with an attitude of
condemnation. It is unfortunate that so many
statements of Church opinion on living moral issues
are negative and condemnatory in form, and give
the impression that the Christian conscience has
learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. " This con-
ference deplores . . ." ; it is an old formula, but not
the utterance of a living faith. We must not identify
Christ's way of life with the social conventions of our
predecessors. Can it really be doubted that through
the ministry of scientific discovery and invention, the
new psychological techniques and the opening of new
possibilities in the elimination of chance and the
conscious control of behaviour, God is not only setting
us new problems but offering us fresh opportunities
for victorious and creative Christian living ? Nor, I
think, is it possible to deny that some of the new
demands which are being made by the conscience of
the twentieth-century man are true, in principle, to
the mind of Christ.
The moral question which comes home most closely
to contemporary men and women concerns the rela-
tionship between the sexes. It is not necessarily the
most important, but it comes first in order of experi-
ence. And here we are moving into a changed
l66 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
climate. At present our course is erratic and unsteady
through shoals of ignorance and reefs of crudity.
But the new ideals of those relationships which are
beginning to show on the horizon may yet be found
to be more fully Christian than those which were
assumed by our predecessors. The new demands
which are making themselves heard are not due
merely to lust and selfishness. And the Church will
forfeit all its moral authority unless it has the courage
to come to terms with the actualities of family life in
the circumstances of our time. An apologetic and
evasive attitude rules it out of court altogether. It
must offer liberal, understanding and genuinely
constructive moral guidance, not least in regard to
those urgent questions bound up with the limitation
of the family which are the points at which ethical
perplexity presses most heavily on the modern
conscience. We cannot hope to sanctify marriage by
identifying the Christian interest with legislation
which has become intolerable. Christianity has its
own scale of values, and it cannot be God's will to
sacrifice the possibilities of family life to the mere
demands of respectability.
While I was in Australia last winter (summer) the
Eucharistic Congress in Melbourne was made the
occasion by the Roman Hierarchy for a vigorous
output of propaganda in its most indefensible
form against limitation of the family. The other
Churches said nothing at all, leaving it to be inferred
by the onlooker that they do not dissent from this
deplorable teaching, and thereby deepening the aliena-
tion of morally sensitive people from their fellowships.
SOME ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH 167
The considered Anglican judgment is on record in the
report of the last Lambeth Conference ; but this docu-
ment is not met with frequently on the bookstalls of
the Australian railway stations.
It is more serious that in our own Church so
many accredited teachers have ignored that judg-
ment and some have tried to bring it into con-
tempt. There are signs that a concerted attempt
will be made to bring pressure on the next Con-
ference to secure the reversal of that courageous
statement. It is not in the least likely that the
Bishops will be influenced by this agitation. But it
does seem necessary to insist that any successful move
in this direction would stultify that moral leadership
which the Anglican Church is increasingly assuming,
and deprive it of all right to offer guidance to the
conscience even of its own members.
There is no slick answer to this perplexing problem ;
and in each country it takes a different colour. Un-
employment, economic stringency and a far more
sensitive recognition of the rights both of wives and
children are probably constant factors in all countries.
But there are situations, as in Australia, where the short-
term necessities of these factors appear to clash with
the long-term necessity for a large increase in popula-
tion. No one answer is universally right. But a
merely negative answer must be false. If we compel
sincere men and women to import shame, evasion and
subterfuge into their most intimate relationships, how
can we hope to Christianise home life, or to construct
a Christian social order from its foundations in the
home upwards ?
l68 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
But phrases about a " Christian social order " may
become dangerously misleading. There is no com-
plete Christian programme for the re-constitution of
society. In the nature of the case there can never be
one. The spirit of Christ offers no direction in respect
of detailed conduct or policy in the circumstances o*
the twentieth century. What it offers is a judgment
redeemed and a will consecrated to the Father and
access to regenerative resources which can resist the
wearing down pressure of moral inertia and dis-
appointment. It offers men vision and it confers
fidelity. The task of the Church is not to put forward
an alternative to the schemes of statesmen as they try
to find their way to a better order, but to inspire them
to produce their own and to supply that spiritual
dynamic which can bring those schemes to victorious
fulfilment. And it may be claimed that Christian
public opinion has contributed with signal effective-
ness to the new forward policy in Housing accepted
at long last by the National Government.
But the technical factors which are involved,
whether in politics or economics, are not part of the
Christian revelation. Many Christians are good
economists, and not all the fools are inside the
Churches. But the Church possesses no revealed
knowledge of governmental or economic techniques.
It would be an irreparable mistake to identify the
Christian solution with any particular programme put
forward. A particular social credit scheme is not in
itself more Christian than any other method that may
prove workable. Nor, I think, is it possible to assert
that a specially Christian sanctity inheres in the British
SOME ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH 169
system of Parliamentary government. There may be
under other conditions other effective instruments
of freedom. However much conscience may be
affronted by the methods of contemporary Dictator-
ship, the " leadership " principle need not in itself
be inconsistent with the Christian genius. The task of
the Church is to affirm that the State is the instrument
of personality, not the end for which persons exist,
and to inspire the labours and sacrifices of men and
women of goodwill not merely to mitigate the existing
system, but experimentally to construct another and
less imperfect instrument of God's purpose.
Nevertheless, in any existing systems and in any
alternatives that may be proposed, there are involved
spiritual values on which the Church is bound to
pronounce judgment. And in a transitional age such
as ours when values are confused and uncertain, it
is not its least important prerogative to supply the
world with a spiritual criterion. For it is not seriously
disputable that a new form of social organisation is
even now taking shape, or that its pattern will differ
very greatly from that which has been familiar to
ourselves. British civilisation in the last century
sought to combine democracy in politics with indivi-
dualistic capitalism in industrial and financial enter-
prise. The experience of the post-war period has
shown that the two are incompatible. Either demo-
cracy must be sacrificed as has happened almost
everywhere on the continent or capitalism must be
superseded.
Capitalism as at present organised has broken
down hi the sphere of economics, and it has poisoned
I7O THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
and corrupted politics. It has failed to deliver or
distribute the goods, and the feverish efforts of the
last decade to keep alive the capitalistic system
have intensified its dangers in politics, but without
redeeming its economic failure. In an age when the
resources of production could secure an abundant
standard of life to the whole of the world's population,
millions are living below the poverty line, and vast
numbers are actually starving. Capitalism can only
maintain itself by condemning millions to unemploy-
ment with all its bitterness and humiliation. The
moral indictment of the existing system is not more
scathing or more obvious than its own economic
incompetence to meet the necessities of a changing
world.
There are probably very few thinkers who believe
that capitalism in its present form can support the
civilisation of the future. The attempts that are
being made to adjust it to contemporary historical
conditions are even more morally disastrous.
Fascism is the next stage ahead of it. The inevitable
trend of the process is towards a capitalism of
monopoly organised on a nationalistic basis, which
means in effect economic imperialism, as ruthless
and as unscrupulous as warfare. There is little
to distinguish its methods from the actual use of
blockade in time of war, except that in this case all
the belligerents which means all nations without
exception and even within the British Empire are
engaged in blockading one another. It is making a
battlefield of two hemispheres. It is heading straight
for unparalleled catastrophe. Yet we need not be
SOME ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH 171
Marxians to recognise that this exceedingly dangerous
new development is not caused by malignant wills :
it is involved in the nature of capitalism and follows
from its inherent necessities. But this means that
the capitalistic system, at least in the forms in which
it exists at present, is incongruous with both the
moral and the economic realities of the new age.
The fundamental Christian objection to the existing
capitalistic system, and to the banker's control of
money from which it seems inseparable in England,
is that it holds persons in helotry to the exigencies of
financial policy. But money was made for man, not
man for money. To say that the social services must
be starved and sons and daughters of God kept in
penury at a time when poverty is the one evil which
we have power to eliminate completely because of
the claims of a monetary policy is merely to say
that the policy is a failure. If a system cannot be
made to work on any terms tolerable to conscience
nor without sacrificing men and women to an
impersonal and abstract dogma, then it is the system
that must be changed, not men and women that must
be starved.
The Church has too long given the impression that
it stands for the maintenance of the existing system.
This has done Christianity grievous harm. We must
not identify the Christian ethic with a system against
which the awakened conscience ought to keep alive
an effective protest. The presuppositions of western
society are the contradictory of the Christian axioms ;
for they value things more highly than persons, and
make traffic in the souls of men. A social order
172 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
resting on such assumptions can never be ratified by
the Christian conscience.
Confronting it now as its one effective rival stands
the stupendous experiment of Communism. The
intense conviction, the will to sacrifice and the
contagious missionary fervour which inspire and
sustain that terrific movement, may well put Chris-
tianity to shame. It is fatally easy to represent
Communism as the antithesis of Christianity. But the
fact that it persecutes religion, represented to it by a
decadent Church subservient to the privileged classes,
must not be allowed to blind Christian judgment to
the spiritual splendours inherent in it. We may regard
its philosophy as false and abhor the cruel violence of
its methods ; but the so-called crusade against its
" atheism " is too much complicated by political
motives for Christians to be advised to take part in it.
Soviet rule is the contradictory of British political
traditions, and the popular instinct is not far wrong
in regarding it as their most dangerous enemy.
If we believe that the British tradition preserves
elements of the highest importance for the moral
development of mankind, it becomes our duty to
safeguard it. But we do not safeguard our own
tradition by condonation of its moral defects. Still
less dare we equate it, in its present form, with the
Christian ideal of the social order.
There is more truth in the Marxian dialectic than
Christian apologists willingly admit. It is, for example,
obviously true that the outward organisation of society,
and predominantly its economic pressures, do condition
men's moral attitudes, and for good and for evil have
SOME ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH 173
their effect on character. It cannot be doubted that
our form of society does induce in its more fortunate
classes too great a readiness to accept privilege as
though it were inherent in the moral order. We do
not really believe in our hearts that everybody is to
count for one and nobody for more than one ; we
do not love our neighbours as ourselves. And it is
true of society as we know it that there is a real clash
of class-interest between those who have and those
who have not. That Marx's predictions have not
worked out precisely in the form he anticipated, that
their arbitrary and dogmatic assumptions can be
easily exposed and refuted, does not affect the import-
ance of this criticism. It is not effectively answered
by ignoring it.
No religion which preaches salvation by the
regeneration of the inward man, but glibly ignores
those external circumstances which in any event
condition character and may frustrate spiritual deve-
lopment, can expect its promises to be taken seriously.
A passion for a radical reconstruction in the material
bases of life is not in itself in the least " materialistic."
It is that only if material well-being is regarded as the
supreme value ; and it may be that this false valuation
is the lie in the soul of bourgeois societies.
The answer of Christianity to Communism must be
passionate, positive and constructive and express a
will to no lesser sacrifices than those which inspire the
Communist crusaders. We are changing the world, chant
thousands of boys and girls in unison as they parade
round Lenin's mausoleum. It is precisely what
Christians mean, or should mean, when they gather
174 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
round the altars of their Lord and say We believe in
God the Father. They mean " This is God's world,
and it is His will to make it a home wherein His sons
and daughters can come to the fulfilment of them-
selves as persons made for communion with Him.
He wills that we should take the material and mould
it to the ends of spirit, fashioning it as the instrument
of His purpose. Our lives are pledged that His will
may be done on earth as it is in heaven."
The fundamentajl Christian objection to the Com-
munist programme for society is that it is not genuinely
Communism. No doubt it is true that all revolutions,
whether aesthetic, moral or political, are determined
by that against which they revolt and must take the.
forms imposed on them by the systems which they
propose to supersede. Some of the worst features
of Communism are thus in fact due to the sins of
Tsardom. But although this should mitigate sentence,
it does not and must not affect the moral verdict of
the Christian conscience on its professed ideals.
Communism, in its only true sense i.e., a community
of persons with all those spiritual capacities which
inhere in the nature of personality is what Christians
call the Kingdom of God. Communism, in the Soviet
sense, despite those Biblical and Messianic elements
which Berdyaef has disclosed in its ancestry, is almost
what St. John calls " the world," a system which
" lieth in the power of the evil." Since it is not
genuinely communistic but the avowed dictatorship
of one class, its loyalties subsist on antagonisms.
Moreover, it confessedly regards persons merely as
means to its own policies or as so much grist for its
SOME ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH 175
mechanisms, and esteems only those qualities which
can be made subservient to its own ends. Thus it
mutilates personality and, by equating the good for
man with the triumph of its own system, Communism
tends to falsify all values.
These are but different ways of describing the intrin-
sic evil of the Soviet polity, that it is a system of social
relations wholly self-sufficient and self-centred which
is what the New Testament means by " the world."
Self-centredness is the essence of sin and the root of
all social wrong. Despite all its egalitarian language,
Communism thus proves in practice to be the antithesis
of community ; for community can never be realised
till the principle of social cohesion is the conscious
unity of societies in the Universal Spirit called God.
Communism, however, is not alone in this condem-
nation. All the societies of the modern world, whatever
particular basis they adopt for their economic and
political structures, are vitiated by the same principle.
It needs of course to be fully recognised that no human
society is entirely secular. No association of men and
women on however humble a level but is, in its own
degree, a manifestation of that " love " which has its
ground in the Being of God. There is no society
wholly apart from God " from whom all Fatherhood
is named." Every kind of social organisation, from
the most rudimentary to the most developed, has its
essential bond of cohesion in the sharing of a common
purpose which organises the Group yet transcends it,
immanent in it, but yet not its product. It lives by
partaking in a spirit. And so far as concerns the
psychological process, the emergence of the Christian
176 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
Church may be rightly described in these terms. It
can be truly said of any society that it is both from
heaven and of men. However imperfect, sterile or
perverted, yet that which has called it into being is at
least some recognition of value (even if only honour
among thieves), some response to spiritual environ-
ment, some sensitiveness to the Divine Spirit. Even
the most worldly society has in it some spark of other-
worldliness, which at best vitalises and ennobles, and
at worst redeems it from total ignominy.
But there is no secular society which realises the
full meaning of a true personal community. They
all achieve a certain degree of harmony, but it is
harmony at too low a level, which attains to a social
solidarity at the price of ignoring or overriding large
fields of personal value and concern. Or they so
far restrict the area of community to their own self-
contained group as to become in the long run a
menace to it. To a certain point they go but no
further. Their conscious goal is wholly within this
world. Their aim is not consciously directed to the
realisation of that true community, through a com-
mon partaking in the Divine' Spirit, apart from which
man's life remains frustrated.
This is the crux of the present situation. For the
fact is that the world is now passing, through extreme
difficulty and dislocation, from the separatisms and
departmentalisms of the post-Reformation and post-
Renaissance era, to some new and more comprehensive
integration. It is groping its way towards a new
synthesis of unity with individuality. And at present
the passage is arrested by the decay of spiritual
SOME ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH 177
conviction. It seems as though men must choose
between a chaotic and sterile individualism and
a closely knit but self-centred group by whatever
name they may describe it which constitutes a focus
of unity but clashes both with other self-contained
groups and the individuality of its own members.
The ferocious Nationalisms of our own time are in
part, as we have already observed, the resultants of
economic necessity, and in their turn help to exag-
gerate the false trends in the economic system. But
they may be regarded quite justifiably as an attempted
spiritual protest mistaken but none the less to be
held in respect against that spurious post-war
internationalism, concerned only with economic
relationships, which ruthlessly disregarded all values,
whether cultural, political or religious, not strictly
relevant to its own interests. It was over-riding
all local differences, tending to make the whole
world Chicago. It was cynically contemptuous of all
loyalties other than those of investments and divi-
dends ; and indeed its most ignominious exhibition
is the armaments combines across those frontiers
which it is their ostensible business to defend.
The neurotic nationalistic movements are, in part, a
reaction against this, and as such may claim some true
positive value. For all the most vital contributions
to the spiritual wealth of mankind come out of the
life of a concrete society, with its own native history
and tradition aaid its roots struck deep into a local
soil. A cosmopolitan culture is no culture. The
great artists and the great saints who belong to all
times and to all peoples are themselves true children
M
178 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
of their own. Shakespeare and Goethe, St. Francis
and St. Augustine, all of them belong to the ages,
but none of them is in the least cosmopolitan. They
could have sprung from no other culture than that
which in fact both bred and inspired them. So again
" citizens of the world " are too often in very serious
danger of becoming citizens of no city and evading
those obligations to a living social tradition which are
two-thirds of the content of the good life.
The current reaction against internationalism is
thus not without some justification. Yet it is in its
present form disastrous. So long as each national
community is organised round itself as centre, tension
and finally conflict are inevitable. There is not,
indeed, any necessary conflict between the self-
fulfilment of local groups and their harmony in an
embracing whole. But the reconciliation is only
possible if the centre both of the groups and of the
whole is conscious submission to the Universal. Only
as men are reconciled to God are they reconciled to
one another. It must of course be thankfully recog-
nised that beneath all its fears and antagonisms the
world of today is slowly learning its lesson. Under
the pressure even of sheer self-interest there is gradually
taking place a continual widening of circumference
in the area of acknowledged obligations. Even if our
practice belies it, we know that no man lives to himself.
And Christians should be eagerly in the forefront of
all movements in thought and policy towards more
effective integration and conspicuous in support of the
League of Nations. But even a world-state which was
organised on a principle of enlightened self-interest
SOMfc ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH 179
would not yet be in accord with the Divine Purpose.
The Brotherhood which the Gospel proclaims is the
expression of the Divine Fatherhood. Therefore only
a radical conversion can offer a radical and creative
remedy for the ills of contemporary civilisation.
This, however, does not mean that the Christian
need wholly despise self-regarding motives. If the
world is ordered by Divine Providence, then the real
interest of one must coincide with the welfare of all.
But the more the Christian schools himself and others
to appreciate what are the true interests which invest
man's life with its worth and dignity, the more will
he help to redeem earthly citizenships from their
disharmonies and their frustration into the freedoms
of Life Eternal. Precisely by what policies and what
methods Community is most likely to be secured,
Christianity does not in itself declare. Each Christian
must act and vote as his conscience judges assuming
that he has done the best possible to keep that con-
science sensitive and enlightened. His one inescapable
obligation is, by training himself hi the vision of God,
to bring to all the decisions of his citizenship a judg-
ment redeemed by the mind of Christ and a fixed
resolve to refer all policies not to immediate national
self-interest, but to the Plan of the Divine Kingdom
which includes the true welfare of his own people.
This obligation seems to involve a decisive repudia-
tion of the claim to absolute sovereignty by the Nation
State. So long as each nation remains a law to itself
and the ultimate court of its own appeal, no people
can realise its vocation as the servant of God's kingdom
in history. Here the Christian is bound to take a
M 2
l8o THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
stand, refusing to burn incense to Caesar. It is also a
part of the Christian's duty to take and to seek out
opportunities of fostering personal relationships across
political and economic frontiers, both within the
nations and between them. And it goes without
saying that the more vitally the Church revives as a
fellowship in Christ, the richer will be the Christian
contribution.
The decisive concern of the Christian ethic is in
this matter of personal relationships. What we mean
by " making civilisation moral " is making it serve
the ends of persons. The machinery of any economic
system is inevitably mechanical and impersonal.
But so also is that of the human body. The chemical
and physiological functions react according to their
own principles. What makes a human life spiritual
is the control of these organic processes by the con-
scious aims of personality. So an economic system
would become spiritual if it were so controlled by the
aims of spirit as to make it the instrument of persons
and a means to enrich personal relationships. Notori-
ously at the present time our system thwarts and
impedes this fulfilment, so that persons are the slaves
of its mechanisms.
The appalling by-product of Unemployment is the
worst example of this result. But just at this point,
by a heaven-sent paradox, is a fresh opportunity for
the Christian conscience to turn its necessities to
glorious gain. Unemployment has created a new
leisured class, which now has opportunity for the first
time for the fruitful enjoyment of leisure. To
relieve the physical needs of the Unemployed is no
SOME ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH l8l
adequate Christian solution, though it is obviously
a first claim. The genuinely Christian contribution
is to utilise the economic necessity for the enhance-
ment of spiritual purposes and the building up of a
new social tradition. Some of the most creative
social experiments which Christianity has to its
credit are those in connexion with unemployment
centres. 1 These may still be indefinitely extended,
and supply perhaps the best illustration of the way in
which, under existing conditions, economic process
may be redeemed into the service of personal com-
munity.
It is in his capacity as consumer that the individual
Christian has the best chance to exercise influence on
social policy. Housewives can insist on being sup-
plied with foodstuffs with the particular " mark "
which they favour, and can thus stimulate their pro-
duction. Women of fashion, led by the Queen's
example, have almost stopped the destruction of song-
birds by refusing to deck themselves in their feathers.
They could, if they would, by a similar refusal to buy
coats made from the skins of trapped animals, wipe
out the horrible cruelties of the fur trade. It is true
that under the existing system the purchaser's freedom
of choice is restricted to what the producer decides to
put on the market. To some extent he must take
what he can get. " We are not selling them in that
style this year." But there must be some limits to this
dictatorship.
In the long run it must rest with the consumer to
1 Cf. Miss Cameron's account of the Lincoln experiment in
Civilisation and the Unemployed (S.C.M.).
182 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
decide what he is prepared to consume. At the cost,
it may be, of some inconvenience and, in extreme
cases, of some hardship, he can influence the pro-
duction of goods and the methods of distribution and
supply in such directions as seem to him desirable. A
consistent and conscientious employment of their
purchasing power by Christian citizens could thus
exert an effective control over many departments of
industry and commerce and help to organise economic
processes for human and spiritual ends. Most of us
are on the whole too ready to contract out of this
responsibility, blaming everything on " the system."
We could at least take steps to ensure that our personal
expenditure is productive, and productive of that
" wealth towards God " about which the Rich Fool
knew so little.
While what has been said applies to commodities,
it is still more applicable to services, and most im-
portantly to those services which cater for recreation
and publicity. It is the film, the stage and the
newspaper which set the tone for the mass of our
population ; and no feature in national life is worse
than the debauchery of public opinion by irresponsible
organs of the Press. Their pernicious influence
operates far beyond the frontiers of our own country.
Not only does it inflame and embitter international
feeling at moments of crisis : it also demoralises the
Orient. Our most disreputable Sunday newspaper is
said to be the favourite English reading in the native
quarters of the Near East. I have seen it myself being
hawked in " the land of Sinim."
Against the massed force of these suggestions
SOME ETHICAL TASKS OF THE CHURCH 183
Christian preaching might almost seem impotent. The
preacher must sometimes feel as he goes to the pulpit,
What chance have the ideas for which I stand against
those that are being purveyed outside, backed by such
an efficient organisation ? These misgivings are faith-
less and despairing. But it is, all the same, true that
the strongest and most dangerous opponent of
Christianity in public affairs is the exploitation of the
popular mind by commercialised propaganda, whether
through the Press or through other agencies.
But we cannot serve God and Mammon. We
cannot both catre for the Kingdom of God and be
content that the minds of our fellow-Christians to
say nothing of our fellow-citizens should be con-
stantly exposed to suggestions which are directly
antagonistic to it. We ought to do our best to repel
them. This is not a plea for a censorship. Christianity
lives in the daylight and can only breathe in the air of
free criticism. It must take even the most extreme
risk for the sake of moral and intellectual freedom.
There is only one completely effective weapon
against the dissemination of error, and that is the
dissemination of truth. But that is not an argument
for encouraging, by the use of our capital or our
purchasing power, influences which we exist to
discourage.
There are enough Christians in England to
guarantee, by concerted action, that at least some
undesirable propositions should no longer be paying
propositions. We are perplexed to learn that John
Newton composed hymns on the deck of a Slaver.
Perhaps the appearance on Christians' breakfast
184 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
tables of matter which I am not allowed to specify
will be not less perplexing to our successors. But I
take the Press merely as one instance of a principle
which can be widely extended.
3. THE GONSTRUGTIVENESS OF CHRISTIANITY
When all has been said, it remains true that
the essential offer of Christianity to the moralisation
of the new age is the regeneration of character.
During the sixteen years since the Armistice we have
seen goodwill constantly defeated, visions, hopes and
ideals broken, by the sheer recrudescence of evil
overriding the pioneers of faith. This has been
partly due to the madness of fear, penury and humilia-
tion caused by unjust or short-sighted treaties. Nor
can we hope that these demons will be exorcised till
the inflaming causes have been removed : it there-
fore becomes part of the Christian's duty to work for
a revision of the peace- treaties. But that is not the
whole account of the trouble, and does not alter the
elementary truth that human character is not yet
good enough for the tasks which civilisation lays upon
it. This is where Christianity comes to the rescue.
The Spirit of Christ is the Constructive Spirit, because
it rebuilds character from within and can thus
rebuild its social embodiments.
Communism appeals to the young so strongly
because of its seeming scientific realism. A generation
impatient of uplift and merely vague Utopian aspira-
tions is strongly drawn to its realistic programme. It
CONSTRUGTIVENESS OF CHRISTIANITY 185
comports with the steel and concrete architecture
characteristic of the twentieth century. It presents
itself as a thoroughgoing attempt to deal by material,
scientific means with the domination of material
forces. It may be cruel^ but it has not the impotence
of a merely " spiritual " ideology. Indeed, as Earl
Russell has shown so brilliantly, the defeat of the pre-
war Liberal ideology was due to its inability or
reluctance to come to terms with the massive organisa-
tion of the new economic techniques. " It is not by
pacifist sentiment but by world-wide economic organi-
sation that civilised mankind is to be saved from
collective suicide." 1 A religion which is so deeply
committed as Christianity to the world of matter
should find in this view many congenial elements.
And the Christian religion must now prove itself to
be no .whit less thorough in its realism than the systems
which seem antagonistic to it.
We have heard too much about Christian " ideals."
Nothing has done more harm to the cause of Christ
than flabby talk about the Dreamer of Galilee. For in
fact there has never been in history a man so wholly
devoid of sentimentalism. He was the greatest
Realist ever born. Before His public activity began
He faced the lure of religious sentimentality, refusing
to dwell in an inner world of dreams unrelated to
moral actualities. The siren voice called to Him in
vain. He would be true to the facts at all costs
even at the cost of the Cross and Passion. It is not
the authentic religion of Jesus which rides away from
life on a vague idealism. Thus, in my view, it is
1 Freedom and Organisation
l86 THE NEW CHRISTIAN MORALITY
gravely mistaken to identify the Christian ethic in the
crucial problem of peace and war with a negative
refusal-to-fight Pacificism though this does not
diminish my reverence for the moral courage of those
who support that policy. It is, I think, more consonant
with its genius to work for the consummation of
peace by the difficult yet morally fruitful method of
building up a cooperative security at whatever
price must be paid to win it as the means to and the
expression of community.
At the moment when I was writing this paragraph
on a liner in equatorial seas, the principle was being
exemplified by the despatch of the international force
to secure the integrity of the Saar plebiscite. From
it sprang new hope of an understanding between
the two great nations across the Rhine.
Nothing that has happened since then, however
disappointing or frightening, need weaken our confid-
ence in that principle. Anything that I might write
today about the European situation would be out of
date before it is printed. But the news each day
makes it increasingly clear that a full, equal, mutual
guarantee as the expression of a common purpose is
the one alternative to annihilation.
The spirit of Christ is the Constructive Spirit.
Essentially it reveals its constructiveness in the
redemption of character and motive and the redirec-
tion of social purpose. St. Paul makes great use of
the word " edifying " to express the intrinsic quality
of the new life. We have spoilt the word by pious
misuse, as when we say that a sermon was dull but
edifying. In itself it means " building " or " con-
GONSTRUGTIVENESS OF CHRISTIANITY 187
structing." And amid the demoralisation and
neuroticism of a world which had lost faith in itself
because it had lost faith in a living God and a Purpose
which gives life significance, it was this inherent moral
constructiveness in which the Gospel proved its
vitality. The Church " built up itself in love."
And love as perfected personal relationship is the
very meaning of constructive morality. It is therefore
the dynamic of the Christian life.
The new age needs a new type of character. The
exploiting, feudal type is anachronistic. It served
some of the needs of the past century, but has become
dangerously incompatible with the social order which
has now to be fashioned. For this needs a new kind
of courage not that of the conqueror and the
crusader but the essentially Christian form of heroism
which dares the adventures of cooperation. What the
new age needs is the constructor. Not the knight
girt with his sword but the master-builder with his
trowel the artist, the teacher, the healer and the
parent, the engineer, the maker and the saint, all who
in their several vocations have the touch which
conserves life and love these are the artificers of the
new world-order and the symbols of the coming
Christianity.
CHAPTER VI
THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
i. WORSHIP AND WORK
that is not against us is on our part." " He
is not with me is against me." Super-
ficially regarded the two sayings seem to contradict
one another. Yet if taken together as complementary,
they express an essential element in the mind of
Christ, and in the genius of Christianity. Fanaticism
was alien from His temper. When they wanted to
call down fire from heaven on villages that refused
to receive Him, the Sons of Thunder were witheringly
rebuked. When John objected to an exorcism which
claimed the authority of the Christian name, the
Master repudiated his intolerance : he that is not
against us is on our part. The mind of Christ would
refuse endorsement to the notion which still lingers in
religious circles that no effort is doing God service
unless it is set in train by the Church ; so that the
League of Nations, for instance, commands but a
faint allegiance from some Churchmen because it is
not a " Christian " organisation. His faith in God
was too strong for that. Upon that depended His
fixed resolve to claim in the service of the Kingdom
whatever in any way might minister to it.
But not less characteristic of His mind is His sense
188
WORSHIP AND WORK l8g
of the commanding urgency of the mission entrusted
to Him by the Father. An invading host stood on
God's soil and by the finger of God He must cast it
out. In that war there was no neutrality. Here the
decisive issues were set, and here any compromise was
perfidy. He that is not with me is against me.
This twofold attitude in the mind of Christ is
native to the Christian religion. For this is the genius
of Christianity, its divine generosity and tolerance
towards all that is good in the surrounding world,
and its conviction of the unique worth and decisive
significance of that which God works in the world
through Christ. It is, of course, the practical expres-
sion of that faith in God as Creator and Redeemer on
which the Christian religion rests. And the Church
needs this bi-polar loyalty if it is to fulfil its vocation
in the world. The saving knowledge of God through
Christ Jesus is more precious than anything else on
earth. It is the essential task of the Church to keep
that knowledge alive in men's hearts through associa-
tion in fellowship and worship. The Church is an
other-worldly society : if it ceases to be that it is
mere lumber. But this indispensable other-worldli-
ness needs to be both balanced and verified by a no
less resolute secularity. It cannot live in a spiritual
vacuum, any more than our creed can be fenced off
from our secular knowledge of nature and history.
If it is the business of Theology to interpret the world
of our experience, so it is the business of religion to
conform our lives to reality. If we attempt to preserve
creed and cultus in an artificially protected atmosphere
from which the winds of life are excluded they will
THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
prove but sterile, exotic plants. Creed and cultus
are merely a solemn game unless, on the one hand,
they spring spontaneously from a vital communion
with God and, on the other, draw life-giving substance
from the concrete tasks, claims and interests which
are the actual stuff of human activity.
This carries important implications, and gives a
distinctive colour to our idea of what membership
in the Church means. It implies that politics and
economics and the secular concerns of citizenship are
essential elements in the life of the Church. The
horrible perversion of this idea, to which history bears
such depressing witness, must not be allowed to blind
us to the truth of it. No doubt it has been terribly
abused. The whole scandalous record of the struggle
for temporal power is the disastrous consequence.
But that sprang from such misunderstanding of the
mission and task of the Church as can only be called
a " lie in the soul." The Church is not in the world
for its own sake but for the salvation of the world.
It is not to be ministered unto but to minister. The
Christian Church must never use politics as a means
to the advancement of its own ends, as an organised
institution. It has no ends but those of the Kingdom
of God. And it is not an organised polity in the sense
that it must defend its own frontiers ; it is the instru-
ment of the Spirit of Christ. If we think of the
Church and the world as two rival^organised systems,
all our thought will start from false premises. The
Church is an adventure, not a system. It is that
redemption of the social order which God calls forth
out of the flux of history. Its mission is to incor-
WORSHIP AND WORK IQ1
porate into Christ ever-increasing elements in the
world's life ; or an alternative form of the same
statement to lose its life in a Christianised world
order.
Clericalist methods and ideals we must uncom-
promisingly reject. History is dark with their
betrayals ; and we have seen something of what
results from them in Central Europe during the
last few years and nearer to our shores in Ireland.
But the falsity of the clericalist ideal is matched only
by that of the suggestion (so dear to the heart of the
middle-class Englishman) that religion must be kept
out of politics. What is religion in the world for
except to redeem man's life to God ? And if all civic
interests are excluded, how much is there left of the
life of man ? To yield to this dualistic defeatism
would leave the Christian life without content, and
make of the Church a mere pietist sect. The Church
will not be doing Christ's work if it retreats back into
the sacristy.
This, however, must not be misinterpreted. It is
not my contention that the Church should act cor-
porately and officially in political or economic issues.
Even if contemporary conditions made such an idea
remotely conceivable it would still be a mistaken
demand. The Church cannot behave like the State.
It can act only through its saints and prophets, that
is to say, through its individual members as it acted
(for example) through Wilberforce to secure the
abolition of slavery. It ceases to be a redemptive
society unless it is breeding and training Christians
who can make this Christian contribution to the
ig2 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
moralisation of the world's life. Moreover, any
individual Christian who perceives some principle at
stake has the right, and indeed the bounden duty,
to persuade fellow disciples to share his views and to
work up a Christian public opinion. 1 What this
amounts to is that the Christian citizen must try to
give effect to a Christian policy by exactly the same
method as other citizens. But that is not really the
point under discussion. What we are here con-
tending for as vital is that the secular tasks of the
world are integral elements in the life of the Church,
and involved in the service of its altars. Else holiness
is a word with no meaning.
For if the life of the Christian consists in being
dedicated to the will of God which is just what holi-
ness means ; and if the content of the divine will is to
be sought in all those activities which help to make
goodness come true ; then it is the task of the Church
to redeem, to sanctify and to direct all worth-while and
constructive enterprises. The family, the professions
and the Council chamber, the technical skill on which
modern life depends, are not merely fields for experi-
ment in which to test our loyalty to the Church.
They are themselves the material of Churchmanship.
1 If representative Christian opinion inclines to the views of
His Majesty's Opposition rather than those of His Majesty's
Government, it is called interference in politics. When recently
a number of Christians expressed their wish to sacrifice income
for the benefit of the unemployed it was called " an unwarrant-
able attempt to go behind the back of the House of Commons."
People who wrote at the same time to their Member to ask for a
reduction of income tax as the first claim on the budgetary
surplus were, on the contrary, law-abiding citizens. In any case,
what is the House of Commons for ?
WORSHIP AND WORK
That is to say, it is not merely a question of carrying
religion out into life amid the temptations of the
world. It is a question of doing the world's work
and responding to its opportunities with insight
cleansed and motive directed by the grace of God
through Jesus Christ. Of this grace we are made
partakers, and in this faith we are sustained, through
the worship and fellowship of the Church.
It is, I think, of the utmost importance to secure
this truth in our presentation. For the emphasis in
our teaching and suggestion is often false at this par-
ticular point, and the evil consequences reach far.
The phrase " Church work " tests it like a plumb
line. What is meant by doing Church work ? For
it is a mistaken answer to this question which has
caused the Church to seem irrelevant in the minds
of so many young men and women. The world of
our time is organised for function : the clergy are
thought (whether truly or falsely) to desire to organise
it for piety. It is characteristic of this generation to
regard technical competence and efficiency as the
best form of social contribution. To be good at one's
job is the best form of service ; amateurish " uplift "
claims no respect. (The falling off of recruits for
settlements and similar forms of voluntary philan-
thropy is due less to desire to get rich quickly or to
insensitiveness of social conscience which is, in fact,
far more keen than it used to be than to a changed
approach to the whole issue. One serves the world
best in a skilled profession. The well-meaning
amateur is an anachronism.) It is inevitable that
this attitude should profoundly affect their idea of the
N
1 94 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
Christian life, and by consequence of the Christian
Church. The latter appears to be too much interested
in the small activities of a religious coterie and too
little in the actual tasks through which its members
serve God and man. " Church work " has come to
be associated with rather mild parochial organisations
which are highly distasteful to many of its members,
and appear to have very little relevance to the real
business of Christians in the world.
Certainly there is truth in this criticism. People
ought not to be led to think that the parish bazaar
or the young men's guild are the primary obligations
of Church membership. The Christian's duty can
never be identified with the way in which people
spend their spare time. The primary duty of every
Church member is to be doing his job in the world
well, for the glory of God and the good of man's
estate. It is true, no doubt, that the pastoral work of
the Church needs to be more directly related to that
consecrated discharge of function in which the
" doing of God's will " consists. It may also very
likely be true that the Churches are apt to undertake
too many inefficient activities, and some which have
no obvious connexion with the training of Christians
for life and work. Much of the effort expended by the
Churches in the way of providing cheap entertain-
ment may, quite probably, be waste of time.
Yet these criticisms may miss the mark. For the
Church's concern is with men and women, not as
barristers or engineers, but as sinners who may be
made saints ; not with what is particular and acci-
dental, but with what is ultimate and universal. The
WORSHIP AND WORK
life is more than meat and the body than raiment ;
and the man* ought to be more than his profession.
But the ruthless specialisation of the modern world
is tending towards an industrial feudalism which
equates the man with his economic function. It be-
comes, therefore, the more imperative that the Church
should provide for its members some opportunities of
a common life in which they may share simply as
Christians, to strengthen their sense of community
in Christ and the family life of God's sons and
daughters. The local Christian group misses its aim
unless its members can meet as friends, and, so far as
is practicable, know one another. This friendship
must, however, be centred in the common worship
and the common loyalty ; else it becomes merely
a hollow heartiness with nothing distinctively Christ-
ian about it ; and this is where we too often fail.
Moreover, what of those members of the Church
whose spiritual lives are devitalised by the humilia-
tion of unemployment? One obvious contribution
to this problem is to offer its victims a; share in
constructive non-economic activities. The Church
can do this far more effectively than any other agency
that exists : it has always work that needs doing.
And the Church will hold the loyalty of its members
in proportion as it demands something from them.
Unless it expects some direct service to the cause
of Christ in the world as one of the conditions of
membership, it becomes merely a club for the pious,
not a means to the redemption of mankind. The
Church must be a working society. The parish group
should contain no members who are not responsible
196 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
for some job, in accordance with circumstance and
opportunity, for the strengthening of its own common
life and the further advancement of Christ's cause.
It is by doing things that we learn. It is by accepting
responsibility for some exacting and sacrificial service
that men and women can best be educated in the
understanding of Christianity ; , and this was the
Master's own method. Faith comes to birth out of
works. It is through the manifold forms of Christian
service which are crying out for more help that
Christians can learn the meaning of their own creed
and some of the secrets of the Spirit of Christ. It is,
too, through the work of Church Councils and the
sense of mutual responsibility fbstered by this and
similar forms of service, whether under the Anglican
or other systems, that they can be trained, both in the
discipline of self-government in a free state and in the
meaning and possibilities of membership in the
Universal Church.
All this must be set on the other side. It follows,
therefore, that Church work, in the sense of some
direct service to the Church of Christ and the cause
for which it exists, is an indispensable element in the
education of mature Christians. It has come to have
an unfortunate connotation. Partly because it is too
much associated with tea out of an urn and sausage
rolls things which may be innocent in themselves,
but have become unfortunately symbolic of the fatal
bias in parish social life towards the second-rate and
the shoddy. Partly for much more profound reasons.
What has brought the idea into disrepute has been
a certain confusion of aim and almost a failure of
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY IQ7
integrity in the way the Churches have dealt with
the whole question. We have allowed ourselves to
assume that the organisation of " Church " activities
is a desirable end for its own sake, and have not
sufficiently clearly related them to the real mission
and purpose of the Church. It is the old fault of
introversion. We have been too much preoccupied
with the running of our own machinery. So we have
come to identify Church work with doing something
connected with the Church, and have therefore been
prone to proliferate in an enormous number of small
busynesses, without sufficient regard for their value
in the making and education of Christians for the
service of the Kingdom of God.
The Church is in the world to redeem it. There-
fore all its plans and all its policies must be such as to
strengthen it for its proper task and to train men for
the Christian vocation in their own callings and
professions. It is not the duty of the average layman
to become a kind of amateur parson. If he has the
gifts of the prophet, pastor or teacher he will put them
at the Church's disposal. But the essential task of the
Christian is to serve the cause of Christ in his home
and the work by which he earns his living, and thus
to redeem into the Kingdom of God that given area
of the world's life. That is the true work of the Church,
and that is the ministry of all believers.
2. MINISTERS AND MINISTRY
Here we reach one of those principles about which
there are widespread misconceptions. One of the
THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
weakest points in the Church today is the breac
between lay and clerical Christianity. The Englisl:
man is stubbornly anti-clerical and is now, as he hz
been all through our history, profoundly suspicion
of the clergy. This, on the whole, is well for th
Church, for a clerical Church is a contradiction i
terms. On the other hand, this lack of understandin
between ordained and unordained disciples grievousl
weakens the forces of Christianity. It makes th
clergy parsonic and self-conscious ; it leaves th
laymen unshepherded and untaught ; and it paralyse
united Christian effort. It is probable that much c
this tension is due to inadequate appreciation of th
true Christian idea of the Ministry. A " sacramental
view of the Ministry is thought by some to involv
such pretensions arrogated to itself by a priestly cast
as the twentieth century rightly repudiates. Yet th
principle of the Christian Ministry is in fact one c
the surest tests of God's responsiveness to His people
need that is, of the truth of the Christian faith i
Him. It is thus bound up with all that the Churc
stands for. It may be some small contributio
towards the closing of this dangerous breach if we tr
to interpret the true place of the Ministry in the lii
of the Christian society and its redemptive task in th
world.
And here as before we approach the question b
the opposite road from that which in the past ha
carried most of the theological traffic. For it has b
this time become apparent that this last was leadin
into a cul-de-sac. Churches have been in conflict fc
centuries, denying the claims of one another to b
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY 199
true parts of the Church of Christ, because they have
assumed that a true Church is denned by the nature
of its ministry. But this is to start from a false
premiss. Not only does it base the claim of the
Church on inductions from historical evidence which
is at the least obscure and uncertain : it is also
theologically mistaken. For, as the Bishop of Glou-
cester has insisted, 1 it is the Church that makes the
Ministry, not the Ministry that makes the Church.
This gives us a more secure criterion. For the nature
and function of the Ministry derive from the nature and
function of the Church, which in turn derives, as we
have already argued, from God's redemptive will for
the world as mediated to us by Christ. Hence the
whole question about the Ministry runs back to the
question, What is the Church for ?
The Church of Christ exists in the world to draw
mankind into its faith and fellowship, in order that
so the whole life of Man (and perhaps indirectly the
life of Nature) may be brought into conformity
with God's will. Thus all Christians are called not
merely to virtue, but to " holiness." The language
of " priesthood " used in the New Testament applies
to all members of the Body ; they are to be men
sanctified and dedicated to the worship and service
of the Father. As " every man is priest in his own
household," so every Christian should be priest in
his own vocation and sphere of ministry. But a
priest " must have something to offer." He cannot
dedicate everything in general and offer to God
nothing in particular. A man cannot be holy in the
1 The Doctrine of the Church and Reunion, pp. 241-283.
20O THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
abstract ; he must work out his consecration in the
concrete material of the world. And it is because we
have sometimes forgotten this that we have succumbed
to the fatal tendency to sentimentalise faith and wor-
ship, till it becomes emotion without conation an
aspiration without practical content.
If we take the idea of priesthood seriously, its range
will extend far beyond the frontier of technically religi-
ous activities. It embraces all that a Christian can do 5
his work, his home life, his leisure, his investments,
his expenditure and his politics. All are to be made
" otherworldly " and offered, through Christ, to
the Father. That is the priesthood of all believers.
For all of us it is " from above " ; it is God's gift and
call through Christ Jesus : and it is mediated and
sustained by the community of the Holy Spirit.
Priesthood is the prerogative of all Christians, and it
derives, through the Church, from God. It inheres
in membership of the Body. This is what gives the
Church its authority to commission some of its
members as " ordained " ministers to the exercise
of a specialised function within the priesthood of the
whole Body.
Of that priesthood Christ is the Source : it is He
who is the ministrant in all sacraments and the giver
of all Grace through the Church, which acts since it
must act through somebody through certain of its
own members authorised for this particular task. 1
1 In the New Testament priesthood is the attribute of Chris-
tians as such. Whether it was a true development or a calamity
when Old Testament ideas of priesthood began to be applied to
the Christian Ministry, is beyond the scope of the present dis-
cussion. But it must be remembered that the word " priest," as
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY 2OI
But all Christian ministry is God-given : the Holy
Spirit bestows and enables all forms and expressions
of Christian priesthood, and these are meant to
include as we have been arguing all men's
" secular " interests and activities. These are part of
the life of the Church. They are as necessary to its
fulfilment and to the discharge of its redemptive
function as its specifically religious ministries. For
if it be true that God was in Christ reconciling the
world unto Himself, and if in Christ is the revelation
of God's purpose for the whole world, then the
Church has not discharged its mission merely in
bringing all men to piety. Its task is the reconcilia-
tion of all human conduct and purposes with the will
of the perfect Source of Goodness. This involves,
for example, that our thinking should be reconciled
with the truth of God : that confusion, injustice and
antagonism should be reconciled with the divine
order : that disease and sickness of mind and body
should be reconciled with God's laws of health :
that the world's politics and economics should be
reconciled with the divine purpose in a fellowship of
free persons. Thus every attempt to control environ-
ment for truly human and spiritual ends is part of
God's reconciling work and part of the business of the
Christian Church. It is an integral part of Christian
ministry. A man's use of his professional skill should
be his exercise of his Christian priesthood. When it
applied to one of the orders of the Ministry, is a contraction of the
word " presbyter," and therefore does not in itself imply any such
priestly prerogatives or functions as may (rightly or wrongly) be
held to belong to the office.
2O2 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
is redeemed by the faith of Christ and offered in con-
secration to the Father, it becomes an essentially
priestly vocation.
This is the grand Pauline conception. Everyone
notes the breadth of St. Paul's vision when he speaks
of the gifts of the exalted Christ, so manifold in
variety of endowment, but alike manifestations of His
presence : " He gave some to be apostles, some
prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and
teachers." But not everyone (I think) has observed
what is implied in this famous passage. The gifts,
however different in expression, are yet all, as we
should say, " ministerial " the proper endowments
of those who exercise the various forms of religious
ministry. But these are not the whole work of Christ.
They are instruments of an end beyond themselves,
a ministry which all Christians are to exercise :
" for the perfecting of the saints for the work of
ministering, for the building up of the Body of
Christ." I The spiritual gifts are bestowed for the
sanctification and redemption of all that Christians
may undertake for the glory of God and the service
of mankind ; and thereby the Church fulfils its
calling. Thus all legitimate " secular " activities are
brought within the scope of the Christian's ministry.
When they are baptised into Christ, they are functions
of the priesthood of all believers.
This perfecting of the saints for the work of ministry
is the responsibility of the Church. It is the concern
of the Body of Christ that its members should so
sanctify their ministry as doctors, parents, engineers
1 Ephesians iv. 11-13.
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY 203
and so forth, that through them the manifold life
of the world may be reconciled to God's will. And
to help one another in these enterprises is the mutual
obligation of all believers ; if one member suffers all
suffer with it. Yet because the Church primarily
exists to be the instrument of the Holy Spirit, its chief
and essential responsibility is to guarantee for all its
members inward and spiritual participation in God's
redemptive gift through Christ Jesus. It must pro-
vide for them " means of grace." If it should ever
fail to do this it would clearly have ceased to be the
Church. It would have become a friendly society,
an ethical guild or a social reform club, but would
certainly not be the Christian Church. It would not
be taking Christ's gift to men. Therefore it is that
the one secure title which any body of Christians can
show to being a true branch of Christ's Church, is
that they care supremely for offering what the
Church's first task is to provide. They must show
that they know what the Church is for, and are trying
faithfully to discharge its function. The obvious sign
(or " note ") of that faithfulness is the due provision
of members, commissioned in the name of the whole
society, to fulfil this specialised form of ministry, on
which the very life of the Church depends. The
commissioning of ministers for this purpose, to secure
the provision, by the whole society and in the name
of the whole Body, of the Church's best gift for all
its members, irrespective of circumstance or capacity,
is decisive and characteristic evidence that the Church
is true to its essential function.
The important thing about an ordained Ministry
2O4 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
is that it should be appointed and commissioned by
the authority of the whole Body. It must be repre-
sentative of the Church itself : not merely a number
of gifted individuals, but persons " called " by the
will of the whole Church to minister Christ's gifts to
its members. That is why a duly ordained Ministry is
so much more than a matter of mere convenience : it
expresses the nature of the Church. You cannot
demand that all ordained ministers shall be morally
or spiritually worthy ; that would unchurch every
Church in Christendom. You can demand that they
should be " duly " ordained on the responsibility of
the whole Church. The distinction between the
Ministry in this sense and the inherent ministry of
all Christians is one of function, not Christian quality.
It is obviously true that some laymen are better
men than some ordained ministers. The Church
may and does make mistakes. It may not always
choose the right people. It may not always train
them in the best way. But it shows that it means to
be faithful to its mission and wills to fulfil its God-given
task if it is taking care to provide a Ministry which
can speak in its name and act on its behalf. It is the
gift of the Church to its members, as the Grace of
Christ is God's gift to the Church. It is thus a visible
sacrament and symbol of God's responsiveness to
His people's need. The importance of episcopal
ministries, to those who care greatly for episcopacy,
is that they symbolise in a unique way the given-ness
of the Ministry to the members through the commis-
sion of the whole Body. Episcopal ordination means
that wherever you have a congregation led in worship
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY 205
and sacrament by the curate, there you have, not
Brown, Smith and Robinson, but the Holy Church
Universal. It does not follow that in the Church of
the future some new development of this principle
may not prove to be practicable or preferable. We
cannot contend that the whole Church of Christ is
committed irrevocably and for ever to one form of
institutional polity.
There need be nothing " mechanical " or
" magical " in such a conception of the ordained
Ministry. There is, for example, no branch of Christ's
Church not even the Roman communion which
takes a " higher " view of the Ministry or cares more
for its proper provision than does the great Church
of Scotland. Yet not even the most fanatical Protes-
tant has, to my knowledge, accused Presbyterians of
holding magical views about sacraments. The autho-
rity of the ordained Ministry is the authority of the
Christian fellowship. It is not that self-constituted
experts dictate to the souls and consciences of their
fellows, which is the sinister connotation of " priest-
craft." It is that the Christian society, accepting its
mutual obligation for the spiritual care of all members,
commits this leadership and oversight to persons duly
appointed for that purpose.
This is not in the least incompatible with the exercise
by its unordained members of such pastoral or prophetic
ministry or such gifts of prayer or counsel or scholarship
as they may have ability to contribute. Indeed, it
pre-supposes that background ; and one of the chief
tasks of the ordained Ministry is the evocation of
spiritual leadership from the lay members of the
2O6 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
society. There is no one in the world more suspicious
of " sacerdotalism " than the Protestant Englishman,
yet the strange idea which he commonly holds, that
Christians cannot rightly pray together unless a parson
is present to " offer prayer " for them, is the worst
and deadliest form of sacerdotalism. It makes prayer
the prerogative of the clergy which is irreconcilable
with Christianity. Would God that all the Lord's
people were prophets ! Ministerial priesthood is
representative. In its liturgical and official capacity
it speaks and acts on the Church's behalf. Not in
order that spiritual concerns should be left to the
hierophants of a mystery while the people follow
their worldly occupations which is paganism not
Christianity but in order that all members of Christ's
fellowship may be gathered within the scope of that
action and share in that priestly dedication, making
their own vocation and ministry and the stuff and
content of their lives a sacrifice, through Christ, to
the Father.
A living Church will grow its own ministry, and one
obvious test of vitality is the quality of the leadership
it throws up. It is clear, moreover, from the New
Testament, that the practice of the Church in the
earliest days was to give commission and authorisation
to those who had already approved themselves as the
natural leaders of Christian Groups. These are the
" Elders " of St. Paul's Churches sometimes referred
to as Bishops. They were not young men sent to the
local Church after receiving a " theological training,"
as a young doctor starts on a practice. They were
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY 2OJ
men of standing in that community, already approved
by service and leadership in the life of that Christian
Group. They were men engaged hi their own
professions tentmakers, lawyers, civil servants, etc.,
who had earned the right and title to be commis-
sioned to representative ministerial functions. This
meant that liturgical and pastoral leadership had its
roots deep in the common life, and sprang out of
intimate association with the secular activities of the
Group. Thus it represented the life of the Church,
both on behalf of its members and towards them, in
a most actual and significant way. Roland Allen has
rightly insisted on the wide difference between this
system and that which has come to obtain in the
modern Churches. And it is, I think, important to
recognise that in the transition to the modern system
however inevitable it has been in practice some vital
Christian values have been obscured.
I am not now discussing the question whether the
traditional " threefold Ministry " which may or
may not be discovered in Scripture is the necessary
or the best form. Nor are we concerned, at the
moment, with the contribution of non-episcopal
Ministries to the united Church of the future. The
point which I am trying to make now is independent
of these delicate questions. Whatever a man's views
on these issues, and whatever his attitude to Episco-
pacy, he can hold that something important has been
lost in the evolution of the Ministry from its primitive
form to the twentieth century. From the standpoint
of my present contention all the Churches are in the
same boat- except the Friends, who have no ordained
2O8 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
ministers. In what follows, I seek to be quite realistic.
I am not suggesting wild revolution. Accepting the
system which we have inherited, I suggest only such
modifications as will make the Ministries, as at
present constituted, more genuinely sacramental of
the fundamental Christian idea. This, so far as
concerns the Church of England, involves an
attempted re-presentation of the case for so-called
" voluntary " clergy. It is stated in terms of Anglican
precedent. But the principle, mutatis mutandis, would
be equally applicable in the other Churches.
The case appears to have been misunderstood. It
seems to have been presented to Lambeth chiefly in
terms of an improvised expedient to remedy the
shortage of ordained men, especially in the Dominions
and in the Mission-field. But that is in fact its least
important aspect. Those of us who attach great
importance to it do so, not on grounds of expediency,
but of ultimate Christian and sacramental principle.
In the Church of England as organised at present
and the same is broadly true of most other Churches
nobody can be ordained to the Ministry unless
he has first agreed to take payment for it, i.e., to
make it a " profession." Even if he wishes to give
his services freely he must nevertheless execute an
agreement to accept a " peppercorn " stipend. So
profoundly has professionalisation affected our ideas
of the Ministry. For reasons which reach far back
into past history ministerial life is regarded as a
profession, inconsistent with any secular occupation,
other than farming or teaching school or sitting in an
office in Church House exceptions which are not
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY 2Og
self-explanatory. Unless a man is prepared to accept
that, the Church is not prepared to ordain him.
Now this system is partly bound up with questions
of discipline and administration, which makes Bishops
reluctant to modify it ; partly also, and far more
importantly, with the idea that it serves to safeguard
the " sacred calling " of the ordained minister against
the contaminations of worldliness. But that is false,
both in principle and in practice. A sacramental con-
ception of the Ministry is no more necessarily bound
up with a whole-time stipendiary profession than it is
with the curious passion of Anglican dignitaries for
walking about the streets of our cities in the riding
habit of the eighteenth century. The equation of
" sacred " with " non-secular " is not supported by
Christian thinking. Moreover, to make the Ministry
a profession is to involve it in all those calculations of
stipend, status and social privilege from which the
system aims at exempting it. That is not in itself an
objection against it, for any system will have its
peculiar temptations. But it does disprove the claim
that is sometimes made for it, to be a safeguard
against worldly motives.
The effective defence of the present system is
empirical rather than a priori. It is that the task is so
exacting, and demands so much time and concen-
tration, both intellectual and spiritual, as to be
incompatible with other activities schoolmastering
and farming always excepted. Now this is true or,
if it is not, it ought to be as the ministerial system is
worked at present. If what we mean by the Ministry
is the Rectors and Curates of parishes, the assertion
2IO THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
is not seriously disputable. But is this necessarily
what we mean ? That is indeed the real point at issue.
Can we not conceive an ordained Ministry other than
that of Rectors and Curates ?
As we have already observed, the trend of events
seems to be leading us towards a kind of industrialised
feudalism in which everybody will have his place,
from which no change or escape can be expected,
in a graded, hierarchised community. Each year we
are reverting more closely to Plato's ideal of a caste
polity ; and experiments both in Europe and the United
States all seem to confirm this prediction. 1 But the
Christian society is not at all likely to remain unaffected
by this tendency. Indeed, it is being affected already.
The demand made on the Ministry of the Church is
not only far more exacting, but it is also a great deal
more specialised than it was in 1835, and this pressure
is likely to become stronger. The kind, friendly,
amateurish parson is already becoming an anachron-
ism. The Ministry demands, more and more, a
technical and specialised training, and its functions
are becoming increasingly specialist.
From one point of view, this is all to the good. It
means that in future the Ministry of the Church must be
manned by very highly selected men, and the standard
of qualification and training will have to be fixed far
higher than it is now. It is probable that the task of
the Parochus will, in future, be more and more concen-
trated on three highly specialised services on teach-
ing, on leadership in prayer and worship, and on the
1 Cf. the ghastly forecast of it by Mr. Aldous Huxley in Brave
World,
1C
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY 211
skilled, expert " cure of souls." These are the proper
ministerial functions. It will never, of course, work
out in practice nor would it on the whole be desirable
that all the administrative and public work which
at present falls to the rector of a big parish should be
entirely removed from his shoulders. The general
direction of the life of the group must inevitably be
vested in him, and he must be, so far as possible,
its persona in all that concerns Christ's cause in the
district. But his functions will be increasingly
religious," and much that is at present expected of
him will remain undone or be done by others.
This is to be welcomed as, on the whole, " a good
thing." It has been the strength of the Anglican
tradition that its clergy, however amateurish, have
always been intimately in touch with the main stream
of national thought and life. The English suspicion
of a clerical caste and its dislike of " seminary train-
ing " is indeed a thoroughly wholesome prejudice.
Yet a man must know how to do his job and in the
world into which we are moving must stick to the
job which he knows how to do. Religious teaching,
leadership in worship and the cure of souls are highly
skilled trades. All of them demand, for their due
discharge, liberal education and wide sympathies.
To urge that these are the true tasks of the Ministry
is not a plea to reverse our tradition and return to the
ordination of chantry-priests. It is, indeed, precisely
the contrary.
Yet this specialisation of function, which is woven
into the pattern of the coming age, must carry with
it peculiar dangers. It can hardly fail to increase
O 2
212 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
that tendency to the departmentalising of life, with
the spiritual sterility that results from it, which has
been already described and deplored. More than
ever the Church will be needed to rescue men from
this narrowing process and restore to life unity and
significance. Yet it will only be with great difficulty
and by taking deliberate precautions that the Church
itself can resist this pressure. All the forces to which
it will be exposed will be driving it back inwards upon
itself. Preoccupied with its own preservation, and
cut off from fructifying contact with the currents of
life in the world around it, the Church will then be
in grave danger of spiritual anaemia and atrophy.
Nor can its Ministry hope to be immune. If religion
itself becomes a specialisation, the specialist concerns
of the Ministry cannot fail to be more and more
limited to technical and ecclesiological interests.
This is, indeed, already becoming noticeable. The
Church should surely take deliberate steps to coun-
teract this disastrous rift between religion and the life
of the world.
One aim of this volume, and of its predecessor, is
an attempt to forestall this false development by
exploring its theological implications. But in practice
we could do much to resist it by the ordination of
" voluntary " clergy. What is really important about
this suggestion is not the alleviation which it might
offer to the problem of staffing the parishes. That
could be solved far more effectively by a courageous
redistribution of human and material resources. It
is rather that it would help to exhibit in a truly
sacramental expression the essential principle of the
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY 213
Christian Ministry. It would demonstrate that the
Ministry of the Church is potentially exercised by all
its members. It would make it clear that the ordained
Ministry is sustained by, as it is meant to " perfect,"
that essential priesthood of all believers which
embraces every legitimate vocation. It would thus
help to save Christianity from becoming a caricature
of itself as something that people do after working
hours.
In principle, the suggestion is this, that side by
side with the whole-time Ministry the Church should
confer ministerial commission on a limited number of
its members, Christians of standing in their own
group and accredited in their own professions. These
while they continued to exercise their own forms of
vocation and ministry, would be ordained to
administer the sacraments or to preach and teach,
according to their ability, supporting themselves by
their own professional work. These " non-stipen-
diary " ministers would thus be almost exactly analo-
gous to the presbyters of the first century. Where
there was no parochus available, as in the Bush or in
outlying Missions, or in emergency in a home parish,
they would act as the priests of the communities. In
the more settled conditions of English life they would
normally serve under the parish priest, and in any
case under Episcopal supervision. It is urged that
thus, in the younger Churches, isolated groups of
Christ's people could meet for the Eucharist on the
first day of the week, under their own duly ordained
President, instead of waiting six or twelve months
for a visiting priest from some distant centre. The
214 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
latter, as Roland Allen rightly insisted, is a travesty
of the Church's intention.
For England, where circumstances are so differ-
ent, the suggestion is based on quite different
grounds. It is true that if the experiment were
successful it would, in time, contribute materially
to the solution of many difficult questions, not
least those of parochial finance, and save many
clergy from breaking down. But the real strength
of the case is one of principle. It is the desire to
exhibit the Ministry as the consecration and focus of
the ministry of the whole Christian body in the
normal activities of life. This is, I believe, of first-
class importance if the life of the Church is to be
strong and healthy. What would it not mean to the
Christian Group if the ministrant of God's gift for the
sanctification of its Christian ministry were one who
was actually sharing in the tasks and temptations of
" secular " daily life, and were looked up to as its
natural leader in the life of Christian citizenship and
service ? Nor can one think of any experiment which,
while preserving the Christian emphasis on the
" given-ness " of the means of Grace, as symbolised
by a duly ordained Ministry, would do so much to
safeguard the Church against the dominance of the
clerical mind. It would help very effectively to
demonstrate the sacramental character of the Church
and the priestly vocation of the Christian life. It is
on these essentially catholic grounds that the suggestion
ought to be brought forward.
So far as regards the Church overseas, the case for a
non-stipendiary Ministry was tentatively accepted at
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY 215
Lambeth. But it was endorsed only as an expedient
justified by exceptional circumstances, and was by
implication if not in words rejected so far as concerns
the Home Church. 1 The case had not, perhaps, been
brought forward quite in the light in which it is here
presented as a matter of high sacramental principle ;
and it is to be hoped that it may be reconsidered.
The suggestion violates no catholic principle : it
involves merely a change in accepted custom and a
partial reversion to apostolic practice. Nobody who
has given much thought to it will be blind to those
administrative difficulties which, inevitably and quite
rightly, count for so much in the judgment of the
Episcopate. But no reckless changes are asked for.
A controlled experiment on a small scale might be
tried out in a few chosen centres where the conditions
are obviously favourable ; in University towns, for
example. The ordained tutor in a college, taking his
share in its life and teaching and also serving as
Minister and Chaplain, is in an exceptionally strong
position. All that the present proposal really asks for
is a certain extension and application of this already
existing arrangement. If the experiment seemed to be
justified, it could then be extended on an enlarged
scale. It might be, in time, that large business
houses could thus be provided with their own
Minister, who was in fact one of their own staff.
The parochial system in England was evolved in
different social conditions from those which prevail
in the twentieth century, and perhaps it needs now
1 Report of Lambeth Conference, 1930, Resolution 65 and
Report, pp. 175-177.
2l6 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
to be supplemented by an ordained Ministry of a
new kind.
If the experiment were to secure approval, the
system could then be established, under due safe-
guards, in the large parishes. This would, in time,
diminish considerably the number of young men of
twenty-three who were ordained straight from their
colleges to a professional or whole-time Ministry.
There would probably be nothing but gain in this.
It would automatically force up the standard. It
would widen the basis of the ordained Ministry. It
would provide for poverty-stricken parishes. And it
would evoke from unordained members through
the Bridge-Ministry of the non-stipendiaries new
gifts of pastoral and prophetic ministry for the
" edifying " of the whole Body.
An effective retort is, of course, open. It may be
replied that the whole suggestion cuts across the
admitted principle of specialised function in the
modern world. The answer is that this is the strength
of it. We cannot allow spiritual leadership to fall
entirely into the hands of " specialists." You can be
an expert in Christianity without being a specialist in
" religion." That is the principle which we wish to
vindicate. It is urged, again, that the non-stipen-
diaries would not greatly assist the parochus, since the
need in the great parishes is not so much provision
for " taking services " as the pastoral care of vast
populations. But a vast amount of work is already
done by accredited unordained leaders in preaching,
teaching, pastoral visitation and the care and guid-
ance of adolescents ; and this devoted, sacrificial
MINISTERS AND MINISTRY
work is the strength of the Church's life in the parishes.
Such persons would not cease from these ministries
nor begin to perform them with less skill if they were
ordained to the priesthood. But that act would give
recognition to the pastoral ministry which they are
discharging.
The proposal known as the Permanent Diaconate,
which is sometimes advanced by way of alternative,
would quite fail to supply what is needed. For the
right to celebrate at the Eucharist is the essential
point of the whole suggestion. If a person selected
for this new type of Ministry had a gift for preaching
or teaching, the Church, naturally, would desire to
use it. But in fact it does this at present, and some
of its most gifted and influential lay members give
devoted service. This does not necessitate ordination.
What I mean is something entirely different from
the ordination of Lay Readers. The real point
is that some members of the Church, foremost
in responsibility for the world's work, should be
authorised to administer the Eucharist, and thus to
consecrate in ordained Ministry the ministry of all
Christian people. That means ordination to priest-
hood ; and nothing less would have any real value.
What matters here is simply the authorisation to act
in the Church's name and behalf. And this in fact
completely invalidates the whole idea of a " per-
manent diaconate."
The actual distribution of Holy Communion
demands no qualifications whatever beyond clean
hands and (if possible) a pure heart. What is crucial
is the authority to do this, and all that is implied in
2l8 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
conferring it. But preaching and teaching in the
name of the Church demand both qualifications and
training. It is not suggested that all non-stipendiaries
would be as well equipped in theology or in the
technique of Ministerial work as the " professional "
or whole-time Ministers. Their status in the Christian
society would rest on other and different qualifica-
tions ; and in virtue of these they would be com-
missioned to represent the ministering community
and discharge its chief Ministerial function. It is
obvious that, under oversea conditions, the diaconate
would not serve the purpose : for the people would
still be left without sacraments (unless, indeed, we
accept the position that " in the absence of the
priest " the deacon may act as his representative,
as he does now in administering Baptism). Under
English conditions nothing much would be gained
by admitting Vice-chancellors into deacon's orders.
They had much better stay as they are.
The same considerations seem to apply to the
ordination of women to the Ministry. The diaconate
does not serve the purpose ; indeed it limits the
range of a woman's ministry. Under the regulations
at present in force she can do more as an un-
ordained member than she can when she has been
ordained deaconess. In any case a " representative "
priesthood which excludes half mankind from its
membership can only claim to be representative
in a very peculiar theological sense. The claim of
the women is logically unanswerable. I have little
doubt that within the present century though not
at all probably in my lifetime the Church will have
BODY OF CHRIST 2IQ
been guided to concede it. And it is surely, within
the wider scheme of a new non-stipendiary priesthood,
supplemental to the existing Ministry, that the first
experiments in this direction could be authorised most
hopefully.
3. BODY OF CHRIST
The Ministry is organic to the whole Body. One
reason for the sub-Christian theories by which it
has sometimes been overlaid is, I think, failure to
appreciate what the phrase, the Body of Christ, means.
Most of us leave it as a merely pious metaphor. We
do to a small extent understand our debt to the
Christian group which has nurtured us, but have
hardly begun to grasp what is entailed in membership
in a universal community. We use the phrase quite
vaguely and loosely, as we speak of " a large body of
Englishmen," of the aggregate of individual Christians.
But that is not its use in the New Testament. There,
it means the Christian society as the instrument of
Christ in the world and the outward manifestation
of His Spirit, the visible habitation in which He
dwells. It means the Church as a sacramental reality,
not merely a fortuitous collection or association of
believers. Nor is it an idealised Church which is thus
described by St. Paul. It is the actual visible society
with all its sins, negligences and ignorances amid the
resistances of history and the frustrations of the time
process, which is the organ of the divine purpose. It
is compact of persons and things, not of spiritual
aspirations. It is an outward and visible sacrament
22O THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
of Christ's redemption in the life of the world. How-
ever inadequate, there is no other. The facile theory
of a Church invisible, by contrast with the empirical
Church of history, can find no support in the New
Testament.
Unfortunately, however, those Christians who have
grasped St. Paul's meaning most firmly have been too
prone to pervert the idea in the sense of a closed
institutional system through which alone Grace is
made available and outside which there is no salvation.
And notoriously this has borne fruit in a temper, an
outlook and an attitude which has brought shame
upon the name of Christ. After all, whatever we
mean by " body " at least it exists to express a spirit,
not to be opaque to its purposes. It is a mind and
purpose in action. But therefore it is never a static
system ; it is something which is alive and developing.
A body is not a fixed quantity. It is no mere
aggregate of substances, nor is it merely the envelope
of a spirit. It is the instrument of a life-purpose. It
derives its identity and continuity not from the
materials which compose it for these are in constant
process of metabolism nor from the patterns into
which it is organised for it may yet persist in a
changed pattern ; but from the purpose by which it
is informed. It is constantly fashioned and
refashioned out of the changing materials of environ-
ment. Ever new substances and energies are incor-
porated into a body as the vehicle of the life which
informs it. This is true of a body at any organic level.
It is the organisation of life-purpose establishing itself
in the world. On the human level it is more. We
BODY OF CHRIST 221
find man constantly increasing the range of his response
to environment when he ceases to do this he is dead.
And whatever becomes the instrument of the man
the machinery through which he exerts his will, his
home, his work, his possessions and his friendships
is thereby in a true sense incorporated into that
particular pattern of energy, informed and directed
by his spirit and made organic to his life-purpose,
which is what we mean by his body. Thus a body
is not merely a system. It is something always in
process of becoming as purpose develops in range and
concentration and embodies itself creatively hi the
world.
This is of the utmost significance. For it means
that the Church as the Body of Christ is itself in
process of becoming and is never a static institutional
system. If, as St. Paul daringly suggested, Christ
Himself is " coming to his fulfilment ' J1 then the Body
of Christ is never a constant term. It, too, is coming
to its fulfilment, as more and more elements in the
world's life are redeemed from the dominion of
worldliness and incorporated into the Church, thus
being made organic to God's will and embodiments
of Christ's Spirit. Thus the Church is always un-
finished, and is yet to be realised on earth. To
profess belief in the Holy Catholic Church is not to
assert that any of the existing Churches is in itself
the true Church of Christ or exclusively the home of
salvation. It is to pledge a faith and a loyalty. We
believe in our own Churches and traditions in so far
as they serve the ends of the one true Church universal,
1 Ephesians i. 23.
222 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
which in sundry portions and divers manners seeks
incarnation in the world.
But the claim to belong to the true Church is
a vow to work and pray for its fulfilment. It
involves an inclusive, not an exclusive temper,
the tolerance of a truly Catholic spirit, not that
sectarian complacency with which the word is too
frequently identified. Evangelism and missionary
mindedness are among the obvious tests of " catho-
licity." Those who most believe in the Church
should surely be those who desire most eagerly the
ingathering of all mankind into the faith and fellow-
ship of the Gospel. Those whose gratitude is most
awakened for the grace given to them through their
own Church ought to be conspicuous in this ambition.
No one Church in its isolation can claim the fullness
of Christian experience. We do not even know what
the Church is till it has become universal. It is as
yet but a foretaste and a promise.
Thus the fellowship of Christ's Church, though here
and now real and actual, is yet always to be fulfilled.
Its present reality is instrumental to a still unrealised
fruition ; and that both intensively and extensively.
It must be remembered, in this connexion, that the
Christian Church is not meant to be a society of like-
minded persons akin to a club or a political party.
It entails a much more exacting loyalty. For it is an
adventure of gathering into unity all sorts and condi-
tions of men and women, differing in capacity and
temperament, in social inheritance, outlook and
character. As Bishop Gore used frequently to exclaim
" ecclesiastical " ought to mean " brotherly." Hence
BODY OF CHRIST 22$
the achievement of Christian fellowship is and always
must be far harder than to get a unanimous vote at
a party meeting. And it is more worth while to
achieve. A Church in which everybody thinks alike
is a sub-Christian and commonplace ideal. There
can be no standardised Christian unity. There are
no doubt, at least in the Church of England, and that
at both ends of the theological spectrum, people
whose ideal of Christianity is that all Christians
should share their point of view. But it is hard to
believe that this marches either with the purpose of
God in history or with the true nature of Christian
fellowship. The richest unity lives in variety ; and
it is only this recognition which can support the claim
of the Church to be the focus of human community.
To remember this helps to explain, even though it
does not condone or justify, the ignominious contro-
versies among Christians. But it also suggests the
constructive remedy. If any Church or denomination
becomes merely monochrome in complexion, then any
group in it who feel strongly about some aspect of
Christian experience to which, in their view, it fails
to do justice, are driven to one of two false reactions.
They must either attempt to " capture " that Church
for their own particular interpretation, or they must
break away as dissenters. Both actions are equally
sectarian, even though in the past the latter course
has sometimes been imposed upon Christians by the
intolerance of the parent bodies. The faith of a living
Church must be strong enough not merely to tolerate
but to encourage varieties of emphasis and expression.
And we are moving into a new climate, in which
224 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
differences of interpretation are seen to be not con-
tradictory but diverse manifestations of the one
Spirit. We have nearly advanced, after two thousand
years, to the position St. Paul took for granted.
It is told of a well-known Japanese Christian that,
speaking in England about Christian unity, whenever
he meant to refer to denominations he said, by a slip
in his English, " damnations." Will anyone say he
was wholly wrong? A man can learn the meaning
of Christian fellowship only within some actual
Christian society. If he wants to belong to the true
Church he must belong to one of the Churches,
sharing its life, its worship and its traditions. In the
world that we mortals know an ideal which is unem-
bodied remains ghost-like and insubstantial ; an
unparticularised universal never enters the field of
reality. It is the Confessions and Denominations,
the given, empirical Churches that are, which must
be regarded as instruments of the Holy Church
Universal. And the richer and deeper their own
common life the more effective instruments they can
be. Under the conditions imposed upon us by
history, faithfulness to his own denomination is
normally part of a Christian's duty. But denomina-
tions may be damnations and partake of the nature
of deadly sin, if they allow themselves to become
sectarian.
There can be one justification only for continued
denominational loyalties. It is that the charac-
teristic forms of experience and interpretation to
which, through its historical legacy, a given denomina-
tion bears witness are regarded as gifts held in trust
BODY OF CHRIST 225
for the building up of the Body of Christ. None of
us is directly responsible for the limiting conditions
which we inherit. But we are responsible for trans-
cending them. There is a right and a wrong way of
attempting it. The wrong way is that of detached
indifference to all denominational differences and a
scaling down of their living variety to an abstract
common denominator. This watery undenomina-
tionalism would find few supporters today. The
right way is interdenominational to cherish that
which is most distinctive in the tradition which has
been bequeathed to us, not with a sectarian self-
sufficiency but as a contribution to the Great Church.
Thus convinced and whole-hearted membership
in any of the Churches of Christendom cannot but
be fragmentary and incomplete. It must always be
pointing beyond itself to the Church in which it will
find fulfilment. They without us cannot be made
perfect. The " end " of all the existing Churches is
incorporation into the true Church, and their strength
perhaps even their survival will depend on the
conviction and courage with which they offer them-
selves to this destiny. The insular policy is but group-
suicide. Thus if they would establish their claim to
be true branches of the Church, two things are
demanded of the Churches. First, such a passionate
concern for the evangelisation of mankind as that the
Church may become catholic ; and secondly, such
cooperation in the carrying out of that enterprise as
that the Church may be made one.
Notoriously one of the fatal weaknesses in the
Christian mission throughout the world lies in our
226 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
separations and divisions. It is, as we saw in the first
chapter (pp. 30-34), when the Churches are face to face
with heathenism that these divisions become most
intolerable and at the same time least significant.
The stream of history has flowed far since the days
when the Churches became divided. It is now scarcely
possible to maintain that the lines of denominational
demarcation correspond with spiritual reality. True,
that each of the separated Churches came into being
in order to bear witness to some one aspect of the
whole faith. True, as we have already emphasised,
that each of these various traditions has its place, of
right, in the Universal Church and must not be
abandoned or overwhelmed in a standardised Chris-
tianity. But much that was in the past distinctive
has now become part of the common legacy. Divi-
sions that were, at the time, inspired by positive and
constructive convictions are now becoming negative
and unreal. They no longer correspond with the
facts. (There is, for example, a far wider variety
within the unity of the Anglican Church than
there is between the two wings of that Church
and the Romans and Free Churchmen respectively.)
Beyond all question these divisions are obstacles
to the redemption of the world. How much
can it matter in the sight of God whether one
or another denomination preserves its independent
existence, compared with the question whether Asia
is won for the allegiance of Christ, or whether con-
flicting and terror-stricken nations are gathered into
the fellowship of the Church in a true spiritual com-
munity ? And if the effort to keep alive Churches
BODY OF CHRIST 227
hinders the conversion of the world and the coming of
the Church universal, we cannot doubt which is the
prior claim. How many of the Churches now
separated stand for anything positive enough or
sufficiently valuable and distinctive to justify further
prolongation of a separation that may have been
inevitable, but is now a hindrance to their vocation ?
Each must answer according to conscience. But
however unique and precious the witness committed
to any one of the Churches, it can be given more, not
less, fruitfully as an element in the united witness of a
Church truly one and truly catholic. Unless the seed
is willing to die " it abideth by itself alone. 3 ' It may
pass through " death " into newness of life within a
more glorious community in which it is not absorbed
but fulfilled.
" The idea of a universal church," wrote Dr.
Inge in his farewell message, "is as obsolete and
chimerical as that of a universal empire." I That
seems to depend on what we mean by it. If it means
an institutional system with a uniform centralised
government in one massive world-wide organisation
like " the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned
upon the grave thereof," I should be in entire
agreement. Even if we thought it desirable, the
attitude of the Roman communion makes such an
idea inconceivable in any future that we can envisage.
Nor do I think it even desirable. The history both
of the Church and the Empire is a conclusive warning
against it. But the phrase need not necessarily mean
this. The commonwealth of British peoples and the
1 Vale, p. 102.
p 2
228 THE FULFILMENT OF THE CHURCH
world-wide Anglican communion illustrate a different
interpretation and point the way to a more hopeful
method. Uniformity is a false ideal. In the united
Church of the future there must be and it is almost
true to say that there are now in the Anglican com-
munion as many varieties in the forms of worship
and of local government and administration as there
are differences of temperament and of social and
racial inheritance. The constituent groups will be
one Church not only in theory, but in fact, through
mutual recognition of Ministries and full reciprocity
of communion. Differences will not mean divisions.
No one who thinks realistically is at all likely to
underestimate the difficulties which still block the
road. Yet unity is the demand of faith for those who
believe in the True Church, as they believe in Justice,
Peace and Freedom, because it is held within the
Divine Purpose, and dedicate their lives to its
realisation.
But the Church is a Body, not an idea. We must
never allow ourselves to forget that no mere extension
of membership, nor even the achievement of reunion,
is an adequate aim for believers in the Church. We
must apprehend the depth and height of the Great
Church as well as its length and breadth. It must pene-
trate and not merely increase. That the Church
should cover the earth's surface with an organisation
of Christians is not enough. Its task is to redeem
the world's life. Our Lord was relentless about people
who compass sea and land to make proselytes for the
sake of a self-contained institution. The less the
Church thinks about itself, and the greater its concern
BODY OF CHRIST 220
for the world which it is God's purpose to redeem,
the more will it be true to its vocation. .It must be
ambitious to reclaim those great tracts of secular
civilisation which are still unredeemed territory, yet
to be won back into the Kingdom of God. It will
study not only to make more Christians, but so to
christen their day-by-day activities in their secular
groupings and associations whether social, political
or economic that men may come " to recognise
Christ as the true centre of their fellowships." 1 Its
task is to reconcile to God, through the faith and work
of its members, the manifold functions of life in time
as the vehicle of the life eternal. It is thus that the
true Church comes to be. For this is to fashion in
history that Body in which the living Christ is incar-
nate, and God's reconciling purpose verified. So the
Father's will shall be done, on earth as it is in heaven,
and Christ shall be exalted in victory.
1 The phrase comes from F. D. Maurice. In my article in
Christianity and the Crisis I attributed it wrongly to Wesley.
INDEX
ADAMS BROWN, William, 88 n.
Agape, 98 ff.
Allen, Roland, 207, 5214
Anglican Communion, the, xv,
22-3, 26, 226, 228
Anglicanism, xiv, 25, 141
Arianism, 107, no
Aristotle, 99
Atheism, 42
Australia, ix ff., 22, 24, 166-7
Authority, 62
BARTH, KARL, no-2
B.B.G., 91, 141
Berdyaef, N., 174
Bevan, Edwyn, 21
Birth control, 166-7
Bishops, 140, 167, 209
Bleak Age, The, 132 n.
Body of Christ, the, 75, 202 ff.,
219 ff., 228-9
Brittain, Vera, 155 n.
Broughton, Bishop, 22, 24
Buchan, John, 80 n.
CAMERON, Miss, 181 n.
Capitalism, 169 ff.
Carpenter, S. C., 21, 28 n.
Central Europe, xiii, 43, 157
Christian society, the, 66 ff.
Christianity, essence of, 115 ;
expansion of, 21 ff. ;
" modern," 83-5 ; and the
New Age, 34 ff. ; non-
ecclesiastical, 54 ; a way
of living, 162 ff.
Church, the, of England, xvi,
73 ff. ; fulfilment of, 222,
225 ; as God's act, 60 ff; ;
idea of, 47-8 ; membership
of, 47 ; and moral issues,
165 ff. ; nature of, 79 ;
organisation of, xvii, 30-3 ;
origin of, 66 ff., 175-6 ;
an " other-worldly " society,"
1 66, 189 ; overseas, xi, 21 ff.,
214, 218 ; philosophy of,
80 ; and propaganda, 48 ;
purpose of, 79-81, 199 ff.,
228 ; record of, 46 ; revival
of, 51, 8 1 ; self-scrutiny of,
8 1 ; and State, 77 ; and
status quo, 171 ff. ; the
true, 80-1 ; universal, 52,
226 ff.
Church buildings, 119
Churchgoing, 1 1 7 ff.
Churchmanship, 63-4
Church services, 129, 135 ff.,
142 ff.
Church work, 193 ff.
Citizenship, 179, 192
Civilisation, 43-4, 49, 153
Clergy, 62, 129, 136 ff., 143 ff,
193, 197 ff., 206 ff. See also
Ministry.
Communism, 40-1, 52, 172 ff,
184-5
Conduct, problems of, 151 ff.
Controversy, 27, 223
Conversion, 58, 130
Cosmology, 87
231
232
Creeds, 83, 88, 109 ff.
Crisis, the, 35 ff.
Culture, 177-8
INDEX
GENERAL
DAWSON, CHRISTOPHER, 37 .,
43-4
Democracy, 169
Denominations, 223-4
Disillusionment, 40-1
Doubt, 84-5
Dualism, 105, 112
ECCLESIASTICISM, 62,
Economics, 37, 42, 143, 170
Ecumenical conferences, 33
Education, 91
Edwardian emancipation, 154
Elders, 206-7
Episcopal ordination, 204-5
Eros, 98 ff.
Eschatology, 68-70
Eucharist, the, 125 ff., 213,
217
Eutychian heresy, 126
Evangelisation, go, 134, 225
Evolution, 88, 162
Experience, 59, 92, 97, 103,
119, 125, 128
FABER, GEOFFREY, 76 n.
Faith, revival of, 37, 44, 53
Fascism, 40-1, 51-2, 170
Fausset, Hugh, 155 n.
Fellowship, 29, 56, 61, 65, 118,
195, 222-3, 229
Free Churches, 32, 226
Freedom, xii, 41, 87, 163
" Friends of Reunion," 32
Friends, Society of, 207
Frustration, 36, 114
Confession, the,
Gloucester, Bishop of, 63, 159
God, approach to, 107 ; as
Creator, 109 ff. ; faith in,
44-5> 93 ff -> IX 9 J idea s of >
88 -9> 93 ff-> J 32 ; know-
ledge of, 103 ff., 113; as
Redeemer, 107 ff., 128 ;
responsiveness of, 104, 126 ;
vision of, 88, 93 ff., 116, 123
Good life, the, 114
Gore, Bishop, 28-9, 76, 79,
222
Gospel, 23, 54-6, 59, 71-2, 81,
84 ; the Fourth, 71, 91, 95,
109, 174 ; Synoptic, 68
Grace, 58, 61, 99, 119, 122,
126-7
Great Britain, x ff.
Gregory of Tours, 37
Grensted, L. W., 70, 101 n.
Group-psychology, 143
HAMMOND, J. L., and L. B.,
132 n.
Heard, Gerald, 34
Hobbes, 40
Holy Spirit, the, 72, 74, 197,
203
House of Commons, the, 192 n.
Housing, 1 68
Hugel, F. Von, 64 n., 75, 106
Hunter, L. S., 150 n.
Huxley, Aldous, 42, 210 n.
Hymns 131, 149
INGE, W. R., 101, 227
Initiative, the Divine, no, 115
Institutional religion, 46-7,
73 ff
Intelligible religion, 86, 91-2
Introversion, 75 ff.
Isolation, 108
INDEX
233
JEANS, SIR JAMES, 97 ., 1 1 1
Jesus Christ, 54-6, 77, 103,
200 ; centrality of, 103-4,
115, 160, 162 if. ; as
Mediator, 116; presenta-
tion of, 67 ; as Realist, 185 ;
twofold attitude of, 188 ff.
John, St. See Gospel.
Judaism, 103
KEBLE, 76-7
Kingdom of God, 55, 60, 71,
129, 190, 197
Kirk, K. E., 121, 122 .
Koinonia, 73
LAMBETH CONFERENCE, xv, 167,
208, 215
Lambeth Encyclical, 69, 89 .,
115 n -
Laymen, 129, 204 ff.
Leadership, xvi, 38-9, 44,
205 ff., 216; in morals,
167 ff. ; in worship, 137 ff.
League of Nations, the, 178,
188
Lessons, 146-7
Liberal school, 64, 141
Lindsay, A. D., 50-1, 59
Liturgy, 107-8, 112. See also
Church Services.
Liverpool Cathedral, 140
Locke, John, 50
Love, 99, 175, 187
Luther, 100
MACAULAY, R., 40 n.
Machiavelh, 40
Marx, 152, 171. See also
Communism.
Matthews, W. R., 70 n., 73, 84
Maurice, F. D., 229
Maurois, A., 154 n.
Melbourne Centenary, 24
Melbourne Eucharistic Con-
gress, 1 66
Micklem, E. R., 118
Ministry, the, 197 ff . ; sacra-
mental conception of, 208 ff.;
a " voluntary," 208 ff. ; of
women, 218
Money, 171
Moral chaos, 37, 154-6, 161
Music, 149-50
NATIONALISM, xii, 42-3, 51,
177 ff.
Natural and supernatural,
105 ff.
Nazism, 41
Needham, J., 132-3
Newman, 25, 76
New morality, the, 35, 156 ff.
New Testament, 52, 56, 65, 72,
74, 86, 107, 127, 175, 199,
200 n., 206, 219
New world-order, 35
Noyes, Alfred, 89
" Numinous," the, 133-4
Nygren, Dr., 98 ff.
OLD CATHOLICS, 32
Old Testament, 57, 200 n.
Oman, J. W., 97, 105-6
Opportunity, the Christian,
39-40
Orthodox Church, 32
Oxford Movement, 24-5, 27-8,
76-9
PAGANISM, 113, 157
Paul, St., 58, 75, 99-100, 186,
202, 219-21
Peace, 38, 42, 184, 186
Peck, W. G., 41 n.
Permanent Diaconate, the, 217
234 INDEX
" Personal " religion, 57
Philosophy, Christian, 29, 85 ;
Greek, 102-3
Piper, Otto, 155 n.
Plato, 98 ff., 153, 210
Prayer, 145 ff., 206
Prayer Book, 138 ff. ; Revised,
Press, the, 182 ff.
Priesthood of believers, 200
Providence, 179
Purchasing Power, 181-2
Pusey, 75
QUICK, O. C., 113 n., 128
RAVEN, G. E., 113
Real Presence, 126-7
Reality, 97, 106
Reason, 86-7
Reformation, 54 ; a new, 54-5
Relevance of Christianity, The,
xvii, 39, 71, 98
Religion, criticism of, 85, 152-3
Response, 97, 102, 104, 113-5,
122
Reunion, 25, 29 ff.
Revelation, 106-7, no-2, 115
Roman Communion, 31, 105,
205, 226
Russell, Earl, 185
SAAR, the, 186
Salter, Sir Arthur, 36, 44
Scandinavia, Churches of, 32
Science, 85
" Scientific humanism," 132-3
Scotland, Church in, 32, 205
Secular activities, 124, 128-9,
188 ff., 202, 212, 214
Sentimentalism, 130
Sermons, 147 ff.
Sexual ethics, 1 6 1 -2, 1 65 -7
Shaw, G. B., 43 n.
Social order, the, 49-50, 60 ;
Christian, 164 ff.
Solution, the Christian, 85
South India, Church in, 24, 32
Specialisation, 208 ff., 216
Spengler, 42
Spiritual community, 39, 57,
72, 74 .
Spontaneity, 136
Storr, V. F., 27
Strachey, John, 51/2.
Streeter, B. H., 41, 129
Student Christian Movement,
33> 9 n -
Sudan, xiii
TAYLOR, A. E., 94 n.
Theism, 84, 93 ff., 101
Theocracy, 59
Theology, 28, 82 ff., 103-4,
109, 116 ff., 121 ; and the
Counter-Reformation, 126
Thomas, St., 29, 101
Times, 87
Totalitarian State, the, 40-2,
49, in
Tradition, xiv, 135
Truth, 30
UNEMPLOYMENT, 170 ff., 180-1,
!95
Universities, 65, 89-90
VALUES, 101 ff., 116, 123, 127
Vocabulary, 91-2
Vocation, Christian, 197 ff.
WAR, 38, 43, 154
" Way of Renewal," the, 90
INDEX
235
Webb, G. J., 28 it.
Whitehead, A. N., 34, 86-7,
III, I20-I
Wilberforce, Bishop, 27
Wilberforce, W., 19 1
Williams, N. P., 70 n.
Worship, 116 ff. ; art of,
134 ff. ; and conduct, 129-
30 ; as education, 134 ;
emphasis in, 127-8, 130-1 ;
failure in, 118 : fulfilment
in, 122 ; instinct for, 120 ;
nature of, 121 ; ordering of,
142 ff. ; private and cor-
porate, 119, 124, 142-3;
revival of, 120 ; theology of,
ii7ff.
YOUNGER GENERATION, 48, 53,
118, 154 ff.
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