WRAR V " MARY'S COLLEGE
HBTARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
LUX MTJNDI
Oxforo
HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
MUNDI
A SERIES OF STUDIES
IN THE
RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION
EDITED
BY CHARLES GOKE,
o
PRINCIPAL OF PUSEY HOUSE
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD
TENTH EDITION
A qxiella Luce cotal si diventa,
Che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto
impossibil che mai si consenta.
JOS
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1890
[ All rights reserved]
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
ESSAYS
AND
CONTRIBUTORS.
1. Faith.
Rev. H. S. HOLLAND, M.A., Canon of St. Paul's, some-
time Senior Student of Christ Church.
2. The Christian Doctrine of God.
Eev. AUBREY MOORE, M.A., Hon. Canon of Christ Church,
Tutor of Magdalen and Keble Colleges.
3. The Problem of Pain : its bearing on faith in God.
Rev. J. R. ILLINGWORTH, M.A., Rector of Longworth,
sometime Fellow of Jesus and Tutor of Kehle
Colleges.
4. The Preparation in History for Christ.
Rev. E. S. TALBOT, D.D., Vicar of Leeds, sometime
"Warden of Keble College.
5. The Incarnation in relation to Development.
Rev. J. R. ILLINGWORTH.
6. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma.
Rev. R. C. MOBERLT, M.A., Vicar of Great Budworth,
sometime Senior Student of Christ Church.
7. The Atonement.
Rev. and Hon. ARTHUR LITTELTON, M.A., Master of
Selwyn College, Cambridge, sometime Tutor of
Keble College.
vi Essays and Contributors,
8. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration.
Rev. C. GOKE, M.A., Principal of Pusey House, Fellow
of Trinity College.
9. The Church.
Rev. W. LOCK, M.A., Sub- Warden of Keble and Fellow
of Magdalen Colleges.
10. Sacraments.
Rev. F. PAGET, D.D., Canon of Christ Church, and Regius
Professor of Pastoral Theology.
11. Christianity and Politics.
Rev. W. J. H. CAMPION, M.A., Tutor of Keble College.
12. Christian Ethics.
Rev. R. L. OTTLEY, M.A., Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon,
late Senior Student of Christ Church.
PBEFACE.
1. THIS volume is primarily due to a set of circumstances
which exists no longer. The writers found themselves at
Oxford together between the years 1875-1885, engaged in the
common work of University education; and compelled for
their own sake, no less than that of others, to attempt to put
the Catholic faith into its right relation to modern intellectual
and moral problems. Such common necessity and effort led
to not infrequent meetings, in which a common body of
thought and sentiment, and a common method of commending
the faith to the acceptance of others, tended to form itself.
We, who once enjoyed this happy companionship, are now
for the most part separated. But at least some result of our
temporary association remains, which it is hoped may justify
and explain the present volume.
2. For this collection of essays represents an attempt on
behalf of the Christian Creed in the way of explanation.
We are sure that Jesus Christ is still and will continue to be
the ' Light of the world.' We are sure that if men can rid
themselves of prejudices and mistakes (for which, it must be
said, the Church is often as responsible as they), and will
look afresh at what the Christian faith really means, they
will find that it is as adequate as ever to interpret life and
knowledge in its several departments, and to impart not
less intellectual than moral freedom. But we are conscious
also that if the true meaning of the faith is to be made
sufficiently conspicuous it needs disencumbering, reinter-
preting, explaining. We can but quote in this sense a
viii Preface.
distinguished French writer who has often acted as an
inspiration to many of us. Pere Gratry felt painfully that
the dogmas of the Church were but as an ' unknown tongue '
to many of the best of his compatriots. ' It is not enough,' he
said, ' to utter the mysteries of the Spirit, the great mysteries
of Christianity, in formulas, true before God, but not under-
stood of the people. The apostle and the prophet are precisely
those who have the gift of interpreting these obscure and
profound formulas for each man and each age. To translate
into the common tongue the mysterious and sacred language
.... to speak the word of God afresh in each age, in ac-
cordance with both the novelty of the age and the eternal
antiquity of the truth, this is what S. Paul means by inter-
preting the unknown tongue. But to do this, the first con-
dition is that a man should appreciate the times he lives in.
" Hoc autem tempus quare non probatis l ? "
3. We have written then in this volume not as ' guessers
at truth,' but as servants of the Catholic Creed and Church,
aiming only at interpreting the faith we have received. On
the other hand, we have written with the conviction that the
epoch in which we live is one of profound transformation,
intellectual and social, abounding in new needs, new points of
view, new questions ; and certain therefore to involve great
changes in the outlying departments of theology, where it
is linked on to other sciences, and to necessitate some general
restatement of its claim and meaning.
This is to say that theology must take a new development.
We grudge the name development, on the one hand, to any-
thing which fails to preserve the type of the Christian Creed
and the Christian Church ; for development is not innovation,
it is not heresy : on the other hand, we cannot recognise as
the true ' development of Christian doctrine,' a movement
which means merely an intensification of a current tendency
1 Gratry, Henri Perreyve, Paris 1880, p. 162.
Preface. ix
from within, a narrowing and hardening of theology by simply
giving it greater definiteness or multiplying its dogmas.
The real development of theology is rather the process in
which the Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters into
the apprehension of the new social and intellectual movements
of each age: and because 'the truth makes her free' is able
to assimilate all new material, to welcome and give its place
to all new knowledge, to throw herself into the sanctification
of each new social order, bringing forth out of her treasures
things new and old, and shewing again and again her power
of witnessing under changed conditions to the catholic capacity
of her faith and life.
4. To such a development these studies attempt to be a
contribution. They will be seen to cover, more or less, the
area of the Christian faith in its natural order and sequence
of parts, but the intention is not to offer complete theological
treatises, or controversial defences of religious truths: it is
rather to present positively the central ideas and principles of
religion, in the light of contemporary thought and current
problems. The only one of the essays in fact which has any
degree of formal completeness, is that on Christian Ethics,
a subject on which the absence of systematic books of a
genuine English growth seems to justify a more detailed
treatment.
5. The main omissions of which we are conscious are due to
want of space. For instance, we should have been very glad
to attempt a separate treatment of the subject of sin ; though
we hope the line that would be taken about it has been
sufficiently indicated by more than one writer 1 . Again, we
have left aside any detailed discussion of historical evidences ;
but it will be seen that our attempt has been so to present the
principles of the Christian faith as to suggest the point of
view from which evidences are intelligible, and from which
1 See pp. 208-211, 292-3, 318-20, 475-6.
x Preface.
they will, it is firmly believed, be found satisfactory. Once
more, if we have not found room for a treatment of
miracles, at least we hope that the Church's conception of
God, as He manifests Himself in nature and in grace, which
we have endeavoured to express, will at once acquit us of any
belief in capricious ' violations of law ; ' and will also suggest
a view of the world as disordered by sin and crying out for
redemption, which will make it intelligible that ' miracles '
should appear, not as violating law, but as a necessary
element in its restoration as well as its completer exhibition ;
contrary, not to the fundamental order of the Divine work-
ing, but only to a superficial or mechanical view of it, or
to a view which sin has distorted or preoccupation with
physical science has unduly narrowed.
6. It only remains to explain that we have written not
as mere individuals, but as ministers, under common conditions,
of a common faith. This unity of conviction has enabled us
freely to offer and accept mutual criticism and suggestion ; so
that without each of us professing such responsibility for work
other than his own, as would have involved undue interference
with individual method, we do desire this volume to be
the expression of a common mind and a common hope.
C. G.
PUSEY HOUSE,
Michaelmas, 1889.
PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION.
The author of the Essay The Holy Spirit and Inspiration
has endeavoured to obviate further misunderstanding of his
meaning on one important point by rewriting some sentences
on pp. 359-60, in accordance with the Corrigenda inserted in
the Fourth Edition.
PREFACE TO THE TENTH EDITION.
I.
THERE are two things which may fairly be regretted in
regard to the criticisms often the very kind and encourag-
ing criticisms which this book has received. There is,
first, the disproportionate attention which has been given
to some twenty pages on the subject of the inspiration of
Holy Scripture, an attention so disproportionate as to defeat
the object which the writers had in view in assigning to
that subject its place in the general treatment of the work
of the Holy Spirit the object, namely, of giving it its proper
context in the whole body of Christian truth : and there is,
secondly, the fact that we have not generally succeeded in
gaining the attention of our critics to the point of view from
which these ' studies ' were written, and the purpose they were
intended to serve.
Our purpose was 'to succour a distressed faith' by en-
deavouring to bring the Christian Creed into its right relation
to the modern growth of knowledge, scientific, historical, cri-
tical; and to the modern problems of politics and ethics 1 . We
were writing as for Christians, but as for Christians perplexed
by new knowledge which they are required to assimilate and
new problems with which they are required to deal. What is
needed to help men in such perplexity is not compromise, for
1 By the phrase ' to attempt to put ance and the faith only secondary,
the Catholic faith into its right re- What was intended was that, as
lation to modern intellectual and holding the Faith, we needed, as the
moral problems ' (Preface to First Church has often needed, to bring that
Edition) it was not by any means with which we are ourselves iden-
intended to suggest that the modern tified, into relation to the claims,
problems or the modern sciences intellectual and practical, made upon
were the things of the first import- us from outside.
xii Preface to
compromise generally means tampering with principle, but
readjustment, or fresh correlation, of the things of faith
and the things of knowledge. In detail this will, no doubt,
involve concessions, and that on both sides, because both sides
have been liable to make mistakes l ; but in the main what is
to be looked for is a reconciliation which shall at once set the
scientific and critical movement, so far as it is simply scien-
tific and critical, free from the peril of irreligion, and the
religious movement free from the imputation of hostility to
new knowledge as free as any movement can be, which is
intensely concerned to nourish and develop what is per-
manent and unchanging in human life. Such a reconciliation
has more than once been effected in the past, though never
without a preliminary period of antagonism 2 : our confidence
that it will be effected anew in the future lies partly in the
fact that we see it already taking place in some minds which
seem to us to represent the best life and thought of our time
both scientific and religious. One such at least 3 we knew
and have lost, though only from present intercourse, in
Aubrey Moore. Nobody could know him and think of him
as ' compromising ' either his faith or his science. He lived
primarily and with deepest interest in his religious life and
theological study, but he lived also with intense reality in
the life of science. And the debt we owe to him, over and
above the debt under which his personal character lays us for
ever, is that of having let us see how the two lives of faith
and of science can melt into one. He felt indeed and wrestled
with the difficulties of adjustment. He had not, as it seemed to
1 Cf. Dr. Pusey, University Sermons, of Christianity to the Copernican
1864-1879. ' Unscience, not science, astronomy: Salmon, Infallibility of
contrary to faith,' pp. 18 ff. the Church, p. 230.
2 Cf. the history of the relations of :i See the tribute to his memory by
the Church to Aristotelian philosophy: Mr. G. J. Romanes : G-uardian, Jan. 29,
Milman, Latin Christianity, ed. 4, vol. 1890.
ix. pp. no S. ; and later the relations
the Tenth Edition. xiii
us, nearly finished his work in this respect. But he had done
enough for our encouragement : enough to help us to believe
that the best minds of the future are to be neither religious
minds defying scientific advance, nor scientific minds denying
religion, but minds in which religion interprets and is inter-
preted by science, in which faith and enquiry subsist together
and reinforce one another. The reason why he should have
been so soon taken from us and from the Church on earth
taken when ' our need was the sorest ' lies in the im-
penetrable mysteries of God. ' Si dolemus ablatum, non
tamen obliviscimur quod datus fuit, et gratias agimus quod
habere ilium meruimus . . . Pusillus corde eram et confortabat
me ; piger et negligens, et excitabat me V
II.
It seems to us that a due regard to the point of view from
which these studies were written would have obviated some
of the criticisms upon them. For instance, it would have
explained why we forbore to enter upon the questions which
may be raised as to the seat and methods of Church autho-
rity. It was because these questions do not arise practically
till the work has been done to which we were attempting to
minister. When a man is once reassured that his faith in
Christ is capable of rational justification, he begins naturally
to enquire what exactly the Christian religion involves in
this or that detail, and how its manifestly authoritative
character, as a Divine Revelation, is to find expression : but
these enquiries hardly begin till the preliminary reassurance
has been gained.
The moral authority of Christianity, of Christian lives and
characters, does indeed exercise a determining influence on the
1 From S. Bernard's most touching sermon (in Cant. 26) on the death of his
brother Gerard.
xiv Preface to
promotion and recovery of faith ; but men do not often either
win a hold on the creed for the first time, or recover it where it
has been lost or impaired, because the theological authority of
the Church enables them to take it on trust. The very
grounds of that authority are for the moment too much in
question to admit of the proper amount of deference being
oiven to it. Thus it seemed to us better in this volume to be
O
content with general statements as to the principle of Church
authority 1 , leaving out its detailed discussion as unsuitable to
our present purpose.
Of course, however, we were conscious all the time that we
were ourselves amenable to the bar of authority and were
bound to feel sure that nothing we were saying was trans-
gressing the laws which the Catholic Church has laid down.
We should indeed be unanimous in disclaiming any desire to
have ' license to say what we please ' in our position as Church
teachers. All meaning would be taken out of the effort and
hope this book represents if we could not believe that we were
speaking as the Church would have us speak. As the essay on
Inspiration has been chiefly called in question on the ground of
authority, the author of it must be allowed to plead that he did
assure himself he was saying nothing which the Church in her
past action had not left him free to say, while for the future
he does earnestly desire in due course, and after due enquiry,
an action of Church authority on the relation of modern
critical methods to the doctrine of Inspiration ; and further
he believes that the Anglican churches, holding as they do so
conspicuous a place in traditional reverence for the Scriptures,
while they are so free on the other hand from the obscu-
rantist fear of historical enquiry, are more likely than any
other part of the Church to arrive at determinations on the
subject such as will be of material service to the whole of
1 See Essay VI. pp. 226-227, 250 ff. ; Essay VIII. pp. 324-327 ; and Essay IX.
PP- 384-39 -
the Tenth Edition. xv
Christendom. But for the present there can be no doubb the
subject is not ripe for any official or formal determinations.
III.
It seems to us also that some of the criticisms on the
treatment of Inspiration in Essay VIII, which shall be
presently dealt with, have been due to the same forgetful-
ness of the writer's aim, and of the general aim of the whole
book. Our traditional belief in the Bible is at the present
time confronted with a body of critical literature which
claims to overthrow a great many of the accepted opinions
about the Old Testament Scriptures. The criticism is at least
grave and important enough to claim attention, to necessitate
that we should come to a more or less clear understanding
of the relation in which our faith stands towards it. The
writer of the essay did not write as a biblical critic but as a
theological student and teacher, bound to give a candid con-
sideration to a criticism which bears directly upon the sacred
books of our religion. His object was not to discuss and
determine questions of biblical criticism, but to explain, as
it appears to him, the relation which theology is to take up
towards them. And he wrote 'in the mind of those who
have felt the trouble in the air : ' he wrote to succour a faith
distressed by the problems criticism is raising. That faith is
very widely distressed by them, and that not merely in
academic circles, does not admit of question. Nor did it
seem to him to admit of question that the best way to deal
with this distress was not to attempt to solve problems,
which, because of the immense area over which discussion
ranges, do not admit of ready solutions ; but to attempt
to state the main conclusions criticism is claiming to have
arrived at, as the critics themselves would have us state them ;
to show that our Christian faith is not vitally affected by
xvi Preface to
them ; and so to divert an anxious mind from problems
which it cannot solve, at least at present, and fix it on the
central truths of our religion, helping it to feel how, if it be
once grounded on these central truths, the issue of the critical
discussion can be awaited, with keen interest indeed, but with-
out alarm. But this assurance of mind in face of the critical
controversy is only possible if we see that the critical positions
are in fact compatible with the real inspiration of Holy
Scripture. Now the best way to give reassurance on this
point seemed to be for the writer to make it plain that he
himself felt the great force and appeal of the critical case,
and that his conviction that the real Inspiration of the Old
Testament was unaffected by it, did not depend upon its being
underrated. Had the main purpose of the writer been to help
to determine critical positions, he would have been bound
to write both at greater length and also with more exact-
ness and discrimination. But on the other hand, the purpose
of reassurance would have had less chance of being success-
fully accomplished as in some cases we have reason to
believe with thankfulness that it has been accomplished or
assisted if the writer had been more reluctant to accept, at
least hypothetically, what are claimed as critical results. We
all know by experience that freedom and happiness in our
attitude as Christians towards problems not easily solved, or
even easily brought to crucial tests, are most readily secured
if we can feel that our faith is, at the last resort, inde-
pendent of the exact solution arrived at. Thus our object
was to give to anxious enquirers, of whom there are surely
an immense number most deserving of any help which can be
given them, a freedom in regard to Old Testament problems
as wide as the Catholic faith seemed to warrant.
the Tenth Edition. xvii
IV.
We cannot but accept the very general suggestion of our
critics that we ought to have attempted a separate treatment
of the problem of sin. Some such treatment is now offered
in the second appendix, and offered in the form of a re-
publication of what has previously seen the light, so that it
may be plain that the absence of it from earlier editions
was not due to lack of conviction or unwillingness to deal
with the subject. The appendix is not in fact more than a
drawing out of what is involved in some passages of the essays
taken together l . Thus the fifth essay takes up a very clear
position as to the practical aspect which sin bears in human
life. The fact is emphasized that sin, as our moral con-
sciousness knows it and Christianity has successfully dealt
with it, is a phenomenon unique in the world : it is what
nothing else is, violation of law. Now this is the essence of
the Christian doctrine of sin, as S. John states it : ' Sin is
lawlessness 2 .' Sin and lawlessness are coincident terms.
This view of sin is primarily practical; it may be repre-
sented in fact as a postulate required for successfully dealing
with sin, a postulate justified and verified by its results.
But because it is thus verified and justified, it passes like any
other hypothesis which explains facts, in proportion to the
range and thoroughness of the experience which tests it, out
of the region of mere working hypotheses into that of ac-
cepted truths. Thus it is to the Christian consciousness an
accepted truth, that sin, all down the long history of hu-
manity, has been a violation of the divine order, a refusal of
obedience, a corruption of man's true nature. Sin, as such,
has always been a source of confusion, not of progress. We
1 See Preface, p. ix. note l.
2 Cf. Dr. Westcott's note on I S. John iii. 4, 77 dfiapria karlv rj dvo^ia.
b
xviii Preface to
can indeed recognise how the movement and development in
humanity has frequently l been in fact conditioned by sin ;
but we should still contend that it has never been the sin in
itself which has been the spring of force and progress, but
the faculties of will and intellect which sin was using.
Always the will and intellect would have worked better
and more fruitfully in the result if they had been free
from the taint of selfishness and rebellion against God.
Always sin, as such, has been a lowering and not a raising
of human life : a fall and not a rise. Thus sin at the begin-
ning of human life must have been not merely the awaken-
ing of moral consciousness, but the obscuring and tainting
of it by lawlessness and disobedience. Sin, as all down its
history, so in its origin, is a fall ; a fall, moreover, entailing
consequences on those who come after, in virtue of the in-
violable solidarity of the human race. To this view of sin
original and actual, Christianity appears to be bound ; and it
is a view that, as we have now endeavoured to show 2 , brings
us into no conflict with scientific discovery. For science
never attempts to prove that man might not have developed
otherwise than as in fact he has, or that the actual development
has been the best possible : nor has Christianity ever in its best
representatives, certainly not in its patristic representatives,
been identified with a denial that human history as a whole
has been a development upwards from below 3 . The Old
Testament is in fact among ancient literatures, the literature
of development, of progress 4 .
1 Cf. F. Lenormant, Les Origims de * Cf. F. Lenormant, Les Origines,
Vhistoire. Paris, 1880, t. i, p. 191. t. I, pp. 63-66. It is a pleasure to refer
' C'est dans la race de Qain que la to this work by a distinguished
Bible place 1'invention des arts et des Catholic and man of learning. The
metiers. " Les fils du siecle sont plus Preface is an admirable discussion of
habiles que les enfants de lumiere."' the relation of scientific enquiry to
2 Cf. p. 534. belief in Inspiration.
3 Cf. p. 535. note i.
the Tenth Edition. xix
V.
The criticisms on our treatment of Inspiration have been so
abundant, and have gone into such detail, that it will be
obvious that any attempt to reply to them must be a more
individual effort than the attempt to reply to the criticisms
on the general aim and spirit of the book. For while the
writers in this volume are at one as to the general attitude
which they would wish the Church to assume towards the
critical treatment of the Old Testament, as they are at one in
the general line of treatment adopted throughout this volume,
they cannot pretend to be at one on all the details of a
complicated subject. The writer of the particular essay alone
can be responsible for these : and with reference to them he
must be understood to speak simply in his own person.
i . The passage about Inspiration was written under the con-
viction that recent criticism of the Old Testament represents
a real advance in analytical method as applied to literature,
and thus a most serious movement of thought. As such it has
been estimated by the Bishop of Oxford in his recent Charge.
He says, ' The Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament are now
going through a process of analytical criticism which has, as
we believe, had no parallel, for acuteness of investigation,
carefulness of method, and completeness of apparatus, since the
days in which they began to be regarded as a code of in-
spired literature, and certainly not since the days of our
blessed Lord's life on earth ; at which period we understand
that to all intents and purposes the books which we receive,
as the Canonical Old Testament Scriptures, had taken their
existing form 1 .' But like the scientific movement of our time,
the critical movement has been accompanied by all the arbitra-
riness and tendency to push things to extremes which appears
1 Oxford Diocesan Gazette, July, 1890 (Parker, Oxford), p. 91.
b 2
xx Preface to
to be an almost inseparable attendant upon living and vigorous
movements, ecclesiastical and secular. Further than this, its
representatives have been and here again the conditions of
the scientific movement are reproduced very frequently men
personally opposed to the Christian faith, and even thoroughly
rationalistic in temper and tone. But it does not follow in
the case of criticism, any more than in the case of science,
that we are not to learn a great deal from a movement charac-
terized even predominantly by ' extremeness ' and unbelief.
And in fact, in the past fifty years there appears to have been
a solid critical advance, underneath a great deal of contro-
versial arbitrariness and irreligious insolence. Now I thought
that I should best serve the purpose with which I was writing,
if I went as far as I could in ungrudging recognition of the
claims of criticism, and involved myself as little as possible
in doubtful discussions ; but I did also intend to express, and
beli eved myself to have expressed with sufficient clearness 1 ,
my own conviction that it was with the more conservative
among the recent critics, and not with the more extreme, that
the victory would lie. Thus when I said, in a sentence which
has been specially criticized (partly because its wording was
somewhat ambiguous), that criticism is reaching 'results as
sure as scientific enquiry,' what I intended so to characterize
was not the extreme conclusions of Wellhausen, but substan-
tially the conclusions shared in common by Wellhausen and
Dillmann, by critics theologically more conservative, like
Konig and Kiehm, by Delitzsch in his last position, by the
French Catholic orientalist, F. Lenormant, as well as by an
increasing body of English scholars 2 . Nor is there a single
1 The summary statements on pp. 2 See Ed. Kiehm, Einleitung in das
351-2 as to the historical character A. T. (Halle, 1889), 15-18, 24, 27.
of the Old Testament represent, I F.^.K6mg,0/enbarung8beffiiffd8A.T.
believe, a ' conservative' attitude, an (Leipzig, 1882), t. n, pp. 321 if. Cf.
attitude towards the history very also Hctuptprobleme der Altisr.-Reliyions-
unlike that, for instance, of Well- gesch. (Leipzig, 1884). F. Delitzsch,
hausen. Genesis, Clark's trans. (Edinb., i
the Tenth Edition. xxi
line of what I wrote which would be affected, so far as I see,
even if Professor Margoliouth were satisfactorily to make out
his case for throwing back the period of the 'Middle Hebrew 1 .'
As to the grounds on which we have been asked to date the bulk
O
of the Psalms below the Captivity, and even in the Maccabean
period, they may appear indeed quite unconvincing ; but it
would have been utterly beside my purpose, as it would also
have been out of my power, to give them adequate discussion 2 ,
nor would it seem as if even so improbably late a date as
that suggested would really affect their Messianic or spiritual
character. Let us affirm then without any hesitation that
there is a good deal of arbitrariness and extremeness in
current criticism as applied to the Old Testament. But surely
we should be the victims of a dangerous delusion if we were to
imagine that because there is a good deal that is unsubstantial
in recent criticism, therefore there is no substantial force in
what really represents the successive labours of many
generations of students. I do not think that we can conceal
o
i. 19-38. P. Lenormant, Les Origines, English or German. For a review
Preface. I venture to think that by a very competent critic, see Prof,
those who want to study the modern Noldeke in the Lit. Centralblatt, July
criticism of the Old Testament would 12, 1890.
be less likely to be prejudiced against 2 I may say that the motive for
it if they were to begin their study what is said about Ps. ex on p. 359
with the assistance of Riehm and was simply the conviction that our
Konig, rather than of more rational- Lord in the passage there in question
istic scholars. I ought to add that cannot fairly be taken as giving in-
while the scholars mentioned above struction on a critical question of
agree substantially as to the analysis authorship, not the difficulty of as-
of the Pentateuch, they differ as to signing the particular Psalm to the
the position assigned to the Priestly age of David. The solution which I
Code, Avhich Dillmann and Riehm propose, p. 3 5 9, as to our Lord's words
hold to be prior to Deuteronomy, is however only one of several which
Wellhausen, Kb'nig and Delitzsch are possible even for those who agree
subsequent to it. with me in the conviction expressed
1 Essay on the place of Ecctesiasticus in above. See, for instance, Edersheim,
Semitic Literature. Oxford : Clarendon Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah
Press, 1890, pp. 20, 21. lalludetothis (London, 1884), ii. p. 406, and Bp.
essay because it has excited consider- Thirl wall as quoted in Dean Perowne's
able interest, but it has not received Commentary on the Psalms (London
favourable notice from critics either 1871), ii. pp. 302 ff.
xxii Preface to
from ourselves that if we are to defend a purely conserva-
tive attitude in regard to Old Testament literature, we
shall require quite different canons of evidence from those
which we are able so successfully to use in vindicating the
historical character of the New Testament : or again, in vindi-
cating the claims of the apostolic ministry and the sacramental
system to be part of the original fabric of the Christian
Church. In other words, the critical principles of historical
enquiry which do so amply justify us in retaining substan-
tially the traditional position in regard as well to the New
Testament documents as to our Church principles, do not carry
us to the same point in the field of the Old Testament. No
doubt there the vastness of the field is a permanent obstacle to
uniformly certain results. A great deal must remain, and
probably for ever, more or less an open question. But this
necessary uncertainty, if it imposes on critics an obligation of
caution, imposes also on us churchmen an obligation of reserve
in dogmatic requirement. We do not wish to run the risk of
making a claim on men's minds for the acceptance of positions
for which we have only this to urge, that they cannot be abso-
lutely disproved.
2. The changed view of the development of Old Testament
literature, such as can be truly said to be proposed for our
acceptance by modern critics with a great deal of unanimity, if
it be granted for the moment that it is compatible with the real
inspiration of the books, involves no important change in our
spiritual use of the Old Testament ; in the use of it for the
purposes of ' faith and morals.' This latter use of Scripture
depends simply on our rightly interpreting the meaning of the
books as they exist.
There is a great principle enunciated by S. Augustine in
regard to the Old Testament which requires to be kept
constantly in view. It is that as the Old Testament is
manifested in the New, so the New Testament is latent in
the Tenth Edition. xxiii
the Old 1 . In order to recognize this there is no discussion
necessary of the method by which our 'Old Testament'
received its present shape. The evidence of it lies in the Old
Testament considered as a finished product. As such, we
cannot study that ' divine library ' without being struck both
by its unity, so far greater than belongs to any other
literature 2 , and by the fact that like no other literature it
looks forward to an end not yet attained, a divine event in
which is to be its justification and its interpretation. The
Old Testament demands the New to bring out its true mean-
ing : the New appeals back to the Old to bear witness to the
continuity of the divine purpose of which it is the outcome. It
is from this point of view that we understand the appeal which,
in the New Testament, is so constantly made to the older
Scriptures. Whether they are appealed to, as in the Sermon
on the Mount, as containing the record of a moral education,
divine though imperfect, which the Christ was to complete 3 ;
or as by St. Paul, as the record of a preparatory and temporary
discipline by means of external enactments of God, calculated
to awaken the dull conscience of men to the reality and
holiness of the divine will, and so to make men conscious of
sin against God, and ready to welcome the dispensation of
pardon and grace 4 ; or, as in the Epistle to the Hebrews', as a
system of ritual and ceremonial observances, in which were
1 S.Augustine, Qucest. 73 in Exod. : ex']: it is < from above ' [from the top,
' Quamquam et in vetere [Testamento] A.V.] because it is inspired; it is
novum lateat, et in novo vetus pateat.' ' woven throughout,' because in its
Quoted by Dr. Liddon, The worth of the whole force it is from above.'
Old Testament, p. 28. 3 S. Matt. v. 17-48, cf. xix. 8:
2 Cf. Didymus in Psalm, xxi. 19, 'Moses, because of the hardness of
where he interprets Christ's ' seamless your hearts,' etc.
robe,' of the Holy Scriptures which 4 After S. Paul, S. Augustine is
they ' part ' who accept one and reject the great exponent of this principle
another. ' This robe of Jesus is also in early days ; see esp. de spiritu et.
indivisible, for it is seamless. Its littera, xix. (34) : Lex ergo data est ut
unity is not enforced but natural gratia quaereretur : gratia data est ut
rjv tvuaiv d\\a avfjupvij lex impleretur.
xxiv Preface to
shadowed forth by the inspiring Spirit * the deep truths of the
still-needed sacrifice, and the access to God not yet won for
man ; or finally, as by almost all the New Testament writers,
as a prophetic dispensation in which the Messianic hope
found gradual expression in fuller and exacter lineaments, and
produced an anticipation which Christ only could satisfy 2 :
from any of these points of view, or from all taken together,
we are concerned only with the Old Testament as it finally
appears, not with the method by which it came into being.
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that when we seek re-
assurance in regard to the inspiration of those books of the
Old Testament, to which our Lord and His Church refer us,
we find it primarily in the substance of the books as they are
given to us, not in any considerations of the manner in which
they came into existence 3 .
And if this is so, it needs to be borne in mind that the re-
sponsibility for bringing it home to the consciences of men,
the responsibility for thus preventing that breach in religious
continuity which the change in critical and literary concep-
tions of the Old Testament might otherwise occasion, lies in
a preeminent degree upon those of us who are most impressed
with the valid elements of the recent criticism. It belongs to
o
us to see to it that, so far as lies with us, the Bible shall not
be less prized by the generations that are coming, as the divine,
the inspired volume, than it has been by the generations
1 See esp. Heb. ix. 8, ' The Holy wards the more we bestow our labour
Spirit this signifying ; ' and cf. Dr. in reading or hearing the mysteries
Westcott on this Epistle, pp. 233 if. thereof, the more we find that the
2 I would venture to recommend thing itself doth answer our received
Riehm's Messianic Prophecy (Clark's opinion concerning it.' Later again,
trans.), as a summary account of as against ' infidels or atheists,' we
prophecy both reverent and critical. must l maintain the authority of the
3 Cf. Hooker's account of our books of God ... by such kind of
grounds for believing that < Scripture proofs . . . that no man living shall
... is divine and sacred.' ' By ex- be able to deny it, without denying
perience,' he says, ' we all know, that some apparent principle such as all
the first outward motive leading men men acknowledge to be true.' E. P.
so to esteem of the Scripture is the III. viii. 14.
authority of God's Church. . . . After-
the Tenth Edition, xxv
that are gone. It belongs to us to attend to the double
admonition of the De Imitotione : ' Every scripture must be
read in the same spirit in which it was written : ' and ' Do
not enquire who said this, but pay heed to what is said.'
3. There is one appeal which the New Testament makes to
the Old which was not alluded to above, as it does not in fact
fall naturally under S. Augustine's principle of the New
Testament lying hid in the Old namely the appeal to it as
to a historical record of God's actual dealings with His people :
a record of things which actually ' happened unto them for en-
samples, and are written for our admonition.' But this appeal
again would not be invalidated unless it were shown not
merely that there is an ideal element mixed with the history
in the Old Testament record, but that the element which is
not mere narrative of events as they happened, the element of
idealism, reaches to the point of obscuring the real significance
of the facts and distorting their divine meaning. Whereas the
truth is that the ideal element in the narrative comes from
the real divine meaning in the facts being brought into em-
phatic prominence rather than overlooked; and we may
depend upon it that no results of criticism have tended to
weaken our belief that the chroniclers of Israel's history,
whether prophetic or priestly, were inspired to see its true
meaning and tendency, and from their different points of view
to bring it out in its completeness. And it is important to
remember in this connection that the Jewish idea of ' history '
was never our modern critical idea of a mere record. They
ranked their history from Joshua to the books of Kings under
the head of 'prophecy,' and intimate to us by this very
classification that they see in the historian one who not only
records but interprets facts l .
1 The Chronicles and the later his- Moralists.
torical books, as is well known, were The truth of this paragraph de-
included in the third class of Hagio- pends upon (i) the character, (2)
grapha' with the Psalmists and the extent of the idealism of Old
xxvi Preface to
4. The changed view of the Old Testament books which
modern criticism asks of us, concerns, then, not so much their
contents, as the circumstances of their composition and the
method by which they reached their present form. When we
pass to this latter class of considerations we are prepared for
any information which criticism or tradition can give us, while
at the same time our indestructible conviction, fortified by the
strongest internal testimony of the books, that here is the
Holy Spirit's work, gives us an antecedent expectation that
the mode of composition in the case of each book will be such
as God in His condescension can have sanctioned and used.
God, I say, in His condescension because undoubtedly the
whole Old Testament does represent a condescension of God
to a low stage of human development. Here then we need
the recognition of a second great principle which S. Augustine
lays down, viz. that ' as wrong is done to the Old Testament
if it be denied to come from the just and good God, so
wrong is done to the New if it be put on a level with the
Old V
For all the reality of its inspiration the Old Testament is on
a lower level than the New. Thus it is now almost univer-
sally recognised that God in the Olc| Testament is seen
appealing to the human conscience at a low stage of its develop-
ment, tolerating what was not according to His original will
or His ultimate purpose 2 , as in the case of divorce, and even,
Testament facts. On this something exist and really represent the divine
more is said later on. Here I am purpose.
only concerned to distinguish an l De GestisPelag. v. (15), 'Sicut veteri
idealism which truly interprets facts, Testamento si esse ex Deo bono et
even if it throws their spiritual mean- summo negetur, ita et novo fit injuria
ing into high relief, from a merely si veteri aequetur.' S. Augustine
imaginative treatment which perverts does not perhaps carry out the recog-
and distorts them. ThusiftheChroni- nition of this principle as fully as
cler idealizes, it is by emphasizing, some other of the Fathers : for refs.
beyond the point of actual fact, the see pp. 229$.
priestly element in the history which 2 S. Matt. xix. 8.
at the same time did both really
the Tenth Edition. xxvii
as in the case of Abraham's sacrifice, appealing to men to do
things which in a more fully developed state of the con-
science could not be even conceived of as commanded by God,
in order that through their very obedience to the appeal they
might be led higher into the knowledge of what God could,
and could not, enjoin. How fully this principle in God's
dealings was recognised and justified by the early Christian
authorities has been already brought out in this volume 1 .
Again, the same method of condescending to what was
not in itself perfect, but was susceptible of a gradual educa-
tion, appears in the institutions of the Old Testament law of
worship. Modern enquirers are pressing upon us the fact
that the ritual law of Israel is closely akin to the common
ritual customs of Semite races. ' What I may call the
natural basis of Israel's worship,' says Prof. Robertson Smith,
' was very closely akin to that of the neighbouring cults V
The peculiarity of Israel's religion lay in fact not in the
ritual itself, but in the moral and theological turn given to
the ritual. According to this view God in the law appears
as diverting to good uses, by an act of condescension, ritual
customs which it would have been premature to abolish.
Such a view of the ritual is somewhat strange to the ears of
modern Churchmen, but it was undoubtedly the prevalent
view of the law among the great writers of Christian
antiquity. References to illustrate this have been given
in the eighth essay 3 .
But I may add to the passages there referred to another
of very striking force. S. Chrysostom is explaining why
God should have appealed to the astrological notions of the
wise men and led them by no other leading than that of a
star. It is because ' in exceeding condescension He calls
1 See pp. 329 ff. added is from S. Chrysost. m Matt.
2 Religion of the Semites. Edinburgh, vi. 3. The same idea is discerned by
1889, p. 4. Bp. Lightfoot in S. Paul ; see on
3 P- 3 2 9> n t e 2 - The passage here Gal. iv. n.
xxviii Preface to
them through what is familiar ... In imitation of this Paul
too reasons with the Greeks from an altar, and adduces tes-
timony from the poets, while he harangues the Jews with
circumcision, and makes from the sacrifices a beginning of
instruction for those who are living under the law. For since
to every one familiar things are dear, therefore both God
Himself and the men who were sent from God, with a view
to the salvation of the world, manage things on this principle.
Think it not then unworthy of Him to have called them by
a star ; for by the same rule thou wilt find fault with all the
Jewish rites also both the sacrifices and the purifications
and the new moons, and the ark, and the temple itself. For
all these things had their origin from Gentile grossness. Yet
God, on account of the salvation of those in error, endured to
be worshipped by means of the very things through which those
outside were worshipping demons, only giving them a slight
alteration, that little by little he might draw them away
from their customs and lead them up to the high philosophy.'
NQW if we recognize that God in the Old Testament can
condescend for the purposes of His revelation to a low stage of
conscience, and a low stage of worship, what possible ground
have we for denying that He can use for purposes of His
inspiration literary methods also which belong to a rude and
undeveloped state of intelligence ? If He can ' inspire ' with
true teaching the native Semite customs of ritual, why can
He not do the same with their traditions of old time ? How
can we reasonably deny that the earlier portions of Genesis
may contain the simple record of primitive prehistoric tra-
dition of the Semites 1 , moulded and used by the Holy Spirit, as
1 I use the word ' myth ' for those is used. On Strauss's application
primitive stories on p. 356. The of the myth theory to the Gospel
legitimacy of this use may be dis- narratives, I should quite assent to
puted, see e. g. Riehm, Einleitung, p. the remarks of Dr. Mill, Mythical In-
542. But I endeavour to explain tcrpretation of the Gospels (Cambridge,
exactly the sense in which the word 1861), pp. 97, 98.
the Tenth Edition. xxix
on all showing the record manifestly has been moulded and
used, to convey the fundamental principles of all true religion ?
Or again, granted that, on the 'dramatic' hypothesis, Deu-
teronomy written not by Moses, but in Moses' name, to in-
corporate the Mosaic tradition, represents a literary method
greatly inferior, in sense of exactitude, to the method of per-
sonal testimony as we have it in S. John 1 , or of careful in-
vestigation and use of original testimony, as we have it in
S. Luke 2 ; granted this how can we, in view of the manifest
facts of God's condescension, find ourselves in a position to
deny that He can have used such a method as a vehicle of
His inspiration 3 ? There is, it must be emphasized, no critical
reason why we should assign the composition of any book of
the Old Testament to the motive of fraud. No doubt hostile
critics have sometimes suggested, for example, that the ' dis-
covery ' of the book of the law in the Temple in the days of
Josiah was a 'got up' proceeding, the book having really
been written and hidden at the very time in order to be
' discovered ' ; but there is no positive evidence at all to sup-
port such a view, while all the evidence is satisfied by the
hypothesis that an earlier prophet, some hundred years pre-
viously 4 , working upon an actual and possibly written tra-
dition of Moses' last speech, had cast this tradition into the
dramatic form and promulgated, as from Moses' lips, the law
which he knew to represent ultimately Moses' authority or
the authority of God in Moses. That such a method should
have been adopted surprises us surely no more than that
1 S. John i. 14, xix. 35, xxi. 24 ; i on S. Jude's Epistle in the Introduc-
S. John i. 1-3. tion to the New Testament.
2 S. Luke i. 1-4. 4 Cf. Kiehm, Einleitung, i. p. 246 :
3 I would call attention in this con- ' Das Gesetzbuch kann nicht erst uiiter
nection to Dr. Salmon's remarks on Josia geschrieben sein, sondern es
S. Jude's use, even in the New Tes- muss spiitestens zur Zeit des Hiskia
tarnent canon, of the traditions con- entstanden sein, und zwar bevor
tained in the Assumption of Moses, dieser Konig seine Reformation ganz
and his quotation of the book of durchgefiihrt hatte.'
Enoch : see at the end of his lecture
xxx Preface to
Hosea should have been led to use such extraordinary means,
as he seems in fact to have been enjoined to use, of revealing
God's mind of love towards His people. It involves no inten-
tion to deceive, and the discovery of this ' book of the law,'
lost in the careless period which intervened, was a genuine
discovery unattended by any element of fraud.
Once again, if the book of Chronicles contains not pure
history but the priestly view of the history, granted that
this priestly point of view was morally part of the divinely
intended education of the chosen people, even though its
intellectual method was as imperfect as ordinarily is the case
with the treatment of traditions in ' schools ' or religious
orders, in nations or churches or families, is there any a priori
reason why God, who used so much that was imperfect, should
not have inspired the record of this tradition ? Here again
we must emphasize that all that criticism requires of us is- to
recognise in the book of Chronicles the record of the history
as it became coloured in the priestly schools ; there is nothing
here of a morally unworthy sort from the point of view of
the contemporary conscience, but only the same features as
are noticeable in the record of tradition all the world over *.
Fraudulent dealing, forgery in literature, always involves the
conscious and deliberate use of methods calculated to impose
on others, methods other than those sanctioned by the literary
conscience of the time 2 .
No doubt a particular writer, like Wellhausen, may make a
bias hostile to the supernatural apparent in his use of the
1 A common feature in all tradi- tradition what is authoritative tends
tions is what Wellhausen describes to be represented as what always has
as the main characteristic of the been authoritative.
Chronicler, ' the timeless manner of 2 Thus the Pseudo-Isidorian De-
looking at things which is natural to cretals are properly called forgeries ;
him.' He ' figures the old Hebrew and the evidence of this would lie in
people as in exact conformity with the fact that the author could not
the pattern of the later Jewish com- have afforded to disclose the method
munity.' Proleg. to Hist, of Israel and circumstances of their produc-
(Edinburgh, 1885), PP- 190-193. In tion.
the Tenth Edition. xxxi
critical method, and may give in consequence an antitheo-
logical turn to his reconstruction of history ; just as many a
scientific writer has done with scientific facts and scientific
method. In view of this we must ' try the spirits ' and not
attribute too much force to the point of view of a particular
individual. But this will not be at all the same thing as
rejecting the modem method of criticism or repudiating those
results which are certainly accepted by many critics who are
as far as possible from rejecting the supernatural 1 .
5. No serious attempt has, I think, been made to show that
the view of the development of the Old Testament literature
which the modern critical schools, with great unanimity,
demand of us, is contrary to any determination of Church
authority. By this it is not meant that the theology of the
Church suggests this view: it is not the function of the
Church to advance literary knowledge, except indirectly ;
and thus the Church has not had the power to anticipate
the critical, any more than it had to anticipate the scientific
movement. The advance of knowledge comes in all depart-
ments through the natural processes of intellectual enquiry. It
is only now, in fact, that the critical problem is before the
Church ; but now that it is before the Church it does not seem
that the Church ought to have any more difficulty in wel-
coming it and assimilating it, than it has had in welcoming
and assimilating the legitimate claims of science.
With reference to the bearing of Church authority on the
present discussion, there are three points which I should wish
to urge. First, that the undivided Church never took action
1 Thus Riehm, whose position is ' the Pentateuch makes. Anyone who
described above on p. xx, has a noble reads it, so as to allow its contents
section (Einleit. pp. 349 ff.) on the to work upon his spirit, must receive
Pentateuch considered as the record the impression that a consciousness
.of a Revelation. The convict ion of the of God, such as is here expressed,
revelation of God is ascribed in part cannot be derived from flesh and
to ' the immediate impression which blood.'
LIBRARY i 'Y'S COLLEGE
xxxii Preface to
on the matter, in spite of an extravagant tendency to alle-
gorism in Origen and those who were influenced by him.
Secondly, that as a result of this the patristic theology
leaves a wide opening at least for what we may call the
modern way of regarding the opening chapters of Genesis.
Thus a Latin writer, of the fifth or sixth century, who gives
an interesting summary of the Catholic faith, and is clearly
nothing else but a recorder of accepted beliefs, after speaking
of the origin and fall of man and woman, continues thus:
'These things are known through God's revelation to His
servant Moses, whom He willed to be aware of the state and
origin of man, as the books which he produced testify. For all
the divine authority (i. e. the scriptural revelation) appears to
exist under such a mode as is either the mode of history
which narrates only what happened, or the mode of allegory
in such sense that it cannot represent the course of history,
or a mode made up of these two so as to remain both his-
torical and allegorical 1 .' A great deal more in the same
sense as this might be produced.
Thirdly, it must be urged that since the division of Chris-
tendom no part of the Church appears really to have tightened
the bond of dogmatic obligation. Our own formularies are of
course markedly free from definition on the subject, and the
refusal of the Eoman Church to define the scope of inspira-
tion, beyond the region of faith and morals, has been remark-
able 2 .
6. But does the authority of our Lord bind us to repudiate,
in loyalty to Him, the modern views of the origin of the Old
Testament books? On this subject I wish to express my
1 De fide Catholica. The treatise is of Cassiodorus, London, 1886, pp. 80-1.
ascribed to Boethius : see Boetii, 2 See the account in Manning's
Opuscida Sacra (Teubner Series), p. 178. Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost,
On the fresh evidence of the author- London, 1877, pp. 156-160, and p.
ship of those treatises supplied by the 166. Cf. also Newman's words below,
Anecdoton Holderi, see Hodgkin's Letters p. 350.
the Tenth Edition. xxxiii
sincere regret that I should have written so briefly in my essay
as to lay myself open to be misunderstood to suggest our
Lord's fallibility as a teacher. I trust that the passage, as it
has stood since the fourth edition 1 , will be at least recognised
as plain in its meaning and theologically innocent. I must
ask leave to defer to another occasion the fuller discussion of
this important subject in connection with the doctrine of the
Person of Christ. Meanwhile I would suggest that the longer
one thinks of it the more apparent it will become that any
hypothesis as to the origin of any one book of the Old Testa-
ment, which is consistent with a belief in its inspiration,must be
consistent also with our Lord having given it His authorisation.
If His Spirit could inspire it, He, in that Spirit, could give it
His recognition His recognition, that is to say, in regard to
its spiritual function and character. Thus as we scan care-
fully our Lord's use of the Old Testament books, we are
surely struck with the fact that nothing 2 in His use of them
depends on questions of authorship or date ; He appeals to
them in that spiritual aspect which abides through all changes
of literary theory their testimony to the Christ : ' Search
the Scriptures . . . they are they which testify of Me/ He
would thus lead men to ask about each book of the Old
Testament simply the question, What is the element of
teaching preparatory to the Incarnation, what is the tes-
timony to Christ, which it supplies ? I do not see how with
due regard to the self-limitation which all use of human forms
O
of thought and speech must on all showing have involved to
1 PP- 359~6o. lead the Pharisees to examine their
2 Nothing except, on the custom- own principles. Unless it be so in-
ary interpretation, His reference to terpreted it does seem to depend, as
Psalm ex. This does seem to lay an argument, on personal authorship,
stress on David's authorship, unless because unless it be by David, it seems
it be regarded, as it certainly seems very difficult to suppose it written in
to me fair to regard it, as a question, David's person. It would naturally
rather than as positive instruction at be a Psalm in which the King is
all a question simply calculated to addressed.
xxxiv Preface to
the Eternal Son, it can be a difficulty in the way of accepting
the modern hypothesis, that our Lord referred to the inspired
books under the only name by which His reference would have
been intelligible to His hearers. Unless He had violated the
whole principle of the Incarnation, by anticipating the slow
development of natural knowledge, He must have spoken of
the Deuteronornist as 'Moses 1 ,' as naturally as He spoke of
the sun 'rising.' Nor does there seem in fact any greater-
difficulty in His speaking of one who wrote ' in the spirit and
power ' of Moses as Moses, than in His speaking of one who,
according to the prophecy, came ' in the spirit and power of
Elias ' as himself, Elias. ' If ye will receive it, this is Elias.'
' Elias is already come V
Once more : if the Holy Spirit could use the tradition of
the flood to teach men about divine judgments, then our Lord
in the same Spirit can refer to the flood, for the same
purpose. It has however been recently denied that this
can be so, unless the tradition accurately represents history.
' I venture to ask,' Professor Huxley writes 3 , ' what sort of
value as an illustration of God's method of dealing with sin
has an account of an event that never happened 1 ' I should
like to meet this question by asking another. Has the story
of the rich man and Lazarus any value as an illustration of
God's method of dealing with men 1 ? Undoubtedly it has.
Now what sort of narrative is this ? Not a narrative of
events that actually happened, in the sense that there was a
particular beggar to whom our Lord was referring. The
narrative is a representative narrative 4 , a narrative of what is
1 S. John v. 46-47. with a single point.
2 S. Luke i. 17; S. Matt. xi. 14 ; * The proper name 'Lazarus' is
xvii. 1 2. presumably used because of its mean-
3 Nineteenth Century, July, 1890, p. 20. ing. It should be noticed that the
The bulk of his argument is directed story is not a parable proper like that
against a position different from of the Sower or the Prodigal Son.
mine. Here I am only concerned
the Tenth Edition. xxxv
constantly occurring under the form of a particular typical
incident. Now the narrative of the flood belongs to a quite
different class of literature, inasmuch as it is not due to any
deliberate action of imagination ; but it resembles our Lord's
story at least in being representative. It is no doubt based
on fact. The traditions of the flood in all races must run
back to a real occurrence. But the actual occurrence cannot
be exactly estimated. What we have in Genesis is a tradi-
tion used as a vehicle for spiritual teaching. As the story
is told it becomes, like that of Dives and Lazarus, a typical
narrative of what is again and again happening. Again and
again, as in the destruction of Jerusalem, or in the French
Revolution, God's judgments come on men for their sin :
again and again teachers of righteousness are sent to warn
of coming judgment and are ridiculed by a world which
goes on buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage,
till the flood of God's judgment breaks out and overwhelms
them. Again and again, through these great judgments there
emerges a remnant, a faithful stock, to be the fountain head
of a new and fresh development. The narrative of the flood
is a representative narrative, and our Lord, who used the
story of Dives and Lazarus, can use this too J .
VI.
Professor Huxley's article alluded to just now is- a somewhat
melancholy example of a mode of reasoning which one had
hoped had vanished from ' educated circles ' for ever that
namely which regards Christianity as a ' religion of a book '
1 It may be remarked that to regard there is every reason why ' the Gospel
' the flood ' as a representative or should have been preached to those
typical expression of a whole class of who died ' under God's physical
divine judgments, helps us in inter- judgments of old times, supposing
preting S. Peter's use of it in i Peter these, as we must suppose them, not to
iii. 19-20. There is no reason for an represent God's final moral judgment
exceptional treatment of those who on individuals : see I Peter iv. 6.
perished in one particular flood, but
C 2
xxxvi Preface to
in such sense that it is supposed to propose for men's accept-
ance a volume to be received in all its parts as on the same
level, and in the same sense, Divine. On the contrary,
Christianity is a religion of a Person. It propounds for our
acceptance Jesus Christ, as the revealer of the Father. The
test question of the Church to her catechumens has never
been: ' Dost thou believe the Bible 1 ?' but 'Dost thou believe
that Jesus Christ is the Son of God V If we do believe that,
then we shall further believe in the Bible : in the Old
Testament as recording how God prepared the way for
Christ : in the New Testament as recording how Christ lived
and taught, and containing the witness borne to Him by
His earthly friends and ministers. The Bible thus ' ought
to be viewed as not a revelation itself, but a record of the
proclaiming and receiving of a revelation, by a body which
is still existent, and which propounds the revelation to us,
namely the body of Christians commonly called the Church V
The Bible is the record of the proclamation of the revelation,
not the revelation itself. The revelation is in the Person of
Christ, and the whole stress therefore of evidential enquiry
should be laid upon the central question whether the Divine
claim made for Jesus Christ by the Church is historically
justified. The whole evidential battle of Christianity must
thus be fought out on the field of the New Testament, not of
the Old. If Christ be God, the Son of God, incarnate, as
the Creeds assert, Christianity is true. No one in that case
will find any permanent difficulty in seeing that in a most
real sense the Bible, containing both Old and New Testaments,
is an ' inspired volume.'
Now faith in the Godhead of our Lord is very far from being
1 These words are Bishop Steere's : It is (i) a criterion, not a teacher ;
see the Memoir of him by R. M. (2) a record of the proclamation of
Heanley, London, 1888, p. 404. He the revelation, not the revelation
admirably characterizes the true itself,
function of the Bible in the Church.
the Tenth Edition. xxxvii
a mere matter of ' evidences.' On this enough is said by
more than one writer in this volume 1 . But so far as ' historical
evidences' go, we have them in our generation in quite fresh
force and power. For our New Testament documents have
passed through a critical sifting and analysis of the most
trenchant and thorough sort in the fifty years that lie behind
us. From such sifting we are learning much about the
process through which they took their present shape. But in
all that is material we feel that this critical investigation has
only reassured us in asserting the historical truth of the
records on which our Christian faith rests. This reassurance
has been both as to the substance, and as to the quality of the
original apostolic testimony to Christ. As to its substance,
because the critical investigation justifies us in the confident
assertion more confident as the investigation has been more
thorough than ever before that the Christ of our four Gospels,
the Christ with His Divine claim and miraculous life-giving
power, the Christ raised from the dead the third day and
glorified at God's right hand, the Christ who is the Son of
God incarnate, is the original Jesus of Nazareth, as they beheld
Him and bore witness who had been educated in closest inter-
course with Him. We are reassured also as to the quality of
the apostolic testimony. In some ages testimony has been
careless so careless, so clouded with superstition and
credulity, as to be practically valueless. But in the apostles
we have men who knew thoroughly the value of testimony
and what depended upon it, who bore witness to what they
had seen, and in all cases, save in the exceptional case of
S. Paul, to what they had seen over a prolonged period of
years ; whose conviction about Christ had been gradually
formed in spite of much ' slowness of heart,' and even persistent
'unbelief ; formed also in the face of Sadducean scepticism and
in the consciousness of what would be said against them ;
1 See pp. 29 S., 229 ff., 337 ff.
xxxviii Preface to
formed into such irresistible strength and unanimity by the
solid impress of facts that nothing could shake it, either in the
individual or in the body. Such testimony does all for us
that testimony can do in such a case. It supports externally
and justifies a traditional faith, which is commended to us at
the same time internally by its self-evidencing power. And
with that faith as the strength of our life we can await with
confidence the issue of minor controversies.
It may be hoped that the discussion which this book has
raised may do good in two ways.
It may enable people to put the Bible into its right place
in the fabric of their Christian belief. It may help to make
it plain that in the full sense the Christian's faith is faith
only in a Person, and that Person Jesus Christ : that to justify
this faith he needs from the Scriptures only the witness of
some New Testament documents, considered as containing
history : while his belief in the Bible as inspired is, speak-
ing logically, subsequent to his belief in Christ, and even,
when we include the New Testament, subsequent to his
belief in the Church, as the Body of Christ, rather than
prior to it 1 .
There is also another good result to which we may hope to
see the present controversy minister the drawing of a clear
line in regard to development between the Old Testament
and the New. For all modern criticism goes to emphasize
the gradualness of the process through which, under the
Old Covenant, God prepared the way for Christ. Now
all that can be brought to light in this sense, the Church
can await with indifference from a theological point of view,
because it is of the essence of the Old Testament to be
1 Cp. pp. 338-341, where this is ex- Christ, before they take any heed of
plained. The ' logical ' order of belief the Church. But to feel the power
is often no doubt not the order of of inspiration is a different thing
experience. The Bible can draw from having reasoned grounds for
men to itself, and through itself to calling certain books inspired.
the Tenth Edition. xxxix
the record of a gradual self-disclosure of God continuous and
progressive till the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It is,
on the other hand, of the essence of the New Testament
revelation that, as given in Christ and proclaimed by His
apostles, it is, as far as this world is concerned, in its
substance, final and adequate for all ages. It is this, because
of its essential nature. If Christ is ' the Word made flesh/
the ' Son of God made Son of Man,' then finality essentially
belongs to this disclosure of Godhead and this exhibition of
manhood. ' He that hath seen Him hath seen the Father,'
and he that hath seen Him hath seen perfect man, hath seen
our manhood in its closest conceivable relation to God, at
the goal of all possible spiritual and moral development.
All our growth henceforth can only be a growth into ' the
measure of the stature of His fulness' a growth into the
understanding and possession of Him who was once mani-
fested. Finality is of the essence of the New Covenant, as
gradual communication of truth was of the Old.
If these two results are obtained, we shall not be liable any
more to be asked ' where we are going to stop ' in admitting
historical uncertainty. ' If you admit so much uncertainty
in the Old Testament, why do you not admit the same in the
New ? ' We shall not be liable to be asked this question, be-
cause it will be apparent that the starting-point as of enquiry,
so of security, lies in the New Testament and then proceeds
to extend itself to the Old. For us, at least, the Old Testa-
ment depends upon the New, not the New upon the Old'.
Nor shall we be liable any more to be asked, ' Why, if you
admit so much development in actual substance in the truth
revealed under the Old Covenant, cannot you admit a similar
augmentation under the New 1 ?' This question will be pre-
vented, because it will be apparent that the essential condi-
tions are different in the two cases. Progress in Christianity
is always reversion to an original and perfect type, not
LIBRARY ST. GARY'S COLLEGE
xl Preface to the Tenth Edition.
addition to it : it is progress only in the understanding of the
Christ. ' Regnum tuum, Domine, regmim omnium saeculorum ;
et dominatio tua in omni generatione et generationem.'
C. G.
PUSEY HOUSE,
July, 1890.
The chief changes of any importance in this edition are (i) the addition
of a note at the end of the first essay ; (2) the alteration of a few sentences
on pp. 289, 296-7 of Essay VII ; (3) the alteration of note 2 on p. 345 and
note i on p. 346 in Essay VIII ; (4) the expansion on p. 357, 6 of the
opening sentences ; (5) the addition of an appendix on The Christian Doctrine
of Sin.
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS.
FAITH.
PACK
I. Faith ; its situation ; its behaviour ; challenged by novel
experiences; alarmed at its own perplexity . . . 3-5
Yet why alarmed ? 5
Perplexity consistent with faith, when faith is stripped of its
habitual corroborations from without : and summoned to
submit itself to internal observation 5~8
For faith is an elemental act of personal self: and, therefore,
like all such acts, e. g. of thought ; will ; love ; is, neces-
sarily, incapable of offering itself for scientific examina-
tion 8-1 1
II. What is faith ? 11-12
The motion in us of our sonship in the Father ; the conscious
recognition, and realization, of our inherent filial ad-
hesion to God 13-1$
This intimacy of relationship is capable of indefinite growth,
of ' supernatural ' development 15
The history of faith is the gradual discovery of this increas-
ing intimacy 16-18
The demand for faith is (a) universal, for all are sons ;
(b) urgent, as appealing to a vital fact ; (e) tolerant, as
reposing on existent fact 18-21
III. Faith, an act of basal personality, at the root of all out-
flowing activities ; is present, as animating force, within
all natural faculties. When summoned out, into positive
or direct action on its own account = Religion, i. e. the
emergence, into open manifestation, of Fatherhood and
sonship, which lie hidden within all secular life . . 21-28
Faith, an energy of basal self, using, as instruments and
material, the sum of faculties; therefore, each faculty,
separately, can give but a partial vindication of an integral
act of faith . 28-29
xlii Synopsis of Contents.
PACK
This applies to Reason ; compare its relation to acts of
affection, imagination, chivalry ; all such acts are acts
of Venture, using evidence of reason in order to go beyond
evidence 30-34
So faith makes use of all knowledge, but is, itself, its own
motive. It uses, as its instrument, every stage of science ;
but is pledged to no one particular stage .... 34-38
IV. Faith, simple adhesion of soul to God; yet, once begun, it
has a history of its own ; long, complicated, recorded in
Bible, stored up in Creeds 38-41
This involves difficulties, intricacies, efforts ; all this, the
necessary consequence of our being born in the 'last
days' 41^45
Yet to the end, faith remains an act of personal and spiritual
adhesion 45-46
V. Faith, not only covers a long past, but anticipates the future ;
it pledges itself ahead, e. g. in the case of ' ordination vows.'
Such pledges justified, because the act of faith is personal ;
and the object of faith is final, i.e. 'Christ, the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever' 46-54
II.
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD.
I. Object of the essay and attitude assumed .... 57-59
II. A broad contrast between the God of Philosophy and the
God of religion ......... 59-60
Attempts to get rid of the opposition (i) by division of
territory ; (2) by confusion of terms 60-63
III. Religion demands that God shall be Personal, and stand in a
moral relationship with man ...... 63-65
IV. Growth and purification of the religious conception of
God 65-68
V. Religion and Morals. Collision between the two in Greece,
and its consequences. Synthesis of religion and morality
among the Jews : and in Christianity .... 68-7.8
Subsequent collisions between religion and morals within
the Christian Church. The Reformation a moral protest.
Immorality of its later developments. Modern protest
against these 78-82
Synopsis of Contents. xliii
FA> ; i.
VI. Religion and Reason. Protest of Greek Philosophy against
Polytheism. Christian Theology the meeting- point of
Jewish religion and Greek Philosophy .... 82-86
What Theology is. Objection to it from the side of (i) re-
ligion, (2) Philosophy 86-90
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity an appeal to the
reason 90-91
Its answer to the speculative problems of Greek thought
(i) as to what unity is ; (2) as to the immanence of rea-
son in nature 9 I- 95
The witness of the Fathers 95
The doctrine of the Trinity the true Monotheism; the
doctrine of the Logos as personal yet immanent . . 95-96
VII. The Christian doctrine of God why challenged in the
present day ......... 96
The deism of the last century. The new science of
nature. Evolution restores the truth of the Divine
immanence which deism denied. Pantheistic reaction . 96-102
The Christian doctrine of God the safeguard of rational
religion against deism and pantheism .... 102-103
VIII. The so-called 'proofs' of the existence of God . . 103-104
Parallel between the belief in God and the belief in nature 104-107
Verification in experience the only 'proof.' Eeason in both
the interpreter of Faith 107-109
III.
THE PKOBLEM OF PAIN.
The problem of pain admits of no new treatment, but the
attempt to use it as an argument against Christianity calls
for a recapitulation of what may be said on the other side 113
Pain is (i) animal, (2) human.
(1) Animal pain is a thing of which we can only form
imaginative conjectures ; and these, besides being
liable to exaggeration, are not of a nature to form
premisses for argument 113-116
(2) Common sense tells us that human pain contributes as
(a) punitive, (&) purgatorial, (c) prophylactic, to the
development of the individual and the race . . . 1 1 6- 1 19
Natural religion further views it as the necessary condi-
tion of approach, by sinful beings, to the Divine ; and
looks for its fuller explanation to a future existence . 119-122
Synopsis of Contents.
Christianity carries on the view of natural religion, and
sees in pain and suffering :
(a) The antidote to sin 122-124
(b) The means of individual and social progress . 124-125
(c) The source of sympathy with man . . . 125
(d) The secret of union with God .... 125-126
IV.
PREPARATION IN HISTORY FOR CHRIST.
General considerations on the study of the historical prepara-
tion, as part of the study of the Incarnation . . . 129-133
Special value of such study in the present age of historical and
scientific method which
may be able to gauge finally the value of naturalist
theories of the origin of Christianity . . . 133-134
may find its own congenial ' signs ' in the beauty of
manifold preparing process ; in the wonder of an
apparently unique convergence of lines of prepara-
tion 134-137
I. General preparation in the world at large :
(1) In the shaping of its external order .... 138-142
(2) Through its inward experiences of
Failure 142-146
Progress 146-150
II. Special preparation in Israel :
(1) The singularity of Israel's external position at the
critical moment of the Christian Era . . . 150-156
(2) The paradox of its inward character . . . . 156-159
(3) The peculiarinfluences which had made itwhat it was: 159-160
a. Prophecy 160-167
b. The Law 167-169
c. The Course of its History 170-175
III. The independence of the two preparations; the paradox
of their fulfilment in one Christ 175-178
V.
THE INCARNATION AND DEVELOPMENT.
I. The theory of evolution has recalled our minds to the
' cosmical significance ' of the Incarnation, which was a
prominent thought in (i) the early (2) mediaeval church 181-187
Synopsis of Contents. xlv
PAGE
II. Theology and Science move in different but parallel planes :
one gives the meaning, the other the method of creation 187-188
Thus the doctrine of 'the Eternal Word' is compatible
with all the verified results of scientific teaching on
(1) energy l % 8
(2) teleology 188-193
(3) origin and antiquity of man .... 193-195
(4) mental and moral evolution .... 195-199
(5) the relation of philosophy to Theology . . 199-202
(6) the comparative study of religions . . . 202-205
while in the Christian view, it both illuminates and is
illuminated by those results 205-206
III. But when the planes intersect, and we say ' the Word was
made flesh,' we are said to traverse experience . . 207
(1) This charge is only a critical presumption . . 207-208
(2) All novelties traverse past experience . . . 208
(3) Moral experience is as real as physical . . 208-209
(4) The Incarnation harmonizes with our moral ex-
perience .... 209-210
(5) By reorganizing morality it reorientates cha-
racter 2I1
(6) It has therefore a true relation to all phases of
human life 211-214
VI.
THE INCARNATION AS THE BASIS OF DOGMA.
I. The principle of Dogma is not to be attacked or defended
on a priori grounds. The real question is whether the
Incarnation, as asserted, is true or false. And this is a
question for evidence 217-220
Even scientific 'dogmata' differ less from religious dogmas
than is sometimes supposed, in that (a) both are received
on evidence, (6) both require an experimental verifica-
tion, or (in so far as either are still held along with
error) correction .... 220-224
The acceptance of dogmatic truth is essentially reasonable.
Its claims to (a) authority, (6) finality, are not the
ground for accepting it, but a necessary outcome of the
facts accepted in it 224-229
II. The evidence for the Incarnation is as many-sided as
human life ....... 229-233
Synopsis of Contents.
But primarily historical. The crucial fact is the Resur-
rection 233-236
Everything is involved in the answer to ' What think ye of
Christ? ' 236-238
.t is an error to think of the belief of the Church as an
edifice built up in the age of the Councils . . . 238-239
The decisions of the Councils represent only a growth in
intellectual precision through experience of error . . 239-245
The creed in its whole substance is the direct outcome of
the fact of the Incarnation 245-250
III. The dogmatic creed is to be distinguished from the body
of theological literature which comments upon it . . 250
Theological comment is variable : it may err, it may
develop. Herein lie most of the disputes of technical,
and the advances of popular, theology .... 250-255
Even the creeds are human on the side of their language . 255-258
IV. The 'damnatory clauses,' though easily misunderstood,
really mean what is both true, and necessary . . . 258-260
Christian dogmatism is after all devotion to truth, for
truth's sake 260-261
V. The modern reading of the Scriptures without miracle
and the Christ without Godhead depends for its justi-
fication upon the truth of an hypothesis .... 262-266
But this hypothesis explains away, instead of explaining,
the evidence ; while it is itself incapable of proof . . 266-270
Historical reality is essential to the truth of the Incar-
nation. Mere spiritualism ends in unreality . . . 270-272
VII.
THE ATONEMENT.
I. Sin and sacrifice in relation to the Atonement . . . 275-276
1. Twofold character of sin :
(a) A state of alienation from God .... 276-277
(b) A state of guilt 277-279
2. Twofold character of sacrifice :
(a) The expression of man's original relation to God 279-280
(6) The expiation of sin, and propitiation of wrath . 280-281
Both aspects shewn in the ceremonies of the
Mosaic Law 281-282
3. Inadequacy of man's offerings to satisfy sense of
personal guilt 282-285
Synopsis of Contents. xlvii
II. The death of Christ answers to the demands of the sense
of sin and of the desire for forgiveness . . . 285
1. Christ's death a sacrifice of propitiation :
() Of the wrath of God, which is
(1) the hostility of Divine Nature to sin . . 285-287
(2) the expression of the eternal law of right-
eousness ....... 288
(b) By virtue
(1) Of the obedience manifested by Him . . 289-290
(2) Of His recognition of the Divine justice . 290
(3) Of His death as the necessary form of both 290-292
The propitiatory character of His death
shewn
(i.) By the general relation between
physical and spiritual death . . 292-293
(ii.) Because of the nature of Him who
endured it 293-294
(iii.) Because of the results flowing from it 294
(c) On behalf of men, for He is our Representative
(1) As Victim, by His perfect humanity our
sinbearer 294-297
(2) As Priest, able to offer what man could not 297-298
The true vicariousness of His Priesthood . 298
2. Christ's death the source of life 298-299
(a) As delivering us from sin 299
(b) As bestowing new life 299
(c) As uniting us to God 299
But only as connected with and issuing in the
Resurrection and Ascension .... 300-301
.'. Christ's death in relation to man's responsibility . 301
(a) The Atonement, being forgiveness, must remit
some of the consequences of sin . . 301-302
(6) But our mystical union with Christ ensures our
share in the sacrifice ..... 302-303
(1) Not in its propitiation, which we can only
plead 33-34
(2) But by faith which accepts it and recognises
its justice 34-35
(3) And by following Him in obedience through
suffering 3S-37
III. Consideration of certain erroneous statements of the doc-
trine 37
1. The implied divergence of Will in the Godhead . 307-308
xlviii Synopsis of Contents.
PAGE
2. The view of Redemption as wrought for us, not in us 308
3. The view that Christ redeemed us by taking our
punishment instead of us . . . . . 309
(1) The essential punishment of alienation He could
not bear 309
(2) The penal sufferings which He bore are not re-
mitted to us 309
(3) But He bore them that we, like Him, may bear
them sacrificially, not as punishment . . 309-310
IV. Short summary.
1. The death of Christ as propitiatory ) tested by
2. His death as transforming pain and death ) experience 310-312
VIII.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND INSPIRATION.
Christianity is an experienced or manifested life : because its
essence is the possession of the Spirit, and the Spirit is
Life 3IS-W
I. The Holy Spirit the life-giver:
In nature 317-318
In man 318-319
In the gradual recovery of man from sin . . . 319-320
In Christ 320-321
In the Church 321-322
His work in the Church :
1. Social or ecclesiastical 322-323
2. Nourishing individuality : both of character through
the Sacraments, and of judgment through authority 323-327
3. Consecrating the whole of nature, material as well
as spiritual ........ 327-328
4. By a gradual method 328
Imperfection of the Old Testament . . . . 328-331
of the Church 33I-33 2
The Holy Spirit personally present and continually opera-
tive in the Church 332-333
II. The Theology of the Holy Spirit. Real but limited know-
ledge through revelation 333~334
He is (a) distinct in Person but very God, (6) proceeding
from the Father and the Son, (c) One in essence with the
Father and the Son 334-335
The Doctrine of the Trinity not Tritheistic . . . 335-336
Synopsis of Contents. xlix
PAGE
III. The Inspiration of Holy Scripture. Fatal results of not
keeping this in context with the rest of the Holy Spirit's
work in the Church 337~34
1. It is an article of the Faith, not among its bases . . 340-341
2. It is a necessary article 341
3. Its certain and primary meaning, as seen by examina-
tion of the books of the Old and New Testaments . 341-348
4. Its practical meaning and obligation . 349-35 1
Questions raised as to its meaning by Old Testament
criticism :
(a) While the Old Testament is, like the New Testa-
ment, certainly and really historical, can it admit
of elements of idealism in the narrative ? . . 351-354
(&) Can it admit of dramatic composition ? . . 354-356
(c) Can it admit the presence of primitive myths? . 356-357
The Church not prevented from admitting these to be open
questions either :
(1) By any dogmatic definitions of inspiration . . 357-358
(2) By our Lord's language as to the Old Testament . 358-360
We may expect the criticism of the Old Testament, like
that of the New, to deepen and enlarge, not impair, our
reverence for the ' Word of God ' 360-362
IX.
THE CHURCH.
The Church the final satisfaction of certain social instincts, viz.
the need of co-operation for life, for knowledge, and for
worship .......... 365
These instincts are :
(1) Universal 365-368
(2) Embodied in Judaism, and combined with the
principle of God's election of one people to be a
source of blessing to others 368-370
(3) Fulfilled in the Incarnation 370-372
I. The Church as the centre of spiritual life : oifers its bless-
ings, without limitation, to all who are willing to submit
to spiritual discipline, and combines them in a brother-
hood of common service 37 2 ~375
Hence it is, of necessity :
(1) ApmWebody 375~377
(2) One, both in its spiritual life and in external or-
ganization. This unity implied in the New
d
1 Synopsis of Contents.
PAGE
Testament, and explained in the second cen-
tury, as centering in the Episcopate. The
Apostolical Succession is thus the pledge of
historic continuity, and has always been the
mark of the English Church. Loyalty to the
Church is no narrowing of true sympathy . 377-384
II. The Church as the Teacher of Truth : primarily by bearing
witness to truths revealed to it ; secondarily by inter-
preting the relation of these truths to each other . . 384-387
Hence :
(1) It witnesses to the reality of central spiritual
truths and teaches them authoritatively to its
members 387
(2) It trains its members to a rational apprehension of
these truths 387-388
(3) It leaves great freedom on points not central . 388-389
(4) It protects the truths themselves from decay . . 389-390
III. The Church the home of worship : worship the Godward
expression of its life : its highest expression in the
Eucharist : its priestly work earned out from the first by
a special class of ministers 39~393
Each aspect of the Church's work completed by the co-
operation of the Blessed Dead 394
Causes of the apparent failure of the Church . . . 394-400
Need of its witness and work in modern times . . . 400-402
X.
SACRAMENTS.
Comprehensiveness a characteristic distinction of fruitful and
enduring work : which will here be traced in the sacra-
mental work of the Church ; with incidental reference
to the evidential import of the inner coherence of Chris-
tianity, and its perfect aptness for humanity . . . 405-408
I. Christianity claims to be a way of life for men : whose
nature and life involve two elements ; which are usually
distinguished as bodily and spiritual .... 408-409
The distinction of these two elements real; their
union essential 409-411
It is to be inquired whether this complexity of man's
nature is recognised and provided for in the Church of
Christ 411
Synopsis of Contents.
\\
II. Grounds for anticipating that it would be so :
(1) In the very fact of the Incarnation; and more
particularly 411-413
(2) In the character of the preparatory system whose
forecasts it met 413-414
(3) And in certain conspicuous features of Christ's
ministry 414-415
The work of Sacraments to be linked with this anticipa-
tion 415
III. The prominence of the Sacramental principle in Christ's
teaching : to be estimated with reference to the previous .
convictions of those whom He taught .... 415-416
There is thus found :
(1) Abundant evidence that the general principle of
Sacraments is accepted, to be a characteristic of
Christianity 416-417
(2) The authoritative appointment of particular ex-
pressions for this general principle :
Expressions foreshown in preparatory history:
anticipated in preliminary discourses : ap-
pointed with great solemnity and em-
phasis 417-418
[These expressions such as may be seen to be in-
trinsically appropriate, ethically helpful and
instructive, and safeguards against indivi-
dualism.] 418-420
(3) An immediate recognition in the Apostolic Church
of the force of this teaching, and of the necessary
prominence of Sacraments ..... 420-421
IV. The correspondence between the ministry of Sacraments
and the complex nature of man appears in three ways :
since :
(1) The dignity and the spiritual capacity of the
material order is thus vindicated and maintained :
so that unreal and negative spirituality is pre-
cluded, and provision is made for the hallowing
of stage after stage in a human life . . . 422-426
(2) The claim of Christianity to penetrate the bodily
life is kept in its due prominence by the very
nature of Sacraments : the redemption of the
body is foreshown ; and perhaps begun . . 426-429
da
Synopsis of Contents.
PAGE
(3) I he evidences of mystery in human nature, its
moments of unearthliness, its immortal longings,
its impatience of finite satisfaction, being recog-
nised and accounted for by the doctrine of Grace
are met by Sacraments : and led in an ordered
progress towards a perfect end .... 429-433
XI.
CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS.
INTRODUCTORY. The twofold problem of Christianity in its
relation to human society
(i) To consecrate ; (2) to purify 437-440
I. The Church is neutral as to natural differences, e.g. the
form of government, autocratic or democratic leaning . 440-442
II. The Church supplements the moral influence of the State,
in respect of
(1) The appeal to higher motives .... 443-445
e.g. as to the duties of
(a) Governors and governed .... 446-45 1
(6) Owners of property 451-452
(2) The support of the weak against the strong . . 452-455
(3) The maintenance of religion 455-461
III. The Church purifies the whole social life of mankind
(1) By spreading Christian ideas .... 461-462
(2) By maintaining the Christian type of character . 462-463
CONCLUSION. The Church appeals to deeper needs than the
State and is therefore fundamentally Catholic, and only
incidentally national 463-464
XII.
CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
General characteristics of the Christian ethical system . . 467-468
Dogmatic postulates :
(i) Doctrine of God : God a Personal and Ethical
469-470
Synopsis of Contents. liii
PAOE
(2) Doctrine of Man : his ideal nature ; his destiny as
related to the good through conscience and
freedom ; his present condition . . . 470-476
(3) Doctrine of Christ : Catholic view of His Person . 476
I. Christ's revelation of the Highest Good .... 476-480
The Kingdom of God : twofold meaning of the term . 477-479
Christian view of the world 479-480
II. The Moral Law ; its authority, sanctions, and content . 480-489
The basis of obligation found in the idea of personal
relationship between God and Man .... 480-482
The sanctions, and motives of Christian Morality . 482-484
The Law of Duty embraced in the decalogue . . 484-489
III. Christ the pattern of character 489-504
Conditions required in the perfect example . . 490-491
Christ the pattern of filial dependence, obedience, and
love 491-494
Virtuous action seen to imply a harmony of the dif-
ferent elements in personality, postulating a three-
fold virtuous principle supematurally imparted . 494-496
Christian character : the Christian personality in its
relation :
(1) To God Christian Wisdom 497-498
(2) To Man Christian Justice 498-501
(3) To Self Christian Temperance .... 501-502
(4) To the hindrances of environment Christian
Fortitude 502-503
IV. Christ the source of the recreation of character . . 504-512
Claim of Christianity to recreate character . . 504-505
Dogmatic truths implied in the recreative process . 505-506
Holiness dependent on a permanent relation to
Christ 506
The Church a school of character, and sphere of indi-
vidual discipline ....... 506-508
Christian ascetics their ground in reason, and effect
on character 509-512
V. The consummation of God's kingdom .... 512-518
The intermediate stage 513
The final stage of glory :
(i) The kingdom to be finally manifested . . 513-514
(ii) and purified through judgment . . . 514
Extent and limits of the final triumph of good . 514-516
liv Synopsis of Contents.
PAGE
Perfection of human personality : the perfect state
one of
harmony 516-517
glory 517
blessedness 517
and fellowship in a moral community . . . 517
VI. Conclusion : relation of Christian Ethics to the products of
civilization, to individual character, to social life . . 518-520
APPENDIX I. ON SOME ASPECTS or CHKISTIAN DUTY . . 521-525
APPENDIX II. ON THE CHEISTIAN DOCTKINE or SIN . . 526-538
I.
FAITH.
HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND.
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
I.
FAITH.
I. IN proposing to consider the origin and growth of faith,
we have a practical, and not a merely theoretical, aim. We
are thinking of the actual problems which are, at this moment,
encompassing and hindering faith : and it is because of their
urgency and their pressure, that we find it worth while to
go back upon our earliest beginnings, in order to ask what
Faith itself means. For only through an examination of its
nature, its origin, and its structure, will it be possible for us
to sift the questions which beset us, and to distinguish those
to which Faith is bound to give an answer from those which
it can afford to let alone.
We set out then on our quest, in the mind of those who
have felt the trouble that is in the air. Even if we our-
selves be not of their number, yet we all suffer from their
hesitation : we all feel the imparted chill of their anxieties.
For we are of one family : and the sickness, or depression of
some, must affect the whole body. All of us, even the most
confident, are interested in the case of those who are fearing
for themselves, as they sadly search their own hearts, and
ask, ' What is it to believe ? Do I know what it is to be-
lieve ? Have I, or have I not, that which can be called
" faith " 1 How can I be sure ? What can I say of myself? '
Such questions as these are haunting and harassing many
among us who find themselves facing the Catholic Creed,
with its ring of undaunted assurance, with its unhesitating
claim to unique and universal supremacy, and contrast with
this their own faint and tentative apprehension of the strong
truths, which are so confidently asserted. Such men and
B 2
4 The Religion of the Incarnation.
women are anxious and eager to number themselves among
those that believe : but can they call this temper ' belief,'
which is so far below the level of the genuine response which
those Creeds obviously expect 1 ? Where is the blitheness of
faith 1 Where is its unshaken conviction ? Where is its
invincible simplicity 1 ? Why is it that they only succeed in
moving forward with such painful indecision?
Now, it is to this temper that this essay is addressed. It
does not aim at convicting a hostile disbelief, but at succour-
ing a distressed faith. And this it does under the conviction
that, in so doing, it is responding to the peculiar character
and needs of the situation.
For the urgency, the peril of the hour, lies, not so much in
the novelty, or force, of the pressure that is brought to bear
against faith, as in the behaviour of faith itself under the
pressure. What has happened is, not that faith has been
confounded, but that it has been challenged. It has been
challenged by new social needs, by strange developments of
civilisation, by hungers that it had not yet taken into account,
by thirsts that it had not prepared itself to satisfy. It has
been challenged by new scientific methods, wholly unlike its
familiar intellectual equipment ; by new worlds of facts opened
to its astonishment through discoveries which have changed
the entire look of the earth ; by immense masses of novel
material, which it has been suddenly and violently required
to assimilate ; by strange fashions of speech in science and
history ; by a babel of ' unknown tongues ' in all departments
of learning and literature.
Faith is under the pressure of this challenge : and the
primary question is, how will it behave ? What is it going
to say, or do, in face of this exciting transformation which
has passed over the entire surface of our intellectual scenery ?
How will it deal with the situation 1 ? Will it prove itself
adequate to the crisis 1 To what extent can it afford to sub-
mit to the transforming process which has already operated
upon the mind and the imagination? If it submit, can it
survive ? And in what condition ? with what loss, or damage,
or change ? On every side these challenges reach it ; they beat
i. Faith. 5
at its doors ; they arrive in pelting haste ; they clamour for
immediate solutions.
Now faith, under these rapid and stormy challenges, is apt
to fall into panic. For this, surely, is the very meaning of
a panic a fear that feeds upon itself. Men in a panic are
frightened at finding themselves afraid. So now with faith ;
it is terrified at its own alarm. How is it (it asks itself)
that it should find itself baffled and timorous ? If faith were
faith, would it ever lose its confidence 1 To be frightened is
to confess itself false : for faith is confidence in God, Who
can never fail. How can faith allow of doubt or hesitation 1
Surely for faith to hesitate, to be confused, is to deny its
very nature. Thus many anxious and perplexed souls retreat
before their own perplexities. Because their faith is troubled,
they distrust and abandon their faith. The very fact that
it is in distress becomes an argument against it.
It is at this point, and because of this particular peril that
we are urgently required to consider very seriously the nature
and conditions of faith. For our panic arises from our as-
sumption that faith is of such a nature, that the perplexity,
into which, now and again, we find ourselves thrown, must
be impossible to it, must be incompatible with it. Now, is
this so? Ought we to expect of faith that its confidence
should never fail it that its light should be always decisive 1
Is faith incriminated by the mere fact that it is in difficulties '?
Let us, first, consider what has occurred. Perhaps the situa-
tion itself, if we quietly review it, will give a reason why it
is that, just at the moment when we most need vigour and
assurance, we should find ourselves stripped of all that tends
to reassure.
For the peculiarity of the disturbance which we have got to
encounter lies in this, that it has removed from us the very
weapons by which we might hope to encounter it. Faith's
evidential material is all corroborative and accumulative ; it
draws it from out of an external world, which can never
wholly justify, or account for the internal reality, yet which
can so group itself, that from a hundred differing lines, it offers
indirect and parenthetic and convergent witness of that which
6 The Religion of the Incarnation.
is, itself, beyond the reach of external proof. It is this gradual
grouping of an outer life into that assorted perspective in
which it offers the most effective corroboration of the inner
truth, which faith slowly accomplishes upon the matter which
human science presents to it. When once the grouping is
achieved, so that the outer world, known under certain
scientific principles, tallies harmoniously with its inner con-
victions, faith feels secure. The external life offers it pictures,
analogies, metaphors all echoing and repeating the inter-
nal world. Faith beholds itself mirrored : and, so echoed, so
mirrored, it feels itself in possession of corroborating evidences.
But the present scientific confusion seems to have shattered
the mirror to have broken up the perspective to have dis-
solved the well-known groupings. It is true, as some of the
essays which follow will try to show, that the convulsion of
which we speak, lies, chiefly, in a change of position, or of
level ; so that great masses of the matter, now thrown into
confusion, will be found to compose themselves afresh, under
the newer conditions of review, and will appear again as part
and parcel of the scientific scenery. It is a change of perspec-
tive more than anything else. But, no doubt, such a change is
just of the character to upset us, to disturb us ; for, during
the change, while shifting from the old position to the new, we
are in the very chaos of confusion ; everything seems, for the
moment, to be tumbling about around us : the entire scene
grows unsteady ; though, indeed, when once we have got our
feet firmly placed at the new level of vantage, much, that once
was familiar, is discovered to be back again in its place,
looking much the same as of old. It is the first shock of
this enforced transition which is so calculated to terrify : as
when, for instance, men see their habitual reliance on the
evidence for design in nature, which had been inherited from
Paley, yield, and vanish, under the review of the facts with
which the theory of evolution acquaints them. What they
feel is, that their familiar mode of interpreting their faith,
of justifying it, of picturing it, has abruptly been torn from
them. That which once seemed to evidence it in the outer
world, has ceased to be accepted or trusted. The habitual
i. Faith. 7
ways of argument, the accepted assumptions, which they had
hitherto used as their supports and their instruments have
been withdrawn have become obsolete. Faith is thrown back
on itself, on its own inherent, naked vitality ; it is robbed for
the moment of that sense of solidity and security, which forti-
fies and refreshes it, when the outer world of natural facts,
and the inner world of intellect and fancy, all corroborate its
confidence in itself, by harmonious attestations of its validity.
The old world of things had been brought into this adaptation
with the principles of belief. Faith was at home in it, and
looked out over it with cheerfulness, and moved about it with
freedom. But that old world is gone ; and the new still lies
untested, unsorted, unverified, unassimilated, unhandled. It
looks foreign, odd, remote. Faith finds no obvious corrobora-
tions in it : there, where it used to feel buttressed and warm,
it now feels chilly and exposed l .
This is the first consequence, and it is serious enough in itself
to provoke alarm. Faith cannot be at ease or confident, until
the outer world responds to its own convictions ; and yet ease
and confidence are exactly what it is challenged to exhibit.
And then, when a man, under this sense of fear, de-
prived of external testimonies, attempts to exhibit, to evoke,
to examine, his inner conviction, in its inherent and vital
character, as it is in itself, unsupported by adventitious aids,
he is astonished at his own difficulty in discovering or dis-
closing it. Where is it all fled that which he had called his
faith"? He had enjoyed it, had relied on it, had again and
again asserted it in word and deed : and now, when he wants
to look at it, when he is summoned to produce it, when he is
challenged to declare its form and fashion; he finds himself
dazed, bewildered, searching helplessly for that which ever
escapes him, grasping at a fleeting shadow, which baffles his
efforts to endow it with fixity and substance. And, so finding,
he grows yet more desperately alarmed : it seems to him that
he has been self-deceived, betrayed, abandoned. He is bitterly
sensitive to the sharp contrast between the triumphant
solidity with which scientific facts bear down upon him,
1 Cf. on all this, an excellent statement in Mark Pattison's Sermons. Serm. 7.
8 The Religion of the Incarnation.
certified, undeniable, substantial, and the vague, shifty, in-
distinct phantom, into which his conviction vanishes as soon
as he attempts to observe it in itself, or draw it out for
public inspection.
Yet, if we consider what faith signifies, we shall see at once
that this contrast ought to carry with it no alarm. It is a
contrast which follows on the very nature of faith. If we had
understood its nature, we could never have expected it to dis-
close itself under the same conditions as those which govern
the observation of scientific facts. Faith is an elemental
energy of the soul, and the surprise that we are undergoing
at not being able to bring it under direct observation, is only
an echo of the familiar shock with which we learn that science
has ransacked the entire bodily fabric of man, and has nowhere
come across his soul ; or has searched the heavens through and
through with its telescope, and has seen no God. We are up-
set for a moment when first we hear this ; and then, we recover
ourselves as we recollect that, if God be what we believe Him
to be, immaterial and spiritual, then He would cease to be
Himself, if He were visible through a telescope : and that if
the spirit of man be what we believe it to be, that is the very
reason why no surgeon's knife can ever arrive at it.
And, as with the soul, so with all its inherent and essential
acts. They are what it is : they can no more be visible than
it can. How can any of the basal intuitions, on which our
knowledge rests, present themselves to our inspection in the
guise of external and phenomenal facts ? That which observes
can never, strictly speaking, observe itself. It can never look
on at itself from outside, or view itself as one among the mul-
titude of things that come under its review. How can it ? It
is itself the organ of vision : and the eye cannot see its own
power of seeing. This is why natural science, which is an
organised system of observation, finds that its own observing
mind is absolutely and totally outside its ken. It can take
stock of the physiological condition of thoughts or of feelings ;
but they themselves, in their actual reality, are all rigidly
shut out from the entire area of scientific research. Wherever
they begin, it ends ; its methods abruptly fail. It possesses
i. Faith. 9
no instrument by which to make good its advance further.
For the only instrument which it knows how to use, and
by which alone it can search, and examine, is itself the
object which it desires to submit to examination. But if
it is to be examined, who, and what, is to conduct the ex-
amination? The observing mind that turns round to ex-
plore itself, carries itself round as it turns. It can never
say 'Let me look at myself, as if I were a phenomenon,
as a fact presented to my own consciousness,' for it itself
would be engaged in the act of looking : it itself is the con-
sciousness to which it proposes to present itself 1 . So again,
the thought itself can never hope, by rigid analysing, to
arrive at last at itself, as the final residue of the analysis,
for it is itself, all along, employed as analyst. The process
of analysis is, itself, the real disclosure of what thought
is : and this disclosure is made just as effectively even
though the result of the analysis be to declare that it can
discover nothing that corresponds to thought. It is, in-
deed, impossible that anything should so correspond, except
the power to analyse ; but this power is thought : and every
act of the analysis, which issues in the sceptical conclusion,
has verified the real existence of thought. It is the same
with all profound spiritual acts. None of them can ever be
offered to public inspection : they can never be handed across
to another, for him to look at. For they are living acts, and
not external results. How can an act of will, or of love, be
submitted to observation "? Its outward result is there to be
examined ; but it, itself, is incapable of transportation. If
anyone were to ask ' What is it you mean by thinking, or
loving, or willing ? ' who could tell him ? It would be
obviously impossible to explain, except to a being who could
think, will, and love. You could give him illustrations of
what you mean signs instances evidences ; but they can
only be intelligible, as evidences, to one who already possesses
the faculties. No one can do a piece of thinking for another,
1 It is not intended to deny that be won by methods of empirical
the mind can ever know itself, but observation,
only that such knowledge can ever
io The Religion of the Incarnation.
and hand it over to him in a parcel. Only by thinking, can
it be known what thought is: only by feeling can it be
understood what is meant by a feeling: only by seeing,
willing, loving, can we have the least conception of sight, or
of will, or of love.
And faith stands with these primary intuitions. It is deeper
and more elemental than them all: and, therefore, still less
than they can it admit of translation into other conditions
than its own ; can still less submit itself to public observation.
It can never be looked at from without. It can be known
only from within itself. Belief is only intelligible by be-
lieving. Just as a man who is asked to say what love is, apart
from all its outward manifestations and results, must be driven
back on the iteration ' Love is what love is : everyone who
loves, knows ; no one who does not love, can ever know ;' just
as a man, who is challenged to describe and define his feelings
or his desires, when stripped of all the outward evidences
that they can possibly give of themselves, is thrown into
inarticulate bewilderment, and can give no intelligible answer,
and can fashion to himself no distinct feature or character,
and can only assert, confusedly, that he feels what he
feels, and that to desire is to desire; so with faith.
The scientific convulsion has shaken and confused its
normal modes of self-interpretation, its usual evidences, signs,
illustrations : these outer aids at definition, by metaphor or
by corroboration, are all brought under dim eclipse for the
moment: their relative values have been thrown into un-
certainty: they are undergoing temporary displacement, and
no one is quite sure which is being shifted, and which can be
trusted to stand firm. Faith, robbed of its habitual aids to
expression, is summoned to show itself on the field, in its own
inner character. And this is just what it never can or may do.
It can only reiterate, in response to the demand for definition,
' Faith is faith.' ' Believing is just believing.' Why, then,
let ourselves be distressed, or bewildered, by finding ourselves
reduced to this impotence of explanation ? Far from it bei]
an incrimination of our faith, to find ourselves caught in such
a difficulty of utterance, it is just what must happen if faith
i. Faith. 1 1
be a profound and radical act of the inner soul. It is, es-
sentially, an active principle, a source of energy, a spring of
movement : and, as such, its verification can never take place
through passive introspection. It verifies itself only in actions :
its reality can only be made evident through experience of its
living work.
II. We may, then, free ourselves from the sinister suspicions
which belong to panic. It is not the superficiality of our
faith, which is the secret of our bewilderment, but its depth.
The deepest and most radical elements of our being are,
necessarily, the hardest to unearth. They are, obviously, the
most remote from the surface of our lives : they are the
rarest to show themselves in the open daylight : they require
the severest effort to disentangle their identity : they lie below
all ordinary methods of utterance and expression ; they can
only be discovered through careful recognition of the secret
assumptions which are involved in the acts and words which
they habitually produce. By these acts and words their
existence and their force is suggested, but not exhausted
manifested, but not accounted for. These form our only
positive interpretation and evidence : and such evidence must,
therefore, always remain inadequate, imperfect ; we have
always and inevitably to go behind it, and beyond it, in order
to reach and touch the motive-energy which is disclosed to us
through it. No wonder that we find this far from an easy
matter. No wonder that, under the pressure of a hostile
challenge, we often lose ourselves in a confused babble, as
we struggle to make plain to others, or even to ourselves,
these innermost convictions of our souls.
Indeed, such things can never be made plain : no one ought
to expect that they should. For, if we think of it, the
primary acts of spirit must be the last things that can ever be
made plain ; for the entire life issuing from them is their only
interpretation, so that only when that life is closed, can their
interpretation be complete. And here, in faith, we are at the
root of a life which, as we believe, it will take eternity to fulfil.
And, if so, only in and through eternity can its full evidence
for itself be produced, or its right interpretation be yielded.
1 2 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Surely, this truth clears us from many clamorous de-
mands, which ask of us an impossible verification. For if
once we saw that we were employed in verifying the nature
of that which, if it be real, can, confessedly, present us, on
this side of the grave, only with the most fragmentary evi-
dence of its character, we should put lightly aside the taunting
challenge to produce such proof of our motive principle as
will stand comparison with the adequate and precise evidences
of a scientific fact, or which will submit to the rigid tests of
a legal examination. If faith be faith, it could not, for that
very reason, fulfil the conditions so proposed to it. These
legal and scientific conditions are laboriously and artificially
limited to testing the presence of a motive, or a force, which
must be assumed to exist under fixed, precise, complete con-
ditions, here and now. They pre-suppose that, for all prac-
tical purposes, its quantity cannot vary, or fluctuate. If it
be present at all, it is present in a distinct and formal manner,
open to definite measurement, expressing itself in unalter-
able characteristics. The entire consideration of its activity
is strictly confined to the normal horizon of the actual
world of present existence. These assumptions are the first
necessity of all forms of science, without making which, it
could not even begin. They are the conditions of all its
success. But they are also its limitations : and as such, they
most certainly exclude from their survey, anything that pro-
fesses to exist after the manner of faith. For what is faith 1
It is no steady force, existing under certified and unvarying
conditions which receive their final determination in the
world about us. Faith is, while it is here on earth, only
tentative probation: it is a struggling and fluctuating effoi
in man to win for himself a valid hold upon things that exist
under the conditions of eternity. In faith, we watch the earlj
and rude beginnings, amid an environment that but faintb
and doubtfully responds to it, of a power still in the womb-
still unborn into its true sphere still enveloped in darl
wrappings which encumber and impede. We see here but it
blind, uncertain pushings, its hesitating moves, now forwarc
now back, now strangely vigorous and assertive, and thei
i. Faith. 1 3
again, as strangely weak and retreating. Its significance, its
interpretation, its future possibilities, its secret of develop-
ment all these lie elsewhere, beyond death, beyond vision :
we can but dimly guess, from its action here, what powers feed
it, on what resources it can rely, what capacity of growth is
open to it, what final issue determines the measure and value
of its efforts and achievements here. Such a force as this is
bound to upset all our ablest calculations. We can never lay
down rules to govern and predict its capabilities. It will
disappoint every conceivable test that we can devise for
fixing its conditions. It will laugh at our attempts to circum-
scribe its action. Where we look for it to be weak, it will
suddenly show itself strong : when we are convinced that we
may expect a vigorous display of its capacities, it will mys-
teriously lapse. All this may terribly disconcert us. It may
tempt us into angry declarations that such an incalculable
existence is unworthy of scientific attention is fanciful, is
unreal. But the only lesson which we ought to learn is that
methods adapted for one state of things are bound to prove
themselves futile when applied to another. If we are em-
ployed in observing a life, which has its ground and its end
in a world beyond the present, then all methods framed for
the express and definite purpose of examining life as it exists
here and now, will necessarily prove themselves ludicrously
inapt. The futility, the barrenness, the ineptitude of our
researches, lies, not with the faith against which we level our
irritable complaints, but with the methods which, by their very
terms of definition, proclaim themselves to be misplaced.
Where, then, must we dig to unearth the roots of faith?
What are the conditions of its rise and exercise? Wherein
lie its grounds, and the justification of its claim?
Faith grounds itself, solely and wholly, on an inner and vital
relation of the soul to its source. This source is most certainly
elsewhere ; it is not within the compass of the soul's own
activity. In some mode, inconceivable and mysterious, our
life issues out of an impenetrable background : and as our
life includes spiritual elements, that background has spiritual
factors : and as our life is personal, within that background
14 The Religion of the Incarnation.
exists personality. This supply of life in which we begin,
from out of which our being opens, can never cease, so long
as we exist, to sustain us by one continuous act. Ever its
resources flow in : ever its vital support is unwithdrawn. In
some fashion or other, we all know that this must be so : and
the Christian Creed only lifts into clear daylight, and endows
with perfect expression, this elementary and universal verity,
when it asserts that at the very core of each man's being lies,
and lives, and moves, and works, the creative energy of the
Divine Will ' the Will of our Father Which is in Heaven.'
We stand, by the necessities of our existence, in the relation-
ship of sons to a Father, Who has poured out into us, and still
pours, the vigour of His own life. This is the one basis of all
faith. Unless this relationship actually exists, there could be
no faith : if it exists, then faith is its essential corollary : it is
bound to appear. Our faith is simply the witness to this inner
bond of being. That bond, which is the secret of our entire
existence, accounting for all that we are, or do, or feel, or think,
or say, must become capable of recognition by a being that is,
in any sense, free, intelligent, conscious : and this recognition
by us of the source from whence we derive, is what we mean by
faith. Faith is the sense in us that we are Another's creature,
Another's making. Even as we not only feel, but feel that
we feel ; not only think, but know that we think ; not only
choose, but determine to choose : so, below and within all
our willing, and thinking, and feeling, we are conscious of
Another, whose mind and will alone make possible both the
feeling that we feel, and also the capacity to feel it ; both the
thought that we think, and also the capacity to know it;
both the will that we put forth, as well as the power to
determine it. Every act, every desire, every motive of ours,
is dependant on the source out of sight : we hang on Another's
will ; we are alive in Another's life. All our life is a dis-
covery, a disclosure, of this secret. We find it out only by
living. As we put out powers that seem to be our own, still
even in and by the very act of putting them out, we reveal
them to be not our own ; we discover that we are always
drawing on unseen resources. We are sons : that is the root-
i. Faith. 1 5
law of our entire self. And faith is the active instinct of that
inner sonship : it is the point at which that essential sonship
emerges into consciousness ; it is the disclosure to the self of
its own vital secret ; it is the thrill of our inherent childhood,
as it makes itself felt within the central recesses of the life ;
it is the flame that shoots into consciousness at the recos:-
o
nition of the touch of our divine fatherhood ; it is the imme-
diate response of the sonship in us to its discovered origin.
Faith, then, is an instinct of relationship based on an inner
actual fact. And its entire office and use lies in realising the
secret fact. For the bond is spiritual ; and it can only realise
itself in a spirit that has become aware of its own laws. No
blind animal acceptance of the divine assistance can draw
out the powers of this sonship. The reception of the assist-
ance must itself be conscious, loving, intelligent, willing.
The natural world can receive its full capacities from God
without recognition of the source whence they flow in : but
this absence of living recognition forbids it ever to surpass
those fixed limits of development which we name ' natural.'
But a creature of God that could not only receive but recog-
nise that it received, would, by that very recognition, lay
itself open to an entirely novel development; it would be
susceptible of infinitely higher influences shed down upon it
from God ; it would admit far finer and richer inpourings of
divine succours ; it would be fed, not only from underground
channels as it were, but by fresh inlets which its conscious-
ness of its adherence in God would uncover and set in motion.
The action of God upon His creatures would be raised to a
new level of possibility: for a living and intelligent will
has capacities of receptivity, which were altogether excluded
so long as God merely gave, and the creature blindly and
dumbly took. Faith, then, opens an entirely new career
for creaturely existence ; and the novelty of this career is
expressed in the word ' supernatural.' The ' supernatural '
world opens upon us as soon as faith is in being 1 .
1 The word super- natural ' is ob- of life are not 'natural.' Of course,
yiously misleading, since it seems to the higher the life, the more intensely
imply that the higher spiritual levels ' natural ' it is ; and the nature of
1 6 The Religion of the Incarnation.
And this career, it will be seen, is markedly distinct from
the natural in this that it is capable of ever advancing
expansion. All natural things, which blindly accept their
life from God, must, perforce, have a decreed and certified
development, limited by the conditions in which they are
found existing. Their receptivity is a fixed quantity, deter-
mined by the character imposed upon them at creation, and
bound to come to an abrupt arrest at some precise point 1 .
But receptivity through conscious recognition is open to a
development of which it is impossible for us to fix the limits.
For this living recognition itself advances in its capacity to
see and understand. Every act by which it recognises the
Giver in the gifts, heightens and intensifies its power to re-
cognise Him ; and every increase of its power to recognise
Him increases also its capacity to receive ; and this increase
will again react on the faculties of recognition. A vision
opens out of spiritual growth, in which every step forward
made through incoming grace, makes a new step possible,
finds a fresh grace ever waiting to crown its latest gift with
ever new endowment. The sonship that is at work under-
ground in man, below the level of consciousness, at the hidden
base of faith, is one that holds in it capacities which can only
be evoked under the appeals of a living and voluntary faith.
Faith is the discovery of an inherent sonship, which, though
already sealed to it, already in action, nevertheless cannot but
withhold its more rich and splendid energies until this dis-
covery is made ; and which discloses them only according to
the progressive clearness and force with which the process oJ
discovery advances. The history of faith is the history o1
this gradual disclosure, this growing capacity to recognise and
receive, until the rudimentary omen of God's fatherhood in
the rudest savage who draws, by clumsy fetich, or weird in-
cantation, upon a power outside himself, closes its long story
God must be the supreme expression present and visible system of things,
of the natural. But the word ' super- ' It is this point of arrest which is
natural' is, in reality, only concerned reached and revealed by the process
with the partial and conventional use of Evolution, under the pressure of
of ' nature,' as a term under which Natural Selection.
we sum up all that constitutes this
i. Faith. 1 7
in the absolute recognition, the perfect and entire receptivity,
of that Son of man, who can do nothing of Himself, ' but what
He seeth the Father do,' and, for that very reason, can do
everything : for whatsoever ' the Father doeth, the Son doeth
also.'
Faith, then, is not only the recognition by man of the
secret source of his being, but it is itself, also, the condition
under which the powers, that issue from that source, make
their arrival within him. The sonship, already germinal,
completes itself, realises itself in man, through his faith. Not
only is the unconscious human nature held by attachment to
the Father who feeds it with hidden succours, but faith is, itself,
the power by which the conscious life attaches itself to God ;
it is an apprehensive motion of the living spirit, by which it
intensifies its touch on God ; it is an instinct of surrender, by
which it gives itself to the fuller handling of God : it is an
affection of the will, by which it presses up against God, and
drinks in divine vitality with quickened receptivity 1 .
What then will be its characteristics'? We have only to
keep close to the conception of sonship, and we shall under-
stand them well enough. Faith is the attitude, the temper, of
a son towards a father. That is a relationship that we all
can understand for ourselves. We know it, in spite of all the
base and cruel corruptions under which, in the homes of man,
its beauty lies disfigured. Still, beneath disguises, we catch
sight, in rare and happy conditions, of that beautiful intimacy
which can spring up between a son and a father, where love
is one with reverence, and duty fulfils itself in joy. Such a
sonship is like a spiritual instinct, which renders intelligible
to the son every mood and gesture of the father. His very
blood moves in rhythm to the father's motives. His soul
hangs, for guidance, on the father's eyes : to him, each motive
of the father justifies itself as a satisfying inspiration. The
father's will is felt deliciously encompassing him about ; en-
closed within it, his own will works, glad and free in its
fortifying obedience. Such a relationship as this needs no
1 Faith is spoken of, here and else- as if unthwarted by the misdirection,
where, in its perfect and true form, and hurt of sin.
1 8 The Religion of the Incarnation.
justifying sanction beyond itself: it is its own sanction,
its own authority, its own justification. ' He is my father ' :
that is a sufficient reason for all this sympathetic response
to another's desire. ' I am his son ' : that is the final pre-
miss in which all argument comes to a close. The willing
surrender of the heart is the witness to a fact which is
beyond argument, which accepts no denial, yet which is no
tyrannous fate, but is a living and animating bond of blood,
which it is a joy to recognise, and an inspiration to confess.
It is in such a spirit of sonship that faith reveals and
realises itself. Faith is that temper of sympathetic and
immediate response to Another's will which belongs to a
recognised relationship of vital communion. It is the spirit
of confident surrender, which can only be justified by an
inner identification of life. Its primary note, therefore, will
be trust that trust of Another, which needs no ulterior
grounds on which to base itself, beyond what is involved in
the inherent law of this life. Faith will ever discover, when
its reason for action, or belief, are traced to their last source,
that it arrives at a point where its only and all-sufficient
plea will be ' God is my Father : I am His child.' That
relationship is its root ; on the top of that relationship
faith works ; as a witness to that relationship, it puts forth
all the spiritual temper which, of necessity, follows on this
intimacy of contact.
And, here, we find ourselves in the presence of the law by
which faith claims to be universal. Unless this inner relation-
ship be a fact, faith could not account for itself: but if it be a
fact, it must constitute a fixed and necessary demand upon all
men. All are, equally, ' children of God ' : and the answer to
the question 'Why should I believe 1 ?' must be, for ever and
for all, valid ; ' because you are a child of God.' Faith is
nothing but the spiritual temper and attitude, which belong,
inherently, to such a fact. No one can escape from such a
claim: for his existence constitutes the claim. If he be a
child, it must be demanded of him, that he should display the
characteristics of his childhood: the father must, of necessity,
be concerned with the question of his own recognition by his
i. Faith. 1 9
son. Our manhood lies in this essential sonship : and, if so,
then to be without faith, without the conscious realisation of the
sonship, is to be without the fulness of a man's proper nature.
It is to be inhuman : to be curtailed of the natural develop-
ment : to be maimed and thwarted. It means that the vital
outcome of the inner verity has been arrested ; that the sen-
sitive perceptions have been blunted and stunted ; that the
sonship in us has, somehow, lost touch with its true fatherhood.
We learn at once,as we consider this, the interpretation of that
two-sided character, which surprises us in God's dealings with
men : i. e. the imperative rigour of His stated requirements,
coupled with His wide and patient tolerance, in actual fact.
As a Father of all, He cannot, conceivably, be satisfied with
anything short of complete recognition by His children. He
must look for faith ; He must require it of them all : He
must leave no means untried by which to secure it : He must
seek to win it at all costs : His love is inevitably and cruelly
hindered, unless He can obtain it : and when He obtains it,
He must passionately desire to establish, evoke, develope,
perfect it : for each rise in faith is a rise in capacities of inter-
course, of intimacy, between Father and son. We see how
strenuous and zealous will be His efforts to build up faith in
men : we understand how urgent, and pressing, and alarming
will become His entreaties, His warnings, His menaces,
His appeals, if faith is allowed to slide or fail. Loss of
faith means a shattered home, a ruptured intimacy, a sun-
dered love ; it means that a Father must look on while the
very nature He has made in His image shrivels and shrinks,
and all hope of growth, of advancing familiarity, of increasing
joy, of assured sympathy, is cut down and blighted. We all
know the bitterness of a breach which scatters a family into
fragments : and that is but a faint shadow of all which the
great Father sees to be involved in the broken contact between
Himself and His son. What standard have we by which to
sound the abyss of divine disappointment, as God waits ready
with gift upon gift of endless grace which He will pour out
upon the child of His love, as the endless years open out new
wonders of advancing intimacy ; and lo ! the channel by
C 2
2O The Religion of the Incarnation.
which alone the gifts can reach him, is choked and closed?
Faith is the son's receptivity : it is that temper of trust, which
makes the entry of succours possible : it is the medium of
response : it is the attitude of adherence to the Father, by
virtue of which communications can pass. If faith goes, all
further action of God upon the soul, all fresh arrival of power,
is made impossible. The channel of intercourse is blocked.
The demand, then, for faith by God is bound to be exacting,
and urgent, and universal. But, then, this demand holds in
reserve a ground of hope, of patience, of tolerance, of charity,
which we can, in no single instance, venture to limit. For
the faith, which it rigorously asks for, reposes, as we see, on
an inner and essential relationship, already existent, which
knits man to his God. Not even the Fall, with all its con-
sequent accumulations of sin, can avail to wholly undo this
primitive condition of existence. The fatherhood of God still
sustains its erring children ; the divine image is blurred, but
not blotted out. Still, at the close of the long days, our Lord
can speak to the wondering men who flock about Him, of One
Who is even now their Father in Heaven. This objective
and imperishable relationship, the underlying ground of all
our being, is the pre- supposition of all faith, without which it
would itself be impossible. And, this being so, God can afford
to wait very long for faith to show itself. So long as its
primary condition .is there, there is always hope. The strin-
gent demand is not inspired by the mind of a lawgiver, nor
pressed home with the austerity of a judge ; it expresses the
hunger of a father's heart, to win the confidence and to evoke
the capacities of the children of its love. Such a hunger is,
indeed, more rigorous and exact than the letter of any law :
it aspires after a more accurate correspondence ; it is sensitive
to more delicate distinctions : but, nevertheless, it holds, in
its fatherliness, far wider capacities of toleration than law-
giver, or judge. That same heart of the father, which in its
hunger of love is so exacting, will, out of the same hunger,
never despair, and never forsake : it will never cease from
the pursuit of that responsive trust which it desires ; it
will make allowances, it will permit delays, it will weave
i. Faith. 2 1
excuses, it will endure rebuffs, it will condescend to per-
suasion, it will forget all provocations, it will wait, it will
plead, it will repeat its pleas, it will take no refusal, it will
overleap all obstacles, it will run risks, it will endlessly and
untiringly forgive, if only, at the last, the stubborn child-
heart yield, and the tender response of faith be won.
Here, then, w T e seem to see why the nature of faith allows
for two points which surprise us in God's dealings, as if with
a contradiction. On the one hand, we hear Him, though pro-
phet and priest, insisting, with severe precision, on the neces-
sity of a right and accurate faith. On the other, we cannot
but recognise, in the open area of actual life, the evidences of
a wide and almost boundless toleration. Again and again it
must have seemed to us that the Church and the world gave,
thus, antithetical evidence of God's character. Yet, in truth,
both speak the voice of one and the same God, Who, in His
undivided love, both passionately seeks for the delicate and
direct response of an accurate faith ; and, also, in order not
to lose this final joy, ' suffereth long, and is kind, beareth all
things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all
things.' Yes ! has even to endure that men should pit His
toleration against His love, and should argue that, because
He will wait so long and quietly for the fruit that He desires
to reap, therefore, He does not desire the fruit. In reality,
the degree of the toleration, with which God will patiently
wait for the fruits of faith, is the measure of the extremity of
His desire for it. Just because He wants it so much, He
w r aits so long.
III. If faith, then, be the witness and the exercise of our
sonship in God, we can recognise at once the place it will hold
among the other powers and capacities of our nature. We
are so unfortunately apt to rank it as one among many
faculties, and then to find ourselves engaged in agitating con-
troversies concerning its limits and its claims. We have to
secure for it, against the rest, a field for free dominion ; and
that field is hard to define ; and rival powers beset it ; and
there are raids and skirmishes on every frontier ; and reason
is ever making violent incursions on the one side, and feel-
22 The Religion of the Incarnation.
ing is actively besieging it on the other : and the scientific
frontiers, which we are ever on the point of fixing, shift,
and change, and vanish, as soon as we determine them ; and
the whole force of Christian apologetics is spent in aimless
and barren border- warfare.
But, if what we have been saying be true, the whole trouble
turns on a mistake. Faith is not to be ranked by the side
ojLthe other faculties in a federation of rival powers, but is
behind them all. It goes back to a deeper root ; it springs
from a more primitive and radical act of the central self than
they. It belongs to that original spot of our being, where it
adheres in God, and draws on divine resources. Out from
that spot our powers divide, radiating into separate gifts,
will, memory, feeling, reason, imagination, affection ; but all of
them are but varying expressions of that essential sonship,
which is their base. And all, therefore, run back into that
home where faith abides, and works, and rises, and expands.
At the root of all our capacities lies our sonship ; at the root
of all our conscious life lies faith, the witness of our sonship.
By adherence in God, we put out our gifts, we exercise our
functions, we develop our faculties ; and faith, therefore, far
from being their rival, whom they are interested in suspect-
ing, and curbing, and confining within its limits, is the secret
spring of their force, and the inspiration of their growth, and
the assurance of their success. All our knowledge, for in-
stance, relies upon our sonship ; it starts with an act of faith 1 .
We throw ourselves, with the confidence of children, upon an
external world, which offers itself to our vision, to our touch,
to our review, to our calculation, to our handling, to our use.
Who can assure us of its reality, of its truth? We must
measure it by those faculties under the manipulation of which
it falls : but how can the faculties guarantee to us their own
accuracy? How can we justify an extension of our own inner
necessities to the world of outward things ? How can we at-
tribute to nature that rational and causative existence which
we find ourselves forced to assume in it? Our justification,
our confidence, all issue, in the last resort, from our sonship.
1 Cf. pp. 105-107.
i. Faith. 23
Our powers have, in them, some likeness to those of God.
If He be our Father, if we be made in His image, then, in our
measure, we can rely upon it that we close with Nature in
its reality ; that our touch, our sight, our reason, have some
hold on the actual life of things ; that we see and know in
some such manner, after our degree, as God Himself sees
and knows. In unhesitating reliance upon our true sonship,
we sally out and deal, with the world ; we act upon the sure
conviction that we are not altogether outside the secret of
objective existence. We refuse absolutely to doubt, or go
behind the reports made to us by feeling, by memory, by
thought. If once we are clear as to what the report is, we
rest on it ; we ask for no power to stand (as it were) outside
our own experience, our own knowledge, so as to assure our-
selves of their veracity. We are certain that our Father
cannot have misguided us ; that we are within His influence ;
that we are in modified possession of His truth; that our
capacities reflect His mind. We could not have so confidently
recognised, understood, and handled the world, if it had been
wholly foreign to us. As it is, we lay instinctive hold upon
it ; we take spontaneous possession ; we exert authority upon
it ; we feel our inherent right over it ; we are at home in it ;
we move freely about it, as children in a father's house.
Acting in this faith, all our capacities justify themselves to
us ; they respond to our reliance upon them ; they develop
into ever advancing strength under the motions of this trust ;
they form a continual and increasing witness to the verity of
that sonship in which we have believed.
Faith, then, belongs to our entire body of activities. We
live by faith. By faith, under the inspiration of faith, we put
out our life, we set to work, we exercise faculties, we close
with our opportunities, we have confidence in our environ-
ment, we respond to calls, we handle critical emergencies, we
send out far abroad our experimental intelligence, we discover,
we accumulate experiences, we build, and plant, and develop.
An elemental act of faith lies at the root of all this advance ;
and every motion that we make, demands a renewal of that
primitive venture. In all secular progress ' we walk by faith.'
24 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Every step revives the demand. Just as the earth, if it neces-
sitates the idea of a primal creation, requires, by exactly the
same necessity, an incessant renewal of that first creative
act, so our life, if it required faith to start it, requires faith
every moment to sustain it. Our faculties never arrive at a
use which is self-dependent and self-originated, as if they
could grow beyond the tentative conditions of their earliest
assays. They originate in a venturous experiment ; and, how-
ever long, and however complicated that experiment become,
it retains its original character ; it remains experimental to
the end. The results, no doubt, justify the venture made ; but,
then, the first venture involved such immense assumptions,
that no results reached can ever complete its justification,
and so remove its tentative nature. For, by assuming a real
correspondence between our faculties and the world with
which they deal, it assumed that such a correspondence would
never fail us ; would be capable of infinite verification ; would
prove adequate to all possible experiences ; would receive
indefinite and progressive extension. No verifications ever
reached can, then, exhaust the faith of that primitive venture ;
they can only serve to exhibit to it how far more was con-
tained within that venture than it could ever have, conceived.
New knowledge, new experience, far from expunging the
elements of faith, make ever fresh demands upon it; they
constitute perpetual appeals to it to enlarge its trust, to
expand its original audacity. And yet the very vastness
of those demands serves to obscure and conceal their true
character. This is the key to much of our present bewilder-
ment. The worlds of knowledge and of action have assumed
such huge proportions, have accumulated such immense and
complicated resources, have gained such supreme confidence
in their own stability, have pushed forward their successes
with such startling power and rapidity, that we have lost
count of their primal assumption. In amazement at their
stupendous range, we are over-awed ; we dare not challenge
them with their hypothetical origin, or remind them that
their entire and wonderful structure is but an empty and
hollow dream, unless they are prepared to place their utter-
I. Faith. 25
most trust in an unverified act of faith. Given that trust,
which relies on the reality of the bond which holds between
our inner faculties and the outer world, then all this mar-
vellous vision is rooted on a rock, has validity and substance.
Withdraw that spiritual trust in our sonship, and all this
fairy- world, won for us by science and experience,
These cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like an unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
Our secular and scientific life is an immense experiment in
faith, an experiment which verifies itself by success, but
which justifies itself only if it remembers to attribute all its
success to the reality of that hidden relationship to God, which
is the key to all its capacities, the justification of all its
confidence, and the security of all its advance.
Such a remembrance is not easy for it : for the exercise of
the capacities is instinctive and spontaneous, and it requires
an effort of reflection to question the validity of such
exercise. And such an effort seems tiresome and impertinent
in the heat of successful progress, in the thick of crowding
conquests. The practical man is apt to give an irritated
stamp on the ground, which to him feels so solid, and to deem
this a sufficient answer to the importunate inquiry how he
knows that he has any substantial world to know and to
handle. For faith lies behind our secular life, secreted within
it : and the secular lift, therefore, can go on as if no faith was
wanted ; it need not trouble its head with perplexing questions,
whether its base be verifiable by the same standards and mea-
sures as its superstructure. Its own practical activity is
complete and free, whether it discover its hidden principle or
not : just as Mr. Jourdain's conversation was complete and
free, long before he discovered that he was talking prose.
We have to stand outside our secular life and reflect on it, to
disclose its true spring. The appeal to faith here is indirect.
But, in religion, this hidden activity is evoked by a direct
appeal : it is unearthed ; it is summoned to come forward on
its own account. God demands of this secret and innermost
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
26 The Religion of the Incarnation.
vitality that it should no longer lie incased within the other
capacities, but that it should throw off its sheltering covers,
and should emerge into positive action, and should disclose its
peculiar and native character. God, the Father, calls faith
out of its dim background into the front of the scene. He
does this under the pressure of invocations, which address
their appeals through, and by means of, the secular and visible
material, within and behind which He is ever at work. This
had, indeed, always told of His invisible and eternal Godhead:
but it did so indirectly, by requiring Him as its constant
pre-supposition and base. Now, it is so used as to bring
God into direct and positive evidence, by means of acts, which
bring forward the energies of His immediate Fatherhood. All
the growth of Eden had always testified to the existence and
the name of God : but a new stage was reached when He was
felt moving, in evening hours, amid the trees of the garden.
And as the Father presses forward out of His silent background,
so the secret sonship in man emerges out of its deep recesses
in positive response, using its own secular faculties by which
to carry itself forward into evidence and action. This definite
and direct contact between the God Who is the hidden source
of all life, and the faith which is the hidden spring of all
human activity this disclosure by the Father, met by this
discovery by the son this is Religion : and the history of
Religion is the story of its slow and gradual advance in sanity
and clearness, until it culminates in that special disclosure
which we call Revelation ; which, again, crowns itself in that
Revelation of the Father through the Son, in which the dis-
closure of God to man and the discovery by man of God are
made absolute in Him Who is one with the Father, knowing
all that the Father does, making known all that the Father is.
Now here we have reached a parting of ways. For we
have touched the point at which the distinctions start out
between what is secular and what is sacred between virtue
and godliness between the world and the Church. If ' Re-
ligion ' means this coming forward into the foreground of that
which is the universal background of all existence, then
we cut ourselves free from the perplexity which benumbs
i. Faith. 2 7
us when we hear of the ' Gospel of the Secular Life ; ' of
the ' Religion of Humanity ; ' of doctors and scientific pro-
fessors being ' Ministers of Religion ;' of the ' Natural Religion '
which is contained within the borders of science with its sense
of wonder, or of art with its vision of beauty. All this is so
obviously true in one sense that it sinks to the level of an
amiable commonplace ; but if this be the sense intended, why
is all this emphasis laid upon it 1 Yet if more than this is
meant, we are caught in a juggling maze of words, and are
losing hold on vital distinctions, and feel ourselves to be
O
rapidly collapsing into the condition of the unhappy Ninevites,
who knew not their right hands from their left.
The word ' Religion,' after all, has a meaning : and we do
not get forward by labouring to disguise from ourselves this
awkward fact. This positive meaning allows everything that
can be asked in the way of sanctity and worth, for nature
and the natural life. All of it is God-given, God-inspired,
God-directed ; all of it is holy. But the foot of this being so
is one thing: the recognition of it is another; and it is this
recognition of God in things which is the core and essence
of religion. Natural life is the life in God, which has not yet
arrived at this recognition: it is not yet, as such, religious.
The sacred and supernatural office of man is to press through
his own natural environment, to force his spirit through the
thick jungle of his manifold activities and capacities, to shake
himself free from the encompassing complexities, to step out
clear and loose from all entanglement, to find himself, through
and beyond all his secular experiences, face to face with a
God, Who, on His side, is for ever pushing aside the veil which
suggests and conceals Him, for ever disengaging Himself from
the phenomena through which He arrives at man's con-
sciousness, for ever brushing away the confusions, and coming
out more and more into the open, until, through and past the
' thunder comes a human voice ; ' and His eyes burn their way
through into man's soul; and He calls the man by his name, and
takes him apart, and hides him in some high and separate cleft
of the rock, far from all the glamour and tumult of crowded
existence, and holds him close in the hollow of His hand as
28 The Religion of the Incarnation.
He passes by, and names to him, with clear and memorable
voice, the 'Name of the Lord, the Lord God, merciful, gracious,
long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving
iniquity, and Who will by no means clear the guilty.' Here
is Religion. It is the arrival at the secret ; the discovery by
the son of a Father, Who is in all His works, yet is distinct
from them all, to be recognised, known, spoken with, loved,
imitated, worshipped, on His own account, and for Himself
alone.
Religion, in this sense, is perfectly distinct from what is
secular : yet, in making this distinction, it brings no reproach :
it pronounces nothing common or unclean. It only asks us not
to play with words : and it reminds us that, in blurring this
radical distinction, we are undoing all the work which it has
been the aim of the religious movement to achieve. For the
history of this movement is the record of the gradual advance
man has made in disentangling ' the Name of God ' from all
its manifestations. Religion is the effort to arrive at that
Name, in its separable identity, in its personal and distinct
significance. It is the fulfilment of the unceasing cry ' Tell
me Thy name ! ' In religion we are engaged in the age-long
task of lifting the Name, clear and high, above the clang
and roar of its works, that through and by means of all that
He is, we may pierce through to the very God of gods, and
may close with Him in the blessed solitude of a love which
knits heart to heart and spirit to spirit, without any with-
holding interval, with no veil to hinder or intervene.
The growth of faith, then, means the gradual increase of
this personal contact, this spiritual intimacy between Father
and son. To achieve this increasing apprehension of the
Father's character and love, faith uses, as instruments and as
channels, all its natural faculties, by which to bring itself
forward into action, and through which to receive the com-
munications, which arrive at it from the heart and will of
Him, Who, on His side, uses all natural opportunities as the
material of a speech, which is ever, as man's ear becomes
sensitive and alert, growing more articulate, and positive,
and personal.
I. Faith. 29
The entire human nature, imagination, reason, feeling, de-
sire, becomes to faith a vehicle of intercourse, a mediating aid
in its friendship with God. But faith itself lies deeper than
all the capacities of which it makes use : it is, itself, the primal
act of the elemental self, there at the root of life, where the
being is yet whole and entire, a single personal individuality,
unbroken and undivided. Faith, which is the germinal act of
our love for God, is an act of the whole self, there where it
is one, before it has parted off into what we can roughly de-
scribe as separate and distinguishable faculties. It therefore
uses, not one or other of the faculties, but all : and in a sense
it uses them all at once, just as any complete motion of will,
or of love, acts with all the united force of many combined
faculties. A perfect act of love would combine, into a single
movement, the entire sum of faculties, just because it proceeds
from that basal self, which is the substance and unity of them
all. So with faith. Faith, the act of a willing adhesion to
God the Father, proceeds from a source deeper than the point
at which faculties divide.
And this has a most vital bearing on the question of faith's
evidences. It is here we touch on the crucial characteristic
which determines all our logical and argumentative position.
For, if a movement of faith springs from a source anterior
to the distinct division of faculties, then no one faculty can
adequately account for the resultant action. Each faculty,
in its separate stage, can account for one element, for one
factor, which contributed to the result : and that element, that
factor, may be of greater or less importance, according to the
rank of the faculty in the entire self. But, if the movement
of faith has also included and involved many other elements
which appear, when analysed out, in the domains of the other
faculties ; then the account which each separate faculty can
give of the whole act, can never be more than partial. Its
evidence must be incomplete. If the central self has gathered
its momentum from many channels, it is obvious that the
amount contributed by any one channel will be unable to
justify the force exerted, or to explain the event that fol-
lowed. If we track home each faculty employed to this
30 The Religion of the Incarnation.
central spring of energy, we shall see that each points to the
result, contributes to it, suggests it ; but the result will
always be more than the evidence, so collected, can warrant.
This limitation, which we may allow about other faculties,
is apt to become a stumbling-block when we apply it to the
high gift of reason. Reason, somehow, seems to us to rise
into some supreme and independent throne ; it reviews the
other faculties ; and is, therefore, free from their limitations.
We fear to hint that it has any lord over it. How can we
assume such a lordship without dubbing ourselves irrational
obscurantists, who in folly try to stamp out the light ?
But we are not, in reality, dreaming of limiting reason by
any limitations except those which it makes for itself. We
are not violently attempting to make reason stop short at any
point, where it could go on. We are only asking, is there
any point at which it stops of itself, and cannot go further ?
We propose to use reason right out, to press it to its utmost
limit, to spur it to put forth all its powers ; and we assert that,
so doing, reason will, at last, reveal its inability to get right
to the end, to carry clear home. And why ? Because the self
is not only rational but something more : it combines, with its
unbroken, central individuality, other elements besides reason :
and therefore, of sheer necessity, whenever that central self
puts out an elemental act in which the integral spring of
personal energy takes part, such as an act of will, or love, or
faith, then, reason can be but one factor, but one element, how-
ever important, in that issuing act : and if so, then it can give
but a partial account of it ; its own contribution can not wholly
explain, or justify the result. In Bishop Butler's language,
the utmost that reason can do is to make it ' very probable.'
The real root-question in this time-worn controversy is
just this: is, or is not, reason the most primal and elemental
act of the integral personality ? If it is, then, of course, it
regulates and determines all subordinate acts. Everything
must finally submit to its arbitration : for everything, if
tracked back far enough, must terminate in an act of reason.
But if, as Christianity asserts, the ultimate and elemental
self be a moral will, that can believe, and love, then, though
I. Faith. 3 1
this self contains in it reason, it also goes back behind reason.
Reason is indeed one of its essential elements, but it is not
its entire essence, for this includes within itself, that which
appears as feeling, and desire, and imagination, and choice,
and passion, as well as that which shows itself as reason. When,
therefore, the self puts out its primitive power, it will do
actions which satisfy reason, indeed, but which reason cannot
exhaustively analyse, or interpret, since the entire force of
reason, if it were all brought into action, would still be only
a partial contribution to the effect.
As a fact, we all of us are perfectly familiar with this limi-
tation, in affairs of affection and friendship. We never have
here that paralysing awe of reason, which haunts us in
matters of religion. We never allow ourselves to be bullied
into submission to its supremacy. W T e should laugh at it, if
it attempted to dictate to us ; or to account for all our motives.
Not that we are at war with it : or are shirking it : or are
afraid of it. We can have affections and friendships, which
have every possible justification which reason can offer.
Every conceivable expediency can unite to authorise and
approve them. Every interest may be served by them. They
may stand every test which a cool common-sense, or a calm
impartial judgment, or an acute calculation of consequences
can apply to them. They may be the very embodiment of
reason. And yet, by no amount of calculated expediencies,
by no pressure of rational considerations, could we dream, for
one moment, that our friendship was accounted for. If ever
it could trace its origin to these motives, it would cease to be
what we thought it. The discovery would destroy it. All
possible considerations and calculations might have been
present, and yet they would be utterly powerless to create
in us the love. And the love, however gladly it may recognise
the approving considerations, would repudiate, with amaze-
ment, and with laughter, any presumption on their part to
say, ' this is why you love.'
It is the same with all primal acts of heroism. They may be
absolutely rational : yet, they would cease to be heroic, they
would never be done, if they did not call upon a force, which,
32 The Religion of the Incarnation.
indeed, may determine its direction by reason, but which uses
quite other motives to induce itself to act. Utilitarianism,
which attempts to account for such heroic momentum by
purely rational considerations, finds itself reduced to shifts
which all those can see through, who refuse to be juggled
out of their own experiences. It is the same with all
the higher forms of moral energy. All of them go beyond
their evidences. They all lift the rational motives, which
suggest and determine the direction of their activity, by
an impulsive force, which has in it the power of initiative,
of origination. Every high act of will is a new creation.
As the gunpowder sleeps, until the spark alights upon it, so the
directions of reason remain below the level of action, until the
jet of a living will fuses its fire with their material. The act
which results may, indeed, be capable of complete interpreta-
tion on reasonable grounds : it may be able to show reasons
which account for every fragment of it : yet, still, the living
force which drew together, and combined all those separate
reasons into a single resultant act, has a creative and original
character. The series of reasons, however complete, cannot
account for the result, for they cannot possibly account for
their own combination: and without this combination of
their momentum the result would not be there.
It is well to recall briefly this character of the moral will,
the affections, the love, of man. For these are faith's nearest
and dearest allies. It is here, in these elemental motions, that
faith finds its closest parallel. It is something very like an
act of will, a movement of love, an heroic and chivalrous
moral venture. And whenever we desire to understand its
relations to reason, we must persistently recall the attitude
towards reason taken by these fundamental forms of energy ;
only remembering that faith is yet more elemental, yet more
completely the act of the central integral self, even than
these. Where they leave reason behind, it will do so yet
further. Where they call upon something deeper, and more
primitive than reason, it will do the same, and yet more
triumphantly. It is not that either it or they are without
reason : or that they stand outside reason, consulting it so far
i. Faith. 33
as they choose, and then dropping it ; it is not that reason
rnay not be found in every corner and fragment of their
activity, pervading, colouring, restraining, limiting, directing,
justifying it : but simply that what we call the rational self is
not only rational, but also something more : that, if analysed
out, the reason will not appear as the root and core of
the man, but rather as an element inhering in a yet more
central base: and that whenever the energy of vital action
is put out, we are driven to look through and beyond reason,
if we would unearth the source whence the act springs.
The relation, then, of reason to faith is not strange, or forced,
or unfamiliar to us, if it is much the same as its relation to the
affections, or to moral acts and intuitions. We know what to
expect, what part it ought to play in such a case. As in a case
of heroic moral daring, or high affection, so, in a matter of faith,
we shall expect that reason, with its arguments and its
evidences, will play all round and about it, will go before it,
discussing the path to follow, will follow after it, unravelling
the secret forces at work in it : will watch, and analyse, and
learn, and warn ; will reconnoitre, and examine, and survey,
and discover: will justify, interpret, defend, assist. But yet
we shall expect, also, that the act of faith will do more than
all the arguments can anticipate : that it will hold itself free
from them all : that it will appeal, not to them, but to its
own inherent force, for the final decision : that it will move
by instinct, by spontaneity, by inspiration : that it will rush
past all evidences, in some great stride ; that it will brush
through scruples that cannot be gainsaid, and obstacles that
cannot be got over ; that it will surprise, that it will outdo,
that it will create ; that it will bring novel forces into play,
invisible, unaccountable, incalculable ; that it will fly, when
reason walks ; that it will laugh, when reason trembles : that
it will over-leap barriers which reason deems final. As with
love, so with faith, it will take in all evidences, it will listen
to all proofs ; but when they have done their utmost, it has
yet got to begin ; it itself, after all its calculations, must make
the actual spring, which is the decision. Out of itself, it draws
its strength : out of itself it makes its effort ; by being what it is,
34 The Religion of the Incarnation.
it sees what it sees, it does what it does. It uses the evidence ;
but uses it to leap from, to go further. Its motives, advances,
efforts, issue from within itself. Just as the lover's final answer
to the question, ' why did you do that ? ' must be, ' because I loved ' ;
so the final answer of the believer, in explanation of an act,
can never be wrung out of the reasonable grounds for so acting ;
it must always be ' because I believed.' Just as man first
acts, and speaks, and reason, following behind, can at last
discover that his actions were all consecutive, and that his
language has a perfect grammar : so faith has always to make
its venture, prompted and inspired from within, and only long
afterwards can it expect to learn that if it has been true to
itself, to its proper promptings, then its action can, by slow
and plodding reason, be thoroughly interpreted and justified.
Faith is, above all things, anticipatory. The sonship, within,
anticipates what the Father has in store for it : by means of
affection, by rapid instincts of love, it assumes what it cannot
yet verify, it foretells the secrets that lie hidden within the
Father's eyes. So anticipating, it 'makes its venture; a ven-
ture which love alone can understand and justify, though the
faithfulness of the eternal and supreme Father ensures that
the anticipation shall receive its full verification.
If this be the relation of faith to i*eason, we see the expla-
nation of what seems, at first sight, to the philosopher, to be
the most irritating and hypocritical characteristic of faith.
It is always shifting its intellectual defences. It adopts this
or that fashion of philosophical apology; and then, when
this is shattered by some novel scientific generalisation, faith,
probably after a passionate struggle to retain the old position,
suddenly and gaily abandons it, and takes up with the new
formula, just as if nothing had happened: it discovers that
the new formula is admirably adapted for its purposes, and
is, in fact, just what it always meant, only it has unfortun-
ately omitted to mention it. So it goes on, again and again ;
and no wonder that the philosophers growl at those humbugs,
the clergy !
But they are criticising faith as if it were a theory, as if
knowledge were its province, while, in truth, the seat of faith
i. Faith. 3 5
lies back behind the region of knowledge. Its radical acts and
motives are independent of any particular condition of thought
or science : they are deeper recessed ; they exist in their own
right, and under their own conditions. True, they may not be
able to express themselves, to get their energies forward, to set
themselves free, to manifest themselves, except through the
mediation of knowledge, through the instruments and chan-
nels which the science of the day provides them. But this
does not confuse their inherent and distinct character. They
never identify themselves with the tools they use. They sit
quite loose to the particular state of thought, the formula, the
terms, through which they make their way out into action.
And, moreover, since the acts of faith are more radical than
those of reason, and since they belong to the entire man
acting in his integrity, they therefore of necessity anticipate,
in their degree, all that the man, by slow development, by
the patient industry of reasoning, will laboriously disclose.
Lying deeper than all knowledge, they hold in them the con-
dition under which all knowledge will be arrived at. They
constitute the activity which ought to be at the background
of all our reasoning. No particular or partial state of know-
ledge can exhaust their significance. Each step knowledge
makes does but illustrate, in some new fashion, the relation
of all knowledge to faith does but elucidate the character-
istics of that primal sonship. In each fresh discovery or
generalisation, faith finds a new instrument for expressing its
old convictions; it is taught to see the weak points, the
imperfections of its former expressions ; it understands where
they hold good, and where they failed ; it gets out more of
itself than ever before, through the new channels opened to
it ; it discovers more of its own character by finding better
modes in which to manifest it. It does but half know itself,
so long as its expression is encumbered.
The advance of secular knowledge, then, is for faith, an
acquired gain : for by it, it knows itself better ; it sees more
of what was involved in its vital convictions. It has a
struggle, no doubt, in dropping oif the expressions that have
grown familiar to it, and in detecting the fresh insight into
D 3
36 The Religion of the Incarnation.
its own nature which it can win by the new terminology:
but when once it has mastered the terms, new lights break
out upon it, new suggestions flash, new capacities disclose
themselves. It has won a new tool: when it has become
familiarised with the use of it, it can do great and unexpected
things with it.
But, for all that, it is but a new tool, worked by the old
convictions; they have not changed, any more than love
changes, though the slow development of married life may
carry the lovers into unknown experiences, in foreign lands,
under changed skies. The two, if they be faithful, learn far
more of what the love they plighted means, as each sweeping
revolution carries them hither and thither, than ever they
understood on the wedding day ; yet it is ever the old love
then pledged, which they hold fast to the end. Its identity
is emphasised by the changes. So with faith. It may absorb
its energies in the joy of wielding the particular instrument
with which, at any one moment, science supplies it. But it
will never the least fear to drop it, so soon as the advancing
skill and the pushing minds of men have elaborated for it
some yet more delicate and subtle tool, wherewith to give free
play to its native vitalities.
For faith is moved by but one solitary passion the hope
of cleaving, closer and ever closer, to the being of God. It
is, itself, nothing but this act of personal adherence, of per-
sonal cohesion ; and all else is, for it, material that can be
subdued to this single service. Each bettering of knowledge
intensifies the possibilities of this cohesion ; and, for that, it
is welcomed. It opens out fresh aspects of the good Father :
it uncovers new treasures of His wisdom : therefore, for faith,
it is an ever-mounting ladder, by which it draws nearer and
nearer, spirit to spirit, heart to heart. No idle or indifferent
matter this ; and right knowledge, therefore, is for faith, a
serious and pressing need. And, moreover, faith is pledged
to use all possible guidance and direction in making its great
act of self-surrender to God. And it is the peculiar office
of reason, and of the rational conscience, to guard it from
any distorted and unworthy venture. Faith has to make its
i. Faith. 37
leap ; but to make it exactly in that direction, and in no
other, where reason points the way. It is bound therefore -
to use all its intelligent resources : it may not fall below the
level of its highest reason without the risk of sinking to a
superstition. This is the radical difference between what we
here claim, and that which a superstition demands of us. A
superstition asks faith to shut its eyes. We ask it to open
them as wide as it can. We demand this of it as a positive
duty. It is bound, as an act of the whole man, to use every
conceivable means and security which knowledge can bring it.
For so alone can it secure itself against the hazards which
encompass its adventure. It cannot afford to enter on that
venturous committal of itself less equipped and instructed
than it was open to it to be. It must put all to use that can
better its offer of itself to God.
It is, in this seriousness, that faith is apt to embrace so fast
the dominant scientific or philosophical creed. It has found,
through this creed, a new and thrilling insight into God's
mind, and it fastens on this precious gift ; and dwells delight-
edly on it, and spends itself in absorbing the peculiar truths
which this particular way of thinking brings to the front.
So that, at last, when the smash comes, when the floods break
in, when the accumulation of new facts outside the old lines
necessitates a total reconstruction of the intellectual fabric,
faith seems to have gone under with the ruined scheme to
which it had attached itself so firmly.
Yet, if ever it has implicated its own fate with that of any
particular form of knowledge, it has been false to itself. It
has no more right to identify itself with any intellectual
situation than it has to pin its fortunes to those of any
political dynasty. Its eternal task lies in rapid readjustment
to each fresh situation, which the motion of time may disclose
to it. It has that in it which can apply to all, and learn from
all. Its identity is not lost, because its expressions vary and
shift : for its identity lies deep in personality ; and per-
sonality is that which testifies to its own identity by the
variety and the rapidity of its self-adaptation to the changes
of circumstance. So with faith. Its older interpretations of
38 The Religion of the Incarnation.
itself are not false, because the newer situations have called
for different manifestations. Each situation forces a new
aspect to the front. But ever it is God and the soul, which
recognise each other under every disguise. Now it is in one
fashion and now in another: but it is always one unalter-
able wisdom which is justified, recognised, and loved, by
those who are her children.
We will not, then, be the least afraid of the taunt, that we
are all accepting and delivering from our pulpits that which
once threw us into anger and dismay. Only let us learn
our true lesson ; and, in our zeal to appreciate the wonders
of Evolution, let us hold ourselves prepared for the day which
is bound to come, when again the gathering facts will clamour
for a fresh generalisation : and the wheel will give one more
turn ; and the new man will catch sight of the vision which is
preparing ; and the new book will startle ; and the new band
of youthful professors will denounce and demolish our present
heroes ; and all the reviews and magazines will yelp in chorus
at their heels, proclaiming loudly that now, at last and for
ever, the faith, which has pledged itself so deeply to the
obsolete and discredited theory of Evolution, is indeed dead
and done with. Faith will survive that crisis, as it has sur-
vived so many before : but it will be something, if it does not
drag behind it the evil record of passion, and blindness, with
which it has too often disgraced its unwilling passage from
truth to truth.
IV. But here our objections take, perhaps, a new turn
altogether. ' Ah, yes ! ' it will be said ; ' faith, if it were a
simple surrender of the soul to God, a childlike adhesion
of the spiritual sonship in us to its Father, Who is in
heaven, might sit loose to all formulae, theories, discoveries,
in the way described. Faith, if it limited itself to this mys-
tical communion, might be beyond the scope and criticism of
reason. But this is not the least what you really ask of us.
The faith, for which you practically plead, the only form of
faith actually open to us, has rashly left these safe confines : it
has implicated itself with a vast body of facts recorded in a
book. It has involved itself in intricate statements of dogma.
i. Faith. 39
How can you claim to be free from the control of logic and
criticism, in things so directly open to logical treatment 1 ?
This spiritual faith of yours has mixed itself up with alien
matter, with historical incidents, with intellectual definitions :
here are things of evidence and proof. Here its locks are
shorn ; its mystic strength is gone. Delilah holds it fast ; it
is a prisoner in the hands of the Philistines. If you will
retreat again back into the region of simple spiritual in-
tuitions, and abandon to reason this debatable land, how
gladly would we follow you ! But that is just what you refuse
to do.'
Now, here is the serious moment for us of to-day. It is quite
true that all would be plain and easy, if we might be allowed
to make this retreat if we might limit our claims for the
spirit to that simple childlike intuition which, instinctively,
feels after, and surrenders to, the good Father in heaven.
But what would that retreat mean? It would mean an
attempt, desperate and blind, to turn back the world's story,
to ignore the facts, to over-leap the distinctions of time and
place, to deny experience, to force ourselves back into pri-
mitive days, to imagine ourselves children again. Simple
intuitions of God, simple communion with the Father, un-
questioned, undistracted, this is the privilege of primitive
days, when minds are simple, when experience is simple, when
society is simple. Plain, easy, and direct situations admit of
plain, easy, and direct handling. But our situation is not
plain, easy, or direct. Our minds are intricate and com-
plicated ; our story has been a long and a difficult one ; our
social condition is the perplexed deposit of age-long expe-
riences. The faith, which is to be ours to-day, must be a
faith of to-day. It cannot remain at the level of childhood,
when nothing else in us or about us is the least childlike.
It cannot babble out in pretty baby-language, when the
situation with which it has to deal is terribly earnest, serious,
perilous, and intense. It must be level with its work ; and
its work is complicated, hard, disciplined : how can it expect
to accomplish it without effort, without pain, without train-
ing, without intricacy 1 The world is old ; human life is old ;
4O The Religion of the Incarnation.
and faith is old also. It has had many a strange and stormy
experience ; it has learned much on the way ; it has about it
the marks of old troubles ; the care, the patience, the com-
pleteness of age, have left their stamp upon it. It has had a
history, like everything else; and it reaches us to-day, in
a form which that history behind it can alone make intel-
ligible. Four thousand years have gone to its making since
Abraham first laid hold, in a definite and consistent manner,
of the faith which is ours to-day. All those centuries it has
been putting itself together, growing, enriching itself, de-
veloping, as it faced and measured each new issue, each
gathering complication, each pressing hazard. This long ex-
perience has built up faith's history : and, by study of that
history, we can know why it was that faith could not stand
still at that point where we should find it so convenient to
rest. Faith appeals to its own story to justify its career ;
it bears about that history with it as its explanation, why,
and how it has arrived at its present condition. That
history is its proof how far it has left its first childhood
behind it, how impossible it is, at the end of the days, to
return to the beginning. The history, which constitutes
our difficulty, is its own answer. For there, in that Bible,
lies the recorded story of the facts which pressed hard
upon the earliest intuition of God, and drove it forward,
and compelled it to fix itself, and to define itself, and to
take a firmer root, and to make for itself a secure dwelling-
place, and to shape for itself a career. The Bible is the
apology which our faith carries with it, and offers as a proof
of the necessity which has forced it to go beyond its primitive
efforts, until it has reached the stage at which we now en-
counter it. It portrays there, before our eyes, how it all
began ; how there came to this man and to that, the simple
augury, the presage, the spasm of spiritual insight, the flash,
the glimpse, the intimation ; until there came the man,
Abraham, in whom it won the emphasis, the solidity, the
power, of a call. ' Oh ! that we might be content to feel, as
he, the presence of the Everlasting ! Why not leave us in
peace, we cry, with the simple faith of Abraham ? ' And the
i. Faith. 4 1
answer is plain : ' because it is the nineteenth century after
Christ, instead of the nineteenth century before.' We are
making a mistake of dates. Let us turn to our Bible and read.
There we watch the reasons disclosing themselves why that
simple faith could not abide in arrest at its first moment ; why
it must open a new career, with new duties, and new respon-
sibilities, and new problems. The seed is sown, but it has to
grow ; to make good its footing amid the thick of human
affairs ; to root itself in the soil of human history ; to spread
itself out in institutions ; to push its dominion ; to widen its
range ; to become a tree that will fill the land. Before
Abraham, it was but a flying seed, blown by the winds ; now,
it is a stable, continuous, masterful growth. It must be this,
if it is ever to make effective its spiritual assertions over the
increasing intricacy of human affairs.
What, let us ask, is that life of faith which historically began
with Abraham ? It is a friendship, an intimacy, between man
and God, between a son and a father. Such an intimacy cannot
be idle or stagnant; it cannot arrest its instinctive development.
It holds in it infinite possibilities of growth : of increasing
familiarity, of multiplied communion. And, thus, such a friend-
ship creates a story of its own ; it has its jars, its frictions, its
entanglements ; alas ! on one side, its lapses, its quarrels, its
blunders, its misunderstandings : and then, on the other, its
corresponding indignations, and withdrawals, and rebukes ;
and yet again, its reconciliations, its reactions, its pardons, its
victories. Ever it moves forward on its chequered path : ever
God, the good Friend, spends Himself in recovering the inti-
macy, in renewing it, in purging it, in raising it. Its condi-
tions expand : its demands intensify : its perils deepen : its
glories gather : until it consummates its effort in the per-
fected communion of God and man in Him, Who completes
and closes the story of this ever-growing intimacy, by that
act of supreme condescension which brings down God to
inhabit and possess the heart of man : and by that act of
supreme exaltation, which uplifts man into absolute union
with the God Who made him.
This is the story: the Bible is its record. As a body of
42 The Religion of the Incarnation.
incidents and facts it must be subject to all the conditions of
history and the laws of evidence ; as a written record it
introduces a swarm of questions, which can be sifted and
decided by rational criticism. This entails complications, it
must be confessed ; but they are inevitable. The intimacy
between man and God cannot advance, except through the
pressure of connected and recorded experience. A human
society which has no record of its past is robbed of its future.
It is savage : it cannot go forward, because it cannot look
back. So with this divine friendship. Its recorded experi-
ences are the one condition of its growth. Without them it
must always be beginning afresh : it must remain imprisoned
at the starting-post. The length and complexity of its record
is the measure of its progress ; even though they must pre-
sent, at the same time, a larger surface to the handling of
criticism, and may involve a deeper degree of obscurity in
details.
And, after all, though details drawn out of a dead past
permit obscurity, the nature and character of the main issue
become ever more fixed and distinct, as the long roll of
circumstances discloses its richer secrets. The very shift
and confusion of the surface-material throws out, in emphatic
contrast, the firm outlines of the gathering and growing
mystery. Ever the advance proceeds, throwing off all that
is accidental, immaterial, subservient : ever man becomes
clearer in his recognition of the claims made on him by
the hope which God keeps ever before Him, ' They shall
be my people : I will be their God.' Ever the necessities
of such an intimate affection point to the coming of the
Christ. Christ is the end, the sum, the completion, of this
historic friendship : and His advent is, therefore, absolutely
unintelligible unless it is held in relation to the long expe-
rience, which He interprets, justifies, and fulfils. Faith in
Christ is the last result, the ultimate and perfected condition
of that faith of Abraham, which enabled him to become the
first friend of God. And the immense experience that lay
between Abraham and St. Paul, can alone bridge the interval,
can alone exhibit the slow and laborious evolution, through
i. Faith. 43
which the primitive apprehension of God was transformed into
the Christian Creed that mighty transformation, spread out
over two thousand years of varied history, which our Lord
summed up in the lightning-flash, ' Your father Abraham
rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.' The
Book is the record of those tested and certified experi-
ments, which justified our Lord in asserting that to believe in
God was, necessarily, to believe in Him. No one can under-
stand that assertion, unless by seeing it worked out, in detail,
by the searching logic of experience.
Faith in Christ, then, includes faith in the Bible : and, in
saying that, we have already cleared away much of the diffi-
culty that beset us, For our faith in Christ becomes the
measure and standard of our faith in the Bible. We believe
in it as the record of our growing intimacy with God. Faith
is, still, a spiritual cohesion of person with person, of the
living soul with a living God. No details that intervene
confuse this primitive relation. Only, that cohesion was not
reached at one leap. It is ancient : it has traversed many inci-
dents and trials : it has learned much : it has undergone patient
apprenticeship : it has been bonded by the memory of multi-
tudinous vicissitudes. Like all else that is human, it has grown.
The details of events are the media of that growth. In that
character they are vitally essential to the formed intimacy :
but in that character alone. They are not valued for their
own sake ; but for the cause which they served. Belief in
God never changes its character, and becomes belief in facts :
it only developes into a deeper and deeper belief in God, as
disciplined by facts. The facts must be real, if the discipline
is to be real : but, apart from this necessity, we are indifferent
to them. We can listen to anything which historical criticism
has to tell us, of dates and authorship ; of time and place. It
may supply all the gaps in our record, showing how the
material there briefly gathered, had, itself, a story, and slowly
came together, and had sources and associations elsewhere.
All such research adds interest to the record, as it opens out
to us the action of the Divine Intimacy, in lajdng hold of its
material. We watch it, by the aid of such criticism, at its
44 The Religion of the Incarnation.
work of assimilation ; and, in uncovering its principles of
selection, we apprehend its inner mind : we draw closer to our
God. The more nearly we can ally the early conditions of
Israel to those of Arabian nomads, the more delicate and rare
becomes our apprehension of that divine relationship, which,
by its perpetual pressure, lifted Israel to its marvellous
supremacy, and which, by its absence, left the Arabian to
be what he is to-day.
The point at which criticism must hold off its hands is,
of course, a most subtle matter to decide. But we can, at
least, be sure of this that such a point will be no arbitrary
one ; it will be there, where criticism attempts to trench on
the reality and the uniqueness of the Divine Intimacy, which
those incidents served to fashion, and those books detected and
recorded, and Christ consummated. Our faith in Christ must
determine what, in the Bible, is vital to its own veracity.
There is no other measure or rule of what we mean by in-
spiration.
The preparation for Christ, then, necessitates such com-
plications as these. And the character of His advent in-
tensified and thickened them. For, while asking of us the
purest form of spiritual adherence, He makes that demand
in a shape which is imbedded throughout in concrete his-
torical facts, which, as facts, must be subject to the thumb
of critical discussion, and to all the external handling of
evidence and argument.
And, then, on the top of this, He has, of necessity, raised
the question of His own Personality to such a pitch of vital
value, that the full force of man's intellectual activities is
drawn towards its consideration, is summoned to contem-
plate, and measure, and apprehend it, is compelled to examine
and face its tremendous issues. The supreme act of personal
surrender, for which Christ unhesitatingly asks, cannot con-
ceivably pass beyond its child-stage without forming a direct
and urgent challenge to the intellect to say how, and why, such
an act can be justified, or such a claim interpreted. No faith
can reach to such an absolute condition without finding itself
involved in anxieties, perils, problems, complications. Its very
i. Faith. 45
absoluteness is a provocation to the questioning and disputing
mind, to the hesitating and scrupulous will. And the result,
the inevitable result, of such a faith proposed, as it was, to
a world no longer young and childlike, but matured, old,
thoughtful, experienced is the Dogmatic Creeds. We clamour
against these intellectual complications : we cry out for the
simple primitive faith. But, once again, it is a mistake of
dates. We cannot ask to be as if eighteen centuries had
dropped out, unnoticed as if the mind had slumbered since
the days of Christ, and had never asked a question. We can-
not hope to be in the same condition after a question has
been asked, as we were before it had ever occurred to us to
ask it. The Creeds only record that certain questions have,
as a fact, been asked. Could our world be what it is, and not
have asked them 1 These difficulties of a complicated faith
are only the reflection of the difficulties of a complicated life.
If, as a fact, we are engaged in living a life which is intricate,
subtle, anxious, then any faith which hopes to cover and embrace
that life, cannot escape the necessity of being intricate, subtle,
and anxious also. No child's creed can satisfy a man's needs,
hunger, hopes, anxieties. If we are asked to throw over the
complications of our Creeds, we must beg those that ask us, to
begin by throwing over the complications of this social and
moral life.
But still, with the Creeds as with the Bible, it is the per-
sonal intimacy with God in Christ which alone is our con-
cern. We do not, in the strict sense, believe in the Bible,
or in the Creeds : we believe solely and absolutely in Christ
Jesus. Faith is our living act of adherence in Him, of cohe-
sion with God. But still, once more, we must recognise
that this act of adhesion has a history : it has gradually
been trained and perfected : and this has been accomplished
through the long and perilous experiences recorded in the
Old Testament ; and it has been consummated in the final
sealing of the perfected intimacy attained in Him, in Whose
person it was realised and made possible for us : and it has
been guarded and secured to us in the face of the over-
whelming pressure of eighteen strong, stormy, and distracted
46 The Religion of the Incarnation.
centuries. And therefore it is that we now must attain our
cohesion with God, subject to all the necessities laid upon us
by the fact that we enter on the world's stage at a late hour,
when the drama has already developed its plot and compli-
cated its situations. This is why we cannot now, in full view
of the facts, believe in Christ, without finding that our belief
includes the Bible and the Creeds.
V. Faith is, still and always, a spiritual intimacy, a living
friendship with God. That is what we must be for ever
asserting. That is the key to all our problems ; and once sure
of this in all its bearings, we shall not be afraid of a taunt
which is apt to sting especially those of us who are ordained.
It is conveyed, in its noblest form, in a book of Mr. John
Morley's, on Compromise. No one can read that book without
being the better or the worse for it. The intense force of high
moral convictions acts upon us like a judgment. It evokes the
deepest conscience in us to come forward, and stand at that
austere bar and justify itself, or, in failing to justify itself,
sink condemned. And in that book he asks the old question,
with unequalled power: how can it possibly be honest for
men to sign away their reason at the age of twenty-three ?
to commit themselves to conclusions which they cannot have
mastered to anticipate beforehand all that experience may
have to teach ? In committing themselves to positions which
any new knowledge or discovery may reverse, they have for-
bidden themselves the free use of their critical faculties : they
have resigned their intellectual conscience.
What do we answer to that severe arraignment 1 Surely
we now know well. Faith is an affair of personal intimacy,
of friendship, of will, of love : and, in all such cases, we should
know exactly what to do with language of this type. We
should laugh it out of court. For it is language which does
not belong to this region. It is the language, it expresses
the temper, of the scientific student a temper, an attitude
specialised for a distinct purpose. That purpose is one of
gradual advance into regions as yet untouched and unsus-
pected an advance which is for ever changing the relations
and classifications of those already partially known. The
i. Faith. 47
temper essential to such a purpose must be prepared for
discovery, for development, for the unexpected ; it is bound to
be tentative, experimental, hypothetical to be cool, critical,
corrective. It deals with impersonal matter ; and it must
itself, therefore, be as far as possible impersonal, abstract,
non-moral, without passion, without individuality, without
a private intention, or will, or fixed opinion.
But such a temper, perfectly justified for scientific purposes,
is absolutely impotent and barren in matters of moral feeling
and practice.
The man who brings this temper into play in affairs of the
will, or the heart, or the imagination, in cases of affection,
friendship, passion, inspiration, generosity, in the things of
home, of war, of patriotism, of love, is in the wrong world :
he is a living blunder : he has no cue, no key, no interpretation.
He is simply absurd.
And religion stands with these affairs. Just as we see well
enough that if love were approached in this scientific spirit, it
could not even begin, so it is quite as certain that, if faith were
approached in this spirit, it could not even begin.
Mr. Moiiey has mixed up two different w T orlds. He is
criticising that form of knowledge, which consists in spiritual
apprehension of another's personality through the whole force
of a man's inherent, and integral, and personal, will and
desire, by the standard of another form of knowledge altogether,
which consists in gradual and experimental assimilation of
foreign and unknown matter through specialised organs of
critical observation.
This latter knowledge is bound to be as far as possible
emptied of personal elements. But our knowledge is nothing
if not personal : it is the knowledge which issues, and issues
only, out of the personal contact of life with life. And
this is why it can afford to anticipate the future. For
a person is a consistent and integral whole: if you know
it at any one point, you know it in a sense at all points.
The one character, the one will, disclose themselves through
every partial expression, and passing gesture, and varying act.
Therefore it is that, when two personalities draw towards one
48 The Religion of the Incarnation.
another in the touch of love, they can afford to plight their
word. For love is the instinctive prophecy of a future ad-
herence. It is the assurance, passing from soul to soul, that no
new discovery of what is involved in their after-life together
can ever deny, or defeat, or destroy their present mutual
coherence in each other. That adhesion, that adaptability,
which has been proved at a few points, will necessarily be
justified throughout. The marriage-pledge expresses the ab-
solute conviction that the present experience is irreversible,
except by wilful sin. Whatever novelties the years bring
with them, those two characters will abide what they are
to-day. Growth cannot radically alter them.
Love, then, is this confident anticipation, which takes the
future in pledge. And where this anticipation breaks down,
it must be through human infirmity, wrong, misunder-
standing.
And our knowledge of Christ is this knowledge of love ;
wherever it exists, and so far as it exists, it issues out of
personal contact, personal inter-action. This is why, in its
tested and certified form, i. e. in the accumulated and historic
experience of the Catholic community, it can rationally justify
its anticipation of an unbroken adherence.
And it can do so with complete confidence, because, here, on
the side of Christ, there is no infirmity which can endanger
the plighted faith : there is no lapse, no decline possible.
Christ must be loyal, for He is sinless. And more : being
sinless, He is consistent. Every part of Him is in harmony
with the whole: in Him there is no unsteadiness, no in-
security. Such a flawless character is identical with itself:
wherever it is touched, it can be tested and approved.
What, then, can upset our trust in Him 1 What can disturb
our knowledge of Him ? What fear of change can the years
bring on ? We may know but a tiny fragment, a fringe of
this love of His to us, yet that is enough : to have felt it at
all is to trust it for ever. We cannot hesitate to commit
ourselves to One Who, if we know Him in any way, is known
to be, by inward, personal, inherent necessity, the 'same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever.'
i. Faith. 49
Yes ! but still it may be pleaded, that this anticipatory
adherence, which might justifiably be given to a person
beloved, cannot be pledged to dogmatic definitions. These,
at any rate, are matters not of love, but of reason : they must
be liable to critical examination, to intellectual revision. It
is the pledge given to believe these dogmas in the future,
which is such an outrage on intellectual morality.
Now, this protest, forcible and obvious as it looks at first
sight, is still guilty of confusing the criticism which belongs
to one province of knowledge with that which belongs to
another. These dogmas of faith do not the least correspond
to the classifications and laws of physical science ; and for
this reason, that the matter to which they relate is wholly
different in kind. Dogmas represent reason in its appli-
cation to a personal life : scientific generalisations represent
reason as applied to matter, from which the conditions of
personality have been rigorously and rightly excluded. The
difference is vital ; and it affects the entire character of the
working of reason.
The dogmatic definitions of Christian theology can never be
divorced from their contact in the personality of Christ. They
are statements concerning a living character. As such, and
only as such, do they come within the lines of faith. We do
not, in the strict sense, believe in them : for belief is never a
purely intellectual act ; it is a movement of the living man
drawn towards a living person. Belief can only be in Jesus
Christ. To Him alone do we ever commit ourselves, sur-
render ourselves, for ever and aye. But a personality, though
its roots lie deeper than reason, yet includes reason within
its compass : a personality cannot but be rational, though it
be more than merely rational ; it has in it a rational ground,
a rational construction ; it could not be what it is without
being of such and such a fixed and organic character. And
a personality, therefore, is intelligible ; it lays itself open to
rational treatment ; its characteristics can be stated in terms of
thought. The Will of God is the Word of God ; the Life is
also the Light. That which is loved can be apprehended ; that
which is felt can be named. So the Personality of the Word
50 The Religion of the Incarnation.
admits of being rationally expressed in the sense that reason
can name and distinguish those elements in it, which con-
stitute its enduring and essential conditions. The dogmas
now in question, are simply careful rehearsals of those inherent
necessities which, inevitably, are involved in the rational
construction of Christ's living character. They are state-
ments of what He must be, if He is what our hearts assure
us ; if He can do that for which our wills tender Him their
lifelong self-surrender. Unless these rational conditions
stand, then, no act of faith is justifiable ; unless His person-
ality correspond to these assertions, we can never be authorised
in worshipping Him.
But, if so, then we can commit ourselves to these dogmas
in the same way, and degree, as we commit ourselves to Him.
We can do so, in the absolute assurance that He cannot but
abide for ever, that which we know Him to be to-day. We
know Him indeed, but ' in part : ' but it is part of a fixed and
integral character, which is whole in every part ; and can
never falsify, in the future, the revelation which it has already
made of itself.
The real question, as to Christian dogma, lies in the prior
question Is Christianity justified in claiming to have reached
a final position? If the position is rightly final, then the
intellectual expression of its inherent elements is final also.
Here is the deep contrast between it and science. The
scientific man is forbidden, by the very nature of his studies,
to assume finality for his propositions. For he is not yet in
command of his material. Far, very far, from it. He is
touching it on its very edge. He is engaged in slowly push-
ing tentative advances into an unknown world, looming, vast,
dim, manifold, beyond his frontier of light. The coherence of
his known matter with that huge mass beyond his ken, can be
but faintly imaged and suspected. Wholly unreckoned forces
are in operation. At any moment he may be called upon to
throw over the classification which sums up his hitherto ex-
perience ; he may have to adopt a new centre ; to bring his facts
into a novel focus ; and this involves at once a novel principle
of arrangement. In such conditions dogma is, of course, an
i. Faith. 5 1
absurdity. But, if we are in a position to have any faith in <
Jesus Christ, then we must suppose that we have arrived at
the one centre to all possible experiences, the one focus, under
which all sights must fall. To believe in Him at all is to
believe that, by and in 'this Man, will God judge the world.'
In His personality, in His character, we are in possession of
the ultimate principle, under which the final estimate of all
things will be taken. We have given us, in His sacrifice and .i-ikv-
mission, the absolute rule, standard, test, right to the very
end. Nothing can fall outside it. In Him, God has summed
up creation. We have touched, in Him, the ' last days,' the
ultimate stage of all development. We cannot believe in Him
at all, and not believe that His message is final.
And it is this finality which justifies dogma. If Christian-
ity is final, it can afford to be dogmatic ; and we, who give
our adhesion to it, must, in so doing, profess our adhesion
to the irreversible nature of its inherent principles: for, in
so doing, we are but re-asserting our belief in the absolute
and final sufficiency of His person.
Let us venture, now, to review the path that we have
travelled, in order that we may see at what point we have
arrived. Faith, then, is, from first to last, a spiritual act of
the deepest personal will, proceeding out of that central core of
the being, where the self is integral and whole, before it has
sundered itself off into divided faculties. There, in that
root-self, lie the germs of all that appears in the separate
qualities and gifts in feelings, in reason, in imagination, in
desire ; and faith, the central activity, has in it, therefore, the
germs of all these several activities. It has in it that which
becomes feeling, yet is not itself a feeling. It has in it that
which becomes reason, yet is not itself the reason. It holds
in it imaginative elements, yet is no exercise of the imagi-
nation. It is alive with that which desires, craves, loves ;
yet is not itself merely an appetite, a desire, a passion.
In all these qualities it has its part : it shares their nature ;
it has kindred motions; it shows itself, sometimes through
the one, and sometimes through the other, according to the
varieties of human characters. In this man, it can make the
E a
52 The Religion of the Incarnation.
feeling its main instrument and channel ; in that man, it will
find the intellect its chief minister ; in another, it will make
its presence known along the track of his innermost craving
for a support in will and in love. But it will always remain
something over, and beyond, any one of its distinctive media ;
and not one of these specialities of gift will ever, therefore, be
able to account wholly for the faith which puts it to use.
That is why faith must always remain beyond its realised
evidences. If it finds, in some cases, its chief evidences in the
region of feeling, it is nevertheless open to deadly ruin, if
ever it identifies itself with these evidences, as if it could rely
on them to carry it through. It may come into being by
their help ; but it is never genuine faith, until it can abide
in self-security at those dry hours, when the evidences of
positive feeling have been totally withdrawn. And as with
feeling ; so with reason. Faith looks to reason for its proofs :
it must count on finding them ; it offers for itself intellectual
justifications. It may arrive at a man by this road. But it
is not itself reason ; it can never confuse itself with a merely
intellectual process. It cannot, therefore, find, in reason, the
full grounds for its ultimate convictions. Ever it retains its
own inherent character, by which it is constituted an act of
personal trust an act of willing and loving self-surrender
to the dominant sway of another's personality. It is always
this, whether it springs up instinctively, out of the roots of
our being, anticipating all after-proof, or whether it is sum-
moned out into vitality at the close of a long and late argu-
mentative process. No argument, no array of arguments,
however long, however massive, can succeed in excusing it
from that momentous effort of the inner man, which is its
very essence. Let reason do its perfect work: let it heap
up witness upon witness, proof upon proof. Still there will
come at last the moment when the call to believe will be
just the same to the complete and reasonable man as it
always is to the simplest child the call to trust Another
with a confidence which reason can justify but can never
create. This act, which is faith, must have in it that spirit
of venture, which closes with Another's invitation, which
i. Faith. 53
yields to Another's call. It must still have in it and about
it the character of a vital motion, of a leap upward,
which dares to count on the prompting energies felt astir
within it.
Faith cannot transfer its business into other hands to do
its work for it. It cannot request reason to take its own
place, or achieve its proper results. There is no possibility
of devolution here ; it cannot delegate its functions to this
faculty or to tha" 1 It is by forgetting this that so many
men are to be found, at the close of many arguments of which
they fully acknowledge the convincing force, still hovering
on the brink of faith, never quite reaching it, never passing
beyond the misery of a prolonged and nerveless suspense.
They hang back at the very crisis, because they have hoped
that their reasoning powers would, by their own force, have
made belief occur. They are like birds on a bough, who
should refuse to fly until they have fully known that they
can. Their suspense would break and pass, if once they re-
membered that, to enter the T ingdom of Heaven, they must
always be as little children. They must call upon the child
within them. At the end, as at the beginning, of all the
argumentative work, it is still the temper of a child which
they must bring into play. There must still be the energy
of self-committal, the movement of a brave surrender. Once
let them turn, enforced by all the pressure of reasonable
evidence, to this secret fount of life within the self, and back
flows the strength which was theirs long ago, when the in-
spiration of their innate sonship moved sweetly in them,
breeding confidence, secure of itself, undaunted, and un-
fatigued. That sonship abides in us all, cumbered and
clouded though it be by our sin ; it abides on and on, fed by
the succours of a Father Who can never forget or forsake,
and Who is working hitherto to recover and redeem. And
while it abides, faith is still possible. For its native motions
are the spontaneous outcome of that spiritual kinship which,
if once alive and free, impels us towards Him by Whose
love we have been begotten. Keason and feeling, proof and
argument these are means and instruments by which we
54 The Religion of the Incarnation.
can invoke this sonship into action, and release it from much
which fetters and enslaves. But it is the actual upspringing
force of the sonship itself, which alone can be the source of
belief. And as it is given to all to be sons of God, through the
eternal sonship of Christ, therefore it is open to all to count
upon possessing the conditions of faith in God.
N OTE . This essay has, for its sole aim, the reassurance of an existing faith in
face of temporary perplexities. It therefore takes faith as a present and possi-
ble fact. It assumes man to be a creature who believes. And it tries to show
why such belief, if it be there, should not be discouraged by difficulties
which belong to the very nature of its original grounds. For this it recalls
the depth and security with which the roots of faith run back into the original
constitution of man ; which original constitution, however broken, thwarted,
maimed, polluted by sin, remains still in us as the sole pledge and ground
of our possible redemption in Christ, Who comes to restore the blurred
image of God in us, and Who must find in us the radical elements of the
supernatural nature which He enters to renew. To its enduring existence
in the heart of man Christ always appeals. Men are still children of their
Father Who is in heaven ; and therefore He can demand, as the sole and
primal condition of redemption, Faith, which is the witness of the unlost
sonship. That faith He still assumes to be possible, by the invitation to
man to believe and so be healed. He makes this invitation just as if it were
in man's own power to respond to it without for the moment touching on
the necessity which, through the very effort to believe, man will discover for
himself i.e. the necessity of God's gift of the Spirit to make such belie:
exist. Such a gift belonged to the original condition of unfallen man,
when his nature was itself supernaturally endowed with its adequate an<
sustaining grace. Such a gift had to be renewed, after the ruin wrought by
sin, both by the restoration of the broken sonship within the man throug.
the beloved Son, as well as by the renewal of the evoking and sustainin
Spirit that should lift up, from within the inner sonship, its living cry o:
Abba, Father. The right to believe, and the power to believe, had both to be
re-created.
But all that was so re-created has, for its preliminary ground, the origina
constitution of man's sinless nature ; and, in all our treatment of redem
tion, we must begin by recalling what it was which Christ entered to restore
That original condition was the pledge of the recovery which God woul
bring to pass ; and, throughout the interval between fall and rescue, i
could anticipate the coming Christ by the faith which rejoiced to see Hi
Day, and saw His Glory, and spake of Him. Therefore the faith whic
Christ raises to its new and higher power by concentrating it upon His ow
Personality, is still, at core, the old faith which was the prophetic witne:
given, under the conditions of the earlier covenant, by that great army o:
the Faithful which is marshalled before us by the author of the Epistle t<
the Hebrews, who most certainly considers it possible and justifiable
emphasise the continuity that holds between the faith of Abraham and th
faith of the redeemed.
II.
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE
OF GOD.
AUBREY MOORE.
II.
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD.
I. THE object of this essay is not to discuss the so-called
' proofs ' of the existence of God, but to shew what the Chris-
tian doctrine of God is, and how it has grown to be what
it is, out of the antagonisms of earlier days ; and then to ask
What fuller realization of God's revelation of Himself is
He giving us through the contradictions and struggles of
to-day ? If it is true that ' the only ultimate test of reality
is persistence, and the only measure of validity among our
primitive beliefs the success with which they resist all efforts
to change them 1 ,' it is of first importance to discover what
it is which, through all the struggles of past history, the
religious nature of man has persistently clung to. Much
which was once dear to the religious consciousness, and
which seemed at the time to be an integral part of the
religious idea, has been given up. A former age abandoned
it with regret, and looked forward with gloomy foreboding.
A later age looks back with thankfulness, and recognises
' the good Hand of our God ' leading us to truer knowledge
of Himself.
It would be idle to deny, after all due allowance has been
made for the natural tendency to believe that the present
is the critical moment, not only for us, but for the world
at large, that the crisis of the present day is a very real one,
and that the religious view of God is feeling the effects of
the change, which is modifying our views of the world and
man. When such a fundamental idea is challenged, men are
1 Fiske, Idea of God, p. 1 39, quoting H. Spencer.
58 The Religion of the Incarnation.
naturally tempted to adopt one of two equally onesided
attitudes, to commit themselves either to a policy of unin-
telligent protest, or to a policy of unconditional surrender.
And if the one is needlessly despairing, the other is un-
warrantably sanguine. The one asks, 'How much must
I give up, of what religion has always been to me, that a
little of the old may survive amidst the new 1 ' The other
asks, ' How little of the old need I keep, so as not to inter-
fere with the ready acceptance of the new ? ' The one view
is pessimist, the other optimist. Both have their representa-
tives in our day, and each party is profoundly conscious of
the danger to which the other is exposed. The advocates of
the one view, finding themselves ' in a place where two seas
meet/ think it safer to ' run the ship aground ' ; those of the
other ' seeing they cannot bear up against the wind ' prefer
to ' let her drive.' But if the spirit of the one is merely
protestant, the spirit of the other is certainly not catholic.
In contrast with these one-sided views, we propose to
approach the question in the full conviction that the reve-
lation of God in Christ is both true and complete, and yet
that every new truth which flows in from the side of science,
or metaphysics, or the experience of social and political life,
is designed in God's providence to make that revelation real,
by bringing out its hidden truths. It is in this sense that
the Christian revelation of God claims to be both final and
progressive ; final, for Christians know but one Christ and
do not ' look for another ' ; progressive, because Christianity
claims each new truth as enriching our knowledge of God,
and bringing out into greater clearness and distinctness some
half-understood fragment of its own teaching. There are,
no doubt, always to be found Christians, who are ready to
treat new knowledge as the Caliph Omar treated the books
in the library of Alexandria, 'they agree with the Koran
and are unnecessary, or they disagree with it and must be
destroyed.' But an intelligent Christian will not ask, ' Does
this new truth agree with or contradict the letter of the
Bible ? ' but ' How does it interpret and help us to understand
the Bible 1 ' And so with regard to all truth, whether it
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 59
comes from the side of science, or history, or criticism, he
adopts neither the method of protest nor the method of sur-
render, but the method of assimilation. In the face of new
discoveries, the only question he is anxious to answer is this,
' What old truth will they explain, or enlighten, or make real
to us? What is this new world of life and interest which
is awaiting its consecration ? " Truth is an ever-flowing
river, into which streams flow in from many sides 1 ." What
is this new stream which is about to empty itself, as all
knowledge must, into the great flood of Divine truth, " that
the earth may be filled with the glory of the Lord, as the
waters cover the sea " ? '
Such a hopeful attitude does not, indeed, imply that the
assimilation of the new truths will go on as a matter of
course. The Christian knows that the acceptance of truth
is a moral, as well as an intellectual, matter, and in the moral
world there is no place for laisser faire. He expects to be
called upon to struggle ; he expects that the struggle will
need his utmost effort, moral and intellectual. His work
is both to keep and to claim ; to hold fast the faith ' once
for all delivered to the saints,' and yet to see in every frag-
ment of truth a real revelation of the mind and will of God.
He has no cut and dried answer to objections ; he does not
boast that he has no difficulties. But he does claim to look
out upon the difficulties of his day, not only fearlessly, but
with hope and trust. He knows that Christianity must
triumph in the end, but he does not expect all difficulties
to be removed in a moment. And he is strong enough, if
need be, to wait.
II. Whether anyone is really guilty of what Hume calls
the ' multiplied indiscretion and imprudence ' of dogmatic
atheism, whether positivism can rightly be so classed, whether
agnosticism is not atheism to all intents and purposes, are
questions which fortunately lie outside the scope of the
present enquiry. As for polytheism it has ceased to exist
in the civilised world. Every theist is, by a rational neces-
sity, a monotheist. But we find ourselves, in the present day,
1 S. Clem. Alex. Strom. I. v.
60 The Religion of the Incarnation.
face to face with two different views of God, which though
they constantly, perhaps generally, overlap, and even some-
times coincide, yet imply different points of view, and by
a process of abstraction can be held apart and contrasted
with one another. Many devout Christians are philosophers
and men of science ; many men of science and philosophers
are devout Christians. But the God of religion is not the
God of science and philosophy. Ideally, everyone will allow
that the relic 'ous idea of God, and the scientific and philo-
sophical idea of God must be identical, but in actual fact
it is not so, and in the earlier stages of the development of
both, there is a real antagonism. To accept this antagonism
as absolute is, by a necessary consequence, to compel one
to give way to the other. We cannot long hold two con-
tradictory truths. We find ourselves compelled to choose.
We may have Religion or Philosophy, but not both.
Very few, however, are prepared to go this length. It is
much more usual to get rid of the antagonism by adopting
one of two alternative m ;ho*ls.
(i) Of these the first is a suggested division of territory,
in which religion is allotted to faith, and philosophy and
science to reason. Such an expedient, though not uncom-
monly, and perhaps even wisely, adopted by individuals,
who refuse to give up either of two truths because they
cannot harmonize them, becomes ridiculous when seriously
proposed as a solution of the difficulty. Moreover the pro-
posed division of territory is unfair to start with. ' Give
us the Knowable, and you shall have the rest, which is far
the larger half,' sounds like a liberal offer made by science
to religion, till we remember that every advance in know-
ledge transfers something from the side of the unknown to
the side of the known, in violation of the original agreement.
Mr. Herbert Spencer calls this division of territory a ' recon-
ciliation 1 .' But if anything in the world could make religion
hate and fear science and oppose the advance of knowledge,
it is to find itself compelled to sit still and watch the slow
but sure filching away of its territory by an alien power.
1 Cf. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, Pt. I.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 61
We say nothing here of the fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer's
division ignores the truth that knowledge of correlatives
must be of the same kind 1 , and that if knowledge has to
do with one and faith with the other, either faith must be
a sort of knowledge, or knowledge a sort of faith. We merely
notice the unfairness of a division which assumes rationality
for science, and leaves irrationality to religion.
Curiously enough, however, there are many devout people,
who would be horrified at the thought that they had borrowed
from Agnosticism, and who have nevertheless made a simi-
lar division of territory. They are the people who stake all
upon what reason cannot do. They have no interest in the
progress of knowledge. The present gaps in science are their
stronghold, and they naturally resist every forward step in
knowledge as long as they can, because each new discovery
limits the area in which alone, according to their imperfect
view, faith can live. Every triumph of science on this
theory, as on Mr. Herbert Spencer's, becomes a loss, not a gain,
to religion. The very existence of God is bound up with that
part of His work in nature which we cannot understand, and,
as a consequence, we reach the paradox that the more we
know of His working, the less proof we have that He exists.
Modern apologetic literature abounds in this kind of argu-
ment. It is the devout form of the worship of the unknow-
able. Yet it is no wonder that people who take refuge in
gaps find themselves awkwardly placed when the gaps begin
to close.
(2) The other alternative is even more commonly adopted,
for it fits in well with the vagueness and want of precision
in language, which is at a premium in dealing with religious
questions. This consists in frittering away the meaning of
definite terms till they are available for anything, or adopting
a neutral term which, by a little management and stretching,
will include opposites. This is the method of indefinite in-
clusion. The strength of the former alternative lay in the
appearance pf sharp scientific delimitation of territory: the
strength of the latter in its unlimited comprehensiveness.
1 See this criticism excellently stated in Caird's Phil, of Religion, pp. 32, etc.
62 The Religion of the Incarnation.
A term is gradually stripped of the associations which make
it what it is, it is ' defecated to a pure transparency,' and
then it is ready for use. The term ' God ' is made merely ' a
synonym for nature : ' ; religion becomes ' habitual and per-
manent admiration 2 ,' or ' devout submission of the heart and
will to the laws of nature 3 ' ; enthusiasm does duty for wor-
ship, and the antagonism between religion and anything else
disappears.
Now so far as this represents, negatively, a reaction against
intolerance and narrowness, and positively a desire for unity,
there is not a word to be said against it. Its tone and temper
may be both Christian and Catholic. But the method is a
radically false one. It is not a real, but only an abstract,
unity which can be reached by thinking away of differences.
As Dr. Martineau says, in his excellent criticism of this
method, ' You vainly propose an eirenicon by corruption of a
word.' ' The disputes between science and faith can no more
be closed by inventing " religions of culture " than the boun-
dary quarrels of nations by setting up neutral provinces in
the air 4 .' 'A God that is merely nature, a Theism without
God, a Religion forfeited only by the "nil admirari " can never
reconcile the secular and the devout, the Pagan and the Chris-
tian mind 5 .' As well might we attempt to reconcile the par-
tizans of the gold and silver shields by assuring them that in
reality the shields were silver gilt.
We are left, then, face to face with the opposition between
the religious and the philosophic or scientific view of God.
The counter-charges of superstition and anthropomorphism
on the one side, and of pantheism and rationalism on the
other, serve to bring out the antithesis of the two views.
No division of territory is possible. There may be many
sciences, each with its defined range of subject-matter ; but
there can be only one God. And both religion and philo-
sophy demand that He shall fill the whole region of thought
and feeling. Nor can any confusion or extension of terms
1 Natural Religion, iii. p. 45, quoted Address, 1884.
by Martineau. * A Study of Religion, vol. i. pp. n, 12.
2 Ibid., iv. p. 74. 5 Ibid., p. 15.
3 Frederic Harrison's Nvic Year's
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 63
help us to a reconciliation, or blind us long to the true issue.
The conflict is too real and too keenly felt to admit of any
patched-up peace. The idea of God, which is to claim alike
the allegiance of religion and philosophy, must not be the
result of compromise, but must really and fully satisfy the
demands of both.
III. What then are these demands considered in abstraction
from one another? We are at once met by the difficulty
of defining religion. But if we cannot define religion, or
trace it back to its hidden source, we can at least dis-
cover its characteristics, as we know it after it has emerged
from the obscurity of prehistoric times, and before any con-
scious attempt has been made to reconcile religion and philo-
sophy, or find a middle term between them.
Now traditional definitions of religion, given as it were
from within, and constructed with no view of opposition to,
or reconciliation with, philosophy, are agreed in representing
religion as a relation between man and the object or objects
of his worship, and this implies, not only the inferiority of the
worshipper to that which he worships, but also something of
likeness between the related terms, since, as even Strauss
allows, in our inmost nature we feel a kinship between
ourselves and that on which we depend 1 . It is quite indif-
ferent which of the rival etymologies of the word ' religion '
we adopt 2 . S. Augustine 3 , following Lactantius, speaks of
religion as ' the bond which binds us to One Omnipotent
God.' S. Thomas 4 adopts almost unchanged the definition
given by Cicero : it is ' that virtue which has to do with the
worship of a higher nature known as the Divine.' It is not
too much to say that, for the modern religious world, religion
implies at least the practical belief in a real and conscious
relation between the inner life of man and an unseen Being.
And whatever of mystery there may be about that unseen
Being, it would seem as if a real relationship demands so much
of likeness in the related terms, as is implied in personality.
1 Old Faith and New, 41. pretatus est, a relegendo,' Lact. Inst.
2 'Hoc vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo iv. 28.
et rdiguti sumus, unde ipsa religio 3 De verd religions, sub fin.
noinon accepit, non ut Cicero inter- 4 Sum. Theol. 2. 2. 81. Art. i.
64 The Religion of the Incarnation.
It is here that we reach the point at which we are able to
distinguish between the religious and the philosophical ideas
of God. It is not that religion and philosophy necessarily
contradict or exclude one another, but that they approach
the problem with different interests. Religion demands a
personal object, be that object one or many. It is committed
to the belief in a moral relationship between God and man.
Philosophy demands unity, whether personal or impersonal.
For philosophy is nothing if it does not completely unify
knowledge. And it seems as if each finds lacking in the
other that which it values most and thinks of first. The only
hope, then, of reconciliation is in the idea of God as per-
sonal, and yet one. So long as religion retains a trace of
polytheism or dualism, philosophy can have nothing to say
to it. So long as philosophy has no room for a personal
God, religion must exclude philosophy. The whole issue of
the controversy lies here. If the belief in a personal God
is to be called anthropomorphism, religion is hopelessly an-
thropomorphic. With the disappearance of anthropomorphism
in this sense, as Professor Fiske rightly sees 1 , religion dis-
appears. But we cannot escape anthropomorphism, though
our anthropomorphism may be crude or critical 2 . We do
not read our full selves into the lower world, because we are
higher than it ; we do not transfer to God all that belongs
to our own self-consciousness, because we know that He is
infinitely greater than we are. But we should be wrong not
to interpret Him by the highest category within our reach,
and think of Him as self-conscious life. Christianity refuses
to call this anthropomorphism, though it stands or falls with
the belief that, in his personality, man is in the image of
God. An anthropomorphic view of God for a Christian
means heathenism or heresy : a theomorphic view of man
is of the essence of his faith 3 .
The religious idea of God may, of course, become philo-
1 Idea of God, p. 117. . 3 Justin Martyr (Exhort, ad Graec.,
2 See Seth's Hegdiunism and Per- ch. xxxiv) explains the anthropo-
sonality, pp. 223, 224, one or two sen- morphisms of polytheism as an in-
tences from which are, almost ver- version of the truth that man is in
batim, transferred to the text. the image of God.
ii, The Christian Doctrine of God. 65
sophical without ceasing to be religious. If there is to be a
religion for man as a rational being it must become so. But
there is a point beyond which, in its desire to include philo-
sophy, religion cannot go. It cannot afford to give up its
primary assumption of a moral relationship between God
and man. When that point is surrendered or obscured the
old religious terms become increasingly inapplicable, and we
find ourselves falling back more and more on their supposed
philosophical equivalents, the ' Infinite ' or the ' Absolute,' or
the Universal Substance, or the Eternal Consciousness, or the
First Cause, or the Omnipresent Energy. But these terms,
which metaphysicians rightly claim, have no meaning for
the religious consciousness, while, in metaphysics proper
' God ' is as much a borrowed term as ' sin ' is in non-reli-
gious ethics. Moral evil is ' sin ' only to those who believe
in God ; and the infinite is only ' God ' to those in whom it
suggests a superhuman personality with whom they are in
conscious relation. Even when religion and philosophy both
agree to speak of God as ' the Infinite,' for the one it is an ad-
jective, for the other a substantive. The moment we abandon
the idea of God as personal, religion becomes merged in philo-
sophy, and all that properly constitutes religion disappears.
God may exist for us still as the keystone in the arch of
knowledge, but He is no longer, except as a metaphor, ' our
Father, which is in heaven.'
IV. Religion then, properly and strictly, and apart from ex-
tensions of the term made in the interests of a reconciliation,
assumes a moral relationship, the relationship of personal
beings, as existing between man and the Object of his wor-
ship. When this ceases, religion ceases : when this begins,
religion begins. But of the beginnings of religion we know
nothing. Prehistoric history is the monopoly of those who
have a theory to defend. But we may take it as proven that
it is at least as true that man is a religious, as that he is
a rational, animal. 'Look out for a people,' says Hume,
'entirely destitute of religion. If you find them at all, be
assured that they are but few degrees removed from brutes V
1 Hume, Essays, II. 425.
F
66 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Hume's statement is confirmed by the fact that those who
would prove that there is no innate consciousness of Deity
are driven to appeal to the case of deaf mutes and degraded
savages 1 . Whether monotheism was a discovery or a re-
covery, whether it rose on the ruins of polytheism, or
whether polytheism is a corruption of a purer faith, is a
question we need not attempt to settle. Nor need we de-
cide the priority of claim to the title of religion as between
nature-worship, or ancestor-worship, or ghost-worship. The
farther we go back in history the more obviously true
is the charge of anthropomorphism so commonly brought
against religion. The natural tendency to treat the object
of religion as personal exists long before any attempt is
made to define the conditions or meaning of personality,
and includes much which is afterwards abandoned. For
religion in its earliest stages is instinctive, not reasoned.
It is 'naively objective.' It is little careful to clear up its
idea of the nature and character of its God. It is still less
anxious to prove His existence. It is only when conscience
grows strong, and dares to challenge the religion which had
been instinctively accepted, that men learn to see that God
not only is, but must be, the expression of the highest known
morality. It is only when the light of conscious reason is
turned back upon religious ideas, that polytheism becomes
not merely untrue, but impossible and inconceivable. What
religion starts with is not any theory of the world, but an
unreasoned belief in a Being or beings, however conceived of,
who shall be in a greater or less degree like the worshipper,
but raised above him by the addition of power, if not
omnipotence; greatness, if not infinity; wisdom, if not omni-
science.
But, while implying from the first something of a moral
relationship between man and the object of his worship, reli-
gion does not always conceive of that Object as necessarily
holy or perfectly wise. There are religions which are both
immoral and childish. They have in them no principle of
growth, and therefore they are the opponents alike of moral
1 H. Spencer, Eccl. Inst, p. I.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 67
and intellectual progress. Tantuin relligio potuit suadere
malorum is the reflexion of Christian apologists, as well as of
the Roman poet, on the religions of heathenism. Hence, it is
argued, ' Religion is the enemy of morals and of science.
Away with it. It is a mere matter of feeling, which cannot
and ought not to stand before the imperious challenge of con-
science and reason.' Such a view has both truth and falsehood
in it. The religious idea of God must be able to justify itself
to our moral and to our rational nature, on pain of ceasing to
exist. But religion cannot be thus shut up to one part of our
nature, nor can one part of our nature be set against the
rest. There is, as Herbert Spencer is fond of pointing out *,
a kind of idolatry of reason in the present day. Reason has
exposed many superstitions only to become itself the final object
of superstition. Men forget that, after all, reasoning is only
' re-coordinating states of consciousness already coordinated
in certain simpler ways,' and that that which is unreasoned is
not always irrational. Rationality in man is not shut up in
one air-tight compartment. ' There is no feeling or volition
which does not contain in it an element of knowledge -.' This
is the truth which Hegel has seized when he speaks of religion
as ' reason talking naively.' You can no more shut up faith
to the compartment of feeling than reason to the compartment
of the intellect. Religion claims the whole man, and true
religion is that which can make good its claim.
The natural history of religion, then, is the history of the
process by which that which has its secret birthplace behind
all the distinctions of modern psychology, establishes its claim
on man, absorbing into itself all that is best and truest in his
moral and intellectual being, as conscience and reason succes-
sively emerge into conscious activity : while, from another
point of view, it is the progressive purification of the religious
idea of God till He is revealed as, what He is to a thinking
Christian of to-day, the Object of reverent worship, the moral
ideal, the truth of nature and of man.
Such an end is not attained in a moment. It is the result
1 Psych, vol. ii. 388-391. 2 Caird, Philosophy of Religion, p. 162.
F 2
68 The Religion of the Incarnation.
of a process with which we are familiar elsewhere, viz. evolu-
tion by antagonism. The true has to be separated from the
false. Immoral and irrational conceptions of God have to be
thrown aside. It is only after what looks like an internecine
struggle between religion and morality that man learns the
truth about the character of God, and only after a conflict
with philosophy and science, which seems to threaten the very
life of religion, that he learns what can be known of the
Divine Nature. For among religions, too, there is a struggle
for existence, in which the fittest survive. And the test of
fitness is the power to assimilate and promote moral and
intellectual truth, and so to satisfy the whole man. An
ideally perfect religion is not ' morality touched by emotion,'
but a worship which reflects itself in the highest known
morality, and is interpreted and justified to itself by reason.
It is this process, as we know it in history, that we proceed
to examine.
V. The statement that religion, even in its most elementary
forms, takes for granted some relationship of likeness between
the worshipper and the Object or objects of his worship,
by no means implies that all religion associates the highest
morality with its idea of God. On the contrary, we know
that not only are there immoral religions, but that immorality
sometimes lingers on in religion long after it is condemned
elsewhere, and that a people will permit as a religious duty
what, according to their thinking, nothing but religion would
justify. We cannot, then, at all accurately gauge the moral
condition of a people by the received teaching about its gods,
for morality is often far in advance of religion, and the char-
acter which in a god or goddess is protected by a religious
halo is looked upon as hateful or impure in man or woman.
The sense of dependence, which, though it does not constitute
the whole, is yet an essential element in the religious con-
sciousness, the awe which, in a low state of development,
shews itself in a grovelling fear of the invisible beings,
makes it impossible for the worshipper to judge his god
by the standard he applies to his fellow man. The god
may be lustful, but his lusts must be respected ; he is strong
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 69
and vengeful and must by all means be kept in a good temper,
cajoled, or outwitted, or bribed, or humoured. His commands
must be obeyed, without question or resistance. But by and
bye the moral nature learns its strength, and begins to assert
its independent right to speak. Morality outgrows religion.
The relations between religion and morals become more
strained. Some heretic dares to say that the Gods are
immoral ; that they are men ' writ large,' and bad men too.
Their claim to reverence is challenged. There is a moral
awakening. Soon the old religion is treated with scorn and
contempt, and either a new religion takes its place, coming
in as it were on the crest of the wave of moral reformation, or
the old religion is purified and becomes the foster-mother of
the new morality, giving to it a divine sanction, and receiving
from it in turn new strength and vitality. Or failing these,
men abandon religion in the supposed interest of morals. A
religion with mysteries may be tolerated, but a religion once
seen to be immoral is at an end. For a time ethics, with a
background of metaphysics or politics, prevails, but gradually
it tends to drift into a mere prudentialism, while a merely
mystical philosophy tries in vain to satisfy those deeper
instincts which reach out to the unseen.
In the history of Greek thought the collision came in the
days of Xenophanes. Long before what is sometimes called
the era of conscious morality, Greece had outgrown its tradi-
tional religion. Greek philosophy at its birth was mythology
rationalized, and the beginning of independent morality in
Greece shewed itself in a criticism of the religious teaching
of Homer and Hesiod. The scathing satire of Xenophanes
reminds us at times of the way in which Isaiah speaks of the
idolatry of his day. It is not only wrong, it is capable of
a reductio ad absurdum. Anthropomorphism, immorality,
childish folly these are the charges which Xenophanes
brings against the worship of Magna Graecia. Anaxagoras
had already been banished for suggesting that the god Helios
was a mass of molten iron, but Xenophanes turns into open
ridicule the religion of his day.
' Homer and Hesiod,' he says, ' ascribe to the gods all that
70 The Religion of the Incarnation.
among men is held shameful and blameworthy, theft, adultery,
and deceit V
'One God there is mightiest among gods and men, who
neither in form nor thought is like to men. Yet mortals
think the gods are born and have shape and voice and
raiment like themselves. Surely if lions and cows had hands,
and could grave with their hands and do as men do, they too
would make gods like themselves, horses would have horse-
like gods, and cows gods with horns and hoofs V
When the age of moral philosophy begins, amidst the un-
settlement of the sophistic period, the same protest is taken
up by Plato. In Xenophanes the protest of the reason and
the conscience went together. In Plato the criticism of the
received theology is more distinctly a moral criticism. God
cannot lie or deceive. He cannot be the cause of evil. He
is good, and only the source of good. He is true in word
and deed. If not, we cannot reverence Him. It cannot be
true that the gods give way to violent emotions, still less to
sensuality and envy and strife 3 . Tor God cannot be un-
righteous, He must be perfectly righteous, and none is like
Him save the most righteous among men 4 .'
Here we have a collision between an immoral religious
conception of God and a morality which is becoming con-
scious of its own strength. And what was the result 1 ?
Religion in Greece received its death blow. It had no real
recuperative power. It could not absorb and claim the new
morality. Homer and Hesiod, the ' Bible ' of the Athenian,
were too profoundly immoral. A Kephalus might go back
in silent protest to his sacrifice, but the youth of Athens
turned from religion to morality. When we pass from Plato
to Aristotle, the last trace of religion in morals has dis-
appeared. Theology has become Metaphysics, and has no place
in the world of practical life. The religious element has
disappeared from philosophy, and is only revived in the
mysticism of Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism. In
1 Ritter and Preller, Hist. Phil. 3 Plat. Rep. 377-385.
Grac., 7th ed. 82. * Thaet. 176 C.
2 Ibid., 83.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 71
metaphysics and science we owe everything to the Greeks;
in religion, as distinguished from theology, we owe nothing.
From the Greeks we turn to the Jews, to whom alone,
among the nations of the pre-Christian age, we of the modern
world trace back our religious lineage. We speak of the
religion of the Old Testament as ' revealed ' in contrast with
all other pre-Christian religions. Is that distinction tenable ?
If so, what does it mean, and what justifies us in making it ?
It is clear that the answer must be sought in what the Old
Testament revelation is, rather than in the process by which
the Jews became the appointed depositaries of it. For what-
ever were the prehistoric elements out of which the religion
of Israel came, whether Assyrian or Accadian or Indo-German
or Egyptian, and whatever were the steps by which Israel
was led * to that doctrine of God which constituted its mis-
sion and its message to the world, as we look back from the
point of view of Christianity we see that the religion of Israel
stands to the teaching of Christ in a relation in which no
Pagan religion stands 2 . The Law and the Prophets were for
all the world ' a sacred school of the knowledge of God, and
the ordering of the soul 3 .' If it is true that the Bible only
records the later and more important stages in a process
which began in prehistoric times amidst the various forms
of polytheistic worship, even if it could be shewn that the
history, as we have it, has been subjected to successive re-
visions, that its laws have been codified, its ritual elaborated,
its symbolism interpreted, it would still remain true that the
religion of Israel, which begins where its history begins, and
of which, indeed, its history is little more than the vehicle, is
1 H. Spencer, of course, follows tianity is connected with the Old
Kuenen in assuming a polytheistic Testament.' Incredible, no doubt,
origin of Hebrew monotheism. See But why ? For the very reason which
Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i. 223. makes it 'incredible' that man should
2 It is strange that Mr. Darwin be evolved directly from a fish, as
should have failed to see that this Anaximander is said to have taught,
was the answer to his difficulty. It and not incredible that he should be
appeared to him, he tells us (Auto- evolved, as Darwin teaches, from
biography, p. 308), 'utterly incredible one of the higher vertebrates. The
that if God were now to make a re- very idea of development, whether in
velation to the Hindoos, he would species or religions, implies a law, and
permit it to be connected with the order in the development.
belief in Vishnu, Siva, &c., as Chris- 3 S. Athan. De Incarn. c. xiL
72 The Religion of the Incarnation.
bound up with the assertion of Monotheism. The central fact
of its revelation is this, ' Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is
One Lord.' The central utterance of its law is, ' Thou shalt
have none other gods but Me.' The unity of God, that truth
which other religions were feeling after and tending towards,
stands out clearly and distinctly as the characteristic of the
religion of Israel, and is fearlessly claimed as an inheritance
from the patriarchal age.
And not less remarkable than the assertion of the unity
of God is the assumption that this One God is a God of
Righteousness. He is ' a God of truth and without iniquity ;
just and right is He.' Here, again, it was not that the re-
ligion of Israel asserted what other religions denied, but that
Israel proclaimed clearly and with increasing certainty a truth
which the highest contemporary religions were struggling to
express. In the religion of Israel the pre-Christian world
rose to articulate religious utterance. Its highest and truest
intuitions found a voice. Israel had yet much to learn and
much to unlearn as to what true morality is. It had anthro-
pomorphisms of thought and language to get rid of. It had
to rise in Psalmist and Prophet to moral heights unknown
to the patriarchal age. But the remarkable thing is that
the claim is made. Morality is claimed for God : God is de-
clared to be irrevocably on the side of what man knows as
righteousness. And this truth is proclaimed not as a dis-
covery but as a revelation from God Himself. It was this,
not less than the proclamation of monotheism, which made
the teaching of the Old Testament what it was. It con-
sciously transformed the natural law of ' might is right '
into the moral truth that ' right is might.'
And the consequences of this new departure in the religious
history of man were far-reaching. It made the difference be-
tween the religion of Israel and all other religions a difference
not merely of degree but of kind. The worship of the Lord
and the worship of the heathen gods becomes not only a
conflict between the true and the false in religion, but between
the moral and the immoral in practice. More than this, it
changes the mere emotional feeling of awe and dependence
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 73
on invisible powers into trust and confidence. If God is
irrevocably on the side of right, the nation or the individual,
that is struggling for the right, is fighting on the side of
God. It was this which made the great Hebrew leaders,
and the Psalmists after them, take it for granted that their
cause was the cause of God, and that the Lord of Hosts
was with them. Even the wars of extermination were the
expression in act of the utter antagonism between good
and evil, the cause of God and that of His enemies. And
when Saul spared A gag it was from no excess of charity, no
glimpse of a higher morality ; it was an act of moral weak-
ness. Finally, this claim of morality for God precluded the
possibility of such a collision as took place in the history
of the Greeks. The progressive development of morals in
the Old Testament, and the gradual unfolding of a perfect
character l was also for Israel a progressive revelation of the
character of God. Step by step the religious idea advanced
with moral progress. And, as they advance, the contrast
with other religions becomes more marked. ' It was the final
distinction between Polytheism and the religion of Israel
that the former emphasized power, the latter the moral
element to which it subordinated and conjoined power V
And this moral conception of God was constantly kept before
the people. If they lapse into idolatry and adopt heathen
practices and heathen ideas of God, the prophets are ready
with the warning that God is the God of Israel, only because
Israel is a chosen people to bear His name and His truth
before the world ; and if they are false to their mission, they
will be rejected. If, again, the sacrificial system loses its moral
significance as the recognition of the holiness of God and the
sinf ulness of the sinner, and the forward-pointing look towards
the great moral fact of the Atonement, and becomes merely
ritual, and perfunctory, and formal, the prophets dare to de-
nounce even the divinely ordered sacrifices as things which
God hates.
Yet it was not that, in the religion of Israel, morality was
1 It is needless to say that this section Discipline of the Christian Character.
is largely indebted to Dean Church's - Edinb. Rev., Apr. 1888, p. 512.
74 The Religion of the Incarnation.
made the essential thing, a nucleus of morals, as it were, with
a halo of religious emotion round it. It was that the religious
and the moral consciousness are brought together in a real
unity. To love the Lord is to hate evil. God is One who
gives His blessing to the righteous, while the ungodly and
him that delighteth in wickedness doth His soul abhor. He,
then, who would ascend into the hill of the Lord and stand
in His holy place, must have clean hands, and a pure heart,
and a lowly mind. The Lord God is holy. He has no plea-
sure in wickedness, neither shall any evil dwell with Him.
Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.
The sacrifice that He loves is the sacrifice of righteousness.
He is to be worshipped in the beauty of holiness. What He
requires of man is that he shall do justly, and love mercy,
and walk humbly with his God.
All this, which comes out no doubt with increasing clear-
ness in the Psalms and Prophets, is already implicit in that
earlier claim made by the religion of Israel, that the
true God is on the side of righteousness, and that to be false
to righteousness is to be a traitor to God. In this union of
religion and morality neither is sacrificed to the other. Each
gains from its union with the other. The religious idea of
God, and the religious emotions which gather round it, are
progressively purified with the growth of moral ideas ; and
morality receives new life and strength when the moral law
is seen to be the unfolding of the character of a Righteous
God, and moral evil is known as ' sin ' against a Personal
Being. The earnest moral protest which in Greece was
directed against the national religion, is found in the Old
Testament making common cause with the national religion
against the immoral beliefs of heathenism. Hence the Jew
was not called upon, as the Greek was, to choose between his
religion and his conscience. He never felt the strain which
men feel in the present day, when a high and pure morality
seems ranged against religious faith. For the Jew every ad-
vance in moral insight purified, while it justified, that idea of
God, which he believed had come down to him from the
' Father of the Faithful.' His hope of immortality, his faith
IT. The Christian Doctrine of God. 75
in the ultimate triumph of the God of Israel, were alike based
upon the conviction that God is a God of justice and mercy,
and that the Righteous One could not fail His people, or suffer
His holy One to see corruption. Even though with the growth
of morality, and the fuller unfolding of the character of God,
there came, like a shadow cast by light, the deepening conscious-
ness of sin as the barrier between man and God, the Jew re-
fused to believe that the separation was for ever. Sin was a
disease which needed healing, a bondage which called for a
deliverer, a state of indebtedness from which man could not
free himself. But Israel believed in and looked forward to,
with confidence and hope, the Redeemer who should come
to Zion and save His people from their sins.
The final revelation of Christianity came outwardly as a
continuation and development of the religion of Israel, and
claimed to be the fulfilment of Israel's hope. It was a ' re-
publication ' of the highest truth about God which had been
realized hitherto. For it came ' not to destroy but to fulfil.'
God is still the Eternally One, the Eternally Righteous. Not
sacrifice but holiness, not external ' works ' but inward ' faith,'
not the deeds of the law, but the righteousness which is of
God this is what He requires. He is still the God of Israel.
But Israel according to the flesh had ceased to be the Israel
of God, and the children of faithful Abraham, in whom,
according to the ancient promise, all the families of the earth
should be blessed, are to be gathered from east and west and
north and south, from circumcised and uncircumcised, bar-
barian, Scythian, bond or free, and recognised as one family
under the one Father. If Christianity had been this and this
only, Christ might have claimed to be a great prophet, breaking
the silence of 400 years, restoring the ancient faith, and truly
interpreting and carrying forward the spirit of the ancient
revelation. But He claimed to be more than this. He claimed,
as the Son of God, to be not only the true, but the only, Re-
vealer of the Father. For ' no man knoweth the Father but
the Son, and he to whom the Son shall reveal Him.' What
fresh characteristics, then, has this new revelation to add to the
Old Testament teaching about God 1 He is still One, the only
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
76 The Religion of the Incarnation.
God. He is perfect Righteousness, yet, as even the older
religion knew, a God of loving-kindness and tender mercy,
' Who wills not the death of the sinner.' But more than all
this, He is now revealed to man as Infinite Love, the One
Father of humanity, Whose only begotten Son is Incarnate
and 'made man that we may be made God.' Not one jot
or tittle of the old revelation of God, as a God of Righteous-
ness, is lost or cancelled. The moral teaching is stern and un-
compromising as ever. God's love, which is Himself, is not the
invertebrate amiability, or weak good-naturedness, to which
some would reduce it. ' The highest righteousness of the Old
Testament is raised to the completeness of the Sermon on the
Mount V ' The New Testament,' it has been said, ' with all
its glad tidings of mercy, is a severe book V For the good-
ness and the severity of God are, as it were, the convex and
the concave in His moral nature. But what seized upon
the imagination of mankind as the distinctive revelation of
Christianity was the infinite love and tenderness and com-
passion of this Righteous God for sinful man. It was this
which shone out in the character of Christ. He was Very
God, with a Divine hatred of evil, yet living as man among
men, revealing the true idea of God, and not only realizing
in His human life the moral ideal of man, but by taking
human nature into Himself setting loose a power of moral
regeneration, of which the world had never dreamed.
The advance which the Gospel of Christ makes upon
the Old Testament revelation consists then, not only in the
new truth it teaches as to the character of God, but in the
new relation which it establishes between God and man.
So soon as men learn the Old Testament truth that God
is eternally on the side of righteousness, the awe and cringing
fear, which lies behind heathen religions, and justifies us
in calling them superstitions, gives place to trustful con-
fidence, which deepens into faith, and gathers round it those
affections and desires for union with God which find ex-
pression in the book of Psalms. The saints of the Old
Testament could ' rest in the Lord ' and wait for the vindi-
1 Discipline of the Christian Character, p. 85. * Ibid., p. 87.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 77
cation of His Righteousness in human life ; they could yearn
for His presence and hope for the day when they should
' see the King in His beauty.' But they were yet separated
from Him by the unobliterated fact of sin. Enoch ' walked
with God,' Abraham was called ' the friend of God,' Moses ' the
Lord knew face to face/ David was ' a man after God's own
heart,' Daniel ' a man greatly beloved.' But one and all
of these fell short, and necessarily fell short, of the closeness
of that union which is the Christian's birthright. In the
Gospel, God is revealed as one with man. And this truth
changed the whole attitude and atmosphere of worship. There
was worship still, for humanity was not merged and lost
in Godhead. There is no Christian ring about the statement l
that ' in Christianity, in the consciousness that he is partaker of
the Divine existence, man no longer sustains the relation of
Dependence but of Love.' Rather the antithesis between de-
pendence and freedom is destroyed. As perfect love casts out
fear, yet leaves reverence, so the consciousness of union with
God, as distinct from absorption in Him, while it destroys
the last remnant of what is servile and degrading in religious
emotion, and gives man freedom, yet gives the freedom of
loving dependence upon God. And by this gift it sets free
new affections and appeals to new motives. It was the
assured consciousness of union with God which gave the
first Christians their power in the great moral struggles of
their day. Their moral ideal with its loftiness, its purity,
its perfect truthfulness, would by its very perfectness have
paralyzed effort, had they not believed that they were one
with Him Who had not only proclaimed but realized it, that
they could do all things through Christ which strengthened
them. And the horror of sin, which was a characteristic note
of Christian ethics, was due to the same fact. Unrighteousness,
not only as under the Old Testament, ranged a man on the
side of the enemies of God, but according to its degree tended
to break the supernatural bond which through the Incar-
nation united men with God. Impurity, which meant so
little for the civilized world of the first Christian centuries,
1 Hegel. Phil of Hist., p. 247, Eng. Tr.
78 The Religion of the Incarnation.
was for the Christian not defilement only, but sacrilege, for
his body was God's temple. The love of the world was
enmity against God, yet the neglect of social duties, and
of all that is now summed up in the ' service of man,' was
for the Christian ipso facto the declaring himself outside the
love of God, just as, conversely, the love of the brethren was
the proof that he had ' passed from death unto life.'
Thus in primitive Christianity the religious and the moral
consciousness were at one, as in the Old Testament, but both
are now raised to their highest level. Free scope is given
for the development of both, and the satisfaction of the
demands of both, in Christian life and Christian worship.
Side by side they fought and triumphed over heathenism,
taking up and assimilating all that was best and truest in
non-Christian ethics. And though Christians were long in
learning what manner of spirit they were of, it seemed as
if a real conflict between religion and morals, within the
area of Christianity, was impossible.
And yet again and again, in the history of Christianity,
such a conflict has come about. Every moral reformation
within the Church was a protest of the conscience against
unworthy views of God ; every new Order that was founded
was a nursery of moral reformation. Yet every protest
against formalism and unreality in religion, every attack on
ecclesiasticism and ' priestcraft ' in the Church, or on worldli-
ness and laxity in professing Christians, owed its strength to
the reassertion of the truth, that in the Christian idea religion
and morals are inseparably united. The moral reformer
always claimed Christianity on his side, when attacking the
Christianity of his day. This was conspicuously so in the
great moral upheaval of the sixteenth century. In actual
fact, religion and morality had separated. And the nearer
one got to the centre of Western Christendom, the more
open and unabashed the neglect of morality was. In Italy
of the fifteenth century renaissance we see, in strange
confusion, 'all that we love in art, and all that we loathe
in man 1 .' It seemed as if, as in the old riddle, a swarm of
1 Cont, Rei\, Oct. 1878, p. 645.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 79
bees had settled in the dead lion's carcass, and there was
sweetness instead of strength, corruption where once was
life. When the new century opened, Borgia was the supreme
Bishop of the West, and the strength of the protest of Chris-
tianity against immorality may be gathered from the list of
prices to be paid to the pardoner. The devout retired from
the contest into the severer discipline of the monastic life, and
hoped against hope for the days of a Papa angelicus, who
never came. Yet when the strained relations of religion and
morals resulted in a revolution, it never occurred to those,
who had a moral reformation at heart, to say that religion
was outgrown, and morality must henceforth take its place.
They appealed from the Christianity of the sixteenth century
to the Christianity of Christ. Even of those who, in their fear
of popery, broke away farthest from the Christian idea of
God, all, if we except the Anabaptists, claimed the Bible on
their side. It was a genuine moral revolt against a religion
which had come to tolerate immorality. The hatred of ' eccle-
siasticism' and 'sacerdotalism' was not at first a rejection
of the Church and the Priesthood, but a protest against
anything which, under the sacred name of religion, becomes
a cover for unreality, or makes sin a thing easy to be atoned
for. The Reformation was a moral protest, and its results
were seen within as well as outside the Roman communion.
The Council of Trent was a reforming Council; the Jesuits
were the children of the Reformation ; and Roman Christianity
in the strength of its own moral revival, even in the moment
of defeat, became again ' a conquering power V
On the other hand, those whose first impulse was a
protest in favour of a moral religion and a belief in a
God who hates iniquity, have bequeathed to the world a
legacy of immorality, of which they never dreamt, and of
which we, in the present day, are feeling the full effects.
Lutheranism starts with the belief that God is love :
Calvinism with the conception of God as power. With the
former, the desire, at all costs, to guard the belief in the
freedom of God's grace, led to a morbid fear of righteousness,
1 Kanke, Popes, i. 395.
8o The Religion of the Incarnation.
as if it were somehow a rival to faith. With the latter, a
one-sided view of the power of God gradually obscured the
fact that righteousness and justice eternally condition its
exercise. If the one was, as history shews us, in constant
danger of Antinomian developments, the other struck at the
root of morality by making God Himself unjust. Forensic
fictions of substitution, immoral theories of the Atonement,
' the rending asunder of the Trinity ' and the opposing of the
Divine Persons, like parties in a lawsuit *, were the natural
corollaries of a theory which taught that God was above
morality and man beneath it.
How deeply these false views of God have influenced
English religious thought is shewn by the fact that every
attack on the moral, as distinguished from the intellectual
position of Christianity, is demonstrably an attack on that
which is not Christianity, but a mediaeval or modern per-
version of it. J. S. Mill's well-known words 2 , ' I will call
no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that
epithet to my fellow creatures,' was a noble assertion of
' immutable morality ' against a religion, which alas ! he
mistook for Christianity. The conscience of to-day, and it
is a real gain that it should be so, refuses to believe that
the imprimatur of religion can be given to that which is not
good, or that God would put us to moral confusion. It
would rather give up religion altogether than accept one
which will not endorse and advance our highest moral ideas.
But men do not always stop to make the necessary dis-
tinctions. On the one side they see a traditional view of
religion which they cannot harmonise with the highest
morality; on the other, they see a morality, which, though
it has grown up under the shadow and shelter of religion,
seems strong enough to stand alone. And their first thought
is ' Away with religion. We have outgrown it. Henceforward
we will have morals unencumbered by religion.' What
would be the effect on the morals of a nation of thus
renouncing the religious sanction it is not safe to predict.
1 Dollinger, The Church and the 2 Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's
Churches, p. 239. Philosophy, p. 103.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 81
In individuals certainly it sometimes has disastrous results.
But there is one thing which those who talk about the ' secu-
larization of morals 1 ' seldom take into account, and that is
the effect on what, in contrast to morals, they call religion.
The religious consciousness always refuses to be treated as
defunct, and the religious emotions, if they no longer find
their object in a God of Righteousness, and are no longer
controlled by morality, will not be satisfied with the worship
of the Unknowable or of idealized humanity, but will avenge
themselves, as they have done again and again, in super-
stition 2 .
And the attempt to do without religion in morals is as
unphilosophical as it is dangerous. It is parallel to what, in
the region of morality proper, we all recognise as a false
asceticism. It is the attempt to crush out, rather than to
purify. When men realize the danger of giving the rein to
the animal passions, there are always to be found moralists
who will treat these passions as in themselves evil, and
advocate the suppression of them. And only after an anti-
nomian revolt against that false teaching do men realize that
morality is not the destruction, but the purification and
regulation of the passions. So with religion and the religious
emotions. The function of morality is to purify the religious
idea of God, and religion and morality are strong and true in
proportion as each uses the help of the other. But neither
can treat the other as subordinate. God is more than what
Kant makes Him. the ultimate justification of morality:
morality is more than what some religious people would have
it, obedience to the positive commands of even God Himself.
In experience we find them separate and even opposed:
ideally they are one, united not confused. Separated, religion
tends to become superstitious, morality to degenerate into a
mere prudentialism, or at least an expanded utilitarianism.
United, religion gives to right that absolute character which
1 H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, pref. and men were carried either to the
2 Se Ihne's remarks on the separa- schools of Greek Philosophy or to the
tion of morals and religion in Rome grossest and meanest superstition.'
at the time of the Punic wars. 'The Hist, of Rome, vol. ii. pp. 477, 478.
religious cravings were not satisfied,
82 The Religion of the Incarnation.
makes it defiant of consequences ; morality safeguards the
idea of God from aught that is unworthy of the worship of
moral beings.
As the result of all the conflicts which have raged round
the idea of God so far as morals are concerned, one truth has
burned itself into the consciousness of both the apologists and
opponents of religion, a truth as old indeed as the religion
of Israel, but only slowly realized in the course of ages, the
truth, namely, that the religious idea of God must claim and
justify itself to the highest known morality, and no amount
of authority, ecclesiastical or civil, will make men worship an
immoral God. And already that truth has thrown back its
light upon questions of Old Testament morality. We no
longer say, ' It is in the Bible, approved or allowed by God,
and therefore it must be right.' It was this view which, in
every age, has given its protection to religious wars and
intolerance and persecution. But we look back and see in the
perspective of history how God in every age takes man as he
is that He may make him what he is not. We see in the Old
Testament not only the revelation of the Righteousness of
God, but the record of the way in which, in spite of wayward-
ness and disobedience, He raised His people to the knowledge
of the truth.
VI. But the religious idea of God in our day, as in former
ages, is challenged not only by conscience, but by the specu-
lative reason. And there is a close parallelism between the
two conflicts. When religion and morals are opposed, men
naturally say, ' Give us morals ; away with religion.' And
the answer is True religion is moral ; that which is not moral
is not true ; and morality without religion will not only leave
the religious consciousness unsatisfied, but fall short of its own
true perfection. So when religion and philosophy are opposed,
men say once more, 'Give us reason; away with religion.'
And the answer again is True religion is rational : if it
excludes reason, it is self-condemned. And reason without
religion fails of its object, since, if philosophy can find no
place for religion, it cannot explain man.
But here again nothing is gained by confusing the issue, or
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 83
denying the actual fact of the collision. We may say with
Lacordaire, ' God is the proper name of truth, as truth is the
abstract name of God.' But it is not a matter of indifference
from which point we start, whether with religion we approach
God first as a moral Being, or with philosophy seek for Him
as the truth of man and nature. The motto of Oxford
University, Dominus Illuminatio mea, altogether changes
its meaning if we read it Illuminatio Dominus metis. As
Reville says, ' A religion may become philosophical, but no
philosophy has ever founded a religion possessing real his-
torical power V And it is a fact patent to the observation of
all, that it is easier to make religion philosophical than to make
philosophy in any real sense religious. The reason of this is
obvious. Religion is not only first in the field, it covers the
whole ground before either morals or science have attained
their full development, or even emerged into conscious life.
But when we speak of philosophy, we have reached a stage in
which the reason has already separated itself from, and set
itself over against, the religious consciousness, and must either
absorb religion into itself, in which case religion ceases to be
religion, or must leave religion outside, though it may borrow
and appropriate religious terms. If, then, the idea of God is to
appeal to both the religious consciousness and the speculative
reason it must be by claiming philosophy for religion, not by
claiming religion for philosophy. It is from within, not from
without, that religion must be defended.
In Greece the traditional polytheism was challenged, as we
have seen, at once on the side both of morals and metaphysics.
To Xenophanes, indeed, the unity of God is even more essen-
tial than His morality, and the attack on anthropomorphism
is as much an attack upon the number of the gods of Hesiod
as upon the immoral character attributed to them. In the
unity, however, which Xenophanes contends for, the reli-
gious idea of God is so attenuated, that we hardly know
whether the One God is a person, or an abstraction. Indeed,
it is hard to see how a champion of Eleaticism could con-
sistently have held the personality of God, as we understand
1 History of Religions, p. 2 2.
G 2
84 The Religion of the Incarnation.
it, without falling under his own charge of anthropomorphism.
In Plato the same difficulty appears, only complicated or
relieved by the fact that while from the moral side he talks
like a theist, from the metaphysical his teaching is pantheistic.
Is the ' Idea of Good ' personal ? Is it a God we can love and
worship, or only a God we can talk about 1 Is the vision of
Er a concession to popular views, or the vehicle of moral and
religious truth ? The question is hardly more easy to decide
with regard to Aristotle. The religious atmosphere, which
lingers on in Plato, has disappeared. What of the religious
belief 1 ? Did Aristotle in any intelligible sense hold the
personality of God ? Great names are ranged on both sides of
the mediaeval controversy. Who shall decide ? But whether
or no anything of religion survived in philosophy, it was not
strong enough to withstand the attack of the moral and
the speculative reason, still less to claim these as its own. It
is not on the side of religion, but of speculation, that we are
debtors to the Greeks.
Among the Jews, on the other hand, speculation seems
hardly to have existed. Religion was satisfied to make good
her claim to the region of morals. God was One, and He was
Righteous, but the mystery which enveloped His nature the
Old Testament does not attempt to fathom. ' Clouds and
darkness are round about Him,' yet out of the thick darkness
comes the clear unfaltering truth that ' Righteousness and
judgment are the habitation of His seat.' Jewish religion and
Greek speculation had little contact, and less kinship, till the
best days of both were passed. But in the days of the dis-
persion we get the beginning of the mingling of those streams
which were only united under the higher unity of Christianity.
' With the Jews of the East,' it has been said, ' rested the
future of Judaism : with them of the West, in a sense, that of
the world. The one represented old Israel, groping back
into the darkness of the past ; the other young Israel, stretch-
ing forth its hands to where the dawn of a new day was about
to break V The Septuagint translation threw open to the
Greek world the sacred books of Israel. The Apocrypha,
1 Edersheim, Life and Times, i. p. 1 7.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 85
with all its glorification of Judaism, was both an apology
and an eirenicon 1 . It seemed as if in Wisdom personified
might be found a middle term between the religion of Israel
and the philosophy of Greece, and the life of righteousness
might be identified with the life of true wisdom. The Jews
of Alexandria were thus willing to find a strain of truth in
Greek philosophy, and Alexandrian Greeks were found ready
' to spiritualize their sensuous divinities V But the result
was a compromise, in which the distinctive elements of each
were not harmonized but lost. There was no fusion as yet
of Jewish and Greek thought, only each was learning to
understand the other, and unconsciously preparing for the
higher synthesis of Christianity.
Whether we think of Christ as the ' Son of Man,' or as the
Revealer of God, Christianity is bound to transcend national
distinctions, and to claim not only the whole of humanity, but
the whole of man, his reason, no less than his heart and will.
And this Christ did in a special way. He not only speaks of
Himself as ' the Truth,' and as having come ' to bear witness
to the Truth,' but the very complement (if we may say so) of
His revelation of the Father was the sending ' the Spirit of
Truth,' who should teach His disciples all things. This pos-
session of ' truth ' is always spoken of by Christ as a future
thing, implicit indeed in Himself, Who is the Truth, but only
to be explicitly declared and brought to remembrance when
the Spirit of Truth should come. He was to guide them
' into all truth.' ' Ye shall know the truth, and the truth
shall make you free.' It was inevitable, then, that the ques-
tion should arise, Will this religion, which has broken
through the narrowness of Judaism, and yet by its belief in
a God of righteousness and love combated and triumphed
over heathen immorality, have the power to assimilate and
absorb the philosophy of Greece ? The great crisis in the
world's history, as we see it, looking back from the security
of eighteen centuries, was this : Will Christianity, with alJ
its moral triumphs, become a tributary to Greek philosophy,
1 See Edersheim, i. pp. 31, etc.
8 Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 343, Eng. Tr.
86 The Religion of the Incarnation.
as represented by the Schools of Alexandria, or will it claim
and transform the rational, as it has transformed the moral,
progress of humanity 1 The answer of Christianity is unhesi-
tating. Christianity is truth, and there is only one truth.
Christianity is wisdom, and there is only one wisdom ;
for the wisdom of the world is not wisdom but folly. And
at once the rival claim is made. Why not a division of
territory 1 Knowledge for the philosopher ; faith for the
Christian. The Gnostics taught, as a modern philosopher
teaches, that religion is 'reason talking naively,' and that,
good as it is for ordinary people, the Gnostic can afford to do
without it. Every one knows the answer of the Apostles to
the insidious suggestions of Gnosticism. To S. Peter it is
' a damnable heresy, even denying the Lord who bought us V
To S. Paul it is the ' science falsely so called 2 ; ' the ' know-
ledge which puffs up 3 ; ' the ' wisdom of this world 4 .' To
S. John, Cerinthus was ' the enemy of the truth 5 .' To S.
Polycarp, Marcion is ' the firstborn of Satan.' It never
occurred to the Apostles, or the Apologists after them, to
retreat into the fastnesses of a reasonless faith. For with
them faith was implicit knowledge, and the only knowledge
that was true.
It was the collision of Christianity with Greek thought
which gave rise to Christian theology in the strict sense of
the term. Its necessity was the claiming of Greek as well as
Jew; its justification was the belief. in the presence of the
Spirit of truth ; its impulse the desire ' to know the things
which are freely given to us by God 6 .' The first Christians
were not theologians. They were 'unlearned and ignorant
men.' When Christ preached, the common people heard Him
gladly, the publicans and the harlots believed Him, the poor
found in His teaching ' good news,' and a few fishermen de-
voted their lives to Him. But the Scribes and Pharisees
stood aloof; and the rationalistic Sadducees asked Him
captious questions ; and the Herodians, the Erastians of the
1 2 S. Pet. ii. i. * ! Cor. iii. 19.
2 i Tim. vi. 20. Euseb. iii. 28.
3 i Cor. viii. 6. 6 i Cor. ii. 12.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 87
day, tried to involve Him with the secular power. It was
only when challenged by an earnest, but non-religious philo-
sophy, that reason came forward, in the strength of the Spirit
of truth, to interpret to itself and to the world the revelation
of Christ. Religion and theology in different ways have to
do with the knowledge of God and of spiritual truth. They
have the same object, God, but their aims and their methods
are different. Religion knows God ; theology is concerned with
the idea of God. Religion sees ; theology thinks. Religion
begins and ends in an almost instinctive attitude of worship ;
theology rationalizes and defines the characteristics of the
Object of worship. As reason seeks to interpret feeling, so
theology interprets religion. It makes explicit what is im-
plicit in religion. ' As the intellect is cultivated and expanded,
it cannot refrain from the attempt to analyse the vision
which influences the heart, and the object in which it centres ;
nor does it stop till it has, in some sort, succeeded in ex-
pressing in words, what has all along been a principle both
of the affections and of practical obedience V It takes the
facts which the religious consciousness has seized, seeks to
bring them into distinctness before the mental vision, to
connect them with one another in a coherent system, and
find in them the explanation and unity of all that is. Christian
theology grows naturally out of the Christian religion. But
religion is a divine life ; theology a divine science.
This explains the fact that though both religion and theo-
logy have to do with the knowledge of God, and ideally
work in perfect harmony, yet they are often found opposed.
Theology is always in danger of becoming unreal. What is
an interpretation for one age becomes ' a tongue not under-
standed ' in the next. Hence when a revival of religious life
comes, it frequently shews itself in an attack on the received
theology. Theology is no longer regarded as the scientific
expression of the very truths which religion values ; it is
conceived of as the antithesis of religion, and reformers dream
of a new theology which shall be for them what, though they
know it not, the old theology was to their predecessors, the
1 Newman's Arians, ch. ii. i.
88 The Religion of the Incarnation.
handmaid and guardian of religious truth. When Martin
Luther said that ' an old woman who reads her Bible in the
chimney corner knows more about God than the great doctors
of theology,' he was emphasising the severance which, in his
day, had come to exist between a religious life and theological
orthodoxy. And when in his Table Talk he says, ' A Jurist
may be a rogue, but a theologian must be a man of piety,'
he touches a real truth. A hundred years later, amid the
confusions and unrealities of the seventeenth century, John
Smith 1 , the Cambridge Platonist, said the same : ' They are
not always the best skilled in divinity,' he says, ' that are
most studied in those pandects into which it is sometimes
digested.' ' Were I to define divinity, I should rather call it
a divine life than a divine science.' Technically, no doubt,
he was wrong, for theology is a science and not a life, but,
like Luther, he was vindicating the truth that it is possible
for quite simple people to know God, though they have no
knowledge of theology, and that theology, when it becomes
speculative and abstract, ceases to be theology. A theologian,
as Mazzini says of an artist, ' must be a high-priest or a
charlatan.'
But the world dislikes a high-priest, and good people dis-
like a charlatan. And the consequence is that theology,
ancient or modern, is attacked from two very different points
of view, by those who look upon it as the antithesis of ' the
simple Gospel,' and by those who approach it from the side
of speculative thought. Theology claims to be a divine
science. Religious people attack it because it is a science ;
philosophers because it claims to be divine. To the former,
religion expressed in rational terms ceases to be religion ; to
the latter, that science is no science which claims for itself
unique conditions. Yet S. Paul seems to recognise both the
necessity and the uniqueness of theology when he says to the
Greeks of Corinth, ' We received not the spirit of the world,
but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the
things that are freely given us by God.'
It is the relation of Christian theology to philosophy and
1 Natural Truth of Christianity, r, 2.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 89
science with which we are specially concerned. But it is
impossible to pass by the objection to theology which comes
as it were ah intra from the side of religion. For if it is
valid, then Christianity may as well give up at once any
idea of being the religion of man. Yet people say, ' Why
have a theology ? Human reason cannot search out " the deep
things of God ;" it will only put new difficulties in a brother's
way ; why not rest content with the words of Holy Scrip-
ture, with simple truths like " God is love," and simple duties
like "Love one another," and leave theology alone ?' Now
without denying what George Eliot calls ' the right of the
individual to general haziness,' or asserting that every Chris-
tian must be a theologian, we may surely say that Christianity
is bound to have a theology. And even individual Chris-
tians, if they ever grow into the manhood of reason, must
have a theology, or cease to be religious. The protest
against theology from the side of religion looks modest and
charitable enough till we remember that religious haziness
is generally, if not always, the outcome of moral laziness ;
that it implies the neglect of a duty and the neglect of
a gift ; the duty of realizing to the reason the revelation of
Christ, and the gift of the Spirit of Truth to enable us to do it.
More than this, the protest against theology in the interests
of religion is irrational and suicidal. To tell a thinking man
that he need not interpret to his reason what religion tells
him of God, is like saying to him, ' Be religious if you will,
but you need not let your religion influence your conduct.'
If Christianity had been content to be a moral religion, if it
had abandoned its claim to rationality and had left Greek
speculation alone, it must have accepted either the Gnostic
division of territory, or recognised an internecine conflict
between religion and philosophy. And it did neither ; but,
under the guidance of the Spirit of Truth, Christian theology
arose and claimed the reason of the ancient world.
Thus as the religion of the Old Testament claims morality
for God, so Christianity goes further and claims to hold the
key to the intellectual problems of the world. So far as the
nature of God is concerned, Christianity met the intellectual
9O The Religion of the Incarnation.
difficulties of the first centuries by the Doctrine of the
Trinity.
From time to time people make the discovery that the
doctrine of the Trinity is older than Christianity. If the
discoverer is a Christian apologist, he usually explains that
God has given anticipatory revelations to men of old, and
points out how they fall short of the revelation of Christianity.
If he is an opponent of Christianity, he triumphantly claims
to have unmasked the doctrine and tracked it down to a
purely natural origin. ' People think,' says Hegel, ' that by
pronouncing a doctrine to be Neo-Platonic, they have ipso
facto banished it from Christianity 1 .' Men have found the
doctrine, or something like it, not only in the Old Testament
but in Plato and Neo-Platonism, and among the Ophite
Gnostics, in the Chinese Tao-Te-Ching and the ' Three Holy
Ones ' of Bouddhism, in the Tri-murti of Hinduism and else-
where. Why not ? Revelation never advances for itself the
claim which its apologists sometimes make for it, the claim
to be something absolutely new. A truth revealed by God is
never a truth out of relation with previous thought. He
leads men to feel their moral and intellectual needs before
He satisfies either. There was a preparation for Hebrew
monotheism, as there was a preparation for the Gospel of
Christ. There was an intellectual preparation for the doc-
trine of the Trinity, as there was a moral preparation for the
doctrine of the Incarnation. If the Christian doctrine of the
Incarnation is distinguished from the avatars of Hinduism,
and the incarnations of Thibetan Lamaism, by its regenerative
moral force, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is no less
distinguished from the pseudo-trinities of Neo-Platonism and
its modern developments by the fact that for eighteen cen-
turies it has been the safeguard of a pure Monotheism against
everything which menaces the life of religion.
But Christian theology is not ' a philosophy without as-
sumptions.' It does not attempt to prove sola ratione the
doctrine of the Trinity, but to shew how that which reason
demands is met and satisfied by the Christian doctrine of God.
1 Phil, of Hist., p. 343, Eng. Tr.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 91
Starting with the inheritance of faith, the belief in the Divi-
O
nity of Christ, and trusting in the guidance of the Spirit of
Truth, it throws itself boldly into the rational problem, fights
its way through every form of Unitarianism, and interprets
its faith to itself and to the world at large in the doctrine of
the Triune God. Its charter is the formula of Baptism, where
the ' treasures of immediate faith are gathered up into a sen-
tence, though not yet formulated into a doctrine V
To the Greek mind two things had become clear before
Christianity came into the world, and it would be easy to
trace the steps by which the conclusions were reached. First,
Reason, as relation-giving, seeks for unity in the manifoldness
of which it is conscious, and will be satisfied with nothing less.
But Eleaticism had convincingly proved that an abstract
unity can explain nothing. Quite apart from questions of
religion and morals, the Eleatic unity was metaphysically a
failure. Plato had seen this, and yet the 'dead hand' of
Eleaticism rested on Platonism, and the dialogue Parmenides
shewed how powerless the Doctrine of Ideas was to evade the
difficulty. Thus the Greeks more than 2000 years ago had
realized, what is nowadays proclaimed, as if it were a new
discovery, that an absolute unit is unthinkable, because, as
Plato puts it in the Philebus, the union of the one and the
many is ' an everlasting quality in thought itself which never
grows old in us.' The Greeks, like the Jews, had thus had
their ' schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.' They had not
solved, but they had felt, the rational difficulty ; as the Jews
had felt, but had not overcome, except through the Messianic
hope, the separation of man from God. But as the Trinitarian
doctrine took shape, Christian teachers realized how the Chris-
tian, as opposed to the Jewish, idea of God, not only held the
truth of the Divine Unity as against all polytheistic religions,
but claimed reason on its side against all Unitarian theories.
They did not, however, argue that it was true because it
satisfied reason, but that it satisfied reason because it was true.
They started, indeed, not with a metaphysical problem to
be solved, but with a historical fact to proclaim, the fact of the
1 Dorner. Hist, of Doct. i. pp. 362, etc.
92 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Resurrection, and a doctrinal truth to maintain, the Divinity
of Him who rose. And starting from that basis of fact revealed
in Christ, they found themselves in possession of an answer
to difficulties which at first they had not felt, and thus their
belief was justified and verified in the speculative region.
The truth for which they contended, which was enshrined
in their sacred writings, was that ' the Father is God, the
Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they
are not three Gods, but one God.' But the Fathers do
not treat this doctrine merely as a revealed mystery, still
less as something which complicates the simple teaching of
Monotheism, but as the condition of rationally holding the
Unity of God. ' The Unity which derives the Trinity out of
its own self,' says Tertullian, ' so far from being destroyed, is
actually supported by it 1 .' 'We cannot otherwise think of
One God,' says Hippolytus, ' but by truly believing in
Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost V ' The supreme and only
God,' says Lactantius, ' cannot be worshipped except through
the Son. He who thinks that he worships the Father only,
in that he does not worship the Son also, does not worship
the Father 3 .' Without the Son the Father is not,' says
Clement of Alexandria, ' for in that He is a Father He is the
Father of the Son, and the Son is the true teacher about the
Father 4 .' So Origen argues, If God had ever existed alone
in simple unity and solitary grandeur, apart from some object
upon which from all eternity to pour forth His love, He
could not have been always God. His love, His Fatherhood,
His very omnipotence would have been added in time, and
there would then have been a time when He was imperfect.
'The Fatherhood of God must be. coeval with His omnipo-
tence ; for it is through the Son that the Father is Almighty 5 .'
This was the line of argument afterwards developed by
S. Athanasius when he contended against the Arians that the
Son was the reality or truth 6 of the Father, without whom
the Father could not exist ; and by S. Augustine, when he
argues that love implies one who loves and one who is loved,
1 Adv. Prux. ch. iii. * Strom, v. I.
3 Cont. Noet. xiv. 5 De Prim. I. ii. 10.
3 lust, iv. c. 29. 6 Adv. Arianos i. 20.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 93
and love to bind them together 1 . Even one so unphilo-
sophically minded as Irenaeus 2 , cannot but see in the Chris-
tian doctrine of the relation of the Father and the Son, the
solution of the difficulty about the infinity of God : ' Immensus
Pater in Filio rnensuratus ; mensura Patris Filius.' While
philosophy with increasing hopelessness was asking, How
can we have a real unity which shall be not a barren and
dead unity, but shall include differences'? Christianity, with
its doctrine of God, was arguing that that which was an
unsolved contradiction for non- Christian thought, was a
necessary corollary of the Christian Faith 3 .
The other truth which Greek thought had realized was the
immanence of reason in nature and in man. When Anaxa-
goras first declared that the universe was the work of intelli-
gence, we are told that he seemed ' like a sober man amongst
random talkers.' But both Plato and Aristotle accuse him
of losing the truth which he had gained because he made
intelligence appear only on occasions in the world, dragged
in. like a stage-god, when naturalistic explanations failed 4 .
The conception of creation out of nothing was of course un-
known to Anaxagoras. Intelligence is only the arranger of
materials already given in a chaotic condition. With Aristotle
too it is reason which makes everything what it is. But
the reason is in things, not outside them. Nature is rational
from end to end. In spite of failures and mistakes, due to
her materials, nature does the best she can and always aims
at a good end 5 . She works like an artist with an ideal in
view 6 . Only there is this marked difference, Nature has
the principle of growth within herself, while the artist is
external to his materials 7 . Here we have a clear and con-
sistent statement of the doctrine of immanent reason as
against the Anaxagorean doctrine of a transcendent intelli-
gence. If we translate both into the theological language of
our own day, we should call the latter the deistic, the former
1 De Trin. viii. 10 and ix. 2. 5 p. 455 b i7- The references are to
1 Iren. Adv. Haer. IV. iv. I. 2. the Berlin edition.
3 Cf. pp. 333-336- 6 P- i99" 8 > I8: 4 T 5 bl 7: 73i" 2 4-
4 Plat. Phaed. 98 B. Arist. Met. 7 p. 1070*7, !O33 b 8, 753 a 3-
A. 4.
94 The Religion of the Incarnation.
the pantheistic, view ; or, adopting a distinction of supreme
importance in the history of science, we might say that we
have here, face to face, the mechanical and the organic view
of nature. Both were teleological, but to the one, reason was
an extra-mundane cause, to the other, an internal principle.
It was the contrast between external and inner design, as we
know it in Kant and Hegel ; between the teleology of Paley
and the 'wider teleology' of Darwin and Huxley and Fiske ;
between the transcendent and immanent views of God, when
so held as to be mutually exclusive.
It is these two one-sided views which the Christian doctrine
of God brings together. Religion demands as the very condition
of its existence a God who transcends the universe ; philosophy
as imperiously requires His immanence in nature. If either
Religion denies God's immanence, or Philosophy denies that
He transcends the universe, there is an absolute antagonism
between the two, which can only be ended by the abandonment
of one or the other. But what we find is that though Philo-
sophy (meaning by that the exercise of the speculative reason
in abstraction from morals and religion) the more fully it
realizes the immanence of God, the more it tends to deny the
transcendence, religion not only has no quarrel with the doc-
trine of immanence, but the higher the religion the more unre-
servedly it asserts this immanence as a truth dear to religion
itself. The religious equivalent for ' immanence ' is ' omni-
presence,' and the omnipresence of God is a corollary of a true
monotheism. As long as any remains of dualism exist, there
is a region, however small, impervious to the Divine power.
But the Old Testament doctrine of creation, by excluding
dualism, implies from the first, if it does not teach, the omni-
presence of God. For the omnipotence of God underlies the
doctrine of creation, and omnipotence involves omnipresence.
Hence we find the Psalmists and Prophets ascribing natural
processes immediately to God. They know nothing of second
causes. The main outlines of natural science, the facts of
generation and growth, are familiar enough to them, yet
every fact is ascribed immediately to the action of God. He
makes the grass to grow upon the mountains ; He fashions
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 95
the child in the womb ; He feeds the young ravens ; He pro-
vides fodder for the cattle ; He gives to all their meat in due
season ; when He lets His breath go forth they are made ; when
He takes away their breath they die and return to dust.
This doctrine of the omnipresence of God, as conceived by
religion, had however yet to be fused with the philosophical
doctrine of immanence. And here again the fusion was effected
by the Christian doctrine of God, as Trinity in Unity. The
earlier Apologists concern themselves first with the vindica-
tion of the Divine attributes. God's separateness from the
world as against Greek Pantheism, His omnipresence in it as
against a Judaising deism. But the union of God's transcen-
dence with His immanence, and with it the fusion of the
religious with the philosophic idea of God, is only consciously
completed by the Doctrine of the Trinity l . The dying words
of Plotinus, expressing as they did the problem of his life, are
said to have been, ' I am striving to bring the God which is
within into harmony with the God which is in the universe.'
And the unsolved problem of Neo-Platonism, which is also the
unsolved problem of non-Christian philosophy in our day, is
met by the Christian doctrine of God. All and more than all
that philosophy and science can demand, as to the immanence
of reason in the universe, and the rational coherence of all its
parts, is included in the Christian teaching : nothing which
religion requires as to God's separateness from the world,
which He has made, is left unsatisfied. The old familiar
Greek term AOFO2 which, from the days of Heracleitus,
had meant to the Greek the rational unity and balance of
the world, is taken up by S. John, by S. Clement, by
S. Athanasius, and given a meaning which those who started
from the Philonian position never reached. It is the
personal Word, God of God, the Only Begotten of the Father,
who is one in the Holy Spirit with the Father. ' The
Word was God.' 'By Him all things were made.' 'He the
All-powerful, All-holy Word of the Father spreads His
power over all things everywhere, enlightening things seen
and unseen, holding and binding all together in Himself.
1 Dorner, Hist, of Doct. i. p. 366.
96 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Nothing is left empty of His presence, but to all things and
through all, severally and collectively, He is the giver and sus-
tainer of life. . . . He, the Wisdom of God, holds the universe
like a lute, and keeps all things in earth and air and heaven
in tune together. He it is Who binding all with each, and
ordering all things by His will and pleasure, produces the
perfect unity of nature, and the harmonious reign of law.
While He abides unmoved for ever with the Father, He yet
moves all things by His own appointment according to the
Father's will V The unity of nature is, thus, no longer the
abstract motionless simplicity of Being, which had been so
powerless to explain the metaphysical problems of Greece.
It is the living Omnipresent Word, coeternal and consub-
stantial with the Father, and the philosophical truth becomes
an integral part of that Christian doctrine of God, which,
while it safeguarded religion and satisfied reason, had won
its first and greatest victories in the field of morals.
VII. The Christian doctrine of God triumphed over heathen
morality and heathen speculation neither by unreasoning
protest nor by unreal compromise, but by taking up into
itself all that was highest and truest in both. Why then is
this Christian idea of God challenged in our day 1 Have
we outgrown the Christian idea of God, so that it cannot
claim and absorb the new truths of our scientific age 1 If
not, with the lessons of the past in our mind, we may con-
fidently ask, What fuller unfolding of the revelation of
Himself has God in store for us, to be won, as in the past,
through struggle and seeming antagonism ?
The fact that the Christian Theology is now openly
challenged by reason is obvious enough. It almost seems
as if, in our intellectual life, we were passing through a
transition analogous to that which, in the moral region,
issued in the Reformation. Even amongst those who be-
lieve that Christian morality is true, there are to be found
those who have convinced themselves that we have intel-
lectually outgrown the Christian Faith. ' The only God,' we
have been told lately 2 , 'whom Western Europeans, with a
1 S. Athan. Contra Genles, 42. 2 Morison's Service of Man, p. 48.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 97
Christian ancestry of a thousand years behind them, can
worship, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; or rather,
of S. Paul, S. Augustine and S. Bernard, and of the innumer-
able " blessed saints," canonized or not, who peopled the ages
of Faith. No one wants, no one can care for, an abstract
God, an Unknowable, an Absolute, with whom we stand in
no human or intelligible relation.' ' God, as God,' says
Feuerbach *, ' the infinite, universal, non-anthropomorphic
being of the understanding, has no more significance in
religion than a fundamental general principle has for a special
science ; it is merely the ultimate point of support, as it were,
the mathematical point of religion.' Yet it is assumed that
this is all that remains to us, and we are left in the following
dilemma, ' An anthropomorphic God is the only God whom
men can worship, and also the God whom modern thought
finds it increasingly difficult to believe in 2 .'
In such a state of things it is natural that men should turn
to pantheism as a sort of middle term between religion and
philosophy, and even claim, for the unity of the world, the
venerable name and associations of God. But the remarkable
thing is that in the numberless attempts to attack, or defend,
or find a substitute for Theism, the Christian, or Trinitarian,
teaching about God rarely appears upon the scene. Devout
Christians have come to think of the doctrine of the Trinity,
if not exactly as a distinct revelation, yet as a doctrine
necessary for holding the divinity of Christ, without sacri-
ficing the unity of God. Ordinary people take it for granted
that Trinitarianism is a sort of extra demand made on Christian
faith, and that the battle must really be fought out on the
Unitarian basis. If Unitarian theism can be defended, it will
then be possible to go farther and accept the doctrine of the
Trinity. It is natural that when Christians take this ground,
those who have ceased to be Christian suppose that, though
Christianity is no longer tenable, they may still cling to
'Theism,' and even perhaps, under cover of that nebulous
term, make an alliance not only with Jews and Mahommedans,
1 Quoted by W. S. Lilly, Nineteenth 2 Morison, Service of Man, p. 49.
Century, Aug. 1888, p. 292.
H
98 The Religion of the Incarnation.
but with at least the more religious representatives of pan-
theism. It is only our languid interest in speculation or a
philistine dislike of metaphysics, that makes such an un-
intelligent view possible. Unitarianism said its last word in
the pre-Christian and early Christian period, and it failed, as
it fails now, to save religion except at the cost of reason. So
far from the doctrine of the Trinity being, in Mr. Gladstone's
unfortunate phrase, ' the scaffolding of a purer theism,' non-
Christian monotheism was the ' scaffolding ' through which
already the outlines of the future building might be seen.
For the modern world, the Christian doctrine of God remains
as the only safeguard in reason for a permanent theistic
belief 1 .
It is not difficult to see how it is that this truth is not more
generally recognised. The doctrine of the Trinity, by which
the Christian idea of God absorbed Greek speculation into it-
self, had but little point d'appui in the unmetaphysical western
world. It bore the imprimatur of the Church ; it was easily
deducible from the words of Holy Scripture ; it was seen to
be essential to the holding of the divinity of Christ. But
men forgot that the doctrine was ' addressed to the reason 2 ; '
and so its metaphysical meaning and value were gradually
lost sight of. In the days of the mediaeval Papacy, ecclesias-
tical were more effective than metaphysical weapons, and
Scholasticism knew so much about the deepest mysteries of
God, that it almost provoked an agnostic reaction, in the
interests of reverence and intellectual modesty. With the
Reformation came the appeal to the letter of Holy Scripture,
1 It is far from our purpose to un- He wavers between a view which
dervalue the work of Dr. Martineau. logically developed must result in
No more earnest and vigorous, and so pantheism, and a view implying a
far as it goes, no truer defence of reli- distinction in the Divine nature,
gion has been published in our day. which carries him far in the Trini-
But his strength lies mainly in his tarian direction. More often he con-
protest against what destroys religion, tents himself with leaving the specu-
and in his uncompromising assertion lative question alone, or storming
of what religion, as a condition of its the rational position by the forces of
existence, demands. He has done religion and morals. See A Study of
little to shew us how these demands Religion, vol. ii. p. 145 compared with
can be rationally satisfied, how the p. 192.
personal God, which religion de- 2 Newman's Arians, p. 84.
mands, is even an intelligible idea.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 99
and the age of biblical, as contrasted with scientific, theology.
The only scientific theology of the Reformation period was the
awful and immoral system of John Calvin, rigorously deduced
from a one-sided truth.
Then came the age of physical science. The break up of
the mediaeval system of thought and life resulted in an
atomism, which, if it had been more perfectly consistent with
itself, would have been fatal alike to knowledge and society.
Translated into science it appeared as mechanism in the
Baconian and Cartesian physics : translated into politics it
appeared as rampant individualism, though combined by
Hobbes with Stuart absolutism. Its theory of knowledge
was a crude empiricism ; its theology unrelieved deism. God
was ' throned in magnificent inactivity in a remote corner of
the universe,' and a machinery of ' second causes ' had practi-
cally taken His place. It was even doubted, in the deistic age,
whether God's delegation of His power was not so absolute as
to make it impossible for Him to ' interfere ' with the laws of
nature. The question of miracles became the burning question
of the day, and the very existence of God was staked on His
power to interrupt or override the laws of the universe.
Meanwhile His immanence in nature, the ' higher pantheism,'
which is a truth essential to true religion, as it is to true
philosophy, fell into the background.
Slowly but surely that theory of the world has been under-
mined. The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in
the present day, is that which represents Him as an occasional
Visitor. Science had pushed the deist's God farther and
farther away, and at the moment when it seemed as if He
would be thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and,
under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has
conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit,
by shewing us that we must choose between two alternatives.
Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere.
He cannot be here and not there. He cannot delegate His
power to demigods called ' second causes V In nature
everything must bo His work or nothing. We must frankly
1 Cf. Fiske, Idea of God, pp. 103, 104. Martineau, A Study of Religion, ii. 1 72, 173.
H 2
ioo The Religion of the Incarnation.
return to the Christian view of direct Divine agency, the
immanence of Divine power in nature from end to end, the
belief in a God in Whom not only we, but all things have
their being, or we must banish Him altogether. It seems as if,
in the providence of God, the mission of modern science
was to bring home to our unmetaphysical ways of thinking
the great truth of the Divine immanence in creation, which
is not less essential to the Christian idea of God than to a
philosophical view of nature. And it comes to us almost like
a new truth, which we cannot at once fit it in with the old.
Yet the conviction that the Divine immanence must be for
our age, as for the Athanasian age, the meeting point of the
religious and philosophic view of God is shewing itself in the
most thoughtful minds on both sides. Our modes of thought
are becoming increasingly Greek, and the flood, which in our
day is surging up against the traditional Christian view of
God, is prevailingly pantheistic in tone. The pantheism is
not less pronounced because it comes as the last word of
a science of nature, for the wall which once separated physics
from metaphysics has given way, and positivism, when it is
not the paralysis of reason, is but a temporary resting-place,
preparatory to a new departure. We are not surprised then,
that one who, like Professor Fiske, holds that ' the infinite and
eternal Power that is manifested in every pulsation of the
universe is none other than the living God/ and who vindi-
cates the belief in a final cause because he cannot believe that
' the Sustainer of the universe will put us to permanent intel-
lectual confusion,' should instinctively feel his kinship with
Athanasianism, and vigorously contend against the view that
any part of the universe is ' Godless V
Unfortunately, however, the rediscovery of the truth of
God's immanence in nature, coming, as it has done, from the
side of a scientific theory, which was violently assailed by
the official guardians of the Faith, has resulted for many in
the throwing aside of the counter and conditioning truth,
which saves religion from pantheism. It seemed as if tradi-
tional Christianity were bound up with the view that God is
1 Idea of God, cf. v. and pp. 105-110.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 101
wholly separate from the world and not immanent in it.
And Professor Fiske has been misled 1 into the belief that
S. Augustine is responsible for that false view. It is almost
incredible to anyone, who has read any of S. Augustine's
writings, that, according to this view, he has to play the
role of the unintelligent and unphilosophical deist, who
thinks of God as ' a crudely anthropomorphic Being, far
removed from the universe and accessible only through the
mediating offices of an organized church 2 .' And not only is
S. Augustine represented as a deist, but S. Athanasius is made
a pantheist, and the supposed conflict between science and
religion is, we are told, really the conflict between Athanasian
and Augustinian ideas of God 3 . Yet, as a matter of fact,
S. Athanasius and S. Augustine both alike held the truths
which deism and pantheism exaggerate into the destruction
of religion. If S. Athanasius says, ' The Word of God is not
contained by anything, but Himself contains all things. . . . He
was in everything and was outside all beings, and was at rest
in the Father alone 4 : ' S. Augustine says, ' The same God
is wholly everywhere, contained by no space, bound by no
bonds, divisible into no parts, mutable in no part of His
being, filling heaven and earth by the presence of His power.
Though nothing can exist without Him, yet nothing is what
He is V
The Christian doctrine of God, in Athanasian days,
triumphed where Greek philosophy failed. It accepted the
challenge of Greek thought, it recognised the demands of the
speculative reason, and found in itself the answer which,
before the collision with Hellenism, it unconsciously pos-
sessed. It is challenged again by the metaphysics of our
day. We may be wrong to speculate at all on the nature of
God, but it is not less true now than in the first centuries of
Christianity, that, for those who do speculate, a Unitarian, or
Arian, or Sabellian theory is as impossible as polytheism.
If God is to be Personal, as religion requires, metaphysics
1 Apparently by Prof. Allen's Con- 4 De Tncarn. c. 17.
tinuity of Christian Thought. 5 De Civ. Dei, vii. c. xxx ; cf. too De
2 Fiske, Idea of God, p. 94. Gen. ad lit. iv. c. 1 2 ; Enchir. ad Laur.
3 Ibid., vii. c. 27.
IO2 The Religion of the Incarnation.
demands still a distinction in the Unity which unitarianism is
compelled to deny. But, further, the Christian doctrine of God
is challenged by the science of nature. Science, imperiously
and with increasing confidence, demands a unity in nature
which shall be not external but immanent, giving rationality
and coherence to all that is, and justifying the belief in the
universal reign of law. But this immanence of God in nature
Unitarian theism cannot give, save at the price of losing
itself in pantheism. Deistic it might be, as it was in the last
century ; deistic it can be no longer, unless it defiantly rejects
the truth which science is giving us, and the claims which
the scientific reason makes.
It remains then for Christianity to claim the new truth
and meet the new demands by a fearless reassertion of its
doctrine of God. It has to bring forth out of its treasury
things new and old, the old almost forgotten truth of
the immanence of the Word, the belief in God as ' creation's
secret force,' illuminated and confirmed as that is by the
advance of science, till it comes to us with all the power
of a new discovery. Slowly and under the shock of con-
troversy Christianity is recovering its buried truths, and
realizing the greatness of its rational heritage. It teaches
still that God is the eternally existent One, the Being on
Whom we depend, and in Whom we live, the source of all
reality and the goal to which creation moves, the Object alike
of religion and philosophy, the eternal Energy of the natural
world, and the immanent reason of the universe. It teaches
that He is the eternally Righteous One, and therefore the
Judge of all, irrevocably on the side of right, leading the
world by a progressive preparation for the revelation of
Himself as Infinite Love in the Incarnation of the Word, stimu-
lating those desires which He alone can satisfy, the yearning
of the heart for love, of the moral nature for righteousness,
of the speculative reason for truth. When men had wearied
themselves in the search for a remedy for that which separates
men from God, the revelation is given of Him Who ' shall
save His people from their sins.' And when reason had wan-
dered long, seeking for that which should be Real and yet
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 103
One, a God Who should satisfy alike the demands of religion
and reason, the doctrine of the Trinity is unfolded. It was
the gradual revelation of God answering to the growing needs
and capacity of man.
VIII. It follows from the point of view adopted in the fore-
going essay that there can be no proofs, in the strict sense
of the word, of the existence of God. Reason has for its
subject-matter, the problem of essence, not of existence, the
question, ' What is God 1 ' not ' Is there a God ? ' Proof can
only mean verification d posteriori of a truth already held.
We approach the problem with an unreasoned conscious-
ness of dependence on a Being or Beings who are to us
invisible. This we interpret crudely, or leave uninterpreted.
The belief may express itself in ancestor- worship, or nature-
worship, or what not. But as our moral and intellectual
nature develops, its light is turned back upon this primi-
tive undefined belief. Conscience demands that God shall
be moral, and with the belief that He is, there comes con-
fidence and trust, deepening into faith and hope and love :
the speculative reason demands that God shall be One, the
immanent unity of all that is. And the doctrine of God, which
is best able to satisfy each and all of these demands, persists
as the permanent truth of religion. But neither conscience
nor the speculative reason can demonstrate 1 God's existence.
And it is always possible for men to carry their distrust of
that which is instinctive so far as to assume that it is always
false because they have found that it is not always true.
Reason cannot prove existence. The so-called proof, a con-
tingentia (which underlies H. Spencer's argument for the
existence of the Unknowable), is an appeal to that very con-
sciousness of dependence which some people consider a weak-
ness, and a thing to educate themselves out of. The appeal
to the consensus gentium can establish only the generality,
not the strict universality, of religion. It will always be
possible to find exceptions, real or apparent, to the general
1 S. Thos. Aq. Sum. Theol. I. i. that he does not mean strict demon-
Quaest. 2, says that the Existence of stration, demonstratio apodeictica, but de-
God is demonstrable, but he explains monstratio ab effectibus.
LIBRARY ST. MARY S COLLEGE
IO4 The Religion of the Incarnation.
rule ; while as for what is known as the ontological argu-
ment, which on principles of reason would justify the in-
stinctive belief, it requires a metaphysical training to under-
stand it or at least to feel its force. There remain, however,
the two great arguments from conscience and from nature,
which are so frequently discussed in the present day.
With regard to the first, there is no doubt that the belief in
God will in any age find its strongest corroboration in the
conscience. Even in the mind of a Felix the ideas of ' right-
eousness, temperance, and judgment to come ' had a strange
and terrifying coherence. There is that much of truth in the
statement that religion is founded in ' fear.' But the argument
from conscience has been weakened by being overstated.
Conscience, as we know it, has won, not indeed its existence,
but the delicacy of its moral touch, and the strength of its
' categorical imperative/ from the assured belief in a real
relationship between man and a holy and loving God. When
that belief has ceased to exist, conscience still survives, and
it is possible and justifiable to appeal to it as a fact which
can be explained by religion, but without religion must be
explained away. But it is a mistake to suppose that we can
take the untrained and undeveloped conscience, and argue
direct from it to a righteous God. The lumen naturale, in
its lowest development, gives but a faint and flickering
gleam. We cannot argue back from it to a God of love, or
even a God of righteousness, unless we interpret it in the
fuller light of the conscience which has been trained and
perfected under the growing influence of the belief. The idea
of ' duty,' which is so hard to explain on utilitarian grounds,
is not to be found, as we know it, in Greek ethics. For it
implies a fusion of morals with religion, as we can trace it in
the history of Israel, and the teaching of Christian ethics.
If it is impossible to explain duty as the result of association
between the ideas of public and private advantage, it is no
less impossible to make it an independent premiss for a con-
clusion which is presupposed in it.
The argument from nature is closely parallel. It is hard
for those, whose lives have been moulded on the belief in
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 105
God, the Maker of heaven and earth, to understand the incon-
clusiveness of the argument to those who have abandoned
that belief, and start, as it were, from outside. Consequently
it has been made to bear more than it can carry. No doubt
the evolution which was at first supposed to have destroyed
teleology is found to be more saturated with teleology than
the view which it superseded. And Christianity can take up
the new as it did the old, and find in it a confirmation of its
own belief. But it is a confirmation not a proof, and taken
by itself is incomplete. It is a great gain to have eliminated
chance, to find science declaring that there must be a reason
for everything, even when it cannot hazard a conjecture as
to what the reason is. But apart from the belief of our
moral nature, that in the long run everything must make
for righteousness, that the world must be moral as well as
rational, and that the dramatic tendency in the evolution of
the whole would be irrational if it had not a moral goal, the
science of nature is powerless to carry us on to a Personal
God. But the strength of a rope is greater than the strength
of its separate strands. The arguments for the existence of
God are, it has been said, ' sufficient not resistless, convincing
not compelling V We can never demonstrate the existence of
God either from conscience or from nature. But our belief
in Him is attested and confirmed by both.
In this matter, the belief in God stands on the same level
with the belief in objective reality. Both have been explained
away by philosophers. Neither can be proved but by a
circular argument. Both persist in the consciousness of
mankind. Both have been purified and rationalized by the
growth of knowledge. But the moment reason attempts to
start without assumptions, and claims exclusive sovereignty
over man, a paralysis of thought results. There have been,
before now, philosophers who professed to begin at the be-
ginning, and accept nothing till it was proved, and the result
was a pure Pyrrhonism. They could not prove the existence
of an external world. They believed it, even if they did not,
like Hume, exult in the fact that belief triumphed over
1 The Existence of God. By Rev. R. F. Clarke, S.J., p. 6.
io6 The Religion of the Incarnation.
demonstration, but there was no sure ground for believing
that the world was not a mere cerebral phenomenon, except
the curiously rational coherence of its visions. Even Prof.
Huxley, in his ultra-sceptical moods, admits this. He says x
that ' for any demonstration that can be given to the contrary
effect, the " collection of perceptions," which makes up our
consciousness, may be an orderly phantasmagoria generated
by the Ego, unfolding its successive scenes on the background
of the abyss of nothingness.' But no one, least of all a man
of science, believes this to be so. He takes reality for granted,
and only tries to interpret it aright, i. e. in such a way as to
make a rational unity of the facts perceived. Tell a scien-
tific specialist, ' I am not going to let you beg the question.
You must first prove that nature exists, and then I will hear
about the science of nature,' and he will say ' That is meta-
physics,' which to him is probably a synonym for an intel-
lectual waste of time. ' Look at nature,' he will say, ' what
more do you want 1 If nature had been merely a phantas-
magoria there would have been no science of nature. Of
course you must make your " act of faith 2 ." You must believe
not only that nature exists, but that it is a cosmos which can
be interpreted, if you can only find the key. The proof that
nature is interpretable is that we have, at least in part, been
able to interpret her. There were people in John Locke's day
who professed to doubt their own existence, and he was
content to answer them according to their folly. "If any-
one," he says 3 , " pretends to be so sceptical as to deny his
own existence (for really to doubt of it is manifestly impos-
sible) let him, for me, enjoy his beloved happiness of being
nothing, until hunger, or some other pain, convince him to
the contrary." ' We do not call a scientific man unreasonable
if he answers thus, though he is justifying his premisses by
his conclusion. We know that he that would study nature
1 Huxley's Hume, p. 81. act of faith, because, by the nature of
a ' The one act of faith in the con- the case, the truth of such proposi-
vert to science, is the confession of tions is not susceptible of proof.'
the universality of order and of the Huxley in Darwin's Life and Letters,
absolute validity, in all times and vol. ii. p. 200.
under all circumstances, of the law 3 Essay IV. 10. 2.
of causation. This confession is an
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 107
must believe that it is, and that it is a rational whole which
reason can interpret. And ' he that cometh to God must
believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of such as
diligently seek Him.' We feel our kinship with both before
the instinctive consciousness is justified by reason.
And there is a remarkable parallelism in the process of
verification. The counterpart of the theological belief in the
unity and omnipresence of God is the scientific belief in the
unity of nature and the reign of law. But that belief, though
implicit in the simplest operation of reason 1 , is not con-
sciously attained till late in the history of science. And even
when it is reached, it is not at once grasped in all its wealth
and fulness. It is thought of as mere uniformity, a dull
mechanical repetition of events, which is powerless to explain
or include the rich variety of nature and the phenomena of
life and growth. It is to meet this difficulty that J. S. Mill
naively assures us that ' the course of nature is not only
uniform, it is also infinitely various 2 .' But soon the truth is
grasped, that the reign of law is a unity which is higher than
mere uniformity, because it is living and not dead, and
includes and transcends difference. It is the analogue in
science to that higher and fuller view of God in which He is
revealed as Trinity in Unity.
But as these parallel processes of verification go on, the
truth is forced upon the world that religion and philosophy
must either be in internecine conflict, or recognise the oneness
of their Object. 'We and the philosophers,' says S. Cle-
ment, ' know the same God, but not in the same way V
Philosophy and religion have both been enriched by wider
knowledge, and as their knowledge has become deeper and
fuller, the adjustment of their claims has become more impera-
tively necessary. Few in our day would willingly abandon
either, or deliberately sacrifice one to the other. Many would
be ready to assent to the words of a Christian Father ; ' when
philosophy and the worship of the gods are so widely
separated, that the professors of wisdom cannot bring us
1 Cf. Green's Works, vol. ii. p. 284.
2 Log. Bk. III. ch. iii. 2. 3 Strom, vi. 5.
io8 The Religion of the Incarnation.
near to the gods, and the priests of religion cannot give us
wisdom ; it is manifest that the one is not true wisdom, and
the other is not true religion. Therefore neither is philo-
sophy able to conceive the truth, nor is religion able to
justify itself. But where philosophy is joined by an insepar-
able connection with religion, both must necessarily be
true, because in our religion we ought to be wise, that is,
to know the true Object and mode of worship, and in our
wisdom to worship, that is, to realize in action what we
know V
It is sometimes argued, You have let in more than the
thin end of the wedge. You admit that ' it is the province
of reason to judge of the morality of the Scripture 2 .' You
profess no antagonism to historical and literary criticism.
Under the criticism of reason, Fetichism has given way to
Polytheism, Polytheism to Monotheism, even Monotheism has
become progressively less anthropomorphic. Why object to
the last step in the process, and cling to the belief in a
Personal God ? Simply because it would make the difference
between a religion purified and a religion destroyed. The
difference between the 30,000 gods of Hesiod,and the One God of
Christianity, is a measurable difference : the difference between
a Personal God and an impersonal reason is, so far as religion
is concerned, infinite. For the transition from Monotheism, to
Pantheism is made only by the surrender of religion, though
the term ' theism ' may be used to blur the line of separation,
and make the transition easy.
Religion has, before all things, to guard the heritage of truth,
the moral revelation of God in Christ, to ' contend earnestly
for the faith once delivered to the saints,' and to trust to the
promised guidance of the Spirit of Truth. And reason inter-
prets religion to itself, and by interpreting verifies and con-
firms. Religion therefore claims as its own the new light
which metaphysics and science are in our day throwing upon
the truth of the immanence of God : it protests only against
those imperfect, because premature, syntheses, which in the
1 Lact. Institt. IV. iii.
2 Butler's Analogy, Pt. II. ch. hi. p. 183.
ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 109
interests of abstract speculation, would destroy religion. It
dares to maintain that ' the Fountain of wisdom and religion
alike is God : and if these two streams shall turn aside from
Him, both must assuredly run dry.' For human nature craves
to be both religious and rational. And the life which is not
both is neither.
III.
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN.
J. R. ILLINGWORTH.
in.
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN.
THE problem of pain, always prominent in a sensitive age,
has been exceptionally emphasized in the literature of modern
pessimism as an objection to Theism in general, and Chris-
tianity in particular. The existence of pain is urged as in-
compatible with the belief in a God who is at once omnipotent
and benevolent, that is with Theism in its ordinary form ;
while Christianity is further charged with being a religion
of pain, a religion which has increased the sum of actual, and
the expectation of prospective pain, darkening the shadow
that lies upon our race. Suffering is not a subject upon
which anything new can be said. It has long ago been
probed, to the utmost limit of our capacity, and remains a
mystery still. But, in face of the adverse use now made of
it, it may be well to bear in mind how much has been said
and is to be said upon the other side.
To begin with, there are two classes of pain, animal and
human, which however intimately they may be connected
must, for clearness, be considered apart. The universality of
pain throughout the range of the animal world, reaching back
into the distant ages of geology, and involved in the very
structure of the animal organism, is without doubt among
the most serious problems which the Theist has to face. But
it is a problem in dealing with which emotion is very often
mistaken for logic. J. S. Mill's famous indictment of nature,
for example, is one of the most emotional pieces of rhetoric of
which a professed logician was ever guilty. When a certain
class of facts is urged in objection to our Christian belief, we
ii4 The Religion of the Incarnation.
are entitled to ask how many of those facts are known, and
how many are only imagined. There is of course a scientific
use of the imagination, but it is only permissible within the
bounds of possible, or at least conceivable, verification. Imagi-
native conjectures which, from the nature of the case, will
never admit either of verification or disproof are poetry and
not science, and must be treated as such in argument. With
all the changes that have passed over our knowledge, we may
still do well to attend to the caution with which Butler begins
his Analogy :
' One cannot but be greatly sensible how difficult it is to
silence imagination enough to make the voice of reason even
distinctly heard ; as we are accustomed from our youth up to
indulge that forward delusive faculty, ever obtruding beyond
its sphere ; of some assistance indeed to apprehension, but the
author of all error : as we plainly lose ourselves in gross and
crude conceptions of things, taking for granted that we are
acquainted with what indeed we are wholly ignorant of.'
This needs repeating, because much of the popular knowledge
of the day consists in the acceptance of results without ex-
amination of the methods of their attainment ; somewhat as,
in the countryman's simple faith, a thing must needs be true
because he has seen it in a book. While the case in point is
further confused by the fact that imagination has an impor-
tant bearing on all our conduct towards the lower animals,
and cannot, for that purpose, be too emotionally developed.
But it is one thing to err on the safe side in practice, and an-
other to convert such possible error into argument.
What then do we really know about the suffering of
animals'? No reasonable man doubts that they suffer. But
the degree and intensity of their suffering is almost entirely
a matter of conjecture. We speak of, and are affected by the
mass of animal suffering; but we must remember that it is
felt distributively. No one animal suffers more because a
million suffer likewise. And what we have to consider is the
amount which an individual animal suffers. We have no
knowledge, but we are entitled to meet conjecture by conjec-
ture. We may fairly suppose that the animals do not ' look
in. The Problem of Pain. 1 1 5
before and after,' and it is this that gives its sting to human
pain. Again, they would seem like children to give strong
indications of slight pain. Further, many muscular contor-
tions which simulate extreme suffering are believed on scien-
tific evidence to be due to quite other causes. And then there
are the phenomena of fascination, which may well resemble
the experience of Livingstone in the lion's mouth. While
many pains are prophylactic and directly contribute to the
avoidance of danger and maintenance of life. All these con-
siderations may mitigate our view of animal suffering. But
a stronger argument is to be drawn from our profound ignor-
ance of the whole question. Animals can perceive colours
invisible to us ; they seem to have organs of sensation of
whose nature we know nothing ; their instincts are far more
numerous and finer than our own ; what compensations may
they not have 1 Again, what are they "? Had they a past 1
May they not have a future 1 ? What is the relation of their
consciousness to the mighty life which pulses within the uni-
verse ? May not Eastern speculation about these things be
nearer the truth than Western science? All these questions
are in the region of the unknown, and the unknowable ; and
in face of them the Theistic position is simply this. We be-
lieve, on complex and cumulative proof, in an omnipotent and
benevolent Creator. That belief is a positive verdict of our
reason, interpreting evidence which we consider irresistible.
And against such a conclusion no presumption of the imagi-
nation, which from the nature of the case cannot possibly be
verified, has any logical validity at all : not to mention that
such presumptions admit of being met by as probable pre-
sumptions on the other side. We decline to arraign our
Creator for a deed which we have not even the means of
knowing that He has done.
' All difficulties as to how they (the animals) are to be dis-
posed of are so apparently and wholly founded in our ignor-
ance that it is wonderful they should be insisted upon by any
but such as are weak enough to think they are acquainted
with the whole system of things.' . . . . ' What men require is
to have all difficulties cleared ; and this is, or at least for
i 2
n 6 The Religion of the Incarnation.
anything we know to the contrary it may be, the same as
requiring to comprehend the Divine nature, and the whole
plan of providence from everlasting to everlasting V
But with human suffering the case is different, for here we
are in a measure behind the scenes. We watch the process
no longer from the outside but from within ; and though it
still remains mysterious, its mystery is full of meaning. In
saying this we make two assumptions ; first, that moral evil
is an ultimate fact for us, in our present state of being, in the
sense that it can neither be explained nor explained away :
and, secondly, that character and not pleasure, being, and not
feeling, or to phrase it more generally, the greatest goodness
of the greatest number, is the primary end of ethics. The first
of these assumptions most men are willing to admit, while the
few philosophical attempts to disprove it have conspicuously
failed. The second has the assent of all moralists except the
hedonists, and those who without being aware of it are
hedonists in disguise ; the pessimism, for example, which
makes so much of pain, being simply disappointed hedonism.
Starting then from these premises, the problem of practical
ethics is the formation of character in the face of moral evil.
And in the solution of this problem pain and sorrow have a
place which no other known agency conceivably could fill.
To begin with its simplest if lowest aspect, pain is a
punishment ; and without importing any a priori notions
into the question, we find punishment to be a necessary ele-
ment in the evolution of character. Punishment is a complex
thing, and the tendency of civilization is to lay stress upon its
corrective rather than its vindictive aspect. But we must
remember that with uncivilized races this cannot be the case ;
and that pains and penalties, considered simply as retrospec-
tive vengeance for the past, have been historically, and in
some cases still are, essential to our social development.
Indeed, it is a shallow view that regards vengeance as a
survival of savagery. Vengeance is intimately bound up
with our sense of justice, and the true difference between the
savage and the sage is that what the one eagerly inflicts upon
1 Butler, Analogy.
in. The Problem of Pain. 1 1 7
his neighbour, the other would far more willingly inflict upon
himself. Plato expressed this once for all when he said that
the sinner who is punished is happier than the sinner who
escapes scot free. We rightly shrink, as far as possible, from
sitting in judgment on our fellow-men ; but we feel none the
less that our own ill deeds demand a penalty, which may
vary from bodily suffering to interior shame, but which in
one form or another must be endured before we can recover
our self-respect. And self-respect is a necessary factor in all
moral progress. Punishment, then, considered as vengeance,
is a necessity for the social development of barbarous races ;
and though less obviously, quite as really for the personal
progress of the civilized man.
Now, without committing ourselves to the statement that
suffering was introduced into the world by sin, which is not
a Christian dogma, though it is often thought to be so, a vast
amount of the suffering in the world is obviously punishment,
and punishment of a very searching kind. For not only are
obvious vices punished with remorse, and disease, and shame,
but ignorance, impatience, carelessness, even mistakes of judg-
ment are punished too, and that in a degree which we are apt
to consider disproportionate ; forgetful that consequences are
God's commentaries, and this apparent disproportion may
reflect light upon the real magnitude of what we often are
too ready to consider trivial things.
But these punishments, it is urged, fall on the innocent as
well as the guilty. And this leads us to another point of
view. Pain is not only punitive. It is also corrective and
purgatorial. And this again is a fact of ordinary experience,
quite apart from the further consideration of why it should be
so. Among primitive races the penalties of law, by the merely
mechanical process of forcibly restraining certain actions,
slowly elevate the social tone. And as men rise in the scale
of development and begin to be a law to themselves, the same
process is continued within the individual mind. The pains
and penalties of evil doing, physical and mental, tend to
correct and purify the character ; and when we say that men
learn wisdom by experience, we mostly mean by experience of
1 1 8 The Religion of the Incarnation.
something painful. Of course, the most obvious form of this
correction is that in which the suffering can be recognised by
the sufferer as merited, because due to his own misdeeds. But
apart from such causal connection, what we call unmerited
suffering exercises the same influence in an even greater
measure. Its forces, not being exhausted in the work of
neutralising past evil, are able to expand and expend them-
selves in a positive direction, elevating, refining, dignifying
the character to an infinite degree. The men of sorrows are
the men of influence in every walk of life. Martyrdom is the
certain road to success in any cause. Even more than know-
ledge, pain is power. And all this because it develops the
latent capacities of our being as no other influence can. It
requires no mystic insight to see the truth of this. However
unable we may be to account for it, it is a fact of everyday
experience, visible to ordinary common sense. And this being
so, there is nothing of necessity unjust in what we call un-
merited suffering, not even in the sad inheritance by children
of the results of parental sin. For while the sight of the
miserable entail may, if rightly used, become the parent's
punishment, its imposition may be the child's call to higher
things. True, like all other useful agencies, it often fails of
its end ; but such failure is of the problem of evil, not of the
problem of pain.
And, lastly, with men, as with animals, suffering is largely
prophylactic. Bodily pain sounds the alarm bell of disease in
time for its removal. Mental and moral pain arrest the
issues of ignorant or evil courses before it is too late. While
the desire to remove pain from ourselves, or better still from
others, is among the strongest incentives of the scientific dis-
coverer, the patriot, the philanthropist. And though it may
seem a fallacy to credit pain with the virtues which spring
from the desire for its removal, common sense rises above
logic and recognises the real value of a spur without which
many of our noblest activities would cease.
Now, though all these considerations naturally lead on into
theology for their further treatment, yet it should be noticed
that they are in no sense exclusively theological. The penal,
in. The Problem of Pain. 119
the corrective, the preventive, and the stimulating uses of pain
are all recognised in the average man's philosophy of life.
Indeed, they are too obvious to need dwelling on at any length.
But the point to be noticed is, that taken together, they cover a
very great deal of ground. For it is hardly too much to say that
in one or other of its various aspects, every human being has
need of suffering for the due development of his character. And
this is a fact which should go far to outweigh much brilliant
declamation of the pessimists. Pessimism, in fact, stereotypes
and gives a fictitious permanence to what is only one among
our many moods of thought. It harps upon the fact that we
naturally shrink from pain. It ignores the fact that we are
conscious of being the better for it, and unable to conceive
progress without it. And though these considerations afford
no solution to the speculative mystery of pain, they make in
the direction of a speculative solution. They do not explain
why pain exists, but they shew us that its existence, in the
only region in which we can really test it, is eminently useful,
and therefore consistent with providential and beneficent
design. Their precise logical relation to the Theistic argument
might be put as follows : Arguments drawn from many
departments of life and thought converge in favour of Theism,
but one large and important department, that of human
suffering, blocks the way. When, however, we isolate and
examine that department, we find that even within its limits
the evidence of provident purpose is prominent, if not prepon-
derant. Its prominence is certainly enough to neutralize the
negative bearing of the department upon the general argu-
ment. Its preponderance, which many if not most men would
admit, carries us further and makes the net evidence of the
whole department an affirmative contribution to Theism.
So far common sense carries us. But when we turn to the
place of pain in the religions of the world, two further
thoughts are suggested. In the first place, the belief in a
future life, which is common to almost all religions, at once
opens endless vistas of possibility before us. The pain which
has failed to purify here, may yet purify hereafter ; the high-
handed wrong-doing, which has seemed to go unpunished here,
1 20 The Religion of the Incarnation.
may there meet with its righteous due. The pains which we
have thought excessive here, may there be found to have
worked out for us a far more exceeding weight of glory. And
so the particular difficulty which arises from the unequal
incidence of earthly suffering may one day find its adequate
solution. No doubt there is an element of truth in the
familiar taunt that belief in a future life has been a curse as
well as a blessing to the world. In some stages of culture,
for example, the future life has been supposed only to em-
phasize the inequalities of the present : the slave living on in
everlasting slavery, and the warrior in incessant war. But
this has been a partial and a passing phase of thought, which
rapidly gave way before more ethical conceptions. The ethical
conceptions in their turn, which were based on future rewards
and punishments, confessedly could not produce a very high
type of morality. But they have filled their place, and that a
large one in the history of human development, while even
after ceasing to be the dominant motives, they still witness
to the ineradicable expectation, of our race, that holiness and
happiness, sin and failure, shall one day coincide. More
serious and sad is the fact that distorted dreams of future
punishment have often reflected a lurid light upon the whole
of life ; goading zealots into cruelty, sinners into madness,
thinkers into unbelief; and have lingered on, as savage sur-
vivals, even into Christian times, to the hopeless obscuration,
in many minds, of the creed that God is Love. But even here
we must draw distinctions. Early races express intensity by
an accumulation of material metaphors fecundity by an
hundred breasts, omnipotence and omniscience by an hundred
arms or a thousand eyes. And so, when they saw the un-
righteous man enjoy the fruits of his unrighteousness, and
die in unrebuked defiance of laws human and divine, their
sense of outraged justice could not but express itself in
terms of material horror. We have grown to be more pitiful,
more refined in our moral thinking, less dogmatic about un-
known things : yet neither our moral experience nor our
Christianity has availed to remove the dread of that unutter-
able 'pain of loss,' which the passing of a soul in obdurate
in. The Problem of Pain. 1 2 1
impenitence has ever suggested to the mind of man. And
however confidently therefore we may put aside the dis-
tortions, and debasements, and interested exaggerations which
have darkened the thought of future punishment, we must
remember that the thought itself was no alien introduction
into history; but due to the instinctive craving of the human
heart for justice; man's own tremendous verdict on his sin 1 .
But the universality, or at least extreme generality of the
belief in a continued existence, is quite distinct from the
particular pictures of it which the imagination has variously
drawn ; much as the universality of conscience is distinct from
its varying content among diverse races and in different ages.
And the broad fact remains that from the dawn of history
the majority of mankind have believed in and looked with
confidence to a future life to rectify, and therefore justify, the
inequalities of earthly suffering ; however much their views
have varied as to what should constitute rectification.
Secondly, there is an instinctive tendency in all religions,
from the savage upwards, to view pain, whether in the form
of asceticism or sacrifice, as inseparably connected with an
acceptable service of the gods or God. The asceticism of poor
Caliban foregoing his little mess of whelks, and that of the
Hindoo whose meritorious sufferings are expected to prevail,
by intrinsic right with heaven ; the hideous holocausts of
Mexico, and the paper substitutes for offerings of the parsi-
monious or hypocritical Chinee are widely different things.
But they all spring from a common instinct, variously dis-
torted, yet persistent through all distortions, and progressively
refined, till it culminates in the Hebrew substitution of the
broken heart for the blood of bulls and of goats. It is the
custom of some modern writers to represent the higher forms
of sacrifice as merely survivals of the savage desire to pro-
pitiate the gods by food. But this is not an adequate analysis
even of the savage creed. Naturally enough the primitive
hunter, to whom food is the chief good, may think food the
worthiest offering to the gods. But it is not simply food, but
his own food, that he offers, the choicest morsel, that which it
1 Cf. pp. 514-16.
122 The Religion of the Incarnation.
costs him something to forego. In other words, the root of
sacrifice is self-sacrifice, however crudely it may be expressed.
Of course, the primitive hypocrite would seek to evade personal
suffering as naturally as the civilized hypocrite will give alms
at another man's expense. But sincerity must come before
hypocrisy, and the sacrificial instinct is in origin sincere. Its
first account of itself may be irrational, and its earlier mani-
festations often blundering and repulsive ; and if it were now
only a survival, the same should be true of its later forms, for
survivals are not commonly improved in the process of surviv-
ing. But so far from this being the case, it has been refined
by successive developments and is as integral an element of
later as of earlier religions, being in fact the symbolic state-
ment that a more or less painful self-surrender is the necessary
condition of all human approach to the divine. Natural
religion then, in the widest use of the term, carries us on
beyond common sense, in attributing a mysterious value to
suffering here, and expecting an explanation of its anomalies
hereafter. The first belief may be called mystical, the second
hypothetical, and yet the two together have done more to
reconcile man to his burden of sorrow than all the philosophic
comments on the uses of adversity ; for they have seemed to
lift him, though blindfold, into a loftier region, where he felt
himself inbreathing power from on high. And so here, as in
other things, natural religion leads on into Christianity.
The relation of Christianity to the problem of pain, may be
best seen by contrasting it with the empirical optimism of
common sense. Enlightened common sense, as we have seen,
is fully aware of the uses of sorrow ; but it looks at the use-
fulness through the sorrowfulness, as a compensation which
should make the wise man content to bear his pain. The
change which Christianity has effected consists in the reversal
of this view of the subject. Once for all, it has put the value
before the painfulness in our thoughts. The Author and
Finisher of our faith, ' for the joy that was set before Him,
endured the Cross, despising the shame,' and ' our light afflic-
tion, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more
exceeding weight of glory, while we look not at the things
in. The Problem of Pain. 123
which are seen but at the things which are unseen.' It bids
us not wait ' till the sorrow comes with years,' but take up
our cross, from the first moment of our conscious discipleship.
And accordingly the real Christian looks at sorrow not from
without, but from within, and does not approach its specula-
tive difficulty till he is aware by experience of its practical
power. Consequently he cannot explain himself to the merely
external critic. He may urge in argument such general con-
siderations as have been touched upon above, and meet the
pleas of pessimism with the counterpleas of philosophic optim-
ism ; but if pressed for the inner secret of his own serenity,
he can only answer with the esoteric invitation, ' Come and
see.' Enter the dim sanctuary of sorrow through the shadow
of the Cross. Abide there, and as your eyes grow accustomed
to the darkness, the strange lines upon its walls which seemed
at first so meaningless, will group themselves into shapes and
forms of purposeful design.
Once for all the sinless suffering of the Cross has parted
sin from suffering with a clearness of distinction never before
achieved. The intellectual Greek had tended to confuse the
two as kindred forms of ignorance ; the weary Oriental as
kindred consequences of our imprisonment in the body, ' the
too too solid flesh ;' the self-righteous Jew viewed blindness,
or death from a falling tower, as evidence of exceptional sin.
Everywhere in the ancient world the outlines of the two were
undefined, and their true relation of antagonism misunder-
stood. But the sight of perfect sinlessness, combined with
perfect suffering, has cleared our view for ever. Sin indeed
always brings suffering in its train, but the suffering we now
see to be of the nature of its antidote ; an antidote often ap-
plied indeed with inexorable sternness, but in its intention
wholly merciful. Thus every sin has its appropriate suffering.
Bodily indulgence brings bodily disease ; cruelty ends in
cowardice ; pride and vanity in shame. And though the
suffering of itself cannot convert the sinner, it can and does
prevent both the gratification and contagion of the sin.
Then comes the more terrible sorrow of remorse ; and remorse
is potential penitence, and penitence potential purification
124 The Religion of the Incarnation.
But while sin thus involves suffering, suffering does not in-
volve sin. It is not only an antidote, but one of those anti-
dotes which taken in time is prophylactic. And this is not
only true of the pains of self-denial and self-sacrifice, the
voluntary bearing of the cross, but of many an involuntary
sorrow also. Delicate health, Plato's bridle of Theages, in-
herited pain, privation, bereavement, may all refine the char-
acter and train the spiritual eye to that purity of heart that
shall see God. Pain in fact, in its manifold methods, is like
the angel of the Eastern story, changing its form incessantly
to cope with the shifting shapes of sin, and passing by turns
into a lion, a bird, a sword, a flood, a flame, in sleepless eager-
ness to follow and find, and slay and quench and burn away
the least last lingering particle of evil. So far from being our
enemy it is our safest ally in the battle of life, and we fail
through shrinking from the stern alliance. We suffer because
we sin ; but we also sin because we decline to suffer.
Still, the very sharpness of the severance between sin and
suffering on the Cross forces upon us the further question
Why should the sinless suffer 1 The vicarious suffering of
Christ is said to conflict with our sense of justice. And it
does so, as misrepresented in much popular theology. But
rightly viewed, it is the climax and complete expression of the
process to which we owe the entire evolution of our race.
The pleasures of each generation evaporate in air ; it is their
pains that increase the spiritual momentum of the world.
We enter into life through the travail of another. We live
upon the death of the animals beneath us. The necessities,
the comforts, the luxuries of our existence are provided by
the labour and sorrow of countless fellow-men. Our freedom,
our laws, our literature, our spiritual sustenance have been
won for us at the cost of broken hearts, and wearied brains,
and noble lives laid down. And this is only the human
analogue of that transference of energy by which all life
and movement is for ever carried on. The sun is so much
the cooler by the heat it daily gives to earth ; the plant and
tree the weaker by the force that has matured their fruit ;
the animal generations exhausted in continuing their kind.
in. The Problem of Pain. 125
And how should their Creator draw all men unto Him, but
through the instrumentality of His own great law of sacrifice ?
If we shrink from our share in the conditions of the solemn
legacy, it is easy to persuade ourselves that the system of
things is wrong. But if we accept it, and resolve that we
too in our turn will spend and be spent for others, we find
beneath all the superficial suffering the deep truth of the
benediction, ' It is more blessed to give than to receive.' And
in the experience of that benediction we see further still into
the mysterious significance of sorrow.
Further ; but not yet to the end. For the human heart
desires more than merely to work for others. It desires to
be one with those for whom it works. Love is the highest
form of that unity ; but even short of actual love, we in-
stinctively crave communion and sympathy with our kind.
And it is no morbid view of life to say that sorrow brings
about this union in a way that joy does not. There is some-
thing, under our present conditions, in the very expansiveness
of joy which dissociates, while sorrow seems to weld us, like
hammer strokes on steel. It is the nationality whose mem-
bers have together struggled for existence, the soldiers who
have faced the shock of battle side by side, the persecuted
party, the husband and wife who have known common suf-
fering that are most intimately, indissolubly one. Nor is this
union merely negative like the bond which fellow-prisoners
feel, and yet would eagerly escape from if they could. It is
due to a distinct sense that the common crisis has aroused all
that is highest and noblest and most spiritual, and therefore
most sympathetic in the soul.
But again, it is only in the light from the Cross, that we
can see why pain should possess this power. For in that
light we understand how pain unites us to each other, be-
cause, as even natural religion dimly felt, it unites us to God,
and therefore through Him to those who in Him live and
move and have their being. It unites us to God because it
purifies us, because it detaches us from earth, because it
quickens our sense of dependence, because it opens our spiri-
tual vision, and above all because He too, as man, has suffered.
126 The Religion of the Incarnation.
But the mystics who have seen furthest into heavenly things
have felt that it unites us to God in still more vital wise, as
being, at least in its form of sacrifice, the very beating of the
heart of love. And so they have raised the question, Has it
not an antitype far in the illimitable depths of the unseen ?
For we are told that God is Love ; and love, as we know it,
must be shewn in sacrifice ; though the sacrifice grows pain-
less in proportion as the love is pure. And when we recall
how in the days of our Lord's ministry on earth, Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit bore their witness each to other, but no one
of the Holy Persons ever to Himself, we are led on to wonder
whether ' in the light that no man can approach unto,' where
the Three are One, some higher analogue of what we call sacri-
fice does not for ever flame ; whose radiant reflection on the
universe only becomes shadow when it falls on a world of sin.
But however these high things may be, the simplest Christian
feels and knows that, in his present state, the unitive way,
the way to union" with both God and man, is the ' via dolo-
rosa,' the way of the cross : a serious and solemn belief, which
is very far from leading to complacency, in presence of the
awful spectacle of animal and human pain ; but still is based
on sufficient experience to justify the hope that all its mystery
will be one day solved. More than this we do not expect, for
the intellect, in our Christian view, is as much on its proba-
tion and as liable to error as the will ; and inordinate curiosity
not less misleading than inordinate desire.
IV.
PREPARATION IN HISTORY
FOR CHRIST.
EDWARD S. TALBOT.
IV.
PREPARATION IN HISTORY FOR CHRIST.
THE paradox of Divine mystery implied in the words
' The Word was made flesh/ is not exhausted by a right
understanding of the Person of Christ. It extends to the
relations between Christ and History. On the one hand, the
Incarnation of the Son of God appears as supreme, solitary,
unique, transcending all analogies of experience, all limitations
of nationality or generation, determined before the world was,
beyond the power of any antecedents to produce, the entry
of a new thing into the world. It appears, in short, as a
miracle. But, on the other hand, it appears as an historical
event, occurring at a particular date, appealing to the feelings
and fulfilling the hopes of the time, a climax and a new point
of departure in the historical order. It does this, necessarily,
because this is involved in the act of taking flesh, of entering
simply, literally, naturally into the conditions of human life.
Such a thing occurs, and must occur, in the natural order.
To say this is not to dictate what a Divine revelation must
be, but only to shew what Christianity asserts of itself. In
this way it was good in God's sight that His revelation
should come.
It follows from this, in the first place, that there must be
two ways, both valid and necessary, of approaching in thought
and study Christ manifest in the flesh. We may treat the
fact of His appearing with little or no reference to historical
relations, for its own inherent unchanging truth and mean-
ing. We may also treat it as clothed in historical event,
K
130 The Religion of the Incarnation.
to be understood in its relations with what went before
and followed after and stood around. The two methods
supplement one another. It may be true that the simple
personal claim which the solitary figure of Jesus Christ makes
upon us, by its unalterable moral dignity and beauty, its
typical humanity, its unearthly authority, is the strongest
that can be made : none the less may that claim be confirmed
and reinforced if we see the same figure as it were upon an
historical throne ; if it should become clear that what went
before (and what followed after) does, in any way, pay homage
to Him ; if the manner of His appearing in place and time
be calculated to heighten the impression which the fact of it
makes.
And in the second place, it follows that to start in any
historical treatment of the subject of this paper from the
central twofold assertion as to Christ, made by S. John in the
phrase ' The Word was made flesh,' is to obtain at once the
right clue to the lines which it should follow.
(1) To do so is not to beg the question or to fetter the en-
quiry, but only to define what kind of evidence, if any, the
study of Christ's relation to foregoing history can yield.
We see that it must be such as works in us the conviction
that He both does, and does not, occur ' naturally ' at the time
and place when He appeared ; that history leads up to Him
and prepares His way, and yet that no force of natural
antecedents can account for Him or for His work. It is
true that evidence for either side of this two-sided impression
may have sufficient weight to determine faith especially with
individual minds. The contrast between Christ and all else in
history, arresting the attention and suggesting the thought
of special Divine presence, may of itself be a spring of faith :
or, upon the other hand, a clear discernment of His natural
supremacy in history may lead a man on to higher truth.
But the true evidence, as corresponding to the true and
full claim, will be that which suggests the conclusion with
simultaneous and equal force from either side.
(2) If the aim is not evidence but instruction, and we
desire simply to understand better what is true of our Lord's
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 131
relation to history, it will still advantage us greatly to start
from the same point. We shall be able to recognise freely
and without fear of contradiction or confusion, on the one
side, the way in which the lines of history, of human ex-
.perience, aspiration, achievement, character, need, lead up to
Christ and issue in Him : and on the other, the unearthly
and peculiar greatness of Him Who spake as never man spake,
Who taught as one that had authority and not as the Scribes,
Who was not convinced by any of sin : Whose daily intimacy
with a disciple issued in that disciple's confession, ' Thou art the
Christ, the Son of the Living God.' Such a method, starting
from the Christian claim, and trying to trace out all that it
involves, need not be only for the believer, any more than
the quest for evidence or witness is for those only who do not
believe. The Christian tests the foundations, and welcomes
every corroboration, of his faith: while, in dwelling on the
character of the work and of its relations to all else, the non-
believer may come to find the conviction grow upon him that
it was indeed ' wrought of God.'
(3) From the same point, we see at once to what double
misunderstanding or double attack the Gospel not only may
but must be liable. On the one side, it may be refused a
hearing as miraculous ; it may be understood as violating the
natural order which it transcends ; it may be regarded and
resented as an anomaly in history. On the other side, a con-
sideration of the aptness of its occurrence when and where it
did occur, and of its harmonious relations to many lines of
tendency will suggest the suspicion that it may be after all
only a result, though a supreme and surprising result, of his-
torical forces. In a word, it may be accused at once from
separate, possibly from the same, quarters as too supernatural
and too natural to be what it claims to be. It is all-important
to notice at the outset that liability to this double attack is
an inevitable incident of its true character and of that which
makes its glory, viz. the presence of true Godhead under truly
human conditions.
But to return to the main point.
The importance and interest of the subject of this paper
K 2
132 The Religion of the Incarnation.
may be inferred, as we have seen, directly from what the
Incarnation claims to be. But we are not left to infer it for
ourselves. Nothing is clearer or more striking than the place
which it occupied from the outset in the declaration of the
Gospel. Jesus Himself spoke of the Scribes of the kingdom
as ' bringing forth out of their treasure things new and
old ' ; and laid it down as a first principle of His kingdom
that He was 'not come to destroy, but to fulfil 1 .' While
with surprising and commanding clearness He centres men
upon Himself, and distinguishes Himself from all who came
before Him, from ' the prophets and the law which prophesied
until John ' ; He yet with evident care, draws the new out
of the old, and fits it on to the old : He delineates His own
mission as a climax in a long appeal of God to Israel 2 , and
the opposition to Him and His, as a chapter of denouement
in the history of an old conflict between God and the un-
godly 3 . He sees a ' necessity ' for the happening of things
to fulfil what had been said of old 4 . The very pith of the
disciples' ignorance is their failure to see how the features of
His work and character had been traced beforehand, and
the supreme teaching which they receive from Him is that
which discloses His correspondence to the whole tenor of the
Scriptures of the past 5 . The teaching of the Apostles, and of
those who followed them, is faithful to these lines. Though
they have to convince the world of an Event which works a
revolution, which is to turn men from darkness to light:
though their perfect confidence in their own truth makes
them see the things that went before as elements, ' weak and
beggarly elements V and they have moreover battles to fight
against these ' elements ' set up again as antagonists : though
their adherence to the Old Testament was an ever fruitful
source of difficulty and attack (of which Judaizing and Gnostic
controversies are the record), yet nevertheless they unswerv-
ingly maintained the inspiration of the Old Testament, and
stood upon it ; and we distinguish without hesitation as their
1 S. Matt. xiii. 52 ; v. 17. 4 S. Mark xiv. 49 ; S. Luke xxii. 37.
2 S. Matt. xxi. 33-38. 5 S. Luke xxiv. 25, 26, 44.
3 S. Matt. v. 12 ; xxiii. 30-37. Gal. iv. 9.
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 133
normal, primary, characteristic method that of appeal to the
correspondence between their Gospel and every hope and
word of Israel's faith : the ' revelation of the mystery . . is
. . by the scriptures of the prophets . . made known to all
nations 1 .' The Hebrews who wistfully look back to their
temple, law, and ritual, are not taught a stern forgetfulness of
what had been, nor led vaguely to spiritualize its meaning,
but are led to recognise in each part of the ancient system
a line which leads up to Christ. Finally, the disciple who
sets the true being of his Master in monumental and awful
splendour as the Word who ' was with God and was God '
now made manifest in the flesh, in the same breath carries us
to the very core and source of all that can be implied in
preparation by declaring the same Word to have been 'in
the world ' before, to have been the author of all things, and
the unseen light of men 2 .
The relation of Christ to history, or the preparation for
the Gospel, is then no afterthought of our own or any recent
time. It was Augustine's saying that Christianity was as
old as the world 3 : and Tertullian's (one of almost venturesome
boldness) that in the previous history Christ was schooling
Himself for incarnation 4 . But it is not difficult to see that
our own time is one which is specially fitted to appreciate
and handle this aspect of the Christian truth. Our cultivation
of the historical method, our historical realism or sense of the
relation of persons or events to historical setting, our recognition
of the part played in forming structure, function, character,
by gradual process, by heredity, by evolution, our developed
understanding of the links by which the parts and successions
in all nature, and not least in what is human, are bound
together all these go to farm a habit of mind which in presence
of such a Kevelation as that of the Gospel will at once busy
itself, whether for satisfaction, for edification, for controversy, or
1 Rom. xvi. 26. So the pages of * De Came Christi vi. Bum Christum
the early apologists are to our feeling qui jam tune et adloqui . . . human-
almost cumbered by the profuseness um genus ediscebat in carnis habitu :
of their appeal to these Scriptures. cp. adv. Prax. xvi. ediscebat Deus in
2 S. John i. i, 14, 9, 10. terris cum hominibus conversari.
8 Ep. cii. 12.
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
134 The Religion of the Incarnation.
for interpretation, with the relation of the Truth to the world
into which it came, to all from amongst which it sprung. In
such a time it is natural that attack should try to shew that
facts which historical criticism has done much to secure, and
a Life which it has become impossible to treat as a myth, are
simply explicable according to the natural laws of historical
causation. It is natural that Christianity should be explained
as the flower and bloom of Judaism, or as sprung from the
fusion of Greek and Jewish influences in a Galilean medium.
Such explanations may not be new, but they are urged with
new resources and a more subtle ingenuity. They have the
advantage of being the sort of explanations which are naturally
most congenial to the time. But out of the very stress of
such attacks may come a special corroboration of Christian
truth. The experiment is crucial : it can hardly be expected
that attack of this kind can ever command greater skill and
resource than it does at present. If therefore it should be
proved to fail : if we are able to look men in the face and ask
whether when all allowance is made for the subtle ' che-
mistries ' of history and for the paradoxical way in which
historical results spring from what precedes them, it is pos-
sible to think that Jesus Christ and His religion were a mere
growth from antecedents then we have here the prospect of
such a confirmation of faith as- no age less historically scientific
could, in that kind, give and receive.
But this negative result, great as its value may be, can
only be part of what Christian science may yield in this
sphere for the elucidation and support of faith. It should
surely be able to display with greater breadth and delicacy
than ever before that correspondence between the Revelation
of Christ and what went before it, which was of old indicated
by saying that Christ came in the ' fulness of the time.' It
should be able to enhance, and not (as men fear) to impair,
the evidence of a Divine presence and influence, preparing
for that which was to come, moulding the plastic material
of history for a 'far-off Divine event.' It may seem as
if this was not so. It may seem, for example, as if the
severity and activity of historical and linguistic criticism had
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 135
dimmed the clearness of those correspondences between
prophetic utterances spoken centuries before Christ and the
points in Him or His work whereby they were fulfilled,
which were once so clear. It may seem, it is evidently true,
that stricter canons of interpretation forbid for us that
unbounded use of the happy expedient of allegory which
could make everything in the Old Testament speak of Christ.
But even if this were so (and with regard to prophecies we
only partially grant it), is there no countervailing gain to
reckon? The hand "of God may be seen in what is mar-
vellous, startling, exceptional, unexplained. Can it not be
seen as distinctly and as persuasively in what is orderly,
steadfast, intelligible, and where our reason, made in God's
likeness, can follow along in some degree with the how and
the why of His working 1 ? It was Christ's wiU to give
special signs, yet the curiosity which ' sought after a sign '
was not honoured by Christ like that wisdom which ' dis-
cerned the signs of the times,' and so could see the force of
the special signs that were given because it saw them in
their true moral and spiritual context 1 . Have we any
reason to hope that our time may be suffered to do (and even
be doing) something for the interpretation of the witness of
history to Christ which has not been done before, and which
is even an advance upon what has been done ? Let us con-
sider for a moment (in order to answer this question) what
it is which specially engrosses the interest and admiration of
all of us in the different branches of modern study and en-
quiry. It is the beauty of process. The practical men among
us watch process in its mechanical forms as contrived by
invention. The naturalists and the men of science have
to an extraordinary extent developed our perception of it
in nature : they shew us its range, and its incredible deli-
cacy, flexibility, and intricacy ; they shew us its enormous
patience in the unceasing yet age-long movements which by
microscopic or less than microscopic changes accumulate the
coal, or lessen the mountain; they shew us the wonderful
power of adaptation by which it accommodates itself to
1 S. Matt. xi. 4, 5 ; xii. 39 ! xvi - 3-
136 The Religion of the Incarnation.
surroundings, and appropriates and transforms them to its
need. The embryologist developes its wonders as it makes
'the bones to grow in the womb of her that is with child.'
And the historians in their sphere do the like: it is for
them, if not the beginning and end of their work, at least the
most powerful of their methods, to shew the processes by
which institutions, customs, opinions, rise and decline ; to
arrange the facts so as to display on their chart the steps of
growth, the stages of decay ; to shew influences blending to
form events, and parting again to destroy or re-shape them.
There is beauty in all this, more than we can, perhaps,
altogether analyse or explain. As living beings we sym-
pathise with the life and movement of it all (or, as in the case
of intricate machinery, with the imitation of life) compared
with what stands stark, solid, unchanging ; as intelligent
beings we revel and delight in its intricacy, and, further, we
are gratified by the way in which it subdues with explanation
what would be anomalous, abrupt, motiveless, in the way of
change or event. It gives us something like the pleasure
which we take in the beauty of the exquisite subtle curves
and shaded surfaces of ta Kaphael figure compared with the
rough outline of a Diirer woodcut. But we could not long
rest in the admiration of mere process, whether delicate or
colossal. There is a rational element present in, or con-
trolling, our sense of beauty, which asks whence and whither,
which demands unity in detail ; and this finds altogether new
and delightful gratification when it can see a relation, a
meaning, a grouping, a symmetry, of which processes are
the ministers and instruments.
It is, then, this idea of beauty in process that we bring with
us as we approach to behold the facts and method of God's
Redemptive Work. It is altogether too strong in us to be
left behind as we cross the threshold of this region ; it is too
much connected with all our thinking and experience. It is
very possible that there may be exaggeration about it in us :
and it is indispensable for us to recognise this, ' le defaut de
notre qualiteV But all the same we cannot disown, though we
must control, what is so specially our own. And if our love
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 137
of process is prepared to be critical, it is also prepared to be
gratified: and there is opened a prospect of fresh witness to
the truth of the unchanging Gospel, if it should be found that
its introduction into this world is ushered in by all the beauty
of process, with all the grandeur of slow unhasting pre-
paration, the surprises of gradual transformation, the deli-
cacies of combination, which process allows.
Such a sight is much more than wonderful, and has in it,
if our ideas of what is Divine are not very narrow, much
more evidence of God's hand than any mere wonder can
have. But it is as wonderful as anything can be. And if we
still plead that our sense of wonder stipulates for exceptional-
ness, it has its own way of satisfying this the way of
uniqueness. For those features which we admire in process
are capable, if combined with a certain degree of grandeur,
completeness, and particularity, of conveying to us the
impression of a unique thing. We may dismiss as a dia-
lectical refinement the objection which has been made that,
as is doubtless true, 'everything is unique.' None the less,
there is a meaning in our ordinary language when it applies
the epithet ' unique ' to certain persons, classes, or things.
A man of science may properly speak of a certain uniqueness
in the way in which natural conditions are combined so as to
make life possible : a historian will certainly miss truth if he
does not recognise a special uniqueness in certain historical
epoch-making moments. In proportion as we believe in
Mind ordering the things of nature and history, such unique-
ness will have speaking significance. And as uniqueness has
its degrees, and rises according to the scale, quantity, cha-
racter and completeness, of that which goes to make it up, so
its significance will rise proportionately, until at last, arriving
at uniqueness, which seems to us absolute, we gain evidence
that there is before us a Supreme Thing, a true centre to the
world. The evidence is not indeed demonstrative, but it is
in a high degree corroborative, and it is the highest which
history can offer. It is this evidence of uniqueness which, as
it seems to me, we of the present day may with special
fitness seek, and shall with special welcome find :
138 The Religion of the Incarnation.
(1) in the shaping of world-history towards the Christian
era,
(2) in the special preparation of the Jewish nation.
Within the compass of a paper like the present, it is
impossible to do more than indicate the lines which, even
without any high degree of special education, a Christian's
thought may travel in tracing the Divine work of prepara-
tion and witness.
I. In the first part of our enquiry the distinction between
an outward and an inward working suggests itself as con-
venient, though necessarily imperfect : the one consisting in
a moulding of the material facts of history, such as the geo-
graphical distribution of peoples, and the political and social
order ; the other in a like use of the changes in thought,
feeling, and the like.
(i) It can never be altogether too hackneyed to dwell on
the strange value to the world's history of the two peninsulas
which we know as Greece and Italy, thrust out into that
Mediterranean Sea, which was itself so remarkable as a centre
and ' medium ' of the western world, binding its many nations
together. They share with other lands of the temperate zone
all its possibilities of hardy and vigorous life : but,, besides this,
their sky and sea, their conveniences and difficulties, had
a special stimulus to give to their early inhabitants. They
were extraordinarily well suited to be the seed-plots of
civilization. And these seed-plots were aptly fertilized, first
by the Phoenicians, those carrier-birds of antiquity dropping
seed along the Mediterranean coasts : and then by the happy
contact between Greece and the other Greece opposite, to
which the island bridges of the Aegean linked it, where, on
the narrow strip of coast plain and rich river valley between
the sea and the high plateaus of Asia Minor, the lonians
enjoyed, as Herodotus says 1 , the fairest climate in the world.
Upon this debouched, with the rivers from the interior, the
highways along which travelled westward the civilization
or the power of the dimly known but highly important early
Phrygian monarchy, or from yet farther east, of the mighty
1 Hat. i. 142.
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 139
Assyria. The recent discoveries of Prof. Ramsay and others
re-interpret and emphasize to us this early connection between
the Asian lands and Greece in Europe, of which the Lion Gate
of Mycenae is a monument. What Greece thus took with her
left hand she could pass across with her right to yet another
Greece, ' Great Greece,' in Sicily and Southern Italy. But
we may easily fail to recognise how much all this delicate
and tender growth depended on favourable circumstance, and
we cannot too carefully mark how space was made awhile for
it to spring. The ' hills stood about ' both peninsulas on the
North to shelter them from intrusion : but this barrier, suf-
ficient for ordinary times, would hardly have resisted the heavy
thrust of the later pressure of population from the East and
North-East, which, when it did begin, so nearly crushed Rome,
and which, if it had come earlier, might have easily stifled
Greek and Roman civilization in the cradle. The reader
of the Persian Wars will watch almost with awe within how
little Greece came of what appeared alike to Asiatic and
Greek a certain subjection to the Persian. A difference of
twenty years earlier, the chance of a different temper in the
little Athenian people, the use by Darius of the methods of
Xerxes, would, humanly speaking, have decided the other
way the fate of western civilization. It is easier again to
admire than to explain the happy fortune which brought the
mountain kingdom of Macedon to its moment of aggression
just too late to hurt the flowering and fruitage of Greece, just
in time to carry its seed broadcast over Eastern, Syrian, and
Egyptian lands. From all the sequence of the Graeco-Roman
history which follows, and in which nothing is more important
to all the purposes of Providence than the simple fact of the
order of these two, Greek first, Roman second, we can here
select only one feature of capital importance, viz. the trans-
formation of a world intensely localized and sub-div.ided into
one as singularly united and homogeneous. Follow S. Paul and
see his circuits, watch him claiming the safeguard of the same
Roman citizenship in the Macedonian town and in the capital
of Palestine, laying hold at Caesarea on the horns of a central
tribunal of justice at Rome, borne thither by the sails of the
140 The Religion of the Incarnation.
carrying trade in the ' ship of Alexandria,' meditating a journey
into Spain, numbering among his Roman converts, as seems
probable, one who had a direct connection with Roman
Britain, writing in the same Greek to Rome and to the
highlanders of Galatia, never crossed in his journeys by any
track of war, never stopped by any challenge of frontier or
custom-house: these are so many object-lessons to shew what
the ' Pax Romana ' and the Roman unity of power and organi-
zation imported for the growth of a world-religion. This was
the time when it could be complained that it was impossible
to flee from the Caesar's wrath because the Caesar owned the
world. And to make the impression more distinct, let the eye
travel backward a little, or forward a little : backward into
the second or even the first century B.C., when this same Medi-
terranean world was still in greater part an unconsolidated
chaos of political de'bris ; when the tumult of the Macedonian
and Syrian wars of Rome and then of her desolating civil
strife filled the world with noise and occupied its thought
and destroyed its peace ; when the sea was impassable because
of pirates, and when the West was still in great part un-
subdued and formidable barbarism : or forward, across the
space during which the Gospel had spread its influence and
struck its roots and won its power, to the time so soon
following, when the lands that had known no war were again
traversed by the armies of rival emperors, and the barbarians
began to dismember the West, and the gloom of a great fear
preoccupied men's hearts. To say nothing of the middle
ages, what unity of the Mediterranean world and the lands
affiliated to it has the whole of later history got to shew, that
can compare for a moment with the unity of the early
Empire, focussed in its cosmopolitan capital Rome 1
And in this there is much more than a mechanical pro-
vision for the progress of a world-religion. It is not merely
that its heralds find a complete facility of communication,
peaceful conditions, and a ' lingua franca ' ready for their use.
We must realize how the unity had been obtained. It had
been by pulverizing separate nationalities, separate patriotisms,
separate religions ; by destroying or leaving only in a muni-
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 141
cipal form the centres round which human energy and loyalty
had been wont to gather. Thus the world had been turned
into that ' cold and icy plain ' of which M. Renan speaks.
And it is not too much to say that this process had destroyed
just so many barriers to the entrance of Christianity. We
have only to realize what had been previously the universal
character of the worships of the western world, viz. that they
had been local, the common and exclusive possession of the
citizens of one place or state, and inextricably bound up
with the being and welfare of that particular community.
Such religions, and people bred under them, would have met
Christianity, not so much with criticism of its doctrines, or
with rival doctrines of their own, as with ideas and a frame
of mind so alien to a spiritual and universal religion like
the Gospel that it would have found no foothold in attacking
them. Conceive the force with which what even in the
second century after Christ the heathen objector urged, ' it is
not creditable to alter the customs handed down to us from
our fathers 1 ,' would have come from the Roman of the earlier
Republic, or the Greek of the times of freedom. Nay, we may
without rashness hazard the conjecture that had it been pos-
sible for the Gospel to overcome these conditions it would have
done so prematurely and with loss : that they were in their
time and place ministers of good : that they were bound up
with that vigorous energy of development within one small
limited horizon, by which, as we shall see, the preparation
of the heathen world was carried out.
It was the negative aid of the Empire to Christianity that
it destroyed these. But it lent more positive help. It created
a demand, or at least a need, for a universal religion. Of this
there are several proofs. The religious phenomena of the
time other than Christianity supply the first. There is an
attempt, or more than one attempt, to provide such a religion.
There is the attempt by way of comprehension, of making
all the gods live together as joint inhabitants of a common
Pantheon. There is the attempt by way of construction, in the
worship of the one Power about which there was no doubt, the
1 Clem. Alex. Protrept. ex. init.
142 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Goddess Eome, and of the Emperor her deified representative.
There is also, we may perhaps add, the attempt by way of
philosophic thought. For philosophy at this time had a
religious bent which increased not improbably as the circula-
tion of Christian thought stole unknown through the veins
of society: and it felt after the One Being whose Personal
existence and Fatherhood it waveringly discerned, but whom
yet it could not steadily distinguish from a personified order
of nature. Such a religious idea, needed to complete Cicero's
commonwealth of the Universe comprehending Gods and men,
may be seen with increasing clearness in Seneca, Epictetus,
and Aurelius. The need of a universal religion is thus
directly shewn. But other proofs, as clear though less direct,
are to be drawn from the other departments of human thought.
For literature was already a unity, into which whatever the
genius of provincials like Lucan, or Seneca, or Pliny contri-
buted was gathered up. And it is a commonplace that the
greatest constructive result of the imperial period was the
creation or development of a universal code of law.
(2) In what has been last said we have almost crossed the
imaginary line by which we were to divide the preparation
in external fact from that which was more inward in thought
and feeling. To deal with this latter may seem almost
ridiculous : since to do so must involve the presumption of
summarizing in a few lines the drift of the literature and
thought of antiquity. Yet, in the briefest words, it may be
possible to suggest a few true outlines of the shape which an
account of that drift should take. It would certainly repre-
sent the mental history of the classical world in its relation
to the Gospel as supplying a double preparation, positive and
negative : a positive preparation by evolving ideas which the
Gospel could work into its own fabric, or a frame of mind
which would make for it a suitable ' nidus ' and a receptive
soil: a negative preparation by the breakdown of human
nature's own constructive and speculative efforts, and by the
room thus left for a revelation which would unite the broken
and useless fragments of thought and minister to unsatisfied
needs. And of these the negative seems the more predomi-
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 143
nant and the more direct. In so saying we are guided by
what appears to be the teaching of the New Testament. It
seems as though the main upshot of that time was, and was
meant to be, the failure of the world ' by wisdom ' l to find the
truth: though when this has been recognised and acknow-
ledged, then the world might find, as we may find, that all
the while in this unattaining and abortive thought God had
put impulses from His own wisdom, and prepared materials
for His own coming work. It is the typical history of the
' natural man ' : and though what is primary and indispensable
is that the natural man should learn the poverty and misery
of his own state, and be ready to die to his life, yet the
natural man too is the true though perverted work of
God, and in his thoughts and instincts, his emotions and
speculations, must be found a witness to which the revela-
tion will appeal, and a response which it will elicit. It is
impossible not to follow the track so suggested, and to see
in the early stages of Greek life, the lusty youth-time of the
natural man. Casting off the bright and truthful sim-
plicity, and the happy story -telling of its childhood, it begins
(we speak of the times between 600 and 450 B.C.) to try its
young energies upon the problems of the world : it suggests its
explanations, quick, ingenious, one-sided, changing, of how the
world came to be : ' it came from water,' ' from air,' ' from
fire : ' 'it came from the dance of atoms : ' ' nay, but these give
us only the how, it came from something more than these, it
came from mind : ' ' are you sure what it is ? fix upon any
part of it and you will find it slip through your fingers, for
all is change, and change is all we know;' these are the quick
premieres ebauches of its young speculation. But already
there is a sound of alarm in the air. That challenge asking
whether there was an ' it ' at all ; and if so, whether by parity
of cavil there was any solidity in the other assumptions of
thought, in 'good' and 'evil,' ' truth' and 'falsehood,' 'beauty'
and ' ugliness ; ' or at least anything beyond such mere rela-
tive and convenient meaning as there is in ' big ' or ' little,'
' thick ' or ' thin,' ' wet ' or ' dry ' this sobers men. Thought
1 i Cor. i. 21.
144 The Religion of the Incarnation.
feels its own dangers. It must try its hand more seriously
at some true constructive work : and so there follows that
great period in which, steadied by the strong grip and sharp
discipline of the great prophet of natural conscience and
natural instinct, Socrates, it addresses itself to its great task
of wringing her secret from the world. It is done and neces-
sarily done in the sheer self-reliance of the unaided mind, yet
of the mind in the fullest sense of the word ; not the mere
critical understanding, but the whole spiritual and rational
energy of the man, not disowning its dependence on a disci-
pline of character and a severe and painful training of its own
powers. The results, so splendid and yet so inadequate, so
rich in great intuitions and suggestions, so patient and suc-
cessful in much of its detail, is preserved to us in the work of
Plato and Aristotle. Christian thought can never be interested
in disparaging that work: Christian thinkers at different
times have done special honour to different aspects of it :
and the position of Aristotle in the works of Dante, and of
Aquinas, and in the frescoes of the Spanish chapel, is the sign
of the ungrudged admiration given by what in our modern
way we might regard as among the least appreciative and
discriminating of Christian times. But the most ungrudging
admiration cannot prevent our seeing, and history compels
us to see, what it lacked. It lacked a foundation upon a
Eock. It had the certainty, if certainty at all, which belongs
to profound intuitions and to a wide interpretation of experi-
ence, not that which makes a definite, settled, and above all
communicable conviction. All the while narrower, pettier,
more captious, or more ordinary minds had been asking ' what
is truth ' in a very different spirit ; had displayed the inde-
pendence and captiousness of youth, and not its hopeful and
trustful creativeness. And more and more this lower element
began to prevail. When it became a question not of projecting
systems which should impress and absorb the higher minds
of a few generations, but of providing that which should
pass on with men, the common run of men, into the advancing
years, and stand the strain of the world's middle life ; then it
was found that the human mind unaided was more powerful
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 145
to destroy than to build or to maintain. The dark horse of
Plato's chariot pulled down his fellow : in the unaided human
understanding the critical faculty proved stronger than the
constructive : without the point of attachment in a central
truth to which men's high thoughts could reach and cling, or
(to change the figure) without a clearly-disclosed goal of truth
towards which they could be seen to tend and converge, they
could not maintain or justify themselves: 'the carnal mind'
was against them and unworthy of them : as regards any real
adoption of them by mankind for fruitful and trustworthy
convictions, they passed away, according to that law of which
the modern poet speaks :
Eternal hopes are man's
Which when they should maintain themselves aloft
Want due consistence : like a pillar of smoke
That with majestic energy from earth
Rises but, having reached the thinner air.
Melts and dissolves, and is no longer seen l .
We shall not be wrong in saying that the course of philo-
sophy after Aristotle displayed increasingly the collapse of
the experiment of speculative self-reliance. Scepticism was
not confined to the ' Sceptics,' nor even shared only by the
Epicureans : it deeply underlay the philosophy of the Stoics.
But as with advancing life men baffled in their early san-
guineness fall back (both for good and evil) and content them-
selves with the energies of practical life, so the mind of that
day baffled and despairing of the speculative problem did not
abandon, but transferred, its self-reliance ; men threw them-
selves with a sort of defiance into the organization of conduct ;
'imperturbableness' and ' self-sufficiency ' became watchwords
of their thought 2 . This is the character of Stoicism : this
explains its vogue and wide indirect influence ; its curious
likeness to its apparently quite alien contemporary, Epicurean-
ism, in a common cultivation of self-sufficingness ; and, finally,
its ready alliance with the natural tendencies of Roman
character when it passed from Greece to Rome.
Here again was a great experiment, which had no mean
success. We admire almost with awe its unsparing thorough-
1 Wordsworth, Excursion iv. 2 'Arapa^ia (Epicurean) : avrap/cfia.
L
146 The Religion of the Incarnation.
ness, its austerity, its unworldliness, its courage, its endurance.
In its later forms, when some power has touched it with
gentleness, we yield it even a warmer and tenderer admira-
tion. Only what we cannot do is to disguise its failure as a
great spiritual experiment. We cannot forget how it left the
mass of men untouched, how it concentrated strength by what
it neglected of human sympathy and effort, how it revealed
a disease and palsy of human nature which it could not
cure : how at its heart it had no certainty of conviction to
give peace and to resist the forces of decay. Humanity will
never, perhaps, wind itself higher. But it was a height on
which human strength is insufficient to stand. There lacked
a sure word of truth: the joy and fruitfulness of an in-
spiration: a grace which could minister to the weakness, as
well as summon the forces, of human nature. We cannot
be blind to its failure unless we share it : unless, that is, we
are trying to satisfy ourselves by some philosophy of life which
misses its secrets, has no key to many of its problems, and
at heart despairs of its solution. The experiment of moral
self-reliance, then, failed in its turn.
But we spoke of a positive as well as a negative upshot to
all this Gentile history : a positive contribution to the prepa-
ration for Christ. Where shall we look for this 1 Surely
alongside of, and in the same plane with, the failures. If one
chief result of the history of the ancient world was to exhibit
the insufficiency of man's efforts to find truth and right-
eousness and life, this must be completely shewn in propor-
tion as the efforts were noble, and therefore in proportion as
they realized (though, at the moment, only for disappointment)
the capacities, the possibilities, the true desires and ideals of
man. If man the race, like man the individual, was finally
to find salvation by dying to himself, to his own natural man,
he could only do this when it had been adequately and mag-
nificently proved both that he could not save himself, and how
splendidly worth saving he was. He must do his best, that he
may despair of his best. Do we not feel that this is just what
was worked out by the histories of Greece and Rome ? They
are splendid experiments of human power. Diverse in their
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 147
method, they combine in this result. In Greece the experiment
is by way of spontaneity, of free lively development, con-
ditioned only by its own instincts of taste and beauty. And
Rome represents the alternative plan of seeking strength by
discipline, by subordination, by distrust of novelty, by sacrifice
of individuality to the corporate life, and of sentiment and
opinion to the rule of law. Both realize deathless types of
matured human life, of its beauty, its brilliant graces, its dig-
nity, its honour, its strength. Perhaps, according to the one-
sidedness which limits so severely the works and lives of men,
it might have been impossible that these possibilities of his
nature should have been first realized with the same solidity
and fulness in presence of those mighty truths, speaking of
what was above man, which brooded over the history of the
Jews and came forth into the world with the Gospel. Yet they
are indispensable to the fulness of the Christian work : they
are the human material : and that material must be first-rate
in its kind. We owe it perhaps permanently to Greece and
Rome that we recognise fully the grace of God's original
workmanship in man, the validity of his instincts, his indi-
vidual value, the sacredness and strength of all his natural
social bonds, the wisdom and power possessed by his incorpo-
rated life. These are things which we could never have
realized if all the world had been brought up in the barbarous
societies of ancient Europe or under the great despotisms of
Egypt and Asia. The religions of Asia may perhaps shew us
by contrast the immense importance to a religion of being
able to build with sound and adequate materials on the
human side. That Greece and Rome did contribute specially
in this way to the work of the true religion may be shewn
by the way in which men have again and again turned back
to these original sources for fresh impulses of liberty or
vigour.
But these things had their day and passed. The age of
Pericles and of Demosthenes, the great days of the Roman
Republic, are only epochs in the history, long past at the era
of our Lord. We look to see whether there is any positive
preparation for Him and His Gospel in the whole drift of that
L 2
148 The Religion of the Incarnation.
history, and especially in tendencies which took a developed
form closer to the era of Christianity 1 .
General and popular impressions about the character and
course of the history will put us on the track of a true
answer. It is impossible to look at the history of the
classical world without getting a double impression, that it is
a history of failure and degeneracy, and yet that it is a history
of bettering and progress. If we take the world at the Chris-
tian era, the times of political brilliancy and energy are over,
and men are sinking into a uniformity of servility and stag-
nation : morally the ancient severity is lost, and the laws of
Augustus are feebly coping with the results of a general dis-
soluteness as to morality and marriage : economically society
is disfigured by a vast slave system, by the disappearance of
honest and thriving free labour, and by great developments of
luxury and pauperism : in literature, though it is the ' golden
age,' the signs are not wanting, in artificiality and the
excessive study of form, of imminent rapid decline into
the later rhetorical culture: in philosophy speculation had
run itself out into scepticism and self-destruction: and in
religion a disbelief in the ancient gods and a doubt of all
Divine providence is matter of open profession. And yet there
is a bettering. The laws of the Empire become a model of
humanity, equitableness, and simplicity. Seneca and Epictetus
rise to thoughts of moral purity and sublimity and delicacy
which at times seem hardly unworthy of the New Testament :
and their humane and comprehensive ideas have cast off the
limitations which the narrow life of Greek cities set to those
of their greater predecessors.
Here then is a great clearing of the stage, and a great pre-
disposing of thought and sentiment, for a religion which pro-
claimed a good tidings for all men without distinction of ' Jew
or Greek. Barbarian and Scythian, bond or free ' ; for a religion
1 The words ' era of Christianity ' world through the first and even the
are used intentionally rather than the second century of the era to receive
more precise ' era of Christ,' because the Gospel may be fairly included as
anything which (without being in- preparation for the revelation of
fluenced unless in the most impalpable Christ,
way by Christianity) prepared the
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 149
of compassion ; for a religion wholly spiritual and unpolitical.
There are traces distinct and widespread of special tendencies
to such a religion, and they are connected with the best side of
the life of the time. The enormous diffusion of the ' collegia '
or clubs, in which the members were drawn together without
distinction of rank, or even of free and slave, in a partly
religious bond, shews the instinct of the time feeling for a
religion of brotherhood. There is a delicacy of family life as
seen in Plutarch, in Pliny, in Fronto, which shews readiness
for a religion such as should regenerate the simple instincts and
relations of humanity. In the position and function of the
philosophers (who sometimes half-remind one of mendicant
friars 1 , sometimes of the confessor or chaplain in families of
rank, in their relation to education and to the vicissitudes of
later life) there is implied a concentration of thought and
interest upon character and upon the discipline of individual
life, a sensibility to spiritual need, which all indicates a ground
prepared for Christian influence. And, finally, whether it be from
the stealing in of Eastern influences, or from a reaction against
the cold scepticism of Ciceronian times, or from a half-political
half-genuine sense of the necessity of religion to society, or
from a sort of awed impression created by the marvellous for-
tune of Rome, or from the steady impact of the clear strong
deep religious faith of the Jews scattered everywhere, and
everywhere, as we know, to an extraordinary extent leavening
society, or, as time went on, from a subtle influence of Chris-
tianity not yet accepted or even consciously known, there was,
it is notorious, a return towards religion in the mind of men.
The temples were again thronged : priests became philosophers.
In Neo-Platonism thought again looks upward, and the last
phase of Greek philosophy was in the phrase of the dry and
dispassionate Zeller 2 'a philosophy of Revelation' which sought
knowledge partly in the inner revelation of the Deity and
partly in religious tradition. This movement was indeed a
rival of Christianity ; it came to put out some of its strength
in conscious rivalry, or it tried in Gnostic heresies to rearrange
1 Capes, Age of Antonines.
8 Philosophy of the Greeks: Eclectics, p. 20 (tr. Alleyne).
LIBRARY ST. MAkY S COLLEGE
1 50 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Christianity on its own lines : but it was the result and wit-
ness of a disposition of men's hearts which made way for the
Gospel.
It was not, then, merely true that the failures of the heathen
world left it empty, hungering, distrustful of itself ; nor merely
that the world of that particular epoch gave extraordinary
facilities of an outward kind for the diffusion of a world-
relio-ion: but also that in some of its most characteristic
&
and deepest workings, in thoughts and dispositions which
it had purchased at a great cost of ancient glories and liber-
ties and of all that was proud and distinctive in Greek and
Roman religion, there was that which would make men ready
for Christianity and cause it to be to them, as it could not
have been to their ancestors, intelligible, possible, and con-
genial.
II. Dr. "Westcott has drawn, in a useful phrase, the in-
valuable distinction between a tendency towards, and a
tendency to produce, the truth of Christianity 1 .
If we have been able to trace a real shaping of the lines
inward and outward of the world's order disposing it for a
true religion, the impression which this makes on us must
be enormously increased if (i) we can see that that religion,
when it comes, is most obviously a thing which comes to the
Gentile world, and does not grow out of it either by blending
of tendencies, or by constructive individual genius : and if
(2) we are able to indicate another and perfectly distinct
course of shaping and preparation which at the required
moment yielded the material and equipment for the religion
which was to go out upon the world.
of Die Rism'/-* </;,,,,> ? ( rd ed.), principles of general humanity, but
p. 72. It is interesting to notice that there was no hint of a possibility of
according to so dispassionate an ob- an end to slavery. There were some
server as M. Gaston Boissier (La Be- signs of mutual interest between
ligion Romaiiie d' Augusts aux Antonins), classes, but no progress towards the
who has done so much to trace the effective appearance of a true philan-
better tendencies of the Imperial thropy such as the Christian. In such
period, the evidence suggests some cases, however, the validity of the
such distinction, even as re:;;in Is some distinctions must be debateable and
of the main practical results of Chris- fluctuating. It is absolute as regards
tianity. For example, there was a the Incarnation,
tendency to ameliorate slavery on.
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 151
That this was so is in a sense upon the face of history.
The Christian Church, it has been said, appeared at first as
a Jewish sect. ' The salvation ' Christ declared was ' of the
Jews.' He came (' not to destroy but) to fulfil ' the system
amidst which He arose. Such sayings put us upon the track
of a special preparation for the Gospel. Let us follow it.
And (as the phrase is chosen to imply) we look here for
something kindred indeed in many of its methods to that
general preparation which we have hitherto traced, but yet
more coherent, positive, and concentrated. For we pass in
a sense at this point (to use language of the day), from the
preparation of an environment suitable to the Gospel, to a
preparation of the organism itself. Such language is ob-
viously open to criticisms and misconceptions of more kinds
than one. But it is sufficiently defensible historically and
theologically to justify us in gaining the clearness which it
gives.
I shall attempt to present the signs of this preparation by
considering successively these three points.
(1) The relations between Israel and the world at the
Christian era.
(2) The fitness of Israel to be the seed-plot of a world-religion,
and of the world-religion given by Christ.
(3) The character of the process by which the Israel, so fitted,
and so placed, had come to be.
(i) Many a reader of Mommsen's History of Rome will have
been surprised by finding that the ideal political construction
which the writer's knowledge and imagination have ascribed
to Caesar was to consist of three elements the Roman, the
Hellenic, and the Jewish 1 . Yet striking as the paradox is,
it is chiefly in the facts themselves. Whether we look at
the ethnological character of the Jews amidst a system
whose strength is from the West ; or at their historical
position, as a nation in some sense in decadence, with a
history of independence and glories long lost ; or at the
minuteness of their original seat, and its insignificance at that
time as (ordinarily) a subordinate district under the Roman
1 Bk. V. c. xi. Tlie New Monarchy.
152 The Religion of the Incarnation.
province of Syria, it is alike surprising that it should be
possible to speak of them as the third factor of the Roman
Empire. Yet, in the main, the same surprise is created by
any acquaintance with the circumstances of the Jewish
Dispersion, as it may be learnt from easily accessible books,
such as Edersheim's or Schiirer's 1 . There is first the ubiquity
of the race : testified alike by Josephus, Strabo, and Philo,
and by the witness of inscriptions. They are everywhere,
and everywhere in force, throughout the Roman world. Out-
side the Roman world their great colonies in Babylon and
Mesopotamia are another headquarters of the race. They are
an eighth part (one million) of the population of Egypt:
they yield 10,000 at the least to one massacre in Antioch.
To numbers and ubiquity they add privilege in the shape of
rights and immunities, begun by the policy of the successors
of Alexander, but vigorously taken up and pushed by Rome
as early as 139 B.C., greatly developed by Caesar round whose
pyre at Rome they wept, and maintained by the almost con-
sistent policy of the earlier Empire : rights of equal citizen-
ship in the towns where they lived, and equal enjoyment of
the boons granted to citizens : rights of self-government
and internal administration : and rights or immunities
guarding their distinctive customs, such as their observance
of the Sabbath or their transmission of tribute to Jerusalem.
The opportunities thus secured from without were vigorously
turned to account by their trading instinct, their tenacity,
their power of living at a low cost, and above all by their
admirable freemasonry among themselves, which bound Jews
throughout the world into a society of self-help, and must
have greatly assisted the enterprises which depend on
facility of information, communication, and movement. So
far we merely get an impression of their importance. But
there are other points which, while they greatly heighten this
impression, add to it that of remarkable peculiarity. To
ask what was their influence plunges us into a tumult of
paradoxes. They had, for example, everywhere the double
1 Edersheim's Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah : Schurer, History of the
Jewish People in the time of Jesus Christ.
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 5 3
character of citizens and strangers, speaking the language of the
countries where they dwelt, ' being Antiochenes,' as Josephus
says, ' at Antioch, Ephesians at Ephesus,' and so forth : possess-
ing and using the rights and franchises of citizens, and yet
every one of them counting the Holy Land his country and
Jerusalem his capital : respecting the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem
as the supreme authority of the race : sending up their tribute
annually, flocking thither themselves in vast numbers to
keep the feasts, or again not seldom returning there to die.
They possessed in fact the combined advantages of the
most elastic diffusion, and the strongest national con-
centration. Such a position could hardly make their rela-
tions to their neighbours entirely simple or harmonious. It
'involved an internal contradiction 1 .' It could not but be
felt that while enjoying all the advantages of citizenship,
their hearts were really elsewhere. From all the religious and
social side of the common life, which in the ancient world
was far less separable from the political than it is now, they
were sensibly aliens. They were visibly making the best of two
inconsistent positions. And accordingly the irritation against
them in the towns (we have a glimpse of it in Acts xix. 34)
and the ensuing encroachments and riots, form as chronic a
feature of the position, as does their protection by the Empire.
But the causes of irritation went wider and deeper. It has
been said that 'the feelings cherished towards the Jews
throughout the entire Graeco-Roman world were not so much
those of hatred as of pure contempt 2 .' Their exterior was
doubtless unlovely : a Jewry, as M. Ren an reminds us, was
perhaps not more attractive in ancient than in modern times.
But what was even more offensive, especially to that cosmo-
politan age, and what struck it as altogether the dominant
characteristic of the Jews, was their stubborn and inhuman
perversity. They would be unlike all the rest of the world.
Tacitus has even formulated this for them as the principle
guiding their whole action, reduced to practice in details which
were singularly well fitted to exhibit its offensiveness 3 . His
picture should be read by any one who wishes to realize how
1 Schiirer, II. ii. 273. 2 Sehurer, II. ii. 297. 3 Tac. Hist. v. 4.
154 The Religion of the Incarnation.
cultivated opinion thought of them : and, even if evidence
were lacking, we can see that this was just the kind of
dislike to be shared by all classes, cultivated and un-
cultivated alike. Yet it is against the background of this
intense prejudice, ever more scornful and irritated as it
was exasperated by the incidents of daily contact at close
quarters, that we have to paint the phenomena, as striking
and as abundantly testified, of the vast and penetrating in-
fluence of the Jews over their neighbours. These also lie
upon the surface. In very various degrees multitudes (of
whom women doubtless formed a considerable majority)
adopted the customs and brought themselves into con-
nection with the religion of the Jews. The boasts or claims
of Josephus, who refers any sceptical contemporary to 'his
own country or his own family,' are confirmed by the ad-
missions of classical writers, by the indignant sarcasms directed
against the converts, and by the vivid touches in the Acts of
the Apostles T . ' Victi victoribus leges dederunt ' is the strong
phrase of Seneca, and it was a very persuasive influence
which could cause it to be said that in Damascus ' nearly
the whole female population was devoted to Judaism ' : which
could give S. Paul's Jewish opponents in the towns of Greece
and Asia Minor the power at one time of raising the mob, at
another of working upon the ' chief and ' honourable women,'
the ladies of the upper classes : or which could bring ' almost
the whole city ' together in a provincial town because a new
teacher appears in the Jews' synagogue 2 . This influence had
its results in a considerable number of actual proselytes who
through circumcision received admission, somewhat grudg-
ing indeed and guarded, within the Jewish pale, but still
more in a much larger number of adherents (the ' devout
persons,' ' devout Greeks,' &c., of the Acts 3 ) attracted by the
doctrines, and acquainted with the Scriptures of Israel, who
formed a fringe of partly leavened Gentile life round every
synagogue.
We hardly need evidence to shew us that to this picture of
1 Schurer, II. ii. 308. 2 Acts xvii. 5, xiv. 5, xiii. 50, 44.
3 Acts xiii. 43, &c.
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 155
the influence of Jew over Gentile, there need to be added
another which will shew how the subtle, persuasive, and
powerful culture of the Graeco -Roman world made itself felt
upon the Jews of the Dispersion. The contrast between the
Jews of Palestine and those of the Dispersion, the translation of
the Scriptures into Greek, the rise of a literature which in dif-
ferent ways tried to recommend what was Jewish to the heathen
or to fuse what was Jewish with what was Greek, the single
fio-ure of Philo at Alexandria, are all evidences of an influence,
O
which must have told continually with penetrating power
on all that was ablest and most thoughtful in the Jewish
mind. It was not the least considerable result of this that
all the great thoughts and beliefs of Israel learned to talk
o o
the language of the civilized world, and so acquired before
the time of Christ an adequate and congenial vehicle.
Such was the position of Israel at the Christian era. It
was one which had been gradually brought about during the
last three centuries E. c. : but it only came to its full growth
in the last few decades (the Jewish settlement in Rome may
date from Pompey's time) under favour of the imperial policy
and the peace of the times : and it was soon to change ; indeed
the fall of Jerusalem A. D. 70 altered it within and without.
Thus it stood complete during the half-century in which the
work of founding the Christian Church throughout the
Empire was accomplished, and then passed away. We remark
upon it how admirable an organization it offered for the
dissemination of a world-religion, originated upon Jewish
soil. The significance of this, occurring at the time when
such a religion actually appeared, is heightened when we
observe that the position had continued long enough fully to
try the experiment of what by its own forces Judaism could
accomplish for the world. As S. James argued 1 ' Moses had,'
now for a long time, 'in every city them that preach him,
being read in the synagogues every Sabbath day ' and it
might have so gone on for ever without any conversion of the
Gentile world. That world could never have been drawn
within a system, which, however zealous to make proselytes,
1 Acts xv. 2 1 .
156 The Religion of the Incarnation.
had nothing better to offer to those whom it made than that
they might come in, if they liked, and sit down in the lowest
place, tolerated rather than welcomed, dependents rather than
members of an intensely national community, leaving father
and mother and all that they had, not for a position of spiritual
freedom, but for a change of earthly nationality.
(2) But we trench upon the second question. What was
the nation that held this position of vantage? What signs
are there about it which suggest a special preparation for a
purposed result ?
It is one answer to this question to say that this wonder-
fully placed people had, alone among the nations, a genuine
faith, a genuine hope, and a genuine charity. They at least,
says Seneca, when he complains of their influence, ' knew the
reasons of their customs.' There was a raison d'etre to their
religion. In a world which still kept up the forms of wor-
ship and respect for gods whose character and existence could
not stand the criticism of its own best moral and religious
O
insight, any more than that of its scepticism ; or which was
framing for itself thoughts of Deity by intellectual abstrac-
tion ; or which was betraying its real ignorance of the very
idea of God by worshipping the two great powers which, as
a matter of fact, it knew to be mighty, Nature and the
Roman Empire, the Jew had a faith, distinct, colossal, and
unfailing, in a Living God, Maker of heaven and earth.
This we may be sure was the inner secret of the true at-
traction which drew the hearts of such men as Cornelius the
centurion to the despised and repulsive Jew. This God, they
further believed, was their God for ever and ever. ' Let us
kneel/ they said, ' before the Lord our Maker, for He is the
Lord our God.' And therefore, let them have gained it how
they may, they had an indomitable hope, or rather, confidence,
which all unpropitiousness of outer appearances had only
served to stimulate, that He would bring them through, that
He had a purpose for them, and that He would bring it to pass :
that the world was no mechanical system of meaningless
vicissitudes, but an order, of which indeed they little realized
the scope, moving under the hand of a Ruler for a purpose of
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 157
glory and beneficence. That the confidence of the extra-
ordinary destiny which, under this order, was reserved for
Israel, as well as the present possession of the Divine law
and covenant, should have produced an intense sense of
unity and fellowship was a matter of course. The Roman is
obliged to recognise their mutual charity, however deformed,
as he thinks, by their antipathy to all who were not of their
kindred and faith.
But such an answer to our question, though it brings before
us a sign, and a sign of the very highest, that is of the moral
and spiritual, order, does not perhaps set us at the point
from which the whole meaning of the position opens to us
most naturally. It may do this more effectually to ask
whether there was any material in Judaism for a world-
religion, and for that world-religion which grew out of it "?
Perhaps if we performed the futile task of trying to
imagine a world-religion, we should, with some generality of
consent, define as its essentials three or four points which it
is striking to find were fundamentals of the religion of Israel,
and at that time of no other. We should require a doctrine
of God, lofty, spiritual, moral : a doctrine of man which should
affirm and secure his spiritual being and his immortality:
and a doctrine of the relations between God and man, which
should give reality to prayer and to the belief in providence,
and root man's sense of responsibility in the fact of his
obligation to a righteousness outside and above himself, a
doctrine in short of judgment. It needs no words to shew how
the religion of Israel in its full development not only taught
these truths, but gave them the dignity and importance which
belong to the cornerstones of a religion.
But then along with these that religion taught other beliefs
as clearly conceived, which seemed to be of the most opposite
character : just as distinctive and exclusive as the former
were universal. It taught the obligation in every detail of a
very stringent written law. and of a ceremonial and sacri-
ficial system, centred at Jerusalem, and forming the recognised
communication between God and man. It taught a special
election of Israel and covenant of God with Israel, a special
158 The Religion of the Incarnation.
purpose and future for Israel. Nor was the conception of the
participation by other nations in the blessings of Messiah's
rule, (to which we, reading for example the prophecies of
Isaiah in the light of the sequel, cannot but give a dominant
place,) more to an Israelite than a striking incident in a dis-
tinctively Israelite glory.
It would seem then, combining these two sides, that
there was in Israel the foundation on which a religion
for the world could be laid, but that it could only be
made available under stringent and, as it might appear,
impossible conditions. An attempt to make a religion
by extracting the universal truths in Judaism would have
been simply to desert at once the vantage-ground which it
was proposed to occupy, because it would have conflicted
directly with every Jewish instinct, belief, tradition, and
hope. If the thing was to be done, it must be done by some
power and teaching which, while extricating into clearness all
that was truest in the theology and morality of Israel, was
also able to shew to the judgment of plain men and earnest
seekers, that it constituted a true climax of Israel's history,
a true fulfilment of the promises and prophecies which Jews
had now made matters of notoriety everywhere, a true final
cause of all the peculiar and distinctive system of Israel. It
must be able to take Israel to witness, and therefore it must
be able to convince men not only that it had a high theology
and a refined morality, but that God had ' visited His people ' :
and that 'what He had spoken unto the fathers He had so
fulfilled.' It must produce accordingly not only doctrine, but
fact. It must carry on, what was implied in the whole
discipline of Israel, the assertion that truth was not a matter
of speculation, but a word from God ; or the knowledge of
a dealing of God with man clothing itself with reality,
embodying itself in fact, making a home for itself in history.
It is true that the Judaism of the synagogue in its idolatry of
the law, had assumed the appearance of a paper system, but
in that form it had no promise or power of expansion : and on
the side where the religion of Israel admitted of development
into some higher and wider state, it was distinctly a religion
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 159
not of theory or teaching only, but of Divine action revealing
itself in history.
It will not escape any observer of the beginnings of Chris-
tianity that it was precisely this attempt which the Gospel of
Jesus made. If we watch S. Paul speaking to his Gentile
audiences at Lystra or Athens, he brings to bear upon the
instincts of his hearers the strong magnet of a clear and
definite Theism. But these addresses themselves implicitly
contain another element : and we must now look to them for
examples of the process, the careful earnest process, by which
the Gospel did its rapid and yet most gradual work of conver-
sion. Unquestionably, as S. Paul himself affirms, and as the
Acts and the early apologetic writers shew us, it was done by
asserting, and making good the assertion with careful proof
and reasoning, that in the historical appearance and character
of Jesus Christ, in His treatment while on earth, in His
resurrection and heavenly exaltation, was to be found the
true, natural, and legitimate fulfilment of that to which the
Scriptures in various ways, direct and indirect, pointed, and
of that which the hope of Israel, slowly fashioned by the Scrip-
tures under the discipline of experience, had learnt to expect.
This could be pressed home most directly on Jews, but it was
available also for the large prepared class among Gentiles,
to whom the pre-existence of these prophecies and anticipa-
tions was known matter of fact, and to some of whom the
Jewish Scriptures had been a personal discipline : the truth
of the Gospel was one ' now made manifest and by the Scrip-
tures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the
everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience
of faith.' The double requirement was fulfilled, and a religion,
intrinsically universal and eternal, was seen by spiritually
clear-sighted eyes to be in a most real and organic sense the
flower of Israel's stalk.
(3) If it has appeared that in the placing of the nation at
the era, and in its character and belief, there was something
much to be ' wondered at,' and, more definitely, something
marvellously suited, not indeed to generate such a religion
as that of the Gospel, but to foster and assist its growth when
160 The Religion of the Incarnation.
the seed of Divine fact should be sown on the prepared soil ;
then we shall ask, finally, whether there is anything of like
striking significance in the way in which this state of things
had conie about? Let us pass by the causes by which the
people of Israel obtained their external position. These, even
including a thing so remarkable as the spontaneous restoration
by an Oriental Empire of a deported people, are not in them-
selves different from the ordinary workings of history ; though
in combination they may contribute to deepen the impression
of a hand fashioning out of many elements, and in many
ways, a single great result. But how had the Jews come to be
what they were ? how had they gained the religious treasure
which they possessed, and the tenacity of religious and
national life which played guardian to it? The whole
course of Israel's history must, in one sense, give the answer
to this question : and there are no controversies more difficult
or more unsolved than those which are now raging round the
problem of that course, its origin, stages, and order. But it
may be possible to make some reflections on it without
entangling ourselves very much in those controversies.
(a) At the outset it is impossible not to be struck by the
interest which the Jews themselves felt in the process of their
history. That interest belongs to the very centre of their life
and thought. It is not an offshoot of national vainglory, for
(as has been so often remarked) it resulted in a record full-
charged with the incidents of national failure and defection:
it is not the result of a self-conscious people analysing its own
moral and other development, for though the moral judgment
is indeed always at work in the narratives and the poems,
it is more occupied in drawing out the teaching of recurring
sequences of sin and punishment than in framing a picture of
the whole. The result is to lay a picture of development
before us, but the aim is to treasure and record every detail
of God's dealings with the nation of His choice. This is what
gives continuity and unity to the whole : this is what lends to
it its intense and characteristic uniqueness. And when we
look steadily at this, we perceive afresh, what familiarity
almost conceals from us, the distinctive quality of Israel's
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 6 1
religion ; that it is not a system of teaching, nor a tradition of
worship, nor a personal discipline, though it may include all
these ; but that it is in itself a belief in the working of God,
Who is the God of all the earth, but specially the God of
Israel, and Who works indeed everywhere, but in an altogether
special sense in Israel. In reflecting on their history they
contemplate the object of their faith. Hence truth is to
them not a philosophic acquisition, but lies in the words
which had come from God faithfully treasured and received:
it is revealed in word and act : goodness, in man or nation, is
the faithful adherence to those conditions, under which the
good purpose of God can work itself out and take effect : it is
a correspondence to a purpose of grace : and the centre and
depositary of their hope is neither the human race, nor any
association for moral and religious effort, but an organism
raised by Him who raises all the organisms of nature from a
chosen seed, and drawn onwards through the stages by which
family passes into nation and kingdom, and then through
that higher discipline by which the natural commonwealth
changes into the spiritual community of the faithful ' remnant.'
If any one will try to realize the impression which Christianity
made upon the heathen world, he will not fail to see how the
new truth was able to impress men because it found these con-
ceptions of revelation, grace, and an organic society of God's
choice and shaping, all so strange and so impressive to the
heathen world, ingrained as the natural elements of religion
in the men whom it made its instruments.
But why did the Jews so regard their history? For the
answer we may revert to the other question, What made them
what they were at the Christian era 1 ? For they had gone
through a crisis calculated to destroy both their existence and
their religion. It has been in fashion with some writers to
emphasize the resemblances, and minimize the differences,
between the religion of Israel and that of its neighbours. In
view of this it becomes important to note the specific peril
of ancient religions. That peril was that the close association
of the nation with its god caused the failure of the one to
appear a failure of the other, and to endanger or destroy the
M
1 62 The Religion of the Incarnation.
respect paid to him. The religion of a subdued or ruined
people was, as we may say, a demonstrated failure. Senna-
cherib's defiance of Hezekiah urges this with a conqueror's
irony 1 . The case of the Ten Tribes had, probably, given an
illustration of it within the circle of Israel itself. And in
Judah, upon any shewing, there was enough of the feeling
that Jehovah was responsible for His people, of the convic-
tion that He would certainly protect His own, of the confi-
dence resting on prosperity and liable to be shaken by its
loss, to make the downfall of the state, carrying with it that
of the Temple and the outer order of religion, an enormous
peril to the religion itself and with it to the very existence
of Israel. It is not difficult to discern the agency by
which the peril was averted. That agency was Prophecy.
Modern criticism, though it may quarrel with the inspiration
or predictive power of the prophets, has given fresh and
unbiassed witness to their importance as an historical pheno-
menon. Kuenen 2 , for example, points out how at every
turning-point in Israel's later history there stands a man
who claims to bring a word of God to the people. Prof.
Huxley 3 , in a recent article, has told us that ' a vigorous
minority of Babylonian Jews,' that is, the Jews upon whom
the full forces of prophecy bore, ' created the first consistent,
remorseless, naked Monotheism, which, so far as history re-
cords, appeared in the world . . . and they inseparably united
therewith an ethical code, which, for its purity and its efficiency
as a bond of social life, was, and is, unsurpassed.' Of what-
ever fact may underlie this description, the prophets are at
once evidence and authors.
Now prophecy confronted the impending peril in the name
of Jehovah : on the one side it displayed the enemy (whether
as by Isaiah it prescribed a bound to his advance, or as by
Jeremiah announced the catastrophe to be wrought by him)
as himself utterly in Jehovah's hands, His axe or saw for
discipline upon the trees of the forest; on the other side it
shewed that Jehovah's obligation to Israel was conditioned by
1 Isaiah xxxvi 18. " Hibbert Lectures, 1882, p. 231.
3 Nineteenth Century, April, 1886.
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 163
His essential righteousness ; that national disaster might be
Jehovah's necessary vengeance, and that His purpose for
Israel which it re-asserted with fullest emphasis might need
to be realized for an Israel purified by such discipline, a shoot
from the stock of the felled tree, the remnant of an ' afflicted
and poor people V And prophecy was beforehand with all this :
it was not an afterthought to explain away a calamity :
and so it fashioned in Israel at least a core of spiritual faith,
to which outward disaster of polity and religion, however
destructive, was not confounding, and which had stamina
enough in it to draw wholesome though bitter nourishment
from the hard Captivity discipline. This, when the flood
came, was an ark for Israel's religion, and, in its religion, for
the national life, which re-organized itself under new con-
ditions round the nucleus of the religion.
Thus, at the crisis and hinge of the historical development
which issued in the wonderfully placed and constituted Israel
of Christ's time, and which was crowned by the New Religion,
we find this agency, which in itself would arrest our wonder.
The more we look at it, the more wonderful it is. Every
suggestion of comparison with heathen oracles, divination and
the rest, can only bring out with more vivid effect the
contrast and difference between it and all such things. It
claims by the mouth of men transparently earnest and honest,
to speak from God. It brings with it the highest credentials.
moral, spiritual, historical : moral, for it spends what at first
sight seems all its strength in the intrepid and scathing
rebuke of the evils immediately round it, especially in the
high places of society, against the lust, cruelty, avarice,
frivolity, insolence, foul worships, which it found so rankly
abundant : spiritual, for it speaks the language of an abso-
lutely unworldly faith, and accomplishes a great spiritual
work, such as we can hardly over-estimate, unless indeed with
Prof. Huxley we distort its proportions so as to prejudice the
earlier religion from which it sprang or the Christianity to
which it contributed: historical, because occurring at the
very crisis of Israel's history (750-550), it gained credence
1 Isaiah x. 15 ; xi. i ; Zeph. iii. 12.
M 2
164 The Religion of the Incarnation.
and authority from the witness of events, and dealt with an
emergency of the most perilous and bewildering kind, as not
the most skilful opportunist could have dealt with it, by a use,
as sublime as simple, of the principles of righteousness and
faith. If we compare what the prophets did for their con-
temporaries and what they did for the future of Israel and
the world, and see that this was done, not by two sets of
utterances working two different ways, but by a single
blended strain of prophecy, we gain a double impression, of
which the twofold force is astonishing indeed. It is gained
without pressing their claim to predictive power, at least
beyond the horizons of their own period. But it is impos-
sible for any careful and candid reader of the words of the
prophets to stop there, and not to feel that there is another
element in them, not contained in a passage here and there
but for ever reappearing, interwoven with the rest, and
evidently felt by the prophets themselves to be in some
sense necessary for the vindication and completion of their
whole teaching. It is an element of anticipation and fore-
sight. We see that this is so, and we see in part the
method of it. It is bound up with, it springs out of, all that
is spiritually and morally greatest in the prophets. Their
marvellous, clear-sighted, steady certainty that the Lord who
sitteth above rules all, that He is holy, and that unrighteous-
ness in man or nations cannot prevail ; their insight piercing
through the surface of history to underlying laws of
providential order ; the strange conviction or consciousness,
felt throughout the nation but centring in the prophets, that
this God had a purpose for Israel : these deep things, which,
however they came and whatever we think of them, make
Israel's distinctive and peculiar glory, were accompanied by,
and issued in, anticipations of a future which would vindicate
and respond to them. Just as the belief in a future life for
God's children was not taught as a set doctrine to the Jews,
but grew with the growth of their knowledge of the Living
and Holy God, and of man's relation as a spiritual being to
Him, so with the predictions of which we speak. As it was
given to the prophets to realize the great spiritual truths of
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 165
present because eternal moment which they taught, it was
given to them also to discern that these truths pointed to
a future which should bring them vindication. The cloudy
time of trial and confusion would one day come to a close ;
the Sun whose rays they caught would one day shine
out ; the partial and passing deliverances in which they
taught men to see God's hand must one day issue in
a deliverance of deeper moment, of lasting and adequate
significance ; there would be an unbaring of God's arm, a
manifesting of His power to decide, to justify, to condemn,
and it would be seen in some final form why and how Israel
was, in a distinctive sense, the people of the God of the whole
earth ; that union between God and His people, of which the
prophets were themselves mediators and which was so miser-
ably imperfect and so constantly broken, would one day be
complete ; and, finally, even the very instruments which He was
using in the present, the Anointed King, the chosen Royal House,
the Prophet- Servant of God, the holy hill of Zion, were charged
with a meaning of which the significance was only in the
future to become clear. Thus, in this free, deep, spiritual
let us say it out, inspired manner the predictions of prophecy
emerge and gather shape. Thus among the people which was
most conservative and jealous of its own religious privilege,
the promise most deeply cherished was one in which all
nations of the earth should be blessed, and there is heard the
strange announcement of a 'new covenant.' Thus it comes
about that the most satisfying and satisfied of all religions
becomes the one which, in its deepest meaning, in the minds
of its most faithful followers, strains forward most completely
beyond itself. Thus, as it has been said, ' Prophecy takes off
its crown and lays it at the feet of One who is to be.' Thus
a people who have become intensely and inexorably mono-
theistic and to whom the Deity becomes more and more
remote in awful majesty so that they do not dare to name
His Name, carry down with them Scriptures which discover
the strange vision of a human King with Divine attributes
and strain towards some manifestation of God in present
nearness. Thus amidst the pictures in which, with every
1 66 7^/ie Religion of the Incarnation.
varying detail, using the scenery, the personages, the nations,
the ideas of its own day, the instinct of prophetic anticipa-
tion finds expression, there emerges, with gradually gathering
strength, a definite Hope, and some clear lineaments of that
which is to be.
For, be it observed, at this point interpretation, declaring
what the prophets seem to us to-day to mean, passes into and
gives way to historical fact. The most sceptical cannot deny
either that the words in which the prophets spoke of the
future, did as a matter of fact crystallize into a hope, a hope
such as has no parallel in history, and of which distorted
rumours were able to stir and interest the heathen world : or
that they were, long before the time of Jesus, interpreted as
sketching features, some general and shadowy, some curiously
distinct and particular, of Messiah's work and kingdom.
And then, face to face with this, stands another fact as
confessedly historical. For, ' in the fulness of the time,' it did
appear to men of many kinds who had the books in their hands,
men with every reason for judging seriously and critically,
and in most cases with the strongest prejudice in favour of an
adverse judgment, that these prophecies were fulfilled in a King
and a Kingdom such as they never dreamt of till they saw them.
It would be a strange chapter in the history of delusion, if
there were no more to add. But there is to add, first, that the
King and the Kingdom whereto, (in no small part upon the
seeming perilous ground of this correspondence with prophecy,)
these men gave their faith, have proved to win such a spiritual
empire as they claimed : and. further, that men like ourselves,
judging at the cool distance of two thousand years, are unable
to deny that in the truest sense of ' fulfilment,' as it would be
judged by a religious mind, Jesus and His Kingdom do ' fulfil
the prophets,' fulfil their assertion of a unique religious destiny
for Israel by which the nations were to profit, of a time when
the righteousness of God should be revealed for the dis-
comfiture of pride and sin and for the help of the meek, of
a nearer dwelling of God with His people, of a new covenant,
and of the lasting reign of a perfect Ruler.
To some minds it may weaken, but to others it will cer-
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 167
tainly intensify, the impression thus created, if they are asked
to observe that now and again there occur in the Jewish
Scriptures words, passages, events, in which with startling
distinctness, independence, and minuteness there stind forth
features of what was to be. It is as if the anticipation which
fills the ai r with glow focussed itself here and there in spark-
ling points of light which form and flash and fade away again.
We may confidently assert that in the .case of such passages as
the 22nd and uoth Psalms or the 9th and 53rd Chapters of
Isaiah the harder task is for him who will deny, than for him
who will assert, a direct correspondence between prediction
and fulfilment. If they stood alone, general scientific con-
siderations might make it necessary to undertake the harder
task. Standing out as they do from such a context and
background as has been here indicated, the interpretation
which sees in them the work of a Divine providence shaping
out a ' sign ' for the purpose which in each Christian age,
and especially in the first, it has actually subserved, is the
interpretation which is truest to all the facts. They are the
special self-betrayal of a power which is at work throughout,
of which the spiritual ear hears the sound, though we are
often unable distinctly to see the footprints.
It seems then impossible, upon such a view of the phenomena
of prophecy as has been here roughly and insufficiently indi-
cated, to deny that whatever appearance of preparation we
may discern in the condition outward and inward of the Jews
in the time of Christ, is strongly corroborated by a like ap-
pearance of preparation in the process by which they had
become what they were.
(V) We have selected out of all the foregoing history the
epoch and the influence of the prophets for several reasons.
They preside over the most critical period of Israel's history.
They seem to bring to most pronounced expression the spirit
and character which pervades the whole of that history. They
are known to us through their own writings : and we are
therefore on ground where (comparatively speaking) the pre-
mises are uncontroverted. And as it is the fashion perhaps
to discredit the argument of prophecy partly, no doubt, on
1 68 The Religion of the Incarnation.
account of the technical form in which it was ordinarily pre-
sented it is important to re-assert that in all its main
strength that argument holds its ground, reinforced in-
deed, as we think, by the increased power to apprehend its
breadth and solidity which our more historically trained
modern minds should have gained. But selection of what is
most salient should imply no neglect of the rest ; and the
argument, or view of the facts, which has here for clearness
sake been abbreviated, and mainly centralized upon the work
and implications of prophecy, can be deepened as the drift of
the great lines of Israel's discipline is more deeply realized.
Thus, for example, little or nothing has been here said of the
Law. Yet, without foreclosing any discussion as to its sources
and development, we can see that the law of God was a factor
in every stage of Israel's history, and that in the making
of the prepared Israel of Christ's time, the law in its fullest
and most developed shape was, and had been for ages, a
paramount influence. No influence more concentrated and
potent can be found in history. And to see the deepest drift
of it we have no need to speculate on what might have been,
or was sure to be. Historical documents point us to what
was. The Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, and the
Epistle to the Hebrews, lay open respectively two ways of its
working. On the one side it appears as a great witness for
righteousness. Men were schooled to live under a sense of
peremptory obligation ; to comply scrupulously, exactly, sub-
missively with an unquestioned authority. This sense and
temper is liable to great abuse : it lends itself when abused to
a mechanical morality, to a morbid casuistry, to the com-
placency of an external perfectness. It was so abused very
widely among the Jews. But it is nevertheless an indispensable
factor in a true morality, to which it lends the special power of
command: and in Israel it conferred this power because it
connected obligation with the will of a righteous God. This is
expressed in the repeated sanction ' I am the Lord your God,'
following precept after precept of the law, and in the sum-
mary claim ' Be ye holy, for I am holy.' Evidently here there
is that which transcends all mechanical schemes of obedience ;
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 169
there is an infinite standard. As such it pointed and im-
pelled onwards towards the true religion in which faith and
holiness should be entirely at one. As such meanwhile it
stimulated and dismayed the deeper spirits : stimulating them
by the loftiness of its demand, dismaying them by the proved
impossibility of that perfect compliance which alone was com-
pliance at all. Thus the foundations were laid of a temper at
once robust and humble, confident and diffident ; though they
were laid upon a contradiction which the law had in itself
no power to resolve. There was indeed (here we take up the
guidance of the Epistle to the Hebrews) one part of the law
which acknowledged that contradiction, which half promised
to resolve it, but having no real power to do so, could only
shape and deepen the demand for some solution. This was,
of course, the sacrificial system. The sacrificial system opens
up quite other thoughts from those of strict demand and strict
obedience. It points to quite another side of religious and
moral development. Yet it starts from the same truth of a
Holy God Who requires, and inasmuch as He is holy must
require, a perfect obedience. Only it acknowledges the in-
evitable fact of disobedience. It embodies the sense of need.
It appeals to, and as part of the Divine law it reveals, a
quality in the Supreme Goodness which can go beyond com-
manding and condemning, to forgive and reconcile. It creates
in a word the spirit of humility, and it feels, at the least, after
a God of love.
What a profound preparation there is in this for the life
which Christ blessed in the Beatitudes and inaugurated by
all that He was and did, and for the truth of the Divine being
and character which was set forth in Him. Yet the law
only prepared for this, and made the demand which this met.
It made no answer to its own demand. It could not reconcile
its own severity, and its own hopes of mercy : its apparatus
of sacrifice was in itself absolutely and obviously insufficient
for any solution of the contradiction. It was a marvellous
discipline which, while it trained its people so far, demanded
the more urgently something which all its training could
never give nor reach.
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
1 70 The Religion of the Incarnation.
(<?) The work of prophecy and the work of the law was
also (if we can distinguish causes which were so much affected
by one another) the work of history. To the work of the
prophets, indeed, the history of both the past and the succeed-
ing times was essential, the former to supply their work with
a standing ground, the latter to engrain its teaching into the
life of the nation. We look back, and we ask, What gave
the prophets their advantage, what was the fulcrum of their
lever 1 Trained to observe the processes of religious evolution,
we must refuse to believe with Professor Huxley that a lofty
monotheism and a noble morality sprang out of the ground
among a ' minority of Babylonian Jews.' But we shall be
prepared to find that the rudimentary stages differ much
from the mature. The beginnings of life, as we know them,
are laid in darkness : they emerge crude and childish : the
physical and outward almost conceals the germ of spiritual
and rational being which nevertheless is the self, and which
will increasingly assert itself and rule. It may be so with that
organism which God was to make the shrine of His Incarnation.
We may have to learn that the beginnings of Israel are more
obscure, more elementary, less distinctive from surrounding
religions, than we had supposed. We need not fear to be as
bold as Amos in recognising that what was in one aspect the
unique calling of God's Son out of Egypt 1 , was in another but
one among the Divinely ruled processes of history, such as
brought up the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from
Kir 2 . We need not be more afraid than Ezekiel to say that
the peculiar people were an offshoot (if so it should be) of
natural stocks, with the Amorite for father and the Hittite
for mother 3 . But all this will hardly take from us that
sense of continuous shaping of a thing towards a Divine
event which has always been among the supports of faith.
We shall see that the prophetic appeals imply a past, and
that their whole force lies in what they assume, and only
recal to their hearers ; the special possession of Israel by
Jehovah, His selection of them for His own, His deliverances
1 Hosea xi. i . 2 Amos ix. 7.
3 Ezekiel xvi. 3.
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 171
of them from Egypt and onwards, giving the earnest of a
future purpose for which they were preserved, and for which
His definite promises were committed to them, to the seed of
Abraham, the house of Israel, the line of David. These things
the prophets imply, standing upon these they speak with all
the force of those who need only bid the people to realize
and to remember, or at most to receive from God some fresh
confirmation and enlargement of their hopes 1 .
Or again, from the work of the prophets we look forward,
and when we have recovered from our surprise at seeing that
a dreary interval of five centuries separates the Evangelical
prophecy, which seemed so ready for the flower of the Gospel,
from the time of its blooming, we discern how the processes of
that interval were utilized in realizing, ingraining, diffusing
the great truths of prophetic teaching. The return without
a monarchy and under an ecclesiastical governor, and the
dispersion through many lands, necessitated in act that trans-
formation of the political into the spiritual polity, almost of
the nation into the Church, of which Isaiah's work was the
germ. The institution of the synagogues, which belongs to
this time and in which public worship was detached from all
local associations and from the ancient forms of material sacri-
fice, was, as it were, the spiritual organ of the new ubiquitous
cosmopolitan Jewish life. Yet contemporaneously the cen-
tralizing influences gained strength. The conservative work
of Ezra and of the Scribes and Rabbis at whose head he stands,
gathered up and preserved the treasures which gave a con-
sciously spiritual character to Israel's national loyalty ; and
guarded with the hedge of a scrupulous literalism, what needed
some such defence to secure it against the perils implied in
1 It is interesting to note that, ac- own likeness. The prophets do not
cording to the record preserved by imagine an earlier row of prophets
Israel of their own history, that which like themselves, put in like the por-
Kuenen says of later times, that ' at traits of the early Scottish kings at
each turning-point of the history Holyrood, to fill the blanks of history,
stands a man who claims to bring a The early figures are not cut to pro-
word from God.' is exactly true of phetic pattern ; they have each their
the older history too ; Abraham. Moses, distinct individuality of character and
Samuel, David, are all in this sense office, only they have a unity of Divine
prophets. Yet there is no appearance commission and service,
of a later age forming a past in its
172 The Religion of the Incarnation.
being carried wide over the world. By the resistance in
Palestine under Syrian rule to Hellenizing insolence, and in
the Dispersion to the fascinations and pleasures of Hellenizing
culture, and by the great Maccabean struggle, the nation was
identified with religious earnestness and zeal in a way of
which we only see the caricature and distortion in the Phari-
saism which our Lord denounced.
Thus, if we compare our Lord's time with the great age of
prophecy, we see how much has been acquired. Time has
been given for the prophetic influences to work. There has
been loss, but there has also been gain. That conscious, ex-
plicit, and magnificently uncompromising Monotheism, which
in the mouth of the Evangelical prophet was quivering with
the glow and passion of freshly inspired realization, has by
'the end of the age' had time to bring everything in the
sphere of religion under its influence. It had discovered its
points of contact with the highest aspirations of the Greek
thought which on intellectual lines felt its way towards God.
And it had unfolded its own corollaries: it had drawn along
with it the great spiritual truths which cohere with the belief
in one Living and True God : and Israel in the Pharisee epoch
had passed, we hardly know how, into secure if not undisputed
possession of the belief in a future life, in a world of spirits,
and in the spiritual character of prayer.
But there was another and more direct manner, in which
the work of history interlaced with what we have indicated
as the work of the law. In the formation of the temper of
chastened confidence which is so characteristic of later Israel,
a part must evidently be given to the discipline of national
experience saddened by departed glory, and with the shadows
thickening over it. Just as we can see that the populations
of the Empire were in a sense more ready to learn of Christ
than the young self-reliant Greeks of Sparta or Athens could
have been, so we can see in such language as that of the 1 1 gth
Psalm or of the 9th chapter of Daniel a temper to which the
meek and lowly Christ would make an appeal which might
have been lost upon the rough times of the judges or the
prosperous age of the monarchy. Old age has come and with
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 173
it the wisdom of a chastened spirit. This is not difficult to
see, and it is important to take it into account. It means that
the comparatively normal discipline of life has brought with
it (as doubtless it is meant to do alike in personal and national
life) a spiritual gain. But it is important to see how much of
the process and the effect remains unexplained. The chastening
is obvious, but whence the confidence ?
It is in some far less normal cause, in something which
seems distinctive of Israel, that we have to find the adequate
explanation of the whole result. We have to ask (as Pascal
so keenly felt 1 ) why a nation records its failures and mis-
fortunes as being chastisements of wilful, repeated, and dis-
graceful fault, and then jealously guards the record as its most
cherished possession. It would be easy to suggest that there
is in this an egotism clothing itself in humility : and to point
out that this egotism would explain the confidence which still
looked forward to the future, which anticipated greatness for
an ' afflicted and poor people,' and a blessing to all the nations
of the earth from its own history. Only this is just to slur
the difficulty, and under the invidious word ' egotism ' to
disguise that wonderful instinct of a destiny and a mission
which is so strangely unlike egotism, and which allowed, or
even produced, in so profound a form the self-condemnation
which egotism refuses.
Doubtless the effects of these preparing forces were felt,
and their meanings discerned, only by a few. Not only were
they ' not all Israel that were of Israel,' but the bulk of the
nation and its representative and official leaders were blind.
They were off the way, down the false tracks of literalist
Rabbinism, or of one-sided Essene asceticism, or of earthly
visions of a restored kingdom, or (as in Alexandria) of a
philosophized Judaism. The issues were the crucifixion of
the Lord, and all which Judaism, without and within the
Church, did to extinguish the Gospel and persecute its fol-
lowers in its first age. It is right to refer to this, but there
are probably few to whom it would cause any difficulty.
To the observer of the world's history it is a common sight
1 Pensees, ii. 7 2.
1 74 The Religion of the Incarnation.
that the true issues and the distinctive work of a people is
worked out not by the many or by the prominent, but by
the few, and often the obscure. To the student of Jewish
history that which has made Israel what it is in world-signi-
ficance appears throughout the course of its history as a gold
thread running through a web of very different texture. It can
be no surprise that the end should be of a piece with the rest.
There, in a climax of sharpest contrast, we see the antithesis
which marks the history throughout. The training issues in
a S. Mary, a Simeon, in those who ' waited for the consolation
of Israel ' on the one side, and in the ' Scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites,' on the other. The natural issue of Israel's life and
tendencies is seen in the cold and sterile impotence which,
because it is the ' corruption of the best,' is the most irreversible
spiritual ruin ; while beside and amidst this there was
fashioned by a grace and power above nature, though in a
perfectly natural way, the true Israel which realize all that
' Israel according to the flesh ' professed yet betrayed, guarded
yet obscured. And if we have at all rightly discerned as a
principle of Divine preparation that it should be negative as
well as positive, and should demonstrate to the world before
Christ was given, how little the world's own wisdom or effort
could supply His place : we shall not wonder that time was
thus given for Israel to try out as it were its second experi-
ment, and to shew that by its selfishness and arrogance, by
its ' carnalness,' it could warp and distort its later spiritual
constitution, even more than its former temporal one, out of
all likeness of what God would have it be. ' The last state
of the man ' was ' worse than the first 1 .'
But the observation of these predominant currents and
forms of Jewish life and thought and religion has this further
value, that it shews the variety, the energy, and the unlike-
ness to one another of the tendencies present in Israel.
They emphasize the fact that the history of Israel was in no
sense working itself out towards the production by its own
forces of the true religion which went forth from the midst of
1 S. Matt, xii 45. It should be observed that the words were spoken of ' this
wicked generation.'
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 175
it. They remind us how intractable the problem of finding by
human ingenuity the solution which could harmonize in one
issue elements so powerful and so alien from each other ;
which with a perfect spiritual liberty could combine an asser-
tion of the permanent value of the law ; which with no
withdrawal from and despair of the world could secure all
that was sought by Essene purity and self-denial ; which, itself
utterly unworldly, could satisfy the idea of a restored monarchy
and a glory for Israel; which while bringing no philosophy
could achieve what Jewish philosophizing had desired, in a
capture of the world's reason by Jewish truth.
III. In the last words we touch that with which this essay
may perhaps fitly end. If its drift has been in any sense true,
there stands before us, as perhaps the most striking feature of
the whole situation, the co-existence of the two preparations,
the one general, indirect, contributory, and consisting only
in an impressive convergence and centering of the lines of
ordinary historical sequences ; the other special, directly intro-
ductory, and characterized by the presence of a distinctive
power, call it what we may, a genius for religion, or more
truly and adequately a special grace of the Spirit of God,
which is new and above ordinary experience, even as life is
when it enters the rest of nature, and reason is when it appears
in the world of life. The two preparations pursue their course
unconscious of one another, almost exclusive of one another.
Greek wisdom and Roman power have no dream of coming
to receive from the narrow national cult of humbled and
subject Israel. And Israel, even taught by the great prophets,
could hardly find a place in her vision of the future for any
destiny of the nations of the world. To this antagonism, or
more strictly this ignoring of one another, there are excep-
tions, exceptions of the kind which emphasize the character
of the situation which they hardly modify. Two streams of
such force and volume as those of Jewish religion and classical
life or culture could not touch and leave one another altogether
uninfluenced, though the influence was characteristically dif-
1 76 The Religion of the Incarnation.
ferent. On the side of the world the spiritual needs of indi-
viduals caused numbers, not inconsiderable, to receive influences
which made them ready to act as seeding ground and ferment for
the Gospel. On the side of Israel, the strong sense of mission
and of truth made the contact with Greek culture suggest the
ambition to use it as a great instrument, to teach it to
acknowledge and witness to the God of Israel, who was God
of the whole earth : and the results, in the Greek of the
Septuagint and in the Helleno-Judaic writings of Alexandria
and elsewhere, were invaluable in fashioning language and
thought for Christ's service. But all the more distinctly,
in the first case, does the antagonism, the gulf fixed, the
mutual aversion, the impossibility humanly speaking of fusion
between Jew and Gentile come out before our eyes. And, in
the second case, the unreal roinancings of the Sibylline works,
the apparently isolated work of Philo, and the opportunism
of a politician like Josephus, have all the character of hybrids,
and shew no sign of the vital fusion by which out of a great
wedlock a new thing comes to be.
The two preparations stand apart : they go their own way.
There is indeed in them a strange parallelism of common
human experience and human need. Both have tried their
experiments, made their ventures, won their successes, gone
through their disciplines of disenchantment and failure.
Both are conscious of the dying of life : in Israel there is ' no
prophet more ' ; outside it philosophy has not the creative-
ness and energy of youth but the quiet acquiescence and mild
prudence of age, and life, public and private, is without ade-
quate scope or aim. In both the ' tendencies towards ' a Gospel
are as far as possible from making a ' tendency to produce '
one. In both there is the same desire for which the Jew alone
can find conscious expression : it is ' Quicken me ! ' Both
need life. Both have no help in themselves. But in the
lines which they follow and the hopes which they frame there
is neither likeness nor compatibility. ' The Greeks seek after
wisdom 1 .' The intellect, and those who are distinctively
men of the intellect, can hardly imagine human advance
1 I Cor. i. 22.
iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 177
otherwise than in terms of the intellect. Philosophy conceives
of it as a conquest of philosophical result, or even as an increase
of philosophical material. It is the pain of an advanced and
critical time, like that of which we speak, to feel this, and
yet to feel that the experiments of speculation have gone far
enough to shew that by none of their alternative ways can
there be any way out to the peace of certain truth. And
yet it seems that, without abdication of reason, there is no
possibility of going any other way : the Greeks (and in this
sense all the world was Greek) could only look for what they
wanted in the form of a new philosophy.
But ' the Jews require a sign.' Totally different, but equally
exclusive, were the conditions under which the Jew could
conceive of a new epoch. The dread of exhausted resources
did not haunt him, for he looked not to human capacity but
to Divine gift and interposition. But he thought that he
knew the form in which such interposition would come ; it
was not to be primarily a teaching, (it is the Samaritan and
not the Jew who is recorded as expecting in Messiah one who,
' when He is come, will tell us all things a '); it must appear in
action, ' with observation 2 ,' with pomp and scenic display, with
signs, and signs which, in a very visible and tangible sense,
should seem to be from heaven 3 , in particular with circum-
stances of triumph and conquest, and with an exaltation of
Israel to the glories of her monarchy many times enlarged.
Such are the demands ; the things sought and needed ; the
conditions prescribed ; definite, severally uncompromising,
mutually unlike, and even conflicting. And then from out of
Israel, without moral or political earthquake, without over-
whelming display of supernatural force, nay even, to a super-
ficial eye, with all the appearance of weakness and failure,
without any rescue for Israel, with no attempt to present
itself in philosophical form, with none of the strain and
elaboration of a conscious effort to combine many in one,
but rather with a paradoxical and offending ' simplicity ' and
1 S. John iv. 25. in each case following some of our
1 S. Luke xvii. 20. Lord's own signs.
* S. Matt.xii. 38 ; S. John vi. 30, 31,
N
1 78 The Religion of the Incarnation.
' foolishness ' of mere assertion : there conies forth a Thing in
which on the one side Jews whom we all recognise to be the
best Jews, Jews in the truest and deepest sense find the
whole spirit and meaning, even down to its detail, of the life
and the hope of Israel summed up and fulfilled ; which left
them no sense of disappointment, but rather a consciousness of
having had hopes only too narrow and low ; which gave them
the exulting sense of ' reigning as kings,' with a ' King of
Israel ' : while on the other side this same Thing was felt by
' Greeks' as a ' wisdom ' flooding their reasons with a light of
truth and wisdom (sophia), which met the search of philosophy
(philo-sophia) l , but also in simple and wise alike drew forth
and ministered to needs which philosophy had but half seen
and wholly failed to satisfy, enabling conscience to be candid
and yet at peace, building up a new cosmopolitan fellowship,
and restoring to human life dignity and value, not only in
phrase and theory, but in truth. ' There came forth a Thing,'
or rather there came forth One, in Whom all this was done.
The question rises, ' Whom say we that He is 1 ' And though
the answer must be reached in different ways by different
men, and the witness to Him in Whom is the sum of all,
must needs be of many kinds ; yet the convergence of many
lines (as we have been permitted to trace it) to One in whom
they are all combined and yet transcended, to One whom they
can usher in but were powerless to produce, may be no slight
corroboration of the answer which was accepted, as we have
to remember, by the lowly Jesus with significant solemnity :
' Thou art the Christ,' the Fulfiller of all high and inspired
Jewish hope ; ' the Son of the Living God V His Son,
as the Son of Man, in whom all that is human reaches ful-
ness ; and as the Son of God, who brings down to man what
he has been allowed to prove to himself that he cannot dis-
cover or create.
1 This comes before us vividly in and for this reason I am a philo-
.Tustin Martyr's account of his own sopher.'
conversion. Dial. c. Tryph. 3 if. 'Thus a S. Matt. xvi. 16.
V.
THE INCARNATION AND
DEVELOPMENT.
J. R. ILLINGWORTH.
N 2
V.
THE INCARNATION AND DEVELOPMENT.
I. THE last few years have witnessed the gradual acceptance
by Christian thinkers of the great scientific generalization of
our age, which is briefly, if somewhat vaguely, described as
the Theory of Evolution. History has repeated itself, and
another of the ' oppositions of science ' to theology has proved
upon inquiry to be no opposition at all. Such oppositions
and reconciliations are older than Christianity, and are part
of what is often called the dialectical movement ; the move-
ment, that is to say, by question and answer, out of which all
progress comes. But the result of such a process is some-
thing more than the mere repetition of a twice-told tale. It
is an advance in our theological thinking ; a definite increase
of insight ; a fresh and fuller appreciation of those ' many
ways ' in which ' God fulfils Himself.' For great scientific
discoveries, like the heliocentric astronomy, are not merely
new facts to be assimilated ; they involve new ways of look-
ing at things. And this has been pre-eminently the case
with the law of evolution ; which, once observed, has rapidly
extended to every department of thought and history, and
altered our attitude towards all knowledge. Organisms,
nations, languages, institutions, customs, creeds, have all
come to be regarded in the light of their development, and
we feel that to understand what a thing really is, we must
examine how it came to be. Evolution is in the air. It is
the category of the age ; a ' partus temporis ' ; a necessary
consequence of our wider field of comparison. We cannot
place ourselves outside it, or limit the scope of its operation.
And our religious opinions, like all things else that have
1 82 The Religion of the Incarnation.
come down on the current of development, must justify their
existence by an appeal to the past.
It is the object of the following pages to consider what
popular misconceptions of the central doctrine of our religion,
the Incarnation, have been remedied ; what more or less for-
gotten aspects of it have been restored to their due place ;
what new lights have been thrown upon the fulness of its
meaning, in the course of our discussion of the various views
O"
of evolution.
In face of the historical spirit of the age, the study of past
theology can never again be regarded as merely a piece of
religious antiquarianism. And there are two classes of mind
to which it should be of especial service. Many an earnest
worker in the Christian cause, conscious how little the
refinements of philosophy can influence for good or evil the
majority of men, and generously impatient of all labour wasted,
when the labourers are so few, is apt to under-estimate what
he considers the less practical departments of theology ; for-
getful that there are souls, and those among the noblest, to
whom the primary avenue of access is the intellect, and
who can only be led homeward by the illuminative way.
The Christian of this type may be materially helped
towards welcoming wider views, by being convinced that
what he has been too easily apt to regard as metaphysical
subtleties, or as dangerous innovations, or as questionable
accommodations of the Gospel to the exigencies of passing
controversy, are after all an integral part of the great Ca-
tholic tradition. On the other hand, many plausible at-
tacks upon the Christian creed are due to the inadequate
methods of its professed interpreters. Fragments of doc-
trine, torn from their context and deprived of their due
proportions, are brandished in the eyes of men by well-
meaning but ignorant apologists as containing the sum
total of the Christian faith, with the lamentable consequence
that even earnest seekers after truth, and much more its
unearnest and merely factious adversaries, mislead themselves
and others into thinking Christianity discredited, when in
reality they have all along been only criticising its carica-
v. The Incarnation and Development. 183
ture. Such men need reminding that Christianity is greater
than its isolated interpreters or misinterpreters in any
age ; that in the course of its long history it has accumu-
lated answers to many an objection which they in their
ignorance think new ; and that, in the confidence of its
universal mission and the memory of its many victories,
it still claims to be sympathetic, adequate, adaptable to the
problems and perplexities of each successive age.
The general tendency of thought since the Reformation
has been in the direction of these partial presentations of
Christianity. The Reformers, from various causes, were so
occupied with what is now called Soteriology, or the scheme
of salvation, that they paid but scant attention to the other
aspects of the Gospel. And the consequence was that a
whole side of the great Christian tradition, and one on which
many of its greatest thinkers had lavished the labours of a
lifetime, was allowed almost unconsciously to lapse into com-
parative oblivion ; and the religion of the Incarnation was
narrowed into the religion of the Atonement. Men's views
of the faith dwindled and became subjective and self-regard-
ing, while the gulf was daily widened between things sacred
and things secular ; among which latter, art and science,
and the whole political and social order, gradually came to
be classed.
Far otherwise was it with the great thinkers of the early
Church ; and that not from an under-estimate of the saving
power of the Cross, which was bearing daily fruit around them,
of penitence, and sanctity, and martyrdom ; but from their
regarding Christian salvation in its context. They realized
that redemption was a means to an end, and that end the
reconsecration of the whole universe to God. And so the
very completeness of their grasp on the Atonement led them
to dwell upon the cosmical significance of the Incarnation,
its purpose to ' gather together all things in one.' For it
was an age in which the problems of the universe were
keenly felt. Philosophical thinking, if less mature, was not
less exuberant than now, and had already a great past behind
it. And the natural world, though its structural secrets were
184 The Religion of the Incarnation.
little understood, fascinated the imagination and strained the
heart with its appealing beauty. Spiritualism, superstition,
scepticism, were tried in turn but could not satisfy. The
questionings of the intellect still pressed for a solution. And
the souls of Christians were stirred to proclaim that the
new power which they felt within them, restoring, quicken-
ing, harmonizing the whole of their inner life, would also
prove the key to all these mysteries of matter and of
mind.
So it was that the theology of the Incarnation was gra-
dually drawn out, from the teaching of S. Paul and of
S. John. The identity of Him Who was made man and dwelt
among us, with Him by Whom all things were made and
by Whom all things consist ; His eternal pre-existence as
the reason and the word of God, the Logos ; His indwelling
presence in the universe as the source and condition of all
its life, and in man as the light of His intellectual being;
His Resurrection, His Ascension, all these thoughts were
woven into one magnificent picture, wherein creation was
viewed as the embodiment of the Divine ideas, and therefore
the revelation of the Divine character ; manifesting its Maker
with increasing clearness at each successive stage in the
great scale of being, till in the fulness of time He Himself
became man, and thereby lifted human nature, and with it
the material universe to which man is so intimately linked ;
and triumphing over the sin and death under which creation
groaned and travailed, opened by His Resurrection and then
by His Ascension vistas of the glorious destiny purposed
for His creatures before the world was. ' Factus est quod
sumus nos, uti nos perficeret esse quod est ipse V
Such is the view of the Incarnation in what may be called
its intellectual aspect, which we find gradually expressed
with increasing clearness by the Fathers, from Justin to
Athanasius. And with all its deep suggestiveness, it is still a
severely simple picture, drawn in but few outlines, and those
strictly scriptural. It was born of no abstract love of meta-
physic, and stands in striking contrast to the wild specu-
1 Irenaeus.
v. The Incarnation and Development. 185
lations of the time. Its motive and its method were both
intensely practical ; its motive being to present Christianity
to the mind as well as to the heart ; and its method no
more than to connect and interpret and explain the definite
statements of S. Paul and S. John. Passing over the dark
ages, when thought was in comparative abeyance, and the
energies of the Church absorbed in the work of conversion
and organization, we come, in the twelfth and following
centuries, to a second period of intellectual ferment, less
brilliant than that which characterized the decadence of the
old civilization, but instinct with all the fire and restlessness
of youth. Unsobered as yet by experience, and unsupplied
with adequate material from without, thought preyed upon
itself and revelled in its new-found powers of speculation.
Fragments of the various heresies which the Fathers had
answered and outlived reappeared with all the halo of
novelty around them. Religions were crudely compared and
sceptical inferences drawn. Popular unbelief, checked in a
measure by authority, avenged itself by ridicule of all things
sacred. It was a period of intense intellectual unrest, too
many-sided and inconsequent to be easily described. But
as far as the anti-Christian influences of the time can be
summarized they were mainly two: the Arabic pantheism,
and the materialism which was fostered in the medical
schools ; kindred errors, both concerned with an undue es-
timate of matter. And how did Christian theology meet
them 1 ? Not by laying stress, like the later Deists, upon
God's infinite distance from the world, but upon the closeness
of His intimacy with it : by reviving, that is, with increased
emphasis the Patristic doctrine of the Incarnation, as the
climax and the keystone of the whole visible creation. There
is a greater divergence of opinion, perhaps, among the School-
men than among the Fathers ; and a far greater amount
of that unprofitable subtlety for which they are apt to be
somewhat too unintelligently ridiculed. But on the point
before us, as on all others of primary importance, they are
substantially unanimous, and never fail in dignity.
' As the thought of the Divine mind is called the Word,
1 86 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Who is the Son, so the unfolding of that thought in external
action (per opera exteriora) is named the word of the
Word V
' The whole world is a kind of bodily and visible Gospel of
that Word by which it was created 2 .'
' Every creature is a theophany 3 .'
' Every creature is a Divine word, for it tells of God V
' The wisdom of God. when first it issued in creation, came
not to us naked, but clothed in the apparel of created things.
And then when the same wisdom would manifest Himself to
us as the Son of God, He took upon Him a garment of flesh
and so was seen of men 5 .'
' The Incarnation is the exaltation of human nature and
consummation of the Universe 6 .'
Such quotations might be multiplied indefinitely from the
pages of the Schoolmen and scholastic theologians. And the
line of thought which they indicate seems to lead us by a
natural sequence to view the Incarnation as being the pre-
destined climax of creation, independently of human sin.
The thought is of course a mere speculation, 'beyond that
which is written,' but from its first appearance in the twelfth
century it has been regarded with increasing favour ; for it is
full of rich suggestiveness, and seems to throw a deeper
meaning into all our investigations of the world's gradual
development.
Again, from the relation of the Word to the universe follows
His relation to the human mind. For ' that life was the light
of men.'
' The created intellect is the imparted likeness of God,' says
S. Thomas ; and again, ' Every intellectual process has its
origin in the Word of God Who is the Divine Reason.' ' The
light of intellect is imprinted upon us by God Himself
(immediate a Deo).' ' God continually works in the mind,
as being both the cause and the guide of its natural light.'
1 S. Thorn. Aq. c. Gent. iv. 13. * S. Bonav. In Eccles. ci. t. ix.
2 H. de Boseham (Migne)'v. 190. 5 H. de S.Victor. (^Migne) v. 177.
P- ' 3?.",- P- 58o.
- Scot. Er. (Migne) v. 122. p. 302. 6 S. Thorn. Aquinas.
v. The Incarnation and Development. 187
' In every object of sensitive or rational experience God Himself
lies hid V ' All intelligences know God implicitly, in every
object of their knowledge 2 .' 'Christ is our internal teacher
and no truth of any kind is known but through Him ; though
He speaks not in language as we do, but by interior illu-
mination 3 .' 'The philosophers have taught us the sciences,
for God revealed them to them 4 .'
II. The point to be noticed in the teaching of which such
passages are scattered samples, is that the Schoolmen and
orthodox mystics of the middle age, with Pantheism, mate-
rialism, rationalism surging all around them, and perfectly
conscious of the fact, met these errors, not by denying the
reality of matter, or the capacity of reason, as later apologists
have often done, but by claiming for both a place in the
Theology of the Word. And this Theology of the Word was,
in reality, quite independent of, and unaffected by, the subtleties
and fallacies and false opinions of the age, cobwebs of the
unfurnished intellect which time has swept away. It was
a magnificent framework, outside and above the limited
knowledge of the day and the peculiarities of individual
thinkers ; an inheritance from the Patristic tradition, which
the Fathers, in their turn, had not invented, but received
as Apostolic doctrine from Apostolic men, and only made
more explicit by gradual definition, during centuries when,
it has been fairly said, 'the highest reason, as indepen-
dently exercised by the wise of the world, was entirely
coincident with the highest reason as inspiring the Church 5 .'
We have now to consider whether this view of the Incarnation,
which, though in the countries most influenced by the Refor-
mation it has dropped too much out of sight, has yet never
really died out of the Church at large, is in any way incom-
patible with the results of modern science ; or whether, on the
contrary, it does not provide an outline to which science
is slowly but surely giving reality and content.
And at the outset we must bear in mind one truth which is
1 S. Bonav. de Reduct. sub fin. * Id. Lum. Eccles. S. 5.
2 S. Thorn. Aq. de Verit. 22. 2. i. 5 Mark Pattison.
3 S. Bonav. Lum. Eccles. S. 12.
1 88 The Religion of the Incarnation.
now recognised on all sides as final viz. that the finite
intellect cannot transcend the conditions of finitude, and
cannot therefore reach, or even conceive itself as reaching, an
absolute, or, in Kantian phraseology, a speculative knowledge
of the beginning of things. Whatever strides science may
make in time to come towards decomposing atoms and forces
into simpler and yet simpler elements, those elements will
still have issued from a secret laboratory into which science
cannot enter, and the human mind will be as far as ever from
knowing what they really are. Further, this initial limitation
must of necessity qualify our knowledge in its every stage.
If we cannot know the secret of the elements in their sim-
plicity, neither can we know the secret of their successive
combinations. Before the beginning of our present system,
and behind the whole course of its continuous development,
there is a vast region of possibility, which lies wholly and for
ever beyond the power of science to affirm or to deny. It is
in this region that Christian theology claims to have its roots,
and of this region that it professes to give its adherents certi-
tude, under conditions and by methods of its own. And of
those conditions and methods it fearlessly asserts that they
are nowise inconsistent with any ascertained or ascertainable
result of secular philosophy.
As regards the origin of things, this is obvious. Science
may resolve the complicated life of the material universe into
a few elementary forces, light and heat and electricity, and
these perhaps into modifications of some still simpler energy ;
but of the origin of energy (TO Trpwroy K.IVOVV) it knows no
more than did the Greeks of old. Theology asserts that in
the beginning was the Word, and in Him was life, the life of
all things created : in other words, that He is the source of
all that energy, whose persistent, irresistible versatility of
action is for ever at work moulding and clothing and
peopling worlds. The two conceptions are complementary,
and cannot contradict each other.
But to pass from the origin to the development of things :
the new way of looking at nature was thought at first both
by its adherents and opponents alike to be inimical to the
v. The Incarnation and Development. 189
doctrine of final causes. And here was a direct issue joined
with Theology at once : for the presence of final causes or
design in the universe has not only been in all ages one of
the strongest supports for natural religion ; it is contained in
the very notion of a rational creation, a creation by an
Eternal Reason. And this was supposed to be directly
negatived by the doctrine of the survival of the fittest
through natural selection : for if of a thousand forms,
which came by chance into existence, the one which hap-
pened to correspond best with its environment survived,
while the remainder disappeared, the adaptation of the sur-
vivor to its circumstances would have all the appearance of
design, while in reality due to accident. If, therefore, this
principle acted exclusively throughout the universe, the result
would be a semblance of design without any of its reality,
from which no theological inference could be drawn. But
this consequence of natural selection obviously depends upon
the exclusiveness of its action. If it is only one factor among
many in the world's development ; while there are instances
of adaptation in nature, and those the more numerous, for
which it fails to account, what has been called its dysteleo-
logical significance is at an end. Now its own author soon
saw and admitted the inadequacy of the theory of natural
selection, even in biology, the field of its first observation, to
account for all the facts : while countless phenomena in
other regions, such as the mechanical principles involved in
the structure of the universe, the laws of crystallography
and chemical combination, the beauty of nature taken in
connection with its effect upon the mind, irresistibly suggest
design, and render the alternative hypothesis, from its mere
mathematical improbability, almost inconceivable. And there
is now, therefore, a general disposition to admit that the force
of this particular attack upon the doctrine of final causes has
been considerably overstated.
But in the course of its discussion an important difference
has been brought to light between external and internal
purposes or ends. The kind of design in nature which first
arrested early thinkers was its usefulness to man. Even in
1 90 The Religion of the Incarnation.
scenery, it has been suggested, they saw the utility before
the beauty. And so they came to look upon all natural
phenomena as having for their final cause the good of man ;
and the world as a machine, a contrivance of which the parts
have no value except as contributing to the work of the
whole, and the whole exists only to produce a result outside
and independent of itself, an external end, as if corn should
exist solely to provide food for man. This was not an untrue
conception ; a shallow thing to say of the reason for which
Socrates believed in God ; but it was partial and inadequate,
as Bacon and Spinoza shewed. And we have now come to
regard the world not as a machine, but as an organism, a
system in which, while the parts contribute to the growth of
the whole, the whole also reacts upon the development of the
parts ; and whose primary purpose is its own perfection,
something that is contained within and not outside itself, an
internal end: while in their turn the myriad parts of this
universal organism are also lesser organisms, ends in and for
themselves, pursuing each its lonely ideal of individual com-
pleteness. Now when we look at nature in this way, and
watch the complex and subtle processes by which a crystal,
a leaf, a lily, a moth, a bird, a star realize their respective
ideals with undisturbed, unfailing accuracy, we cannot help
attributing them to an intelligent Creator. But when we
further find that in the very course of pursuing their primary
ends, and becoming perfect after their kind, the various parts
of the universe do in fact also become means, and with in-
finite ingenuity of correspondence and adaptation, subserve
not only one but a thousand secondary ends, linking and
weaving themselves together by their mutual ministration
into an orderly, harmonious, complicated whole, the signs of
intelligence grow clearer still. And when, beyond all this, we
discover the quality of beauty in every moment and situation
of this complex life ; the drop of water that circulates from
sea to cloud, and cloud to earth, and earth to plant, and plant
to life-blood, shining the while with strange spiritual sig-
nificance in the sunset and the rainbow and the dewdrop
and the tear ; the universal presence of this attribute, so
v. The Incarnation and Development. 191
unessential to the course of nature, but so infinitely powerful
in its appeal to the human mind, is reasonably urged as
a crowning proof of purposeful design.
The treatment which these various aspects of teleology have
received, during the last few years, may be fairly called ex-
haustive : and the result of all the sifting controversy has
been to place the evidence for design in nature on a stronger
base than ever : partly because we feel that we have faced the
utmost that can be urged against it ; partly because, under
scientific guidance, we have acquired a more real, as distinct
from a merely notional apprehension of the manifold adapta-
tions of structure to function, which the universe presents ;
and these adaptations and correspondences, when grasped in
their infinite multiplicity, furnish us with a far worthier and
grander View of teleology than the mechanical theory of
earlier days.
All this is in perfect harmony with our Christian creed, that
all things were made by the Eternal Reason ; but more than
this, it illustrates and is illustrated by the further doctrine of
His indwelling presence in the things of His creation ; render-
ing each of them at once a revelation and a prophecy, a thing
of beauty and finished workmanship, worthy to exist for its
own sake, and yet a step to higher purposes, an instrument
for grander work.
God tastes an infinite joy
In infinite ways one everlasting bliss,
From whom all being emanates, all power
Proceeds : in whom is life for evermore,
Yet whom existence in its lowest form
Includes ; where dwells enjoyment, there is He :
With still a flying point of bliss remote,
A happiness in store afar, a sphere
Of distant glory in full view.
And science has done us good service in recalling this
doctrine to mind. For it has a religious as well as a theo-
logical importance, constituting, as it does, the element of truth
in that higher Pantheism which is so common in the present
day. Whether the term higher Pantheism is happily chosen
or not, the thing which it denotes is quite distinct from
192 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Pantheism proper, with its logical denial of human personality
and freedom. It is the name of an emotion rather than
a creed; that indescribable mystic emotion which the poet,
the. artist, the man of science, and all their kindred feel in
contemplating the beauty or the wonder of the world. Vague
as it is, and indefinite, this sentiment is still one of the
strongest of which our nature is susceptible, and should be
recognised as an integral element in all true religion. Yet
for want of such recognition on the part of Christians it is
often allowed to gravitate nearer and nearer to pure Pantheism,
with which it has, in reality, no essential affinity. We cannot
therefore over-estimate the importance of restoring to its due
place in theology the doctrine of the Divine immanence in
nature, to which this sentiment is the instinctive witness.
Fathers, schoolmen, mystics, who were quite as alive to any
danger of Pantheism as ourselves, yet astonish us by the
boldness of their language upon this point ; and we need not
fear to transgress the limits of the Christian tradition in
saying that the physical immanence of God the Word in
His creation can hardly be overstated, as long as His moral
transcendence of it is also kept in view.
' God dwelleth within all things, and without all things,
above all things and beneath all things Y says S. Gregory the
Great.
' The immediate operation of the Creator is closer to
everything than the operation of any secondary cause,' says
S. Thomas 2 .
And Cornelius a Lapide, after comparing our dependence
upon God to that of a ray on the sun, an embryo on the
womb, a bird on the air, concludes with the words, ' Seeing
then that we are thus united to God physically, we ought also
to be united to Him morally 3 .'
Here are three typical theologians, in three different ages,
not one of them a mystic even, using as the language of sober
theology words every whit as strong as any of the famous
Pantheistic passages in our modern literature ; and yet when
1 Mag. Mor. ii. 12. 2 S. Thorn. Aq. ii. Sent. i. i.
3 In Act. Apost. c. 17. v. 28.
v. The Incarnation and Development. 193
raet with in that literature they are commonly regarded as
pleasing expressions of poetic dreams, very far away from, if
not even inconsistent with what is thought to be dogmatic
Christianity.
To sum up then, the reopening of the teleological question
has not only led to its fuller and more final answer, but has
incidentally 
